A Parallel Life (12 page)

“I'm only all right when I'm driving,” Simone said.

“Uhhuun,” Ophelia moaned.

“As soon as I leave a place there's this sense of relief. And then, of course, there's anticipation about what I'll find at the next place. Then when I get there I can't wait to get away and go somewhere else.”

Ophelia moaned again, bringing up two fingers to her lips. Simone reached into her bag and took out a pack of Herbert Taryinton's, lit two cork-tipped cigarettes, and handed one to Ophelia. The Packard bounced over a wooden bridge and Ophelia giggled. “Your mother doesn't like my giving you cigarettes,” Simone said and
smiled when Ophelia grinned, the plume of smoke leaving the girl's lips like a feathery substitute for a word.

Then someone new appeared on the seat of the Packard beside Simone. To her credit, Simone at first seemed to be trying to act with discretion, but Marigny was a small town and, at best, discretion could be only a holding action.

He fixed cars. There had been something wrong with the Packard and he was recommended to Simone. He raised the hood and bent over the world of metal and spark that the hood protected her from knowing. She watched as his grease-stained arms, ropy muscled and quick, moved in and out. A wrench here. Turning something there. His fingers prodded and probed. He sat on the creamy leather and touched the wheel that only she touched. He turned the key and listened.

“It was your carburator,” he said. “I think I've fixed it. You shouldn't have any more trouble.”

“No,” she said.

His name was Ruben Fouchet and his auto shop was under a raised house that sat among others like it—shabby buildings all—on a spit of dredged-up mud and shell on the other side of the bayou. In the rooms above, his wife had a business. The painted wooden sign at the end of the driveway read Francine's Beauty Shoppe. A sign in the top half of the window advertised permanent waves. Pink cafe curtains hung over the bottom half.

Simone wrote him a check. He folded it without even glancing at it and then he placed his hand on her waist and looked at her.

“I'll be out at Three Rivers on Friday night,” he said.

When Simone got home, she took off the lilac linen dress and saw that his fingers had made a black print at the waist. She folded the dress and placed it in a box with tissue paper and put it on a shelf.

Three Rivers Pavilion was a long, screened dance hall at the end of a road reached by crossing an arching white-timbered bridge. The pavilion overlooked a wide expanse of water, almost a small lake, created by the convergence of three slow-moving rivers. On one end were tables where people sat and drank and ate boiled shrimp and crab. At the other end was a dance floor and a band.

She and Ruben were like one body as they whirled around the floor. They were both tall and slender with dark hair and pale eyes—his blue, hers green. Simone wore a yellow dress and he a blue shirt and black slacks. Anyone watching—and there were many—could see how much Simone loved being held by him.

How soon Alex heard about this affair was open to question. Alex was aloof, something of a recluse—a snob, perhaps. He wasn't the sort of person just anyone could go up to and say, “I saw your wife with a Cajun grease monkey at a dance hall the other night. She looked damp enough to pour in a glass and drink down straight.”

She had her life, and Alex had his studies. He read history, especially the history of battles. That summer he was reading about the Punic Wars. Simone was happy to point out to him, whenever the subject came up, that his interest in things seemed to be inversely proportional to their distance from him in time or space. As they receded from him, he became fascinated.

They ate lunch together most days at a round wicker
table on the big front porch with a view through the trees of the lake. Sometimes Alex would bring a book to the table and sometimes he would also bring in a yellow legal pad on which he'd make sketches of some action or another. He'd eat a bit, take a sip of his iced tea, read, and then jot down some position. After each notation he'd raise his head and lift his farsighted eyes to Simone to let her know that conversation could take place.

“We could drive up to Vicksburg and visit a real battleground,” she'd say. “I realize it's not Carthage or Rome, but we could sit on real ground that has almost recently been stained by real blood. It's just a hop, skip, and a jump away. We could go to Chalmette—that's almost next door—and look for cannonballs in the bushes.”

“You drive anywhere you want,” he'd say. “Leave me out of it.”

