Now Let's Talk of Graves (5 page)

“That's right.” Maynard grinned, comfortable again with words, terms, definitions.

Yeah, Old Maynard was feeling like a quarterback now, Harry thought. The stud hoss from University of Virginia. Calling the shots. Everybody looking at him. Not knowing they thought he was a fool. “I wouldn't breathe a word. I'd just
do
it.” That's right. Maynard Dupree was a man of
action.
Sheeeeit.

Jimbo and Calvin slapped high-fives, a salute to Maynard Dupree and his way of doing things.

Slick.

Yep, yep, thought Harry. Slick bullshit.

Just about then Chéri made her way back down the bar, finished in the Ladies, a fresh coat of orange lipstick glistening.

“Well, don't you look pretty,” Maynard said. “I sure hope we didn't say anything to offend you, Chéri.”

“You couldn't offend me if you tried, Maynard Dupree.” She smiled, but with something behind it. Harry thought she'd been cogitating on more than lipstick and hair spray during her trip to the Ladies. “But I was just wondering, seeing as how, you being the captain of Comus and all, running things, and that pretty little Zoe Lee getting to be Queen of Comus this year…”

Maynard gasped. Way to go, Chéri. Harry grinned. Got him. The identity of Queen of Comus was a
big
secret, the kind Uptown stiffs took more seriously than death or taxes.

Chéri went right on. “I was just wondering if that's why you were sitting around this bar tying one on like any other N'Awlins trash, if it stuck in your craw that Zoe's being queen…”

“
How
do you know that?” Maynard sputtered.

Chéri didn't even blink. “As I was saying, Zoe Lee's being Comus's queen makes her Miss Hot-Shit Society of N'Awlins this year. I mean, what with you being Comus's captain and seeing as how her daddy Church Lee is not exactly your best friend, it seems to me all you'd had to do was say
no,
blackballed her. But maybe balls
are
the question here. Am I right, Maynard honey?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Maynard snapped.

“Now, wait a min—” Calvin started.

“Never mind, darlin'.” Chéri grinned, picking up her orange fox and flinging it over one shoulder pad like
she
was the linebacker here.

Harry had to give it to her. Hell, if it wasn't his job to get in her way, he'd be glad to see her screw Uncle Tench out of a couple hundred thousand. She wasn't his type, but this past half hour he'd warmed considerably to her.

“Now that we know who's who and what's what, I think I'll just be moseying,” Chéri said, then sashayed on out like she knew the whole room was watching her rear, which it was.

A few minutes later Harry drained his beer, threw some bills on the bar, and slid out. A couple of other men farther down the bar did the same now that the floor show was over.

As he passed behind Jimbo, who didn't even give him a glance, the pipe-handler was muttering, “We could do 'em both. That redhead and the nigger. Two-for-one deal.”

“Throw in Maynard's buddy Church Lee,” Calvin said, “and I bet you got yourself a taker.”

And then they all three laughed. The pipe-handler, the Uptown lawyer, and the barkeep. Booze laughing. Booze talking.
Tough
guys, Harry thought. Jesus.

Four

EARLY THE NEXT afternoon, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, in a big old house on Prytania Street in the Garden District, blue-eyed Zoe Lee was standing in her candy-striped bedroom, staring at her naked self in a full-length mirror.

She didn't like what she was seeing.

Of course, no woman ever does. Breasts too large, too small, cockeyed, too low, too long. Then you could move on to waist, bottom, thighs, knees, calves, upper arms. But why bother? It's always the same song—taught to them by their mothers, their grandmothers, all the way back to Eve, who got it from Adam that she was a little heavy in the keister and ought to try running a few laps around the Garden and laying off the pasta.

Who was Zoe to fight the tide?

Yet her story, like all stories when you look at them up close, was a little different.

Twenty-year-old Zoe Julianna Lee was five feet six inches tall and weighed an even one-twentieth of a ton.

