Say You're Sorry (29 page)

“Hello? Hello?”

“Jon?” she gasped.

“Julie? Sweetie? Are you all right?”

“Where are you?”

He laughed. “You called me. I’m home. I got in only a few minutes ago. I had my hand on the phone to call you, darling. Are you okay? You sound terrible.”

“I heard your footsteps. I heard you answer the phone. I know it’s you up there.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then Jon said, “Julie, sweetie, dear heart. We’ve got to do something about this.”

“I know what to do. I know exactly what to do.”

*

“I’m going to kill him,” Julie said to herself with each step as she climbed to the floor above. To Jon, to her tormentor, her sweetheart, the love of her life. Waves of grief washed over her. Her brain pounded. Why? That was all she could think. Julie couldn’t get past the first word of the question. Why? She was so tired. The torture had gone on so long. Far too long. So many years.

She unlocked the door at the top of the stairs.

She stepped into the hallway and made her way slowly to the door of the apartment directly above hers. She pounded once, twice.

The door flew wide.

The man standing there in the doorway, the man with fury inscribed across his face, was no one Julie had ever seen before.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” he shouted, then he pushed out past her, slamming and double-locking his door.

He headed down the stairs. Julie followed. She was right on his tail.

“You’ve made me crazy!” she screamed. “You wake me up every single morning. This is all your fault.”

“Ha! That’s a good one.”

Down, down, they went, the man in his Wall Street shoes, clattering on the stairs, Julie silent and swift in her bare feet.

They whirled through the bottom door, through the lobby, past the fake palm trees, the low benches, and out onto the sidewalk.

“I have to talk with you!” she shouted. “You have to stop this!”

But the man didn’t slow. So she grabbed the back of his suit jacket and whirled him around. They froze, an odd couple, one fully dressed, one in her nightclothes, out in front of their building, just outside the lobby door.

“Outta my face!” the man who was not Jon Lemmon shouted. “Get a life, why don’t you?”

People, smelling of shampoo and aftershave, slowed in their rush toward the subway station, staring at what looked to be an al fresco marital dispute.

“I have a life,” Julie cried. “Had.” The sadness in Jon’s last words to her echoed in her heart. Then from a pocket of her pj’s she pulled the sleek Glock 19 revolver she’d brought back from North Carolina on the train. No metal detectors on the choo-choo. “But you’ve ruined it. Destroyed it. And now I’m going to have to shoot you.”

But Julie was hesitant, derailed by the toll her sleeplessness had taken. By confusion. By tears.

Then John Linden, Julie’s upstairs neighbor and a junior-high math teacher whose summer-school students daily terrified the bejeezus out of him, pulled a .38 from the shoulder holster he wore, illegally, beneath his jacket. “Not if I shoot you first,” he said.

And then he did.

Crossing Elysian Fields on a Hot, Hot Day

“I’m so hot I could die,” said Lily Cheri Boisson Davidson standing at the bus stop at the corner of Royal and Elysian Fields. Eight-thirty in the morning, the temperature 90, humidity the same. It didn’t even help to take a shower in New Orleans in July. You couldn’t towel off fast enough to keep ahead of the sweat.

Lily wouldn’t be doing either of these things if she were still married to Clark Davidson. No sweating, no waiting for the Royal Street bus to take her from her hot, hot little shotgun house in the shabby but outlaw chic Faubourg Marigny neighborhood to her job at the Levee Bookstore in the French Quarter near Canal.

“If you hadn’t run off and left Clark you’d be summering in Pass Christian,” Lily said in an exaggerated falsetto, imitating her mother’s voice for the amusement of her friend Bernard standing beside her.

Yet as she spoke, Lily could see the lovely rambling beach house, hers and Clark’s, but Clark’s really. Wide, low-hipped with porches all around, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, St. Augustine lawn right up to where Bayou Mallini began. The very thought of it made her heart ache.

“Don’t I sound just like Daisy?” she said, making the effort to grin.

