18

Elizabeth was as Gus had never seen her. She was happy. “My God, have you seen this?” she said, breezing into his office with a copy of the Times-Picayune stretched out ahead. She was reading from an editorial:

It is rare and reassuring amid this city’s ongoing racial unrest for an institution such as Miss Angelique’s Academy to take upon itself the bold and openhearted effort to reach out into the rest of the community. Through a novel, if long overdue, decision to participate in this year’s Jazzfest, this most traditional of New Orleans institutions has served notice that it is a part of the community at-large. And not just Jazzfest—the Academy has been invited to perform in the Gospel Tent.

Not least because of the—let us be honest—élite nature of this traditional, expensive, and almost totally white school is its offering, however symbolic, to be commended. Many of our city’s other institutions, from Mardi Gras krewes to corporate offices, could learn the wise lesson from these young women of the Garden District.

We are delighted to offer this month’s “Thumbs Up” to Agon and Elizabeth Hapsenfield, the delightful and imaginative forces behind the school, for their bringing of new ideas and social initiative to the city.

Elizabeth flopped into the leather couch, beaming. “And then it says to turn to Section F for the story on us that girl came out and wrote.” She clutched the paper to her breast and seemed to blush. “I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are truly a sweet and wonderful man.”

Gus squirmed a little in his chair and pretended to look at his blank computer screen. It helped, of course, that the Picayune’s publisher’s daughter, now a journalism major at LSU, was an alumnus of Miss Angelique’s and that the sports editor’s fifteen-year-old was currently enrolled. But once you have their attention, you still have to show them something, right? So Gus accepted the praise.

“I really mean it,” she said. “At first I wondered if the Jazzfest idea was, to be honest, any kind of thing for the Academy to be involved in. But I have to tell you it’s just the best, the very, very best! And then the story!” Elizabeth flipped the paper open to the “Life and Times” section, where the front page was filled with a very flattering picture of her surrounded by the eight girls selected for the choir, which she had named “The Voices of Angelique” for the occasion. At the back stood Gus and Jean-Pierre.

Gus moved around to the front of his desk and read along with the headmistress. He could smell her perfume, feel her heat, but this was not the moment for that. They scanned the article slowly, though each knew the other had already seen it: Gus over coffee at home, and Elizabeth at five a.m. when she went out to collect the newly thrown paper, as she had been doing all the last week. But he pretended for her, as she, perhaps, pretended for him, because it had been made clear from the inception that honesty was not to be the foundation of their relationship.

She read aloud from the second column in Section F.

“‘Mrs. Hapsenfield had always seen the Academy as a way of molding not just the student, but the character of the student, and when her chaplain’s assistant, Mr. Houston, sketched the idea to her, she seized it at once’—” Elizabeth looked at Gus. “I guess they embellished it a little.”

“Not that much. You’re good at seizing.”

She smiled, a little, and read more. Gus remembered the reporter, Caryn Ames, a young woman just out of Auburn who’d been put on the education beat. She was smart but a little gullible, and Elizabeth had played her like a fiddle.

But the maestro had been nervous as a cat waiting for the orchestration to unfold. In truth, Gus had put it out of mind. He was far too busy with choir practice to think about set-ups in newspapers, the kind of thing he’d done in some previous gigs. Not to mention Bonita wanting to procreate all the time (lab results: sperm to spare), but Elizabeth’s anxiety had been more than enough to go around. And now all was well. Gus had played it right. Chaplain schmaplain. Next year he’d be able to pick any job at the school, at double his salary.

As they were reading, Angie Ballew peeped in.

“Oh, I see you saw it. I guess they didn’t get Mr. Hapsenfield in it much, did they?”

Elizabeth barely looked up. “I think they got the main characters pretty well.”

“Ciao,” said Angie. She’d been into foreign phrases spring semester. “Got to run.” She looked at Gus and she looked at Elizabeth. Then she was gone.

Elizabeth folded up the paper and said something Gus couldn’t hear. Then, “Well, I have to get back out front. I expect the phone’ll be ringing off the wall from the parents. Might be a good time to remind them of our fund drive.” She looked at the door to see if anyone was there, then leaned over and kissed Gus on the mouth. She licked his lips with her tongue.

“Nice doing business with you.”

“Nice to be done.”

She studied him a moment, and was gone. Gus walked to his window, peered out, went back to his desk. He sat down. Some time passed; he wasn’t sure how much. He was smiling.

