Coq au Vin (13 page)

“Nanette, if I didn't know you for all these years, I wouldn't believe a word of this story,” Aubrey said. “But 'cause I do, I know it's all true. Fact, you probably haven't even told me the worst of it yet. Goddammit. Other people just don't have your fucking life, girl.”

Her voice had taken on that edge of maternal outrage that I both resented and craved. With Mom, I had always been so fundamentally secretive about my life that she didn't have a lot to bust my chops over. Aubrey, on the other hand, had plenty of ammunition. She not only knew in excruciating detail about all the messes I got myself into, she usually played a role in getting me out of them. Where I was a dedicated spendthrift, she was shrewd with her money. Where I tumbled time after time after time into these ensnarling, take-no-prisoners affairs with men, she was cool and guarded with her feelings, could play a man like a tin whistle, and was always the one to walk away first. My childhood friend Aubrey Davis, tough bitch that she was, was unfailingly there when I required a killer pair of high heels for the evening, a sympathetic ear for my man troubles, or simple forgiveness. In short, she had earned the motherly stance—outrage and all—she sometimes took toward me.

In a voice thick with intimidation she demanded, “And who is this Jamaican Negro you're living with, Nan?”

“He's
not
Jamaican. I said he had dreads. He's kind of a mulatto from Detroit and his folks are dead and—God, I wish I could tell you—I wish I could tell you everything about him.” Yeah, yeah, I knew how sickening this kind of rhapsodizing could get. But I couldn't stop myself. “Like I said, I met him down in the subway. He saved me from these racist geeks. And he's just so young and sensitive and serious and I don't want to hurt him, Aubrey, I can't, I—oh, shit—I guess I love him,” I said hopelessly.

She was silent for a minute, gathering her patience, I suppose, trying to calm down, trying not to treat me as the fool she knew me to be.

“What does he look like?” she asked sheepishly.

“Child, he's so gorgeous you could die.”

The both of us laughed for a long time.

“I'm not lying, girl. He's got these beautiful bony wrists and fingers and these long arms like a Watusi.”

“Like a what?”

“Never mind. Let me tell you about his mouth, Aubrey. At the edges it goes down, but then it goes up again, see, like a surprise. You know what I mean? And you know how some guys have a butt that starts right underneath their waist? His is like that. And his legs are so long, they're almost as pretty as yours. And he has these humongous feet that make me want to cry when I look down at them at night, they're so—so big and awkward and the back of his ankle is so thin you don't know how he can stand up on it.”

“Nan!”

“I know, I know, I know.”

“You have to pack up and get out of there, girl. You could end up being tapped for that pimp's murder. The police ain't gonna hear about finding your aunt Viv. Or about Andre's butt. What are y'all going to do if they point the finger at him? If the cops over there are like they are over here, they ain't gonna look no further than the first black man they can put their hands on. They'll put his long legs
under
the jail.”

That one hadn't occurred to me yet.

Since we found Gigi, I had run a whole world of horrible possibilities through the washing machine of my paranoia. For reasons I couldn't begin to explain, I felt that instead of helping Vivian I was putting more heat on her. I didn't know how, I just knew the danger to her was growing.

But I hadn't thought of the danger to Andre—Andre, who had from the very beginning wanted nothing to do with Gigi. My God, I
was
doing it again: I was calling down death and destruction on those I loved.

“You're right, Aubrey,” I said. “I know you're right. I told Andre it was time for me to go. That we had to give up on the Vivian thing. That I had to go home. But he won't hear it. He begged me to give him another day.”

“Another day for what? What's he going to find out in a day that y'all couldn't find out in two weeks?”

“Nothing, obviously. I just couldn't bear him nagging me anymore. See, for him it's not about finding Vivian. He wants me to stay here maybe permanently. He wants to—”

“What? What does he want?”

“I don't know. Get married, I think. Or something.”

“You kidding.”

“He's young, Aubrey.”

“How young?”

