The Night of the Comet (14 page)

She was ten or twelve years old (so the tale began) when her daddy drove them up to New Orleans to see the holiday decorations along Canal Street. It was cold, or at least as cold as New Orleans could get at Christmastime. As they walked along the sidewalk, car exhausts
blew clouds of steam past their legs, and the lights overhead stood out bright and sharp as stars, like constellations that had been dragged down from heaven and strung across the street for the holiday.

Lydia wore her best outfit, a dark green velvet dress that her mother had made for her, with black stockings, black patent leather shoes, and a green velvet bow in her hair. She carried herself with a proud, careful bearing, mindful of her dress, and of the specialness of their outing, and of the rich sophistication of the big city. She loved the department store window displays and insisted on stopping at every one. Resting her mittened hand on the glass, she stared at the miniature villages with their animated ice-skaters, and the electric trains winding through snowy landscapes, and the log cabins puffing real smoke from their chimneys, and she felt the scenes behind the glass were so beautiful, so perfect, so impossible that they made her want to cry.

At D. H. Holmes she indulged her parents by sitting on the lap of the Santa Claus, even though it embarrassed her, and even though she knew by then that he was just a fat man with a fake beard and smelly breath. She was rewarded with a candy cane, and she was still trying to figure out how to put her mittens back on and hold the stick at the same time when they stepped out the side door onto Royal Street and saw the car pulling up at the Hotel Monteleone.

Her father gave a low whistle at the enormous white Cadillac. It had a long hood, chrome bumpers, and rounded, winglike fenders, like some kind of spaceship from the future that had landed on the road in front of them. There was a flurry of movement at the hotel entrance, and Lydia and her parents crossed the street to see what was happening. Porters were ferrying out luggage on brass carts; other hotel personnel dashed in and out while a doorman tried to hold back sidewalk traffic. Then an important-looking man in a sharp gray suit stepped out of the lobby, escorting a woman holding a bouquet of flowers wrapped in tissue paper printed with the hotel’s coat of arms.

The crowd jostled to see her. People murmured to one another. Lydia craned for a better view. Though she’d never seen a celebrity before, she knew such people existed, and she instinctively knew that this must’ve been one of them. The woman wore a red chesterfield coat with a black fur collar and large black buttons up and down the front.
Her skin was remarkably pale and white, her lips bright red, and her auburn hair fell in crimped waves over her shoulders. And her eyes: even standing at the rear of the crowd, Lydia could tell they were green as emeralds. She was, Lydia was sure, the most strikingly beautiful woman she’d ever seen.

Lydia’s father had begun narrating the action: “There’s no way they’re going to fit all that luggage in that one car, I don’t care how big it is.… That’s one, two, three, four hatboxes … Look at that steamer trunk. You ever seen a trunk as big as that in your life? … There he goes, he’s calling for another one.…”

The doorman stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and blew his whistle, causing the woman in red to grimace. A taxicab swooped up and the porters swarmed around. The man in the gray suit barked a few orders and then stepped in to help manage things, leaving the woman to wait alone on the rug in front of the hotel.

Lydia’s feet had drawn her forward, away from her parents, until she was at the front of the crowd. She stared at the woman, studying her. Though she stood in the center of this whirlwind of activity, she appeared perfectly composed. It was as though, Lydia thought, she were enclosed in a glass bubble that kept her separate from the rest of the world—as though she had somehow contrived to live inside one of those beautiful, perfect scenes in the department store windows, and it was this extraordinary poise and containment, as much as her good looks, that set the woman apart and attracted Lydia to her.

Lydia was still staring when the woman turned and looked directly at her. She peered curiously at Lydia, and then she made a funny, bug-eyed expression, as if to say,
Yes? What?
Surprised, Lydia smiled. The woman waved, a quick, girlish motion of her gloved hand. Lydia tentatively raised a hand and returned the wave. The woman laughed, took three steps away from the carts and luggage, and squatted down in front of her.

“Aren’t you a pretty girl. What’s your name?”

Something about the woman’s naturalness immediately put Lydia at ease. She felt like she was meeting an old friend, and she had no trouble at all answering her.

“Lydia,” she said, but then corrected this: “Lydia Marie Simoneaux.”

“What a lovely name. Lydia, my name’s Ava.” She took off a glove and offered her hand. “How do you do?”

Close up, she was even prettier. Her lipstick was perfect, like painted lacquer, and her eyebrows were dark and finely shaped. A rich, heady perfume wafted from her, a scent that suggested unimaginable luxury and romance.

