“They’ll be all right,” Velmyra said. “They look like the kind who don’t give up easily.” She let out a thoughtful sigh. “The neighborhood’ll come back, better than ever. You’ll see.”
He said nothing. They drove on to the other seven houses on the block to find, here and there, neighbors sitting on their porches, fanning themselves, their faces grim masks of puzzlement, despair, resignation. Occasionally there’d be a commiserating huddle of two or three in a yard before piles of debris, bodies slack in postures of fatigue, or sometimes defiantly erect, hands on their hips or flailing as they shared with their neighbors the day’s travails.
They drove on through block after block of emptiness, houses standing but water damaged and clearly vacant since the hurricane. Each yard, it seemed, contained towers of debris so large they often overshadowed the houses themselves. When someone was home, they delivered the boxes in person, accepting the “bless yous” and “thank yous” of the grateful church members. When they were not at home but known to be in town they left the boxes on porches with a note attached: “From your family at Blessed Redeemer—may God bless you and keep you well.”
Street after street of houses with their own story inside of lives shaken to the core. An unearthly silence presided where there had been the vital sounds of a neighborhood: kids on bicycles, trash trucks trudging through, and car stereos amped up a little too loud. Julian shook his head, an anger he hadn’t felt before rising in him like fever. This place was a ghost town now.
After the first house in the next block, Velmyra said, “I mean, I’m not saying it won’t take a lot of work to bring the place back, but it’ll happen.”
Julian turned to look out his window. “Yeah. Well. If you say so.”
Velmyra turned sharply to look at him.
“You don’t think the city can come back?”
He took in a deep breath. He didn’t really want to get into this, remembering that Velmyra had always been a little blinded by optimism. At least, he’d thought so. But today, seeing all the misery in the neighborhood, he felt like telling the truth, the way he saw it.
“Come back? Back to what? The way it was before?”
And once he started, he couldn’t pull back. There was the crime. The corruption. The schools. The way they treated the musicians and the lousy pay. And that was all before the storm. How much worse would it be now? And even if the city came back completely, which now looked doubtful, it would only be back to the same inadequate place. It would still be the wrong city for anybody with real ambition.
“I mean, look at Grady Casey. The cat is a freakin’ genius. What’s he doing? Playing at the Embassy Suites…”
“Wait a minute.” Ice stiffened Velmyra’s tone. “What if everybody felt that way—the way you do? What if everybody with talent, with potential, left? Who would teach the kids art and music, who’d give them the opportunities we had?
“Who’d preserve the culture? The history? This city is what we make it, and it can only be as good as the people who are willing to stay. And believe it or not, Julian, a lot of people were pretty damn happy here, and some were even successful.” She turned to him. “I stayed, OK?”
What had he just walked into? He could feel the heat from her eyes without looking. He held up a hand, partly in apology, partly to stop the torrent of anger coming toward him.
“I didn’t mean you…”
As he steered around the corner a little too fast, a stray cat ran from one of the vacant houses and dashed in front of the car; Julian slammed his brakes as the frightened cat scampered away and into another yard across the street. His heart raced. He pulled to the curb and turned off the engine.
He lowered his head, took a deep breath, then turned to her. “Look, there’s no reason for us to have an argument. I was just saying…”
She cut him off. “You want to know why we broke up? This. This is why.”
He fell silent. Closed his eyes, exhaled in a tired huff. “Vel. Come on. Let’s not do this…”
She inhaled a short breath. Her eyes quieted, her voice softened. “Remember how we talked about where we would live? You were having a fit to go to New York. I wanted to stay here. You kept saying, ‘I want more than I can find here.’ And I said, ‘Why not stay and help make this city a place where people like you would want to stay?’ And you said…”
“I know what I said.”
“You said…”
“…I wasn’t up to it.”
“Right. You weren’t up to it.”
A moment passed, as both stared through the windshield in front of them.
