Something Rising (Light and Swift) (24 page)

A man beside her said, “You visiting?” He had a kind face, middle-aged, a wide smile.

“Yes. Do you work here?”

“Too much. I own the place.”

Cassie looked at the wall. “I don't know much about photography.”

“Do you know what you like?” He had a lot of laugh lines around his eyes; he wore a vest woven from wool in many different colors.

“Only a fool doesn't know what she likes.”

He nodded. “What's your favorite piece up here?”

She walked back down the hallway a few feet. “This one,” she said, pointing to a portrait of a little dark-haired girl sitting in bed, her eyes round and grave. The wall behind her was painted with a lavish floral scene but was heading toward ruin. The print was small, five thousand dollars.

“Oh, I love that one. Roman Vishniac, the only one I've ever had. I've been here thirty years, and that's it. So I treasure it myself.”

The Only Flower of Her Youth
, Warsaw, 1938.

“It hardly bears thinking about,” he said, shaking his head, “what happened to her. If you like this, I have a couple books of his downstairs. Let me show them to you. I'm Jacob, by the way.”

“Cassie.” She shook his hand and followed him down the narrow staircase. Downstairs he greeted other visitors, then took a coffee-table edition of Vishniac's photographs off the shelf. On the cover were two little girls caught in some game, gleeful and conspiratorial.
Children of a Vanished World
. He handed the book to an assistant and asked her to wrap it.

“This is on me,” he said, handing the package to her. “And take this, too.” On the back of a business card he wrote the name and address of a restaurant. “This is where you should have dinner. Tell the goofy guy at the door that I sent you.”

“Thank you.” Cassie looked at the card, Epistrophes on Royale.

“My pleasure.” Jacob gave her a slight bow. “Enjoy our fay-uh city.”

Epistrophes's owner, Gabe, who looked and sounded like a Brooklyn detective (born and raised in Baton Rouge), took Cassie over the minute she introduced herself. He brought her a bottle of
white burgundy, then ordered from the menu for her: fried green tomatoes over fresh mozzarella with a basil aioli, a nearly raw tuna steak with sautéed greens. He explained how the steak had been seared in olive oil suffused with the oils of exotic peppers.

“Is it too spicy?” he asked, sitting down opposite her. “Do you need more bread?”

“It's perfect. I never—I've never eaten this well.”

For dessert he brought a goat-cheese crème fraîche with poached pears and a mint leaf, a cup of strong coffee, asked if she'd like a liqueur. She told him she needed to keep her head clear; she was about to visit a landmark in her mother's life, and she was looking for a pool hall.

“Landmarks we've got plenty of; pool halls are scarce. There are a few places in the Quarter with tavern tables, but nowhere around here with nine-footers. I don't know what's happened. It's fallen out of favor.”

She said she was looking for a game, mentioned Jackson LaFollette. He told her about a private room in an old hotel, then sized her up, too late to take it back.

“Not the nicest people in the world.”

“No,” she said, “I wouldn't think so.”

Gabe stood up, stretched his lower back. “Gettin' too old for this business.” They shook hands, and he told her the meal was on him. “Any friend of Jacob's,” he said, walking back toward the bar. She left him a fifty-dollar tip, just a portion of the cost of the meal, then stepped out into the night. Perhaps New Orleans was a real place, or maybe she'd gotten lucky and stepped into the world Laura had conjured, standing in her kitchen in Roseville, in exile. Thirty-three years' worth of longing redeemed was what this city felt like to Cassie.

*    *    *

She stood outside the Grille on Bourbon Street, studying the facade. Some people were lucky enough to live in Los Angeles and to have their own genesis paved over flat and simple. Others grew up in the shadow of their making (my father was born here and my mother next door); they went to church together every Sunday and married there (I was conceived and born, too, in this bed my parents still sleep in), and that would have been a terror to Cassie. To Belle. Nothing said run like the fact of her origin: Laura and Jimmy innocent of each other, then innocent no longer, hell-bent on ruination and their children the evidence they succeeded.

