The Floating World: A Novel Page 11

  “But maybe the way I’m thinking is no different,” Joyce continued, reconsidering. “Like: we’ve already got it twice in a row, Katrina, Rita, so it can’t happen again? But of course there could be another one. Or who knows, an earthquake? They could drop a bomb.” She nodded, turned. “I want you to—Can you come to me at the Monteleone? Any time. I’m not busy.”

  “How could I help you?”

  “It’s just that—I’m not going to die, like you always tell me. It’s going to be okay.”

  “No,” Tess said firmly, and she saw Joyce look to her, desperate as a cornered doe. “I mean, how could I possibly help you? You’re right. Anything could happen at any time.”

  “Jesus.” Joyce looked like she’d slapped her.

  The rain started up again abruptly, and they both looked to the window to see a curtain of water sweeping across the street as if it were a stage.

  “I can still call in the Xanax, Joyce.”

  “No,” Joyce shook her head hard. “I already told you, I don’t want any Xanax.” She pulled on Rafael’s raincoat, dug a plastic grocery bag out of her purse and tied it around her hair.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Joyce said, then ran, wobbling in her heels, down the office hallway.

  Tess watched as she flung herself down the steps and across the front yard, hunched over her purse to protect it from the rain.

  HOLDING THE PHONE in one hand, Del smoothed her curls up from her forehead with the other, watching in the night window as her brow went smooth, then creased again.

  “The new girl moved in today,” Fran was saying. “She wants the room clear.”

  “Hang on a minute, Fran,” Del said into the phone. Behind her, at the cabin’s long hand-sawn table, Papie and her father were waiting to eat, their hands folded in their laps. “Y’all go on. I have to take this.”

  “Y’all,” Fran said. “Three days back, and you go all Southern.”

  Del opened the door to the screen porch, out to the loud night sounds of tree frogs and crickets, then shut it behind her carefully, reminding herself to take a deep breath. “She wants the bureau out? The Boisdoré bureau, that my grandfather and I made. Are you fucking kidding?”

  “Everything.”

  “What else is left?”

  “Your hangers, your shoe boxes, your soap, your pictures, your hair clips, your bed. Zack.”

  “Zack?” She picked at the screen that separated her from the forest.

  “He’s been over here like six times.”

  Del watched through the window as her father picked up his salad fork, raised his eyes at her, pierced a piece of romaine. She thought of Zack, hangdog in the corduroy chair by the fire escape, then forced herself to think instead of the houses she’d seen yesterday, the curtains blown out of windows, the mattresses on top of cars.

  “There’s bedbugs in the city, Del.”

  Del felt her face go red as she tried not to scream. She had slammed her bedroom door in Fran’s face the day the levees broke, had burned the letter Fran wrote her in the bathtub: If you would only let me help you. It’s difficult for me—this was the funniest part—when you shut me out. Just days before they’d been down at the Delancey, spinning around each other on the rooftop dance floor, laughing with Annabelle and Rhea and Zack. She taught the bartender to make Sazeracs, and they raised a toast to the hurricane they’d thought had passed. She had loved Fran, loved New York; they’d made her feel free and powerful and young, but now all she could think was—A decade of friendship, and I pretty much can’t stand you anymore.

  She turned her back to the window and stepped out of its light, took the cigarette she’d been saving out of her bra, twisted it—Marlboro stamped in little gold letters all around the cork-print paper. Funny how much effort goes to fancy a thing made to be burned.

  “I don’t have fucking bedbugs.”

  “Please let’s not start again.”

  Del laughed. “Oh, I’m not starting a fucking thing,” she said and hung up the phone before Fran could think of an answer.

  Behind her, Papie and her father would be fidgeting with their napkins, watching her as she dropped the phone to her side, as she pressed her forehead into the screen, but she still stood on the porch for a moment longer, looking out into the darkness. If she could just rewind the tape, she thought, start again. If she could leave this body, like a cicada molts its nymph skin. If she could become a nymph again and burrow down under the pine needles into the forest floor. If she could be reborn every seven years, her sister next to her. If they could come running out of the forest, two children with baskets full of blackberries, wearing their old twig crowns. She would do it all differently. Not leave. Never leave.

