by James Sallis
Cherie had started working full time as a nurse’s aide just before Vicky left, and took over the apartment lease. Then she worked her way through nursing school. I don’t hear from her too often, but she’s doing fine-nice home outside Lake Charles, a hardworking guy who loves her, two kids that look a lot like Jimmi in the photos she sends every Christmas. At least for Cherie, the best part wasn’t over.
I stayed at Verne’s a few weeks, moved out to a furnished room (mutual decision), moved back in (mine). I was getting ready to move out again (we got along great as long as we didn’t live together) when I had an accident-the accident consisted of turning my back on a guy I’d just leaned on, hard, for money he owed the loan company-and Verne said: Don’t be silly, stay here.
For a while, in short, life was as complicated as that sentence you just read.
Laid up in bed with a concussion and cracked ribs, more or less just to relieve boredom, I wrote a book called Skull Meat, about a Cajun detective in New Orleans. Just lay there and spun it out, making it up out of whole cloth, improvising wildly, throwing in whatever came to me. The publisher paid me three thousand for it. Then, when it sold okay, he offered me five thousand to do another with the same character, and that one took. We got reviews in major papers, foreign sales, even a movie option. (The books are very popular in France, Vicky tells me.) Some critics started talking about me in the same sentence as Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald and Himes; they shouldn’t have, because those guys are way out of my league, but they did.
I don’t make a lot of money really, but with a book every year or so I’m able to pay the rent, buy what I need, stay out of debt and off the streets.
You write three or four hours, which is about all you can handle and stay sane, and then there’s still most of the day ahead of you. I tried reading Proust and the whole of Chekhov, awful TV movies, afternoon matinees at two dollars, avocational drinking. Finally I signed up for courses at Dillard and finished my B.A. Now I teach one or two days a week, just filling in, French mostly, an occasional writing course. I do it mainly because it’s fun, not for the money, and I learn far more than any of my students. As you get older you need some way of staying in touch with the young, something to keep your head working and turning, something to plow up rooting presumptions, new faces, new crops.
Verne and I found an old house just outside the Garden District with a slaves’ quarters behind, and that’s where I work. I have a stereo and lots of blues records out here, a filing cabinet, a desk with cubbyholes, another desk for the typewriter, a few books, and not much else. Roaches, of course. I turn on lights at night and the desks go from black to white.
I was eighty pages into a new novel, The Severed Hand, wondering if my crazy Cajun was about to beat someone up or get beaten up in a bar scene. I had on Cajun music as I often did while writing these books, hoping that wild, droning pulse might somehow work its way into what I was writing. Nathan Abshire sawed away at “Pinegrove Blues” on his accordion, a song he recorded under various names, at least once as “Ma Negresse.” I looked back through the manuscript and found that Boudleaux had been beaten up two chapters ago, so I figured it was time for him to win one. A character in the book was pretty clearly based on Blaise Cendrars-hence the title. I wondered if any reviewers or critics would pick up on that. I also wondered if other writers (because I didn’t know any) played such games to get themselves through their books.
The phone rang and went unanswered for some time, so Verne had to be out. I picked it up, leaning over to lower the volume of the music (felt more than heard now) and said “Yes?”
“Lew? Jane.” A brief pause. “Janie.”
The past leapt like a toad into my face.
“I’m very sorry to bother you, and I know you’d probably rather hear from just about anybody else but me. But I was wondering when you last heard from David.”
“Three, four months at least. A postcard with bored-looking gargoyles; he was in Paris. The back of it was covered with that tiny handwriting of his, all about people he’d met, things and places he’d finally seen after reading about them for so long. He was even thinking about staying on in Europe once his sabbatical was done.”
“And nothing since?”
“Nothing.”
“Is that usual? I mean, I don’t know how regularly you two traded letters after you started keeping up with each other.”
“Not unusual, at any rate. Several months of absolute silence, then a ten-page letter; that seemed often to be the pattern between us.”
I reached over and turned the music off. A grasshopper strolled obliquely across the outside of my window, legs finding no difficulty with the smooth glass.
“I assume that something’s wrong, Janie, else you wouldn’t have called me, not after all these years.”
“I don’t know, Lew. That’s the worst part. But David wrote me almost every week, on Sundays usually, and I haven’t heard anything now for over two months.”
“Where is he supposed to be?”
“Somewhere between Rome and New York.”
“You have an address for him?”
“The last one was just poste restante to a post office in Paris. He was supposed to let me know.”
“Seven-five-oh-oh-six?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the same one I have, then. Have your letters been returned?”
“No.”
“Then he, or at least someone, is probably getting them. Or forwarding them, anyhow.”
“Someone?”
“Janie. It’s probably nothing; you know that.”
“Yes. But I have bad feelings about it. And it’s halfway across the world, Lew, almost like another planet. I had to call you, to talk to someone. It took a long time to get up enough courage.”
