One Year Earlier
After our kiss in his Jeep, I spent all of my free time with Mark, and my not-so-free time too, even ditching class twice to see him. It was two weeks of hand-holding, cheek-stroking, and kissing, over lattes and cabernets and late dinners, until he invited me back to his cabin one Tuesday night.
I had no idea such secluded parts of Kenosha existed. I’d driven down only the outskirt country roads, past barns and cornfields, in the stretch between Lake Michigan and the Interstate. But off the main thoroughfare, just a few miles north of Tarble, a small gravel road beckoned us into an oak forest, where I heard only crickets and leaves rustling through the open window of Mark’s Jeep. No people. No cars, less the sound of wheels crunching the gravel.
“It’s so quiet,” I said as he parked in front of what used to be his mother’s cabin. Size-wise, it reminded me of a concession stand at a Little League field. “You’re right. It’s like Walden Pond back here. I love it.”
“I thought you would. Not everyone appreciates its . . . simplicity.”
And by not everyone, I knew he meant Meryl.
We stood in silence at the doorstep as he slid the key into the lock and jiggled the doorknob with just the right amount of pressure, the right sequence of turns.
“Persnickety,” he explained, once the doorknob turned.
When we stepped into the darkness, I smelled wood—a tangy, sweet odor emanating from the pine walls and floor. The air at first smelled dry, like the inside of a sawmill, but a waft of humidity suddenly hit my nose like an aftertaste. Mildew.
“Home sweet home,” he said after he flipped a switch beside the door. A lamp flickered, shedding a dim light, equivalent in glow to a jar of captive fireflies. “One step up from camping, actually.”
“But you have a kitchen,” I argued, pointing at his minimal cooking quarters. “A deep sink. Two burners. A good-size fridge. I camped a lot as a kid, in the bayou with my dad. This is at least three steps up from camping, maybe four.”
“It’s tiny and needs to be gutted.”
“It’s cozy,” I corrected, “and needs a little TLC.”
He pulled me to him then, holding my wrists behind my back, my arms removed from the equation so he could press his body fully against mine. And then he kissed me, softly at first like he sipped wine and then more deeply, as if deciding to gulp the whole glass.
“What was that for?” I asked when our lips parted.
“Your optimism. I’m a grown man living in . . . this is a shed, let’s call a spade a spade, and here you are trying to sell me on it.”
“Show me the rest of your shed,” I said.
Another lamp and a few floor creaks later, and I’d seen the whole place. A table with two mismatched chairs, one vinyl and one wood. A full-size bed with no frame or headboard and unmade, the sheets twisted with a wool blanket in a striped pattern, a candy cane effect. A stone fireplace. A bulky, lopsided sofa. No television, but a radio. It had all come with the place when he bought it. Rustic Bachelor Pad—that’s what the real estate agent called it in the MLS listing.
“Do you want something to drink?” he asked.
“What do you have?”
“Water.” He cringed. “Well water. Or . . . I think I have orange juice?”
I realized then why we’d gone out for coffee and drinks and dinner so often in the past weeks, why Mark seemed to live at his office. I was sure a peek into his fridge would reveal a lonely colony of ketchup packets. This cabin needs a woman’s touch, I thought. He needs a woman’s touch.
“I love orange juice,” I said, making myself comfortable on the couch.
He brought me water. No juice after all. To make up for this, though, he put on a fire. I watched him heft several massive logs onto the hearth and understood why his biceps were so defined. He probably split the wood himself, using nothing but an ax.
“I can see why your mom liked it here,” I said, once more scanning the room, now soft and hazy under the orange glow of fire light. “No distractions. That’s what you need to write.”
“It’s quiet and sentimental, yes. But it isn’t romantic.” He sighed. “But we can’t go to your dorm, can we? And my office is too visible.”
I knew then that a platonic tour of Mark’s home was not the extent of our agenda that evening. I’d probably spend the night; drink coffee with him in the morning. The thought made me giddy.
