I’m underwater. This room’s an aquarium.
“Once again, Mr. Griffin, I thank you for coming. You had little enough reason or inclination to do so.”
“True.”
“So why have you come?”
“To be quite honest, Dr. Guidry-”
“Horace. Please.”
“-I’m not sure. I’ve nothing to offer. Nor is there anything I want from you.”
“Of course.”
We sat quietly a moment. Half a block away, girls in plaid skirts and white shirts with pocket crests pumped swings higher and higher while young men in charcoal slacks and white shirts with clip-on ties shot baskets. All of this soundless outside the aquarium walls.
Turn off sound and even the most familiar scenes, the commonest human gestures, turn strange on you. Not to mention what strange lives these were to me in the first place, how impenetrable. Nothing whatsoever to do with my own. I might as well be watching lobster or rays in their tanks. Ant farms. Beehives.
“Just felt I should be here, I guess.”
“Intuition. Much of your life has been shaped by it.”
“What shape there’s been, yes.”
“And not always to your benefit.”
That, too, I had to concede.
“Still you persist.”
I shrugged. “As good a guide as any other, finally.”
“Anything can save you if you grab it hard enough, and hold on.” He smiled. “You’re surprised that I’ve read your books.”
“I’m surprised anybody’s read them. Surprised they were ever written, for that matter.”
“But surely you must realize their attraction. How they take up the common textures of our lives-”
“And just what do you think might be common in the textures of our lives, Doctor Guidry?”
He paused. “You’re right, of course. A presumption on my part. Forgive me. Nonetheless, taking the books’ own high ground-scrambling for their shelter, if you like-I have to tell you I found them fascinating. Those first sentences drew me in. I was there. Oil pumps shushing Lew as he stands waiting to kill a man, water oak splitting open like a book in the storm. Lew himself shot, coming half-to there in the emergency room.”
“Parent searching for a lost child.”
“Yes.”
Hands emerged from beneath the blanket and found their way to wheels, swiveling the chair to see what it was I watched over his shoulder. Wrists looked frozen, immobile, knots of bone protruding like cypress roots, fingers swollen and red as sausages. “Young people…. We should never let ourselves get too far away from them.” Then, swiveling the chair back around: “It’s not just another Catholic school, you know-despite the uniforms. Private, yes. But there’s no church affiliation. None. Other parts of the nation, they call it a magnet school. Culling the most talented, most promising students from all the city’s schools, small and large and in between, bringing them together here. I’m privileged to contribute.”
Bending, he plucked a catheter bag from the side of the wheelchair, snapped his finger against the valve at the top, waited a moment, then snapped again. Bright gold fluid flowed into the bag in a gush. He let go of the bag and it swung there at the end of its rubbery placenta, back and forth.
“I know about David, of course.”
I nodded.
“Recently I called to ask if you’d consider finding someone for me.”
“And I declined.”
“You did, yes. And it’s a capacity in which I require you no longer.”
One hand snaked out again from beneath the blanket. A crooked finger hovered. Was I to follow knuckle, first joint, or tip? Each pointed in a different direction.
“There’s a folder on the desk, at the corner there. Perhaps you’d be so good as to retrieve it?”
I did so.
“Therein are copies of letters I’ve received. They may prove of interest.”
Opening the folder, I read the top page and the one under, then shuffled through the rest, perhaps a dozen of them. Each began with some variation of history asserting itself. Memory transports us … In those years … Experience shows that … Those who have no knowledge of history are doomed to repeat it. Santayana I took as a bad sign. This went on, soon enough we’d be getting Shakespeare and Ross Macdonald, quotes from Tocqueville manhandled like soft clay into shapes their author never intended.
“I can keep these?”
He nodded. The nod was easier than pulling out of it. Gravity and time are toll bridges, fares keep going up.
“You know who sent them.”
He started to say more but stopped himself.
“No.”
“A moment ago you spoke as though you did.”
His eyes went from the wall where they’d wandered, back to me. They were amazingly clear. “At first …” Blue springwater tumbling over white stone. “But what I thought then, upon first seeing them, I know can’t possibly be true. You’ve had a chance to look them over now, Mr. Griffin. What do they suggest to you?” His head dipped an eighth of an inch.
“Aside from the fact that you’re withholding information, you mean.”
One diffident hand made its way to the surface, floated there a moment with fingers together like logs in a raft-confirming? allaying? — then subsided. Guidry’s chin followed the hand down to sink onto his chest, bisecting the curve. He snored.
I eased from the chair and made my way into the outer room. Guidry’s home had been built around the turn of the century as Europeans began taking over the city and crept by degrees uptown, putting up ever more magnificent homes in rivalry to those of downtown Creoles. At one point, like many others, the home had been transformed, to a hotel in this case, but unlike others suffered few structural modifications. This outer room, originally intended as parlor or sitting room, in its hotel period a lobby, had remained much the same through all the home’s avatars.
Mrs. Molino rose from behind an elegant antique desk that put one in mind of stilt-legged birds.
“He’s asleep,” I said.
She nodded.
“For much of the day. And careening about the past the remainder. There’s not a lot left to him. Or of him. We always think of the elderly as increasingly needy, but it’s quite the opposite, really. Their lives get simpler-attain a kind of purity. There’s little enough now that I can do for the doctor. I manage his affairs, offer what comfort I can. Just as you’ve done. Thank you again for coming.”
“I’m not sure why I did, or, for that matter, what good it may have done. But you’re welcome.”
“Mr. Griffin?” she said behind me.
I turned.
“He’s concerned over the letters, isn’t he? The messages Alouette has been receiving.”
“Should he be?”
She stepped briskly across the room to stand close. Tall and slender, man’s oversize white dress shirt billowing out in the breeze of her passage, making me remember the first time I saw Deborah there beside the counter in her shop and thought willowy, as I’d done so often since. No sign of internal struggle in her eyes.
“That’s not for me to say.”
I could smell the shampoo she’d used that morning, apples and pears, a quiet tide of garlic, olive and lemon on her breath. Massively unsure of myself and long out of practice, signals a blur, I asked if she might consider having dinner with me. Or just coffee, if she’d be more comfortable with that.
I’ve embarrassed her, I thought at first; then, as she regained composure, recognized her reaction for what it was: some essential core of shyness overcome but unvanquished. Her eyes met mine.
“Understand that it’s terribly difficult for me to get away …”
I nodded.
“But yes. Yes, I’d like that very much, Mr. Griffin.”
“Good.”
“You have my number. Please call. We’ll arrange something.”
Touching her lightly on the upper arm, I took my leave.
From a phone in a K amp;B just down the street I dialed her number. New-fashioned teenagers sat with piercings and bleached hair behind old-fashioned stemmed glasses of cherry phosphate and malted milk at the lunch counter. A hunched, rickety man pushed himself erect before the display of condoms, natural vitamins and copper bracelets to brace the harried pharmacist over conflicting needs and insurance plan, his wheelchair’s E-cylinder of oxygen a silent witness.