8
Booze had never had much of a hold on Marshall. In his teens, he’d smoked a lot of dope. Everybody did. They had to, to get by. Or so they told themselves and each other. He’d never married or fathered a child. In his twenty-odd years as a partner in Stokes, Knight, and Marchand Restoration Architects, he had never taken more than a month or two of vacation all put together.
But lately, he’d sensed a change touching as lightly as an autumn leaf drifting onto the sleeve of his coat, the fringe of a woman’s shawl brushing the back of his hand in a crowded restaurant.
An awakening?
Marshall pushed the thought aside. He had no patience with self-analysis. It was just that in recent months, after work, he’d stand beneath the wrought iron balcony that shaded his offices on Jackson Square and allow himself a couple of minutes and, in careful measured sips, he’d enjoy himself.
He was enjoying himself now, though this would not be evident to even a careful observer. Standing perfectly still Marshall simply breathed. With the breathing came an unfolding, a blossoming which, either by choice or habit, he’d not experienced since he was a child. Perhaps not even then. Or maybe always then. This was how he imagined children feeling all the time: connected, plugged in, the world forming and reforming around them as they moved.
His pulse rate slowed, and a feeling as near to peace as he ever knew ironed the years from his face. The sense of being one of Jackson Square ’s living statues settled over him.
On the square’s southwest corner, where the horse carriages lay in wait for tourists, a silver man, shining from his cropped kinky hair to his tattered running shoes, was frozen in mid stride, an upturned, silver baseball cap by his side to collect coins and dollars. On the northwest corner, where St. Peter’s Street elbowed into Chartres, lace skirts cascading artfully down shallow, cement steps, was the golden lady-immobile, beneficent, the Good Witch of the East caught in amber. In front of St. Louis Cathedral, shouldering space between fortune-tellers, a lineman was caught halfway up a pole cleverly self-supported by a camouflaged, steel I beam.
Then there was the Man in a Suit, hair white at the temples, dark blond, and thick where it fell over a heavily lined forehead, suit immaculate, leather briefcase in hand-Marshall Marchand, architect. Becoming one of Jackson Square ’s living statues suited him. At one with inanimate, yet living, things he indulged in a rare and delicious sense of belonging-to what, Marshall didn’t choose to pursue. The sense of connecting was enough.
Maybe he had outlived the demons.
Then again, maybe the demons were immortal.
The thought jarred him from his fragile peace and, as his eyes cleared, he saw her.
Framed by ornate arches of ironwork, she was seated on a bench, her head bowed over a book, the spine resting on her neatly trousered knee. Golden and clear as water, spring light poured through the blacksmith arms of a live oak, dripped green-gold off resurrection ferns to warm her cheek and fire the champagne-blonde hair across her forehead. Liquid luminescence curved around the swell of her breasts and set the left half of the book she was reading aglow. Form, function, color, light, and line came together flawlessly.
An inrush of breath kick-started the Man in a Suit to life, heart lurching like the first turnings of a cold engine. Blood pumped noisily past his ears. All at once he was aware of the ten thousand sensations of a new-made being: the pressure of the soles of his feet against the concrete, the pull of the briefcase handle on his fingers, a cinnamon-sugar scent from a nearby bakery, faint skritching of scaled toes on brick as a pigeon strutted by, the balm of the sun’s warmth against the back of his hand.
He stepped off the curb-off the edge of the known world-and moved toward her. His brother Danny could have stopped him-would have stopped him-but Danny wasn’t there. Watching himself, an awestruck spectator of his own destruction, he crossed the brick lane, drifted up the steps into the garden, and approached the bench where she sat.
A moment passed. Then she looked up to see who had intruded upon her solitude. Her eyes were of moss and lichen, vines over old wood, slow streams in autumn, rich with tannin and fallen leaves.
“Would you join me for tea?” he heard himself say in a level voice. “It’s a little past time, I know.” He spoke as if he’d been born in the century in which he worked every day-the eighteen hundreds when people had an elevated sense of the importance of human intercourse. It should have struck him as absurd, but it didn’t.
In the cool, running depths of her eyes, thoughts flickered near the surface, then retreated again to the shadows. “My name is Polly,” she said with a smile and a lilting drawl that could put mint in juleps. “I am a woman of a certain age, divorced, and with two daughters, seven and nine; I am in the middle of a good book, so, if you’re a shallow fiddling kind of a fellah, I have no time for you.”
“I’m not that kind of fellow,” Marshall said gravely.
She laughed, and in his mind, the sound built playgrounds for children, church steeples for bells, and walls with clear, cold, cascading fountains.
“In that case I would simply love to have a cup of tea with you.”
9
Polly told Marshall Marchand the story of her life-the G-rated version. With the sex and violence edited out, it was a charming fairytale: how a lost child of fifteen had come to Jackson Square, how a gypsy had foreseen a glittering future for her, and how that future had come to pass.
Marshall was captivated as she’d meant him to be. She smiled and leaned in, her head tilted slightly, bangs brushing the thick, dark lashes. “Now tell me,” she said sweetly, “how is it that you have come to be a man old enough to have silver at his temples, hold a partnership in a well-regarded firm, and yet are not married?”