City of Masks

23

Paul's apartment was on the third floor of a Creole-style town house on the far end of the French Quarter. Like the buildings adjoining it on either side, the tall, narrow building had a shabby-looking, flat facade that descended directly from roof to sidewalk, with wrought-iron balconies on the second and third floors. Paul opened a door on the right side and led Cree into a gangway that led straight back into the house. It ended at an interior courtyard, surrounded by high brick walls, open to the sky above and landscaped with flower beds and small trees. Exterior stairs led to galleries on the upper floors. A few scattered windows glowed and gently illuminated the greenery. It was lovely and strange, a tiny private oasis in the middle of the city.

"It's a condo," Paul told her. "Just bought the place about four months ago, and I'm doing some fixing up – you'll have to forgive the mess. But the kitchen is done, I can make you something good."

They went up the wooden staircase. From the third-floor gallery, Cree could look down into Paul's courtyard and the others on either side. This was the face of the French Quarter invisible from the streets, where the real lives of residents were conducted.

Leaning over the railing, Cree noticed a statue at the center of Paul's courtyard, only vaguely visible – a woman's pale form, smooth bare limbs and draped cloth.

"That's Psyche," Paul explained from behind her. "When the Realtor first brought me here and I saw her, I knew I had to buy this place. Given that I make my living studying her domain." She heard him unlock his apartment door.

Psyche, personification of the soul, Cree was thinking. Also the lover of Eros, god of sexual love.

The thought put her suddenly on edge as Paul switched on lights and stood aside to let her into the apartment.

"These old places were mostly left to rot for a long time," Paul explained, "and back in the fifties the city was going to tear down pretty much the entire district. But then a bunch of civic-minded people began a movement to restore and preserve them. And thank God. When you get them fixed up, they're like nothing else. Let's start in front."

He led her through the kitchen to the front by means of a hallway that ran down one side of the apartment. The living room was gorgeous. Ceiling fans spun lazily high above. The streetside wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened to the balcony. Paul's taste in furniture and art was mostly modern, with a few Asian curios here and there, but it went well with the high ceilings, faux-finished moldings, battered but nicely refinished wooden floors, crackled plaster walls. It all came together in a style like nothing Cree had ever seen: not quite a Parisian apartment, or a Greenwich Village loft, or an antebellum Deep South parlor, but rather a little of each.

When Cree stopped to tap a knuckle on a xylophonelike instrument, Paul explained that it was from Bali, where he'd visited some years ago; the tarnished gong and parchment shadow puppets above the bookcase were also Balinese. They moved on into the hallway, where he opened a door to reveal a room under construction: bare split-lath walls, piles of broken plaster, sawhorses, plastic sheets, scattered tools. "The once and future master bedroom," he told her. "And here's the bathroom. And this's my office – not where I meet patients, God forbid, I run my practice from a suite downtown, this is just where I do my homework. The couch is a convertible, that's where I've been sleeping while the bedroom's a mess. I know it's not Beauforte House, but my daddy was a humble physician and he had six kids to divide his inheritance. Let's head back to the kitchen so I can make you something to eat."

The kitchen had new appliances but cabinets and counters that were apparently original. The track lighting, fine cutlery, and built-in wine rack showed that he'd lavished some money on the remodeling here. A photo above the sink showed Paul in a some tropical-looking place, naked but for a knee-length sarong. Cree gazed at the articulation of his chest and stomach muscles before realizing what she was doing and snapped her eyes away.

"I take it you're an accomplished cook?" she asked.

"Huh!" he snorted. "No, it's something I keep thinking I'd like to do but never quite get around to. I'm afraid I don't have some great culinary genius to astound you with. Sorry. But I'm pretty sure I can whip up something reasonably palatable and nutritious. What're you in the mood for?"

"Whatever's easy."

"Wine?"

"Wine, definitely."