“You don’t need to impress me,” I said. To prove this fact, I sipped the water. It tasted like sulfur, but I didn’t dare purse my lips. “I like it here. Because I’m with you.”
He sat beside me on the couch and kissed me again, hard but sweet; it shot through me like an electric shock, down to my feet and back again. And then he stared into my eyes and brushed his knuckles across my cheek.
“Come with me this weekend,” he blurted.
“Really?”
“Really. I don’t think I can go three whole days without you.”
My heart melted. Mark’s impending trip to New Orleans, for the symposium at his alma mater, had been hovering above me like a rain cloud. We hadn’t been apart for more than half a day in the past weeks.
“I can’t imagine how expensive a flight would be on such short notice,” I said.
“Ruby, I’ll take care of everything. Flight, hotel, meals. Let me do this, let me whisk you away to somewhere picturesque and charming.” He gestured at his unkempt surroundings, as if they were the antithesis of both these things. “I can book us a room in the Quarter. Somewhere historic,” he added. “The Hotel Monteleone, perhaps. They say it’s haunted. If we’re lucky, we can throw back a few pints with Faulkner’s ghost at the bar.”
I had never stayed at the hotel before—you never stay at the hotels in your own town—but I knew it had been a literary haunt for famous authors like William Faulkner and Truman Capote and served as the setting for short stories by Ernest Hemingway and Eudora Welty. And I wanted to go with him, more than anything. I was romanced by his determination to romance me. But I didn’t know if I could do it, if I could go back home. While a student at Tarble, I had flown into New Orleans twice a year—for Christmas and Mardi Gras, per an agreement with my father. But the very last time I’d flown there was the morning after he died. I’d taken a red-eye flight, and Mom had waited for me past the security checkpoint with churning hands, flattened curls, pale lips, and a vacant stare. She’d embraced me as if I were an emergency floatation device. “I’m so sorry,” she’d whispered selflessly, as if, for a moment, it was my loss not hers. And then we’d driven home in unusual silence, cognizant that we, just the two of us, were now the extent of our family. One of us had been removed from the equation, not from our hearts—never from our hearts—but from the physical realm in which we lived and breathed. We would survive, of course we would, but we had known, even on that very first day without my father, that the wound would never fully heal. It would bleed, and it would scab. But it would scar.
Could I walk through the French Quarter now, knowing my father’s antiques store was no longer there, probably leased to a touristy patchouli-scented voodoo shop? Would the guilt I harbored about his death overcome me, overshadow my time there with Mark? And what if I ran into someone I knew—which seemed inevitable after living there so long—how would I explain what I was doing there, and who Mark was? And perhaps most important, how quickly would the news of my sordid affair travel a thousand miles north to my mother?
“You’re making it very hard for me to say no,” I said.
“So don’t.”
I exhaled. My reservations came out with my breath. I said yes.
And then it was settled, and we relocated our conversation—a discussion suddenly made up of actions not words—to the ruffled sheets of his unmade bed.
By the time we checked into the Hotel Monteleone that Friday night, it was dusk, my favorite hour in the Crescent City, when waves of violet streak the horizon, when day succumbs to night and you know there is no turning back.
We stood aimless for a moment in front of the hotel doors, and I watched Mark look up and down the street, then take in a big whiff of city air. “It’s exactly how I remembered,” he said.
My eyes moved down the street. We were on Royal—Rue Royal—and my father’s storefront was just a block away. But New Orleans was not exactly how I remembered. The hues were all wrong. The pink facades appeared more coral than salmon; the green ferns looked more emerald than kelly; the ironwork more espresso than black. Being back in New Orleans was like kissing an ex-boyfriend, simultaneously familiar and foreign. I knew this place by heart, and yet time had passed.
We had changed.
“You’re my tour guide,” Mark said. “Where to?”
I pointed down Rue Royal in the direction of my father’s store.
