I am so impressed with the Brazilian people. So impressed. Americans can learn a lot from the Brazilian people. I have.
——
Chapter 15: The Creation of Purpose
The rains came to New Orleans with sharp, sudden sounds announcing the downpour like a thin sheet of metal dropped on a gymnasium floor and then picked up and shaken all morning long. The holiday shoppers in their SUVs waited impatiently on throughways backed up by standing water. The city pumps could clear only one inch of rainwater per hour, and sustained bursts closed some streets for hours. The mid-city area always took the worst hit: New Orleans was concave, a great wide bowl of a city, and everything drained toward the middle. It was common after a storm for the sun to shine insistently with only a few clouds at the horizon, raising the humidity beyond what was generally considered comfortable as the standing rainwater on lawns and parking lots evaporated, steam adding heat to the already humid sky. People fled indoors. Uptown on the campuses of Tulane and Loyola jam band fans took their shoes off and walked barefoot across the quads. The free feeling was contagious and the shy and the introverted offered to share their umbrellas but the angry Gulf clouds were breaking up and their offers got declined sending the introverts back within themselves. Warm vapor rose from the blacktop. Clothes came off. Smiles broadened.
Lucy was nervous at the end of every work week. She in fact loved her job and championed it to others. The job suited her organized mind, she had always enjoyed writing, it gave her life structure. The freedom of weekends and holidays caused anxiety and indecision. Tonight they would visit Jerry’s folks on the West Bank for dinner and then watch the fireworks shot off the Mississippi. Until then Lucy had her To-Do list. She went to the physical therapy center and volunteered as a counselor for the disabled, for the ones who were in recent accidents. It had been twenty years since her own, and its Fourth of July anniversary brought back a sadness, a feeling that had to be talked about to be borne.
She talked small with the director of the center, a nice man with a capacity for numbers whom she had known for some years. Holidays at the center were trying, and though it was worse over Christmas, a time of charity that brought the stoutly independent into abstract conflict, and Thanksgiving, for reasons that we need not belabor, any celebration here was tinged with melancholy, and today was no exception. But it was warm, and since lunchtime the sun returned to shine on the blacktop paths that criss-crossed the grounds right to the edge of oaks whose brothers built the Old Absinthe House. The black weights of depression lessened in all the guests, and the night was long in coming and when it did settle there would be colored lights exploding in the sky to carry them through to sleep, and no one stayed in his room, everyone assembled in the east lot to watch the city’s joie de vivre, and in this destructive delight the idea of hope occurred.
Lucy waited in the office while the director told the staff she was here. The ones who needed counseling most would stay away as they had their strength in cynicism. Those Lucy wanted to seek out and she would not. There was no blame. Outside her window two quads talked behind a tall honeysuckle bush. A custodian in dark overalls sauntered up to them. The first quad let the steering tube fall from his mouth. The custodian took a plastic baggie and a rolling paper from his breast pocket. He rolled a joint and held it to the lips of each young man in turn. They smoked a long time and at their leisure. The roach burned shorter but the custodian showed no sign that it burned his fingers. After they finished he stayed outside talking to the young men, one of whom was certainly a teenager. From the second story Lucy could see their smiles. It broke her heart and she would not tell.
Lucy collected herself when a woman who looked to be her age joined her. Their stories came without hesitation. Cass Kurlantzick was a mother of three, active in her church, and an independent real estate agent. She and her husband, an investment banker, were on the church yacht in the Gulf with a few other inner circle families on their way to cut the ribbon on a soup kitchen in Santo Domingo that would fail again as soon as they left. A storm came up fast and her husband shouted jokes about Ginger and Mary Ann while they frantically tied everything down. The yacht pitched and Cass was thrown. She landed wrong on the deck railing and it was only through the grace of Our Heavenly Lord that she was not tossed into that churning gray sea. The storm left as quickly as it came and when she woke an hour later Cass could not get out of her bed and she was embarrassed to admit to Lucy that she screamed. That was in May and in that time Cass had come to see that Our Heavenly Father had a purpose for her, that this ordeal was a blessing and His plan would be revealed. But, oh she didn’t want to use the word “but,” it sounded so defeating, but when she dreamt she pushed her youngest in her stroller and she used the rowing machine and she walked to the toilet and she sat in the bleachers at the track meets and how could she navigate the crowded gala dinners with her husband? She was used to doing so many things for everyone and now she had to rely on them for everything. Her priest had stopped by when she was at home and she told her husband to say she was asleep from the medication! She never would have considered such a thing before. It could not always be this way.
