Music For Chameleons Page 17

  But I didn’t hear from her again—at least, not personally. My wife phoned a few hours later; I’d say it was about three in the afternoon. She said: “Darling, please come home as soon as you can,” and her voice was so calm that I knew she was in extreme distress; I even half-knew why, although I acted surprised when she told me: “There are two policemen here. One from Larchmont and one from the village. They want to talk to you. They won’t tell me why.”

  I didn’t bother with the train. I hired a limousine. One of those limousines with a bar installed. It’s not much of a drive, just over an hour, but I managed to knock down quite a few Silver Bullets. It didn’t help much; I was really scared.

  TC: Why, for Christ’s sake? What had you done? Play Mr. Good Guy, Mr. Pen Pal.

  GEORGE: If only it were that neat. That tidy. Anyway, when I got home the cops were sitting in the living room watching television. My wife was serving them coffee. When she offered to leave the room, I said no, I want you to stay and hear this, whatever it is. Both the cops were very young and embarrassed. After all, I was a rich man, a prominent citizen, a churchgoer, the father of five children. I wasn’t frightened of them. It was Gertrude.

  The Larchmont cop outlined the situation. His office had received a complaint from a Mr. and Mrs. Henry Wilson that their twelve-year-old daughter, Linda Reilly, had been receiving letters of a “suspicious nature” from a fifty-two-year-old man, namely, me, and the Wilsons intended to bring charges if I couldn’t explain myself satisfactorily.

  I laughed. Oh, I was just as jovial as Santa Claus. I told the whole story. About finding the bottle. Said I’d only answered it because I liked chocolate fudge. I had them grinning, apologizing, shuffling their big feet, and saying well, you know how parents get nutty ideas nowadays. The only one not taking it all as a dumb joke was Gertrude. In fact, without my realizing it, she’d left the room before I’d finished talking.

  After the cops left, I knew where I’d find her. In that room, the one where she does her painting. It was dark and she was sitting there in a straight-back chair staring out at the darkness. She said: “The picture in your wallet. That was the girl.” I denied it, and she said: “Please, George. You don’t have to lie. You’ll never have to lie again.”

  And she slept in that room that night, and every night ever since. Keeps herself locked in there painting boats. A boat.

  TC: Perhaps you did behave a bit recklessly. But I can’t see why she should be so unforgiving.

  GEORGE: I’ll tell you why. That wasn’t our first visit from the police.

  Seven years ago we had a sudden heavy snowstorm. I was driving my car, and even though I wasn’t far from home, I lost my way several times. I asked directions from a number of people. One was a child, a young girl. A few days later the police came to the house. I wasn’t there, but they talked to Gertrude. They told her that during the recent snowstorm a man answering my description and driving a Buick with my license plate had got out of his car and exposed himself to a young girl. Spoken lewdly to her. The girl said she had copied down the license number in the snow under a tree, and when the storm had stopped, it was still decipherable. There was no denying that it was my license number, but the story was untrue. I convinced Gertrude, and I convinced the police, that the girl was either lying or that she had made a mistake concerning the number.

  But now the police have come a second time. About another young girl.

  And so my wife stays in her room. Painting. Because she doesn’t believe me. She believes that the girl who wrote the number in the snow told the truth. I’m innocent. Before God, on the heads of my children, I am innocent. But my wife locks her door and looks out the window. She doesn’t believe me. Do you?

  (George removed his dark glasses and polished them with a napkin. Now I understood why he wore them. It wasn’t because of the yellowed whites engraved with swollen red veins. It was because his eyes were like a pair of shattered prisms. I have never seen pain, a suffering, so permanently implanted, as if the slip of a surgeon’s knife had left him forever disfigured. It was unbearable, and as he stared at me my own eyes flinched away.)

  Do you believe me?

  TC (reaching across the table and taking his hand, holding it for dear life): Of course, George. Of course I believe you.

  III

  Hidden Gardens

  SCENE: JACKSON SQUARE, NAMED after Andrew Jackson—a three-hundred-year-old oasis complacently centered inside New Orleans’ old quarter: a moderate-sized park dominated by the grey towers of St. Louis Cathedral, and the oldest, in some ways most somberly elegant, apartment houses in America, the Pontalba Buildings.

