Restoration (27 page)

“I owe you an apology.”

“You apologizing, then?”

“Yes, I am. I’m sorry, Rondell.”

He lowered his head and scratched one of the scars on top, then he laid his hand flat against his skull, as if to quiet the commotion inside. “You think you and Rhys Goudeau were the first to come around looking for that old painting? You think the first day I met you I didn’t know what you were looking for? What about when I saw her crying? And what about later when she came back and stood in the lobby taking pictures and pretending they were of the light.
Of the light, Jack?
You must think I’m some kind of ignorant motherfucker.”

“Hey, now, come on, Rondell, that isn’t fair.”

“Rondell,” he said in a quiet voice. “Listen to you. I’m
Rondell
to you. Why am I Rondell to you and Miss Wheeler isn’t Gail? Rhys
Goudeau doesn’t call me Rondell.” He shook his head. “I’m old enough to be your daddy, boy. I ever tell you it’s okay to call me by my first name? I don’t remember telling you shit, Jack.” He took a long swallow of the beer, then raised a hand and called the server over. “I’ll take the ticket when it’s ready,” he said.

She made a notation, put the bill on the table and walked back around the counter.

“I’m sorry, all right?” I said. “I’m sorry for everything today.”

He placed a ten-dollar bill under the saltshaker and picked up his lunch pail and newspaper and hugged them close to his chest. He was staring at what remained in his mug. “You couldn’t know this, you wouldn’t, but I had the chance to play for Eddie Robinson at Grambling State University.”

“Who’s that?”

“He came to see me once on a recruiting trip.”

The statement was so far off subject that I was taken aback and couldn’t think of how to respond. “Eddie Robinson?” I said. “You mean the football coach?”

“He met my mama and my daddy. He sat at the kitchen table showing brochures with pictures of the campus and the weight room and where they practiced. He had this twinkle in his eye. He told Mama she made the best potato pancakes he ever ate in his life. He told Daddy it was okay to call him Coach Rob. We had ourselves a good time.”

“Can I say something now?”

“Let me finish, Jack, then I’ll go. You’ll let me finish?” I nodded and he said, “I remember he was someone who combed his hair just so, and who kept his shoulders straight and up like this here even when he was sitting down. He was young then, but he had a presence. You have what it takes,’ he told me. He looked me right in the eyes and told me that.
‘You have what it takes.’
I was six foot five and two hundred and seventy-three pounds and I wasn’t yet eighteen years old. When he left, the little boys in the neighborhood chased after his
car, ran all the way up South Rocheblave. I stood out in the yard and looked at the taillights of his Olds Ninety-eight and got the shivers where I never had them before.” A faraway look came to his eyes and he pushed his beer to the side and leaned back in his chair. “Two weeks later I blew out my knee against Saint Aug and never played football again. Coach Rob said I could come up and be on the team as a manager or trainer but I pouted and hung my lip and made every excuse and never left New Orleans. I would get wasted and show all the brothers the train tracks running along the side of my leg, from where the doctor cut me. I had what it takes, I told everybody. This went on for years. You don’t want to know how many. I was on the damn street, Jack. Then I met my wife and she got me in the Bridge House? You know about Bridge House?”

“It’s a place down on Camp Street.”

“That’s correct. They help addicts and alcoholics there, people who are down on their luck. I ain’t mad at you, Jack. You can’t help it.”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m embarrassed, I feel like shit.”

“Telling you about Coach Rob. Like that’s going to make you see I’m somebody that deserves your respect.” He pushed the beer even farther away and when he looked at me I could see that the anger had gone out of him. “You know why you can’t help it? You can’t help it because you never really stopped to consider what it’s like to be a black man in America. You come at me without the benefit of the motherfucking doubt. You think to yourself,
Look at this ignorant brother with the mop.”

“I don’t think that at all.”

“The words might not be there, but the feeling is. I don’t like the patronizing, you know what I’m saying? You know what else I don’t like? I don’t like some boy nearly half my age calling me
Rondell.”

“What if I called you Mr. Cherry from here on out?”