Looking down, Julian spoke, his voice smaller, his words pointed, emphatic. “I just wanted you to come to New York with me. I wanted us to be together. I thought we could have made a good life there. If you’d really loved me…”
Her hand shot up, a stop sign in his face. “Hold it right there. Why does it have to be about my not moving to New York? I asked you to stay—not forever, just a while longer while we sorted things out. If you loved me like you said you did…”
“I did love you.”
“But not enough to stay.” She sighed heavily.
Julian’s breathing was tight as he guided the car back to the church, and he ran his hand along the side of his neck where the muscles had bunched together in a spasm. This was not what he wanted. There were more boxes to deliver, but he was exhausted, and he couldn’t imagine that Velmyra would want to stay in this car any longer than he did. This little jaunt was over. How did this happen? He backtracked in his head, trying to remember how it had gotten out of hand.
Hard woman. That’s what he remembered now about her. Always expecting so damn much of him. Yes, he’d wanted to get away from New Orleans and off to a place where he’d have half a chance to accomplish what he was capable of. So what? He was… what was the word? Entitled. He was entitled to try. Even the guys in the band, they knew it too. They may have cocked their heads, made sarcastic noises when he left, but they’d have done the same thing if they had the guts, the opportunity, the…hell, the talent. Well, most of them would have, anyway.
He kept talking to himself, trying to make the case that he was right. But her words sliced his skin so hard they left scars. The possibility that she had a point—given what was happening in the city now—jabbed at the scars, drawing fresh, red blood.
He wished he could start the conversation again and take it someplace else. But as he pulled into the parking lot of the church, Velmyra unlocked her door. Before he’d even applied the brake, she was getting out of the car.
“You know what, I almost forgot. I was going to try to call that plumber again,” she said, her head up, looking away from him. “Tell Sylvia I’ll give her a call later.”
And without looking back, she walked toward her car.
Julian stared after her a moment, still breathing hard. He’d wanted to call her back, but didn’t have a clue what he would say. So he walked into the church.
Sylvia was arranging boxes on the table. “Oh, good, you’re back,” she said, glancing up at him. “I got some more supplies and I’ve got about twenty more boxes ready to go.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize how late it was getting. Maybe we’ll just do these tomorrow. Where’s Vel?”
He pulled one of the folding chairs out from the table and sat.
“She’s gone.”
She looked up. “Oh, really?”
“We, uh, we had a fight.”
Sylvia’s eyes paled. “Oh.” She looked down at the box in front of her and put the bag of dried fruit she was holding inside it, and closed the lid.
“You want to talk about it?”
He got up and walked toward the window facing the parking lot and looked out at the street. He answered her without a sound: he hunched his shoulders up, hands in both pockets.
“To be honest,” Sylvia said, “I was a little surprised that you two were spending time together again. But then, when something lik
e this happens—the storm and everything—people do things they wouldn’t normally do.” Julian sat back at the table again. “I told her I couldn’t remember why we broke up. Well”—he shook his head with a small, sardonic laugh—“she reminded me.”
Sylvia sat across from him at the table. The church still had no electricity, so the room grew dim as the sunlight from the windows began to wane.
“You know, when your dad proposed to me a few months ago I didn’t think anything of it. When I think about it now, I guess I kind of—how do you young folks say it?—blew it off. I thought we had so many years left together, and maybe we’d get married, maybe we wouldn’t. It didn’t seem so important. But now that—” Her voice shook—“now that Simon is…gone, I wish I’d done it. If for no other reason than that I could have been a part of his family—your family. I could have been a part of Simon’s—I don’t know. His history.”
She put an elbow up on the table and leaned her cheek against her fist. Her hair, normally meticulously coifed, was straw-dry and curl-less, it’s gray roots inching up beneath the Clairol red. “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say to you, baby. I’m…just thinking out loud. But I’ll tell you this. One of the hardest things to do is to live your life without regrets. But in the end, it’s a whole lot better if you try.”
