The Dogs of Babel (20 page)

Anyway, I thought, it’s wishful thinking, all this talk of ghosts. If the dead wandered among us, their spirits still present on this earth, what need would we have for grief? Scary as it is, it’s what we hope for. How else can we go on living?

But Lexy shushed me when I began to voice my objections.

“It’s a sweet story,” she said. “And who are you to say it’s not true? Can’t you give yourself over, just once, to something that doesn’t make any logical sense?”

No, I thought. I can’t. Of course I can’t. But this was our vacation, and I wanted Lexy to be happy, so I kept the snide remarks to a minimum.

The first night, we went to the French Quarter. The reality of it was nothing like I’d imagined: there was none of the mystery, none of the dark magic I had expected. The streets were filled with loud music, with drunken frat boys flashing their penises, with girls lifting their shirts and showing their breasts for beads. The forced revelry of it was all wrong. I was too old for this.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Lexy said. She was drinking a grain alcohol concoction she’d purchased from a walk-up window. It was in a plastic cup shaped like a hand grenade. “We just got here. It’s fun. Let’s make the best of it. Let’s go someplace and dance.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “This really isn’t my kind of scene.”

“Well, of course it isn’t. That’s the point. Let’s do something a little out of character. Isn’t that why you brought me here?”

I wasn’t sure anymore why I’d brought her there. It was late, and I wanted to go to bed. In situations like this, I was always reminded that Lexy was eight years younger than I was. Or maybe age had nothing to do with it. Would I ever have liked being in a crowd like this?

“Don’t sulk,” she said. “Let me buy you a drink. You want the one that comes in the monkey’s head or the one that comes in the fake coconut?”

“Neither,” I said, making a face. “I had wine with dinner, and I don’t think I should mix.”

“Well, you’re not going to find wine here.”

“Let’s just go back,” I said. We’d stopped in the middle of the street, and people were pushing past us on all sides. I took Lexy’s arm and pulled her off to the side of the street. “There are parades tomorrow, and we have to get up early to get a good spot along the route.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You whisk me away on this trip, which is, like, the most romantic thing you’ve ever done, and once we get here, you don’t want to have any fun.”

“I feel out of place with all these kids. What if I run into one of my students?”

“If you did, they’d think you were a lot cooler than they’d ever imagined.”

“Well, I’m going back to the hotel. Are you coming or not?”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to stay and have fun.”

“Fine,” I said. I felt irritated, and I was starting to get a headache. “Do you remember how to get back to the hotel?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” She turned and walked away from me. I could tell she was annoyed with me, and as I started to make my way through the crowd, I was starting to wish I’d stayed. I almost decided to stay, but when I turned around to look for her, she was already out of sight.

By the time I reached the hotel, I felt terrible. Lexy was right—I’d brought her here to have fun, and then I refused to enjoy myself. I began to worry about her out in the crowds all by herself. What if something happened to her? Or what if she simply decided not to come back at all? Would I ever find her again in this city full of people?

By the time I heard her key turn in the lock an hour later, I was ready to fall at her feet and beg her forgiveness. But when she walked in, she looked flushed and excited. She didn’t look angry at all.

“Lexy,” I said, jumping up from the chair I’d been sitting in. “I’m so sorry. You were right. I was a jerk. I’m sorry I ruined everything.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “You were right. It wasn’t that much fun. It was kind of an obnoxious scene. I only stayed another fifteen minutes or so after you left.”

“Then how come it took you so long to get back?”

“Paul,” she said, her face lit with excitement. “I saw her. I saw Blue Mary.”

L
exy was convinced she’d seen Blue Mary. She told me that she’d come back to the hotel and had decided to walk through the open courtyard on her way back to our room. She was standing by the swimming pool, enjoying the cool night air, when she noticed a woman in a formal blue gown sitting on the edge of a deck chair with her face in her hands. She appeared to be crying. Lexy didn’t think anything of her elaborate, old-fashioned dress; after all, this was Mardi Gras, with masquerade balls every night. Lexy walked over and stood beside her.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

This is the kind of person my Lexy was—she would approach a crying stranger to see if she was all right.

