by James Sallis
Chapter Five
My cajun, bless his ancient hunter’s heart, was nosing closer and closer to the truth, improvising his way toward it the way an artist does, a jazz musician or bluesman, a poet, and I was remembering what Gide had said about detective stories in which “every character is trying to deceive all the others and in which the truth slowly becomes visible through the haze of deception.” A few chapters back, I’d thrown in some passages from Evangeline, translated into journalese.
But something odd was occurring. The more I wrote about Boudleaux, the less I relied on imagination, using experiences and people of my own past, writing ever closer to my life. Now on page ninety-seven a red-haired nurse materialized without warning, tucking in the edges of Boudleaux’s sheets (he’d been involved in a traffic accident) as she rolled her r’s. I figured Verne would be along soon, maybe even her latest exit scene.
I wrote till two or three that morning, weaving the nurse ever more tightly into the book’s pattern, and fell asleep finally on the floor when I lay down for a few minutes’ break.
Sometime around dawn (I heard birds, and in half-light could make out the phone’s dim shape at the corner of the desk) bells went off.
“Lew, I know it’s quite early there….”
“I was almost up. Giving it serious consideration, anyway.”
“Voila. Here it is, then. I’ve been ’round to the pension where David was staying, and he left there, according to plan, in late August, somewhere around the twenty-fifth, giving his New York address for forwarding. Jean-Luc rang up the travel agents and confirmed a reservation in the name of David Griffin, departing Paris nonstop to New York on the twenty-sixth, fare charged to David’s American Airlines card.”
“Not bad for amateurs.”
“The original meaning of amateur is someone who cares, who loves, Lew. Is there anything more we can do to help?”
“Not just now, but I can’t say how much I thank you both.”
“You don’t have to. Ecris-moi, ou appelles-moi encore?”
“Bientot, ma chere.”
The connection went, leaving me alone there in the rump end of America. I put on water for coffee, showered, shaved and brushed my teeth, none of which helped much. I ate a peach (thinking of Prufrock) and some scrambled eggs. I lay down again, in a bed this time, and was almost asleep when the phone rang.
“Lew? I’ll be coming home tomorrow morning, if that’s all right with you.”
“I’ll have breakfast ready,” I said after a moment.
“… I could come tonight. Or now.”
“In that case you do breakfast.” And fell back asleep, waking later to the smell of bacon, fresh coffee, hot grease, butter. It was dark outside, and I was disoriented. I walked out into the kitchen.
“Good whatever-morning? evening?” Verne said. “Have a seat and some coffee, not necessarily in that order.”
I did, and while I drank she pulled skillets with omelettes and potatoes out of the oven, slipped buttered bread in to take their place, exhumed crisp bacon from layers of toweling. When the toast was done, she poured new coffee for me and a cup for herself, warm milk and coffee at the same time, New Orleans-style, and sat down across from me.
“How’s the book going?”
“Slow as usual, but okay?” I said nothing about David, about Janie calling. “I may put you in it. Not you really, but someone like you.”
“There isn’t anyone like me, Lew.”
I looked at her then, the way she held the toast, looking at it slightly cross-eyed, and I knew she was right. It’s never ideas, but simple things, that break our hearts: a falling leaf that plunges us into our own irredeemable past, the memory of a young woman’s ankle, a single smile among unknown faces, a madeleine, a piece of toast.
“I guess it’ll have to be you, then,” I said.
We finished the meal without talking. As Verne gathered up dishes, she said, “I’ll be going after I’ve done these, Lew.”
“But you just came back.”
She shook her head. “A visit. That’s all you allow, Lew. Whether years or a couple of days, always only a visit to your life.” She began drawing water into the sink, squirted in soap. “You’ve never asked me to stay with you, not even for a night.”
“But I always thought that should be up to you, V.”
“ ‘Up to you.’ ‘Whatever you want.’ How many times have I heard that all these years-when I heard anything at all? Don’t you want anything, Lew?” She turned from the sink, soapy water dripping onto the floor in front of her, hands curled back toward herself. She closed one hand and raised it, still dripping, to chest level. “I could be anyone as far as you’re concerned, Lew-any woman.” The hand opened. “People are interchangeable for you, one face pretty much like any other, all the bodies warm and good to be by sometimes.”