“We took this very drive the day before Jackie left for Europe,” Simone said to Ophelia. “We didn't understand the smallest thing then.” They were driving over a white shell road through miles of shoulder-high marsh grass. “Of course, I'd be married to him, but would that make any real difference? Would I be doing what I'm doing if Jackie hadn't been killed? Would I be restless like this?”

Ophelia took her chewing gum out of her mouth and examined it.

“Just remember not to stare at the sun,” Simone said. “You could go blind. That would just about do it for you.” She took a sip of Coke and passed the bottle to the girl. “I'm thinking strange thoughts, Ophelia. A friend of mine's father jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge and was swept down the river for miles before they dragged him out. He drowned, of course, and it has never ceased
to distress his family. Hunting accidents are often suicide—when they aren't murder. I can't imagine a bullet piercing my skull, though, can you? I try to imagine it—the moment of impact. So sudden. Then what? A great big hole full of light?”

Ophelia passed her back the bottle and Simone took a swallow. “It's just morbid, I know.”

Her visits to churches around the countryside continued. There probably wasn't a single church, of any denomination, that Simone hadn't prayed in. “If you go to Mass on the first Friday of each month for seven months, God has promised that he won't let you die without a chance to confess,” Simone told Felton Mackay.

“We don't hold with confession in my church.”

“Well, if you plan on sinning, it's a good idea to have confession.”

“I have to get back to work now,” he said. “Besides, I don't plan on sinning.”

“Good for you,” she said. “Maybe you should pray for me then.”

“Yes, Ma'am,” he said and looked out his side of the car. Later Felton told Mole that he didn't think he'd ride with her anymore, even though she'd never been anything but nice and he did admire the car.

“You know, I don't remember much about him. Mostly I remember the way he smelled. He smelled like expectation. He was killed in the war,” Simone said. She was standing by a window of a cabin that Ruben had brought her to. The river outside was pale in the moonlight. Ruben sat on a cot behind her smoking.

“So he's dead and you aren't?” he said.

“Maybe that's all there is to it. Maybe I feel I should be dead, too.”

“Maybe? What else could there be?

“I can't believe it's only that. When I was little I used to pray that I'd become a saint. Only I didn't want to be a saint to be good. I wanted to be a saint to be lifted up off the earth when I prayed. I remember praying in chapel and expecting at any moment for at least an inch of airspace to appear between my knees and the wood.” She turned around to see if he was listening. The only light in the room besides the red stump of his cigarette came from a kerosene lamp on a chest of drawers. His eyes never left her. “There are words that make me crazy when I hear them,” she said. “There are words I almost can't bear to hear—words like
rapture
, and
frenzy
, and
transport
.”

“What will you settle for?” he asked.

She poured some bourbon into a glass and took a sip. “That's really it, isn't it?”

“We don't get many choices,
cher
.”

“We could be dead.”

“My father drowned,” he said. “Can you imagine that, a man from the bayou drowning? I mean, my people don't drown. God gave us webbed feet like ducks, you know.”

“So what happened?”

“I guess he forgot how to swim.”

“What do you think of this place?” she asked. She had invited Ruben to come driving with her the next day. It was a day so hot that as soon as they turned off the highway and stopped, they were covered with a film of moisture. She had pulled onto a dirt road to park under an oak
tree near a tiny house that had been turned into a church. Someone had crawled onto the roof and fashioned a steeple on the peak out of pieces of an old crate. The panes of the windows were painted in checkered patterns of purple and gold.

Simone pushed open the door and led the way. It was cool inside. There was a kitchen table covered with flowered oilcloth for the altar and seven pews. The light through the windows made the room look like a neon-lit aquarium.

“I think this is a crazy place,” he said, “but I like it.”

“Me too,” she said. She sat in a pew and bowed her head for a moment. “The minister here is just the holiest man—all gnarled and bent over,” she whispered after a bit. “I think he was born in slavery. He's so old and his voice is just always about to break but I came one Sunday for the services and, let me tell you, when that wheezy organ in the corner there started, that little old man sang like he was expecting to be heard directly in heaven.”