Lucy told her own story, hunting where they weren’t supposed to on the Carolina side of the Smokies with her dad and one of his buddies. She tagged along on these occasions. She was the eldest and her little brother wasn’t old enough to go yet and though she refused to fire a gun and though she was a lover of animals Lucy could not deny she felt a thrill when Dad’s face lightened and he said that low, “Gotcha.” It was their special thing. On the day of her accident she was kicking rocks off a cliff’s edge when a shot rang out. A jackrabbit came bounding out of the bush, saw Lucy, and veered away. Lucy shrieked. Then from over her shoulder a red-tailed hawk swooped out of the sky and nabbed the jackrabbit in stride. Lucy’s shriek echoed in abject fright. She stumbled back as the hawk took to the air and she was too close to the edge. Like Cass she fell. But the cliff was not sheer, it had enough grade to keep her from plummeting. She came to rest a quarter of the way down against a maple tree. Her dad was there almost immediately and his friend was already going for the truck. She awoke in the hospital and she never asked who fired the shot.
Cass came around the desk. They embraced.
Snoz walked up the shady side of Burgundy, always the shady side to avoid the summer sun. He wore headphones, and its cord snaked to the iPod in his backpack. He passed the leather bar, the hotel that sat above its own ground-level parking lot, the Irish pub, the corner bar that served five-dollar steaks on Wednesdays, the corner bar that served free red beans and rice on Mondays, the succession of cracked concrete stoops touching door after door with chipped paint facades, the walls between the homes topped with razor wire and broken bottles, past gutters staffed year-round with crusted throw cups and busted windshield glass and strip club flyers. He passed it all with ginger steps so Vauxhall would not skip.
A fat drop of water plopped on his forehead and he cursed. It could be 95 degrees in the middle of a drought but it wouldn’t matter, the French Quarter drip was omnipresent and it would find him. He stayed on Burgundy until he passed the project the next block over, parallel on Rampart, then turned on Iberville which took him past the post office. Where Rampart joined Canal it was an outdoor bus station on each corner and he had to walk in the street to pass the throng of people waiting for the 12:17 to Desire. It was hot now in the sun and Snoz was conscious that he looked different than everyone else. Inevitably someone would ask for bus fare, that was what the earphones were for. He made it across Canal, what Elio had said was the widest street in the country, without stepping in front of a bus or a streetcar, both of which had their own lanes running down the middle. From there it was a few block more to the library.
Inside the library it was announced that a panel was starting in ten minutes in the main conference room, a panel on how to break into the music industry. He sometimes thought about joining a band, but being up there in front of people… He fingered the pink post-it note list of books that he wanted to check out. Reading was an obsession and when there was a book he wanted Snoz demanded instant gratification. When he had a car it was not unusual to find him at a 24-hour superstore at three in the morning rifling through the romance and self-help in search of Borges or Camus. Still the announcement was too synchronous to ignore so he found the room and took a seat to the side, pulling a folding chair up to a table pushed against the wall to sit apart from the rows neatly combed in the center of the room. There were two young women seated in front. A man who identified himself as the head librarian introduced them as writers of a series of books on how to break into the business. They opened the floor directly for questions, most of which were basic and as there were no industry people on the panel Snoz left a few minutes in. He found all the books he wanted save one and slung them in a pack across his back. He was preparing himself for the songs he would make one day, mindful all the while of the character in Of Human Bondage who always spoke of the book he would write one day but who never sat down and did the work.
Home was a former slave’s quarters, where servants had lived behind the manor house, a separate dwelling little bigger than a poolhouse or single-room efficiency. Emily had picked it out for them. Geckos scampered over the palm fronds in the brick courtyard. The space was cramped but Snoz enjoyed having no neighbors on adjascent walls. He was sensitive to noise.
