orchestra music, the flagstone patio overhung by electrically lit oak trees, the white-jacketed, sycophantic waiters, were a testament to an idea, a fusion of the antebellum South with twenty-first-century prosperity, a systemic exclusion of everything in the larger culture that seemed coarse and intellectually invasive and contrary to the ethos of free enterprise.
The celebrants were politicians and judges and attorneys and shopping-mall developers and realtors and executives from petrochemical industries. They greeted one another with a level of warmth and gaiety that seemed born of lifelong friendships, although few of them had any personal contact outside of their business dealings. They gave the sense that they all shared the same love of country and the same patriotic commitment to its governance. There was almost an innocence in the narcissistic pleasure purchased by their success and in their shared presumption that a great, green, rolling continent had been presented to them by a divine hand for their own use.
Clete ate his steak and lobster and drank wine spritzers and said virtually nothing during the evening. In fact, two petroleum executives who had been fighter pilots in Vietnam kept hitting him on the shoulders and roaring at his jokes. But Barbara Shanahan became increasingly restless, her face ruddy with either alcohol or frustration, blowing her breath upward to clear her hair out of her eyes, crunching ice between her molars. Then a congressman who had changed his party affiliation the day after the balance of power shifted in the House of Representatives, receiving the chairmanship of a committee in the bargain, mounted the bandstand and told jokes about environmentalists.
He brought the house down.
'I can't take these assholes,' Barbara said, and snapped her fingers at the waiter. 'Clean these spritzers out of here and bring us a couple of depth charges.'
'Depth charges, madam?' the waiter said.
'A shot and draft. Put it on Fuckhead's tab,' she said, gesturing with her thumb at the congressman.
But the waiter, who had an Irish accent, was a piece of work. 'Which fuckhead is that, madam?' he asked.
'Not bad. Have one yourself while you're at it,' Barbara said.
'Maybe we ought to hit the road,' Clete said.
'Not a chance,' she said.
When the waiter returned, Barbara lowered a jigger of bourbon into a schooner of beer, then drank the schooner empty. She blew the hair out of her face, her eyes slightly out of focus.
'Wow,' she said. “You gonna drink yours?'
'Absolutely,' he said, putting his hand on the schooner before she could pick it up.
She waved at the waiter. 'Hey, Irish, bring us a couple more,' she called out.
Then they went out on the crowded dance floor. The band had gone into 'One O'clock Jump,' and Barbara danced in her stockinged feet, her arms flying in the air, her body caroming off the dancers around her.
'Oops, excuse me,' she said to a woman she knocked into a table.
'My, but you're an energetic thing, aren't you?' the woman said, her glasses askew.
'Sorry. Don't I know you? Oh, you're the new federal judge. Hi, Your Honor,' Barbara said, stopping, shutting her eyes, then opening them again. 'Boy, am I shit-faced.'
She walked unsteadily back to the table, then pulled off her corsage and threw it on her plate and leaned over and hooked her shoes in her fingers and almost fell when she tried to put them on. Clete put his arm around her shoulders.
'Guess who is seriously fucked up,' she said.
'You're beautiful,' Clete said.
'I know. But I think I'm going to throw up,' she replied.
They drove back to New Iberia on the old highway that led past Spanish Lake. It started to rain and mist blew out of the trees, and a long Southern Pacific freight clicked by on the elevated grade, its whistle blowing down the line. Barbara pressed her fingers against her head as though she were awaking from a dream. Her skin looked green in the glow of the dashboard.
When he mentioned food, she made a sound like someone slipping into a whirlpool.
'I think you were great back there,' he said.
'Good try,' she said.
When they reached her apartment on Bayou Teche, he walked her upstairs and was about to say good night.
'No, come in. I'll try to stop acting like a basket case. Watch television while I take a shower. Then I'll fix you something to eat,' she said, then sprained her ankle going through the bedroom door. She threw a shoe at the wall and closed the door behind her.
Clete could hear her pulling at zippers and snaps on her clothes. He folded the coat of his summer tux and pulled off his tie and sat on the couch and watched a boxing match on a sports channel. He tried not to think about Barbara Shanahan in the shower. When she came back out of the bedroom, she had put on faded jeans, a blue terry-cloth pullover, and Indian moccasins. Her hair was damp, her skin rosy from the heat of the shower. But her eyes were scorched with an early hangover, her voice husky, her speech clipped, as though she could not coordinate her thoughts with her words.
She started breaking eggs in a skillet.
'Is there something on your mind I could help you with?' he said behind her.
'I thought I might run for district attorney. You know, make a difference, put away more of the bad guys, stick it to the polluters, all that jazz. What a joke.'
'No, it's not,' he said.
She dropped an egg on the floor and looked at it wanly. 'I'm sorry, Clete. I just don't feel very well,' she said.
He used a dishrag to clean the floor, then squeezed it out in the sink and dropped the broken eggshells in a waste can. 'I'd better get going,' he said.
'You don't have to.'
'I probably should.'
'You don't need to,' she said, her face averted, looking at the streetlights on the drawbridge.
Then, against all his instincts, all the warnings that told him not to take advantage, not to be a surrogate, he closed his arms around her, his biceps swelling into the girth of pressurized firehoses. He could smell the freshness of her clothes, the powder she had sprinkled on her shoulders, a touch of perfume behind her ears. He ran his big hand across the firmness of her back, the taper of her muscles along her hips.
'You're stand-up,' he said.
'Not really,' she said.
'You feel great, Barbara. Wow, do you feel great,' he said, rubbing his cheek against her hair, petting her back, closing his eyes as he breathed in the fragrance and heat on her neck.
'So do you. But, Clete…' she said uncomfortably.
'What is it?' he asked, looking with alarm at her face.
'You're standing on my foot.'
From her bedroom window he could look out across the veranda and see the tops of the banana trees below, the old gray convent across the bayou, and the moss in the oaks that grew above the convent's roof. He saw a milk truck drive by, one like his father had driven, and he tried to think of an explanation for the presence of a milk truck on a quiet, lamp-shadowed street at this time of night. For some reason he saw images out of his childhood: a razor strop, a thick-bodied child walking to school, bent down in the wind, a peanut butter sandwich and an apple in a paper bag for lunch. Clete blew out his breath and shook the image out of his head and tried to remember the number of drinks he'd had that evening, almost as a form of reassurance.
He felt awkward undressing in front of Barbara, conscious of his weight, the gold hair on his back and shoulders. She lay down on the far side of the bed and waited for him, her hair like points of fire on the pillow.
'Is something wrong, Clete?' she asked.
'No, not at all,' he lied.
He lay down beside her and kissed her mouth, then touched her breasts and stomach and felt his sex harden