“Are you from here?”

“No, ma’am. Terrebonne.”

“Where’s that?”

Lydia swung her arm around and pointed in the direction from which she supposed they’d come. The woman laughed.

“Small town?”

Lydia nodded seriously. “Very small.”

“I’m from a small town, too, in Carolina. North Carolina. Do you know where that is?”

“Mm—not exactly.”

The woman pointed over her shoulder with her thumb. “Back there somewhere.”

This struck Lydia as enormously clever, and she laughed.

“Ava! We got it. Come on, let’s go,” the man in the gray suit called.

“Darn. I have to go,” Ava said. “Here. Take this.” She pulled a flower from her bouquet. “I like you, Lydia. You’re a very special girl. You’re going to have an amazing life, I can tell.” Lydia took the flower. “Do you believe me? Do you believe Ava?”

Lydia wasn’t sure what to say to this—it sounded strange—but the woman held her eyes until Lydia was compelled to nod her head and answer, “Yes.”

The woman touched the palm of her hand to Lydia’s cheek. “Merry Christmas, sugar.”

And with that, she stood and left. The man in gray escorted her by the arm to the white Cadillac, waving off people’s shouts for autographs. A photographer rushed in to take a picture. “Ava! Ava! Miss Gardner! Over here!” Ava smiled from the backseat of the Cadillac and dangled one bare, tantalizing leg out the door. The photographer got his shot, the door closed, and the cars roared off.

The camera flash startled Lydia back to her senses. The sidewalk, the cold air, the traffic fumes all began to return. Her encounter with the woman in red couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, but Lydia felt as if she’d been away for days. Her parents appeared at her side, talking excitedly. They still weren’t sure who the lady was.

“Are you kidding me?” a man said. “That’s Ava Gardner!”

“Who?” Lydia asked.

“Oh, mercy me,” her mother said. “I thought I recognized her. Of course. Good gracious. Can you believe that?”

As they resumed walking, Lydia’s mother recounted in a rush all she knew about Ava Gardner, the famous Hollywood actress: her early marriage to Mickey Rooney, and then to Artie Shaw, and now the scandal with Frank Sinatra, how everyone said she lured him away from Nancy and now the Church wouldn’t let him get a divorce and so he was petitioning Rome … “What in the world do you think she’s doing here?”

Lydia’s father recognized the name but was indifferent. “Probably getting married again,” he joked, and then he opened a glass door and steered them into a noisy seafood restaurant with sawdust on the floor and shouting waiters. Her father embraced the cashier; the owner was called for.…

But for the rest of that night and well into the next week, Lydia was lost in a dream. Ava. Ava Gardner. She could’ve spoken to anyone, but she came to Lydia, knelt right in front of her, and gave her a flower. Lydia felt like she’d been touched by a goddess.

Back home in Terrebonne, she riffled through her mother’s old
Life
magazines for photos and articles about the actress. When she exhausted those, she headed to the magazine rack at the drugstore. She begged her parents for money for the latest issue of
Movie World
, that week and then every week after. She learned all she could about Ava—her poor childhood, the sharecropper shacks, her tobacco-farming father, her homemade dresses, and her penchant for going barefoot, even after she’d been discovered and brought to Hollywood. She worried over the gossip she read and was dismayed by the studio’s new label for her, “The world’s most beautiful animal!” But she wasn’t an animal at
all, Lydia argued to herself. Anybody could see what a sensitive, intelligent woman she was—much more an Elizabeth Taylor than a Marilyn Monroe. She was being horribly miscast by the studios; she deserved so much better than the silly roles they gave her.

The movie she’d been filming that winter in New Orleans,
My Forbidden Past
, didn’t come out until two years later, when Lydia was still in junior high school. As soon as it opened at the RKO in New Orleans, Lydia coerced her parents into taking her to see it. She dressed carefully for the outing, feeling in a way that it was her movie, too, and she was nervous when the lights went down and the film began to play in the half-empty theater. Her father shifted impatiently in his seat and gobbled his popcorn and guffawed. Her mother complained in a whisper that this movie really wasn’t suitable for teenage girls. Even Lydia had to admit the film wasn’t that good. But Ava—Ava, of course, was wonderful. Lydia attended carefully to every raised eyebrow, every sigh and gesture, chuckling with recognition and saying to herself,
That’s just like her. That’s just what Ava would do
.

