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  8

  Booze had never had much of a hold on Marshall. In his teens, he’d smoked a lot of dope. Everybody did. They had to, to get by. Or so they told themselves and each other. He’d never married or fathered a child. In his twenty-odd years as a partner in Stokes, Knight, and Marchand Restoration Architects, he had never taken more than a month or two of vacation all put together.

  But lately, he’d sensed a change touching as lightly as an autumn leaf drifting onto the sleeve of his coat, the fringe of a woman’s shawl brushing the back of his hand in a crowded restaurant.

  An awakening?

  Marshall pushed the thought aside. He had no patience with self-analysis. It was just that in recent months, after work, he’d stand beneath the wrought iron balcony that shaded his offices on Jackson Square and allow himself a couple of minutes and, in careful measured sips, he’d enjoy himself.

  He was enjoying himself now, though this would not be evident to even a careful observer. Standing perfectly still Marshall simply breathed. With the breathing came an unfolding, a blossoming which, either by choice or habit, he’d not experienced since he was a child. Perhaps not even then. Or maybe always then. This was how he imagined children feeling all the time: connected, plugged in, the world forming and reforming around them as they moved.

  His pulse rate slowed, and a feeling as near to peace as he ever knew ironed the years from his face. The sense of being one of Jackson Square ’s living statues settled over him.

  On the square’s southwest corner, where the horse carriages lay in wait for tourists, a silver man, shining from his cropped kinky hair to his tattered running shoes, was frozen in mid stride, an upturned, silver baseball cap by his side to collect coins and dollars. On the northwest corner, where St. Peter’s Street elbowed into Chartres, lace skirts cascading artfully down shallow, cement steps, was the golden lady-immobile, beneficent, the Good Witch of the East caught in amber. In front of St. Louis Cathedral, shouldering space between fortune-tellers, a lineman was caught halfway up a pole cleverly self-supported by a camouflaged, steel I beam.

  Then there was the Man in a Suit, hair white at the temples, dark blond, and thick where it fell over a heavily lined forehead, suit immaculate, leather briefcase in hand-Marshall Marchand, architect. Becoming one of Jackson Square ’s living statues suited him. At one with inanimate, yet living, things he indulged in a rare and delicious sense of belonging-to what, Marshall didn’t choose to pursue. The sense of connecting was enough.

  Maybe he had outlived the demons.

  Then again, maybe the demons were immortal.

  The thought jarred him from his fragile peace and, as his eyes cleared, he saw her.

  Framed by ornate arches of ironwork, she was seated on a bench, her head bowed over a book, the spine resting on her neatly trousered knee. Golden and clear as water, spring light poured through the blacksmith arms of a live oak, dripped green-gold off resurrection ferns to warm her cheek and fire the champagne-blonde hair across her forehead. Liquid luminescence curved around the swell of her breasts and set the left half of the book she was reading aglow. Form, function, color, light, and line came together flawlessly.

  An inrush of breath kick-started the Man in a Suit to life, heart lurching like the first turnings of a cold engine. Blood pumped noisily past his ears. All at once he was aware of the ten thousand sensations of a new-made being: the pressure of the soles of his feet against the concrete, the pull of the briefcase handle on his fingers, a cinnamon-sugar scent from a nearby bakery, faint skritching of scaled toes on brick as a pigeon strutted by, the balm of the sun’s warmth against the back of his hand.

  He stepped off the curb-off the edge of the known world-and moved toward her. His brother Danny could have stopped him-would have stopped him-but Danny wasn’t there. Watching himself, an awestruck spectator of his own destruction, he crossed the brick lane, drifted up the steps into the garden, and approached the bench where she sat.

  A moment passed. Then she looked up to see who had intruded upon her solitude. Her eyes were of moss and lichen, vines over old wood, slow streams in autumn, rich with tannin and fallen leaves.

