82 Desire (12 page)

“My baby boy.”

“Okay, love. Love is a good thing, and that makes us happy. And money does—we already talked about that. Don’t look at me like that—I’m not going to pretend you can be just as happy poor as rich. They tell y’all that in church? Well, this is school, and we’re supposed to know things here. Think I’m not happier writing my poems at my golden desk, sittin’ on my ivory chair, wearing my silk and damask robes than at some formica kitchen table, wearing an old beat-up sweatsuit?”

And miraculously, a kid in the back of the class said, “No, you’re not—because when you’re writing your poems, you don’t care what else is going on. You don’t even care, ‘cause you’re happy already.”

Talba stared at the girl in utter astonishment. “Now, how on earth do you know that?”

“ ‘Cause I sing in a choir. I’m just as happy at choir practice as when we have on our robes and all the candles are lit, and you can smell incense, and everywhere you look in the church, everything’s real pretty and real… expensive.”

Talba stuck both thumbs up in the air. “Yes!” she hollered. “That’s it! Does anybody else know what she’s talking about?”

“I’ve got a question,” Darryl said. “Did you make up that poem just now—in class?”

“It was that raw, huh?”

“No, it just seemed appropriate.”

“Well, yeah. I guess I kind of did.”

A murmur went up. “You did? You did that right here, now?”

Talba bowed again. “
That
is why I am a Baroness.”

By now, she had them. Somehow, she wasn’t sure how, she’d turned them around—probably it wasn’t her, probably it was that little girl who sang in the choir, but she didn’t care, when she talked with Darryl afterward, when he walked her out, she felt the adrenaline glow she got from a reading.

“I did okay, didn’t I?”

He smiled at her, and not for the first time she noticed what perfect teeth he had. “You’re a natural-born teacher. If you ever want to come starve to death, maybe you could get a job like mine.”

“No, thanks. I already get to starve.”

“Listen.” He caught her eye. “This really meant a lot to them.”

“Oh, sure. They’ll think about it while they’re knocking over a gas station; or nodding out, maybe.”

“They’ll think about it,” he said, evidently not wanting to get into joking with her. When he shook her hand, he touched it with his left one. “Would you… have coffee with me later?”

She could see that he had asked the question on impulse and felt the power once again of her performance—she knew that she could affect people like that, make them want to know her—want to fuck her, maybe, the way a musician on stage affects his fans. And she liked it. The other thing was, she liked Darryl Boucree. There could be no question he was asking her for a date, and she already had Lamar.

She made a little face at him. “I guess so,” she said. “Or maybe a beer.”

And so, when school was out, after she’d raided Magazine Street for the sorts of things a Baroness in reduced circumstances ought to have, they had not one, but two beers, and she found that smile of his infectious and seductive.

“I was wondering,” he said. “How much
does
a Baroness make?”

She laughed. “Well, I didn’t want to mention they might have to get a day job to pursue their art.”

“Yeah. Let ’em think it’s all limos and limelight.”

“I know that’s my life.”

“Are you independently wealthy or something? I notice you were free for this little gig.”

“I have an extremely interesting little income supplement.”

“Legal?”

“Sometimes.”

They both laughed.

“Fun?”

“Really fun.”

“Can’t be robbing banks. That’s never legal. Now let me think—sometimes legal…You’re a lawyer.”

“Good guess. But no.”

“Doctor.”

“How’s that illegal?”

“Prescriptions.”

“Uh-uh. You’d never guess in a million years.”

“Mayor.”

“Nope.”

“Crooked cop.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Private detective.”

“What?” Talba had been in mid-pull on her beer. She actually choked—the game had gone too far.

He hit her on the back. “I was right? You’re a private dick? Or do they still say that?”

“Depends on the company. Dickhead’s a little more common.”

“Really? You mean I got it? How’d you get into, uh, dicking?”

“You’ve got the wrong idea. I don’t dick, I merely dick around. But how about you? Bet you’ve got a life outside the classroom.”

“Well, matter of fact. You ever heard of the Boucree Brothers? I play a little music with them now and then.”

She started to say she was impressed (which she was), but he kept talking: “Also, I do a little mixology a few times a week.”

“Let me get this straight—schoolteacher, musician, and bartender? You’re a regular Renaissance man.”

