By mid-July it was extraordinarily hot, and would be that way till October. Barbra was still sleeping off the heat. It was their first summer in New Orleans, after all.
“She wasn’t aware it would be like this,” said Victor.
“No one ever is,” said Twyla.
They were sitting on the back deck under the umbrella, drinking spiked tea. Gary had told her never to drink with Victor unless she was in the mood to see a mean drunk in action, but good lord, man, it was hot, and it had been hot for a long time. The air hadn’t moved in weeks; it just sat there, roiling, on the Mississippi.
But Victor wasn’t being mean, not that she could see. He was being quite charming, actually, even convincing that at one point his life had been interesting. It had started with her asking for stories of Gary’s childhood, but had quickly swerved to Victor’s financial successes. An hourlong meal of investments and mergers, with a side dish of luxury condo development. Who could find that interesting? But he told his stories well, with a booming voice and well-timed hand gestures, as if he were an airplane marshal signaling to a pilot to land, each new hand motion acting as punctuation. His enthusiasm swelled with the heat, and the boozier they got, she began to picture the two of them sitting not on the Westbank of New Orleans, but instead in a martini bar in New York City, somewhere near Grand Central station (she did not know the city well enough to picture it anywhere else), and as he went on with his storytelling about bidding wars and suspect contractors and dealing with the Jersey mob and fuzzy bank loans and paying off city council members (“You can’t repeat that last part, sweetheart”), she became a bit starry-eyed, as ridiculous as she knew it was, and felt younger, and perhaps flattered by his little flirtatious gestures, the way he pinched the skin on her upper arm. “Uch, sorry, I just had to see, it’s gorgeous, of course,” he said, and then she was aware they were right back where they had started on Thanksgiving, only this time she felt sort of swollen, sexily, with something. When he hugged her goodbye—the two of them ignoring the amount of alcohol in his system as he was about to get in a car and drive—it was for an absolutely inappropriate amount of time, their bodies pressed together far too close, his breath on her neck hot and full of desire, and briefly at the end, he put his hands in her hair, and not once did she push him away, not once, and so that, that, was when the trouble began. Six weeks ago.
* * *
Before New Orleans, Twyla had been to a casino only once. Early in their relationship, Gary had taken her to Las Vegas for a wedding, two friends of his from film school, people they didn’t talk to anymore. (Were they even still married?) Twyla and Gary had shared a pot brownie on the balcony of their room in Circus Circus, and then wandered from casino to casino, cocktails in their hands, tittering at the spectacle, and she kept thinking, This is America, I am in America right now. But she became fixated on the way it was lit up like a stage show, and was convinced it was only a performance of America, one long play from one casino to the next. Suddenly she needed to communicate this message urgently to Gary. She tugged on his arm, insisting he listen to her. “You’re having a bad trip,” he told her.
He took her back to the hotel room. “Don’t make me go back out there,” she begged him, and he chuckled at her and took care of her until her heart slowed down, then left her for an hour for the ceremony (it felt like six hours to Twyla). During that time she wiped off her glittery makeup, showered, ran a comb through her hair, and got under the sheets naked to wait for the next command from her brain. Gary walked in the door, assuredly more fucked up than when he had left, and leaned over her and kissed her. He tasted sweet. “Cheap champagne,” he said. “We come all this way, you think they’d get the good stuff.” He took off all his clothes and stood next to the bed. “Would it make you feel better if my cock were in your mouth?” She was appalled, and he looked surprised himself that he had said the words, but then she found herself leaning over and accepting him into her mouth.
“It was the strangest thing, but it did make me feel better,” she wrote in her journal, although she wasn’t even sure that was true. Gary would casually return to the suggestion of blowjobs over the next fifteen years, always when she was upset or distracted or vulnerable. It became a joke between them. Occasionally he made a joke about slot machines. Blowjobs were hilarious, as it turned out. Ha, ha, ha.
Harrah’s in New Orleans looked the same as the casinos in Vegas, except there was just the one casino, nowhere to wander to from there but outside again, and the downtown city streets, all the way to the river. She remembered that Harrah’s had made some deal with the state where it would be the only casino allowed to operate downtown. It sounded sneaky and greedy to her, but she had learned in her time in the city that a different set of rules seemed to apply to businesses in New Orleans. Don’t think too hard about it right now, she told herself. Don’t think too hard about anything. She sat down at a slot machine.
A waitress appeared immediately, getting her hustle on, first shift of the day, second shift she’d be driving an Uber. She was on autopilot. Her uniform had grown loose on her, no time to eat. A down payment on a condo in three months. She was saving hard. Then she’d quit one of these jobs. Have a life again. That condo would be hers, though. Oh yes.
Twyla ordered a double from her. “I can’t get a triple, can I?” she said. The waitress smiled politely. No, thought the waitress. No, you cannot.
* * *
The next time Twyla saw Victor was in the afternoon a few days later, and there was a threat of storms every day that week, and he was wearing a seersucker suit with a peach-colored shirt underneath it, he was freshly shaven, and his skin glowed from the sun and the humidity, and he was still old, thirty years older than her, much closer to death (closer than she realized), but he was offering the best version of himself to her, a smitten man, she thought. They drank mint juleps on the porch, she carried their glasses inside to the kitchen, and he came up behind her, and she thought, All right, just do whatever.