  In the orange light of the dining room, her father was bringing plates of the shrimp creole she’d made to the table, set for three. She turned around into the light, opened the door, before she had time to cry.

  “Mmm.” Her grandfather smiled up at her as he swallowed. “Tastes just like Tess’s.”

  “It does,” her father said.

  Del sidled around the table into her usual spot, spread her napkin in her lap. He was allowed to miss his wife, she reminded herself. They should all admit what they missed.

  “The way Sylvia made it was different—darker roux,” Papie said.

  “And more bay leaf,” her father said, “and less spicy. Don’t get me wrong, I like it hot,” he corrected, picking up the bottle of Crystal and sprinkling it over his plate. “I’m not saying that. It’s just—my mama’s was a little more country, Tess’s is a little more city. A little moderner.”

  “There’s basil in here?” Papie said, picking now.

  “More modern.” Del speared a shrimp, stared into her plate.

  Papie was humming as he cut his shrimp with his trembling hands, his mouth wet at the corners, and she tried to remember how she’d revered him once, how she had pleaded with him to teach her while he went on about how woodworking would ruin her pretty little hands. She had loved watching him, the way he’d stand back and stare at a piece, shaking his head, then sketch an ogee, then another with fuller curves. When they’d been making the bureau together, the bureau Fran’s new roommate wanted to put out on the curb, he’d gotten frustrated with the way she was drawing the feet—not claws, she’d decided, but fetlocked, cloven hooves—and he had taken the pencil out of her hand. Watching him draw was even better than watching her father draw. You didn’t expect those craggy, varnish-stained fingers to have so much grace, a Pan’s foot flowing onto the paper almost as good as something tossed off by a Renaissance master.

  She had wanted what he had to give her so fiercely. She’d wanted to wear it, “her heritage,” strapped tight to her body like a suit of armor. She’d thought it would protect her against all the people who talked down to her—her supposed friends whose mothers wouldn’t let them spend the night, the Jesuit boys who constantly asked her advice but never asked her out, the trustees and Garden District dads and PR ladies at Buckner who saw her as a perfect example of the sort of brown girl they allowed to wear their uniform kilts. She thought if they respected the work, they’d have to respect its maker, and she’d had fantasies of making something beautiful—a table or a breakfront sécrètaire—to donate to Buckner with a little brass plaque to show all those stuck-up bitches a thing or two: That “her heritage” was more valuable than theirs. That membership in her family was better than membership in some fucking Carnival krewe. That what she’d inherited was worth more than plantations and oil money. Instead, she’d made one chest and gone to college, and Papie had gotten old and senile like everyone did in the end.

  A necrotic smell came off her grandfather now that was not quite masked by the aggressive scent of the Irish Spring, and she suddenly didn’t want to eat. Along the back of the shrimp ran the dark vein no one in her family ever bothered to remove, shrimp shit not being shit, somehow. She worked the tip of her knife into the shrimp’s bel
ly and pushed it off the fork.

  “Something wrong?” Papie gestured with his water glass. “Got a bad shrimp?”

  “I should’ve cleaned them better, is all.”

  “Tastes plenty good to me,” her father said.

  She took a bite of rice and sauce and made herself swallow. There had been maggots in the freezer when they cleaned it out, her mother said, which meant their eggs had been waiting all along inside the vacuum-sealed filets of fish and bags of stone-ground grits for a good warm place to hatch.

  “Think we can keep you around a little longer, chef?” Her father pinched her shoulder with his dirty-nailed hand. “I don’t like the idea of your going back to the south shore tomorrow. Or back to New York in a month, for that matter. It’s been a long time since we’ve had you home to take care of us.”

  She had been planning to tell him. Lay her hands on the table, say, So, Dad, by the way, I quit my job, though, really, the word was fired. But when she looked at him, she still saw the pride he’d taken in all her big plans: she was going to be the department head of American Furniture and Decorative Arts, put her daughters through Brearley, buy a brownstone on Little West 12th. He had wanted what she wanted just because she wanted it, and he wanted it still.

