For their part, the family didn’t seem to like me much. I didn’t really fit in. It was a question of attitude. I am ill at ease in company, sarcastic, cynical, sentimental. A northern temperament, Antoinette called it once. A temperament born of gray afternoons and sleety rains and melancholy, though I am a native of Washington, D.C.—technically south of the Mason-Dixon Line—where my father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
But worst of all, to the Rivaudaises’ way of thinking, I was an intellectual. They regarded ideas as unnecessary, even dangerous. They were old-fashioned Creole pragmatists, happy with good food, strong drink, nice clothes, beautiful things—the fruits and sweetness of life.
13
IN JANUARY, an icy wind blowing down across Lake Pontchartrain from the north, her parents took Antoinette and me to Commander’s Palace for dinner in one of the private rooms there. They wanted to get a closer look at me, confirm the unfavorable opinions formed at our first meeting. Though relieved to find she had given up Dothan, they were suspicious of my motives. How could I tell them I didn’t give a damn for their money, that it was only their daughter I wanted? Their daughter unadorned, naked, and asleep in my arms at three o’clock in the morning.
It was an expensive, excellent meal, full of awkward silences and stilted conversation. Antoinette, stiff beside me, looking marvelous in a tight dress of crushed velvet, rarely lifted her eyes from the plate. At last Mama, a big, handsome woman of about sixty, with hair still as black as her daughter’s, rose and went off to the powder room. Antoinette flashed me a weak smile and followed demurely, and I was left alone at the table with the big man, Papa himself. He seemed an assured, robust figure in possession of an amazing mass of white hair and a mustache as thick as a hussar’s. But there was a certain tiredness around his eyes and a disappointed droop to his lower lip. He looked like a Confederate general in retirement after the war. Like P. G. T. Beauregard at Contreras House before the White League riots, like Lee at Lexington in 1870. A man who had lived long enough to see his secret certainties confounded, his best hopes dashed by unfortunate circumstance.
He finished his cognac and studied me from beneath his bushy eyebrows as I fidgeted. In the background, the clink of glasses, the hushed murmur common to expensive restaurants everywhere. Our waiter, who had introduced himself as Remi, approached in the uniform of the place—black trousers, a spotless red apron and starched tuxedo shirt and bow tie, his feet encased in a pair of those ridiculous glossy black tux slippers. He carried our check on an ebony tray. Papa waved him away without even looking.
“Not yet, Remi,” he said.
Remi withdrew without a peep. I am always impressed by men who command the respect of waiters and bartenders, by men who know that money means prompt, efficient, and obsequious service.
Then Papa took a cigar sealed in an aluminum tube out of the inside pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the cap, and removed the dark, fragrant log within. He ran it beneath his nose, smiled, clipped the end carefully with a fancy device on his key ring, and lit it off the candle. In a moment the air of our little dining room was heavy with cigar smoke.
“Now you see why they put us in here,” he said. “They know I like a good cigar after a meal, and people these days hate cigar smoke.” This was dissimulation. The private rooms at Commander’s Palace were reserved weeks in advance for special guests at a considerable surcharge over the main dining room.
For the next few minutes, absorbed in the cigar, drawing on it, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling, Papa seemed to forget about me. I sat absolutely still, hands in my lap as if awaiting judgment. Finally, when I reached for the last of the wine, he made an exaggerated show of remembering my presence.
“Forgive my manner,” he said. “I’ve got another one if you’d like to join me.” He pulled a second aluminum tube out of his pocket and pushed it across the table. “They’re actually Cuban. Have them imported through Panama with Jamaican labels. Here.”
I shook my head.
He nodded, as if to say he knew as much, then went back to enjoying the cigar. In his houndstooth sports jacket and open-collared white shirt, cigar in mouth, he was the very image of the southern patriarch at his ease. Then he put the cigar in the glass ashtray and leaned forward so abruptly I started.
“Let me ask you something, Ned,” he said, a sudden edge in his voice.
“O.K., Mr. Rivaudais,” I said.
“What is it that you want from us?” It was an accusation.
