The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  “So, what you do—” Maggie looked authoritatively at Vincent as she pulled down the buckle of the stirrup strap, adjusting it. “—is you put your left foot in here, and then your hands on the saddle, and then you jump up and swing your other leg over his back.”

  Vincent nodded. He felt steady and good today—this was something he could do. He approached the pony, and though Joe followed closely, he did not interfere. The girl had lengthened the stirrup strap so that it hung halfway to the ground, and slowly, Vincent used his hands to lift his leg and slot his foot in place. He put his hands on top of the little girl’s saddle and stood up on his stirrup, leaning into the animal’s musty side. Under the new weight, Buttermilk stepped forward, and Vincent’s right foot dangled helplessly alongside his left, and the bulging top of the saddle dug into his stomach, and he knew now that this would end in disgrace, but instead he felt Joe’s broad hands underneath his right thigh, and then he was vaulted up and over and into the saddle.

  He was not as tall as the mule had been, Buttermilk, and yet Vincent felt high. He was over his son’s head now, and he could see the flames flickering in the barbeque pit and the last thumbnail sliver of red sun hiding behind the black trees at the bottom of the sky. Around the grill, the mothers and fathers had lifted their heads to look at him. They pointed. They raised their eyes up over their hot dog buns and stared at the old man on the little pony, and so it was absurd. Of course it was absurd, but between his legs the pony’s warm sides rose and fell and his smell was good and true. Vincent took the reins from Maggie and turned the pony’s head away and let him walk across the gravel driveway, out towards the long, rolling meadow. In the pasture beside them, a herd of full-grown horses, oaken, silver, and maple, saw Buttermilk at their fence and galloped up, snorting and kicking their heels. Buttermilk, inheritor of the earth, did not let this bother him. He looked at them, twitched his ears, and then walked on, taking Vincent farther from Joe, farther from the worriers and the children. He had a stream in mind, maybe, or a patch of clover, and Vincent let himself be taken there. The crickets had started singing, and the light was fading, after all.

  ZACK DIDN’T KNOW quite what to do with the funk. Four hours in, he still wobbled against the beat, his feet not quite syncopated, his hand flashing out to repeat a cymbal clash, a long high trumpet note, but Del still liked having him near her, even though she saw the other locals up front smiling at them. A large woman passed them on the way to the bar, winking, and said, “Where you from, baby? New York?” and he tried harder for a minute, bobbing his head from side to side, until Del came up behind him and showed him the way.

  She took his hips in her hands, and he pressed back against her. She laughed, though it wasn’t funny. She closed her eyes and put her face into his back, and she could feel his muscles tense beneath his T-shirt as he stopped dancing and stood, letting the music scatter across them. In New York, he had taken her wrists and pinned them behind her head, held them there with one hand as he kissed her neck, pushed her shirt up, pushed his other hand under her still-clasped bra, took her nipple in the rough tips of his fingers, and she had lain there quiet, her mind spinning. When he took his hand from her wrists she had kept her arms up above her head, and when he grabbed the waistband of her panties, she had lifted her hips into the air, and when he’d gone down on her, she had come in such hard, high waves that she had to fight to breathe. Now, she moved her hands under the hem of his T-shirt. Kermit blew his horn: Do you know what it means, to miss New Orleans?

  Zack took a step away from her.

  And miss her each night and day?

  Del couldn’t stand to look at him, that look of solicitous concern on his face again, and so she pulled him to her and kissed his slow, wet mouth.

  Then, they were walking down the middle of Royal Street, distant cars whispering from the avenue.

  Del was sobering up, and her ears rang—she kept her eyes on the asphalt. Zack walked along beside her, and she felt his gravity the way she imagined the sea felt the moon’s. She veered towards him, away. Every so often, his hand fluttered out and brushed her elbow, and she walked him right past the Dobies’ and onto Esplanade, looking up at the branches of the still-living trees.

  “I loved that magnolia tree,” she said.

  He rubbed her back with the flat of his hand. “I know.”

  They stopped in front of her house. The Ryder truck with her stuff in it—the bureau and her mattress, the wooden hangers rejected by the new girl who didn’t hang up her clothes—was parked out front, but Zack was looking at the façade of her house in the darkness.

