Liza sipped a glass of chilled chardonnay.\u00a0 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\u2019d had at brunch.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m afraid to touch any of these,\u201d she said.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ll leave sweat stripes on them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Each book had a dozen or so pink post-its marking pages already passed and put in the running by Liza.\u00a0 Gillian, who was a trim, bold brunette the same age as Liza and ran the interior decorating firm Nouvelle<\/em> 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.\u00a0 \u201cNo, no, don\u2019t worry.\u00a0 See here, these could go over the valences you already picked out as a contrasting, nice accent.\u00a0 Or we could even make it up as a drape for a side table.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happened to this one?\u201d\u00a0 Liza tapped a square outline of glue where a swatch had been.<\/p>\n Gillian leaned in and whispered, \u201cOstensibly it\u2019s supposed to be \u2018out of stock\u2019, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd you did that?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor a fee.\u201d<\/p>\n Liza\u2019s face brightened. \u201cHow much?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt cost what it costs.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, shit, Gillian, don\u2019t you remember when you\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cStop right there.\u00a0 You only say, \u2018Don\u2019t you remember when\u2019 as a prelude to some sweet little sentiment of blackmail.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTell me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s just say Mister<\/em> Babineaux stopped flirting with me after he found out.\u201d<\/p>\n Liza laughed.\u00a0 She loved it all: the millions of patterns, textures, and layers, the choices and custom-made chit-chat that had been, until now, unaffordable.\u00a0 She wanted to sit in the chair and gossip and speculate all afternoon then drive home tipsy and take a long, rich nap.\u00a0 \u201cLet\u2019s move on.\u00a0 What about something a little more contemporary?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo you want traditional contemporary, classic contemporary, or maybe something a little contra-temporary?\u201d<\/p>\n Liza took another sip of wine.\u00a0 \u201cOh, just whatever is in these days.\u00a0 But I also want something that won\u2019t look dated in five fucking years.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell now, this color story would be perfect for a secondary living room or den\u2026Something a little crisper, a little more flair.\u00a0 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. \u00a0Do you have a room like that?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I\u2019m not sure, really.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cStill trying to decide how to use all the rooms?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGillian, there are no rooms yet.\u00a0 This is sort of a reconnaissance mission.\u201d<\/p>\n The decorator clicked her tongue like a timer.\u00a0 \u201cLiza I know<\/em> you and all, but I really don\u2019t pay the bills with look-sees.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, no, no.\u00a0 Don\u2019t think of me that way.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t insult you like that.\u00a0 Paul and I are going to buy a house together.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh my god, Eliza Rosenstein.\u00a0 Are you finally engaged?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSomething like that.\u00a0 We think it\u2019s time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDidn\u2019t you try the whole cohabitation thing a few years ago?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, that was before.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBefore what?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBefore a lot of things.\u00a0 Family things.\u00a0 Look, you\u2019ll get to do the whole house, whichever one we pick.\u00a0 I want it to look good enough for a magazine.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t set a date or anything, but it\u2019ll be within a year.\u00a0 I just couldn\u2019t help myself, though.\u00a0 I had to come and start getting some ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n Gillian leaned in over crossed arms and whispered, \u201cDo you want to smoke?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, I haven\u2019t in ten years.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJust come outside with me.\u00a0 They\u2019re cloves anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n Out on the sidewalk of Carondelet Street, the two women held their cigarettes away from them.\u00a0 The smoke went nowhere in the heavy air and they constantly waved at it with flicky hands.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a man,\u201d Gillian said.<\/p>\n \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a man I want you to see.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s a Discretionary Consultant.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA what?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, a Discretionary Consultant.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI have lawyers, Gillian.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, no.\u00a0 He\u2019s more like a private detective.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAhh.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat he specializes in is this transition period you\u2019re about to go through.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m confused again.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll stop trying to be euphemistic.\u00a0 He\u2019s a vetter of fianc\u00e9s.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA vetter?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe vets people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLike a politician?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSomething like that.\u00a0 Look, you\u2019re a smart woman.\u00a0 And you\u2019ve been with Paul for, what, seven\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTen.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTen years.\u00a0 So you may think you know him.\u00a0 But men are hunters of variety, and you need to know what you\u2019re sliding into bed with before you end up staying up restless and worried.\u00a0 Or, as my mother put it, \u2018There are seven vices and nine muses.\u00a0 And 16 to 1\u2014no matter how thoroughly bred the horse\u2014is a longshot.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPaul would never.\u00a0 He\u2019s as conservative as they come.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis man has a science.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like he\u2019s just going to follow Paul around Big Sleep style.\u00a0 There\u2019s a method.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe I just need the method.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all about outside observation, Liza.\u00a0 You\u2019re fifty and that makes the plunge you\u2019re about to take that much more delicate.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDid you use this man on David?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOf course.\u00a0 And when I say he was discretionary, I mean it.\u00a0 And I haven\u2019t had nearly as much trouble as with my first husband.\u201d<\/p>\n Liza bit her bottom lip and flicked her cigarette into the street.\u00a0 \u201cHow much?\u00a0 Is this like an hourly rate kind of thing?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSister, if you\u2019re going to start spending Hinckley money, you\u2019re going to have to learn to say\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c\u2019It cost what it costs.