Madeleine's Ghost (13 page)

“I'll admit this place is a shithole, but it's all I could get tonight, baby,” she said. “The Quarter was booked solid. But you like the Holiday Inn Château LeMoyne, right? They've got that huge Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom, remember?”

“You're missing the point, Antoinette,” I said. “First, all this is really expensive. Hotel rooms three, four nights a week. My God! And it just vanishes on your credit card. That's not right.”

“Money,” she said with a dismissive wave. “Don't you worry about that.”

The party next door was fading in and out like a bad radio station. “Antoinette,” I said softly, “next time let's go to your apartment or mine.”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“You're pushing me on this. Stop. Just let it go for a while.”

“Antoinette, are you still sleeping with Dothan?”

“Don't ask me that,” she said sharply. “That's none of your goddamn business.”

“O.K.,” I said, “I should go.” I don't know where I got the courage to get up, to dig around in the mess of clothes on the floor, to pull on my socks and tie my shoes, to buckle my belt, to get my coat and step over to the door. I put my hand on the knob and half turned back toward her. She lay motionless in bed, hands still clasped tightly between her breasts, eyes fixed on the water-stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling.

“I'm crazy about you,” I said. “You know that. But I need something. A word. Something to keep going with this. Otherwise it's just fucking. And I suppose I'm still too much of a Catholic to believe that's a good thing.”

I stood there like a fool, watching her. She wouldn't say anything. After a while I turned the knob and went out into the carpeted hall, and got into the elevator again with the stripper and her bodyguard. This girl,
a year or two younger than Antoinette, was no doubt on her way to another gig at another hotel across town, and I snuck a good look at her in the hard white light. Her hair was in place, her makeup newly applied, mascara and eyeliner perfect. Calm, pale, composed, she did not show a single drop of sweat or any outward sign of her recent performance.

I
WAITED ALL
week for Antoinette to call. She didn't call. It was one of the hardest weeks of my life.

I alternated between curses and self-congratulation on my handling of the situation. I was tough all right, I said to myself, real tough. But then I'd break down and pray to some secret god of lovers that Antoinette would come back to me. This didn't seem like a matter for the Catholic God, the God of chastity and abstinence and punishment, the God on the cross, who never laid a finger on Mary Magdalene and who spoke through the apostle Paul to tell us that physical love, even confined to the sacred bonds of marriage, was at best a lewd compromise with the evils of the flesh. Instead I prayed with intensity and despair to another being entirely. A female deity in her hidden velveteen bower in the humid shade. A goddess of laughter and music and the rustle of silk under silk, and long afternoons in the arms of a woman whose husband was elsewhere. A goddess whose famous name I did not care to pronounce, adding another broken commandment to the long list we acquire before we leave our mother's house.

To pass the time, I drank. Molesworth was the architect of this escape. I'd present myself to him like a penitent in the red evenings after class, and he'd fire up the Land Rover, and we'd do the town till 3:00 and 4:00
A.M
., undergraduates again. He was a man who asked no questions. At some point in his distant past all the natural curiosity had been beaten out of him by one of his backwoods relations, or perhaps he was one of
the lucky few content not to know. But a man who asks no questions often gets answers despite himself.

We were ensconced in one of the foul, beer-sticky booths all the way out at the Stew Pot, sunk in gloom over two bottles of Jax with bumps, when I spilled my guts. Molesworth had traveled this far afield to score a few bags of homegrown weed from his connection, a suspicious ex-con known only as Sawyer, who hung out in the bathroom there. The deal went down in one of the stalls while I kept an eye on the door for the local police, drank my beer, and tried to look as innocent as possible, given the circumstances.

The Stew Pot is a little-visited dive out on the fringes of Belle Chasse on the other side of the river and typical of the establishments found in Plaquemines Parish. The usual chewy Cajun crocodile bits deep fried in congealed fat as bar food, the usual morose country songs on the jukebox and Confederate flag-mounted fish decor, with one remarkable exception: A full-length portrait of Judah P. Benjamin in frock coat and gray beard painted sometime before the Civil War hung over the bar. The portrait was stained and blackened with age and torn at the corner, but still a museum piece. How it ended up at the Stew Pot was beyond imagining. I asked the redneck bartender if he knew anything about it when he came over with another round.

