Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (35 page)

Hard woman. That’s what he remembered now about her. Always expecting so damn much of him. Yes, he’d wanted to get away from New Orleans and off to a place where he’d have half a chance to accomplish what he was capable of. So what? He was… what was the word? Entitled. He was entitled to try. Even the guys in the band, they knew it too. They may have cocked their heads, made sarcastic noises when he left, but they’d have done the same thing if they had the guts, the opportunity, the…hell, the talent. Well, most of them would have, anyway.

He kept talking to himself, trying to make the case that he was right. But her words sliced his skin so hard they left scars. The possibility that she had a point—given what was happening in the city now—jabbed at the scars, drawing fresh, red blood.

He wished he could start the conversation again and take it someplace else. But as he pulled into the parking lot of the church, Velmyra unlocked her door. Before he’d even applied the brake, she was getting out of the car.

“You know what, I almost forgot. I was going to try to call that plumber again,” she said, her head up, looking away from him. “Tell Sylvia I’ll give her a call later.”

And without looking back, she walked toward her car.

Julian stared after her a moment, still breathing hard. He’d wanted to call her back, but didn’t have a clue what he would say. So he walked into the church.

Sylvia was arranging boxes on the table. “Oh, good, you’re back,” she said, glancing up at him. “I got some more supplies and I’ve got about twenty more boxes ready to go.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize how late it was getting. Maybe we’ll just do these tomorrow. Where’s Vel?”

He pulled one of the folding chairs out from the table and sat.

“She’s gone.”

She looked up. “Oh, really?”

“We, uh, we had a fight.”

Sylvia’s eyes paled. “Oh.” She looked down at the box in front of her and put the bag of dried fruit she was holding inside it, and closed the lid.

“You want to talk about it?”

He got up and walked toward the window facing the parking lot and looked out at the street. He answered her without a sound: he hunched his shoulders up, hands in both pockets.

“To be honest,” Sylvia said, “I was a little surprised that you two were spending time together again. But then, when something like this happens—the storm and everything—people do things they wouldn’t normally do.” Julian sat back at the table again. “I told her I couldn’t remember why we broke up. Well”—he shook his head with a small, sardonic laugh—“she reminded me.”

Sylvia sat across from him at the table. The church still had no electricity, so the room grew dim as the sunlight from the windows began to wane.

“You know, when your dad proposed to me a few months ago I didn’t think anything of it. When I think about it now, I guess I kind of—how do you young folks say it?—blew it off. I thought we had so many years left together, and maybe we’d get married, maybe we wouldn’t. It didn’t seem so important. But now that—” Her voice shook—“now that Simon is…gone, I wish I’d done it. If for no other reason than that I could have been a part of his family—
your
family. I could have been a part of Simon’s—I don’t know. His
history
.”

She put an elbow up on the table and leaned her cheek against her fist. Her hair, normally meticulously coifed, was straw-dry and curl-less, it’s gray roots inching up beneath the Clairol red. “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say to you, baby. I’m…just thinking out loud. But I’ll tell you this. One of the hardest things to do is to live your life without regrets. But in the end, it’s a whole lot better if you try.”

“You know Velmyra, she’s strong willed. But that’s why we love her, right?” She smiled and patted his arm. “Give her a little time. Give her a little time, then talk to her, and tell her what’s in your heart.”

He stared at his hands a moment, then folded them.

“Yeah. I will. Thanks.”

She picked up her purse and swung it over her shoulder, then reached inside it and pulled out her scarf.

“Lord, I tell you.” She put the scarf on and tied it loosely under her chin, smiled. “Used to be a time when I’da never left the house with my hair looking like this,” she said. “Everything’s changed. Some days I’m doin’ good just to get out of the bed.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean.”

A car rolled by and she looked toward the street. “You know, Vel’s not saying much. But she’s taking all this pretty hard. Oh, I know, she’s trying her best to be positive, but you know how much she loves this place. We all do, of course, but Vel…” She stopped, shook her head. “Yesterday we were watching the news, and they were, you know how they do, showing all that footage of the days right after the flood. And Vel just started crying. Took her a long time to get herself together.”

