I got myself more coffee. I asked her if she wanted some, but she shook her head.
“You have blood on your shoe,” she said.
“I was playing tennis,” I said.
There was a hesitation. An eyebrow drifted upward. But she said nothing.
“Are you really here to buy a house?”
“No. Not really.”
Once again she was silent.
After the string quartet, there was muted, cultivated conversation. The topic was Rush Limbaugh. Publicity-seeking blowhard or crafty capitalist iconoclast? The on-air jury was clearly still out.
“How do you feel about Mr. Limbaugh?” I asked Sandy.
“I wouldn’t let him suck the fart out of my ass,” she replied. “You?”
“He’d have to ask me very nicely,” I said.
She snorted a little into her coffee cup at that.
At ten-thirty Sandy glanced at her watch.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” she said sweetly.
She leaned across the table, kissed me hard on the forehead, grabbed a bag from the chair in the hall, and ran for the door. The bag advertised New Balance running shoes.
As she left, she shouted, “Leave the dishes in the sink. Pull the door closed when you leave. Dinner’s either some horrible dried salad shit in the back of the refrigerator, or we can order a pizza. If you decide on the pizza call me and I’ll pick it up on the way home. My number’s on the notepad on the fridge. I can’t stand olives. Anything else is fine. I’ll see you around six-thirty. I can’t stand little fish either.”
I stood at the kitchen window and watched her as she left, as she pulled a black men’s Trek 800 bike from the side of the house and jumped on, pedaling hard, cutting across the long grass of the yard, adjusting her bag on her back, then freewheeling down the hill, toward the lake, bouncing along on her own private dirt road. Once she had her bag where she wanted it she took her hands away from the handlebar and put them behind her head.
She looked just like a kid then, a carefree kid, and I imagined I could hear her laughter.
I did wonder how she could ride the bike and carry a pizza at the same time.
As I was finishing the breakfast dishes, the telephone rang. I let it ring. On the fourth ring, Sandy’s mechanical voice cut in. She was to the point, and, more remarkably, she was expletive-free. When she finished, Tom Younger began to talk, and I picked up the phone.
“Say, what the hell did you say to Will Sanders?”
“He wasn’t terribly friendly.”
Younger laughed. “Well. He just called me and told me he wouldn’t sell you pigshit on a stick.”
I said nothing.
“But anyway, don’t sweat it none. Truth to tell, his place was nothing fancy. Not the pick of the crop by any means. The real reason I called was to tell you to go over to Connie Alexander’s house today and have yourself a look-see. I just reached her at home, and she’s sitting doing nothing and would be more than happy to show you around. Connie’s an honest-to-god lovely woman. Getting on some now of course. Must have been a looker at one time. Not that I’d have been looking. One-woman man. That’s me. For sure. But Connie’s still pretty spry and nobody’s fool.”
“Why is she selling?”
“Mmmm. Goddamn. I don’t know. Fancy that. I should know that, shouldn’t I? Well, I don’t. I’ve no goddamn idea. You could ask her when you’re there. I did tell her your name so she’ll be expecting you sometime this morning.”
“Thanks a lot, Tom.”
“No problem, Tom. And try not to piss off any more prospective sellers.” He laughed heartily at his own joke. “Say. I’ve just had a thought. Could you use me there? Lunch after? My treat, of course?”
“No,” I probably answered too hastily. “That’s all right, Tom. This is just a preliminary look for me.”
If he was hurt, it didn’t show. “Okay. Well. That’s fine then. Good. No problem. Mar says Connie has some very fine furniture there. I wouldn’t know. You might want to ask her if any of it comes with the place. Lay on the Brit charm thick. You never know. Can’t hurt to ask her.” I heard a whirring sound. “Look’s like there’s something coming in over the fax. I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you soon, Tom. Good luck with Connie. Hope you like her place. Call me if you do. I’ve gotta go. Bye now.”
And with that Tom Younger hung up.
