Boulevard (18 page)

“It'll be worth it, Mac,” Newell said, and Mac waved his hand at him.

Newell could bring good fortune. She had seen that light on people before, and she knew it was true. No need to try to help him, he would make his way.

She refused to go home after work but walked all night again, aware of voices and refusing to listen, the ones in the overhead who talked all the time, only sometimes she could tune out that station and sometimes like tonight she had no choice but to listen. She was getting bad again and wanted a drink. But not one dime in her pocket, smart, to leave the money at home and to walk the other direction. It was all right to have the thirst in her mouth, but if she satisfied it she would plunge into the underground, something like the bottom of the Mississippi River, something that would suck her legs like mud and drown her lungs like water. It was okay to have the thirst but not to drink. So she walked down St. Charles Avenue all the way through the mansions of the Garden District and uptown to Audubon Park, and she wandered under the live oaks from the streetcar line all the way to the river, the mighty muddy, and she was in sight of it when the first light of day started to show and she felt the vise loosen across her chest and she headed home, the long walk back to the streetcar, and then the ride to Canal Street and the change to the Desire bus.

At home in the darkness of the apartment she lay down on the bed with all her folds of clammy skin and
turned on the air conditioner as cold as it would go, even though it was October now. She fell deeply asleep and dreamed she was flying in a department store that became a supermarket and then outside over a city that was not New Orleans but somewhere else; she was flying and that was the whole dream, that she could will herself to rise and feel the lightness of her body. Everyone was looking up at her. She flew, but never so very high that she lost sight of the people on the ground, and sometimes she swooped down close to the ground, and then soared up again. She woke in the middle of the dream abruptly and felt so sad she wanted to cry because her body lay leaden and heavy on the bed; she knew she could never will it to rise from here.

She smelled Newell's beau for the first time that day, caught the scent of him in the bookstore, a whiff of perfume sweet, a smell of a man's chin freshly shaved, the clean line of the jaw, a white-toothed smile, ripe lips, she had all that from the scent, she knew the beau was there, or had been there, from the moment she arrived that evening to begin cleaning. This was a Friday night. She could tell by the crowd. On a Friday, on all the Fridays lately, the magazine shelves were crowded with men, looking at every kind of magazine, as if the men were somehow comfortable with one another, no matter what each had come here for individually; as if the presence of the toys and the Rush and the movie booths were pleasing to all of them in the same way, amid the rhythm of hammering, the sound of the new movie booths going up
in the back. When she went back to talk to Leon tonight he was gleaming dark and giving her the busy eye, too busy to talk to any crazy lady, smoking a cigarette, sipping from a flask from time to time. She was not one to defy the busy eye, she would talk to him some other time.

She had forgotten something, the scent of the something, the beau, the word had been in her mind for a reason. She parted the curtain and returned to the front of the store, sticking a finger under her wig to scratch. Walking into the glare of the store, she caught the scent at once and saw Newell again in the dog collar leaning over the counter alongside the cash register and someone talking to him. Jeans tight onto his butt, slutting that pelvis forward like he wanted to drag the ground with it, this handsome thing, honey color of hair, eye of gold, grinning a slow grin at Newell and looking him into the eye, deep down into the base of the pupil like somebody about to go for the high dive. She had seen it before, she had seen this coming.

She goes to clean. She bows her head to do it. To look at a toilet to bow the head to kneel on the knees and scrub, the stiff white bristles of the toilet brush, the yellow stain that never goes away.

She went upstairs to pull the trash. The city smelled half of rot in the night, in the warm wet air. Rain smell. She stood on the back gallery and leaned over, listened. The sound of a jet airplane. The low calling of its engine the sweetest line of white noise. She would rise up there and fly one day. Into the starry night, oh yes indeed. With
the smell of that man in her nostrils, the one whose scent was still there, honey sweetness, the man who was now leaning over the counter after Newell, poised for the dive, suspended in midair.

Later she was stumbling home with no memory of the bus from Canal Street or the ride to Bunny Friendly Park. She held her wig onto her head with her hand as if Clarence Dodd were trying to escape. Out of her mouth like her spirit rushing, out he would come flying like the friendly ghost, and she would no longer have to be drunk to see him. She would be face to face, she would have her penis in her hand and she would be face to face with him. The sadness of it, that she had married him long ago and he was inside her and only came out when he was drunk, when he could bear to comb his hair. She saw herself in front of the mirror, not now, not tonight after she stumbled into the apartment into the shadows, but years ago, the first time she dabbed color across her lips, the first time he stroked out eyelashes long and curved from a tube, the first girl he made of himself, with a wig as black as a mousketeer's ears. A girl in a tight sweater with pointed cone tits. Long ago.

He stood there in front of the mirror. He was himself. He took off the dress. He took off the yellowed slip, the satin bra, the girdle, the garters, the support hose, the rest. What he had made of himself looked back at him, the flaps of skin that might have been something else, the tiny penis that might have been removed. He was alone in the house, and he looked at himself.

Catching a whiff of the same scent again, trying to find how it had got in his house, the smell of the beau, Newell's new beau, the one from tonight, the sight of him so sweet it had made Miss Sophia vanish altogether, for now. Clarence stood in front of the mirror for a long time. He was sober, he was himself. Here he was again.

Leigh had asked Mark for the merest cut. A trifle. She had draped herself on the settee and opened her robe. The skin at the top of her breasts beginning to crease in that powdery way, white as milk. Such a fine skin. “Just do touch it to the skin.” Her breath moving her so the blue veins lifted and subsided, she added, “You have a delicate touch, it's in the fingertips.” She pulled the robe below her shoulders. She and Mark looked into each other's eyes now, breathing together.

