Boulevard (16 page)

Up Ramparts she walked, a promenade along the boulevard, singing the song again, the world like some kind of flat image bobbing this way and that in front of her, past the bars where the studs and the hunks went, the boys the age of Newell. Maybe she'd even see Newell today. She waited at the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter and looked down at the church, that bit of a boa wrapped around her arms and her perky flat shoes so pointed at the toe, everyone was looking, all the gewgaw tourists with their flat Alabama and soft Mississippi accents pointing to her, noticing her. Nobody took a picture
this time, but plenty of times people had taken Miss Sophia's picture. “What is it?” one teenage boy asked another as they passed, and Miss Sophia thought a curse at them, not a bad curse really, just that they would both get old one day and that they would arrive at old age looking every bit as funny as she did.

He would start to think of himself as a he for a while, when he was drunk. He would remember that his real name was Clarence Eldridge Dodd and that he was a man inside this dress and these support hose, these shoes that he took such painful care of, these pretty baby doll flats that he loved to wear because the higher heels hurt his ankles. He couldn't strut around in those spike heels like he used to, oh no. He found himself walking to the church up Pirate's Alley, and his skirt was drooping, dragging into the gray, slimy water that in the French Quarter could be pretty much any kind of liquid known to man, this good tulle dress that only had one stain on it to start with, and now he would have to hand wash it and very carefully dry it, because he could not afford the dry cleaners and anyway they never took care of your clothes, you paid good money to have people ruin your clothes for you when you could easily ruin them yourself for free. Up here was the square where President Jackson and his horse were having the usual good time standing there with everybody walking around them. It was easy for Miss Sophia to get a good sip from the vodka now and again, and people noticed but they thought it was cute to see, a man dressed up like a woman getting drunk in
Jackson Square, weren't these New Orleans drunks all so cute and colorful? But a man in a purple dress, you didn't see that everywhere, and real breasts, too. He could almost see himself as if he were outside himself, and the spectacle he made, the wig and dress and boa, the shoes, the purse, the liquor, the walk, the whole parade, that gave him a feeling of soaring over all the rest of these people, of carrying himself grandly through the crowd as if he were a procession all by himself, because he had invented Miss Sophia, after all, and she was far more interesting to inhabit than nearly anybody he could see.

Except for the prettiest. The boys. The beauties on the street. He would become one of them, if he could. But you couldn't buy that in a used clothing store, nothing to make you look like that. Nothing to make you look like pretty Newell, with his long, tapered fingers, with his pouty lips and fine, clear skin. No, but Miss Sophia will do, will carry you through, this runs through his head like a jingle in a commercial about himself, Miss Sophia capers drunkenly across Decatur Street singing Miss Sophia will do, will carry you through.

To the river. She had walked here all her life. Clarence had. Come to stand at the edge of the river, the muddy water so broad, the distant line of Algiers on the opposite shore.

By then he was good and drunk and everything was soaring inside him, as if it all made sense, a babble of voices, darling this and darling that and where y'at and by your mama's house and everybody your friend, a nice
afternoon on the Moonwalk looking at the
Venture Queen
sail past, her decks loaded with containers so high he wondered how the ship could float, the day easing down, afternoon already here, and him having only to go home now, nothing else to do, because he had the weekend like normal people, to do what he pleased.

In the morning he woke up with a cottony feeling in his head, not entirely sure where he had been or how late he had returned home, though he always found home sometime; he was Clarence for a moment before he went back to being Miss Sophia. She struggled out of bed with the feeling that her head was stuffed with something, especially behind her eyeballs, and she poured herself a glass of tomato juice and vodka and drank it fast to get the feeling to go away.

While she was waiting for that first slug of vodka to hit, she cleaned. She kept her house immaculately swept. “Anonymity produces pigdom,” she said, to no one; a phrase which, when she had first thought it, made her laugh. When nobody is looking, we are apt to do anything, make any kind of mess, and leave it for others to attend to. A person who is apt to do anything even in front of other people is a psychopath, a further stage of anonymity than most people can achieve. But Miss Sophia used to read a lot of true crime magazines and felt she could spot a psychopath, where others might see only an ordinary person like herself.