Bernard laughed and nodded. Lily did a dead-on impression, though she didn’t look a thing like her mother. Daisy Boisson was every inch the Uptown lady, her hair tinted blue to match her blood, and she was built like a three-cushion sofa. Outfitted in white from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Daisy fought the heat with Jean Naté and baby powder. All summer long she smelled like lemon cake.

Lily, at 35, was long and lean with flashing black eyes and a mop of dark curls she twisted up and pinioned with a trio of tortoise hairpins she’d received in trade for her diamond-encircled gold wedding ring in the ladies’ room of Tipitina’s juke joint.

That exchange had taken place the night after she’d come home early from a Nuke the Duke fundraiser—back when the former, according to him, Klansman David Duke was running for governor—and found her husband Clark in bed with the wife of his law partner/best friend.

Since then Lily had worn nothing but black, and her mother Daisy told her bridge friends that her daughter was in mourning for the demise of her marriage.

“Pure horse twaddle,” said Lily, referring to the mourning as she dammed a rivulet of sweat pouring down her neck. “Black simplifies things and just means clothes are one less thing I have to worry about since Clark made off with all our money.”

“Uh-huh,” said Bernard, thinking that Lily could wear an old tablecloth and be the height of chic, whereas here he was in head-to-toe vanilla Armani feeling like something the cats dragged in.

“Also, black, I don’t have to wear underwear, never could understand how women can do that in this heat anyway.”

Bernard rolled his pale blue eyes behind his horn rims. Ladies’ undies were nothing he’d given a lot of thought to, though there had been that one girl back in college before he’d figured out….

“Besides, I ask you, how can I mourn Clark if he’s not dead?”

Bernard made a cross with two carefully manicured forefingers and held them in front of Lily’s face.

“Don’t you start that witchy business again with me,” she said.

But Bernard had known Lily since their mother’s maids had wheeled their prams down the crumbling sidewalks of St. Charles Avenue, around the roots of the live oaks, and even then it had seemed as though all Lily had to do was imagine something and…Poof!

She’d phone somebody, and he was already on the line. Picture someone, and there he stood at her door.

Bernard called it witchcraft. Lily called it coincidence.

“Well, if I’m so good,” she said now, one hand on a hip in the same pose she’d struck when she was four, “how come I can’t make this damned bus come on and get here before we melt into the banquette? Do you think New Orleans buses even have a schedule, Bernard? Or do they just run whenever the drivers manage to sober up and pull themselves out of bed?”

*

Charles Robinson, an even six feet of bus driver, was mad enough to spit nails. As he was racing out the door, already late for work, his girlfriend Sharleen’s momma Dorothy had announced that, thank you very much, she’d love to stay another few days.

Sharleen had already been cranky for weeks, ever since the arrival of the email announcing Dorothy’s impending visit from Alaska. A photo of Dorothy’s plaque from the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce as Minority Entrepreneur of the Year had been attached.

“For being the only black woman crazy enough to move up there within shouting distance of the Arctic Circle, to open a 24-hour washateria and tanning salon complete with blues, chicory coffee, and beignets.” That’s what Sharleen had said.

Followed by Charles’s offering that Dorothy was so weird she ought to audition for one of those reality shows while she was in the Lower 48.

Whereupon Sharleen had shot him a dirty look.

Because no matter what she said, Charles was not allowed to express an opinion about any woman, not one word about the entire gender, not since Sharleen had seen Representative Todd Aiken on TV opining that rape rarely leads to pregnancy because, “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down.” With that, Sharleen had shouted “Legitimate my ass!” and reached over the sofa and slapped Charles upside the head.

As far as Charles could tell, it was now the opinion of Sharleen and all her girlfriends, that most men these days were stupid and evil—and while he wasn’t denying that there was a lot of that going around, he wouldn’t say most—while on the other hand every woman in the whole United States had been dubbed a saint. He wasn’t talking about any football team either. And black women, they were Saints with Attitude.

