City of Masks

33

Paul took his time driving back from the Garden District, cruising the quiet three A.M. streets, thinking. The events of the day, especially the last few hours, had put him in a lousy mood. He felt compromised, tainted by ambivalences and conflicting loyalties.

He was very attracted to Cree, fascinated by her. Seeing her after her ordeal tonight had broken his heart – she was in such disarray, such a state of shock and disconnection. Yet he'd also found himself unbearably attracted to her – her wild hair, that look of wide-eyed alarm, and later, when they'd talked about Lila, her fierce concentration. Even when she'd blazed at him – the way her emotions were right there, her anger and need and hurt. He could still feel the sweetness of her light, fumbling touch as she rebuttoned his shirt.

But she was right about the other things. His feelings toward her were compromised.

The supernatural issue – the existence of ghosts, enduring noncorporeal impulses, whatever you called them – was a big part of it. Like a religious person, Cree was someone who had built her life on belief, who acted out of belief. You could argue that all belief was a kind of commitment to the invisible, the unprovable, and that Cree's was no different from faith in God, or luck, or democracy, or the stock market. But despite all the warmth and fascination he felt toward her, he couldn't get past his skepticism. The things she claimed she saw, heard, felt, did – they struck him as unscientific. Impossible by the laws of physics. The idea they'd batted around for a while, that maybe Ron Beauforte was manifesting a specter or poltergeist that raped his sister, showed just how far out this stuff could get.

The depth of her commitment, the passion there, was arguably delusive, obsessive, morbid. Many people believed in ghosts, in some vague way, but few made it central to their lives. That being the case, it radically affected the prospect of a relationship with her. This wasn't a little difference of taste or opinion, something you could chuckle over like whether one person liked Chinese food and the other Italian. It was central to her sense of herself and the world, and Cree demanded it be taken seriously.

And he did – as some form of psychological disturbance. For all of Cree's intelligence and persuasiveness, for all the insights her intuitions or supposed supernatural experiences had provided again and again, when push came to shove, he couldn't deal with it as anything else.

He wished he could suspend rational analysis and just go with his heart. What did his heart say? One in a million, it said. Go to her. It said, Trust this. How would Cree's synesthetic sensibilities describe the feeling he had when he saw her? Swallows swooping and weaving in the sunlit air.

No, it was bigger than that. Being around Cree made him feel as he had as a child, those three years when his father had taken a hospital administration job up north and they'd endured the dour winters of Michigan. He'd learned the way winter makes you appreciate the change of seasons. That first day in early April when earth and sky seem to celebrate, and your whole being opened to it. You became something of a blithe spirit in a new world. That's how being around Cree made him feel.

If he could forget the delusional pathology represented by her belief in ghosts.

He'd done his best to rationalize it. For all their unconventionality, her methodologies as a psychologist were slightly more defensible. Back when he was an undergraduate, he'd taken a cultural anthropology course that had briefly explored "etic" and "emic" approaches to understanding other cultures. Advocates for the "etic" approach insisted that you had to study cultures and belief systems from something of a distance, bringing an objective and comparative perspective to bear. The "emic" people argued that, no, you couldn't know how people thought, why they behaved the way they did, what traditions meant, unless you stepped inside. You had to experience what the subject tribe or group experienced, adopt their beliefs, see the world through their eyes. The best examples of the emic school were the anthropologists who studied the mysticism of Native American tribes by actually taking hallucinogens during traditional divinatory rites and vision quests.

Back then, he'd flattered himself by deciding that if he became an anthropologist, he'd combine the rigor and objectivity of the etics and the open-mindedness, the daring deep immersion, of the emics.

If you could apply the same concept to psychology, Cree was definitely the emic type. She empathically entered the world of her client, felt what the client felt. She learned the client's problems from the inside out, took them as her own. She became the client. She said she even became the supposed ghost, as much as she could stand to. Emic to the hilt.

Fine and dandy. Except that ghosts didn't exist. A woman who conversed with and communed telepathically with ghosts was not quite sane.

He crossed Canal Street and navigated through the streets of the Quarter. It almost always felt good to be enfolded again in those narrow ways, the balconies overhanging, the patchwork facades. It felt like home, especially at this time of night when even the die-hard tourists had petered out. Squint your eyes, and you could easily imagine you were here in 1840, or 1760. The old buildings and rough textures, the whole style of the place, created something of a refuge from the twenty-first century and its uncertainties.

But tonight it did little for him. He felt sour and depressed as he found a parking space and pulled the Beemer into it. He went upstairs, unlocked the door, kicked it open, and threw his keys on the counter.

The ghost thing was only one of the compromises, the conflicted loyalties.

He thought about what he had to do for a moment, then decided to fortify himself. He poured a couple of fingers of Jack Daniel's into a tall glass, swirled it, sniffed it, and then tipped some back. It scalded away some of the sour taste in his mouth.

He picked up the phone, dialed, waited. It was after three in the morning, but she had insisted he call any time, day or night. Serve her right if it woke her out of a sound sleep. Or maybe she wouldn't answer. He hoped she wouldn't.

But the phone rang only once before Charmian picked up.

"She's very smart, Charmian. She zeroed in on the right years, she figured out the mask, she figured out the Mardi Gras connection. Then she deduced that there might be something in your files at the house, went over there, and broke into them."

At the other end of the line, Charmian spluttered in speechless outrage.

"Needless to say she didn't find anything," Paul went on. "But she will. She and her assistant are top-notch researchers. Even if they don't get at the Epicurus archives, there's bound to be something at the Times Picayune records. And they're looking for Josephine."

Her voice, when she regained it, was acerbic: "And you are calling me at this hour because -?"

"Because you told me to keep you informed of developments."

"And precisely what has developed at three-fourteen in the morning?"

"After she broke in the file cabinets, she says the boar-headed ghost chased her. She went off the stairwell, could have broken her neck. Her assistant called me, and we went over there. I just got back from the emergency ward."

"Was she badly hurt?"

"No, but – "

"How very unfortunate."

"I hope you've got a plan B. Because she'll be back at it tomorrow, Charmian. This isn't staying under the rug. Maybe it's time to tell her the truth."

Charmian thought about that a long time. Paul heard nothing but her breath, steady, controlled, for a full minute.

"You may be right," she said at last. "You are probably right."

"I think we've exhausted your attempts at deflection, Charmian. It's time to face the truth and start trying to figure out how to cope with the consequences."

Again, she needed to think about that. "Consequences," she said at last. "Paul, you're very drawn to her, aren't you? And she reciprocates, doesn't she?"

"That's irrelevant to – "

"No, it's not irrelevant at all. Because you two would be something very special together. And I think you really want that, and if you have half a brain, if you're even half a man, you'll go to her. But you've been something of a double agent in all this, haven't you? How do you think she'll react when she finds that out? If she has any trust issues at all, which we both know she does, you think that won't wreck any chances you might have with the oh-so-vulnerable Dr. Black?"

Now it was Paul's turn to be speechless with anger. It should never have gone this far. There seemed to be no limit to Charmian's willingness to intrigue, to control everyone around her, to bring anyone down if she didn't get what she wanted. At last he croaked, "You mean you'll tell her about our… arrangement… if I don't keep doing what you want."

At the other end of the line, Charmian made a pleased sound in her throat. "Exactly! And before you play indignant with me, Paul, let me remind you, you signed on from the start. You know what's at stake here. You're right, it's time for the truth. But even in your most self-righteous moments, you'll agree that it needs to be revealed.. . tactfully, right? So now I'm going to tell you exactly what we're going to do."