Boulevard (10 page)

Near evening one of the girls, Starla, came down to mind the store. Mac still had to hire somebody for the night shift. Newell offered to stay, but Mac said Newell should go home and come back the next day at the same time, to continue his training. Newell left the store oddly disappointed that he could not stay all night, till closing time. But he picked his way home through the bright, noisy blocks of the upper Quarter, tourists emerging from their hotels for the night, and he had a sudden certainty that everything was going to be all right.

At home, when he was walking into the loggia from the passageway he heard voices and paused, concealed by one of the arches, seeing Miss Kimbro in the courtyard with somebody, embracing a girl who turned out, when
he could see her, to be the girl who worked in the junk store. Standing in the shadows of the balcony of the slave quarters, slatted shadows across their faces, the young girl with a mocking look on her face, a low-pitched laugh as she pulled away. Miss Kimbro let the girl go as far as arms could reach, then called, “Millie,” quietly, hurtled forward toward this Millie again, collided with her, and pulled her close, and the girl laughed—a ripple of pleasure, that sound, and she leaned toward her with tantalizing slowness, kissed the woman on the lips, a kiss that melted across both their faces, and Miss Kimbro drew the girl back into the shadows, never aware that anyone had seen her, though Newell stood breathless till they were gone.

He followed along the loggia, crossed the courtyard in the shadows and stood where he could see into the room where they were standing. He felt no compunction in spying, he simply watched as she stood the girl against the wall, slowly stroked her hair with long, curved fingers, kissed her face on all sides, but slowly, with careful precision, as though she were reading invisible signs to learn where she should place her lips, and the girl gone rapt and sightless at the pleasure. Standing in the light of a torchère beyond a casement door, half open. Miss Kimbro kept them there for a long time; she was clearly the one in control, whispering in the girl's ear, touching the underside of her throat with the tips of her nails. Newell watched till Louise closed the door.

Upstairs in his room he opened the windows and let
fresh air enter, trying to get calm, but the memory of Louise and the girl stirred him up, no matter that he tried to think of something else. No matter that it disturbed him that two women together like that could excite him. The force that drew them together, the compulsion toward each other that draped over them like a mantle, taking them over. Louise and the girl who worked for her. Now he knew a secret. For everything about the scene had the sheen of something to be concealed.

But when he was leaving to make a trip to the Verti Mart for a
Times-Picayune
, he found Miss Kimbro waiting for him, or so it seemed to him, standing in the loggia near the stairs. When she saw Newell she beckoned to him, and when he was close said, “Well, why don't you come inside and we can have a drink,” as if that were something special. But he followed her inside the same rooms where she had been fooling around with the girl earlier, a nice sitting room with handsome old furniture, including a low wooden table with curvy legs, where she had set up a silver tray and a bottle of bourbon with a black label.

“What do you drink?”

“Well, to tell the truth, I drink mostly beer. But I like vodka, too.” He wanted to sound adult.

He settled on a beer, and she brought it and poured herself a bourbon in a plain small glass. She had a nervous way of handling things, of looking around the room, and he wondered why she had brought him here, whether maybe the room had become too quiet now that the girl
was gone. Miss Kimbro had hardly been more than cordial to Newell before, so it was hard for him to figure why she would invite him inside for a beer. But he sipped it anyway and ate the potato chips with the sour-cream-and-onion fur on them, and by now he was accustomed to the flavor of beer and quickly finished his first one.

She brought him another one and sat down. She was wearing a long robe that tied at the waist, a silky fabric, emerald green, a delicate brocade running through it. When she sat, she sipped the whiskey with such intensity Newell was sure she hardly knew he was there at all.

“I just got off work,” Newell said.

“Are you still being a bus boy?”

“Oh, no ma'am. I quit that job. Now I'm a cashier at a bookstore.”

“Which one?”

He had never asked, and had never seen a sign, so he shrugged. “I don't even know the name of it. It's on St. Ann near North Rampart.”

She blinked. “Why, I know where that is. That's an adult bookstore.”

