City of Refuge (5 page)

SJ didn’t participate the way he used to. When he was young he used to like to get out there behind the parades and do that second-line, dance with his podnuhs, slide his cap to the side, what they called acey-deuce, jump in with Leon or Joe, get the counterrhythms going, the little sleight of hand with the feet, the head doing one thing and the shoulders another and the hips—integrated, and part of the larger flow, stopping to hug your aunt-tee up on her steps; it didn’t matter if it was an anniversary or a funeral. People from other places mistook it for carefree happiness, but it was not that at all. It was joy at connecting the world of the spirit with the physical world, the Word made flesh (and bone and muscle and sound), a sacrament without a sacrifice. Not that they necessarily would have thought of it in those terms, unless they were like Mr. Perrilliat with all his books, a little old berry-black man who talked like a professor and was rumored to have gone to Howard University decades earlier and worked maintenance at the Criminal Court, where the lawyers called him Mose and tipped him five bucks at Christmas…

SJ didn’t jump into the parades anymore. He would hook up the big oil drum he had converted into a grill and barbecue on the neutral ground during a parade, and he would be the center of all the family and friends, and neighbors in beach chairs joking, eating, being themselves while he cooked up the pork chops and the hot sausage, and hot dogs for the kids, and that was enough for him. What was it that kept him out of the parades and the dancing in the street? What was he holding tight on to in his heart? Once in a great while, if the mood was just right and he was feeling good, he might do one of his old-time moves from back in the day, ankles bucking in, hips shaking in syncopated time as he expressionlessly turned some meat with a long fork, and maybe Lucy or Shawnetta or Bootsy would holler something at him and he would crack up laughing. And all around him all that defiant laughter and defiant grace that kept them all alive.

Before he got up off his knees, he asked again to be shown the way, if there was a way, and he prayed for Lucy. SJ knew she wasn’t taking her blood pressure pills and diabetes pills; he knew because once when he had carried her back to her house from a drunk he had checked in the medicine cabinet and the three month-old prescription bottles were in there, full and untouched. His guess was that God, if He existed, must have felt about humanity somewhat the way SJ felt about Lucy. Maybe God had problems of His own. Maybe the creation, as grand as it was, had something flawed in it, something He hadn’t gotten quite right. All that work, all that love and beauty, and still the warpage in the mechanism. People prayed for His compassion and understanding, but maybe mankind had to have compassion for God, too.

Talk like that drew strange looks, and SJ knew to keep those particular thoughts to himself most of the time. The only exception was sometimes, on visits to Texas, when he and Aaron’s wife, Dot, would argue about it. SJ would push her to the point of exasperation while Aaron sat back and laughed.

“That is the most ignorant thing I ever heard about,” she would say, frowning at him across the table in their kitchen. “How can you talk about the Creator of Heaven and Earth struggle like a man? You talking about God. Do you understand? He created everything…”

“That mean He created good and evil, right?”

“Oh shit,” Aaron said. “Here we go.”

“The Devil create the trouble of this world, SJ. And you have a choice to make. Don’t matter if you want…”

“If God created everything he created the Devil, right?”

“And the Devil had pride within him and that’s why he fell. Because he wanted to put his own will up against God, just like you doing.”

SJ would chuckle at this, along with Aaron, but Dot maintained
her stern look. “You trying to understand God’s motive and if you could understand that you would be God.”

“Let me ask you something, Dot. Why he made Abraham to almost kill his own son?”

Dot looked at him incredulously; the answer was not just obvious but so obvious that the question itself was suspect. “Why do you even ask something like that? You read the same Bible I read, SJ. He was testing Abraham’s faith…”

“Now, see…” SJ said, smiling, “you talking like you know his motive.”

“I’m saying what the Bible says,” she almost shouted. “I’m not making up no science fiction.”

“The Bible says that God and the Devil hang out together. They bet on how bad the Devil can mess over Job before he turn his back.”

