Tempter (3 page)

Chapter Three

The tears in Charlie’s eyes refracted the light of the parking lot, turning everything into watery smears. If she had not already been familiar with the metal stairway, she would have fallen at least twice. She was aware of being watched from a couple of windows, but she was past caring what the neighbors thought.

‘Neighbors!’ That was a laugh! Her mouth curled into a bitter smirk. You didn't have neighbors in places like Stonebrook Apartments; you had people who lived next door. Besides,
they weren’t
her
neighbors they were Tony’s, and Tony didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone but himself.

She shifted her grip on her suitcase as she searched her pocket for the keys to the car. This was the final load. She hoped he wouldn’t show up and start something at the last minute. Even as she packed her things, part of her had been unsure if she was truly walking out for good, but now there was no denying that the relationship was over, once and for all. The resolve to stick by her decision to leave numbed the hurt inside—not all of it, but enough to make it bearable.

She shoved the suitcase into the back seat of her BMW, squashing the double armload of CDs and paperback books already there. She didn’t want Tony to see her looking like this; she didn't want him to see her out of control. One look at her swollen, seeping eyes and runny nose would be all it would take him to start in on how possessive and over emotional she was. Her self-pity turned, presenting its sharper side to her. The anger she was finally allowing herself to feel was good; better than the sex she had experienced with Tony for the past eight months.

Charlie wiped her eyes and took one final look at Parking Lot G of the Stonebrook Apartment Complex. The sun glared against the vast expanse of concrete, forcing her to squint. No sign of Tony’s candy-apple red TransAm. He was probably hanging out at Shooters or one of the other bars on Veterans Highway, relaxing after another day at his uncle’s furniture showroom, sucking up happy-hour margaritas and flirting with secretaries. It wasn’t hard for her to imagine him doing that; after all, that’s how they first met.

She got into the car and slammed the door shut. Within seconds she was on I-10, fleeing the adults-only apartment communities and sprawling malls of Metairie. She turned the satellite radio to the Classic Rock channel and
Free Bird
filled the interior of car as she sped past the ornate funerary statues of Metairie Lawn Cemetery.

How could she have been so stupid as to get herself mixed up with a loser like Tony Scramuzza? She should have seen trouble coming when he made fun of her taking continuing education classes at UNO. Also, Tony didn’t like staying at her place in the city, since that meant he’d have to make a fifteen-minute commute to work, even though it meant she had to suffer a forty minute drive into the city whenever she stayed overnight at his place. No, she couldn’t take such subtle non-commitment hints; she had to hang around until she found him in bed with another woman.

Her eyes began to sting and she almost missed the Carrollton Avenue exit. She slowed down, allowing the warm wind coming through the open window to dry the tears on her cheeks. The pleasantly sharp aroma of peppers from the nearby hot sauce factory cut through the carbon monoxide and diesel fumes of the interchange.

She had gone to Tony’s the other night after a long day at work. She hadn’t bothered to call ahead to tell him she was coming. She wanted to surprise him, since she had told him earlier it was doubtful she could get away in time for dinner.

She surprised him, all right.

She’d let herself in with the spare key he had given her after their first weekend together, eight months before. She found Tony standing at the breakfast bar, a bottle of vodka in one hand, a pair of highball glasses in the other. His mouth and robe were both hanging open. She could see the golden chains glinting in his chest hairs.

The other woman was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, one hip resting against the doorjamb. When she saw Charlie, she clutched the robe she was wearing shut. Charlie stood there like a lump, as her mind registered the fact the robe the other woman was wearing belonged to her. Her face burned as it there were live coals buried in her cheekbones.

“You didn’t say nothin’ about being married,” the other woman said accusingly.

Tony’s voice managed to be both sharp and blunt at the same time. “I’m
not
.”

Charlie knew from his tone of voice that he considered the problem to lie with her, not him. So much for remorse. She fled the apartment and returned to her home in the city, where she cried until her stomach ached. She called in sick that morning, unwilling to show a puffy, tear-swollen face to her co-workers. It had taken the better part of the day for her to work up the nerve to return to Tony’s apartment and retrieve what few belongings she kept there.

Part of her hoped Tony would return while she was packing. It was the part of her that fell in love with him, and she fantasized that he would realize how much she truly meant to him and beg her not to go. However, the part of her that was tired of Tony’s macho swagger and selfish behavior feared he
would
show up and start slapping her around in the parking lot. Again.

