Then the table clears and there’s the sound of powerboats from all around and the stench of diesel fumes and the light splash of paddles. The place is clearing out. A few minutes later I am joined by Antoinette.
“Where’ve you been since four-thirty?” she says.
“Out here watching the sunrise. You?”
“Ran into some people I know from New Orleans.”
She sits heavily beside me and takes my hand, palm up. “I’d read your future,” she says, “but I’m drunk. Can’t read the future when I’m drunk.”
I look over, and her eyes are swimming in alcohol. “That’s all right,” I say. “I don’t want to know the future.” Then our eyes meet and we are both drunk and it is morning and the sky is clear and beautiful.
“Uncle,” she says. “I give in,” and we are leaning toward each other and her lips are very close when Molesworth picks this moment to interrupt.
“All right, kids,” he says. “Time for breakfast.” He steps up carrying a cork-bottomed tray set with an odd array of fixings. I see Tabasco sauce, tomato juice, Cajun spices, onions, eggs, lemons, tequila, a bottle of Benedictine, glasses, and a few other odds and ends. He sits heavily on the wooden bench and proceeds to mix three complicated drinks. The end result looks like a Bloody Mary with a brown layer of brandy at the bottom. I can smell the tang of tomato juice and the tequila and lime from across the table. At last, with a flourish, he breaks a raw egg on top of each and hands out the glasses.
“Voilà,” Molesworth says, looking from Antoinette to me and raising his glass. “Shall we say, to love?”
Antoinette gives a lazy smile. “Why not?” she says, and, smiling still, downs the concoction in one long quaff. I almost gag on the egg, and then there is the spiced burn of the tomato-tequila mixture, followed too quickly by the smooth warmth of the brandy, but at the end of it I feel fine. This is a drink like a long and arduous journey after which you feel glad to be home again. My head and sinuses clear suddenly. I take a deep breath, amazed. For the moment I am not drunk or hungover.
“My God, what was that?” I cry.
Molesworth smiles mysteriously, his huge red face puckering up like a country ham. “That’s old Molesworth’s Cajun restorative, patent pending,” he says.
“You’ve got to bottle it,” I say. “You’ll make a fortune.”
“I thought about that,” he says. “But the secret is this”—he leans close—“the ingredients must be absolutely fresh and natural. Stick it in a bottle, and the zing is gone.”
“Yeah, that was great, Lyle,” Antoinette says. “But I’ve got a restorative of my own.” She produces the pillbox from her little square purse, but before she can pop one of the yellow pills into her mouth, Molesworth snatches it away. He’s quick for a man with such meaty hands.
“What is this shit, honey?” he says, examining the yellow pills.
“You know,” Antoinette says.
“Get them from Hash Davis?”
Antoinette nods, a bit nervous.
“You shouldn’t be eating anything that bastard mixes up,” Molesworth says. “You’ll be having babies with two heads, let alone the more immediate consequences.” Then he tosses the box over the side into the tea-colored waters of the lake.
Antoinette is quiet for a moment. Then she snaps her purse shut and stands with the aggrieved dignity of a southern matron whose honor has been offended. “Lyle, you are a bastard,” she says through her teeth.
“You been talking to my daddy,” Molesworth says.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she says. “I am not an innocent high school girl or an addict,” and she walks, stiff-backed, into the bar toward the bathroom, screen door slamming in her wake.
“Sorry, Coonass,” Molesworth mumbles to me when she is gone. “She’s better off without that shit. We had some fast-living college girl in here writhing all over the floor last month from those things. A bad batch. The chick almost swallowed her tongue. One more incident, and I’m turning Hash over to the state boys.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me, Molesworth,” I say. “I was tempted to get rid of those pills myself, except—”
“Yeah, except you let her run you around like a pig with a ring through the nose.”
“You’re a pessimist.”
“Unh-huh. Just be careful you don’t waste the second half of your life on that woman. You already pined away the first half.”
