The Annunciation

Amanda had not seen her cousin Guy in years. The family had kept them apart when they were young. Then, when he was twenty-one years old, Guy had left Mississippi and gone to play football for the Chicago Bears.

The first year he was there he was Rookie of the Year. The second year he injured both his knees so badly he could hardly walk. In the last quarter of a game on a freezing day he allowed a medic to shoot his knees full of novocaine and his arm full of methamphetamine and stumbled off the field a hero.

Many months later he walked out of Northwestern Memorial Hospital and looked around at a hot summer city full of men who seemed to know what they were going to do next.

Guy knew what he wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going home and farm what was left of Esperanza and wait for his father to die. He wasn’t going back to Mississippi and sell insurance or tractors or do any of the other things all the old football players he knew ended up doing.

He had made $35,000 the year he was a rookie and $55,000 the year after that and if he wasn’t going to keep on being a hero at least he was going to keep on being rich.

He knocked around Chicago for a while looking for options. The most promising one turned out to be a sweet Italian girl named Maria who took him home to Lakeshore Drive and introduced him to her father.

Maria’s father was in the habit of buying athletes for his daughters. He bought Guy for $200,000 and a house on Lake Michigan the size of a library. It was understood there would be more, much more.

“Don’t worry about that,” the old man said. “We’ll find you something to do.”

What they found for Guy to do didn’t take up much of his time so he learned to play golf and began following the wealthy golf world around from Calcutta to Calcutta, screwing society women at night, playing golf in the daytime, coming home every now and then to Maria. It was enough for her. She had a rheumatic heart and got her love from doctors.

So the years went by. There were no children of this arrangement. For a long time Guy had liked it that way. Now he was having strange thoughts about being childless. He had begun to have many thoughts he could not control or understand. His knees bothered him when the weather was bad and he had taken to sitting alone at night watching old movies of himself on the field, watching his knees move up and down on the screen, as if somewhere in that movement was the secret of what was wrong, as if he believed what plagued him was a disease of the knees and not of the spirit.

When Amanda called him one morning to tell him their grandmother had died the sound of her voice was like a voice in a dream. It was the first time he had talked with Amanda in many years. “Guy, she’s gone. Grandmomma’s gone. Please come. When can you come?”

He kept hearing the soft remembered voice all the way to Memphis on the plane and he told himself that all along it was losing Amanda that had made his life so empty and alone and without meaning.

He rented a car at the Memphis airport and started driving to the delta, hurrying to get there in time for the funeral. He drove as fast as he dared down the long straight roads, beginning to lay his plans. At Shelby the rain began.

Now he stood beside Amanda with her husband, Malcolm, holding an umbrella over their heads. The funeral was over. They had stayed to watch the gravediggers shovel the last of the dirt on the grave. We should be doing that, Amanda thought. We should be the ones to do it. She looked at Malcolm. He had his head bowed, trying to be polite and respect Christian burial excesses, trying to hold on to the umbrella and pretend he didn’t care that he was standing in mud up to his shoetops.

If there was one thing in the world Malcolm Ashe was good at it was being polite. Besides, he told himself, this was why he had married Amanda, to be part of this world he liked to read about in books. He had been a Faulkner scholar at Yale and it had a big effect on his life.

Guy was looking him over, sizing him up, trying to figure out who he was, this rich New Orleans Jew Amanda had married some years ago. A million times Guy had tried to imagine Malcolm. Nothing he had imagined was anything like this handsome, well-mannered man, standing so quietly, looking so out of place in his hand-tailored Oxford suit. Much as he wanted to hate him, Guy couldn’t find anything to hate.

Amanda was counting the shovelfuls. Une, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix…uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, seis, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight…She was thinking about an afternoon two days before, the last time she had seen her grandmother alive.

It was the first cold day in November and she had driven up to the delta from New Orleans on a whim, thinking she would like to see the fields turned under and lying fallow for the winter. Thinking she would show her grandmother an article she had published in a magazine and make her proud. As it turned out she had never gotten around to getting the magazine out of the car.

Her grandmother was waiting for her on the porch when she arrived, standing at the top of the stairs with her hands on her hips, her glasses dangling on a silver chain, her shirtwaist dress with its uneven hem hanging in waves, her tireless shoulders as straight a a girl’s.

They had eaten lunch in the dining room on unironed placemats, then gone to sit in a little sewing room on the back of the house. It was pleasant there, with a fire in the grate and the cold weather pressing against the windows. I don’t come home enough, Amanda thought. I need to get up here more often.

“I’ve taken to sleeping back here now that I’m alone,” the grandmother said. She stretched herself out on the day-bed and propped her Red Cross shoes up on a pillow. She was tired now. She had outlived both her sons. Guy’s father had died in the spring and his mother had gone back to her own people in Tupelo.

“Duke sleeps here with you, doesn’t she?” Amanda said. “We’re paying her to sleep here at night. I don’t know why you won’t come on down to New Orleans where I can watch after you.”

“Well, of course you know why. I’m perfectly comfortable right here in my own house, thank you. And Duke sleeps right next door in Guy’s old room and we’re doing just fine. Put some coal on that fire, would you? I love a fire in the daytime.” Amanda did as she was told and the two women settled down, her grandmother lying on the daybed reading The Daily Word, Amanda sitting in the wicker rocker looking through old copies of The Progressive Farmer.

“How is Malcolm?” her grandmother asked, looking up from her reading. “I don’t know why he never drives up with you anymore.”

Amanda sighed and stuck the magazine down into the side pockets of the chair. “That isn’t going too well, Grandmomma. You were right. I shouldn’t have married a Jew.”

“Oh, Amanda, I never said that. I never said any such thing. It was just such a surprise to me. You know very well I think Malcolm’s a wonderful man.”

“Well, that’s because you don’t have to live with him. He’s having a fit because I went back to school. He’s jealous of everything I do. Oh, shit, it’s just that goddamn city. Jesus, I hate that city.”

“Please don’t say those ugly words in front of me. I can’t believe you let those things come out of your mouth. Do you say things like that down there in New Orleans? No wonder Sudie couldn’t get you in the Junior League.”

“Oh, shit, there isn’t any way to talk to you. I didn’t want to get in the goddamn Junior League. That was all Sudie’s idea. All I want is to get my work done and learn to be the best translator in the world. That’s all I’m interested in now. So I can leave Malcolm and get out of that goddamned city.”

“I don’t know why you always talk so bad about New Orleans. You were dying to marry him and move down there. You couldn’t stay away from there. You used to go see Sudie every time she opened the door….”

“Well, that’s because I was crazy. Now I hate it. Ever since I quit drinking I can’t stand to live there. All anybody down there does is drink and be snotty to each other. And quit bringing up that goddamn Junior League stuff. That was years ago. You and Sudie can’t get that off your minds a minute. I’m sick of hearing about it. Besides, the reason I didn’t get in was because I married a Jew. That’s very touchy stuff down there in that old whore of a city.”

She poked around in the fire, rearranging the coals, then poured herself a cup of tea. She went over and sat on the floor by her grandmother’s bed and laid her head down beside her hand.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t do this to you. I mean to just come up here and tell you how great everything is. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m really very happy. I love the work I’m doing. And Malcolm’s okay. He gives me anything he knows how to give.”

“It would have been different if you’d had children. That would have made a difference.”

“That’s the other thing about that place, Grandmomma. I think she’s there. I just can’t stop thinking she’s there, somewhere in that city.”

“Don’t dwell on it, honey. It was so long ago. We did what we could. We did what we had to do.” She laid her hand on Amanda’s head, stroking her hair. “Look out there, honey. It’s such a perfect day. Clear as glass. Listen, I’ll read you today’s lesson.” She opened the book and adjusted her glasses on her nose. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” she read. “From whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth …”

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” Amanda said. “I want to walk up to Miss Hattie’s and speak to her while I’m here.”

“You aren’t ever going to find any peace until you accept the Lord as your savior, Amanda. He doesn’t make —”

In the night Duke came into Amanda’s room and stood at the end of the bed. “You better come on,” she said. “I think she’s gone. I think she’s gone away. I been shaking her and nothing happen.”

Amanda flew down the hall into the little room. She stood beside the bed looking down at the cold face. “Why is the window open?” she said. “It’s too cold in here.”

“I open it to let the spirit out. Can’t keep the spirit in after it leave the body.”

“All right, all right,” Amanda said. “What happened, Duke? What did she say? What did you hear?”

“She just making a noise like trying to push a baby out. Big old sucking noise. Then I woke up and come running in here and she’s daid. All the breath gone out of her, just like that. That’s a lucky death, go off like that in yo sleep.”

Amanda sat on the edge of the bed holding her grandmother’s hand until she was trembling with the cold. Then she took her grandmother’s old blue wool robe off a chair and put it on and went out into the hall and started making the phone calls.

At dawn she called Malcolm and told him to come down and help her. Then she looked up the number in her grandmother’s address book and called Guy. Then she walked down to the bayou bank still wearing the robe and stood for a long time staring down into the cold brown water, thinking about a story her grandmother used to tell her about an old dog and his bone, how the dog lost his bone by trying to bite the reflection of it in the water. Old greedy yellow dog, Amanda was thinking, seeing him right there in the water, where she had left him as a child. Poor old dumb thing.

The bayou bank was overgrown with weeds now. It had been years since anyone had had a fish fry or gone swimming there. All gone now, Amanda thought. The black iron pots waiting for the catfish, the wild sons and winter fires, the McCameys of Issaquena County.

Her mind returned to Greenfields Cemetery. Une, dix, tres, cinco, seis, seven, eight, nieve, diez, ocho, nieve, diez. She looked down the levee road to the little house built on top of an Indian mound where her grandparents had lived while they built Esperanza. The Episcopal priest lived there now. He was the only one brave enough to live that near to Mayersville, which had a black woman for a mayor and was suspected of being a hotbed of revolution.

Dix, tres, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nieve, diez. Guy moved closer and took hold of her arm. After that the only thing she was paying any attention to was his hand on her arm.

“Now they’re all gone,” she said. “Now it’s only us. Mother used to bring me out here every Sunday after church until Grandmomma put a stop to it,” she said, turning to Malcolm. “One Sunday Grandmother picked me up and carried me into the house. ‘Leave Amanda here,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop you from going if you have to, but don’t ask a child to live with a dead man.’ She was a powerful woman, wasn’t she, Guy?”

“The only person in the world I was ever afraid of. Not Amanda though. Amanda wasn’t afraid of anything, not even Grandmomma. Is she still like that, Malcolm? Is she still that way?”

“Let’s get out of here before she catches pneumonia,” Malcolm said, taking her other arm.

Later they all got drunk at Beth’s house. Everyone got drunk except Guy. Guy never got drunk. In the world he lived in it was stupid to get drunk. Stupid and dangerous. Besides, he was doing something more interesting than getting drunk. He was watching Malcolm.

Malcolm was having a good time. He had forgotten all about being at a funeral. He was getting drunk and listening to Mr. Rife Chaney tell delta stories.

“His name was Hank,” Mr. Rife was saying, “after my dentist from Rolling Fork and he was a mussel eater. He’d dig up a mussel and bring it up and set it out in the sun until it opened, then eat the meat. He’d do that all day long, run down to the bayou bank and dig a mussel. He was the sweetest dog in the whole world, named for the sweetest man.”

“Who was the dressed-up black man at the funeral,” Malcolm said, “the one with the big hat?”

“That was B. C. Ward, Gert’s husband. There’s a nigger farmer for you. Can’t even read and write. Can’t write his name but he’s got a Cadillac and four tractors and a six-acre fish pond he built himself. I was fishing his pond last week.”

“They say gold’s going up every day now,” Shine Carey put in. “There’s a man in Jackson buying anything gold he can get his hands on.”

Mr. Rife ignored Shine and went right back to nigger farmers. “He bought this old frame house and built him a brick room on it. A real nice old frame house on Panther Burn Plantation that Mr. Courtright built in my granddaddy’s time. Well, he just built him a brick room on the back of it. Porches falling off, steps rotting, roof leaking. He just builds on another room.”

Malcolm was all over Mr. Rife, bringing him drinks, asking questions, being the best listener in the world.

“Who built the Indian mounds around here?” Malcolm said. “I never saw so many in one place.”

Mr. Rife began. “Well, there were Chickasaws and Choctaws, and before that the mound builders, but nobody knows much about them. Guy McCamey’s got Indian blood. Look at his face. His momma was half-Chickasaw. Guy’s got a real Indian face. You should have seen him play ball. He looked just like an Indian playing ball.”

“If you can keep them sober,” Mr. Rife said. “Guy can’t drink. He’ll tell you so himself. He told me he got drunk in Chicago one night and nearly killed a man with his fists.”

“You really think it’s Indian,” Malcolm said, “that it’s genetic?”

“Sure. We used to play Indians on the colored ball teams in the old Plantation League. It never worked out. There’d always be plenty of whiskey around and you couldn’t tell them they couldn’t have any. Give them two drinks and they’d be laid out foaming at the mouth. I’ve seen them covered with flies.”

“Colored ball teams, son. Regular colored ball teams. Amanda’s grandaddy had one. Well, we played some Mexicans. And like I told you, we tried Indians.”