He said as much to Sharleen this morning when she and her momma both started in yelling at him.

Didn’t pick up the dry cleaning or the laundry from Mr. Lee. You’d think he could do some little something to help out around here.

Well, he did plenty. Lots of the shopping, all the heavy cleaning, most of the cooking, but he didn’t have time right now, working a four-to-midnight, then turning around and picking up an eight-to-four. Trying to put aside a little bit so they could go someplace cool for a couple of weeks in August. Sharleen didn’t make beans at that bookstore where she worked days, and she went to school at night.

“You want to see attitude? I’ll show you attitude!” With that Sharleen had picked up a handful of books, hard cover, and started chunking them at his head.

Wasn’t that something? Popped him in the ear with a copy of
Are Men Necessary?
, and he bled all over his Regional Transit Authority uniform shirt. Then Sharleen and Dorothy both stared at his bloody collar like he was Jack the Ripper instead of the victim of a book-throwing crazy woman.

After that they’d been neither time nor appetite for breakfast, and he was the last man in, his supervisor yelling at him, he’d drawn one of the buses with the on-again off-again air conditioning. Plus his least favorite route.

Elysian Fields starting out at the lake, that part wasn’t bad. But hang a right on Royal, straight through the Quarter jammed with tourists clogging up the streets, don’t know where they’re going, don’t have the right change, horse carriages with old uncle drivers dressed up like fools yelling “Cornstalk Fence Hotel,” it was enough to make a man pay a brother driver to run over his foot, file for his disability.

Today, even the good part had gone bad. Out in Gentilly between Mirabeau and Brutus, three kids got on with a boom box screaming dirty rap.

Charles said, “You turn that thing off before I rap you upside your heads.”

Then an old black lady hobbled up, smelling pretty ripe, talking to herself, not a penny in her purse. Could be his grandma.

“Come on, darlin’,” he said, “you ride anyway.”

“Who you calling darlin’, you mother-raper?”

That was it. Enough. Bottom of his shift, Charles was heading for that bookstore, grab up Sharleen, slap those women silly been feeding her all this women-this, women-that bull, especially the one she’s always talking about, that Lily.

Charles was a peaceful man, but the time had come to knock some heads.

*

Lily’s friend Bernard walked away for two minutes to buy a
Times-Picayune
at the liquor store. A good-looking man in a blue-and-white seersucker suit, carrying a briefcase, joined Lily at the bus stop. He nodded Morning, then stared down at her black sandals with the grosgrain ribbon ties and said, “You have the most beautiful ankles I’ve ever seen.”

“Buzz off,” Lily said.

*

Between Pleasure and Humanity a fat lady got on the bus. She weighed 300 pounds easy, maybe 350, was carrying another 25 of groceries in wet bags.

Of course, one broke, and there’s Doritos and Cheez-its and guacamole and chocolate chip cookies going every which way on Charles’s bus. One of the rap kids grabbed up a bag of chips with green onion and sour cream, ripped it open, and dug in.

The fat lady put all her weight behind a pretty good backhand, knocked him forward three seats.

“I’ve had me just about enough of you young hellions,” she hollered. “Don’t have a lick of home training.”

Charles didn’t even slow down. He was thinking about the look on Sharleen’s face when Dorothy was talking about young white boys growing on trees up there in Alaska.

“I like ’em,” Dorothy had said. “Not set in their ways. Not housebroke either, but who cares, I can train ’em. And one starts getting the least bit sassy, I just toss him out, go get me a fresh one.”

Sharleen had looked like that was the best idea she’d heard all week. Like she didn’t know a relationship took work, had highs and lows, good times and bad. Like life.

“Before my friend Lily cut and ran from her rotten two-timing husband she chopped his two-hundred-dollar shirts into little bitty pieces and threw them out the window like Carnival confetti,” was what she said.

That Lily again.

When Bernard came back with his paper and Lily started talking loud, the man in the seersucker suit hailed a passing cab.