Acts of God (8 page)

“Watching television and reading legal papers she has spread out all over your damask bedspread.”

“She likes lawsuits. She and Elizabeth have accused me of everything in the book, battery, infidelity, drug use. None of it is true and my lawyer gets it thrown out of court but it's cost me a lot of money. I can't believe she's here. I can't believe I have to nurse Janet.”

“Ill-mannered people always manage to keep attention on themselves,” I said. “They are like characters in a Pinter play. The meaner they are the more we think about them. I did a psychology workshop last year on people like that. It's a form of narcissism but even more destructive. Fascinating really. Well, if we can't kick her out I guess we just study her. If she goes to sleep we can steal her papers and read them.”

“What's the daughter like? Your soon-to-be ex-wife.”

“Like the mother only prettier. It was the great mistake of my life but I survived it and I got away.”

“How did you get involved with them?”

“A blind date. Then she thought she was pregnant so I married her. I almost never do women. It had been a strange night in many ways.

“Then Mother Janet came from England and moved in with us because her house in London had been condemned.”

Janet came into the living room as he was finishing this speech. “What is there to eat?” she said and went immediately into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door and stood looking in.

“Don't leave the door open long, Mother Janet,” Charles said. “We may lose electricity when the storm hits.”

She took out cheese and bread and milk and started making herself a sandwich without asking if anyone else wanted anything. She put it on a plate and walked back into the bedroom.

BY TEN THAT
night the storm had started to be fierce outside the windows. At midnight the electricity went off. At two o'clock Charles and Dean and I gave up trying to sleep and sat in the living room listening to the battery-operated radio.

Dean has a scientific mind. He was the first one to say he thought the city would flood. “Even if it lands to the east the tidal surge will come here,” he kept saying.

“We're safe here,” Charles kept insisting. “That's the tallest levee on the Mississippi River. That levee will hold. That levee is a hundred feet deep.”

By four a.m. the wind was howling like a band of vampires.

“Coming for to carry me home,” Charles kept saying for a joke but no one was laughing when he said it. Mother Janet got up from her bed and came into the living room and took up a corner of the sofa for a while.

“Are you all right?” I asked her several times but she didn't answer.

“Are you all right?” Charles added. Still no word from inside the mind of Mother Janet.

Dean got up and made a plate of crackers and grapes and cheese and handed it to her and she said “thank you” to him, which made us all feel better somehow.

When she finished the plate of food she got up and went back to her bedroom. “Call me when it's over,” she said, and went back to reading her legal papers by the light of the only working flashlight that we had.

By six a.m. we decided the worst was over. The eye of the storm had turned east and hit the Mississippi coast at Bay Saint Louis. We thought New Orleans had dodged a bullet.

IN THE EARLY
morning as soon as there was light we went out into Jackson Square to look at the damage. A few neighborhood people were wandering around the square. Television cameramen were taking photographs of a statue of Jesus that had survived trees falling all around it. A wrought-iron fence was lying on its side beneath a live oak and signs were blown away and slate tiles were missing from historical roofs, but it didn't seem all that bad. The strangest thing was the smell, which I can only describe as unhealthy, not the clear, cool smell right before dawn you usually get for an hour in tropical cities after a rain but a smell of danger somehow, as though the storm hadn't really passed.

The other thing was how empty everything seemed, how quiet and deprived almost of oxygen.

Charles and I climbed the levee on the concrete steps behind the Café du Monde and that's when he told me the Philip Larkin poem about only one ship is seeking us.

“Too dark for me this early in the morning” was all I said. It was too late for romance to blossom any further between Charles and me. I was falling back in love with my old friend, Dean. He had beaten Charles at chess, three games out of three, and his scientific mind had called the hurricane correctly all night long and now he was the one who was saying the city was going to flood from the lakeside. He didn't climb the levee with us because he was talking to a television crew from CNN and had met a man who told him the levees on the lake were already spilling water into an industrial canal and it was going to be hell to pay before the day was over.

Charles and I came down off the levee and Charles gave the television crew a sound bite about how long his family had lived in the Cabildo and then the three of us went back to the apartment and had cereal and cold bread and then Dean called the Tulane Medical Center and asked them if they needed help. At noon we all went over there and presented our credentials and went to work. Charles went with us because anything was better than staying in the Cabildo with Janet, who was eating everything in the house and letting all the refrigeration out of the refrigerator no matter how many times we asked her not to do it.