“Well, there was a big controversy about playing Mexicans at first. Colored people don’t like associating with Mexicans. Mr. Audrey over at Bear Garden Plantation worked Mexicans. He liked Mexicans. Had the inside of his house all fixed up like you were in Mexico. Rugs hanging on the walls and clay plates and everything Mexican. Well, Mr. Audrey had a Mexican team one year but they never did win a game. Smoked too much marijuana.”

“They grew it. Nobody cared. It wasn’t against the law. Mr. Audrey let his Mexicans grow it right in the middle of a cotton field. They had a patch the size of a baseball diamond and it grew taller than a man’s shoulder all summer long. No one cared if Mr. Audrey played Mexicans. If he wanted to put up with Mexicans it was all right with us. Of course, colored people wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

Maybe Mr. Rife will tell him about the Jew peddlers that used to come through the delta selling needles, Amanda thought. Maybe if he gets drunk enough he’ll tell Malcolm all about the International Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Everyone was in the kitchen. Amanda wandered off into the living room and sat on the piano bench playing with Beth’s old metronome.

In a minute Guy came out from the kitchen and stood beside the piano. “You want to talk?” he asked.

“I’ll know where to begin,” he said, and he picked her up in his arms as though she were a child and carried her out the front door and put her into his car and drove off down the street.

Amanda looked out upon the darkened streets of the little community, then across the seat at the serious face of her cousin. It was the same old impassive face she had loved all her life. He was the best football player in the state of Mississippi, she thought. And I never even saw him play a game.

Guy parked the car by the gin and held her while she cried, blowing her nose on his tacky monogrammed handkerchief and getting the front of his pin-striped suit all wet with her tears. It was a suit that would have looked good on a French decorator. Guy’s shoulders were so wide that none of the suits he liked ever looked right on him. She remembered him in the boys department at Nell’s and Blum’s with that glum look on his face when their grandmother would take them shopping in the fall. She could just imagine him somewhere in a Yankee city standing in front of a mirror being talked into that suit and somehow that cheered her up.

“Oh, Guy. Nothing’s wrong with it. I’m sorry. I’m just being mean. I’ve been mean all day. I was mean to Malcolm and now I’m being mean to you.” She had started to cry again, making little strangling sounds. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “oh, Jesus Christ.”

“Sissy,” he said. “Little Sissy. I think about you every day of my life. Sissy, where is the child? I want to know where she is. I want to see her.”

“My God, Guy, don’t start that. I don’t know where she is. I live in horror that she’ll come and find me. Every time I read about children being allowed to see their adoption papers I get terrified she’ll come for me. And she’s not a child. She’s a grown woman.”

“Don’t talk about it, Guy. I’ve spent my whole life doing penance for this. Don’t make it any harder on me.”

“I have loved you all my life, Sissy. And no one else. I would have helped you if I could.” He was touching her now, rubbing her arms and her shoulders and her soft fair graying hair. “Shit, I couldn’t even help myself. That was the worst summer of my life. Not that the rest of them have been so good. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t known what I was doing for years. But I want to find that child. I know that.”

“Don’t talk about it. There’s something terrible about it. She’s blind or crippled or dead. Or she’ll come for me and kill me for deserting her. Shut up about it, Guy. Don’t talk about it.”

She moved closer to him, moving her hands across his shoulders, then laying the palms of her hands against his chest, ready to do anything to make him stop talking about it.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s all right. It’s raining and Grandmomma’s dead and you’re supposed to fuck your cousins at your grandmother’s funeral. Don’t they know things like that in Chicago?”

Then the old desire rose between them and they gave into it while outside the rain poured down upon the houses and the streets and the levees, upon the sidewalks and sheds and graves and clotheslines and fences. The old rain falling and falling all over the little town of Glen Allen, Mississippi.

“Well, we shouldn’t have done that,” she said, when it was over. “But we did it.” Now that it was over she wanted to be away from him. It was too sad, sad and impossible, like trying to fit into a dress she had worn in another life. She moved away from him, back to her own side of the seat.

“Life doesn’t do things to people, Guy. Life happens. And it’s good. Most of it is good.”

“Where do you think she is?” he said. “I have to find her. I have to know she’s well. I have to know there’s something of me left on this earth.”

“I think she’s in New Orleans. Imagine what it’s been like for me to live there all these years knowing that. Guy, you have to take me back now. I can’t do this to Malcolm. Mr. Rife will get drunk and start tracing his bloodlines or something.”

“Let me come to New Orleans,” he said. “Let me see you. We can at least have that after all these years.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t do that to myself. Besides, I may not be there long. I’ve gone back to school, Guy. To Tulane.”

“I’m a translator. I translate poems from French and Italian into English. I’m getting sort of famous in a limited way.”

“I’m going to divorce him. Or let him divorce me, whichever comes first. He’s a good man, Guy. He’s been good to me. It isn’t his fault I don’t love him anymore. It’s that goddamn city. Jesus, I hate living in that city. It never changes. It never gets to be fall or spring or winter. And you can’t see the stars. There’re these goddamn clouds all over the sky all the time. Well, now that I have some money I’ll be free to make a life for myself.”

“Let me leave with you,” Guy said. “I’ll leave Maria. We’ll go somewhere together. We’ll be happy. You know we’d be happy.” He reached across the seat and pulled her back into his arms. “I need you, Sissy. There hasn’t ever been another woman for me. Do you know that? All the women in the world, all the women I’ve fucked and it’s still only you.”

“I don’t want that, Guy, even if it’s true. I don’t want to be anyone’s woman, yours or Malcolm’s or anyone’s. I want to find out what I really want in the world.”

“I can give you anything you want. I can give you anything that goddamn ingratiating Jew can give you.”

“I’m not talking about money. I’ve had all of that I can stand. I want something else. Something I don’t know the name of yet. Oh, well, I don’t mean to say things that hurt you.”

“Different things. I’m writing for a newspaper. And studying translating. I’m fascinated right now by what happens when you move things from one language to another. Well, all I’m really trying to do is find out what I’m good at. So I can be a useful person, so I can have some purpose.”

“And we’ll find our little girl and live happily ever after. Is that the scenario? Jesus, Guy, I’m the romantic and even I know better than that. Look, you have to take me back now. I can’t do this to Malcolm.”

“No,” she said. “Whatever happens from now on, at least it won’t be this old sadness.” She looked out the window. The rain was falling harder. “I hope the rain doesn’t wash all the dirt off the grave,” she said. “What if it washes the dirt off the grave?”

“I can’t believe you can make love to me like that and then just disappear again. Doesn’t this mean anything to you, Sissy? Don’t you know the difference between this and the rest of it?”

“I know how sad it is. Don’t worry. I know about that. Now take me back. I mean it, Guy, take me back there.”

Malcolm was furious with her. When the party broke up and they were back in her grandmother’s house, he was so angry he wouldn’t let her get in the small walnut bed with him.

“My God, Amanda, I thought you’d wandered off to the river to drown yourself. You’ve been acting weird ever since we got here.”

“Of course I’m acting weird. My grandmother’s dead, Malcolm. I’m taking this very hard.”

“So you run off from the party with a man without even telling me you’re leaving.”

“Good God, Malcolm. He was closer to me than a brother. He’s my oldest friend.”

“Look, can I get in the bed now? I’m bleeding again,” she said. “I’ll have to go see Dr. Friday as soon as we get home. I guess he ought to go on and do a hysterectomy.”

She climbed in beside him and held him to her. Keep it on the road, she told herself. No one is happy. We are outside of nature. Nothing outside of nature is happy. Only idiots are happy. She held on to the tight angry body of her husband and fell asleep to dream of wandering in a forest, the child’s face looking out at her from behind every tree. The child was glad Amanda was lost, glad she was lonely, glad she was frightened. Amanda walked on and on, pushing aside the thick undergrowth as the light began to leave the sky.

It was one thing to sit in a car in the rain and brag to Guy about leaving her husband and going out into the world to be useful and simple and wise, no longer attached to money and power.

It was another thing to actually divorce Malcolm Ashe. He didn’t want a divorce. He was a well-raised Jew. He thought divorce was a terrible dusty Christian sin.

Besides, Amanda liked Malcolm. He had never done an unkind thing to her. He had never told her a lie or denied her anything he had the power to give her or threatened her or broken a promise to her. For years he had devoted himself to Amanda morning night and noon whether she wanted him to or not.

Amanda had met Malcolm at a cocktail party at Delgado Museum. It was the night before her birthday and she was in New Orleans visiting her cousins and trying to decide what to do with her life.

There was Malcolm leaning up against a marble pillar with an oil painting of a pope on the wall behind him. He was wearing a rumpled tweed jacket he had bought years before at the Yale Coop and he was smoking a cigarette so small it was about to burn his fingers. He was just what Amanda had been looking for. She had become enchanted with Jews during the civil rights movement and thought every Jew she met was a crusading liberal.

Amanda and Malcolm proceeded to get drunk together at the benefit and before the night was over she dragged him off to a dive on Royal Street where tourists gather to sing corny songs around a piano bar. Amanda pulled up a stool next to the piano player and announced to everyone at the bar that she and Malcolm had been married an hour before.

“Had to do it,” she told everyone. “Got to give this baby a name. Can’t have babies running around without daddies to fight off tigers.”

Everyone in the bar was delighted to be in on such a brave and fruitful romance and bought them drinks and serenaded them until four in the morning.

Malcolm had lived a sheltered life. He had never been with a woman who had that much energy or that much imagination. He had never been with a woman who seemed to be in that much danger. He wanted to follow her around and protect her. He wanted to see what she would do next.

When the bar closed he took her to the Royal Orleans Hotel and rented a suite of rooms and held her in his arms while she slept off her martinis. He held her in his arms dreaming of tall redheaded sons who weren’t afraid of anything. By the time the sun rose Malcolm was in love. He decided to marry Amanda as soon as he could talk her into it. He was very wealthy. He could buy anything he wanted, even a wild Christian girl from Mississippi.

“What do you do for a living?” Amanda asked. They were sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed taking big drinks of the milk punch the Royal Orleans bartender had made for them and little bites of the lavish breakfast the Royal Orleans chef had cooked for them. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and already they were getting drunk again.

“I represent minority groups,” he said, smiling his charming boyish smile. It was a joke he was fond of telling people. What he was was a management lawyer. What he meant by minority groups were the owners of the restaurants and factories and newspapers he represented.

“Oh, God,” Amanda said. “That’s wonderful. I wish I had done more to help the civil rights movement. I never did feel like I did all the things I should have done.”

“As soon as we get moving let’s go out to the lake and sail my sailboat,” Malcolm said. “I’ve had it a month and barely had time to sail it. Can you do that? Can you call the people you’re staying with?”

“I don’t have anything to wear,” Amanda said. “I only brought dress-up clothes.”

In the next few months Amanda started going down to New Orleans to visit her cousins every chance she got.

“I’ve run through all the available men in Mississippi,” she confided to her cousin Sudie. They were out at the New Orleans Country Club eating sandwiches by the pool, watching Sudie’s children show off on the diving board. “Everybody worth a damn is either married or gay. I’m not getting any younger, Sudie. I’m starting to get fat on the back of my legs. I am. I saw it in the mirror the other day. I think I ought to get married.”

Amanda stood up. “They’re not fat,” Sudie said. “But I see what you mean. There’s something starting up there.”

“Well, for God’s sake, find somebody with money,” Sudie said. “Being married is bad enough without having to be poor at the same time. Whenever I get tired of Johnny’s allergies I just go look at his Merrill Lynch portfolio. It turns me on. I swear it does.”

“Malcolm Ashe has plenty of money,” Amanda said. “I’ll say that for him.”

The next afternoon she went with her cousin to Langenstein’s to buy cheese for a party they were having that night. A tall mannish-looking woman in a tennis dress came up to them as they were leaving and started talking to Sudie about a book fair they were planning.

“Remember,” the woman said, patting Sudie’s arm. “This is your big chance to show your stuff.” She smiled conspiratorially and moved on off into the imported coffees.

“That’s Coleman Riley. She’s grooming me to be president of the league next year. But don’t tell anyone. It’s very hush-hush. Usually it has to be a native, but, well, I’ve got the skills they’re looking for.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Chep’s got his eye on me. And, well, a lot of men in this city are in love with me. It oils the wheels when you want something done.”

At the party that night Sudie’s little children were all over the place in their school uniforms, passing napkins, looking like children in an English book. The man who owned Defraites Parish was there and the man who owned the governor and the man who owned the football team. The man who owned the parish was telling African safari stories but he was too drunk to remember the end of them. He kept starting new ones, then forgetting the end.

“Town and Country is coming to do an article on the hundred most prominent New Orleanians,” the tennis dress woman was saying. “They’re going to film it at Marti’s. Can you imagine. Everyone’s scared to death they won’t get in. I heard Jean deMontluzin offered them her house to make sure she’d get Herbert in but they turned her down.”

“Did we tell you Mark got into Princeton? Oh, yes, we’re terribly pleased. He was in the top percentile.”

I could live here like this, Amanda thought. I could have beautiful little children and send them to wonderful schools with blue and white uniforms and wear my tennis dress to the grocery store and have my picture in magazines like Sudie. All I’d have to do is marry Malcolm. She looked over at him, leaning on the stair railing being charming to everyone. They wouldn’t mind that he was Jewish. It would be a famous mixed marriage. She’s so brave, they would say. So advanced. She married a Jew. Oh, yes, she’s very liberal. She’s a brilliant girl. We must groom her for something special.