As Mark and I walked arm in arm into the Vieux Carré, my heart began to pound, mimicking the sound of my black high heels click-clacking against the sidewalk, a rhythmic cacophony, like horseshoes hitting pavement. By that time, most of Royal’s antique and jewelry shops had closed for the day, but the street remained busy with tourists savoring the afterglow of daylight. To settle my nerves, I watched our reflection in the glass of the shop windows. I saw my black silk dress, my red shawl swept over one shoulder, my curly auburn hair pulled up girlishly on one side. I saw Mark’s black blazer and white shirt tucked into tan trousers. Each window was its own frame, and the distance between shop windows made the frames appear and reappear, flicker like an 8 mm film, as if we were actors in a silent movie.
The movie played until we reached what used to be my father’s store. It was still an antiques shop, not a voodoo tourist trap as I’d feared, but the gold-framed mirror on display in the front window catapulted me back in time. And suddenly, I was seven years old again.
It was late summer, and school had just resumed. Dad had taken me to his shop after school. If I behaved, if I didn’t break anything, he’d promised to buy me a naval orange in the French Market, and I’d earned my treat. I was already peeling it as we made our way back to the streetcar, dropping orange rind behind me like Hansel and Gretel’s bread. When we came to an intersection, he’d reached for my hand but pulled back in surprise at my wet, sticky palm.
“You’re a mess,” he’d said, rubbing the drips of orange juice staining my white button-up shirt, one of two I wore every day to parochial school.
“I want to see,” I’d said, even though I’d just placed a new orange segment in my mouth.
He’d lifted me, his hands deep in my armpits, and walked me up to the window of his antiques store, where I saw myself in a bejeweled display mirror. Orange bits dotted both my cheeks, and the juice dripped off my chin. I’d smiled at my reflection. Then, I’d stuffed the last crescent moon segment of orange into my father’s mouth, and the juice came pouring down his chin too.
“We’re twins now,” I’d said.
“No telling where you start and I begin,” he’d added. And then my father had lowered me to the ground and held my hand tightly as we crossed the street. He’d never let go, not until we reached the streetcar. And by the time he’d fished for fare in his pocket, our hands were literally glued together by dried juice.
Mark interjected my thoughts. “Is something wrong, Ruby?” he asked, because I’d stopped walking. “You look so sad.”
My eyes blurred with impending tears. “I don’t think I can do this.”
He swallowed. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down in a gulp. “Are you having second thoughts, about us?”
I shook my head no and kissed him then, a soft brushing of lips, because he looked so vulnerable, like a little boy hugging his piggy bank, waiting for the ice cream truck to drive by his house on a humid August afternoon.
“This used to be my father’s shop,” I divulged. “I thought I could do this. Come back here. But the last time I was here was for his funeral and it’s all . . . it’s like it all just happened.”
“Oh, sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me?” He gripped both of my arms, crouching down so he could look up at me from under downcast eyes. “We could have gone to Vegas or New York, somewhere else, another weekend.”
“But I wanted to. And I’m fine. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
He studied my face; he didn’t believe me. “I just wish you would have told me.”
Why hadn’t I told him? Why hadn’t I shared my anxieties about the trip, the impact I feared it would have on my psyche? Because I didn’t want to be that girl anymore, the girl whose father died. I didn’t want to have an emotional handicap. Learning to live without my father had been like learning to live without a leg, and I didn’t want to limp anymore. Mark had become my prosthetic so quickly, so effortlessly—he’d filled that aching, empty space, ever since the night we kissed in his Jeep. And I wanted to indulge in the euphoria of feeling whole again.
“Do you want to go home?” he asked.
More than anything, I thought. I want to go home, to a New Orleans that no longer exists, the one where Dad is alive.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “We flew all the way here. We checked into the hotel already. And we have the symposium tomorrow.”
“None of that matters if you’re not happy, if you’re not comfortable. Say the word, and I’ll book us on the next flight back.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course.” His expression was solemn, determined, earnest—the countenance of a knight in shining armor the moment before he rescues the princess.
I wrapped my arms around the meaty part of his waist and rested my head on his chest as I weighed the decision. “Let’s stay,” I finally said.
He took my hand then and led me past my father’s shop, our palms bonded by a love as strong, as adhesive as orange juice.