He was smiling, showing those gorgeous teeth. She relaxed a little. She had successfully changed the subject, but she wondered. Had he been pumping her? And why on earth would he do a thing like that?

But he was too damned attractive to dwell on it for long. She liked the way he bantered, something Lamar wouldn’t do in a thousand years, and the way he really cared about his students, and the way he smiled and touched her hand now and then to make a point.

Still, when she left, when it was either order another beer—which both knew would mean trouble—or get up and go, she had a funny feeling she’d said too much.

Twelve

IT’S ALMOST LIKE before
, Russell thought.
Just me and the boat.

This time, of course, I am free to leave the boat. But if I leave it, where would I go?

And I have all my senses, not just hearing. Not only can I see, I am free to see any damn thing I want. The question is, what do I want to see?

It was odd. He had left home to be free and never had he felt so confined, save that one time when he’d been trapped—the time, ironically, that had led to this time.

I’m lonesome,
he thought.
That’s what’s wrong with me. And I happen to be a very eligible bachelor.

If he went out and had a drink and happened to encounter female companionship, how could that hurt? He wasn’t married. Well, actually he hadn’t quite thought that out yet. He had simply left. He hadn’t thought about whether he was now dead or merely missing for a while. Anyway, he was separated. That called for a babe.

He’d seen a place on the Intracoastal Waterway where there were several extremely popular restaurants all bunched up together. He could just take the sloop there, tie it up, and go get some strange Florida drink like a Fuzzy Navel. He set sail, as they said in the old days.

The establishment with the largest dock bore the unpromising name of Bootlegger, and, something he’d never noticed, most of the boats there were cigarettes—long, skinny, loud, megapower racing vessels absolutely unsuitable for leisurely jaunts on the ICW unless you were a drug dealer who thought they were phat.

Still, he’d come here and he was going to have his damn drink.

Immediately, he classified it: a T-shirt—not a polo shirt—kind of place. (He himself wore neither, having opted for a slightly fancier blue chambray number—the better, he thought, to entice babes.) Nonetheless, polo shirts were the shirts of sailors, from hired crew on up. These people weren’t sailors. From the looks of things, they were football fans—there were at least a dozen TVs in the place, maybe as many as eighteen. And they were undoubtedly beer-drinkers—he should probably forget the Fuzzy Navel.

Dean Woolverton didn’t fit in too badly. He was older than most, though not all by any means. There were a few lined, leathery faces scarfing beer above the T-shirts, many fringed by beards. Aha, he thought—a beard would be a very good thing instead of the stupid blond hair. Why hadn’t he thought of that in the first place? It was much more Russell—more like a sea captain than some asshole beach bum. He made a mental note to reverse his new persona as soon as it seemed safe.

No sooner had he gotten settled—ordered a beer, sipped it, begun a serious TV count—than a woman started talking to him. A young woman, good-looking, with dark hair and white skin—Cuban, maybe. She wore some kind of white shirt with no sleeves—not exactly a tank top, maybe just a sleeveless T-shirt tucked into a pair of very brief blue shorts. As for the T-shirt, it was tighter than a corset, intended to show off her assets, which were worth showing.

He felt old and somewhat dowdy in his crisp shirt and pants.

“Nice boat,” she said.

He said, “Uh… thanks,” hesitating because he couldn’t figure out how she knew which boat was his. He realized she must have watched him come in. How about that?

She had watched him, and now she was talking to him. This had promise. He said, “Do you sail?”

She turned to her margarita, rather shamefacedly, he thought. “No. I never learned how.”

They swapped a few more sentences, during which he got a chance to try out his ex-lawyer routine on her, which at least didn’t meet with huge guffaws, and he learned that she had some low-level job at an insurance company. He was searching around for a topic of mutual interest when, out of the blue, another woman joined her, probably fresh from the ladies’ room. “Ready?” she said.

“Ready,” said Russell’s babe, and they departed.

So much,
Russell thought,
for babes.

He looked around and found he could honestly say he didn’t find a single woman in the whole place attractive. They were too young, too blond, too busty, too scantily clad, too Florida.

Old fart,
he thought.
You sound like your father.