One afternoon she went with Sudie’s husband to Galatoire’s to talk about it. “If he asks me should I marry him?” she said. “Would you do it if you were me?”

“Why not?” he said. “He’s got a good reputation. We’d adore to have you down here with us. Sudie’s so fond of you. And when you got bored with him, well, I’ll always be here if you get lonely.” He reached his pudgy fingers across the table and gave her hand a little squeeze.

“Are you worried about the election?” she said. He was running for district judge.

“Not too much. We might have to buy the black vote and that’s a bore. But then, it’s always for sale. Last time I ran I had two black leaders in the kitchen the night before the election practically going crazy trying to sell me votes. Come on, let’s have another martini before you catch your plane.”

A few weeks later Amanda and Malcolm flew off to Bermuda and got married. They had a bottle of wine before the ceremony and two more before they even bothered to make love to each other.

Amanda really liked Malcolm Ashe. She liked his boyish smile and his Yale degrees and his beautiful house on Henry Clay Avenue. She had visions of extravagant cocktail parties with Christians and Jews and black people all running around getting to know each other better. Malcolm would be running for office, senator maybe. She would be president of the Junior League or the Council of Jewish Women or both at the same time. “Have a drink,” someone was always saying. “Come on, have another.”

She could never remember when her vision cleared, when she began to see past the designer gowns to the women who couldn’t even comb their own hair. “Darling, she’s never combed her own hair. I swear it. Well, she has those Mexicans, you know. She has three or four. They’re just like slaves.”

“She told her brother she was pregnant and he said, good, he’d go on safari and bring her back a little Negro.”

“The Puerto Ricans are pretty good, if you can find one that’s devout. Oh, fix that room in the basement. They’ll live anywhere. Of course, Hondurans are also nice.”

Perhaps it was the faces of the children. She watched them run in and out of the houses on Henry Clay and Webster Street and State Street and Exposition Boulevard. Why do they look so worried? she asked herself. Why do children this rich look so scared?

“Did he get into Newman? Did he get into Country Day? Do you think I should have her tested for Trinity? What if she has to go to Saint George’s? I’ll die if he doesn’t get in this year. Well, we’ve got him working with a tutor. Well, she’d better make it this year or I don’t know what we’ll do.”

These people hate their children, she decided. They use their children as counters in the games they play.

“Did she get into Sacred Heart? Oh, that’s a shame. Well, she’ll probably like Saint Stephens. It’s a nice little school. There’s always Ecole Classique. There’s always Montessori. There’s always boarding school or that new place out in Metairie.”

“Perhaps another weekend. We’re packing him off for Europe. Oh, yes, he’s off on a tour. I know, isn’t it absurd. He’s only thirteen and already he’s been around the world.”

“She’s going sailing in the BVI. Oh, yes, it’s darling. They have these little regattas just like grown people.”

“My dear, did you hear who’s queen of Oberon? I heard they had to lock her in a house in Covington for two weeks to keep her from eating so she’d fit in her dress.”

“She’s suing the hospital and both the doctors. She’s furious because they didn’t finish her nose. I mean, her heart stopped while she was on the table. What could they do? Well, she’s suing. I swear she is.”

“She stole all the drugs out of the medicine cabinet. Oh, it was dreadful. Then she stole the car. Oh, no, they were in Vail. The housekeeper didn’t know what to do.”

“Shot himself in front of his girlfriend’s house while the party was going on. Oh, yes, barely sixteen. They don’t know where he got the gun.”

“Oh, he’s disappeared into the Quarter. Won’t even take calls. Of course, everyone’s known for years. I heard it was a high school boy, an Italian.”

“Darling, no one sees him anymore. He’s in hiding on Philip Street. Well, the maid goes in.”

“No, he hasn’t written anything in ages. Just comes over to stay at his cousin’s in that old fortress on Camp Street. Just lies out on the lawn drinking and looking at the stars.”

What am I doing here? Amanda thought. What am I doing in a place where people hate each other? No, that’s wrong. They hate themselves. That’s who they really hate. Oh, well, I’ll have a drink. I’ll call up some people and have a party.

Malcolm’s dreams didn’t fare much better. Amanda’s body wouldn’t cooperate. No matter how many times he made love to her, no matter how many mornings she took her temperature or let Dr. Friday blow out her Fallopian tubes, Amanda never got pregnant.

Amanda wanted to get pregnant. She wanted to give Malcolm a baby. She had a UNICEF calendar with a painting of a small black-haired girl on the cover and she would look at it and imagine herself the mother of a child radically different from herself, a small dark-haired girl who was quiet and composed. Amanda’s imagination created all sorts of small dark-haired children that could come from her womb. In her dreams she bathed and dressed and loved them, her perfect dreamchildren with their perfectly wonderful genes.

“I wouldn’t allow one of my children to marry another Jew,” a pediatrician told her at a party. “I’m sick of all the little children at Newman running around with their thick glasses. It’s from intermarrying all these years. I might let one of my children marry a Russian Jew. If they could prove to me their people hadn’t had anything to do with French Jews for a thousand years.”

“That the recessive genes disappear when people from different racial groups marry. You and Malcolm would have a wonderful child, for example. Your mania would disappear into his nailbiting.”

Amanda and Malcolm waited and waited for the baby that never came. Many times Amanda’s menstrual period would be a week late, even two weeks late. Then Malcolm’s face would light up every time she entered a room and if he touched her she would tremble. Once she was three and a half weeks late. Malcolm came home one afternoon carrying a package and hurried into his bedroom and hid it on a closet shelf. After she started menstruating Amanda took it down from the shelf and looked at it. It was a poster with a picture of a pregnant woman on it. Pregnant is beautiful the poster said. Taped to it was a diamond bracelet.

That night she had a talk with Malcolm. “I’m going to get an IUD to regulate my periods,” she said. “I won’t spend my life waiting for something that isn’t going to happen. I’m plenty good enough to love, just like this, me, Amanda McCamey Ashe, singular. I’m tired of the obstetrician’s stirrups. I’m tired of Dr. Friday’s Fallopian tube torture machine.”

“I’m going to put an IUD into my poor confused uterus and get on with being alive. I’m not an incubator. I’m bored with this baby project.”

“Well, you might as well believe it. Because tomorrow I’m going to do it.”

After that, whenever Malcolm made love to Amanda he was always thinking about Onan, a man God punished for spilling his seed on the ground. Every time he was inside Amanda he could see God standing over him frowning and looking sad. After a while he quit making love to Amanda altogether.

And what of Amanda’s real child? Every time Amanda drove down Saint Charles Avenue she passed the home, a stone building surrounded by oleander bushes. Sometimes she hardly noticed it. Other times, especially on days in early fall, it would loom before her or the sight of the girls standing beside the gate waiting to go to the drugstore would haunt her for hours.

One afternoon she was driving home from a drunken lunch at Brennan’s. She stopped the car and got out and walked up the stairs into the front hall. Five or six girls were gathered around a library table. A young man from the Tulane sociology department was helping them fill out forms about their dental habits. Amanda walked up to the table. She put her hands on a girl’s shoulders. She had come into the place with the drunken idea of telling the girls not to give their babies away. The sight of them so earnestly filling out the pointless forms took all her resolve away. She had not known they would look so helpless.

“Are you coming here?” the girl she touched asked her. “Are you going to come here?”

“No,” she answered. “I came to see about my little sister coming here. Is it a good place? Would it be all right to send her here?”

A sister appeared in the entrance to the room and Amanda made a hurried exit. The girl she had touched followed her to the door. “Come back to see us,” she said. Amanda stopped at the door and looked up the wide stairs leading to the dormitory rooms. Her room had been at the top of those stairs.

She walked across the street to the K&B and bought a bottle of wine and went out to Jefferson Parish and drove drunkenly around until she passed out in the parking lot of a Piggly-Wiggly.

Amanda touched her daughter one night without knowing it. It was in a hall behind the back rooms at Antoine’s. Wealthy New Orleanians all have special waiters at Antoine’s. They call ahead and the waiter meets them at a side door and takes them to one of the rooms on the back of the restaurant. No one who is anyone in New Orleans would be caught dead eating in the front rooms of Antoine’s with the tourists.

The night Amanda touched her daughter was a Saturday in February. Amanda and Malcolm were at a party in the Mystery Room arguing politics with two of his partners and their wives. Amanda was arguing. Malcolm was getting drunk and trying not to listen. The room was dark, lit only by candles and a fireplace.

Everyone at the party was good and drunk. Even the waiter was drunk. He was a Frenchman named Bernard who was famous for being drunk. You could depend on him to be drunk any time after five in the afternoon. But anything Bernard lacked in efficiency he made up for in servility and he was in great demand, especially among the wealthy Jews. The wealthy Christians were partial to a black man named Twilight, who was good at rolling his eyes back into his head.

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Amanda was saying. “Your vested interests are the welfare of mankind, Arthur. Your vested interest is the survival of this planet. You can’t just cut half the people in the world off at the trough. Goddammit, you can’t let people go hungry.”

“You’re such a little bleeding heart, Amanda. And you’ve never worked a day in your life. You don’t know what in the shit you’re talking about.”

“I know you can’t go bomb villages off the face of the earth and not have to pay for it in karma. I know that, you bastard.”

“Jesus, Amanda, you’re getting to be such a pain in the ass. Can’t you control this woman, Malcolm? Can’t you control your wife? What’s getting into you lately, Amanda? Who’ve you been running with?”

“I read, Arthur. I read books. I read something besides the Times-Picayune and the Wall Street Journal.”

“Amanda,” Malcolm said. “That’s about enough of that.” Arthur’s father was a power in the Times-Picayune. “You really go too far.”

“I’m going home,” Amanda said. “That’s what I’m going to do. I won’t stay here and eat with a bunch of warmongers. I’d catch bad karma from you like a disease. Like a fucking virus. Like flu.” She picked up her pocketbook and started out the door, nearly knocking over the waiter who was carrying a tray of d’filet en brochette Medici. He almost dropped it on Malcolm’s head.

“Get them some more booze,” she screamed in his face. “And get the hell out of my way.”

In the hall leading to the phone booths she passed a girl in a navy blue silk dress. The girl was crying. Or about to cry. Walking toward the ladies room holding her pocketbook in front of her like a steering wheel.

“Can I help you?” Amanda said, reaching out her hand, touching the girl’s sleeve. “Can I do anything to help you?”

“No, thank you,” the girl said, pulling her arm away. “It’s nothing. It’s just a mistake. Thank you anyway.” It was dark in the hall, the girl lowered her eyes. She had been taught never to get into conversations with strangers, not even at Antoine’s. She pushed open the door to the ladies room and went on in.

What a place to live, Amanda was thinking. The faces of these dismal French Catholics. Goya could have painted that young woman’s face. She shook her head, pulled open the door of the old-fashioned wooden phone booth, and called a cab. Then she called a couple of people she knew, trying to find somebody who wanted to drink with her the rest of the night. Finally she got a journalist from Greenville on the phone. “Well, wake up anyway,” she said. “I can’t stand it, Joe Lee, I’ve got to talk to somebody. Well of course I’m drunk. Would I be calling you up if I wasn’t drunk? … Well, I’m coming over anyway so just go on and open the door.”

Inside the ladies room, the young woman, whose name was Barrett Clare, and who was Amanda’s daughter, fixed her makeup, took thirty milligrams of Valium, and pulled herself together. When she opened the door to the hall her husband, Charlie, was waiting for her, towering over her in his blond good looks. He was furious with her.

Inside the phone booth Amanda hurled one last demand at her buddy Joe Lee, hung up the phone, and started to open the door. Then she stopped, not knowing what to do, trapped in the corner of the hall by the scene she was overhearing.

“Are you going back to that party and act like a lady?” he said. “Or do you want me to have you sent home?”

“It’s not fair,” Barrett said. “It isn’t fair. You know it isn’t fair.”

“You didn’t really invite that woman, did you?” She squeezed her pocketbook until her fingernails went through the leather. “You didn’t really do that to me?”

“I had to invite her. She wants to come. She works for me, Barrett. She doesn’t sit around on her ass all day in a psychiatrist’s office feeling sorry for herself. She’s going to Comus and you’re going to call her up tomorrow and tell her you’ll pick her up and take her with you to the ball. You can use mother’s chauffeur.”

“Then you can pack up and get your ass back over to that mausoleum on Prytania where I found you. How about that?”

She lowered her chin into her chest until it touched her breastbone. “I will take him anywhere I go. He belongs to me. No one could take him from me.”

Amanda could stand it no longer. She slammed open the door of the phone booth, making as much noise as she could. Tell him to get fucked, she wanted to say. Tell him you read the Napoleonic Code. But she didn’t say it. She had already been rebuffed.

She brushed past the couple as quickly as she could and wandered out the side door and down the narrow passageway and out onto Saint Louis Street. She stood leaning against an iron column, picking off pieces of the peeling green paint.

The air was moist and full of the smells of the river and the sacks of oyster shells piled up by the banquette. The sweet smell of fish and spilled wine was all around her like a cowl. Three drunk college boys came by drinking Hurricanes and falling all over the sidewalk. The taxi was taking too long to come. A band started up across the street, four bored musicians playing dixieland. All I need now is a couple of little black boys to tap dance for quarters and I’d be all set, she said to herself. Way down yonder in New Orleans, in the land of the dreamy dreams.