“Hey, Mr. H. What’s so funny?”

Gus focused on the young woman at the door—Brittany Anderson, he thought was her name. It didn’t really matter.

Jean-Pierre knew where Ocho lived from Maria. In the time they were together, they had driven to his apartment complex out Chef Menteur Highway one night because Maria was scared that Ocho might be following them or stalking her. But his car was home and the lights were on and Maria had decided she was just a little paranoid. At least on that night, Ocho was innocent. Now he was not. Now he had the blood of Paulus all over him and he was not going to get away with it.

Jean-Pierre had never actually been in a pawn shop. They looked like trouble and they always seemed dirty from the outside. This one pretty much fit the bill. He’d crossed the river to Algiers, on the theory that he wouldn’t run into anyone who knew him, and he bought the 9mm Baretta automatic for three hundred and twenty-five dollars using a fake name. He had thought of taking Aunt Eddie’s revolver from the Ogun pot in his mother’s botanica but when he went looking for it, it was gone. Rather than ask his mother if she had it, which was pretty obvious, he decided to just get something for himself. The less she knew about any of this the better.

When he got back to his apartment he cleaned the weapon and loaded the clip and put it in a soft leather briefcase he’d been given for winning a parish-wide Teacher of the Year contest. He’d saved the answering machine tape from the day he had heard the voice and now he got it back out. He stuck the tape in the machine and played it, fast-forwarding through the other messages, from Houston and the others. And there was the voice.

It didn’t have much to say—some thick breathing into the receiver and a “Fuck you, motherfucker”—but Jean-Pierre knew the intonation, and he knew the accent, and he knew the epithet. It often had filled Maria’s machine in the time they were together and in the end it had terrified her so much that it had ruined what they had. “Ocho will kill you,” she had said each time they listened to the curse, sometimes all slurred from the drinking. They had broken up because of that voice.

Jean-Pierre didn’t think that Maria had gone back to Ocho or any other of her exes. Probably she had just left New Orleans altogether. Jean-Pierre missed her but there was no finding her. Maybe she had decided just to start over somewhere else. Ocho had marked her and by the time she met Jean-Pierre she was like a puppy hit with a stick too many times. But Jean-Pierre had been good and happy with Maria, and it might have worked for the long haul except that Ocho heard she was with someone and started phoning, following her. Jean-Pierre wanted to face Ocho down as soon as he learned what was happening, but she begged him not to.

He didn’t understand that about women—some kind of willingness to suffer, or was it to avoid the fight? He didn’t know; he didn’t understand. But she said that was the way it was. And so Ocho and what to do about Ocho had become larger than what to do about them and it had poisoned them and it had ended them. “Ocho will kill you, baby. He’s crazy. Look at me. Don’t you believe me?”

And now Ocho had beaten up Paulus. And now he was calling Jean-Pierre directly like he did indirectly before with Maria.

Ocho was a shit, a gangster. Castro had sent such people to freedom in America. And people like the Delgados hired them. Who knew why? Jean-Pierre thought it was a blood thing, a race thing. Same as he saw all the santería and the way the Cubans hijacked a black people’s faith. At first, Jean-Pierre’s mother had defended Elroy, saying he was just giving jobs to his people, but later, when she fell out with Elroy, she saw it like Jean-Pierre did.

Jean-Pierre thought Elroy Delgado had gone even further of late in his relationship with scum like Ocho. Wherever the Delgados set up a business, their competitors gradually disappeared. But until Mardi Gras, Jean-Pierre never thought Elroy actually had his Cubans hurt people—more like intimidated them.

Jean-Pierre’s idea was to shoot Ocho in the knees and cripple him. He might kill him in the event, but he wanted mostly to hurt him. He had never forgotten seeing Paulus on that gurney. His face was raw and puffy like cheap hamburger meat and he could barely breathe. Jean-Pierre had never seen his mother really scared until then.

Probably that was when it set in his mind and it would not go away. His mother was denying it, or maybe she was planning something of her own, but it had gotten to where they couldn’t talk about it—as if they could talk about anything with all that hanging over them. And so he was going to hurt Ocho. It would be for Paulus and Maria and his mother and himself. But it would be his business and not his mother’s to take care of.

If he could do it. He thought he could. He dreamed of doing it. He had to admit he wasn’t sure, though. Just buying the gun was hard. Loading the clip, putting it into the handle, pointing it and imagining putting a slug into somebody’s leg, even Ocho’s, had begun to seem very real. So he didn’t know. But he would do something.