  “It’s still a beautiful house,” he said.

  She walked up the steps, and reached for the vinyl-wrapped chain. She fished in her pocket for the little lump of keys, dangled them in the streetlight. Only the big keys were there; she’d put the padlock key back in the Dobies’ kitchen drawer.

  “I don’t have the key.”

  Nodding, he kissed her on her hairline with his wet whiskered mouth. “It’s alright, D. Let’s just go get some burgers.”

  “No.” She jumped off the edge of the portico. “I have the key to the garden gate.”

  The broken bottles along the top of the fence glowed amber and green in the moonlight, and Zack looked up at them as he walked through. The lower gallery was deserted—the rockers gone—and over the toolshed, the moon had risen, a coin on the belly of the naked sky. From here, only the disk of the tree’s roots and an upward slash of trunk were visible. A little burst of wind shot through the air, and she listened for its rustle in the leaves. She felt Zack’s eyes on her neck. On the street, a car passed, and the shadow of the fence tilted against the house, bars of gray and yellow.

  “We’re going to be in the shit if a cop drives by,” he said.

  “This is my house. I grew up here,” she said, staring into the wide black V the magnolia had cut through the siding. On either side of the gash, the windows of her father’s studio banked sideways, and the walls hung slack, the house open to the sky. Del took Zack’s hand and led him to a place where the tree leaned close to the ground, and then she vaulted onto its trunk.

  “They don’t know it’s your house,” he said. “Come on, it’s alright. Let’s go get something to eat, and then, if you’re good, you can drive me to the airport at four.”

  Ignoring him, she began to shimmy up the trunk. He pressed his hands into the tree and followed her.

  The broken staves of siding were thrust at wild angles into the gap, and the wiring had tangled in the branches. The kitchen glowed dimly with light from the street, and Del climbed over the low branches, easing across the wide crux in the trunk where as a girl she’d used to sit and read, and ducked under the canopy of broken twigs. Once she was sure the floor was steady beneath her, she let herself down. Zack came after her, his heavier movements making the tree quake. He dropped down as soon as he was over the kitchen floor, bushwhacked his way through the splintered branches and glossy leaves until he reached her. For a second he just stood there, his arms limp, his red mouth parted. Under his brows, his eyes darted towards hers and then away. Quick, like jumping into cold water, she moved towards him, put her mouth on his mouth. For a moment his lips resisted hers, his tongue heavy as clay. But then he stepped into her, warm in the hot night, his hands on her ribs, his leg up between her thighs. She heard the leaves above them stirring as the wind began to shift them on their branches, and she too began to tremble. Wrapping her arms around his neck, as if he could be more solid than a thing rooted in the earth, she pushed him down into the fallen branches. Kneeling, he ran his fingertips up the backs of her calves, her knees, her thighs, and up, until a heaviness seemed to rise through her like leaves rising to the surface of a pool.

  Monday

  October 24

  Empty room, empty house, empty street. Tess ran her tongue around the inside of her sleep-wooled teeth. Empty wineglass, empty air.

  The cluttered room was jaundiced with street l
ight, still dark, and the wing of the chair was rough against her cheek. It was unclear how long she’d been asleep there, how long since she’d come back to the Dobies’ smelling of Augie Randsell and Tanqueray and showered, poured herself a glass of wine, and went into the girl’s bedroom to find the beds unmade, Del and Cora gone. She had wandered a while over the padded floor looking at things—all these familiar objects defamiliarized, only themselves again now that they were out of context in this new and temporary place. Eventually, she’d sat down in the parlor armchair beside Cora’s bed to wait.

  Now, she pushed her hands up across her face—her hair was dry, the wine a film in the bottom of the glass. She thought that, sometime in her sleep, she’d heard a door closing, footsteps, but the house still seemed empty, something too light about the air. It made her skin prickle.

  Lacan was right: it was a thing, emptiness. She felt it driven through the center of her, as if Pan could take her to his mouth like a flute and play. Women were better adapted to it, reminded as they were of their own inner emptiness every time a man put himself inside them, and then by the babies that sometimes followed—creation ex nihilo. A consolation, that was supposed to be, until they clipped the cord. After that it was nothing but abandonment. No shoes on their feet, they left you. They grew up, they left you. Their faces painted with powders and pastes, they went out into the streets, they left you. No note, no phone call, they left you, they left you.

