We stand for a moment arm in arm on the banquette, looking up. The windows are boarded up from behind. Broken panes of glass glint in the afternoon light. Antoinette has an odd, expectant look on her face. She searches the facade as if for a clue.
“What are we looking at?” I say.
“See the green shutters?” she says eagerly. “There was a time when green was the only color for shutters on Creole houses in the Vieux Carré. Everyone had green shutters. If you didn’t, you were déclassé—or an American.”
We squeeze through the gate of the porte cochere, rusted half open over the weedy cobbles, and go around back into the courtyard. Here there are two blackened bronze urns depicting classical scenes, and a rusty fountain. A few steps lead up to a wide brick patio littered with broken appliances.
“It’s sad how little time it takes for a house to fall apart if no one lives there,” Antoinette says. “Only been abandoned for a couple of years, but to look at it, you’d think centuries. What is a house, you know, without the people inside it? The people are the glue and the nails and the wood that keeps old places together.”
She leans a garden chair against the bricks at the French doors, climbs up, and retrieves an age-blackened key from a nook above the lintel. At first the lock won’t give, then a heavy chunk and the old machinery turns, and Antoinette hips open the door, which scrapes over the mottled flooring of hardwood. Inside there are high, empty rooms with cobwebbed plaster rosettes staring down from the ceiling like eyes. The fanlight over the front door illuminates a curving stairway that leads from the entrance hall into dim upper regions. Dust is piled in the corners. The air is hot and thick. I feel as if we have entered an Egyptian tomb. On the mantel in the front parlor, a stilled clock. Antoinette leads me by the hand in a silent inspection of the first floor. I have never seen her so serious. We cannot go upstairs because a few of the steps are rotted out, and we end up back in the parlor, slashes of yellow light coming through the cracks between the boards overlooking Esplanade.
“Well, needs a lot of work,” I say, digging my heel into a hole in the floorboard.
“Of course,” she says impatiently, “but that’s not the point. The point is that this is my house now. Mine.” She does an odd little pirouette in the middle of the floor, then settles with a delicate movement of rump and thigh and a cloud of dust on a low worktable against the far wall. I find what seems my natural place across the room, leaning arm and elbow against the mantel as if I’d just come in from a hard day at the Cotton Exchange.
“I love this house,” Antoinette says, with an unexpected fierceness. “My great-aunt Tatie left it to me in her will when she died three years ago, because she knew I loved it. She was the coolest old lady, lived to be a hundred—can you believe that? Born in the big room upstairs, and she would have died there except she fell down one day and broke her hip and they took her out to Metairie, to this sort of Confederate old ladies’ home, poor thing. And she never did come back from there; no one does.”
“How old is the place?” I say.
“That’s a little bit of history I do know.” She smiles at me across the room. “The house was built in the 1820s by some ancestor of Mama’s, when Esplanade was one of the most fashionable streets in New Orleans. Except for the land right around the fishing camp that used to belong to the plantation, this is the oldest property still in the family. It was their in-town house. Mostly they lived out at the plantation, of course, but they would come and stay during the winter months for parties and suchlike. The opera, the Olympus Ball, the races. Yeah, I know it’s a wreck now. Wiring bad, floors eaten by termites, leaky plumbing. I started to have work done a while back, but it’s expensive, and I ran out of money when I got heavy into coke. But you know, sometimes I think that this house is the real reason I kicked that stuff. The only thing that kept me going. Because I belong here, because—”
Suddenly I can’t take my eyes off her. She is wearing a floral-print sleeveless sundress cut just above her knees. Her legs are slightly open, and a bit of yellow light from the window falls across her hair and against the wall like a halo. She looks beautiful, but it is more than this. There is something in her voice that has been missing in the last few days, something irresistible. Hope.