He picked up his phone and dialed the number he knew—could never forget—from when he and Maria were together. It rang four times.

“Hello.”

“Hey motherfucker yourself,” he said, and hung up.

Jean-Pierre slumped back on his couch. He was glad he made the call. There would be no turning back now. It would be a matter of who got the other one first.

Not a good lesson for his students. He had become a bad example. But he did not feel bad. He did, feel, however, that maiming was not his style and he would simply shoot the son of a bitch in the head.

Agon Hapsenfield pretended not to notice the cocked eyebrows when he mentioned the New Primitivism, or the smirks when he patiently tried to explain how it had become the guiding principle in his life, or when they called it “New Age Primitivism,” as Newsweek termed it. But he did. Still, because of the very beliefs which drew the put-downs of others, he was able to circumvent their disdain. As Elihu said, “Sophistication is the great clouder of minds.”

Agon believed that to be true. Take his own case. Sophisticated, cosmopolitan—a Man of the World. He had accumulated much, had traveled widely, was surprised at little. And he was a fool. He remembered the morning after he had spent a night with the youngish mother of one of his first-year students. The woman was bored and filled with hate for her husband and had shared herself with Agon out of little more than spite. Since it was her money, not the husband’s, that carried their daughter’s tuition, Agon had been only too happy to allow his cock, so to speak, to become the spear with which Suzanna impaled her husband’s ego.

But more to the point was how they had sex. It wasn’t even making love. It was Suzanna in black leather asking to be chained to the bed in the motel in Lafayette, where they had arranged to meet because of mutual travel plans. It was Agon coming on her face and rubbing it into her hair and it was her shitting all over the bed and it was fucking her in the ass and it was watching on a video and then pouring acid on the video and it was leaving her chained up all night while he took another room because she wanted to see how that felt. It was waking up the next morning and going in and seeing her and smelling the room and her asking him to fuck her again and him doing it. But mostly it was the drive back to New Orleans later in the day, in his own car, thinking about what he had done. It was a sense that—well, he had told Elihu later—that there wasn’t anything else to do. It was a sense that he was dead.

Had he not met Elihu at the headmasters’ conference in San Diego not long after the night with Suzanna, Agon wasn’t sure what he would have done. Most of January had been a blur. During the school holiday, Elizabeth went to Santa Fe, or somewhere, and he stayed in the city but he could remember little of what happened. He had watched considerable TV, something he almost never did, and had read a succession of paperback books bought from supermarket checkout racks.

Blessed San Diego. Elihu’s speech was hardly the centerpiece of the conference, but Agon had gone that Tuesday evening out of curiosity. The New Primitive Primer was a best-seller, and even if Newsweek sneered at “New Age Primitivism” and mocked the “best new est in the West,” it was clear in the several pages devoted to Elihu and his philosophy, and to the enthusiasm of those who had attended his “primitive” retreats, that something was up.

Agonistes Franklin Hapsenfield’s quite traditional Presbyterian upbringing served to keep self-help fads at a safe distance, but even then he sensed that Elihu Aliesson might be a cut above the run. At the hotel bookstore, he bought The New Primitive Primer, intending to skim it before the speech.

He spent the afternoon locked inside its pages, skipping every session of the conference and ordering dinner from room service. The reasonableness, the intelligence, the scope of Elihu’s theory made him want to weep. It could be summed up, in Elihu’s phrase, as a “Will to Simplicity.” Derived from all the great minds who had ever been entranced by the appeal of the simple, the primitive, the unadorned core of meaning, from D. H. Lawrence to Jesus to Heidegger to the Buddha, the New Primitivism put everything in its most elemental focus.

Elihu called it the “Pre-Future.” “Now” was a worn-out concept, he wrote. Nor do we live “Now.” We live in our own moment of “Becoming.” Elihu said he coined the phrase “Pre-Future” so that we would try to think of our Being in a new and fresh way. He said thinking in new and fresh ways was particularly a problem for people who already thought they did.

That was what hit Agon. That was the hook. That evening at the lecture, the man who had left Suzanna Boyse handcuffed in a motel room felt something shatter inside him and then something fill. Supposedly this was what people felt who underwent a religious experience, but Agon had never had a religious experience. He was born into what he thought. In other words, he was born as his Past. He had no Present. He had never had a Now. He had been a Pre-Futurist all his life without knowing it.