He shrugged. “Jest a picher of some old fart,” he said.

“Where did it come from?”

“Hell if I know, been here since I been here.”

“That's Judah P. Benjamin,” I said.

“Who?”

“He was a Jew.”

The redneck's jaw dropped and he turned to the portrait with suspicion. “Huh,” he said. “A Jew.”

When he went away, Molesworth raised an eyebrow.

“Judah P. Benjamin, though a Jew in a day of much anti-Semitism, became secretary of state of the Confederacy under Jefferson Davis,” I said. “He was often called the Brains of the South. He led a wandering life, full of temporal successes, but sad somehow. Born in the West Indies,
the son of a rabbi, he went to Yale, went into exile after the war rather than swear an oath to the Union. He eventually became a famous barrister in England and died in France in the arms of his French mistress on an estate outside Paris. He never returned to New Orleans, a city he dearly loved.”

“So who cares?”

“It's history, Molesworth. You should care. Everyone should care. Judah P. Benjamin at the Stew Pot. Amazing.”

“I don't give a damn,” Molesworth said. “Let's get out of here.”

“Where?”

“Back to civilization. Let's go to Spanish Town. Haven't been there in a while. We can say hello to Dothan and that beautiful bitch he's got behind the bar.”

I went white. “No,” I said. “I can't go to Spanish Town.”

“Can't?” Molesworth said, surprised.

“Don't ask.”

Molesworth shrugged and went back to his beer, tipping the butt end of his bottle toward Judah P. Benjamin, who seemed to nod back, his bearded lip touched with a smile of benevolent patriarchy.

After a while I said, “Aren't you going to ask?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“O.K.,” I sighed. “I'll tell you.” I told him everything, sparing only those intimate details which discretion forbids the gentleman from repeating in a barroom.

After I was done, he set his beer down on the table with a wet, decisive click, something like disappointment in his eyes. “Have I taught you nothing, Coonass?” he said. “All these years, and you're still the same Yankee coonass you were when you moved into the dorms. You've gone and done it this time, all right.” Then he made an inarticulate gesture with his thick hand.

“Gone and done what?” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my question.

He leaned close, his voice a deep gravel now, his breath smelling like beer and careless brushing. “There are badasses, and there are
badasses. Dothan is one of the latter, from a family full of badasses. I'm not saying he isn't a decent sort. He's fully rational, not like his brother Curtis. But Christ, when the sombitch gets mad …”

On the way back to town, up the Belle Chasse Highway, through Fort St. Leon and the greenish mists of 10:30, a large blue snipe flew low across the grille of the Land Rover and swung off into the darkness on its big wings toward the Bayou Barrierre Country Club. Molesworth honked the horn at the big clumsy bird and gestured with a Styrofoam go-cup full of bourbon and soda. In those days, before intrusive national legislation, Louisiana was one of the few states civilized enough to allow its citizens to drink and drive and carry a gun in the car at the same time.

“If I were an ancient Roman,” Molesworth said, “I'd take that bird as an omen. A bad omen.”

“You're not an ancient Roman, Molesworth,” I shouted over the carbon monoxide roar of the engine.

“Augury, you know, the prediction of the future from the flight of birds. The ancient Romans were into that sort of thing. Think, when was the last time you saw a snipe flying at night?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“They're diurnal birds, not nocturnal. Everyone knows that.” Molesworth, though he knew little else, knew the wildlife of the Louisiana swamps in a detail unequaled since the day John J. Audubon set up an easel in the Barataria wilderness. “And they're river birds. We're a good way from the river out here. An omen, Coonass!”

“O.K.,” I said. “I'll bite. What does that particular bird tell you?”

He paused, took a sip of his bourbon, and nodded a toothy grimace at the dark windshield, faint glow of the instruments in his face. On the shortwave now, the plaintive wail of Cajun violin from a station clear across the state in Bayou Laforce.

