Chapter 6: Houses

Liza sipped a glass of chilled chardonnay.  She purred slightly as the wine trickled cold over her esophagus, temporarily negating the horrific heartburn from a spicy bowl of shrimp and grits she’d had at brunch.

“I’m afraid to touch any of these,” she said.  “I’ll leave sweat stripes on them.”

Before her on a wide tabletop a buffet of swatch books lay at odd angles, stacked upon each other, open centerfold style to reveal the brushed allure of silk and linen samples.  Each book had a dozen or so pink post-its marking pages already passed and put in the running by Liza.  Gillian, who was a trim, bold brunette the same age as Liza and ran the interior decorating firm Nouvelle in which they sat, spread her manicured fingers over yet another page of patterned lace while six silver bracelets separated, slid down her wrist, and collected again.  “No, no, don’t worry.  See here, these could go over the valences you already picked out as a contrasting, nice accent.  Or we could even make it up as a drape for a side table.”

“What happened to this one?”  Liza tapped a square outline of glue where a swatch had been.

Gillian leaned in and whispered, “Ostensibly it’s supposed to be ‘out of stock’, but really Stella Babineaux asked me if I would pull it out so that no one else would have the same drapes that she has in her master bedroom.”

“And you did that?”

“For a fee.”

Liza’s face brightened. “How much?”

“It cost what it costs.”

“Oh, shit, Gillian, don’t you remember when you—”

“Stop right there.  You only say, ‘Don’t you remember when’ as a prelude to some sweet little sentiment of blackmail.”

“Tell me.”

“Let’s just say Mister Babineaux stopped flirting with me after he found out.”

Liza laughed.  She loved it all: the millions of patterns, textures, and layers, the choices and custom-made chit-chat that had been, until now, unaffordable.  She wanted to sit in the chair and gossip and speculate all afternoon then drive home tipsy and take a long, rich nap.  “Let’s move on.  What about something a little more contemporary?”

“Do you want traditional contemporary, classic contemporary, or maybe something a little contra-temporary?”

Liza took another sip of wine.  “Oh, just whatever is in these days.  But I also want something that won’t look dated in five fucking years.”

“Well now, this color story would be perfect for a secondary living room or den…Something a little crisper, a little more flair.  You could do homey up front for when family comes over and have this be for your getaway spot for close friends on a late night.  Do you have a room like that?”

“Well, I’m not sure, really.”

“Still trying to decide how to use all the rooms?”

“Gillian, there are no rooms yet.  This is sort of a reconnaissance mission.”

The decorator clicked her tongue like a timer.  “Liza I know you and all, but I really don’t pay the bills with look-sees.”

“No, no, no.  Don’t think of me that way.  I wouldn’t insult you like that.  Paul and I are going to buy a house together.”

“Oh my god, Eliza Rosenstein.  Are you finally engaged?”

“Something like that.  We think it’s time.”

“Didn’t you try the whole cohabitation thing a few years ago?”

“Well, that was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before a lot of things.  Family things.  Look, you’ll get to do the whole house, whichever one we pick.  I want it to look good enough for a magazine.  We haven’t set a date or anything, but it’ll be within a year.  I just couldn’t help myself, though.  I had to come and start getting some ideas.”

Gillian leaned in over crossed arms and whispered, “Do you want to smoke?”

“Oh, I haven’t in ten years.”

“Just come outside with me.  They’re cloves anyway.”

Out on the sidewalk of Carondelet Street, the two women held their cigarettes away from them.  The smoke went nowhere in the heavy air and they constantly waved at it with flicky hands.

“There is a man,” Gillian said.

“Okay.”

“There is a man I want you to see.”

“He’s a Discretionary Consultant.”

“A what?”

“You know, a Discretionary Consultant.”

“I have lawyers, Gillian.”

“No, no.  He’s more like a private detective.”

“Ahh.”

“What he specializes in is this transition period you’re about to go through.”

“I’m confused again.”

“I’ll stop trying to be euphemistic.  He’s a vetter of fiancés.”

“A vetter?”

“He vets people.”

“Like a politician?”

“Something like that.  Look, you’re a smart woman.  And you’ve been with Paul for, what, seven—”

“Ten.”

“Ten years.  So you may think you know him.  But men are hunters of variety, and you need to know what you’re sliding into bed with before you end up staying up restless and worried.  Or, as my mother put it, ‘There are seven vices and nine muses.  And 16 to 1—no matter how thoroughly bred the horse—is a longshot.’”

“Paul would never.  He’s as conservative as they come.”

