A Density of Souls (10 page)

For a brief instant, Jeff believed that Stephen had caused it. But no, he was the angel embracing it—a tall, wiry silhouette, head thrown back, arms thrown out to embrace the falling impossible.

Jeff wrapped his arms slowly around Stephen’s waist from behind.

His hands did not clasp around Stephen’s stomach until Stephen tilted his head back slightly, opening his eyes only to be blinded by the snow. Jeff felt Stephen go rigid for a second, before his body slowly rocked back against Jeff’s, allowing Jeff’s entire weight to support him.

Stephen’s arms wilted to his sides. Jeff’s lips met the nape of Stephen’s neck with a hot rush of breath. He held his mouth there as Stephen’s head gently rolled backward, fitting perfectly onto Jeff’s shoulder.

Jeff’s bottom lip became delicately caught between both of Stephen’s. Half a minute passed before Stephen opened his mouth. For a while they shared breath. Both felt for the first time what it was like to be lost in another person and momentarily free of oneself.

Seven-year-old Alex Darby awoke to the sound of a monster tapping against his second-floor bedroom window. He sat up in bed with a sharp cry before he saw falling pieces of sky blotting out the glare of the neighbor’s yard light. When he began to scream, Angela Darby sat up in bed with a jerk that awakened her husband, Andrew, from his Scotch-induced slumber. “What the hell?” Andrew grunted.

“It’s Alex!” Angela managed, sliding out of bed and grabbing her robe on the way to the bedroom door.

“What the hell is he screaming for?” Andrew asked before smother-ing his face in the pillow to blot out his son’s wails.

In the next room, Greg and Brandon leapt from Greg’s bed at the sound of Alex’s shrieks. The porn movie they had stolen from under Andrew’s bed kept playing silently until Greg slammed one fist The Falling Impossible

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against the VCR’s control panel and the frozen image of a woman’s penetrated vagina was the room’s only illumination. Both boys froze as they heard Alex’s door slam shut and Angela’s panicked voice before they could make out what Alex was screaming, “Mommy! Snow!

Look, Mommy! Snow!”

Several blocks away, Meredith first saw the snow in what she thought was a swarm of roaches crawling across the liquor cabinet. All the lights in the living room were out and she was the only one home; she had drained her last bottle and crept downstairs for another before discovering that Trish Ducote had not replaced the Stoli. Meredith spun around. Both living room windows were dotted with snowflakes, their shadows swarming eerily across the walls and floor of the darkened living room. “Someone’s kidding,” Meredith whispered to herself.

At her kitchen table, Elise Charbonnet had composed the fifth draft of a letter to Monica Conlin, admonishing her for dumping her son’s Jeep in front of her house and thus implicating Brandon in the van-dalism. Roger Charbonnet had told her if she was that upset about it she should consult their lawyer. But to Roger’s dismay Elise had refused, opting instead to draft a letter that after three months of composition was only three lines long. Elise glanced up into the adjacent living room to see her eldest son Jordan’s picture had somehow been horribly stained. Jordan’s smile was now splotched, his handsome face carved into a colorless pattern of shadow. And then the stains on his face shifted and slid down the frame as Elise turned to see the small drift of snow tumbling down the window opposite, from where it had become caught in the upper corner of the ledge. The letter forgotten, Elise rose numbly from the table and moved to the back door.

For several minutes she stared out at the snow fall that had turned the Bishop Polk bell tower rising over their backyard into a looming, hazy shadow. She realized she was smiling. She had never seen real snow before in her entire life.

On the bank of the Mississippi River, the headlights of Jeff’s Honda winked out and the only other light amid the blanketing snow was the iridescent green glow of the dashboard.

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“W
here the hell have you been?”

The front door slammed shut in response, cutting off the harsh echo of her words.

A dark shadow at the foot of the stairs didn’t answer her.

Monica had waited for Stephen outside of the Theatre Building for over an hour. Panic had set in and she did not know a single parent or friend that she could call. She had finally strode into the Theatre Building and found David Carter sweeping the stage. He seemed too unnerved to offer up a coherent answer as to where Stephen might have gone. Then, as she drove home, the snow had begun to fall and Monica thought that the world had cracked down the center.

“I was with someone,” Stephen said.