“I don’t want to hear no more.” Dot started to walk out of the room, turned and stepped back. “You need to think about one thing. Life is suffering, and God have His reasons. Whether they make sense to you don’t make no different. But at the far end there is a reckoning. God send everyone their own portion of suffering. It’s not about if God love you you don’t suffer. The Savior said it easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle—Praise God—than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus don’t lie…”

Dot and Aaron. SJ took hold of the bed now and rose up slowly onto his feet as he did every other night, having wrestled his questions to a draw, and got himself ready to go to sleep in the one-hundred-year-old bed that had belonged to his grandparents.

Five blocks away, Lucy on the couch reaches out to Wesley’s picture and turns it so she can look at it. Television remote across the room but she is where she was. Was where she is. She helped him
buy that bike and now that’s what he did nights. The Crystal Mist sound just like fruit but with the wine tang. Taste she means. With that mustache thought he look so grown up. She missed out on that when he turned sixteen; SJ and her supposed to take him to the Piccadilly Cafeteria but she didn’t make it that time. She bought him that watch that the strap broke. Remember your mama, she said, crying. I know it don’t look that way but I love you. That one time he drove her to the emergency room. But how he drive her without they own a car. That time he got her the big comb for Mother’s Day said Goody on it. That was in her dresser.

“Wesley,” she slurred out.

Big comb said Goody; back when he was small enough he’d push his head under her arm and rest there with she on the couch but he grown now, say I love you mama. I love you. I love you baby boy. Don’t never think you too old. My boy drove me…someplace. Not on the bike though. No, no. I love you mama he say. Where Wesley?

He tells himself he is not looking for Chantrell but of course he is. Bent over the hand grips, T-shirt flapping halfway up by his rib cage in the backdraft, up and down the hot night streets alone, under the dark, leafy oak trees, or on the broad avenues under streetlights. Speed was its own reason.

Feelings suck you under; compassion is an undertow and you ward it off with money and watches and cars and sunglasses and clothes, and that made you different from who? Some are truly hard and some are weak, and some are taking some time in the land of hard and will use what they learn later in a constructive way, and some will end up on the greasy asphalt behind the Winn-Dixie at three in the morning and maybe even still there at dawn, the spreading puddle around their head like an obscene misshapen wine-col
ored halo no longer spreading, drying around the edges, with their pants around their thighs after they slid down and they tripped and the two others caught up with him and laughed at his pleading for mercy and shot him twice in the head and then ran off. And even those two, if things go right and they end up in court, still trying to play defiant but taken out of their feedback chamber of friends and images, and then in jail, long hours to think, end up realizing that they made an error.

Wesley right on the edge. Staying by Roland in Gentilly off Broad behind the Fairgrounds. Flirting around the edges of it, getting the taste, trying it on. What it feels like to slap a woman. Or standing squarely, hands crossed in front of you, staring eye to eye with another young man, as if in a mirror, to see who blinks. Slumped on the couch, staring into the cell phone with the game, or the messages. The difference, if it was going to make a difference, was that he had a family; he knew what a home life looked like and he had seen how it worked. He was trying to find a place in a world where there weren’t a lot of second chances.

Wesley loved and looked up to SJ, but he needed to get away from him, too. The discipline and ethic of hard work that had been a lifesaver for his uncle was suffocating to him. Not even that he didn’t believe his uncle was right—maybe because he believed his uncle was right. It didn’t matter—it was the completeness of the worldview, the emotional urgency of his uncle’s concern and anxiety, his sense of rightness, the sense that what had worked for him worked, had come across to him, that made him feel that he needed to get out from under.

Unlike many, he had the images of another way, but they hurt, too. Pictures taken by SJ during his time as an amateur photographer (his darkroom was long in disuse; he no longer saw the point after Rosetta died, except for the corny pictures that Wesley chafed at now); he could remember himself in a short-sleeve white shirt
and bow tie with that exaggerated smile he used to put on for the camera when he was six and seven and eight, or out in Texas riding that pony he wanted to take home. Or in the kitchen at his birthday party, with Lucy looming over him, a paper hat on her head and the light from the birthday candles making her look spooky. He could outrun all of that; the bike was a speedboat cutting through the water, a long touchdown run. Home hurt, and look what the world outside said was of value. Things and more things. No mercy for losers, voted off the island, off the stage, off the show. The camera always on you and when it was off who cared about you anymore? Don’t look back, Wesley.

