The Floating World: A Novel Page 13

But Tess had not yet developed that talent. Even when she tried to drink herself to oblivion, she still had dreams of houses torn apart like slaughtered animals. She had been so worried for so long—that Cora was locked up, that Cora had drowned, that Cora was out of it and lost in the system of buses and shelters that scattered New Orleans to the four corners of the earth, that she had trouble believing these things hadn’t really happened—her body remembered them as true.

  As Augie led Tess through the rooms, she looked around, trying to find traces of her daughter’s presence, but nothing besides the chandelier seemed to have been touched since Madge’s memorial. The same insulated silence lay over the carpets like a blanket of moss. In the living room, the abstract steel sculpture Augie had bought from Joe just after Madge’s death still reclined on the console table behind the sofa, and the sofa was still covered in the same striped fabric she’d helped Madge choose when Mrs. Randsell had moved to Northline, to that “more manageable house” behind its high, locked wall.

  From above the small server that held the cut-crystal carafes, Madge looked down from her portrait. It was a half-length piece, Madge’s body severed at her slender linen-clad waist, her fingertips brushing the lower frame. Mrs. Arbor had made her turn sideways and peer back solemnly over her shoulder, and Madge liked to joke that the old lady had chosen the pose on purpose to give her a neckache, so that her expression would have “at least a little edge.” It was not a perfect likeness—her features pinched, her eyes too wide set and dark.

  Augie crossed the room and held open the swinging door. She saw his eyes go to the portrait too, and then he turned from her into the kitchen.

  “You know it’ll be five years in November?”

  “I know.”

  “She would have hated this, just hated it.” He slammed his hands down on the granite countertop. “I drove through where Hildy lived—you remember Hildy who worked for us in the ’80s, early ’90s—and the little house we helped her buy off the derelict rolls and fix up? All its guts were lying rotting in the street. I don’t know how to reach her, but Madge would have found a way. She would probably have driven out and scooped her up out of the Red Cross in Wichita or wherever and put her in the guest room and made her stay.”

  “She probably would.” Tess nodded.

  “She would have made them fix it. Hildy’s house, everything. And if they wouldn’t, she’d have had us all down there scrubbing on our hands and knees.”

  Tess smiled. She could better see Madge, her hair tied up in a bandana, bright pink lipstick on her narrow lips, storming city hall, brandishing a pithy sign in one hand and some ruined thing of Hildy’s—a sofa cushion, a rusted cast-iron skillet—in the other.

  “Me, all I can do is drink,” Augie sighed, shook his head. He glanced behind him at the liquor cabinet, turned back. “You want one?”

  Tess looked at the microwave clock—it was 10:15 a.m. and Cora would still be sitting in Alice’s chair, silent as a locked room—but, regardless, yes, she did. “Gin and tonic?”

  Augie leaned into the Sub-Zero for a lime and the tonic bottle, then turned around to her, shrugging his shoulders.

  “You know, I used to be very strict about it. No drinking for medicinal purposes. It really ticked Madge off.” He shook his head, laughing, and took down a cutting board and a knife. “ ‘I wish you’d have a drink. You’re in such a foul humor.’ I see her point, now. What’s a couple of years shaved off at the end of things? And what else are you going to do?”

  “I could write you a scrip for Xanax.”

  “Already have some.”

  “We could storm city hall.”

  “Ha! You think that son of a bitch Nagin’s going to listen to us?” He tossed his head up, then went back to slicing the lime, very carefully, the fingers of his left hand bunched. “No, everybody’s got to go back to where they were before, no matter how dangerous, no matter that it was a crime that their ancestors were sold a bill of goods on some malarial backwater a hundred years ago, it’s their ‘home,’ Tess, don’t you understand? They have the right to have it swept out to sea again!”

  “You should run for mayor.”

  He shook his head, smiling. “You always wanted me to run for mayor.”

  “I did.” She laughed, for real this time. “I remember spending our entire homecoming dance trying to convince you go into politics. Madge was so angry at me! But you reminded me of Barry Goldwater.”

