Restoration

by John Ed Bradley

  They lived together for two years, although Lowenstein left the art school after only a semester and began his studies in business at Tulane. Asmore, on the other hand, remained at the school as a part-time instructor of painting and took on various odd jobs in the Quarter. He waited tables and did carpentry and roofing work. For a while he contracted with a dealer named Harmanson, who had him decorate plates with New Orleans scenes for the tourist trade. All of Asmore’s plate paintings—and there were hundreds—were distinguished by their banality; he often painted two of them at a time, using both hands, a brush in each. Lowenstein once watched Asmore paint a view of the Brulatour Courtyard with his eyes closed, to prove a point. “Have you ever seen those plates?” Lowenstein asked.

  “I’ve seen plates from that period decorated with city scenes,” Rhys said, “but never one that I can say looked like his work or came with his signature.”

  “Oh, he never would’ve signed one of those dreadful things, and he intentionally painted them all to look like something the worst street artist might’ve done. I’m a little uncomfortable bringing up the subject of the plates, because his legacy is secure and I don’t want to detract from it. He never advertised the fact that he was painting plates. Outside of Mr. Harmanson, I was probably the only person who knew it. Levette was paid ten cents for each plate, if I recall correctly. You could always tell when his funds were depleted because he would say, ‘Well, Low…’—he called me Low—‘well, Low,’ he’d say, ‘my plates await.’” Lowenstein laughed. “‘My plates await,’ as if he cared about them.”

  One night in his room Lowenstein was awakened to the sound of a woman’s laughter. It wasn’t the first time, but he checked his wrist-watch and saw that it was 4:00 A.M., late even for Asmore. Lowenstein covered himself with a robe and walked into the living room. There was no one. He looked around and saw empty wine bottles standing on the floor, a saucer serving as an ashtray covered with butts, pillows arranged in a stack at one end of the sofa only. The doors leading to the courtyard were open, and when he walked outside he saw Asmore sitting on a bench with a young woman. Moonlight sent their shadows in sprawling puddles on the flagstones. A wind rustled the leaves of the banana trees and blew the girl’s hair in her face, and when she raised a hand and pulled the hair back Lowenstein saw that the girl was a light-skinned Negro. Levette and the girl rose to their feet, and Levette, who was so drunk he had a hard time standing, introduced her as “Jacqueline, not Jackie, LeBeau.”

  Had he grown up in any southern city but New Orleans, Lowenstein might’ve been shocked to find his housemate involved with a black woman. When Lowenstein was a teenager his uncle Teddy, a bachelor with a wily, concupiscent nature, had often regaled him with stories about the Quadroon Balls of old at which moneyed white men, most of them French Creoles with wives and children at home, had courted beautiful women of color to keep as paramours. Perhaps Asmore was pursuing such an arrangement. “But, no, this didn’t add up,” Lowenstein said. “Levette wasn’t married and he barely had enough money to keep himself, let alone a woman.”

  They carried on their love affair largely in the confines of the cottage, venturing out in public together after hours when there were few people to observe them. They went for walks along the river or borrowed Lowenstein’s car and took drives in the country. When Asmore painted plein-air in the old district, Jacqueline occasionally accompanied him, but she made certain to keep a distance, slipping in doorways or blending in crowds. None of Levette’s contemporaries knew about the relationship, although he seemed less reticent to talk about Jacqueline with his teachers at the school, primarily Alberta Kinsey and Paul Ninas. “Like them, I thought it was an infatuation that would end after a few weeks,” Lowenstein said. “But it didn’t end. Levette continued to pursue Jacqueline for no reason but the obvious one. He was in love with her.”

  From his bedroom Lowenstein could hear the sounds of their lovemaking. One night he listened as Jacqueline pleaded with Asmore to stop drinking. “I heard her say, ‘Please, Levette, you are my heart,’ over and over. She was weeping, and to hear her that way almost made me weep myself. It probably sounds maudlin now, but she was begging him not to kill himself.”