Inside and unloaded he lounged under the ceiling fan on Emily’s couch flipping through his books, deciding which to read first. A glass of water was ready and waiting upon Emily’s coffeetable should he grow thirsty. Two pairs of shoes sat by the door. The refrigerator cooled a quart of orange juice, a quart of soy milk, butter substitute, single slices of American cheese, and assorted condiments, while the freezer froze a package of Veggie Chix patties and two pints of cookies ‘n cream. Snoz organized his things by piles, piles of post-it notes with fragments of poems and ideas for songs, the shorts and T-shirts he wore to bed each night piled on the floor in front of his dresser, piles of paid utility receipts, piles of books both read and unread, and videocassettes piled on top of, beside, and against the television. His day passed quietly without his having talked to a single person save thanking the librarian. He performed his toilet in the same order since high school: he washed his hands, took his contacts out, washed his face, and brushed his teeth for two minutes. And when he lay down for sleep the bed felt unnaturally big for one person.
Half of Emily’s day was spent at work catching up. After a succession of service industry jobs she quit or was asked to leave, as she was the type of clerk who was bothered by the most innocuous customer, she didn’t mind coming in to the Art League on a holiday. It kept her mind occupied and it was something she was good at. Emily was drawn to peace of mind and she ran from anything that did not bring it, which caused the aforementioned string of jobs through college and the immediate period following, in the Quarter with Snoz. Ultimately New Orleans itself became the source of her unhappiness, or at least that unhappiness in the beacon light of her conscious mind. Once the cause of her discontent was attributed spatially, the idea of leaving became possible.
In his head Snoz went over it, and over it again, and this is the story he made of it to find sense in it all. He thought himself into a wall, and when he could go no further he found himself surrounded by it, unable to turn, intimidated by the mute strength of the unanswerable. And now he was cursed to die without ever finding its edge. But it had to be wrong. That old charlatan, acting like she could see his dreams. Still… His only escape was the past, and there he spent his time, and this was the story he took refuge in, the story of how he met Emily:
Snoz was in Kentucky, in the town that reared the state university, where he had graduated the year before. More than affection it was a lack of ambition that kept him there. Accustomed as he was to the university he felt detached from the post-college life he found himself in, and in his subconscious he focused on nothing more than the change he expected to come about that would repair the gross boredom, the empty bedroom, the decidedly unfilmic flan within the crust of his non-stick existence. He had graduated in four years, and he’d heard the faux jealousy in the voices of others his age who had taken longer, unable to relate to their longing or attempts at comraderie. He was unable to relate to much of anything outside his direct experience.
It was the night before the Fourth of July and he had been invited to a party thrown by the friend of a friend whose parents, as if in a teen comedy, had left until the following Monday. The girl he was dating had also left town for the weekend, her destination an outdoor rave in a muddy forest field in Indiana. Snoz avoided poor sleeping conditions like the Baptists who canvassed his neighborhood so he declined to go with her, but she was nice enough to score some acid for him before she left. At the party he gave one hit to the host, took the other himself, and then rode with him and a girl he did not know to the grocery to pick up the beverages for the evening. It was only a half hour in but already he felt the blue-white light of static shock skirting his skin like an aura. He admonished his host to speed the selection of the cases before it came on. He had taken it for the first time at a warehouse rave the week before, and the sensory overload it brought was so extreme he was unable to remain inside the venue: the strobe lights, the game of Super Mario Kart projected onto a wall, the bass so loud it made them into solipsists. It drove him into the calm warmth outside, away from searing light and sound, to lay on his back between parked cars and stare in Biblical ecstasy at the clear starry sky. Snoz could not handle that coming on inside the fluorescent aisles of a major grocery chain. But his host dawdled. They had time to kill, waiting for the girl who was off conversing with the produce manager, her current paramour.
Many hours later, after his old roommate had left in abhorrence at the drugs they took, after the host ate fistfuls of vitamin C tablets on a stupid giggly dare, after they trespassed in the next-door neighbor’s grown-wild garden, the girl reappeared and handed Snoz a square white napkin on which she had written a quote from Kierkegaard. Snoz was floored. She-quote-philosophy, his brain said. They sat on the living room couch hips touching while with great care he removed seashells from the basket on the coffeetable and arranged them into constellations. The girl was confrontational, insistent. She lamented more than once that everyone was on drugs except her. She was completely guileless. She rubbed his shoulders and his arms and back and hands with force. “I know how this feels, when your entire body is clenched, like every muscle is flexed. They always cut it with strychnine, that’s why you feel like one big ache.” She never broke eye contact, and when Snoz did she sought it out again. She told him about herself. She sang in a choir. She spoke Latin. She loved Leonard Cohen. Time telescoped. Her name was Emily Season, and she stunned him back to grade school.
