“Eh?” He backed away in near terror.
“It’s Harold LeBlanc.”
When that had no apparent effect, I added, “From the Royal Street Bookshop in the Quarter.”
His spine seemed to unlock, which I took as a good sign. “Harol’, o’ course. You mus’ fo’give me, baby. I am not myself at the moment. I mistook you for a reporter. They’ve been doggin’ me since that Cavett Show. What a pleasure seein’ you again.”
He swayed and I reached out a hand to steady him. “You okay?”
That prompted one of his oddly humorless, cackling laughs. “Not eg-zack-ly. I may need your assistance to make it to the baggage section.”
I offered him my arm, and off we went.
“It’s the airline’s fault,” he said. “There was some mix-up about my First Class arrangement. I explained that I could not fly Coach because of my condition, my fear of suffocation. I’m afraid I had to rant a bit, but I sincerely doubt they would have treated Mr. Neil Simon so offhandedly.” He smiled and emitted another cackle.
“Eventually they saw the error of their ways and, to compensate, overdid the kindness, supplying me with several more vodka martinis than I actually needed. Do you think you could retrieve my luggage for me, baby? The theater was supposed to send somebody, but they either forgot or changed their mind.”
“They sent me,” I said.
“Ah, a splendid choice,” he said. “I shall take it as a sign my ghastly notices have not used up all of my cachet.” Another cackle.
In spite of the still-boiling three-o’clock sun and the humidity that has always blanketed New Orleans, Tom insisted I lower the top on my Mustang for the drive to his house in the French Quarter. “I am devoted to tropical climates,” he said. “It’s why I keep residences here and in Key West.”
Not being devoted to tropical climates, I turned on the car’s air conditioner once we were on our way. This amused him immensely. “Icy air in an open car,” he said, shouting through the wind. “Ah, technology.
“How are they treating my Cat, by the way?”
He asked the question with a forced casual air, as if the answer weren’t as important as the cigarette he was trying to light in the wind.
I told him in truth that I had no idea what they were doing with his play. “We nonparticipants have been locked out of rehearsals. Harmon Kane’s orders.”
“That sounds like Harmon.” He gave up on the cigarette and put it and a black holder back into his coat pocket. “I was not exactly overjoyed to hear he was directing the production as well as starring in it. He’s a bit too much of a ‘genius,’ if you know what I mean. It’s made him persona non grata in Hollywood. Tends to be hard on his players, which must make it especially rough for local actors. But I expect his Big Daddy will be something to see.”
“A columnist for the Picayune said it was the first time an actor might have to go on a diet to play the role.”
This time the cackle had some mirth to it. “He has been mistaken for the Goodyear blimp,” he said. “But there was a time when he was as svelte as you, Harol’. Before his appetites got the better of him. Speaking of which, how’s he been behavin’ himself?”
“I’ve caught his act a few times,” I said. “Most recently in Antoine’s, cursing his waiter for having the temerity to bring him an after-dinner coffee he hadn’t requested.”
“Was he in the bag?”
“I hope so.”
“Prob’ly didn’t understand that in this tradition-lovin’ section of the world an after-dinner demitasse is considered part of the meal,” Tom said with an air of dismay. “He took the brew to be the waiter’s commentary on his inebriated state.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“And, of course, he was playing to the room and to the wide-eyed admirers at his table.”
“Just one wide-eyed tablemate,” I said. “Eugenia Broussard, an artist at Webber Advertising and our local Kim Stanley. She’s playing Maggie the Cat.”
“They... involved romantically?”
“I gather they are.”
Tom sighed. “Never a good idea to mix business with romance,” he said. “I learned that lesson a long time ago.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes, offering his face to the sun. “Were the ‘sixties good for you, Harol’?” he asked.
Though we were only a few years past that decade, the answer to the question required some thought. I’d survived my wife’s death, quit my job at the same ad agency where Eugenia now worked, bought the bookstore, seen my country enter a war it couldn’t possibly win, and lost a son to the priesthood... well, better lost to that than to a sniper’s bullet.
“It was the worst period of my life,” Tom continued, making me realize his question had been rhetorical. “After Night of the Iguana, everything went to pieces. Plays folding almost before they opened. The critics like vultures feedin’ on my stringy old remains.
“Frank dying.” That would be Frank Merlo, his long-time companion, a cancer victim. “And Diana Barrymore. And my dear Carson.” Carson McCullers. “So many of my friends. All gone. All the doomed people.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.
After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Don’t pay any attention to me, Harol’. It’s those martinis talkin’. I have survived the ‘sixties. I’m alive and reasonably healthy. My past plays are being performed and I have new ones on the horizon. I am sitting in an air-cooled automobile with the sun on my face, heading into a city that is my spiritual home. As the great Robert Louis Stevenson once noted, ‘The world is filled with such a number of things, it’s a wonder we all aren’t happy as kings.’”
At the entrance to his two-story house on Dumaine Street, I offered to help him with his single piece of luggage but he assured me that he could handle it. “That delightfully windblown drive has delivered me into sobriety,” he said, “a state that I shall attempt to alter at the first opportunity.”
“I have several first editions of Roman Spring and some of the plays at the store I’d like you to sign,” I said. “How long will you be in town?”
“Maybe a week, this trip,” he said. “I told Megan I’d look in on the final rehearsal tomorrow. And then the opening night, of course. You’ll be there, right?”
Megan Carey, the play’s producer, and I had been keeping company for a while. I told him I’d be on hand opening night.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll try to stop by the bookstore before then. Otherwise, I’ll see you at the theater.”
It rained the next afternoon, just enough to clean the French Quarter’s streets and cool and freshen the night air for the usual flock of tourists.
In those days, I often kept the shop open late on the weekends, ever the optimist as I watched the crowds pass by with their go-cups and Pat O’Brien glasses in hand. That Friday night, just as I was about to turn the sign around on the door, Tom appeared. With him was Jason Dupuis, a blond, blue-eyed young man (in his twenties, I guessed) who’d been tending bar at the Barataria Lounge when Harmon Kane noticed his resemblance to Paul Newman and cast him as Brick, the alcoholic husband of Maggie the Cat in Tom’s play.
Tom was dressed in suit and tie. Jason, who had the habit of staring at you with an insolent sneer that I presumed was his “method” pose, wore patched Levis, battered tennis shoes, a flounced white silk pirate shirt, and, in spite of the season, a blue velvet blazer. The three colorful plastic bead necklaces he wore were either his homage to Mardi Gras or a sign that the hippie influence had not quite vanished from the earth.
He strolled by the shelves studying titles while Tom sat at my desk, signing the small stack of books.