Life’s not anything here if it’s not adaptable. And relentless. A year or so after I first came to New Orleans, I took a snapshot of the old camelback shotgun on Dryades where I was living with four or five other guys and a couple of families, and was surprised to see how green everything was. Not just trees and grass, but wooden stairs, the edges of beveled glass in doors and windows, cracks in painted walls, balcony railings, sidewalks where air conditioners dripped-as though a fine film of green had settled over the entire world. And I had gotten so used to it that I didn’t see it anymore, until that snapshot saw it again for me.
I was still sitting there sipping Courvoisier, thinking about life’s adaptability and musing further upon the fact that “seeing again” is finally what art’s all about, when my doorbell chirred. Almost before it stopped, there was a pounding at the door. And then before I could get to it, the door opened.
“Lock your fucking door, Lew,” Walsh said, closing it behind him. “Where the hell you think you live?”
I sat back down. “Don’t you have criminals you ought to be out there catching or something?”
“They’ll still be there. Always have been. So’s the goddamn paperwork. You got any coffee?”
“I can make you some.”
“Don’t bother. Probably had too much already.”
He went out to the kitchen for a Diet Coke, came back and sank into the wingback’s tired embrace, looking for a hard moment at the bottle on the floor, the cup in my hand.
“Goddamn it, Lew, what the fuck are you doing here, anyway? You oughta be at the church already. You got people up there waiting for you. You just sitting here getting drunk, that it? Business as usual?”
“Nope. He’s definitely not getting drunk, Don old friend. Not that he hasn’t tried. Valiantly.”
“So, what then? You’re just gonna pretend it didn’t happen? You gonna just blow off the whole thing, after all she meant to you? And after all the crap she put up with from you for all those years? Cause you didn’t give her shit when she was alive, man, you know? You know that, I know you do. And it’s damn little enough you can do now.”
He leaned back, breathed deeply. Held up his empty can in a mock salut. “I’m sorry. I coulda said that better, I guess. Most things I could, these days.”
“You scored the point, Don. It’s okay.”
He shook his head, looked out to the patio. “I don’t know, Lew. Ever since Josie and the girls left, everything looks different. I don’t know; I’m one hell of a guy to be giving advice. But sometimes it seems to me like you spend half your life doing everything you can to avoid things and the rest trying to make up for it. I have trouble understanding that. Always have.”
“So you got another point to make?”
“Well, I got this point that you better get up off your butt and haul that same sorry thing on over to Verne’s goddamn funeral. That’s the only other point I got. For now, anyway.”
“I’m not going, Don. I can’t.”
“Lew.” He sat back again, exhaled deeply. “Listen to me. I swear it, Lew: you’re going. If I have to get a squad down here and have ‘em help me drag you into that church, you’re going. You hear what I’m telling you?”
“Such devotion and friendship’s a rare thing.”
“Yeah, Lew, it is. It sure as hell is. But what the fuck would you know about that?”
I looked at him then and felt tears force their way out onto my face.
Stones in my passway, as Robert Johnson said. And my road seem dark as night.
Surely the funeral could not have been conducted in silence-surely (to whatever recondite end) I’ve invented this-but in memory that is how I always see it: several dozen people sitting straight as fences on the hardwood pews, not a sound anywhere, even traffic sounds from outside curiously hushed and transformed as though broadcast from somewhere else, from another world or time, and people moving, when at last they began to do so, as though that silence were substantial, something that resisted, something they had to push through, slowing and drawing out their movements. As though we all had slipped unaware into some timeless deep.
I remembered James Baldwin’s funeral a few years back. The solemn slow progress of cross and chasuble, and then, breaking over it, tearing that long European sentence apart, the sudden leap and skitter of African drums.
And that was just how the world came back, sudden, staccato, as Don and I stood on the steps outside the church.
“Where can I drop you, Lew?”
“I think I’ll walk back. Maybe swing by the school.”
“C’mon. It’s five, six miles at least.”
“I’ll be fine, Don.”
“No you won’t. You haven’t been fine more than ten minutes in all the years I’ve known you. But if you’re saying you’ll get through this, yeah, I guess you will. You always do. Take care, friend. Buy you dinner some night?”
“Sounds good. I’ll call you.”
“No you won’t, Lew. You’ll mean to, but you won’t do it. And then eventually I’ll just come on over there and pry you out of the house and haul you off somewhere. Just like always.”
He started away, shaking his head.
“Don …”
“Yeah?” Turning back. I had never noticed before this just how deeply the web of fine lines had sunk everywhere into his face, or that flesh now hung slack beneath chin and cheekbones. Even his eyes had a grayish cast to them.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, don’t embarrass me in front of Verne’s friends. I hate it when you get all teary-eyed, I ever tell you that?”
“I mean it.”
“Yeah. I know you do. I know that.”
“You hear much from Josie?”
“Not so long as the checks keep coming. Shit, I don’t mean that. She sends me pictures of the kids every few months. She’s real good about doing that.”
“She still loves you, Don.”
“Yeah. Well. Guess I better go shut down a few crack houses, huh? Got a few hours left in the day. You sure you don’t want a ride?”
“I’m sure.”
He climbed into the Regal, his own, that he’d been driving at least ten years, waved to me in the rearview and hauled it into a lumbering U back toward down-town. The department kept offering him new official cars and he kept telling them his was fine, he was used to it.
I walked down State to Freret and turned right. Kids on bicycles heading to and from classes at Tulane or Loyola shot past me. I hadn’t had a car since Vicky left. At first I’d planned to buy one, but I kept putting it off for one reason or another, and after a while it just stopped being important. I’d got used to walking and liked it, and if I had to get somewhere I couldn’t walk, well, cabs in New Orleans are plentiful as roaches.
I crossed Napoleon and, one street over, turned onto General Pershing. Blackjack Pershing, they called him. Most of his mounted troops were “buffalo soldiers.” Black men. They performed so well that Pershing suggested only blacks should be taken into the armed services. Except for officers, of course.
Squirrels ran along power lines with blue jays screaming and swooping about them. It was garbage pickup day for this part of town; emptied plastic bins sat inverted or on their sides before most houses. This stretch was pure New Orleans, a jumble of wrought iron, balconies, leaded glass, gingerbread, Corinthian columns. Grand old homes well preserved, decaying ones once every bit as grand and now carved into multiple dwellings, simple raised cottages and bungalows.
I walked along thinking hard about Verne, and about something I’d read in an art journal, unable to sleep, at two or three that morning. The lives we lead, it said, the art or artifacts we produce, all these are but scrims, one layer over countless other layers, some that reveal, some that conceal.