Madeleine's Ghost (17 page)

For a moment I hesitated. Best come back later, I thought, when Antoinette had things sorted out. But I felt ashamed of my cowardice. I took a deep breath and went up the narrow stairs with the heavy, resigned step of a condemned man mounting the scaffold. From the landing I could hear the muffled sound of an argument. I let myself in with the key Antoinette had given me and put my books on the couch. They were in the bedroom. I paused a minute and listened. When I had heard enough, I called out to her.

Silence.

Finally Dothan said, “Who the fuck is that?”

“Oh, God,” Antoinette said.

Then, in a moment like the eye of the hurricane, Antoinette emerged in her red robe, and I saw she was naked underneath.

“Ned,” she said. She was puffy-faced from crying, and her eyes held a strained whiteness. She seemed surprised, though I often dropped by in the afternoons on my way home. “This is not a good time.”

“What's going on in there?” I said quietly.

“Nothing, O.K.?” and she began to push me back toward the door.

But I looked down at the robe and her bare feet, and I said, “Have you been making love to him?”

From the bedroom came the hurried metallic clinking of a belt buckle and the sound of boots on hardwood. In a moment Dothan appeared in the doorway, his shirt in one hand. He was as brown and muscular as an Indian. A whitish scar crossed his chest with a diagonal
line, and a tattoo of the Greek letter
omega
, showed red on his shoulder. His eyes were black. He pointed at me with one long, sinewy arm.

“Who the fuck is that?” he snapped. “Get that motherfucker the fuck out of here.”

“Just a friend.” Antoinette turned to him, an admirable calm in her voice. “He came to drop off some notes. I told you I was thinking about going back to school.… Thanks, Ned,” she said to me, and again tried to back me toward the door, but I stepped out of the way.

“Dothan,” I said, “my name is Ned Conti. We need to talk.”

“Wait a minute, I remember
YOU
now, motherfucker.” He advanced, menacing. “You're that fat shit's roommate.”

“Yeah, and Antoinette told me all about you,” I said.

“Yeah?” He stepped up till he was quite close. His underarms stank, and there was something else, the faint ammonia smell of lovemaking. He had let his sideburns grow, and now they reached down like two hairy hands on either side of his jaw. I choked down a quick burst of panic. There was no way out of this.

“So what did she say?” Dothan breathed his foul breath into my face. I could almost see his muscles tense.

“She said it was over between the two of you,” I said. “She said she was crazy about me.” This was a lie. Antoinette had never said anything of the kind, never made so much as a single promise.

Dothan swung toward her. “Is this true?” he hissed.

Antoinette lowered her eyes and said nothing. Light the color of stone came through the shutters in dull slashes. In the apartment next door a shower went on, and there was the murmur of a television.

“Is this true?” Dothan repeated. “Was there anything between you and this runty little motherfucker?”

She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it and shook her head.

“She's lying,” I said. I looked at her, but she would not meet my eyes. “I'll put it so you can understand. We've been fucking for the last four months. Since before you went to buy drugs in Colombia.”

I was still looking at Antoinette when the blow came, it seemed out of nowhere, an explosion in my left eye. I went crashing back over the
couch, blind, and Dothan was on top of me, quick as a monkey, flailing with his fists. I took it in the jaw and in the eye again. I don't remember much except for the hiss of Dothan's curses in my ear and the raw stink of him. It was a smell that clung to me for days. Then I heard Antoinette's voice screaming his name, and she came up behind, pulling at him to stop, her robe open, her breasts hanging down, the nipples red and swollen as the teats of a dog. He swung back and hit her across the face with a quick backhand and she fell away from him with a cry. But in another moment, I'm not sure how, he was off of me and the two of them were twisted together, weeping, in a heap on the floor, Dothan kissing her hair, her face.

“I'm sorry, baby,” he sobbed. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I ain't never hit you before. I didn't mean to hurt you. I'm a fucking asshole. I'm an asshole.” Then he twisted away from her and slammed his fist into the tough old oak of the floor, once and again and again until I heard a sickening cracking which was the cracking of bone.

