“The police!” Una’s merriment was almost infectious. “The police in the Quarter!”
Rondo wheezed through his nose.
“If you don’t want to stay here,” Una said, recovering from her mirth, “you’d better run along. What you want—we don’t have that.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow!” My voice was tiny out on the sidewalk where I’d been deposited like a bottle.
This time the door was as unresponsive as the rest of the shop.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Shame-faced, I instinctively headed for the river. Maybe I could jump a banana boat for Haiti, though National Geographic once had that television special about the guys who unload bananas, and if they get bitten by a banana snake—who are apparently able to exactly impersonate bananas, if impersonate is the word you use when a snake makes like a piece of fruit—they have twelve seconds to lop off whatever got bitten in order to save their lives. Which is why they all carry machetes. No thanks.
Maybe a coffee barge. Or sugar cane. Or a luxury yacht bound for Bombay and needing a cabin girl. Maybe I could do what Stan and Linwood always said we would—take a slow boat to China and have a Singapore Sling in the Raffles Hotel.
Couple after smiling couple passed by. Tourist women were dressed for the evening in gauzy pastels like moths, and tourist men wore big white belts and white shoes and sweated in their ties and jackets.
Antoine’s was on my left and I stopped. Through the curtains you could see the diners ending their meals with crepes suzette and cherries jubilee. Close to the window was a family of four, with two little girls, both well on the porky side. Looking at the dad, you could see how they got that way, though the mother was reed-slim and bored, the angle of her face in the dim room a sharp suggestion of Linwood, and I thought: Maybe it’s us! Maybe there’s a time warp and— But then I remembered, I was never fat. Was I? And anyway, they were all fussing over the youngest, it wasn’t us.
You go back to a place like this, you think you can close your eyes and open them quickly, quickly, and nothing will have changed since you were there before! An act of will, why, you conjure the whole thing up—
This was working up to a big downer, so I moved on riverward, heading for Jackson Square and the Café du Monde.
It was all bustle down there, as full of happy tourists as Disneyland at high noon. “Artists” had their wares displayed around the wrought-iron-fenced square, and old men in top hats tried to get people to ride around in carts pulled by tired horses dressed up in paint, feathers, and wigs. Threading my way through the crowd, I found a little table in the café that never closed, and from the looks of the pillowy confections dusted with a heavy snowfall of powdered sugar, at least when the world kept changing, beignets hadn’t.
I ordered my doughnuts and some coffee—I was all grown up now and actually preferred the stuff to hot chocolate, bully for me. Then I lit a cigarette and took the dream book, which I had never gotten around to studying earlier, out of my bag.
“Watching your step?”
As soon as the words were spoken, my right foot was raised and a loud kiss was planted on the instep.
Alonso. He’d changed into a clean white shirt with a string tie made from a scorpion frozen in amber. His freshly oiled black hair hung slick and dark down his back, stressing the prominence of the high bronze cheekbones and those dark tea-colored eyes.
“Take what’s at hand,” he added, sitting down at my table and grabbing my wrist. He licked my palm.
Without a shadow of a doubt, this was what they called sexual attraction. “Aren’t you going to suggest I keep abreast of the situation?”
“Or,” he continued, “that we get behind the problem.”
I’d used up my quota of wit.
“Or—”
I held up my palms for mercy as the beignets and coffee arrived. Alonso charmed his way into someone else’s order, so we sat there and munched.
“Have to hang around you for my daily dose of sugar,” he observed after a few minutes. His lips were all covered with the stuff. Maybe I should lick it off.
“A lucky break for you.”
“You’re telling me?”
Clearly, we could keep this up all night. “Look,” I said. “I snuck off the bus like that because—”
This time he held up his palms for mercy. “Whatever. Now you’re here.”
I finished my coffee. “Apparently.”
“Look, honey.” He leaned over and nuzzled my neck.
Cooked-goose time.
“Do you want to…”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.”
We walked along Decatur, not the most savory of avenues, past the praline shops and the Greek groceries and then the old seamen’s bars, which looked like places where Jack the Ripper would have felt right at home, and then we were in rows of funny old houses, stoop-type affairs with doors set askew on their hinges. The air smelled like sewers and fried food and cigarettes, but every now and then there was a whiff of something pungent and flowery, almost like violets, which I thought might be opium, that would be romantic. The sounds from the houses and stoops, where shadowy figures sat, were molasses-rich melancholy, and something else, which the surface could not support.
You had the sense that the surface of things, the visible dimension, was a basket, catching.
Then too, it was like the luminous fibers of my body were all caught up with Alonso’s, and I wanted to be as close to him as his jugular, skin breaking skin and you got on over to the other side, where you’d never gone before. How could you know that it was there?
I knew it was there.
We filed through a side gate many blocks from the café, across a weed-filled courtyard with a chipped cupid rising in what looked like terminal depression from a stagnant fountain. A nightclub for mosquitoes. Then we climbed up some shaky stairs, and I thought: Maybe I’ll never have to climb back down.
His hand on the small of my back.
When the door closed behind us, I remembered, Sex is stronger than doors and windows.
“Listen,” I whispered. “I’ve never actually done this before.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“But—”
He put his arms around me and rested his hands on my butt. Yup, this was the ticket all right.
“You want to travel somewhere you’ve never been,” he said. “Find an experienced guide…”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Who’s Sammy?” I asked, many hours later. It seemed like many hours later. All you knew was that it was that dead-dumb time of the night, what they call the Witching Hour.
Alonso was flat on his back, smoking a cigarette with his air of utter cool. We were both lying in a mass of rumpled bedclothes in the middle of what appeared to be the only room of his apartment.
“I mean, he’s a real guy, right?”
Alonso performed his French exhale.
You don’t love this man, I told myself sternly. But geezo, that was one hell of a planet we visited!
“You don’t want to mess with him.”
“No, probably not. But listen.” As quickly as I could, I told him the whole grisly story, the whole childhood bit, glossing lightly over the part where everybody but me buys the farm, then on through the years with Aunt Edith, and finally up to what happened at the voodoo shop.
He grunted several times, held my hand during the difficult sections, and then looked bemused at the recent stuff. It took half a pack of cigarettes and the near-arrival of dawn.