“This man has a science.  It’s not like he’s just going to follow Paul around Big Sleep style.  There’s a method.”

“Maybe I just need the method.”

“It’s all about outside observation, Liza.  You’re fifty and that makes the plunge you’re about to take that much more delicate.”

“Did you use this man on David?”

“Of course.  And when I say he was discretionary, I mean it.  And I haven’t had nearly as much trouble as with my first husband.”

Liza bit her bottom lip and flicked her cigarette into the street.  “How much?  Is this like an hourly rate kind of thing?”

“Sister, if you’re going to start spending Hinckley money, you’re going to have to learn to say…”

“’It cost what it costs.’”

“Attagirl.  I’ll get you his number from the rolodex and another four ounces from the fridge.”

*          *          *          *

Paul lifted the box of artifacts out of his trunk then slung his father’s golf bag over his shoulder and hauled them up the front steps of his old family home on St. Charles Avenue.  Midday traffic exhaled loudly as it went by accompanied by the chung-chung-chung of a streetcar taking off from a stop.  The front door was open to let a large expandable hose escape out into the side of a steam cleaner’s van parked in the drive.  Industrial noise filled the entire first floor of the house.  The cleaning crew worked brusquely on the carpets, a team of maids were assisting Miz Florence, the old, dedicated housekeeper dust and polish the furniture, and a florist and his assistant ran relays with enormous arrangements.  Paul barely acknowledged any of them and walked up the wide staircase to the second floor.

The house, transferred to his father in lieu of payment in 1952 by the disreputable runt of a family who had never quite figured out how to make enough New Money to replace all the Old he was emptying out of his family’s accounts, was, as his father said often, “built like a headstrong, big busted broad and aged just like one, too.”  Inside, the rooms had fourteen-foot ceilings and hardwood floors older than radio.  Paul walked down the hallway enjoying the intense, cedary scent of his childhood home that hadn’t yet been swept away or overpowered with professional sprays.  His left leg came down purposefully on an old plank that had been threatening to snap for thirty years and produced a predictable creak.  He placed the clubs in a closet off of the hallway then continued down to the far end.  He turned the cut glass doorknob that led into his father’s study, placed the box on the wide desk, and began to unpack it.

The room was fortified with floor-to-ceiling bookcases crammed with hundreds of legal tomes that were there mainly to take up the space and act as soundproofing instead of research.  All of the books actively read by James Hinckley could be found in one small section an arm’s length from the desk chair: eighteen different biographies of Robert E. Lee, a near-complete collection of a parish-by-parish travelogue commissioned by the Louisiana division of the WPA in the 1930s (only St John the Baptist remained unacquired), seven years’ worth of Battlefield Cartography Journal his father had had bound by annum, and a handful of books from James Thurber’s heyday.  Catty-corner to the main desk was a smaller one that was nevertheless more often employed.  A fly-tying kit was bolted to this piece with a large magnifying glass floating over it attached to a jointed arm.  Spools of colored thread hung on rows of dowels, tiny baggies filled with feathers and beads lay in piles, and tiny nickel hooks jangled in a drawer.  The dozens of finished flies his father had completed rested in tiny plastic cases in a bank of cubbyholes still waiting to be taken on a tour of the nation’s rivers.

This little hobby was the room’s true purpose, a fly factory posing as a grand library.  Paul thought about all the time spent at the cozy little workspace, hours of detailed fingerwork, small movements winding and hooking thread in silent preparation for a momentous week of meditation.  The flies would never hit the water now, never slowly pull against the current led by his father’s line, never tempt a trout out of any clear stream.  Paul wondered at that imbalance, the buildup of Saturday afternoons and late night hours, displaced time that never found its equilibrium.  Did it dissipate or did it flood into some other temporal zone, a ghost energy enhancing some stranger’s life halfway around the globe?  Who reaps when the sower is gone?

He felt a sudden unease, realizing the intangible wealth of unfulfilled plans that cannot be bequeathed.  It simply wasn’t fair.

