City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  SJ closed the door after her when she left, and he stood alone in the silent apartment. He walked to the middle of the room. Couch, poster, end table, lamp. Telephone. Ingredients in a soup that hadn’t had time to blend flavors. There was the coffee table. There was a bed in his bedroom and, because Leeshawn had insisted on it, there was a rug on the floor next to the bed. There was a toilet seat cover and a matching mat on the floor of the bathroom. All of it bought at Target that week. He had everything he needed to live except a life.

  There were days, now, when he could look in a mirror and almost recognize himself. Not just his face, but his energies, and not just from before it had all happened, but from longer ago than that. Parts of himself that had been wrapped and put away in a drawer, exposed now by all that upset. It was not necessarily a bad thing. But as it healed and he began to piece the parts of himself back together and he felt familiar energy, he got restless to use those energies, to begin building something connected and coherent, a life.

  Outside the window he looked across a pathway between his building and another building exactly like it next door. A place with no roots, no reason, no echo, no flavor. Not for him, anyway. This will not last forever, he told himself. As long as you can begin again, he always thought, have a place to start, you could build, you could continue. But he didn’t want to get started here. There was unfinished business in New Orleans. They were still not letting people back into or even near the Lower Nine yet, and SJ knew he wouldn’t know exactly what he was doing until he had had a chance to see for himself. He began to think about how to get back in, official go-ahead or not.

  They had gotten him a new cell phone at Wal-Mart, one where you bought minutes and added as you went, and SJ spent time calling the numbers he remembered or could find for his crew, trying to track them down. Lester, when he finally found him through his sister, was in Little Rock, which was good. Ronald’s trail was cold for the moment. He knew that Curt had cousins in Baton Rouge; through them he tracked down Curt in Atlanta. SJ registered with a couple of the national data bases for displaced New Orleanians.

  His crew had different ideas about returning.

  “Where I’m gonna stay, J?” Curt said. “I’m not coming back to that motherfucker. My daughter in a school where they got books and the lights stay on. FEMA got us into an apartment where it ain’t like the Wild West every night. You know God-damn well they blew up the levee on us. What I want to come back for?”

  “We managing, J,” Lester said. “If I could get a trailer I’m happy to come back. I want to come back. Little Rock got nothing for me. How you doing? Lucy and Wesley make it through all right? People here try, but you know…This lady made some red beans at the church the other night I almost started walking back home after the first bite. Didn’t taste like nothing. Look here, the whole city like that. Not to put nobody down, ’cause they being real nice to us, but I want to come home.”

  Sometimes SJ wondered if it would be possible to conceive of another life entirely, outside New Orleans. Aside from himself, where would Lucy live? And Wesley? Wesley was working, he was doing very well, actually, and Houston worked as a city, unlike New Orleans at the moment. Lucy missed New Orleans very badly. But what if there was nothing to go back to?

  It had been decades since he had even remotely entertained the idea that he might live somewhere other than the Ninth Ward. But now, in between the errands, and the calls to his crew members, the visits with Lucy and the trips to shop for Aaron and Dot, life began to assume a pattern again, inevitably; you fell into it like hypnosis, it seemed real, until you woke up again and realized that your real life had been interrupted, that it was on hold, trying to reassemble itself in your sleep, like the dreams you might have when you were in a coma. But what if you never woke up? What if someday this life began to be your life?

  When he spent time with Lucy and Wesley, they kept each other warm, restated the fact of continuity with the past and the future. But they were subject to the undertow, also. Lucy seemed to be doing well in some ways, not in others. She seemed a little depressed, to him. He worried that she might get started with her bad habits again, out of boredom if nothing else.

  “You taking your medicine, Loot?”

  “That the first time you called me Loot since we been here, SJ. You remember one time Wesley call me Lootie when he was seven year old and you told him you’d go upside his head if he didn’t call me Mama?”

  “You taking it?”