I felt the back of my neck begin to sweat. For a moment I imagined being dragged outside by thugs from the bayou, my legs broken over the curb. But I can be just as pugnacious as the next guy. I looked down, drumming the tablecloth with my fingertips for dramatic effect. Then I looked up to confront him.
“I’ll tell you what I want from you, Mr. Rivaudais,” I said. “Not a damn thing.”
He leaned back, a bit surprised. I wondered how many of his daughters’ hapless suitors he had tried this with. I didn’t blame him really. The world is full of scoundrels, and he had five attractive daughters and no sons. The poor bastard.
“So you’re a student,” he said at last.
“That’s right. A graduate student.”
“Studying some kind of history.”
“French history, yes.”
“And what is it you expect to do with that?”
“Become educated,” I said. “And then?”
“Then, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, I will be fit company for myself.”
“Unh-huh.” He jabbed his cigar in my general direction. “Of course, it hasn’t occurred to you that I am one of the wealthiest men in this state and that a union with my daughter would allow you to keep yourself company for life without doing much else.”
This was a bit much. No wonder Antoinette had run away with a Lothario from the bayou. I told him so.
“You know about that,” he said, looking a little crushed.
“Yes,” I said, my voice raising. “And let me tell you something, sir. I don’t care about that, and I don’t care about your damn money. In fact, money to me is a strike against your daughter that I’m willing to overlook because I’m crazy about her. And for your information, all this is not my style at all.” I waved to include the restaurant, the slippered waiter, the bejeweled customers in the main dining room. “I’d just as soon eat a po’boy at Nick’s than put on a tie and swallow your crap.”
“I didn’t see you protesting when I brought you in here, son,” he said calmly. “I would say quite the opposite. You seemed downright pleased to be walking through the door of Commander’s Palace for a free meal.”
“It was not my intention to abuse your hospitality,” I said. Then I stood, almost knocking over the chair, and rang the bell for the waiter. In two seconds Remi entered on slippered feet with the check and made to hand it to Papa.
“No,” I said, “I’ll take that.” He looked at Papa, who clamped the cigar between his teeth and shrugged.
“You heard the boy,” he said.
The waiter nodded apologetically, handed the check to me, and left the room. The total came to $575, not including tax and tip. One of the bottles of wine Papa had ordered was listed at $125. I went white, slumped back in the chair, and went fumbling for my credit card with the dazed motions of a man who has just been told he has six months to live.
Then Papa began to laugh and laughed for the next few minutes till cigar smoke came out of his nose.
“I don’t appreciate that, sir,” I said stiffly.
He wiped his eyes on his napkin. “Your face,” he managed. “When you saw that check! Priceless.” Then he reached for it.
“No,” I said weakly, “I’ll pay.”
But he made an unseen gesture and in a beat the waiter was there and the check was signed for and it was over.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got an account here,” he said. “And this is a legitimate business expense to me. Trying to marry off my daughter. Hell, I wa
s a student myself once, if you can believe it. Scraping after every penny. I know how it is.” Then he leaned forward and put a conciliatory hand on my arm. “Listen, let me give you a piece of advice. Please.”
“O.K.” I looked him in the eye. They were blue and watery, a sadder reflection of Antoinette’s.
“What you need, Ned, is a sense of humor. Because if you’re going to deal with my daughter, there’s no other way. A highly developed sense of humor.”
I thought he was probably right, so we shook hands.
A few minutes later Antoinette and her mother came back in, hand in hand, their eyes shining, the stink of oranges on their breath. They had been at the bar, drinking Cointreaus.
“You two men have a nice talk?” Mrs. Rivaudais said, and leaned to kiss her husband on the forehead. Antoinette came around and sat beside me and put a hand on my knee.
“Yes,” I said. “We had a fine talk. Mr. Rivaudais tried to get me to smoke one of his cigars, but I turned him down.”
“Good for you,” Mrs. Rivaudais said. “Lord, those things do stink,” and she gave her husband a drunken punch on the shoulder, and everyone laughed. Then Remi came in with a nightcap on the house, and everyone talked at once, and things were much more relaxed between us. But at the last of it I glanced over to see Papa, a weary sadness in his gaze, studying me from beneath his eyebrows.