“That little bird tells me you're a fool, Ned.” There seemed for a moment an unusual note of sympathy in his voice that scared me more than anything I had heard tonight. “It's bound to end badly for you. A woman like that. What kind of fool rushes to meet disaster?” He wouldn't say any more.

For a while we drove on in silence except for the sound of the truck. When we slowed down coming into Gretna and the West Bank Expressway, I took advantage of the lessened roar to say, almost in a whisper, “But she's beautiful. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Without her the days drag by, empty, dull. She's like the sun, Molesworth. Without her the whole city is dark, the whole state. Dark, empty streets full of strangers.”

“Very pretty, Coonass,” Molesworth said. “But let me tell you a little story. There was this Greek Coonass named Paris for some reason, though why they named a Greek after a French city will always escape me. In any case, he ran off with this high-class chick who was some other poor sombitch's wife. But Paris, he had a choice in this matter. It's not like people don't have choices. He could have chosen to be the smartest man in the world, the richest man in the world or to run off with this chick. He picked the chick over all of that. Shit, you know what happened next. The rest is history, which is your field. A whole shitload of trouble.”

We didn't say anything more about it. He finished the go-cup and crumpled it and tossed it on the floor with the rest of the garbage, and soon we were on the New Orleans Bridge, running at full bore toward the city whose light, if Molesworth's augury was to be believed, illuminated a tragic destiny.

T
WO DAYS
later came another knock at our door on Mystery Street, and the boy from Marche Florists delivered a second armload of roses from Antoinette. These were white, to show the purity of her intentions, and the card said, “I'm sorry about everything. Been missing you. I'll try. Please come to my apartment tonight at 8:00. 177 Marigny, No. 3, if you don't remember.—A.”

Molesworth was out somewhere, so I hid the roses in my bedroom beneath a sheet, and I went and got a haircut at a Salvadoran place on
Esplanade at DeSoto, where for five dollars you emerge looking like a gaucho in an old movie. Then I went home and dressed and walked over to the Delgado Museum and mooned absently around the galleries there till it came time to take the bus downtown. Traffic was sparse along the streets of the faubourg. A pale and inviting light showed through the shutters of Antoinette's apartment. She buzzed me up without speaking, and I took the narrow steps two at a time. The door was open, a deep, slow jazz coming from within. It was eight o'clock exactly.

I saw the gleam of silverware and crystal as I entered and took off my coat. The small table in the living room was set for dinner. Just then Antoinette came out of the kitchen with a bottle of wane and two glasses. She smiled.

“I knew you'd be on time,” she said. “But look at me, I'm not even dressed.” She wore a new red plush robe that fell all the way to the floor, and her hair was loose and damp about her shoulders. There was something different about the place. I looked around for a beat, saw the fainting couch, its yellow pillows plumped up, the oriental rug, the photograph of the painting hanging straight between the French doors.

“Wow, you cleaned,” I said. “Just for me.”

“Well, sort of. I got a maid.”

She went over to the table to open the wine, but I stepped up and took the bottle from her and put my hand on her breast under the robe and kissed her and started pulling her toward the bedroom.

“Hey,” she said, “we've got to eat dinner. It's almost ready. Crawfish Étouffée, salad, wine …”

I stopped in the doorway and leaned her back against the frame. She put her face on my neck and lay there, silent for a moment, and there was the fragrance of perfume and soap and shampoo and the ready smell of her.

“So I guess you forgive me,” she said, her face still in my neck.

“Sure,” I said, and I reached around and tugged the robe down off her shoulders, and pulled her back into the bedroom, closing the door behind, even though the apartment was empty.

L
ATER WE
lay in each other's arms in the rumpled sheets of her four-poster and listened to the hush and murmur of the darkened city beyond the shutters. The jazz record on the turntable kept repeating. Lassitude prevented us from getting up to turn it over. I pushed my face into her armpit and inhaled the pleasant bitter smell of her body.