Acts of God (7 page)

“I'd like to have a dad,” he said, getting serious. “And I'd like to have a little brother as fine as Jesse. And I don't care where I live. Live anyplace you want as long as it's in Fayetteville.”

They stood in a circle for a moment, no one knowing what to do next and then they moved into the kitchen and Grady started eating cookies and Daniel got out ice cream and started making chocolate milkshakes and Carly kept saying I have to comb my hair. Finally she went into her bedroom and put on a robe and combed her hair and Daniel poured the milkshakes into the glasses and handed one to Grady and they started talking about the ball game and the tight spot in the fourth quarter when Bentonville had the ball on the Fayetteville fourteen-yard line and Waylon intercepted a pass and Jesse kicked his tenth successful field goal of the season from the nineteen-yard line twenty feet from the center of the field and it made an arc and dropped behind the goal posts. “You should have seen it from the field,” Daniel said. “It was like an angel was holding it. I wish he was with us now. It's not right he's not here for this.”

“I told him I was going to ask you all,” Grady said. “Before too long I'll get him for longer and more often. I've got a lawyer working on it. We're going to make it real expensive for his mother to be so mean. She stands in her driveway looking at her watch when I take him back on Sundays. I can't be a minute late. But if she wants to change my days she just does it and sends me word.”

“You'll get him more,” Daniel said. “I bet you will. He had a good time with us last weekend. He told me about the stuff she does to keep him from seeing you. He's not going to put up with that forever.”

“What are you all talking about?” Carly asked. She had come back into the kitchen wearing a blue wool bathrobe and with her hair combed and her makeup fixed. “What's going on?”

“We're talking about Jesse,” Daniel said. “You want a milkshake, Momma? I can make you one.”

“I want to see my engagement ring again,” she said to Grady. “You put it back in your pocket. Give it here.”

Grady took the box out of his pocket and stood up and handed it to her. “You don't have to keep it if you don't like it,” he said. “Mr. Mozer said you can trade it for anything you wanted.”

Carly took the ring out of the box and put it on her finger and sat down at the table and looked at her son. “I do want a chocolate milkshake,” she said. “And I want you to make it for me.”

IN NEW ORLEANS,
Louisiana, a beautiful little ten-year-old girl got up from her prayers and climbed into her bed in the trailer she and her mother and her grandmother were using for a house. She had been praying the same prayers she had prayed each night for a month. She thanked God for all his blessings, for the new trailer and for cleaning up Lusher School and getting it started again. She prayed for her mother to get in a better mood and she prayed for her best friend, Sallie, and she said a special prayer for the woman with curly hair who had come down from the helicopter in the little chair and pulled her up into the seat beside her and strapped her in and told her not to be afraid. “Get her something nice that she really wants,” Celia asked God. “Get her a new car or a new boyfriend or some pretty clothes or anything she needs. She's from Arkansas, but you know which one she is. She's the one who pulled Mother and Grandmother and me off the roof in the flood. I don't think you made the flood. I think you didn't know the canal barriers were going to break. Anyway, good night now, God. Amen.”

S
o Dean Reyes and I had been in the French Quarter for five days and we weren't ready to leave. We work for a living and this was our vacation. Well, it was also a paramedics convention and our expenses were being paid by the hospital and the rest was tax deductible; still it was a vacation. We're paramedics in Los Angeles, a city so beset by AIDS and Hepatitis C and gunfire and every problem you can think of from an emergency worker's point of view that our hospital demands its workers take vacations. Anxiety becomes your middle name when you do the work we do.

What can I say to justify the decisions we made from the twenty-fifth of August 2005 until we got home on the sixteenth of September? We're only human. As Douglas Adams wrote, “In other words, carbon-based, bipedal life forms descended from apes.” Only apes would have run from a storm, not decided to ride it out in the oldest apartment building in the United States.

Dean and I live together, but we are just friends, not committed to anything as foolish as monogamy. We're proud of each other and we like the way we look and we like to be together and we'd been looking forward to our New Orleans trip for months. We had three weeks of hard-earned vacation saved and we weren't in the mood to have it cut short by a hurricane. We had wardrobes, connections, cash, and we weren't finished in New Orleans yet. We were shopping for antiques to tone down Dean's minimalist tendencies. We have a town house in the canyon and we've been redoing it all year.

We had driven to New Orleans so we could bring things home. We rented a red 2006 GMC Envoy and drove through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and on down to New Orleans, “The City that Care Forgot.” Let the good times roll, we had decided. We're ready.

So we weren't finished having fun yet and we didn't evacuate. So kill me. Mea culpa. Dean's an insomniac. You can talk him into anything if you don't wake him up in the morning on his time off.

WE DIDN'T EVACUATE
because WE DIDN'T WANT TO. Dean was sleeping until noon every day and I was power flirting with a tall, good-looking native New Orleanian, and besides it's the nature of our jobs to run toward natural disasters and not give in to fear.

