Jazz Funeral (40 page)

Not again. She wanted to be a good friend, but she’d called him because she needed cheering up, not because she felt like offering a shoulder to cry on. In fact, what she felt was bone-tired. Just too tired to cope. A day of her favorite pop Cajun R&B singer had done her in.

She yawned, not bothering to hide it.

“Tired?” said Dee-Dee.

“Getting there.” She blinked at him sleepily. She slapped her own face.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I just realized I’m stoned out of my gourd.” She smiled. “I’m out of practice.”

“I better go.” He started to get up.

“No.” She patted the sofa. Suddenly it was important to her to function, to do something for Dee-Dee. She was tired, but suddenly overcome by guilt, accompanied by a tidal wave of sloppy sentimentality. She hoped she wouldn’t throw her arms around his neck and tell him she loved him.

“Talk,” she said.

“Okay.” But he was silent. “This is hard.”

“For Christ’s sake, you’re acting like a straight guy. Only two things make them this nervous. So I’m wondering—are you proposing, or are we breaking up?”

The minute she said it, she got a cold feeling in her stomach. Maybe they were breaking up, in a sense. Maybe he was moving to Minneapolis to take care of his niece and nephew. Dee-Dee gave her a smile as sloppily sentimental as she felt. Then he did the unspeakable—threw his arms around her neck and said he loved her.

“Ick, Dee-Dee! Bleeagh. I love you too, but yuck. If we start carrying on like this, what’ll be left when we’re eighty?”

He was laughing as only the mightily stoned can do, his whole body shaking, tears pouring. “God, you’re a bitch. No wonder that man-mountain’s stopped coming around.”

“Oh, boy. Who’s the bitch?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it. I mean, I’m sure it’s nothing—bimbo attack, probably.”

“Oh, can it, Dee-Dee, I thought you wanted to tell me something.” She hated herself for breaking the mood. Women always said men wouldn’t talk about feelings, but she was the guilty one here. She’d sidetracked sentiment as handily as any clod who’d ever pledged Deke.

“Well, like I was saying, I love ya, baby.”

“Likewise, I’m sure.”

“I have to make changes in my life—for the kids.”

“You’re really going to be a dad?”

“What else do you suggest?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Boarding school, I guess.”

He shook his head vigorously. “Uh-uh and no way. I got sent and no kid of mine—”

“Listen to you! One minute you’re camping it up and next you’re talking no-kid-of-mine.”

“Well, dammit, I want to do this. I really want to take care of those kids.” He stopped and looked away from her, made sure she couldn’t see his face, and said, “Love them.”

He said it so low she wasn’t sure she’d heard right, but she was starting to come down and she had the sense not to ask.

He turned to her and grimaced. “It’s not like I had a sex life or anything. I might as well get a hobby.”

“Dee-Dee, you’re the worst.”

“Well, I mean, guys in feather boas and leather aren’t exactly a wholesome influence. Do you think?”

“Depends on the guys.” He said it with her, and they split their sides for a while, still deliciously loaded.

“What I want to say first—here’s the bottom line—is you’re family. Do you understand that? No matter what happens.”

“Dee-Dee, what are you saying?”

“Well, I kind of need your apartment.”

So that was it. The cold feeling in her stomach came back. “You want me to move?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“Dee-Dee, you do or you don’t.”

“I want you to move and stay here too. What I want to do is take back your apartment and the other two, redo the budding as a single-family home, and move the kids in. Plus a nanny or au pair or something—whatever you’re supposed to get.”

She shrugged. “Beats me.” She didn’t know what she’d do if it were she, suddenly a mom without a clue.

“It’ll be gorgeous, don’t you think? Qui you see the possibilities?”

“It’ll be great.”
I wish I could live in it.

“And I want you to take the slave quarters.”

“What?” He lived there himself, and it was a showplace. “Dee-Dee that’s sweet of you, but I don’t think—”

“At the same rent, my dainty darling. A teensy-weensy little rent for a teensy-weensy girl.”

“No.”

“Yes.
Mais certainement.
”

“I can’t.”

“But you must. I can’t go through this alone.” It was a joke, he said it like a joke, but she caught an involuntary twitch in his neck, knew that it was true, that he was tense right now, afraid she’d turn him down.