“—because it’s my house, Ned! My house. Generations of my family have lived here. You remember that painting, the one of the lady in the white dress you saw in the museum in the Cabildo years ago, that you said looked like me? The first time you met me you saw the resemblance, and I was impressed. That’s what I liked about you then. You never met me before, but you seemed to know right where I came from. Well, my guess is that lady used to live right here in this house, because they found the painting rolled up in the attic upstairs. O.K., the house is a shambles now, but by God, with some work, it could be beautiful again. Five bedrooms, and fanlights, and the curving staircase and the porte cochere and the courtyard, and the dust of my family in the walls. What’s the word I’m looking for, a word you might use …? Continuity! Sometimes I dream of it all fixed and painted and there’s carpets on the stairs and the floors are sanded, and there’s no Dothan in my past and no yellow pills and no cocaine, and I’m calm and sane and the world is calm and sane, and there’s mass on Sunday in the St. Louis Cathedral, and summers down at the camp, and children, five bedrooms full of children.…”
She barely speaks this last part, it’s a whisper, a secret breath, and without knowing how, I’m standing in front of her, and my hands are on her thighs, and she leans back and pulls up her dress. Then her legs are around me, the heel of one shoe dug in at the small of my back, and I’m inside her, and she’s laughing and biting at my ear and saying, “Yes, oh, yes, those oysters, it’s the oysters …” and then she arches against me as the spasm takes her and the old house is loud with us, the sound of passion echoing off the walls for the first time—who can say?—in a hundred long and dreary years.
16
ON THE way to Moisant Field we get stuck for an excruciating hour in a traffic jam. There is an overturned tractor-trailer, two flattened sedans, blood and glass on the pavement, a half dozen police cars; and the grace we found making love in the old house is lost to the heat and confusion and carbon monoxide fumes somewhere along the Airline Highway. I am nervous because I am always nervous when it comes to travel. Antoinette is enervated because she is high-strung and impatient by nature. She shakes my hand off her knee, reaches beneath the seat for the aspirin bottle, and pops one yellow pill, then a second.
“Antoinette …”
“Goddammit, don’t!”
And we don’t speak till she pulls the Saab up to a No Parking zone at the terminal and she turns to me, eyes cloudy with the stuff. There is so much I want to say to her, but the panic wells up, blurring the right words, and there isn’t enough time. My plane leaves in five minutes. I have a horror of missing planes. She gives me a hug and a quick closemouthed kiss and pulls away as if regretting the excesses of the last four days. Her enthusiasm has faded; her face is sallow-looking in the fluorescent light of the terminal.
“O.K.,” she says. “Have a good trip.”
“We can’t just d-do it like this,” I say in a stuttering rush. “I’ve got to tell you … every day for the last ten years I thought about you, every day I wished—”
But she puts a hand over my mouth. I can hear the loudspeaker announcing the departure of my flight. She takes her hand away slowly and clasps them both in her lap. The sky is streaked with sunset and green-gold above the city.
“I need to think about this for a while,” she says quietly. “We had fun. Let’s not spoil this right off by raking it over the coals.” Her voice is softer now, but her tone implores me not to ask the wrong questions, not to insist.
My shoulders slump. I acquiesce.
“I’ll call you,” she says as I step out of the car.
“Right,” I say. “Thanks for everything.” Then I shoulder my bag and turn toward the terminal, and I
hear the Saab rev, speed down the ramp, and grow faint, a single whiny note lost in the voice of the traffic.
I am the last passenger aboard. As the plane lifts off the tarmac, nosing out across the dark waters of Lake Pontchartrain, I pull down the window curtain to avoid a glimpse of the city slipping away below, the brilliant lit crescent receding in the distance. Soon New Orleans is gone under the dark belly of the plane, and there is only New York blooming like a monstrous black flower on the horizon.
Part Five:
MADELEINE’S GHOST
1
I HAVE A fever.
