City of Masks

47

Bourbon Street hadn't changed.

It was still a circus, a perpetual mini-Mardi Gras packed with tourists seeking abandon from purveyors offering a thousand varieties of it. Lights bounced in the bars, shadows of dancers played on the windows, blaring rhythms battled as Cree walked past doorways. She'd had the airport shuttle drop her on Canal Street right at the end of Bourbon. Her flight hadn't gotten in until five o'clock, and now it was well past dinnertime. She was hungry and thirsty and still a little stiff from sitting in jets and shuttle buses so long.

Tuesday. She'd been away only twelve days, but New Orleans seemed to welcome her back like a long-lost friend, the kind you've formed a deep attachment to not because you've known each other for a long time but because the times you shared were so hard and so revealing. You know each other well. You greet each other with a certain gritty, guilty, wry intimacy. Cree liked the feeling.

She went into a cheap restaurant and ordered a sausage po'boy, which she washed down with a beer from a plastic cup.

Better, she decided.

Back on the sidewalk, her hunger stilled, she let the flow of the street pull her. She window-shopped, stopped to listen to street musicians, tossed quarters into the cardboard box set out by two little boys tap dancing. For a couple of blocks, curious about where such a person would be going, she followed a towering, muscular black man, glorious in tight pink skirt, feathered boa, and sequined platform shoes. He disappeared into an anonymous doorway between strip clubs, leaving her wondering at the mystery of his life.

Continuing up the street, taking her time, she bought a Jell-O shot, just to see what they were like: They were said to be lethal, but though it didn't taste too bad in a cloyingly sweet sort of way, it didn't affect her as much as she'd been led to expect. She bought a dozen strings of beads and a mask made of sequins and brilliant scarlet feathers that covered just her eyes and forehead. She stuffed the mask into the outer pocket of her shoulder bag, but she put the beads around her neck immediately. They sparkled and spangled with every step she took and made her feel good; men gave her appreciative once-overs and even a couple of double-takes. She stopped at a sidewalk concession and bought one of the infamous Hurricanes in a to-go cup. It was about a quart of icy liquid and it froze her palate; she made it only halfway through before she got too full and too chilled and had to drop the remainder in a trash basket. She was feeling a little looped anyway, as much from the whirl of the street as from the booze.

From windows and doors, attics and courtyards, she could hear the whispers of the ghosts of the living and the dead, forever and ever. In the night air, she could smell the big, slow Mississippi, just to the south, hugging the city in its big bend, and below it the miles of flat, wet land stretching away to the Gulf.

New Orleans.

Halfway down Bourbon Street she chose a club at random and went into the dancing throng. The band was playing Zydeco, raucous accordions and bass and piano and a pair of washboards whose rhythms put an itch into Cree's bones and made them move. She danced by herself for a time, then floated through the crowd, taking an occasional partner for a number or two. She wondered if she were stalling or just having a good time, but the music was so loud she couldn't really think about it.

Not thinking wasn't too bad. She resolved to try it more often.

After a while she'd had enough noise and body odor and cigarette smoke. She left the place and cut south two blocks to Charters Street, which was tranquil by comparison to Bourbon. A few more blocks east and she could feel the glowering, festering aura of LaLaurie House, one block north on Royal, but she stifled the tremor it gave her. She passed into the quieter parts of the French Quarter.

Better. But her anxiety mounted as she drew closer.

She had deliberately not thought about this. She'd just made the decision. But when she got to Paul's place, she realized didn't know what she'd intended. The windows of the first two floors were dark, but Paul's lights were on. He was probably at home. But there was no way to get to the courtyard and his stairs without ringing the bell. He'd answer through the intercom and she'd have to say something, and she didn't know what. She'd have preferred just to appear at his door.

She pressed the button and waited. Nothing. She tried again, longer, and waited again as a falling sensation swooned in her chest. If he didn't answer now, she wasn't sure she'd have the brass to do this again. But after another long moment the buzzer went and she opened the door and walked through the pitch-black porte-cochiere to the courtyard. Suddenly afraid, she took out the feathered mask and put it on as she climbed the stairs. The statue of Psyche seemed to watch her from the dark garden.