She said, “You just want a built-in babysitter.”

“Wrong. I need a cop in the house. ‘Cause you know what kids do? They make you watch Freddy Krueger movies and then you have nightmares and wake up scared. I need you to protect me.”

Skip was jerked upright by the sweet domestic image—Uncle Jimmy and his niece and nephew watching scary movies in their newly redone French Quarter home. Munching microwave popcorn. No lights on. The kids on the floor, Skip too. Everybody giggling at funny old Freddy and his fake fingernails.

It seemed doable. Alien, but doable. She was excited by it in a funny way, somewhere deep in her belly felt fuzzy little stirrings.
I want this.
She was surprised.

She turned to Jimmy Dee and raised an eyebrow. “You’re getting weird, Dee-Dee.”

“I’ll go make up the lease—okay?”

“They have to call me Auntie. That’s non-negotiable.”

They were hugging when Steve came in. A curious domesticity had come over them, a weird blissful peace, as if they’d found something they were looking for.

“You two getting married?”

“No. We’re going to be single parents.”

“Am I missing something?”

“That’s my cue,” said Jimmy Dee. “‘Bye now.” He floated out with a campy flick of the wrist.

Steve stared after him: “Like I said. Am I missing something?”

Skip got up and gave him a hug, but she felt resistance and was hurt. “What’s the matter?”

“You and Dee-Dee. You looked like you were in love.”

“Well, we are, sort of. It’s like Tootsie—if he’d cut out the drag act one day, maybe we could—”

He stepped away from her. “You’re stoned.”

It was like a slap, sudden, sharp, painful, and utterly sobering. “Well, I was. I think I’m coming down. I’m sorry about the scene with Dee-Dee. I have a hard time remembering you get jealous of him.”

“I’m not jealous!”

“Would you like to sit down, by any chance? Could I get you a beer maybe?”

He relaxed, dug into his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Good God, yes.”

She got him the beer and made some instant iced tea for herself, thinking about what she wanted to say. “Listen, I’m sorry I got stoned.”

He reached for her in that easy way he had. He was affectionate and she liked that in a man. He didn’t seem even slightly threatened by being close to her. “It’s okay. You’ve got a right to get stoned. I was just noticing, that’s all.”

“You know, I hardly ever do it anymore. Tonight I was feeling insecure.”

“Your case?”

“No, you.”

“Me!” He couldn’t have looked more bewildered if she’d set him on fire.

“I guess I was upset that you went to Cookie’s the other night.”

“But why?” Now he seemed hurt too—as if she’d said she wanted to break up.

“I guess I thought you didn’t want to be with me.”

“I didn’t want to be with you?” He leaned back to look at her. “Listen, Skip, you don’t have to worry about that. You can believe what I say. If I say I want to give you some space, you don’t have to think I got a better offer or something. Tell me you aren’t feeling crowded in here.”

She shrugged, starting to feel embarrassed. “Sometimes. But it’s getting better, don’t you think?”

“I thought it might be getting worse. The three-day guest theory, you know?”

“I feel silly.”

“Don’t feel silly, feel secure. I want you to feel secure.”

“Okay.” It was all she could think of to say. On the one hand, he’d made her feel ridiculous for being so absurdly neurotic; on the other, she was conscious of a funny resentment she couldn’t identify.

What am I mad at? He’s perfect.

It’s easy to be perfect when you only have to do it a week or two at a time.

So that’s what it was. She wanted a bigger piece of him. Well, that was her problem and she’d have to get it under control.

He said, “Remember that first time I was here? At Mardi Gras a year ago? How I didn’t know anything and you had to keep giving me New Orleans lessons?”

“And you more or less thought you’d landed on Mars?”

“I can barely remember that now. This place is starting to seem like home to me. I bet you never notice the air here.”

He got up and took his beer to the open window. It was a window that opened from the floor and reached almost to the ceiling. The legs of his shorts blew slightly in the breeze. “It’s like velvet,” he said. “Soft and deep, like you could fall into it and sink; you can hardly stand it on your skin it’s so soft. But it can be smothery too. Like wool sweaters in July.”

“I do notice it; I notice it all the time. I think I might be addicted to it.”