By chance, Agon was able to tag along with a group of headmasters taking Elihu to dinner after the lecture and thus meet the remarkable man on a more informal basis. They seemed nothing alike. Elihu was short, ascetic, somewhat Mediterranean in appearance—Spanish, perhaps, with a red beard. Agon towered over him like a Yankee giant. They hit it off. Before leaving California, Agon reserved two weeks at Elihu’s “first-step” colony, the Age Zero Primitive Encounter Center in Oregon. There, living communally with a dozen other men and women, dialoguing day and night among themselves and with Elihu, he was changed forever.

Elizabeth had not taken his conversion well. In fact, she seemed to suspect him of something, which was not unusual, given the state of their marriage. Now he could see the sickness of all the games they played with each other. The hideous infidelities, cruelties, plots. The way she had driven Eva Valthenough away—that, as much as Suzanna, had been the final level of sophistication for Agon. He could see it all so clearly now that he was out of his Past.

They had seen each other even less since Oregon. Elizabeth said theirs was a “marriage of old”—by which she meant a business arrangement. It didn’t matter if they loved each other (she laughed) or even liked each other, as long as they prospered. Certainly, the Academy was doing well. All he had to do was stay to himself, live his own life in private and let her do the same. That part didn’t matter to him.

But lately he was thinking he owed his students more. That he had been a spectacularly disinterested headmaster, all considered, and that just as a chance encounter had changed his life, so perhaps he should attempt to change the lives of those around him. Elihu called it being a “catalyst.”

Elihu warned against “secular evangelism” but also said “providing an example to others is the most important thing a Pre-Futurist can do.” Agon had asked what the difference was but Elihu, characteristically, had replied, “Everything is obvious, including this statement.”

To say the least, Elizabeth wasn’t interested in adding The New Primitive Primer to the curriculum. She believed what the press said. She took refuge in the cynical distance. Agon let her be, stuck in the Present, for he knew the Present was merely the Past playing itself out. The Pre-Future was that which was Becoming.

Agon knew he was Becoming and that helped him put those who were mired in the Past/Present in perspective. He thought of them like Dr. Dick Diver thought of his own versions of the sophisticated in Tender Is the Night. Agon constantly dispensed benediction on the unaware and the guilty.

Unfortunately, there was another Becoming to negotiate with Elizabeth. Darker, eternal. Primitive, yes, but in a warped way that led not to the Future. He wasn’t sure, but he was getting the idea she was up to something. He’d seen strange men come around the school and he’d been hearing things. A few times he thought he had been followed. That was standard procedure before Oregon on his part, too, but he had stopped all that, had told her he had, and had assumed she had, too. But Elizabeth was too much of her own Past. She was up to something.

In that mood of suspicion—better said, Pre-Awareness—had the man Elroy Delgado appeared to him. When the Cuban first called, Agon had almost declined, but the man, whose family Agon knew ran a number of grocery stores, had said he wanted to talk about a business opportunity. They met in the coffee shop at The Pontchartrain, which had made Elroy seem legitimate enough, but what he said was something else altogether.

It was about Elizabeth. And another man. When the Cuban brought up the subject, Agon shifted in his chair and almost left the table, but the Cuban had put up his palms like a man showing he is unarmed and looked downward, almost embarrassed. That look kept Agon from leaving. That look told him he was with a man who was a Pre-Futurist. A man who was aware of where he had been yet knew not where he was going—and, most importantly, knew he was not aware. That was the mark of the Pre-Futurist—“enlightened confusion.”

“Let me start again,” Elroy Delgado had said. “What I’m really asking you for is a favor for me. I was only offering you something in return. I apologize for offending you.”

Agon had looked at the middle-aged man. He wore a clean white shirt, dark blue tie, dark suit. Very Latin, Agon thought. For himself, he did not wear suits and ties anymore. He was in a light knit shirt and cotton trousers. And sandals.

“What is it that you want, then?”

And Elroy had explained it. He had a friend—a politician—who was eager to change his image with the black voters. He thought the best way to begin was to appear before them and confess his wrongs of the past and tell them he would be different from then on. He had thought of going to a large black church, Elroy explained, but had gotten a better idea. He wanted to speak in the Gospel Tent at Jazzfest. He thought that would avoid being tied to any one denomination and, frankly, would draw lots of media attention.

