The Cutting Season (16 page)

At her invitation, Eric leaned his head over the threshold.

“I just wanted to say good night,” he said, hanging behind the door, kind of, careful not to make any assumptions about where he was welcome in her home.

She turned Danny’s manuscript face down on the bed.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You can come in.”

He stepped over the threshold in his bare feet, stopping just a few inches beyond the door, determined to put limits on the situation, for both of them. He leaned against her maple chest of drawers, the one by the door. She felt a hot batch of nerves, pinpricks down her spine. She hadn’t had a man in her bedroom, or her bed, in years.

“How is she?” she asked. “Lela.”

“Worried.”

“About you being here with me?”

They were the first words out of her mouth, and she regretted them immediately.

Across the room, Eric smiled.

He adjusted and readjusted his glasses, grinning to himself, tickled in some way he did not choose to share with her. “No, not that,” he said, making her feel foolish for presuming to know anything about Lela’s feelings or her faith in her future marriage. “It’s just that I left so suddenly,” he said. “She’s as worried about Morgan as I am.”

“You told her, then?”

“Well, yes,” he said, a peculiar look on his face, as if he just now realized how little she understood about his life anymore. “She would have come down, too, but . . .” He wisely let the rest of that thought, and all its uncomfortable social implications, wilt away. At that moment, Caren felt she could go the rest of her life without ever meeting Lela Gramm. “Listen, Caren,” Eric said, getting back to the issue at hand. “I’ll talk to Morgan again in the morning. I’m sure it’s nothing, just a bit of confusion is all. We’ll get it all figured out, I promise.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, then.”

He lingered in the doorway, rolling something around in his mind. He was biting his bottom lip, chewing a corner of his own flesh, eyeing her on top of the bed. She was wearing one of his old Tulane T-shirts, faded and torn. He tapped his fingers on the dented wood of the door’s frame. “It’s good to see you again,” he said quietly.

As he started out the door, she called his name. “Eric.”

She didn’t know why she was about to tell him this, except that she didn’t have many people in her life she could talk to anymore.

“I think Raymond is going to sell the plantation.”

Eric paused, his hand on the door. “When?”

“Soon.”

The conversation in his office had done nothing to clear this notion, and it suddenly occurred to Caren that if she were forced to choose between Raymond and Lorraine as the one most likely to tell her the truth, she would pick Lorraine every time.

Raymond is definitely up to something, she thought.

“He had a guy in his office today,” she said. “A Larry Becht, I think. They were talking politics, and they were both telling me over and over not to talk to the press about what happened. There was definitely an air of damage control in the room.”

“Larry Becht? Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“That guy’s a Republican strategist. He runs an office out of Alexandria, Virginia.”

Caren shook her head. “No, they were talking about the Democratic primary.”

“Caren, Larry Becht is part of that whole take-back-the-country crowd. He definitely swings hard to the right. If he’s down here to launch a campaign, then Clancy is planning to run as a Democrat in name only, some kind of bait-and-switch.”

“He’s trading on his family name is what he’s doing, the way black people, in particular, feel about the Clancys,” she said. “It’s his ticket to the Senate, he thinks.”

Eric made a humming sound. “No kidding.”

“You know, Leland was the main one pushing to integrate the public schools in this state, way back in the late fifties and early sixties. When every other businessman and politician in power was dragging his feet or just out-and-out swearing against it.”

“And now Raymond’s claiming it as his legacy? To court the black vote?”

Caren nodded. “The Clancys have always been big on ‘Negro education.’ ” Her tone was not bitter, but there was something dry and distant there. Eric was scratching at his chin. She knew this information was of a more than casual interest to Eric, himself a political player. “I wonder why he would sell his place now?” he said. “Hasn’t it been in his family for generations? I thought you Southerners liked all this Civil War shit.”

Caren shot him a dirty look.

Tulane or no Tulane, what Eric didn’t know about the South could fill several shelves of his office in Washington. But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to give the impression that she was in any way defending Belle Vie or what it stood for.

