The Floating World: A Novel Page 10

  “Are you at your house?”

  “The office. The Dobies’ landline quit, but this one still works, God knows why.”

  Alice sighed. “It was you yourself who said that you didn’t think medication was the right thing for Cora.”

  Holding the heavy receiver between her shoulder and ear, Tess wrenched open the window behind her desk and coughed again.

  “That’s not what I said. I said cognitive-behavioral had been working for us.”

  “It’s not bipolar: I’m just repeating your words.”

  “This morning was something I hadn’t seen before. Wandering, yes. Delusions, no. She thought she was out there in the flood, Alice. And now it turns out a woman she rescued has turned up dead? If she saw that—If she thinks—”

  “Lalalalala!” Alice sang. “I can’t hear you!”

  “Christ, Alice!”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, and Tess tried to imagine Alice, chastened, sitting in the chair on the far side of her desk. Tess was her superior, goddamn it. But Tess’s desk chair was growing blue-green mold and the top of her desk was warped. Her file cabinets were overturned, her patients’ files strewn across the floor, the ink running off of their names.

  “You put her under my care,” Alice said, in a richly enunciated voice of authority. “If you want me to see her, I will be available tomorrow morning, unless you believe this is an emergency? In which case I can rearrange my schedule and see her today.”

  Tess shook her head. “The episode’s over. She’s asleep again.” She picked up one of the pictures of the girls from her bookcase. The color had washed out of it, leaving only coppery outlines of the two of them wearing Christmas dresses on her mother’s silk sofa. She turned it over, pried out the velvet back, and peeled the photo up off the glass. If they could all have just stayed there, in the wash of those lights, their bellies full of filet and bordelaise and chocolate mousse. “She was walking all night. She goes walking every night, I think. Out in the flood zone.”

  “Well, then, tomorrow at nine?”

  She rolled the photo up in her hand. She coughed again. “Alright.”

  “You should get some fresh air,” Alice said. “It’s not healthy, breathing that shit.”

  “I won’t be long.”

  Tess replaced the receiver in its cradle, leaned her head through the window into the breeze. Goose bumps went up on the back of her neck as she imagined Cora tracing the paths she’d taken in that pirogue during the flood, repeating the trauma. She was sure that’s what this was: compulsive reenactment. Most places, the lights were still out, and who knew where she was going, into the houses where people—like Reyna—were still turning up dead. She remembered the time Del and Cora had found that injured raccoon on the batture and brought it back to her mother’s house in a cardboard box. It had bitten Del, and they’d had to send it off for a brain biopsy, to be sure it wasn’t rabid. When Tess—fool that she was—told them what had happened, Cora had cried for weeks. Tess looked out onto the wasted boulevard. Wind was barreling down Canal instead of traffic, racing across the facades of the deserted houses. She had her own prescription pad, of course, in the top, locked drawer of her desk.

  Pulling the hank of keys out of her pocket, she stepped over the file cabinets and slotted the little silver key into the lock of her desk drawer. It wouldn’t turn. She worked the key out, slipped it in, wiggled it. Crouching down, she tried again. She pounded against the key. Her hand slipped. A splinter broke off the desk and stabbed her.

  “Fuck!” she screamed into the uninhabited air.

  Mold was filling her lungs, and she held her breath as she yanked the key so hard the head of it bent back. Lightheaded, she kicked the desk with the heel of her boot, and as it groaned to the floor, the window fell closed with a guillotine swish. Tess sank down onto one of her fireproof file cabinets and pulled the blade of wood out of her wrist. Slowly, the rain began, drops falling against the cracked window, darkening the stucco columns, joining to form rivers that ran down the glass. She used to love the rain.

  “IF SOMETHING’S BROKEN, what’s your first step?”

  His grandbaby, Adelaide, looked up from spading putty willy-nilly into the new cuts in the hope chest on the living room floor. Looked up, blinked, like she’d forgotten he was there.

  “You take it apart,” he said, answering the question for her.

  She had that set to her mouth she always took when, long time ago now, he’d tried to teach her something. Mulish, just like her father. Never believed anybody could know better than their own mighty self.