On the fridge door, I found Sandy’s telephone number at the health club. Underneath it was an expired coupon for a pizza place in town. Their telephone number was listed on the coupon. When I called they told me that Sandy was a regular customer who always ordered the same ingredients. I told them to make it a large one this time. I asked if they delivered. They were happy to inform me that they did, although Ms. Weller normally chose to pick it up herself. I gave them my name and my credit card particulars and requested delivery. This proved to be no problem and I was assured a pizza, hot and delicious, at the front door at seven in the evening.
I had no reason to doubt them, and I hung up smiling stupidly at the receiver.
Eventually, I reasoned, I would have to pay, but, for now, life with Ms. Weller was getting to be an awful lot of fun. I wasn’t a swinger, and two greasy meals and a very fast, and quite clearly all but emotionless sexual encounter were a rare bucolic interlude. But by my hidebound standards, I was behaving like a wild man, even without taking into account my kicking an inexplicably angry man in the face, and my bizarre transformation into a private detective on a case.
I was still smiling. I thought of my wife. It didn’t work. The smile remained in place.
The peach-colored paint around the windows of Connie Alexander’s house was peeling. It was a fact that a real prospective buyer would, I felt, have carefully noted. The grass was long, yet, ironically, a magnolia bush was trimmed carefully. Some thought had gone into fashioning a Southern-style garden here in the northern wilds. Everything seemed to hang green and low and lush.
I rang the doorbell and Connie Alexander answered the door.
I instantly recalled the late actress Vivien Leigh. Connie was older than I ever recall seeing Ms. Leigh, but I both saw and somehow felt the resemblance. Perhaps it was the voice, when she spoke, that served as the trigger. Ms. Leigh was an Englishwoman, and worked hard on her antebellum cadences for A Streetcar Named Desire and Gone With the Wind, but Connie Alexander was clearly southern born. There was an exotic playful darkness to her voice.
She wore a short dark burgundy velvet jacket over a white silk blouse. There were beads around her neck and large exotic rings on five of her ten tiny-boned fingers. Her face was white from the kind of makeup only older women seem to use, her eyes were painted dark, yet clearly huge, even without the cosmetic augmentation. She wore wine-colored baggy, tailored slacks down to almost spike-heeled shoes made of shiny black patent leather. Without the heels she was perhaps five feet tall.
She looked dressed up for something more than house showing, but I somehow understood that this was simply everyday wear for Ms. Alexander, who was clearly determined to remain stylish and youthful indefinitely.
Her hair was long and dark, almost black, parted in the center and falling to her shoulders in a ratty fashion that would look smolderingly dangerous on a girl of twenty. It was hair a young girl would wear to play with, to twist around a finger, to puff up before a date, to tease a little, as she looked into a welcoming mirror with her supple cheeks sucked all the way in, a cosmetic weapon in her hand, just in case.
And perhaps Connie Alexander played with hers in just that way, letting the reality of the years drift away as she did.
We took our tea in her sitting room. She said little until I was seated and comfortable, serving me in a silence that was soothing. The cups were English china, flat and tiny and decorated with elfish children skipping to and fro. As Tom Younger had noted, most of the furniture was an
tique, dark wood, the fabric a uniform burgundy that was close to black and which I was sure was deliberately chosen to match her clothes.
Paintings covered the walls, primitive portraits in the main, in cracked oils, strong, vivid, frightening colors, pale bodies in lace and velvet with features often subtly out of proportion. Many depicted street scenes of bucolic revelry, set in what I took to be historic New Orleans.
I stared at one, a scene in a brocaded bordello, where four effete young men sat watching a plump rouged girl dance in nothing but her black stockings.
As she watched me, a smile stole across her painted lips. When she spoke, her voice was soft yet authoritative, and I suspected that she used the trick of speaking quietly to draw her listener closer.