  “Would you join me for tea?” he heard himself say in a level voice. “It’s a little past time, I know.” He spoke as if he’d been born in the century in which he worked every day-the eighteen hundreds when people had an elevated sense of the importance of human intercourse. It should have struck him as absurd, but it didn’t.

  In the cool, running depths of her eyes, thoughts flickered near the surface, then retreated again to the shadows. “My name is Polly,” she said with a smile and a lilting drawl that could put mint in juleps. “I am a woman of a certain age, divorced, and with two daughters, seven and nine; I am in the middle of a good book, so, if you’re a shallow fiddling kind of a fellah, I have no time for you.”

  “I’m not that kind of fellow,” Marshall said gravely.

  She laughed, and in his mind, the sound built playgrounds for children, church steeples for bells, and walls with clear, cold, cascading fountains.

  “In that case I would simply love to have a cup of tea with you.”

  9

  Polly told Marshall Marchand the story of her life-the G-rated version. With the sex and violence edited out, it was a charming fairytale: how a lost child of fifteen had come to Jackson Square, how a gypsy had foreseen a glittering future for her, and how that future had come to pass.

  Marshall was captivated as she’d meant him to be. She smiled and leaned in, her head tilted slightly, bangs brushing the thick, dark lashes. “Now tell me,” she said sweetly, “how is it that you have come to be a man old enough to have silver at his temples, hold a partnership in a well-regarded firm, and yet are not married?”

  Marshall started visibly.

  “You don’t beat around the bush do you?” He laughed and set his cup back in its saucer.

  “Well, I do,” Polly drawled, “but only when I have no interest regarding what is in that bush.” She was flirting; she could feel the magnetism between them as easily as she could see the sparkle of the candlelight on the wine. It had been a while since she enjoyed such a physical awareness of a man.

  “Am I to have no secrets?”

  “No, darlin’, not a one. If a man wants to keep secrets, he must never let a woman close. We are as curious cats with secrets. We simply cannot leave them alone.”

  He hid the shape of his mouth with his cup. For an unsettling moment, she couldn’t tell if he hid a smile or a grimace of fear.

  “No secrets,” he said, and the warmth of his voice reassured her she was not losing her touch. “Gad, why haven’t I ever married? I don’t think about it much. My work, maybe? I haven’t had a lot of time to find Ms. Right. I like my solitude. I live with my brother. Danny and I were orphaned as kids and have pretty much just each other for family.”

  He shook his head in confusion, and Polly almost believed he actually hadn’t given matrimony a good deal of thought. That, or he was making up the story as he went along and hadn’t decided how it was going to end. “Obviously, I’m not the introspective type.”

  “You live with your brother?”

  A smile deepened one corner of his well-cut lips. “We don’t exactly live together. We live in the same building: condos, one on top of the other. Separate beds and everything.”

  “And you never married?” She touched the back of his hand and whispered reassuringly, “First dates are for deciding if we wish to bother with a second.”

  “Fair enough. I never married. Now you know the worst: I’m an old maid. I didn’t have a date to the prom; never went steady with a cheer-leader. I almost got married once-can I get credit for that?”

  “All the credit in the world, my dear. I almost stayed married once so we are even.”

  “Why didn’t you? Stay married, I mean?”

  Polly eyed him narrowly. “Surely, you do not want to hear about all my husbands?” she said.

  “I though
t we were clearing the decks for our second date. How many were there?”

  Since he sounded more concerned than amused, Polly chose the truth: “I was married once. He was a kind man, but not a good man; and, in the end that comes to be an oxymoron, doesn’t it? One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good. We were married for fifteen months.”

  She picked up her tea and took a slow sip to let any unasked questions pass unanswered. In the brief time between the lowering of her eyes and the lifting of her cup, the last night of her brief marriage played through her mind:

  Ten o’clock, and Gracie was standing in her crib, holding onto the bars. Soon, she would be walking. Polly kissed her round face and marveled that such perfection could be built out of such mundane things as milk and pureed carrots.