“He was twenty-seven last month.”

“That's only a year and half younger than you are, fool.”

I nodded slowly, as if she were there in the room with me.

“Nan?”

“What?”

“You not going to marry that man. I know it's good, girl. But you are not marrying a Geechee street-violin-playing Negro from Detroit. It's stupid, Nan. I don't care how cute he is and I don't care how intelligent he is or what he does to you at night. He got his head up in the same cloud as you, Nanette. He'll never have no money, he can't take care of business, and he can't take care of you. And you belong back here.”

I fell silent.

“Nan!”

“Yeah, I'm here.”

“Start packing.”

I began to cry, hiding it.

“I'm not playing, Nanette. Start packing.”

“Right. Will you call Mom like I asked?”

“Yes, girl. Ima call her as soon as you hang up. And you gonna call me when you get a flight out.”

CHAPTER 11

What'll I Do?

I fell asleep in my clothes. Everything—shoes, skirt, top, underwear.

I'd felt sorry for myself plenty of times before. I'd been in that valley of indecision and self-pity and regret more times than I cared to recall. It had never felt quite like this before.

It was a restless, heavy kind of sleep. Hideous dreams about everything from being lost in the play yard at age four, to facing my father with a D in my grade book, to my grandmother's ravaging cancer.

I had told Andre on that day I checked out of the hotel: I bonded with another man once in this same way—all at once, and right down to the bone.
It ended up terrible
. Be warned, young man. Black widow Nan will get you.

I heard his key in the door.

To hell with everything else. He was back.

He had been unable to find Martine, let alone Aunt Vivian. Unable to come up with anything new. I knew that he wouldn't. You have to let yourself hope. But I knew he wouldn't. Still, he was safely back home. He looked like shit.

We cried in each other's arms. I don't even know if we knew why we were crying. And perhaps we weren't crying for the same reasons. In any case the tear fest seemed to both exhaust and reanimate us. At the end of it, he reached into his back pocket, extracted a palm-sized object of plastic, and tossed it on the table.

“What is that?” I asked.

“The total fruits of my labors,” said Andre. “I asked a couple of the musicians I've met playing on the street to help me find Martine last night. We never did. But one of them found this in his girlfriend's apartment. It's a bootleg Rube Haskins tape. She bought it at a flea market.”

That sent us not into tears but hysterical laughter. Laughter that threatened to revert back to tears.

“Play it, Andre. I want to know what kind of chops this son of the South had.”

He shook his head. “In a while,” he said, sounding like an old man. “Let's go to bed now. You get undressed.”

Well,
quel
morning.

We made love until noon—dozing, waking, doing it again, falling off again, waking each other from bad dreams, kissing, promising, doing it again. Finally, he fell asleep still inside me.

The late afternoon bustle down in the street woke us. I'd never been so hungry in my life. I put on the coffee and Andre jumped into some clothes and went out to the market for food.

I bathed, set the table, changed the sheets, tidied the apartment, watered the plants, made a pot of coffee, drank it, and made another.

He'd been away for ninety minutes by then.

By the time another hour went by, I knew.

CHAPTER 12

Poor Butterfly

I forgot to comb my hair, I thought, absurdly.

I bet I look like Martine, I thought. Eyes like pinwheels. Breathing through my mouth and probably drooling.

Help me!
I was screaming inside my skull.
Somebody help me!

But of course I made no sound as I ran through the neighborhood. I was hoping for a miracle. Hoping I'd see him sitting in the café. Hoping he was waiting on line for a pound of ham at the open market. Hoping he had run into one of his musician acquaintances or was shooting the breeze with the guy in the wine store. Hoping, even, that he'd been hit by a motorcycle and been taken to the hospital with a nice, safe, lovely broken leg.

I ran blindly down into the métro and back out again.

I went back to the apartment, still running, still hoping, still screaming inside.

No Andre.

I couldn't catch my breath. “What'll I do baby, I'll go crazy,” I wailed.

