The Floating World: A Novel Page 12

  In his own house, the sheets had been pushed off of the beds and the tubs were all full. The one in the front, where Cora and Troy must have been bathing, was cloudy, with grit pooled near the drain. They had pulled the mahogany sideboard in front of the door to the kitchen, and he’d had to wedge himself between it and the wall and push it away with his legs to get through. He had wandered into the canopy of the tree—a few blossoms still clung to the branches, and their sticky sweet perfume mingled with the smell of damp heat and early rot—and looked up at the debris, the rain of shingles and lath, paintbrushes, a chair, a sculpture, the unfinished chalk Cornelia, the Woodshed Dog. Still, it had not seemed real. He’d been expecting chainsaws, emergency rooms, a tearful embrace.

  Then someone pounded on the front door, and Joe felt his joints lock up. The latch broke through the door with the sickening sound of splintering wood, and then their heavy, mud-caked boots tramped across the floor—four men in something like a uniform of dark khakis and bulging flak jackets, semiautomatics in their arms and pistols taped to their legs.

  “This is private property,” he’d said, the last words he’d spoken as one of the naive.

  Their mouthpiece, a broad man with a shaved head, had flicked at his ID badge the way you shoot a dead fly off a table. “We have been contracted by the government to enforce martial law,” he said. “I would make you aware, sir, that in a state of emergency, the concept of private property does not apply.”

  It had clicked then, as one of the troops shouted out that he had a weapon, as the others closed ranks, that he was no longer in the world he’d thought he built. That whatever he’d built, it did not belong to him: nothing ever had. As the mouthpiece flipped Joe’s license between his fingers like it was a playing card, he remembered the nightmares he’d had in college: The jackboots. The card inscribed with the date of his death pushed across a wide desk by his high school principal. The rope a naked blonde woman had given him as a prize. He remembered the cold sweat, the plastic dorm mattress under the sheets, his heart beating. The girl he’d visited in Montreal who’d slapped him in the face as they made love, the dense hair on her legs like a man’s, the smell of frying sausages. He thought of the e-mail Charlie Tolland had sent before Joe left Houston: stories of snipers posted on the roof of Poydras House, shoot-to-kill orders, of the Jefferson Parish cops barricading the Mississippi River Bridge against the citizens of New Orleans who, as in the old days, were not really considered Americans, who probably never had been.

  Blackwater had followed him as he walked back to the front of the house, close enough that he could feel the rifle butt to the ribs they would give him if he slowed down. They had allowed him to close the broken door and lock the vestibule gate, and then one of them had shaken a can of spray paint and drawn an X on the siding. The mark of the destroying angel. As he got into the truck and drove away, they had moved on to the Maestres’ house, knocked once before they rammed a rifle through the door’s glass. The troops went in, but their mouthpiece lingered on Wynne and Susan’s steps, watching him. As Joe made a U-turn, the mouthpiece pointed a finger at him and shot, mouthing the sound of fire.

  The pixelated darkness was beginning to resolve into cleaner shapes: the square of the window, the cold-headed hammers hanging from the wall. Joe stood between the sawhorses in the center of the room, waiting to know what to do.

  Del was so angry, and he couldn’t blame her. There was no other real way to be. But it had twanged something inside him. Kicked up a vibration, a hum that normally he could turn into something good, or at least pretty, as if prettiness had any worth in this world. He pulled down one of the pieces of plywood he’d used to board up the windows and tilted it against the table. I appreciate work that has a use, his father, pressed to comment, might say.

  A whole life of uselessness, then, was his life. A life of rearranging deck chairs. Del blamed him for that, and well she might. But what could he have done? Held off the paramilitary thugs with Vin’s 9mm? Nobly gone to jail? Hog-tied Cora and put her in the truck on that first day? Beyond that, did she expect him to raise the levees? Stop the storms? Did she really want the city to become again the golden capital it once was, when cotton money flowed and the docks were crowded with white-sailed ships? Or was he supposed to raise a rebellion in the river parishes and burn down The Royal O, tear down the scaffolds set up for the auction of slaves? Was that what she expected of him? He pushed the chair back under the desk and lay the panel on the floor.