A half hour later Antoinette emerges and, without looking right or left, marches down to the airboat, its prop thumping into life at the mooring.
I stand up. “This is me, Molesworth.”
“Yeah.” He lumbers up, huffing, and we shake hands.
“Well …”
He looks over his shoulder as if in consultation with an unseen deity, then back at me. “Don’t give me that shit, Ned,” he says. “It was only a matter of time. I’ll be seeing your ass for the rest of your life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s in your blood.”
“What?”
He grins. “This,” and gestures toward the lake and the sky and the bayou beyond the dark fall of water, and the cypresses and live oak trailing with Spanish moss, and the whole state of Louisiana receding into the grainy blue distance to New Orleans, just waking up now by its coffee brown river, in the sun.
12
ANTOINETTE DOESN’T say a word. We are on the dirt road in the Saab, bumping through the bayou to the highway. Her Italian sunglasses reflect the trees and the sky. I cannot make out her eyes.
“O.K., maybe Molesworth shouldn’t have thrown away your pills like that,” I say, “but you’re too old to be playing around with drugs like a kid.”
She makes a small, strangled noise in response, and I look over to see that her hands are trembling on the wheel.
“Are you all right?”
“Shit!” she says, and suddenly her lips are splotchy and parched-looking. Then she begins trembling in earnest. She lets go, and I reach over quickly and take hold of the wheel.
“No, it’s O.K.,” she says, but I steer the car onto a grassy patch shielded from the road by a cluster of pine. The sun comes down thick and full of pollen through the leaves, and there is the heavy croaking of frogs from the swamp. Just beyond the Saab’s glossy hood, an algae-covered tributary of the Nezpique gulps and bubbles.
“I swear I’m going to kick the pills,” Antoinette says as we come to a halt. “But not like this. This is too damn hard.” Then she reaches under her seat and takes out a Ziploc bag containing an aspirin bottle full of the yellow pills. She fumbles with the childproof cap and cannot get it open.
“Please,” she says. It’s almost a whimper.
“All right,” I say. “Give it here.” I open the bottle for her and watch as she knocks out two pills, brings hand to mouth, and swallows. In a minute or so the shaking subsides, and she leans back and stares up at the blue sky through the leaves. Finally, face slack and lazy, she turns to me.
“Don’t look at me like that, Ned,” she says. “I’m not as bad off as I seem. Look in the glove compartment. I’ve kept careful records.”
“Records?” I fumble in the glove compartment and pull a small datebook out from behind the spare signal bulb, maps, tire warranties, and other junk. In the datebook each day is marked with a series of red x’s.
“Start with April and flip to August,” she says.
The x’s, six and seven a day in April, dwindle to two or three in August.
“Those little x’s are the pills,” she says. “I’m trying to do this thing gradually. I don’t want to rely on some clinic detox and then relapse a year later. And I don’t want any Prozac. This is something I need to do myself. I’m going to clean out and stay clean.”
I consider this plan. “Why do you do them?” I ask quietly.
“Oh, the usual reasons,” she says, with an airy wave of the hand. “Because there’s not enough going on in my life. The days—the
y’re long, they drag. All those minutes.”
“Maybe you should get married,” I say. “Children. I hear they have a tendency to take your mind off things.”
“Ha,” she says, but then she is serious. “There is no one. No one like that.”
“Come on,” I say. “Not a single eligible man?” A cracking sound comes from nearby. I look up to see a woodpecker, his throat blue, his wings scarlet, drilling a hole into the nearest tree. He stops, blinks at me with beady bird eyes; then in a second he is gone, a scarlet and blue flash in the greenness.
“There are plenty of men sniffing around as usual,” she says, “some of them quite beautiful to look at, but no one I can talk to. I’ve been celibate for eight months now, if you want the truth. And you know how hard that is on me.…” She takes off her glasses and looks at me, and her eyes are dark gray today, and there is sunlight on her face.