“I have chosen to collect primitive art from the city I was born and raised in. That particular oil was, I believe, a rendition of a famous New Orleans red light district that existed in the 1870s. The area sadly no longer exists. A terrible shame, I feel. Only a few photographs still exist. And they show such fine European-style architecture. It was surely a lawless time, yet women were sometimes the bosses as well as the slaves. Now we seem to exist purely as the latter. The hypocritical city fathers saw fit to sweep the area clean, and replace it with what eventually would become a public housing project. A misguided notion at best.”
“An attempt at moral cleansing?”
She half smiled. “Hardly. But what a delightful notion. It would, I think, be an unlikely posture for them to adopt. The city is mostly famous for its corrupt politicians, its nasty outdoor drinking habits, big tasseled breasts bouncing on urine-soaked Bourbon Street, and weighty, and, I must confess, rather lovely gothic novels full of sexually adventurous vampires. My town has never shown much inclination toward moral reformation.”
“And music.”
“Of course. And the music. Have you ever visited the Crescent City?”
I shook my head regretfully.
“They will eventually make of it a faceless conference oasis, rife with hotels and malls. And that I fear will be the death of me. Naturally I hope to be long gone, but my experience is that progress is nothing if not both cruel and wondrously swift, thus I fully anticipate being called upon to witness the cultural abomination.”
“Do you return there often?”
“I do. The few ragged remains of my once illustrious family still reside there in antiquated squalor. The rest of us are buried above ground, in one of the city’s smaller but more prominent cemeteries. My family are, for better or worse, entombed in a well-traveled locale, frequented daylong by hordes of underdressed shivering tourists, who take pleasure in leaning like B-movie delinquents against my ancestors’ last resting place, smoking their low-tar cigarettes and drinking their decaf lattes.”
I smiled then, thinking that, if I ever got to her cherished city, I would surely go to the very same cemetery and visit, forgoing the cigarettes, naturally.
She must have guessed my thought. “I shouldn’t complain I suppose. Perhaps the dead value the company of the living. Much better that than buying a loud T-shirt at a mall, or putting a dollar bill inside some poor girl’s woefully meager undergarments. But enough of my decrepit southern sentimentality. Let me show you the site of my lonely exile.”
And with that the tour began.
The house was quite beautiful. No. That isn’t accurate. The outer shell was a ranch house on a lake, nice, if blandly unremarkable.
The inside of the house was what was special, a shrine to a bygone age and to a level of social refinement also vanished. In an austere room, chairs were padded and stiff-backed to receive callers who were expected not to slouch, nor to watch television, nor to drink their beer from cold cans. It was a room for polite conversation. And especially for books.
The spaces on the walls without art were given over instead to bookshelves. I noted from the catholic titles that Connie read widely without prejudice; and had even made a few grudging concessions to the godless present. She had mentioned vampires, and I saw that she owned several dauntingly thick works by Anne Rice, who I knew to be a New Orleans native.
“The woman’s a helpless romantic,” Connie informed me, as she walked through what I had at first assumed was her library. It wasn’t. No room could lay singular claim to that honor, as they all boasted bursting bookshelves, and all had chairs placed just so, for the optimum light to read by.
“Have you read her?”
I confessed that I hadn’t.
“Do you ever find yourself hungering for love?”
I supposed that I did. Although I couldn’t really imagine how to answer her question, I tried to smile bashfully.
“I see by your painful reticence that you are uncomfortable with the question,” she said. “These books display a hunger for love and companionship, as much as they take delight in the opening of rich young veins for the sensual letting of blood.”
“I know little about love or vampires,” I told her truthfully.
“You are far from alone in that regard.”
“Are you something of a fortune teller?”
“Do I look that cheap and outlandish?“ She retorted.
At the end of the tour we came to a small room in the back of the house. This was the room where Connie worked. The door was closed, and as she opened it, she peered mistrustfully in, as if expecting an ambush.