  Time: 26 March 1979, an exuberant spring day, Bougainvillaea descends, azaleas thrust, hawkers hawk (peanuts, roses, horse-drawn carriage rides, fried shrimp in paper scoops), the horns of drifting ships hoot on the closeby Mississippi, and happy balloons, attached to giggling skipping children, bounce high in the blue silvery air.

  “WELL, I DO DECLARE, A boy sure do get around”—as my Uncle Bud, who was a traveling salesman when he could pry himself away from his porch swing and gin fizzes long enough to travel, used to complain. Yes, indeed, a boy sure do get around; in just the last several months I’ve been in Denver, Cheyenne, Butte, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, Toronto, Washington, Miami. But if somebody asked, I’d probably say, and really think: Why, I haven’t been anywhere, I’ve just been in New York all winter.

  Still, a boy do get around. And now here I am back in New Orleans, my birthplace, my old hometown. Sunning myself on a park bench in Jackson Square, always, since schoolboy days, a favorite place to stretch my legs and look and listen, to yawn and scratch and dream and talk to myself. Maybe you’re one of those people who never talk to themselves. Aloud, I mean. Maybe you think only crazies do that. Personally, I consider it’s a healthy thing. To keep yourself company that way: nobody to argue back, free to rant along, getting a lot of stuff out of your system.

  For instance, take those Pontalba Buildings over there. Pretty fancy places, with their grillwork façades and tall dark French-shuttered windows. The first apartment houses ever built in the U.S.A.; relatives of the original occupants of those high airy aristocratic rooms are still living in them. For a long time I had a grudge against the Pontalba. Here’s why. Once, when I was nineteen or so, I had an apartment a few blocks away on Royal Street, an insignificant, decrepit, roach-heaven apartment that erupted into earthquake shivers every time a streetcar clickety-clacked by on the narrow street outside. It was unheated; in the winter one dreaded getting out of bed, and during the swampy summers it was like swimming inside a bowl of tepid consommé. My constant fantasy was that one excellent day I would move out of that dump and into the celestial confines of the Pontalba. But even if I had been able to afford it, it could never have happened. The usual way of acquiring a place there is if a tenant dies and wills it to you; or, if an apartment should become vacant, generally it is the custom of the city of New Orleans to offer it to a distinguished local citizen for a very nominal fee.

  A lot of fey folk have strolled about this square. Pirates. Lafitte himself. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Huey Long. Or, moseying under the shade of a scarlet parasol, the Countess Willie Piazza, the proprietress of one of the ritzier maisons de plaisir in the red-light neighborhood: her house was famous for an exotic refreshment it offered—fresh cherries boiled in cream sweetened with absinthe and served stuffed inside the vagina of a reclining quadroon beauty. Or another lady, so unlike the Countess Willie: Annie Christmas, a female keelboat operator who was seven feet tall and was often observed toting a hundred-pound barrel of flour under either arm. And Jim Bowie. And Mr. Neddie Flanders, a dapper gentleman in his eighties, maybe nineties, who, until recent years, appeared in the square each evening, and accompanying himself on a harmonica, tap-danced from midnight until dawn in the most delicate, limber-puppet way. The characters. I could list hundreds.

  Uh-oh. What’s this
I hear across the way? Trouble. A ruckus. A man and a woman, both black: the man is heavyset, bull-necked, smartly coiffed but withal weak-mannered; she is thin, lemon-colored, shrill, but almost pretty.

  HER: Sombitch. What you mean—hold out bread?! I ain’t hold out no bread. Sombitch.

  HIM: Hush, woman. I seen you. I counted. Three guys. Makes sixty bucks. You onna gimme thirty.

  HER: Damn you, nigger. I oughta take a razor on your ear. I oughta cut out your liver and feed the cats. I oughta fry your eyes in turpentine. Listen, nigger. Let me hear you call me a liar again.

  HIM (placating): Sugar—

  HER: Sugar. I’ll sugar you.

  HIM: Miss Myrtle, now I knows what I seen.

  HER (slowly: a serpentine drawl): Bastard. Nigger bastard. Fact is, you never had no mother. You was born out of a dog’s ass.

  (She slaps him. Hard. Turns and walks off, head high. He doesn’t follow, but stands with a hand rubbing his cheek.)