He nodded. “Yes. Maybe that’s what gets you about the place. I miss this air.”

“I’d think in L.A. you’d miss any air.”

“You know, you’ve still never come to visit me there.”

“Well, I want to; it just hasn’t worked out yet.”

He sat beside her again. “This place is its own little world.”

“Well, we like it.”

“Hey, don’t get defensive. You’re the ones who call it a Third World country.”

“It’s not exactly an apple pie kind of place. The last bason of hedonism.”

“That’s not all. Remember when you had that case that had us all going to twelve-step programs?”

“You only went once or twice, I thought.”

“Shows how much you know. I went to three or four. And, actually, I’d been to one or two in California.”

“Why, Steve Steinman, you never said so.”

He looked embarrassed. “Well, I went with a friend. And in California, they’re extremely polite. No ‘cross talk’—you can’t answer back—”

“I thought there was always no cross talk.”

“There’s never supposed to be. And there’s a certain language for these things. Everybody’s real sincere; kind of reverent, like it’s church or something.”

“They’re like that here too.”

“Ha! The first one I went to, the speaker calls on this guy and he says, ‘I’ve really been giving it some thought lately and I’ve decided Al-Anon is for neurotic wimps with no brains and no balls.’” He paused. “What do you think the speaker did?”

“Said ‘thank you’ and called on the next person—that’s the protocol.”

“Fat chance. He started arguing with the guy.”

“What do you mean? Those people don’t do that.”

“Well, they did. So, then the next person who gets called on puts in her two cents worth, and the speaker answers her back. Then the original ‘neurotic wimps’ guy answers him. Next thing you know, everybody’s mixing it up.”

Skip was laughing now, able to see the scene all too clearly, to recognize the rugged individualists of her home state in a true-life vignette. “The Louisiana legislature’s exactly the same way.”

“That’s what Ham said when I told him about it.”

Ham. The word had a sobering effect on Skip. She drew in her breath, but Steve didn’t seem to notice.

“You know what I thought when I saw that? I thought, I’ve got to find some way to move here—people this crazy are my kind of people. A whole state like the Rum Turn Tugger.”

“Like what?” She was only listening with half an ear.

“One of the cats in Cats: ‘He do do what he will do and there’s no doing anything about it.’”

She gave him a vague smile.

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About my moving here. Did you hear a word I said?”

“What—you’re moving here? Sorry. I was thinking about Melody.”

He turned away. “Well, I thought I might.”

It started to sink in.
“You’re moving here?”

“We need to talk about it. I’m in deep, you know.”

“Uh—well, I—What does that mean exactly?”

“With you, Skip. In deep with you.” He touched her arm lightly, but that was all. He was behaving shyly, which wasn’t like him. “I wasn’t trying to get away from you last night. I’m falling more and more in love with you.”

“You are?” She wanted to look around and see if there was anyone else in the room.

“Look at me!” Her eyes must have followed her impulse. “You know, it doesn’t make me feel really great to have you looking around for a way out.”

“That’s not it. Believe me, it’s not it. Would you really move here?”

“Well, half-time maybe. Something like that. If I could get work. Maybe I could get a more or less regular gig with the foundation. Or something else—all I need is one semiregular kind of thing.”

“You mean it? You really mean it?”

“Yeah, I mean it. And you know what else I mean? You are the most beautiful, curly-headed, green-eyed amazon I ever saw in my life.”

“Amazon?”

“Goddess. I misspoke. Would you make love to a mortal?” He was tugging on her arm.

“I’m all sweaty.”

“Well, okay, let’s get in the shower.”

If the air felt like velvet, the water felt like liquid silk. It washed the case away, washed away her worry about Melody, even temporarily banished what she was beginning to see as her towering insecurity.

She could swear she saw rainbows, but there wasn’t enough light.

“Skip, Turn around.”

She turned away from him, in a haze of love and passion, her mind mud, mud so wet it shook like jelly. Her focus slipped to the center of her body and her legs shook, like the mud of her mind. Steve ran his hands once over her butt and let them settle on her hips, lightly, so very lightly, and then her eyelids exploded in gold and silver stars, rivers of them, bursting out of a sun somewhere in her head.

“Skip, don’t fall. Hold on, help me or you’re going to fall.”