Restoration (2 page)

“A ghost, is there?”

“Mr. Lowenstein asked me to make sure to mention it, in the spirit of full disclosure. Unexplained footsteps in the middle of the night, the sound of someone weeping. You get up to see who it is and there’s no one. Frankly it strikes me as a bunch of hogwash. But the old man insists it’s real.” Patrick slapped another hand on my shoulder. “I hope that doesn’t kill the deal.”

“Not at all. If you live in New Orleans, they can’t be avoided, can they?”

“Who’s that?”

“Ghosts,” I said. “Ghosts and termites. They own this town.”

We sat at a small table on the front gallery and he spread out a
collection of papers in front of me. I began filling out an application form and paused when I came to the question of employment. Patrick raised an eyebrow as I wrote the word
Self.

“If you have no job, Jack, how will you pay rent?”

“I’ve recently come into some money. By way of inheritance. My father left me some assets. My credit history’s strong. I assure you I’m a good candidate.”

“I ask only because Mr. Lowenstein will want to know.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I’d just returned to the office from putting my sign up when the phone rang and you asked to have a look.”

“Then it really was meant to be,” I said.

To finish the paperwork I wrote out a list of references, then Patrick and I walked across Moss Street and stood staring back at the house from the grassy bank of the bayou. The wind was blowing and pink and violet dust from the trees swirled in the dense, sun-bright air. I could see the windows past the second-floor gallery, in one a lamp glowing against the counterpane.

“Mr. Lowenstein collects paintings,” Patrick said. “Has them scattered all over the house, from floor to ceiling in some rooms. He’s a bachelor, never married. Probably gay. Or he was gay when he was younger and that sort of thing mattered.”

“You mean when sex mattered?”

“Yes, Jack, I do mean sex.” He touched my shoulder again. “But back to the paintings. It might interest you to know that Lowenstein even owns some landscapes by that fellow Drysdale.” Patrick pronounced the artist’s name this way:
Driz-dul.
“You’ll have to get him to show you sometime,” he said.

“Drysdale,” I repeated.

“Maybe you’ve seen the stuff. He painted oak trees and Louisiana bayou scenes, most dating to the early part of the century. People today pay bloody fortunes for them. I was never one for the primordial—my idea of camping out, you understand, is staying at a Holiday
Inn on the edge of the woods—but these Drysdales are kind of inviting if you’re only having to look.”

Patrick was quiet as he inspected me once again. Immediately after scheduling the appointment, I’d shaved my face and trimmed back my sideburns, I’d combed the curtain of hair out of my eyes, and I’d put on freshly laundered clothes, a gray tweed jacket, and my best shoes, with socks. Still in all, Patrick seemed keen to my fakery. He saw past the shine. For a second I thought for sure he’d dismiss me as a rental candidate, but then a smile came to his face and he nudged me with an elbow. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous,” he said, “but are you a Chambers man, Jack?”

“A Chambers man?” I had never heard of such a person.

“I’m referring to the stove, built by Chambers. Mine dates to ’29 and is the rarest of all colors.” He seemed to be waiting for me to say it. “That’s right, a red one. We Chambers men must stick together, Jack. Remember that.”

How do you respond to such an assessment of yourself? In the past people had judged me to be many things but never this: I was a Chambers man, of all things.

“Chambers men have little use for the present,” Patrick explained. “The past is where their hearts reside. They are smitten with cobwebs and dust. Consequently they spend a lot of time gathered around the stove, and on barstools.”

“Patrick, would you like to join me for a cocktail?”

“See there,” he answered. “I knew I’d read you right.”

We returned to the house a couple of hours later, as dusk was settling in, and Patrick, still pitching the place, offered another look at the rear garden and garçonnière.

“Doesn’t it just drip with old New Orleans charm?” he said. “It drips, Jack. It absolutely
drips
…” He’d had a few more than I had, but it didn’t show in how he carried himself. I was impressed by the fluidity of his movements, all the more so because I found it necessary to touch trees and statuary to maintain balance.