  “This is all the vacation I get, and sick days too. You can’t just leave,” she said.

  Except that you could. Except that she had.

  “That’s not what I’m saying, honey. You know that.”

  She nodded, but the shame—Phillip’s nostrils flaring as he looked at his watch, then at her empty seat, then called her cell which she would not answer—made her almost sick. Fran sat red faced and silent in the kitchen with her hand cupped over Del’s key, reading over her post on the alumni listserv: Perfectly good room suddenly available in E. Village walk-up. Help me pay the rent! Zack stood barefoot halfway down his building’s stairs, squinting to make her out in the dark.

  She stood up from the table to take her plate to the sink.

  “You’ve got to eat.” Her grandfather chewed the shrimp and its guts, the rice and whatever lived inside the rice.

  “I don’t have to do anything.” She stopped, looking from her bowl to her father’s well-stocked cabinets, to the chopping board, the dirty counter, the dishes piled in the sink.

  “You’re not hungry? I think it’s delicious,” her father said.

  “She’s too thin, Joe. Look at her—you can see her bones.”

  She hunched over the sink, afraid she was going to vomit. She saw Troy’s kitchen again, Reyna’s leg sticking out from beneath the plastic bags, her missing face. She spat once, pushed herself upright.

  “I’m not hungry, no.”

  She ran water into her bowl. The thick sauce floated up in chunks, threatening to overflow.

  “Can I fix you something else?” her father said. “We’ve got chocolate ice cream. Whip-cream in a can like your mother won’t let me buy. Cookies? Oreos. Chessmen.”

  “Stop.” It was too much. “Please just fucking stop.”

  His eyes fell to his food, and the smile went off his face, and he took a bite of dinner. Papie stood with his clean dish and walked, lamely, towards the stove. The rice and sauce poured over the lip of her bowl like vomit, and she leaned over the sink, clutching her skirt, her hair hanging.

  “In my day, a girl was supposed to have meat on her bones.”

  “I never said you shouldn’t have left.” Her father pointed at her with his fork. “You’ve got to live your life the way you choose—”

  You don’t have to do anything, her brain said. You can go to France like Louis Armstrong, like Virginie Gautreau. Never call, never come back. Papie scraped up the last bit of rice from the pot. For some reason, all she could do was laugh.

  “Right,” she swallowed. “Right.”

  “Right! You’re not obliged to us. Your only obligation, at this point, is to make your life the wonderful, joyous thing it has the potential to be.”

  “Oh, it’s all up to me, is it?”

  Papie’s hand shook so violently that the spoon clanged against the side of the Dutch oven.

  “It is all up to you.”

  “Bullshit!” She snatched the spoon from her grandfather and ladled sauce over his rice for him. “You know that’s bullshit! What if I wanted to be here? What if that’s what would have made me ‘joyous’? But I was born a century too late and in the wrong fucking body. And this city—” She laughed. “I get them now, the people asking if we’re going to rebuild. That fucking asshole on Marketplace? He’s right. Why were we shocked? This had been going to happen. Been going to happen for a long time, and we pretended it wasn’t, went on our merry way. It’s our fault! It’s our fucking fault, and now not even you can bring yourself to go into the city, not even to pick me up from the airport. Couldn’t bring yourself to talk your way in even when Cora was here—”

  Her father bowed his head, closed his eyes. “When an officer tells you to turn around, you turn around, Del.”

  “So you let her stay trapped here? You let Cora ignore a mandatory evacuation order, and then you gave up on rescuing her from that hell,” she shouted, “because one cop said turn around?”

  She waited for his face to change, but it didn’t. Her mother was right: he was weak, and he didn’t know it. She had friends, like Tina’s husband, George, who had gotten back into the city on day four, no problem, and stayed just to check out their house. It was different for a black man maybe. But then maybe don’t leave your white doctor wife in Houston.

  “You don’t know what it was like, Del,” he said. “You weren’t here.”