  “It back on Tennessee Street, Samuel. Don’t get mad. I didn’t like it. The Humixtra give me diarrhea like I couldn’t even get my drawers down in time, and the other give me a female problem, and I’m a go see Wandrell doctor over in Holly Ridge see he can get me something don’t make me have to run every half hour. But look here, SJ—if I die and we still here don’t bury me in Texas, allright? Promise me that. I don’t care about buried or cremated; just take my dead ass back to New Orleans.”

  22

  A bright Wednesday in mid-October, and Alice stood at the corner of East Forest Avenue and North Mankato, sipping the mocha latte she had bought at Brew Horizon and waiting for the crossing light. She had an entire afternoon to herself; Craig was in New Orleans doing another column, Gus and Jean were watching Malcolm, Annie was in school, and Alice was walking the three-block strip of Forest Avenue that formed the main drag of OffWabash. She hadn’t felt so happy in months.

  Alice loved the change of seasons; it was one of the things she had missed most, being in New Orleans. This autumn snap in the air brought back Ann Arbor, the early days with Craig; it brought back acting, and painting, college lawns, possibility, new classes and new clothes. All around her, early-afternoon light glinted off of car bumpers and shop windows, and the latte warmed her as she drank.

  The light changed and she crossed Mankato and passed Salon Elegance, the tired-looking hair place on the corner with its perpetual “Help Wanted” sign in the window (Our Lady of Perpetual Help Wanted, she thought—one of her and Craig’s old games). She was headed to La Bahía, figuring that she would work her way back down to the other end from there. La Bahía had great scarves and block-print skirts and blouses. It reminded her of Gae-Tana’s, on Maple Street in New Orleans, where she used to go with Connie and Kelly, and then they’d have lunch at the Maple Street Grill. In front of the store Alice first stopped and looked at the display windows, which were featuring cotton sweater jackets in a sort of brick orange and olive green. Big cloth buttons, which she never understood; they were hard to fasten and they lasted about three wearings. The scarves, on the other hand…

  Inside, Alice tried on a scrunchy velvet hat, black with dark red flowers embroidered on it, looked in the mirror, put it back. She gave some attention to an oatmeal-colored cotton sweater, loose-knit, with off-the-shoulder seams and an oversized crew neck. She held it up to herself in a mirror, imagined it over her black slacks, maybe with the small pearl pendant on the fine gold chain…She decided to wait; she wasn’t in love with it.

  After browsing for a while more she left La Bahía and turned left on the sidewalk, walking east. The air was crisp and invigorating, and her beige parka kept her nice and warm. One day before too long she wanted to buy something a little nicer for herself for the winter. She nibbled at the lemon tart she had also picked up at Brew Horizon—a guilty pleasure, which reminded her to call Stephanie and see about finding a health club that held yoga classes. She crossed back over Mankato, past Brew Horizon. The only real goal she had for the afternoon was to hit Planka’s, where she wanted to buy some pastels, a set for her and a set for Annie. Alice missed painting, and the pastels were so much easier to use than oils, certainly as far as cleaning up was concerned, and with the limited space back at the apartment it would be a good solution. And it would be something she and Annie could do together.

  She had been short with Annie lately, and at the same time she had been yearning to make more of a connection with her, for them to be there, together, where they wer
e. A few days earlier, Alice had found her sitting on the floor, with her big sketchbook open to swirls of pink and bright yellow, fluorescent orange. “What’s that, Annie?” she asked.

  “It’s Wild Magnolias,” Annie answered. This was a gang of Mardi Gras Indians.

  “Wow,” Alice said. “Pretty. What’s the house?”

  “That’s the H&R Bar.” This was a place Craig insisted on bringing them every Mardi Gras as if it were the Taj Mahal. Alice could understand Annie drawing pictures of the brightly colored Mardi Gras Indian outfits, but that her daughter would choose to draw a low-life bar as a place to which her imagination returned felt wrong. And one that had burned down, in the bargain. Even before it burned down, that was one place Craig had brought her that made her feel nervous.

  “That is real pretty, sweetie,” she had said. “Listen—how’d you like to go out to Herman’s?” Herman’s was an ice-cream parlor in OffWabash that was always a big hit with the kids.