“Don't, Dothan! Stop it, please! Please!” He stopped, his face contorted in pain, and she took his broken hand and put it between her breasts and leaned over it and wept. He pulled her to him with his other hand, and they collapsed like that, weeping and petting each other on the floor.

I saw all this as a vague blur out of one good eye as I staggered up, my face bloody, my lip broken, the taste of blood in my mouth. Somehow, I gathered my books from the couch and stepped around them writhing there in private ecstasy and stumbled down the narrow stairs. Out in the faubourg the wind was cold and the pain in my eye was terrible, but it did not hurt enough to make me realize what a fool I'd been all along.

What a fool.

A
WEEK LATER
the third and final bunch of roses was delivered to my home on Mystery Street. Red this time, symbolic of blood and suffering. The delivery boy waited sympathetically as I fished in my wallet for a tip.

“Man,” he said, “who hit you over the face with a board?”

“Ran into a door,” I said.

“Yeah, mighty big door.”

“You could say that.”

“I been here before, right? You the only people get flowers in this neighborhood.”

“Yes,” I said, and I gave him three dollars.

“Good luck, man,” he said, and got back into the Marche Florist van and drove out of my life.

“I can't tell you how very sorry I am about everything,” the card said. “I would like to see you if that's O.K.,” and it named a neutral, touristy meeting place, Café du Monde in the old French Market on Jackson Square and a time later that afternoon.

AN UNFORGIVING
wind swept up from the river, but, hunched in our coats, we sat outside behind one of the thick beige columns. The waiter brought two café au laits and a paper plate of beignets covered with powdered sugar and went back inside, shivering.

My eye had been swollen shut for three days and was just opening up again. The skin around the eye was an amazing shade of purple, and my eyebrow still sported a lump the size of a quail egg.

Antoinette wore a short coat of faux leopard skin, long gloves of red kid leather, and a fancy scarf wrapped around her head. Cat-eye dark glasses hid her expression. She looked like an Italian starlet going incognito. She drank some of the coffee and put her hands in her pocket.

“Wow,” she said. “Your eye.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not too much anymore.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“About what?”

“About your eye.” She didn't sound too sorry, really. Pigeons perched on the equestrian statue of General Jackson in the park; tourists in rain slickers loitered in the arcade of the Cabildo. On the steps of the St. Louis Cathedral, two priests stood deep in discussion—arguing theological matters, one would like to think. From the river came the long, hollow whistle of a tanker docking at Algiers.

Antoinette looked away. “You need to know a few things,” she said. “First, I love Dothan.”

“But you're tired of him, you told me so yourself. You wanted to end it, to get away.” I must have sounded a little desperate.

She held up her hand to stop me. “Please,” she said. “He needs me. He's always needed me. We're probably going to get married. At least we're talking about it. He's just got to clean up his act a little bit. You were a lot of fun. But it's only been three months—”

“Four.”

“Whatever. Dothan and I have been together ten years. You can't throw that sort of thing away without trying to work it out first.” There was something missing in her voice, a certain depth that had been missing all along. She started to say something else, but I stood suddenly, and my chair fell over and clattered on the brick pavement.

“Enough,” I said.

She looked up at me. I couldn't see her eyes through the dark glasses.

“Take off your glasses,” I said.

She took them off. Her eyes were steely blue today, resolved.

“O.K.,” I said. “Have a nice life.”

Then, trying not to feel too ridiculous, I turned and walked down the square, past the pigeons and the tourists, and the ornate railings of
the Pontalba Apartments, built by the philanthropic baroness in 1849. Antoinette called my name once, I think, but it is to my credit that I did not look back.

I
HAVE ALWAYS
been best at endings. I am an expert in tying up my affairs and disappearing into the night. The roots that hold me anywhere are never strong enough. I have a few acquaintances, fewer friends, a stick or two of furniture, a suitcase of clothes, eight boxes of books. Nothing indispensable, nothing real. Is one moment of bliss worth a lifetime? the poet asks. All the years since then I have made do with those few months in New Orleans with Antoinette. Every happy moment pored over, tattered and torn now at the creases like a letter from an old lover
YOU
will never see again. The pages are yellow, the ink faded to a whisper. Only the signature remains in a fluid, half-remembered hand.