  “Oh lord. I didn’t know that was the reason! You told me once,” he said, poking towards her with the paring knife, “you said, ‘You’ve got a politician’s charisma.’ I was kind of offended, actually.”

  “I didn’t mean it badly.”

  “Then how did you mean it?”

  She shrugged and looked down at the vein of amber quartz running through the countertop. As Augie swirled the drinks in their crystal glasses, the ice cubes rang like altar bells.

  “She had such good taste.”

  “Oh, in politicians?” Augie grinned.

  “Ha-ha,” she said. “No, I mean, this kitchen looks like it was put in yesterday, and she saw all that. She was a true classic, Madge. Elegance just dripped from her.”

  “You know, it’s been so long since we renovated—two whole refrigerators ago—that I’d almost forgotten that old kitchen. Yellow cabinets, my God. And to think that was chic back then.”

  “Avocado,” she said, before she could stop herself. She watched his hands pause, the cap half-screwed on the tonic bottle. “Weren’t they green?”

  “Oh, you know, you’re right?” He slotted limes onto the sides of their glasses. “Avocado.”

  “It’s just—” She laughed. “Do you know how many rolls I buttered in this kitchen with Beulah? Hiding from those third basemen Madge always insisted you provide for me?”

  Augie had opened the French doors and was standing between them, waiting for her to come out onto the veranda. As she stepped into the shade of the green-and-white striped awning, one of the cold, wet glasses kissed her upper arm, and she turned into him and took it, and his thigh pressed hers through his thin khaki pants.

  “Do you remember that New Year’s Eve?” he said.

  She froze. The broad leaves of the gingers waved against the lawn. Just before midnight, Madge and Joe and their other guests had gone down to the river to watch the fireworks, but Augie had stayed behind with her on Esplanade. Her feet hurt from being crammed into cocktail shoes, and Augie had offered to help with the dishes, but instead, they had gone out onto the gallery, the tiles slick with rain under her bare feet, and he had taken her shoulders in his hands. She had tilted her face up, and he had kissed her.

  “I’m sure you realized that I was in pain,” Augie said now, his hand still on the French doors. “Confused and in pain and thrashing about, trying to understand how life could go on if we lost her.”

  Tess nodded. The ice settled into her drink.

  “You didn’t know that she was sick yet, but you were kind to me. I still remember the way you took my hand, afterwards, and squeezed it. As if you understood everything.”

  Tess nodded again, pressing her body against the railing as she held her glass over the edge. That was how she felt now—as though he understood. They had been through it together, after all, the anxious drive into the city as Rita strengthened in the Gulf, the discovery, the relief. He had stood beside her at the garden gate, seen his mother beside Cora in the grass, his hand against her hand.

  On the little iron table under the oak tree where Mrs. Randsell and Cora had been sitting that morning, a hardcover book had been abandoned in the rain. It was swollen with water, splayed sloppily open, and she felt something similar expanding, unfolding under her breastbone.

  “What a pity,” she said, under her breath.

  “What?” Augie asked.

  She listened to him stride across the veranda behind her, but did not turn to him. As he wrapped his broad hand around the edge of her waist, she held herself straight,
tried not to react when he dipped his nose into her hair. She wanted to say, Do you know how long I’ve wanted this? But the answer would have put him off. Instead, she said,

  “You’ve left your book out in the rain.”

  He took his hand from her waist and moved around in front of her, pushed the hair back off of her cheekbone, then kissed her there, kissed her mouth. His tongue, coated in gin, edged with coffee, fluttered against her palate. His hands moved around behind her back, worked themselves up underneath her shirt, and she couldn’t stop thinking that this was how Madge had taught him to kiss, how they had learned to kiss together, here, on this veranda under this striped awning while, hovering over the green Bakelite dish, their cigarettes burned down to columns of ash, supported only by some vague, structural memory of what they once had been.

  “LORD, I AM not worthy to receive you,” the priest said, holding the Host up over the chalice, “but only say the word and—”

  “—my soul be healed,” Vincent said.

  “—I shall be healed,” Joe said, the congregation said, Father Reynard said.