“Yes ma'am, it is. And there is stuff in that store you would not believe.”

“I suppose there would be.” She sipped her whiskey and lifted a kerchief to her lips. “Well, I suppose it's better than the restaurant.”

“Oh, yes ma'am. It's clean. And the people are all nice. I work the cash register and make change.” He found
himself watching her with tremendous enthusiasm. He liked her odd face with its sharp lines, and he sipped the beer, which had warmed some. “It's almost like an office job. My grandma wanted me to get an office job.”

“Well, this is nearly like that,” she agreed, though she was staring distractedly at something on the tip of her shoe.

“So now I can call her and tell her I have an office job, and she won't worry so much.”

“Where does your grandmother live?”

“Pastel, Alabama. Near Pocatawny. I gave you the address, remember?”

“My husband had people up that way,” she nodded. “Pretty country.”

“You can't beat it for looks,” Newell agreed.

“You grew up with your grandmother?”

“Yes ma'am,” he answered, but he decided not to offer anything else. She watched him. Finally he asked, “You had a husband?” This surprised him, after seeing her with the girl.

“Oh yes. But he died.”

They sat there sipping their drinks and refrained from any more questions. Miss Kimbro chewed the inside of her lip, the loose, softly wrinkled skin sliding up and down her throat. “Well,” she remarked, “since you are so well employed, I hope you'll be staying in your apartment.”

“Oh, yes ma'am. I like it up there very much.”

“You can get you a window fan for when it's hot. I won't charge for the electricity.”

“Yes ma'am, that's a good idea.”

“You might even get you a television,” she added.

But he could tell by the way she was watching him that she was thinking about something else. She had gone suddenly very far away. When she returned, she faced him and smiled. “You should be careful, working at that bookstore.”

“I think it's safe,” Newell said, “I think it's all right.”

After a moment she added, deciding each word, “You have to be careful how you live, here.”

When she began to clear away the glasses, he helped her a bit and said good-bye, decided to forget buying a newspaper, went upstairs and wondered what Louise had meant.

For the next few days, with the sweltering summer settling onto the city, he went to work early and left late. He learned about the bookstore and especially relished Mac's ominous hints about the mysterious barge that brought the magazines downriver from St. Louis and Chicago, its secret connections to crime, to a network of criminals spread throughout New Orleans. “There's people in this city would take one look at you and kill you and not think twice about it. You think I'm playing?” An image of a life full of nebulous danger. Now and then Newell thought about Louise Kimbro and the alcohol she had shared with him, and he wondered if this was what she had meant, he had to be careful how he lived; but he soon forgot when Mac presented the possibility of something else.

Mornings, while the traffic in the store was slow,
Newell drank coffee with Mac and stood in the cloud of his cigarette smoke. Afternoons, Mac went upstairs to the girls, to do some business in his office upstairs, he said, and Newell tended the store by himself. The phone rang sometimes, and he answered it, mostly wrong numbers or people who breathed heavily or mumbled, asking about some magazine or other; occasionally a message for Mac. He dusted the shelves of dildoes and plastic vaginas with fake hair and the bottles of Rush, and he wondered what was the good of such a small bottle when it cost so much money, almost four dollars.

Often he was drawn to the racks of magazines, especially the ones that had only men on the covers, and he arranged them and rearranged them until the blend of faces and thighs and elbows seemed to him more harmonious, as if in grouping these hairy and pale, flabby and firm asses side by side, he were writing sentences in some picture language. He grouped the Stallion Studios magazines near the Eagle Studios magazines, at first through instinct, afterward noticing that the beefy men on the Stallion covers complemented the more adventurous covers of the Eagle magazines, on which the boys were piled on top of each other in poses that could not be mistaken for sports practice. The rest of the magazines were a blur of titles to him at first,
More Than Enough, Two Hands Full, Take Ten, Truck Stop, Marine Daddy, Three in a Barn, The House Painter, Navy Buddies, Beefcake, Muscle Love, Stag
, and their covers appealed to him when the color was good, the skin looking like skin, the pimples
none too prominent. His discrimination, at first, amounted to nothing more than a feeling about each image that he saw, each magazine on the rack, each postcard of some oily-haired blond from the fifties posing naked with his thigh thrust forward to hide his penis, a feeling that these images were overpowering him in some way, were speaking to him.

