Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

— It’s bedtime, Joan said, taking my drink and sipping it.

— What did they want?

— A man wants a divorce because nine years ago his wife had a feebleminded baby. He says it’s not his. Wants me to claim adultery and unclaim the child.

— Nice man.

— Actually, I began. Then no. Bedlow did not seem a nice man or not a nice man. He seemed a driven man, outside whatever might be his element. So I said that.

— Who isn’t? Joan sniffed. She is not the soul of charity at two thirty in the morning.

— What? Isn’t what?

— Driven. Out of her... his... element?

I looked at her. Is it the commonest of things for men in their forties to consider whether their women are satisfied? Is it a sign of the spirit’s collapse when you wonder how and with whom she spends her days? What is the term for less than suspicion: a tiny circlet of thought that touches your mind at lunch with clients or on the way to the office, almost enough to make you turn back home, and then disappears like smoke when you try to fix it, search for a word or an act that might have stirred it to life?

— Are you... driven? I asked much too casually.

— Me? No, she sighed, kissing me. — I’m different, she said. Was she too casual too?

— Bedlow isn’t different. I think he wants it all never to have happened. He had a little car franchise and a pregnant wife ten years ago. Clover. He had it made. Then it all went away.

Joan lit a cigarette, crossed her legs, and sat down on the floor with my drink. Her wrapper fell open, and I saw the shadow of her breasts. — It always goes away. If you know anything, you know that. Hang on as long as you can. ’Cause it’s going away. If you know anything...

I looked at her as she talked. She was as beautiful as the first time I had seen her. It was an article of faith: nothing had changed. Her body was still as soft and warm in my arms, and I wait for summer to see her in a bathing suit, and to see her take it off, water running out of her blond hair, between her breasts that I love better than whatever it is that I love next best.

— Sometimes it doesn’t go away, I said. Ponderously, I’m sure.

She cocked her head, almost said something, and sipped the drink instead.

What made me think then of the pictures there in the parlor? I went over them in the silence, the flush of gin, remembering where and when we had bought each one. That one in San Francisco, in a Japanese gallery, I thinking that I would not like it long, but thinking too that it didn’t matter, since we were at the end of a long difficult case with a fee to match. So if I didn’t like it later, well...

And the Danish ship, painted on wood in the seventeenth century. I still liked it very much. But why did I think of these things? Was it that they stood on the walls, amidst our lives, adding some measure of substance and solidity to them, making it seem that the convention of living together, holding lovely things in common, added reality to the lives themselves? Then, or was it later, I saw us sitting not in a Roman garden in Britain, but in a battered house trailer in imperial America, the walls overspread with invisible pictures in the image of a baby’s twisted unfinished face. And how would that be? How would we do then?

Joan smiled, lightly sardonic. — Ignore it, and it’ll go away.

— Was there... something I was supposed to do? I asked.

The smile deepened, then faded. — Not a thing, she said.

The next morning, a will was made, two houses changed hands, a corporation, closely held, was born, seven suits were filed, and a deposition was taken from a whore who claimed that her right of privacy was invaded when the vice squad caught her performing an act against nature on one of their members in a French Quarter alley. Howard Bedlow did not turn up. Joan called just after lunch.

— I think I’ll go over to the beach house for a day or two, she said, her voice flat and uncommunicative as only a woman’s can be.

I guess there was a long pause. It crossed my mind that once I had wanted to be a musician, perhaps even learn to compose. — I can’t get off till the day after tomorrow, I said, knowing that my words were inapposite to anything she might have in mind. — I could come Friday.

— That would be nice.

— Are you... taking the children?

— Louise will take care of them.

— You’ll be... by yourself?

A pause on her side this time.

— Yes. Sometimes... things get out of hand.

— Anything you want to talk about?

She laughed. — You’re the talker in the family.

— And you’re what? The actor. Or the thinker?

— That’s it. I don’t know.

My voice went cold then. I couldn’t help it. — Let me know if you figure it out. Then I hung up. And thought at once that I shouldn’t have and yet glad of the miniscule gesture because however puny, it was an act, and acts in law are almost always merely words. I live in a storm of words: words substituting for actions, words to evade actions, words hinting of actions, words pretending actions. I looked down at the deposition on my desk and wondered if they had caught the whore talking to the vice squad man in the alley. Give her ten years: the utterance of words is an act against nature, an authentic act against nature. I had read somewhere that in Chicago they have opened establishments wherein neither massage nor sex is offered: only a woman who, for a sum certain in money, will talk to you. She will say anything you want her to say: filth, word-pictures of every possible abomination, fantasies of domination and degradation, sadistic orgies strewn out in detail, oaths, descriptions of rape and castration. For a few dollars you can be told how you molested a small child, how you have murdered your parents and covered the carcasses with excrement, assisted in the gang rape of your second grade teacher. All words.

The authentic crime against nature has finally arrived. It is available somewhere in Chicago. There is no penalty, for after all, it is protected by the first amendment. Scoff on, Voltaire, Rousseau, scoff on.

My secretary, who would like to speak filth to me, buzzed.

— Mr. Bijou.

— Good. Send him in.

— On the phone.

Bert sounded far away. — You ain’t seen Howard, have you?

— No, I said. — Have you?

— Drunk somewhere. Called coughing and moaning something about a plot to shame him. Talking like last night. I think you ought to see Irma. You’re supposed to seek reconciliation, ain’t you?

— I think you’re ripe for law school, Bert. Yes, that’s what they say do.

— Well, he said. — Lemme see what I can do.

I was afraid of that. When I got home there was a note from Louise, the childrens’ nurse. She had taken them to her place up in Livingston Parish for a day or two. They would like that. The house was deserted, and I liked that. Not really. I wondered what a fast trip to the Gulf coast would turn up, or a call to a friend of mine in Biloxi who specializes in that kind of thing. But worse, I wasn’t sure I cared. Was it that I didn’t love Joan anymore, that somewhere along the way I had become insulated against her acts? Could it be that the practice of law had slowly made me responsive only to words? Did I need to go to Chicago to feel real again?

I was restless and drank too many martinis and was involved so much in my own musings that time passed quickly. I played some Beethoven, God knows why. I am almost never so distraught that I enjoy spiritual posturing. Usually, his music makes me grin.

I tried very hard to reckon where I was and what I should do. I was in the twentieth century after Christ, and it felt all of that long since anything on earth had mattered. I was in a democratic empire called America, an officer of its courts, and surely a day in those courts is as a thousand years. I was an artisan in words, shaping destinies, allocating money and blame by my work. I was past the midpoint of my life and could not make out what it had meant so far.