The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  “We keep meeting like this, I’m gonna start calling you a streetwalker,” Augie called, and she closed her eyes for a second, saw the headlights of his Porsche lighting up the backs of the highway signs—the nightmare of evacuation in the contraflow—as he braked into the emergency lane. She had been standing down the shoulder, holding onto Vincent as he urinated into the trees. That was what had started it: Augie had left Mrs. Randsell at home, and Joe had sent Cora after her, in a boat, on the flood. Fancy meeting you here! his face peering over his half-rolled window, the evacuation coursing behind him.

  Do you feel like your parents abandoned you?

  As he turned towards her, away from the automatic doors of the grocery—opening and shutting, opening and shutting—she watched his shoes: saddle leather, polished, stiff-soled, heel-toe, heel-toe, the cuffs of his trousers breaking nicely across the waxed laces. In his front pocket, he jingled change. He had put his hand on her hand on the white tablecloth in Houston the evening after Joe had abandoned her to go look for Cora, and she had eaten the steak he’d paid for, she had let herself be consoled. It was wrong. Inappropriate. Unhealthy, like the widower she’d seen who responded to his wife’s death by seeking out fetish parlors where he could be tied up like an animal, only to come into his grief two years later when nobody he didn’t pay would speak to him.

  It’s not a question of feeling, Alice said, apropos of something spoken too softly to hear. It’s a question of fact.

  Augie was grinning so wide his lips disappeared. She had given him up thirty-eight years ago, and only once before had she felt even a twinge of regret.

  It’s not a question of feeling, Alice said.

  But she hadn’t felt this way about seeing anyone, Joe included, since she was twenty-three years old. It must be, she diagnosed herself, some sort of sublimation or displacement of grief. How else to explain it? Augie Randsell was nothing more than an aging Debutante’s Delight of middling intelligence, but here she was clinging to the hood of her car.

  It’s not a question of feeling. It’s a question of fact.

  “My dear Dr. Eshleman,” he said, as he always said.

  “Mrs. Boisdoré to you, Mr. Randsell,” she said, as she always said.

  “Call me Augie,” he said, laughing, and patted her on the back. “You alright?”

  She shrugged and let go of the roof of her car.

  “Home again, home again,” she said.

  “Jiggedy-jig. Glad to be out of Houston, I’ll bet.”

  “How much?”

  He blinked his pale lashes.

  “How much will you bet?”

  “It’s hard to prepare, isn’t it.” He led her away from the car, his shoes clip-clopping as they crossed Arabella, back towards the market.

  “Impossible,” she said.

  They went through the magic doors into the air-conditioning. The cashiers kept their heads down. The registers beeped. “It’s like when Madge died—” He picked up a basket. “You understand it conceptually. In theory. You can even visualize it, think, we’ll lay her out in the green silk dress, bury her in the family tomb beside the cypress tree. But then you have to live with it.” He cleared his throat. “You have to live with it.”

  She was following after him like a small child, her hand somehow in his hand, until he dropped it. He picked up a bottle of wine from the wire rack next to the crackers.

  Tess looked at her feet, at the inches of spotted linoleum between them. After Madge’s funeral, Augie had drifted away from them. Had not called. Had not even sent the proper Thank you for your thoughts, not even a printed card. And that New Year’s they had left a message on his machine, inviting him to the usual dinner, but they never heard back. Joe had taken it as an affront, but it wasn’t that, was it.

  Augie was holding the golden bottle of chardonnay up into the fluorescent light, and it cast watery shadows over the toes of his shoes.