She turned back to the sink, scrubbed at a plate. I took a towel from the drawer and stood beside her.
“In your books you never write about anything that’s not past, done with, gone.”
She handed me the plate, and she was right. I dried it. Put it in the rack at the end of the counter.
“Okay,” I said, “but it doesn’t make sense for you to leave. You stay here, keep the house, and I’ll go.”
She shook her head. “I’ll stay with Cherie until I find a place. You do whatever you want to with the house and the rest.”
We finished in silence, the past, or future, shouldering us quietly apart. I looked at the clock above the sink. It was 9:47. When Verne came back in to tell me she was leaving, it was 10:16.
Not too long after, the phone rang. I picked it up.
“Yes?”
“Is La Verne there, please?” someone said after a moment’s hesitation.
“No.”
I hung up, turned off the light and sat staring out into the darkness. Somewhere in that darkness, sheltered or concealed by it, maybe lost in it, was David; and somewhere too, Vicky, Verne and others I’d loved.
In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you.
The only help you’ll get is a few hard drinks and morning.
Chapter Six
I pushed the door open and saw his back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar. I sat beside him, ordered a bourbon and told him what I had to.
For a long time then we were both quiet. I could hear traffic sounds from the elevated freeway a block or so away.
“La vie,” he finally said, “c’est toujours cruelle, n’est-ce-pas?”
“Mais oui,” I said. “C’est vrai. And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.”
“Le matin, it is still far away, and this I can do nothing about. But the drinks, I can do. A bottle, please,” he said to the bartender, and to me: “You will join me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
And that was it. I skipped a few spaces and typed The End, mixed another drink and started proofing the final pages.
Not long after Verne had left, I’d made a pot of coffee, turned on the fans and the stereo, and settled into work. The phone had rung several times and I’d ignored it, letting the machine earn its keep. When the coffee was gone I had mixed a pitcher of martinis and drunk that, then more coffee, more martinis, and about eight in the morning, some scrambled eggs and toast. After that I switched to margaritas, and with the third or fourth came to the end of the novel, far and away the best I’d done, maybe the best I’ll ever do. I mailed it off to my agent and slept for three days. Then got up to answer all the calls.
Most of them were junk and hang-ups. One was from Verne giving me her new address. Two were from Janie. The school had called to ask me to fill in for Dr. Palangian, advanced conversational and nineteenth-century French lit, next month while he was in Paris. A magazine editor wondered if I would consider doing a short piece for her, on whatever topic I’d like. The Times-Picayune was sending out a book for possible
review.
Twice, whoever called neither spoke nor hung up, keeping the line open until the machine automatically closed it. I found those twenty-second segments of tape somehow profoundly unsettling. To this day (for I have them still) I find them so, though without good reason.
I called Janie to tell her what little I’d managed to learn, then Verne to say hello (she wasn’t in, so I breathed hard at her machine and told it hello instead), then spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone to a few friends and many rank strangers (ticket clerks, a flight steward, cab dispatchers and drivers, hotels, hospitals, hostels) trying to pick up a single loose thread that might ravel back to David.
Nada, as Hemingway said. (A word he later turned into a verb, his last one.)
About eight I knocked off and made some sandwiches and coffee, then read for a while. An hour or so later Dooley, the only detective I know in New York, called back. We were in the service together (myself briefly, him for a couple of hitches) and somehow stayed in touch. He was an MP then.
“Okay, Lew, here it is. I’ve got a confirmation, David did come in on that plane. The stewardess remembers him because of his manners. Then I’ve got a hack that remembers him, flashed on the description. Thinks he dropped him midtown, maybe Grand Central or Port Authority. And after that, nothing. Zilch.”
“You’ve been to the apartment?”
“The super told you just the way it is.”
“No other leads? Ideas?”
“Short of calling in the crazies with their birch rods and chicken entrails, no. I’m sorry, Lew. I’ll put the word out among my contacts here, of course. They’re a pretty wide-ranging lot. You never know. One of them might catch sight of him, or hear something, if he’s still in the city.”
