“No, wait,” she called insistently. “You may be suffering from heat-stroke. I think that’s it- the clammy skin, the way you look—”
“It’s not heatstroke, I’m freezing in this goddam refrigerator. Just leave me the fuck alone and I’ll be fine!”
I fled, peeling off my jacket, tearing open the top of my blouse. I couldn’t go back, not to that awful air-conditioning. I would stay out where it was warm.
I lay in bed with the windows wide open and the covers pulled all the way up. One of the men from my company phoned; his voice sounded too casual when he pretended I had reassured him. Carl’s call only twenty minutes later was not a surprise. I’m fine, dear. You don’t sound fine. I am, though. Everyone is worried about you. Needlessly. I think I should come down there. No, stay where you are, I’ll be fine. No, I think I should come and get you. And I’m telling you to stay where you are. That does it, you sound weird, I’m getting the next flight out and your mother can stay with the boys. You stay where you are, goddamit, or I might not come home, is that clear?
Long silence.
Is someone there with you?
More silence.
I said, is someone there with you?
It’s just the heat. I’ll be fine, as soon as I warm up.
Sometime after that, I was sitting at a table in a very dark place that was almost warm enough. The old woman sitting across from me occasionally drank delicately from a bottle of beer and fanned herself, even though it was only almost warm.
“It’s such pleasure when it cool down like dis,” she said in her slow honeyvoice. Even the old ladies had honeyvoices here. “The heat be a beast.”
I smiled, thinking for a moment that she’d said bitch, not beast. “Yeah. It’s a bitch all right but I don’t like to be cold.”
“No? Where you from?”
“Schenectady. Cold climate.”
She grunted. “Well, the heat don’t be a bitch, it be a beast. He be a beast.”
“Who?”
“Him. The heat beast.” She chuckled a little. “My grandma woulda called him a loa. You know what dat is?”
“No.”
She eyed me before taking another sip of beer. “No. I don’t know whether that good or bad for you, girl. Could be deadly either way, someone who don’t like to be cold. What you doin’ over here anyway? Tourist Quarter three blocks thataway.”
“I’m looking for a friend. Haven’t been able to find him since it’s cooled down.”
“Grandma knew they never named all de loa. She said new ones would come when they found things be willin’ for ‘em. Or when they named by someone. Got nothin’ to do with the old religion any more. Bigger than the old religion. It’s all de world now.” The old woman thrust her face forward and squinted at me. “What friend you got over here? No outa-town white girl got a friend over here.”
“I do. And I’m not from out of town any more.”
“Get out.” But it wasn’t hostile, just amusement and condescension and a little disgust. “Go buy you some tourist juju and tell everybody you met a mamba in N’awlins. Be some candyass somewhere sell you a nice, fake love charm.”
“I’m not here for that,” I said, getting up. “I came for the heat.”
“Well, girl, it’s cooled down.” She finished her beer.
Sometime after that, in another place, I watched a man and a woman dancing together. There were only a few other people on the floor in front of the band. I couldn’t really make sense of the music, whether it was jazz or rock or whatever. It was just the man and the woman I was paying attention to. Something in their movements was familiar. I was thinking he would be called by the heat in them, but it was so damned cold in there, not even ninety degrees. The street was colder. I pulled the jacket tighter around myself and cupped my hands around the coffee mug. That famous Louisiana chicory coffee. Why couldn’t I get warm?
It grew colder later. There wasn’t a warm place in the Quarter, but people’s skins seemed to be burning. I could see the heat shimmers rising from their bodies. Maybe I was the only one without a fever now.
Carl was lying on the bed in my hotel room. He sat up as soon as I opened the door. The heat poured from him in waves and my first thought was to throw myself on him and take it, take it all, and leave him to freeze to death.
“Wait!” he shouted but I was already pounding down the hall to the stairs.
Early in the morning, it was an easy thing to run through the Quarter. The sun was already beating down but the light was thin, with little warmth. I couldn’t hear Carl chasing me, but I kept running, to the other side of the Quarter, where I had first gone into the shadows. Glimpse of an old woman’s face at a window; I remembered her, she remembered me. Her head nodded, two fingers beckoned. Behind her, a younger face watched in the shadows. The wrong face.
I came to a stop in the middle of an empty street and waited. I was getting colder; against my face, my fingers were like living icicles. It had to be only 88 or 89 degrees, but even if it got to ninety-five or above today, I wouldn’t be able to get warm.
He had it. He had taken it. Maybe I could get it back.
The air above the buildings shimmied, as if to taunt. Warmth, here, and here, and over here, what’s the matter with you, frigid or something?
Down at the corner, a police car appeared. Heat waves rippled up from it, and I ran.
“Hey.”
The man stood over me where I sat shivering at a corner table in the place that bragged it had traded slaves over a hundred years ago. He was the color of rich earth, slightly built with carefully waved black hair. Young face; the wrong face, again.