  “I keep thinking still, you know, about your mother,” Tess said. There had been no green silk dress for Mrs. Randsell—she was cremated in Houston in the T.J. Maxx pajamas she’d been wearing when she died—and as yet there’d been no burial under the cypress that shaded the family tomb. Augie had not set a date for the memorial, and she doubted that he ever would. It would have distressed Mrs. Randsell greatly, Tess was sure—she of the ten-year mourning, who wanted to talk about nothing but Eleusinian mystery cults the whole long drive out of New Orleans. Mrs. Randsell was sure Tess would be interested—You read Jung, don’t you dear?—and so she’d gone on and on about “Golden Leaves,” initiations, pennyroyal. You have to really watch what you drink down there, she’d said, of Hades. Don’t drink from Lethe, whatever you do! she said, reaching from the front seat to grab Cora by the arm. And if anyone tries to stop you drinking from the pool of Mnemosyne, you just tell them you have a right to it, because you are—wait—She’d picked her book up from the footwell and read, with mock seriousness, “The child of earth and starry heaven.” You’ll need your memory if you’re ever going to get back out to the land of the living.

  If it had been up to Tess, she would have buried Augie’s mother with coins on her eyes. At least burned that book with her. But it had not been up to Tess.

  “It was only going to get harder for her.” Augie’s sigh smelled of gin.

  Tess nodded and took a step closer, then a step back again, putting a hand on the edge of a shelf half-stocked with crackers. He plucked another bottle of chardonnay off the rack and, holding it in both hands, read the label.

  “I do hope Adelaide is feeling better,” Augie said.

  “Cora, you mean.”

  He looked up at her, blinked, and there were broken capillaries on his nose, and it was almost as though she’d been under a spell. Time spun forward. The gilding flaked from his face.

  “Del’s fine,” Tess said. “She’s home, did I mention? Cora on the other hand—”

  Do you feel like your parents abandoned you?

  “Oh, Jesus, Tess, I’m sorry,” Augie laughed and put the bottle back on the shelf. “My mouth, lately, it’s been getting ahead of my brain. Too much living alone. So this daughter of yours, who saved my mother’s life—the little that was left of it—whom you and I drove out of New Orleans, whom I’ve known since she was knee high to an ant, her name is Cora?”

  “You got it, Mr. Randsell. Right on the nose.”

  Augie touched his index finger to the tip of her nose, and for one flashing moment, she was a girl again, perfumed and powdered, in a new gown at Proteus the night Madge was queen. Augie had her in his arms, and when he pulled her close, she imagined he might kiss her, that she was his girl, not Madge who stood on the dais in her heavy dress, that she was Augie’s girl and not Joe’s, who even then was waiting at the valet stand in his father’s car for her to emerge from the rustling lights so that he could drive her home before the storm broke—a winter storm that was already shaking the auditorium with its thunder, though the rain had not yet begun to fall.

  “Is Cora alright?” Augie said, serious again suddenly, his liquid eyes on her face.

  Do you feel like your parents abandoned you?

  Tess shut her eyes. He put his hand on her shoulder, a warm hand at the verge of her blouse, on her skin. She let her head fall against his collarbone and took a deep breath of his old-fashioned aftershave, his smell of soap and sweat, and he held her tight.

  DEL WATCHED CORA hesitate at the edge of Alice’s front porch, her head tilted back, her eyes closed against the breeze that fell through the remaining branches of a damaged oak. Dressed all in white, she looked almost mummified, her cheeks sunken, her ribs visible where they met her sternum over the stretched-out neck of her sweatshirt.

  Tess had told Del to wait outside, in case Alice needed more time for the session, and so they’d set up camp in the Jeep, all the windows open. Kea sat on the rear bumper in the shade of the open hatch, while Anthony played tag with Neesa, chasing after her while she ran giggling back and forth a
cross the quiet street.

  Cora put her hands into her hair, looking from the child to the Jeep and back again, but before Del could go to her sister to explain, she was already coming down.

  Kea pushed herself up and went towards Cora with a big grin on her face, her hand extended. “It’s so good to meet you! Troy, you know, told us what you did for those kids—”

  Cora, aloof as a goddess, walked right through her. She was watching Anthony and the child, but not as if she saw them, her eyes blank disks of blue.

