Baz and I fed each other cake.
The Hungarian ex-roommate and his husband toasted me and made a prayer they said was Jewish, for good luck, and I took their word for it.
I threw the bouquet straight at Verlette and she caught it.
Baz and I danced all by ourselves to a whole string of corny songs before he would let anybody else join us.
Did I mention he could dance? My bridegroom danced really well.
I began to relax. Uncle Chester scolded me for getting some cake frosting on the dress. I also put my heel through the hem. Using safety pins, Londa gathered the dress up at the knee, so I could walk while tipsy. Aunt Maybellyne hugged me and cried. Boy, that brought me back to reality fast.
Baz kept circulating around to me and asking if I wanted to tear off a quickie in a broom closet.
When I finally threatened to clobber him, he said, “Good. You’re back to normal.”
He also introduced me to Sophie’s beau, Veek, the best man and Baz’s last remaining roommate. Veek was a stunningly groomed, solemn, dark-skinned black guy who looked about twenty-five. The ink on his cheekbone and the earring in one ear were the only street things I could see about him. Baz nearly broke down when they shook hands at the bar—I guessed I would hear about all that eventually.
A month ago, in my hotel suite, Sophie had confided to me that Veek was really ninety-six years old, and a vodou jam bois. I wondered when she would show up.
As I thought this, I heard a scream. I turned. Sophie stood in the doorway to the reception, looking like a goth whore at her pimp’s funeral in an artfully-ripped-up, pouffy, black lace dress and black high-button ankle boots. Her hair was dyed black-blue-magenta. She was in a rage.
“That broom closet looking any better?” Baz murmured in my ear.
“I’ll take her somewhere private,” Veek said, “where she can scream at me.”
I put down my champagne flute and drooped in Baz’s arms. “Maybe for just a minute,” I muttered against the shoulder of his tux.
VEEK
“Veek! There you are!” Sophie cried, scarlet with fury. I raised my hands to defend myself. She flung herself on me, her fists hammering my chest. “Where? Have? You? Been?”
“Sh, sh.” I wouldn’t get out of this without bruises. I deserved them.
“Don’t shush me!” she shrieked. Her dress would have been more suitable under a streetlamp than at a wedding. Her hair was a salon-tousled mop, streaked blue and dangerous magenta. “You disappeared that night! My father told me where you were, but you didn’t tell me! I called! I texted! I made Baz give me your email!”
“Remarkable. I wish I had seen you force it out of him,” I murmured.
Sophie swung a fist at my face. I blocked with my forearm.
“Don’t try to flatter me, you rat! What are you trying to do, break my heart? I flew to Paris, but you were on your way to New Orleans. I flew to New Orleans, and they didn’t know where you were. I wasted two weeks looking for you in New Orleans! She hinted you might still be in France, so I flew to Montmorency, but you hadn’t even been there!”
I uttered a silent prayer of thanks to Mme Vulcaine. “How are your vodou lessons going?”
“Don’t change the subject!” She was running out of shriek, but not out of grievance. She stopped flailing.
I caught her by the forearms and pulled her arms around behind me.
She buried her face in my coat, which was black, so her mascara smeared it but did not show. Immediately a good feeling penetrated me.
I murmured to her hair, “Beat me again, ma choux, but don’t scream. This is Yoni’s wedding.”
She said in a muffled voice, “Yoni told me I could probably summon you into my presence, as long as we had had sex already—even as few as two times.”
Thanks so lots, Yoni. I kissed the top of her head. “You didn’t try it?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt what you were doing, with the Bureau’s judgment coming so soon. I thought it would take months. But Papa said, ‘No, it is for next week.’ I decided that if I didn’t find you by the judgment, I would try it.”
And there you had my Sophie. This was why I couldn’t run far or stay away for long. She never, ever lost sight of what she wanted or the practicalities entailed.
I drew her out of the reception room and into a service corridor. “Don’t cry, baby. Thank you for not interrupting what I was doing.”