We'd been having the best, best time and we'd both been super careful. Well, Dean was careful and I wasn't doing anything, as usual. I wasn't sticking my thing into any strange places without blood tests first when there was plenty of fun to be had power flirting, shopping, sashaying down Bourbon and Royal Streets, eating oysters Rockefeller and pompano meunière and drinking white German wines and French reds.

We'd gone to Antoine's twice in two days, once for lunch, once for dinner. And to Galatoire's three times. And to every other good restaurant in town. We found an oyster place called Casamento's that I'll put up against any in the world.

I was power flirting with a man named Charles Foret, who was a bit player in
The Runaway Jury,
besides being the only living male heir to an old New Orleans coffee fortune.

Then Charles invited us to stay with him for the hurricane and we did. “The Pontalba is the oldest apartment building in the United States,” he told us. “Stay with me until it goes by. It will turn east. They always do.”

We had barely shown our faces at the paramedical convention. Just went by the first day and got our credentials and listened to half of a boring speech about epidemiology and left our phone number at the hotel with a woman who was supposed to be our group commander.

Places we shopped that may never open again include A Gallery for Fine Photography, Harbison and Hunt Antiques of Royal Street, Boots and Belts, Your Grannie's Chairs, and Britannia Bed and Bath. God forbid I should ever think about the walnut and blue velvet chair that was in the back of the GMC when it was hotwired and stolen. The sales slip was in the glove compartment, Dean's idea. I will have the canceled check for the insurance but who knows how that will turn out.

STANDING IN LINE
outside of Galatoire's is where I first met Charles Foret. Like he's the most elegant man I've ever seen this side of Durham, North Carolina. Tall, tall, tall and dressed in an unlined white summer suit with a pale blue tie he had made to match one described in a William Faulkner novel. “It's a copy of the tie V. K. Ratliff was given by the Russian woman after he may or may not have made love to her in the back of her shop in New York City. It's my lucky tie. I knew if I wore it today something good would happen.”

That's one thing I'll always remember about Charles. The other thing was after the hurricane, when we were alone on the levee watching a ship come down the river and he told me, “. . . Only one ship is seeking us. A black-sailed unfamiliar. In its wake, no billows breed and break . . . Philip Larkin . . .”

Charles has a PhD in English literature from the University of Virginia and has published poetry all over the world. Plus, he plays piano and paints and he thinks the world is good and for some reason he likes me. Plus he has a law degree.

“Standing in line at eleven forty-five in the morning is patently absurd” is the first thing he said to me. We were behind him in the line to Galatoire's, a restaurant that does not take reservations for anyone except the president of the United States. “I swear I won't do it anymore but here I am. Everyone comes here on Friday. I'm Charles Foret.” He extended his hand and I took it. It was powerful and soft with long fingers and he let the handshake linger, didn't just stick out his hand and pull it right back.

“We're from Los Angeles,” I said. “I'm David Haver. This is Dean Reyes. We came for the paramedical convention but we're playing hooky. Why won't they take reservations here?”

“A new way to be snotty in the world's snottiest town, with the possible exception of Charleston, South Carolina.”

“I've never been in South Carolina. My parents are Lutherans from Minnesota. They don't take children to visit the South.”

“I was in Charleston once,” Dean puts in. “I liked it very much. Those squares are so beautiful. I really liked them.”

A white-coated black man with beautiful gray and black hair came out the door and ushered Charles into the restaurant. He was followed by a younger waiter who took Dean and me around crowded tables and to the back where I could just make out the back of Charles bending over a table to kiss an older woman on the forehead.

“Was that an apparition?” I asked.

“I imagine so,” Dean answered. “What do you want to drink?”

IT WAS NOT
my imagination that made me think Charles was looking at me the whole time he was in the restaurant, and certainly not my imagination that saw and returned a long, wonderful smile right before he went out the door. Dean and I were deep into trout almandine and deep fried potatoes and a Piesporter Goldtröpfchen but I still caught that smile.

ON SATURDAY CHARLES
was in line again at Casamento's, the oyster place I told you about earlier. This line was even longer as the mayor was calling for evacuations and half the restaurants in town were already closed. Casamento's was serving until two.

“Hello, again,” Charles said. He was with an older man he introduced as his cousin.

“Hello, indeed,” I answered.

“Has your visit been good?”

“Except for this hurricane business. Do we really have to leave?”

“I'm going to my house in Mandeville,” the cousin said. “I never stay for these things. If the electricity goes off it's a mess in this heat. You should leave this afternoon if you're leaving.”

“I never leave,” Charles said. “I live in the Pontalba on Jackson Square. It's right inside the tallest levee on the river. It's completely safe.”