And the thought stabbed him like a needle in the neck. Everything about it hit him at once: that he could be like his father in any respect; that he could even
have
a father so arrogant, so judgmental, so uncaring. That his father was dead.

The Fortiers had done well in New Orleans. Because of his father, Russell’s father had had no trouble getting a job with a shipping line that could have taken him as far as he wanted to go. Yet, from the first, at age twenty-six, he had insisted on trying to tell his father’s friend, the president, how to run the company. When his suggestions weren’t taken, he leaned more heavily on the president, criticizing him personally. Eventually, he was let go, on grounds of “personality conflict.”

Russell knew all this from his father, told just about like that, but heavy with judgment—against the company (small-thinking and poorly organized), against his father’s friend (stubborn, old-fashioned, closed-minded, and stupid), even against the city (corrupt and backward).

The miracle was, they’d actually kept him for nineteen years before dumping him. He’d found other jobs and eventually retired to North Carolina. He’d even found a second wife after Russell’s mother died, though why anyone would want the old goat was unclear to his son.

The self-appointed guardian of righteousness in every respect, Thomas Fortier delighted in getting in the fast lane and driving the speed limit, just to make the other drivers obey the law. When Russell was a child, it had embarrassed him so thoroughly his shirt was usually soaked with sweat by the time they got where they were going. In retrospect, embarrassment seemed less appropriate than fear; it was a wonder his father hadn’t been killed by some outraged citizen.

Now that Russell was a grown man, that story should be amusing. He was aware that it should be amusing. He told it to friends and they laughed. Bebe had laughed. Russell never did. Instead, he always found himself shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

Bebe had said, “Why can’t you get over it?”

“When you live with something like that,” he replied, “it’s just not a laugh riot.”

“So, I guess little Russell’s report card was never good enough? If you’re not valedictorian, it’s the same as not graduating? That sort of thing?”

“You can’t even imagine.”

Not a single thing Russell had ever done had pleased his father, so far as he could tell. And yet his father had given him a check for $300,000 on his deathbed. He didn’t approve of probate—it was that simple. The only good thing he’d ever done for Russell, he’d done—as he’d done most things—to show the world how wrong it was.

(Though his father wouldn’t view it that way—he would probably say putting Russell through Harvard was a good thing, a paternal thing. But Russell had wanted to go to Tulane.)

Old Thomas had actually sent Russell the check the same day he entered the hospital. If she’d known about it, Bebe might have said it was a guilt thing, to get Russell to go to his bedside, but Russell didn’t think so. Thomas had his second wife and wasn’t much on mushy family stuff anyway. Besides, guilt wasn’t his thing.

Being right was; control was. His wife had also been left a liquid sum, with explicit instructions as to how Thomas wanted to be buried, down to how the headstone should read.

When Russell got the check, this thing with Ray Boudreaux and the Skinners was just starting to break. Ray was just beginning to contact them, trying to get something going, some kind of negotiation. The others were all for ignoring him, but Russell had a feeling things were about to escalate.

A plan formed in the back of his head. Even then, he was thinking about a run for freedom. He deposited the check in a bank he and Bebe didn’t use, waited for it to clear, and then withdrew the money in the form of a cashier’s check. Bebe never even knew about it.

He turned that into cash once he got to Fort Lauderdale and bought the boat with a big fat chunk of it.

The check thing, so like his father, did make him smile.

He was in a mood to smile. The Cuban girl’s drink had looked so festive he’d switched to margaritas after his beer, and by now he’d had two.

I wonder how Mother stood him, he thought, and, as always, the memory of his mother made him feel warm and loved. She was as generous, as kind, as sympathetic and understanding as his father was arrogant and hard-nosed, righteous and punishing.

He was starting to go all mushy when another woman talked to him, this one about thirty-five, also dressed like live bait, and for some reason wearing a baseball cap.

Her face was shiny with the heat. She wore pearl stud earrings with her baseball cap and tube top, and she was on the short, chunky side. But pretty.

Undeniably pretty. He supposed they didn’t come out to this sort of bar unless they were.

For some reason, she was asking him where he went to college. “Harvard,” he said, and that seemed to stop her cold.

Finally, she said, “What was it like?”

