Restoration (19 page)

Weeks would pass before I saw
Beloved Dorothy
again. In the meantime I agreed to do something I’d sworn off forever only a short time before. That is to say, I contracted with a magazine to write a story, this one about the tourism boom on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I took the assignment because I needed to. The thought of having to place my fingertips on a computer keyboard was nearly enough to make me physically ill, but I recognized the fact that a break from my dark little cave on Moss Street would do me good, and the Gulf Coast wasn’t a bad destination if one meant to reacquaint oneself with the world. The place was made even more attractive by the magazine’s promise of a generous expense account.

The beach was wide open and there the wind blew. Even the light was different. My first day there, I called Rhys and invited her to drive down for a night out on the town. We could have dinner and take in a show, I said. If she liked, she could stay over in the hotel—not with me in my room, but in her own room. She was polite about it, but in the end she declined the invitation.

As long as it wasn’t my money I was spending, I made sure to enjoy myself. I went out for meals at seafood restaurants. In huge, audacious gambling halls I played the slots and attended fight cards featuring flabby, washed-up pros who ten years before had been headlining in Vegas. One night an assistant publicity director for one of the casinos gave me a tour of what she called “my Biloxi.” The woman’s name was Cindy Fournier, and she was a twenty-something divorcée who’d become a PR flack after a brief career as a television reporter in Jackson. Her accent was pure Mississippi Delta, and the sexiest I’d ever heard. We drank beer and ate hamburgers in a dark little redneck bar by the water. Maybe she was only doing her job, that
being to sell the area as the “Deep South’s premier vacation paradise,” as she kept calling the place, but it felt good to be with a woman who constantly looked at me as if she could eat me whole. “You’re a very handsome man, Jack Charbonnet.”

“Am I?”

“How come the men in Mississippi can’t look like you?”

Cindy had a great line of bullshit—even better than my own. Between stories about the enchanting adventures that awaited travelers to the Coast, she talked about her on-again, off-again relationship with a blackjack dealer named Earl Chitty, who’d seemed like the sort of guy she wanted to settle down with if only he’d kick his horse habit.

“Earl likes the ponies, does he?”

Her eyes went wet with tears. “Horse is heroin, Jack. I would take the ponies any day over what Earl’s gone and got hisself hooked on.”

We held hands and walked the beach and sat in the sand under the stars and watched old men in hip boots cast for fish in the surf. At the end of the night Cindy drove me back to my hotel and followed me into the lobby. “Will you give me a hug, Jack?” she said. “I could sure use one.”

She was small but strong in my arms, and the embrace awakened a feeling in me that until now I’d put on reserve for Rhys. Cindy and I should’ve ended it there, but an hour later we were lying side by side in bed, trying to understand what had just happened. “I can’t believe you don’t have a girlfriend,” she said.

“I guess that’s a compliment.”

“I really do mean it in a positive way. When we were making love you made me wish I was someone else.”

I lifted my head off the pillow. “Was that one a compliment, too?”

“That I deserve better than Earl Chitty, Jack. That’s what I should’ve said. Because you made me wish that just now.” She waited awhile, then said, “What did you wish for when we were making love?”

I couldn’t tell her the truth—that I’d kept wishing with all that
was in me that she was Rhys Goudeau—so instead I sank my face back in the pillow and said, “I didn’t wish for anything, Cindy. Because my wish had come true.”

I could’ve cut my own throat for being so sappy, but it scored big with Cindy. Thirty minutes later we were making love again, and doing so with an abandon that wasn’t present the first time. She made so much noise I had to cover her mouth with my hand to keep my neighbors in the hotel from hearing.

On my way home I remembered something my father had told me when I was a kid. “Jack,” he’d said, “be careful what you get good at. Most people aren’t and live to regret it.” With that in mind, I pulled over at the next exit and stopped at a bait shop with a pay phone out by the road. I was thinking about Cindy and her situation with Earl. I’d decided it was as important that we also be careful to fall in love with the right person, otherwise we grow to regret that, too. Cindy picked up right away but something in her voice told me she didn’t want to talk. She seemed embarrassed to be hearing from me again, and it came to me that Earl was nearby, listening. I started to make a case for why she should come and visit me and see “my New Orleans,” but then I dropped it. I probably could’ve continued the lie as long as she let me, but I knew that I might be smart to heed my own advice and let this one go. “Good luck with your story,” Cindy said. “And, please, Jack, let us know when it’s going to be running. I’ll make sure to include it in our press packet.”

