City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  Craig shook his head, looking down at his bagel, spreading the cream cheese as if he were putting the final touches on a painting. “No,” he said. “No. We like our home.”

  “If you’re thinking of buying more property,” the man went on, helpfully, “now’s the time to buy houses in flood areas. Mid-City especially. Broadmoor maybe not so much.”

  “I don’t think we’re in the market for more property, either. We kind of have our hands full as it is.” Craig said. He didn’t want to telegraph any sense that he was unhappy. He didn’t want to give the guy an opening. Trying to sound upbeat, he said, “You said a lot of people are selling up around Boucher?”

  “We’ve moved six houses within a twelve-block radius in the past week.”

  “Really,” Craig said, noncommittally, still looking down at his bagel.

  “Yep. It’s a land grab. Houses that didn’t flood are in big demand. It’s going to get bigger. As soon as all the Lakeview insurance money starts rolling in they’ll all be looking for houses that didn’t flood.”

  Craig silently, tortuously, debated whether to mention that they were…considering selling. Just out of curiosity. It was information, nothing more than that. He had yet to have a conversation with one realtor. This could be a bone to throw Alice; he could use it to stall for a little more time, make it seem as if they were moving forward…

  With half a smile, Chuck Bridges said, “You sure you’re not thinking about it? I could have a buyer for you within a week. Guaranteed.”

  “Well,” Craig said, playing for time, “everybody I know has ‘thought’ about it. Given everything that has happened you’d be crazy not to at least think about it. But this is our home, you know?”

  “Let me tell you something,” Bridges said. “Your house is one of the most desirable houses I have looked at. A block from Boucher, all that space, the nice yard, convertible garage…You could do well.”

  “What is ‘well’?” Craig heard himself saying.

  “Shoot for 450K,” Chuck Bridges said, “and maybe she’ll weigh in around four twenty-five.”

  Craig was genuinely shocked by the figure. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “When did you buy the house?”

  “Eight years ago.”

  “So you paid maybe one seventy?”

  “One fifty-five,” Craig said, disgusted with himself for playing along.

  “Sweet. After you pay out the closing costs and all, you walk with close to a quarter mil in profit. Not bad. Put the money right into the kids’ college fund.”

  Craig had not thought about the profit as money in the bank for Annie and Malcolm. Even if the house sold for $400,000 it was an inconceivable profit, to Craig. Even $300,000. He had known in the back of his mind that they could make a profit if they sold, but he had never wanted to think about it too directly. The provisional number he had in mind was somewhere around $80,000 in profit, which he had thought made him something of a real estate genius. But these figures were like science fiction. These weren’t just numbers to make life easier or more comfortable. These kinds of numbers represented a paradigm shift.

  “A lot of people are doing it,” Bridges went on. “It’s just timing. There’s an inflated demand right now. In another year, fourteen months, it’ll all start cooling off once the market stabilizes.”

  Never had Craig thought of being able to make a one-shot coup of this sort. Years ago, when he had assumed the harness of the editing job at Gumbo, it was with the recognition that the kids had changed everything in the equation. But the kind of money Bridges was talking about meant being able to knock their potential mortgage way down if they bought a house in Chicago. Alice wouldn’t necessarily have to find a job right away; she could stay home and take care of Annie and Malcolm. The money from the EYE would be enough to take care of them. Assuming that Bridges was telling the truth and knew what he was talking about.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Bridges said. “The market around by you was hot before the storm. But right now it is on fire. The time isn’t going to be right for everybody to sell; I understand that. If you have your kids in school, and a solid job, or you need to be here for family, whatever…Hey, that’s the way it is. But anybody who’s even thinking of moving…Hey, do it now. There’ll never be a better time. And, you know, once the next storm hits, if the city floods again, property values will tank all over the city. Here,” Bridges said, holding a card out between his thumb and index finger. “You don’t want to be rushed into anything, and I respect that. Take my card and call me when you decide. I’ll deliver for you better than anybody else can. I live this stuff and I know it like the back of my hand.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Craig said, looking at the type on the card for lack of anything more sensible to do while he grappled for a little equilibrium.

