Clouds had been gathering for some time, bumping up against one another, and as we sat over burned-smelling coffee with oils afloat on its surface, several of them coalesced into one, like a dark fist closing, and rain began pounding at the windows and blacktop outside.
I’d spent those hours on the road thinking of many things.
That, for instance, I’d never got around to calling the university after all.
Or got back to Chip Landrieu.
Or talked to Clare.
Composing in my mind, between Tunica and Shelby, the second chapter of what was to become Mole.
And thinking how, during travel, the mind instinctively shifts mode. Eyes fix on something far off, something unattainable, as you go on about mechanics appearing to have little to do with end or destination: steering, stopping for gas, working pedals; and time itself, unfolding into a plane, a kind of veldt, a portable horizon, all but disappears.
That was also as good a description as any of the life Alouette, and in reflection I myself, would have to live over the coming months.
Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we’re doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don’t recognize them when we look into mirrors.
After lunch, as we drove on through Vicksburg and veils of rain toward Natchez, Alouette began talking about the hospital. Though barely conscious at the time, she remembered the intubation, fighting against it, to her mind then a worse violation than anything sexual, worse than anything possible.
“But then, suddenly, I broke free. Really free. I was floating, drifting, nothing could touch me, nothing could hold me down. I remember thinking: How wonderful this is, I don’t even have to breathe now.”
Later, pain made its way in, though a pain she could at first easily ignore: therapists drawing blood from her radial artery for ABG’s, as she later learned.
“For a long time I was floating just under the surface of things. I could decide whether to come to the top or stay where I was, or at least it felt like I had that choice-though I always stayed right there.”
But then after a time, half an eternity, the time it took to rebuild the world, light flooded in. “Light everywhere, so much light that it hurt. God, how it hurt!”
She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes, staring, I suppose, into the face of her own pain and the world’s, as I drove on.
We reached New Orleans a little before nine that night.
Chapter Thirty
Across the street new apartments were going up. Broussard General Contractors had torn down the 140-year-old Greek Revival manse with its rotting gingerbread, burst columns and disintegrating friezes, left wing for years drooping at an ever steeper angle. Doorways, newels, mantels and windowwork had been stacked in trucks and carted off for resale. Only a few stanchions still stood totemlike near the lot’s borders, exposing a once-enclosed central courtyard, the bare heart around which new luxury apartments would be constructed. On the balconies of these apartments in four months, or six, young men and women would stand squinting into the sun, memories watching silently over their shoulders.
We sat outside at steel tables painted yellow and green, under a sky whose sagging bellies of clouds reminded me of the upholstered walls and draped ceilings of old Russia. Every few moments wind puffed its cheeks and Clare put a hand on her napkin to hold it in place.
“I’m sorry, Lew,” she said suddenly.
I’d been telling her about Alouette’s baby. “It’s for the best.”
She shook her head. A gesture I’d seen often before, when the wrong words came, or when words wouldn’t come at all. “I don’t mean that.”
I looked back at the clouds, lower now. Something was blowing in across the lake, groping for new ground here.
“I don’t know how to say this. I don’t even know what it is I want to say. And I was never good at speeches-even before.”
A sketchy wave touched at the length of her body, hinted at the difficult thing her world had become.
“But I won’t ever understand it, won’t even begin to understand it, if I don’t.”
She moved her fork in a gentle sweep through pasta. There was a fleur-de-lis on the plate, and she had pushed sauteed bits of green pepper into one leaflet of the trefoil, red into another.
“I never wanted anything to work out more than I wanted this, Lew. Not that I ever really thought it would.”
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers.
“Somehow as women we learn to say that all the time: ‘I’m sorry.’ As though it’s our all-purpose social formula, good for any occasion, one size fits all. And a lot of time we’re not sorry at all; we don’t mean to apologize, only to say ‘I understand’ or ‘too bad.’ But right now, that’s exactly what I mean.”
She looked at me, smiled.
“Where do messages like that come from? How can we learn to read them so well without even recognizing that they exist?”
I remembered a poem I’d seen recently in a magazine at Beaucoup Books: We must learn to put our distress signals in code.
“That’s what socialization is, Clare. Most of the messages-maybe all the most important ones-are silent.”
“I guess.”
She took a mouthful of pasta, chewed slowly, sipped at her wine. Pacing herself, making herself hold back. Like a runner, or like a hard drinker taking the first one slow, half convincing himself for the few minutes it lasts that this is only recreational drinking.
“I think I love him, Lew. I think he loves me. And I have to do everything I can to give this a chance. Maybe later on we’ll be able to see one another again, if you want to. But for now … It bothers him, Lew. He doesn’t say anything about it, but I can tell. It hurts him, in some very quiet way he probably doesn’t even know or understand himself. But I see it. And I can’t do that any longer.”
Clenched about her regret and misgivings, her hand had become a small fist beneath mine.
“It’s okay, Clare.”
“No, it’s not okay, Lew, not at all. But it’s how it has to be. Do you think we could go now?”
On the way to her car, wind swirling torn paper wrappers and magnolia leaves around our ankles in tides, I asked how Bat was.
“Gone. I got home last Tuesday and he wasn’t there on top of the refrigerator where he always was. Or anywhere else. I still don’t know how he got out. Or why, for that matter, since he never seemed to have much interest at all in going out. I waited, thinking he’d show up again. Last night I finally admitted he wasn’t coming back and put his things away in the pantry, his bowl and all.”
She unlocked the door and I reached around to open it for her. I told her I was sorry about Bat.
“Life goes on,” she said. We kissed and said goodbye. “I’ll call, Lew. When I can.”
I watched her drive away, holding my hand up in a wave as she took the corner onto Joseph. I walked back, crossed the street and stood for a while in the empty courtyard, looking across at the restaurant with its yellow and green tables and chairs, its laughing, chattering people. I imagined the new apartments going up around me in stop-time, slowly shutting out that world, marooning me here in this ancient, sequestered place.
Chapter Thirty-One
When I got back to the house Alouette was on the phone, as she’d been on the phone pretty much nonstop since the morning before. Thus far she had set up two job interviews, attended another, arranged for information to be mailed concerning GED testing and night classes at Delgado, Xavier and UNO, and spoken with an MHMR counselor about vocational programs. Now she was talking to Richard Garces about outpatient therapy and local support groups.