Authors: Brandon Shire
As we dashed through the puddles I worried each footstep with the concern that some small harpy would suddenly appear and crush me to the ground with a whisper to these two about my previous lodgings; the secret past I’d stashed away like moth balls in a closet.
We stopped at an L shaped two story house with iron grill work on the balconies and elongated eaves that hung out over them. We slipped in through a side entrance, through an inner patio, and finally into a pale yellow high ceilinged room with French windows that ran to the floor.
“Nana’s home,” Manuel said as he pointed to the candles and peeled off his shirt. My pulse quickened and I forced my eyes back to the candles.
Despite the intricate chandelier in the center of the room, there was an abundance of wicks flickering unhesitantly from atop tables and a baby grand in the corner. Manuel admitted that Nana was not partial to electricity and insisted that their home be filled with the soft light of wax. “Especially when it rains,” he said. “’When the damp noise is married to the soft flame,’” he quoted her.
I smiled. Were even the simple things like rain and candles always so romantic here? Or was this what happened in a house filled with obvious love?
Julia put her umbrella in a rack by the door and gave Manuel a disapproving glance as he began to shed his jeans. I heard her whisper snidely before she escorted me to a bathroom.
“There’s towels and a robe,” she pointed out. “When you’re finished, I’ll put your clothes in the dryer,” she said as she pulled the door closed behind her.
“Wait. I, uh… . Do you do this often?”
“What?”
“Drag men home from the café for your brother.”
She smiled. “No.”
“I’ll bet,” I muttered as I began to free myself from the sopping constriction of my clothes.
She knocked ten minutes later. I was sitting on the toilet wrapped in a white robe thick enough to be a mink.
“Are you decent?” she asked through the door.
I opened it and stood in front of her. “I feel like an idiot.”
“Relax. Nana’s gone up for a siesta. Come on,” she motioned me out. “It’s just the three of us.”
I sighed and followed. What else could I do; sit and listen to the souls of my old lovers thrash about inside of me and deliberate over the value of the deluge outside? I had looked up the rainfall for New Orleans before I left; 64 inches a year. I began the protracted subliminal calculations as we walked but knew, before I even got passed the living room that these two would dredge my tale of woe from me. My guise as a disinterested tourist was too shallow; too unobscure to diffuse the rage and rejection hovering behind it.
My mind wondered out of its solitary calculations as I entered the kitchen with Julia. Manuel was sitting at a dinette with a steaming mug of mocha coffee in a robe that matched my own. Julia took a stool and sat me opposite him. There was a scent of jasmine in the air mingled with some other spice that I could not quite name. And still the rain fell like small sunlit crystals escaping the clouds.
Manuel studied me as Julia put a mug in front of me. “Whose demons are you chasing?” he asked me.
“Is it that obvious?”
They both nodded; conspirators little convinced by the precise façade I had erected.
My mouth opened and snapped shut. For the first time in my life my head felt as empty as my soul. Where did I start? What would I say? And why would I divest myself of my bitter treasures to these anonymous strangers?
But I knew why. Because already my seasons had become dry and bitter; years had died away while I gripped my secrets. If I allowed myself, I would camp in this stunted oasis and feel their eyes pick at me for the truth. I needed sun warmed dirt, hot rain and languid amours squeezed tight on one of these slave scrolled balconies. I needed a refuge where my gray sight could pierce the dewy rustle of mockery Charlotte had impressed upon me. But was this the place?
“It’s fruitless,” Julia told me. And she was right.
As the words tumbled from my mouth like pebble scarring fresh fallen snow, Charlotte’s eyes seemed less cruel; her words less brutal; her demeanor not as uncompassionate. But there was no laughter in my voice; no sharp childish crack of tinkling ice. They could not mistake my words for love. Or sorrow.
The lazy fan above us whispered the only sound when I finished. Disgrace and shame rimmed my mug like pieces of broken chocolate. I’d been talking for an hour, maybe more; and yet, there still seemed so much had been left unsaid.
“So you’ve come to dig her secret bones out of our alluvial soil?” an abrasive voice asked from behind me.
We turned and parked our eyes on Nana’s cross armed scold.
This was Nana. In her words she was much too young to be addressed as Missus, and I was not even close enough to an age that I could address her as anything but Nana. Later Julia and Manuel would assure me that she harpooned all their take home strays in such a gruff manner, if only to show them the strength of her back. But to me, at that moment, she looked only formidable and I was ready to bolt.
She was a stout woman, dark skinned, with dark eyes and hard working-woman hands. She looked like a scrapper; a hard bit of tough gristle chewing back at the mouth that dared consumption. I became as silent as I was before I started this tale and could only shrug.
She looked at her grandchildren with a sigh of resignation and began peppering them with questions about the café; consciously lifting the burden of conversation off of me.
Eventually, after business and banalities were settled, Nana turned her mind back to me as her hands busied themselves around the kitchen. Suddenly she smiled and started tossing plates of food on the counter between us. “Hot date tonight,” she said.
Julia and Manuel glanced at each other, got up and quietly abandoned me in the kitchen with her. A quick pat on the back as I looked at them in bewilderment was as close to an explanation as I got.
Nana turned with another platter from the fridge, noted the two empty stools and smiled at me. “Works every time,” she said as she poured herself coffee.
