Madeleine's Ghost (26 page)

“I sure as hell better look good,” she says to my compliments. “Cost me enough. I've got a personal trainer, can you believe it? This gorgeous black man, used to play for the Saints, comes over twice a week and gives me one hell of a workout. Here, check this out.” She flexes her free arm. “Go on,” she says.

I give it a squeeze and feel the muscle stiffen and bulge beneath the flesh. “Very nice,” I say.

“And that's not all, feel this!” She puts her foot on the steel lip of the carousel, pulls up the flared leg of her slacks and stiffens her calf muscle. I hesitate; she takes my hand and presses it against her calf, which feels warm and smooth. But when I bend toward her, my hair falls away from my face and she sees the purple bruise and zigzag laceration on my temple.

“Honey,” she says, concerned, “is that where they got you?” She pulls me up and touches it gently with her fingertips.

“Yeah.”

“New York. What the hell are you doing all the way up there?”

There is not enough time to answer. My shoulder bag comes crashing out of the chute, and as soon as I've got it, she pulls me toward the sliding doors and out into the thick, buttery heat of New Orleans in August.

“I'm parked illegally,” she says. “Come on. Oh, and these are for you.” She turns and thrusts the pink roses into my arms.

“Welcome back,” she says, and leans over and kisses me on the cheek.

T
HE CAR
is new and impressive, a red convertible Saab Turbo with brushed aluminum alloys and an interior of white Italian leather. Antoinette kicks off her shoes and drives the thing barefoot, carelessly, as if she were driving a battered old pickup truck. There is already a ding or two in the bright
enamel. We're dodging in and out of traffic on the Airline Highway, headed toward the city in the light flow of Saturday traffic.

“Nice car,” I shout over the rush of hot wind.

“I guess so, if you like your cars all modern,” she shouts back. “Papa got it for me last year. I didn't want the car, really. I wanted a big old 1959 pink Cadillac convertible, and I had one lined up for ten thousand dollars—this old boy I knew who used to work with Dothan at Spanish Town. But Papa said he didn't feel comfortable with me driving around in a thirty-year-old car no matter how big it was, and he goes out and buys me this thing. Didn't even ask me. I hate it, if you want the truth. Makes me feel like a sorority girl just out of Ole Miss. Need a bow in my hair to drive this thing.”

Now the clouds seen earlier from the window of the plane break with a crack of thunder, and it begins to rain. Antoinette's got the top down. Raindrops hit the windshield, but because of the rake of the car, we stay dry. I've never driven with her before, and it's a frightening experience. Her idea of driving seems to involve the quickest way of getting from point A to point B, and damn all the niceties in between. She looks over at me, teeth clenched in the front seat, and laughs.

“Hey, haven't lost a passenger yet,” she says. When the rain picks up and I begin to feel a few drops, she fishes up an LSU hat from the junk in the backseat and tosses it my way. “Put this on if you don't want to get wet,” she says, and she bears down on the accelerator and we go barreling in and out of traffic till downtown rises, a gray and green swath, through the windshield. She's got the radio on now, a station that plays country oldies. She sings along with this, a song full of slide guitar and broken hearts, as we intersect with the Pontchartrain Expressway. The streaked metal walls of the Superdome glint dull and ugly just ahead, like the walls of a futuristic prison.

“How do you feel about a beer?” Antoinette puts a gruff fist on my knee. I am hunkered down in the seat like a ten-year-old.

“I'm game,” I say.

“But just one. Because we need to stop by the store so I can borrow
some money from myself; then we've got to hit the road. The whole family's waiting for us. O.K.?”

“Sure.”

We exit the freeway at Dryades and head over to Perdido. Antoinette leaves the Saab parked at the corner of Perdido and Carondolet right beside a fire hydrant. Half a block down, just before the dead end of Carroll Street, there is a neon martini glass lit against the gray sky. It fizzes a pleasant blue in the rain. Antoinette jumps out of the Saab in a short athletic hop, without opening the door. She's done this before. I can see scuff marks and grass stains on the armrest.

“Aren't you going to put the top up?” I say.

