The Floating World: A Novel Page 14

  Del turned away from her sister and looked at the bead of green light that ran between the Dobies’ Pottery Barn curtains, suddenly and deeply afraid that out there beyond the old-glass windows was the end of all that. The way things were going, everything François and Theodule had worked for would just be allowed to decompose. The way things were going, there would never even be a funeral, much less a horse-drawn hearse, a beautiful coffin, a brass band.

  As she rolled over again towards her sister’s body, the bed groaned familiarly, and Del wanted to press her hands against her ears.

  “I think we should go,” she whispered to Cora. “I think the only thing we can do is leave.”

  Cora just breathed, in and out, through her high Choctaw brow.

  “It doesn’t have to be New York. We could go to San Francisco, Oaxaca, Tokyo. I don’t care, just somewhere we can make our own lives. We’ll get a little flat, and you can cook, and I can find some shop to work in, and we can start over. That way we won’t have to watch everything die.” She propped herself up on her elbow and brushed the hair back off of Cora’s face.

  “I just want to forget,” Cora said without opening her eyes.

  “I know, I know.” Del pulled her hand through her sister’s long, silky hair. “And you won’t be able to if we stay here—neither of us will.”

  Cora turned her head from side to side on the pillow, and Del pushed herself up to sit, her back against the cold wooden headboard. “I can’t go.”

  “You can, though.” Del searched for Cora’s hand under the blankets. “Let me help you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Cora whispered.

  “I—” Del started. She reached over and turned on the lamp. On the bedside table, their mother had left a small vase of roses, the red-tipped yellow ones that grew along their back fence. Del tugged one free, its thorns and little side leaves clutching at the others, and put her nose in it. “That’s not fair, Cora. I’m from here too. I’ve loved this city and suffered by this city too. This is hard for all of us.”

  Cora shook her head again. “There are things I still need to do.”

  It was hard not to laugh. “You’re very busy, clearly.”

  Cora’s eyes opened, and their blue-haloed pupils searched Del’s face. “Can you help me?”

  “Of course I can. Anything.”

  “She’s waiting for me.”

  “Who’s waiting?”

  Cora’s mouth dropped open, and she looked at Del, confused for a moment. “No,” she said, and she closed her eyes again. “Nobody. I’m sorry. I was confused. It’s just a dream I had.”

  Del sighed and turned the rose between her fingers, the tiny thorns on the stem pricking her lightly. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Cora shook her head. Her skin was draped over her face like a veil.

  “You can tell me. Please tell me. I want to know.”

  “There’s a dead woman on the kitchen floor. Because of me.”

  AUGIE STILL HAD Madge’s pictures on his bedside table: Madge in a dotted sundress holding someone else’s baby, Madge smiling with her green-lit eyes, Madge making a funny face in her going-away suit. Next to them was a half-full flacon of her perfume, and the smell of wilted gardenias leached into the air, so that Tess had to avoid turning to that side of the bed.

  Augie stood up and began to unbutton his shirt, his fingers trembling, and Tess pushed herself up onto her elbows. He was watching his hands as he pushed each yellowed button through its hole, and when the second to last button, broken by the cleaners, snagged, he glanced at her and smiled apologetically. She had to bite her cheek to keep from crying. Intimacy was so cheap these days—all these Tulane girls with tears running down their cheeks telling her about how they’d hooked up with him and him and the other guy, so why were they still so lonely?—that it had almost ceased to exist. Even in her marriage, it had become mundane, then taken for granted, then finally lost, like a set of keys that was in your hand one minute and gone the next.

  Augie’s shirt fell open, and his eyes went to her again, though they looked behind her, at the drawn curtains, maybe, or maybe the bureau, maybe nothing. So far, he was less naked than he would be swimming laps in the Country Club pool, but in a bedroom with one other person, those inches of flesh, this tangle of fur, those pink, useless nipples become something private, something deliberately shared.