“My thanks, D. I’m expecting a bill.”
“For what? I ain’t done chickenshit, Lew. I do something, then I’ll be sending a bill.”
“Take care, friend.”
“I will. Have to, up here.”
I got another follow-up call that night, a few more the next morning, none of them of consequence, buckets full of holes.
Walsh called to say he’d heard about David, let him know if he could do anything to help.
“Verne’s gone,” I told him.
“Jesus, Lew. Sounds like you reached for your hat and got the chamberpot instead.”
And for some reason that cheered me immeasurably.
I walked over to St. Charles and caught the trolley downtown, wandered around Canal and the Quarter like a tourist, stopped off for coffee at Cafe du Monde and for a brandy at the Napoleon House. Then took in a cheap matinee.
It was a forties-style detective movie, all stark blacks and whites, full of women flaunting cigarettes, silly hats and wisecracks. The hero was a one-time idealist turned mercenary and gone more recently to seed and gin. Ninety minutes later he’d become a solid citizen and, left behind there in movieland when the curtain closed, was probably scouting out real estate just north of town and a few new suits.
It was wonderful.
I walked over to Corondolet in the dark and caught the next trolley, almost empty at first, but it filled quickly as we worked our way around Lee Circle and uptown. A young woman sat in the back alone, looking steadily out the window and crying. The driver kept looking up at her in his mirror.
The house was emptier than I had left it. I mixed a drink and sat in darkness. The news my Cajun had brought the old man in the bar was that his son was dead, needlessly, stupidly dead, and I knew that more than ever before I was writing close to my life, that the old man’s bottle and mute acceptance were my own, that I would not see David again. I am not a man much given to the mystic or ineffable, but sitting there that night in the darkness like a cat, with the fruity smell of gin and a murmur of wind from outside, I knew. And I have been right.
Chapter Seven
The following days are as blurred as that one moment is distinct.
I must have drunk up everything in the house, then gone out for more. I remember walking back along St. Charles with paper bags in both arms, stumbling at a corner but only one of the bottles, miraculously, breaking. Signing a check at a K amp;B. Walking barefoot on hot sidewalk trying to find my way home and waking the next morning to find the soles of my feet covered with blisters.
A few bright frames, all the rest lost.
At some point Walsh was there (or I thought he was), then Verne and a little later two Indians with a travois. I was a kite floating over crowds that included Janie, David, Robert Johnson, my old man, Verne, Jules Verne, Ma Rainey, Walsh, George Washington Carver, the whole sick crew.
Lots of vintage television. Game shows! Soap operas!
And again one morning woke to pain and thirst, not a rolled r anywhere.
It didn’t take long this time, a week or so, and I was turned loose on society once again. I lay around the house drinking endless pots of coffee and reading things like Balzac and Dickens. Taught for Jack Palangian three days a week and had a few good students, started running with a younger member of the French faculty. Did some low-key magazine pieces and a series for the Times-Picayune on Cajun culture.
Some nights after work Verne came by and we’d cook, then spend the rest of the evening out on the balcony talking about the old days. “We’re just alike that way, Lew,” she used to say. “Neither one of us is ever going to have anyone permanent, anyone who’ll go the long haul, who cares that much.” But she was wrong.
A few months out of hospital, down thirty pounds and a couple of sizes from running, I got galleys for The Old Man and finished reading them early one morning (I pushed the door open and saw his back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar) with tears in my eyes. The book’s success some months later surprised me not at all.
And now I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose.
I can’t imagine what it should be.
I still live in the house Verne and I once lived in together, and she still comes by some nights. I often talk to Vicky, Walsh, Cherie and others. Memory and real voices, and the voices of these characters as I write, fill the rooms. Sometimes regret or sorrow tries to rear up and make itself heard, and sometimes, though not so often as before, I think, it succeeds.
And so, another book. But not about my Cajun this time. About someone I’ve named Lew Griffin, a man I know both very well and not at all. And I have only to end it now by writing: I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain beats at the windows.
It is not midnight. It is not raining.
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Document creation date: 05.11.2012
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Document authors :
James Sallis
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