  Anthony ambled towards them, his arms out wide for a hug, but Cora ignored him and climbed into the passenger seat. Anthony’s hands dropped to his sides. When he looked at Del, she saw that old familiar expression of pity on his lips. He nodded at her, to say he understood, like everyone always had. Hey, Del, how’s your family holding up? When Cora went missing from college, when they had to send her to DePaul, her classmates, her teachers, her friends all always only squinched their eyebrows, bit their lips. So, is Cora going to be okay?

  Del made herself get back in the car, fighting the old impulse to pretend not to know her sister. It was always Cora’s show, always had been. Everything was always on her terms. In the passenger seat, her sister had her head down between her knees, and Del put the key in the ignition. She tried to call up the memories she relied upon when she needed to be kind: Cora holding Del’s head in her lap when Del had fallen from the pecan tree and broken her leg, Cora stroking her hair as their mother maneuvered the car through the pines, Cora making up a story about fairies while pain glared like the sunlight that shone in a halo around her sister’s head.

  “So where we headed, folks?” Del asked as Kea buckled Neesa into the middle seat and Anthony shut the door.

  “You know the train tracks out by Elysian Fields? Behind in there,” Kea said.

  Cora groaned into her hands, and Del worked her thumb into the muscle along her sister’s spine. Del knew how hard it was for her to see hard things—images lodged in her, and she had trouble getting them out again. One glimpse of a TV show with an abused child or a hurt animal could send her to her room weeping. Truly, Del didn’t know how she’d survived it: three weeks in the flood.

  “I won’t make you look,” Del whispered.

  Even before they’d reached the old abandoned market in St. Roch, the rest of the car had gone quiet. The little girl looked widemouthed out of the windows at the boarded-up houses as they passed, the messages in spray paint on plywood: I am here. Destroy this memory. Baghdad. I have a gun. Kea leaned against her daughter and stroked her hair, humming.

  There was nobody out on the street, nobody sitting on their porches. Electrical poles tilted over the sidewalks, trailing their wires like trees brought down by vines, and everywhere a broken gray crust of dirt covered the concrete, the grass, the trashcans and bicycles, sofas and potted plants strewn on front lawns. On every block, disabled cars had been stranded along the curb, a thick swamp of mud on their upholstery, so that when the occasional undamaged sedan appeared in a driveway beside a flung-open house, it gleamed so brightly you saw stars.

  Del could count on one hand the number of times she’d been out this way—the eighth and ninth wards being off her mother’s maps of safe, read “white,” places to go. She and her mother had sped down the length of St. Claude once on the way to some nursery in St. Bernard, her mother’s knuckles pale around the wheel, and Del had gone to Vaughan’s for music some in college, been down to Holy Cross twice as a teenager with her grandfather to see a hundred-year-old ébéniste about veneers. So it was odd how devastated she felt looking out at the neighborhood. It wasn’t hers, and yet maybe it should have been. She shook her head. It didn’t matter if had it been hers. What mattered was that it was gone.

  As they descended farther below sea level, the line the flood had drawn traced steadily up the sides of the houses. They passed a single person—a middle-aged woman in a stretched-out cotton shift, carrying a dresser drawer—and then it was back to nothing.

  Del curled a hank of Cora’s smooth hair around her hand, and Cora nodded, pulling the coil of hair tight before Del let it go.

  “It must have been rough, what you went through,” Kea said softly as Del turned the Jeep down towards the Industrial Canal. “Me, I can barely handle a thunderstorm, isn’t that right?”

  “She screams like a little child,” Anthony said.

  Neesa started to giggle. “She’s silly. I’m not scared. I wasn’t even scared in the hurricane, and you couldn’t see your hand in front your face.”

  “Good for you,” Del said to her. “You must be very brave.”

  In the rearview, she watched the little girl nod.

  “Turn—” Anthony coughed a little on the word, his face turned to the window. “Take your next right.”

  A stop sign stood off-kilter at the intersection, and though there was no one for miles, Del stopped. On the next corner, a camelback painted blue with orange shutters had buckled, its roof stove in by a telephone pole.

  “I can’t hardly believe it,” Kea said. On her lap, Neesa’s face had turned to stone. “I can’t hardly believe it. The house I grew up in, the house I was raised in.”