What was easy was an eclectic meal of a good baguette, pate, mustard, some leftover jamb alaya, Greek olives, several cheeses, a bunch of grapes, and a bottle of burgundy. Paul set it all out on a big tray, but instead of bringing it over to the dining area, he carried it to a door at the far corner of the kitchen. Balancing the tray on one knee, he opened it to reveal a steep staircase, almost a ladder, that led up into darkness. When Cree gave him a questioning look, he said, "The other reason I bought this place. You go first, hold the upper door for me. This is a little tricky with a tray."

She went up. At the top of the stairs she found herself in a slope-ceilinged attic, its dimensions invisible in the dark, still stuffy from the heat of the day. A faint square of light drew her, and approaching it she entered a narrow roof dormer with a small door at its end. When she opened it she found herself outside in the city night. The dormer gave to a wooden deck built over the roof, which Paul had set up with a makeshift trellis, several planters full of growing things, and a teak table and chairs covered by a Cinzano umbrella. There were no stars visible, but the city's glow lit the hazy sky in every direction, and rows of bright windows defined several of the tall buildings downtown. Though it was Monday midnight, Cree could still hear the distant sound of a blues band from the direction of Bourbon Street. The varied peaks of nearby rooftops stretched away into darkness. The air had cooled considerably, but the roof still gave off some of the day's heat, making it perfectly comfortable.

Paul moved past her in the dim light to set the tray down. It clattered, the wine almost toppling, and as they both moved to catch it their bodies collided. Neither backed away from the contact. Without thinking about it Cree turned toward him, bringing her body against his, her arms going around him. One of his hands went to the bare skin at the back of her neck, the other slid into the incurve at her waist and found a fit there. Against her body she felt his breathing, a little quick from the climb up the stairs.

It happened so fast she was startled, but she just shut her eyes and felt the fascination of it. A man gave off heat, she realized, half surprised, as if she'd never known that fact. Her hands moved and found hard ridges of muscle where his back flared wide to the shoulders. The solidity of him seemed to give off gravity, too, and her body responded, falling toward him. They rocked side to side minutely as if they were dancing to each other's heartbeat. After a moment he turned his head slightly and put his lips to her ear. His warm breath tickled, and she thought he was going to whisper something, but instead he bit the rim of her ear -just with his lips, not a kiss at all but a way of tasting her or taking her a little into him.

In the dark, she felt vertigo. With the plummeting sensation came fear.

She pulled away, breathless. "Jeez. How much wine have I had?" she joked. "I'm dizzy already."

"None. But I know what you mean." He chuckled with her, but he'd heard her request for some time, a little distance. He let her go.

Cree took her arms back, though her hands were uncertain what to do.

They sat on either side of the table. Paul lit a couple of candle lanterns, poured the wine, and they clinked glasses. The wine was smooth and smoky. In the light, she could see the question in his eyes.

Why had she pulled away? A moment ago she was just free falling, and it was nice, it was… fascinating. This was what Joyce, Deirdre, anybody sane, would call a romantic situation. Soft rooftop air, the strange cityscape, good food, a handsome man, that undeniable charge of attraction and, yes, expectation. Two adults with that unspoken understanding that had been forged between them, by degrees, each time they met.

It should've been easy. It wasn't.

Cree found herself increasingly at war inside, wanting somehow to tell him, warn him, explain. Explain what? How unbalanced she was right now. How at odds this simple, sweet moment with nine years of habit. How long it had been.

"Weather's changing," Paul said, breaking what had turned into an awkward silence. "Supposed to get a couple of days of rain. This time of year, hard to believe, but it can be hot enough to boil crawfish one day, then turn truly nasty cold. I hope you brought sweaters and umbrellas with you."

"I'm from Seattle, remember?"

"Right. Of course. Where the biblical deluge never quite stopped." His smile flashed in the candlelight, and he tasted his wine. "You know, I've been thinking about what you do. On one level, I have this skepticism, I've told you that. But every time I think about what you've told me, I can see ways it makes sense."

"Such as?"