Mark and I created an alternate New Orleans that night—a city once again built on hope, on dreams, on the promise of tomorrow.
We ate dinner at a courtyard table for two, under antique lamps and strings of white lights swirled through a canopy of branches and vines. Our mouths were romanced by a roux done just right, by the perfect balance of garlic and onion and celery, and later, the buttery warmth of Bananas Foster. And then, with bellies full and senses heightened, we strolled down Pirates Alley, pausing to pay William Faulkner homage outside his 1920s apartment, before stepping into a hauntingly darkened Jackson Square, lit by streetlamps and the glimmering candlewicks of fortune-tellers. We watched the fog settle on the Mississippi River and listened to the moans of cargo ships—late-night calls that echoed the bliss beating in our chests—before hitching a ride on a horse-drawn carriage.
“But that’s for tourists,” I argued, when Mark pulled out a wad of cash for the driver.
He sported an irresistible smile. “Isn’t that what we are?”
And then, as if we hadn’t been up and down almost every street in the Quarter, we walked them all again, sometimes in silence and other times, in unadulterated conversation. With every sight and sound, Mark’s memories from his college days seemed to sharpen—they were mostly related to being drunk on Bourbon Street— and it was almost midnight when we found ourselves back where we’d started the evening, in front of our hotel.
I slipped off my heels and stood barefoot on the cool sidewalk, my shoes dangling by their backs from my index finger. Mark embraced me, his mouth going to the tender spot behind my ear. His warm breath sent a chill down my spine. And then he slid a dress strap off my shoulder so he could kiss the skin above my collarbone.
“Are you going to invite me up to your room?” he whispered.
You know what I could go for?” Mark asked an hour later, his body pressed against mine under the sheets like a spoon. “One of those powdered sugar doughnuts.”
I loved his phrasing I could go for; it sounded familiar, like we had always been like this, had always been together.
“You mean beignets.” I placed a reprimanding finger to his lips. “Never call them doughnuts. Cardinal sin.”
“Sorry. Beignets.” He eyed the nightstand clock. “Do you think that café is still open?”
“Café Du Monde? It’s always open.”
“Let’s go.”
“Now?”
“Why not now?”
And so we threw on the clothes we’d strewn across the hotel room floor and headed to Café Du Monde. This time, though, I wore flip-flops and Mark opted out of his suit jacket for the plain white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. We grabbed a table on the periphery of the café overlooking the sidewalk, where a saxophonist had left his instrument case open to collect spare change for playing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Mark kept an eye out for the waiter while I took in the sights and sounds of the café.
Two tables over, I saw a group of college students who looked like they’d just stepped off Bourbon Street. Beads adorned the girls’ necks. Red kiss marks covered the guys’ cheeks. One girl still carried a tall souvenir glass, a few sips of pink daiquiri remaining. Her bright eyes and pink cheeks revealed she had finished most of it. I studied each student in the group, and not one looked familiar. I breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no awkward “Didn’t I sit next to you in Mr. Harrison’s biology class?” conversations.
Next to the students sat a woman, perhaps midthirties with brown, wiry hair and dark-rimmed glasses, more New York than New Orleans. She seemed to be writing in a notebook. Something about the tilt of her head and her smooth, relaxed jaw made me believe she truly had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
And then there was the man folding napkins into origami, the transvestite, and the amorous couple, who French kissed between slurps of coffee. I smiled, happy to see the café as I often had in the past—filled with artists, eccentrics, and lovers. The waiter, a young Vietnamese man wearing the uniform white paper cap, approached us then with a stone face. Mark asked for two café au laits and an order of beignets.
“So tomorrow,” he said once the waiter left. “We’ll ride the trolley out to Tulane?”
“Streetcar,” I corrected.
“Streetcar. Beignets.” He rolled his eyes. “For people who chant Who Dat, you sure are particular about semantics.”
I laughed. “What time do we need to be at the symposium?”