  Other times, better times, Lowenstein endured their giggles as they played like clumsy puppies on the living room floor. When Asmore got the WPA commission to paint the post office mural, the couple took over the kitchen and Jacqueline prepared a huge dinner in celebration. They had porterhouse steaks, Lowenstein recalled. “It was a happy day. We played jazz on the phonograph and took turns dancing across the floor, the three of us did. When Jacqueline left off to tend to her cooking, Levette and I came together and danced as well. We were both three sheets to the wind and there was no suggestion of intimacy. He and I had roughhoused before, as young men do, but this night was the only time I ever actually held him in my arms. I remember how strong and powerful he felt. His body might’ve been cut from rock.”

  Jacqueline lighted candles on the table and served the meal. “Here’s to the history of transportation in America,” said Asmore, lifting a toast with his wineglass. Lowenstein noticed a tight edge of sarcasm in his friend’s voice.

  “To the history of transportation in America,” Lowenstein and Jacqueline answered in unison, and raised their own glasses.

  Asmore brought the glass up higher. “And here’s to its history of discrimination against the Negro,” he said, suddenly turning serious.

  “To the Negro,” Lowenstein shouted out, and nodded at Jacqueline, who’d lowered her glass and sat without responding.

  Later that night Lowenstein, watching through his half-open door, saw them lying together on a blanket on the floor of the living room, their naked bodies bathed in candlelight. They seemed oblivious to his presence, but then Jacqueline’s gaze turned to Lowenstein and she seemed to smile at him in the moment before she came to orgasm. “It was too much to bear,” Lowenstein said. “I turned over and put my back to them.”

  In the early days Lowenstein had enjoyed the spectacle. But by now the couple’s passion for each other, ever on display, gave him reason to wonder if they meant to taunt him. Were they intentionally trying to hurt him? They truly seemed to enjoy making him miserable. Ever since Jacqueline entered the scene he’d begun to feel alienated from Asmore, whom he’d regarded as his closest friend and confidant. But he and Asmore never talked anymore. They never went out on the town together, never shared meals at home alone, never did anything without Jacqueline being with them. Lowenstein felt abandoned and betrayed.

  “‘Night, Low,” Jacqueline said, standing in the doorway to his bedroom. Against the soft light of the living room he could see her shapely form, the dense weight of her breasts barely contained by the light fabric of her dress. She was holding a shoe in each hand. Her lips were dark and full from kissing and her hair hung loose past her shoulders. Lowenstein lay still, willing himself not to move.“’Night,” she said again. He wondered if he was losing his mind.

  In the weeks that followed, he stopped attending class and rarely got out of bed before noon. On dates of his own, he began to act differently than he ever had before. He pawed at the girls when they clearly had no romantic interest in him, and forced kisses on them when they didn’t want to be kissed. One of them, Jennifer Vaden, a judge’s daughter, slapped him so hard he thought she’d ruptured his eardrum. He started visiting a house on Toulouse Street, finding there the sexual intimacy he craved, if not the affection.

  “It went beyond jealousy,” Lowenstein said. “I began to resent them. I can recall waking up one day and finding candle wax on a table in the living room. The table was nothing special, and it was only candle wax, for heaven’s sake. But I exploded in a rage and carried on as if some terrible crime had been committed.”

  One night Jacqueline arrived at her usual hour and Lowenstein let her in. Asmore had not returned home yet. He was still working at his studio, trying to meet a deadline for the post office mural.

&nb
sp; “I remember what your grandmother was wearing,” Lowenstein said to Rhys. “It was a blue silk dress with an Oriental design, probably straight off the rack at D. H. Holmes. It was cut rather low, which was unusual for Jacqueline, who was quite modest. She’d had her hair done; it was piled on top of her head. She was such a gorgeous girl, and tonight she smelled of a strong, fancy perfume. Around her neck was a Spratling creation. Do you know who Bill Spratling was?”

  “Yes.”

  Lowenstein looked at me. “And do you, Mr. Charbonnet?”

  “He was the artist from here in the twenties who moved to Mexico and became a silversmith.”