Inside the restaurant Barrett and Charlie Clare returned to the party. The party they were enjoying that night was in the Rex Room. A senior partner of Putney, Carroll was having a surprise fiftieth birthday party for his wife. She was surprised, all right, but she wasn’t having any fun. She had given orders to everyone she knew not to give her a birthday party. She had taken an Antabuse that morning and planned to spend a quiet evening getting used to the idea of getting older. Instead, she was sitting at the end of a U-shaped banquet table watching forty people get drunk and pretending not to be mad about the presents they had given her. They had given her a bottle of Geritol and a bottle of hair dye and a pair of support hose and a lot of stupid cards and some inexcusable book called How to Be Hip over Forty.

She was sitting at the end of the table in a brown tweed suit, being pissed off and refusing to talk to anyone. The only interesting thing that had happened all evening was when Clayton Paige let it slip that Charlie Clare had invited the receptionist to Comus. Of course it was accepted practice for men in the crewes to send invitations to their little sweeties so they wouldn’t feel left out at Mardi Gras. Still, one arranged for someone else to do the inviting. It really wasn’t done to invite your own mistress yourself.

“Did you hear Stella Marcus was going to the balls this year?” someone was saying. “I saw her at Oberon and she was dancing with everyone at Proteus.”

“Oh, he sits upstairs and watches her dance like a good little well-raised Jew. Can you believe it?”

“Of course he can’t be on the floor committee because of his religion. So he just goes along and watches. Isn’t that the limit?”

“Oh, balls are such a bore, anyway,” someone said. “I don’t know why we keep on doing it.”

“We have to do it. It’s our responsibility. I mean, after all, sweeties. It’s what we do.”

Down the hall in the Escargot Room the floor committee of Momus was eating Pompano en Papillete and arguing about whether to start serving drinks to ladies at the ball. “Let them drink in the ladies room like they’ve been doing for years,” Claiborne Redding was saying. “For God’s sake, Paine, they love to sneak in there with their little bottles. You’ll take all the fun out of the ball if you start serving them drinks.”

“He’s right,” another man said. “Susie’s the cutest thing, finding all the little train bottles in the house and sticking them in the pockets of her mink. She had a quart of whiskey hidden on her last year. I said, ‘Susie, you’ll be the most popular girl in New Orleans tonight.’”

Amanda had an ally during the years she was married to Malcolm, a black woman named Lavertis, a beautiful Creole who had come with her husband to New Orleans to escape the sugar mills of South Louisiana. By the time Amanda knew her, Lavertis was alone with small children to support and could only do work that allowed her to be home early in the afternoon. In New Orleans that meant housework, wearing a white uniform, washing a white lady’s underwear, standing all morning ironing linen sheets and Brooks Brothers shirts and white tablecloths.

The day Amanda moved into the house on Henry Clay Avenue Malcolm’s mother sent Lavertis around to help with the unpacking. “I’ll give her to you if you like,” she said. “She’s too clever to be a laundress. She has nice manners and she’s honest, but uppity. Too uppity for me, but she might work out for you. Well, see what you think. If you like her you can keep her.”

Amanda kept her. Or the other way around. Amanda and Lavertis loved each other from the start. They liked the way each other looked. Lavertis was beautiful. She had lovely erect posture and a wonderful face. Everything she did in the world was done with courtesy and with love. If she opened a box she opened it with ceremony, one flap at a time, as if it might contain a surprise. If she ironed a lace-trimmed sheet, it was not as a servant irons, with resentment or impatience, but as a person in the business of augmenting and admiring the lace-maker’s art. “Look a here,” she was always saying to Amanda. “Look at this pretty thing. Imagine making something like that. I bet that come from Paris, France.”

Lavertis thought Amanda looked like a movie star, flying all around the house unpacking everything at once, drinking orange juice out of a wineglass, her hair falling all over her face, unpacking and redecorating. Unpacking and talking and complaining about her hangover, pushing furniture around and asking Lavertis a million questions about herself.

All day that first day they pushed and shoved furniture around and opened windows and unpacked boxes and sorted sheets and towels and pillowcases.

Around four in the afternoon they sat down in the sun room to survey their work. “Well,” Amanda said. “What do you think?”

“It looks a lot better,” Lavertis said. “It doesn’t look so much like a museum.”

“They likes that color,” she said. “His momma and his auntie got everything painted that color.”

“Most of the time, unless we’re dusting. I guess they don’t want the sun coming in and fading things. Of course, they’re old people. They got old ways.”

“Well, we’re new people,” Amanda said. “We’re going to have all the sunlight we can get.”

Later, when Lavertis was ready to go home, Amanda insisted on driving her. “So I can see where you live,” she said. “In case I need to get you for something.”

They walked out to the car and Lavertis opened the back door. Amanda sighed and put her hands on her hips. She looked down at the ground, trying to decide what to do. “Look,” she said at last. Lavertis wasn’t looking. “Look here, Lavertis, we’ve got to get some things straight between us. I can’t have you sitting in the back seat. I used to be a civil rights worker. Well, not much of one, but at least I helped. Anyway…”

“I knew all about that,” Lavertis said. They were standing by the car beneath the live oak trees with the evening traffic going by down Henry Clay. The rich men were coming home to dinner. “I was right down there in Abbeville praying to the Lord every night that you all wouldn’t get me killed.”

“I was in high school when it was all in the papers. I was scared to go to school. I thought somebody was going to come and shoot me.”

“Well, it was for a good cause,” Lavertis said. “Now I’m glad it happened.”

“Well, come on,” Amanda said. “Get in the car. Look, let me put it this way. Where do you want to sit?”

“I’ll sit up there,” she said. She very formally got into the front seat and put her pocketbook in her lap, and the two women drove off down Saint Charles Avenue looking straight ahead, getting used to being new people in the old museum of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Lavertis ran the house on Henry Clay Avenue to perfection, hiring other servants when she needed them, telling the gardener what to plant and when to trim the hedges, taking care of small repairs, making grocery lists.

Lavertis took care of her when she had hangovers, pretending they were colds or sinus headaches or flu. She would come into Amanda’s bedroom bringing glasses of chocolate milk or iced tea, and sit on the bed listening to Amanda’s morning-after remorse. By noon they would be together in the library watching As the World Turns. Lavertis would be ironing, Amanda lying on the couch beginning to feel better, comforted by the sound of the steam rising from Lavertis’s tireless iron.

The hangovers might have gone on forever. Amanda might be lying on that Henredon sofa watching As the World Turns right this minute except for a series of accidents that even Amanda’s ability to rationalize couldn’t overlook.

Of course, even before the accidents Amanda hated being drunk. She hated never knowing where she left her car or her pocketbook or her evening wrap. She hated calling people up and apologizing for things. Dozens of times she swore off alcohol. A week or so would go by. She would start lecturing her friends on the evils of alcohol. Then there would be a party. Then she would decide to have a glass of wine. Then she would be drunk again.

When the accidents began they happened one right after the other. First she fell down a flight of stairs. She quit for two months after that. Then she turned the car around three times on a rain-soaked road and plowed into a power line pole. Then she got drunk at a bar called The Saints and went upstairs and started interviewing the hookers. She had been writing articles for a local paper and had the idea that a press card would take her anywhere. The first hooker liked being interviewed. The second hooker hit her in the face and knocked her down.

But the worst thing of all, the thing that caused Amanda to quit drinking forever, was the night Coretta Scott King came to New Orleans and the Ashes were invited to meet her.

The party was held in a famous French Quarter restaurant. The owner of the restaurant had given Mrs. King $200,000 to start a scholarship fund in her husband’s name. She was in town to accept the gift at a ceremony at Dillard College.

Amanda started getting drunk before she even left the house. They had been invited to the party because Malcolm was the restaurant owner’s labor lawyer. He would never have told her about the invitation if he had dreamed she was going to accept it.

“Why are you going downtown to see that woman strut her black ass all around Knoll’s Restaurant acting like the great martyr’s wife when everybody knows her husband screwed half the women in the South. She probably wanted to shoot him herself. Hell, she might have done it. Why are you going down there, Amanda? Will you just tell me that?”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she said. “I happen to admire her very much. I don’t want you to go with me anyway. I wouldn’t be able to talk to her with you around.”

“None of your goddamn business.” She was putting on her shoes, getting up and starting to leave. “I wouldn’t let you go with me if you wanted to. I wouldn’t want Mrs. King to know I was with someone who does what you do for a living.”

Amanda slammed out of the house, got into the car, and drove on down to the Quarter. She stopped on the way and bought a bottle of wine and drank most of it out of the bottle. By the time she got to Knoll’s she was good and drunk. She sat down at the bar and started talking to the black bartenders in a conspiratorial tone. “Do you guys really think Mr. Knoll likes black people? Do you think he gave Mrs. King that money because he’s such a good guy? He should have used that money to raise your salaries. Let me tell you something. I’m married to the man Mr. Knoll loves, the man who fixes it so you guys never get a union. I’m married to the man who oversees the hiring and firing of every single man and woman who works in this place. And if you think Jodie Knoll gives a damn about Dillard University or any goddamn thing in the world but his own profits you’re just as crazy as he hopes you are. And the minute Mrs. King gets here I’m telling her so. I know Jodie Knoll. I know all about him. I know his humanitarian ideals and his fascist heart and his racist jokes.”

Amanda was surrounded by black bartenders. They didn’t know what to think. They knew this crazy white woman was fixing to get them fired. Beyond the circle of bartenders a group of well-dressed people were giving each other horrified looks and trying to decide what to do. Mr. Knoll knew what to do. He came charging across the room through a sea of black and white faces and took hold of Amanda’s arm.

“Let go of me, you son-of-a-bitch,” she said. She thought he was a bouncer. “I’m Mrs. Malcolm Ashe. I’m married to Mr. Knoll’s labor lawyer and I’m here to organize your goddamn kitchen help.”

“Get this woman out of here,” Mr. Knoll said. “Somebody get this woman out of here. Willy, get over here and help me out with this.”

“Where’s Mrs. King?” Amanda was yelling. “I want to talk to Mrs. King.”

Mrs. King was being escorted into the restaurant by an entourage of Dillard professors. She turned her head and looked Amanda’s way.

“Coretta,” Amanda called out. “Come here. Come over here. I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve got to tell you where you are. I have to tell you who these people are who have you. Coretta! I’ve got to talk to you!”

But the real bouncers were there now and three Secret Service men. “Take your hands off me, you sons-of-bitches,” she was yelling. “Don’t you dare touch me, you goddamn fascist pigs. Coretta, come help! Coretta, come let me tell you where you are!”

The men took Amanda out a side door and put her into a car. They drove off through the crowded streets of the French Quarter. Halfway home she passed out in the lap of a Secret Service man. When the car got to Henry Clay the driver helped Malcolm carry her into the house.

“That’s it,” she said when she woke. “That was the last straw. That was really the last goddamn straw.” As soon as she could get out of the bed she pulled on a robe and went wandering around the house looking for Lavertis. She found her in the sun room watering plants.

“I’ve got to quit drinking,” she said. “Lavertis, you wouldn’t believe what I did last night. I can’t even stand to tell you what I did.”

Lavertis put the watering can down and took Amanda into her arms. “Oh, Mrs. Ashe,” she said. “I been waiting so long to hear you say that. I’ve been praying and praying for that. Every Sunday I go down to the prayer circle and pray you’ll stop doing yourself that way.”

“What will I do?” Amanda said. “How will I do it? I don’t know how to do it.”

“First you got to find something else you like to do,” Lavertis said. “You got to get you a baby or a job or something so you hadn’t got so much time on your hands.”

“It has to stop,” Amanda said. “I’m going to end up like my mother if I don’t stop. I’ll end up spending my life in a back room where the sun can’t even get in.”

“You’ll do it,” Lavertis said. “I know you’ll do it. You can do anything you want to do. A lady as smart and all as you are.”

It was not easy to stop drinking. I am a pocket of habits in a burning universe Amanda read somewhere and stuck up on her mirror. The hardest part was going to parties. The hardest part was not actually being there. The hardest part was thinking about it beforehand.

“You’re mindfucking, Amanda,” the behaviorist she went to said. “You’re spending more time dreading the party than you are being there. The party’s only going to last two hours. Just suffer those two hours instead of thinking about it for days beforehand. Or don’t go. You’re a rich lady. You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to go. Are you listening, Amanda? Listen to me. Please listen to me.”

“No, I want to make you well. Do you want a tranquilizer to take before you go to parties? To use for a month or two?”

“I’m going to tell you something, Amanda. You can serve that god sober. You can do anything sober you can do drunk, including ecstasy. You were capable of ecstasy when you were a child, weren’t you?”

“Oh, God, yes. When I was little I lived in the water. I am deliriously happy in water. I go crazy in water.”

“No, I wouldn’t be caught dead taking that stuff. Let me see how much longer I can do it this way.”

Needless to say Amanda’s friends were horrified that she quit drinking. What did it mean, they whispered among themselves. Did it mean she would be wandering around their parties listening to every word they said?

“Oh, come on, Amanda,” Dr. Lovett said. He was the Ashes’ family doctor. “You can have a glass of wine.”

“Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want a goddamn glass of wine. I quit drinking. I told you I quit drinking. Don’t talk about it.”

