Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Now amidst this time and place, I could do almost as I chose. Should it be the islands of the Pacific with a box of paints? To the Colorado mountains with a pack, beans, a guitar, pencils, and much paper? Or, like an anchorite, declare the longest of nonterminal hunger strikes, this one against God Almighty, hoping that public opinion forces Him to reveal that for which I was made and put in this place and time.

Or why not throw over these ambiguities, this wife doing whatever she might be doing on the coast of the Gulf, these anonymous children content with Louise up the country, contemplating chickens, ducks, and guinea-fowl. Begin again. Say every word you have ever said, to new people: Hello, new woman, I love you. I have good teeth and most of my mind. I can do well on a good night in a happy bed. Hello, new colleagues, what do we do this time? Is this a trucking firm or a telephone exchange? What is the desiderata? Profit or prophecy?

Bert shook my arm. — Are you okay? You didn’t answer the door.

I studied him for a moment, my head soft and uncentered. I was nicely drunk, but coming back. — Yeah, I said. — I’m fine. What have you got tonight?

— Huh? Listen, can I turn down that music?

— Sure.

He doused the Second Symphony, and I found I was relieved, could breathe more deeply. — I brought her, he said. — She’s kinda spaced out, like the kids say.

He frowned, watched me. — You sure you’re all right?

I smiled. — All I needed was some company, Bert.

He smiled back. — All right, fine. You’re probably in the best kind of shape for Irma.

— Huh?

He looked at the empty martini pitcher. — Nothing. She’s just...

His voice trailed off and I watched him drift out of my line of sight. In the foyer, I could hear his voice, soft and distant, as if he were talking to a child.

I sobered up. Yes, I have that power. I discovered it in law school. However drunk, I can gather back in the purposely loosed strands of personality or whatever of us liquor casts apart. It is as if one were never truly sober, and hence one could claim back from liquor what it had never truly loosed. Either drunkenness or sobriety is an illusion.

Irma Bedlow was a surprise. I had reckoned on a woman well gone from womanhood. One of those shapeless bun-haired middle-aged creatures wearing bifocals, smiling out from behind the secrecy of knowing that they are at last safe from any but the most psychotic menaces from unbalanced males. But it was not that way. If I had been dead drunk on the one hand, or shuffling up to the communion rail on the other, she would have turned me around.

She was vivid. Dark hair and eyes, a complexion almost pale, a lovely body made more so by the thoughtless pride with which she inhabited it. She sat down opposite me, and our eyes held for a long moment.

I am used to a certain deference from people who come to me in legal situations. God knows we have worked long and hard enough to establish the mandarin tradition of the law, that circle of mysteries that swallows up laymen and all they possess like a vast desert or a hidden sea. People come to the law on tiptoe, watching, wishing they could know which words, what expressions and turns of phrase are the ones which bear their fate. I have smiled remembering that those who claim or avoid the law with such awe have themselves in their collectivity created it. But they are so far apart from one another in the sleep of their present lives that they cannot remember what they did together when they were awake.

But Irma Bedlow looked at me as if she were the counselor, her dark eyes fixed on mine to hold me to whatever I might say. Would I lie, and put both our cases in jeopardy? Would I say the best I knew, or had I wandered so long amidst the stunted shrubs of language, making unnatural acts in the name of my law, that words had turned from stones with which to build into ropy clinging undergrowth in which to become enmeshed?

I asked her if she would have a drink. I was surprised when she said yes. Fasts for the sake of an idiot child, trying to get others to do it, praying on her knees to Jesus beside the bed of Albert Sidney who did not know about the prayers, and who could know about Jesus only through infused knowledge there within the mansions of his imbecility. But yes, she said, and I went to fix it.

Of course Bert followed me over to the bar. — I don’t know. I think maybe I ought to take care of Howard and let her be your client.

— Don’t do that, I said, and wondered why I’d said it.

— She’s fine, Bert was saying, and I knew he meant nothing to do with her looks. He was not a carnal man, Bert. He was a social man. Once he had told me he wanted either to be mayor of Kenner or a comedian. He did not mean it humorously and I did not take it so. He was the least funny of men. Rather he understood with his nerves the pathos of living and would have liked to divert us from it with comedy. But it would not be so, and Bert would end up mayor trying to come to grips with our common anguish instead of belittling it.

— I never talked to anyone like her. You’ll see.

I think then I envisioned the most beautiful and desirable Jehovah’s Witness in the world. Would we try conclusions over Isaiah? I warn you, Irma, I know the Book and other books beyond number. I am a prince in the kingdom of words, and I have seen raw respect flushed up unwillingly in the eye of other lawmongers, and have had my work mentioned favorably in appellate decisions which, in their small way, rule all this land.

— Here you are, I said.

She smiled at me as if I were a child who had brought his mother a cool drink unasked.

— Howard came to see you, she said, sipping the martini as if gin bruised with vermouth were her common fare. — Can you help me... help him?

— He wants a divorce, I said, confused, trying to get things in focus.

— No, she said. Not aggressively, only firmly. Her information was better than mine. I have used the same tone of voice with other attorneys many times. When you know, you know.

— He only wants it over with, done with. That’s what he wants, she said.

Bert nodded. He had heard this before. There goes Bert’s value as a checkpoint with reality. He believes her. Lordy.

— You mean... the marriage?

— No, not that. He knows what I know. If it was a marriage, you can’t make it be over. You can only desert it. He wouldn’t do that.

I shrugged, noticing that she had made no use of her beauty at all so far. She did not disguise it or deny it. She allowed it to exist and simply ignored it. Her femininity washed over me, and yet I knew that it was not directed toward me. It had some other focus, and she saw me as a moment, a crossing in her life, an occasion to stop and turn back for an instant before going on. I wondered what I would be doing for her.

— He says he wants a divorce.

She looked down at her drink. Her lashes were incredibly long, though it was obvious she used no makeup at all. Her lips were deep red, a color not used in lipsticks since the forties. I understood why Bedlow drank. Nine years with a beautiful woman you love and cannot touch. Is that your best idea?

— He told you... I’d been unfaithful.

Bert was shaking his head, blushing. Not negating what Howard had said, or deprecating it.

— He said that, I told her.

— And that our baby... that Albert Sidney wasn’t... his?

— Yes, I said. Bert looked as if he would cry from shame.

She had not looked up while we talked. Her eyes stayed down, and while I waited, I heard the Beethoven tape, turned down but not off, running out at the end of the — Appassionata. It was a good moment to get up and change to something decent. I found a Vivaldi Chamber Mass, and the singers were very happy. The music was for God in the first instance, not for the spirit of fraternity or Napoleon or some other rubbish.