14
A WEEK LATER, out of money from a student loan, I bought a beat-up 1960 MGA for eight hundred dollars from a doctor in Gentilly who was selling his house, and took Antoinette along the Gulf Coast on a trip to Biloxi. Wind whistled through the holes in the tattered convertible top, the twin SUs stuttered and burped, but on the curves the old sports car flexed and held the road like a living thing, and the loud thrum of the engine at open throttle sounded a strange sort of harmony not available in newer vehicles.
Antoinette loved the old car from the first. She stretched out happily, feet against the dash like a teenager, and kept her hand on my thigh as I racked through the gears with the grim determination of Stirling Moss himself. She wore cat-eye sunglasses, a silk scarf over her head and shouted over the engine’s shudder to tell me I had won the first round.
“Papa said you stood up to him,” she said. “Papa likes that, when people stand up to him. He said you’ve got backbone. He likes backbone.”
Then she put her hand on top of mine on the gearshifter and kissed my ear, and that night we made love with particular intensity in one of the crumbling old rooms at the Biloxi-Stanton Hotel, windows open to the cold, salty air.
This was the first of several trips we took together in the three months between Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras, after I bought the car. Though Dothan was gone on his unspeakable journey south, the city still held his shadow. To escape it, we drove to Natchez and Opelousas and Galveston, and we went on smaller jaunts, just driving out of a Sunday. We drove a hundred miles along the River Road, stopping at Ashland and Destrehan and Oak Alley, where we strolled arm in arm down the famous approach of live oaks to the great house with the tourists, its twenty-eight columns gleaming in the winter light. We drove up to Oxford to visit
Faulkner’s home and up to Jackson for a Christmas party given by one of Antoinette’s old classmates from St. Jerome’s. Then we drove to Gulfport and Mobile. Christmas we spent with Antoinette’s family—all five girls, husbands and broods, and a few aunts and uncles—in the Rivaudais condominium on St. Eustatius, Leeward Islands. I sent a sarcastic postcard to Molesworth from this idyllic tropical isle, showing a topless babe knee-deep in turquoise water with the caption “Wish you were here!” On the back I wrote, “Not really,” and left it at that.
New Orleans in winter is mild, but there is a bite to the damp that can get into your bones. The furnace in our pink house went out in the middle of November, and there was frost in the yard. I never felt the chill that year. It was impossible to be cold with Antoinette around, her warm voice in my ear or just on the other end of the phone line. I did my best to forget about Dothan. Antoinette got a few postcards from the other hemisphere, sanitized tourist views of Caracas, of Bogotá and Lima, which she refused to let me read, and there was one long phone call full of silences in the middle of the night. I didn’t mind.
She had taught me to live in the moment. For the first time in my life I gave no thought to the future or the past.
15
NOW I remember the Mardi Gras party at Antoinette’s parents’ house on Prytania Street with some bittersweetness. It was the high point of my brief, bright life with her. I wandered the well-dressed crowds a dazed man, not daring to believe my luck, expecting the ceiling to come crashing down on my head at any moment.
The Rivaudais house was an amazing place, built in 1857 by a wealthy English cotton exporter, Albert Douglas, with the use of slave labor, fifteen varieties of indigenous hardwood and lavender marble from Carrara, Italy. Two raised galleries ran the length of the front and back, sheltering enormous high-ceilinged rooms filled with antiques and paintings. Historic houses often have the stiff and slightly lurid appeal of wax museums. Not so with the Rivaudais house, which managed to be both elegant and comfortable. Antoinette, wearing the same low-cut green velvet dress she had worn that night at the Napoleon House, rhinestone pins sparkling at her shoulders, gave me the tour just before the party started. In my rumpled fifties-era thrift-store tuxedo, I felt like a servant being shown the busing stations. But I nodded and smiled and cracked jokes and tried not to let on how badly outclassed I felt.