When she saw him at the kitchen door, Cree recoiled slightly. He was shirtless, and his face and shoulders and chest and arms were uniformly filmed with white dust, cut through with runnels of sweat. The white emphasized the shadows made by the cut of his pectorals and his corrugated stomach muscles, and he looked like some pagan tribesman, interrupted at some wild ritual. His forehead and hair were white, too, but the skin around his mouth and nose was clear, vividly flesh-colored, as if he'd painted himself with skin tones there. When he opened the door and saw her, his frosted brows rose, but with his odd whiteface it was hard to tell what his expression was. He stood back and let her come inside.

"You," he managed.

"Probably," she said. She'd meant to say, Of course.

They stared at each other for another heartbeat or two. Cree knew that the eyes Paul saw in her mask's eyeholes were wide and disturbed. She couldn't resist another glance at his torso.

Paul glanced down at his own chest, put his hands to his powdered cheeks. "Oh. You're wondering why I look like this. I was just doing some renovation work – knocking down plaster in the bedroom. Hot and dusty in there. My downstairs neighbors are gone this week, so I can bang away at night if I need to. I seem to need to. It's… cathartic. Sorry i f – "

"No, you look good," she said. And he did. God, yes. Another man dusted with white might look ghostly, but Paul looked like Nijinsky in L'apres-midi d'unfaune: wild, intense, and very physical. She could picture him, raging at the walls with his sledgehammer, angry at the new disarray of his once orderly world, chunks of plaster falling in clouds of dust.

He dipped his head, acknowledging the compliment. He stepped to the kitchen table, cleared away a dirty plate and a paper dust mask, gestured to a chair. At the counter, he grabbed a bottle of wine and a glass and turned back.

Cree stayed standing.

"No apologies, though, either way. Right?" he asked.

"Right." However they'd upset each other's worlds, whatever they owed each other, it evened out. He was pretty perceptive.

"How're you doing?" he asked.

"Mixed, I think. You?"

"You know. Why mixed?"

"You know why."

That caught him, pleased him. He put bottle and glass aside without looking at them and came straight to her. When he put his hands on her hipbones, the touch took her breath away.

"I made a bet with myself," he told her. "That you'd come back."

"Oh? How'd you know?" Given what a shit I was.

"I figured that if you were at all the person I thought you were, you'd come back." He hesitated, cleared his throat. "Well. Actually, that wasn't the whole bet."

"What was the rest?"

He smiled. "That either you'd come back here and find me, or I'd go to Seattle and find you. I couldn't lose." He watched her eyes, and the smile became a frown. "Why're you wearing a mask?"

"Just trying to fit in on Bourbon Street," she lied.

He kept looking at her.

"Hiding," she admitted, scared again.

"Take it off, Cree."

She mustered some false bravado: "I will if you go take a shower."

He nodded. When he let her go, she could still feel where his hands had pressed. His white back disappeared down the hall. Cree waited in the kitchen, listening to the water running and feeling her pulse thud in her throat. She debated tossing back a slug of wine to steady her shaking hands and then decided not to. After a few moments, she went out to the rear gallery and leaned against the railing. Better, she thought; it was cooler out here. The mask was hot and it pressed too hard against the bridge of her nose, but she left it on as she looked over the dark courtyard and the surrounding roofs and walls and hidden gardens of the French Quarter.

When Paul came back, he was wearing only a Balinese sarong, a bolt of batik wrapped snugly around his waist and falling like a skirt almost to his knees. Above it, his skin was clean now, tan and warm looking, shower scented. As she'd imagined, his legs were carved with the corded sinews of a runner.

They stood side by side at the railing, looking out at the night. They had both come a long way to get here. Paul looked at her expectantly, and then Cree remembered her part of the bargain. She slipped the elastic band over her head, took off the mask. After a hesitation, she flipped it over the railing, and it fluttered down into the darkness like some night bird.

Much better, she decided.