“A special girl … an amazing life …”

The encounter would stay with Lydia all through high school, where she became a mediocre student, prone to daydreaming. She was impatient with her teachers and quickly grew tired of her classmates, too, especially the FFA boys in overalls who teased her for putting on airs. “Miss Nose-in-the-Air,” they called her. “Miss Too-Good-for-You.” When she thought about it sensibly, she knew that there was nothing at all for her to be smug about. And yet, the notion had taken hold that Terrebonne was just a way station for her. She’d been dropped off there by mistake, and if she only waited it out, the next train would arrive soon to whisk her away. Surely she wasn’t meant to spend the rest of her life here in this muddy dump.

The summer after graduation she got a job at the McCall’s Rexall. She’d been practically living at the shop anyway, going several times a week to read the movie magazines, and so when Trudy Arcineaux, the night girl, got pregnant and had to quit, Lydia barely had to turn around in order to take her place at the counter.

She loved the job; it made her feel grown up and important. Being right there on the town square, waiting on customers behind the large plate-glass window, was almost like being on stage. She took special care with her makeup and wardrobe, and she set herself the task of improving her deportment and elocution. “Yes, ma’am, we can certainly order that for you,” she’d say, and, “If you don’t mind waiting for just one minute, I’ll ask the manager.” Even during her breaks, eating her sandwich in the park, she was unfailingly poised and polite, as if (a boy once teased her) she was expecting someone to pop out of a bush and take her picture. Mr. McCall had nothing but praise for her.

She’d become a dedicated moviegoer by then, and on her nights off from work she drove with her girlfriends, or even by herself, to see the latest releases in Thibodaux or Houma. As she sat in the darkened theater, the dusty beam of light streaming over her shoulder seemed to cast her dreams up on the screen—dreams that were so private, so true, that she almost blushed to see them shown in public. Many times she had the overpowering conviction that it could’ve been her moving and talking up there in that silvery world. Indeed, she often felt that all it required was some intense act of concentration on her part—that if only she closed her eyes and squeezed her fists and wished it strongly enough, it would happen: all at once the beam would flip around to shine on her, and her life would be transformed. No longer just Lydia Marie Simoneaux from Terrebonne, she would become some greater, larger, brighter, more perfectly realized version of herself.

And yet, things did not look promising for her. All the wealthiest, smartest boys of her class had gone off to college, and the ones that remained in town were the poor boys who would always be there: the sons of fishers and trappers with their muddy boots and batteaus, and now the oil-rig toughs in their pickup trucks and greasy blue jeans. And then a year had passed, and while her classmates were getting married and having babies, she was still restocking dinner mints at the counter in the Rexall, staring out the window at the world passing by and wondering when, oh when, the amazing life Ava had promised her would begin.

Sometimes late at night before closing, when the store was empty and there was only the hum of the cooler and a faint buzz from the
overhead fluorescent lights to disturb the silence, she would have the feeling that she was perched at the very edge of her dreams. She would stop whatever she was doing and lean on the counter, listening. A Gulf breeze rustled the leaves in the gutter; a train whistled on the outskirts of town. Possibility seemed to shiver in the air, like the electric sensation before a hurricane. Any minute now, she would tell herself, staring out the window, any minute now it would happen. It
had
to happen. She could feel it like a tingling beneath her skin. Any minute now, the bell would ring, the door would open, and her future would step in to greet her. He’d be wearing a suit and tie, and he’d ask in a polite, gentlemanly voice that sounded at once foreign but completely familiar, “Miss? Hello? Can you help me?”

BY
November we could spot Kohoutek easily near the head of Scorpio, visible in the lens of the scope as a faint blue teardrop-shaped smudge. From day to day it seemed not to move at all, but from week to week its progress was obvious. My father kept notes on its appearance and location, along with sketches to show the size of the coma and the shape of its tail. He compared his observations with those of other members of the regional American Astronomical Society, and he kept abreast of the more detailed scientific data available through regular bulletins issued by NASA. It had already passed Mars; around Thanksgiving it would cross the orbit of the Earth and brush past Venus and Mercury before looping around the Sun to begin its return pass through the solar system. Greatest magnitude was still predicted for late December and early January, when it would be nearest the Sun. Preliminary spectroscopic analysis revealed evidence of water in its makeup, and radio frequency radiation disclosed traces of hydrogen cyanide and methyl cyanide in its outgassing—discoveries that lent
credence to the theory that Comet Kohoutek was indeed a relic from the origins of the solar system, “a messenger from the past,” as my father called it.