  Without really intending it, Alice found herself trying to sell Chicago to Annie and Malcolm. But Alice used to like the Mardi Gras Indians. She had enjoyed the neighborhood bars, the second lines. It had been fun, and mysterious. But the fun had disappeared somewhere along the line, like the smell of flowers, replaced by this fist she carried in her stomach. And she felt a sadness wafting off of Annie that worried her. Annie had an iPod mini that Craig had given her, stocked with New Orleans music, to which she listened constantly. Alice felt that it was unhealthy for Annie to be so emotionally focused on what could well turn out to be an irretrievable past. Alice was trying with everything she had to project a vision of a life that would be healthier and full of more possibilities for her children than what she honestly believed New Orleans had in store for them.

  Alice looked up and down the sidewalk and thought, This is a beautiful, sunny afternoon. Across the street was Szarky’s Market, and Alice reminded herself to swing back later with the car and pick up some of their good Polish sausage for dinner. Right after Brew Horizon on her side of the street was Alizé, and she stopped in there for a minute to look at the lingerie.

  She moved among the tables with the frilly satin pillows and ribbons. Who bought this stuff, she wondered? Some of the lingerie was all right, although her style tended toward the more straightforward. She thought about an item or two, maybe a new pair of the colorful string bikini underpants they had arrayed on tables, fanned out like cold cuts on a tray. She couldn’t do the whole deal with the negligees, the garters and stockings…it just wasn’t her. She didn’t like the thongs either…One table had very sheer underpants of a type she could wear, with lace cutaways in front and a full-cut back. She could surprise Craig with something like that; the idea made her feel a little racy, until she checked the price—forty-eight dollars, and she put them back on the table. Fifty dollars was too much for a pair of underpants, no matter how cute.

  It was hard for her to work out a balance in how she felt about Craig being gone so much. This was his second trip, and he had another scheduled for later in the month. Obviously they needed the money from the columns, and she knew, too, that it was important to Craig to not feel totally cut off from New Orleans. At the same time, the nonstop tasks of parenting and housekeeping were a lot heavier to carry solo: getting Annie and Malcolm dressed in the morning, then taking Annie to St. Lawrence with Malcolm in the car, and juggling the shopping and picking up Annie and making sure Annie did her homework, and dealing with Malcolm’s stubbornness around certain toilet-training issues, and doing the cooking and getting the kids to bed…it was a grind. On the other hand, she had the occasional day like this, which felt like a blood transfusion to her. But even in the middle of such a perfect day she missed Craig, even though they were having a difficult time right now. She missed her partner, and her friend. And on days like this, when she felt so alive, she missed her lover. Sometimes that felt like such a long time ago. She picked up the underpants with the cutaways one more time, held them out by the strings. She’d wait; maybe she’d come back and buy them. Anyway, Craig wouldn’t be back for another three days.

  Planka’s was almost at the end of the block. Alice liked the place, an older store run by a family, with all kinds of mismatched stuff—mostly art supplies but also straw hats, tarot cards, greeting cards, coffee mugs, little statuettes and Halloween costumes and posters. The floors were charmingly unreconstructed—linoleum green in some places and black in others, and the art supply section was in back, up a couple of stairs, on bare, worn wood flooring. There she picked out two sets of pastels, a nice starter set for Annie and a slightly larger one for herself—Caran d’Ache—pricey, but this was worth the investment. Annie loved to draw—she was crazy about Ms. Ritter, the art teacher at St. Lawrence—and Alice looked forward to teaching her daughter a little bit about the more sophisticated techniques involved in pastels. And also just drawing herself—she imagined the feel of the pastels in her fingers, the simplicity of the experience, the direct pleasure of making a mark on a piece of paper, the immediate return.

  She also picked out two sketchbooks with heavy-duty paper and went to check out. Waiting there behind two other customers, she mused idly over the little impulse-buy items, the mints and gum, the talking key chains, the eyeglass-repair kits. She looked at her pastel sets, which made her happy. As she looked at them, she noticed her hands, the slight redness and dryness in the knuckles in the fluorescent overhead lights. She stared at the backs of her hands. Not an old person’s hands, not by a long way, but it seemed that she could read a map of the past eight years in them. Her nails, trimmed short and unpolished, like a nun’s haircut…

  “Will that be all for you?” came the polite, older man’s voice, Mr. Planka.