Julian blinked, felt a tug in his stomach. He thought of himself collapsed on Genevieve’s bathroom floor, Velmyra kneeling beside him, bringing him back to himself. Listening, waiting while he cried. He thought of all the words he’d said to her and now he wanted them back. What had he been thinking? He wasn’t the only one who was dealing with grief.

He got up and hugged Sylvia, told her he would be back the following day. “If you talk to Vel,” he began, “would you tell her I’m…” He stopped. He just didn’t know the words.

“Never mind. I’ll tell her myself.”

He was walking back toward his car in the dimming daylight, when he spotted something large, a frame of some sort, leaning against the door of his car. When he got closer he realized what it was. A painting on a large canvas.

It was covered with a sheet of thin, translucent paper taped to the frame, he guessed, to protect it. When he lifted the cover, what he saw brought water to the corners of his eyes.

It was a painting of the cover of his album “Boplicitude,” his face large and luminous, looking out over the Left Bank of the River Seine in Paris, his trumpet in his hand. Thick,
impasto
brushstrokes applied in a post-impressionist style covered the canvas, and though a patchwork of odd colors detailed his skin—pinks, purples, blues—when viewed as a whole, it all made perfect artistic sense.

In the lower right hand corner, there was Velmyra’s familiar signature—an elaborate ‘V’ and ‘H’ with the other letters scribbled in a completely illegible fashion. The likeness was amazing. His eyes opened wide; he’d forgotten what an extraordinarily talented artist she was. But it wasn’t the portrait he remembered on the album cover. It had all the details correct—the angle of his head, the proportions of his features, the color of his skin—but somehow she had captured something that wasn’t in the photograph.

The album cover photo had shown a young Julian Fortier—cocksure, confident, self-absorbed—a man with the world at his feet. This portrait revealed something more. She’d painted him older, his skin etched with the lessons of life, his eyes lit with equal measures of wisdom and vulnerability. And in his expression she’d captured something even more interesting: a capacity for understanding. A quiet, somber grace.

He ran a hand along the back of his head and exhaled a slow stream of air. What Velmyra had painted was not the man he was then, nor was it the man he was now, he believed. This was a painting of the man she hoped he would become.

He covered the painting with the tissue paper. The air was cooler now, and a southerly breeze stirred the trees. He took a deep breath. Then he opened the trunk of his car and carefully put the portrait inside.

He didn’t consciously decide not to go back to the Best Western, but when he thought of spending the rest of the evening in his box of a motel room alone with a TV, a refrigerator stocked with beer, and his thoughts, it depressed him. So he started the car and before he knew it, he was driving the streets of New Orleans.

He ended up on Lavalle Street in front of his father’s house, and in the oncoming twilight the house looked almost normal. The street, though, was deathly quiet. He turned off the ignition, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Even though Julian probably would not have talked to Simon about his fight with Velmyra—he had rarely discussed the details of his love life with his father—he would have sought him out for company. His father always knew when something was troubling him, and Julian had always depended on the comfort of their unspoken bond. Searching his son’s brooding eyes, Simon would say, “You ate anything yet?” And Julian would sit in the kitchen while a cast iron skillet clanked against the stove and Simon talked about everything and nothing—the Saints, the Hornets, local politics, who he beat at dominoes, who in the neighborhood had gotten married, or divorced, or had a grandbaby. As the shrimp etouffee or the smothered Creole catfish bubbled, Julian would nod, then eat quietly until he felt better. And he always did.

But there was no comfort tonight. He watched the darkness surround the kitchen window where his father would look out onto the street while he talked, and tried to imagine sitting with him as the amber glow of lamplights swelled in the purple dusk. A half hour passed. And finally, Julian started the car.

The Claiborne Avenue Bridge was closed since the flood, and it was just as well. Julian had never trusted that strange, rickety bridge anyway, and there were other ways to get to the Lower Ninth Ward. Seeing the place where so much devastation happened was something Julian might have put off forever—the images on television were horrible enough to see, and he didn’t think he needed to witness the horror in person. But tonight, he felt compelled. This was his city, and now he was ready to claim it. The Lower Nine was where his friend Dereek had lived. If he could straddle roof shingles and swim through the muck-and-sludge river that filled his neighborhood and survive it, the least Julian could do was witness where he’d done it.

