Thing was, you could tell the guy cared. Thirty years riding herd on this zoo, living in muck and mire like a catfish, and he could still be concerned about a small-time sex offender doing his damndest to make good.
When I got to the hospital-Don hadn’t told me where he was and I’d had to call around-he met me in the lobby. “Let’s go get drunk, Lew,” he said. So we did.
It had been a long time for both of us. We started at Kolb’s with dark German beer and drank our way purposefully into the Quarter. We were sober and depressed for hours, then suddenly drunk and afloat. By the time the suit people began their five o’clock hegiras homeward we were stewing in our own juices in the far corner of a bar on Esplanade, doe-eyed bartender and teenage transvestite our sole compatriots.
“You gon’ be able t’drive, Lew?” Walsh said.
“Sure. But if I drive, you gotta find the car.”
“S’only fair.”
But he couldn’t and I couldn’t either, and after an hour or so of trying we walked back to Cafe du Monde. Stuffed doughnuts into our mouths and washed them down with chicory coffee until the world slowed, shuddered and stood still again.
“It’s still by the hospital, in the lot,” Don said. “The car.”
“Right. One more for the road?”
He ordered another coffee for each of us, and I went inside to phone Vicky.
By this time it was almost ten, and she was getting ready for work. “I was worried, Lew,” she said. I briefly told her what had happened and said I’d be home soon. “Be careful, Lew,” she said, “I’ll leave some food on the stove for you.”
What she left was sweet potatoes, grits and pork chops, all obviously ready some hours ago-food I’d grown up eating, wholly alien to her. I wondered if she had found a cookbook somewhere (were there cookbooks for this stuff?) or talked to my mom. Whatever, she’d taken some trouble. I tried to get her at the hospital and was told she was tending to an emergency.
I was almost asleep when she called back.
“I’ve got two minutes between the elevator-case stabbing and the MI on its way from Freret,” she told me.
“Soul food?” I said. “What’s that in French?”
“It’s our anniversary, Lew. I wanted to do something a bit special.”
“You are special, Vicky. You don’t have to do anything special.”
“The MI’s here now, Lew; I have to go. I’ll see you in the morning. Perhaps we could have breakfast out; I’d like that.”
“I would too.”
Quiet then; the shush of the air-conditioner, the humming in wires. Far off a radio plays early rock and roll. I try to juggle my memories and what I am, and the two do not get along. They come together at the rim of a mountain, circling one another, snarling, flashing teeth. There are dark clouds and lightning to the south. Now it is light-it could be seven, or eleven-and Vicky is beside me.
We missed breakfast. Sometime in early afternoon the phone gradually penetrated my sleep but whoever it was didn’t stay around long enough for me to answer. I turned on the answering machine and went back to bed. At five or so we roused, showered, and read the Times-Picayune over cups of cappuccino at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. There wasn’t much in the paper; the real day’s news came from Vicky.
“I turned in my notice this morning, Lew.”
“I see. Then….”
She nodded. “Won’tya reconsider, Lew? Will you not come with me?”
“I can’t,” I said, noticing how manifestly my Southern cain’t had shifted toward her own British cahn’t.
“Then we’ll have four good weeks together.”
We hopped a cab to Commander’s Palace for dinner, fresh trout for me, oysters in a red sauce for Vicky, and two bottles of wine, her departure growing between us like a wall of tall grass, something you try so hard not to mention that it enters every word and silence. We had brandy afterwards, then walked back over to St. Charles for the trolley.
It was filled with the usual collection of tourists, students, drunks, workers and quiet older folk who crossed themselves as we passed the churches. A pudgy, red-faced guy across the aisle kept staring over at Vicky and finally leaned toward us.
“I do hate to be a bother, but would you be British by any chance?”
“Je suis Francaise,” Vicky said. “Je ne parle pas anglais.”
He got off at Jackson Avenue, looking suspiciously back at us one last time.