We poked our heads into the downstairs salon, where a jazz quartet warmed up in the corner, looked into the vast brick-walled kitchen crawling with caterers. Then we went up the wide staircase of polished maple, past age darkened portraits of ancestors—Spanish grandees and ladies of France dead two or three centuries, overlaid with the layers of varnish and fine skein of cracks that are the years. We ended up in the library on the second floor just as the downstairs began to fill with guests. Out the tall windows, expensive cars pulled up the circular drive to the red-jacketed valet parkers at the front steps, who in turn pulled them down again and parked them under guard along Prytania Street.
From above the mantel in this room the portrait of an especially forbidding ancestor glowered down at us. It showed a middle-aged man with olive-toned Spanish skin and a hawkish, unforgiving face. He wore the Byronic coat and high collar of the 1820s; his hand rested on a table upon which there were some charts, a brace of pistols, and a few heavy ledgers, probably lists of slaves and indigo and horses. Beyond a drape to his right a plantation house overlooked the river in the near distance. It was built in the early Creole style like Destrehan, with a horseshoe-shaped staircase leading to the galleries on the front, and walls an unusual shade of pale blue.
“Another ancestor of Mama’s,” Antoinette replied to my question. “They’re all ancestors of Mama’s. Father’s people were too poor or too decent to have their portraits painted. Supposedly this guy was one real son of a bitch. Just a real mean bastard. Famous for his duels—that’s why he had the pistols painted in. Looks Spanish, doesn’t he? Like the Grand Inquisitor or something. Those eyes. Always scared the shit out of me when I was a girl. I used to be afraid to come in here alone,” She shivered, though there was a fire going in the grate, and I put my arm around her bare shoulder.
“And the house?” I pointed to the distant blue mansion.
“That was the plantation I told you about. Along the river down past English Turn. Belle something. They’re always called Belle something.” She shrugged, oblivious to this lost patrimony. From downstairs now came the sound of voices and the thrum of the jazz quartet. I had never been in such a well-appointed room with such a beautiful woman. The world seemed a marvelous place. I turned to Antoinette and kissed her, happy and blind. We nuzzled for a few minutes on the couch until the door opened and Jolie pushed in, breathless.
“Hey, you two,” she said, “some other time for that shit. Nettie, Papa wants you downst
airs before the house is too packed to move.”
“What for?” Antoinette said, annoyed, pulling away from me.
“You know, pictures. Up!” She snapped her fingers, and Antoinette rose with a sigh and smoothed out her dress.
“I am not in the mood for this fucking shit,” she said to Jolie. Between themselves the girls used the cheerfully obscene language of truck drivers.
“What pictures?” I asked as we swept down the stairs to the crowds waiting below.
“Some Papa thing,” Antoinette whispered. “He’s got magazine people coming. Southern Living. They’re doing a spread on the party, on the house.”
“On us,” Jolie said with a sharp smile. “It’s going to be about us.”
A half hour later I slumped hands in pocket against the wall near the door and watched the family pose on the stairs. First the parents—Papa, ruddy-faced and slightly drunk, ill at ease in a tuxedo of magnificent cut; Mama, wearing a blue tulle gown of amazing proportions, sapphires at her throat—both of them the picture of success and earthly contentment, battles won, wine in the keg. Then the girls, arranged shortest to tallest, from Jolie to Antoinette, all cocktail dresses and bare shoulders and youthful promise, showing healthy teeth to the flash and whir of the camera and the applause of the guests gathered in the foyer: Louisiana’s first citizens, residents of the Garden District, patrons of the most prestigious Carnival krewes.
It was hard to reconcile this Antoinette, smiling and elegant for the pages of Southern Living, with the other ones: the acid-dropping bar girl dancing above the drunks at Spanish Town or the jaded lover, who, even in my arms, wore her past like an extra layer of skin. Suddenly I felt a little dizzy. The spectacle was too much for me. I wandered the party alone for the next hour or so, drink in hand, catching glimpses of Antoinette engaged in conversation with well-dressed people I didn’t know, her glossy hair reflecting light, the sound of her voice full of laughter floating an octave above the party chatter.
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