  “Actually, that’s the old card; let me write my cell number on that for you.”

  The man took it back, wrote something quickly with what Craig recognized as a Mont Blanc pen—an odd dash of flair that he wouldn’t necessarily have expected from Chuck Bridges. “There you go,” Bridges said, handing the card back to Craig. “Day or night.”

  “Thanks,” Craig said, placing the card in the breast pocket of his shirt. “I’ll call you if we decide to…sell. Some day.”

  “That’ll work,” Chuck Bridges said, standing up. “Don’t wait too long.”

  23

  When Craig was back in Chicago, the old routine reasserted itself—Alice reading a book on the couch after the kids were in bed, and Craig watching movies or TV, or working on one of his columns. The apartment Alice had found was undeniably a good place for them to have landed, and both Craig and Alice knew how fortunate they were. Yet for Craig the very comfort of the place—the tasteful furnishings, the maple veneer table where they ate, the kitchen utensils, the linens, the couch—was jarring, incongruous. And yet, secretly, he was glad for it. It was a secret even to himself.

  In the evenings, husband and wife watched each other covertly. Craig hadn’t told Alice about the conversation with Chuck Bridges, nor about the part of himself that wanted to run from New Orleans. And Alice didn’t ask Craig about Maple Street or the places she missed in New Orleans, or the depression she was experiencing, and she didn’t tell him about the cute underwear at Alizé, nor about seeing the journal. They didn’t tiptoe around each other, exactly. But each carried secrets that they were afraid the other might sniff out. So they talked to Annie a lot—about school, about her teachers, about her homework. Craig found ways of inserting New Orleans into the conversation. Despite himself, he didn’t want Annie to get too attached to St. Lawrence Montessori and lose her hold on the life they had been building those past years. At her age, roots were shallow. While cleaning up the kitchen, making coffee, Craig would slip a Professor Longhair CD into the boom box on the drain board, or the Wild Tchoupitoulas.

  Annie seemed the most self-contained, the least fazed, of them all, from outside at least. Malcolm had decided that, of all things, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the most interesting thing on the planet—where he had found out about them, neither Craig nor Alice knew—and he watched the old videos they found for him over and over. Alice and Craig both worried about him watching so much television, but it was a provisional solution to the question of where to direct his attention. Annie, on the other hand, read every book they could take out from the children’s room at the Elkton Public Library. She filled sketchbooks and books of newsprint paper with drawings. She dutifully let her mother show her how to use pastels, then she used them to copy a picture of an ostrich from a book which shocked both her parents with its assurance and quality.

  If Annie was worried or upset, she didn’t show it. Without realizing it, she was practicing a skill that both her parents had acquired as children, a way of maintaining a substitute life while hanging over the abyss of her parents’ unhappiness, as if hanging between two railroad cars running along not-quite-parallel trac
ks. Obviously an impossible situation, so she summoned up a world that she could have some control over, at the tip of a pencil, or Magic Marker or crayon or pastel. When she got tired of that, she escaped into a book.

  Secretly, she had a fantasy about having a cat. She wanted a cat to hug because she got cold sometimes. She could play with a kitty and it would be her friend. More than anything, really, Annie wanted a cat. But she never mentioned it to either of her parents.

  On a brilliant, cloudless fall day in the third week of October, Craig headed down to the Loop for lunch with Peter Morehead. The CHI EYE offices were in a building a block and a half from the Art Institute, amid all the good urban bustle of downtown Chicago. The fall tang in the air, the sense of people heading someplace, the old steel and stone Chicago of Theodore Dreiser and Bix Beiderbecke. Not manic and hell-bent like New York, but solid in some hard-to-define Midwestern way. The marble-and-terrazzo lobby spoke of the mid-1920s, with brass fittings on the elevator call plates and the edges of the building directory kept shining, on this afternoon at least, by a white man in his forties wearing a blue workman’s shirt and wielding a rag with detached, professional concentration. Craig wasn’t impervious to the urban caffeine, the fizz, and despite himself, and periodic intrusions of vertigo when he thought of his life in suspended animation in New Orleans, he enjoyed being dressed in jacket and tie, on an errand in a downtown filled with activity.