I was talking to myself.

I went on talking: “No—Don't go out again. Stay by the phone. No, use the phone. Call! Call somebody.”

Inspector Simard didn't answer. Where the hell was he? In that stupid garden of his? Drinking wine out on the lawn as the sun went down? Having coffee with the postman in the town bar? I pictured his two lazy brown dogs looking up in boredom at the ringing telephone.

I went rummaging in the liquor cabinet, knocking over a couple of those goddamn useless little cordial glasses. All I could find was a bottle of Jamaican rum. I poured out a huge glass and gulped it. No cigarettes in the house. I pulled at my hair until my scalp ached.

Simard answered on the second try.

“Ah!
Salut
, mademoiselle. Are you well? I was thinking of you and your friend only last—”

I stopped him there and began to babble out the story in that kind of fractured French for which the Academie Française would have brought back the death penalty.

Gigi Lacroix no longer needed my discretion, my protection from the authorities. I told Simard what I'd omitted from my story before.

“That was not a very wise course to follow,” he commented softly at the end of the tale.

A masterpiece of understatement.

And then he added, “It might have been better for you to have disclosed this to me during your visit.”

I sighed into the receiver, not out of exasperation but grief. The sigh soon became a sob. I cried my heart out while he hung on at the other end, making no sound except to clear his throat periodically.

“Very well, very well then,” he said at last. “Listen carefully, young one. The
sûreté
will not undertake a search for Monsieur Andre for at least another forty-eight hours. But you must get the wheels turning a great deal faster than that.

“I will give you the name of a lieutenant at the Quai des Orfèvres. He will contact you later, after I've had a chance to locate and speak to him. But first, go to your embassy. Do it right away. It does not matter what you tell the consul about how your friend came to be missing. The authorities are accustomed to dealing with young people in trouble. Tell them…Well, you are obviously adept at inventing things. Or tell them the truth, if it appears warranted. The important thing is that you go to them now.
Entendu?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, sniveling.

“Go now,” he said sternly, “but first, some other advice.”

“Yes?”

“I know you are a brave, independent young person, and that you are trying to do the honorable thing. But I ask you this, mademoiselle: How good an actress are you? How good are you at being a Frenchwoman?”

“What do you mean?”

“Only this: It will not do to go to the embassy, and especially not to the Paris police, as a hysteric demanding action. Present yourself as a respectable young woman, one who has taken a misstep perhaps—but a
woman
, if you take my meaning.
Une femme française
. Cry discreetly, cross your legs demurely, show how distraught you are over the disappearance of the man you love. But do not become shrill in the face of their lassitude.”

Got it. The basic damsel-in-distress riff. Get the men to do what you want. Could I pull it off? Here was yet another occasion for me to wish that I was Aubrey.

On the other hand, if I wasn't genuinely in distress right now, then what in God's name could distress possibly mean?

While Simard instructed me, I began undoing my jeans and searching the room frantically with my eyes. Where were my pantyhose?

“Inspector?” I said.

“
Qui?
”

“Do you think he's still alive? Do you think that's possible?”

He didn't hesitate at all. “Of course I do. You love him,
n'est-ce pas?”

I knew fully how little logic there was in his enigmatic answer. Still, it made sense to me, and I had to hang on to it. I rang off.

But before I could take my femme act on the road, it became academic.

As I was wrestling horribly with the back zipper of my dress, the telephone rang. I pounced on it, thinking, Thank you, God/Allah/Siva/Sojourner Truth. I'd rather take my chances with Simard's contact at the police department than face an unknown quantity like a white American diplomat—one who, for all I knew, might even turn out to be a woman.

“Oui, allo!”
I called into the phone.

“Nan.”

It was Andre.

I fell to the floor, receiver still in my hand.

“Nan?”

“It's me, sweetheart,” I said, matching the grave hush in his voice. I willed my heart to stop pounding so loud. “Something's wrong, isn't it?”