At least that's how she always thought of her one hundred pounds.

“Gotta get the tons off,” she said to herself, pulling her masses of dark curls atop her pretty head while she turned and squinted at a bulge on her backside.

To anyone else it would have been the beginnings of a cute behind.

She reached for the Ex-Lax. Chocolate. Radical. Yummy-yum.

Well, hell, what was a girl to do when she was, like, practically force-fed for an entire debutante season at one breakfast, brunch, luncheon, tea, cocktail party, dinner, supper, a grand total of five hundred disgusting party meals one right after another?

After all, this was New Orleans, where hostesses couldn't show their faces in public, not to mention polite society, if they didn't lay on buffets of oysters and shrimp and crawfish floating in béarnaise, béchamel, beurre blanc, cream, hollandaise, lemon-butter, mushroom, mustard, remoulade, and veloute sauces. And that was for starters.

Just the thought of the food she'd faced since the deb season began made Zoe want to puke, or, as her friend Chloe would say, talk to Ralph on the big white phone.

Zoe stepped into her pink and white bathroom and did that very thing, smartly.

Zoe was very good at praying to the porcelain goddess, or, as her father would say, vomiting.

It was one of her talents that Ma Elise, her great-grandmother, had failed to enumerate when catching Sam Adams up to speed on the family. No, Ma Elise hadn't talked to Sam, who was visiting Ma Elise and her aunt Kitty a couple of blocks away in the house where they lived together on Third Street, about Zoe's daily vomiting.

But, yes, Zoe actually did do a few things other than sleep, try on endless clothes (size three) that she wore to all those parties, and look at herself in the mirror—not that Ma Elise knew about them all.

For one thing, she was quite a little entrepreneur.

Her father, Church, was a doctor, right? Which meant he could write prescriptions, right? And left lots of those cute little 'script pads lying around, right?

Zoe had been able to fake his signature since she was eleven years old and began forging notes to her teachers down the street at McGehee so she could skip school and hang out smoking cigarettes in Lafayette Cemetery.

Actually, she got
very
good at signatures, so good, in fact, that it wasn't long before she was writing notes for anybody who had five bucks.

Another thing about Zoe—she was very careful with all that green. She didn't spend her earnings, but had it changed into silver dollars and built towers of gilt, castles, and silos of coins, all over her bedroom. They beat the hell out of dollhouses, except she had to dismantle them every day before the cook or housekeeper came sneaking around. No matter how many KEEP OUT—THIS MEANS YOU!!! signs she posted on her door, no one ever did. They had orders from her father to lurk—standing in for her mother, who had run off and left her long before the silver skyscrapers began.

It was very complicated, Zoe thought, this business in life of acquiring and losing. You could earn all the silver dollars you wanted to, and then,
poof!
someone could break in and steal them. Or you could have a mom one day, and then,
shazam!
she'd flown the old coop before her little biddy was even half grown. So much for all those stories about mother hens. And then there were pounds—as in fat. They were the opposite of money and mothers. Once you collected them, you couldn't
ever
get shut of them. They'd hang around for the rest of your life like glop on your waist and hips and thighs.
Disgusting.

Some things you couldn't hold on to. Some things you couldn't lose. It was all very random.
Very
complicated.

But back to the 'script pads. By the time Zoe was twelve, she and her friends were serious devotees of uppers and downers. One of their all-time favorites was 'ludes. It was, like,
so
funny to watch people 'lude out and fall down, especially at those dumb dance parties their mothers (her father) made them go to, you could die laughing when people went
kaboom.

Though after a while that got dangerous.

Oh, no, not the 'ludes. 'Ludes wouldn't hurt you. But getting caught writing 'scripts could. Like fry you. Like Big-Time Trauma. Like, puhleeze, who needed the grief?

Especially if you were a smart little girl like Zoe who could figure things out.

