Madeleine's Ghost (14 page)

“Hey,” she said, and slapped me lightly on the nose with the back of her fingers. Out in the living room the record player picked up and went back to the beginning again. “Someone's got to change that,” she said.

“Unh-huh.”

“And my étouffée is going to be ruined.”

“We'll eat it for breakfast.”

“Aren't you hungry?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but not exactly for étouffée.”

She smiled and reached for me.

After we made love again, Antoinette sat up in bed and lit a cigarette from the pack on the night table. She offered one, but I shook my head.

“Reminds me of those motel rooms,” I said.

“Oh.” She stubbed it out quickly in the ashtray and put her head on my chest.

“There's still no promises. I'll try to make things different. I want you to know that,” she said. “But you'll need to show me what to do, because I'm new at this. What do you want me to do?”

I thought for a moment. Then I said, “I want you to tell me about Dothan.”

She went stiff and rolled off me and was quiet for a long time, but
then she said, “All right, I'll tell you about Dothan,” and went on in a small voice. “Dothan and I had a talk on Wednesday. He's off on a tour of South America for the next three months. Colombia, mostly. Then Venezuela and Peru. I don't know what he's doing down there, and I don't want to know, but I can guess. In any case, we're supposed to think about things while he's away, and we're supposed to have this big talk when he gets back.”

“What will you say to him?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you tell him about me?”

She hesitated. I couldn't see her eyes in the darkness.

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Was it hard?”

She reached for another cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke out her nose like a tough chick in a bar. In the few seconds it took her to light the cigarette her mood had changed.

“There's a lot you don't know about Dothan and me,” she said a little harshly.

“O.K.”

“I mean, I have loved him. I have loved him very much.”

“Do you still love him?”

“Do you really want the whole story?”

“Yes.”

“All right, shut up and listen, since you want to hear it,” she said, and took a deep breath of the cigarette smoke. “Papa has a place up in Bayou Dessaintes near Mamou. A fishing place not much more than a shack, really, with an outhouse—there's electricity now, just got it a couple years ago—but Papa loves the place. He's never happier than when he's up there fishing or carrying on away from Mama's society friends and all that shit in the Garden District. Out of us girls I was his favorite. He told me once that I reminded him of his sister who died when she was still beautiful and young in high school with the nuns.

“In any case, Papa always took me up there with him when he went
for the weekend. He'd fish, and he'd let me drink beer and smoke. Once, I was about ten, I remember, and he fed me two beers and I was drunk off my ass. Papa just laughed. Then he'd have these poker parties with some of the local boys, and I'd sit in a chair in my nightgown—nothing very revealing, just an old flannel thing buttoned up to here—I'd sit beside Papa and watch him and tell him what cards to keep and what cards to put down. Hell, they'd play till four in the morning, old Cajun stuff on the radio, Hank Williams, whatever, and drink and talk like bayou men do, and crack dirty jokes, but Papa didn't mind because they were always respectful to me. To this day, I'll tell you, I'm a pretty good poker player. I can bluff with the best of them, and I'm a good fisherman, too. I can tie a lure, and I can fix an outboard with a rubber band, gum, and some spit. You got that?”

“Huntin', fishin', cardplayin',” I said. “Yes, ma'am!”

She elbowed me for my sarcasm and went on.

“So one summer Papa and I went up to the cabin for two months because he'd been working real hard and needed to get away for a while. By this time, understand, I'm thirteen, and already pretty well developed. Just about as busty as my sister Jolie, who was seventeen and in her last year at St. Jerome's Academy. You could say I divide my life into distinct categories, B. B. and A. B.—that is, before breasts, when I was a girl, and after, when I grew up pretty fast and did a few things maybe that should have waited for later.”

She paused here, said, “Wait a minute,” and set her cigarette on the lip of the ashtray on the night table and went out and turned the record over. It began to rain suddenly, as it will in South Louisiana, rain sweeping up from the direction of Algiers and across the low neighborhoods of the city, the drops beating lightly against the shutters. Before she got back into bed, Antoinette pulled the curtains wide and opened the window to the deluge, leaving the shutters closed. Damp air entered the room, and with it the smell of the river and mud and the fecund bayous of the delta. There was a slight chill on her body when she crawled back in beside me.