I feel something snap inside like a twig. “Aw, hell,” I say, and reach for her. Her lips are rough, and her mouth tastes sour, but in a minute her breasts are in my hands, and when I push up her skirt, I find that her thighs are wet.
“Yes,” she breathes, “please, yes,” and it is awkward across the gearshift, so she climbs over and straddles my hips and lowers herself onto me, her knees pressed into the leather of the passenger seat, her arms around my head, and her breasts and her hair smelling of cigarette smoke and faintly of perfume, and her ready smell, which comes back to me now, pungent and familiar. It is over far too quickly, but I am there again soon, and we climb into the backseat and struggle out of our clothes and go at it the old-fashioned way, she moving beneath, solid and warm as sand, as the hot sun dapples through the leaves in light and shadow on my back, and all the years in between, the long, melancholy years, melting away like a bad dream.
13
FOR OLD times’ sake, we get a room at the Bienville House in the Quarter. We make love beneath the starched sheets as businessmen and conventioneers congregate in the lobby below, and the noise of the bars and clubs along Bourbon reaches us, a carnival whisper through the thick plate glass, and the river shines dull and heavy with the mud of a continent beyond the low tops of the buildings. I make love to her, then I make love to her again, then I fuck her, because she asks me to and there is a difference, and afterward we lie slick with sweat, cooling in the blast of the air conditioner, two bodies tangled up in the sheets and in the past.
It is a little strange making love to her now. Sex in our youth had innocence, but it was also clumsy. Now the innocence has been wiped away by too much experience. Her body moves knowingly beneath my fingers; she adjusts herself to the right angle; she bids me wait for the moment. Perhaps what was lost in sweetness is made up in pleasure. Is this worse, better? I can’t say. We are no longer the same people. As a youth, despite what I once thought, it was not possible to fuck. It would have broken our young hearts. Now it is difficult not to.
Antoinette doesn’t talk at first because it is hard for her to talk, there is so much locked up inside her, and because her mouth is busy elsewhere, and then busy smoking, cigarette after cigarette, ashtray balanced on the slight round hummock of her belly. But at last after two days, desire is exhausted, and she runs out of cigarettes, and it is dusk, the sky ablush beyond the crescent curve of the city, and she is compelled to speak. This is the first thing she says to my questions, hair in a black and fragrant tangle on the pillow, last cigarette stubbed out: “I don’t really want to talk right now, O.K., honey? Why don’t we just leave it alone for a while? Not think. Just be with each other for a while.”
I frown, twist in the sheet, drum my fingers against the mattress. Then I say it is O.K., we don’t have to talk now, and I settle against her, but she sighs and says: “All right. What do you want to know?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Everything.”
She wags her foot nervously. “I need a cigarette,” she says.
“Send down for room service.”
She considers this, then ends up eating one of the yellow pills, the first today, and it is almost seven in the evening. “I’m getting better,” she says as her body absorbs the pill and a sly purplish look, now familiar, comes into her eyes.
“Even one pill is one too many,” I say.
“I tell you what let’s do,” she says, ignoring me.
“What?”
“Let’s order up a drink.”
“No.”
“Just a little drink.”
“No.”
Her lip curls out in a pout; then she brightens.
“All right, let’s fuck.”
I’m not sure if there’s anything left in me, but she is insistent, and I put my hand on her breast and feel the nipple harden and there is the corresponding reaction, and a half hour later, we come out of it, stuck to each other again. “Ouch,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
“This is a good way to catch a urethral infection,” I say.
“I know. Honeymoon cystitis, they call it. From overindulgence. That’s why you have to pee afterward. Clears out the pipes. Go, pee.” She pushes me off her, and I go to the bathroom. She follows, and then we are back in bed, spoon fashion, my arm around her stomach.
“It’s nice to be here with you,” she says, covering my hand with hers. “Hell, it’s nice to be with anyone after eight months.”
“Great.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.” She is silent for a while. There is the barest flush in the sky now, as the day drowns itself in the river like a suicide jumping off the Huey Long Bridge.
