Роберт Батлер - Rafferty and Josephine

"Yes," Rafferty said. "You're right. The children we love and are devoted to."

"Yes."

"And who would control us, if they could?" Rafferty crimped up the end of his sentence to make it a question. He was thinking of Max. He didn't know about this woman's daughter.

"Or we, them." Josephine thought of herself and Delphine, but wondered if it was Rafferty himself who loved neon and whorehouse plush and, if he did, how they'd ever decorate a room together.

The two fell silent again. Finally Josephine said, "When?"

"I'm an impatient man."

"Tomorrow then."

"Fat Tuesday," Rafferty said.

"We should be discreet."

"I think I know a place."

~

A stingray glided by, directly over Rafferty's head, and then a porcupine puffer as big as a fire hydrant. Rafferty stood in the center of the underwater tunnel of the Aquarium of the Americas, surrounded by half a million gallons of water. As he'd expected, the place was nearly empty, with the revelry building to a climax just a few blocks away. He lowered his face and half a dozen bright silver Mexican lookdowns, their mouths drawn into frowns, slid by, their bodies suddenly turning into knife blades, nearly vanishing, as they wheeled around and faced him head-on. "Hello, girls," he said, their thin elegance reminding him of fashion models.

"Do you often talk to fish?"

He turned. It was Josephine.

He smiled. "While I was waiting I confessed to a monkfish."

"What was your sin? Buying the LeBlanc House?"

"I thought we'd leave that for a while."

"Yes," Josephine said. "I'm sorry."

They watched a little flurry of coming and going before them-a parrotfish, then a royal gramma and a queen trigger, then the lookdowns reappeared, gliding past. Josephine said, "Aren't those the girls?"

"Yes they are."

"They're very skinny."

"Yes they are."

"Is that what attracts you to them?" Josephine asked.

Rafferty knew she was joking, but he also knew enough to take a little leap with her. He looked at her until she turned her face to him and he said, "You are quite wonderfully slender."

Josephine's eyebrows lifted and then she smiled. She found she liked being caught off balance by this man. She said, "You do know what a girl wants to hear."

Rafferty put on a very serious face. "Right. 'You're skinny' and 'I'd just as soon cuddle.'"

Josephine laughed, lifting her head back to do so and exposing her throat, which seemed to Rafferty as kissable as her lips. When she stopped laughing and was looking again at him, something more serious had come over her. She said, "Do we talk too cute sometimes?"

"We haven't had enough times yet in order to even have a sometimes ," Rafferty said and he regretted answering her serious question with more cuteness.

"Wow," Josephine said. "That's true, isn't it."

The shadow of some great fish passed over them, but they did not look up. They studied each other's eyes for a long moment and finally Rafferty said, "It's pretty much life-story time, isn't it."

"I think so," Josephine said.

And so they walked among fish and spoke of things that were relevant and irrelevant to the present moment and it was impossible to tell these two kinds of things apart. Rafferty grew up in the Irish Channel and his father was a policeman, but Rafferty preferred his mother's kitchen and he learned to cook, much to the dismay of his father, and after high school he started in the kitchen at Brennan's and he kept his eyes and ears open and then, with the help of some independent money his mother had-and which he paid back, at his insistence, with loan shark's interest-he started a restaurant on Poland Avenue, and he called it Rafferty's. He married a fellow kitchen worker from Brennan's and she had died three years ago after fighting ovarian cancer for longer than anyone figured she would and they had one child, Max, who had his mother's eyes and her mix of practical good sense and bullheadedness and, yes, manipulativeness.

Josephine grew up in the house she now lived in and the Claiborne of Claiborne Avenue was a distant uncle, and her father was wealthy from oil and her mother was wealthy from her father's oil and Josephine went off to Vanderbilt and she married by reflex upon graduation, when the only life she had imagined for herself was being married, and a mere six months before an acrimonious divorce, her only child came of that marriage, Delphine, who thankfully bore nothing recognizable of her father and who studied English literature at Radcliffe and started her own public relations firm, which took Josephine as its first client.

Josephine had always written. She was an only child and perhaps that had something to do with it. She always wrote stories, telling the things to the paper that she otherwise would have told to her sisters in their beds in the dark, especially in the dead quiet dark when Fat Tuesday had turned into Ash Wednesday, when the thrilling blare of Mardi Gras had suddenly turned into silence. That was a night when she'd always stayed awake to write the stories she yearned to speak.

And after speaking all of this, Rafferty and Josephine themselves fell into silence as they sat before a tank of jellyfish. Rafferty's mind tracked through Josephine's story and came to a thing that Rafferty spoke almost to himself. "That's tonight," he said.

Josephine shook off her own meditation on Rafferty's life. "What?"

"The night of the year that made you a writer. It's tonight."

Josephine liked the way he spun what she'd said. "Yes. It did do that."

Rafferty watched a great moonjelly throb its way upward in the tank. After a moment Josephine said, "Was your wife witty?"

"Yes." Rafferty thought he sensed a flinch in Josephine. He added softly, "I'm not seeing her in you."

Josephine didn't realize that this was the little stutter in her until Rafferty said it. Somewhat to her surprise she felt a twist of resentment at that, as if he'd abruptly put his hand on her breast, although, also to her surprise, that's where her breast presently wanted his hand. She looked away. "Yow," she said.

"Yow?" Rafferty asked.

"Yow," Josephine said, knowing instantly she could not find a way even to begin to explain.

"I see," said Rafferty, and he sort of did see the part about his knowing what she was feeling. "And your husband. Do I remind you of him?"

"If you did, we wouldn't be sitting here."

Rafferty found that this pleased him very much. He was prepared to be retrospectively jealous of the man. He wondered if he should tell her as much, but he decided against it. That was surely near the top of the list of things a girl does not want to hear. He regretted now even bringing it up, for he could feel Josephine pulling into herself. "We've had a little too much life-story time," he said.

"I think you're right."

"At least it brought us to this moment," Rafferty said. The words suddenly sounded glib to him. He checked to see if he meant them. He did.

Josephine might have wondered about his sincerity as well, but he'd done it again, spoken truly a thing she herself was feeling. "And it gave us the children we're proud of," she said, and upon hearing her own words she checked to see if her devotion to Delphine would destroy what was happening with this man. She did not know.

A brooding silence came upon them both and finally Josephine said, "I should go."

"All right," Rafferty said, something that seemed like panic rising in his chest like a jellyfish. He added, trying not to sound desperate, "But I didn't even get a chance to buy you a cup of coffee."

It was all on Josephine now. All she needed to say was, I don't think that would be a good idea, or even, Some other time, and they could go straight to the place where part of her feared they were inevitably heading. And yet, she said, "Tomorrow."