  She pushed her hands into the chair arms, levered her heavy body upright. The yellow streetlights and the moon in Pisces fought with each other in the darkness. She had no idea what time it was, except late. The girls should be back by now—had to be. She figured they’d gone out for dinner, walked down to Port of Call for a burger like they used to do in high school. Del would have thought she was being a good sister, dragging Cora to that pirate ship of a place, the tables overhung with nets and ropes. When you got drunk down there on twenty-ounce hurricanes, you could almost feel the ocean.

  Tess went out into the hall, calling for them, but no one answered. They were probably asleep in the Dobies’ big bed—they would have tiptoed up the stairs, seen her in the chair, then retreated, so as not to wake her. But when she opened the door to the master bedroom, there was nothing but the tangle of sheets that she herself had left that morning. She heard her own lungs filling, emptying. Take what you need, need more.

  Still, she hesitated at the head of the stairs, listening, thinking she heard talking in the kitchen, but even as she went down, clutching the banister, she knew it was just the voices of drunks passing on the sidewalk, and that the kitchen would be empty, as the sofa was, as was the courtyard. 1:38 a.m. The microwave’s clock branded the air. Curfew had begun over an hour and a half ago. They would be home soon, or the police would bring them home.

  DEL HAD TAKEN her mother’s car to drive Zack to the airport for his early flight. For a little while, they had lain in the mess of leaves on the kitchen floor, she with her head on his damp chest as he slept, listening to the slow beat of his heart inside its cage of bones. The branches swaying over them, she had traced the lines of his body, the twisted muscles of his abdomen, his hip bones, keeping her fingers just above his skin. He shuddered in his sleep as if touched, and she wondered what touch was, really, whether it began at contact or if, millimeters apart, a person could still feel another’s polarity—if wanting were something transmitted physically through the air. She was trying to decide if it was possible for her body to know what she needed better than her mind when the alarm on Zack’s phone went off at quarter after three, and he recoiled from her, rolling out from under her and standing up, before he remembered where he was, who she was. Then, of course, he’d apologized for the sex again. But in the very words I’m sorry, you were drunk, she heard accusation. Anger, even.

  In the car, he wasn’t talking, and so she babbled, pointing out the blocks of Esplanade François Boisdoré had owned before the city built streets on them and the derelict storefronts along N. Claiborne that had been the center of African American commerce in the city, until the city decided it needed the I-10 overpass instead. Zack watched out of the window, nodding from time to time. She kept talking, to avoid silence, to avoid hearing herself think, as she nosed the car onto the highway. She talked about the flood of 1927, when the levees at Caernarvon had been dynamited to save the city, and about the river’s intention to jump into the Atchafalaya, about the trenches the oil companies had been allowed to dredge through the marsh but had not been required to fill, until she was tired of hearing herself. Just plain tired really.

  “It’s going to be okay, you know,” he said as the city dropped away behind them.

  “No.” She wrapped her hands tight around the wheel. “I don’t know that.”

  “Look, this has happened before—to other people, in other places. Worse things, actually, have happened.” He paused, waiting for her to look at him, acknowledge his losses: father born in a displaced persons camp, village in Poland gone. She would not participate in that, some kind of Olympic Games of suffering. “People get back up again. They manage.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t get that, Del. Truly. You’re not a person who gives up! I thought you always said, you were not a people who give up. So how come you guys have gone from not giving enough of a shit to see to there being buses to evacuate people to having this hardcore existential crisis? Okay, so the city flooded. People died, and it’s tragic, but now you’ve got to dust yourselves off, clean up, get it right this time.”

  Del laughed. Below them, the cemeteries spread out along their dark grids. “You don’t get it. You weren’t here. You’re not from here.”

  He turned to the window, shaking his head. “You either.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You weren’t here. You were in New York getting drunk and fucking everything that moved.”