He grimaced. “I wish you could tag along, Ruby. Truly. But I think it’s too risky. I still know quite a few people at Tulane—my former professors, colleagues in the field. If anyone would see us, put two and two together . . . Besides, I don’t think I could concentrate with your pretty face in the crowd.” He stroked my cheek. “You can keep yourself busy, right? Nose around campus and the bookstore until I’m done?”
My heart sank. I’d simply assumed I was going to the symposium with him, since he’d asked me to attend that afternoon in his office, even before our relationship began. I hid my disappointment with an exaggerated head nod. “I’ll go to the library. I need to work anyway.”
“I knew you’d understand.” He squeezed my hand. “And how is your thesis shaping up?”
“Really well. Right now, I’m working on the connotations of the word room. When Woolf said a woman should have a room of her own, did she mean only a physical space? I think room could be something more abstract, a corner of the mind perhaps, a place free of judgment and guilt and expectation.”
He said nothing but looked back at me with warm eyes and a soft smile.
“What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. I just love the way your mind works.”
Love. He loves me. Does he love me?
“Anyway, I’m still in the note-taking stage,” I went on. “I have fifteen pages so far, but there’s still so much information to sift through. So actually, it’s a good thing I’m not going to the symposium. I can hole myself up in one of those study cubicles.”
“Well, don’t work too hard,” he cautioned. “I wanted this weekend to be about pleasure not business.”
I placed my hand on his upper thigh. “Well, I’m certainly enjoying myself.”
“Me too. But . . .” He studied me like a crossword puzzle clue, as if both confused and challenged by me. “I think we should talk about what happened earlier. On Royal Street. I’m beginning to think you haven’t told me the whole story.”
“Story?”
“About your father. What happened when he died.”
Mark must have seen my eyes water then, because he tucked one of my errant auburn curls behind my ear, then cupped my cheek with his hand. And the warmth of his hand caused the first tear to fall, and the rest followed suit. I pushed my fingers into the corners of my eyes to stop the weeping, but like a Band-Aid on a gushing cut, it didn’t work. In a matter of seconds, I was blubbering—a sudden, snotty-nosed, ugly cry. I covered my face with my hands.
“I’m so sorry,” I blurted.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.” Mark made a shushing noise. “Ruby, I want to know the whole you, not just the parts you want to show me. I like it when you’re happy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know when you’re sad. So don’t leave me in the dark, okay?”
I blew my nose first into a napkin plucked from the metal holder on the table.
“It was my fault,” I said.
“You said it was a car accident. Were you driving?”
I shook my head no. “It was a hit-and-run. He was just crossing the street.”
“How could that be your fault?”
“It wouldn’t have happened if I had come home like I was supposed to.”
I continued to tell Mark the details, how every year, on the night before Christmas Eve, my father and I went to the Celebration in the Oaks, the annual holiday light display in City Park. It was traditionally just the two of us, ever since I was a toddler, because my mother always took extra shifts at the hospital to assure she’d be off Christmas Day. And with each passing year, the holiday outing became as sacrosanct as Mardi Gras.
“But last year, Heidi invited me to go home with her to Minnesota. And I said yes,” I explained. “I wanted to experience a real ‘White Christmas.’ But more than that, I think I was testing my autonomy. Maybe I wouldn’t move back home after graduation; maybe I would stay in the Midwest. And I needed to prove to myself that I could do it, that I could cut that tie—to New Orleans, to my family, to my father. Of course, I had no idea what would happen. He would still be here if I hadn’t been so selfish.”
“If you had been here, you would have been hit too,” Mark rationalized.
“No, because the timing would have been off. Dad and I always went out for cheeseburgers and fries first. It was our little indulgence, our little secret. We’d load up on fat and carbs and then walk the food off in the park, walk the stench of it off our clothes, so Mom wouldn’t smell it on us when she got home. But I didn’t come home for holiday break, and my father went alone. Not for the cheeseburgers, just the light show. And so if I had been here, we would have been crossing the street at least an hour later. It wouldn’t have happened.”
“You can’t blame yourself, Ruby. You can’t play the ‘what if’ game.”