The next morning, Friday, Craig awoke with a warm fizz of hopefulness in his brain and body, left Alice sleeping in bed and went downstairs to put on coffee. The previous night’s lovemaking had seemed to him a moment of real touching and caring that he—
they
—had been missing badly. As long as they could get to that, he thought—that arc between them, the contact—they had something to build on, there was a way forward.

Early sunlight came into the kitchen through the backyard trees. He turned on the morning television automatically—traffic reports, headlines, weather. The storm they had been watching had moved into the Gulf; there would be a couple of school closings, nothing big. They’d monitor it during the day and if it looked like a potential problem they could leave the next day or Sunday, go to Oxford, Mississippi, as they had in years past, make a little vacation out of it. Outside, the morning was bright and rich with color.

He counted out spoonfuls of coffee into the filter basket, looking out the kitchen window onto the brick patio, which was ruptured in places by the knuckles of roots from the grizzled oak tree that shaded their cookouts and cocktail parties. Some days he couldn’t get over the faint smell the oaks gave off as they dried in the morning sun when he walked out the front door to pick up the
Times-Picayune
in its plastic sheath, or the feeling of warmth he got coming back inside and greeting the Big Ugly Lamp that sat on the mail table in the front hall like some decadent Statue of Liberty, welcoming visitors.

The Big Ugly Lamp was the first thing they had bought for the house after moving to New Orleans, at the Jefferson Flea Market. Its saddle-stitched shade hovered obscenely over a massive base, a kind of bloated cement cruller that looked as if it had been finished in blue stucco then dotted with gold highlights on its wimpled surface, a twisted pastiche of Jean Arp and LeRoy Neiman. They had seen it and had both started giggling at it simultaneously. “That poor lamp,” Alice said. They examined it, and Craig said, gravely, “It’ll never survive on its own.” Buying it was a vote for generosity of spirit, a talismanic embrace of the limits of taste. “Here we are in New Orleans,” the lamp had said for them both. Everything is part of the parade; everything gets to dance.

In the past few months the Big Ugly Lamp had served mainly to remind Craig how rarely he and Alice found themselves on the same page anymore about gestures like that. But on this morning it seemed a harbinger of possible rebirth. Everything Craig saw made him happy—the primitive and “outsider” art on the living room and dining room walls, the children’s toys in their boxes at the ends of the room, the huge redwood picnic table that served as their dining room set, the laundry stacked up behind the partly open louvered doors to the laundry alcove, Annie’s and Malcolm’s watercolors on the refrigerator door, in this, the first house he had owned. Instead of feeling like an unprepared extra in someone else’s television show, he felt himself right in the center of where he wanted to be.

To his surprise, he heard little bare feet approaching, quickly, around the corner of the kitchen wall, and then Annie herself followed the sound in, running, in her pajamas, breathlessly saying, “
Daddy
…Daddy…when are we…”

With an air of mock seriousness, Craig held up his hand and said, “I’m sorry…I think we’re forgetting something?”

Annie stopped short, squeezed her lips together trying not to laugh.

“Can we say, ‘Good morning, Daddy’?” Craig said, a caricature of officiousness.

“Good morning, Daddy,” Annie repeated, dutifully.

“‘How are you this morning, Daddy?’”

“Daddy, stop it!” Annie said. “Do I have to wrap my present for Malcolm now?”

“Shhh,” Craig said, “not too loud, okay? Let’s have breakfast and get dressed first. If you don’t get it wrapped now you’ll have time after school. How come you’re up so early?”

“I heard you brush your teeth and I’m excited about Malcolm’s birthday.”

She climbed up on the maple veneer bar stools they had around the counter island and he set out her cereal bowl. His heart was flattened with joy and love, as it always was, seeing her sitting there eating her cereal, with her blond hair falling across her forehead, with its pale bluish veins visible under her skin. They lived a block from school, so there was less of a rush to get Annie pulled together for her day than there might otherwise have been, and Craig let himself feel simple pleasure in watching his daughter eat her cereal in the warm kitchen in the warm house he had provided, in the city he loved.