“You haven’t heard a word I’m telling you.” He shook his head, then opened his lunch pail and dug around inside and removed a handful of the tacks Rhys had used to hang the replacement mural.
He dropped them in my beer, letting one fall after the other. “I’m going home to my family now,” he said and rose to leave. “What are you going home to?”

“Wait. Please, wait.” I reached out and put my hand on his arm. “At least let me try to explain.”

He stared down at my hand until I moved it away. “I got a feeling this is something I’d rather not know about,” he said.

He brushed by me and walked to the door, and I ran outside after him. Something came to me in the moment before I spoke. “You knew we’d taken it out of the building and yet you sold it to him, anyway.”

He took a few more steps before stopping and turning around. He brought his shoulders up in a shrug, the lunch pail dangling from one hand, the newspaper in the other. “What do you expect for ten grand? A masterpiece? Come on, Jack.”

His laughter was lost in the roar of a truck moving past.

When the call came, I was sleeping and lost in yet another dream of Rhys Goudeau. I reached for the phone and glanced at the clock, hardly surprised by the hour. Dreams are fine, especially when they’re the kind I was having, but give me real. Give me the girl who naps on a cot in her office when she should be at home in bed. Give me coffee and a squeaky chair and a voice thick with exhaustion. It was 3:00 A.
M
., but I snapped awake. For days I’d slept in hopeful anticipation of the interruption, and with a script prepared. I waited long enough to hear her breathing, the delicate silence between each exhalation. “What are you wearing?” I said.

In rehearsal the question was met with rich, heartfelt laughter. She remembered. But tonight the response was the last thing I could’ve imagined. “Jack, it’s Isabel. I’m sorry, sweetheart. You were expecting someone else.”

She was quiet, waiting for me to speak. In times of boredom and
stress, I recalled, Isabel had the irritating habit of clicking her fingernails against her teeth, and this was what I heard now. “Jack… Jack, I do apologize. This is so—”

“Isabel?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s me, darling: Isabel Green, your beloved former editor and one-time fuck buddy. And, no, I’m not calling with an assignment, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

I should’ve put the phone down, right then. “Is something wrong?” I said instead.

“No one in your past life has died, if that’s what you mean. Jack, I’m calling to ask if you would meet me tomorrow at the Sazerac.”

“Have you been drinking again, Isabel?”

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Jack. Don’t you start on that, too.”

“I was sleeping, Isabel.”

“I keep remembering that Christmas we went there after the office party and rented the room upstairs with the view of the rooftops. God, that was nice.”

“That was four years ago.”

“I loved that night. When I die I want to be remembering that night.”

“To be honest, I’d rather forget it. I’m not proud of any part of the memory. It was a stupid thing we did and I regret it.”

“No more sex for Jack with Jack’s married boss. Is that what you’re saying? Jack has changed. Jack has
grown.”

“I like to think I have.”

“Jack has become a
good
man.” She laughed in the loud, obnoxious way I probably deserved. “You were good, too, then, Jack. You were very good. God, boy, you went at it like a jackhammer. Jack the jackhammer.”

“Why did I have to answer the phone? Isabel, please don’t call here again. And if you insist on calling, at least show me the courtesy of doing so at a decent hour.”

“Please, Jack. Just meet me in the goddamn bar, will you?” I didn’t answer and she said, “Freddie left me, baby. The little bastard… he
left
me. Do you know the woman they brought in to help edit the section? She’s fourteen years older than he is.”

I sat up in bed and turned on the lamp. It was hopeless: there would be no more sleep for me tonight. I wondered if she could hear my teeth grinding together. “Freddie and the new editor,” I muttered. “Tell me, Isabel: what am I supposed to do about it?”

“Help me. You’re supposed to help me. You’re supposed to help me because you’re supposed to be my friend.” And now she was crying, bawling into the phone.

“I am your friend,” I said. “But I wonder if you’re my friend, Isabel.”

“Then meet me there, Jack. Be my friend and meet me there.”