“Since you want to know, things have been bad with me for a very long time,” she says quietly when there is nothing left out the window but the green dark of the city.
“What do you mean?” I can’t see her eyes.
She shrugs. “I loved Dothan, I guess, although that seems so far away now. I was so young, too young. And I was crazy about you. You were only the second person I slept with. You may not believe it, but I actually cried my eyes out when you left.”
“I believe it.”
“Yeah, you up and walked off through Jackson Square, all beat-up and mad as hell. Didn’t even look back.”
“Unh-huh.” I cringe, remembering.
“So after you left, there was Dothan again. Then I got rid of him finally, and there was everyone else. I can’t remember half their names. Just sex. Nothing more than that.”
“O.K.”
“So, a while back, I met this guy, Victor. He was born in Caracas or some such place. Tossed money around like it was water. Sold coke, among other things. He had a big villa out on the lakeshore, a yacht, and a lot of sleazy friends. I don’t know how I got hooked into that crowd.”
“Probably the drugs.”
“Maybe … So it got bad. I was snorting all the time, taking money from the till at work. Then, last September, Victor threw this wild party at his house. It was like something out of the seventies, with little silver bowls of coke on the tables and people having sex all over the place, right in front of everybody. I was too stoned and coked up to care. Like, here was this couple fucking on the couch not two feet from me, and I was just—I don’t know—absent.”
“Unh-huh.”
“But Victor, he got all worked up and took me upstairs and we’re going at it on the bed when the door kicks open, and it’s three cops in flak jackets and combat gear, with guns. I mean, Victor is literally, well, in mid-stroke. It was like a scene from a bad action movie. They pulled him off me and hit him a bunch of times till he was bloody and handcuffed him naked and threw him on the floor. And they wouldn’t let me get off the bed or even pull up the sheets. They walked all around, making these crude comments, and I’m laying there, trying to cover myself with my hands. It was horrible. Finally they start asking me if I’m a prostitute, because it turned out most of the women downstairs were known prostitutes. I kept saying no, no; then I started to cry, and they allowed me to wrap the sheet around myself; then they arre
sted me and took me downtown. So there I was sitting in this wire cage in the Third Ward Precinct house, wearing a sheet, surrounded by hookers and junkies, and the cops wouldn’t let me go because they’re trying to book me with prostitution and possession and I don’t know what.”
Antoinette is silent for a while. Ear pressed to her back, I hear her heart beating faintly through the thickness of flesh. I try to turn her toward me, but she won’t turn, and at last I must urge her to go on. Her voice is different when she does, descended to a low, sad register.
“I was in there for twenty-seven hours. They wouldn’t let me call a lawyer till they finished processing my paperwork. But that was O.K., because I didn’t want Papa to know—he’s so sick now—and all my lawyers are Papa’s lawyers. I just sat in there with these women, the absolute dregs, and did nothing but think. Finally one of Victor’s mob lawyers got me out, and there was a limousine waiting and flowers and a bottle of expensive champagne on ice, and Victor kept apologizing, but that was enough for me. I went home and scrubbed myself three times. Then I dug my aunt Tatie’s mantilla out of a chest, and I covered my head with it and took my rosary, the one I got at my first communion, and I went down to the St. Roch shrine. I got on my knees and begged the saint to ask God to forgive me, because I wasn’t good enough, clean enough, to ask God myself, because I felt, I really felt just then, that he had turned His face away in disgust, and I was so ashamed of the things I had done. Then I made a pledge to the saint in the dark of the chapel. First, I swore I would stop using cocaine, and I was pretty far into the stuff then, which is why I’m using the yellow pills now. Second, I swore I would stop having sex like that, as if it didn’t matter who I had sex with. I promised I wouldn’t have sex again until I had it with someone I cared about.”
She stops talking abruptly and lies in my arms stiff and nervous. I wait for her to go on, but she does not.
Madeleine's Ghost Page 24