His voice seemed lower. Could it have been dropping for months now and she hadn’t noticed? “Who?” she yelled back.

“What does it matter?” Stephen asked, but without any sarcasm she could detect.

“It matters because I thought something had happened to you. I waited outside the theatre for an hour. Mr. Carter didn’t know where you were. Jesus, Stephen, I thought something was wrong. I thought maybe you’d done . . .”

Monica’s thoughts careened into the wall of her real fear. On a June afternoon in 1983, Monica had driven frantically around the city after Jeremy neglected to meet her for lunch. She had tried his office in the English Department at Tulane. The departmental secretary didn’t know where he was. She’d returned home to find a police cruiser parked in front of their house. A neighbor had reported a gunshot.

Monica didn’t realize Stephen had ascended the staircase toward The Falling Impossible

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her until he took her in his arms, and she thought for a moment that the shadowy figure in the darkened foyer was not her son but an im-postor.

“I’m not going to end up like Dad,” he whispered.

She heaved in his embrace. He held her easily.

“Dammit, Stephen,” Monica said, defeated, as Stephen walked her to her bedroom.

For the first time ever, Stephen tucked his mother into bed.

Monica watched as Stephen turned out the lights, shutting off the television where the weather man was announcing that the unpredicted snow fall had tapered but ice warnings were still in effect for all the Big Easy.

“Stephen?”

He halted in the doorway.

“I want to tell you something.”

“Yes?” he asked.

His voice was too steady. Monica thought that he might be drunk.

“I want to tell you what Brandon’s family did to me once,” she said.

In June of 1976, Monica Conlin became the first and last woman ever to be the subject of a “Special Memorandum” by the Garden District Ladies’ Society. Its chairwoman, Nanine Charbonnet, wrote her missive in finishing-school cursive, filling up half a page of perfumed stationery to issue her response to Monica Conlin’s application for membership into the GDLS.

“Many of you are already aware of the unusual circumstances under which Jeremy Conlin came to take his wife, Monica. Many of you are also aware of the effect their marriage had on the Conlin family’s involvement in the neighborhood we seek to preserve and protect,”

Nanine wrote.

“I do not wish to deny Monica Conlin membership simply because her entrance into the Conlin family seriously endangered the his-torical preservation of the Conlin-Dobucheaux house, where she now happily resides.”

The memorandum was read aloud to a convocation of the society’s thirty members on a Sunday evening. Among those present were 72

A Density of Souls

Nanine’s new daughter-in-law, Elise, and Angela Gautreaux—

recently married to Charles Gautreaux—who had already decided on the name of her first child: Greg. (Angela’s children would be sired by her second husband, Andrew Darby—and her second child, Alex, would be a happy accident).

“I wish to deny Monica Conlin membership on the basis of one undeniable fact,” the memo continued—read aloud by Melissa Dubossant, whose daughter, Trish, would soon marry a handsome, crude man with the harsh last name of Ducote.

“She has failed to raise a garden,” Melissa read aloud. “Our neighborhood is one of verdancy within a city devoured alternately by concrete and the effects of forced integration. I am hereby requesting that we deny Monica Conlin membership on the basis that she has failed to raise a garden in keeping with the traditional landscape of our neighborhood.”

Thirty hands wearing expensive but discreet platinum wedding bands and diamond engagement rings rose.

Several weeks later, Nanine Charbonnet was released from Southern Baptist hospital after an intense bout of what the doctors thought was pneumonia. Her son, Roger, and his pretty new wife, Elise, picked her up from the hospital and dropped her at her house, where she told them to leave her bed so she could resume her routine. Nanine owned two Pekingnese, Hershel and Stanwick, and she walked them every afternoon at four.

Nanine’s route brought her to the corner of Third and Chestnut around four-fifteen. On the day she was released from the hospital, Monica was waiting on her front porch with a gin and tonic.

When Nanine rounded the corner that day and saw the Conlin-Dobucheaux house, she clutched her pearls in shock, inadvertently releasing Hershel’s and Stanwick’s leashes.

Bougainvillea burst up the front two columns of the house. Morning glory vines curled up the house’s side porches. The front lawn had been cut through by flagstone paths that wound between meticulously placed beds of crocus and azalea. Elephant ears poked through the corners of the high wrought-iron gate. Two medium height banana trees stood like sentries on either side of the house.