Miss Sophia drank the tomato juice and dressed for church. Tomato juice to settle her stomach. For church
she dressed as a man, as Clarence Dodd, whom she once knew, a lawyer who worked in a fine office on Gravier. In the Whitney Building? A fine attorney from an old New Orleans family, Clarence Dodd.

She put on his trousers and his coat. Without makeup and wig, she looked so much like a man, it was amazing even to her. It never occurred to her to question the logic of this, that she, a woman, should dress in clothing of the opposite sex in order to go to church, but even more deeply she understood that this was necessary, and at moments would remember that she was a man, that her name was Clarence Dodd, that she was he. Fine to parade the streets in a dress but for mass she wore a suit, no wig, dark socks, a neatly tied silk tie, and a white starched shirt perfectly pressed. She wielded the steam iron and spray starch herself, her head spinning from the night before, her throat dry. On the way out the door she looked at the bottle of vodka. She never drank before mass, except the one slug to clear her head. But she looked at the liquor.

Mass she went to here and there various places, often taking the bus to St. Louis Cathedral. She liked the ceremony, the Holy Sacrament, Jesus dissolving like a kiss on her tongue. Sometime she went to confession, too, and confessed to various things that appeared to confuse the priests, but she said her Hail Marys and counted the rosary but always lost track, even with the beads, and sometimes she forgot to bring the rosary anyway, so it was hopeless. But she said the prayers. Sat in the churches.
Perfectly prepared for God to speak.

Afterward she went home and made a drink and changed into her clothes for Sunday afternoon. Today she wore one of her conservative outfits, a long brown skirt of fine wool challis, a cream-colored silk blouse that tied in a fetching bow at the front, a nice wool jacket that looked like she was riding in the hunt, fitted at the sides, black Frye boots and a fedora. She looked smart, especially with the little brunette Mary Tyler Moore girl-on-her-own wig. Never mind these clothes were all too young for her and fit on her ungainly body in an even more ungainly way. She drank another tall drink, the ice cubes chattering in her glass. She looked at herself in the mirror.

Sunday was God's day, meaning it was the hardest day to live through, when God's eye was most watchful, God who sees even what the psychopath does when alone, God who sees even the tiny penis balled up in Miss Sophia's panties. She had to be most careful on Sunday, especially toward sundown, and on the best of all possible Sundays she arrived at dusk so drunk she passed blissfully into unconsciousness until the crisis of God's eye passed. God's eye on her all day Sunday as she walked through the streets, looking somehow even more a spectacle in the lumpish new clothes she had bought off the rack, the nice wool skirt making the legs beneath appear mannish to her, but she walked on the legs in the good boots that she loved, walking walking, stopping now and then to sip from her flask.

Once on Sunday she had been courageous, rode the streetcar all the way down to Audubon Zoo to look at the animals, the monkeys in the cage, the parrots in the cage, the lion in the cage, but she got lost in the park, among the live oaks spreading their enormous branches, old spirits hovering over the ground, she thought, tough old spirits risen out of the ground and flinging out their arms. She read about the great cotton exposition of 1884 that had been the occasion for the building of the park and of many buildings, she read each plaque carefully, word after word, but none of the claims made any sense to her. If someone had built such beautiful structures, where were they? If somebody opened a mercantile exposition and fair here at one time, where was it now? What on earth was a cotton exposition? What did you do, lay out a lot of cotton in a line and let people look at it? Ridiculous it seemed to her, but by then she was weaving badly, the day getting late. She found a bar, sat in it, drank a Dixie beer, found her way over to Magazine Street, took the Magazine bus to downtown, and changed buses for home.

Today she had the memory of her adventure in the park vaguely flitting through her mind, wondering whether she could find the zoo if she tried, and for a few blocks she did head down Bourbon Street toward Canal, where she could catch the streetcar, but pretty soon she got tired and sat on the banquette.