He sipped, looking over the rooftops. "In graduate school, I was fascinated with traditional healing disciplines, even wrote a paper on shamanism from a psychoanalytic perspective. I pointed out that all over the world, throughout history, healing traditions are remarkably consistent. I saw it firsthand in Bali, but you'll find the same basic ideas in Siberia or Central America or Congo. People with bad health or troubled circumstances go to the village shaman. To fix the problem, the shaman enters a special state of mind that allows him to make a journey to the underworld, where he intercedes on the patient's behalf with ghosts of the sufferer's ancestors or maybe spirits of nature. The affliction is always assumed to have a psychological as well as a physical element, and so does the cure. The shaman finds that some part of the afflicted person's soul is held hostage because he's offended some spirit by doing wrong in his life – there's some unfinished business. Say a son marries someone his mother disapproves of. Later, after the mother dies, he gets sick or his crops fail repeatedly. The shaman identifies his guilty feelings as the cause of his misfortunes, figures out an appropriate way for him to atone to her ghost. And it often works! Because the shaman allows the victim to have closure with the unfinished business. Same principle as psychoanalysis, just a different vocabulary!" He looked over the rim of his glass at Cree as if a little wary of her reaction. "But why am I telling you this? You're the modern-day shaman."

"I've observed the parallels. You're very insightful."

"So then I was thinking, how does your methodology compare with mine? And I realized yours has several advantages. Me, I see only the patient – I listen to his story, I probe, I ask questions. I accept the story, regardless of its literal truth, and help the patient formulate a constructive coping process. Conventional psychoanalysis is based on creating useful, therapeutic fictions, and I've never been comfortable with that… separation from objective reality. The issue of recovered memory you brought up is a perfect case in point. The patient may come to believe he was ritually abused by satanic parents, but if it's literally, objectively not factual, it creates a damaging schism between the patient and the rest of the world. But you, you do research on the whole picture, so you have much more information at your disposal. You not only talk to the patient, but you also talk to family and friends, you look at patients' home environment and family history, you observe how they live, you see their relationships firsthand. Which allows you to be more… objective. More reality based." He looked surprised at himself and then added with a grin, "I can't believe I said that! If one accepts that there are such things as ghosts to begin with, I mean."

"It's really a more intuitive process, Paul. I get pretty far out there, by your standards. I know ghosts to be a literal reality. And some of my processes – I doubt you'd appreciate them all in the same light."

"That sounds like something of a warning – 'Keep back! I'm weirder than you think.'"

"Paul, I am for sure weirder than you think." She said it flippantly, but it reminded her of just how much there was to warn Paul Fitzpatrick away from. It wasn't just issues of scientific credibility, things like empathic identification with clients and telepathic communion with ghosts. It was personal.

"But I didn't hear you say, 'Keep back,' right?" he asked.

Cree didn't answer. She was starving, and yet she was too tense to eat. A pressure grew in her, something that had begun when she first met Paul. How could she ask Lila to brave her own depths if she herself wouldn't? Wasn't this the first step to becoming a living person again? But it was so huge. It would have to begin with Mike and expand into metaphysics and psychology and life after death and professional commitments, and there seemed no end and no way out. Going into it now would twist her up inside and imperil her process.

"So you did sort of say it," he prompted, disappointed.

The wind was cooling rapidly now, bringing with it a coarse mist and the scent of the wet Delta lands to the south.

"I don't want to get into my own convolutions right now. I'd rather get a little drunk. Enjoy the view, unwind in good company. Cut loose a little."

"Fine by me." Paul poured her glass full and topped off his own. They both drank and looked out at the view.

That lasted about one minute.

"I mean, what?" he asked. "You're living with someone? You're HIV-positive? You're a lesbian? You belong to religious cult that forbids intimate relationships with psychiatrists?"

They were both able to laugh, that was nice, but Cree's trepidation grew. She put her hand over his, the best she could do for an answer.