  She shook her head. Now, Tess, she told herself. Now, now, now, now. She inclined her neck towards him, put her fingers into his chest hair. She lay her lips on his sternum. She touched the skin of his belly, his chest, his smooth, cool collarbones. She licked at the salt in the crux of his neck. He was holding his arms rigid, a little bit out from his sides, and when she looked up into his face, his mouth was open in a dumb O.

  She pulled herself off of him—to ask, as it was only right to, whether this was something he actually wanted—but pulling away, she felt again that heat radiating up the back of her thighs, prickling across her abdomen. Her hands slid over his shoulders, around the sunburnt, hot back of his neck. It didn’t matter if he wanted it: what was done was done. She pushed his shirt away, and it slid down over his out-flung, unmoving arms and fell to the floor with a rustle.

  His hands fumbled for her elbows, and she felt his penis stiffening on the other side of her panties, and she moved her fingers up into his hair. His eyes were cottony. She kissed him on his hairline, his ear, the edge of his neck. She closed her eyes, and the sound of a car passing on the street crackled along her skin. He was touching her, and she leaned back to let him put himself inside her, and the light flashed and dimmed, flashed and dimmed—oak branches ducking in the sun—and she remembered how Augie’s headlights had flashed in her rearview mirror as they descended the rural highway into El Dorado, Arkansas, leaving New Orleans as the storm approached. As far as she’d been able to see down that highway, there was nothing in front of her and nothing behind but that silver Porsche, glowing dully in her taillights and the blowback of its own high beams.

  His eyes were closed, his pink body moving heavily against her. Tires whispered on asphalt, and down in the valley the lights changed in series, yellow to red to green.

  DEL PUT HER nose into her plastic cup of bourbon and inhaled hard. It was only four o’clock, but already she was two bars and four drinks in. She’d stopped seeing the faceless woman on the kitchen floor, her sister standing over her in her nightdress; she had convinced herself, with the help of the bourbon, that that couldn’t possibly be what Cora meant, that it had only been the nightmare Cora said it was. But now she was hearing things—her sister’s laughter, her own name. She kept looking behind her at the door, feeling someone looking at her, smelling Fran’s smell of Easy Mac and cigarettes, imagining Zack’s tongue in her ear. He’d kept calling her all afternoon, but she couldn’t remember what she’d wanted to say to him, how to say it. His name lit up the screen now, and she pressed her finger into the red button, lifted her cup again, drank the shot down, signaled to the bartender for another.

  “Del?”

  She looked up. The early band was getting on stage, the sparse crowd chattering. The drummer hit the drum, and the room spun a quarter turn. The bartender poured another shot, and she slid off the stool with it and pushed past the crowd coming in through the door. Frenchmen Street was abuzz with the shrieks of the do-good tourists who wandered up and down on their day of rest in an alcoholic stupor, hunched under the weight of paid-for Mardi Gras beads. In the middle of the street a sunburned blonde with a Hand Grenade was jumping up and down and squealing. Del stepped off the curb, and a vet in dog tags ran smack into her, the sweat on his shirtless chest smearing across her arm.

  “Motherfucker!” Del screamed as he pushed off her, kept walking. “Fuck you, motherfucker!”

  In the middle of the street, the bouncing girl fell giggling against some jock’s chest.

  “Del!”

  A hand fell on her shoulder, thumb on the back of her neck. She jum
ped away, turned back.

  “Zack? What are you doing here?”

  He was grinning a stupid, big-toothed grin, and she stepped towards him, hit at his chest with the flats of her hands.

  “What in the hell are you doing here!”

  His lower lip between his teeth, he walked into her beating hands, brought his arm over her shoulders, and then she was burrowing into him. A shudder of comfort suffused her body, and she was pissed at herself for feeling it, pissed at him for making her. How could she change anything if she couldn’t even stop herself from doing again the things she should never have done?

  “We were worried,” he said. “And Fran needed your stuff out of the apartment. I volunteered to drive it down.”