  “You’ve got to study it.”

  She nodded, but just stuck that putty knife back in the tub, and, a little more careful this time, filled in a gap in the old cypress. He never could talk to them in terms they understood, women, always cooing to one another about how they felt this way and believed that. Him, he never could think except in terms of the physical. Didn’t matter if it was divorce or destruction, failure or death, you could dismantle it like a slow clock and lay the parts out on butcher paper, examine them all for the little spot of rust or the chipped tooth on the bevel.

  The thing with clocks, though, is you had to be very careful to label each and every small part, and lay a clean drop cloth down under you, in case you dropped something. He’d had a clock come in once, a German clock that sang a song and had a shepherdess that went around and a little sheep after her. He’d marked the dials, taken it apart, laid everything on the paper, cleaned it, and left it with the heater on to dry. But the next day, when he put it back together, it didn’t work. He took it apart again, put it back together, and on and on all day until Sylvia called him to supper and he was beside himself with frustration. It wasn’t until he woke up at two in the morning with the ghost of this hard little thing between his index and thumb—a spring he’d missed—that he went down to the shop and, all the lights ablaze, crawled around on the floor until he found it rolled up against the foot of his workbench, smaller than a grain of rice. After he’d put it right, the clock set to ticking—the even beating of the pendulum and the little shepherdess going round and round.

  “You’ve got to spend your time,” he said to Adelaide, who was just troweling that putty in. “You’ve got to study it. Think: Where did it fail? What’s not meeting plumb? How, if you were going to put it back together, would you do it different? And don’t you answer without a why.” He raised his voice to make her mind, but the finger he pointed wouldn’t hold still. Imagine, trying to put that clock back together now—he wouldn’t even be able to slot the screwdriver into the screws.

  We come in and out of our competence is the truth, in reverse course as we come out and into confidence in our work. Boy now did he believe this hope chest was a work of genius when he finished it, oiled it, put inside it the letter he’d wanted Sylvia to read after he’d shipped out.

  Along with this piece I hope you will accept the proposal I had hoped to make you in person. But as you are away at your sister’s, I leave this trunk here, hoping you will see in it the light by which I worked on it—the fullness of a man’s love. As you wait for my return, I hope you might fill it with something like the same.

  It was a sentimental, amateur business, “a man’s love” indeed. He’d made it out of cypress—rot-resistant, watertight—though it was an ugly wood, coarsely grained. Everything on it had “meaning”; he would have painted the roses red if he’d had more time, their thorns hidden by wisteria, which hung over the pavilion where they’d first kissed. The roses, though, looked like something from on top of a cake, and on the side panels, the magnolia buds were vulgar in a way he should have noticed—probably his subconscious had been in the chisel, his mind in the hotel room on Canal Street that hot afternoon before she went down to the Pass for the summer, the blinds striping her waxed mahogany skin. The corner beams, which were executed fine, were carved to look like pine boughs: Our love is evergreen. And so he had taken the oyster knife to it
. Awake at night in that basement room in Houston his eldest son had furnished straight from a catalog, thinking of his passing, thinking that this would be all that was left of his life’s work when he was gone, as the rest of it was more than likely sitting under nine feet of water. They would put the chest in a museum, in their damned reverent condescension. What does the wisteria mean, Vincent? Tess would ask in front of the company, though he’d answered twenty times before. And so he’d found the oyster knife in a kitchen drawer and sharpened it on Vin’s good stone.

  He didn’t blame Tess for stopping him. The cuts he’d made were careless, done with the wrong tools in the wrong light. His hands shook. There came a time when the work wanted to be passed to younger hands. Problem was the younger hands wouldn’t take it up. Everything was supposed to be easy: instant gratification, instant soup, prefab furniture, premarital sex. Not even Joe had the patience to do things right. He’d wanted to spit when they’d dragged him to that show with those animal cabinets, the pigs and cows that opened up like steamer trunks to reveal compartments Joe had filled with all kind of little garbage. Arks, Joe called them. Nonsense. But worse were the drawers that stuck and drooped, the visible seams between the veneers. Some little reporter for the Living section had found her way to him and wanted to know how he felt about his son turning his “métier” to a “higher purpose,” how he felt about having trained such a great artist at his knee. No comment, he’d said. Across the room, Joe gesticulated with a fizzy little cup, and Sylvia wouldn’t let him go home. Please, I don’t wish to comment. He’d had to beg the girl to go away.