Yesterday I bought a fifteen-dollar digital thermometer at the Drug Loft on Second Avenue to monitor its progress. The fever hovers around 100, though it has been as high as 102.1 and as low as 99. My new thermometer, a beige plastic instrument in a clear plastic slipcase, beeps and displays the correct body temperature on a tiny green screen after barely a minute in the mouth. I know it is no more accurate than ordinary mercury thermometers, but there is something very comforting about its precise digital display and clear plastic slipcase. Every fifteen minutes or so I am able to monitor my temperature without the inconvenience of waiting or the uncertainty of shaking out the mercury and squinting to read tiny numbers etched on glass. Somehow, the digital thermometer, cheery and professional as a candy striper in an old folks’ home, makes the sick person feel less alone.
I have had this fever for a few days now, since about a week after my return from New Orleans. It is not enough to make me miss work, but it adds an additional dose of ennui to my labors in the crypt. I seem to have lost all interest in the piles of brown documents, deeds and letters of decades past—just at the point when my efforts need redoubling. Father Rose’s deadline is fast approaching, and I have yet to turn up anything that might help with the Congregation of Rites in Rome.
At night the fever gets worse, and I lay prostrate on the couch, TV noodling in the background, a cold compress over my eyes. In the mornings I awake shivering, my sheets stained with sweat in the shape of my body like the impression on the Shroud of Turin. Antoinette has not called. She will not call. I must face this fact.
2
THE FEVERISH afternoons drag in these last days of August. Even the crypt, which is usually cold and clammy as the palm of a dead man’s hand, has become oven hot. The brittle documents break apart at my touch. Outside in the churchyard the headstones stand stark and white in the sun, the black obelisk casting a blacker shadow across the enclosure like an accusing finger.
The ghost is keeping a respectable distance, perhaps because I am sick. I wonder if ghosts are prone to spiritual sicknesses; are there phantom microbes, supernatural viruses on the other side? I once saw the picture of a virus magnified ten thousand times on a science show on PBS. It was a magnificent thing, a snowflake spiral all ghostly white, floating in the human ether in the darkness between the cells.
Rust thinks I’ve got a touch of the flu, something I picked up down South. Summer flus can be the worst, he says, particularly August flus, because they are flus outside flu season, ignored by the media, and there are not many people around to share the misery.
We are at the Horseshoe Bar having a beer as he explains this theory. I drink three beers, then feel too exhausted to move, light as a feather, chills and fever running up and down my spine like electrical currents. This expedition to the Horseshoe Bar was unwise, I now know, but I’ve already been cooped up for five days and thought I could risk going out.
Rust looks concerned. His face is half hidden in darkness. The other half is illuminated in garish reds and blues from the neon beer signs in the windows. The Horseshoe Bar is a seedy Lower East Side dive, scarred and stained from years of drunkenness and despair. Rust likes the place. People come here to hide in the smoke and darkness. One of the beer signs advertises Hamm’s with the slogan “The Land of Sky-Blue Waters.” I would like to find this place wherever it is and make my bed in a cool stream there. I would sleep, breathing slowly through a hollow reed, as the sky blue waters caress my fever away on the sandy bottom. Suddenly disgust and nausea wash over me in a dirty wave.
“Why are you here, Rust?” I say. There is a petulant edge to my voice.
He squints at me through the gloom, waiting patiently for an explanation.
“This seediness, this same old life,” I say, waving a pallid hand. “This city. It’s no place for decent human beings. Did you see the news last night? Yesterday morning, during rush hour, a young woman was assaulted on the four between Fourteenth and Grand Central. She ran down the cars, screaming for help, pursued by an ax-wielding madman released from Bellevue last year when they ran out of funds to keep him incarcerated.…”
“I got it,” Rust says. “No one helped her, right?”
“Wrong. The morning commuters in their suits and dresses with pearls beat the attacker to death with their briefcases and Franklin Planners. Not because they cared about the woman who was attacked but because they were pissed off about being made late for work. Someone actually said that.”
