Walsh and Richard Garces were coming for dinner that night. I’d done most of it ahead, a cassoulet and flan, and Alouette was in charge of the rest. When I stepped through the door at seven-twenty I found them all sitting together in the living room. Richard had a glass of wine, Walsh a tumbler of bourbon, Alouette one of those prepackaged wine cooler things. No one got up, but three faces swiveled toward me.
“There goes the party,” Garces said.
“And the neighborhood.” Alouette.
“Buck seems to be stopping here.” Walsh.
“What would you like, Lewis?” Alouette again. I followed her out to the kitchen, pulled an Abita out of the fridge. The kitchen was warm and full of wonderful smells.
“Everything set?”
“Cassoulet’s heating, bread’s in the oven with it, salad’s made except for the dressing.”
“You’ve been watching reruns of Donna Reed.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Anything I can do?”
“Go sit down, drink your beer and talk to the guys. I’ll throw this stuff together.”
“You sure?”
“Shoo.”
It had felt good being in the kitchen again last night, preparing for this, and it felt good now sitting with friends, talking about nothing in particular, anticipating more of the same. I laid my head back, felt tensions go out of my body. My mind rippled with stray thoughts, then became still water.
“Had a call from a friend of yours today,” Walsh said. “Sergeant Travis up in Mississippi. Asked how things were going down here. And wanted me to tell you things are a lot duller there now that you’re gone.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” Garces said, “but I’ve asked Alouette to see Torch Song Trilogy with me this weekend; they’re doing it at the Marigny. It’s sold out-which means about twenty tickets-but I have friends in unimportant places. It’s Saturday night. That’s all right?”
“Sure. Do her good to get out. She’s become kind of monomaniacal about this whole thing.”
“She has to, for a while.”
“I know.”
“She seems to be doing well. I have a good feeling about it.”
Moments later, Alouette called us to table. We all went out to the kitchen to help her bring things in, forming a culinary chorus line on our way back through the open double door, me with cassoulet, Richard with salad and a huge basket of bread, Don with a tray of condiments and a pitcher of iced tea, Alouette with serving spoons, trivet and a pot of coffee.
The usual dinnertime conversation-politics, jokes, anecdotes, compliments-mixed with grunts of satisfaction and the clatter of silverware. The coffee disappeared fast, and before long I went out to the kitchen to make another pot. When I came back, Alouette was saying: “I can’t plan too much ahead. I mean, I want to, but I know I just can’t do that, that it doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right,” Richard said. “That’s part of what addiction’s all about. The personality type, anyway. You start setting up a scene in your head for how things should be, and before long you’ll look at what’s there and how far it is from what you envisioned, from your expectations-and fall into the gap.”
“‘I fear those big words that make us so unhappy,’” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“James Joyce.”
“We … fear … change,” Alouette said.
“Wayne’s World.” Garces. We were an allusive, cultured bunch.
Walsh asked about Treadwell then, and I filled him in.
“Your dean’s going to have his face rubbed in shit, any way you look at it, Lew. He ready for that?”
“Hard to say. At some level or another, he probably already knows. I think he wants me to be able to tell him everything’s all right. But I also think he knows that’s not going to happen.”
We sat around the table long after dinner and the second pot of coffee were finished. I’d put music on low, a Yazoo anthology of early jazz guitar including the Eddie Lang-Lonnie Johnson duets (for which Lang had used an assumed name, since black and white musicians didn’t record together in those days), and a recent CD by New Orleans banjoist Danny Barker.
Walsh bailed out, bleary-eyed, about eleven, Garces within the hour. In each case I threw my arms across the door and explained that they had to take cassoulet with them or would not be allowed to leave. As usual, the cassoulet had gone upscale from a small skillet to the kitchen’s largest ovenworthy vessel.
Alouette and I for a while made motions toward cleaning up, mostly just picking things up in one place and putting them down somewhere else. Finally we abandoned pretense and sat at the kitchen table to finish off the iced tea. Out in the front room Danny Barker was making his third or fourth trip of the night down to St. James Infirmary.
I started telling her about David, how I hadn’t been around when he was growing up, how we’d at last got to know one another a little, not really as father and son (though I guessed those feelings were there) but more as two adults living in very different worlds.
“He’d gone to Europe for the summer, and sent a postcard or two. Bored gargoyles on one of them, I remember. But we had this pattern-nothing at all for months, then one of us would write a ten-page letter-so I didn’t think anything of it. But then his mother called to say she hadn’t heard from him either and couldn’t seem to get in touch with him.”
Alouette listened silently.
“I started trying to find him, figuring there’d be nothing to it. He was in Paris. Apparently he boarded a flight to return to the States, and a cabdriver thought he remembered picking him up at Kennedy and letting him off near Port Authority. But then it was as if he’d dropped off the edge of the earth. There was no trace of him, whatever I did.
“Once about this time, someone called me and said nothing but stayed on the line until the answering machine automatically broke the connection. And somehow, for no good reason, with no idea why he might call like that, or why he wouldn’t speak, I knew it was David.”
I didn’t tell her that, like one of Beckett’s mad fabulists, I still had the tape with that silence on it.
Alouette waited, and when she was certain I was through, said: “You never found him, or found out what happened?”
“Nothing.”
She reached across the table and laid her hand loosely on mine. “I’m sorry, Lewis. It must hurt terribly.”
“It should. But what it really feels like, is that the hole in me, the one that’s always been there, just got bigger. And now I know it won’t ever be filled.”
I removed my hand to pat hers briefly and retrieve my tea. “Well. That last beer seems to have carried me right past philosophical and poetic drunk straight to maudlin.”
“In vino veritas.”
“I never found any. And God knows I spent enough years looking. Right now-I’ve been giving this some thought-I’ve decided that I may have just enough energy left to crawl up the stairs to my room.”
We walked up together, and at the head Alouette turned back.
“Why did you tell me about David, Lewis?”
Because it’s the deepest, most guarded thing in me that I have to give you, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I said.