  No, he didn’t blame Tess for grabbing him, though Joe did. What he blamed them both for was their hypocrisy. Incompetence was incompetence was incompetence in their book, or so they said. Meanwhile, they pretended to respect him. Pretended to defer.

  “I can’t remember,” the girl Adelaide said. “Do I need to let this dry first and then sand it down, or can I clean it up now?”

  “Patience. You have to have patience.”

  “So I let it dry.”

  He groaned, his dramatic sigh, but she didn’t seem to care. She had been the promising one, the one who sat with him, until they sent her north. He had given her her own mark, hadn’t he: forged it late one night, a B like his B, holding an A on its upright, and she had held it in her hands and thanked him with tears in her eyes. He’d given that to her. Not to Joe. Not to Vin. He did things purposefully, though they didn’t like to believe it—that was the kind of learning age wouldn’t strip away.

  He stood up from his chair and crouched down and took her hand, as if that was all he needed to do to make her listen.

  “It’s never the fault of the broken thing,” he said. “It is always, every time, your fault.”

  She smiled at him, smug as a full-bellied gator. She scraped her knife against the side of the tub. “No, Papie. I’m pretty sure it’s not.”

  TESS STACKED THE staves of wood together and wound duct tape around them, threw them in the corner, brushed the hair out of her eyes. All that for a pad of useless, ink-streaked paper, when she could have called it in. Just dialed Majoria’s, if it was open again, and read off a prescription for Depakote. There had been no need to destroy her father’s desk, not that there had been any need to save it. Soaked through with floodwater, it would have smelled like petroleum and mildew for the rest of time. You weren’t supposed to feel tenderly for heirlooms belonging to people you didn’t care for, but what she saw when she looked at the desk was her mother leading her into her father’s cigar-smelling study and saying, He would have wanted you to have it. It hadn’t mattered that that was a bald-faced lie.

  Tess pulled out the last of the big drawers and set it on the floor, stepped on one of the sides and pulled up, ripping the dovetails free. The desk had had dry-woods twice. Been fumigated twice. Well, it was done now. The rain past, heat was filling the room, and she turned to the window to see someone in an oversized raincoat and a grocery bag on her head coming across the lawn. She flattened herself against the wall. The footsteps rang on the porch. The vestibule door slammed.

  “Someone’s here!” Tess hollered.

  There was no answer. She grabbed the crowbar as her mind flipped through the possibilities: not Alice, and Sheila was still in Louisville. It could be anyone, hunting for Oxycontin, Percocet, needles. The main door opened heavily on its hinges.

  “There are no drugs on the premises!”

  The tapping footsteps passed reception, turned down the hall. The doorknob turned. She flung an arm out and held the door shut.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Dr. Eshleman? It’s Joyce.” That pathetic, perpetual tone of crisis. “Please let me in.”

  “Joyce.” Tess let the doorknob go. “It’s customary to knock.”

  Joyce didn’t make eye contact as she came into the room. Instead, she looked up, tracing the flood line that ran a foot or so below the ceiling. She pulled off the big raincoat, a golf jacket of Rafael’s. Underneath, Joyce was wearing a white dress with elaborate beading, and she had a new Gucci bag slung across her gym-toned body. Shopping again.

  “I knew y’all had flooded, but I couldn’t believe it until I saw it with my two eyes.”

  “How are you, Joyce?” Tess started gathering the patient files still strewn across the floor.

  Joyce’s hands twitched at her tightly bound hips. “It’s all gone,” she said. “The house, the boat, one of the cars, all my pictures—my wedding pictures—the televisions, all the little things I’ve saved my whole life. My mama’s house too. Rafi, he said, ‘Oh, Lakeview’s gonna be fine,’ but he’s always saying that. ‘The levees are built solid, my baby.’ What the fuck does he know?”

  “Language, Joyce.”