What Zoe had figured out a couple years ago, well, actually she hadn't figured it out—it was more like she fell into it, but that was a trick in itself, wasn't it? Like, some people could fall into a pot of gold and think it was just another pile of shit. Zoe kept her eyes open. She knew the diff.

It all started at her friend Chloe Biedenharn's first tea, the announcement party for her debut. Zoe was in the ground-floor bathroom behind the stairs in Chloe's grandmother's big old house over on St. Charles, honking up two or three stellar lines of coke by herself like a greedy porker, when Dr. Cecil Little came barging in.

“Why, excuse me, darlin',” he'd said, all flustered-like. He turned away, but she saw him sneak a peek.
That's
'cause he thought she was taking a pee and thought he might
see
something. You'd think they'd get used to it, seeing something, since they were doctors, but they were
all
like that, all her father's friends and her friends' fathers—who were all the same people really. Trying to sneak peeks and cop feels and then pretend they weren't. It was enough to make you puke.

But
then
he caught her act, zeroed in on what she was doing.

“Why, Zoe darlin',” he'd said, easing back into the room with his long, skinny arms like a praying mantis and shutting the door.

Locking
it. For a minute there Zoe thought she was going to have to yell
fire! fire!
that was what old Ida over to Ma Elise's house had told her to do when rape was in the air.

“You got some more of that sugar to share with your uncle Cecil?” he'd asked.

Boy, was she relieved.
That
was all he wanted. Why, sure, she'd said, reached in her little evening bag, hauled out her stash, and cut him two lines on the mirror of the solid gold compact her daddy'd given her for high school graduation.

Sure as shooting he'd dug out his wad of hundreds and peeled off one for tooting, then wiped off the damp end and tucked it down the front of her blue party dress.

“Don't guess you got any more where that come from, do you, sugah?”

“Why, Dr. Little”—and she truly was surprised—“I'd of thought you'd have plenty of access.”

“Oh, no, Miss Blue Eyes. You ought to know doctors are very careful about that. Don't
ever
like to be holding.”

“You don't say.”

Zoe had turned back to the vanity by then, checking out her mess of curls, her lipstick, and brushing around her nose. There was nothing more embarrassing than coming back from the Ladies with coke all over your face. But all the time she as thinking.

“So what
do
you do for blow?” she asked.

“Grub. Like I did just now.”

“That's not exactly grubbing, Dr. Little.” She grinned, deepening her dimples.

She knew that trick always caused a man like Dr. Little to want to stick his tongue in them. It was smart—to distract a man when you were doing business. 'Course, they just thought she was a dumb little twat they were chatting up, so they never figured that out. She'd learned the bit from watching old Bette Davis movies on the VCR. Girl didn't have a mama grabbed her role models wherever.

“I wouldn't call a C-note grubbing,” she said.

“Well, hell!” He laughed his hearty there's-lots-more-where-that-came-from-little-girl laugh.

Then, like it was an egg she could hold in her hand, it came to her—oval and perfect and self-contained—her plan.

But right now, this very minute, the doorbell was ringing. They were here, the Mardi Gras army. Zoe threw on a pink silk robe and ran down the stairs.

Leading the troupe were her great-grandmother, Ma Elise, and Ida, who'd been with her a hundred years, the two little old ladies toddling in, leaning on each other, looking for all the world like a matched pair of salt and pepper shakers. Following them were Aunt Kitty and her friend Sam. They were all here to watch her get dressed and keep her company while drinking champagne and eating turkey sandwiches.

Close behind was the dressmaker she'd seen for a thousand fittings, who'd made the incredible white and silver gown she'd wear tonight with its mantle and a twenty-foot train. It was resting in a room of its own across the hall. The hairdresser was trailed by a makeup artist. Mr. Adler insisted on coming himself from his Canal Street store, carrying dark blue velvet boxes holding the diamonds and pearls her daddy had bought her. A lady from the newspaper asked a million stupid questions. She grinned for a photographer.