Sometime, it was late, the party let out like a movie and Snoz went home alone. The next afternoon he awoke when his hay fever went haywire. His sinuses were running like a nightclub sink. It was hours before a full bottle of Ny-Quil settled his system. In this state passed the entire day, the silly waiting that marks the daylight portion of the Fourth, the events from the night before alive in his memory but distorted in a pastel Impressionist haze. It seemed hyperreal and he sat at his wobbly glass-topped kitchen table fucked up and trying to write about it, barefoot, shirtless, and low.
When the phone rang it was his host from the night before, inviting him to another house they would have the run of, one stocked with alcohol and an out-of-town owner, from such a vantage point that they would be able to watch the city fireworks from the back deck. Snoz hemmed. The host mentioned that Emily had asked if he would be there.
At the party Snoz found himself drawing Emily away from the group, and he found she wanted to be drawn. The absent owner was an artist employed by the university, one rather well known, but who had the misfortune of sharing a name with one of the world’s great trumpet players. The house was a delight, filled with hand-crafted objets d’art from nations the world over, all arranged by the eye of an artistic eccentric: a mobile suspended from the ceiling caught the light of a candle chandelier in its butterfly-wing apertures, clay-colored wooden blocks guarded a Viennese curio cabinet, and a papier mache green dragon snaked from the sitting room up the short steps to the landing with the baby grand. It was the type of home that could have changed admission in the East Village. And Snoz, fueled by a couple low-grade amphetamines, danced through the rooms like a beatnik Fred Astaire. When the evening gave into night fireworks lit the sky with the deliberate anticlimax of a postmodern thriller, and they sat out on the deck in a semi-circle around the beer keg in a reverie expectant of a thrill the day failed to provide. But this was the prevailing attitude of the group, not that of the couple at the heart of our story who, soon after the explosions ceased, excused themselves from the party, this time together.
Emily led Snoz to a public park that sat upon the same wide swath of farmland on which a consortium of developers had constructed a mega mall. The park had a sprawling playground, one meant for education as much as recreation, which was the designation used by the architect to justify the log cabin fort, the network of slides, and the jungle mish-mash of rope bridges, turrets, tire swings, and monkey bars in a chaotic pinwheel that would challenge the strictest Marine in a course completion test. But they had just settled chests heaving onto adjascent swings when a spotlight began sweeping the grounds. The light was aimed at chest level and with the calling of a baritone voice they stood from the swings before Snoz could convince himself to kiss her. A policeman told them the park closed at dusk and with a mumbled apology he left. Standing at their cars parked side by side, the cop’s giveaway, Snoz fumbled over the next part, the invitation to his place. He said more than was necessary, and her concise acceptance brought him to laugh at himself over it.
She followed him home. In the familiarity of his environment Snoz became giddy. He showed Emily his picture album. He brewed for them hot tea. He took his volume of the complete Shakespeare from the shelf and laying on his bed with her beside him at five in the morning read to her from A Midsummer’s Night Dream, using a different cartoon voice for each character. It was pure communication, his words carried not just their meaning but also mind, body, essence. It was the moment of a life, one worth putting down in a book. When the cheerful summer dawn broke he raised his ground-floor window and yelled to the neighborhood that they ought to go back to school or earn their GED. Then coming back to himself he told her how he used to enter and exit the apartment by this window because it didn’t have a screen and his brother had lived with him for a time, sleeping in the living room where the front door was, and Snoz did his best not to disturb him, especially on work nights. It was a space-filling story. Snoz asked Emily if he could kiss her then and Emily with a wry smile said no. It was at that moment Snoz knew he was in love. The sun slanted through the open blinds, and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
His day was drawing to a close. Snoz picked up his guitar, strummed it a few times, and sat it back in its corner. Emily was having drinks with a coworker. Lucy had returned home to cook a late dinner for her and her husband. Jerry ate with all the easy going gusto of a cooking show audience. He never tired of a conversation about everyday things. Theirs was a marriage devoid of bitterness. It was a foil to all the small problems of life, the checkbook empty of checks, the broken-down car, the rise in gas bills. It was a consolation and a comfort, a voice that would answer whenever you spoke. It was mist on the bathroom mirror when you thought you were up first. It was someone else to address the Christmas cards. It was tension born of proximity that’s broken by an in-joke. It was someone else to think about besides yourself all the time, a mental salve, a conscience enhancer. Most marriages fail, true, but its cure for loneliness is why everyone keeps trying. In their bedroom Jerry flipped the switch off; in his, Snoz flipped the reading lamp on.