  “Sorry,” she said, in her narcissistic, wheedling voice. “I shouldn’t have barged in on you, but I tried your service. They said they didn’t know how to reach you. Then I’m trying Dr. Luce, and she says I can come to groups with her, but I don’t want groups, Dr. Eshleman. I want you.”

  Tess nodded. She put the files back in one of the boxes she’d brought over. She bent over and grabbed more of them—Jason Katz’s on top. He was dead, Jason Katz.

  “I told him to get out,” Joyce continued. “ ‘It’ll be okay,’ he says to me. ‘We’ll just spray it all down with Febreeze,’ like he thinks it’s a joke! I told him, ‘Go, be with your buddies in Texas, I ain’t coming.’ ”

  Tess nodded.

  “So I’m living in the Monteleone and trying to deal with the insurance, but we’re going to run out of money before we get anything. You know they don’t cover floods? What’s it good for then, you don’t cover floods?”

  “Why don’t you go to your sister’s in Monroe?”

  Joyce waved her hand in dismissal.

  “Why not?” Tess asked, before she realized she didn’t care. It was profound, the depth of her not caring.

  Shaking her head, Joyce reached out to touch the wall only to yank her hand back as if she’d received an electric shock. “What am I going to do in Monroe? In that house with my mama and Henri and Jasmine and all of those kids? I’d start tearing my hair out again.”

  “I can prescribe you more Xanax.” She motioned to the lump of wet brown paper that had been her prescription pad. “I can call it in.”

  Joyce shook her head. “I can’t go to Monroe. I’ll die.”

  Joyce was always saying she would die, and now it made Tess angry to hear her say it as she stood in those ridiculous shoes on the mud-caked floor.

  “You won’t die.”

  Joyce put manicured fingers to her temple. “Xanax’s not going to do me a bit of good. Xanax going to build my house back? Clean my things off? Xanax going to fix it? Going to make me smile at Rafi? ‘Oh, yeah, honey, it sure is funny how everything we own is covered in industrial waste.’ Going to take that storm, break it up in the Gulf? ’Cause that would be one hell of a drug. I’d take that drug.”

  Tess looked
out at the cars parked on the gleaming street—her ancient Mercedes next to Joyce’s new white 4Runner and nothing else for blocks. Tess had bought that car in 1988, the same year she’d gone into private practice, when everything had seemed to be on track and accelerating towards some unseen, idyllic future. With the advent of Prozac, she had more patients than she had time for and more ways to help them, Joe had just sold out at the show in Copenhagen, the girls were happy and healthy, the USSR was faltering, and the city was riding a crest of oil that seemed like it might carry them all to prosperity. The day after the act of sale, she’d driven to this perfect, discreet building she’d bought, on her own credit, in the shiny silver car with her windows down like a teenager, blasting the Bee Gees. She’d put on old jeans and painted the walls sunny yellow in reception, private mauve in the restrooms, soothing green in the offices. She’d hired her own staff, her own colleagues. She would be able to fix people who had been unfixable, and the elation she felt had made the whole world seem better. She had thought she was in control.

  “They say the trees are going to die,” Joyce said. “The ones that were underwater. That the roots got choked up and they’re going to suffocate.”

  Tess looked at her hands, their raised blue veins. “There’s nothing we can do, Joyce.”

  “God.” Joyce was pacing before the shelves of ruined books. “God, God, God, God.”

  Tess picked up the frame holding the ghost image of Cora, then put it back down. “I do understand,” she said. “It’s a shock. We didn’t think—it didn’t seem real. We didn’t believe this kind of thing could come to us. Tragedy. It was something that happened to other people, wasn’t it.”

  Joyce’s eyes drifted up to the flood line again. She shook her head. “You sound like Rafi.”

  “What?”

  “That’s an ignorant thing to say. ‘Tragedies happen to other people?’ Maybe in your world, Dr. Eshleman.” She laughed, and a perfume, the smell of lilies, rustled out from her sleeve.

  Tess stared at this pretty woman, leaning, in a white dress against the mud-stained walls of her devastated office. She looked like a borderline-offensive Versace ad, like disaster porn.