  Quincy at the gallery said that people were looking to buy things. There’s a hunger out there for relevant work. Things that resonate with the storm. With the city as it was, as it will be. Things to tell them how to feel. Art that swept it all up, wrapped it up in brown paper, so that nobody would cut their hands. Art that packaged all the splinters and shards in a box with a tidy description on the top: Ceci n’est pas une cyclone. He could make that, if they wanted it. He had exactly $1,439.38 in his personal bank account and no desire to ask Tess for more money. Ceci n’est pas une acte de Dieu. He could make it. It would be crap, but he could make it and they would buy it. You couldn’t even blame them. They just wanted to help. Something should result from this. Some good should come, and art was good.

  When he was still a kid, he’d figured out that transforming the emotions you didn’t want into art was best way to get rid of them. Even when his mother had died, that very night, as he was driving across the lake, he could see, beneath the reflections of the headlights and the moon on the water, the chalk figures dissolving in their pools. He created an entire show on that drive: chalk portraits of his mother, of Tess, of baby Cora, of his father, of François Boisdoré, of himself, and their stainless steel pendants—Mother, Beloved, Descendant, Father, Ancestor, I. He had needed a couple of years to make them, but before he’d even gotten to his studio, he understood the whole concept. He would place the portraits in pools of acidic water that would slowly dissolve them, the gasses bubbling up to the surface like breath, until nothing was left but flints and fossilized shells and photographs in a book.

  It was his best work to date. The Guggenheim had bought the Sylvia/Mother diptych to put in storage, and others had gone to collectors across the country. Augie Randsell had bought the Beloved steel. Quincy had been supposed to sell them in pairs, but Augie had bought her the day before the show went up, barged in as the assistant was locking the gallery. Joe had let him have it, out of respect for their friendship, though Augie hadn’t even had the courtesy to come to the opening the next day. The chalk portrait of Tess, then, was alone, sunk in the sculpture garden at NOMA, where at least he could visit from time to time. She had lost her eyelashes already, her fingernails, the careful carving of her hair. He hadn’t seen her since the storm, but her pool would have taken on water in the flood, and if the flood was acidic, she would be vanishing even faster now, a stream of tiny bubbles pouring up out of her collapsing face.

  He pulled the light’s chain and illuminated the small sketches of Tess, clustered like sleeping birds on the high shelf. Heads and busts and full-length sculptures of her, nude and clothed, reclining with a book in tall clover, sitting primly, one leg crossed over the other: private studies he’d done since before their marriage, two or three a year. In the beginning, she would pose for him, but she quickly tired. Could you not right now? She looked at him from over the rim of her glasses, impatient. You realize I work all day? He clicked off the light. If she was here, he could have taken a hunk of something—chalk, marble, wood—and gone to her and done her portrait, to jump-start something. Despite her impatience, she had always been a good muse. He shook his head. Muse was the wrong word—she did not sing to him, did not whisper syrups in his ear. It had always simply been the act of seeing her, the lovely thing, or the act of re-seeing, if necessary, re-finding what was lovely, that hit that twanger inside him, made it hum. It was humming now, but beneath his feet, the board was still a nothing. Just a square of plywood from Home Depot.

 
; No, he did understand Del. Who was he to make her feel guilty for doing exactly what he had done? He had gone north too, escaping to a place where people looked at him only half funny, only said “nigger” behind his back. He remembered thinking even the air down here, the humidity and the heat, were designed to keep him down, while in New York, the breeze had skipped so lightly across his arms he felt like he might lift right off 42nd Street, luggage and all. Of course, he had eventually come home. He had let Tess seduce him, lead him blindfolded back to New Orleans, but he was seduced by her to start with because she reminded him of his city, of the luxurious wetness of a subtropical summer, that dangerous fertility and somnolence, the smells of jasmine and oak and varnish and green peppers frying, the delicious languor of the days. She had explained to him that what he liked about the North was that it forgave his detachment, and she asked him if that was what he wanted, to be a marionette dancing in front of a painted scene. She told him that he would never be a part of New York except inasmuch as he was a member of its crowds, that as soon as he left, someone else would come to fill his place. She had been right.