She gulped. “You’re welcome.” She beat my chest one more time, weakly. “Rat.”
“That was very bad of me,” I agreed. “I was afraid.”
“Yes?” She lifted her face. I took out my handkerchief and wiped black stuff off her.
Ashamed, I confessed, “I didn’t want to—to pursue you—to let you pursue me—until I knew for certain that I would win. You shouldn’t want me without the title.” I held my breath. Now she knew how faithless I was.
She dropped two more tears. “Ass. Parrot.” She sniffled and took my handkerchief. “It probably took you twice as long without my help.” She blew her nose and would have thrown the handkerchief into a potted plant, but I took it away from her and pocketed it. She nodded briskly. “You’ll realize that someday.”
We looked at one another for a moment, while from adjoining rooms came ridiculous music and the clamor of our friends around the bar.
It came to me as I stood there in a fiercely overlit corridor smelling of past banquets, looking at my beautiful teenager, that I was in for a struggle that I had spent eighty years avoiding.
And that was probably good.
“What?” she said, her eyes darkening. “You’re plotting.”
“I’m thinking,” I said, pushing her black-blue-magenta curls away from her eyes, “that you’ll lead me by the nose if I don’t fight back.”
She opened her mouth. I touched her lips with one finger.
“Here I will tell you a secret about me. I think quite a lot. That’s why I don’t say much. If I choose to speak, you should be grateful. I made Jake dig every word out of me.”
She frowned.
I laughed. “That was the best I could do, in my struggle against his taste for adventure. Luckily for him, I was fool enough to give him that bit of beef liver, and fool enough to believe it had power over me, so he was able sometimes to bustle me.” I dropped my gaze. “So I let him. It kept me from having to make decisions.”
“Veek, I know you’re a slacker. But I don’t want to—to brandish a club over you.” She looked troubled.
“Oh, ma belle. You’ll snatch me up into your funnel cloud and deposit me here, there, and everywhere. Unless I bestir myself.” She made as if to speak, and I stroked her cheek to silence her. “Sophie, Baz believes that all of us who have lived in the Lair are slack for some reason. He thinks his reason is cowardice. Baz! A coward!” I shook my head. “A man slacks that long because he doesn’t want to know his own reasons. Once he knows them, he can—he must—put those reasons behind him and rejoin the world.”
“But this is profound!” Sophie opened her eyes. “What was your reason?”
Was. She believed I had put my fears behind me. No wonder I loved her.
“I? I believed I was not wanted. I made Jake prove that he wanted me every day, by making him drag me about America. Lately I’ve realized at last that I was wanted all along. I am wanted.”
“Do you have to ask?” She bumped against me, her bright eyes turning wistfully up to me.
I smiled. “No longer.”
“So.” Her lashes veiled her gleaming eyes. “I’m to keep you in a whirlwind of adventure, in order that your so-dominant will may receive sufficient exercise.”
“Not necessarily. I like a quiet life,” I said quickly, hoping I wasn’t whining. “But you won’t be able to keep still. I’ll have to—” I stopped, astonished. “I’ll have to want something enough to resist you.”
There was a remarkable thought.
“I perceive that I am very good for you.”
Her eyes glittered.
I touched her lower lids to draw away the tears. “You are.”
“But what,” she said gruffly, “if we both want the same thing?”
“I think we do.”
She threw herself on my chest again. I squeezed.
“If you want to squeeze me you have to kiss me,” she squeaked.
“Can’t it be my idea just once?” I complained.
She stamped. “But when? I have been in your arms for ten minutes now, and no kiss!”
I took her chin in my hand and shook it. “O thou bully.”
And there in that smelly corridor we did kiss.
o0o
Sophie wanted to make love right there in the corridor, but I made her join the reception. She ate, drank champagne, kissed everyone on both cheeks, and tried to make me dance, but I said, “Later. Talk to these people. It may be a long time before you meet them again.”
I could almost believe that I was winning all these points with my iron will.