“Did you sing too?” he asked.

“Oh no,” she said and crossed her legs and straightened her skirt. “I was just a guest in a sacred place.”

Back outside, the day was even hotter than before. The sun boring through the branches of the oaks seared white smoky patches on the grass.

“I'd like to leave a little offering,” Simone said, opening her handbag and taking out her gold compact. She walked over to one of the brick foundation piers, picked up a twig, knelt, dug a hole next to the pier, and buried the compact. Ruben stood back and watched her. “There,” she said and dusted off her hands.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“For now,” she said.

“I'm tolerant, Simone, but I'm no fool,” Alex said the next day at lunch. He put aside his yellow pad and looked in her direction. She had been going through the personal section of the
Times-Picayune
circling ads that thanked St. Jude for favors received.

“St. Jude is the two-to-one favorite over all,” she said. “He even beats out the Blessed Mother. Hopeless cases, you understand. The city must be full of them.”

“I have heard talk from such disparate sources as Billy Friedrichs, my lawyer, and Mole Guidry, who services my car.”

“I'm trying to understand things, Alex.”

“I'm not thrilled about being on the apex of a triangle.”

“I'm truly sorry, Alex, to hurt you.” She pulled a shrimp from the crown of tomato on her plate and then put it back. “I know this isn't what you need to hear, but, really, this doesn't have anything to do with you.”

“I'm going to try to be patient, Simone. I care for you. I worry.”

“I am praying, you know, Alex. I'm not happy either.”

The kerosene lamp on the end of the pier cast a flickering light on the water and they swam to it. Ruben crawled out first and squatted on the wood and pulled her up so they could lie like two silvery fish on the weathered boards.

“I don't understand how a person could forget how to swim,” she said.

“No, me neither. When my mama heard about my
daddy, she ran off the pier in front of the house and jumped in the water, but she bobbed to the top like a cork. Maybe she wanted to forget, but she couldn't.”

Simone sighed and rolled over. He reached to touch her, but she pulled away. “I want to go back and dance,” she said. “Let's go back to the pavilion.”

“This all . . . what we're doing, can't go on much longer, Simone.”

“I know.” She stood and walked to the cabin.

He held her that night when they danced as if he expected not to hold her again. She kept her arms around him, her body against his. When the music stopped, they stood side by side under the colored lanterns and looked over the place where the rivers came together. When the music started, they danced again, legs and arms like limbs reflected in a mirror.

Later that night, rather than drive directly to Marigny from Three Rivers, they chose to detour on a lonely road that led through stretches of logged-over land. Ruben leaned back, his eyes closed. When she swerved and he felt the gravel under the tires, his whole body jerked up.

“What was that?” she asked him after straightening the car. “Did you see it? There was something in the road, something big and dark. It was waiting for me.” Her voice shook.

“I didn't see anything,” he said. “It was probably a deer. The headlights get them sometimes and they can't move.”

“It was something big,” she said and then she let out her breath—as if she'd been holding it for a long time. “I just don't want to kill anything.”

“Well, whatever it was, you didn't hit it.”

“Oh,” she said. “Don't let me kill anything.”

“Let me drive,
cher
.” He reached for the wheel, but she pushed his hand away.

“No, I can't let you. This is what I do.”

She started laughing, then singing, then shouting, “We're gonna fly, Ruben, honey! They can't keep us here! We're going to lift off the ground.” She pressed the gas and they sped forward, the only car on the road with nothing but the dark stunted forest stretching away on either side. There was a sudden crack in the sky in front of them and a wide jagged door of light opened. “There it is,” she cried. “There it is!” Then the thunder broke and the rain, a seamless sheet of water, covered the open car.

Almost every light in the house was burning when Simone got back. Usually after dinner Alex went to his study to read and left on only the front-porch light for her. That night he came out onto the porch and stood blocking the door. He wore a silk robe over his pajamas. His eyes had rings under them and there were new hollows in his cheeks.