  Joe stared down at the sheet of cheap wood, his ears ringing. He pulled a paint can off the shelf and pried off the top, poured an unmixed slop of pigment and oil over the board and his bare feet. In the moonlight, it was impossible to see where the paint ended and his skin began, their color was so close—the color of river sand, cypress bark. The longer he stared, the less it felt as though he had feet at all.

  Sunday

  October 23

  Drifts of camphor berries clustered against the risers of the steps to the Randsell house. Tess crushed them underfoot as she climbed, releasing their medicinal scent. Through the leaded glass of Augie’s front door, she could see work was already in progress on the decorative plaster where the chandelier had fallen. Scaffolding stood under an ugly hole in the ceiling, and drop cloths and ladders clustered in the hall. Just a little water damage, Augie had said the morning they’d found Cora. Nothing that can’t be fixed.

  She had three whole hours of freedom—Alice was keeping Cora after their session for her PTSD group—and so why not call on an old friend? They were old friends, after all. Together, they’d been through a lot. Slowly, she pulled her hands from her skirt pockets, rang the bell.

  Tess held herself very straight as she waited, feeling her face go red. Sparrows were twittering in the sweet olives, and she felt as she had that time she’d given Madge a ride here for a date, and Madge had said, Oh, you don’t need to walk me up, but still Tess had, the crinoline of her party dress crunching against her thighs. When Beulah, the housekeeper, opened the door, she had given Tess a look: Girl, don’t be a fool. But she was a fool. Now, Augie, pausing on the landing, leaned over the banister and waved.

  “Dr. Eshleman!” he said, opening the door with three brass clicks. “What a nice surprise.”

  “Oh, I was just in the neighborhood.” She rustled her keys in her hand. “Cora’s at the doctor’s for the morning, so I thought I’d drop by and see how you were holding up.”

  “Well, come on in!” Augie held out his hand. She took it.

  Lying in the Dobies’ big bed the night before—Cora’s bedroom securely bolted now, from the outside—she had tried to put herself to sleep by remembering the way his starched collar had pressed against her cheek in Langenstein’s. She had tried to imagine him pushing her up against the wall of Charmin. She had tried to reenact the fantasies she’d had as a seventeen-year-old—Augie unbuttoning thousands of tiny buttons on the back of her wedding dress, Augie kneeling down to pry a shoe off of her stockinged foot—but such things were not so easy as they used to be. She would get an image of his lips against her neck, her hands on his belt buckle, but then she, or, rather, the ghost of her seventeen-year-old self, would evaporate. As she stared up at the Dobies’ ceiling, she had forced herself to remember Madge as she had been at the end, the petal-dry hand on Tess’s wrist, those translucent eyelids shutting, so that when Tess closed her eyes again, it was Joe hovering over her and her own hand between her legs, and then it was no one at all.

  “I got Tevis on the phone just a day or two after I saw all this mess,” Augie was saying as he led her around the scaffolding. “And good thing too. He says he and his guys have a waiting list that’s going to stretch into 2007, at least.”

  “That’s lucky,” she said.

  “It’s lucky Mother came here after her house flooded. Those French doors blew open in the wind,” Augie dropped her hand and pointed. “If Mother hadn’t taken it into her fool head to ride out the storm in Metairie, if Cora hadn’t found her—thank God—if she hadn’t listened to Mother and brought her here, if she’d insisted on evacuating her or something, we’d be as bad off as you. Of course, if Mother had evacuated—”

  Tess nodded. If only Mrs. Randsell had evacuated. If only Cora had. If they had only known Cora was safe here with the camp percolator and the generator and not lost somewhere in the storm. She could still see the empty rooms of the house on Esplanade the afternoon, a full two weeks after the storm hit, when she and Joe had returned to the city, having finally received mayoral sanction. Even before Joe had put the truck into park, she had opened the door, run across the sidewalk strewn with fallen leaves and into the portico, where she found their front door kicked in and a trail of boot tracks and a jumble of bare footprints on the mildew-clouded floors. Joe had hesitated outside the door, crumpling his keys in his hand. What is it? he said, some specific fear in his voice. Tess couldn’t answer.