“Leave her to heaven,” Charles said and went with us to the Tulane Medical Center to lend a hand.

Here is what we found when we got there. A major teaching hospital with no electricity or water, generators failing, water rising in the street outside its door, a staff who had been up all night, and a team of doctors and nurses who should receive medals of honor. We put on scrubs and went to work.

“Is this still going to count as vacation when we get back?” I kept asking.

“Probably,” Dean said. “Don't talk, David. Just help me move these beds. We have to get these patients to higher floors so we can medevac them when they bring the helicopters.”

Except, as everyone knows, the helicopters didn't come for two more days and when they came there weren't enough of them and the hospital next door had to send their patients to Tulane on rowboats including people who were dying and women with babies only hours old and so many other things I could not tell it all if I wrote all night. I'll say this for Charles. He dug in and did the work. He carried forty people up six flights of stairs in the dark. He slept on the roof when he slept and he got eaten alive by mosquitoes which is the main reason we broke into the Walgreen's on our way back to the Cabildo later the second night. We wanted to get a change of clothes and some food and we wanted Cortisone cream for the bites. We were in Charles's pirogue which a man who works for his family had brought to the hospital for us to use for patients. A pirogue is a flat-bottomed boat used for duck hunting in the bayous. We paddled the pirogue to dry land and then pulled it up on a sidewalk and looked around for a place to store it until we got back from the apartment. It was night but there was a moon and we had one flashlight we had borrowed from the hospital.

There it was before us. A drugstore, an almost new Walgreen's that had opened in the French Quarter a year before. “I didn't know there was a drugstore so near,” Charles said. “I say we go in and get supplies. I say we replenish the hospital's supplies. I say we get me some insect repellant and cortisone cream.”

“I say yes,” Dean answered and before I could voice a vote Charles and Dean had dragged the pirogue across the dry street and were battering the Walgreens windows with the paddles. When that didn't break a window they grabbed the pirogue and turned the sharp end toward the window and rammed it through. We went inside and headed straight for the drugs. Dean used to run the pharmacy at the hospital and we knew what to get and where to get it. I went to the hardware section and brought back some tools.

An hour later we were headed back to the hospital wearing new clothes and carrying a boatload of sterile needles, tetanus vaccine, antibiotics, pain killers, muscle relaxants, antihistamines, sterile bandages, first-aid kits, and two ice chests full of ice, plus a case of bottled water. Dean and I were paddling, Charles was sitting in the prow putting flashlight batteries into flashlights and guarding the drugs so they didn't get wet.

Needless to say we were greeted as heroes by the staff at the Tulane Medical Center and sent back for more. We made two more trips before we were forced to desist by the presence of several policemen and about forty men and women helping themselves to the rest of the supplies in the store.

Dean's cousin, who is dean of the University of Nevada School of Law, says there is no way we can be prosecuted even if the police figure out we're the ones who broke the windows. He said he will represent us himself if they try.

Other things we took include reading glasses for workers who were struggling to read patients' charts while we carried them to the roof, boxes of diapers and formula for children, and several boxes of Hershey bars with almonds.

During the emergency I lost ten pounds, Dean lost seven pounds, and Charles is so elated by his service to mankind that he is thinking about going back to practicing law. “Think of the lawsuits,” he said. “It will take twenty years to begin to settle with the insurance companies. I'll represent both sides. Maybe I'll become a judge.”

IT'S THE SIXTEENTH
of September and Dean and I are back in Los Angeles. Momma Janet messed up everything in Charles's apartment but she is gone now. Her daughter, Elizabeth, came in a van from Baton Rouge and took her away right before Dean and I left.

I asked Dean to marry me on the flight home but he said it was too much trouble and we could just go on living together if I didn't mind.

“We have wills and living wills and we live in Los Angeles,” he said. “We do not need a marriage ceremony out of some ancient old religious book to make our friendship safe or sacred.” He reached over and gave my arm a long, smooth, loving touch and then he put his first-class airline seat (we'd been bumped up by a gay American Airlines steward we'd met at a party in Sausalito last year) back as far as it would go and went immediately to sleep. For an insomniac he can sleep in the daytime more soundly than any human being I've ever seen in my life. His mother got his days and nights mixed up when he used to stay backstage while she was in Little Theatre plays in San Francisco.