“I’m made out of water, Drusy,” she said. “I’m ninety-eight percent water and the rest is a finely balanced highly sensitive delicately tuned chemical mix and I’m tired of pouring alcohol into it so I’ll be as dumb as all the rest of you.”

“Jesus Christ, Amanda, you ought to hear yourself. You sound like some kind of evangelist. Well, there’s nothing worse than a reformed whore, they always say.”

“I’m trying to save my life, Drusy. I’m sick of having hangovers all the time.”

“People have been getting drunk since the dawn of time, Amanda. The first thing men did with the first grain they stored was find a way to make alcohol out of it.”

“So it’s time to find something better to do,” she said. “Time to climb down out of the trees.”

“Are you still drinking water?” Monroe Frazier said, coming up to them, trailing his mannerisms. “Dear heart, that’s getting to be rather a bore.”

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to be somewhere else. I have to collect Malcolm and get out of here.”

“Now don’t go off mad, Pussy Faye,” Monroe said. “Don’t go off in a huff.”

“Fuck you, Monroe,” Amanda said. “You’d give anything in the world if you could quit being a drunk. You’re just mad because I’m doing something you can’t do.”

She pushed him out of the way. She put her hand on his pin-striped Christian Dior suit and shoved him out of her way and made for the door, leaving her coat and purse and Malcolm behind. She headed down the stone stairs to the sidewalk. I’m leaving this behind me if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life, she told herself, moving on down Philip Street like a tank, head down, hands in the pockets of her three-hundred-dollar skirt, scuffing up her leather boots on the bricks. I’m leaving it. I hate them. I hate every goddamn one of them. I hate those goddamn little drunk Frenchmen and drunk Jews and drunk white Anglo-Saxon Protestant princes and princesses. I know there’s something better to do in the world than hang around doing numbers on each other in this fucking dead old anachronistic world. Goddamn it, I know there’s something to do in the world besides get drunk….

“Did you really shove Monroe into a mirror?” Malcolm said. “Did you really insult him in his own house? I don’t know about you, Amanda. I don’t know…”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about that,” she said. They were fighting it out in their bedroom. “You goddamn self-righteous bastard. Don’t you dare say a word to me about anything. I hate this goddamn place. I hate this life. I hate it, Malcolm, do you hear me? And I’m getting out. I’m getting out of here if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.”

“I hate their guts,” she screamed at her behaviorist. “You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t imagine what it’s like at those parties.”

“How could I not go? You have to go. I hate Drusy. He’s the worst one. Every time he sees me at a party he starts in on me about it.”

“God, yes. I’m doing ballet and yoga and swimming an hour a day. All I do is exercise. Goddammit, Walter, what am I going to do about those parties?”

“You’re going to quit going. Now get in the chair. I’m going to hypnotize you and put some good ideas in your head. Then I’m going to take you to lunch.”

“I never said I didn’t want to, Amanda. I said I wasn’t going to. And that’s another thing. I want you to find somebody to fuck. It’s unhealthy not to fuck anyone.”

“Shrinks don’t talk like that, Walter. They’re going to kick you out of the club for saying things like that.”

“They already did,” he said. “Come on. Get in the chair. And I’m serious about you finding someone to fuck. If you keep putting it off, when it finally happens it’s going to hit you like a ton of bricks.”

“What a nice idea,” she said, settling down into his chair, imagining a love affair falling down on top of her like a disintegrating skyscraper. “I’ve been waiting all my life for that to happen.”

“I’ve stopped going to parties,” she told Malcolm. “I mean it. Not a single one.”

“Nope. Those people bore the shit out of me. When they’re all in a room together it’s like some vast superego sucking the juice out of my brain. Or when we’re all sitting down at the tables like good little lawyers and wifelets. I always think maybe Jesus will come and nail us all to the chairs to punish us….”

“Well, you’re going with me to that dinner, Amanda. I don’t care whether it bores you or not. It’s something we have to do.”

“I don’t have to do a goddamn thing but get myself well. Besides, the Ballet of the Americas is in town. It’s the first time it’s toured in years. I’m going to see Maurice Bejart dance. He’s going to dance The Firebird.”

“I don’t know who you are anymore, Amanda,” Malcolm said. “I look at you and I can’t find the girl I married. I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time.”

“All I ever wanted from the stuff to begin with was the sugar,” Amanda told Lavertis one morning. “I think now I was in it all along for the sugar. So anytime I want a drink I’m going to eat all the candy and ice cream and cake I want. I guess I can work my way up to protein later.”

That afternoon Lavertis walked down to the store and bought all the ingredients and made a yellow cake and left it sitting on the counter in the kitchen. It had real caramel icing an inch thick that was made from scratch in an iron skillet. There was a note in Lavertis’s careful handwriting propped up on the cake cover.

I am so proud of you. Lisa’s husband came back. I think he’s planning on taking her child away. Grandpa got out the flower boxes for spring. Bob is back on the staff but he’s still mad at David. He and Lisa are going to get together for lunch. More next week.

It was something Lavertis had started doing to keep Amanda up with the events of As the World Turns. Amanda never had time to watch As the World Turns anymore. She had taken Lavertis’ advice and found something to do to fill up all the time she used to spend having hangovers. She had walked across the street to Tulane and signed up for five classes in the foreign languages and English departments. She was getting up at dawn to begin her work, sitting at the dining room table covering pages of paper with her huge illegible scrawl, relearning two languages and the craft of translation all at once, learning fast.

“I think I have enough left,” she said to herself, meaning her brain cells. “I think I have plenty.”

Soon she was the golden girl around the Tulane foreign languages department. Small magazines were accepting her translations almost by return mail.

Lavertis was as excited about Amanda’s new career as Amanda was herself. It was Lavertis who thought up turning a spare bedroom into an office.

“You can’t move those papers on and off the dining room table every time you want to have a meal,” she said. “Make Mr. Malcolm send you out a desk from the office. They got a hundred desks down there.”

“I think that old table in the basement will be fine,” Amanda said. “Go call Clarence and tell him to get over here and help us move it.”

Lavertis began to change her role in Amanda’s life. She brought endless cups of coffee into the room on trays as she had seen secretaries do on television. She answered the door and the phone and told everyone Mrs. Ashe was working and couldn’t be disturbed. She noticed if Amanda’s spirits got low.

“I haven’t heard that typewriter going lately,” she would say over her shoulder as she dusted the piano. “I read about some big translator coming to talk at UNO,” she would mention as she got out the vacuum. “Guess you’ll be going out there to hear him. Guess you’ll be traveling around giving speeches before we know it.”

Amanda began signing her maiden name to her translations. Amanda McCamey, it said. Translation by Amanda McCamey. The first time she saw her name in print it excited her so much she took the magazine home and hid it.

“Oh, my God,” he said. Malcolm knew what he was seeing was more than a twelve-line poem in The New England Review. “Now you’re going to start that. Why don’t you go on and stop wearing my rings, while you’re at it. Go all the way. Stop spending my money.” This was an uncharacteristic thing for Malcolm to say. He never mentioned money to Amanda. He and Amanda just pretended money didn’t exist.

“I would if I knew some other way to get some.” She started out of the room. Then she came back and took his face in her hands. He was sitting in a high-backed Queen Anne chair looking so tired, looking so forlorn.

“Start thinking about a life without me,” she said, relieved to be saying it at last. “I was the Wasp princess and it didn’t work out. You don’t have to stay here forever with an idea that didn’t work. Get out of here and find a woman with black hair and have yourself some babies.”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “It’s like telling me my mother just died.”

“I’m not your mother,” Amanda said. “Your mother’s right over there on State Street waiting to welcome you home.”

“I’m sorry I said that about the money,” he said. “I didn’t mean that. You can have all the money you want as long as you want it. You know that.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with money,” Amanda said. “It has to do with us not having anything in common, not a single dream or idea. It has to do with the future. I want there to be one for me. As long as we stay in this dead marriage the future can’t happen for either of us. Pretty soon I’m going to have to leave here, Malcolm. I feel it coming like a storm across the delta.”

The next month Amanda’s grandmother died and left her half of Esperanza, seven hundred acres of delta land under cultivation.

Now, she said, driving home from the funeral. Now there is not a single thing to keep me from being free.

When he got back from Chicago after the funeral Guy couldn’t stop thinking about Amanda. He thought about his body deep inside of hers, long ago and last month and in every sort of dream and predicament. He began to dream of her, something he hadn’t done in years. Every woman he fucked became her. Finally he stopped seeing all the women he fucked in Chicago. Finally he only thought about Amanda, and about the child, the girl, the woman. He thought about the girl with different faces, at different ages. He imagined he saw her on the streets, in movies, in restaurants.

He began to cry in odd times at odd places and became so cold and distant to Maria that her whole family stopped speaking to him. He began to imagine that her father would have him killed, that he would turn a corner at any moment and the hit man would be laying for him.

One night he could stand it no longer. He had been off on a business trip during which he was barely civil to the men Maria’s father had sent him to see. When he got home Maria made him a late supper in the kitchen. He ate it in slow disinterested bites, listening to her ramble on about her sisters and their families. How did I get here with this ugly Italian woman, this big-nosed woman sitting across a table from me? Is this what I bought with my talent and my skills? This foreigner, this idiot, this invalid. Thank God there are no children. Thank God life didn’t do that to me. Imagine children with skin like that, with hair that thick and coarse, with eyes that stupid and permitting. This is what I sold out for? And for what? None of the power has passed to me. None of the money has come to me. It is all in her name still.

Across the table Maria rambled on, knowing he wasn’t listening to a word she said, content to have him there.

After Maria went to bed Guy walked around the house touching the dark shapes of the furniture. Light from a streetlamp poured in the windows of the living room.

“Goddamn that streetlight,” he said for the thousandth time. “It fucks up the stars.”

He sat down at his grandfather’s desk. It was the only thing in the house Guy felt was really his. Maria and her decorators tolerated it like some sort of an indictment, this old handmade plantation desk taking up a perfectly good wall in the contemporary splendor of the Mies van der Rohe living room.

Guy sat at the desk all night pushing the little drawers in and out, thinking of Esperanza, of the old days, of Amanda, and of the girl who was his daughter, asleep somewhere in a stranger’s bed.

At dawn he made some phone calls, drove out to the airport, got into a small plane that belonged to the family, and flew out over the lake, then banked and turned, headed for New Orleans.

Vaiden Canizaro was waiting for him on the porch of his lakefront mansion. He looked like the old emperor he was, watchful, intense, impossible to intimidate or overpower or fool.

He took Guy into his study and held out a manila envelope. “It is here,” he said. “I hope it will set your mind at ease.”

Guy could not move his hand. He stared at the folder. He could not reach out his hand to take it. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what it says.”

“That she is a grown married woman. That she is well. She was raised by the Allains here. That’s sugar plantation money. She’s married to a lawyer, a young partner in Putney, Carroll, the society law firm.”

“Where does she live?” Guy said. “I have to look at her. I have to see what she looks like.”

“I arranged for that. She plays tennis. My correspondent says she plays nearly every Sunday at a club. I arranged for someone to take you there. A man named Todd Denery, who moves in those circles, an asshole but you can tolerate him, I suppose. He thinks you’re looking the town over to see if you want to live here. He was impressed by your name. Of course, there’s no assurance she’ll be there tomorrow.”

“These things happen to all of us. We help each other. We fix them up. We go back home. It all works out.”

Sunday was a clear bright day. Guy had refused Vaiden’s offer of a bed and taken a suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel on Saint Charles Avenue. He was waiting in the lobby when Todd Denery came to pick him up.

“I used to watch you play,” Todd said, helping him into the car with elaborate courtesy. They drove off down Saint Charles Avenue. Guy hadn’t been in New Orleans in years. He was surprised at how little anything had changed. “The city never changes,” he said. “I had forgotten how quiet it is.”

“I was quite a fan of yours,” Todd continued. “I’ll never forget that Sugar Bowl when you played Nebraska. What a football game. It was freezing cold that day.”

“It’s kind of you to take me to your club. If we move here my wife will need someplace to play.”

“It’s the oldest lawn tennis club in the United States, you know. We’re proud of that. There’s a waiting list. But it wouldn’t apply to you, of course. We’d figure out something for you.”

“Oh, Diana Davis is about the best. And Anne and Sally Waters, they’re sisters. They take turns winning things.”

“There’s a woman my wife met somewhere named Barrett plays down here. Clare, that’s her name. Barrett Clare. Do you know her?”

“Oh, yeah, Barrett Allain. That married Charlie Clare. She’s pretty good. She’s a queer duck. She’s some kind of a poet. She doesn’t mix much with people at the club. Well, the Allains are funny folks, intellectuals, liberals, you know the kind.”

They turned off Saint Charles at Jefferson and crossed Magazine and pulled into the parking lot of the new Lawn Tennis Club. It looked like a motel.

“I wish you could have seen the old club before they built this one,” Todd said. “The old club was one of the most beautiful things in this city. It’s a nigger tennis club now. The city bought it. They let this old black player run it as a city playground. He’s a nice old guy but he’s got all these blacks and Chicanos playing there, trashing the place. You ought to see what they did to the swimming pool, which had tiles made for it in Mexico. One of the Palafox boys gave them to us. Sent them from Mexico City. Well, times change.”

Guy sighed, wondering if the man ever stopped talking. Jesus, he thought, Jesus Christ. The South. I had forgotten.

