life, buildings all around.”
“So plant a garden. Take back the lot.”
“It can’t be that easy, can it, Lew?”
And of course it wasn’t. In the weeks following, Deborah began play after play, at length abandoning them all.
“It’s gone,” she said, weeping against me in the deep of night. “How do people live without passion, without that one bright blue light? How do they go on without something central in their life?”
We were agreed on the idiocy of good advice, that only a fool would give it, a greater fool accept it. That night, three in the morning with Deborah’s body shuddering against me and wind padding predatorily about outside, was no different.
“That’s what people do,” I said. “They go on.”
Chapter Eighteen
I wasn’t looking for him, you understand.
Long since an adult, he was equally capable of making his own choices and declining to make them; he’d never hedged at accepting the fallout from either. Nor could I plead to having had much impression or influence on his life, not having been around to offer understanding, a sympathetic ear, least of all an example. I knew something, myself, about not making choices.
So as I rummaged the city, touching down with beer-drinker fishermen at their ordained posts on the levee off Tchoupitoulas, benching myself to reminisce in a statue-guarded, pie-slice park on Magazine, prowling Decatur with its shoulder-narrow sidewalks and balconies like shrugs above, wading across river-wide Canal down Esplanade to the Faubourg Marigny and rising back up through the Quarter past Simple Suzies, Eds and Professor Bills, past lean-to missions with tureens of watery soup and hope, past the library and City Hall, Leidenheimer Bakery, wooden stoops and swayback cement stairways, shipwreck islands of storm-tossed furniture, cable spools and milk crates on the neutral ground, I wasn’t looking for my son.
For something within myself, rather. At some level that’s what all our searches are about, of course.
“Can’t help you much, Lew,” his mother said that morning when I called. “Far as I knew, everything was going well. Last heard from him-I’d have to check to be sure-four, five weeks back? One of those trademark postcards of his, where the message starts off in regular script and becomes ever more crabbed, final sentences squeezed in sideways at the margins or asterisked in between lines.”
“No sense of what was going on in his life?”
“You’re kidding, right? You know what those cards are like. Sometimes he’d touch down, sure. Bring up some play or movie or concert he’d seen, string together bits of overheard conversation, remark that both of you’d taken to hanging around the house too much. Mostly, though, he just wrote about what he saw at his job. People he got to know there,
“True enough.”
“No reason for that, you know. You have my address, you could write from time to time, even do something outrageous like send the occasional Christmas or birthday card. Scrawl a satirical line or two in there if it made you feel better, whatever space’s left. A quote, maybe, something appropriately snarly. Swift, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Bernhard, like that. It’s always Serious Friday somewhere.”
Serious Fridays had begun as a joke when David and his friends were students, all of them casually bohemian. No television, parties, dumb movies or other mindless escapism allowed on Fridays, the screed read. Exalted conversation only. High-end jug wine. Smelly, mysterious cheese. Books tucked underarm, coolly they’d stroll towards bars and ethnic restaurants, skirling intellectual happy hours like bullfighter’s capes about them out there in a hot world.
“I hadn’t imagined there was any way you’d want to hear from me, Jane. Christmas, Serious Friday, or otherwise.”
“Well-” She turned away. “Hey! You see me, right? One standing here by the kitchen counter? knives all around? Don’t want to spend the rest of your life reaching for things with two blunt forearms, hobbling about on ankles, right? Get away from my bread!” Back to me then. “All that was a long time ago, Lew. We were young together. Shared the very beginnings of our lives. We won’t ever have that with anyone else, will we? It binds us.”
“Those beginnings lasted, what, about ten minutes?”
“And the marriage not much longer-I know.” Silence fell like Joyce’s snow along hundreds of miles of wires, up past bayou and swampland, Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tete, through stands of ancient cypress, on into wildest America. “Nothing turns out the way we think it will, Lew. We don’t know much else, but we know that. And if life’s about anything, it’s about all those twists and twinings and sudden turns and trapdoors, about learning to get lost gracefully.”
I said I’d be in touch and, fortified with a troop-sized cup of coffee and a bagel I could have used help from that same troop in chewing, entrained for my sentimental journey. Steamed out of port past K amp;Bs and Circle Ks, chewed-up, century-old homes, abandoned storefronts sheathed in plywood so pitted and weatherworn that it resembled bark. Tchoupitoulas, Prytania, St. Charles, Jackson, Decatur. Streetcars teeming with tourists, black maids headed home with cash pay rolled and tucked into garters and waistbands after the day’s work uptown, children gone hunchback from knapsacks of schoolbooks and video games. Mule-drawn carts stood at idle alongside Jackson Square; limos skimmed the city’s surface like sharks; battered delivery trucks, mopeds and bicycles hauling makeshift carts rose and sank in random patterns. Cats beside buildings crouched over invisible meals and shot glances past shoulders as I drew abreast. Children’s faces turned up from tricycles, peered out from latticed recesses beneath porches. By one apartment house, garbage bags sat piled in a black honeycomb, aloud with the hundreds of flies buzzing inside them.
In a bar on St. Philip I came across Doo-Wop holding forth to a busload of bulky, fair, rather square-faced tourists, Finns possibly. Half a dozen drinks sat aligned on the table before him. A Sony recorder, like Doo-Wop hard at work, ground away there too. The tourists were ordering round after round, eating with greasy fingers from baskets of what purported to be alligator tails and smiling broadly at one another, the barmaid, Doo-Wop, the jukebox, signs on the walls advertising beer, the walls themselves.
“Gitcha sump’n?” the barmaid asked. She was twenty maybe. Looked well on the way to piercing everything possible. We all need short-term, long-term goals.
“Draft.”
“On tap we got-” Gold stud in her tongue flashing into view like a Christmas tree ornament hidden away.
“Whatever,” I said. “All pretty much the same, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“These people have any idea what’s going on?”
She shrugged. “How you gonna know?”
She brought me a glass of something that the other beers probably beat up every day on its way home from school. Felt kind of sorry for the poor thing, actually. I’d taken a seat at bar’s end in half darkness and now, price of the ticket paid, was able to focus on Doo-Wop’s performance.
“This was back in the golden days, you understand, no reason back then to doubt any of it. Did what we did so other Americans could get on with their lives. Eternal vigilance and all that. Hell, we were saving the free world single-handedly. You-all understand free world, right? Single-handedly?
“Good.
“Twice a day, then, flying at treetop level to stay just below radar, I’d make my way towards Cambodia. I’d climb in the cockpit with floppy mailbags and come back with them packed full. Most days I flew a modifie- Captain!”
Doo-Wop had caught sight of me. He stood, sole of one shoe flapping forward of the hemp twine he’d secured it with. A bright yellow sportcoat hung heavy as stage curtains from his shoulders. Below, as though under