“You don’t talk to your husband?”
“My husband stopped listening years ago. More recently, he stopped being here. There’s a number I can call if I absolutely have to see him about something.”
“And you accept that?”
“Like I have a choice? I’m probably still nineteen or twenty to you, Lew, young, attractive-attractive as I ever was, at least. But the truth is I’m almost fifty and can’t think of much reason to get out of bed most mornings. I’m fat, my hair’s falling out, my teeth are awful. I was never really pretty. Now I’m worse than plain. No man can ever know what that means.”
“Maybe a man who’s loved you can. Give me a number.” She did. “It may be a while.”
The grasshopper had completed its tour and disappeared. I walked out into sunlight and sat on a bird-bespattered bench under one of the trees. Slowly sunlight gave way to evening. Slowly the toad became only history, and bearable.
Chapter Two
I went inside and called Columbia University, reaching the English department without too much trouble (after all, in most universities we’re dealing with bureaucracies aspiring to heights achieved only in the Soviet Union), finally getting through to the chairman.
“Yes?” he said. “Could I help you?” in an accent that was part New England, part Virginia. The sort of accent you think of Robert Lowell as having.
I told him who I was and asked if David was safely back at work.
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Griffin, we’re quite worried about Dave up here. He was to have been on campus last week, and should en effet have met his first class today. But no, we’ve heard nothing. He’s not there, by any chance?”
“No. There’s been no word from him-no one he was close to, to whom he might have sent a postcard, a letter?”
“Well, of course we all like him a great deal. Admire his work tremendously, it goes without saying. But close, no. I don’t think so. Not very social, Dave, if you know what I mean. Keeps his own counsel. Different drummers and all that. But wait, now that I think of it, there was one of the librarians he saw quite often, Miss Porter, our special collections curator. Nothing of the romantic sort, you understand, but good colleagues.
Would you like me to transfer you? Miss Porter should be on duty?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all, es nada. By the way, I’m a great admirer of yours. We’ve even taught your books, in a course we offered on the proletarian novel, quite a popular course as it turned out.”
“Thank you. I’ve always thought of them as only entertainment.”
“Ah. And so they are, most decidedly. But on another level certainly a bit more than mere entertainment-no?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s the stuff: keep the critics guessing, eh? Here you go then, over to Special Collections.”
I got an idiot undergrad shelver, with persistence a graduate assistant, and finally Miss Porter, who told me to call her Alison, one l. She said it as though no one ever had. I explained who I was.
“I thought maybe you’d have had a card, a letter. We don’t even know if he’s back in the States,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “He did write almost every week. We have so much in common, you know. I’m a real Francophile; and he would write and tell me all his discoveries, all about the people he’d met, rare books or manuscripts he had seen all over France. I so looked forward to those letters.”
“When did you last hear from David, Miss Porter-Alison?”
“O dear, I really wouldn’t know. Time and dates and those things just get terribly away from me. Could you hold a moment?”
I said certainly, and listened to the humming in the wires.
“Yes, here it is. The last letter I have is dated 24 August, from Paris. Then there’s a postcard, no return address but with a New York postmark, the date on it’s something of September-seventh, seventeenth? Just ‘See you soon, amities.’ ”
“And nothing since?”
“Rien.”
“Thank you, Alison. I hope if you have further word you’ll let us know.” I gave her my number, thanked her again, and hung up.
After a while I went across the patio into the house and put on the kettle. I was grinding beans when the front door opened and, a little later, Verne came into the kitchen.
“Coffee, huh?”
“Right.”
“Enough for me?”
“Always.”
She filled a pitcher and started watering plants on the window ledge.
“Gonna be away a few days, Lew.”
“Milk?”
“Black, I think. You be okay?”
“As always.”
We sat at the kitchen table, steaming cups between us. Verne sipped and made a face.
“You’re not angry with me.”
I shrugged.
“You know I’ll always come back. No one else makes coffee like you.”
She took her cup and drank it while packing. I turned on the radio to The Marriage of Figaro. Later I heard the cab driver at the door, Verne’s suitcase bumping against the sill as she left. And then the silence.
Chapter Three
That night, sudden and unseen in the embracing dark, as though the city, like Alice, had tumbled into some primordial hole and through to another world, a storm broke.
I woke, at three or four, to the sound of tree limbs whipping back and forth against the side of the house. Power had summarily failed, and there were no lights, was no light, anywhere. Wind heaved in great tidal waves out there in the dark somewhere. Rain hissed and beat its fists against the roof. Yet looking out I could see nothing of what I sensed.
It went on another hour, perhaps more, the edge, as we learned the next day, of hurricanes that touched down in Galveston, extracting individual buildings like teeth, and blew themselves out on the way up the channel toward Mobile.