“But I play it all the time, ever since it happened. Even in my sleep. Right after, I started having these recurring nightmares, where my father is walking alone in the park, and people—moms with snot-nosed kids wearing reindeer antler headbands—are glaring at him as he passes because, what forty-five-year-old man goes all by himself to a holiday light show? A pedophile?”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” he said.
“Do you know it snowed here last year?” I went on. “The first time in a very long time. It snowed that night, just a few inches, but people here don’t know how to drive in snow, not like people up north. They close school here for a dusting of snow. They close roads. And that night, it snowed. And whoever was driving the car that hit him—the police never caught the person—probably didn’t know how to handle driving in that kind of weather.”
“This is an awful amount of guilt for you to bear, Ruby.” Mark sighed. “Have you seen someone?”
“When it first happened, yes, especially when the nightmares kept me up all night. I was an insomniac. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed sleeping pills. But I’ve been fine lately. I’ve been sleeping well. I haven’t been feeling guilty. Until now and . . .”
“—Come here,” Mark said, wrapping his arms around me so tightly, his hands clasped at the small of my back. We sat like that—my face buried in his chest, my tears dotting our laps below us—until I gained control of my breathing.
It was then, after we pulled back from the embrace, that I noticed the woman with the notebook—the one who’d looked like she had nowhere to go and nothing to do—watching us. She stared at me as if she knew me, as if trying to place me in her memory, and my mind raced through faces: women my mother used to work with at the hospital, the mothers of my grammar school friends, our old neighbors. Do I know her? I wondered. Does she know me? Had she known my mother and saw a resemblance? No, her expression did not suggest recognition but rather disgust. It seemed she’d seen our exchange. Or had she overheard our conversation? Either way, it was clear she didn’t approve.
The waiter provided me a respite from her damnation when he appeared with two mugs filled with a liquid the color of a good summer tan, and a small plate of fried dough coated in powdered sugar. Mark paid while I gave the woman one more glance, and sighed relief when I saw her reabsorbed in her notebook. Maybe she hadn’t been looking at me after all, but someone or something past me. I turned to look behind me but saw only an empty table.
I sipped my coffee then—the rising steam a comfort to my red eyes—and delighted in that unmistakably earthy taste of chicory. Meanwhile, Mark’s mouth was already full of dough. White powder coated his lips and fingertips after only one bite. He looked adorable.
“Have one,” he said, pushing the plate toward me. “Nothing has the power to cheer you up like a big dose of fat and sugar.”
Unfortunately, there is no ladylike way to eat a beignet, so I held the mass of warm dough and watched the powdered sugar dangle at the edge, preparing to sprinkle my black dress with Café Du Monde fairy dust. The napkins were so small, I would have had to use twenty of them to protect my lap. With my head positioned above the plate, I brought the beignet to my lips, and I ate the whole thing that way, shoulders curved, chin up. But the powder, miraculously, still sprinkled the front of my dress. I dabbed the spots with water, but the sugar seemed imbedded in the black silk. My rubbing had turned the smudges into splotches.
“I think my dress is ruined,” I said after exhausting all efforts.
Mark tossed me a playful wink. “So you’ll take it off.”
We didn’t say more about my father. I think Mark sensed I was emotionally drained from the conversation. Instead, we ate and we drank, listened to the saxophonist, enjoyed the ambiance of the café, the high ceiling and twirling fans, the cup and saucer clinks, the noisy chatter of people out in the wee hours of the morning.
When we finally left the café, we had to pass the college students and the transvestite and the origami artist but first, the woman and her notebook. She lifted her eyes as we went by, but I could not look into them. I feared they’d remind me too much of my mother’s, of the guilt I’d somehow escaped in my affection for Mark. I saw only the corners of her mouth turn down, her head shaking.
“Tsk, tsk,” I thought I heard her say under the café murmurs and clanking dishes.
Or had she said mistress?
Once on Decatur Street, I tried to concentrate on the night sky, on the spires of St. Louis Cathedral aiming for the stars. But I lost the image. The woman’s disgust was all I could see. I rubbed the front of my dress once more.
