The sound of running shower water and a nasty rendition of “Every Breath You Take” wafts into the kitchen.
Once Julie gets into the shower, and singing, she’s likely to stay for half an hour. I get up from the table and walk back into the living room and stare at the altar. Then my feet tap the floor until you can hear where the loose board and the hollow are. Inside the hollow is a series of objects wrapped in velvet. The colors are so pretty and bright that you’d think you’d discovered a nest of flowers. My hands reach for the item swathed in lavender.
I remove it, replace the floorboard, and, after lighting a candle and whispering a brief prayer, sit crosslegged before my power objects and unwrap the flat, square parcel.
Neatly framed by a gold-leaf rim and revealed behind reflection-proof glass is a photograph: the quintessential American Family. The Dad stands in back, handsome and healthy, somewhere in his early forties. Proudly he surveys the bevy of girls before him.
In the front row sit the Mother and the three Daughters, sweet little stairsteps. The Mother is deep-chested and robust; she wears a neatly pressed shirtwaist dress and her arms are spread protectively around the Daughters.
The oldest Daughter is a real charmer, curly brown hair, long lashes, hint of a Bardot pout. Perhaps if you knew that she would turn out to be the “bad” child, you would look more closely at the way she stares straight into the camera, knowing that she will always be the star of the show.
Not so the middle Daughter. This one cannot enjoy herself and you see why: the Baby is sitting on the Mother’s lap. Worse, Baby has been given a toy telephone to play with and she, the middle Daughter, has nothing. Her round face and intense, jealous gaze are so intent on the telephone and the lap of comfort that she does not realize the picture has already been taken.
And the Baby? Why, she nestles into the warm breasts of the Mother, and she tinkers with her toy. Not a care in the world! Isn’t she protected, safe and cuddly, isn’t she the precious darling, the adorable pet?
“Hey, Porko, I’m talking to you!”
For a minute I am confused, convinced that June has come back to life, speaking from the confines of her printed image. But then the voice is only Julie’s. She stands in the doorway wrapped in a towel.
“When was the last time you got laid?”
A bit of a stumper. There was a guy in New York. But in the several months I’ve been here—
“Not lately, right?”
“Right.” I wrap the picture back in its lavender velvet.
“New Orleans is the answer. Take an evening off from training.” Julie turns back to the bathroom, satisfied we’re in accord.
I put the item back, wondering at the constant, never-ending disparity between what appears and what is, between what you remember and the evidence that refutes it.
When my hand reaches into the cache under the hollow board, it touches something warm, waiting.
Wrapped in paprika velvet is a white silk hooded robe, so flimsy that when you’re wearing it, you’re more naked than you are without any clothes at all.
Suppose you wake up in the middle of the swamp, in the remains of what must have been one hell of a wild party. You cannot remember anything at all after you ran pell-mell into the circle, convinced you had been watching the imminent death of your only living sister.
No sister now. No anybody: just empty wine bottles, squashed fruit, unidentified splashes of blood.
Let’s say the person who brought you here has vanished as well. You go back to the place (slowly because everything on your body aches: the sun is nauseating and your skin is bruised, your thighs throbbing as if they had been engaged many times during the night) where you left the car and there is your duffel bag and a one-way bus ticket to San Diego.
Let’s say you’ve had it.
Let’s say you take off the white silk robe and put on your jeans, walk until you hitch a ride, ride until you get to the bus station.
You are not concerned with the voodoo shop anymore, whether or not it is still there, whether or not it ever was there.
Your body and your soul have been battered.
What you want is to go back to your old simple life as a teenager. Ennui is not the greatest evil.
Not by a long shot.
Now you have half a dozen things you can name that are far worse.
What is this sickness of soul, for instance?
What you want now, what you will dedicate your life to, is being too strong to let anything get you again.
Personal power: the getting of it and the keeping of it.
“Well, Fatso, let’s move it!”
When Julie goes into the galley, I return the robe to its spot beneath the board. It waits there for a reason.
“I’m not fat,” I remind her quietly.
She flexes a bony arm. Her puny biceps amuse me. “Next to me you are.”
Summoning my muscles like so many well-trained animals, my body snaps into the ever-impressive Crab.
“Wow!” she says.
“Next to me,” I brag, “the world is fragile like an egg.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The late afternoon sky broods down on us as we head east, gray February. I called Roy’s with the message for Barnett to meet me the following day; I feel guilty for not feeling guilty.
What possible difference can one day make in the great scheme of things?
Julie is resplendent in black lurex pants and a red satin halter, gold Christmas ornaments for earrings. I am no slouch either in my shiny blue zebra mini, hair puffed out in a thousand lacquered ringlets, and two-inch false eyelashes. We both wear spike heels so sharp you could pick up trash from the sidewalks.
This close to Mardi Gras, there’s a lot of trash.
We snap our fingers to rock music, loud and brash, but the falling of evening and the length of the drive—you really have to work hard to sustain your energy, your sense of the prowl.
Finally New Orleans slides into view, a few towers of twinkly lights, the huge UFO they call the Superdome, the slow slug of the Mississippi out there.
Julie exits on Esplanade, to enter the Quarter from behind.
My stomach kinks up and I roll down the window, to inhale the sweet fetid air of the city.
It’s been a very long time.
You can hear the distant reverberations of parades; Canal and Saint Charles will be impossible to cross. People press in on one another, jostling and bruising to catch the odd plastic bead or aluminum doubloon. The bands beat drums, sound horns. The air, though chilly, has that weird frantic edge.
“So where’s a good bar?” Julie asks.
“Hey, you’re the native. I don’t know the first thing about New Orleans.”
She frowns, hesitating at the turn to Saint Phillips. “But didn’t you say you’d been here before?”
“Not lately.”
We cruise for a parking space, weaving around choked traffic and past the rundown buildings with their lacy iron balconies, winos sleeping on stoops, plump tourists with their tumblers of potent red drink.
“What about herpes?” Julie says.
“I vote against any bar named Herpes.”
“No, Dodo! I mean, how do you pick up a guy and not get herpes?”
“Ask the gentleman to kindly wear a rubber.” You feel something very strongly in this city, irresistible—but what?
Julie snorts. “Ha ha.”
“Look.” My hands smooth down the slippery fabric of my dress. “No tips on bars, no tips on men. Basically, I’m a washout. We compulsive athletes rarely get to see the jazzy side of life.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” Julie says. “Whose idea was this anyway?”
“We could go to the movies.”