She maneuvered the BMW through Carrollton Avenue traffic with the ease of an experienced commuter. Her body lapsed into the rituals of acceleration and braking while her mind chewed at itself like a fox in a trap. She barely registered the Popeye’s Fried Chicken that marked the homestretch.

Although legally a part of New Orleans, in many ways Carrollton was still a separate community from that of the city that had annexed it, decades ago. Its narrow tree-lined streets housed young urban professionals with parochial school-age children, students from the nearby Tulane and Loyola campuses, and blue-collar laborers. It was a pleasant place to live, mixing the relative quiet and privacy of a suburban neighborhood with the benefits of a thirty-minute streetcar ride from the French Quarter.

Charlie pulled the car into the private drive of her vintage camelback and stared at the front porch for a long moment. Why did she waste so much time on a jerk that preferred living in an over-glorified dry-walled rabbit hutch rather than a real house?

She glanced in the rearview mirror and grimaced at the mascara smeared across her eyes and cheeks. God, she looked like Tammy Faye Baker. She dug into her purse and found a wad of not-too-damp tissue, and after a few dabs at her ruined makeup, began ferrying her things into the house.

The first time Tony set foot in her home, he made a wisecrack about how the bookshelves in the living room made the place look like a library. As if having more than three books in one place was weird. Then again, the only reading material Tony had in his apartment was
Car & Driver
,
Entertainment Weekly,
and
Maxim.

She lugged the suitcase into the kitchen and dumped its contents onto the table. At least she wouldn’t have to wash his goddamned clothes anymore. She began sorting the pile with the same efficient single-mindedness her mother had given the laundry whenever she argued with dad. Socks go over
here
, blouses go over
there
. She stopped when she realized she was holding the bathrobe. The other woman’s cigarette smoke and perfume now permeated the material.

The tears started again, and she heard the cloth rip before she realized what she was doing. After she tore the bathrobe into three large, ragged pieces, she found a pair of shears and began to frantically scissor the material into even smaller fragments. When the sobs finally died down, there were hundreds of scraps, none bigger than her thumb, scattered across the kitchen floor. She stared at the tatters for a long moment then began to gather them up, placing them in a plastic bag from the grocery store. When she picked up the last piece of robe, she stuffed the bag deep into the kitchen trash can, weighing it down with the Sunday edition of the
Times-Picayune
.

After she dumped the laundry into the washer, she retrieved the bottle of Jagermeister from the freezer and retired upstairs. She needed a good long soak in the tub. And a drink. At the same time. Her bathtub was ideally suited for soaking and drinking. It dated from the 1920s, with lion’s feet and a basin deep enough to drown a platoon of Marines. As she bent over to stuff the rubber stopper into the drain, a pair of yellowish eyes greeted her.

“Pluto! So, there you are, you good-for-nothing cat!”

A tabby tom with a stainless white bib and socks lay curled at the bottom of the tub. The cat liked to spend warm days lounging against the smooth enamel, vacating its cool comfort only to drink from the toilet bowl, use the litter box downstairs, and snack on his favorite Nine Lives entrée.

“C’mon, kitty, move your butt. Mama’s in no mood to play right now.”

Charlie lifted the tabby from his resting place, dropping him onto the linoleum with an unceremonious thud. Pluto stretched and then strolled over to the door, where he began to lazily groom himself. She turned the faucets on full and tossed a handful of bath salts into the water that blasted from the tap. As she waited for the tub to fill, she moved into the master bedroom. Pluto ran ahead of her, his tail held up like a flagpole, mewling piteously.

“Aw, shut up, cat.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head. Pluto jumped onto the bed, heedless of the designer coverlet. “To hear you tell it, I never feed you,” she sighed, scratching the tabby behind the ears. Pluto's diesel-powered purr kicked in, sounding like an idling motorcycle.

Charlie skinned herself free of her pants and plopped onto the bed, cradling the cat against her breasts. She noticed the red light on the answering machine next to the bed was blinking. Probably her mother
calling long distance from Atlanta, again, to remind her she still wasn’t married. The last thing she wanted to do was to listen to her mother’s digitally recorded guilt trips.