Paul was looking increasingly unsettled. "Look, Cree, you want my marital resume in twenty-five words or less? It's pretty humdrum – your typical postmodern tale of white-collar love. I'm thirty-nine. Lived with various girlfriends when I was younger. Finally got married about seven years ago, wanting to hang in for the long haul. Got divorced last year, some resentments and bruised hopes on both sides, but sort of semi-amicably. She relocated to Atlanta. It's one reason I moved to this place get a fresh start, you know? I'm still a little rusty at living single. But I like to think I'm wiser now, I move more slowly into relationships now – " His eyebrows jumped as he looked down at their clasped hands on the table. "Present circumstances excepted, obviously."

It had all come out in a rush, and when he was done he paused to take a deep breath. "Sorry it's not more exotic or… epic or something." His face moved in wry self-disapproval, but then he rallied and met Cree's eyes. "Your turn."

Cree thought about it. She was tired, and the familiar pit of despair opened and drew her toward it. It occurred to her that she faced a clear choice: She could give in to that dark attraction, stay confined within the limits she'd imposed on her life since Mike died, become ever more a ghost. Or she could yield to the sweet magnetism that filled the night air between her and Paul.

She sipped some wine. The blowing mist thickened and began to condense into drops that beaded on her face and rolled intermittently off the umbrella.

Paul gave her plenty of time but at last broke in on her confusion. "If it'll help at all, I can tell you that I haven't waited on a doorstep in the dark for anyone since I was… I don't know, maybe sixteen?"

"Mine is maybe a little too epic. You up for that?"

He tried to smile. "From you, I'd expect nothing less."

Maybe it was the need to honor that unspoken compact she'd forged with Lila. Maybe it was just the wine on an empty stomach, or the big, beguiling, rainbow ghost of New Orleans, the Big Easy. But she did, she began. It was the first time she'd ever tried to lay it all out in plain language. The words came haltingly at first but gradually began to pour until she couldn't have stopped it if she'd tried.

They'd met at U Penn, where she was getting a degree in psychology and he was studying art and film media. Mike was a dark-haired, blue eyed Irish kid from Illinois whose goal was to get into animation production. They married while they were both still in school. He lingered around Philly for a year while she got her bachelor's degree, then they moved to New Hampshire so he could take a job with Imagitech, a Manchester firm that was producing a new generation of digital animation equipment and software. They lived in a ramshackle farmhouse outside of Concord, surrounded by abandoned hayfields that looked down on the back forty of a commercial apple orchard. They'd decided to have kids later, but they had two dogs and two cats and it was very much a family. They'd never had to think about their love, or getting married, they'd never analyzed it. It was just something that flowed, easy and uncomplicated; it always felt inevitable.

Mike adored his work. The technical side of it exercised his talents for math and engineering, while the cartoons and other visual fantasies he created expressed his whimsical, dreamy side and his absurd sense of humor. Cree admired the way the two sides balanced in him.

Cree worked for the county, helping counsel individuals and families in the social services system. She eventually wanted to go on for her master's degree in psych, get into research, but for now she felt her job did some good for people, and besides life was so nice. It all wove together. Deirdre and Mom were still in Philly then, and she visited them often. She and Mike had good friends in Manchester and Boston. For seven years, it seemed that this was how it worked, this was what life was about. Rather very much lovely.

Telling Paul about it now, she paused, unable to say some things. There was making love beneath the scraggly crabapple tree in the tall meadow grass they never mowed. Mike's broad, muscular body above hers, hard yet so gentle, the earth beneath her back and the grass parted around them clean and sweet, the timeless currents running through them both. Without thoughts, their desire and the ground's fertility and that inevitability all merged into one thing that was who they were and what life was

"Can I ask something?" Paul said. "When you say you wanted to do research, you mean in parapsychology, or – "

"Oh, God, no! I never once thought about any of that stuff. If somebody had asked me about ghosts or ESP, I'd have said I was a skeptic. I was just fascinated with the human mind, and I was good at talking with people, empathizing with them…"

Paul nodded.