  FOR A WHILE I WATCH the prancing spring-spry balloon children and see them greedily gather around a pushcart salesman selling a concoction known as Sweetmouth: scoops of flaked ice flavored with a rainbow-variety of colored syrups. Suddenly I recognize that I am hungry, too, and thirsty. I consider walking over to the French Market and filling up on deep-fried doughnuts and that bitter delicious chicory-flavored coffee peculiar to New Orleans. It’s better than anything on the menu at Antoine’s—which, by the way, is a lousy restaurant. So are most of the city’s famous eateries. Gallatoire’s isn’t bad, but it’s too crowded; they don’t accept reservations, you always have to wait in long lines, and it’s not worth it, at least not to me. Just as I’ve decided to amble off to the Market, an interruption occurs.

  Now, if there is one thing I hate, it’s people who sneak up behind you and say—

  VOICE (whiskey-husky, virile, but female): Two guesses. (Silence) Come on, Jockey. You know it’s me. (Silence; then, removing her blindfolding hands, somewhat petulantly) Jockey, you mean you didn’t know it was me? Junebug?

  TC: As I breathe—Big Junebug Johnson! Comment ça va?

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON (giggling with merriment): Oh, don’t let me commence. Stand up, boy. Give old Junebug a hug. My, you’re skinny. Like the first time I saw you. How much you weigh, Jockey?

  TC: One twenty-five. Twenty-six.

  (It is difficult to get my arms around her, for she weighs double that; more. I’ve known her going on forty years—ever since I lived alone at the gloomy Royal Street address and used to frequent a raucous waterfront bar she owned, and still does. If she had pink eyes, one might call her an albino, for her skin is white as calla lilies; so is her curly, skimpy hair. [Once she told me her hair had turned white overnight, before she was sixteen; and when I said “Overnight?” she said: “It was the roller-coaster ride and Ed Jenkins’ peter. The two things coming so close together. See, one night I was riding on a roller-coaster out at the lake, and we were in the last car. Well, it came uncoupled, the car ran wild, we damn near fell off the track, and the next morning my hair had grey freckles. About a week later I had this experience with Ed Jenkins, a kid I knew. One of my girl friends told me that her brother had told her Ed Jenkins had the biggest peter anybody ever saw. He was nice-looking, but a scrawny fellow, not much taller than you, and I didn’t believe it, so one day, joking him, I said, ‘Ed Jenkins, I hear you have one helluva peter,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll show you,’ and he did, and I screamed; he said, ‘And now I’m gonna put it in you,’ and I said, ‘Oh no you ain’t!’—it was big as a baby’s arm holding an apple. Lord’s mercy! But he did. Put it in me. After a terrific tussle. And I was a virgin. Just about. Kind of. So you can imagine. Well, it wasn’t long after that my hair went white like a witch.”]

  B.J.J. dresses stevedore-style: overalls, men’s blue shirts rolled up to the elbow, ankle-high lace-up workman’s boots, and no makeup to relieve her pallor. But she is womanly, a dignified figure for all her down-to-earth ways. And she wears expensive perfumes, Parisian smells bought at the Maison Blanche on Canal Street. Also, she has a glorious gold-toothed smile; it’s like a heartening sunburst after a cold rainfall. You’d probably like her; most people do. Those who don’t are mainly the proprietors of rival waterfront bars, for Big Junebug’s is a popular hangout, if little known beyond the waterfront and that area’s denizens. It contains three rooms—the big barroom itself with its mammoth zinc-topped bar, a second chamber furnished with three busy pool tables, and an alcove with a jukebox for dancing. It’s open right around the clock, and is as crowded at dawn as it is at twilight. Of course, sailors and dockworkers go there, and the truck farmers who bring their produce to the French Market from outlying parishes, cops and firemen and hard-eyed gamblers and harder-eyed floozies, and around sunrise the place overflows with entertainers from the Bourbon Street tourist traps. Topless dancers, strippers, drag queens, B-girls, waiters, bartenders, and the hoarse-voiced doormen-barkers who so stridently labor to lure yokels into vieux carré sucker dives.