  The CHI EYE offices, on the eighth floor, turned out to be a Bizarro-world version of the Gumbo offices, which had been very funky and unbuttoned. Alternative newspaper offices almost always are, but here, young interns passed down a warmly lit hallway lined with framed CHI EYE covers. A woman whom Craig checked himself from staring at too intensely, shockingly beautiful with red hair and stylish glasses, wearing black slacks and a red silk blouse, gave him a smart, brief smile as she passed him. A young man sat at the reception desk, wearing a black open-necked shirt and moussed hair, reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Craig gave his name and said he was there to see Peter Morehead.

  The receptionist’s eyes focused and he said, “I’ve enjoyed your New Orleans articles, Mr. Donaldson.”

  Slightly startled, Craig fumbled out a few words of gratitude, then he stood looking around as the young man hit Peter Morehead’s number on the intercom. At Gumbo, he was lucky if Alison at the front desk could take down a phone number accurately on a message slip. Everyone he saw, walking past, or down the hall next to the desk, talking in office doors, seemed bright, plugged in. Craig sat down on a leather couch in the reception area; on the end table were copies of the EYE with his name on one of the cover lines.

  He had trouble admitting to himself just how much he dreaded the idea of going back to work for Borofsky at Gumbo. That had been another conversation he’d declined to share with Alice. On his last visit he had met with Borofsky to discuss Craig moving back to steer the “book,” as Borofsky called it, back to weekly status. Borofsky held forth about revised demographics and New Orleans’ “new profile,” and his vision for the paper’s future, which was characteristically both grandiose and venal. Craig mentioned a letter he’d received, part of a theme that was coming out of the closet more and more, asking whether the city wasn’t better off without its poorer black citizens, and Borofsky had tacitly defended the letter-writer’s point of view.

  “Craig,” Borofsky had said, with his condescending smile, “Nobody loves the Mardi Gras Indians more than I do. But you and I are the Outsiders’ Club, here. Because of that we can see things with a healthy degree of perspective. I, like you, see the city as a dynamic set of tensions among its different neighborhoods, and I, too, read its culture as a dynamic mixture of African and European streams. I realize full well that the culture that we love and share in our city comes out of, and serves, a community. What I am saying is that communities are living organisms, and living organisms do not remain static. I completely agree with you about the apparent agenda behind this note and others like it and, like you, I find it reprehensible. And at the same time the fact does remain that some of these neighborhoods do not express, have never expressed, something essential about the city.”

  “Like which neighborhoods?”

  “Well, my young friend, just to show you that this is not a racially based argument, let’s take Lakeview. Lakeview could be anywhere. From a preservationist viewpoint there is absolutely no reason why Lakeview should be rebuilt or preserved. The houses are 1950s at the earliest, characterless—and populated, I might add, by white-flight types who were attempting to escape the inner city, or at least alter the fuel-to-air mix of the cultural realities we prize so dearly.”

  “But they are still New Orleanians. They are still part of the mix. And they stayed in the city at least. They didn’t move to the suburbs. That’s got to count for something.”

  “I’ll let that pass for a moment. Let’s take New Orleans East. Same thing, different color. Middle-class, black, flavorless, could be in Atlanta or Los Angeles…Why rebuild it?”

  “Because people made lives there. They raised families there. They worked hard to build those houses and to afford them…”

  “Craig, please. Sentiment aside, the reality is that the city has a reduced footprint, and greatly reduced resources. We need to think about how to deploy what we have most effectively. I and you and everybody else would love to just wave a wand and have everything back the way it was, but that is simply not going to happen. So we have to make hard decisions about what we spend money and effort on, and what we don’t.”