He’d known this street so well; Dereek’s mother was a fine cook, and many a night he’d sat around the family’s kitchen table while she dished up her extra hot chili. But when Julian turned down the familiar block, his heart skittered, his face went cold; he couldn’t have been more shaken if he’d witnessed a murder.

The once flat, green lawns had bulged into mountains of mud. The majestic oak trees looked as if a giant fist had reached around them and ripped them up through the earth by their trunks, leaving their shredded roots to dangle like the wiry, stray hairs of an unkempt beard. That same fist had crumbled houses, swiped them off their slabs, or pounded them to rubble as if they’d been made of matchsticks. In school, he’d seen pictures of Dresden after the bomb blasts of World War II; it was the only thing he’d ever seen that was remotely similar. It couldn’t have left any more destruction than this.

He thought he knew exactly where Dereek’s house had been, but drove in circles, veering around piles of wood siding, pieces of rooftops flung into the street, cars upended and sitting on what had been porches, or on other cars. His headlights shined on piles of rubble, but only a few things looked identifiable. A dinner plate, a basketball, a teapot, a lawnmower, a toilet bowl, a boot, a lamp. Random items flung together in some sort of cruel, metaphysical collage. All the jetsam of peoples’ lives, reduced to piles of nothing.

How many made it out? How many didn’t?
Dereek hadn’t said and probably didn’t know.
Please. Let them all be safe.
But he knew if Dereek had stayed through it, then others had too. Not everybody owned a car, or had enough cash for a motel room miles away. Some had surely stayed, some that weren’t as young and strong and capable of survival as Dereek.

He never found Dereek’s house. He drove back to Baton Rouge in a fog, his eyes sometimes welling up and burning with the memory of what he’d just seen. By the time he got back to his hotel room in Baton Rouge, he was still breathing hard. He took the portrait Velmyra had painted out of the car, leaned it up against the portable refrigerator, and fell onto the bed. It was late, but a sick feeling churned his gut and it was impossible to sleep. He thought of his father’s house, his father’s neighbors. Even with water marks five feet high, at least it still looked a little like a neighborhood.

He left the room and paced around the Best Western parking lot to calm down, and when he felt reasonably peaceful, walked over to Waffle City and ate a meatloaf dinner he barely tasted. That night, after two beers, he slept in fits and starts, waking now and then with the images still in his head. Now he knew what helplessness felt like. As much as he wanted to do something, there was nothing he could do.

The next morning a bright sun sliced across his bedspread, pulling him out of sleep, and even lifting his spirits a little. A new day. He thought to call Velmyra, then realized she probably had appointments all day—her folks, their insurance company, her own house and a plumber who might or might not show. She likely wouldn’t pick up anyway, and honestly, he wasn’t sure what exactly he would say.

But he dialed her number anyway. Her outgoing message—
Hi! This is Vel. Please leave your name and number
—had an upbeat lilt: sweet, perky, optimistic. It was an old message, obviously, recorded by a woman who hadn’t yet had her life turned on its head.

When he heard the “beep” to leave his message, his tongue froze, his heart raced. “Hey, Vel. I…sorry to, uh.” Sigh. “Look… can we talk sometime? Maybe we could…I, uh, I just want to talk. To you. OK? OK. Later.”

Damn. So lame. Normally, he would have been embarrassed, leaving a stuttering message like that, but he didn’t care now. He was weary of trying to act like he had it all together. He felt raw, and didn’t care if she knew it.

He called New York. There had been a message on his cell phone from his agent in Manhattan, Morris De Camp of Galaxy Artists, Incorporated. Something about a concert coming up in New York.

He answered on the second ring. De Camp asked about Julian’s father, and when Julian told him they’d still had no luck in finding him, De Camp quickly offered his condolences. And then he got to the business at hand.

He knew all about what happened in Tokyo, and had one question for Julian.