The morning we learned this, weather was mild, air exceptionally clear, sun bright and cool in the sky. Worms had come out onto sidewalks and lay there uncurled in the steam rising lazily from them. In every street, cars maneuvered around the fallen limbs of age-old trees. And ship-wrecked on the neutral ground, crisscrossing trolley tracks, lay uprooted palms-fully a third of the city’s ancient, timeless crop.
Chapter Four
And it seemed to them that in only a few more minutes a solution would be found and a new, beautiful life would begin; but both of them knew very well that the end was still a long, long way away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.
I consoled myself with Chekhov.
Then I called David’s number in New York and, getting no answer, dialed O and asked to be put through to a New York operator at that exchange. I got a quiet-spoken, courteous type and asked if it were possible to obtain the number of an apartment complex’s superintendent in an emergency. She put me through to her supervisor, who listened to my explanation, said she’d call me back, did, and gave me the number for a Fred Jones.
I dialed again and got a “Yeah?”
“Is Mr. Jones in, please?”
“Depends. You a tenant?” In the background I could hear kids shouting one another down, a blaring TV.
“No ma’am,” I said, hoping imagination might rush in, or at least stumble in, to fill the void.
“About one of the tenants, then.”
“No ma’am.”
“Yeah…. Well, he’s asleep, that’s what it is. You want for me to wake him up?”
“I think that would be best, yes ma’am.”
“He ain’t gonna like it.”
“Who does?”
A couple of minutes later I had Grizzly Jones on the line.
“New York P.D.,” I told him. “We’ve got a missing-persons report down here, David Griffin, yours the last known address, hope you can help.”
“Do all I can, officer. Always cooperate with the law. But we ain’t seen him lately. Off to Europe, he tells us, this is back in June. I’m still picking up his mail out of the box. Apartment’s paid up through November.”
“Nobody living there?”
“No sir.”
“You’ve been up there to check that personally?”
“A week ago. Part of what I’m paid for.”
“You have the mail there by you?”
“Yeah, it’s all here in a box, hold on a minute …. Okay.”
“Tell me what’s there.”
“The usual junk-bank statements, Mastercard bills, a few other charge cards, some magazines, a couple pounds of flyers and advertising. Schedule from a theater showing ‘foreign and art’ films. A book catalog from France.”
“Nothing personal.”
“No sir, not really.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jones.”
“Anytime, sir. Anything I can do for you, anything at all, you just call. You know?”
“I know. Good citizens like yourself make all our jobs easier.”
“ ’s nothing.”
He was right. It was all nothing.
(-I remind you of the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.
— But the dog did nothing in the nighttime.
— That is the curious incident,
as my colleague Mr. Holmes once put it.)
I finished the pot of coffee, read a little more Chekhov, mixed a pitcher of martinis and dialed the transatlantic operator. Twenty minutes later I had Vicky on the line.
“It’s so very good to hear from you. You’re well, I hope.”
“Ca va bien. Et tu?”
“Marvelous, especially now, talking to you again after all these years.”
“They go by quickly, V.”
“They do that, Lewis. And the people we care for and love go by almost as quickly.”
“A lot of things have changed.”
“A lot haven’t.”
“True enough. How’s Jean-Luc?”
“Splendid. Translating computer books for the most part now. Boring, he says, but quite easy after all those lit’ry novels; and of course the pay’s far, far better.”
“And the real boss of the house?”
She laughed. “Yesterday in English class they ha
d to write an essay: what I want to be when I grow up. Louis has assured us all, and in excellent English, that when he grows up, what he wants most is to be an American.”
“In which case he’d better watch that excellent English.”
“Quite.”
“So he’s in school already.”
“Hard though it may be to believe. He’s six, Lew.”
“Really … Listen, I called to ask a favor of you.”
“I can’t think of anything you’d ask that I wouldn’t gladly do.”
“My son David has been in France this summer on sabbatical. We heard from him fairly regularly, his mother and I, I mean. Then it all stopped: letters, cards, everything. He hasn’t shown up at his school though classes are underway. We don’t even know if he’s returned to the States.”
“And you need for me to check over here?”
“Right. Whatever you can find out.”
“I’ll need return addresses, names of friends or university connections. What else? Airline credit cards?”
That was one I hadn’t thought of. I gave her what I had, said the rest would be coming shortly by wire, including passport number. I thanked her.
“No thanks are necessry, Lew. When Louis grows up and becomes an American, you can track him down for me, tell him to write his poor mother.”
“Je te manque, V.”
“Et moi aussi…. This may take a while, Lew. Things here in France aren’t quite what they used to be.”
“Are they anywhere?”
“Au revoir, mon cher.”
“Au revoir.”
I poured another glassful of martini and stepped out onto the balcony. New Orleans loves balconies-balconies and sequestered courtyards where you can (at least in theory) go on about your life at a remove from the bustle below and about you. Across the street, schoolgirls left St. Elizabeth’s, every doubt or question anticipated, answered, in their catechism and morning instruction, strong young legs moving inside the cage of plaid uniform skirts.