  “It’s the love, sweetheart. That’s what makes babies grow big and strong,” she whispered. “Sleep tight.”

  Turning out the light, she left the nursery. On her way to bed, she stopped by the small room-a closet really-that Carver called his office. The only light was the glow of the computer screen. Over his shoulder, she could read the words on the screen. Transfixed, she watched, as he exchanged sexually explicit notes simultaneously with three different women, one via e-mail and two through instant messaging. Backing out quietly, Polly went to the bedroom they’d shared for over a year.

  She sat on top of the bedcovers in her pajamas and stared at the familiar walls. So little of Carver was represented. Had his clothes not hung in the closet, it would have been as if he’d never existed.

  The house was hers; she’d bought it the first year she’d been tenured by the college. The bed was a sleigh bed she had found secondhand and refurbished. Framed photographs she had taken of her favorite places in New Orleans hung to either side of an antique dresser she’d bought on Magazine Street. All of it was from her mind, or from her heart, or from her work.

  All of it was clean, and decent, and honestly come by. Sordidness was anathema to her. Lies and foul language, violence-the gods of her mother-nauseated her. To have Carver spinning webs of petty filth in the darkness ten feet from Gracie’s nursery gave her that same sense of sickness.

  The next morning, she asked him to leave and to give her a divorce. He had refused until she offered him thirty thousand dollars, all of her savings. Three weeks later, she found out she was pregnant with Emma and knew she had gotten everything she wanted from marriage.

  “The marriage ended, dear heart, because I did not love him,” Polly said truthfully. For a while they sat in comfortable silence, sipping their tea. Like a schoolgirl on a date, Polly laid her hand on the tablecloth and was thrilled when, after rearranging his spoon, Marshall ’s lingered near it.

  What Polly left unsaid was that, except for Emma and Gracie, she had never fallen in love with anyone. She enjoyed the company of men, but she didn’t fall in love. Like orgasm or the smell of lilacs, the sensation of falling could not be described, only experienced. She wondered if she were not sensing its first tingles.

  The sweet of the evening poured through the open windows on a gentle breeze. Lights in the square were coming on. The glow of the candles warmed Mr. Marchand’s liquid-brown eyes, until she felt she might immerse herself in them. Polly sensed she was being set up by some-possibly malevolent-spirit, the muse of Barbara Cartland or Danielle Steele.

  As an English professor and a lover of the classics, a part of her noted with interest how this frisson of emotions flowing through her with the subtlety of velvet-wrapped electricity informed the sonnets she had taught, the romances of Shakespeare and Molière. She reminded herself that the life she had built with her daughters was perfect and precious. A man would scatter dirty undershorts and oversized shoes throughout their orderly universe. The thought of Mr. Marchand’s undershorts sent a thrill through her, and she knew she was undoubtedly going to make a fool of herself in the not-too-distant future.

  Two teenagers in high-heeled mules, both on cell phones, clattered by the open window. One had the smallest Chihuahua Polly had ever seen. It was pure white, the ghost of dogness, and was being towed on a leash. The little creature stumbled on its two-inch legs, fell, then was dragged up again, as its oblivious mistress chattered on.

  “They buy them as accessories, like a purse or a scarf,” Marshall said disgustedly. “Miss,” he called through the window. “Miss.”

  The girl turned a blank look in their direction.

  “Your dog,” Marshall said to her. “Would it like a drink of water? The poor little guy looks pretty tired.”

  The girl shook her head and, still talking on the phone, picked the Chihuahua up and tucked it under her arm.

  Polly hadn’t been raised to respect life or practice kindness. When she’d escaped Prentiss, all she’d known was she hated cruelty. In the intervening years she’d been both cruel and kind and, like Sidney Poitier in A Patch of Blue, come to believe tolerance was the greatest human virtue.

  “You are a good man,” she said.

  “A virtual god to dogs,” Marshall mocked himself. “An old girlfriend of mine-the one I get credit for almost marrying-used to have a white Chihuahua, Tippity.” His lips closed tightly on the dog’s name as if he wished he’d never mentioned it.