“Wild boors,” Vicky answered to my curious glance. “We breed them by the barrelful in Britain. One of the reasons I lived in France.”
We’d got off at our own stop and started hiking across to the apartment, wind rising, cold air turning to crystal around us. We passed a young girl with a baby buggy (pram, Vicky would have said) full of groceries, a group of Spanish-speaking middle-aged men with guitars and accordions and a small, wood-frame harp.
“I’m sorry, if that means anything,” she said as we went in the front door, “and I’ll miss you terribly, I’ll miss you for a very long time, Lew.” Then later: “You’re going to stay up?”
“A while.”
“Will you wake me when you do come to bed, then?”
I nodded, knowing I probably wouldn’t. She probably knew it too, hesitated and went away. I heard running water, the shower, toothbrushing, a clock being wound, classical music from the bedroom radio, turned low.
I poured brandy into a teaglass and watched the winking red eye of the telephone machine. Put on Bessie Smith and bobbed about for a while on the promise of her voice, on her empty bed blues, her nine-day crawl, her haunted house, on her thirst and her hunger. Every note and word was like something pulled with great difficulty from deep within myself.
“Cherie was here tonight,” the answering machine told me when I finally got around to running the tape back and playing it. “This is Baker. Give me a call; I may have something for you.”
I dialed and waited through a lot of rings. Looked at the clock: after midnight.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Baker. I’m sorry to wake you. Lew Griffin. I wasn’t sure what you had could wait.”
“Minute,” Baker said at the other end. He put the phone down. I heard water running. Then he came back.
“It was about six or so. Heard a knock at the door, opened it, and there she was. Had a doll, some kind of dinosaur kind of thing, for Denny. Said she was sorry she hadn’t got back sooner.”
“How was she?”
“Looked good. Told me she’d been out of town, that things were looking up for her; she had a job and new friends, she said. I made her eat something-she’s always been on the skinny side-and she and Denny spent an hour or maybe a little more together.”
“She tell you anything about this job?”
“No. But as she was leaving she told me she wouldn’t be able to come back again, that she was leaving town.”
“And?”
He paused. “Cherie’s been a good friend to us, to Denny and me. I’m not telling you this because she’s a kid and we’re big folks, or because you found Denny when he wandered off. I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“I think because she told me three times, ‘I’ll be leaving for good on a Greyhound at two thirty-six this morning.’ Almost like she wanted me, or someone, to stop her.”
“Does she?”
“Who knows? I don’t know what I want, most mornings. Maybe you could ask her.”
“I could do that. Was she alone?”
“She came here alone, yes. After she left I looked out the window. A car pulled up to the curb a half-block up-town and she got in. A Lincoln, late model, dark.”
“Thank you, Mr. Baker. Say hi to Denny for me.”
“I will. And try to make Cherie understand why I had to tell you. She’s a child, Griffin.”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful, but a child for all that.”
“Sorry again to have waked you up.”
“Believe me, I don’t mind at all. One of the pleasures of my life is sitting alone here in the early morning with a cup of coffee, just looking out into the dark and thinking, remembering. I do it often. But not often enough.”
I hung up to the sound of his teakettle whistling, walked into the bedroom and found Vicky fast asleep. Stretched out naked on the white sheets she looked almost like a child herself, pale and small, so vulnerable. Memories sprang into my mind like tigers.
I do it often, Baker had said, but not often enough.
And I realized how much of myself, of what I was now, was Vicky, the sound of her voice and those r’s, the books she read, her music, thin arms entering white sleeves, the sandals she wore in our hours together, her gentleness and curiosity. Whatever else should happen, all that would remain part of me forever.
I found a pad of paper and wrote on it slowly, haltingly: Je t’aime toujours, et je te manquerai quand nous nous quittons. Longtemps je te manquerai.
I tucked it underneath the clock she kept at bedside, one she’d had since nursing school. I could still hear that clock ticking as I walked out into the black, cold night, like a small heart, like a cricket, a needle stitching a life together, something that doesn’t change.