“I’m having guests over Friday night for supper,” he said. “It promises to be great fun. I hope you’ll join us. You’ll meet a nice lady or two. Better still, you’ll have a chance to see the Chambers in action.”

We’d already got halfway drunk together. I could think of no reason to decline. “Shall I bring anything?” I said.

He seemed to think about it. “Dreams,” he said. “Bring your dreams, Jack. And if you know how to make one, a nice big Jell-O salad. I’m crazy for the stuff.”

We sat on the garden bench and watched the house for a while, then Patrick walked up to the back door and rapped on it with a fist. I was standing next to him. When Lowenstein failed to answer, we moved to the very rear of the property. Here we could see the place more clearly and observe the full length of the upper windows as well as the lower ones.

I put my hands around my mouth and called out Lowenstein’s name—I shouted it repeatedly—and at last he showed himself, his seated form pausing at a window downstairs. He came up out of his chair and stood gazing at us. I lifted a hand and waved, but he offered no response. I thought it only polite that I introduce myself—we soon would be sharing the property, after all—but when I started walking in his direction he dropped back into the chair and vanished just as suddenly as he’d appeared.

“Ghosts,” Patrick said bitterly, as if we’d just seen one.

I’d learned many things during my time at the paper, none more important than the importance of keeping people’s secrets. It was a rule that extended to my own interests. The truth was, I could recognize the hand of A. J. Drysdale long before Patrick Marion told me how to pronounce his name, having grown up in a home crowded with paintings by the artist. My father had been a collector, chasing antique pictures of the bayou the way other men chase Bourbon Street strippers and sure bets at the Fair Grounds. Drysdale was Louisiana’s answer to Claude Monet, his oil washes possessing the same ethereal,
haunting quality as the French Impressionist’s portraits of lily ponds and flower gardens, but his prices being considerably more affordable. Dad found his at garage sales, junk shops, flea markets and consignment stores, rarely paying more than twenty dollars for a picture. At the time of his death he owned twenty-three Drysdales, one image barely distinguishable from the next, as well as twenty or so other paintings by long-dead Louisiana artists. After we buried him my mother found it difficult to live with the paintings, just as she found it impossible to open the armoire in their bedroom and keep from sobbing at the sight of his clothes still neatly hanging. On a Friday morning I loaded my car with Dad’s clothes and donated them to the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store on Jefferson Highway. In the afternoon I consigned his paintings to the New Orleans Auction Galleries on Julia Street. It hurt me to let the paintings go, knowing how he’d loved them, and the weekend when they came on the block neither Mom nor I were on hand to watch them being sold.

Although Dad famously steered clear of auctions, in the end he would’ve been pleased with the results of the sale. The John Francis Charbonnet Collection, assembled over thirty years of picking through junk, netted his family nearly $200,000. I offered the entire sum to my mother, but she insisted we split the money. As I was waiting in line at the bank to deposit my share, it came to me that every story I’d ever written had been for the old man. And if they were all for him, I wondered, then who would I write for now? When I arrived at the office later that morning I found my editor outside, where she was permitted to smoke. “I’m quitting,” I said.

“You’re not quitting shit, Jack,” said Isabel Green, then flicked ashes at me.

“I’m telling you I quit, Isabel.”

“Jack?”

“I’m going,” I told her.

“You can’t leave me like this.
Jack?
Jack, you bastard, come back here.”

I saw her cigarette fly past my head. “Too late,” I said.

I’d given ten years to the job, and I frankly was tired of words—tired of speaking them and having them spoken to me, but also tired of writing them. My fatigue had intensified during my father’s long ordeal with lung cancer. I’d sit by his bed and read newspaper stories to him. My column appeared three days a week, and they were always the toughest to get out of my mouth. I wondered why he didn’t grab me by the throat and rip out my voice box. “How do you tolerate such torture?” I asked him one day. The only good thing about Dad’s dying—for both of us—was the end of my lousy readings.