  Things had changed. Even church, the one place that should have been safe. They didn’t say “the Holy Ghost” anymore and they didn’t speak in Latin and they hardly ever sang, these women—mostly women—standing in the pews with their heads uncovered. Sylvia would never have dared enter a church without a hat. He could remember the day when girls who had misplaced their bonnets would put handkerchiefs on their heads.

  Joe was tapping his arm as if he expected him to join the communion line. Vincent hadn’t taken communion since 1969, but his son was still an altar boy under that four-day beard. Vincent shook his head as Joe climbed over into the aisle and stood looking at his shoes.

  1969. That was the year the priest had been replaced at St. Joseph with this cringing, skinny fellow he couldn’t bring himself to confess to. Seemed like sin would scare him, like he didn’t have the constitution for it. Father Keenan was his name, and he’d brought a guitarist with him from Oregon and forced them all to commit hootenanny mass, Sylvia in her hat clapping along. Whether this had been passed down and perpetrated by the Second Vatican Council or no—along with the banishment of Latin and the turning of the altar so that the geeky, string bean Father Keenan stood looking at you as he said things that were supposed to go straight to God—it took the meaning out of everything. The mass had been stripped naked, like those girls who took off everything but their tennies and ran across a football field. What beauty, what grace had been there turned out to have been nothing but trickery and veils. It was no wonder the girl Adelaide stayed home in bed.

  He looked at Joe, inching forward, still bending his head in prayer. Vincent had believed once. His first communion, he’d gotten a tingle of something like faith, being one of a long line of little boys and girls lined up in their finest in front of the church. Before they walked, the deacon had given them all candles with a little paper circle around the bottom to protect their hands from the wax. He remembered thinking it wasn’t funny the way the other boys, Francis Morillo, for one, made like they would light the girls’ braids on fire. He remembered he’d been anxious the Eucharist would taste like meat—it was supposed to be Jesus’s flesh after all. For the life of him he couldn’t tell you now whether it had, the memory was so completely covered up by the gummy, plain flour taste of every other host in every other church of his life. It was possible that his memories of that day weren’t even true, not the sharp drip of the hot wax, not Francis Morillo’s missing side teeth—that the whole thing might be just a story his mother told for company. That happened sometimes. What you were told or told yourself could, little by little, change the very thing you’d lived, until finally there was no telling what was real and what wasn’t. In the end, of course, it didn’t matter; what you remembered became your world.

  He was no fool, no matter what they thought. He was dying was all, just like everyone was bound to do. It just happened to be his misfortune to die in drips and drabs rather than all at once; they had called a poor executioner, his arm weak, the blade dull. So he had to watch as hotel rooms vanished into the air and office towers slumped to dust, as clients and great-aunts were erased, leaving pale smears where their faces should be. The song his mother sang as she rocked his cradle was muted in her mouth, as were the words Sylvia had said as she lay beside him in the night; all words in fact would soon be changed to moving mouths and whispers that failed to reach across a dining table that would eventually be cleared of all ordinary meals, until all that remained were abstractions, insults, radio music, and the burnt crust of marshmallow on the candied yams. Eventually, his baby children would be driven away in the backseat of that 1964 Pontiac Bonneville that had been either blue or gray. The house with the green walls he and Sylvia had raised them in would burn to a cinder, and Sylvia would walk out into the lake until the water closed over her head. Finally the bark of the trees would smooth to brown paper and the birds’ voices would lose the birds, the lake and river would evaporate into the clouds, and the cars and streets would roll away over the edge of the earth until nothing was left but their roar.

  Vincent bent his head and tried to pray.

  DEL GOT INTO the Dobies’ tiny shower without waiting for it to get hot. From the neck-high showerhead, water hammered on the bones of her chest. A bottle green fly flew in through the open window and knocked at the wet glass. All morning she’d felt like crying as she left her father’s house without apologizing and drove across the lake, as she gathered Cora from Alice’s, delivered her home. She felt queasy still, as if she might vomit. It wasn’t just the fight she’d had with her father, who’d been trying so hard to please, standing in front of his overstuffed kitchen cabinets like the owner of a failing store; it nagged at her, leaving Reyna there in that house. She’d called DMORT again that morning, but the woman who’d answered had been so unconvincing—talking of backlogs—that she’d nearly driven by Troy’s house after Alice’s, before thinking better of it, since Cora was in the car. Do you know what it would do to her, her mother had said, if Cora knew her friend’s sister killed herself? They should have wrapped the body in a rug and dropped her on the front steps of the nearest precinct. Or, like Kea said, just dug a goddamned hole. She wanted to force someone to do something. It was the most basic function of civilization, burying the dead, and if they couldn’t get their acts together to do even that, then they weren’t any better than the dogs scavenging in the streets.