  She looked at him, her mouth open, feeling like she’d been punched in the gut. They were passing under the overpass at Causeway, where the helicopters had dropped off people to wait days for buses, and in the air that came through the open windows, she could smell the swamp rushing towards them: the end of civilization.

  “Cora was, though. Here. She was here,” she said, and suddenly, as she sped away from the city along the smooth highway, she saw how much she didn’t understand of what Cora had lived, why she couldn’t bear to look around her. There were no nightmares anymore, she realized. None of this had been dreamed.

  “I think she might have killed someone,” Del said, surprised by the words coming out of her mouth.

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know why. Her friend’s sister was shot dead. There was something—she said something about it being because of her, about—” She felt nauseous, the reflectors on the side of the highway skipping light up over the hood of the car. “I don’t think even she really knows. She’s just been sleeping, sleeping and walking through the city in the middle of the night. I don’t know. All I know is it’s not just a garbage-removal problem, I don’t care what you think. You can go back to New York and pretend life begins and ends there and forget this ever happened. But that’s not possible for us.”

  Zack was silent. She looked over at him, at his pale face reflected dimly in the dark window, the tattered billboards ticking by behind it. The road ripped away under the tires, and, for a second, she took her hands off the wheel. The car tacked in towards the oncoming lane of traffic, the lane markers flared up in her headlights, and she wrapped her hands back around the steering wheel again, ten and two. Zack ducked his head towards her, his eyes not meeting hers, then turned back to the window. He did not look at her again, not as they went up onto the exit, not as they sped along the airport road, an airplane landing beside them. The lights were on in the departures area, people getting out of their cars in their bathrobes. Only when she’d pulled up to the curb and put the car in park did he turn towards her.

  “I’m sorry,” he
said. “For everything. I shouldn’t have come.”

  She kept both hands on the wheel, looked ahead of her. “Thanks for bringing my stuff.”

  He nodded, and she watched him in the rearview mirror as he took his satchel out of the backseat and closed the door gently, as if there were someone in the car he was trying not to wake.

  “Take care of yourself.”

  She nodded as he turned, shutting the passenger door behind him.

  JOE WOKE INTO the early morning darkness out of a dream in which he’d been buried to the neck in sand. The arm he lay on throbbed, but he couldn’t bend it. He felt paralyzed, but when he ordered himself to breathe, his lungs opened up and gathered air. With relief, he raised his arms, and the bird started up again with a high frequency trill. When it paused, the night squeezed in around him, releasing him only when the bird started a new song.

  When he was studying in New York, living in that swelter-box of a sixth-floor walk-up on Hudson, there was a mockingbird who made frequent stops on the water tower across the street. He would land, raise his beak, and carry on. Joe couldn’t recollect the last time he’d heard one in New Orleans, though they were common. Probably he just never distinguished it from the songs of the birds it imitated: the cardinal, jay, gull, crow. Outside his window now, though, a mockingbird was singing. The double low-high, low-high followed by an obnoxious shriek, a wow-chickie-wow-chickie, a SEEE-saw. Around the calls went in rotation. Once, twice, five times. Joe got out of bed.

  The canvas curtains were so soaked in light that he thought it might already be dawn, but when he pulled them aside, it was only the full moon hanging at the far edge of the pasture, right above the dead pecan where the little bird perched, like some kind of Egyptian stele to destruction.

  Joe lay back down and closed his eyes but the mockingbird kept at it. He began to feel hot, desperate, the way he had that last summer in New York, when, fed up, he’d buy ice from the bodega and crawl through the window onto the roof. As he melted the cubes on the back of his neck, trying to catch a breeze, he’d watch the mockingbird come and go, watch it argue with the pair of crows that visited his water tower. The mockingbird would lift his narrow gray head and caw, his tail feathers wobbling sassily, as if he really was mocking them. You can’t come up with something better than that? he seemed be telling them. Untie yourself from convention, man. The bird was a beatnik, apparently. Joe had a professor at the time who was urging the same thing, that he break away from received ideas of sculpture, and so, as he stood with the ice on his chest, he tried to interpret the mockingbird. Critical, the creature certainly was, but he was a slave to his influences too. Whence novelty, birdie? Joe would inquire, but the mockingbird only filled his throat and announced that there was nothing new under the sun.