“I’m from New Orleans quite a few years now,” he says, “and I talk to a lot of folks. But I don’t think I ever heard that one.”
Kelly tries to concentrate on the man across the table. Something doesn’t fit. Keith Carradine had a little beard in that movie, and long hair, not like this man at all. She sips at her drink again.
Luke has waited a few moments for a response, but she is saying nothing. He shrugs a very small shrug and says, low, afraid she’s heard him as argumentative, “The Quarter just don’t seem like a place you happen to end up in going from point A to point B.” He pauses again.
Kelly looks at him. It’s from some other movie. Short hair. No whiskers. A film by an Altman protégé, Alan Rudolph: Choose Me. Choose me. I’m easy. She feels Michael next to her in a theater somewhere. Mobile. They saw that movie together, early on. Carradine didn’t look all that great to her by then. Too lean. Hungry. Simply hungry. She was glad. She put her head on Michael’s shoulder. Choose me. She feels tears coming to her eyes.
Luke is saying something. “You’re feeling scuffed up tonight,” he says, very softly. “I’m sorry.”
Kelly hears his words, appreciates the sudden shift in him, but she can find no words of her own.
Luke says, “I’m going back over to the bar now. If you need to just talk, you give me a sign.” He rises, picks up his drink.
“Thanks,” Kelly says. Thanks for going away. He turns. He goes. And she is sitting in her Mercedes, sitting at the curb across the street from the Blanchard Judicial Building and she roils hotly in her head, in her limbs, and she holds her cell phone in her hand, but the welter in her won’t let her work her fingers to make this call that she has come here to make. She watches the distant figures moving before the building, and she lowers her eyes and she finally makes her forefinger move — her finger is trembling, however, her whole hand, as well, is trembling — she can barely draw a breath — and she begins to dial.
And she drags herself back into this bar on some corner of probably Bourbon Street — she’s probably made her way to Bourbon Street — and she still can hardly draw a breath. It’s the bar now. It’s the bar that won’t let her breathe. She pulls her purse to her, feels around for her wallet. She takes out twenty. Enough for the drink. She puts it on the table and she rises and she moves past the bar without seeing anyone there and she goes out of this place and she crosses what is probably Bourbon Street because Bourbon Street won’t let her breathe either and she heads down whatever cross street this is, heads in the direction of the river.
Soon, though, she is diverted uptown by a lit window in a closed antique shop on Royal and she casts her eyes over the things there without seeing them, but without seeing anything inwardly either, and she drifts on and a tune plays in her head — weary blues have made me cry — just those few bars over and over — and she wonders if she will wear a blister on her heel from walking and walking in her Louboutins and she wonders why she wore them and she wonders if she packed any Band-Aids to put on the blister that she will probably rub onto her heel but of course she didn’t and she wonders why she should wonder such a thing does she think she’s a tourist come to the Quarter with all the things packed that she needs instead of come here simply to move from point A to point B and she hums and thinks about her feet and about the faint dryness in her mouth and then the shops vanish and beside her is an iron fence and she stops and looks and it’s Jesus standing in a floodlight at the back of the cathedral and his arms are raised above his head and his hand is broken, his hand is broken by Katrina and still unhealed, and she thinks that FEMA should take care of Jesus, that FEMA should heal his hand, and she finds herself backing away from him because Jesus does not approve of her and she is sorry for whatever she has done and whatever she might do and for whatever she is doing even now and his arms are raised as if in a blessing but his eyes are cast up Orleans Street toward Bourbon and he does not even notice her and that is just as well. She backs off. She turns and enters the darkness of Père Antoine’s Alley and emerges upon Jackson Square and she could look only a little to her right to see the bench where she and Michael sat but she did not mean to come here and she angles off to her left to get away, moving quickly, and her mind has clarified enough in this escape to hear the voice of a heavy woman sitting in the darkness with a tarot deck and the faint flicker of candles before her on a small table.
“I will read your future,” the woman says.
“You’ll get it wrong,” Kelly says, and she moves as fast as her Louboutin platform pumps will allow her to go, which isn’t very fast, and when she is far enough away from the tarot reader so there can be no more discussion of her future, Kelly stops and takes off one shoe and then the other and hooks her fingers in them to carry them. And she feels the cool press of stone on her bare feet, feels it for a long moment, a good thing. Then she moves along the galleried Pontalba and abruptly she is before another place where she did not intend to go: the pavilion of the Café du Monde, lit bright in the dark, and a young man and a young woman are before her, not someone from the past but uncomfortably here before her right now and they are sitting near the street and they have pushed their chairs side by side at the tiny bistro table and he sips his coffee and she takes a bite of a beignet and she struggles to manage the powdered sugar and he watches her do this and she catches him watching and they laugh and he leans to her and puts his lips near her ear and he whispers something, her face softening as he does, and she smiles, and Kelly knows exactly what he has said, she knows exactly what he has said that pleases her, and Kelly turns abruptly away and she moves quickly along the river-edge of Jackson Square where the carriage horses are stinking and nickering all along the curb and she cuts in front of one and crosses Decatur Street and now she is in a neutral place, a place with nothing of her and Michaeclass="underline" she crosses the street-performance space before the wide, low, concrete façade of Washington Artillery Park.
She climbs the stairs before her and another set of stairs up the façade and she is on top of the monument. A Civil War cannon on a pedestal aims at the Mississippi. She goes down the back stairs and finds herself crossing railroad tracks — the train whistles come from here, she thinks — and she presses on, climbing more stairs. She stops. The river is before her, going black in the gathering night and scattered with lights from Algiers across the way.
She’s having trouble controlling the heave of her chest. She has rushed here, she realizes. Since she crossed the street she has been moving very fast, free to do so with her feet bare and feeling compelled to see the river. And now she pauses. She struggles to slow her breathing. She is standing on the Moonwalk, the herringbone-brick esplanade along the water, and she can’t think why she was in such a rush. There’s only a wide darkness before her and she turns in the direction of Canal Street and she walks on. And like her husband, the past runs strongly in her, carrying her feelings about her husband, about her marriage, about her life, but it courses in her deeply enough that it’s as if it weren’t there, as if she were unaffected, as if she were merely here, in this present life, choosing to take this step and then the next, moving, in this moment, for instance, toward the distant steamboat Natchez lit up bright at its mooring and toward the even more distant hotels and the bridge to the West Bank. But in fact Kelly is beside another river, the Alabama, and she is five years old and Katie is nine and she is a prissy bossy big sister such as to drive Kelly crazy and the two of them and their mother are sitting on a blanket on the grass and Katie has taken over — even from Mama — taken over the laying out of the sandwiches clenched tight in Saran Wrap and the napkins and the bags of Fritos and Mama is sitting at the edge of the blanket and she’s looking away and Katie is in the center and acting like she is in charge and everything is done.