Роберт Батлер - Rafferty and Josephine

"Why doesn't he leave you alone?" Delphine said.

"We only danced."

"Your landmark."

"I didn't know."

"These people are bad news," Delphine said, patting Josephine on the hand as if she were the mother. "Thanks for the pep talk this morning. You're still my top client." Delphine rose and headed for the door.

Josephine tried to balance the little she had of Rafferty against the weight of her work, her legend, the renewed vigor of her daughter's allegiance. Delphine's hand was on the doorknob and she turned to her mother. Josephine jumped up and crossed to her, saying, "Hug hug." The phrase surprised both of them. Cutesy talk had been banned between them before Delphine even had breasts. But Josephine knew where that talk had come from. And Delphine complied, squaring around and offering her torso. Josephine hugged her and found, to her surprise, that she wished she could take back the bite.

~

At the same moment, in the bar named Desire, Rafferty and Max sat at a corner table in robe and cloak, their evening's faces propped side by side against the wall behind the salt and pepper shakers, and Max said, "Did you know?"

"She said she was a writer. That's as far as I got before the shit hit Amelia Earhart's propeller."

"I'm sure that's where she was heading."

"Who?"

"Josephine Claiborne."

"Heading where, exactly?"

Max puffed in exasperation at his father. "Getting you to back off from the LeBlanc House."

"It seemed to be the daughter's beef."

"It's the mother's holy ground we're trampling on."

Rafferty sagged inside. He didn't wonder why. The face of this Josephine Claiborne floated still in his head, sweeter to him than the princess in her mask. But Max was smart in these things. The woman who'd awakened him was merely after something. Then a thought lifted him. "Wait a minute," he said. "There was no way for her to know it was me."

"There's no basis for a suit," Max said. "That's crazy."

"I didn't have my mask off all night. Not till. "

"Dad. That's not the basic point. Lawsuit or not, they can make things nasty for us. She's got a lot of power in this town, power with the people. PR." Max paused and leaned across the table. " We want this restaurant ."

This last was said with more passion than Rafferty had heard in his son's voice in a long time. Max missed his mother badly. After her death, he'd trimmed his feelings back as neatly as the ivy on Harvard's walls. The LeBlanc House seemed to be changing all that. Rafferty heard the neon in his son's voice and he was grateful for that. And yet he could not hold Max's bright eyes before him. His gaze turned inward where all he could see was Josephine's face emerging, luminously naked, from behind its mask.

~

Rafferty spent the next day hiding in the little office off his kitchen on Chartres Street. Max was somewhere with his girlfriend, who was a lawyer, and it was impossible to guess whether they were partying or going over contracts, and Rafferty closed his door and even the tempest of Mardi Gras felt far away. He threw himself into the restaurant paperwork and he studied the menu, trying to see the culinary gaps, and he left his confinement only to scramble himself some eggs with onions and Tabasco sometime in the middle of the day. It was late when he finally pushed back from his desk and stared at the ceiling and let himself actually think about the question that had been running in him all day: What was there to do about this woman?

Forget her, was one answer.

He tried that one by sliding back under his desk and groping around and finding the menu and looking at it one more time. This restaurant and the one on Poland Avenue and-yes-the new one that was springing from his dear and only son's mind and talents on Magazine Street: these were his life at fifty. These were his work and his identity and they were the bond with what was left of his family. But his eyes fell on an appetizer-one he did especially well-and he felt itchy with the desire to spear an Oyster Bienville on a tiny fork and place it on Josephine Claiborne's tongue.

What was another answer? Talk to her. Try to see her.

His hands, eager and naÔve as they were, went at once to the phone book, though Rafferty didn't hold out much hope for the quest. A woman of her fame would never be listed. But his hands worked on and his forefinger went down the Claibornes and there she was: Josephine Claiborne. The hands were vindicated and they charged on, picking up the phone and dialing the number, though Rafferty was fluttery with trepidation.

A recorded message answered at once. He recognized Josephine's voice. "Hello," it said. "This is Josephine Claiborne. You've reached my special fan hot line. I'm busy at work on a brand-new book. " and she went on to talk about the Civil War and the beautiful Southern belle who was in fact a vampire using her dark powers to try to defend the Confederacy and find eternal love, as well. But Rafferty wasn't absorbing much. He was caught by the sheer sound of her, by the thought of her lips shaping words. Then she was saying, "If you'd like to leave me a message, you can speak after the beep. And thank you so much for reading my books."

Rafferty felt a clutching in his throat as he waited for the beep, his hands, still dreaming of placing an oyster on her tongue, not letting him hang up.

~

In the house with the machine that was about to sound its beep, Josephine had been acting out a day similar to Rafferty's. She closed the door of her writing room and closed the shades, even to her Writing Tree-she was not superstitious; she could find words on her own-and she fired up her computer and Marie Therese was there for her at once and the words flowed and flowed and finally Marie Therese was ready to bite her love and bring him into the Dark Forever of her own life and Josephine stopped. She was, herself, breathing heavily. But she was no longer inside Marie Therese. She was Josephine. And Josephine's lips trilled with the yearning to kiss a man she knew not to kiss.

She turned away from her computer. And she saw the light on the answering machine beside her reading chair. A fan was calling. She could use the adulatory distraction of a fan right now. Delphine had made her promise when the fan hot line was installed to pick up the phone occasionally and talk to whoever was there. It was good public relations. And right now it seemed very good therapy. So she rose and went to her chair and sat and she reached out and then hesitated, even as the machine was about to offer her fan a beep. She beat the tone by only a second, lifting the handset and putting it to her ear and saying, "Hello?"

On the other end, Rafferty made an incoherent sound from surprise and nervousness and desire, though all of this hardly registered on Josephine. She simply had the impression that someone was choking, though quite softly.

"Are you there?" Josephine said. "This is Josephine. Not the machine. I'd be happy to take your message personally."

Nothing.

"Are you all right? Are you choking?" she asked, though now there was only silence.

"I'm sorry," Rafferty said. "You took me by surprise."

"It's you," she said.

"I hope you mean Rafferty."

"I do."

"I'm sorry. I was going to leave this Josephine Claiborne the novelist a little message."

"Go ahead," Josephine said, quite softly.

Rafferty started choking again.

"Would you like me to beep for you?" Josephine asked.

"It wouldn't do any good. You've called my bluff."

"You have nothing to say to me?"

"Just. " Rafferty struggled to figure out what exactly he wanted here. Then he knew. "Just that I'd like to see you sometime. Without a mask and without historical figures nearby to put us at odds."

"Those weren't historical figures," Josephine said. "Those were our children."