“I grew up playing,” Todd was saying. “It’s a way of life for me.” Of course, all the tournaments are ruined for me now. You have to let anybody in. They’ll wear anything. They don’t care how distracting it is. Last week I had to play a man who wore a shirt advertising his business.”

I am on my way to see my child for the first time in my life and I have to listen to this idiot, Guy thought. He smoothed the knuckles of one hand against the other, breathing as softly as a cat.

They went into the building and on into the snack bar to get a drink. As soon as they entered the door Guy began searching the faces of every woman who was walking by. The snack bar was the center of the Sunday morning club activity. Women were walking by in lovely fresh tennis dresses with matching ribbons and headbands and hats, all going in and out of the doors zipping and unzipping their racket covers, sipping Cokes, talking to each other. Any one of them could be her. Guy was sure he saw his dark eyes on one woman. He saw Amanda’s smile on another. Once he saw his grandmother’s shoulders. Todd kept chattering away, introducing him to people, talking about the club.

“A hundred years ago this place was started. Well, you have to be at the old club to get the full effect of that. Think of playing tennis on top of a hundred years of tennis history …”

“Look,” Guy said. “If you don’t mind I’ll just wander around by myself and get the feel of the place. You don’t need to introduce me to anyone. They’re all getting ready to play.”

Todd went off to the locker room and Guy walked carefully over to the board where members signed up for courts. He looked down the list of names. It was there, halfway down the page. Barrett Clare, it said in careful legible handwriting. Barrett Clare/Shelly Brunstetter — Court 4.

Guy moved out of the glass doors and up the stairs to the balcony and looked down on the neat green rectangle.

Two women were on the court. One of them was tall and blond, with long braids down to her waist. As Guy watched she returned a serve with a beautiful clean down-the-line backhand and moved quickly to the net, laughing with delight at her good shot.

Across the court from her a young woman swung easily and without haste, without even any apparent interest and put the ball away in a corner far from the blond girl’s reach.

“Nice shot,” the blond girl called out. Then the girl who was his daughter turned her face his way. It was an impassive, humorless face. It was Amanda’s face with all the gaiety and passion gone. The girl wore Amanda’s face as if it were a shadow. This is real, Guy thought. This is true. And he watched his child as the game went on.

All of her moves were exactly right. She played like someone who has had thousands of dollars’ worth of tennis lessons. She made almost no mistakes. Because of that she was beating the blond girl badly.

The blond girl played as Amanda would have played, fiercely, with much gesturing and cursing and hitting her racket on the ground. And across the court the child he had dreamed of a million times picked up the tennis balls one by one with the edge of her racket, gave each one a careful precise bounce and served or returned them as if she were a tennis-playing machine.

For almost an hour Guy watched his child, watched the muscles in her legs, watched the arc of her arm as she hit the flawless serves. There had never been anything in his life like the hour he stood on the balcony of the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club watching the breath enter and leave the body of the strange young woman who was his only child.

Her legs were lovely and well formed, her breasts were full, her hands were graceful and sure. There was no motion wasted. There was nothing excessive anywhere. Even her hair stayed in place, tied back with a brown and white checked ribbon that matched the trim on her ladylike tennis dress. She is like me, he thought. She is careful, like me.

A strange thing was happening to Guy. In some absurd way he was starting to root for the crazy blond girl with the braids. She was losing so badly and trying so hard not to.

Finally the match was over. Barrett came up to the net. She reached out and the two women shook hands. They poured water from a steel pitcher and drank. As they were gathering up their things to leave the court, a child came to the gate behind them. A wild fat little redheaded boy. He came bursting out into the court yelling about something, and as Guy watched, his daughter gathered his grandchild into her arms, put her face down into his wild curly hair. Now she was smiling. Now her face had come alive. I have to hear her speak, Guy thought. I have to hear her voice.

He leaned over the railing and dropped his glasses into the path of the women and the child. “Could you help me, please,” he said, leaning over the railing. “I dropped my glasses. Would you throw them to me please.”

“Of course,” the blond girl said. She picked them up. “You’re lucky,” she said, “they aren’t broken.” She threw them up into his waiting hands. Barrett turned her face to his. He caught the glasses. “Nice throw,” he said to the blond girl.

It was hot for February. Hot and humid, one of those languid midwinter New Orleans days. By the time Guy got back to the hotel his golf shirt was soaked with sweat. He pulled it off, then lay down on the bed with his hands on his chest, letting the knowledge sink in, letting it run, letting it go.

It was two A.M. when he got back to Chicago. He parked in the driveway, went inside, took a Browning thirty-ought six out of a closet in the hall, walked back out the side door and around to the front of Maria’s eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house, took careful aim, and splattered the streetlight all over the top of a silver maple tree. Then he sat down on the lawn to look at the stars.

Amanda was in a strange elated mood when she got back to New Orleans from the funeral, full of a sense of power that owning part of Esperanza gave her. I could sell it and live on the money for ten years doing anything I damn well pleased, she thought. For ten years I could do anything I wanted to without asking anyone’s permission. I could live in Europe. I could live in Paris.

What she wanted to do was work. She threw herself deeper than ever into her studies. “She’s got the blue flow,” her teachers said. “She’s got the touch. She’s got the thing we can’t teach.”

She began writing feature articles and stories for magazines around town and working on translations with a serious young man named Brummette. He was part of a group of writers and artists who had all studied at one time or the other at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. People at Tulane called them the Fayetteville Mafia because they always walked off with all the grants and prizes.

Amanda was comfortable with these people. They reminded her of people in the delta. She began bringing them home with her to the house on Henry Clay Avenue, among them a tall, eccentric potter named Katie Dunbar who was at Tulane for a year working on a grant project.

Brummette was in bed with a cold the day Katie arrived in New Orleans. He called and asked Amanda if she would meet the plane. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m going to a wedding. My housekeeper’s getting married. Oh, damn, I really want to meet Katie. Is she the one that did that white vase in your living room? The one with the cross on top?”

“The very one, the one and only Katie Vee-for-Victoryover-Japan Dunbar. Well, damn, I was really hoping you’d meet her.”

“All right. The wedding isn’t until two. I can make it. What does she look like, this great potter, Katie Dunbar.”

“Like a state champion drum majorette, which she was. Like the Alma Homecoming Queen. She dresses like no one you’ve ever seen in your life. You’ll know her. It won’t be hard.”

Katie was not a disappointment. She came striding down the aisle in a group of passengers, passing everyone in sight, wearing a purple jacket over a white silk halter and what might have been a skirt or might have been a sari. She was tall and broad shouldered with a dazzling smile and a yard of wild blond hair.

Amanda was enchanted. “I don’t usually dress like this,” she said as soon as she introduced herself. “I know I look like some fucking uptown matron but I’ve got to go to a wedding as soon as I let you off.”

“How do you usually dress?” Katie said. Depend on Brummette, she was thinking. He can find them. He can ferret them out.

“I don’t know,” Amanda said. “But I wish it was in whatever you’re wearing. Is that a skirt?”

“It’s something I made to wear down here. Brummette said it was hot as the gates of hell. Where is he?”

“He says he’s got a cold. I guess he’s either got a cold or a new graduate student. He runs through a lot of graduate students.” She giggled. “Anyway, I’m delighted. I love your work. I’ve been dying to meet you.”

They were at the baggage carousel. Katie picked up a fat duffel bag and a heavy old-fashioned suitcase and Amanda helped her lug them out to the car. “What time’s your wedding?” she said. “I don’t want to make you late.”

“Well, to tell the truth I’m going to be late if I try to take you to Brummette’s first. I was thinking maybe you’d go with me. It might be a great introduction to New Orleans. Part of the city you’d never get to see.”

“Sure,” Katie said. “I’m up for anything.” From the looks of the car she imagined Amanda was going to take her to a society wedding where she could meet all the eligible bachelors in town.

“Well, put on your seat belt then,” Amanda said. “And don’t worry about my driving. I’ve never had a wreck in my life except once when I was drinking. Actually I have this really good hand-eye coordination that makes up for it if I stop paying attention.” She pulled out onto Veterans Highway and started driving as fast as she could go, weaving in and out of the lanes of traffic.

“Well, damn, I hate for anyone to see New Orleans from this ugly highway. I know you hear all your life about how pretty this place is, but driving in from the airport you’d never know it. Well, most of it isn’t pretty anyway. Most of it is a tenement and a swamp.” She turned off Claiborne Avenue, then down Washington through the old Creole neighborhoods. At Saint Charles she decided to waste a few minutes and go through the Garden District. “I can’t give you much of a tour right now,” she said. “But at least you can get a look at what people mean when they speak of the beauty of this city. It’s this overpriced bunch of monuments to slavery they’re talking about. They worship these old houses. There’re people down here that spend every cent they’ve got to keep up these old mausoleums. And, of course, there isn’t a single plaque anywhere with the names of the people who actually built them.”

“Is this where we’re going?” Katie asked, looking out at the beautiful antebellum homes with their gorgeous gardens blooming like crazy. She was starting to worry about the way she was dressed.

“Oh, no,” Amanda said. “We’re going to the Saint Thomas Street project. It’s near here though. As a matter of fact it’s right next door. My best friend’s getting married. She’s my housekeeper, I’m ashamed to say.”

“You don’t have to justify having a servant to me,” Katie said. Amanda had slowed the car down. That’s all she was really interested in.

“I have to justify it to myself. Well, I do a lot of things I can’t justify but I’m getting better. Anyway, don’t think of me as some rich New Orleans cunt. I love your work. That vase of Brummette’s blows my mind.”

“I wish I was a rich New Orleans cunt,” Katie said. “It would make my life a lot easier. I could really throw some pots if I didn’t have to make a living at it. Well, throwing pots is easy. What you and Brummette do is what blows my mind. I had a big crush on a translator once. I used to go over to the translation department and take the worksheets down off the shelf and read them all the time. I was so crazy about this guy I worshipped his poetry. Anyway, I’d go read the worksheets and there would be this poem in Spanish or something and then four or five different translations of it. It was fascinating. I could really get into doing that if I was good with languages.”

Amanda had come down Coliseum and turned onto Jackson Avenue, a main street that runs beside the Garden District. “I’ve been able to speak different languages since I was a child,” she said. She stopped at a street light by the Sara Mayo Clinic. Black women with children were lined up by a side door.

Across the street black men loitered outside a bar. By turning a corner the whole atmosphere of the city had changed, thickened and darkened. Finally the light changed and they proceeded on down the street, moving in the direction of the river.

Katie had never seen that many black people in one place in her life. All the old scary movies about the South were playing in her head. “I guess I should have worked harder at it when I was young,” Amanda was saying. “But I was too busy drinking and running around being wild. I was the wildest girl in Mississippi. All I wanted to do was relive the life of Zelda Fitzgerald. No one ever told me she wasn’t happy. Can you believe it? I used to read those books and all I got out of them was that it was exciting. I thought The Beautiful and the Damned was about some people having a wonderful time. Well, so much for the power of the printed word. At least when you throw a pot you don’t have to worry about influencing someone’s life….” Amanda stopped, seeing the expression on Katie’s face. “Oh, shit, I forgot about that pot with the cross on top. Goddamn, that’s the most irreligious statement I’ve ever seen.” But the expression on Katie’s face had nothing to do with the relative social values of clay sculpture or literature. Amanda had turned off Jackson Avenue onto Rousseau, a narrow street between tall yellow buildings. They were near the river now. Everything was the color of the river. The streets were covered with dried mud, the courtyards so bare she could not tell the difference between the concrete and the earth. Even the shrubs were covered with dust. In three blocks they had come from the lush tropical beauty of the Garden District to a floodplain. No one could live here, Katie thought. No one could live in such a place.

Amanda turned down Barrow Street to Nuns, then to Celeste. They were deep into the heart of the Saint Thomas Street Project. “Well, now I have a new start,” she said, bringing the car to a stop before a courtyard where a group of men were drinking beer around a statue of Martin Luther King. A child walked by carrying an empty bottle. He ran his hand across the hood, then stopped and stared into the car. The men by the statue turned and looked their way.

“I was almost forty years old before I started to use my talents or gifts or whatever you call them,” Amanda went on. “I hope it isn’t too late.” Katie was trying to open the car door. She had her hand on the door handle but her fingers wouldn’t work. She kept wanting to roll down the window and yell, “It’s not my car. I marched at Little Rock. It’s not my car.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Amanda said. “We’re under Lavertis’ protection. No one will hurt you here.” As she was talking a tall black man came down off the balcony where the wedding party was going on and escorted them into the building. Lavertis had been watching out a window and sent her brother to bring them inside.

The rest of the afternoon was wonderful. Lavertis and her daughters were dressed in beautiful shades of pink organza and the ceremony was full of surprises. The preacher tied the bride’s and groom’s hands together with a white ribbon saying this wedding would be one they couldn’t get out of without a fight. Then the musicians arrived and the dancing started. Lavertis’ children took the white women and started teaching them dance steps. Katie learned fast and soon was dancing with everyone at the party. Amanda couldn’t get the hang of it. “It’s this goddamn skirt,” she said darkly. “Who could dance in a thing like this?”

Then the bride, who was cutting her wedding cake, put down the knife, came across the room and held out her hands. Amanda rolled her skirt up around her waist, took off her shoes, and the two women began to dance. They danced and danced, holding each other’s arms, laughing up into each other’s eyes, while everyone clapped and cheered them on.