What did I learn from my trip to New Orleans? Nothing I didn't already know except that we people are more powerful and quick on our feet than we know and can dig in and get it done if we have to. Also, everyone in the United States has too much stuff. We could survive these disasters a lot better if we all went minimalist. So there's no point in thinking about that 1950s walnut-and-blue velvet chair in the back of that red 2006 GMC Envoy. Leave that to the insurance adjustors. I'm back in California where all I have to do is wait for an earthquake and get on the internet and tell hurricane stories to our friends.

We saw some strange and wonderful things. We saw helicopter rescues and met television crews and watched Mother Janet ruin Charles's damask bedspread while plotting her daughter's divorce action to steal his property. Some people are heroes and some plot, some lie and cheat and steal, and some carry morbidly obese patients up six flights of stairs so they can be medevaced to hospitals and kept alive to eat another day.

The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace . . .

I
t was April nineteenth, the second day of our journey to Italy. There were three of us, old friends come together to spend two weeks in a villa in Tuscany. Cynthia and Mary Jane were more excited about all this than I was as they had traveled less and were less weary of the process. Stuck all day in Heathrow Airport in the middle of a terrorist scare had proven who was right about that, but, strangely enough, it was me who kept on being cheerful and hopeful. Cynthia, whose wealthy husband had paid for the villa and the first-class British Airways tickets, was the first to become despondent. She had left two small children with a nanny to have this escape and there we were, in the midst of a bomb scare and a terrorist threat.

Nothing's ever lost on a writer, I told myself although I'm not sure I can call myself a writer. I make documentary films for the Public Broadcasting Services. I write the scripts, not that what I write ends up being what the narrators end up saying. By the time the language police and the lawyers get finished with a script, there's not much left. Anyway, nothing's ever lost on me, I told myself. I'll use this someday, whereas three women going to Tuscany to rebond has been done ad nauseam in recent years, which is probably where Cynthia and Mary Jane got the idea to begin with.

The beginning of the trip had been perfect, a private jet to Atlanta, then a luxurious journey across the Atlantic with a British Airways hostess to steer us through customs and into the first-class lounge at Heathrow. We got in at nine a.m. Our flight to Pisa was scheduled to leave at eleven-thirty.

We stowed our carry-on luggage with an attendant in the lounge, then wandered out into the shopping mall to get some exercise. I tried to buy a bright green leather handbag but Mary Jane wouldn't let me. “Italy is the World Series of leather shopping,” she said. “Don't buy anything here.”

“You can buy it on the way home if you don't find something better,” Cynthia said. “We'll be here four hours on our way home.”

“I've been with you one day and you're taking me over,” I said. “It's because you have children and I don't have any. Your maternal instincts are sharp and honed. I'm going to be mothered. That's clear.”

“We're sorry,” they said together, turning to me. It was exactly like the old days at the Tri-Delt house at Vanderbilt. I was the one who needed roping in, Cynthia was the conciliator, and Mary Jane was the president of everything and arbiter of taste and manners.

“I want to buy that bag,” I insisted. “I might not have time to look for one in Tuscany. I'm going to Italy to look at art, for God's sake, not to shop.”

“Let her buy it,” Cynthia said.

“It costs a hundred pounds,” Mary Jane said. “That's a hundred and fifty-five dollars.”

“Now I don't even want it,” I said. “You have ruined the green leather bag for me.”

“All right,” Mary Jane said. “Let's go back to the lounge and get ready to go to Pisa.”

“To the walled city of Lucca and Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei and the Grotto Del Buontalenti, the Villa Garzoni and Giotto's Campanile,” I chanted.

“The Giotto Campanile,” Mary Jane repeated. She pronounced the name elegantly although twenty years of elocution lessons had never really erased her childhood lisp. It was a lovely fault in an otherwise perfect façade. “A sweet disorder in the dress,” as the poet said, and certainly Mary Jane had had her share of powerful men. In the past ten years she had divorced a judge and married a vice-president of General Motors. She wasn't as wealthy as Cynthia was but she was doing all right.

“I want to really explore Tuscany,” I said. “Five times I've been in Italy on business and I've never seen the Tuscan hills. It's the price I pay for working for a living. No wonder I don't like to fly, although that first-class flight on British Airways may make me change my mind.”

We were collecting our carry-on bags from the desk when the announcements began to come over the intercom system. At first it was just flight times and cancellations. Ten minutes later the airport was locked down and nobody was going anywhere, not even out of the first-class lounge. Amid a buzz of cellular phones I called an editor I knew at the BBC and was told London was under siege. “I have to get off the telephone, darling,” he said. “Be of good cheer. You'll be fine. It's just a terrorist threat. Stay calm.”