“By tomorrow,” I said, “do you mean later today or do you mean tomorrow, as in Saturday?”

“I mean like in fifteen hours from now, so tonight. I guess I mean tonight. By the way,” she continued, “to answer your question—you want to know what I’m wearing, Jack? I’m not wearing anything.”

“I’ll see you later, Isabel.”

“You’ll be there? Oh, thank you, sweet Jack.”

“One drink,” I said. “That’s it.”

After she hung up I lay in bed looking at the ceiling and trying to calm myself. My stomach hurt. Why hadn’t I just told her to go to hell and slammed the phone down? Why couldn’t it have been Rhys calling with an invitation to meet her at a hotel bar? I got up and put on some clothes and walked out to the gate. A light shone in one of the windows and I brought my face against a pane of wavy glass and looked in and saw Lowenstein asleep in his chair, a single gooseneck floor lamp burning at his shoulder. His mouth had fallen open. At his feet were piles of books such as those I’d come to favor and on top of one of the piles was a bottle. Would that be me in fifty years? I wondered. All alone with my art tomes and my booze and my stuffy fat chair? I was tempted to rap on the glass and ask him if he’d ever done
dumb, regrettable things when he was young, but he looked too peaceful to disturb. His face lacked its usual grip of pain and anger and I saw in it the man he might’ve been once.
No, that won’t be you
, I said to myself.
No way will that be you.

I left the bayou and Moss Street and went for a drive. I cruised the French Quarter where the neon had gone dark on Bourbon Street and yet tourists continued to roam. I passed under the oaks of Saint Charles Avenue and followed the path of the Mississippi until I was at Riverbend. I had breakfast at the Camellia Grill and when I left it was still dark, the streetlamps abuzz under the palm trees.

My mother’s house was only a couple of blocks away, and I drove there and parked across the street and waited for about an hour until she came out for the paper. Somehow seeing her in a robe and padded slippers, and reaching down for the sack in the grass as she had each morning for as long as I could remember, gave me the lift I needed. She was the good, pure thing that made the bad, corrupted ones tolerable. But I wasn’t entirely comfortable spying on her this way; I felt as if I were cheating her out of something. She paused at the door and looked back at the street. Her eyes seemed to drift to my car parked in front of the Berteaus’. I thought she’d spotted me, but then she turned and went back in the house, into rooms with empty squares and rectangles on the walls. I started the engine and shifted to Drive, and suddenly there Mom was standing at the door again. She walked to my side of the car and I let the window down. She bent forward at the waist, holding the robe together at her chest, and peered inside. “Everything okay, Jack?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you like to come in and join your mother for coffee and the paper?”

I shook my head. “I was just out driving and ended up here.”

“It’s your home, Jack. You can always come here. No matter what.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Will you bring your friend over sometime, Jack?”

“Sure, Mom.”

“If she’s anything like her name, she must be really beautiful.”

“Rhys is black, Mom.”

“Yes, I know, sugar.” She reached in the car and put her hand on my face. “You just bring her whatever color she is.”

I waited until she’d gone back in the house before I left, and before I let the tears start to fall. I hadn’t cried when my dad died, nor had I cried since, but I really made up for it now. I cried so hard I thought I was going to hurt myself. My whole body was involved. I had to pull over on the side of the road.

When I finished, I drove to Martin Luther King and the old fire-house that was home to the Guild. By now it was almost six o’clock in the morning, way too early to be feeling so much. Central City was coming awake in the spinning gray light. Pigeons fed in the street; a woman in raggedy clothes pushed a shopping cart holding a collection of cans and other found objects. I don’t know why I was surprised, finding the studio lights on upstairs. At some other time I might’ve sat on the horn and forced Rhys to come outside and talk to me. But this morning I was content to wait. A couple of hours went by before I caught a glimpse of a shadow moving across one of the windows, and then in an instant Rhys was standing there, staring out at me. She wore a lab coat and her hair was pulled back in a loose arrangement. I stepped out of the car and stood in the street and waved up at the building. She lifted the window and thrust her head out. “He used casein paint,” she called out.