Eventually she pranced away to talk to Baz.
Her father found me by the bar. “She gets what she wants,” Henri said, watching her scamper away. “You won’t escape.”
“I don’t want to escape.” We watched Sophie enter the ballroom and join Kamadeva’s apsaras in a lewd line dance. “Did you bring the assignments?” I said.
He turned back to me. “Yes, let’s attend to that.” We moved to a table.
Henri donned a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and produced documents from his briefcase. “Here, you see, I cede you all claim to monies and property owned by your father at the time of his death. These include the estate at Montmorency, certain sums of cash that are now distributed among these banks—the statements as of date of execution are in—the tin mine in Argentina, and the equivalent cash value of the town house in Paris, the chalet in Switzerland, the house on Fire Island, and forty racehorses.”
“The tin mine still works? I’m astonished.”
“You won’t be disappointed. Lately it yields bauxite. Here you assign me control, use, and enjoyment of such securities and properties as were purchased on behalf of your father the vicomte’s estate following his death until the present day. This includes the real estate, excepting Montmorency itself, mentioned in my concession. The family has become attached to these places, particularly the chalet.”
“I hate snow.” I waved away the town house, the chalet, and the house on Fire Island. “They may have them.”
“Here you ratify my position as trustee of your investments until such time as . . . you choose another.” He looked over his glasses at me.
I put up both palms. “She insists on managing the money. She’s educated to do it and I’m not.”
Henri’s eyes turned toward the ballroom and Sophie. For several minutes, he watched her as if he forgot I was there.
At length he said, “I want to warn you. We had a bargain. She pretended that I had the power and authority to command her, and I never stopped trying to command her.” He paused, watching her, and swallowed. “But then I stopped. I think she decided I had abandoned her at last. That was when I lost her.” In his eyes, fixed on his daughter, I saw worship.
Their peculiar relationship began to make a twisted kind of sense. “That sounds complicated,” I said.
“I tell you this so that you can work out what your bargain is with her. She has already decided what it is. You can only guess at it, and then try to live up to it. If you disappoint her, she’ll withdraw.” He shook his head, his eyes still on his daughter. “Then, there is no touching her.”
He swung back to me with a challenging look. “You think I’m fucking with you, but I’m not. I want you to succeed.” He hesitated. “It can be exhausting, trying to control her.”
“And you want to go to New Orleans and study vodou.”
He flushed. “A little selfish something for myself. Another man would take up golf. Let them all think I have retired. I won’t pass up a chance to learn how to control a new power.”
“The lwas cannot be controlled,” I reminded him. Would he ever understand that? He had calmed considerably since that crazy night on the lakefront, but I didn’t give a sou for his grasp of how the spirit world worked.
“You did. You summoned that one, the Baron.”
“I asked him to come. There are rules. One can go mad.”
He looked at me with sudden suspicion.
“I’m not fucking with you,” I assured him. What sort of coldhearted disguise for my concern would he accept? I flickered a smile. “I don’t want to lose my attorney in the middle of this case.”
He patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry, mon ancêtre. I’m going to win this case next week and go down in history for it. And then I will tackle your lwas.”
Oh well, I tried. Mme Vulcaine would have to keep him out of trouble. We shook hands again.
Henri walked off toward the ballroom.
Baz came up at that moment. “Who’s the shark?”
“My father-in-law to be.”
“Sheesh. Count your fingers.”
“Always.”
“Listen,” Baz said, all business. “I have to ask you something. When are you moving out of the Lair?”
I got a sudden, sad, sinking feeling. Baz and I hadn’t been under the same roof for weeks. Our separation was inevitable. But now it was real. No more boozing in the hot tub under the jet trails and city lights. No more Xbox wars in the kitchen.
I knew afresh how right he was. When a man loses the friends of his youth, something dies that can never be recovered. I perceived centuries of such losses ahead of me.
Sophie seemed more necessary to my sanity than ever.