“Hold me,” she said.

I held her until she was warm, watching the cigarette over her shoulder on the nightstand smolder down to its filter and wink out. A few minutes later she rolled away from me, took a breath, and went on.

“So there was this younger guy that started showing up at Papa's poker parties, a kid compared to the rest of them, about twenty-five then, I guess, but he was one hell of a good poker player and my God! one of the most beautiful single human beings I had seen outside of Peter Frampton with his shirt open on the cover of
Frampton Comes Alive
, who I had a serious crush on back then. This poker-playing boy was the son of Claude Palmier, a Cajun tracker out of Mamou Papa used when he took friends from New Orleans on hunting trips. Dothan was his name. A weird name, some biblical thing, but he looked like a combination of Elvis and Richard Burton, and there I was, thirteen with these brand-new breasts and feeling sort of wild whenever he came into the room. Papa stopped letting me hang around in my nightgown that summer, because as he put it, ‘I was growing into too much of a lady.' But keep in mind this is the seventies. Instead of my coverall flannel nightgown, I wore jeans cut down to here and a midi-halter top thing, and my hair's parted down the middle like Laurie Partridge, and I'm hanging out all over. All in all, the nightgown would have been less revealing.

“So after a while I caught Dothan sneaking looks at me over his cards, but not so anyone else would notice. He was very smart about it. Picked his moments. I tried not to look back, but it was impossible. There he was with these black eyes staring like he knew things about me I didn't know myself. He probably didn't figure me for thirteen, but I don't think it would have mattered much to him anyway. Then, one night when they were playing pretty hard, Dothan sat out a hand to use the outhouse. He went out on the porch and into the yard, but he came back real quietly a half minute later and stood just the other side of the screen door. Something made me look up, and he smiled and beckoned and stepped back out of the light. I said something about being hot and went out on the porch and found him there smoking in the shadows. He threw the cigarette away and pushed me against the side of the house and started kissing me like that, and his hands were all over me, and his belt buckle
pressed into my bare stomach, and he was saying stuff in my ear I had never heard before. Finally I crooked my elbow around his neck and pushed up against him like I had been doing it all my life and kissed him back, and he probably would have done me right there against the side of the house except for the men playing cards inside.”

“Jesus,” I said, slightly shocked. “Were you scared?”

She paused for a moment. “No, I wasn't scared,” she said. “I knew exactly what he wanted and what I wanted to give him. I'm the youngest of five sisters, and you know how sisters are.”

“So when did it happen?”

“Why am I telling you all this?”

I shrugged. “Because I'm interested?”

“You're dangerous. Women lay in bed and they tell you things that they shouldn't tell you.…” Then, for a minute or so, it seemed Antoinette would stop, but she didn't.

“It happened two weeks later in the back of his pickup on some blankets,” she said. “He got me drunk on wine and I wanted to do it, so we did. Afterward I was scared finally, and I cried because I knew there was no going back. But he kissed me and told me he loved me and said he wanted me and would always want me because I was beautiful like the stars to him, and he swore he would marry me and take me away from Papa and we would live together in a big house in the bayou, and by God, he meant it. All of it. Dothan may be a hard-ass sometimes and a little bit of a smuggler and what not, but when he says a thing, he means it.

“So we made love all that summer, and I got to like it. I would sneak out of the cabin just before dawn, just after Papa went to bed, drunk from the card game, and Dothan and I would make love in his truck parked on one of the trails in the bayou. Or in the ruins of the old Spanish fort, sun coming up over the crumbling brick walls. When I went back to New Orleans in the fall, Dothan drove down in his truck for the weekends, and we'd get hotel rooms out in Arabi or someplace. I told my parents I was sleeping over at one friend or another's, and we'd go to redneck bars out there in the suburbs, where they're not too picky about IDs, and Dothan would tell the rednecks that I was his wife.…”