  His face was so full of pity his eyebrows nearly touched, and he smelled of Tide and fast food, his T-shirt tight across his chest. I volunteered. No different, really, than the do-good tourists in the Livestrong bracelets and new Timberlands. At least he hadn’t bought Mardi Gras beads. I would feel so much better, Fran had whined on the other side of her bedroom door, if I could help. She almost laughed.

  “Thanks.” She turned around, stepped back. “But I was going to take care of it.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “I’ve got things under control.”

  “Well, let’s lay out the facts then, baby. You bailed on your job, your lease, your friends,” He was actually counting on his fingers. “You weren’t picking up your phone, except to yell at Fran. You kept calling and hanging up. What were we supposed to think? I went by your house. I’ve been sitting on your parents’ front steps all afternoon, but the house seemed abandoned. I didn’t know what to do—”

  She turned away from him and walked into the crowd.

  “Adelaide Hortense Boisdoré!” He grabbed her by the shoulder, and she was forced to make the face she made whenever he said her middle name.

  Zack was dead serious, however. “Please, Del,” he said. “Please. I’ve got to fly out in the morning. Please, just talk to me.”

  She bit her lip and turned away from him, hoping the crowd would separate them. He jogged after her, hands on her shoulders again, then off.

  “Del, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that. You came to me to talk—”

  She put her hands against his cheeks, tried to shut him up.

  “I don’t know why you came to me, why you come to me.”

  “Stop,” she said. “Stop. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

  “No, Del.”

  “Really.”

  He opened his mouth to speak again, and she took his hands.

  “Stop,” she said, more gently now. “Just stop. Let it go.”

  Inside the club, the drummer beat a test riff on his drum. The shirtless vet came back through, his dog tags bounding against his pecs.

  “I can’t let it go,” Zack said, from under his stupid lashes.

  She closed her eyes and nodded. A little breeze moved through the street, moving the hair that lay against her neck. “Then come inside and dance.”

  FLAMES LEAPT FROM the grill, and the bald man whose name Vincent should have remembered stood back, holding a bottle of lighter fluid up in the air. The long day was closing down on them, and there seemed to be a firelit flicker to everything stained by the falling sun. It lit the edges of the cut grass and polished the coats of the ponies trotting in the sandy paddock. Five girls in total were taking a lesson, three mahogany ponies, one ebony, and another the dingy color of whey. A pretty brunette stood in the center of the whirling girls, yelling instructions, while Joe hung on the rail.

  For some time now, since he’d been sitting here under the barn’s overhang, Vincent had had the phrase “inheritors of the earth” stuck in his brain like a piece of gristle, though it hadn’t been the Beatitudes today, so far as he remembered. In no sense were these little girls meek, but he supposed that was what Jesus had meant, that the Second Coming would usher in a sort of Opposite Day when high would be low, right left, up down. That was what the woman in the arena was saying, over and over. Up, down. Up, down. Aubrey, watch those heels. Up, down.

  The girls seemed to know what they were doing, better than he would, that was for certain. The ponies lined up politely and hopped over the crossed poles like there was nothing to it, while the girls popped up to put their hands into their ponies’ glossy manes.

  “Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. Release a little more next time, Maggie. Up, down.”

  Maybe someday the low would be brought high and the high low, but not anytime soon. Around the table near the grill where they had the chips and dip and carrot sticks, the mothers and fathers had been talking about some poor child who’d had her head stove in by her horse’s hoof. They didn’t know how the parents could stand it. There was supposed to be a limit on how many bad things could happen at once, they said. Their own darlings needed better helmets, more supervision. He’d had to walk away. No one wanted to hear what he had to say: you protect your children too much, it only makes them less capable of handling trouble when it comes.