“You know Velmyra, she’s strong willed. But that’s why we love her, right?” She smiled and patted his arm. “Give her a little time. Give her a little time, then talk to her, and tell her what’s in your heart.”
He stared at his hands a moment, then folded them.
“Yeah. I will. Thanks.”
She picked up her purse and swung it over her shoulder, then reached inside it and pulled out her scarf.
“Lord, I tell you.” She put the scarf on and tied it loosely under her chin, smiled. “Used to be a time when I’da never left the house with my hair looking like this,” she said. “Everything’s changed. Some days I’m doin’ good just to get out of the bed.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean.”
A car rolled by and she looked toward the street. “You know, Vel’s not saying much. But she’s taking all this pretty hard. Oh, I know, she’s trying her best to be positive, but you know how much she loves this place. We all do, of course, but Vel…” She stopped, shook her head. “Yesterday we were watching the news, and they were, you know how they do, showing all that footage of the days right after the flood. And Vel just started crying. Took her a long time to get herself together.”
Julian blinked, felt a tug in his stomach. He thought of himself collapsed on Genevieve’s bathroom floor, Velmyra kneeling beside him, bringing him back to himself. Listening, waiting while he cried. He thought of all the words he’d said to her and now he wanted them back. What had he been thinking? He wasn’t the only one who was dealing with grief.
He got up and hugged Sylvia, told her he would be back the following day. “If you talk to Vel,” he began, “would you tell her I’m…” He stopped. He just didn’t know the words.
“Never mind. I’ll tell her myself.”
He was walking back toward his car in the dimming daylight, when he spotted something large, a frame of some sort, leaning against the door of his car. When he got closer he realized what it was. A painting on a large canvas.
It was covered with a sheet of thin, translucent paper taped to the frame, he guessed, to protect it. When he lifted the cover, what he saw brought water to the corners of his eyes.
It was a painting of the cover of his album “Boplicitude,” his face large and luminous, looking out over the Left Bank of the River Seine in Paris, his trumpet in his hand. Thick, impasto brushstrokes applied in a post-impressionist style covered the canvas, and though a patchwork of odd colors detailed his skin—pinks, purples, blues—when viewed as a whole, it all made perfect artistic sense.
In the lower right hand corner, there was Velmyra’s familiar signature—an elaborate ‘V’ and ‘H’ with the other letters scribbled in a completely illegible fashion. The likeness was amazing. His eyes opened wide; he’d forgotten what an extraordinarily talented artist she was. But it wasn’t the portrait he remembered on the album cover. It had all the details correct—the angle of his head, the proportions of his features, the color of his skin—but somehow she had captured something that wasn’t in the photograph.
The album cover photo had shown a young Julian Fortier—cocksure, confident, self-absorbed—a man with the world at his feet. This portrait revealed something more. She’d painted him older, his skin etched with the lessons of life, his eyes lit with equal measures of wisdom and vulnerability. And in his expression she’d captured something even more interesting: a capacity for understanding. A quiet, somber grace.
He ran a hand along the back of his head and exhaled a slow stream of air. What Velmyra had painted was not the man he was then, nor was it the man he was now, he believed. This was a painting of the man she hoped he would become.
He covered the painting with the tissue paper. The air was cooler now, and a southerly breeze stirred the trees. He took a deep breath. Then he opened the trunk of his car and carefully put the portrait inside.
He didn’t consciously decide not to go back to the Best Western, but when he thought of spending the rest of the evening in his box of a motel room alone with a TV, a refrigerator stocked with beer, and his thoughts, it depressed him. So he started the car and before he knew it, he was driving the streets of New Orleans.