I don’t claim to be the first of my generation to face the crisis of professional burnout before he’d succeeded in paying off his college loans, not to mention finding a wife and buying a home. But I probably differed from most quitters in that I was leaving at the top of my game. Giving it up when you still have some good years ahead isn’t a concept that most people would dare apply to their own experience. Readers mailed in letters to the editor pleading with me to stay. My friends said I was being stupid. To judge from their reactions, one might’ve thought I’d publicly torched a winning lottery ticket. My last column appeared under the heading “To Your Own Self Be True,” and it basically was a finger shot at those who would keep me employed. I might’ve been the paper’s “award-winning humor columnist,” as my obit was certain to read one day, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had any fun at the job. More than anything I longed for the freedom of observing a day without having to reduce my observations to eighteen column inches of wit and jocularity. I’d had it with wit and jocularity.

To show its gratitude for my dedicated service, the paper’s management threw a going-away/early-retirement party in my honor at a pasta restaurant out by the interstate. Attended primarily by my department’s lower-echelon support staff, I sat and listened as copy aides and summer interns lifted toasts wishing me well in my every future endeavor. Except for Isabel, who wept delivering an obscenity-laced send-off, there were no staff heavyweights in attendance. Come to think of it, even the middleweights stayed away—the writers and editors with whom I’d worked for nearly one-third of my life. At last there came the
bright tapping of flatware against wineglasses, and shouts for me to speak. I shoved my chair out from under me and confronted them at last. “Thank you for your kindness,” I said, “and good luck to all of you as well. I’m moved not only by your presence here tonight but by your generous and heartfelt sentiments. I apologize for not knowing more of you by name. You seem so nice and I recognize the possibility that, given more time, you might have become dear to me. No hard feelings, anyone, but I’m off to do something altogether historic. That is, I’m off to see if I can arrange to take a nap each afternoon for the rest of my life. Isabel, I’m sorry, darling, you have every right, as you said in your very moving remarks, to hate me and wish catastrophic ruin on me…. Anyway, well, drink up everyone. And good-bye.”

The party lasted until the restaurant closed its doors at 2:00 A.M., and then I found myself alone with Isabel in the cold backseat of a cab. I loved the taste of smoke and whiskey on her mouth, and she felt truly amazing when I slipped a hand under her skirt, but Isabel was married and all that sort of thing was behind me now. I kept hearing my father’s desperate, labored breathing and my own voice as it had sounded when I read to him. Now Isabel was sneaking her hand down my skivvies, and I forced my eyes open and pushed her to the other side of the car. “Pull over. Cabbie, pull over.”

“We’re on the interstate,” he protested, meeting my eyes in the rearview.

“Pull over anyway.”

Isabel was screaming at me when I threw a fist of cash at the driver and scrambled out of the car, but she’d screamed at me before and better the verbal abuse in the short term than the specter of her soft, ravaged form in my morning bed. It took me more than an hour to walk home and once there I sat out on the front stoop and drank from a carafe of day-old coffee and waited for paper delivery. When it came I read each section from front to back, thrilled beyond telling that I was nowhere in it.

Some days after the sale of my father’s collection I returned to the auction house to retrieve those paintings that had failed to attract buyers.
There were only a few of them, and as I was loading the trunk of my car the company’s consignment director came outside and regaled me with stories about other Drysdale collectors in town. If I bothered to park one night in front of Roger Houston Ogden’s house on Broadway and look in his windows, she said, I might see paintings by the artist hanging on the walls. Other big Drysdale collectors were Gig and Mabel Jones in Lakeview. They owned sixty bayou landscapes, all of them similar in appearance, and once when a plumber finished work in their home he looked around and said, “Mr. Jones, I like your painting.” Yet another Drysdale collector, and perhaps the most renowned in the city, was someone named Lowenstein who lived in a spooky old house at Bayou Saint John. Lowenstein was a shut-in, the woman told me, and no one knew exactly how many Drysdales he owned, but estimates put the number at no less than a hundred.