“Don't you worry about my car,” she says, annoyed, and is already halfway to the bar. She's inside before I have quite disentangled myself from the seat belt. I leave the pink roses on the backseat, where they will benefit from the rain, and hurry after her. She is acting a little strangely now, slightly awkward as if she doesn't want to make too much of my arrival after the initial enthusiasm at the airport.

The cocktail lounge is long and dark, decorated in a nautical theme. Prints of sailing ships hang in the dark booths; a polished wood ship's wheel hangs over the bar, and nets with glass floats are nailed to the ceiling. I get a vaguely illicit fifties atmosphere. Close to the federal buildings and businesses on Canal, it's the sort of place you would bring your secretary if you were having an affair. Antoinette is already sitting on a red vinyl stool at the bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking a gin and tonic. She points to another one of these, sweating on a paper cocktail napkin. A lime and a lemon perch on the edge of the glass.

“Drink up,” she says. “We're already late. The rest of them got there this morning.”

I climb on the stool, somewhat dizzy. I had forgotten the heat of New Orleans in the summer, the air like a hot bath, then the frozen atmosphere of air-conditioned places. And there is something else—a strange disassociation, a transparency. I feel like a man haunting his own past, and it seems I can almost see through my own hand as I pick up the glass. O damned insubstance!

“You look a little sick,” Antoinette says. “A little green around the gills. You sick?”

“No,” I say. “It's just been so long, I—”

“Oh, come on now.” She gives me a stiff punch on the shoulder. “Don't go misty-eyed on me. You're back, that's all. You've been gone too long. This is your vacation. Climb out of your head for me and try to relax. Can you do that? Come on, try,” and she reaches over and raps on my head with a sharp knuckle.

I decide to take her advice, for fear I'll return to New York with more bruises than when I left. She knocks back her gin and tonic and orders another round, though I have barely touched mine. Then she snaps open her small rectangular purse and removes an antique pillbox. She takes a yellow pill out of the box, curls it onto her tongue, and swallows with a mouthful of gin.

“What's that?” I say.

“Didn't get much sleep last night,” she says. “Just a little something to keep me going.”

“Unh-huh.”

“Don't ask.”

We are silent for a minute, and Antoinette slurps her second drink as I finish my first. Then she pauses and looks at me through her lashes, an unreadable expression on her face.

“Out with it,” I say.

“Nothing,” she says. “You're too sensitive.” Then she tells me about the family gathering, which I will be attending. It's a Rivaudais tradition. Her parents have a sort of fishing camp downriver between Pointe de la Hache and Jesuit Bend that twice a year they fill with daughters and husbands and grandkids and crawfish boils and barbecues.

“When I talked to you on the phone, you sounded so low,” she says. “This thing might be a little boring, but anything's better than New York, right?”

“Right.”

“We've been going down to the camp about the last ten years now. Ever since Papa gave up his cabin on the bayou outside Mamou. You
know, he just never could stomach that place after the whole Dothan thing. I think he always blamed himself for taking me out with him, unsupervised, as it were, and for everything that happened. Though to tell you the truth, it would have happened just the same anywhere else. I was a little piece of something ripe in those days.”

Suddenly she seems very nervous. Cigarette going in the corner of her mouth like a truck driver, she begins to tap her fingers in a drumbeat on the bar, and then her foot is going, and I realize that the yellow pill has kicked in and that it is speed. She tries to say something but shakes her head. Her thoughts are racing faster than her tongue. I try to slow her down.

“So whatever happened to Dothan?” I say, and she stops jittering for a second, as if someone has just closed a gate in her face.

“Dothan, huh,” she says. “I don't know where the hell he is now, and I don't care. We broke up for good about three years after you blew town. The bastard gave me a nice fat black eye, just like the one he gave you. Not too long ago I heard the state troopers got him for some drug thing. They had him up at Angola for a couple of years on the prison farm. He was a tough guy, but that place is full of tough guys. I heard a couple of things from Leroy Threefoot, this half-blood Choctaw used to work at the bar, the same guy I almost bought the Cadillac from. Leroy told me that Dothan took a little black boy lover like they all do up there and that somebody broke both his arms and stabbed him in the lung, which he recovered from. When he got out, he left for Texas. That's all I know. But I'll tell you what, Texas is where he belongs. A state full of rednecks, no-class shitheels, and rattlesnakes. Dothan ought to fit right in.”