The Grille was a diner as diners should be, shaped like a caboose, a glass door framed in metal, draped inside with twinkle lights. She opened the door and stepped in; the counter stretched the length of the long building, with booths in the front window. On the jukebox Peggy Lee was singing “Is That All There Is?” and at the counter a transsexual was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Her paisley dress, silk and clinging like water,was buttoned up wrong in the back, and she had cut her ankle shaving. A young girl stepped out of the kitchen in an apron and a hair net, and this was what Cassie wanted to see, a girl working. Someone the age Laura had been. Even the transsexual seemed to have been placed as a prop, since Laura had mentioned a friend called Beverly who came in every night after eleven and eventually was abducted and left for dead in a bayou. Laura missed her for years, and now here she sat, after a fashion.

To replay the scene entirely, the diner would have to be empty save for Laura, working the night shift, nineteen years old, betrothed to a man of means and questionable character named Jackson
LaFollette. The bell over the diner door, currently missing, would ring, and in would stroll Jimmy Claiborne, beaten and bleeding but on his feet. Laura said his injuries hadn't seemed life-threatening, and she didn't much care anyway.

Cassie sat down a couple stools away from Beverly and closed her eyes. She could imagine him, short and lithe, that spring in his step. He wore, Laura had told her so many times, cream-colored linen pants, pleated and cuffed with a strong break, two-tone shoes, a braided brown leather belt, and a white silk shirt under a cashmere sweater vest. Dance, dance, his feet were always moving, he slid and tapped, jingled the change in his pocket in time. He could whistle the entire repertoire of a mockingbird he kept as a boy: twenty-three songs. And snatches of classical music, isolated for a dramatic rise or fall, a trill. He could sing, do imitations of Bing Crosby or Elvis, but never sang seriously. For a while he'd played a snare drum in a band at a home for Wayward Men, but he gave it up, and Cassie had never heard him play. Legend had it he could cook; he could swim a mile, but she'd never seen that, either. Because he wasn't the sort of man, he might have said, who would take up practicing something just because he
could
, simply because he'd been given a healthy measure of God's gifts, he wasn't responsible for what God had taken it upon Himself to hand out. What he liked to do was gamble. He was wired for a certain sort of risk.

“What can I get ya?”

Cassie opened her eyes to the young waitress, her acne and cheap metal necklace. One of her teeth was slick with the coral of her lipstick.

“Just coffee, black.”

“And another for me, doll,” Beverly said, raising her cup.

Jimmy sat down at the counter. He was bleeding over his left eyebrow and from his bottom lip. His right eye was starting to swell. A handkerchief, formerly buttercream, was stained with the blood he was trying to keep off his shirt. When Laura approached him, she smelled his cologne, something spicy and masculine, maybe bay rum, and the Sen-Sen he always carried in his pocket, a man who applied Chap Stick every day and was shaved so close his skin was like a boy's. Cassie remembered his smell; she had spent hours as a child categorizing it.
It is like this—no, it's more like this
. Finally she had landed on oranges and whiskey, that was his essence and everything else was extra. He smoked, of course, and wore a tiny bit of Brylcreem in his hair.
I've got places to go and people to do
, he said at the door as he headed out into the night, and left his silent wife reading in the dim living room. Those smells came home with him, too.

“Can I get a chocolate milk shake?” he'd asked Laura, giving her his haven't-I-gotten-myself-into-some-predicament smile. She didn't smile back.

“With whipped cream?”

“There are milk shakes without whipped cream?”

Laura stepped over to the ice-cream freezer—the metal cup would go from warm to frosty in her hand, a swift conduit—and noted, as people do, that the jukebox was playing Louis Armstrong, “St. James Infirmary.” The man behind her began to whistle along with the song, but she didn't look at him. She shoved the mixture up under the spinning blade harder than she needed, blocking out the sound. When the blender stopped, he was humming, a sound both scratchy and deep.

The waitress poured coffee for Cassie and Beverly, then went
back to wrapping silverware in napkins. The coffee was steaming and smelled vaguely like chocolate.

“This town is full of sonsabitches,” Beverly said, perhaps to no one. She shook her head in resignation.