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAttagirl.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get you his number from the rolodex and another four ounces from the fridge.\u201d<\/p>\n *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n Paul lifted the box of artifacts out of his trunk then slung his father\u2019s golf bag over his shoulder and hauled them up the front steps of his old family home on St. Charles Avenue.\u00a0 Midday traffic exhaled loudly as it went by accompanied by the chung-chung-chung<\/em> of a streetcar taking off from a stop.\u00a0 The front door was open to let a large expandable hose escape out into the side of a steam cleaner\u2019s van parked in the drive.\u00a0 Industrial noise filled the entire first floor of the house.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Paul barely acknowledged any of them and walked up the wide staircase to the second floor.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s accounts, was, as his father said often, \u201cbuilt like a headstrong, big busted broad and aged just like one, too.\u201d\u00a0 Inside, the rooms had fourteen-foot ceilings and hardwood floors older than radio.\u00a0 Paul walked down the hallway enjoying the intense, cedary scent of his childhood home that hadn\u2019t yet been swept away or overpowered with professional sprays.\u00a0 His left leg came down purposefully on an old plank that had been threatening to snap for thirty years and produced a predictable creak.\u00a0 He placed the clubs in a closet off of the hallway then continued down to the far end.\u00a0 He turned the cut glass doorknob that led into his father\u2019s study, placed the box on the wide desk, and began to unpack it.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 All of the books actively read by James Hinckley could be found in one small section an arm\u2019s 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\u2019 worth of Battlefield Cartography Journal<\/em> his father had had bound by annum, and a handful of books from James Thurber\u2019s heyday.\u00a0 Catty-corner to the main desk was a smaller one that was nevertheless more often employed.\u00a0 A fly-tying kit was bolted to this piece with a large magnifying glass floating over it attached to a jointed arm.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s rivers.<\/p>\n This little hobby was the room\u2019s true purpose, a fly factory posing as a grand library.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The flies would never hit the water now, never slowly pull against the current led by his father\u2019s line, never tempt a trout out of any clear stream.\u00a0 Paul wondered at that imbalance, the buildup of Saturday afternoons and late night hours, displaced time that never found its equilibrium.\u00a0 Did it dissipate or did it flood into some other temporal zone, a ghost energy enhancing some stranger\u2019s life halfway around the globe?\u00a0 Who reaps when the sower is gone?<\/p>\n He felt a sudden unease, realizing the intangible wealth of unfulfilled plans that cannot be bequeathed.\u00a0 It simply wasn\u2019t fair.<\/p>\n Paul carried his pathos down the hall to his old bedroom.\u00a0 He\u2019d long ago emptied it of everything that didn\u2019t bear some emblem of boyhood.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He\u2019d never carried it into adulthood, but now he took it and put spooled it into his front chest pocket.\u00a0 It seemed to be something that someone in his unenviable position should do.\u00a0 Paul surveyed the miniature furniture standing bare in a room a little bigger than the bedroom he had now on Harmony Street.\u00a0 They seemed to stand in corresponding scale to all his memories of the sixties compared to their real-life settings.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Audrey Hepburn was a face on a poster, never appreciated until after puberty in revival matinees on the hot Sunday afternoons of the seventies.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Mass in the morning, strangers\u2019 backyards dressed in crepe and lace in the afternoon, tugging on the tropical wool of daddy\u2019s slacks when the sun slipped down the other side of the roof.\u00a0 There was the fixed date of baseball\u2019s opening day versus the shifting occurrences of Mardi Gras and Easter.\u00a0 War was over there<\/em>, something immutable but still not accepted through customs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n He could feel someone poking their head through the doorway.<\/p>\n He turned.\u00a0 \u201cHello?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, hello, Mr. Paul.\u201d\u00a0 His old housekeeper stood diminutively dressed in sweatpants.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMiss Florence.\u00a0 How are you holding up?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOld bones, old bones.\u00a0 Came to dust the room.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll get out of your way then.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSore to hear about ya daddy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI know, I know.\u00a0 But who knows.\u00a0 One of us might be moving back into the house.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho\u2019s dat then?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 But, yeah.\u00a0 Fill this place up again, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSure, sure.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow much longer do they have down there?\u00a0 Those crews?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey been here since before I got here.\u00a0 They fillin\u2019 up the hours with work supposedly.\u00a0 Though I can\u2019t say I seen as much as there should\u2019ve been done.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll let you get to this room.\u00a0 Just so you know, I\u2019ll be down in the den.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn case anyone calls.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou go on then.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThank you, Florence.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou go on and get your grieving done.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cActually, I need to look for a few videos.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou go on then.\u201d<\/p>\n Downstairs Paul closed the sliding doors of the den behind him.\u00a0 The room had one easily covered window in it, and the shades were down, covering all the surfaces with a late-afternoon, rusty glow.\u00a0 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\u2019s fingertips.\u00a0 From a shelf he found the video cassettes he was looking for, thickly stuffed into their paper sleeves.\u00a0 He slid out the tape of Johnny Carson\u2019s Greatest Moments, Vol.2<\/em>, and pushed it into the old Magnavox VCR.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The two remotes he needed were placed neatly on the coffee table.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Just when he was settled and the first clip started, Paul felt thirsty.\u00a0 He stood roughly, backed towards the sidebar facing the television, chuckling at Carson and Dean Martin, and laid his hands on a decanter.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He\u2019d had three before the tape ran out, and during Volume 3<\/em>, he just brought the ice can and decanter over with him and set them on the floor next to the couch.\u00a0 The afternoon elapsed.\u00a0 Paul could physically feel the withdrawal of the cleaning crews and hear the silence they left drifting down like a heavy gas.\u00a0 He was alone in the house now, one man mentally occupying twenty-five rooms.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Eventually Paul\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Liza sipped a glass of chilled chardonnay.\u00a0 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\u2019d had at brunch. \u201cI\u2019m afraid to touch any …<\/p>\n