Madeleine's Ghost (15 page)

“We had fun for a while. Dothan played husband and I played wife, and we smoked pot and ordered out fried chicken and pizza every night and went to the bars and made love afterward. But I was too young for it, really. I missed my family and my friends at school. So one Saturday, when Dothan was out scoring some weed, I called Mama, and she cried and cried. She loved me, she said, she missed me. She wanted me to come home. Then Papa got on the phone, too, and he cried. It really shook me up, hearing Papa cry. It was terrible. I made a deal with him right then and there. ‘Let me keep going out with Dothan,' I said, ‘don't get him in trouble, and I will come home and go back to school.' They agreed. They just wanted me home.

“The next day Dothan packed up my things and drove me back to New Orleans. He was scared, but Papa kept his word and called the police and squared things somehow so Dothan wouldn't get in trouble. Dothan and I have been together ever since, going on ten years now. I mean, we've had our ups and downs. Didn't even speak to each other for almost a year once. I went on a few dates, even brought a few of them around to the house, but they were nothing compared to Dothan, and when we got together again, it was great. And it's been great up till recently. Till he moved down from Mamou and opened up his bar. And that's pretty much the whole story. The end.”

Antoinette was quiet for a few minutes afterward, smoking her cigarette and blowing the smoke through her nose. The rain picked up outside, and wind rattled the shutters. She got up and closed the window, pulled on her robe, and turned to look at me through narrow eyes.

“Let's go eat some étouffée,” she said.

I got up and put on her spare terry-cloth robe, and we went into the
living room and she brought out the étouffée and the salad. The étouffée was dried out from sitting on the stove all that time, and the rice was sticky; but the salad was good, and the wine was fine. It was a silent meal. The candles burned low. Side two of the jazz record kept repeating itself. At last, during the salad, Antoinette looked up at me.

“O.K.,” she said. “What else? There's something else.”

I looked down at my plate. “What is he like?” I said.

“You're jealous?”

“No. A little.”

She took a sip of her wine and sighed. “He's wild. He just does whatever the hell he wants, and the rest of the world be damned. You've got to realize I grew up with him. I did everything with him. Before Dothan, I was a little girl. He does a lot of drugs, more lately, so I've done a lot of those, too, because for a while there we did everything together. I don't really see them as bad, especially pot, as long as it's recreational and doesn't take over your life.”

“Is he dangerous? Molesworth says he's dangerous.”

“I suppose he can be mean. He's never been mean to me. He's never hit me. Lord knows, I've hit him a hundred times. Gave him a black eye once after I heard through the grapevine he went off with some bimbo in Shreveport. I love him. I'll always love him. It's just that …” Her voice trailed off.

“What?”

“He's the same. He's always the same. I don't think he'll ever grow up. He'll just stay the same hell-raising good old boy forever. I started out younger than him, and he knew everything. Then I caught up with him, and for a year or two we had the best time. But now I'm older than he is. I've been to college, more or less—that is, I've got a year or so left at Dominican. I know things he doesn't know, and I see now that a lot of the things he does are just plain stupid. We're becoming different people now. He'll never change. I think change is a good thing. He doesn't. And I'd like to go out with someone else for a while.”

She leveled her pale eyes at me, and I saw that she meant what she said, and I felt a
twinge
in my heart for this man who loved her and had
loved her from the beginning. Men can be like that, constant and blind, their women changing in the dark hours when they are not looking, just when they think everything is safe. Mutating, growing new limbs, turning away, becoming utterly unrecognizable in the space of two weeks, a day, an hour. I might not be the one she'd settle on in the end, but she was through with Dothan, that was plain to see.

Antoinette put her wineglass down, leaned across the table, and took hold of my hand.

“Now that I've told you all this,” she said, “I want you to forget it. I want you to make love to me and keep making love to me for the next three months. And when Dothan gets back, I want to be as far away from him as possible. I want to be gone. O.K.?”