Cassie blew on the surface of the coffee. Laura set the milk shake in front of Jimmy, along with a tall spoon and a straw, and he smiled at her gratefully, then fainted. People fainted in the Grille all the time, or they threw up, burst into sobs, inconsolable. They fought, they fought off delirium tremens, they had heart attacks, seizures, they confessed. It was a busy place. But the rule was that the unconscious couldn't stay. Laura's boss, Badrae, wasn't running a boardinghouse, as he liked to say. So Laura went around the counter and hoisted Jimmy up from where he'd slumped over the neighboring stools, took him under the arms. He didn't weigh much, he was a small man with a light step. She dragged him out onto the sidewalk, where he opened his eyes, an even more striking blue-green in the streetlight than in the day, and said, “I don't have any money to pay you for that milk shake.”

“Do you know what I mean about sonsabitches?” Beverly asked, looking at Cassie.

“I think I do.”

“Mine just kicked my ass out his apahment. Don't have my clothes, my purse, nothin'. Says he'll be 'round this way to pick me up in the mahnin'. Mmm, mmm, mmm. I think he caught a whiff uh his wife. She in town, I think.”

The coffee was rich. Not chocolate. Something else. “That's no good,” Cassie said.

“Naw it ain't! I say to him, Look how you do me! I cry like a
chald and say, Look! But nothin' gets through that man. Didn't even have my dinnah, he kickin' my ass out.”

Laura had thought little of it; the way of the world was the con. But the next night Jimmy had shown up again, what a dresser! How sweet he smelled! And paid her for the milk shake and ordered one of the Grille's famous hamburgers (without condiments: he was a finicky man) and tipped her 300 percent. That was all the story Cassie had ever known, that and Laura taking up and following Jimmy to Indiana not two weeks later, leaving behind her own mother, everything she'd ever known. Wild love, oxygen-depriving passion. Cassie was the daughter of a great romance, if what was meant by romance was wreckage. The story was not diminished by the other cogent details: that Laura had been engaged to another, or that when she finally found Jimmy in Indiana, he was back in his trailer on a wooded lot outside Roseville with his own betrothed.

Cassie finished her coffee, then walked over to look at the jukebox. Beverly remained slumped over her coffee cup; her ass must have been kicked out along with cigarettes and a lighter, because there was a full pack of Kools on the counter, and a disposable Bic bearing the words
MARDI GRAS
1998. On the jukebox there was Louis Armstrong; Elvis singing “That's All Right, Mama,” and Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Dorsey, Julie London, Harry James, Howlin' Wolf, John Coltrane, all on CD now. Cassie looked around at the walls covered with festival paraphernalia, and photographs of strangers dancing with strangers, the green vinyl on the metal stools, the old-fashioned straw dispensers. Whoever owned this place, now that Badrae was surely on the bayou, fishing out his final days, had turned it into a dreamland for nostalgics. People like Cassie, who wanted a glimmer of the long-gone
world and would accept these tokens. CDs instead of records, but the songs she wanted to hear: if that didn't sum up the struggle. She felt very little standing in this place, far less than she'd expected.

Cassie slipped a twenty out of her wallet and laid it on the counter next to Beverly's lighter.

“Thank you, baby,” Beverly said.

In Jackson Square, before midnight, only a few artists and tarotcard readers still sat at their makeshift booths, some drinking cocktails. They spoke to one another as if they shared a long history. Cassie approached one of the park benches, where a boy with blond dreadlocks and a beard the color of honey sat hunched forward with his shirt pulled up over his head, exposing his back. He looked out through the neck of his shirt as if into an aquarium filled with starving sharks. Cassie looped around behind him. His thin back was covered with scars; if he'd been older, she would have guessed shrapnel. Another sort of war, perhaps, other weapons. Every few minutes he shivered so hard he shook the bench. A black man clutching a brown paper bag noticed the boy and walked across the square and knelt in front of him, offering whatever was in the bag, but the boy couldn't see him.

“Bad, very bad.” The man shook his head, then sat down on the bench. After a few seconds he reached up and pulled the boy's T-shirt down over his back, smoothed it flat.

Cassie turned the corner and stopped in front of Saint Louis Cathedral. A sign out front declared that the bishop would say the Easter mass, two days hence. The building was beautiful and imposing but didn't suggest the inhuman power of the cathedrals
of Europe, at least as they looked in pictures. Laura had wanted to see them, Belle, too, but Cassie felt her skin prickle with resentment anytime she thought about standing in front of such an edifice, or listening to a bird caught in a spire that a hundred poor men had died to build.