When I got off the phone I needed to roll down the windows and play the radio loud before I felt halfway right again.

I returned to Moss Street to find a week’s worth of the
Times-Picayune
scattered in the monkey grass beneath the crape myrtles, papers that neither Lowenstein nor his help had bothered to retrieve and save for me. An image in the Friday paper, set above the fold on the front page, showed Patrick Marion standing in front of Dorothy Marion’s ramshackle house on Ursulines Street. His arms were open
wide as if to embrace the whole world, and no doubt some of the money in it.
LOCAL MAN DISCOVERS REPUTED MASTERPIECE
, read the headline. I walked up the street to my coffee shop to check
Gambit Weekly.
I found a copy of the popular tabloid in the wire basket next to the door. A big color photograph on the cover showed Rhys and Patrick with the painting. THE MILLION-DOLLAR PICTURE NOBODY WANTED, went that one.

In both stories the Asmore legend was embellished to a point where the artist better resembled a Cajun Van Gogh than a troubled young man with a talent for scandal, and the hype didn’t end with the print media. That night I turned on the TV and heard the voice of Neal’s Lucinda Copeland seconds before her face came up on the screen. She was being interviewed for a segment about the painting on a six o’clock news show. “Finding a lost Asmore is like finding a lost Ernest Hemingway manuscript or the lost sheet music of a never-published Louis Armstrong composition,” she said. “No, it’s actually more significant than that. Hemingway and Satchmo lived long, productive lives. Levette Asmore died before the full flower of his gifts could be realized. I don’t think I exaggerate when I tell you his passing was one of the greatest tragedies in the history of art in America. It is made slightly more bearable by the discovery
of Beloved Dorothy.”

The next day, taking a break from writing, I tuned to a popular talk radio program and encountered the voice of featured guest Patrick Marion. He represented himself well, although with perhaps too much candor, and he probably would’ve been wise to spit out the chewing gum. “I just wish Aunt Dottie had been prettier,” he said. “Instead of a double with income potential, I’d be shopping now for a mansion at English Turn—you know, one of those marble palaces they like to put in coffee table books.”

Because of a Friday deadline the magazine had imposed on my Gulf Coast assignment, I was pressed for time and had no choice but to skip the Thursday-night preview at Neal. But that Saturday there was no way I was going to sit out the event “that was sure to be as colorful
as any Carnival parade that ever rolled,” as an op-ed piece in the morning paper predicted.

Finding a place to park near the auction house proved to be a problem, and so I ended up in a pay lot nearly a mile away. The hike had me running with sweat, and I paused only once: to remove my jacket and loosen my tie. I spotted the painting as soon as I entered the gallery. It stood on an easel positioned next to the auctioneer’s lectern, a blast of light hitting it from overhead. On a table nearby stood a huddle of Newcomb College pottery and a glass vase filled with Louisiana irises. It came to me that the flowers matched those depicted in the painting and that each of the Newcomb vases was decorated with the same purple blooms. I registered at the front desk and received a card with a number on it—Neal’s version of a paddle—then I retrieved a house-copy catalog from the end of the glass counter, one of many hands grabbing at the stack. Upon spying
Beloved Dorothy
on the cover, I experienced a sensation that imposed on me physically. My spine tingled and a blanket of gooseflesh covered my arms. I could feel my breath go thin, and my body temperature went from hot to cold in an instant. I’d lived with the old girl for all of three days and yet we’d had our magic. These things really are alive, it came to me. And they really do belong to us, however brief their stay.

