Madeleine's Ghost (12 page)

A mild evening, the windows of the Napoleon House stood open onto Chartres Street. I went in and ordered a Sazerac cocktail just for the hell of it and sat at the bar and waited. At about eight-thirty one of the waiters, an ancient black man in a stained red jacket and crooked bow tie, came up and tapped me on the shoulder.

“You Mr. Ned Conti?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, surprised.

“Follow me, please.”

I took my drink and followed him around the bar, down a peeling corridor and past a sign that said
Patio Closed
, and into the courtyard. An iron fountain out there stood dry for the winter. Banana trees and other shrubs in large earthenware pots surrounded a half dozen empty black iron tables like a jungle. A curving staircase led to upstairs galleries—apartments once prepared for the emperor himself on the eve of a failed plot to rescue him from the arid and windswept rock of St. Helena, where he died in exile.

Antoinette sat at a table on the far side of the fountain, a martini before her. Two candles in old cognac bottles lit her face and sparkled off the rhinestone pins at the shoulders of her green velvet cocktail dress. She looked fine, her eyes shining, without a trace of the distress of a few days before. We were alone in the courtyard.

“Here you are, suh.” The waiter gestured to a chair across from her.

Antoinette looked up and smiled. “Thank you, Henri,” she said to him. “Hello,” she said when I sat down.

“Can I get you anything, suh?” the waiter said.

“Yes, another Sazerac, I guess,” I said, looking into my drink.

Antoinette made a face. “You're some kind of tourist,” she said. “Sazerac.”

“Yeah, I don't know what got into me. I had a taste for something fancy,” I said, trying to ignore her breasts in the low-cut dress.

“Hmm …” She pursed her lips, then turned to Henri.
“Au bon goût, Henri. Lo vrai fai por loui. Et lo même por moi,”
she said in what
sounded like Gombo French, the dying old dialect of New Orleans. I'd never before heard anyone speak it.

“Bon, bon, 'zelle Toinette.”
Henri nodded and moved off slowly across the courtyard toward the bar.

“I told him to make you a good one,” Antoinette said. “None of that nasty-ass bottled stuff. From scratch, you know.”

“You seem to have some pull around this place,” I said, looking around at the empty tables and the dripping balconies. “Looks like they opened up the patio just for you.”

“Papa proposed to Mama right here in this courtyard,” she said. “I was practically born here, you could say. Food's not so good anymore, but I love the place.”

When Henri brought the drinks, I tasted the Sazerac, and it ran like fire down my throat.

“Damn,” I said, “this is one hell of a drink.”

He smiled, pleased, and went away.

“Henry used to be head bartender here till they figured he got too old,” Antoinette said. “But he's one of the few can still make a Sazerac from scratch. You know, absinthe, bourbon, sweet vermouth, sugar, bitters. The secret is you take the absinthe, swirl it around the glass, and throw it out, then add the other stuff. That's the secret. Of course, you can't get absinthe anymore. Pernod's a decent substitute.”

I nodded dumbly.

Antoinette pulled her metal chair close. It made a scraping sound on the old bricks of the patio. “Let me taste that,” she said. She tasted the Sazerac and grimaced. “Packs a wallop,” she said. Then she put her hand on my arm and lowered her voice. “Listen, I want to get this over with right now, because the whole thing's a little embarrassing. I really appreciate what you did the other day. I was really out of control, and I needed someone to help me, and you were there, and I really, really—”

“You don't …” I began.

“Please, let me finish. I really appreciate what you did and how you did it—so sweetly. So, this is for that.…” She leaned forward and
kissed me on the lips, her hand still on my arm, and I was too dumbfounded to kiss her back.

“You taste like Sazerac,” she said, but when I didn't say anything, she leaned back and watched me through narrowed eyes, waiting. I must have looked white as a sheet, because after a while she said, “Shit, I didn't mean to scare you.”

“No, you just took me by surprise.”

“If you don't like me to kiss you, just let me know.”

“That's not it,” I said, and in a rush I reached for her and kissed her hard on the lips and kissed her again and tried to pull her close, but instead knocked her martini shattering to the bricks.

