Elise Blackwell - The Lower Quarter

“I like the Katrina costumes,” Johanna said as they walked down Conti Street. She gestured to a couple dressed like broken refrigerators, a person walking under a blue tarp, a monstrously colored whirlwind of a man.

“You’re perverse,” he told her.

When she just nodded, he said, “I like that. It’s part of why I like this city — it’s perverse.”

It was hard to hear, even when they leaned into one another, so mostly they just walked until the parade crashed in on itself back where it started, with new arrivals mixing in with the sore-footed. People milled about talking, some going in and out of the bar, a few drunk off their asses, but most merely happy, smiling at their job well done, reacting to others’ small infringements of personal space with generosity. It looked like one kind of freedom.

When Eli asked if he could buy Johanna dinner, she surprised him by agreeing. He’d wanted to take her somewhere nice, and also somewhere quiet where he could hear well across a small table, but she led him down Decatur and up Frenchmen Street to a dingy box whose entry was flanked with poker machines. They sat at the bar and were waited on by a large, bearded young guy with full ink sleeves. Johanna ordered a tofu po’boy and tater tots, which was not what he had imagined them eating, though now he ordered the same with a local beer. Johanna asked for a glass and poured two inches of his beer into it. “If you don’t mind,” she said, but it was not a question, and he was confused by the change in her personality, the switch from reticence to forwardness, awkwardness to something like social comfort. Perhaps this was simply an alternative strategy for guarding herself, a portion of her repertoire that he hadn’t yet seen.

Eli did three things he rarely did: eat too much, talk too much, and drink too much. Johanna drew speech from him without asking direct questions, and he ordered a third and then a fourth Abita and told her about small events from his childhood, about working as a tour guide helping unskilled tourists steer their kayaks to and back from the eerie waters of the bioluminescent bay outside Fajardo, about his early painting days in Spanish Harlem and the place where he’d always taken his morning coffee. It felt good to loosen his tongue and good to talk, connecting his life now with the one across the long, narrow bridge that was prison.

“And now you are here,” she told him, refusing his offer of another dram of his beer.

“Which reminds me,” he said clumsily, “I’m supposed to ask you how you know the Fontenot family.”

He imagined himself watching her carefully, dissecting her gestures and expressions, discerning whether or not her answer was truthful. But with the beer, he simply forgot, though he heard what she said, which was that she had once restored a painting for Gerard Fontenot.

“So that’s how you came to be at a party with those people.”

She held her head straight, smiled with one corner of her mouth, which carved a small crescent an inch higher on her face, which looked like someone had dug in a fingernail or like a very old scar. “Yes. I met his son there as well.” She swirled the last piece of potato on her plate in hot sauce, but did not eat it. “By the way,” she said, “there was a policeman also asking about your missing painting.”

Eli felt foggy from the beer and could not quite make sense of what she was saying. He’d felt certain that the detective he’d talked to had no interest in investigating the case, which meant he’d been lying or else had changed his mind. Unless it wasn’t the same cop, which made no better sense, given the labor shortage in the city for that kind of work. He marked this revelation as important, as something he’d need to figure out when he wasn’t drunk.

As they walked back, Johanna cut off Frenchmen a couple of streets before Decatur, walking toward his hotel rather than to her place. “I could come up with you,” she said, and he could not imagine a world in which he would have this much luck. Perhaps sensing his disbelief, she added, “That little dog, his owner claimed him today. My apartment will feel too still. It’s strange how you can become used to something quickly if you are not being careful.”

This made enough sense that Eli discarded his good sense, claimed his key at the desk, and led Johanna up the staircase toward his room. On the landing, he kissed her. He expected it to be clumsy even as he moved toward her, but it was not. They were a good fit — anatomically, chemically, electromagnetically, or whatever it is that makes that happen. He opened his eyes and nodded; she was already looking at him, also approving. In the room, Johanna stood by the armchair and undressed completely, so he did the same, though he would have preferred it if they had moved more slowly, if they’d had undone each other’s buttons one at a time rather than their own all at once. He met her at the bed, which she turned down while he watched, again registering that he was a little drunk and so working doubly hard to remember every detail of what was happening.

Since he had given up all the ideas he had previously held of what she would be like, he was not surprised, as he would have been before, that she was not shy and was not quiet. He lay on his back and let her do as she wished, and she knew how to bring them both pleasure. He hoped for imperfections but found none. He loved the sharp jut of her hipbones and collarbones, her small and perfectly shaped breasts, the elongated concave oval in the center of her stomach. Her skin was evenly colored, with no sun lines, no tattoos, no scars — almost as though she were not real. At one point he closed his eyes, but he opened them again quickly; he did not want to miss looking at her, not even for a moment. He was afraid he would wake up, find himself in prison, shaking off the long, vivid dream, moving his hand in case anyone looked into his cell and saw him.

Sometimes she returned his gaze; at other times she closed her eyes, and he wondered if it mattered to her whom she was with, if she even remembered that it was he. During a break she lay on her back and looked around the room. Before he’d made love to her, he had not viewed her as a person of passion. Now he saw her as a person who usually hid her passion. He wanted to ask her if she’d been in the hotel before, but he knew he would not do anything to disrupt or ruin this moment.

He pictured her in this same room, or one adjacent to it or maybe down the hall, bashing in a man’s head with a lamp or a rod or whatever had been used to kill the man found with two paintings but not three. “Blunt force” was all he had been told by Detective Mouton. It seemed both possible and impossible all at once that she had killed a man as the winds started to buffet the city, as though both realities were simultaneously real. This was a feeling he’d often had in prison, when he’d imagined an alternate self walking the streets of the Bronx or swimming in the glowing waters off Fajardo or bundled up against the icy wind blowing down off Lake Michigan.

She was capable of murder, he felt sure of it. Though he did not think she meant to harm him, he admitted the possibility, which did not stop him from starting again after their rest. He would serve up his jugular to her if she would let him keep making love to her until it was time for him to die.

And if he had to go to prison to protect her, it wasn’t as if he’d never gone to prison to protect a woman before. At least this one had made him no promises, so there would be no promises for her to break. He would know the sacrifice was selfless and not just a long-term strategy.

Clay

Johanna had agreed to meet him again after he’d told her it was necessary. It was a little too cold and far too wet to sit on the grass in their usual place across from the birds, so he suggested that he meet her in front of her studio — he never entered her space — and that they walk along the levee. The weather wasn’t good for walking, either, but he hoped the greater privacy of open space might make her more open than she would be if they were somewhere they would be interrupted by a server or were seated near potential eavesdroppers.