He had started work on a Tuesday night and finished out that week on the day shift. Mac paid him at the end of his shift on Saturday, the end of his first week, Mac counting cash into Newell's hand, one hundred sixty dollars. Newell found himself surprised by the amount and by the fact that he was paid in cash. He could pay his rent and still have some left over to live on. Next week he would be paid one hundred sixty dollars again, and he wouldn't have to pay rent then, he would have all the money for himself. He gaped at the stack of bills and stood there tingling, then folded the money and slipped it into his pocket as if he always carried that kind of money. He grinned at Mac, who said, “You're doing a good job. The cash register hadn't been short once all week.”

“I like working here,” Newell said, and he truly did, from the bottom of his heart, but speaking the sentiment aloud disturbed him so he got busy dusting the dildoes, the big inflatable woman with the holes in all the right places that had taken Newell a good morning and a bicycle pump to blow up, and all the other toys that were displayed in the locked case beside the door.

Mac said, “You get Sunday and Monday off. People
don't like it if you sell smut on a Sunday, so we close. And Monday you get off.”

“Really?” Newell asked, as though this had never occurred to him, and Mac nodded.

Mac watched him for a while longer, without speaking, and Newell continued to work with that same cheerful air, as Mac marveled, though he himself would not have used the word; he marveled at the nonchalance with which Newell worked among the plastic cocks and leather harnesses and studded masks, as though this were some five-and-ten-cent store. Mac had been struck by this thought for most of the week while Newell trained on the cash register or answered the phone or stuck price labels onto the plastic covers of the magazines. Finally Mac said, “I told you to go home, now,” and Newell grinned, stored away his dust cloths, and left the store just as the phone rang, Marlene from upstairs to tell Mac she was bringing down his dinner.

That night, Newell bought cologne at a drugstore on Canal Street, a fragrance called English Leather, which the cashier allowed him to sample at the counter; he also bought a new comb, and a conditioner for his hair, even though he did not know what a conditioner was supposed to do, and he bought a separate kind of soap for washing his face, and he priced a gold chain at a counter that also had watches and a few rings, but he would have to wait to spend that much money, nearly fifty dollars. But he could see himself with the gold chain around his neck, and he realized as he pictured himself that this gold
chain would make him more similar to the other people he had seen in the bars. The cashier bagged his cologne and comb and toiletries, a word that he savored, having read it over the section of the drugstore where he found the soap, and Newell took the bag and his change and felt the bulge of money in his pocket and hurried home.

He got the rest of his money from upstairs and paid the next month's rent that very moment, wanting to secure his room before he spent more money on anything else. He found Louise in the courtyard with a cat in her arms, stroking it down the spine and along the tail, the cat blinking in satisfaction. Someone at the back of the courtyard was singing, a young girl's voice; and Louise smiled serenely as if no sound on earth could please her more. She stood there as though she had been waiting for Newell, and she accepted the rent money when he counted it into her hand, and slid it into the pocket of her skirt. “Thank you,” she said, as if she had been expecting him to come in at that moment and pay the rent, even though she could hardly have known he would do so; and he dipped his head to her, and smiled, and the voice from the back of the courtyard called, “Louise?” and she turned and walked away, stooping just a bit, letting the cat glide out of her arms to the pavement.

Upstairs, Newell heated a can of soup on the hot plate and ate it with a slice of bread. He had the money to eat out if he wanted, but he decided to spend it in the bars instead. Before leaving he spread a film of cologne behind his ears and along his wrists, the way he had seen his
grandmother do before going to the Moose Lodge dances, and he smelled his fingers and checked his hair in the mirror. He wished he had new clothes and planned, briefly, to buy clothes next week, when he got paid again, at least a new shirt or new jeans.