Роберт Батлер - Rafferty and Josephine

"They've grabbed the LeBlanc House."

Josephine thought of terrorists. "Why on earth.?"

"They want to string it with neon lights and fill it with whorehouse plush."

Josephine tried to figure out whose radical political agenda was that tacky.

After a moment, Delphine realized she wasn't getting through to her mother. She said, "Those people who own the Rafferty's restaurants. They've just bought LeBlanc House." Delphine collapsed back into her wicker chair. "They'll destroy it with light and noise and bad taste. They'll defile Voodoo Vampire ."

Though it was early in the morning and though Josephine's novelist's mind wanted to linger with the alternate story of tacky terrorists on Magazine Street, she put her coffee down and, perhaps from the ongoing dream of her new novel, she felt as if she wanted to bite something. Voodoo Vampire had been her first big bestseller and the LeBlanc House was the setting for the novel's grand-ball scene.

"It's easily one of the three or four most popular spots on the tour," Delphine said.

Josephine waited for more. But Delphine grumped under her breath and sighed and then returned to her coffee.

"So?" Josephine said. Something was suddenly nibbling around in her, a prickly little pain.

"I'll change the script."

Josephine waited again. Delphine handled Josephine's press and publicity, but her public relations firm was much more than Josephine Claiborne now. It was a microbrewery, a senatorial candidate, the Association of New Orleans Street Performers, Bayou Viagra Hot Sauce, and more and more all the time. Josephine understood the nibbling even as it grew fiercer. She felt neglected by her own daughter. She felt jealous. She was ashamed of these feelings but it didn't stop her from saying, "That's it? What was that whole leap-in-the-air-and-shout thing about?"

"I'm damn angry." She sipped her coffee.

"This is something I never noticed before," Josephine said. "That a surge of anger has this languor afterward, like after sex."

Delphine narrowed her eyes, trying to figure out the rebuke.

"Darling, you sent me around in a coffin for the Voodoo Vampire book tour. What's happened to your initiative? They defile my vampire space and you go back to your coffee?"

Delphine looked at the cup in her hand.

Josephine silently upbraided herself. Stop this right now. There's nothing to be done about the LeBlanc House. More important, Delphine deserves her own life away from you. And she said, "Isn't there something?"

Delphine jumped up again. "You're right, Mama. Let's kick their ass."

"Go for the jugular, sweetie," Josephine said, feeling shamefully pleased at her daughter's attention.

~

On the night of this day there was a masked charity ball in a great ballroom in a Vieux CarrÈ hotel with a bar named Desire, and Rafferty put on a black cloak and the mask of Mephisto, and Josephine put on a bouffant satin gown with an overskirt of chiffon starry-skied with rhinestones and a sweetheart bodice of brocade fruited with silver fringe pearls, aurora borealis stones, sequins, and bugle beads, and she wore the mask of a princess, the very face she imagined for Marie Therese DeSang. The room swirled with waltzing princes and pirates and whores and goddesses and gods and sailors, and beneath the churn of violins and the deep thump of percussion was the soft clash of bangles and chains and plumes and trailings of fur and silk and feathers, and the dancers swooped and spun and others of their kind crowded close watching or leaning together or swaying or bending to press their words through the music, and all the eyes in these faces of porcelain or canvas or leather or felt were wide and fixed and the brows neither rose nor fell and the cheeks were high and rouged red, and the only unmasked faces in the place were fixed, too, as chins clutched violins and eyes closed and bows swooped and fell and swooped to the dark flow of the Masquerade Waltz and near the orchestra an Aztec sun king who had once tasted true absinthe was briefly transported by the thought of his mother waltzing with him, many years ago, and he spilled his Pernod on the goddess Mnemosyne who backed abruptly into Joan of Arc in full armor who lurched into the path of a high-hatted lawyer and his creole mistress whose crinolines deflected them and in so doing moved another couple and another and the eddy of dancers reshaped along the floor until Shakespeare swung his Dido into a tuxedoed waiter in a jester mask whose lifted tray tipped from his fingers and fried oysters tumbled down Eurydice's chest and into her cleavage and she invoked the hell where her well-meaning but stupid husband had stranded her and he himself who was dressed this year as an Indian chief lifted his tomahawk as if to have the scalp of the waiter but in fact he only jostled the passing Mephisto just enough to bend his path into a turning princess and so it was that Rafferty and Josephine collided.

"I beg your pardon," Rafferty said and he lifted her hand and bent to it and placed the mouth of his mask there and the gesture had come from the music and the glitter of this princess and he held his face there, unable, of course, to work the lips into the appropriate action. Rafferty and Josephine held the pose for a moment, she waiting, he contemplating what it was he was doing, and then he said, "Kiss kiss," and rose from her hand with a flourish of his cape. They looked at each other, mask to mask.

"Blush blush," Josephine said.

"Flirt flirt," Rafferty said.

"Ah, but how, precisely? You've gone quite vague."

"Wink wink, then."

"Good. Blush blush eye-flutter eye-flutter."

"Wink wink brow-wiggle brow-wiggle leer leer."

Josephine cocked her head at this man. "Please. I expected better than a leer, even from the devil himself."

"The devil is much more mundane than anyone suspects," Rafferty said.

"Perhaps you're right. Certainly this Southern belle is quite different from what you'd expect. Leer away then. I must make do."

And they stood before each other, having riffed together, instinctively, in a way that had been rare for each of them but which felt very good here with the music and the welter of strangers around them, and Rafferty said, "Are you free to waltz?"

"I am."

And they took each other in their arms and slid into the flow of dancers and his cape billowed and her rhinestones glittered, and mask before mask they danced spinning beneath a great chandelier and past first Amelia Earhart in flying togs and then, a brief time later, past King Louis the Fourteenth in a golden robe and both Amelia and Louis turned to look, and Josephine and Rafferty whirled on before the orchestra and each was thinking, I know nothing of this body holding mine he could be half my age she could be ugly , and they spun on, their feet moving lightly, synchronized as if they had done this for years together, and they quickly concluded that they'd thought wrong, I am agelessly sexy I care nothing of her looks if she has this wit , and Rafferty said, "Are you alone?"

"No." And Josephine knew he meant, Are you with a man , but she hesitated a beat onetwothree and another onetwothree and she wished to see the face behind his mask to see if his misimpression mattered to him but she could not and then onetwothree she said, "I'm here with my daughter."

"And I'm with my son."

"I'm smiling," she said.

"So am I," he said.

"Why?" The question flew from her of its own will and they spun on.

"We are so far only masks to each other," he said, elaborating on her question, revealing to her, actually, what she'd just meant, and this made her smile again, though she did not say so.

"And quite incompatible masks," she said.

"Do you think?"

"Are you not the very devil himself, sir?"