  “Yes, thanks,” Alice said.

  “These are wonderful,” he said, tapping the pastel sets lightly, ringing them up.

  Outside, she stood in front of the store for a few moments, looking around at the crisp shadows on the street, the bright blue sky over the two-story buildings, the people coming and going, and she willed herself to be happy. This is life, she thought. Come on.

  She decided to make one more stop, turned left and crossed North Oliphant onto the third block of OffWabash. Plume was an upscale stationery shop, one of the strip’s new jewel boxes, which sold handmade papers and expensive pens, fine notebooks, custom letterhead, engraved wedding invites. She had been thinking about getting a journal for herself, someplace to keep the thoughts and feelings and experiences she was having in Elkton. If she could start stockpiling these images and good feelings maybe they would begin to accrue interest, maybe before long they would start adding up to a life.

  Inside, she looked at one leather-bound journal, pretty, a rich, soft brown leather with an elastic band to keep it closed, and cream-colored paper inside. It would have been an extravagance, at forty-two dollars, and she looked around at some others to find one at a slightly more reasonable price. Here was one—red leather, or imitation leather, with a softer cover. Maybe? She opened it, white pages, and for some reason they had put a thick, annoying border around the lined part, and she put it back. Here was a black one, with a rose on it. A rose on the upper-right-hand corner of the front. Craig had bought her a journal very similar to it, not long after they had moved to New Orleans. He bought it at Scriptura, one of her favorite stores, on Magazine Street. He knew she would like it. She set the journal back down and walked out the door.

  Alice cut around the corner onto Oliphant, weeping, sat down at an empty bus stop bench, furious with herself. Why was she crying? Something inside her had betrayed her, some part of herself that she didn’t even know. Almost like wetting the bed—that sense of affront, of part of her acting on its own, without her permission…It was a strange thing to remember at that moment. Her father had made her feel like a leper about it, but her mother showed an odd sympathy; they had never had that great a relationship, but Alice remembered some feeling of tenderness around that one question. A bus rolled past
, down Oliphant.

  She hated this; there was no room for her to have her own grief about their life, or to miss New Orleans; Craig’s missing it took up all the air there was; it sucked the air out of her lungs. She wanted to be here, where she was. It was a chance at a fresh start, which she had wanted, and it was evaporating before she even had a chance to experience it. Annie had had a bedwetting problem, too. It was a couple years back, and Alice had a hard time with it; she got angry with Annie, kept telling her to pull it together. Why was she thinking about this now? What an idiot, she thought. Craig had been so gentle and understanding with Annie, too, during that time. Their daughter. Where are you, she thought, sitting there weeping…like an idiot, she thought…Craig, goddammit, where are you?

  All along the grassy neutral ground on Carrollton Avenue, on either side of the dormant streetcar tracks, the little signs bloomed like wildflowers. Little thin wire stems, blowing slightly in the breeze—Oak Street Grill Now Open. Jefferson Chiropractic Open. Crescent Ford Now Hiring. Drywall and Painting Specialists. Ochsner Welcome Home—We’re Open, Walk-Ins Accepted…

  Craig was driving up Carrollton toward Mid-City to visit Bobby and Jen, who were staying in Baton Rouge and driving into New Orleans every day to gut the first floor of their house. He wished Alice could see these little signs. He took a couple of snapshots with his digital camera. He would tell her about them that evening on their nightly call.

  What he would not tell her about was how hard he found it to be in New Orleans, even in their neighborhood, which had been spared the devastation of most of the rest of the city. The community had been so wounded; everyone had the worst stories, so many people were absent—temporarily or permanently. It was heavy on the heart, being there, and everyone showed it in unexpected ways. Craig, for example, could apparently not eat enough doughnuts. He would buy a box of Krispy Kremes and eat three right off the bat walking through the rooms of his house.