Chapter 16: Halloween 1983
It’s true she keeps busy. She likes to work. But in the midst of most anything she can call it up. A version of it recurs in her dreams. It reaches across time. And with the story Snoz told her at the opening, the things she’d left behind so discourteously came strutting back into the waking world.
Emily was sitting on the family room couch watching cartoons, her feet dangling unable to reach the floor, waiting for her mother to get home and put her costume together. Their home had all the space of a grand foyer, unreachable ceilings and hardwood floors, Grampy’s deluxe leather recliner, her mother’s china cabinet filled with Precious Moments figurines, and what family oddities had been passed down with the house itself: a bone white farfisa organ, a lynx mounted in the wary pose it struck just as it caught sight of her shell-shocked great uncle, a turn of the century Mardi Gras costume in green and gold that adorned a mannequin she called Gary Busey in the guest room’s walk-in closet, and an iron stewpot so cavernous it was never used, which sat upon a marble block.
Mother’s friend Delaney was flipping through a magazine. His pale blue Oxford shirt was untucked and wrinkled. His slacks lacked a belt and his eyes lacked sleep. “What are you doing, sweetie?”
“Watching cartoons.”
“So I see.”
“I’ve seen this one before. Bugs puts stuff on Elmer’s head and flowers grow, not hair.”
“Know what? Maybe I should get some of that for my own chrome dome,” he said tapping the crown of his head.
“You don’t want flowers on your head!” Emily squealed.
“No, I suppose you’re right. It would only attract bees.”
“When’s mother coming home?”
He stood up. “Anytime now, I think.”
“It’s almost tricks or treats and my costume’s not done.”
“It isn’t?” He paused. “I better give it a look-see. Where is it?”
“Dunno.” She swung her legs, growing excited. She was thinking about breaking the record for the number of pieces of candy eaten in one night. Her favorite book was the Guinness Book of World Records. It was kept in a basket in the bathroom.
“Found it!” Delaney called from the other room. He returned with an open-neck emerald dress and a mall shopping bag. “You’re going to be quite the belle of her majesty’s court, Mlle Bourlet.”
She giggled. “I’m the princess.”
“Then I suppose I must decipher the purpose of these bagged items, provided my head doesn’t split in two from John’s fête last night. Some things should be illegal, mon petit ami.” He dumped the contents of the bag on the Persian rug. Then he laid the dress flat beside them. “Come to think of it, those things are illegal.”
“My dress’ll get dirty!” she said.
“It will do no such thing. You remember your paper doll book? Yes well, you must think of this as the same. First we decide what goes on the dress,” he said, and then added as an aside, “then afterward how to get it on there. Bets should be home by then.”
“Why isn’t mother home yet? Will she be home soon? I like candy bars. They’re great. I’m going to set the world record.”
“In what?”
“Everything.”
“Like Bruce Jenner.”
“She won’t miss tricks or treats, will she?”
“Her job keeps her very busy. Your mother is a very important woman in the prosecutor’s office. She’s on what we call the fast-track career path.”
“She knows everything.”
Delaney laughed.
“What time does tricks or treats start?”
“I don’t know. It’s in the paper. We’ve got time to do your dress.”
“Mother puts the bad guys in jail.”
“C’est vrai. You should feel very proud of her.”
“I’m going to tell her I’m very proud of her…”
“That’s…”
“If she stays home with us this whole weekend.”
“Emily.”
“She didn’t for my birthday. When I went from this many (five fingers) to this many (six fingers).”
Delaney spoke over the pause. “I see you’ve forgotten the fun you had in the arcade that day. I lifted you up to see the top of the prize display case, hmm? Thin crust, light cheese, extra sauce. You wore blue gingkham and your handbag was the type that gets knocked-off in Mexico. Knocked off, like your enemies. I could tell you’d been in those types of places before. There was dried tomato sauce under your nails.”