“O.K.” She laughed and pushed me back, hand flat against my chest. “You be careful now.”

In retrospect it was advice I should have heeded. But instead, as she went for Henri, I leaned back in the metal chair and stared up at the sky above the courtyard, such a shade of marvelous green it seemed a miracle.

S
OMETIME AROUND
4:00
A.M
., after drinking and dinner and more drinking at a half dozen tourist bars across the Quarter, we ended up at Lafitte's, its old blackened walls of slave-made brick sunk four feet below the level of the banquette. It was a piano bar now, with fancy neon over the baby grand and chrome-rimmed glass tables and red leather booths. But once, in another age, the place had been a front for the pirate Lafitte's illegal slaving operations, and it still held the low-down feel of crime's past.

Antoinette and I leaned into each other at the booth in the corner, half-drunk bottles of Dixie on the table before us. The oversize brandy snifter on the piano across the room was stuffed full with dollar bills, and the woman there wailed her last number, but it was still an hour away from last call, a bare hint of dawn over the city.

“There's a few little things I want to tell you,” Antoinette said.

“Shoot.”

“But you won't remember. You're drunk.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I'll remember.”

“The Quarter,” she said. “All of these tourist bars. Why do you think I wouldn't leave the Quarter tonight? Do you think I like drinking down here?”

“I know,” I said. “The bar at the Hyatt. Those plastic alligators hanging from the ceiling. Christ.”

She took hold of my arm in a firm grip, and her voice was serious all of a sudden.

“My friends don't drink here; your friends don't drink here. Dothan doesn't drink here. Do you see what I'm saying?” She bent her face toward the table as I considered this. Her neck showed white and smooth as ivory in the dim light. Her black hair curled around the pearls in her ears. Along the street a trio of drunks stumbled by. All I saw of them was their shoes through the low window.

“I'm saying that it could be dangerous for you at first.” Antoinette continued quietly. “Dothan doesn't always react rationally, and he's done some crazy things in the past. We're going to have to sneak around a little. Not that I like sneaking around. Just till I can figure out how to go about breaking it off. I'll be totally honest with you because I like you and you're a nice guy. I've been trying to get away from Dothan for a while now. He's just too much for me. He wants too much. But I'm weak, and I can't do it by myself. I call him when I've told him that we're going to cool it for a while, because I get lonely and bored. And when he's not around and when I'm lonely and bored, I do stupid things, like the other day, all that acid. That was really stupid. So I need your help.” She wouldn't look at me, and when I pulled her face up, there were tears in her eyes.

“But I'm not promising anything,” she said. “I want you to remember that. But I want …” I held my breath.

“I want you to be my lover. Will you be my lover?”

I should have been thinking about the things she said, but I wasn't thinking at all. Instead I took her in my arms and I kissed her face.

“The devil himself,” I whispered. “For you, I'd face the devil himself,” and out in the green firmament above the city there was the long demon howl of a departing freight, the Illinois Central north to St. Louis and Chicago, pulling through the swampy darkness along the river.

W
E WERE
careful. We went to tourist bars where no one we knew would be caught dead and made love in hotel rooms in the Quarter—the Lasalle, the Landmark French Quarter, the Monteleone—coming and going amid the businessmen on convention and the housewives from Akron with balding husbands in tow who wore their mortgages on their sleeves.

I liked to stand in the shadows and watch her sitting at the bar of the Bienville House or the Bourbon Orleans waiting for me. They made way for her; they gawked. Antoinette was the girl on the poster waving from a speedboat bouncing along the blue waters of the Gulf—“Louisiana, Sportsman's Paradise!”—hanging on the walls of travel offices in some gray city of the North. Once a middle-aged CEO, old enough to be her father, offered eighteen hundred dollars for one night. She turned him down with firm politeness. Another time a hustling young pharmaceutical salesman from New Jersey offered her four hundred dollars for a blow job. She dumped a cup of coffee in the lap of his Armani suit.

