Moth

Bakery and a lengthy stretch of weathered Creole cottages and doubles, storefront churches, windowless corner foodstores. Every couple of blocks there were clusters of chairs and crates beneath trees on the neutral ground where the community’s social life is carried on. Lots of boarded-up buildings with signs on them. Do Not Enter, No Admittance, Property Pelican Management. There were even signs on the Dumpsters outside the projects: Prop. of HANO. Signs on everything. The ones we read, and the ones we just know are there. We learn.

I went on up to Louisiana, turned left, looked in the window at Brown Sugar Records and across at the Sandpiper’s sign over the door, a two-foot-high martini glass complete with stirrer and olive and a rainbow arcing into the glass. It’s supposed to be lit up, of course, probably all greens and blues, but the lights haven’t worked in twenty years at least. These great old signs still turn up all over the city. Things are slow to change here, or don’t change at all.

I went on across St. Charles to Prytania, stopped at the Bluebird for coffee, and stepped through my front door just as the rain began. First a few scattered drops-then a downpour so hard you could see and hear little else.

Fifteen minutes later, the sun was struggling back out.

I poured an Abita into an oversized glass and settled down by the window to look over notes on Camus and Claude Simon. It was my semester to teach Modern French Novel, something that rotated “irregularly” among our three full-time professors (who got benefits) and four part-time instructors (no benefits: administration would be ecstatic if everyone were part-time), and it had been a while. My last couple of books had done well, and I hadn’t been teaching much. But then I started missing it. Also, I couldn’t seem to get started on a new book. I’d begun two or three, but they kept sounding more like me-my ideas, the way I see things-than like whatever character I supposedly was writing about.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.

That great opening line of the novel I probably admire more than any other I’ve read. And I thought again how much blunter, how much more matter-of-fact and drained of passion the phrase is in French than it ever could be in our own language. How well it introduces this voice without past or future, without history or anticipation, with only a kind of eternal, changeless present; how Meursault, and finally the novel itself, becomes a witness upon whom only detail (sunlight, sand, random clusters of events) registers. Telling in the calmest way possible this astonishing story of a man sentenced to death because he failed to cry at his mother’s funeral.

I remembered, as I always did now, reading this, the telegrams Mother had sent, one before, one after, when my father was dying.

Afloat in reverie, I’d been distractedly watching a man make his way over the buckling sidewalk beneath an ancient oak tree opposite, and when now he turned to cross the street, I took notice.

Moments later, my doorbell chirred.

In the stories, Sherlock Holmes is forever watching people approach (and often hesitate) in the street below, and by the time they’re at the door ringing for Mrs. Hudson he has already deduced from carriage, dress and general appearance just who they are and pretty much why they’ve come.

I, on the other hand, had absolutely no idea why this man was here.

“Mr. Griffin,” he said when I opened the door. Still wearing, or wearing again, the suit he’d had on last week. It hadn’t looked too good then. The tie was gone, though. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, and I apologize for coming into your home like this. I’m-”

“I know who you are.”

At his look of surprise, I said: “Hey. I’m a detective.”

“Oh.” As if that, indeed, explained it.

“And of course, as a writer, an inveterate snoop as well.”

That was true enough. Sometimes sitting in restaurants or bars I’d become so engrossed in eavesdropping that I’d completely lose track of what my companion was saying. LaVerne had always just sat quietly, waiting for me to come back.

“Oh.” A perfunctory smile.

“Actually, I saw you two out together a few times. The Camellia, Commander’s, like that.” Only a partial lie.

“Then you should’ve come over, said hello.”

I shook my head.

“I know what she meant to you, Griffin. What you meant to one another.”

He didn’t. But he was a hell of a man for coming here to tell me that.

“You want a drink? Coffee or something?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

“Well, I tell you. What I’ve been having is this fine beer made out of hominy grits or somesuch right here in Governor Edwards’s own state. But what I’d really like is a cup of cafe au lait. One so muddy and dark you think there’ve got to be catfish down in there somewhere. You in a hurry?”

“Not really.”

“Then I’ll make us a pot. What the hell.”

He followed me out to the kitchen, staring with fascination at shelves of canned food and two-year-old coupons stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, rifling the pages of surreptitious cookbooks, fingering the unholy contents of a spice rack.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” he told me when the coffee was ready and we were back by the window, he in a beat-up old wingback, me in my usual white wood rocker. “I mean, I know; but I don’t know how to tell you.”

He sipped coffee. From his expression it was, in miniature, everything he had hoped for from life.

“You and LaVerne, you were together a long time.”

He looked at me. After a moment I nodded.

“We weren’t.” He looked down. I thought of a Sonny Boy Williamson song: Been gone so long, the carpet’s half faded on the floor. Or possibly it was carpets have faded- hard to tell. Though mine were hardwood. “What I mean is,” he said.

And we sat there.

“Yeah,” I said finally. I got up and put on more milk to heat, poured us both refills when it was steaming, settled back. My rocker creaked on the floorboards.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We got together pretty far along in life. I sure didn’t think there was anyone like LaVerne out there for me, not anymore. All that stuff about candlelight and the perfect mate and little bells going off, that’s what you believe when you’re nineteen or twenty maybe, some of us anyway. Then you get a few years on you and you realize that’s not the way the world is at all, that’s just not how it goes about its business. But still, one day there she was.”

He looked up at me and his eyes were unguarded, open. “I hardly knew her, Lew. Less than a year. I loved her so much. Sure, I know an awful lot’s gone under the bridge, for both of us, but I still think we’ll have some time, you know? Then one day I look around and she just isn’t there anymore. Like I’m halfway into this terribly important sentence I’ve waited a long time to say and I suddenly realize no one is listening. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been hoping somehow I’d be able to see LaVerne through your eyes, have more time with her, find out more about her, that way. Stupid, right?”

“No. Not stupid at all. That’s what people are all about. That’s something we can do for one another. We always get together to bury our dead. And then to bring them back, to remember what their lives were like, afterwards. Though Verne’s life wasn’t one either you or I can easily know or imagine.”

He nodded.

“Good. You have to know that before you can know anything else. But I just don’t see what you want me to tell you. That she loved you? She must have, and you must know it. That it’s terrible how she was taken from you? Hell, of course it is, man. Join the fucking club.”

“You think-” he started, then took another draw of coffee. “I’m sorry. I haven’t made myself at all clear. I didn’t come here for assurances, however much I could use them just now. And yes, I know LaVerne loved me.” He