  She leaned against the tiles and watched white floes of lather drift towards the drain. The water had gotten warm finally, and she closed her eyes and tried to feel nothing but the shower pounding against her back, but the smell of the Mississippi floated around her in the steam, and she saw again the flood washing over the floorboards of Troy’s cottage.

  She turned off the taps and wrapped one of the Dobies’ big blue towels around her. In their bedroom, Cora was lying exactly as Del had left her, her head propped up on pillows, her arms straight out on top of the coverlet. Holding the towel around her, Del climbed up into the narrow bed and lay down beside her sister. Cora’s breathing was so quiet that if it weren’t for the gentle rise and fall of the sheet over her breast, Del wouldn’t have been sure she heard it at all.

  “Cora? You okay?” She placed her hand over her sister’s brow, but Cora’s eyes stayed closed.

  In the dark around the bed, their furniture huddled like ghosts. There were the armoires that had come out of Oma’s house, which they had climbed into as girls, looking for Narnia between the hand-sawn boards. There was the vanity that her mother would sit at before she went out at night, dabbing the stopper of the perfume bottle on her throat. There was Cora’s cheval glass, its face turned to the wall, which had reflected their teenaged bodies, silvering the blades of Cora’s hipbones and the overturned bowls of Del’s breasts. There was the sideboard their mother had bought at Neal’s, attributed to Mallard, and the blanket chest where they’d always kept their Mar
di Gras costumes—the painters’ smocks and sequined tutus and old duck-feather wings. Then there were the Boisdoré pieces: the marble-topped side table, its legs an Art Nouveau riot of vegetal forms, and a third armoire, classical and austere in her great-great-grandfather’s style. There were the beds that Papie had made, all three of them, for her and Cora and, before that, for their father, all gifts on their tenth birthdays. Her father’s and hers leaned, dismantled, against the wall, her palm-fronded posts intermingling with his arrow-headed spears. She and Cora lay in the third bed.

  She could smell, rising out of the headboard, the old woody perfume of her grandfather’s workshop, the same smell that had probably lingered in the workshops of all the Boisdorés who had come before, even down to the back rooms of the shop that Theodule set up when his grandmother, Adelaide, purchased his, his uncle’s, and his mother’s freedom from the estate of the white widow Boisdoré. Though Del had done research into their genealogy in college, she could find no record of where the money had come from; Adelaide herself had been a slave, and her children were the result of a “liaison” with a white man named Dubuisson, who might well have paid for his children’s manumission. But Del liked to imagine that Theodule’s uncle François—listed on his free papers as a bon maçon—had been building houses all along, and that he had given Adelaide the money for his own liberty and that of his sister and his sister’s child. She liked to imagine Theodule tagging along with his Uncle François as he built houses in the Quarter and the Marais, picking up a hammer first, then a chisel, and then being taught to use them by François’s apprentices and slaves. By the time François owned a stretch of Esplanade between Marais and Treme and three lots at Villere and Bayou Road, Theodule had his own shop, where he later made fine coffins that his cousin, François fils, used to bury the best of colored Francophone society. The Françoises, père et fils, and their descendants had all the money, but better than money was what François père had left to Theodule, and Theodule had left to Homer and Homer had left to Augustin and Augustin had left to Louis-Vincent and Louis-Vincent had left to Papie. He had taught them how to create not just beautiful objects, but their own freedom. They learned how to rescue something rough and mortal, something that, if felled, would otherwise just be left to rot, and turn it into something exquisitely beautiful, something that would last longer than the lives of many men.