“You look like you in the market for a sweater.”
“Go away.” I lifted the coffee cup with shuddering hands. “A thousand sweaters couldn’t keep me warm now.”
“No, honey.” They caressed you with their voices down here. He took the seat across from me. “Not that kind of sweater. Sweater I mean’s a person, special kinda person. Who’d you meet in the Quarter? Good-lookin’ stud, right? Nice, wild boy, maybe not white but white enough for you?”
“Go away. I’m not like that.”
“You know what you like now, though. Cold. Very cold woman. Cold woman’s no good. Cold woman’ll take all the heat out of a man, leave him frozen dead.”
I didn’t answer.
“So you need a sweater. Maybe I know where you can find one.”
“Maybe you know where I can find him.”
The man laughed. “That’s what I’m sayin’, cold woman.” He took off his light, white suitcoat and tossed it at me. “Wrap up in that and come on.”
The fire in the hearth blazed, flames licking out at the darkness. Someone kept feeding it, keeping it burning for hours. I wasn’t sure who, or if it was only one person, or how long I sat in front of the fire, trying to get warm.
Sometime long after the man had brought me there, the old woman said, “Burnin’ all day now. Whole Quarter oughta feel the heat by now. Whole city.”
“He’ll feel it, sure enough.” The man’s voice. “He’ll feel it, come lookin’ for what’s burnin’.” A soft laugh. “Won’t he be surprised to see it’s his cold woman.”
“Look how the fire wants her.”
The flames danced. I could sit in the middle of them and maybe then I’d be warm.
“Where did he go?” The person who asked might have been me.
“Went to take a rest. Man sleeps after a bender, don’t you know. He oughta be ready for more by now.”
I reached out for the fire. A long tongue of flame licked around my arm; the heat felt so good.
“Look how the fire wants her.”
Soft laugh. “If it wants her, then it should have her. Go ahead, honey. Get in the fire.”
On hands and knees, I climbed up into the hearth, moving slowly, so as not to scatter the embers. Clothes burned away harmlessly.
To sit in fire is to sit among a glory of warm, silk ribbons touching everywhere at once. I could see the room now, the heavy drapes covering the windows, the dark faces, one old, one young, gleaming with sweat, watching me.
“You feel ’im?” someone asked. “Is he comin’?”
“He’s comin’, don’t worry about that.” The man who had brought me smiled at me. I felt a tiny bit of perspiration gather at the back of my neck. Warmer; getting warmer now.
I began to see him; he was forming in the darkness, coming together, pulled in by the heat. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, young, the way he had been. He was there before the hearth and the look on that young face as he peered into the flames was hunger.
The fire leaped for him; I leaped for him and we saw what it was we really had. No young man; no man.
The heat be a beast.
Beast. Not really a loa, something else; I knew that, somehow. Sometimes it looks like a man and sometimes it looks like hot honey in the darkness.
What are you doing?
I’m taking darkness by the eyes, by the mouth, by the throat.
What are you doing?
I’m burning alive.
What are you doing?
I’m burning the heat beast and I have it just where I want it. All the heat anyone ever felt, fire and body heat, fever, delirium. Delirium has eyes; I push them in with my thumbs. Delirium has a mouth; I fill it with my fist. Delirium has a throat; I tear it out. Sparks fly like an explosion of tiny stars and the beast spreads its limbs in surrender, exposing its white-hot core. I bend my head to it and the taste is sweet, no salt in his body at all.
What are you doing?
Oh, honey, don’t you know?
I took it back.
In the hotel room, I stripped off the shabby dress the old woman had given me and threw it in the trashcan. I was packing when Carl came back.
He wanted to talk; I didn’t. Later he called the police and told them everything was all right, he’d found me and I was coming home with him. I was sure they didn’t care. Things like that must have happened in the Quarter all the time.
In the ladies’ room at the airport, the attendant sidled up to me as I was bent over the sink splashing cold water on my face and asked if I were all right.
“It’s just the heat,” I said.
“Then best you go home to a cold climate,” she said. “You do better in a cold climate from now on.”
I raised my head to look at her reflection in the spotted mirror. I wanted to ask her if she had a brother who also waved his hair. I wanted to ask her why he would bother with a cold woman, why he would care.
She put both hands high on her chest, protectively. “The beast sleeps in cold. You tend him now. Maybe you keep him asleep for good.”
“And if I don’t?”
She pursed her lips. “Then you gotta problem.”
In summer, I keep the air-conditioning turned up high at my office, at home. In the winter, the kids complain the house is too cold and Carl grumbles a little, even though we save so much in heating bills. I tuck the boys in with extra blankets every night and kiss their foreheads, and later in our bed, Carl curls up close, murmuring how my skin is always so warm.
It’s just the heat.