  “Not this one?” Del let the car coast until she was parallel with the camelback, then tapped the brake, her hands at ten and two on the wheel.

  Kea didn’t answer, her face locked in an expression of refusal.

  “Yeah, this one,” Anthony said as he opened his door and got out into the mud-coffined grass.

  Anthony climbed up onto the front porch and rattled the gate locked over the door. On the siding, the rescue patrols had marked a different sort of X, this one inscribed in a square.

  “I can’t hardly believe it,” Kea said again as Anthony hopped off the side of the porch and climbed over the chain-link fence into the yard.

  “I know how you feel,” Del said as she rubbed her hand over her sister’s back, but she wasn’t totally sure that that was true.

  When Anthony appeared again from around the back of the house, he was shaking his head. He stood for a moment looking at the telephone pole that had crashed into the house, at the floorboards snapped in half and hanging over the trash-strewn mud, then he put his hands in his pockets and got back into the car.

  For a while, they continued out and down, stopping at a sister’s house, an uncle’s, and a cousin’s—all flooded so bad the furniture lay overturned in heaps on the floor, every wall stippled with black mold. They stopped in front of a friend’s house with no roof, looked for an address that no longer had a house to its name—only concrete steps with the numbers 1341 set into them in blue porcelain tile. They idled in front of it, watching fire ants build their mound beside a shipwrecked chest freezer. Anthony rolled down his window and pounded his hand twice against the door.

  Kea sighed. “You want to go by Troy’s?”

  “I don’t have the address,” Anthony said.

  “She does.” Kea pointed her chin at Cora.

  Her face still in her lap, Cora whispered, “No.”

  Del drew her brows together.

  “Sure you do,” Kea said. “Y’all been fucking for how long? Besides, that’s where they found them—Reyna and Tyrone and Willy—you know.”

  “The child, Kea,” Anthony said.

  “When they got stuck in the water?” Neesa said.

  Cora was humming to herself, her hands pressed over her ears, and Neesa scooted forward on her mother’s knees to look at her. “She rowed in the boat?”

  “It’s just life, Anthony,” Kea said.

  “I want to rode in a boat,” Neesa said.

  “Troy lived right down the block from you, Cora, didn’t he?” Del said.

  “Row a boat,” Kea repeated. “Ride in a boat.”

  “No,” Cora was saying. “No.”

  “I know a song,” Neesa said, and began to sing it: Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily—

  “Do y’al
l know the house from the outside?” Del asked, turning up Claiborne, back towards Esplanade. “I can get us close at least.”

  WHEN JOE PULLED back the shower curtain, his father was standing inside the white steam. He was clutching at the towel hanging on the door, and he lifted it off its hook, held it out like Joe’s mother used to do before he was old enough to bathe himself. Joe took it, dried his hair. Air was blowing from the vent over the door, cold in the water-beaded fur on his chest.

  “You need me to get out, so you can use the toilet?” Joe asked.

  His father shook his head, his face needy but impassive like a child’s.

  Joe wrapped the towel around himself, patted at his privates through the terry. “It’s not a problem, Pop. I’m done in here.”

  He reached around his father’s back, struggled to get a grip on the glass knob, turned it. Dry air flushed the room. The smell of sawdust was still in his nose, and he turned around to grab a Q-tip. His father was leaning over the sink, trying to see his face through the mirror’s scrim of steam.

  “You got an in-grown whisker again?” he asked Vincent.

  Joe took a Q-tip from the jar, cleared a hole in the condensate with the flat of his hand. His father’s eyes met his in the reflection, blinked, as the fog began to creep back across the mirror.

  “Man, I look like a drowned rat,” Joe said, ruffling up the short hair matted to his scalp.

  Side by side they looked like before and after versions of the same man: The receding hairline receded. The freckles become liver spots, laugh lines become trenches. The careworn hollowness of his cheeks under their three-day stubble turned into his father’s permanent hangdog mouth. They were both too skinny, Joe thought. He’d have to feed them more.