Antoinette finishes her drink, mouths a cube, spits it back into the glass, takes her purse, and slides off the stool. There's something unfamiliar about her, something I can't quite put my finger on, a layer of weariness perhaps, or sadness, beneath the tanned sexy look and the speed, but I do not know enough yet to say for sure.

“You ready?” she says.

It is not a question. She's out the door, and I swallow half a glass of gin in a choking second and follow.

A
NTOINETTE'S STORE
is on Treme, on the block closest to the park. It occupies the ground floor of a late-nineteenth-century three-story town house built in the Creole style, with wrought-iron balconies and painted a vivid shade of pink common in New Orleans.

“Up there you've got two apartments,” Antoinette says, pointing to the balconies of the upper floors. “Pretty nice one-bedrooms with a little shared garden in the courtyard out back. Two gay couples, but I'll say one thing—except for the occasional marital spat, they're neat and quiet. I really ought to kick them out, renovate a little, jack up the rent, which is dirt cheap, and move in some yuppies. But you know how I am about money. Never could abide the stuff.”

“You own the building?” I say.

“Now I do. Papa had the deed made over in my name last year on my birthday.”

“Nice of him.”

“Yes.”

Antoinette double parks the Saab on the narrow street and we go into the store. Inside the small foyer there is hardly enough room to move. It smells like mold, clove cigarettes, and mothballs and is jammed floor to ceiling with old clothes—suits, dresses, jackets, coats, hats, shoes, purses. The flotsam and jetsam of the last four decades.

“This is the sale room,” she says. “Everything here is fifty percent off, or two for one.” A hand-lettered sign over one rack reads 70s!
HIP! STYLISH! ON SALE
! I see ugly polyester dresses, maxicoats, and the fuzzy rabbit fur jackets that I remember from the fast girls of my youth.

“The seventies are so hot right now,” Antoinette says, pulling out a disturbing green sweater-dress hemmed with a green feathery substance.

“I know,” I say. “It's all over the East Village. Clumpy black platforms and bell bottoms. The stuff was ugly then, it's ugly now.”

She frowns, and we pick our way around piles of clothes on the floor to the next room. Here there are counters and glass display cases and framed black-and-white photos of people from the 1920s. I stop before one of these, a pretty woman with the glossy black bobbed hair of the era. The resemblance is striking. The same cheekbones, the same insouciant smile.

“That's my aunt Tatie,” Antoinette says. “Something of a wild woman in her day apparently. Had lovers, never got married.”

“Runs in the family, I guess.”

“Shut up.” Antoinette shoots me a glance. “She was so sweet. She died a couple of years ago in the home. I miss her.”

The register, manned by three hard-looking high school girls, is set on an antique planter's desk against the far wall. Antoinette introduces them as Sticky, Polly, and Emmy-Lou. The girls eye me blandly. I don't impress them.

“How'd we do yesterday?” Antoinette says.

Polly shrugs. “All right.”

They all wear exaggerated makeup and are dressed in clothing from the store. They look like little girls who have gotten into their grandmothers' cedar closet. Two of them smoke clove cigarettes, and a noxious cloud of this stuff hovers in the air over their heads. Speed metal shrieks at volume from a tape box on the shelf behind them. It is too easy to predict the lives that await them: At nineteen, one will marry a bassist in a rock band and after a roller coaster ride of drugs and distant gigs will divorce, bereft of youth and prospects, at thirty. The other will die of an overdose or in a drunken car accident in the next five years. But the third, she might surprise us. I see a rapprochement with her parents and finally law school. Between them, seven abortions.

I am drawn from these uncharitable speculations by Antoinette's jittery nervousness. She knocks a box full of glass beads off the counter, and Sticky sighs and stoops with her to clean up the mess. Then I look around the store while Antoinette opens the register and counts up the previous day's receipts. There is a back room, full of an odd assortment of men's clothes. I count nearly a hundred pairs of khaki jodhpurs, regulation
for the pre-World War U.S. Army, racks of Depression-era double-breasted suits, ten boxes of wing tips, curled up at the toes. I try on a moth-eaten Knights of Columbus bicorne hat. Its silver braid cross still glitters beneath a layer of dust. As I am posing Napoleon style in the peeling oval mirror, Sticky approaches me from behind.