Suddenly Cree doubted she was up for this. "Look, Paul, that's the easy part. I've never… I don't know if I can – "

"Don't, then. Only if you want to."

Cree thought about that for only an instant.

So then Mike had to go out to Los Angeles. Big company meeting with some Hollywood heavies, Spielberg or Lucas or somebody. Everybody was excited, this was the big break not just for Imagitech but for the whole field of computer animation. Mike and the four other company principals flew out, intending to be gone for three days and to come back rich. Cree took the opportunity to go visit Mom and Deirdre in Philly. She had a great visit with Deirdre and the six-month-old twins, already demure and contentious, and talked to Mike at his hotel that night.

The next day she went clothes shopping downtown. Just after noon, she was making her way through the crowded sidewalks on Market Street when she saw Mike, of all people, standing forty feet away. After her initial feeling of sheer surprise, she felt delight – how nice he looked, how fun it would be to spend some time in Philadelphia with him. He was facing slightly away from her and seemed to be searching through the crowd, and before he saw her she took a moment just to admire him. He was wearing the suit that she had helped him pick out for his trip, a flattering cut, he was very definitely the most handsome man on the whole street. At last he turned her way and his face moved in recognition; she waved and smiled and began walking toward him. She thought of a salacious line to greet him with, as if he was a stranger and she was picking him up. He watched her intently, his eyes burning with feeling, lips moving as if he had something very important to say and was overcome with emotion. His intensity caused her to feel a rush of worry – for the first time, it occurred to her something must have gone wrong, maybe with the Industrial Light and Magic meeting, for him to have come back so early. But even as she thought that, she knew with certainty that together they could fix anything, whatever it was they'd ride it out, they'd be okay. She continued making her way toward him through the lunch-hour crush, and his intensity grew, and she felt a stab of fear, realizing something really bad must have happened. Maybe his mother had died, he'd flown back earlier and called Mom to find out where she was, came straight from the Philly airport on the off chance of finding her here. When she was only a dozen feet away, a vendor rolled a concession cart between them, and when he passed, Mike was gone. She turned around in a full circle, she ran after the cart, she scanned the street and the sidewalks and saw him nowhere. She called his name; no one answered. She shouted his name, getting frantic, and people around began to give her odd looks.

His sudden disappearance confused and scared her, especially when she thought of the intense, unspeakable feeling in his eyes. Suddenly she realized how wrong the whole thing was. She'd just talked to him on the phone last night, how could he have gotten here from L.A. so quickly? What were the odds he'd be able find her in central Philadelphia at lunch hour? From a pay phone, she called Mom's house. But she hadn't heard from him. She called their number in Concord and got their messages off the answering machine, but there was nothing from Mike. She called his mother, who said no, she hadn't heard from Mike since before he left on his trip, was everything all right?

Three hours later, she called Concord again and heard the message from the Los Angeles police. Mike had been riding in a rented car with three others from his company, the voice said, when they were hit broadside by a pickup truck that ran a red light. Two of the people in the car had been killed. One of them was Mike.

She knew it was a mistake, but it still scared her almost out of her mind. When she called LAPD and got the right person on the line, she heard the news again.

"No, there's been a mixup," she told the cop. "He's back here – I just saw him. It must be someone else."

But the policeman insisted he had personally recovered the identifica- tion from the corpse. The dead man's appearance, as he described it, was very similar to Mike's.

"Who were the other people in the car?" Cree asked, panicking now.

The names were Mike's colleagues at Imagitech. The other person killed was Terri McNamarra, Mike's fellow VP and good friend.

Cree said, "Maybe the wallets got mixed up during the accident – "

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Black. His boss – Mr. Lederman – was still conscious at the scene. He identified the body."

But but but. But she had seen him, here, alive! She had looked into his eyes!

