The Dogs of Babel

THIRTY-THREE

Lexy was convinced she’d seen Blue Mary. She told me that she’d come back to the hotel and had decided to walk through the open courtyard on her way back to our room. She was standing by the swimming pool, enjoying the cool night air, when she noticed a woman in a formal blue gown sitting on the edge of a deck chair with her face in her hands. She appeared to be crying. Lexy didn’t think anything of her elaborate, old-fashioned dress; after all, this was Mardi Gras, with masquerade balls every night. Lexy walked over and stood beside her.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

This is the kind of person my Lexy was—she would approach a crying stranger to see if she was all right.

The woman looked up, and Lexy could see that she was very pale.

“I can’t seem to find him,” she said to Lexy. “I don’t know where he went.”

As she spoke, she took Lexy’s hand in her own, and her touch was as cold as ice. It was then, Lexy said, that she understood whom she was speaking to.

“I’m sorry,” Lexy said. “Maybe it’s time to stop looking.”

At that, Lexy told me, the woman became furious. “Stop looking for him?” she said, her voice rising to a screech. “What have you done with him?” Her face grew ugly before Lexy’s eyes, and when she stood up, she seemed to tower over Lexy. “What have you done with him?” she said again.

“I haven’t done anything,” Lexy said.

“Well, where is he, then?” she roared.

Lexy stood straight and tall and looked her in the eye. “He’s gone,” she said. “You’re not going to find him now.”

The look on the woman’s face in the instant before she turned and ran away was one of horror and terrible, terrible pain. Lexy immediately regretted what she had said, and she reached out to take her arm. But the woman was already gone.

“What do you think?” Lexy said to me now as we sat on our hotel bed. “It was her, it had to be.”

“I don’t know,” I said, skeptical bastard that I always was. If Lexy could see me now, putting my faith in a talking dog! “It could have been some hotel guest coming back from a costume party, and you go and tell her her husband is gone.”

“If you could have felt how cold her hands were,” Lexy said.

“So she had cold hands. Some people always have cold hands. They have trouble regulating their body temperature.” God, would you listen to me?

“She disappeared, Paul. She vanished into thin air. Right in front of me.”

“Maybe you looked away for a minute and she ran away.”

“I didn’t look away.”

“Well, I don’t know, Lexy. But I don’t believe you saw a ghost.”

“Well, I know you don’t believe me,” she said, lying back on the bed. “But I know what I saw.”

Later that night, I awoke to find Lexy sobbing. “I’m so afraid,” she said. “I’m so afraid you’re going to die.” I held her to me until my chest was damp.

The next morning, while Lexy was still asleep, I woke early, dressed, and slipped out to go get beignets and coffee. When I returned with my bag of sweets, I found Lexy sitting on the couch in her nightgown, looking at the Blue Mary pamphlet. She looked so lovely sitting there in the morning light that my breath caught in my chest.

“Good morning,” I said. “I brought breakfast.”

“Good,” she said, without looking up.

“What are you reading?” I asked, although I could see perfectly well from where I was standing.

“I’m reading about Blue Mary,” she said. She looked up at me. “Whether you believe it or not, I’m sure that’s who I saw last night.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to argue. “Well, come and have some beignets,” I said. “They’re still warm. And then we’ll go find ourselves a spot along the parade route.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’d like to go the cemetery. I’d like to find Mary’s grave.”

“But what about the parade? That’s the reason we came.”

“Paul, there are, like, five more parades between now and Tuesday. We can go to those.”

I sighed. “Lexy, I’m worried about you,” I said. “You seem to be so concerned with death lately, with the death masks and everything. I brought you here to take you away from that.”

She looked up at me and smiled. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “The death masks are important to me—it’s a new direction for my work, and I’m excited about it. But I’m not going to let it turn me into a morbid person, I promise. This Blue Mary thing is something different, though. I’ve just never had an experience like this. I want to investigate it a little further. We could have fun with it, if you weren’t such a skeptic.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try to be more open-minded.” I hesitated a moment. “What about last night?” I asked. “When you were crying.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking down. “I don’t know what that was. Sometimes I just get so scared that I’ll lose you.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” I walked over to the couch where she was sitting and kissed the top of her head. “Now come and have some breakfast while it’s still warm.”

So we went to find Blue Mary’s grave. The cemetery was one of those strange New Orleans boneyards, with all the graves aboveground. It was quite picturesque, actually, with the old marble stones and the Spanish moss hanging from the trees. I was surprised to find I wasn’t sorry we’d come.

We followed the directions on the hotel pamphlet and finally located the grave. It was a tall block of granite with the head and wings of a cherub carved on top. I read the words aloud.