“Don't be a fool,” the older man said. “I can't believe you'd take that chance.” They argued all the way into the restaurant and to their table. Casamento's is walled with blue and white Italian tiles and it isn't that big. I could hear the cousin's voice until we were seated two tables away from them. All the while Charles was looking at me with his eyebrows raised in the most seductive and beautiful way. Dean was laughing at me. Adventure, imagination, exaltation, storm: we bipedal, carbon-based life forms know a good thing when we see it, and strangely enough I had no desire to copulate with the man. I wanted to talk to him for days and days and days.

I got to, it turned out, but not about literature and music and painting and plays or the state of the world or politics and history.

Waiters and waitresses were going by carrying trays of the most divine fried oysters and softshell crabs and oysters on the half shell, and people all around us were mixing ketchup with horseradish and squeezing lemons and drinking iced tea and digging in. A Force Five hurricane was bearing down upon the city but Casamento's was open until two and carbon-based life forms must be fed.

We were still eating seafood gumbo and buttered French bread when Charles came over to our table and invited us again. “I'm going to ride it out,” he said. “It's too late to get on the highways. Please come and stay with me. I have enough provisions for twenty people. I hate to be alone with all this happening. We might be able to help other people when it's over. I worked in a hospital when I was young. I know how to do all sorts of things that might come in handy.”

“We should,” I said, and looked at Dean to see what he was thinking.

“Then we will,” he said. “How do we get to your place?”

Charles drew us a map on the place mat and wrote down numbers and the address. “I'm going home as soon as I get Fanning on his way to Mandeville. Come as soon as you can.”

SO AT THREE
that afternoon Dean and I packed a few things in a small bag, called the convention center and left word of where we could be reached, put messages on all our phones with Charles's apartment telephone number, picked up our bag and walked out of the Royal Sonesta and down Royal Street past shops being boarded up and on down to Jackson Square, which was full of artists packing up their easels into old vans and starting to leave the city.

“I'm exhilarated,” Dean said. “Haven't felt that in a while.”

“This could be a mistake,” I answered. “But thanks for letting me have this. I've been too good for too long. Listen, are we going to call our parents?”

“I'll call my brother in Ohio and tell him to call mine. I am not getting into this with my mother.”

“I left a message last night when I knew they were already asleep. That's it for me. I told them we were going up to Mississippi. I always lie to them. I never lie to anyone in the world but my parents.”

“Is that it?” Dean asked. We had come to a tall brick building across from Jackson Square that really is the oldest apartment building in the United States. It is an amazing structure, ancient, almost Roman, built of handmade brick and stone, very solid and dug in. It is across the street from the Café du Monde where they make the famous New Orleans beignets and is behind a levee as high as its second floor. We went in through wide wooden doors and up two flights of stairs to Charles's apartment. He met us at the door and giggled with delight.

“Ah, company,” he said. “I hate to be alone.”

The apartment was floored with white polished oak. In the center of the living room was the most expensive black leather sofa I've ever seen in my life and two black Mies van der Rohe chairs and a marble table. So minimalist even Dean wouldn't find a thing to remove. There were black-and-white photographs by Ansel Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Karsh, Yavno, Edward Steichen, Clarence White, and Clarence Laughlin.

“It's a gallery,” Dean declared. “My God, this is the best museum in town.”

“My uncle Angus started it. I impoverished myself for the rest. Do you know Clarence Laughlin's work? He lived in an apartment across from here.”

We toured the apartment and Dean was given the largest guest room and I was given one that shares a bath with Charles.

WE HAD BARELY
settled in and opened wine when the doorbell rang and Charles' ex-mother-in-law comes in carrying a suitcase and a briefcase full of papers.

“Janet,” he said. “This is a surprise. Why didn't you leave with Elizabeth?”

“I survived the cold war. I suppose I can make it through a television hurricane crisis. I tried to call but you didn't answer.”

“Well, well, sorry.”

“The police made me leave the house. They forced me to leave.”

“Where is Elizabeth?”

“Gone to Baton Rouge. I wouldn't go.” So she settles down on a sofa, not even acknowledging my or Dean's presence in the room.

“Mother Janet worked for MI-5 during the cold war,” Charles said. “She did research in their legal department.”

“I'll go to my room then,” she announces and marches out to the room Dean had been given and lies down on the bed and starts watching news on the television set.

“Well,” Charles said. “This is unexpected.”

“Is she going to stay?” Dean asks.

“I'm afraid so. My divorce isn't final although we've been separated for two years. I can't be rude to Mother Janet. She is taciturn because she worked for thirty years with spies. I think we're stuck with her.”

“Well, we can't make her leave unless we all do,” Dean said. “The mayor is calling for mandatory evacuations as of an hour ago, whatever that means.”

“We're safe here,” Charles said. “We really are. Do either of you play chess?”

“I play,” Dean answered, and they both laughed and got out the chess set and started a game.

AFTER A WHILE
I went to the door of Janet's room and asked if I could remove our suitcase and she said all right and I picked it up and carried it out the door.

“What is she doing in there?” Charles asked.