“You’re being silly.”
“As Bets would say, guilty as hell your honor. Now then, to the objects at hand.”
He picked up a wide silk ribbon. The gas-powered fireplace automatically kicked on. The light in the room changed. The absence of the presence of her mother loomed like a shadow in the doorway, crossing sharply, and disappearing before anyone else sees. Her mother hadn’t been late long enough for Emily to grow anxious, merely alert.
He laid the ribbon across the waist of the dress. “This must be the sash,” he said.
“Nuh-uh, Delaney, you’re supposed to cut it into stripes.”
“Stripes?”
“Stripes.”
“God forgive me for what I’m about to do,” said Delaney. He cut the ribbon up. “Well, here we have stripes. Or perhaps they’re strips.”
“Next stick them down the front,” said Emily.
“Stick them?”
“Pin them!”
“I see. A pin-striped dress. For the cross-dressing Don in your old neighborhood.”
When he finished Delaney said, “I hesitate to ask, aware of the peril of my immortal soul, but what, I cringe, is next?”
“Put the petals on it,” Emily said and hopped to the floor.
“No, that is a corsage, my dear, you wear it like so.”
“Pin the petals!”
“Very well,” Delaney said and grasped the shopping bag. He collapsed it and placed it over his heart. “I hereby swear…” he rattled the bag “…with the mall as my witness…” he stifled a sob “…that we shall disregard taste and indeed common sense… by turning this pink rose corsage… into a butterfly collection.”
Delaney set to his task with aplomb. He had the two of them in stitches, begging himself in a cartoon voice not to pin one particular petal, the only one that was purple, for the crime of selling magazines door to door for college. After a few minutes he held the garment up with care. Dozens of straight pins poked through to its back.
“Hmm, I don’t see how you’ll wear this now, unless you want to be Princess Porcupine.”
“Let’s get the fingerpaint!” Emily shouted.
To Elizabeth Bourlet when she walked in an hour later the family room looked like a bridal party had torn through an arts and crafts fair. Delaney had measuring tape draped over his shoulders and he stood in bare feet squishing a rag in a foot bath. Emily seemed to be dipped in rainbow swirl. She froze.
“Delaney,” Elizabeth said. She threw her purse and it clattered on the table. “Whatever this mess is, get rid of it. I only came by for a file. It’s on my desk. It better be. If it’s not you can toss this whole case in the latrine where the asshole left the bodies.”
“Hullo dearie. Take off your flats and have a go,” said Delaney. “It’s all the rage with the gals in the secretary pool.”
“Why is my daughter covered in filth?”
“It’s not filth, it’s fingerpaint,” said Delaney, marching in place.
“We’re getting my costume ready for tricks or treats,” said Emily.
“Oh Christ, it’s Halloween,” said Elizabeth. “Damn it.” She sighed. “Well, where is it?”
Delaney stopped marching.
“Where is the costume?”
He stepped onto a beach towel.
“Where is it?” Elizabeth demanded, her voice rising in the silent room.
“The thing is, dearie, we’ve made a remarkable discovery,” said Delaney. “It seems Emily’s costume is a miraculous curative for corns and bunions.”
Rooted to the floor Elizabeth had a full-body muscle spasm. “The dress…?”
“Is in the foot bath, yes. Along with glitter and glue and Purplesaurus Rex and, oh, who knows what all.”
“Get it out!” Elizabeth screamed. The other two jumped.
“It’s a children’s holiday, Bets. It’s for the kids.”
“I said get it out, you bastard!”
Delaney held up the dress. It looked like a pan of soppy sourmash.
“That is cashmere! Do you know how hard it is to find a cashmere dress? In that size?” She threw a coffee mug from off the table. It shattered over the fireplace, ringing in the room like a hacking cough. “You!” Bets said staring at Emily, “Undress. Now.”
“But mommy…”
“Don’t you mommy me. You’re behaving like an imbecile. Is that what I’m raising? Is it?”
Emily made to grasp the hem of her dress but her hands were laden with gunk and she froze, eyes dollar-coin wide.
“For the love of it, must I do everything myself?” She yanked the dress up over Emily’s head, nearly toppling her. “I suppose this is ruined now too. Why must you do stupid things to torment me? It’s been the worst day of my entire life, and I come home for some peace and quiet, for an hour!, you two do nothing all day and all I want is an hour to do anything! I don’t get any time to myself! And instead you make me deal with this shit.”