“She’s really something,” Katie told Brummette the next afternoon. “She isn’t afraid of anything. I don’t think I ever met anyone that fearless.”

“Well, I like her. And I’d know she was a writer without anyone telling me. She just makes up the world as she goes along.”

“I knew you’d like each other,” Brummette said. “That’s why I sent her out there to get you.”

So the two women became friends, real friends, with things to teach each other. They spent a lot of time together the year Katie lived in New Orleans. They were both working very hard that year, and they would meet in the afternoons and go for long walks around Audubon Park, then back to Amanda’s house to lie on the floor and listen to jazz, telling each other the stories of their lives. Amanda even told Katie about the baby she had given away. It had been on her mind a lot since Guy brought it up at the funeral.

“Why don’t you find out where she is?” Katie said. “It’s easy to do that now. I don’t know how you can stand not knowing.”

“Oh, I would never do that,” Amanda said. “I would never in a million years do that.”

“Don’t ever say you wouldn’t do something,” Katie said. “Don’t set traps for yourself.”

“Let’s go over to Tyler’s and get some oysters,” Amanda said. “Johnny Vidocovitch is going to be playing later. I heard he has a great new bass player.”

A strange thing happened to Katie one afternoon that fall. She was out jogging in the park and fell in behind two women as she passed the flower clock. One was a chubby blonde, the other a tall foreign-looking girl. Katie was a few feet behind them, looking for a polite way to pass, when she began to overhear an intense conversation. She slowed up so she could listen.

“You ought to go over there sometime if you can get invited. You wouldn’t believe that house. She’s got art hanging all over the walls. I mean, every wall is covered with paintings. It’s like a gallery. She’s got these artist friends who make things for her. Oh, yeah, they’re all painted especially for her.”

“Oh, she talks all the time. She’s always telling someone something they don’t want to hear. She told me it was a waste of time to have children. That all they did was break your heart.”

“Yes, she did. She told it to me at a Yellin, Ashe picnic in Mandeville. She said I could forget being a painter if I had children. Well, listen, what she really said was worse than that. She said it in front of CeCe Mullin. If you don’t believe me, just ask her.”

“She said when the child is born the parents start dying. Something like that. I can’t remember the exact words.”

“What a terrible thing to say. It’s like that article she wrote for that French Quarter paper. About the mixed marriages. I know that embarrassed the Ashes to death. All about Negroes that live with whites.”

“Did you like her at all? I mean, he’s such a doll. Jim just loves working for him. Why is he married to her if she’s like that?”

“Oh, I liked her. You can’t help liking her. There’s something about her. Like she’s, well, like she’s glad to be here.”

Later that evening Katie reported the conversation to Amanda. They were lying on the sun room floor listening to Ravel. “Do you think they meant me?” Amanda said, sitting up on one elbow, looking surprised.

“Of course they meant you,” Katie said. “Who else in New Orleans could they be talking about but you?”

“It must have been some of the associates’ wives,” Amanda said. “I feel so sorry for them. They’re expected to live up to such unbelievable standards of mediocrity.”

Malcolm stayed in the back of the house when Katie was there. Of all of Amanda’s new friends Katie bothered him the most, towering over him with her long crazy hair, wearing her clay-spattered sweatshirts any time of the day, laughing at everything that happened. He was haunted by the sight of her unpainted toenails in her hippie sandals, by her wild language. “You’re starting to talk just like that woman,” he said to Amanda. “You two sound like a pair of sailors. You ought to hear yourself.”

“Then don’t listen,” Amanda said. “Besides, I was talking that way long before I met Katie Dunbar. I don’t need her to teach me language.”

“Well, it’s worse when you’re with her. You ought to hear a tape of yourself talking to her someday.”

Malcolm began to wonder if Amanda and Katie were queer for each other. In a way he liked the idea. It was better than the fears he had about her being over at Tulane.

Malcolm was a proud man. The thought of being married to a woman who ran all over town not wearing a wedding ring drove him crazy. The thought of never knowing whether his wife would be there when he came home from work in the afternoon drove him crazy.

The sight of his mother holding his brother’s children in her arms broke his heart. Maybe she’s right, he began to think. Then he put that idea aside. Malcolm had been brought up to believe that divorce was an unforgivable evil, a sign of weakness, a thing Christians did because they didn’t have enough sense to make a marriage work. He decided to try one more time to make Amanda love him.

Amanda came home one night from a seminar very excited about a piece of writing the other students had praised. She couldn’t wait to get to her workroom and start making the revisions they had suggested. I’m going to make a pot of coffee and write all night, she said to herself as she turned off Saint Charles onto Henry Clay. I’m going to be the best translator of Middle French that ever walked the face of the earth. She started to turn into her driveway, then stopped. Malcolm’s Audi was parked on the sidewalk blocking the steps going up to the front door. Someone had driven Malcolm’s car right up onto the yard. What in the shit is this all about? she thought. Goddammit, what’s going on? There must have been an accident or something. What has Malcolm done now? Well, I just hope he isn’t dead. Then I’d never get to finish my poem.

She gathered up her papers and walked across the yard to the car. Now she could see the signs. The Audi was locked and the windows rolled up. There were hand-printed signs in all the windows. I love you Amanda Ashe, they said. I love you and I don’t care who knows it.

She shook her head. It was a part of Malcolm she hadn’t seen in years. It was a part of him she had forgotten existed. She climbed around the car and went up the steps and opened the door. There was a chair blocking the front hall with a manila envelope from the office lying on the brocade seat. She opened it up. It was two airplane tickets to Paris for Saturday. And a letter.

Dear Mrs. Ashe,

Mr. Aschaffenburg has made you reservations at the Ritz. He says it’s the only place in Paris silly enough for you. He says they still talk about you running out of there at dawn in your jogging suit and he says if you and I don’t get out of this town and enjoy life he is going to do it for us.

Amanda, please go with me. I am pretending to sleep in our bed. Please come get me warm.

“Oh, shit,” Amanda said, and sat down on the chair. She sat there for a long time holding the letter. He can do it, she thought. He can really do it when he wants to do it. After a while she went back to the bedroom and sat down on the bed and put her hand on the back of his head.

“I have to work all night,” she said. “I have something important to do. And I can’t go to Paris. I’m in the middle of a semester. I have important work to do.”

“I’m not important,” he said, keeping his face turned to the wall, not looking at her.

“What’s going on, Amanda?” he said. “What’s going on in this house?”

“The end of a marriage,” she said. “Go find a woman to love, Malcolm. Go find a woman to bear you a child and cook you dinner and care whether you live or die. It isn’t me. I don’t think it ever was.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m on my way somewhere, though. I’m going to find the other places. That’s a line from something I read the other day. It goes…”

But Malcolm had pulled the pillow over his head. There was a tone Amanda got in her voice when she was going to start quoting something that made him want to tie her jugular vein to her carotid artery.

She went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee and carried it into her workroom and went to work. I don’t know how to love, she thought. I’m hopeless. I can’t even love a man who would drive a car up on his own tulip beds for me. Later that night she wrote him a letter.

Dear Malcolm, I don’t know what it is I’m looking for. I know it is wrong for me to take your love and life and use them as props — I know it’s wrong of you to let me.

This is a cold letter. This is a dead serious letter.

All I’m interested in is my work. I don’t know what is wrong with me or right with me. I didn’t make my nature. I didn’t create my needs and ambitions. Neither will I deny or regret them. I am what I am. So be it. Find us an out.

Amanda

P. S. The quotation goes: “A traveler who has lost his way should not ask, Where Am I. What he really wants to know is, Where Are The Other Places. He has got his own self but he has lost them.” — A. N. Whitehead

When Katie went back to Fayetteville at the end of the year Amanda was lonely for her. Within a month she had gotten in the habit of going up there to visit.

The first time she drove to Arkansas she left before dawn, planning on making the long drive in one day. She drove up through Mississippi, coming within a few miles of Esperanza without giving in to the desire to go and look at it. She crossed the Mississippi River at Greenville so close to home she could smell it, then drove on up through the Arkansas delta all the way to Little Rock without stopping.

In Little Rock she stopped at a Waffle House for an omelet, pouring maple syrup all over the eggs like a bad child, eating the last bites with her fingers, full of some outlandish feeling of freedom. She licked the syrup from her fingers and began the last leg of the journey.

As soon as she saw the hills of northwest Arkansas she fell in love. It was an October day and the red maple trees were a brilliant carpet all the way from Little Rock to Alma. This is where a person could live a real life, she told herself.

At Alma the real hills began, the Boston Mountains, the oldest mountains in the United States. As Amanda drove up into the mountains they reached out to her and took her heart away as nothing had ever done, not the Tetons, not the Rockies, not the French Alps. Something about the lay of the land seemed exactly right to her, as if she had been here before, as if she had been on her way there always.

It looks like Scotland, she said to herself. It looks like where I am supposed to be.

From Alma to Fayetteville the mountains got higher, the bluffs black in the afternoon sun, the beautiful views appearing around any curve making her laugh with pleasure and surprise.

“I don’t know why you’re so infatuated with Fayetteville,” Katie said, laughing at her. “There’s nothing to do here but work and wait for the mail.”

“It’s the way it looks,” Amanda said. “Like someplace I’ve been before. I lived in Indiana, before my father died. Maybe it looks like that. Or maybe it’s an older memory, Katie. My family are Scots, the McCameys and Torreys and Purcells. Maybe this place is like Scotland. Maybe my DNA feels at home.”

“It’s a good place to make a stand,” Katie said. “If you can put up with the winters. And if you have some money. There isn’t any money. You have to bring it with you or do without it. Well come on, I want to take you to meet some people.” Then Katie put Amanda into an old van she used to haul her pots and drove her around town showing her the sights. She took Amanda down Maple Street to sit on the Alberts’ swing and talk literature, then over to the Whiteheads’ to argue politics and philosophy, then down to the Morrisons’ to see the paintings and over to Calabash to watch Angele throwing plates and out to the river to go wading. They ended up at the Restaurant On The Corner eating omelets and helping plan the victory celebration for a local girl who had just run a triathlon in Hawaii.

“We’re going to have thirteen guitars,” Margaret Downing was saying, “and two dobo players. Do you think that will be enough?”

“They had thirteen for Anderson winning the Medal of Honor,” Jodie Whitehead said. “I think a triathlon ought to get more than a Medal of Honor.”

“That’s just like you, Jodie,” someone said. “Always trying to turn every goddamn thing in town into a contest. Anderson’s medal of honor hasn’t got a damn thing to do with Sylvia’s triathlon and if you don’t think thirteen guitars are enough well you just go out and get some more yourself.”

At night Amanda slept in Katie’s waterbed looking up at the skies through Katie’s homemade skylights. Katie’s house was an old stone ruin with a high roof like a wing. In one room there was a brick kiln with copper tubing going in and out at strange angles.

“It’s designed to hold the vases I was painting that year,” Katie said. “At that time I intended to paint Chinese love scenes on vases forever.”

“The first thing I saw of yours was one of those vases,” Amanda said. “I saw one in a house in New Orleans. It was the wildest thing I ever saw on a piece of pottery.”

“That was the year I went back to men,” Katie said. “After the movement cooled down and we let men back in. Jesus, what a relief that was.”

“That’s wrong,” Amanda said. “The first thing I saw was the vase Brummette has. The one with the cross on top. I really love that vase, Katie. That vase gives me cold chills. It gives me chills just to think about it.”

“You’re always talking about that vase. Well, come on. Put on your shoes. I’ll show you where the idea came from. Come on, we’re going for a walk.”

They walked down a dirt road and up a hill until they came to a wide place in the road with a beautiful view of the valley. Right in the middle of the view was a huge tin cross, fat and squat and riddled with uneven punctures designed to let the lights show through at night.

“Welcome to Arkansas,” Katie said. “Methodist heaven. For fifteen years I have had my view of the valley ruined by that goddamn cross. It’s like a bad marriage. I’m so used to it I’ve forgotten to want to blow it up. I used to spend a lot of time figuring out ways to blow it up. Finally I just made the vase instead. I’m glad you like it.”

They sat down on a bench to look at the cross. A storm was brewing to the east and south, great horizontal streaks of lightning beginning to appear in the distance so far away they could not even hear the thunder.

A car full of graduate students drove up, coming to watch the lightning. By the time the storm arrived there were several dozen people. They had driven up from all over town to watch the storm approaching.

That fall a coincidence occurred. Amanda was only a few months away from finishing her graduate work. Brummette had put her in touch with some young French poets and she was studying their work, but none of it seemed really serious or beautiful to her.

“It’s just words,” she told Brummette. “There isn’t any heart in any of it. It’s all either surreal or nihilistic. I can’t find any reason to bring that to English. I want something that means something. I want something with a moral heart to it, or some passion, or something worth passing on.”

“I thought art wasn’t supposed to mean anything,” he said. “I thought art was supposed ‘to be.’”

“That’s not enough,” she said. “I won’t serve abstractions. Whoever started that idea did the world a big disservice. A rock has being. But I don’t learn much from it.”

“Come over to the seminar at Loyola this weekend,” Brummette said. “I want you to meet my old teacher, Marshall Jordan. He’s going to be here lecturing. He thinks like you do. You’ll have fun talking to him. Maybe he can put you on to something.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Amanda said. “All his old students tell wild stories about him.”