I
started to say something, but Antoinette said, “Shh!” and put her lips over mine and took my hand, and we went into the bedroom and got back into the high four-poster bed, where we stayed for the next three days. Making love and talking softly in the soft light as rain swept across the low neighborhoods and the brown river frothed and boiled up the sides of the levees and sandbags broke in the lower delta and water spread across the black, rich earth of cotton fields beneath the wild yellow hurricane sky of the season.

S
UDDENLY, FROM
the furtive life of motel rooms and French Quarter tourist bars, I entered a world I barely knew existed. The way Antoinette handled her credit card and a comment or two from Molesworth had led me to believe her parents were well off, but in fact, they were better than this. They were filthy rich. According to
Louisiana Magazine
, Antoinette's father, Charles Gaston Rivaudais, was the major shareholder in the Louisiana Gulf Company, and one of the dozen richest men in the state. Her mother, Helene d'Aurevilley Rivaudais, was the last-surviving offspring of a prominent Creole plantation family who had come to the region not
ten years after the Sieur de Bienville caused his surveyors to lay out the streets of a new city at a defensible bend in the river.

Her full name was Antoinette Marie Jeanne d'Aurevilley Rivaudais, a marvelous mouthful. She had four older sisters—Elise, Manon, Claudine, and Jolie. All of them attractive, though none as downright beautiful as Antoinette. Elise, the oldest and most responsible, had married an engineer out of the University of Texas at Austin who now managed the Biloxi branch of her father's firm. They had two girls, a four- and a five-year-old hellion with blue eyes and hair the color of straw.

Manon, the bohemian of the family, met an Irish jazz musician while attending Juilliard in New York and had married him the year before in a quick ceremony at City Hall in Manhattan. Then they moved home to New Orleans for no particular reason and lived in a restored ninteenth-century Creole-style raised cottage on Carrollton Avenue, a wedding present from Papa. The Irish husband drank whiskey professionally, smoked Turkish cigarettes, and occasionally gigged at clubs around town. Manon's specialty was the harp, that damnably bourgeois instrument. She gave recitals twice a year with a quartet that played chamber music in the bandshell in Audubon Park and lived without a qualm of conscience off her trust fund.

Claudine and Jolie were just a year apart, three and four years older than Antoinette. They were the ambitious ones. They had gone to LSU together, both majored in political science, and now lived in Washington, D.C., in a neatly appointed town house on the Hill, not far from the ugly white wedding cake of the Capitol. Claudine worked in some minor administrative capacity for Republican Congressman Robert Essex, who represented the uptown wards of New Orleans and was, coincidentally, a large shareholder in the Louisiana Gulf Company; Jolie worked as a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. They were both part of the contingent of attractive, preppy, hard-drinking Louisianans that enliven our staid capital.

I admired the Rivaudais family. I admired their style and their complacency and the grace with which they went about the world, the grace that comes from belonging to a specific place, from belonging to its
streets and its skies, from knowing you are home. I had the wanderer's appreciation for those things they took for granted: family portraits, tombs in old cemeteries all over the city full of their familiar dead, stories of a hundred years past, ancient photographs, trunks full of musty letters.

For their part, the family didn't seem to like me much. I didn't really fit in. It was a question of attitude. I am ill at ease in company, sarcastic, cynical, sentimental. A northern temperament, Antoinette called it once. A temperament born of gray afternoons and sleety rains and melancholy, though I am a native of Washington, D.C.—technically south of the Mason-Dixon Line—where my father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

But worst of all, to the Rivaudaises' way of thinking, I was an intellectual. They regarded ideas as unnecessary, even dangerous. They were old-fashioned Creole pragmatists, happy with good food, strong drink, nice clothes, beautiful things—the fruits and sweetness of life.

I
N JANUARY
, an icy wind blowing down across Lake Pontchartrain from the north, her parents took Antoinette and me to Commander's Palace for dinner in one of the private rooms there. They wanted to get a closer look at me, confirm the unfavorable opinions formed at our first meeting. Though relieved to find she had given up Dothan, they were suspicious of my motives. How could I tell them I didn't give a damn for their money, that it was only their daughter I wanted? Their daughter unadorned, naked, and asleep in my arms at three o'clock in the morning.