  “I am now. I fucking am now!” she shouted. “I quit my job, Dad. Or maybe I was fired. But I’m here now.”

  “Oh, Del.” Her father clenched his eyes shut.

  “Not on our account,” Papie said. “I hope that wasn’t on our account.”

  Del shook her head. Out of the windows, Cora’s Jeep, grayed with dust, sat on the shells. “People are killing themselves, you know. Yesterday, down in the disaster, I saw a woman who’d blown her own face off. Troy’s sister. You know Troy—the guy Cora rode out the storm with? Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve checked out so far you don’t even care.”

  “Of course I care, Del!”

  “You’re being cruel to your father, Adelaide,” Papie said, straightening himself up in his starched blue guayabera. As if he were still the patriarch. As if he were still anything.

  “Oh, yeah—” she turned on him, the bile rising in her throat. “I’m the one who’s cruel. There are bodies being left to rot in the streets, and apparently I’m the only one who’s shocked by this! But maybe I’ve just been in New York too long, right? Maybe if I’d been here all along I’d be less upset? Maybe I just need time? How long, then, until I become a good New Orleanian again. Until the next hundred-year flood? Until the whole state of Louisiana falls into the sea? I guess I should just wait around for the ease to set in. Wait around and hope that we’ll get a competent government, a functional economy. But tell me, while I’m waiting, what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

  Papie was looking at his hands now, folded in front of his plate, and her father was staring straight at her, his eyes dead and fixed on her face.

  “I can’t do what I want—there’s no one left to teach me. And, fine. People don’t want our kind of furniture anymore, maybe, huh Papie? And I guess Dad had to live the life he chose. Had to leave you, leave this—him and Vin both—until there was no one around but strangers. And how could you teach a stranger your precious fucking skill? It was my birthright, after all.”

  “Adelaide—” Papie said, trying to stop her, but she wouldn’t stop.

  “You can’t take care of everything, can’t protect everything, can’t save everything and everyone, not if you’re looking out for yourself. How can you worry about what other people might need, and still look out—”

  She stopped herself finally, but her father’s eyes were already
closed, his head tilted back.

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean that.”

  He pushed himself back from the table. She shouldn’t have said it. It was unfair, uncalled for, but how else could she explain. She had made the choice to leave, and she had to stick by it. Otherwise what excuse was there for the fact that she hadn’t been there when they’d needed her? When they were running she hadn’t run with them; when they sat on their roofs, when they waited, she had lain in bed; when her sister poled a pirogue out to save them, she had taken the subway; when they held to, she did nothing, because she had already gone. She hadn’t even held to when there was something to hold.

  JOE TURNED ON the lights in the workshed then turned them off again. The moonlight hung like a fog in the room, and he thought that might help—that he might actually see something if he had to work to see.

  When the FBI agent had rapped on his hood that first morning back in New Orleans, it had taken Joe a while to figure out where he was: everything had looked unreal, the way reality can look when it shows itself unadorned.

  Running his tongue across his teeth, he had blinked at the man. Just coming to fetch my daughter. Behind the agent’s looming head, the sun seemed too high, too hot, too yellow. His truck was parked in front of the Walmart that had been dropped into the middle of the Irish Channel like a bomb, and just blocks away, the twin spans of the Mississippi River Bridge vaulted out of the city. They had been invisible the night before, the power still out.

  Now, in the daylight, the city had regained its geography, but not its sense. The streets were stranged by silence, by the crowds on foot carrying their lives in coolers, their children on their backs.

  He still hadn’t understood what had happened. He hadn’t understood anything, not even as he’d driven past the Convention Center, where people the news called “refugees” poured out over the sidewalk—mothers cradling tiny diapered babies, old people limp in folding chairs. He hadn’t understood. He’d been in a daze, driving slowly, while they’d wandered up to the truck, knocked on his windows, a large man in an LSU T-shirt, a tiny girl in filthy flowered pants. Joe hadn’t understood, not even when a woman in his rearview—a white woman—dropped to her knees in the middle of the street and pressed her head into the ground.