  As for this “Jockey” business, it was a nickname I owed to Ginger Brennan. Forty-some years ago Ginger was the chief counterman at the old original all-night doughnuts-and-coffee café in the Market; that particular café is gone now, and Ginger was long ago killed by a bolt of lightning while fishing off a pier at Lake Pontchartrain. Anyway, one night I overheard another customer ask Ginger who the “little punk” was in the corner, and Ginger, who was a pathological liar, bless his heart, told him I was a professional jockey: “He’s pretty hot stuff out at the race track.” It was plausible enough; I was short and featherweight and could easily have posed as a jockey; as it happened, it was a fantasy I cottoned to: I liked the idea of people mistaking me for a wise-guy race-track character. I started reading Racing Form and learned the lingo. Word spread, and before you could say Boo! everybody was calling me “The Jockey” and soliciting tips on the horses.)

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: I lost weight myself. Maybe fifty pounds. Ever since I got married, I been losing weight. Most ladies, they get the ring, then start swelling up. But after I snagged Jim, I was so happy I stopped cleaning out my icebox. The blues, that’s what makes you fat.

  TC: Big Junebug Johnson married? Nobody wrote me that. I thought you were a devout bachelor.

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: Can’t a gal change her mind? Once I got over the Ed Jenkins incident, once I got that view out of my noggin, I was partial as the next lady for men. ’Course, that took years.

  TC: Jim? That’s his name?

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: Jim O’Reilly. Ain’t Irish, though. He comes from Plaquemine, and they’re mostly Cajun, his people. I don’t even know if that’s his right name. I don’t know a whole lot about him. He’s kind of quiet.

  TC: But some lover. To catch you.

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON (eyes rotating): Oh, honey, don’t let me commence.

  TC (laughs): That’s one of the things I remember best about you. No matter what anybody said, whether it was the weather or whatever, you always said: “Oh, honey, don’t let me commence.”

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: Well. That kind of covers it all, wouldn’t you say?

  (Something I ought to have mentioned: she has a Brooklyn accent. If this sounds odd, it’s not. Half the people in New Orleans don’t sound Southern at all; close your eyes, and you would imagine you were listening to a taxi driver from Bensonhurst, a phenomenon that supposedly stems from the speech patterns idiosyncratic to a sector of the city known as the Irish Channel, a quarter predominantly populated by the descendants of Emerald Isle immigrants.)

  TC: Just how long have you been Mrs. O’Reilly?

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: Three years next July. Actually, I didn’t have much choice. I was real confused. He’s a lot younger than me, maybe twenty years. And good-looking, my goodness. Catnip to the ladies. But he was plain crazy about me, followed my every footstep, every minute begging me to hitch up, said he’d jump off the levee if I didn’t. And presents every day. One time a pair of pearl e
arrings. Natural-born pearls: I bit them and they didn’t crack. And a whole litter of kittens. He didn’t know cats make me sneeze; make my eyes swell up, too. Everybody warned me he was only after my money. Why else would a cutie like him want an old hag like me? But that didn’t altogether figure cause he has a real good job with the Streckfus Steamship Company. But they said he was broke, and in a lot of trouble with Red Tibeaux and Ambrose Butterfield and all those gamblers. I asked him, and he said it was a lie, but it could’ve been true, there was a lot I didn’t know about him, and still don’t. All I do know is he never asked me for a dime. I was so confused. So I went to Augustine Genet. You recall Madame Genet? Who could read the spirits? I heard she was on her deathbed, so I rushed right over there, and sure enough she was sinking. A hundred if she was a day, and blind as a mole; couldn’t hardly whisper, but she told me: Marry that man, he’s a good man, and he’ll make you happy—marry him, promise me you will. So I promised. So that’s why I had no choice. I couldn’t ignore a promise made to a lady on her deathbed. And I’m soooo glad I didn’t. I am happy. I am a happy woman. Even if those cats do make me sneeze. And you, Jockey. You feel good about yourself?

  TC: So-so.

  BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: When was the last time you got to Mardi Gras?

  TC (reluctant to reply, not desiring to evoke Mardi Gras memories: they were not amusing events to me, the streets swirling with drunken, squalling, shrouded figures wearing bad-dream masks; I always had nightmares after childhood excursions into Mardi Gras melees): Not since I was a kid. I was always getting lost in the crowds. The last time I got lost they took me to the police station. I was crying there all night before my mother found me.