  “And famous for his jewelry,” Lowenstein said. “I think it was Alberta Kinsey who introduced Levette to Bill, when Bill had returned to New Orleans from Taxco one year and lectured at the art school. They hit it off and the two of them exchanged letters for years. When Levette wrote to Bill that he’d met the woman of his dreams in Jacqueline LeBeau, Bill sent him a silver necklace to give to her. He knew, of course, that Levette couldn’t afford such a thing. That’s the kind of man Bill Spratling was.” Lowenstein coughed into a fist and a splash of red came to his face. “Anyway, your grandmother was wearing her Spratling piece this day. I invited her to sit down, and she thanked me and pulled up a chair from our little dining table, and I sat across from her and stared without speaking until she began to feel uncomfortable.”

  “I have something important to tell Levette today,” she said. “I’m nervous, Low.” Lowenstein didn’t comment and she said, “What is it?” She glanced down to make sure she was covered. “Low, is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “There’s a lot that’s wrong.”

  “What is it?” Now she reached up and felt her hair, to make sure it was in place. “Did I do something?”

  He was tempted to reach over and grab the necklace and rip it off her neck. His anger boiled to a point where he could feel the color rise in his neck. “Did you do something?” he said. “You better believe you did something.”

  “What, Low? What did I do?”

  “You’re a goddamned nigger bitch, that’s what you did.”

  She sat for a while, then stood and walked to the door, a hand covering her mouth. Lowenstein remained seated in his chair wondering where the words had come from and feeling such shame that he thought he’d rather die than face either Jacqueline or Asmore again. “I hated myself,” he said. “I’d never intentionally been so vicious to anybody before in my life.”

  He left the cottage and walked to the house on Toulouse Street and satisfied himself in the rough fashion that had become his release. As he was leaving, a boy came outside and said, “Hey, aren’t you Charlie Lowenstein, from Tulane?” He didn’t answer and the boy said, “We have a business class together.” Lowenstein put his head down to avoid contact with the boy. “How about a drink, Charlie. What’s the hurry?”

  “I’m not who you think I am,” Lowenstein said.

  “You’re Charlie Lowenstein. Don’t worry,” the boy said. “I won’t tell anyone.” He looked around and laughed. “You’re not here alone, are you?”

  Lowenstein slowly backed away from the boy, then ran back to the cottage as fast as he could, his sobs seeming to grow louder with every stride.

  He found them waiting outside on the courtyard. “I’ll be out as soon as I finish hanging the mural,” Asmore said when Lowenstein passed through the French doors.

  “Jacqueline, I’m sorry, darling. Please forgive me.” He was winded, his hair and face lathered with sweat.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Asmore flicked his cigarette in Lowenstein’s direction. “And what are you doing, calling her ‘darling’ now?”

  “Jacqueline, I apologize. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Forgive me. You must forgive me.”

  “Get away from her,” Asmore shouted.

  “Tell me you forgive me,” Lowenstein said to Jacqueline.

  She was sitting on the bench under the banana leaves, in a different, more conservative suit of clothes now, and without the Spratling necklace. She’d also let her hair down, he noticed. She hugged her arms to her chest and lowered her chin. “I forgive you, Low,” she whispered.

  “I should cut your tongue out of your mouth,” Asmore said to Lowenstein.

  “I forgive you, Low,” she whispered a second time.

  In Rhys’s office Lowenstein paused and drank from the whiskey. Rhys walked across the floor without any apparent direction, then returned to her chair and sat on the edge leaning forward. “Did she ever tell you what it was that was so important?”

  “She didn’t have to tell me.”

  “Jacqueline was pregnant, wasn’t she?”

  “I’m certain that was it. She was radiant that night, when she first came over. She’d dressed up for him. I think that’s what set me off. I just couldn’t take it another minute. I despised her.” He closed his eyes again. “She was carrying his child. I’d lost him forever now.”

  Early the next morning he awoke to find the artist standing in his room. Asmore reeked of cigarette smoke and his eyes were bloodshot. He was wearing canvas coveralls, the ones from work, and paint colored his fingers. After leaving the cottage the night before, he’d gone to the studio to complete work on the mural. But he obviously had also found time to drink. Asmore’s expression was so severe that Lowenstein covered his face, in anticipation of being struck. “Get up,” Asmore told him. “It’s time you saw something.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see when we get there.”