For a full day, she refused to believe Mike had been in that car. She kept refusing, insisting there had to be a mistake – first because this couldn't happen to him, to her, to their marriage, and second because she had seen him alive in Philadelphia. She kept up the denial until she flew to L.A. to identify Mike's body herself She later determined that he'd been pronounced dead at the scene only moments before she'd seen him there on the street in Philadelphia, three thousand miles away.

Cree stopped and found her way back to New Orleans, which seemed choked with fog, unreal. She'd hoped it would be easier, but it felt as though things were breaking loose inside her chest. The pain seemed impossible, open-heart surgery without an anesthetic.

She had never encountered him again. No physically manifesting phantom, not even a sense of his presence. For a long time, she wished she could. Just one more moment together. But it didn't happen. The only ghost that remained was the one that lived in her memory and that box of photos that had to be locked away.

Later, trying to make sense out of what had happened, she went over and over the scene, trying to glean every detail. The Mike she had seen that day had not been bloody and broken, but handsome, beautiful Mike wearing the new suit he'd bought for the trip and the tie she'd given him for Christmas, the breeze making his hair do that thing that irritated him but that she liked. Did he cast a shadow? Was the background faintly visible through him? Much later, having played the sight back so many times that the memory lost its integrity, she could see it any way she chose: Yes, he cast a sharp shadow on the sidewalk, no, he didn't; yes, he was solid as anyone else on the square, no, he had a slightly misty or translucent look.

One thing she knew for sure, though: It had been Mike, Mike and no one else, who had looked into her eyes that day with that inexpressible emotion. Somehow space and time and corporeality had permitted him to visit her in the minutes after his death. Mike had sought her and found her.

Much later, she'd learned that the occurrence was among the most common paranormal experiences: the spectral visitation by a geographically remote loved one at the moment of death. The survivor's conviction that the manifestation was physically real was also typical.

Of course, the statistics didn't explain how it happened. Nor help her come to grips with it.

In the end, all she hoped was that whatever he had experienced at that moment, he had seen the smile on her face, understood it for what it was: Oh, my beautiful Mike is here, what a wonderful surprise! Hello, my sweet, how I love you. Surely that was obvious, surely he couldn't mistake it for anything else. Whatever he took wherever he went afterward, she hoped he'd remember that.

It deflected her entire life, her whole being. Suddenly she was alone and heartbroken. Every simple assumption had been smashed. The days of anything clear and straightforward had died with Mike.

She also had a huge mystery right in her face, obstinate, undeniable. To cope with that, she started doing some reading. After a while she went back to school, studying psychology, philosophy, religion, anatomy and physiology, history – whatever seemed to promise hope of an explanation.

Or was it really explanation she wanted? Cree sometimes wondered. Maybe it was more a search for a way back to Mike. She spent her life looking through windows into other dimensions of the world, and into the past, observing and interacting with the ghosts that lived there. She claimed to be a scientist, but in the end maybe it all came down to the simple hope that one day, through one of those windows, she'd see Mike again. Just one more glimpse.

The night air had turned very cool, the breeze more insistent and now heavily laden with mist. The candles had burned themselves out, and Paul Fitzpatrick had become little more than a shadow in his chair. He didn't move or speak.

Against her will, Cree found herself laughing. Each laugh hurt, an explosion in her chest that burst up and seemed to come out her aching eyes.

"What?" Paul asked warily.

"Talk about a lead balloon! Talk about ways to put the chill on a date! Oh, man! Tell him you were married to the perfect guy whose shoes nobody could fill. Yeah, and better yet, tell him the perfect guy's not really, totally, quite dead, no, you're still pretty much married to him, so good luck, bud!" It really would be funny if it didn't hurt so much.

Paul didn't say anything.

Neither of them moved for a long time, and after another little while the coarse, blowing mist turned into raindrops that pattered on the umbrella and splashed on Cree's face. They were both well soaked by the time Paul leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, and stood. He came up stiffly, as if his joints pained him.

"Blowing up pretty wet," he said hoarsely. "We should probably go inside."