As Annie brought her bowl to the sink to rinse, her mother walked into the room, dressed already and moving with a deliberate, businesslike rhythm. Craig’s heart fell slightly; in his mind some gauzy oasis of morning lounging, leisurely romance after the kids were out the door for the day, unrealistic given their logistics to begin with, evaporated. He tried to send her a little smile, edged over to kiss her as she poured out her cereal, but her attention was on the television, where they were back to talking about the storm; they
were monitoring its movements, it had lost strength over Florida but was reforming “nicely” over the Gulf.

“Oh, good,” she said. “We’re going to have to evacuate again.”

“No we’re not,” Craig said. “It’s hundreds of miles away and it will pull east the way they always do.” On the screen, the disingenuously concerned expressions on the broadcasters’ faces slid quickly into equally disingenuous hearty cordiality for a segment on a local chef.

After several minutes, Annie went upstairs to finish getting herself dressed, and Craig took the moment to ask Alice if anything was wrong. Expressionlessly, she replied that they needed to talk. “What’s wrong?” Craig repeated. Alice shook her head, looking, to Craig, as if she were about to cry. “I’ll call in late,” Craig said.

He deputized Scott, the managing editor, to proof the final pages, then got Annie in gear to head out and walked her the block and a half to school, while Alice drove Malcolm over to their friends Chris and Lisa’s for a playdate with their two-year-old, Bonnie.

Forty-five minutes later Craig and Alice sat down across from each other in two living room chairs. Craig looked at her seriously. They had learned some things from therapy. One was to never interrupt. Another was to not raise your voice. Another was to closely monitor your own facial expressions for annoyance, exasperation, etc. Things could arc quickly out of control in accelerating, centrifugal curves; chain reactions in which the way the other person spoke or looked, matters of tone and inflection, became the topic of argument rather than the supposed actual topic. They both realized that that was the sure road to dissolution. But managing a conversation despite all the stored-up anger and frustration was not easy.

Craig waited for Alice to begin speaking, since she had called for the talk; this was the unspoken rule. For all that he was hurt and frustrated by what he thought of as Alice’s distancing, Craig was never unmindful of her intelligence, her strength, her total commitment to the children. He wasn’t sure what the problem was this
morning, but he felt the glow and fizz slipping away, and reflexively, as if to try and hold on to it, just as she was about to speak he said, “Okay, wait, can I say one thing really fast? I wanted to say that last night made me really happy. I felt like we found a place that we hadn’t visited in a while, and I felt like it brought us closer together, and I am really happy for that.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully, pressed her lips together and looked him in the eyes. The remark made her furious. Craig had a way of framing their conversations, a kind of presentational aspect, as if he were reading a proclamation, that drove her crazy. Plus he had violated the unspoken etiquette of their conversations by speaking first when she had been the one asking to have a talk, which she read as a way of him discharging his anxiety about what she had to say by taking some kind of control, and it really pissed her off. Not to mention the obliviousness about the night before. So instead of the conciliatory, helpful approach she had envisioned, she spoke more sharply than she meant to.

“I was happy we were able to get past our fight,” she began. “I do think that is important…”

Craig had noticed a pattern in the previous couple of years: they would get close, make love, then, inevitably, the next day she would be distant, even hostile. His provisional theory was that she had a chronic fear of closeness. She was happy to let down her emotional defenses, but then she got angry at being vulnerable. Still, he couldn’t help taking it personally, and, trying to deliver the line as a joke, he said, “I take it you’re saying that the sex wasn’t too great.”

Incredulous, Alice said, “Would it be possible even for a minute for me to finish what I have to say without it being interpreted—wrongly in this case—and summed up by you?”

“I’m sorry,” Craig said. “I shouldn’t have interrupted. And it was a stupid thing to say.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then, showing that she had
been awake during their couples therapy sessions, too, she said, “Thank you,” and they were back on track. A year and a half earlier they would have gone all the way down that rabbit hole, arguing about how they argued, increasingly angry with each other.