  He watched Joe watching the woman who paced the sand in her tight pants, beating time against her thigh with a short whip, and hoped it was the girls his son had turned his attention on. Hard to deny that rear end, but this was another one from an alien planet, just like the one Joe was still married to. He knew the boy was aggrieved, but a man’s place was beside his wife in bad times. It was his bound duty to forgive. He himself had forgiven Tess—she’d misunderstood was all, never had any real discernment when it came to furniture anyway—but Joe expected her to come back on her knees. That was the thing with marriage, though: sometimes you had to swallow venom for the other’s sake.

  Vincent just wanted them to be happy, but he couldn’t get involved. Maybe it was that he had gotten too involved in the past, or tried to, or Sylvia had. They had seen this coming for miles. The boy too much in love, the girl too high above. You can’t put a woman on a pedestal, especially when she thinks she belongs up there. They had gotten this idea that they were charmed, that nothing could touch them, as if their differences—white vs. colored being the least of them—could just be laughed away. It was for damn sure they’d never expected to run into real problems, and when they had finally gotten knocked off balance, well, it turned out they were so far apart, they couldn’t even hold each other up.

  The lesson was finished, and the girls on their ponies filed out of the arena. Joseph turned with them, walking alongside the whey horse and still talking to the girl, a little redheaded boy’s body in a green shirt. Joe pointed to him, and the girl turned her pony without moving so much as a finger. Inheritors of the earth. The smell of horse and sweat and leather came ahead of them, and Vincent took a good deep breath of it. It was a wholesome smell, like the smell of new cut lumber.

  “Pop,” Joe said. “I want you to meet Maggie.”

  “Maggie,” he said. “Princess Maggie.”

  The girl giggled, and her teeth were straight and perfect under her smooth upper lip. “Do you want to pet my pony? His name is Buttercup.”

  Vincent pried himself out of the dusty chair. “That’s what I would have named him. He looks just like a Buttermilk.” He patted the animal’s hot, damp shoulder. “He’s a good horse?”

  “Yes.” The girl smiled and scrubbed her fingers in his mane. “The best.”

  “Did you see them take that jump at the end, Pop?” Joe had on his visiting face, a mask of sunshine. “What did you call it, Maggie. A boxer?”

  “An oxer.”

  “An oxer. The wide one.” Joe looked at him, apparently serious. Blinking.

  “No, I did not, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, it was impressive.”

  “Not really,” said Maggie, inheritor of the earth. “I jump ones that are higher and wider.”

  “Oh, well, it looked impressive to me,” Joe said and Vincent knew he missed this, the easy banter one can have with a child. He had loved h
is babies, Joe. “But I’ve never been on a horse.”

  “You haven’t?” squealed the princess. “Why not?”

  “Some of us are not as lucky as you, missy,” Vincent said.

  “You either?”

  “No, me neither.”

  He’d sat a mule once, he remembered, so long ago now that he couldn’t tell you anything about it except that it had felt funny to be up so high, to be able to see through the top panes of windows and into the fruiting lower branches of the pecan tree.

  “Do you want to ride Buttercup?”

  “Oh, no, Maggie. Thank you.” Joe slapped the pony’s meaty neck and took a step backwards. “We’re just going to have a couple hot dogs and then head home to bed.”

  “I’d like to try him.” Vincent said.

  Before Joe could stop her, Maggie flung one long, thin leg over the saddle and let herself down gracefully in the grass. She took the reins over the pony’s head and looked up at Vincent, expectantly.

  “Do you know how to get on?”

  Joe moved between Vincent and the horse. “I don’t think this is the best idea.”

  “Why not?” asked the inheritor of the earth.

  Vincent knew why not. Joe was afraid he’d fall or hurt the horse, afraid he’d take off with it into the fields, and Joe would lose all the power over him he’d worked so hard to acquire.

  “We’re both too big for Buttercup, Maggie, but thank you.” Joe made to take hold of Vincent’s hand. “He’s little-girl-sized, not old-man-sized.”

  “Monica rides him all the time, if he’s being bad.”

  Joe looked over to where Monica—that pretty brunette in the tight pants—was replacing the cover on the grill, and opened his mouth, but Monica was a tall woman, and the child had defeated him.