The woman looked up, and Lexy could see that she was very pale.

“I can’t seem to find him,” she said to Lexy. “I don’t know where he went.”

As she spoke, she took Lexy’s hand in her own, and her touch was as cold as ice. It was then, Lexy said, that she understood whom she was speaking to.

“I’m sorry,” Lexy said. “Maybe it’s time to stop looking.”

At that, Lexy told me, the woman became furious. “Stop looking for him?” she said, her voice rising to a screech. “What have you done with him?” Her face grew ugly before Lexy’s eyes, and when she stood up, she seemed to tower over Lexy. “What have you done with him?” she said again.

“I haven’t done anything,” Lexy said.

“Well, where is he, then?” she roared.

Lexy stood straight and tall and looked her in the eye. “He’s gone,” she said. “You’re not going to find him now.”

The look on the woman’s face in the instant before she turned and ran away was one of horror and terrible, terrible pain. Lexy immediately regretted what she had said, and she reached out to take her arm. But the woman was already gone.

“What do you think?” Lexy said to me now as we sat on our hotel bed. “It was her, it had to be.”

“I don’t know,” I said, skeptical bastard that I always was. If Lexy could see me now, putting my faith in a talking dog! “It could have been some hotel guest coming back from a costume party, and you go and tell her her husband is gone.”

“If you could have felt how cold her hands were,” Lexy said.

“So she had cold hands. Some people always have cold hands. They have trouble regulating their body temperature.” God, would you listen to me?

“She disappeared, Paul. She vanished into thin air. Right in front of me.”

“Maybe you looked away for a minute and she ran away.”

“I didn’t look away.”

“Well, I don’t know, Lexy. But I don’t believe you saw a ghost.”

“Well, I know you don’t believe me,” she said, lying back on the bed. “But I know what I saw.”

Later that night, I awoke to find Lexy sobbing. “I’m so afraid,” she said. “I’m so afraid you’re going to die.” I held her to me until my chest was damp.

The next morning, while Lexy was still asleep, I woke early, dressed, and slipped out to go get beignets and coffee. When I returned with my bag of sweets, I found Lexy sitting on the couch in her nightgown, looking at the Blue Mary pamphlet. She looked so lovely sitting there in the morning light that my breath caught in my chest.

“Good morning,” I said. “I brought breakfast.”

“Good,” she said, without looking up.

“What are you reading?” I asked, although I could see perfectly well from where I was standing.

“I’m reading about Blue Mary,” she said. She looked up at me. “Whether you believe it or not, I’m sure that’s who I saw last night.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to argue. “Well, come and have some beignets,” I said. “They’re still warm. And then we’ll go find ourselves a spot along the parade route.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’d like to go the cemetery. I’d like to find Mary’s grave.”

“But what about the parade? That’s the reason we came.”

“Paul, there are, like, five more parades between now and Tuesday. We can go to those.”

I sighed. “Lexy, I’m worried about you,” I said. “You seem to be so concerned with death lately, with the death masks and everything. I brought you here to take you away from that.”

She looked up at me and smiled. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “The death masks are important to me—it’s a new direction for my work, and I’m excited about it. But I’m not going to let it turn me into a morbid person, I promise. This Blue Mary thing is something different, though. I’ve just never had an experience like this. I want to investigate it a little further. We could have fun with it, if you weren’t such a skeptic.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try to be more open-minded.” I hesitated a moment. “What about last night?” I asked. “When you were crying.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking down. “I don’t know what that was. Sometimes I just get so scared that I’ll lose you.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” I walked over to the couch where she was sitting and kissed the top of her head. “Now come and have some breakfast while it’s still warm.”

So we went to find Blue Mary’s grave. The cemetery was one of those strange New Orleans boneyards, with all the graves aboveground. It was quite picturesque, actually, with the old marble stones and the Spanish moss hanging from the trees. I was surprised to find I wasn’t sorry we’d come.