  They had moved through their house—coolers in the dining room full of food now hot and crawling with maggots, bread on the table growing blue mold. The federal buffet Cora and Troy must have moved in front of the kitchen door had been pushed aside just enough that Tess could squeeze her body through, and in the kitchen was the magnolia, its thick green leaves coated in gypsum, sketched sculptures hanging in the branches among the unripe cones. A path had been kicked through the broken things on the kitchen floor, and a single bare footprint was printed in the dust, heading in. Upstairs, the ceilings were water damaged, and there was an odd constellation of holes in the plaster above the stairs. Cora’s and Del’s beds were unmade and all the bathtubs but one were drained, an assortment of shampoos and cleaners and antiseptics and bandage wrappers strewn across the tile. Cora’s clothes were all there, but Cora was gone.

  Her duck boots, though, were in the vestibule.

  She can’t have gone far without her boots, Joe said. And so they’d waited.

  If the Red Cross had her, we’d have gotten a phone call, Joe said.

  There’s only one Boisdoré Construction in the whole damn country, Joe said.

  If she was arrested or forcibly evacuated we would have been contacted, Joe said, and he took her hand in both of his, and they sat together on the edge of the portico watching the Humvees and the police cars pass in the street, waiting for the Jeep they knew would not come.

  Tess had not been able to think. Panic will do that to you—it will strip away your ability to reason, your ability to say, We told her to go looking for Mrs. Randsell. Maybe we should check her house on Northline. If all else fails, check Augie and Madge’s house on Felicity Street. But it didn’t seem possible to leave Esplanade before night fell.

  When twilight hung in the street and a squad car whooped its siren, Joe had stood, still holding her hand. We can’t stay after dark.

  They’d driven back across the lake, playing the Meters loud to drown out their thoughts and they had undressed each other on the screen porch of the cabin, listening to the frogs singing in the trees, and had sex in the rocking chair, had sex again in the bedroom just so they’d be able to sleep.

  But Cora had been here the whole time—or for a while at least, Cora wouldn’t say how long—making coffee with Mrs. Randsell in Augie and Madge’s house, reading through August Senior’s library, wearing Madge’s clothes.

  “Did she tell you—your mother—how long th
ey were here together?” Tess said, clearing her throat. “When Cora joined her here? What happened? Did she say anything about that time?”

  Augie shook his head gently, his lips between his teeth. “They took good care of each other, Tess. You saw them in the garden—Mother at the camp stove, wearing all her jewels. ‘If they want the jewelry my husband gave me, they can have it over my dead body.’ ” Augie laughed somehow. “I think those two loons had a good old time.”

  A good old time: that was a new one. Tess wondered if Augie’s talent for repression might be so great that he had forgotten how the jokes had stopped as soon as they had forced Cora and his mother into the car. If he hadn’t noticed how Cora and his mother had kept their eyes focused through the rear windshield as they left the city, watching New Orleans sink below the horizon until nothing remained above the highway but the unresisting air. She wondered if Augie had forgotten how Cora had wept at the gas pumps outside of Lafayette and how he had tried to comfort her, how he’d said twice You saved her life as if he hadn’t heard Cora replying, But what’s there left to save? She wondered if Augie had forgotten the night they’d spent in that hot motel room in Galveston, lying awake listening to the wet sounds of tires on the highway, the sound of Louisiana draining of its people for the second time. If he hadn’t heard his mother whisper, They think they’re getting somewhere, but we’re all already gone.

  Perhaps he had forgotten, and perhaps that was the right thing to do. To keep on living, you avoided looking back. You forced forgetting to stop yourself from turning into salt.