Through the open door, in the dim bedroom beyond, Jack coughed, one deep sound, his shadow moving on the wall. Mark lay the blade onto Leigh's skin, hardly touching her, drawing the tipmost edge of the razor over the
fine white creases, Leigh's breathing changing and the insides of her thighs shivering. He could see the motion where her robe had come open. Her breath caught and a flush rose through her and she smiled in a glimmering that became for an instant some other expression. She was rolling her eyes back in her head. Red blood trickled in a line down her breast. “That's good,” she said, pulling the robe onto her shoulders again, “I knew you could do it,” but when she stood her eyes slid past him to the open door where Jack's shadow had stopped on the wall, waiting. “This is so nice of you.” Standing, with a nod of the head, one only, she stepped past him. Currents of air, everything, including the light she shed, smelled of her.

She paused at the open door, the robe gliding off her shoulders. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. Mark listened for a while. He laid the razor in the marble bowl, a drop of red pooling at the blade tip.

He was supposed to go away now. Not supposed to open the door and go inside himself. Leigh had told him so.

When he headed for the streets, he was looking for nothing. Out the courtyard and down the long, dark passageway to Governor Nicholls, opening the wooden door and closing it, he headed into a night with a smell of rain. He could feel the edge of the trip, now. He liked these first moments of chemical sensation, the taste of metal in the back of his throat. The feeling that his stomach was rising onto his ribs. Mark Cascade, he thought. No. Mark Chase. Or Chace. Mark Stone. Mark Rampart. Like the
street, like the sign, the word he liked in his head, and every sound rushing at him in full doppler, a feeling of something in motion passing and receding, gone, so precise, every sound passing, the world.

He felt as if he could not get his breath, there was something constricting his ribs, but he did manage to take a breath, easily; the feeling stayed that he would strangle but he kept breathing, and walking, and his head felt as if it were becoming detached from his body.

He wandered for a while, went into the Golden Lantern and sat with the mellow crowd, men looking at him, while he wished he could fade a bit for the night. But in the gay bars he had become a famous blond of the season. When he thought he had the drug under control, he went into Travis's, walked to the movie house on Decatur Street, but too many people had crowded there already. He headed back to Mac's place. The guy who worked there at night was too cute.

He had been upstairs at Mac's earlier that day, with Jack. Now the store was more crowded. At the cash register the cute man, in a dog collar, gave Mark some quarters from the cash register. Mark tried to watch a movie, but he was seeing something else in front of his eyes in the booth, he started to strangle, the room was spinning. Somebody was at the door, some man coming into the booth. Mark took a deep long breath and hissed past the guy, as if Mark were full of air under compression. He stopped when he saw the dog collar again, the night cashier, and stood at the counter in the harsh light,
pretending to look at things, near the dark-haired farm boy, somebody named Newell in a studded leather collar that matched Newell's hair and made his skin look white as the top of Leigh's breasts.

Mark was not even thinking about what he had done with Leigh, about what Leigh had asked him to do, about what any of that meant.

He was talking to Newell about Leigh, for some reason. He already liked Newell, as if the guy was some puppy in a box on a street, wanted to pet him and smooth down his fur. He was telling Newell his family was descended from the king of Comus. Not the first one, who was a Jew. He couldn't say which king of Comus, you were never supposed to reveal a secret like that. But not the first one.

Here was a fellow who did not know what Comus was, and laughing, too, and Mark had the feeling other things had been happening, that this short conversation had actually taken a very long time, and that everybody in the room knew that he, Mark, had taken a drug, was under the influence of something, was fucked up. He was looking down into the counter and what looked up at him almost winking was a plastic vagina with hair. A voice whispered in his ear, “Are you all right?”

It was the sweetest voice. Echoes and the tingle of peppermint gum breath and all this multiplied and the voice distorted, bouncing.

“I'm fucked up,” Mark said. “Take me home.”

“I can't go home right now.”

Mark sagged toward the counter and stared deeply into the artificial pubic hair. He stood there for a long time mesmerized, and before he knew it Newell was leading him out of the store and the lights were turned off. He had been standing in front of a woman in a wig. Or maybe a man in a wig and a dress. Standing in front of this woman, who was sniffing him as if he gave off a scent. Newell came along exactly then, led Mark out of the bookstore, and Mark realized some time had passed; Newell still wearing the dog collar and a light, long-sleeved shirt. The night had a touch of chill.

“What are you fucked up on?” Newell asked. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I'll be fine.”

“My apartment is not too far,” Newell said. “I have some instant coffee.”

Mark laughed. Newell gave him a puzzled look and he headed down the banquette. Mark's hand slipped between the collar and the throat and tightened and Newell coughed and shoved Mark backward and Mark laughed and Newell pulled him out of the boxwood in front of somebody's house and Newell was red in the face and said, “What do you think you're trying to do?”

“I'm trying to kill you. We should go to your house.”

“That's where I was taking you, you asshole. Did you know you were choking me?”

“I can't breathe.”

“Yes you can.”

“I'm fucked up.”

Mark wanted to go. He reached for the collar again. “I won't choke you this time.”

His hand, however, was doing it already, and Newell made a sound and it shattered all around Mark, the sound splintered and broke and echoed and something huge, a fist in Mark's gut sudden and hard, all the air blew out, Newell slammed Mark, the wall came up hard at his back and he was bursting, wondering what to do, he could not seem to remember how to breathe.