  “I disagree that everybody would like it back the way it was. What about the guy who wrote that letter, and the others like him?”

  “Okay, I relent on that point. I overspoke. Let’s say everyone of good will.”

  “And anyway,” Craig went on, “it’s not about having it back exactly as it was. Maybe there’s a chance to have people come back and this time make sure they have decent schools. With books, and working bathrooms. You know, you don’t have to be blind to the poverty and crime to recognize that the Ninth Ward was a living community. You don’t have to bulldoze it to make it function. That was like the whole Vietnam thing, right? Torch the village to save it?”

  “Slow down, Craig,” Borofsky said, his smile fading just a bit. “The Ninth Ward is not the alpha and omega of black New Orleans. The most motivated, most talented citizens, black and white, whatever neighborhood they lived in before the storm, will come back. And they will be the ones most likely to make a contribution to the city’s growth and rebuilding and eventual well-being. And the ones who want to sit on their ample posteriors and cash a monthly check to buy potato chips and watch their High-Definition TVs that they bought with their FEMA money will be just as happy in Atlanta or Houston, I daresay.”

  Craig was stunned; he felt his face redden. Borofsky’s knowing smile, the cultured façade that hid the old nasty reflexes, the easy cleaving—keep the good ones, get rid of the bad ones; the strong and good would come back, the others would disappear and they weren’t our problem…As if it could ever be that simple. What about the hardworking people who were just hanging on, who had worked their entire lives, doing the best they could, stuck two thousand miles from home? If they couldn’t muster the resources to move back, in this climate of no insurance, no electricity, no jobs, no schools, no services, then the hell with them? Easier just to airbrush them and all their troublesome complexity out of the picture, one less set of problems to deal with. How were they supposed to make a life? Or were they? If you lacked the energy to overcome problems that would have crippled the strongest and most privileged among us, then it was just tough luck…

  Craig sat in the chair, overwhelmed and depressed at the prospect of continuing to work for this windbag. The sheer weight of that point of view, of knowing how ingrained it was, how widespread, felt like overpowering fatigue.

  “Craig, are you much of a poetry devotee?”

  “Why?” Devotee? Craig thought.

&nbs
p; “There’s a marvelous poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats”—as opposed to the French poet William Butler Yeats, you jackass—“called ‘Lapis Lazuli.’ It’s about how people—Yeats calls them ‘hysterical women’—think their society has to last forever or the world will end. And he delineates all these different civilizations that ‘go under the sword’ and how the world lasted through art; the people themselves didn’t matter all that much in the final analysis. Telemachus made sculptures and they were all destroyed…‘Things fall apart and men build them again; in the building is happiness.’ I remember my Yeats fairly well,” Borofsky said, with a self-satisfied smile. Craig was almost sure Borofsky had misquoted the poem, which Craig remembered dimly from a twentieth-century-poetry class in Michigan…And Telemachus wasn’t a sculptor…

  “The art that you and I both love is the only thing that matters in the long run. The world will not long remember or care whether Fred Johnson or the waiter at the Camellia Grill ever lived—much as we might love them now. They don’t matter. What did Faulkner say? The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth a thousand old ladies?”

  You probably have that quote wrong, too, Craig thought. Borofsky was looking across the desk at Craig, with his ironic smile, inviting Craig into complicity. What was he supposed to say to this? Should he call Borofsky a pretentious fool? A moral degenerate in the guise of an aesthete? He stood up as Borofsky said, “Craig…” in the voice that Craig thought of as his Great Conciliator voice, another intolerable mask.

  “I need to step out of this conversation for right now,” Craig said, and he started for the door.

  “Peter will be right out, Mr. Donaldson,” the receptionist said. “Are you living in Chicago now full-time?”

  “Yes,” Craig said. “I mean, no, we are based here for now, but we don’t really know what the future has in store. We still have a house in New Orleans, and, I don’t know…It’s like…”