It was an expensive, excellent meal, full of awkward silences and stilted conversation. Antoinette, stiff beside me, looking marvelous in a tight dress of crushed velvet, rarely lifted her eyes from the plate. At last Mama, a big, handsome woman of about sixty, with hair still as black as her daughter's, rose and went off to the powder room. Antoinette flashed me a weak smile and followed demurely, and I was left alone at the table with the big man, Papa himself. He seemed an assured, robust figure in
possession of an amazing mass of white hair and a mustache as thick as a hussar's. But there was a certain tiredness around his eyes and a disappointed droop to his lower lip. He looked like a Confederate general in retirement after the war. Like P. G. T. Beauregard at Contreras House before the White League riots, like Lee at Lexington in 1870. A man who had lived long enough to see his secret certainties confounded, his best hopes dashed by unfortunate circumstance.

He finished his cognac and studied me from beneath his bushy eyebrows as I fidgeted. In the background, the clink of glasses, the hushed murmur common to expensive restaurants everywhere. Our waiter, who had introduced himself as Remi, approached in the uniform of the place—black trousers, a spotless red apron and starched tuxedo shirt and bow tie, his feet encased in a pair of those ridiculous glossy black tux slippers. He carried our check on an ebony tray. Papa waved him away without even looking.

“Not yet, Remi,” he said.

Remi withdrew without a peep. I am always impressed by men who command the respect of waiters and bartenders, by men who know that money means prompt, efficient, and obsequious service.

Then Papa took a cigar sealed in an aluminum tube out of the inside pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the cap, and removed the dark, fragrant log within. He ran it beneath his nose, smiled, clipped the end carefully with a fancy device on his key ring, and lit it off the candle. In a moment the air of our little dining room was heavy with cigar smoke.

“Now you see why they put us in here,” he said. “They know I like a good cigar after a meal, and people these days hate cigar smoke.” This was dissimulation. The private rooms at Commander's Palace were reserved weeks in advance for special guests at a considerable surcharge over the main dining room.

For the next few minutes, absorbed in the cigar, drawing on it, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling, Papa seemed to forget about me. I sat absolutely still, hands in my lap as if awaiting judgment. Finally, when I reached for the last of the wine, he made an exaggerated show of remembering my presence.

“Forgive my manner,” he said. “I've got another one if you'd like to join me.” He pulled a second aluminum tube out of his pocket and pushed it across the table. “They're actually Cuban. Have them imported through Panama with Jamaican labels. Here.”

I shook my head.

He nodded, as if to say he knew as much, then went back to enjoying the cigar. In his houndstooth sports jacket and open-collared white shirt, cigar in mouth, he was the very image of the southern patriarch at his ease. Then he put the cigar in the glass ashtray and leaned forward so abruptly I started.

“Let me ask you something, Ned,” he said, a sudden edge in his voice.

“O.K., Mr. Rivaudais,” I said.

“What is it that you want from us?” It was an accusation.

I felt the back of my neck begin to sweat. For a moment I imagined being dragged outside by thugs from the bayou, my legs broken over the curb. But I can be just as pugnacious as the next guy. I looked down, drumming the tablecloth with my fingertips for dramatic effect. Then I looked up to confront him.

“I'll tell you what I want from you, Mr. Rivaudais,” I said. “Not a damn thing.”

He leaned back, a bit surprised. I wondered how many of his daughters' hapless suitors he had tried this with. I didn't blame him really. The world is full of scoundrels, and he had five attractive daughters and no sons. The poor bastard.

“So you're a student,” he said at last.

“That's right. A graduate student.”

“Studying some kind of history.”

“French history, yes.”

“And what is it you expect to do with that?”

“Become educated,” I said. “And then?”

“Then, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, I will be fit company for myself.”

“Unh-huh.” He jabbed his cigar in my general direction. “Of course, it hasn't occurred to you that I am one of the wealthiest men in this state and that a union with my daughter would allow you to keep yourself company for life without doing much else.”