“Take it easy on her, Bets,” said Delaney.
“You get upstairs and get a shower and get to bed. Now.”
Emily could not move. She cried.
“That’s right. No Halloween this year, not now, no ma’am. Now go on. I said go on.”
“But I don’t know how,” Emily pleaded.
“Turn on the cold. Turn on the hot. Turn on the middle knob. The water comes out the top. Even you should be able to get it. Now go on and don’t make me tell you again.”
Emily took small steps on shaky legs to the staircase. She looked back and seeing she was stared after turned and ran the rest of the way. She was afraid to stay downstairs and she was afraid to take a shower. She didn’t close her eyes when she washed up at the sink at night. When she did, she could feel the monsters creeping up behind, their bloody hands reaching out from the mirror. And now she had to stand behind the shower curtain where she couldn’t see anything. They’d be right there, on the other side, waiting. And if she closed her eyes…
“You’re a cold bitch,” Delaney said.
“That’s my job.”
“It was all my idea. You cannot take your day out on her like that.”
“I pay the rent.”
“If she wants to do some alterations to her costume, you should let her. It’s creative.”
“You just said it was all your idea.”
“This isn’t the courtroom, Bets, so stop being such a lawyer. Emily was having fun. That’s what it’s about.”
“I say what it’s about.”
“I’m not kidding, Bets. You’re…”
“Shut up. Just shut up.” She took a tumbler from the liquor cabinet and made herself a scotch and soda.
“I will not,” Delaney said. “I don’t care what kind of day you had. I don’t care if you come home confined to a wheelchair. If I ever see you be so cruel to that girl again I’m moving out, and the first thing I will do is find a social worker to talk to about your parenting. Do you understand?”
“I got fired today.”
“What?”
“I said I fucking got fired today.”
“What, are you serious?”
“Oh, now you give a shit. Well it’s this case. And this witness for the defense. A real snoozer. He picks up the kids from school and drops them off at home. Then he steps in the K&B and comes out with a box of candies. Then he stops at the florist for a dozen roses. Then he goes in a pub. I can’t resist, I have to go in and see who he’s giving them to. I walk in and he’s standing right there. He hands them to me. He buys the drinks. It’s a late night.”
“So that’s where you were. And…?”
“And?” Bets said. “And they found out. And the D.A. called me in his office. And that was it. A cop saw us. Fraternizing with a witness for the defense.”
“Fraternizing. So that’s what you people call it.”
“I can’t believe this happened to me. I’m so mad. I’m fucking livid.”
“What about the file you left here?”
“Fuck the file. It won’t do anything. My career is over. Everything I worked so hard for is over.”
“The first Creole A.D.A. of Jefferson Parish,” Delaney said.
“I was going to be the first D.A. too. And from there state assemblywoman. And from there… The world has always done this to me. I almost get something I want, I can almost touch it, and then just like that, nothing. Life is a joke.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, the winner for Best Victim.”
“But I know something they don’t. Jacobs and his goony boys. Something old. My grandmother taught it to me, and she learned it from hers, and it was older even than that.” Bets rattled the cubes in her empty glass.
“What are you talking about?”
“How to collect a blood debt.”
Delaney sighed. “Oh good. Yes. Enjoy taking on the police force. I’m going to check on Emily.”
“Not until you clean up that mess.”
“Why do I let you boss me around?”
“Because you, Delaney, are weak when it comes to strong female figures. It’s ironic really. Is your license up to date?”
“To practice? No. I haven’t thought about the law since the Bar. How many times did you take that, again?”
“Fuck off.”
“Oh, to be shown up by your roommate who never studied and was so high the night before he went to confession to proposition a priest. How it must have rankled.”
“I should’ve lived alone,” Elizabeth said. “If you weren’t always waking me up in the middle of the night with your comings and goings…”
“Mostly comings…”
“I would have aced the Bar. I’m the best they’ve got, damn it, and I do not deserve this. Now. The floor.”
Delaney ignored her. He went upstairs and drew a bath for Emily. When she was calm he ran down to the corner store for consolation candy. At the scene of the crime, he washed out the foot bath and threw the dress away and picked up the newspapers. The ring they left looked like a chalk outline.