I cleared my throat. “Soon. We’re due in court in Paris in a week. I know I must move out, but . . . I’ll miss the Lair.” A good slacker does not admit to loving another, even if only for the beers. “I haven’t stayed so long anywhere since I was a boy.” Remembering Samedi’s words, I added, “I have put down roots there.” I didn’t say, with you. “It’s a special place.”
“No shit.” Baz cleared his throat hard. “That’s kind of what I want to talk about. Remember I said that I notified our old supervisor in the Regional Office that we were quitting?” He pointed at the floor.
I smiled. “Did he weep?”
“Pretty much,” Baz said. “But he has this cockamamie idea there’s something special about the location.”
“Do we own it?”
“I do. Paid cash. It was cheaper and easier than fucking around with mortgage applications. ‘I supplement my income by screwing women for thirty pieces of silver a month from the Bad Place?’”
“Sell it to him. You’ll need capital.”
He gave me a pained look. I knew Baz. He lived on nothing. His most expensive pleasures were new socks and craft beer.
I said, “I assume you refused a settlement.”
“Yes,” he said rudely, “and she forced one on me anyway. It’s not the money. It’s tax documents and surveyors and lawyers and appraiser inspections and oh-dear-fucking-god.” He trailed off on a moan.
“Give it to him,” I suggested.
“Same deal.”
“Set up a trust, you incorrigible slacker.”
“Fuck!” Baz exploded. “What part of ‘allergic to paperwork’ are you not getting here?”
“Rent it to me,” said a voice behind us. I turned. It was indeed Ish Qbybbl, our demonic supervisor from the second circle of the Regional Office. His human form was that of a paunchy middle-aged Italian-American nightclub owner. His suit was caution orange satin and his shirt was purple and green paisley polyester and his gray chest hairs tangled in a thick gold chain and his turquoise boots were long, pointy, and made of shiny snake-skin. For the type, the look was impeccable, only ruined by the “Hello my Name Is” patch sewn directly onto the lapel, with eighty-eight tiny numbers scrawled in fine-point Sharpie in the white space below.
He looked nervous. I recalled
that Archie once said Ish was agoraphobic, and never willingly left the Regional Office.
Baz nodded at him. “Ish, where’s your entourage?”
“Learning dirty dancing from those Indian broads.” The demon supervisor turned to me. “Set the rent high, I don’t care. I got three of the loveliest, wickedest, skankiest succubi in the second circle of hell waiting to take over your space. Soon as I find them an onsite manager, they’re ready to move in.”
I said, “It doesn’t matter to me. I’m moving out. Baz owns it.” I glanced into the ballroom again. Sophie had been joined by a trio of what Baz would call “arm candy.” Her dress looked too much like theirs. I frowned.
Ish whined, “Can we get done here? I ain’t been out of my cubicle in two hundred years.” He and Baz lowered their voices and haggled.
I thought it was time I joined Sophie in the ballroom, before someone thought she was one of Ish’s coed demon sluts. But before I could leave the bar, Henri de Turbin turned up again, this time with Mme Vulcaine.
“Madame Vulcaine has just arrived,” Henri said deferentially. I was astonished at his transformation to a calm, polite, humble person.
I greeted the head of my house with similar deference.
Mme Vulcaine looked as she always did: dignified and gaudy and watchful. “Sophie tells me we have to thank you for this invitation, M’sieur le Vicomte,” she said.
I bowed.
“Madame is teaching Sophie the vodou ways. I hope, when my legal business is concluded, Madame, that you will give me that opportunity to join her in her studies,” Henri said, exuding an aroma of equal parts wealth and admiration.
Mme Vulcaine nodded in a stately way, as if not to be outdone in the courtesies. I felt I was present at historic negotiations. “Your Sophie tells me that our kinsman here will soon be your son-in-law.”
“Just as soon as his claim is confirmed by the Ministère de la Justice,” Henri said. “It’s only a matter of weeks now. I am,” he bowed, “a brilliant attorney.”
Walking on Sunshine Page 34