She checked her watch then looked at the telephone again. Jerry probably hadn’t left for his evening class yet. If there was anyone she could talk to right now, it was him. She put Pluto back down and picked up the phone, hitting Jerry’s number on the speed-dial. It rang once. Twice. Three times...

“Hello?”

“Hi, Jerry?”

“Hey, Charlie! Haven’t heard from you for a long time. How’s it goin’, girl?”

“Okay, I guess.” She realized she was forcing a smile although there was no one there to see it.

“Really?” He didn’t sound too convinced.

She took a deep breath, determined to keep the tears from her voice. It almost worked. “No, not really.” She turned her sob into a tight, bitter laugh.

Jerry sighed, and she could easily imagine him on the other end of the line, shaking his head. “You wanna talk about it?”

“Yeah, but not over the phone.”

“I won’t be free until eight-thirty. You want to meet for a drink around nine?”

“That sounds good. It’ll give me time to get my shit together. I look a fright. Where do you want to meet up?”

“How about the Gris-Gris Club? You know where that is?”

“Sure I do. That sounds great.”

“See you there.”

She could already feel her spirits starting to lift as she hung up. Good old Jerry. She could always count on him being there for her, no matter what.

Chapter Four

Jerry stopped on the way back from the men's room to order another round of zombies, paying for the concoctions with a twenty. While he waited for his change, he watched Charlie from the corner of his eye as she sniffled and tore a damp cocktail napkin into confetti. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. But how did he ever get roped into being her father confessor? Sometimes being a nice guy really sucked.

Jerry Sloan had known Charlotte Calder for two years. They first met while she was auditing his figure-drawing class at the Center for Continuing Education at the University of New Orleans. Jerry was in his late thirties and far from setting the art world on its ear. He was good draftsman, but that only went so far these days. Teaching art to retired bank clerks and bored housewives was stultifying, but it paid the rent. But at least it had brought Charlie into his life.

Charlie was the prototypical yuppie, dressed in the latest fashions straight out of
Vogue
, and her conversation often revealed the fact she’d majored in business, not the liberal arts. Still, he enjoyed introducing her to the masters, seeing the familiar canvases anew through her eyes. And as well as being a stunning beauty, she also possessed an inquisitive mind, something that had rarely been noticed—or appreciated-- by her previous admirers.

For propriety’s sake, he had waited until she finished the course before asking her out on a date, and she agreed. They spent that first evening talking over coffee and beignets at the Café du Monde, where Degas once spent a sweltering Louisiana summer, dreaming of ballerinas. When the sun came up, they were still talking, and she bid him farewell with a chaste peck on the cheek. He knew then things would not turn out as he’d hoped.

Their second date was stimulating, but Charlie had insisted on paying her way. When she started to talk about her boyfriend, an alcoholic ex-jock named Ken, and his inability to make a commitment, Jerry thought he saw his chance. He told her she deserved better than Ken, but couldn’t summon the balls to nominate himself for the job. Although Charlie was the first woman he had been seriously interested in since his divorce, the thought of being rejected by her was enough to paralyze him.

Over the next three weeks they met regularly at various bars and restaurants within easy walking distance of Jerry’s apartment in the Faubourg Marigny, and talked--mostly about Charlie’s problems with Ken. Then one evening he received a phone call from Charlie. She sounded both excited and pleased with herself.

“I did it! You were right, Jerry! I took you advice and did it.”

“Did what?”

“Dumped Ken. I told him I never wanted to see him again.”

“Good for you! This calls for a celebration!” Jerry showered, put on his good suit, and splashed himself with the best aftershave he could find in his medicine cabinet. Now that the brawny, ill-tempered Ken was out of the picture, he was finally free to make his move.

However, Charlie kept him waiting for almost an hour, and when she finally showed up, it was in the company of a boisterous, bold-talking young man named Jason who hogged the conversation and drank too much. Charlie hardly said a word. When Jason staggered off to the john, Charlie leaned forward, her cheeks flushed like those of an excited teenager, and asked; “What do you think? Isn’t he
wonderful?
”

Any self-respecting man would have walked out right then and never looked back, but Jerry had never truly recovered from his years spent as a high school geek. That a woman of such beauty showed
any
interest in him at all was enough to sublimate his hurt and outrage, simply in order to remain in her company. So he smiled and told her he was happy for her, all the while hoping that someday Charlie would come to her senses and see him as more than a friend. Since then, he had held her hand through three disastrous relationships, each new romance bearing the same M.O. as the last.