“And this disturbs you?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think it disturbs you as much as you’d like it to,” Rust says quietly. “I’ll tell you why I’m here, Ned. Like the song says, I love New York. I had enough of wide-open spaces and clean air and so-called decency out West to last me a lifetime, and I can tell you people are pretty rotten everywhere. But you …” The rest of his words are lost in the general hum, the traffic on Avenue A, the ceaseless headache drumbeat of the natives in Tompkins Square Park. The next thing I know, we are out on the sidewalk and Rust is flagging a cab. He puts me in the backseat and hands the beturbaned driver a twenty-dollar bill.
“Molasses Hill, Brooklyn,” Rust says, and gives directions. The driver hesitates. As usual he does not want to go into Brooklyn, but it is too late. I am in, and money has changed hands.
“Rust?” I say as he closes the door and steps back onto the curb.
“You were passing out on me in the bar,” he says. “Go home and get some sleep.” Then I see his face slide away, a white blur through the glass as the cab pulls off around the park.
3
I LIE IN bed for the next three days.
According to my digital thermometer, my fever has steadied at 102.6. My room is little larger than a coffin, just over six feet long, wide enough for a single mattress and a bookcase full of clothes, carefully folded. The ceiling is made of tin and pressed with the elaborate floral patterning popular in the 1880s. It was once the walk-in closet for the apartment, but anything with a door and a window in New York qualifies as a room. I stare up at the whorls and leaves, trace the convolutions with a trembling finger. I try to sleep but am caught most of the time between an uncomfortable exhaustion and a prickly torpor. It seems something terrible is happening. My pee darkens the water in the toilet, and on the evening of the third day I am visited with a persistent nausea, like a low earthquake in the stomach.
Soon the bed is no longer comfortable. I spread Molesworth’s old sleeping bag in the middle of the living-room floor, and if I lie just the right way across the red flannel duck-and-hunters quilting, the nausea will go away for a few minutes. On the morning of the fourth day I begin to vomit. There isn’t much in my stomach, just a bowl of Ramen noodles and a few stale saltines, but I keep vomiting until I vomit up mucus and bile. At last it occurs to me that I might have something other than the flu. I call a doctor in Manhattan whom I’d seen once for boils, but he is on vacation, and I get the temp filling in for the receptionist. I ask her if she can recommend anyone for an immediate appointment.
“Are you kidding?” the temp says. “There’s even a two-day wait for the walk-in places. The whole city’s sick.”
“With what?”
“The usual,” she says. “All the ills that flesh is heir to.” An unemployed actress. She tells me to go to the emergency room of any hospital, but I have no health insurance and am without the five
hundred dollars necessary for such a visit.
“Then you’re up shit’s creek,” the temp says, and goes to another line.
After this call I vomit again and, when my strength returns, call an ex-girlfriend who is now a nurse. Her name is Clara, and she lives in Los Angeles, where she assists surgical procedures at Mother of Angels Hospital. During the first three months of our acquaintance several years ago, she was a tempestuous dance major at Columbia University. Then she ran out of funding from her parents and dropped out to get her head together and later applied to nursing school. I caught her at a hard time in her life when she was beginning to understand the futility of her artistic aspirations. I always catch them at a hard time: on the way down. When they start back up again, they seem to lose me, an anchor stuck in the muck.
We used to lie in that muck in apartments all over the city, blinds drawn in the afternoon, going at it with a desperate urgency. She didn’t have a place of her own the whole time I knew her, but apartment-sat while other people were out of town. All her possessions fitted into one small suitcase. We fucked among other people’s stuff on unfamiliar futons, family photographs full of strangers smiling on the dresser, used other people’s bathrooms, looked through their drawers for clues to an unknown life. It was a depressing period for her, though I rather enjoyed myself. She didn’t shave her armpits for six months, and she didn’t bathe all that often. I didn’t much mind her smell, which had a certain spicy pungency. Then, when she got accepted to nursing school, she cleaned herself up, and the affair was over. We parted friends. She’s engaged to a doctor now and allows me to call her for medical advice whenever I’m sick.
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