The hotels were much alike. Hard double beds, wall-to-wall carpeting, blue movies for an added fee, bad paintings of flowers on the wall, the smell of anonymity, the lights of Algiers across the way through the thick plate glass. We had our routine and our subterfuges. She'd leave a message in a copy of Th. Flournoy's
Des Indes à la planète Mars
in my study carrel at the Fr. Dupuis Library at Loyola. (At the time I was doing a research project on the phenomenon of automatic writing in the
nineteeth century, and this is a famous work written supposedly by an otherworldly entity
à la planchette
, as they used to say.) The messages—which I was instructed to memorize and destroy like somebody out of
Mission Impossible
—were little scraps of yellow paper bearing the name of a hotel, an hour of the day or night, a room number, and signed only with a scrawled heart.

She made all the arrangements, put everything on a credit card I never saw, and was always waiting for me in the hotel bar or in the room, freshly bathed, with her hair wrapped in a towel like Scheherazade when I came up, coat smelling of the outside world. Then we'd fall on each other, two healthy young animals.

For a while this was enough. I asked no questions, and we didn't talk about Dothan. For a while there was just her body, and the smell of her and the feel of her hair in my hands, and afterward, smoking like two characters in a foreign movie and ordering room service: bacon cheeseburgers or tepid filé gumbo at 3:00
A.M.

I was young then and not so experienced with women, but I knew from the beginning that there was something missing, that her heart did not follow her body when we made love. That she was possessed by a reserved spirit, cold and watching at the center of it all. I am not saying that she lacked enthusiasm. She had plenty of that, and I learned a few things in bed that stood me in good stead with paler women later, but something vital was missing, a piece to the puzzle not in place. Then, one night following the act, Antoinette drowsing against my shoulder, it hit me: We weren't making love at all; we were fucking.

I woke her up and told her so.

She looked at me through sleepy eyes. Then she leaned up, gave me an ironic sort of kiss at the side of the mouth, and said, “Baby, just go to sleep.”

But I wouldn't go to sleep, and I sat up brooding over it until dawn.

A few days later, in bed in room 247 of the old River Mark Hotel, I brought up the subject again. Through the thin walls of the place came
the hooting and catcalls of a bachelor party. They had a stripper in the suite next door. I'd seen this buxom creature coming up in the elevator, wrapped in a long raincoat, accompanied by a man the size of an outhouse. We could hear the drunken howls every time the girl squatted down to pick dollar bills out of someone's teeth with her vagina, and then the sound of breaking glass.

In our room the television was on to static to drown out the sound of this neighboring bacchanal.

“You might as well shut off the TV,” Antoinette said at last, turning on her hip away from me. “It's not working.”

I got up and turned it off, but instead of getting back into bed, I sat down naked in the desk chair across from her.

She blinked at me curiously. Her gray eyes shone like a cat's in the dim light of the desk lamp. The hooting surged from next door, and from the opposite side, the sound of a toilet being flushed.

“I'm sorry this is a crummy hotel,” Antoinette said, and put the pillow over her head. When she came up for air and saw me still sitting there, she held out her arm for me to come to her.

I shook my head. “We need to talk,” I said.

She was quiet a moment. “O.K., why don't we talk in bed?” she said at last.

“That won't work.”

Then she sighed and rolled over onto her back, her breasts fleshing out on either side like a river overflowing its banks. She clasped her hands between them, a saint in repose. She was never an easy woman to talk to; she did not trust words. She held back so much of herself that reticence became a habit.

“All right, if everyone's going to talk,” she said, staring at the ceiling, “why don't you put on your pants?” It did seem strange to have a serious talk in the nude, so I stood and put on my jeans and pulled on my T-shirt and sat down again in the chair.

“O.K., go ahead.”

I hesitated, looked out toward the city, elusive in the green light, and looked back at Antoinette, still staring at the ceiling. The hotel
seemed terribly quiet all of a sudden. I knew I had everything to lose, but I couldn't stop myself. “I'm tired of hotel rooms,” I said. “This whole thing's beginning to seem a little cheap.”