The only unoccupied seats were reserved, which gave me no option but to stand in the rear of the room, along with scores of others. I leaned against a giant secretary and marveled at the dexterity of the auctioneer ticking off one lot after another. When Rhys and Patrick finally made their entrance, accompanied by Elsa Dodd, it was to the sort of barely restrained excitement that had greeted Tommy Smallwood on my last visit to Neal. They’d timed their arrival for maximum exposure, as only about an hour remained before
Beloved Dorothy
was scheduled to be sold. A couple of news photographers, heretofore hidden in the crowd, stepped up with cameras raised and clicked off a barrage. Rhys and Elsa were wearing light summer dresses, white straw hats and platform espadrilles. Patrick wore seersucker, a bow tie
and wing tips: the uniform of the quintessential southern gentleman. He strode up the aisle like a politician with nothing less than the world to save. In recognition the auctioneer gave a nod, the porters broadened their smiles and the female staff members manning the phones exchanged a chorus of sibilant whispers.

They went all the way up to the front row and removed the RESERVED placards from chairs sandwiched between Mary Lou Cohn and Beatrice Wolff, professor emeritus of art history at Tulane University. Although we’d never met, I recognized the elderly woman from recent news reports about the Asmore. In fact, Professor Wolff was the one who, in a TV interview, had spoken words that I later scribbled on an index card and stashed in one of my art books: “For a painter with immortality in him, Levette Asmore couldn’t wait to die. I still can’t cross a river without wondering why.”

As his big moment approached, Patrick spent more time watching the rear of the room than the front of it. At the end of each sale he glanced back at the doors, then faced the auctioneer again only after the porters had brought out the next lot to be auctioned. By my count he checked the door forty times, and he still managed to go without spotting me. I was invisible to him because there was only one person he was looking for today. That was Tommy Smallwood.

Perhaps in anticipation of a large crowd, the auction house had turned up the air-conditioning, and the room was so cold now that it almost hurt. My head ached and my face felt fat and rubbery. We were about half an hour away when, unable to stand it any longer, I went outside to warm up and nearly bumped into Smallwood as he came rushing to the entrance. His face was burning with color, his eyes bulged and he was winded and gasping for breath. I stepped to the side to let him pass, but he threw his weight against me and collapsed in my arms. I gave a small burp of surprised laughter, and then we both groaned terribly. The man was in trouble. Recognizing that he was either dead or dying, I gently lowered him to the sidewalk and felt his neck for a pulse. Others came running to help. Someone removed Smallwood’s coat, another his necktie. A young woman put an ear to
his chest. “Mr. Smallwood?” she said. “Mr. Smallwood, do you hear me?”

Smallwood made a feeble effort to return to his feet but the woman pushed him back to the ground. “Mr. Smallwood? Mr. Smallwood, can you hear me? If you can hear me talk to me. Mr. Smallwood, talk to me. Talk to—”

“Levette,” he muttered.

“We’re going to take you to the hospital now. You just take it easy. Everything will be okay. Mr.
Smallwood?
Everything will be okay.”

“Levette,” he said again.

The woman punched the keypad of her cell phone, identified herself as a doctor and asked that an ambulance be sent immediately to the Neal Auction Company on Magazine Street. By the time she finished, Smallwood was sitting up, although he still appeared to be in great physical distress. His general complexion had turned ashen, and sweat formed a milky film on his face. “Levette,” he said a third time, shouting out the name, before falling to his side and flopping over on his back.

A small crowd had gathered outside. I could still hear the auctioneer and his gavel from inside the building. Time waited for no man, and neither, apparently, did the auction. My father had no use for spoiled, rich men like Tommy Smallwood, and Rhys surely held them in contempt, but as I gazed down on his large, defeated form I could feel only pity. The great pumpkin head, the expensive clothes stripped away to reveal mealy white flesh. Before, Smallwood had seemed a rude, bumptious ass, a mere caricature of a man, but now he’d proved to be as needy and vulnerable as the rest of us. I resisted an urge to kneel beside him and pillow his head in my hands, to speak words to console him. Finally an unusually large dose of cynicism kicked in, and I thought to myself,
You greedy hog, where’s your money to save you now?