The following days are as blurred as that one moment is distinct.
I must have drunk up everything in the house, then gone out for more. I remember walking back along St. Charles with paper bags in both arms, stumbling at a corner but only one of the bottles, miraculously, breaking. Signing a check at a K amp;B. Walking barefoot on hot sidewalk trying to find my way home and waking the next morning to find the soles of my feet covered with blisters.
A few bright frames, all the rest lost.
At some point Walsh was there (or I thought he was), then Verne and a little later two Indians with a travois. I was a kite floating over crowds that included Janie, David, Robert Johnson, my old man, Verne, Jules Verne, Ma Rainey, Walsh, George Washington Carver, the whole sick crew.
Lots of vintage television. Game shows! Soap operas!
And again one morning woke to pain and thirst, not a rolled r anywhere.
It didn’t take long this time, a week or so, and I was turned loose on society once again. I lay around the house drinking endless pots of coffee and reading things like Balzac and Dickens. Taught for Jack Palangian three days a week and had a few good students, started running with a younger member of the French faculty. Did some low-key magazine pieces and a series for the Times-Picayune on Cajun culture.
Some nights after work Verne came by and we’d cook, then spend the rest of the evening out on the balcony talking about the old days. “We’re just alike that way, Lew,” she used to say. “Neither one of us is ever going to have anyone permanent, anyone who’ll go the long haul, who cares that much.” But she was wrong.
A few months out of hospital, down thirty pounds and a couple of sizes from running, I got galleys for The Old Man and finished reading them early one morning (I pushed the door open and saw his back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar) with tears in my eyes. The book’s success some months later surprised me not at all.
And now I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose.
I can’t imagine what it should be.
I still live in the house Verne and I once lived in together, and she still comes by some nights. I often talk to Vicky, Walsh, Cherie and others. Memory and real voices, and the voices of these characters as I write, fill the rooms. Sometimes regret or sorrow tries to rear up and make itself heard, and sometimes, though not so often as before, I think, it succeeds.
And so, another book. But not about my Cajun this time. About someone I’ve named Lew Griffin, a man I know both very well and not at all. And I have only to end it now by writing: I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain beats at the windows.
It is not midnight. It is not raining.