“There’s no use.” Mark reached around my waist. “What’s done is done.”
I knew it would wash out. I knew no one would see it that time of night. But until we reached the hotel room, I kept my hands before me, hiding the powdered sugar stains on the front of my dress: the letter A the woman from the café had placed there with one hard look.
I opened my eyes to a dark hotel room. The heavy curtains worked so well, I didn’t know if it was morning or the afternoon of the following day. But soon, I saw a thin stream of hazy early light where the curtain met the wall.
Mark was still asleep on his stomach, his arm curled over the pillow. The position revealed his muscular arms and toned obliques. I wanted to slide my arm around his waist and kiss him softly on the shoulder, not only for how handsome he looked in slumber, but also for breaking the ice about my father. How could I repay him for his kindness at the café? He’d been so sweet, so strong. He’d seen through my facade. He’d asked the hard questions. He’d listened. How could I wonder if he loved me? Was that not evident in his actions?
I decided not to wake him and instead, slipped out of bed. I’d fallen asleep reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The book, my alternative to sleeping pills, was still in bed with me, and I placed it on the nightstand. And that’s when I thought of Leonard Woolf.
From my research, I knew Virginia Woolf’s husband had been equally as kind, caring for her during the bouts of depression and nervous breakdowns that inevitably followed her completion of a novel. Leonard had given his wife so much time, so much understanding, that she’d come to feel like a burden, that she was ruining his life. In addition to hearing voices and the sensation she was going mad, it was one of the reasons Woolf took her own life in 1941.
“You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good,” Virginia had written to Leonard in the suicide note she penned just before she drowned herself in the River Ouse. “I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”
I didn’t want Mark to see me as a burden. I didn’t want to take advantage of his compassion. And I vowed then not to cry about my father the rest of the weekend, not to appear weak, injured, needy, or emotional. I would prove to him that I was strong. Stoic. I would be fun and easy and carefree, the kind of woman he deserved.
I approached the window then to witness the dawn of a new day. Pushing the curtains aside, I saw the foggy courtyard below. Fog, especially first thing in the morning, is as characteristic to New Orleans as jazz or seafood, and I watched the hazy cloud of white as it revealed tables, chairs, and a chaise lounge, all enjoying the tranquil aftermath of a light morning rain. I reached for Mark’s watch—he had set it on the writing table near the window—and found it was quarter to six. I had slept a mere three hours. We’d made love again after the café au lait and beignets and powdered sugar spill. But somehow I felt refreshed enough to venture out for a coffee from the hotel lobby and a courtyard stroll. I would bring Mark back a fresh cup, fixed just the way he liked it. We would start the day off right.
Sunlight slowly penetrated the veil of fog and continued to lift it as I walked through the courtyard that morning. After only a few minutes, the humidity cooled my coffee and it became chalky, but it was a nostalgic taste, actually, like chicken soup. It reminded me of the many Saturday mornings I’d sat with my mom at the kitchen table talking about everything and nothing. I longed to call her, to burden her instead of Mark, but she had no idea I was in New Orleans with him, with my professor, a married man. She would certainly disapprove of my relationship with him, but somehow that seemed a secondary issue to a more unpardonable sin: I went back to New Orleans without her.
I decided to return to the hotel room then, and I was on my way to the lobby to fix Mark’s coffee, when I stopped abruptly at the sight of a woman standing just below our hotel room window. Even in the haze of fog, her profile struck me immediately. I recognized her, but in a vague way, like seeing a childhood friend all grown up. Her hair, the color of muddy water, was pinned at the nape of her neck and appeared unkempt and yet refined. Perhaps it was her blouse, white with a frilly lace neck, which suggested reservation. Or her brown ankle-length skirt. Or the narrow, pointy nose of a nun.
I closed my eyes, then reopened them, but still she was there. I stared at her in the silent courtyard, watched her hands fiddle inside the pocket of her cardigan, and tried to place her. She did not look well; her skin was pale, or was it the whiteness of the fog still lifting?