If she tried to pinpoint why she did it, if she closed her eyes and pictured herself as a bird flying into the darkness of her mind’s eye, a pelican, maybe, diving into the ocean, it was because she was curious to see what he would do to her, what this old man would do to this young woman—with him, she was young—and that it would be a new kind of pleasure, when all she had had were the old pleasures for so long, and had not even had them recently. And also, she knew that it was wrong to do, and she liked that it was wrong. It was as close as she would ever come to a criminal act. They could not throw her in jail for it, but it was wrong, regardless.
She spread her hands against the kitchen countertop, one hand on either side of the sink. He pushed up her skirt and unzipped his pants. He fiddled around with her pussy until he found what he was looking for, and then he fucked her with two fingers, efficiently, professionally, and she felt sort of shook. Behind her, he had his hand on his cock, and he was stroking it, and when she looked back he was studying it, moving his hand steadily, and then he turned his attention to her again. He laughed. “Gorgeous girl,” he said. When she came, she rested her head against the counter, and then a minute later he came against her thigh. He laughed again, smacked her ass.
“This can never happen again,” she said.
“Sure thing,” he said.
It happened again. Three more times. There were a few cards he sent her, day after day, which she immediately burned. A note from Victor always felt like a telegram sent during some decades-old war.
“Stunning woman. The dream I had last night. Don’t stop being you.”
She wrote about him in her journal several times, in a veiled fashion, so if she were to read it years from now only she would know what it meant. One day she wrote, “It was so nice to be touched again,” and she burst into tears after writing it, because she hadn’t recognized that she felt that way, that she was missing it, missing any touch at all.
After the third time, she wrote only this:
“I am a mess.”
That was two and a half weeks ago, and now Victor was almost dead.
* * *
She had lost hundreds of dollars to the machine, but now she was drunk. She heard the echo of her father’s voice from one of his backyard sermons: For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Well, she didn’t actually care about winning. She just wanted to play. She wanted to not think, and she wanted to look at all the lights, and she wanted to pull that handle.
Victor had taken her to this casino once. It was a ridiculous gesture on his part to ask her here, and even more ridiculous for her to say yes. Yet it seemed a safe place for them to go. Tourists everywhere; Twyla couldn’t imagine running into anyone she knew.
That night, she had met him wearing a minidress she had bought impulsively months before at the mall while shopping with her daughter. It was too short, she knew it. She only wore it around the house on hot days. And now she was wearing it for him.
Victor wore a new linen suit. He was amped up, excited to be there, excited to see her, how gorgeous she was. She sat with him at the high rollers’ table like she was his mistress, which she supposed she was. He called her “baby doll.” He dropped cash everywhere. He’s showing me what he can offer me, she thought. He’s showing me what could be our life. She watched him lose five thousand dollars quickly. What a life.
Then they squeezed next to each other at a bar, his hand on her knee. His boldness riveted her. He was drinking Scotch, and it smelled disgusting. She’d been tossing back glasses of astringent, cold white wine all night. They were drunk, terrible people. He was in the middle of proposing something to her by way of a story about someone else.
It had started out as a casual reference to a buddy of his from New Jersey. He checked his phone, saw a text from him. “This guy,” said Victor. “He’s really something.” He had just retired from a tech job. He hadn’t been a rich man by any means, but he had saved and invested and had a nice little pile of cash waiting for him for the rest of his life. A few weeks after he left his job, he took a cruise for the first time with his wife and mother-in-law. “To the Dominican Republic, I think,” said Victor. “For a week. Nothing too crazy.” His friend had found that he loved it, that life on the cruise ship made more sense to him than anything else he’d experienced. He loved the sea air, loved the boundlessness of the view, loved the buffets, loved the structure of the ship’s events and its schedules and the order of it all, and he thought, I could live here. He wanted to spend the rest of his life on cruise ships, hopping from one to another. Who needed to spend another second in New Jersey, sitting still? His whole life had been on land.
“He had a lot of time left—he was sixty-five, that’s like a good twenty years more at least—but still he heard a clock ticking,” said Victor. “He didn’t have time to fuck around.”
His buddy made a case for it to his wife. She did not agree. She said, “Can’t we move to Florida instead?” He said, “You move to Florida. I want to float.” They didn’t have any children to care if they split up. It was easy. Fifty-fifty, done. Now he spends all his time bouncing around cruise ships, Victor told Twyla. “They do his laundry for him, they feed him, he gambles, he suns himself, and he feels free.”
He ordered another round for the two of them without asking Twyla if she wanted one. This is how he was, this is how it would be. He was telling her this story as a suggestion. It was a specific idea of freedom he was conveying to her, though Twyla was certain she’d feel trapped if she had to spend the rest of her life on a cruise ship.