He ended up on Lavalle Street in front of his father’s house, and in the oncoming twilight the house looked almost normal. The street, though, was deathly quiet. He turned off the ignition, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Even though Julian probably would not have talked to Simon about his fight with Velmyra—he had rarely discussed the details of his love life with his father—he would have sought him out for company. His father always knew when something was troubling him, and Julian had always depended on the comfort of their unspoken bond. Searching his son’s brooding eyes, Simon would say, “You ate anything yet?” And Julian would sit in the kitchen while a cast iron skillet clanked against the stove and Simon talked about everything and nothing—the Saints, the Hornets, local politics, who he beat at dominoes, who in the neighborhood had gotten married, or divorced, or had a grandbaby. As the shrimp etouffee or the smothered Creole catfish bubbled, Julian would nod, then eat quietly until he felt better. And he always did.
But there was no comfort tonight. He watched the darkness surround the kitchen window where his father would look out onto the street while he talked, and tried to imagine sitting with him as the amber glow of lamplights swelled in the purple dusk. A half hour passed. And finally, Julian started the car.
The Claiborne Avenue Bridge was closed since the flood, and it was just as well. Julian had never trusted that strange, rickety bridge anyway, and there were other ways to get to the Lower Ninth Ward. Seeing the place where so much devastation happened was something Julian might have put off forever—the images on television were horrible enough to see, and he didn’t think he needed to witness the horror in person. But tonight, he felt compelled. This was his city, and now he was ready to claim it. The Lower Nine was where his friend Dereek had lived. If he could straddle roof shingles and swim through the muck-and-sludge river that filled his neighborhood and survive it, the least Julian could do was witness where he’d done it.
He’d known this street so well; Dereek’s mother was a fine cook, and many a night he’d sat around the family’s kitchen table while she dished up her extra hot chili. But when Julian turned down the familiar block, his heart skittered, his face went cold; he couldn’t have been more shaken if he’d witnessed a murder.
The once flat, green lawns had bulged into mountains of mud. The majestic oak trees looked as if a giant fist had reached around them and ripped them up through the earth by their trunks, leaving their shredded roots to dangle like the wiry, stray hairs of an unkempt beard. That same fist had cru
mbled houses, swiped them off their slabs, or pounded them to rubble as if they’d been made of matchsticks. In school, he’d seen pictures of Dresden after the bomb blasts of World War II; it was the only thing he’d ever seen that was remotely similar. It couldn’t have left any more destruction than this.
He thought he knew exactly where Dereek’s house had been, but drove in circles, veering around piles of wood siding, pieces of rooftops flung into the street, cars upended and sitting on what had been porches, or on other cars. His headlights shined on piles of rubble, but only a few things looked identifiable. A dinner plate, a basketball, a teapot, a lawnmower, a toilet bowl, a boot, a lamp. Random items flung together in some sort of cruel, metaphysical collage. All the jetsam of peoples’ lives, reduced to piles of nothing.
How many made it out? How many didn’t? Dereek hadn’t said and probably didn’t know. Please. Let them all be safe. But he knew if Dereek had stayed through it, then others had too. Not everybody owned a car, or had enough cash for a motel room miles away. Some had surely stayed, some that weren’t as young and strong and capable of survival as Dereek.
He never found Dereek’s house. He drove back to Baton Rouge in a fog, his eyes sometimes welling up and burning with the memory of what he’d just seen. By the time he got back to his hotel room in Baton Rouge, he was still breathing hard. He took the portrait Velmyra had painted out of the car, leaned it up against the portable refrigerator, and fell onto the bed. It was late, but a sick feeling churned his gut and it was impossible to sleep. He thought of his father’s house, his father’s neighbors. Even with water marks five feet high, at least it still looked a little like a neighborhood.
He left the room and paced around the Best Western parking lot to calm down, and when he felt reasonably peaceful, walked over to Waffle City and ate a meatloaf dinner he barely tasted. That night, after two beers, he slept in fits and starts, waking now and then with the images still in his head. Now he knew what helplessness felt like. As much as he wanted to do something, there was nothing he could do.
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