“Hello,” I said.
She did not startle, but guided her eyes toward mine with a languid turn of her neck. Her lips parted, but not into a smile. More like a smirk; an all-knowing smirk, almost condescending, as if she knew things I could only read about. And then she simply sauntered away, vanished into the hallway leading to the hotel lobby.
I stood there a moment, numbed by her expression and the ease with which she’d left. I had not heard footsteps. But I soon followed into the hotel’s marble-floored lobby. No one was there, except a hotel desk clerk.
“Did someone just come through here?” I asked him. “A woman?”
He twisted his lips and eyebrows together in puzzlement.
“I just saw her. She went this way.” I looked back into the courtyard. How could the woman have disappeared so quickly? “She was . . . I think she was wearing a costume?”
The clerk nodded. “This hotel is haunted. We have many resident ghosts,” he said rather coolly, as if he’d said the hotel had many available suites.
Ghosts are a part of New Orleans culture as much as parades and pralines; there are ghost tours, cemetery tours, and voodoo tours. But there was something so striking about the woman I’d seen. Her hair, her nose, her outfit. Why had she looked so familiar and yet unable to place? And then the realization exploded in my mind, and I rushed upstairs.
I opened the hotel room door with stealth, but Mark stirred anyway. After looking next to him in bed, he craned his neck to find me. “I thought I heard you leave,” he said. His voice was scratchy, as if he’d been in and out of the bars on Bourbon Street all night.
I went straight to the bedside table, where I’d set the copy of A Room of One’s Own I’d been reading, and flipped to the back cover to study Virginia Woolf’s picture. In it, she is young; her hair dark and pulled back at the nape; her skin smooth and white like porcelain; the collar of her blouse feminine and lacy. It is a profile shot, so her nose is prominent and pointy. In contrast, the woman I saw in the courtyard was not so young. She was wrinkled. No, weathered. But the similarity of the two profiles—the Woolf in the photo and the woman in the courtyard—was so striking, a wave of pinpricks swept down the backs of my arms.
“What is it? What are you looking at?” Mark asked.
I didn’t answer. My mind was still replaying everything I’d seen and hadn’t seen. The woman had looked so real, and yet she’d vanished faster than humanly possible.
“Ruby?” he almost shouted. His voice was forceful, authoritative. It reminded me of that first afternoon in his office, how he’d addressed that girl Madeline and snapped her out of her sadness.
“I saw a woman in the courtyard,” I finally divulged. “She looked just like her,” I added, pointing to the picture of Virginia Woolf on the back of my book.
Mark rubbed his eyes of sleep, then studied the photo. “If memory serves me right, this city is crawling with characters,” he offered. “Lots of people dressing up in costume for no good reason. You probably saw one of those street performers who stands perfectly still for hours, just to get a few quarters.”
“But she didn’t look like a real person,” I argued. “She was pale and white and muted. And she disappeared so quickly. The front desk clerk didn’t even see her, and there’s no other way out than through the lobby.” I paused. “Do you believe in ghosts, Mark?”
“Ghosts. God. I see a lot of gray.” He narrowed his eyes. “You think you saw a ghost?”
“No,” I said, and then: “I don’t know.”
“Weren’t you reading this last night?” He tapped the book I still held in my hands. “Before you went to bed?”
I nodded.
“You didn’t get much sleep,” he added.
He was right; I was sleep-deprived.
“You probably saw a woman, someone staying here, who kind of looked like Virginia Woolf,” he offered. “And it was foggy, and you were tired, and you only imagined the woman was Woolf.”
“It was foggy,” I said.
“Well, see. There you go.”
His tone was casual, but I noticed the wrinkles of concern forming beside his eyes.
Don’t burden him, I thought.
And so I let it go, chalked it up to fatigue and fog. Looking back, I should have known foreshadowing when I saw it. The repercussions of seeing Virginia Woolf in the courtyard did not fully occur to me then.
I had no indication of the dark, twisted path I was about to follow.