A large desk stood covered with watercolors and drawing pencils, paper, old wrinkled newspaper, paintbrushes soaking in jars of cloudy water, photographs of landscapes pinned to a notice board. A collection of paint-splattered smocks hung on a hook behind the door.
Until we arrived at that room I had forgotten all about Connie Alexander’s art career.
“I’ve seen many of your paintings.” I told her.
She looked at me strangely, and I bit back the compliment I had planned.
“You are, I judge, a wealthy man by most standards.” She spoke slowly.
I sensed that it was a question and I told her that I supposed I was.
“And are you proud of your occupation?”
I tried to laugh. “I wouldn’t go that far. I’m not ashamed of it.”
She nodded. “An excellent answer. I have to confess that, in my cups, I am in fact a trifle embarrassed by my occupation, which is that of landscape painter, a dabbler in singularly insipid watercolors.”
“Your work sells very well.”
“Yes it does.” She shook her head in studied amazement. “It’s a wonder, to be sure. But tell me, if you can, is that a worthy measure of success do you think? The selling of it?”
“No. I suppose not. It’s an achievement though.”
She all but sneered, “A singularly shallow one, I’ve always felt. Many years ago I discovered my love of art. And simultaneously I discovered my utter mediocrity as a practitioner of that same art. I found myself to be cast, to my abject horror, as the Salieri, rather than the Mozart, if you take my meaning.”
I nodded. I had seen the movie.
“So I reviewed my options. There was the impotent cut and thrust that is the world of art criticism. There was the teaching of art. A job requiring patience, of which I have precious little. I chanced to observe the hapless simpletons sitting around the city square, painting the likenesses of delighted tourists from Instamatic snapshots and mailing the finished abominations back to trailer parks somewhere in the wilds of Iowa. That this sorry vision presented itself as a bona fide option was a lamentably sad truth.”
“What did you do?”
“I postponed my fate, left my beloved city and traveled up north in search of my true muse. No, I’m teasing you. Please forgive me. I’m sadly no longer girlish enough for that particular affectation. But to answer your question, I did choose to leave New Orleans twenty years ago.”
“You could have painted your watercolors th
ere.”
“Yes. I surely could have. You are quite right. But I had another reason to leave. You see I also left to be closer to my sons.”
“They live near here?”
“You are a relentless little interrogator, aren’t you?” She allowed herself a slight smile. “Yes. My two boys attended college here. On scholarships. They are twin boys. Or rather they were twin boys. Now they are twin men, with twin wives, and four delectable little children between them.”
“Did you say twin wives?”
She laughed. “Are you in the habit of watching the vivacious Sally Jesse Raphael?”
“No. I do know who she is, though.”
“Then you must have missed her finest episode, where she featured my boys and their wives. ‘Twins Marrying Twins,’ I believe the particular episode was entitled. I don’t possess a television set. But a kind friend allowed me to watch. It was such marvelous fun.”
“Did they have twin children of their own?” I couldn’t help asking.
She smiled. “That would have been nice wouldn’t it? But sadly, no. My grandchildren are singular creations. I naturally have a selection of adorable pictures, just like any doting grandmother. The boys settled in these parts after college, found themselves two dull yet dependable careers, and settled down for the long haul that is the upper middle class existence. I have chosen to stay here too.”
“You must miss New Orleans.”
She nodded. “I hope I always will. But to return there and live would probably be to shatter too many fond illusions after all this time. But you have by now doubtless found me to be a chronic complainer. And I don’t wish to be viewed as such. After moving here I did find to my amazement that my pale, listless watercolors were considered to be rather fetching additions to the walls of lofts and young dentists’ offices. And I am able in my lighter moments to give hesitant thanks for my gift of creation, even if it is a decidedly lesser gift. But no. I must not backslide in my gratitude to the powers that be, for I am the possessor of a genuine gift. From water and paper and soft paint shades I fashion a pretty if insubstantial pastel muzak for the less-than-discerning eye.”
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