“You’re asking the wrong person.” He gave her what he hoped wasn’t too paternal a smile. “I hated its guts. My dad wanted me to go, so I did. Barely scraped through, but did graduate, and then applied myself rather assiduously to becoming a ne’er-do-well.”

“Is that what you are now?”

“I’m working on it.”

“You’re working on getting drunk.”

He lifted his glass to her. “I’m Dean Woolverton.”

She leaned back, eyes wide, in a kind of self-conscious double take. “That’s really your name?”

It was the last reaction he expected. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“It’s the weirdest thing. Mine’s Dina Wolf.”

“Omigod. We’re the same person.” He heard himself speaking and felt profoundly depressed. Why in hell had he left Bebe? Maybe she was cheating on him, but at least he didn’t have to have inane conversations with her.

In fact
, he thought,
I don’t have to have inane conversations with anybody. I could leave right now and I think I will.

But Dina Wolf had sat down. “When’s your birthday?”

Oh, well. Might as well get with the program. “I’m a Sagittarius,” he said, though he didn’t really have a clue what he was.

“Good. I was born in the spring, so we can’t be the same person. That means I can buy you a drink without seeming selfish.”

“I thought the man bought the drinks.”

She pointed to their respective glasses. “You’re empty. I’m full.” She summoned the bartender. “Now. On with your life story.”

“You’re quite the take-charge lady.”

“I used to train dogs. So you hated your father.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“People would kill to go to Harvard. You decided not to like it because your dad made you go there.”

“Ah. And where did you go?”

“Florida State.”

Once again he raised his glass, dimly aware that it was a drunk’s gesture. “Well, you’re a smart cookie.”

“Did you like your mother?”

He put the glass down and felt a dopey smile spread across his face. “My mother was an angel.”

“Oh, really? Then you’d probably make a good husband.”

“I didn’t.”

She pursed her mouth. “I see. What were your wife’s complaints?”

“She didn’t complain exactly. She just found someone else.”

“And now you’re trying to do the same.”

There was something unnervingly straightforward about the woman—he would have preferred a softer approach. “What about you?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting for my husband—see that big guy over there?”

Russell glanced over his shoulder, and Dina Wolf laughed.

“I’m kidding, I’m a graphic designer, unmarried. Talking to a cute guy, just for fun. No strings, no obligations, just talk.”

Actually, he didn’t much care at that point who or what she was. In fact, he was extremely confused by her. He’d never met a woman in a baseball cap who talked like this. He said, “You’re damn right, Dina Wolf. I didn’t like my father much at all. I did a lot of things he wanted me to do—”

“Trying to get his approval.”

“You a shrink or a graphic designer? I was going to say, I didn’t like the old coot, but he gave me a lot. In a way, I guess I owe him big-time. Everything I became I owe to my father.”

“Except,” she said, “what you are now.”

“Why would you say that?”

She shrugged. “Just being provocative.”

But nothing could have been more true. He hadn’t wanted to go to Harvard, would have been perfectly happy at Tulane. Then maybe law school and an ordinary life in Uptown New Orleans. But once having gone to Harvard, he didn’t know what he wanted. He couldn’t bring himself to leave New Orleans, yet he couldn’t seem to fit in either. He worked for a bank for a while, but it was so deadly boring he finally got fired for taking too many mental health days.

Whereupon his dad about popped a gasket. He was perfectly clear about it, too—Russell’s behavior made him look bad.

And so Russell went to work in the oil patch. Being a roustabout suited him. He was young, he was arrogant, and after a couple of months, he looked good with his shirt off. His mom thought the sun rose and set on him, and his dad was pissed as hell. All was right with the world.

Until an accident on the oil rig. He was covered by the company’s insurance, money wasn’t the problem. It was far more complicated than that—he lost partial use of his leg. Thus he needed someone to drive him to physical therapy, someone to help him with his exercises, someone to cook his meals, someone to shop for him, and someone to do his laundry. And he had such a person. A person temperamentally suited to all these chores, who loved him deeply and wanted more than anything else to take care of him. His mother. He moved back home for a while, which gave his father power over him. Or at least he saw it that way. Russell could hear him now: “As long as you’re my son, living under my roof, you’ll abide by my rules. When you’re well, you’ll start acting like a man and get a real job.”