Moth

specially outfitted, there was never any question who would drive. She parked by an elementary school on the far side of the neutral ground and we walked across Carrollton, dodging a streetcar that lugged its way toward St. Charles beneath towering palms, bell aclang. She was wearing sneakers, jeans and an old sweatshirt from the rehab hospital that read Do It-Again.

Lester told us how good it was to see us after so long, wiped quickly at the counter, set out tableware rolled into crisp white napkins. Without asking, he brought coffees with cream, and within minutes was also sliding our breakfasts onto the counter before us, pecan waffle for Clare, chili omelette for me.

We ate pretty much in silence, smiling a lot, then walked over to Lenny’s so she could get a New York Times.

“What now, Lew?”

“Maybe you could drop me off at Touro’s ER.”

“Would you mind too much if I stayed with you? It’ll probably be a long wait, and you never know how you might be feeling afterward.”

“You don’t have to do that, Clare.”

“I know I don’t.”

So she did.

At the triage desk I gave my name and other information to the clerk, answered that no I had no medical insurance but would be paying by check for services rendered, and earned for that a lingering, weighty glance, as though it were now moot whether I was the worst sort of social outcast and deadbeat, or someone important who perhaps should be catered to.

“Please wait over there, Mr. Griffin,” he said, pointing to row upon row of joined plastic chairs I always think of as discount-store pews. “A doctor will see you shortly.”

Shortly turned out to be just under three hours.

The place was more like a bus station than anything else. That same sense of being cut off from real time, much the same squalor and spread. Everything stank of cigarette smoke, stale ash and bodies. Stains on the chairs, floor, most walls. Steady streams of people in and out. Some of them picnicking alone or in groups from fast-food bags and home-packed grocery sacks, a few to every appearance (with their belongings piled alongside) homesteaded here.

Periodically police or paramedics pushed through the automatic doors with drunks, trauma victims, vacuum- eyed young people, sexless street folk wound in layers of rags, rapists and rapees, resuscitations-in-progress, slowly cooling bodies. Every quarter hour or so a name would boom over the intercom and that person would vanish into the leviathan interior. None of them ever seemed to emerge. Nurses and other personnel strolled past regularly on their way outdoors to smoke.

A young woman from Audubon Zoo came in with the hawk she’d been feeding attached to her by the talons it had sunk into her left cheek.

A detective from Kenner arrived to inquire after a body that had been dumped on the ER ramp earlier that morning allegedly by a funeral home that claimed the next of kin refused to pay them.

An elderly woman inched her way in and across to the desk to ask please could anyone tell her if her husband had been brought here following a heart attack last night, she couldn’t remember where they said they were bringing him and had tried several other hospitals already and didn’t have any more money for cab fare.

Clare, it turned out, was right on several counts. Once the whale finally got around to swallowing me, I emerged with a dozen or so stitches. I emerged also, barely able to walk, on wobbly legs, demonstrably in poor condition to attempt wending my way home unaided.

To her credit, she made only one comment as she watched me wobble toward her in the waiting room: “Well, here’s my big strong man.” Then she took me home.

I woke to bleating traffic and looked at the clock on my bedside table. Four fifty-eight. From the living room I could hear, though the volume was low, Noah Adams on NPR, interviewing a man who had constructed a scale model of the solar system in his barn.

Clare sat in the wingback reading, a glass of wine beside her.

“I know it would be far, far too much to hope that, anticipating this second, unexpected morning of mine, you might have coffee waiting.”

“Fresh coffee, as a matter of fact.” She glanced at the wall clock. Time-thief of life and all good intentions. “Well, an hour ago, anyway.”

It was wonderful.

I drank the first cup almost at a gulp, poured bourbon into the next and nursed it deliciously. We sat listening to traffic sounds from Prytania, a block or so away, and to an update on Somalia relief efforts.

“I ever tell you about my father?” Clare asked.

“Some. I know he died of alcoholism when you were still pretty young. And you told me he was a championship runner in college.”

“Leaves a lot of in-between, doesn’t it?”

“That’s what life mostly is, all the in-between stuff.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” She crossed her leg and leaned toward me, wine washing up the side of her glass in a brief tide. “I don’t remember a lot, myself. Mostly I have these snapshots, these few moments that come back again and again, vividly. So vividly that I recall even the smells, or the way sun felt on my skin.”

A woman walked down the middle of the street pushing a shopping cart piled with trash bags. White ones, brown ones, black ones, gray ones. An orange one with a jack-o’-lantern face.

“I remember once I’m sitting in his lap and he’s telling me about the war. That’s what he always calls it, just the war.’ And he says, every time: a terrible thing, terrible. And I can smell liquor on his breath and the sweat that’s steeped into his clothes from the roofing job he’s been on all day over near Tucson.

“You know about code-talkers, Lew? Well, he was one of them. The Japanese had managed to break just about every code we came up with, I guess, and finally someone had this idea to use Indians. There were about four hundred of them before it was all done, all of them Navajo, and they passed critical information over the radio in their own language, substituting natural words for manmade things. Grenades were potatoes, bombs were eggs, America was nihima: our mother.

“They were all kids. My father had gone directly from the reservation up near Ganado into the Marines. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time. And when he came back, three years later, to Phoenix, he couldn’t find work there. He wandered up into Canada-some sort of pipeline job or something, I’m not sure-and he met Mama there. The sophisticated Frenchwoman. The Quebecoise. Who devoted the rest of her life, near as I can tell-though who can say: perhaps misery was locked inescapably into his genes-to making the rest of his life miserable.

“By the time he died he’d become this heavy dark bag my mother and the rest of us had to drag behind us everywhere we went. What I felt when he died, what my mother must have felt, was, first of all, an overwhelming sense of relief.

“I think about that still, from time to time. The feelings don’t change, and it seems somehow important to me that I don’t lose them, but it does keep flooding back. Like givens that are supposed to lead you on to a new hypothesis…. You have any idea at all what I’m talking about?”

“Not much.”

“Neither do I. But I almost had it, just for a moment there.”

“ ‘Keep trying.’ ”

“Tolstoy dying-right?”

“Scratched it with a finger on his sheet, yes.”

“What would you scratch out, Lew?”

“Something from a poem I read a while back, I think: ‘find beauty, try to understand, survive.’ ”

Moments later: “You ready for bed?”

“Hey, I just got up.”

“So? What’s your point?”

Mozart replaced Noah Adams, traffic sounds relented, the old house creaked and wheezed. We got up a couple of hours later and walked over to Popeye’s for chicken, biscuits, red beans and rice.