“I want us to have a serious discussion about what we are doing with our lives,” she went on. “I don’t like having to evacuate my house a couple times a year, take my children out of school, leave and not know what will be left of my house when I get back…”

“
Our
house,” Craig offered, firmly.

“Dammit,” Alice said, “can I finish my sentences without having them corrected or edited by you?”

“Not if you are going to write me out of the script.”

It took a moment, but she went on, with a harder edge in her voice now. “I don’t like getting called into school because
our
daughter is using words like ‘motherfucker.’ And I don’t like worrying whether I am going to make it alive from
our
car to
our
house when I come home after dark. I don’t like hearing about
our
friends being held up and wondering when it is
our
turn. And above all, Craig, I don’t like not even being able to voice these concerns to
my
husband without getting into a fight every time.”

“Where would you like to live, Alice?”

“You know…” she said, leaving the sentence dangling, pressing her lips together and looking out the window. She shook her head. “That’s not even the point.”

“Then—listen to me, Alice, please—I need to know what the point is. This is our life. I have a really good job here that provides for us and our children. We have a house that we love. Our daughter is in a great school, a block away from our house, along with the children of our neighbors, whom we also like and have a community with. We have friends all over the city, great food, music when we want to hear it, and our children are exposed to other children from all kinds of backgrounds. Yes, the city has a lot of crime, but so do most cities…”

“Not like this.”

Craig stopped speaking, with his eyebrows raised, and after a moment Alice said, “I’m sorry.”

Craig went on. “Yes, we have to evacuate occasionally, but it doesn’t take all that much, we have a nice two-day vacation in Oxford, and then we’re back. We have a life here. I’m trying to figure out what it is you really want, realistically. We’ve had this conversation at least a dozen times…”

“A dozen?”

“…and I never know where it leaves us,” Craig went on, letting the interruption pass. “We’ve had good times here, haven’t we?”

“Of course,” Alice said after a brief hesitation. “We…”

“Then—bottom line, then I’m finished—I need to know what it is you want, what you really want. Otherwise this is just like picking at a scab. If we’re going to be here I want to be here.”

They sat there, practically knee-to-knee, and the thing that was really at issue, the unnameable thing that neither of them could see clearly or focus on because it was too big and too close and too nameless, rotated above their heads like a mirrored ball over an empty dance floor. The argument was never really about logistics but about each one’s desire for the other to feel what they felt. How had they gotten so dug into their positions?

Alice looked at Craig evenly and seriously and said, “I want you to acknowledge that this is a scary, backward, inconvenient place to live, and that we are putting our children at risk by living here.”

“So—bottom line—you want to move. Right? Where do you want to live? That’s what I asked you before.”

“I’ll repeat what I said, Craig: What I want is for you to acknowledge…”

“Right, right—that New Orleans is a horrible place and we should go back to Ann Arbor.”

“No,” she almost screamed. What she wanted was for him to
acknowledge that her fears had some basis in the reality of the situation. At least that way, if they were going to stay, they could face the fears together, instead of her feelings being negated because there was no immediate practical solution. She wanted them to be on the same page; that in itself would have relieved much of the pressure that fueled her anger.

That is what she thought, when she could think quietly about it, although there was another element, harder to admit. She was, at heart, jangled by the city. It was garish, loud, full of abrupt and, to her, inharmonious contrasts. Yes, it was fun to visit, fun as a spice, as a side dish. But as she had gotten older she found herself, to her surprise, wanting something closer to what she had never wanted for herself growing up. Muted colors, tasteful room arrangements, recognizable social and cultural activities with literate, educated friends…All the things she had grown up wanting to escape, the overtones of class anxiety that drove her crazy in her parents, she was discovering to her own intense discomfort were embedded in her. And in her hopes for Annie and Malcolm. She wished that Craig could have shouldered some of that desire, let it rest less completely on her shoulders. She had married someone who reflected her need to distance herself from her upbringing, and now because of that she had been left alone to defend the part of her that was still stuck back there with those values.