We followed the directions on the hotel pamphlet and finally located the grave. It was a tall block of granite with the head and wings of a cherub carved on top. I read the words aloud.

“‘Here lies the body of an Unknown Girl, found on the streets of New Orleans on the 27th day of December, 1872. Since no Kin or Well-Wishing Friend stepped forward to claim the Fair Young Lady in the Blue Dress, this Memorial was erected with Funds raised by the Citizens of New Orleans on the 24th day of August, 1873. May she rest in Peace, in God’s Bosom at last.’”

Lexy bent to run her hands over the faded lettering. “I wish I’d brought some paper to do a rubbing,” she said.

“What for?”

“Just as a keepsake.”

I felt around in my pockets and came up with the three-page itinerary I’d made for the trip. I glanced for a moment at the entry on the first page for what we were supposed to be doing just then—the parade, followed by lunch at a carefully selected restaurant and an afternoon of browsing in mask shops—before I ripped the page off.

“Do you have a pencil?” I asked.

Lexy smiled at me. “I think I do,” she said. She rummaged through her bag. And that was how we spent our second afternoon in New Orleans, husband and wife kneeling in the moist grass, rubbing the words from a stranger’s grave. It took all the pages of my itinerary to get them all down.

After that strange day, though, our trip seemed to get back on track, and things started going more or less the way I’d planned. There were more parades than we could manage to see, and it didn’t really matter that we’d missed one. The whole city was infused with an air of revelry and masquerade, and it was infectious. We saw wonderful things: acrobats who seemed to walk on air, and a big white dog whose fur had been dyed to match his master’s tie-dyed shirt. Throughout it all, Lexy was buoyant. Something about the trip, whether it was my good planning (as I’d have liked to believe) or her encounter with Blue Mary, seemed to have lifted her spirits, and it was more than I could have hoped for.

On our last night there, the night of Mardi Gras itself, as we were getting ready to go out, Lexy opened the suitcase that contained our masks. She handed me a mask with a lion’s face, surrounded by a wild mane.

I was pleased. “Why a lion?” I asked.

“Oh, no reason. I just thought it’d look good on you.”

I must have looked disappointed, because she laughed. “Okay, let’s see,” she said. “I brought you the lion mask because you’re so strong and fierce and wild.” She came up beside me and made a growling sound in my ear. “No one better get in your way.”

“Well, you don’t have to make stuff up.”

She smiled. “There aren’t always reasons for everything. It’s just dress-up. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, you know. But I guess you
are
kind of a big pussycat, if that helps.”

“Yeah, thanks, that helps a lot. What are you wearing?”

“I thought we’d go as a matching pair,” she said, and she pulled out a lovely lioness mask, topped with a garland of papier-mâché flowers that seemed to be twined through the fur.

“Perfect,” I said. I turned my mask over in my hands. “I’ve never seen these before. When did you make them? I know you didn’t have time before we left.”

“I was just playing around with designs. I thought I might save them for our anniversary,” she said. “But this seemed like a good opportunity to unveil them.”

“Well, I love them,” I said. “We’ll be the best-dressed couple of the night.”

We went down to the lobby, with our masks still in our hands. We were standing in line at the front desk—our hotel subscribed to the old-fashioned policy of leaving your key with the desk clerk when you went out for the evening—when a woman came up and tapped Lexy on the arm. She was a young woman, very pretty, with dark hair. She was wearing a red ball gown.

“Hi,” she said. “Remember me?”

Lexy turned and stared at her. She didn’t answer.

“From the other night?” the woman said. “Out by the pool? I was hoping I’d run into you, so I could apologize.” She turned to me and explained. “I was coming back from a party, and I’d had a lot to drink, and I’d had a big fight with my husband, and I was sitting there crying, and your friend here was so nice to me, and I really acted horribly. I think I yelled at you, didn’t I?” she said, smiling at Lexy. “And then I just ran away.”