Elroy made no secret that the politician was seeking votes and publicity, but he said he thought it was worth it considering the weight of the issue. “To me it is like Matthew the taxman converting to Christianity, or something like that. And so I told him I would help him.”

“And me?”

“I know, we don’t know each other, and now I see I was wrong to try to approach you in this way. But when I saw in the paper how the Miss Angelique’s Academy was going to have a choir at the Gospel Tent, it gave me the idea to come to you. The paper said how everyone else in the city should follow your example. And Senator Prince, he read that, too. That’s how he decided—”

“Joe Dell Prince?”

Elroy nodded.

Agon Hapsenfield swallowed, pursed his lips, looked out the window toward St. Charles Avenue. He shook his head. “Why, he’s from the Klan.”

“I can’t say he is or isn’t. But we do business sometimes and I never had any trouble. When he asked me if I could help him get into the Gospel Tent, I asked him all about himself. That’s when he told me how he wanted to change and all.”

“I still don’t see how you came to me. Or all that about my wife.”

Elroy sighed, folded his hands on the tablecloth. “I said, that is my mistake. I was not sure if you would listen to me. About your wife, it’s this way. I have some friends in the investigating business. I can’t say more about them. But one of them has been following a person I have had some trouble with before and in the course of that he turned up your wife’s name. This man and your wife have something going on.” He paused, but Agon’s expression didn’t change. “I’m sorry to tell you, but my investigator said this man is having an affair with your wife.”

Agon looked into the distance. “She has had many affairs.”

Elroy seemed taken aback. He cleared his throat.

“Well, I just thought you would like to know that. I thought if I told you who it was, you might return a favor and allow Senator Prince to introduce the Academy choir.”

Agon laughed.

Elroy said, “Well, he is a state senator. Everyone knows him.”

“Don’t you think he would . . . tarnish our image?”

“Well, yes. But what I was thinking was how good it would look for you if you were the one who inspired this well-known senator to confess his bad ways in public. Do you see?”

Agon frowned. He signaled the waiter for more coffee. He watched the Cuban. He could see it in him. He was definitely a Pre-Futurist. Moreover, he was handing the Pre-Future to Agon. If Agon could only grasp it.

“I suppose that would be exactly what the editorial in the paper was getting at, wasn’t it?”

“I think so, yes.”

Agon closed his eyes momentarily. Behind him—blank. All he could see was ahead. And it was in his vision. A crowded stage in a crowded tent. A choir of angels. A rank of preachers. A microphone. Agon at the microphone, introducing what he felt might be the most important moment of the entire festival. A moment in which the lamb was already with the lion and the sinner had risen to the heavens and the lame had thrown away their crutches and the jewel was in the lotus. And now—no, no, hear me out—now I introduce to you . . .

Agon smiled. “Whether you know it or not, you are a good man. Are your sure Mr. Prince is truly ready for this?”

“I don’t know why else he would have come to me.”

“You say you’ve done business with this man?”

“I’ll just say he owes me a favor. I like to not say too much about such things. And no, it’s not that I like him very much, but, like you, I think some good may come out of what he has been in this way.”

“Exactly. You are exactly correct.”

“Then you agree to let him introduce your choir?”

“Yes.”

Elroy extended his hand. Agon didn’t take it.

“But about that other business. Leave it. That’s not something in which I have interest anymore.”

Elroy let his forearm hover over the saucers and plates. “As you wish. In Cuba you learn to always have some extra thing to offer when you ask for assistance.”

“We all must learn to change. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

Agon extended his hand.

Later, when the many questions were asked, it wasn’t that important whether Joe Dell had heard of the idea first and wanted to use Jazzfest politically or if Elroy heard of Corina’s involvement, through Jean-Pierre, and wanted to make her look bad, and had conned a semi-dotty aristocrat into setting it all up. Unless one can turn state’s evidence on the other, co-conspirators don’t need to be concerned with who knew what when. They all knew it close enough to the same time anyway. Or so it would play out in court.

As a matter of history, it was Elroy who went to Joe Dell. He said he had an idea that could be of use to the senator’s career, especially considering his record with black voters, and would be the sort of event he could become involved in without really alienating white ones either, since it all took place in a “church context.” It was Elroy who asked Joe Dell if he wanted to make a speech at the Gospel Tent. It was Joe Dell who agreed. It was Agon who never quite figured it out. Or maybe it was Agon who did.