Paul carried his pathos down the hall to his old bedroom.  He’d long ago emptied it of everything that didn’t bear some emblem of boyhood.  The five-drawer dresser covered with the stickers of sports teams, the old thread-loose bedspread, one of the first plastic 45 record players, magic-markered with his initials on the front panel.  Looped over one of the bedposts was a St. Michael pendant on a beaded chain, a token his mother had given him to wish on.  He’d never carried it into adulthood, but now he took it and put spooled it into his front chest pocket.  It seemed to be something that someone in his unenviable position should do.  Paul surveyed the miniature furniture standing bare in a room a little bigger than the bedroom he had now on Harmony Street.  They seemed to stand in corresponding scale to all his memories of the sixties compared to their real-life settings.  He could barely remember the death of a president and the boyhood fairy-tale feelings that came with it, and the menace of the Viet Cong always fell subservient in childhood warfare, even after the last troops had been pulled from Saigon.  Audrey Hepburn was a face on a poster, never appreciated until after puberty in revival matinees on the hot Sunday afternoons of the seventies.  For Paul, the boy, the sixties were blueberry snowballs, upturned prams in the greenery of City Park, and choking bowties worn to the endless adult fetes that seemed to trade in hours for ambiguous blocks of eternity.  Mass in the morning, strangers’ backyards dressed in crepe and lace in the afternoon, tugging on the tropical wool of daddy’s slacks when the sun slipped down the other side of the roof.  There was the fixed date of baseball’s opening day versus the shifting occurrences of Mardi Gras and Easter.  War was over there, something immutable but still not accepted through customs.  New Orleans had just become connected via interstate, but still sat like a crowded house on thousands of empty acres, separated by marsh, forest, and river miles from the nearest social engagement of any importance.  Until turning eighteen and all the inrushing bicentennial fever of 1976, the world was only as big as the blocks he knew by heart and the few landmarks he could recognize along familiar routes downtown.  If necessary, if stranded alone one afternoon, the boy Paul could walk across the entire world, following its longitude and latitude by the tiled street names embedded in the concrete at each corner.

He could feel someone poking their head through the doorway.

He turned.  “Hello?”

“Oh, hello, Mr. Paul.”  His old housekeeper stood diminutively dressed in sweatpants.  Her old breasts poked out at gut level underneath a hot pink t-shirt, and her head was wrapped in a black and gold handkerchief.

“Miss Florence.  How are you holding up?”

“Old bones, old bones.  Came to dust the room.”

“I’ll get out of your way then.”

“Sore to hear about ya daddy.”

“I know, I know.  But who knows.  One of us might be moving back into the house.”

“Who’s dat then?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  But, yeah.  Fill this place up again, huh?”

“Sure, sure.”

“How much longer do they have down there?  Those crews?”

“They been here since before I got here.  They fillin’ up the hours with work supposedly.  Though I can’t say I seen as much as there should’ve been done.”

“I’ll let you get to this room.  Just so you know, I’ll be down in the den.”

“Okay.”

“In case anyone calls.”

“You go on then.”

“Thank you, Florence.”

“You go on and get your grieving done.”

“Actually, I need to look for a few videos.”

“You go on then.”

Downstairs Paul closed the sliding doors of the den behind him.  The room had one easily covered window in it, and the shades were down, covering all the surfaces with a late-afternoon, rusty glow.  The pilling fabric of the upholstery still smelled like it had for decades, and the lacquered cupboard that held the television still felt waxy and over-polished under Paul’s fingertips.  From a shelf he found the video cassettes he was looking for, thickly stuffed into their paper sleeves.  He slid out the tape of Johnny Carson’s Greatest Moments, Vol.2, and pushed it into the old Magnavox VCR.  He settled onto the loveseat that lay perpendicular to the TV set, slid off his loafers, and laid so that the backs of his knees settled over the arms of the couch.  The two remotes he needed were placed neatly on the coffee table.  He read through the FBI warning twice without using the fast-forward button, then unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves while the familiar theme music began to play.

Just when he was settled and the first clip started, Paul felt thirsty.  He stood roughly, backed towards the sidebar facing the television, chuckling at Carson and Dean Martin, and laid his hands on a decanter.  He returned to his original position with a tumbler filled nearly to the rim with scotch and two ice cubes bumping like poorly moored boats.  He’d had three before the tape ran out, and during Volume 3, he just brought the ice can and decanter over with him and set them on the floor next to the couch.  The afternoon elapsed.  Paul could physically feel the withdrawal of the cleaning crews and hear the silence they left drifting down like a heavy gas.  He was alone in the house now, one man mentally occupying twenty-five rooms.  On the TV, Carson played fierce, he played humble, he handed the baton and let the toothy, tan creatures run with it, hi-hat and handclap.  Eventually Paul’s eyes began to close and open every five minutes in drowsy enchantment, catching glimpses of stars playing musical chairs and switching places, half-hearing jokes begun but finishing their memorized punch lines in his unconscious, and Carson through it all incrementally aging.  The skin broke apart around the eyes, his handshake loosened, his ties got wider then narrower, and the cameras modernized and the music hastened and Tonight became Tonight became Tonight until the videotape hit its limit, clicked, stopped, and rewound itself.