Maybe if Charlie had been the stereotypical ditzy blonde, he could understand her taste in men a little better. But Charlie wasn’t a checkout girl at the Winn-Dixie; she was a successful junior executive with a local accounting firm. She had three people under her at work. She made more money that Jerry ever would teaching art to
hausfraus
. With her looks, drive and income, she could have
any
man she wanted. But instead she invariably picked weak, cheap losers with a mean streak.

Jerry had tried time and again to put Charlie out of his mind and develop a real relationship with women who didn’t confuse brutality with masculinity and sensitivity with weakness. But every time Charlie called him on the phone, he inevitably found himself drying her tears as she poured out the latest crisis in the unending apocalypse that was her love life.

“Thanks, Jerry,” Charlie sniffled as he handed her a fresh drink. “Next round’s on me.”

“Don’t sweat it.”

“I feel like a real skank, running to you every time I have boyfriend trouble. You must

think I'm brain-dead.”

Jerry recognized this as her ritual self-deprecating remark and countered it with his own ritual response. “You know better than to say that.”

“Everybody’s worries about dying,” she sighed. “Hell, dying’s easy. You only do it once. There’s no end to suffering when it comes to love, though. God, Jerry, what am gonna do now
²
”

“The same thing you did after you got rid of Steve. And Jason. You deserved better than Tony. All he was interested in was your money, anyway.”

“I realize that now. I guess I always knew that was the case, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. The only time he was ever really nice to me was whenever he wanted me to make car payments for him.” She shook her head in disgust. “You know, Tony only wanted to eat at places like TGIFridays and Chili’s. I kept trying to get him to go to Galatoire’s or Commanders Palace, but he refused. He didn’t like going to places he hadn’t been to before. Lord, can’t believe I was in love with an utter Yat!”

“I never did like him,” Jerry admitted.

Their conversation halted as the cocktail waitress approached the table. “Can I get y'all anything else?” she asked.

“Another round, please. Put it on my tab,” Charlie said.

“It’s okay,” Jerry said quickly. “I’ll get it”

“No, I insist. You got the last one.”

The waitress removed the empty glasses and placed a flyer on the table. “We just got next month’s schedule printed. Thought y'all might like one hot off the Xerox.”

At the top of the page was the bar’s logo, draped in Spanish moss with shrunken heads dotting the ‘I's in ‘Gris-Gris’. The rest of the page was a calendar with the names of the various bands typeset into the appropriate play dates. As he studied the schedule, Jerry’s eye was caught by a familiar name.

“Hey, I know this guy.”

“Know who?”

“Alex Rossiter. We used to go to school together, back in junior high and high school. I heard rumors he’d moved to New Orleans, but this is the first time I’ve seen any evidence of him playing anywhere.” Jerry’s grin faltered when he saw the blank look on Charlie's face. “I’m not surprised you don’t remember him. His last real album was back in ‘96.”

“I was more into Celine Dion back then,” she admitted.

“Alex had this band called Crash. They were your basic teen fantasy come true. He started the band in ’90, when he was fourteen. They were a grunge band, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. They played sock hops, private parties,
that kind of stuff. I used to help them load and unload their shit at gigs. I even painted their drum kit for them. When he turned sixteen, Alex was hot on quitting school and taking the band on tour, but his folks put their foot down and said no way. So he made a demo tape and sent it to SubPop Records, and the next thing you know Crash had a record contract and a song on the Top Forty! It was called
Love Hurt
.”

“I think I heard that on one of the classic rock channels on the satellite radio in my car,” Charlie said.

“Then in ‘93 Crash got a chance to open for Nirvana. Anyway, since it was a summer tour and wouldn’t interfere with school, Alex's folks let him do it. Crash’s first album,
Crash and Burn
, came out the next year
.
”

Charlie’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute! Did the album cover have these guys standing in front of a crashed airplane, with smoke coming out it?”

“Yeah, that’s the one! They had two hits off that one. The critics loved it. They couldn’t get over how a teenager wrote such deep lyrics! Everyone was calling him the new Kurt Cobain. Alex dropped out of school and moved out of his parents’ house. I’ve only seen him a couple of times since then.

