The Long-Legged Fly

the end of the novel, far and away the best I’d done, maybe the best I’ll ever do. I mailed it off to my agent and slept for three days. Then got up to answer all the calls.

Most of them were junk and hang-ups. One was from Verne giving me her new address. Two were from Janie. The school had called to ask me to fill in for Dr. Palangian, advanced conversational and nineteenth-century French lit, next month while he was in Paris. A magazine editor wondered if I would consider doing a short piece for her, on whatever topic I’d like. The Times-Picayune was sending out a book for possible review.

Twice, whoever called neither spoke nor hung up, keeping the line open until the machine automatically closed it. I found those twenty-second segments of tape somehow profoundly unsettling. To this day (for I have them still) I find them so, though without good reason.

I called Janie to tell her what little I’d managed to learn, then Verne to say hello (she wasn’t in, so I breathed hard at her machine and told it hello instead), then spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone to a few friends and many rank strangers (ticket clerks, a flight steward, cab dispatchers and drivers, hotels, hospitals, hostels) trying to pick up a single loose thread that might ravel back to David.

Nada, as Hemingway said. (A word he later turned into a verb, his last one.)

About eight I knocked off and made some sandwiches and coffee, then read for a while. An hour or so later Dooley, the only detective I know in New York, called back. We were in the service together (myself briefly, him for a couple of hitches) and somehow stayed in touch. He was an MP then.

“Okay, Lew, here it is. I’ve got a confirmation, David did come in on that plane. The stewardess remembers him because of his manners. Then I’ve got a hack that remembers him, flashed on the description. Thinks he dropped him midtown, maybe Grand Central or Port Authority. And after that, nothing. Zilch.”

“You’ve been to the apartment?”

“The super told you just the way it is.”

“No other leads? Ideas?”

“Short of calling in the crazies with their birch rods and chicken entrails, no. I’m sorry, Lew. I’ll put the word out among my contacts here, of course. They’re a pretty wide-ranging lot. You never know. One of them might catch sight of him, or hear something, if he’s still in the city.”

“My thanks, D. I’m expecting a bill.”

“For what? I ain’t done chickenshit, Lew. I do something, then I’ll be sending a bill.”

“Take care, friend.”

“I will. Have to, up here.”

I got another follow-up call that night, a few more the next morning, none of them of consequence, buckets full of holes.

Walsh called to say he’d heard about David, let him know if he could do anything to help.

“Verne’s gone,” I told him.

“Jesus, Lew. Sounds like you reached for your hat and got the chamberpot instead.”

And for some reason that cheered me immeasurably.

I walked over to St. Charles and caught the trolley downtown, wandered around Canal and the Quarter like a tourist, stopped off for coffee at Cafe du Monde and for a brandy at the Napoleon House. Then took in a cheap matinee.

It was a forties-style detective movie, all stark blacks and whites, full of women flaunting cigarettes, silly hats and wisecracks. The hero was a one-time idealist turned mercenary and gone more recently to seed and gin. Ninety minutes later he’d become a solid citizen and, left behind there in movieland when the curtain closed, was probably scouting out real estate just north of town and a few new suits.

It was wonderful.

I walked over to Corondolet in the dark and caught the next trolley, almost empty at first, but it filled quickly as we worked our way around Lee Circle and uptown. A young woman sat in the back alone, looking steadily out the window and crying. The driver kept looking up at her in his mirror.

The house was emptier than I had left it. I mixed a drink and sat in darkness. The news my Cajun had brought the old man in the bar was that his son was dead, needlessly, stupidly dead, and I knew that more than ever before I was writing close to my life, that the old man’s bottle and mute acceptance were my own, that I would not see David again. I am not a man much given to the mystic or ineffable, but sitting there that night in the darkness like a cat, with the fruity smell of gin and a murmur of wind from outside, I knew. And I have been right.

Chapter Seven

The following days are as blurred as that one moment is distinct.

I must have drunk up everything in the house, then gone out for more. I remember walking back along St. Charles with paper bags in both arms, stumbling at a corner but only one of the bottles, miraculously, breaking. Signing a check at a K amp;B. Walking barefoot on hot sidewalk trying to find my way home and waking the next morning to find the soles of my feet covered with blisters.

A few bright frames, all the rest lost.

At some point Walsh was there (or I thought he was), then Verne and a little later two Indians with a travois. I was a kite floating over crowds that included Janie, David, Robert Johnson, my old man, Verne, Jules Verne, Ma Rainey, Walsh, George Washington Carver, the whole sick crew.

Lots of vintage television. Game shows! Soap operas!

And again one morning woke to pain and thirst, not a rolled r anywhere.

It didn’t take long this time, a week or so, and I was turned loose on society once again. I lay around the house drinking endless pots of coffee and reading things like Balzac and Dickens. Taught for Jack Palangian three days a week and had a few good students, started running with a younger member of the French faculty. Did some low-key magazine pieces and a series for the Times-Picayune on Cajun culture.

Some nights after work Verne came by and we’d cook, then spend the rest of the evening out on the balcony talking about the old days. “We’re just alike that way, Lew,” she used to say. “Neither one of us is ever going to have anyone permanent, anyone who’ll go the long haul, who cares that much.” But she was wrong.

A few months out of hospital, down thirty pounds and a couple of sizes from running, I got galleys for The Old Man and finished reading them early one morning (I pushed the door open and saw his back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar) with tears in my eyes. The book’s success some months later surprised me not at all.

And now I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose.

I can’t imagine what it should be.

I still live in the house Verne and I once lived in together, and she still comes by some nights. I often talk to Vicky, Walsh, Cherie and others. Memory and real voices, and the voices of these characters as I write, fill the rooms. Sometimes regret or sorrow tries to rear up and make itself heard, and sometimes, though not so often as before, I think, it succeeds.

And so, another book. But not about my Cajun this time. About someone I’ve named Lew Griffin, a man I know both very well and not at all. And I have only to end it now by writing: I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain beats at the windows.

It is not midnight. It is not raining.