“What?”
She motioned toward the door her grandchildren had escaped through. “They think I’m too old to play the sexually liberated woman.” She laughed lightly. “It shakes up their misconceptions about what a woman my age should be doing.”
I looked at the countertop, my face reddening. “I wouldn’t know about that.”
Her face took a stern look of disapproval as I looked up. “I heard. But you revered your grandfather, no? You want to keep him in this cocoon of veneration you’ve built around him?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” She chuckled again as she picked through the array of food between us. “Youth. So much time; so little real knowledge.” She turned serious again. “Bitterness is man’s invention, Charles. Satan brought darkness, but it was man that filled it with its many hues. The only light you allow to burn within you is a stinking black candle of bitterness, regret and cynicism. You’ve become your mother’s twin.”
“I know,” I said as I studied the counter between us.
“You know but you don’t act. Care hasn’t forgotten you, you’ve forgotten care. That’s why I’m going to help you,” she determined.
I looked up at her. “How?” I had completely forgotten the matchbook.
“Nana knows everyone. Whole generations have been raised at my café.”
I waited for more but realized that she would not allow such easy lessons. She turned back to the subject that had chased off her grandkids and talked as though their embarrassment and protests still littered the counter top between us.
“The penis is not a tool…,” she began. This insistence was used against one of her previous lovers and my ensuing laughter saved me from losing the meaning of her words in the mire of my despair. But it wouldn’t be until after I had gathered Charlotte’s secrets that I would realize how wholly inept I was at putting Nana’s lessons into action.
When she finished with her anecdotes, Nana began putting away the snackery and leftovers that we had munched on. Manuel and Julia slipped back in, as if on cue, rubbed the siesta from their eyes and sat in quiet coffeed silence as Nana readied herself for her date.
Julia disappeared to return t
o the café and left Manuel and me
alone to curl around the fire in the living room with the rain still crying on the patio stones outside.
My clothes had long since dried and I sat staring into the flames when I felt Manuel’s hand slip over mine and urge me up. The whole day had gone by and I barely remembered its soft flow passing me by.
The night was different. Instead of coffee it was dark cinnamon rum. Instead of jambalaya it was strawberries and warm chocolate. Instead of hard manly lust, it was passion; a whisper of words instead of the harsh bark of lewdness.
I fell into the dark inviting scent of his ancestral Spanish blood and the thick ridges of his contoured body. I could feel his hands; his tongue; his penis flickering over the curves of my body, caressing my lips; the arc of my ear, the gentle lines of my spine. Our breath and bodies mingled as we fell into a rhythm; a gentle stirring action that pushed my mind and body to feel and explore; to twist and to writhe. I could not get enough of him, of the pleasure and fire he gave me; the tide he moved in me like some cruel moon.
I clung and he caressed. I willed pauses and he brought me progression. I begged for breath and he exhaled pleasure. I pleaded escape and he gave it to me unbound; knowing I would never be able to free myself without him. And the rain continued, thrashing against the windows as the sweat and tears of my passion dampened the sheets as if we were out amongst the rocks on the patio
.
A minor epiphany came to me in the night when I realized one of Charlotte’s secrets. She had never found beauty in New Orleans, only ugliness; the reflection of rancor she carried with her and splashed on the scenery. She had missed everything she had sought in New Orleans and I had found it. Had it offered to me and partook of it with a thirsty reverence I hadn’t dared thought possible.
I slept through a good part of the next day, waking only once to hear the rain still splashing against the windows and wondering vaguely what had all the angles crying so hard here in this city. Manuel was gone, but his scent remained and I had wrapped myself in it and lumbered back off into sleep.
Manuel finally woke me with gentle love making. We showered afterwards and found Nana, seeming quite pleased with herself, hovering around the stove with a air of quiet confidence. We all settled into coffee as Manuel recounted his day at the café and bartered suggestions about staff and menu changes with Nana while I simply enjoyed their presence. Nana glanced at me curiously a few times but said very little about anything other than my appearance and how well rested I looked.
Manuel glanced at his watch, claimed his required presence at the café, then, with gentle earnestness, kis
sed my cheek and left Nana and me
to our own devices.
An instant flush zipped up from my toes and colored me red, but when I looked up Nana had discreetly turned her back and busied herself at the stove again. It wasn’t until she put a plate in front of me and settled one in front of her own stool that I realized she had made us breakfast. With a sly glance she smiled, telling me that her night had been just as lengthy and sensuous as mine.
“I want you to stay with us until you leave New Orleans,” Nana said after we finished eating.
“But I don’t know when I’m leaving.”
“No one says you have to,” she countered.
I looked at her suspiciously. “What is it? What did you find out?”
She pulled a slip of paper from her house dress and slid it to me. “Have Manuel take you. It’s in the bayous.”
“What is it? Who is it?”
“The people you need to talk to,” she answered.
“But how…?”
She shrugged nonchalantly, but tapped her nail on the paper. “This is your mother’s cross; don’t let it be yours too. Leave it alone and cherish the happiness you’ve found.”
There was her lesson. My choice. I could give up this quest and take what she offered in her grandson or I could continue with it and give up any hope of redemption.
I reached out and snatched the paper from the counter. “I have to know,” I said as I ran back to Manuel’s room and locked the door behind me.