Cynthia was staying calm. Her father had been a Republican senator from Oklahoma and she had things to live up to. Mary Jane was pretending to stay calm but the lisp was becoming more pronounced. “Let's just sit down,” she kept repeating. Mary Jane was an attorney although she hadn't practiced in several years. She hadn't practiced since she divorced the judge, moving on to greener fields. “Let's sit down. Let's just sit down and let the people who know how to deal with this deal with it. Let's find a place—how about that big round table with the sofa behind it—and just settle in. This may take awhile.”

“Go on over there and stake a claim,” I said. “I'm going to use my press cards to see if I can find out anything.”

“It's a waste of time,” Mary Jane said. “The last person they're going to talk to is an American journalist.”

“You're right,” I said and we marched over to the corner table and put down our carry-on bags and set up a cozy spot to wait out the scare.

An American woman in pink slacks approached our table. “Could I sit here with you?” she asked. “They won't tell us anything. Did you see all the police in the place? Look out there.” She pointed out the wide windows where the concourse was filling with uniformed men.

“Look that way,” said a tall, older man who was listening from a nearby table. He got up and walked our way. “Look at the runways.” Outside the back windows we could see our airplane surrounded by soldiers. Jeeps were bringing more.

“That's our plane,” I said. “It's our plane that was targeted!” I turned to look out the back windows. “They're all over the plane. We'll never get our luggage back. I guess you know that.”

“Are you someone important?” the pink-slacked woman asked. She had stationed herself by my side. “You look like you know what's going on.”

“She's Louise Hand,” Cynthia answered. “She writes documentaries for PBS. And she used to write for
Vogue.
”

“Cynthia,” Mary Jane said. “My God. Louise doesn't want you saying who she is.”

“It's all right.” I turned to the pink-slacked woman and held out my hand. “Louise Hand, from Raleigh, North Carolina.”

“Rivers Royals from Jackson, Mississippi,” she said. “I'm on my way to Florence to borrow paintings for our museum. You really think we won't get our luggage back?”

“Not anytime soon. You don't want it if there's a bomb on the plane. It could be biological. We can buy more clothes.”

“I packed my papers, for the museums. I had surgery on my hand last month and I can't carry things.”

A British Airways attendant approached our group, which had grown to seven people. “We need people to stay calm,” he said. “We'll get information to you as soon as we have it. There is tea and sandwiches, fruit and crackers and of course the bar, but we'd rather no one was drinking quite yet, so that will be closed for a while. We all need to keep our heads, don't you know.”

I looked at Rivers Royals. She was trying not to smile. “Okay,” I said, speaking for my group. “We're good. We've settled down. Don't worry about this corner of the room.”

“I'm going for snacks,” Mary Jane said. “I'll bring crackers and cheese.” She stood up. “Anyone want to help?”

A man in a tweed suit stood up beside her and the two of them walked off toward the serving tables. The rest of us turned back to watching the soldiers search the airplane. They had turned dogs loose on the luggage, which was being hurled to the ground. Each piece came flying out the compartment door and landed in a pile.

“There's my bag!” Rivers said. “I put red ribbons on it. See the one the German shepherd's sniffing.” We all watched. “I guess it's the computer,” she added. “It has floor plans of all the museums in Florence.”

“That might interest them.” The tall man had moved nearer to us and taken a chair by Rivers. “Charles Halliday, from Memphis. You're with a museum in Jackson? I'm on the board of a museum, several actually. One in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and one in Kansas City. Tell me about your work.”

Rivers crossed her legs and composed her face and did a reversal now that there was a man for an audience. She straightened her back and moved her shoulders down. “We're doing a show of Italian masters. We want, I know this sounds crazy, to have a copy made of the David. Not life-size, of course, smaller, but not small. I have to get permission and talk to them about money. We have a backer, plus the state will help if we get it started. We would want to keep it for a permanent exhibit, of course, so that may cost more. It's all such a business anymore, isn't it.”

Cynthia stood up and walked to the window. “There's my suitcase,” she said. “I bought a cheap one so I could throw it away if the airlines ruined it. Prophetic.
They threw it out of the compartment!
If they think a suitcase has a plastic bomb, why are they throwing them on the ground like that?”

“They're in a hurry,” I answered. “They have hundreds of planes to search with God knows how many bags. Sit down, Cynthia. It will only make you crazy to watch them search the luggage.”