To keep still was to invite God's attention, that eye was sure to focus on you if you were still, so she took a short
rest but kept moving. So much to see. She walked to the old Mint to where the Desire streetcar was on display at the end of the market. Miss Sophia thought it a fine thing to display a streetcar like this, right out in the open with no sign or anything to explain it, but people nearly all the time pointed and said to one another, “Look, there it is. It says ‘Desire,' right on the front.”

At the end of the day she felt its heaviness no matter what. She had outrun her liquor, drunk it up. Now it was time to go home, the sun going down, the dark descending, the hardest time of all, when she would have to go home, look at what was left of the vodka and slug it down and crawl into bed for the night.

But for just a moment standing outside the Café du Monde, powdered sugar on her skirt, she wondered what it would have been like to go to the Audubon Zoo again today, to read the signs about the long-ago buildings that used to stand under those trees.

Monday afternoon Miss Sophia put Clarence to sleep for the week, got herself out of bed and made a pot of strong coffee with chicory, took a long hot bath, did her makeup, and dressed for work. She had only two brassieres to hold up what was left of her flaps of skin that had been breasts, but she wore a bra every day, even at home. To remind herself who she was. Who she was supposed to be. Miss Sophia Dodd Carter. Widow of Clarence Dodd Carter, a soldier who died in World War II. With this in mind and her breasts in place, she headed off to work.

Mac was lazing against the counter with his hair slicked back greasy, the unhealthy yellowish jowls hanging off his face. He grinned like a dog with a bone and asked, “Miss Sophia, were you up to anything interesting this weekend?”

This took her up short, because he rarely spoke to her in such a way that she would have to answer. His mind might be set on wickedness, she thought. “You're getting to look old, Mr. Mac,” she said, and walked past him to her closet.

“Well, you can kiss my ass, too,” Mac said, and sauntered back to his office.

Newell giggled and said, “Good evening Miss Sophia. I'm always so glad to see you come in, it means I don't have to be here all by myself in this big store.”

“You don't do enough business for two people on nights,” Mac hollered from the office.

“We would if you would stay open on Sundays and get rid of some of them titty machines,” Newell hollered back.

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“That place down on Decatur Street stays busy all night, and they're open all day Sunday, and there's no women in those movies.”

Miss Sophia had to agree. The titty movies just didn't do as well in this part of the French Quarter, you had to face it. Those booths stayed too clean to be earning any money.

After a moment came Mac's voice out of the office.
“What I ought to do is tear out that back partition and put more machines into the storeroom. We ain't storing fucking shit in there anyway.”

Silence for a moment. One of the clip-clop tourist wagons passing in the street.

“Well,” Newell said, “why don't you?”

She could hear the change when he said the words. Could hear the wheel turn in Mr. Mac's head.

The next few days one of the regular black clouds passed over her and engulfed her, and she paid hardly any attention to anything except getting from one moment to the next. She felt the cloud settle over her in the early morning when she was thirsty for liquor and sleep refused to come. The emptiness of the apartment was hollow at that hour, had a ringing to it that echoed through her. Her own apparition in the mirror had a dead look, an old man's face, bald at the top, hair chopped off and uneven, damp like chicken feathers to be plucked, his tits of skin, his bony shoulders, the scars from surgery on his hips and knees. She sat on the couch and stared at her hands till dawn. She went walking and walked most of the day, one street and another, restless. But when she stopped, when her mind went looking for something to do, it settled on a wish that she could go home with a bottle of vodka and lie in the bed curled around it; a wish that she could drown in a lake of vodka. She kept moving through the day and refused to drink a drop except water, not even a sweet drink of soda or Barq's root beer, because sugar would make her crave liquor that much
more. She walked in and out of her neighborhood around Bunny Friendly Park, and then she walked into the Fauborg Marigny and up and down those streets, and then along Esplanade and down Ramparts and through the old Fauborg St. Marie to Lee Circle and down St. Charles Avenue and then into the Irish Channel through the Garden District, and then back up Magazine Street and into the French Quarter again, where she went to work early at the bookstore.