From where she sat, on a wrought-iron patio chair purchased just three days earlier, Monica raised her glass to Nanine and wished for a heart attack to strike the woman right there on the corner.

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Nanine retrieved her two dogs and hurried home to phone Elise.

As new daughter-in-law, Elise had warmed to her duties as Nanine’s lady-in-waiting quite well.

Several days later, when she was sure Jeremy was ensconced in his third-floor studio, Monica called Nanine and invited her over for tea.

“Tea!” Nanine exclaimed over the phone at Elise, a half-hour after she accepted Monica’s invitation. “Does that woman really know how to serve high tea? Should we be expecting scones or doughnuts?”

Before their visit, neither Nanine nor Elise bothered to consult Monica’s immediate neighbors about the new Conlin garden. If they had, they would have discovered that Monica had become one of the first women in their neighborhood to hire a landscaper. For a hefty fee, he had redesigned and replanted the entire front yard in just one month.

Still, Monica’s application to the GDLS and the subsequent denial had driven a wedge between Monica and Jeremy that would never be bridged, not even by the child they would have five years later. Jeremy felt betrayed. His angel from the wrong side of Magazine Street had sold out, and the magic he had dreamed of creating with her was dwindling in the process. Occasionally, depending upon the amount of Merlot he drank, he would stumble downstairs. Monica would start awake with the thud of Jeremy hitting the mattress beside her. The night before Nanine and Elise called on Monica, she had opened her eyes to find Jeremy’s mouth against her ear. His breath was hot from wine.

“Poor little Irish girl,” he whispered.

Monica froze.

“Go upstairs,” she hissed back.

“What are you serving tomorrow? Let me guess . . .”

“Jeremy. You’re drunk. Go upstairs. I don’t want you in the bed.”

“. . . tea, scones, and bite-sized portions of your own soul.”

She shot up in bed so fast her shoulder cracked Jeremy’s chin. He stumbled backward into the night table. Monica said nothing as Jeremy struggled to his feet with the help of the bathroom doorknob.

“I guess I’m not invited then,” he mumbled, slamming the bedroom door shut behind him.

Monica did not sleep for the rest of the night. Nanine and Elise arrived at the Conlin residence on a July afternoon to find a pitcher of iced tea and three glasses set up on the wrought-iron table on 74

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the front lawn. The front door was open. The roar of Mahler’s Second Symphony could be heard from the third-floor studio. Nanine squinted at the sound of the music; Elise’s jaw fell slightly in awe.

When Monica emerged from behind an azalea bush, Nanine cried out and grabbed Elise’s arm. Monica smiled and swung open the front gate.

The three women took their seats. Elise fiddled with the lap of her dress to such an extent that Monica asked them both if they would like to go inside. Perhaps it was too hot? Nanine responded with a firm no.

As she reached over to fill Nanine’s glass, Nanine glimpsed the fleshy cleft of Monica’s right breast through the armpit of her sundress.

Monica caught her gaping, letting her eyes stay on Nanine’s until the old woman realized she had been caught.

“And how is Jeremy?” Nanine asked as soon as their eyes met.

“Very well,” Monica said, resting back into her chair.

“He’s teaching now, I understand?” Nanine asked.

“What does he teach?” Elise said.

“Jeremy claims to teach his students about the lies that humans per-petuate to mask their own fear of mortality,” Monica said easily.

Silence fell before Nanine managed a giggle. Elise gazed at Monica with almost reverent awe.

“His mother would be proud,” Nanine said. Her tone suggested that not only would Amelia Conlin not have been proud of Jeremy but she probably would’ve tried to throw Monica over the front gate.

“The garden is . . .” Nanine began.

“. . . beautiful,” Elise finished.

“Thank you,” Monica said, lighting a Benson & Hedges from a pack she kept in the breast pocket of her sundress, before exhaling through her nostrils. “The true secret to working with plants is understanding what ferocious beasts they truly are. Simply because they don’t eat meat, we assume all plants are docile creatures.”

She had lifted the insight from Jeremy almost word for word, except that Jeremy had articulated the thought to her years before as an explanation for why they should not have any front yard at all beyond a lawn.