Three days after our last meeting at Café du Monde, I was ready to go. The MGA packed, bills paid or discarded. I took a leave of absence from the history program at Loyola, citing a fictitious death in the family. I sold my books to Ribari's, the used-book place on Carondolet, and I gave my mattress to Molesworth. On the last afternoon he and I went in the Land Rover for one last drink at Saladin's, a little run-down place on Gentilly Boulevard.

We sat at the dusty table near the window and drank two Dixies apiece in gloomy silence and stared out at the traffic. Spring was on its way. The buds on the magnolia trees along the neutral ground looked like little white buttons from this distance. “I still think you're making a mistake, Coonass,” Molesworth said. “Running out of town just because Dothan beat the shit out of you. Hell, if all the people that old boy beat the shit out of decided to leave town, there'd be a traffic jam on the Pontchartrain Expressway.”

“Don't worry, Molesworth,” I said. “I'm paid up through the end of the month. That should give you enough time to find another sucker.”

“That's not it.” He frowned and went on in a serious manner unusual for him. “Letting a woman chase you out of town is bad for your soul. So what if you move somewhere else? She'll always be there at the back of your mind, every time you look in the mirror, like a ghost. Why do you think I left Mamou, went to school? Hell, did you figure me for the academic type?” He turned his big face toward me, and I saw for the first time a deep sadness in his eyes.

“Molesworth,” I said, shocked. “You?”

He nodded. “Takes people by surprise, don't it? Old Molesworth's a human being.”

“Who was she?”

“Makes no difference now,” Molesworth said in a tired voice. “It's over now. She's married. Three kids. Shit. Every time I go home it tears my heart out. If I had stayed, I might have been able to face it down, to reclaim my own town. Instead I ran. Big mistake.”

“Too late, Molesworth,” I said. “These streets are like poison to me. The green skies, the river. I can't stay another day.”

“Where will you go?”

“D.C., my mom's for a while. After that wherever my credits will transfer. I'll finish the degree, do my thesis, then”—I shrugged—“life will engulf me. One city or the next, it doesn't matter. Maybe New York. New York is a good place for exiles.”

“You're a morbid bastard, you know that?”

We finished our beers in silence, and he drove me back to the peeling pink house on Mystery Street and watched from the porch as I put a few last things into the MGA. When I was done, I stepped up and shook his hand.

“This is it, Lyle,” I said. “God bless you, I guess.”

“You, too, Coonass.”

Then I got into the car and drove off, down Mystery to Esplanade and over to the expressway. Soon, within fifteen minutes, I had left the city behind, racing along the dark pavement, whine of the MGA in my
ears, the choppy waters of Lake Pontchartrain away to my left, small planes descending toward the airport out of the gloom, and ahead now through the dirty windshield, only the gray prospect of northern cities.

B
UT THE
past is the past, and despite our best intentions, life goes on.

Two and a half years later, in another spring, during exam week at Georgetown, I called Antoinette for no reason, on a whim. We talked for hours that night, not as lovers but as old friends. I am genuinely interested in her life, she in mine. We have stayed in touch sporadically since then, with the occasional call and the less than occasional postcard or letter. I finished the course work for my Ph.D. at Georgetown, then moved to New York for a paid research assistantship at the New-York Historical Society, which ended three years ago. Molesworth found me in Brooklyn when obscure events forced him to leave the state of Louisiana, and after an interval of six years he once again became my roommate.

Antoinette never finished college. She dropped out of Dominican to open up a vintage clothing boutique called Antoinette's Vintage Armoire, which is on Treme on the fringes of the Quarter. It is a popular place, and she does a good business, especially around Carnival time. I have even seen her face-to-face a few times over the years. She comes up to New York now and then to shop for clothes for her store. On her visits we go to Domsey's, the used-clothing warehouse in Williamsburg, and I help her pack the boxes of mold-smelling clothes to ship back South, where they will be cleaned and repaired and sold for ten times what she paid. Then we go to dinner and stay out drinking till all hours in East Village bars. She looks beautiful still, though I am careful to keep my hands to myself. We are in our thirties now, and wiser. The years, if anything, have added an attractive patina of world-weariness that she wears well, like one of the 1940s-era dresses she sells in her store.