“Crash kind of fell apart after their keyboardist OD’d, and Alex ended up doing a solo album that took two years to produce. When it finally came out, it was a disaster! The grunge thing had peaked, and Alex’s stuff was too extreme and experimental, even for die-hard Crash fans. After that he had trouble getting recording contracts. Too bad; now it’s considered a seminal album.”

“Wow! I didn’t know you knew anyone famous!”

“Well I wouldn’t exactly call Alex Rossiter
famous.
I mean,
you didn’t know who he was.

But every once in a while Rolling Stone mentions him in one of those “Whatever Happened To?” columns. The last time I heard anything about him was when his dad died back in ‘99. It would be good to touch base with him, after all these years.”

‘I’d really like to hear this guy play. He sounds pretty interesting. Could you introduce me to him? I’ve never met a real-live rock star before.”

“I’ll introduce you,” Jerry said, savoring the change his tenuous proximity to glamour had made. “But only if you agree to be my date for the evening.”

Charlie smiled and extended her hand across the table. “It’s a deal.”

Jerry grinned like an ape as he walked back to his apartment. Things were finally beginning to turn his way. He kept rewinding his memory and enjoying the look in Charlie's eyes. She was seeing him as exciting for the very first time. He particularly liked the way she let her hand linger in his...

He looked up and saw something cross the street ahead of him. Although the neighborhood was a relatively safe one, by New Orleans standards, Jerry instinctively froze. There were streetlights very twenty feet, but fog from the nearby river twisted shadows and sounds in such a way that muggers could be on you before you realized which direction they were coming from. Suddenly there came the sound of squeaking wheels.

Squee...squee...squee ...

“Gris-Gris, Dragon’s Blood; Johnny Conqueror; Worry-No-More; Money Wash; Do-As-I-Say; Gris-Gris; Dragon's Blood; Johnny Conqueror; Worry-No-More...”

Jerry relaxed. It was only Mad Aggie.

The old voodoo woman trundled toward him, pulling her ancient red Flying W wagon behind her with one gnarled hand. There was no telling her exact age; she could have been anywhere from sixty to a hundred years old. Her white hair stuck out like a dandelion’s ruff, framing her wrinkled turtle-face. She was close to toothless and her left eye was made from glass. Her extreme age had rendered such trivialities as race moot, but Jerry suspected she was at least part African- American.

“You’re late out tonight, Aggie.”

The old woman came to an abrupt halt, twisting her head so she could look at him with her good eye. She was dressed in the tattered remains of what had once, decades ago, been a stylish dress made from brushed velvet. Her arthritic hands were encased in black lace gloves and on her feet were a pair of bright red high-top sneakers.

“Body’s got t’ make a livin’.”

“I suppose so. But aren’t you scared to be out on the streets this late? It’s almost midnight.”

“Who wants a crazy ole woman draggin’ a wagon full of hoodoo?” she cackled. “Sides, I gots ways of protectin’ me. So don’t worry none on my account.” She squinted at him with her real eye, while the glass one gazed off to one side. “You looks like a man who needs his-self a love charm.”

“That’s all right, Aggie.” Jerry tried to step around her, but the old woman blocked him with her wagon.

“I gots something to suit you right here,” she muttered to herself, bending over the collection of grocery sacks cluttering the bed of the Flying W. When she straightened up she was clutching a small red cotton bag, the mouth of which was tied shut with yellow string and smelled of cinnamon. She shoved the charm into Jerry’s hand. “You put this under your pillow when you sleep for the next seven days, and when you dream of your lady—”

“Aggie, if I buy this thing, will you go home?”

“That a bribe?”

“What do you think?” Jerry stuffed a five-dollar bill into the street vendor’s hand, and it disappeared inside the folds of her dress without a trace. “Now get yourself indoors before you run into someone not as generous as I am.”

Mad Aggie merely cackled and continued in the direction was she was headed, the wagon’s squeaky wheels echoing her laugh.

Squee... squee... squee...

Jerry turned the charm over in his hands, staring after the old woman as she dragged her wagon full of homemade charms down the narrow streets of the Vieux Carré.

“Gris-Gris; Dragon’s Blood; Johnny Conqueror; Worry-No-More...”