She wasn’t.

“That ought to be Becht’s pitch,” Eric said. “Positioning Clancy as a legacy, a keeper of America’s true heritage,” he said. “That’s how I’d do it, anyway.”

“I don’t really know what he’s thinking or what he plans to do with the land.” She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs the way Morgan sometimes did when she was feeling particularly insecure. “This place is over a hundred and fifty years old. I guess I just thought it would always be here.”

“You think someone would tear it down?”

“I think if Raymond and his brother let it go, anything could happen.”

“So what are you going to do?”

She looked down, fingering a knot of thread on the bed’s quilt. “I guess I need to start making some contingency plans. I have to start thinking about where we would go. I could get a place in Baton Rouge, I guess, start over there. It’s not far from her school.” When she caught Eric’s eye again, she could see he was frowning. He grew quiet, pensive, his mouth turned down in a way that made him look sad.

“They have good schools in D.C., too, Caren.”

Here we go, she thought.

“I’d love to have Morgan in Washington,” he said. “You know that.”

“And, what, send her to Sidwell Friends with Malia and Sasha?” She was teasing him about his social connections, his new life inside a White House administration. He’d been working in Obama’s Office of Urban Affairs for the past ten months, one of the very first hired.

“Maybe,” Eric said matter-of-factly, as if a spot in a private school were the very least of what was available to him in D.C. “I mean, I could make a call.”

“You’re serious?”

“We’d love to have Morgan in D.C.”

The word,
we
, cut a little.

He slid his glasses along the bridge of his nose. “Well, at least think about it,” he said, and she nodded, feeling a queer warmth at the back of her throat, a vague sense that she might cry. For a moment, she actually wished she’d never called him at all.

“I will,” she said.

“Well,” he said. “Goodnight, then, Caren.”

S
he could still smell him in the room, long after he was gone.

She lay awake in the dark, unable to sleep, seeing his face every time she closed her eyes. Restless and agitated, she rolled over onto her left side, feeling the cool, empty spot beside her. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying in vain to push him out of her thoughts . . . until finally, alone in the dark, she surrendered.
Eric
, she said, whispering his name and letting her mind drift all the way back to their beginning.

I
t was an unlikely and unexpected romance. They hadn’t actually started dating until long after they’d met, almost a year after she’d walked out of Tulane; it was, not coincidentally, around the same time she’d asked her dad, one last time, for help with school. There had been checks here and there during her undergraduate studies, but now, trying to finish law school, she told him she needed something more.

He asked after her mother.

She didn’t mention their falling-out.

Instead, she told him that if she reenrolled in law school now, full-time, she could still catch up. She could still graduate on time. She just couldn’t do it on her own, she said. But her dad said no. His daughter, the real one, she guessed, was getting married the following spring. There was simply a limit to what he could do, he said. Caren had left his office in the Seventh Ward and walked back to work empty-handed. She had a full-time job by then, at the Grand Luxe Hotel on Poydras, a few blocks from the convention center, where she managed the bar. She was good at it, the managing of other people’s problems, staff quibbles, and guest complaints. She liked even the smallest, dullest tasks. It passed the time, and kept her mind off other things.

She was doing a sweep of the floor, checking in with the night staff, when Eric Ellis walked in. He was wearing a trim, dark-blue suit, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar. He was there for happy hour with a handful of third-years from Tulane, two of whom Caren recognized. They’d all worked in the same law clinic the year before.