Rivers was continuing her story. “I studied art in Paris and Florence when I was in school. Then I got married and had children and my husband runs Mississippi Power and Light and he's busy so I have time to help with the museum. We are making quite a success of it. Did you happen to come to the Russian show last year? We made money on it. Actually, we made a lot, enough to help with these new plans. So what do all of you think about all of this mess? This terrorist thing and the war in Afghanistan and who should be our next president. I want to know what other people think. I really do.”

“Oh, please,” Mary Jane put in. “I'm going to sit at another table if we have to talk about politics or war. I really am. I will not listen to people give their opinions about politicians while we are sitting here in the absolute middle, the ground zero, if you will, of what the Muslim fundamentalists are doing to the Western world, which my ancestors helped create and which I am ready to fight to protect. I won't listen to it because sooner or later I'll have to hear someone spouting liberal hogwash and bashing the government of the United States of which I am a tax-paying citizen and of which I am proud.” Mary Jane had stood up. Everyone had turned from the windows and was listening to her.

“Then let's tell the stories of our lives,” the tall man named Charles Halliday suggested. “Stranded travelers are supposed to tell one another stories of who they are and how they came to the place where they are stranded. Shall I begin?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and everyone drew near and began to pay attention.

“My mother was from Kentucky,” he began. “Her parents and grandparents all lived in a small town called Franklin and my grandfather was the editor of the newspaper there. When I was in high school I played basketball and worked in the afternoon at the paper. I married the homecoming queen, later, when the two of us were seniors in college at the University of Kentucky. We were sweethearts from the time we were fifteen years old until she died last year of cancer. It happened very quickly. It began in her lungs and spread all over her body and nobody could save her. We used to smoke but had quit ten years before she died. I keep wondering if I'm next. For a while I wanted to be next, but now I'm better and want to live as fully as possible and see my grandchildren come into their full maturity. There are six of them. We had two sons. They are both married and work in my law firm but the younger one is leaving to work in Washington if his candidate wins the election. I won't say which candidate since you don't want to talk about it. All right, that's my story so far. I am going to the Italian Open and plan to stay through Wimbledon. I am a tennis player and my doubles partner and his wife will join me in Europe in two weeks. I have learned to cook, not much, but a little. And I am taking pleasure in my wife's garden which will be a mess when I return to the United States in August. My name is Charles Halliday as I told you earlier but my friends call me Charlie. Next.”

“Mary Jane Tolliver, née Smythe,” Mary Jane began. “I play tennis but not very well and mostly doubles. Lately I'm more interested in Pilates and yoga. I love to exercise. I've done it all my life. I don't do it to look good but to feel good and because I have a lot of energy I have to expend. Louise was my roommate my freshman year at Vanderbilt and we've been friends ever since. Cynthia is our other best friend. We were Tri-Delts at Vandy. We all got married and went our separate ways but we have kept up with each other. We used to meet each spring in New York City and go shopping and see plays. Then Louise got too busy and Cynthia and I are involved in our children's and husbands' lives and we sort of lost each other, so Cynthia thought up our going together to Italy to become friends again. I mean we are always friends but we don't really know our
new
selves, the ones we are now, but then, when we are together we are just the old selves again. Isn't that right, Louise?”

“Exactly right,” I answered. “We revert to our old selves and it feels good, like finding an old shirt and putting it on and it still fits and you can't believe you haven't worn it in so long. I have to be tough in my working life. I have to make decisions and stick to them and be up and drink coffee and be on guard. Ever since yesterday I've felt like I was really on a holiday and all we have done so far is fly on airplanes and sleep while crossing the Atlantic Ocean and wake at dawn and land at Heathrow just in time to be locked down in a terrorist threat. What else about me? My family is an old Southern family and my aunt was a famous writer who committed suicide because she had cancer and didn't want to be treated for it. The treatments were worse twenty years ago. She walked into the ocean, in Maine, wearing a fur-lined Valentino jacket and leather boots. Anyway, that's the legend. We don't know what she was wearing because they never found the body. What else? The rest of the family are quite sane although some of them drink too much but some have quit, thank God. The thing I like about Muslim fundamentalists is they want everyone to quit drinking. I hate alcohol and almost never drink it myself. I think it has ruined our culture. Alcohol and sugar. I am thirty-five years old and I have never married but I want to be married. I just never can find anyone I want to live with for the rest of my life.”