  They left the city in Lowenstein’s car headed west on the state highway. They drove past swamp bottoms and vast areas of farmland and stopped for fuel in Baton Rouge. They’d been traveling for more than two hours. Asmore, though hardly in any condition to drive, had manned the wheel the entire distance, refusing to answer Lowenstein’s pleas for forgiveness or questions about their destination. They crossed the river on a ferry, then drove for another hour, the latter part of it on dirt and shell roads. It was late afternoon when they motored into a small railroad town, dust coming up like a hurricane in their wake. They stopped finally before a shack where a girl was removing clothes from a line that stretched between trees in the yard. The girl shielded her eyes with a hand as she gazed up at them.

  “There,” Asmore said, pointing. “You see her?”

  “See who?”

  “That girl there?”

  Lowenstein sat up in the seat and peered through the dusty glass. “Yeah, I see her. Jesus, Levette. We came all this way to look at a colored girl?”

  “That’s not just any colored girl.”

  Lowenstein looked again. He gave her a closer inspection this time. “I don’t see how she’s any different.”

  “That girl’s my first cousin, Low. Her name is Annie Rae Asmore. Her father and my father were brothers. You want me to call her up to the car?”

  Lowenstein didn’t answer and Asmore reached over and placed a hand against the back of his head and held it there, forcing him to look again. “Look at her, Low. Drink it all in. She’s a goddamned nigger just like I’m a goddamned nigger.”

  “You’re not a god—” Lowenstein muttered.

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re drunk. You’re a drunk is what you are.”

  Lowenstein wouldn’t look again at the girl. He wouldn’t talk, either.

  Asmore began to laugh then, even as tears filled his eyes and his voice broke. “Sure, I’m a nigger,” he said. “Or I was a nigger until they moved me to New Orleans and somebody decided I was too pale and pretty to be placed in a home with them. That’s when I became like you, Low.”

  Lowenstein slipped lower in his seat. His eyes were closed. “I wish you’d take me home now,” he mumbled.

  “Let me call Annie Rae on up here.”

  Lowenstein shook his head. “Take me home.”

  “Take me home, nigger,” Asmore said.

  “Wha
t?”

  “Take me home, nigger. Say it like that. Say, ‘Take me home, nigger.’”

  Through clenched teeth Lowenstein said, “Take me home, Levette.”

  “Take me home, nigger,” Asmore said, raising his voice. “We don’t leave until you say, ‘Take me home, nigger.’”

  “Take me home.”

  “Take me home, nigger.”

  “Take me home, nigger.”

  Asmore started the engine and pushed the stick into gear. “I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do,” he said. “It’s simple, Low. It’s simple what we’re going to do. I’ll be moving out soon but until then you’re going to be nice to my girlfriend. You’re going to treat her with kindness and respect. If you don’t treat her with kindness and respect… well, Low, I’m going to have to do something.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to tell everyone who’ll listen that Charlie Lowenstein went and fell in love with a nigger. Worse, with a goddamned nigger.”

  “I’m not in love with Jacqueline,” Lowenstein said.

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m fond of her. She’s lovely. But I’m not in love with her.”

  Asmore laughed again, then set the car in motion. “Jacqueline isn’t the nigger I meant,” he said.

  It now was after two o’clock in the morning. Lowenstein held his glass high as Rhys poured more whiskey. His hand was trembling when he brought the glass to his mouth. “I didn’t see him again,” he said.

  “No?”

  “Well, no, of course I saw him again. What am I saying?” He glanced over at me. “Be a gentleman and have a drink with me, Mr. Charbonnet.”

  I’d been sitting on the floor. I stood up and went for a glass.

  “You, too, Miss Goudeau. Don’t let me go through the rest alone.”

  After we’d poured our whiskeys Lowenstein said, “He moved out and never lived with me again. That’s what I should have said. I’m afraid I’ve lost my ability to think straight. Maybe we should finish this some other time.”