It turned out that he needed one prescription for distance and another for reading. “Two birds with one stone,” the optometrist said. “In other words, bifocals.”
Jesus, bifocals. He tried on frames, and the one he liked was of heavy black plastic. She looked at him, laughed, said something about Buddy Holly, and steered him to a less assertive metal frame, with rounded rectangular lens openings. He tried it on, and had to admit she was right.
There were shops where they made your glasses in an hour, but this wasn’t one of them. “About this time tomorrow,” the fellow said, and they stopped at Café du Monde for café au lait and beignets, and paused on their way through Jackson Square to watch a woman feeding the pigeons as if her life depended on it.
She said, “Did you see the paper? The DNA test came back. He was definitely the man who raped and killed that nurse in Audubon Park.”
“No surprise there.”
“No, but wait’ll you hear what they think happened. You know how the live oaks will have branches that come almost to the ground?”
“They’re the only tree I know that’s like that.”
“Well, see, it makes them real easy to climb. And that’s what they believe he did, climbed up into one of the trees to wait for a victim to pass by.”
“I think I can see where this is going.”
“And then, because he had a something-point-something blood alcohol level, he lost his balance and fell, and he landed on his head and broke his neck and died.”
“The world is a dangerous place.”
“But a little less so,” she said, “now that he’s not in it anymore.”
Her name was Julia Emilie Roussard. She’d written it on the fly-leaf of one of the books he picked up.
It took him two days to use it. For all the conversations they had, there was somehow never an occasion where he could fit her name into one of his sentences.
He took her out to lunch after they picked up his eyeglasses (with a complimentary leather case bearing the optometrist’s name and address, and an impregnated strip of cloth for cleaning the lenses). On the way home she reminded him that he’d talked about two losses, his best friend and his most prized possession. Who was the friend, she wondered, and what was the possession?
He answered the second part first. His stamp collection, gone when he got into his apartment.
“You’re a stamp collector? Seriously?”
“Well, it was a hobby, but I was pretty serious about it. I gave it a lot of my time, and put quite a bit of money into it.” He told her a little about his collection, and how the childhood hobby had drawn him back in as an adult.
“And the friend?”
“It was a woman,” he said.
“Your wife? No, you said you’ve never been married.”
“Not a wife, not a girlfriend. It was never physical, it wasn’t that kind of a relationship. I suppose you could say she was a business associate, but we were very close.”
“When you say business associate…”
He nodded. “She was killed by the same people who set me up. They tried to make it look as though she’d burned herself up in a fire, but they didn’t try too hard. They set a fire any rookie investigator would spot right away as arson, and they left her with two bullets in her head.” He shrugged. “They probably didn’t care what the cops called it. It’s not like anybody could do anything about it.”
“Do you miss her?”
“All the time. That’s probably the reason I talk so much. I wouldn’t ordinarily, not on such short acquaintance. There’s two reasons, actually, and one is that you’re very easy to talk to, but the other is that I’m used to talking to Dot, and she’s gone.”
“That was her name? Dot?”
“Dorothea, actually. I always thought it was Dorothy, and either I got it wrong or the papers did, because Dorothea was the way it appeared in the press coverage of the fire. But all anyone ever called her was Dot.”
“I never had a nickname.”
“People always call you Julia?” There!
“Except for the kids, who have to call me Miss Roussard. That’s the first time you’ve ever used my name, do you realize that?”
“You never told me what it was.”
“I didn’t?”
“I figured there’d be papers in the house, but I didn’t want to snoop around. You’d tell me when you wanted to.”
“I thought you knew. I just took it for granted we had that conversation. You saved my life and I got to watch you break a man’s neck and then you walked me home and we drank coffee in the kitchen. How could you not know my name?”
“I opened a book,” he said, “and there it was. Oh, for God’s sake.”
“What?”
“Well, how did I even know it was you? Maybe you bought the book secondhand, or maybe it came down in the family.”
“No, it’s me.”
“Julia Emilie Roussard.”
“Oui, monsieur. C’est moi.”
“French?”
“On my daddy’s side, Irish on my mama’s. I told you she died young, didn’t I?”
“You told me she went gray early.”
“And died early, too. Thirty-six years old, and she left the table one night and went straight to bed because she felt a little feverish, and the next morning she was dead.”
“My God.”
“Viral meningitis. She was healthy one day and dead the next, and I don’t think my daddy ever did understand what happened to him. To her of course, but also to him. And to me, and I was eleven at the time.” She looked at him. “I’m thirty-eight now. I’m two years older than she was when she died.”
“And you don’t have a single gray hair, either.”
She laughed, delighted. He said he was several years older than that, and she told him he looked it. “With your new haircut,” she said. “I think what we’ll do is bleach it, and then dye it a nice medium brown. If you’re not happy with the way it turns out, we can always dye it back to the way it is now.”
But it turned out fine. Mousy brown, Julia called it, and said that women supplied by nature with hair that color were often moved to do something about it. “Because it’s kind of blah, you know? It doesn’t attract attention.”
Perfect.
If her father even noticed the difference, he didn’t see fit to comment on it. Keller, checking the mirror, decided the lighter color went with the professorial effect, which the bifocals had reinforced big-time. The glasses, now that he was getting used to them, were a revelation. He hadn’t exactly needed them, he’d been getting along fine without them, but there was no question they improved his distance vision. Out walking on St. Charles Avenue, he could make out street signs he’d have squinted at previously.
He went for that walk on a day when Julia was teaching, and a plump brown dumpling of a woman named Lucille came to see to Mr. Roussard. When Julia got home he was waiting for her on the front stoop. “It’s all arranged,” he said. “Lucille’s agreed to stay late, so let’s you and I go to an early movie and a nice dinner.”
The movie was a romantic comedy, with Hugh Grant in the Cary Grant role. Dinner was in the French Quarter, served in a high-ceilinged room by waiters who looked almost old enough to be playing Dixieland jazz at Preservation Hall. Keller ordered a bottle of wine with dinner, and they each had a glass and agreed it was very nice, but they left the rest of the bottle unfinished.
They’d taken her car, and when it came time to drive home she handed him her keys. It was a mild night, and the air had a tropical feel to it. Sultry, he thought. That was the word for it.
Neither of them spoke on the way home. Lucille lived nearby, and wouldn’t accept a ride, and just shook her head when Keller offered to walk her home.