  “Did it die?” Polly asked impulsively.

  For a minute, she didn’t think he was going to answer. Before the ease of their camaraderie could leak away, he began to speak. “I was renovating a shotgun near Magazine. The place was more or less just a shell. Danny and I had a falling out, and I was camping there. Occasionally, Elaine and her dog would stay over. One Friday Danny brought us a bottle of champagne as a peace offering. Our argument had been over Elaine. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, so much as he didn’t like the fact of her, if you know what I mean.”

  Polly hadn’t the foggiest idea what he meant, but she nodded. She hadn’t wanted to know this much about somebody else’s dog, but Marshall seemed to need to tell the story. Though she’d dragged it out of him, he now spoke as if he had to tell it beginning to end, all the words in the proper order.

  “So, anyway, the champagne. When we woke up in the morning Tippity was missing. Elaine flipped out; I flipped out. She finally went to work. To make a long story shorter, I found the dog in the freezer. Evidently, Elaine had gotten up during the night for ice cream, or whatever, and opened it. The freezer was the drawer kind at the bottom of the refrigerator, and Tippity had jumped in. When I got to her, she’d about run out of time.”

  “Time! Oh, my Lord!” Polly exclaimed. “The time! I forgot my children!” Caught up in Marshall, she had put all thought of Emma and Gracie from her mind. Maternal guilt had her reaching for purse and cell phone before she’d removed the napkin from her lap.

  Immediately, Marshall was out of his chair signaling the waitress.

  “It’s okay,” Polly said, as she held the phone to her ear. “I didn’t leave them wandering around the Ninth Ward or anything of the kind. A friend is watching them for me. But that dear friend is eighty years old and would probably like to go to bed soon.”

  “Let me walk you to your car,” Marshall said, as he threw enough money on the table to cover the bill and the tip twice over.

  Polly had been so absorbed by the company of a handsome man that she had forgotten the children. For a mother, that was terrible; for a woman, it was marvelous.

  10

  Idly, Red shuffled the oversized deck and watched Mr. Marchand talking with the blonde. She knew him-maybe better than anybody but his brother, Danny. Mr. Marchand was why she’d become the Woman in Red: to be near him. And to make a few bucks. Tarot reading on Jackson Square paid pretty well, or had until Katrina. Posthurricane, tourists didn’t seem as interested in getting their cards read. Maybe they figured if there was anything to it, of the thirty or so fortune-tellers on the square, at least one might have mentioned that the levees were going to break. Nobody’d seen it coming. Red hadn’t seen it coming. Th
ough, afterward, she did remember the cards had been running dark most of that August.

  Red knew the blonde, too. Not by name and not to talk to. But she knew her by sight. Blondie was a regular. Came about once a month. After getting her cards read, she’d sit in the park with a book, or sometimes just watch the people going by. This wasn’t the first time a man had come up to her, but this was the first time she’d ever given anybody the time of day.

  Jason had done the blonde’s reading today. With his phony English accent and swarthy pirate looks, he grabbed up a lot of the business. “Hey Jason,” she hissed across the space separating their setups. “What was in the cards for blondie tonight?”

  “Her name’s Polly. Pollyanna. Good name. Old-fashioned and sweet.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Anything interesting in the cards?”

  Jason cocked an eyebrow as thick and mobile as a caterpillar. Red believed in the tarot. Jason didn’t believe in anything. She wondered if he was going to rag her about it. He chose not to, and she was relieved.

  “Let’s see.” He fingered a chin so dark with stubble Red half-imagined she could hear the rasp of his fingernails being filed down. “I did the Celtic Cross. The Knight of Swords was in the sixth.”

  Daring, brave, handsome, unstable man, Mr. Marchand.

  “What else?”

  “I don’t memorize this crap,” Jason said amiably.

  “What else? Come on, don’t be an asshole.”