A year earlier, she and Eric had worked their very first case together, a simple battery charge that Professor Kazari let them take a crack at, leaving them alone in his office. Eric took one look at the file photos—the victim a white woman who’d been jacked by a lead pipe, both her eyes swollen shut, and the defendant, smug and indifferent in his booking photo, his black hair braided on one side and flying loose on the other—and announced he was going into politics, public policy maybe. Criminal law just wasn’t his thing. He did his work, though, was too much of a gentleman to let it all fall on Caren. He transcribed police interviews, watched hours of security-camera footage from a liquor store on the corner of Lombard and St. Anthony. And he made sure all of their paperwork was filed on time. But it was Caren who spoke at the arraignment; she was the only one the defendant trusted; and she was the one who, during a long cross-examination at trial, put the victim at a bar in the French Quarter from the hours of two o’clock in the afternoon until midnight the day of her assault. She was quite drunk, Caren got on record, and unable to walk straight by the time she made it to the liquor store on Lombard, picking up a nightcap on her way home. Their client, the defendant, had offered her a hand when she’d stumbled off the curb, had even offered to call her a cab. But he was
not
the man who assaulted her, was in fact already a block away, on Sumpter, when the assault occurred. The woman had simply made a mistake. Caren liked the work, being inside a court of law. She liked the order of it, the hope implied, that we might get something right in this lifetime. At the defense table, Eric leaned in and whispered in her ear, “You just saved that kid’s life.”

She hadn’t seen him in nearly a year, not since she’d left school.

He stopped in the middle of the bar, saw her, and smiled.

“Caren Gray,” he said. “I was wondering where the hell you went.”

She smiled.

It meant something that he’d thought of her, that he’d noticed she was gone. But she was not otherwise enthusiastic about the encounter, or the need to explain her life, her job in a hotel bar—not with two of her ex-classmates nudging each other, eyeing the cheap blazer she was wearing, the name tag on the lapel. She quickly sat them at her best table, the one across from the piano, with a view of the wharf. And she set them up with a bottle of Brunello, on her. Then she turned and walked through the kitchen to her small office and shut the door, hiding out until she thought they were gone.

Eric found her anyway.

About a quarter to closing, he knocked on her office door.

He was in jeans and a thin, cotton sweater. He’d gone home and changed clothes, and then come all the way back, he said. He wanted a chance to see her one last time. Caren sat behind her desk, fiddling with a paper clip, bending and twisting the silver metal, turning it over and over in her palm. She didn’t want him to leave. She didn’t want him to leave her
behind
. But she couldn’t get the words out.

“Hey,” he finally said. “You want to get out of here?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

It turned out they had the same taste in music and a low tolerance for the French Quarter. Eric found the tourists loud and tedious, and Caren was a single woman who’d learned to avoid it out of a concern for basic safety. That night, they went to a blues club in the Seventh Ward, a dive joint that let you bring your own liquor, charging $1.50 for a setup—a plastic cup of ice and 7-Up or Coca-Cola, whichever you wanted. They sat close to each other in the dark, smoky bar, Eric resting one knee between hers, so that their thighs were touching. He cracked roasted peanuts in his hands, carefully peeling the skins before offering some to her. They drank a lot, beer and whiskey, and talked for hours—about school, Eric’s family in Chicago, and what she wanted to do with herself, why she’d walked out on law school. Eric took her job at the bar as a lark, a break from the pressures of middle-class expectations, like the time he’d cut out of undergrad for a year to work at a fish cannery in Oregon, a summer job that he’d held on to for months, living out of a duffel bag. It was always understood that he would come back, that he would finish school. Eric’s family background was not unlike her father’s. He came from a long line of doctors, had two brothers who were professors, one at Loyola and the other at the University of Chicago. She didn’t point out their differences, didn’t tell him who she really was, a cook’s kid from rural Louisiana who was lucky to have made it this far. She didn’t tell him she’d run out of money, that even with student aid she couldn’t pay her tuition, couldn’t eat and pay rent at the same time. She couldn’t stay in school without a job—and a job, a real one, meant she couldn’t study, which meant she couldn’t keep up her grades, or her scholarship. It was an impossible dance, one she’d been tripping over for most of her time in law school, ever since she’d stopped taking money from her mother, ever since they’d had their big falling-out. She didn’t tell Eric any of this, the messy details.