She seems so young, he thought. Her face was smooth, the skin beneath her eyes was sound. It struck him then how good the doctor and the children must have been for her.
“Allons,” Walker declared. “Laissez le bon temps …”
She put her hand over his mouth.
“I forbid you to use that idiotic phrase,” she told him. “It’s for morons. Only cretins use it. And people from Shreveport.”
“I was feeling moronic. Happy in my sex life. A stud once more.”
“You were always a stud, Gordon.”
“Ofttimes,” he said, “of late not always.”
Suddenly she said, “How are your boys, Gordon?”
He fell silent inside. Her question fell upon his inward man like frost. He swallowed the pain.
“They’re fine.”
“In school?”
“Stuart’s in school. Deak’s on his own.”
“Deak is the funny one, right? The pretty one.”
“Stuart,” Walker said. “He’s the funny one now.”
“They’re the only ones you love,” she said. “You always fretted over them.”
“Hostages to fortune,” he said. He was thinking that if they began to talk about their children they would drown in a sea of regret. Walker had always pictured regret as something like vomit. The association was not gratuitous.
“I think I’ll do a little more coke,” he said brightly. “It might sober me up for dinner.” When he got up and looked in the mirror he thought of Lowndes and the pictures. He assembled his works, feeling more sober than he could possibly be.
“I shouldn’t have any more,” Lu Anne said uncertainly.
“Good thinking,” Walker said. He was trying frantically to get his hit and put the stuff away.
“Well,” she said finally, “if you’re having some I want some too.”
“You’re on half rations,” he told her. “Recuperating.”
“There are some would have me drink,” she said mysteriously, “there are those who would have me dry.”
He chopped two narrow lines for her and handed over the equipment, the mirror and the drinking straw whose festive colors had shown up so well on the color photographs.
For the drawn blinds and the dim light, it might have been any hour. How foolish of him, he thought, to have forgotten about the blinds. On locations people were always watching, peering in trailers, looking for lighted windows.
“Don’t think about your kids,” she told him earnestly. She leaned her head on one arm to lecture him. She was wearing a pair of silver-rimmed aviator glasses he had not seen before and he suspected she had appropriated them to use as a prop when she felt admonitory.
“Seriously,” she said, “your kids don’t care about you. Don’t care about them.”
Walker did not answer her. He reached down, took a pinch of coke under his fingernail and touched it to his gum.
“I saw you do that,” Lu Anne said. “Now listen to me — you don’t care a damn about your daddy, do you?”
“My father is dead,” Walker said. “And my mother is dead. And my brother is dead.”
He repeated this statement, this time as a little song, to the tune of an Irish jig.
“There was a time …” Walker began. He managed to stop, shut up before it was too late. He had been about to discourse on the subject of his father. Without trying to conceal it from her he put the mirror on his pillow and took some more. She took the straw from his hand and snorted until he thought she would pass out. He put it back down quickly before she could exhale on it.
“But honestly, Gordon! They won’t be worrying about you. You ought not to worry about them. I’ve got children myself, Gordon.”
“I know that, love.”
“Yessir. Four.” She held her hand, the long fingers splayed and trembling, before his face. “Four counting the dead and I insist on counting the dead, that’s the custom in Louisiana, Gordon, where the living and the dead are involved in mixed entertainments. And are not tucked away in the ground but dwell among us. Their hair grows and their fingernails and they go on getting smarter in those ovens under their angels. Which represent the angels that attended them in life. Or their crosses. Or their Médailles miraculeuses.”
“Stop,” he said.
“Life too much for you, brother? Huh? What says the gentleman?”
“The gentleman allows that things are tough all over.”
“Gordon,” she demanded, “are you listening to me?” She took her glasses off and gave him a look of pedagogic disapproval. “Show the courtesy to listen to the person in the same bed as yourself. I have four!” Her hand quavered before his eyes. “They don’t care about me. I’m a biological function of their lives. That’s it. Three lives, one death. That’s all, man. Would I let them destroy me? No, I would not, Lionel. Gordon, rather. You wrote the book, Gordon. She doesn’t let them dominate her life! She will die for them, sure, but she won’t live for them. Isn’t that the way it goes? They need not have thought that they could possess her. Isn’t that what you wrote, Lionel?”
“Lionel didn’t write it and neither did I. Madame Chopin wrote it.”
“A red-necked Irishwoman who would trade her kids for a pint of Jim Beam. That’s the big secret, you know. She didn’t care about her kids. What she really wanted to be was an actress. Isn’t that right, Gordon?”
“I don’t know what’s right, my love. I’m drunk and you’re bananas. That’s the score.”
“I want more now, please, Gordon.”
“Well, honeychile,” Walker said, “you ain’t getting no fuckin’ more. Because you have degenerated into a goddamn lunatic. What kind of party has a lunatic at it?”
“Plenty,” she insisted. “Plenty of parties do. And I want more. Damn it, Gordon!” she said. Then she cocked an ear as though she had heard something.
“Listen, Gordon. A recitation. Sir King, we deem that ’tis strange sport, to keep a madman as thy fool at court.”
“Rest easy, Lu Anne.”
“This is the forest primeval.” She paused thoughtfully and repeated the line. “Gordon, do you know how long it took me to understand that Evangeline was not a good poem?”
He put her arm under his head and wrapped his arms around her. His thought was to suffocate her fire, keep her from burning up.
“Longer than most, I bet.”
“That would be about right,” she said. “Late in life.
“Do you know why I take so many showers?”
“Yes,” he said, “sort of.”
“Say why.”
“Because you have hallucinations in which your friends advise you to take showers.”
“They hardly advise me, honey. French,” she breathed confidentially, “can be the vehicle for some very low observations. And Frenchman French, well!”
“They aren’t really there, Lu Anne. That’s all there is to it.”
“They aren’t there in your life. They’re in mine.”
“Lu Anne,” Walker said. “Do you understand that I love you?”
“Yes, yes.” She patted his arm. “Yes, I understand.”
“Does that penetrate the … whatever it is?”
“Whatever it is,” she said, “I guess love penetrates it.”
He took his arms from around her and kissed her hand.
“Gordon,” she whispered, “what I said about our children …”
A long time ago he had learned to watch for a catch in her voice, a look in her eyes. He had learned what it portended. He had called it shifting gears. Once he had told her that she had two speeds: Bad Lu Anne and Saint Lu Anne. There on the bed beside him he saw her slide into Bad Lu Anne. Bad Lu Anne was not in fact malign, but formidable and sometimes terrifying. As soon as he saw her eyes, he jumped.