“I’ve got some money in a couple of different accounts that Barbra doesn’t know about,” he said. “We could take that money and run.” He looked around, then ran a finger along her rayon spaghetti strap. “And you’ve got some money too, no? From that farm sale?” He said this casually, as if it had just occurred to him, but surely it had not.
“I put that in a trust,” said Twyla. “So my daughter can go wherever she wants to college.”
“You can’t access that at all?”
“It’s for Avery,” she said faintly. She felt dizzy—America, she thought again, the same everywhere—and then her focus sharpened. “I haven’t considered anything like that, so I have no idea.”
“There’s ways around trusts. Anyway, we can talk about it some other time.” He smiled at her, beyond her, too.
Later she wouldn’t let him come inside the house, and while they were parked in the garage he reached his hand up her skirt and manipulated her again and she came quickly, and when he put her hand on his cock she said, “I think we’re done.”
Then, last week, Sierra had commented on her state of being without actually asking. As in: “You look like garbage.”
“I am garbage,” said Twyla.
They were in Sierra’s baby pool, vaping, high on hemp oil from the pet store, drinking cans of bubbly rosé. Before that comment, Sierra had been bitching about why her husband wouldn’t buy her a real pool, but they both knew the answer was because he couldn’t afford it.
“No, I said you look like garbage.”
“OK, then I’m both.”
“Well, whatever’s wrong, stop it.”
Twyla spilled it all to her.
“You don’t say a goddamn thing, you hear me, girl?” said Sierra.
Twyla was in tears. She splashed her hand in the pool haphazardly.
“Look at me,” Sierra said. “You don’t want to know what they do, and they don’t want to know what you do.” She wiped a hand in front of her face. “Let it just float away.”
At Harrah’s she checked her phone, texted Gary for the fiftieth time, how he had known, what he knew, how fucked she was, how fucked their marriage was, how much her life was going to change, and if there was anything she could do to save it all now.
20
Alex, on the corner of Decatur Street, a block away from Jackson Square. It was nearly sunset by then. I don’t know what to do with myself, she was thinking. Here I am, being me, and I don’t know what that means. Her phone was dying, nearly dead, and she had given up on checking the news, and her disconnection from this particular timeline had altered her. She couldn’t figure out whom she was supposed to be worrying about now. If not her father (nearly dead), if not her mother (intolerable), if not her daughter (strong and steady, now she knew this for sure), and if not America (still burning in the distance, but she couldn’t remember why at this exact moment), then who? She thought everyone else was on their own, but really it was her; she was alone and adrift in this city, far enough from home to feel like she could have been anywhere at all.
But, of course, she was in New Orleans. In the French Quarter.
On the corner, across from a golden statue of Joan of Arc riding a horse triumphantly, a man and a woman started fighting. They were both short, as if something had stunted their growth early, and wore cutoff jeans and oversize tank tops, the collars stretched out from wear. His hair was shaved on one side, and hers was in a big messy bun on top of her head. Her skin was terrible, picked raw in spots. There were two children with them, girls, both chubby, and they were sunburned, and they looked terrified and sad. The woman had her finger out, waving it in the man’s face, and she was talking rapidly, and she was cursing, and he pushed her hand away once, and again, and then finally he hauled back and slapped her. The crowd stopped moving, and Alex heard someone say, “Hey,” but no one approached the couple. Everyone was waiting to see what happened next, she supposed. But why wait? He’d already struck once.
She imagined herself a hero, wondered what a hero would look like and what that hero would do, and in fact she knew: that hero would make this fight stop. And so, sloppily (although she felt confident), she crossed the sidewalk and stood between the man and the woman. A thing she wished she could have done for her mother a long time ago, she realized as she settled in between the two of them. In their house, that faraway house up north.
“Don’t touch her again,�
�� she said.
The man barely looked at her. He was shorter than her, and she could smell the booze coming off him, but then again, there was booze coming off her, too. The man shoved Alex without even thinking, and her shoulder strained.
“This has nothing to do with you,” he said.
“Are we all going to just stand here and let this man assault people?” Alex said to the crowd, still standing there.
“It’s all right, I got it,” said the woman, and slapped the man back. The two of them went after each other, growling, and it seemed they aimed to wound: she was digging her fingers into his face, and he was pulling her hair with one hand, the other around her neck. Alex stepped back until she was leaning against a wall on the street corner, rubbing her shoulder, as, after a beat, the crowd decided the fate of this couple, finally dividing the two of them, two large men holding either one of them easily. Then it was over, the man handing the woman the car keys, the woman grabbing her girls, both of whom were now sobbing, and directing them up the street. Someone suggested the man take a walk. Another said he’d buy the man a drink. “That sounds about right to me,” he said, and she heard a distinct snort. Everyone was forgiving him too quickly, she thought. No no no. This was too fast. The crowd picked up again, heading toward the waterfront or the square up ahead or back to their hotel, to cool off in a lobby bar. To buy tiny bottles of hot sauce or a rhinestone-studded T-shirt or one more drink. Alex didn’t realize she had sunk to the pavement until there was a hand extended in front of her face, attached to a man, who was offering to help her back on her feet.
All This Could Be Yours Page 16