Antoinette was quiet for a while, smoking, her eyes dark and far away. “Do you want me to go on?” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“Of course, my parents found out, finally. I had built this web of lies, and it all came crashing down on me. Jolie told them, that bitch. She said she did it for my own good, but I think she did it because she was jealous. Because she wanted a boyfriend as beautiful as Dothan. When Papa found out it was Dothan, he was furious. He told me I could never see him again. Ever. There I was, his favorite daughter, a slut or something, and there was Dothan, ten years older and worse; a Cajun, for chrissakes, a bayou rat. Not good enough for his daughter, no way in hell. There's always been this thing between the Creoles and the Cajuns in Louisiana. You know that, right?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“The Creoles were aristocrats, descendants of Spanish and French nobility, all that crap. Plantation owners. And the poor backwardsass Cajuns, well—redneck peckerwoods. Possum-eating scum who ran down from Canada when the Brits got too tough on them.”

“Plantation owners?” I raised one skeptical eyebrow, a habit acquired from Molesworth. “Did your family really have a plantation once?”

“Hell, yes. Had a big old place down past English Turn on the river. Slaves, the whole nine yards.”

“What happened?”

“Burned to the ground during the Civil War, that's what happened, like everything else. We've still got a bit of land down there, all tangled over with kudzu and Spanish moss. Keep in mind this is Mama's family. Papa's family wasn't much different from Dothan's really. They were Creole, but poor Creole. Fishermen or something out on Grand Isle. Papa came up the hard way. Went to the army in World War II, went to engineering school on the GI Bill. Made a lot of money in the oil fields by inventing this drill bit thing, I don't know. The house on Prytania Street, all the dumb old pictures, and dusty old books, that's Mama's stuff. You ever see the house?”

I shook my head.

“You will,” she said, and she leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips and continued her story. “After he found out about Dothan, Papa wouldn't speak to me, not a word. For three weeks I stayed in my room. I wouldn't go to school. I hardly ate. I just cried and cried. It was terrible. Mama came in to talk to me, but I wouldn't talk to her. I wouldn't talk to anyone. I just cried because they were watching me all the time and I couldn't get to Dothan. Finally I managed to sneak a phone call to him from a pay phone, and he came down in his pickup truck and parked right out front and knocked on the door. I saw him through the window, but I stayed in my room. I could hear the yelling from downstairs and glass breaking. Dothan told Papa he wanted to marry me. Today I think how ridiculous this was, but then it seemed like something right out of
Romeo and Juliet.
I was barely fourteen, a freshman at St. Jerome's Academy. Shit! Of course, Papa said no. Papa said if he ever saw Dothan again, he'd get the police and have him locked in jail for statutory rape. Then he threw a half full bottle of Old Grand-Dad at something Dothan said, but Dothan ducked, and it crashed into Mama's china closet and broke a whole lot of her precious antique crockery.

“I watched him drive away, but I had stopped crying because I knew what I was going to do. A week later I decided to go back to school, and a few days after that Dothan was waiting for me with his truck. I was in my school uniform. I still remember it: dress blue blazer with the cross and crown on the pocket, white shirt and bow tie, blue plaid skirt, saddle shoes. I just put my books on the curb and got in the truck without a second thought. Jolie saw us drive away and ran after, screaming for us to stop, but I didn't look back. We drove down to the river near the grain elevators off the levee and made love right there in the cab. Then we drove off to Baton Rouge. Dothan had already rented an apartment there in Spanish Town, not far from LSU. That's why he called the bar Spanish Town, after the six months we spent there, living together like we were married.”

“Six months? What about your parents?”

“My poor parents were frantic. They called the police, they called the FBI; they called everyone. There was an APB out on Dothan. The
state troopers were looking for him all over. It was even in the papers and on TV. They called it a kidnapping, but Dothan wasn't afraid. We would live together for three years, he said. Then, when I was seventeen and old enough to consent, we would get married. He sold the truck, got some phony name and phony driver's license from one of his crooked friends, and got a job working in an electronics store, selling stereos. Dothan in an electronics store, crazy just to think about it.