“They’re all true,” Brummette said. “He’s something else, oh, God, it’ll be fun introducing you to Jordan.”

“Oh, he’ll just adore you, that’s all. If he asks you for a piece of ass don’t feel insulted. He lived in Italy too long. Promise you’ll come. You’ll love meeting him.”

“Oh, fuck,” Amanda said. “You drive me crazy, Brummette. I never know when to take you seriously.”

“Never,” he said. “Never take anything seriously if you can help it.” He turned to a girl who was standing in the door holding a notebook. She was an expensive-looking girl, so well dressed she looked like an advertisement for a college shop. Everything she had on was perfect: Bass Weejuns, madras skirt, oxford cloth shirt, careful makeup. She was obviously embarrassed at the conversation she had just overheard.

“Come on in,” Brummette said. “This is my new tutorial student, Amanda. Barrett Clare, Amanda McCamey. I was telling you about Barrett the other day, Amanda. Remember, I told you I liked her poems.”

“Oh, sure,” Amanda said. “Well, I’ll be around on Saturday then.” She leaned across the desk to give Brummette a kiss. “I’ll see about this guru. Can we get together afterwards?”

“I like your work,” the girl said, refusing to be ignored. “I read the portfolio The New Orleans Review published last month. I was hoping I’d get to meet you around here.”

“That’s nice,” Amanda said. “It’s nice of you to say so. I’ve got to be going, Brummette. You be a good boy. I’ll see you on Saturday then. Nice to meet you, Shelley. I’m glad you liked my poems.”

“Barrett,” the girl corrected. But Amanda was gone before she got it out of her mouth.

“She really is, isn’t she? Did you see her piece in Sunday’s paper? I thought it was so good. Quite a coup to get to write about that stuff in the T-P. I don’t know how she got that interview past the editor.”

“I don’t know about that,” Brummette said. “She’s pretty busy. Why don’t you just let me go on looking at them? What’s that you’ve got in your hand? Come on, out with it.”

“No I don’t. It’s just that lately I seem to have a lot of things to write about.”

He put the folder down on his desk and opened it, trying to act enthusiastic. Jesus, what a profession he thought. A fucking dream merchant. Why don’t I go on and tell her how dull this stuff is? Why am I leading her on like this? Jesus, I hate this job. He pushed his sleeves back up above his elbows and pretended to concentrate.

I am in jeopardy Kiss Me Lay with me
Make me whole No Oh Please Quiet Rest Satan Time

“This must have been hard to write,” he said, raising his eyes from the page. He thought he was going to cry. There she sat in those careful clothes with all that terror. How armored she is, he thought. Armor by Perlis, Your Uptown Store, Where The Elite Meet To Shop. I would not tell that girl to stop writing for anything in the world. For all I know this goddamn poetry is the only thing that’s keeping her alive.

“It’s just a rough draft. It needs working on. You think it’s a poem then? You’re sure it’s a poem?”

“There’re a lot more of them. They’re for him, for Gustave. He’s my doctor. I want to surprise him with them. Get them published. Then surprise him.”

“You’re so nice to do this for me. It’s so good of you to do this. So kind of you.”

On Saturday afternoon Amanda dressed in some old slacks and walked over to Loyola to the translation seminar. Jordan was not a disappointment. He came sweeping into the lecture room wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and a cape. Amanda had never seen a grown man seriously wearing a cape. He must have been seventy-five years old but he was as straight and supple as a dancer and full of wonderful energy. He took off the cape, dropped his hat on top of it, pulled some papers out of his pants pocket and went to work to mesmerize the audience, talking about a manuscript he had smuggled out of Italy the previous summer. The Lost Wedding Songs of Helene Renoir he called it. Les chansons mystiales perdues d’Helene Renoir. He had bribed a Jesuit to steal the poems from the catacombs of the Vatican. Jordan was obviously having the time of his life being involved in the intrigue and would throw out his hands and lapse into Italian talking about the secret meetings in every cafe in Rome. “The Italians take themselves so seriously,” Jordan said. “Here I was sitting in a cafe talking to a man who actually believed he was selling his soul for two thousand American dollars.”

Amanda was fascinated by Jordan and by his story. That night she dressed in her most seductive clothes and went around to Loyola to the cocktail party being held in his honor. As soon as she got a chance she lured him off to the solarium and started asking him questions about the manuscript.

Jordan leaned happily against a marble pillar, gazing down the front of her pink silk blouse, telling her anything she wanted to know.

“My favorite is called ‘Moon on My Breasts in Winter.’ ‘La lune d’hiver sur mes seines.’ Isn’t that lovely? Almost oriental. Imagine, she wrote that in Aurillac in seventeen thirty-three. She couldn’t have known Chinese poetry. And yet, there you are. Like Sappho. Dazzling clarity. The good ones are always alike, you know. Well, I’ve got to appoint a translator. I mean, I found the damn things.”

“Let me try it,” Amanda said. “I’m good. Ask anyone. I’m really good.”

“Well, if I were here I would take that under serious consideration,” he said. “Alas, I am far away in Fayetteville and I really don’t like to work with anyone through the mails. It takes all the fun out of collaborating on anything.”

“I’ll come up there,” Amanda said. “I know all about Fayetteville. I have a friend up there, the potter, Katie Dunbar. I’ll come up there and live and work with you.”

“I could translate those poems better than anyone in the world,” Amanda said. She turned her great black eyes upon him. “They’re mine. I know they are. Please let me try.”

He smiled down the blouse and sighed, wondering how old a man would have to be to be safe from those breasts.

“Send me your credentials. I’ll see what I can do. It wouldn’t be official, you understand. There wouldn’t be a guarantee that you could publish.”

“Let me get you another drink,” Amanda said. “You’re all out of wine.”

That was in October. As soon as Amanda heard from Marshall Jordan that she could do the translations she walked into the bedroom and asked Malcolm very formally for a divorce.

He had been polishing a Celestron telescope he almost never got around to using. He laid down the polishing cloth and walked over to his closet and got out his tripod.

“What do you want?” he said, opening the door to the back porch. “What can I do to help you?”

“Give Lavertis some money. Fix it so she doesn’t have to go to work for some asshole.”

“So far I’ve given you everything you ever asked me for, Amanda. I don’t know why I should stop now. How much money do you need?”

“The house will do. Give me the house and I’ll sell it. You wouldn’t want to keep on living here.”

“Probably. Look, will you plug that cord in and bring it on out here. I want to see the moons of Saturn. I’ve been waiting all week to see the moons of Saturn.”

Malcolm looked through the telescope for a while, then he took a small bag and went over to his mother’s house and walked into his old room. Everything was just where he left it when he married Amanda. His lunar globe, his bronze statue of Diana, his old desk, his old chair, his old bed. He turned back the beautiful linen sheets and climbed in and slept like a baby. He was glad to be home.

Barrett was lying on her analyst’s couch with her eyes closed and her hands lying lightly on her waist. She almost never lay on the couch. Mostly she sat in a cross-legged position with her back against the wall and looked at him, babbling on and on and on about the petty details of her boring uptown New Orleans life. She was the most intractable patient the doctor had ever treated. She couldn’t seem to learn a thing. No matter how many hours she sat on the couch or lay on the couch or squirmed around in the chairs she always seemed to come out as helpless as she had been the first day he treated her. He leaned back in his chair and tried hard to listen, to care and not to care.

“Let’s face it,” she was saying. “I’m an unsuccessful poet. No one wants to publish my stuff. The editor of the Oak Mountain Review told me I should stop writing. Brummette said he ought to be put in jail for saying that to me. Brummette really likes my work. He couldn’t fool me about that. I know. I know he needs the money I gave him for the magazine. I know that, Gustave. You don’t have to remind me of that. But he wouldn’t lie about poetry. He really thinks I’m good.

“He says I’m good. He tells everyone I am. Why would he tell me I was good if I wasn’t? Why would he let me go on spending all my time on something like this? Writing and writing and writing if it wasn’t going to get me somewhere. He said I just have to keep trying. I’m going to be an associate editor of the magazine he’s starting. Did I tell you that? Well, it isn’t certain yet. Of course Charlie doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a damn. Nothing I do matters to him. Did I tell you what he did? I can’t believe what he did. At the one hundredth anniversary of the club. He passed out these cards saying ‘Would you like to fuck me?’ With his office number on them. He gave one to Donald Coleman’s wife and she called and told me about it. He put it in her pocket and she got it out when she got home and her husband almost saw it. Printed cards, Gustave, printed cards. He’s gone too far this time. I won’t put up with much more of it. I don’t love him. You know that. Why do I live there? Daddy practically supports us. I told you that. It’s my house. Why do I live with him? I beat Shelly Brunstetter Sunday. I beat the shit out of her. Well, I’m sick of it. When are you going to get me out of it? Oh, I know, I know. I have to get myself out of it. I’m going to. I’m going to get out of it. You know so much. But you don’t know what it’s like to be me. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be locked up in this marriage. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Charles if I divorce Charlie. I think I’ll go on and try to find out who my parents are but you can’t know who they’ll turn out to be. It might be somebody really awful. Really bad. They might be anyone. I beat Gail Harris Tuesday. I think she wants to be my doubles partner but first I’ll have to get rid of Norma. I can’t keep on playing with Norma. She never practices and one of the kids is always sick. Well, I’m sick of Norma. I want Janet. But no one can get Janet for more than a month. She’s always moving around.

“What I want is a book of poems published by a respectable press. Is that too much to ask? Well, I don’t care how long it takes. Brummette says I have to pay my dues. I’ll get there. You just wait and see if I don’t.

“Why won’t you ever help me? I wouldn’t even think you loved me except you cried that day I told you I dreamed about my mother. You cried. I saw the tears. You know you cried. What difference does any of it make? I ought to go on and have another baby. Except that I hate Charlie. You’d hate him too. I’m tired of the looks everyone gives us. He’s not going to be beautiful forever. He’s getting fat and there’re these little places coming on his skin from being in the sun all the time. He’s so blond. Maybe he’ll get skin cancer. I know where his apartment is. It’s in the building with AI Hirt’s apartment. The whole law firm’s got herpes now. Isn’t that a riot? I ought to write a poem about that. Putney, Carroll, Davies and Weems and all their goddamn secretaries and half their wives and their wives’ boyfriends and I heard the obstetric group at Ochsner’s was going crazy trying to do something about it. Well, he isn’t giving it to me. I don’t even sleep in the same room with him since he got it. I’m scared to death he’s going to give it to Charles.

“I know, I know, I know. It’s just a virus. It’s just like a cold. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Well, I watched Sally Lucas when she got it and it isn’t funny, Gustave. She couldn’t urinate for three days. She didn’t even know it was a venereal disease. That’s why she told everyone about it. Now there’ve been nine cases at the firm that we know about.

“I wouldn’t make love to him if he was the last person in the world. I’m going down and see Daddy this afternoon about the divorce. I really am. I won’t live with a diseased man. I don’t care how good-looking he is.

“What time is it? Do I have time to tell you about the match with Darby? It was a riot. I wish you could have seen me. I was so cool. I slaughtered them. I wish you could see me play. I wish you could see me do something besides sit in this room.”

The monologue rolled on and on. The gentle middle-aged Freudian laced his fingers together, listening to every single word as if it were the most important thing in the world.

“What difference does it make to you,” she rambled on. “Your kids go to Newman. Your kids get good grades. They aren’t going to let Charles in Country Day. And Charlie went there. But John Jenkins is trying to help me get him into Trinity. Maybe I ought to try Newman again.

“I have to get him in somewhere. I don’t know what I’ll do if he has to go to some trashy second-rate place. I can’t stand it if he does. Oh, well, who cares. I guess it doesn’t matter. I know he’s bright. You can’t miss it. I mean he’s twice as strong as anyone his age. He just can’t sit still. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“You can only be the kind of mother you had. That’s what I read somewhere. Well, mine was nonexistent. And of course Katherine doesn’t love me. You ought to see how she hugs me. I think they’re sorry they adopted me. I’ve told you that. They love Terry and Danielle so much. If it wasn’t for me they wouldn’t have had them. They could love me for that, couldn’t they? They could at least pretend to love me, couldn’t they? I know, I know, they give me money. They do that. They sure do that.”

She rolled over and put her head down in her arms. “I know you get tired of hearing this same old bullshit over and over and over.”

“I never get tired of anything you tell me,” he said, unlacing his fingers. “Go on. Tell me how Katherine hugs you. I know it’s hard, Barrett. I know it isn’t easy.” He sighed.

He was tired. He had flown home that morning from committing a fifteen-year-old adopted boy to a home for juvenile incorrigibles in Houston, Texas. It was the second patient he had lost. In seventeen years it was the second patient he had ever committed to an institution. It was driving him crazy to think about it.

“Three-fourths of the juveniles in homes for permanently disturbed children are adopted,” the head of the home had told him. “You know that, Gustave. Stop acting like a bourgeois. We do what we can. He’ll kill someone, you know that. We do what we can.”

What do I care, he thought, looking up at Barrett’s crazy confused face. She was sitting up on the couch putting on her shoes. Now she was bragging about some tennis match she had saved at the last minute. When she left the Folger boy would be here. Then it would be over. Sixty-three more minutes and it would be over for the day.

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