“‘Here lies the body of an Unknown Girl, found on the streets of New Orleans on the 27th day of December, 1872. Since no Kin or Well-Wishing Friend stepped forward to claim the Fair Young Lady in the Blue Dress, this Memorial was erected with Funds raised by the Citizens of New Orleans on the 24th day of August, 1873. May she rest in Peace, in God’s Bosom at last.’”

Lexy bent to run her hands over the faded lettering. “I wish I’d brought some paper to do a rubbing,” she said.

“What for?”

“Just as a keepsake.”

I felt around in my pockets and came up with the three-page itinerary I’d made for the trip. I glanced for a moment at the entry on the first page for what we were supposed to be doing just then—the parade, followed by lunch at a carefully selected restaurant and an afternoon of browsing in mask shops—before I ripped the page off.

“Do you have a pencil?” I asked.

Lexy smiled at me. “I think I do,” she said. She rummaged through her bag. And that was how we spent our second afternoon in New Orleans, husband and wife kneeling in the moist grass, rubbing the words from a stranger’s grave. It took all the pages of my itinerary to get them all down.

After that strange day, though, our trip seemed to get back on track, and things started going more or less the way I’d planned. There were more parades than we could manage to see, and it didn’t really matter that we’d missed one. The whole city was infused with an air of revelry and masquerade, and it was infectious. We saw wonderful things: acrobats who seemed to walk on air, and a big white dog whose fur had been dyed to match his master’s tie-dyed shirt. Throughout it all, Lexy was buoyant. Something about the trip, whether it was my good planning (as I’d have liked to believe) or her encounter with Blue Mary, seemed to have lifted her spirits, and it was more than I could have hoped for.

On our last night there, the night of Mardi Gras itself, as we were getting ready to go out, Lexy opened the suitcase that contained our masks. She handed me a mask with a lion’s face, surrounded by a wild mane.

I was pleased. “Why a lion?” I asked.

“Oh, no reason. I just thought it’d look good on you.”

I must have looked disappointed, because she laughed. “Okay, let’s see,” she said. “I brought you the lion mask because you’re so strong and fierce and wild.” She came up beside me and made a growling sound in my ear. “No one better get in your way.”

“Well, you don’t have to make stuff up.”

She smiled. “There aren’t always reasons for everything. It’s just dress-up. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, you know. But I guess you are kind of a big pussycat, if that helps.”

“Yeah, thanks, that helps a lot. What are you wearing?”

“I thought we’d go as a matching pair,” she said, and she pulled out a lovely lioness mask, topped with a garland of papier-mâché flowers that seemed to be twined through the fur.

“Perfect,” I said. I turned my mask over in my hands. “I’ve never seen these before. When did you make them? I know you didn’t have time before we left.”

“I was just playing around with designs. I thought I might save them for our anniversary,” she said. “But this seemed like a good opportunity to unveil them.”

“Well, I love them,” I said. “We’ll be the best-dressed couple of the night.”

We went down to the lobby, with our masks still in our hands. We were standing in line at the front desk—our hotel subscribed to the old-fashioned policy of leaving your key with the desk clerk when you went out for the evening—when a woman came up and tapped Lexy on the arm. She was a young woman, very pretty, with dark hair. She was wearing a red ball gown.

“Hi,” she said. “Remember me?”

Lexy turned and stared at her. She didn’t answer.

“From the other night?” the woman said. “Out by the pool? I was hoping I’d run into you, so I could apologize.” She turned to me and explained. “I was coming back from a party, and I’d had a lot to drink, and I’d had a big fight with my husband, and I was sitting there crying, and your friend here was so nice to me, and I really acted horribly. I think I yelled at you, didn’t I?” she said, smiling at Lexy. “And then I just ran away.”

I looked at Lexy. She had turned very pale. “I thought you were someone else,” she said finally. “Your hands were so cold.”

The woman looked at Lexy curiously. “Were they?” she said. “Well, anyway, I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.” She looked down at the mask Lexy held in her hand. “What a great mask!” she said. “Put it on, and let me see!”

Lexy put the mask over her face. She didn’t say a word.

“Oh, that’s just beautiful!” the woman said. “Wherever did you get it?”

I stepped in for Lexy. “My wife makes them,” I said. “I have one, too.” I put it on.

The woman exclaimed over our masks, and then she stood by us, making small talk until it was our turn in line. When she’d finally walked away after apologizing to Lexy one last time, I took Lexy’s hand. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, and I couldn’t tell by her voice whether she meant it or not. “I guess you were right.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I wasn’t.”

We walked out into the noisy street. It was a warm night, and I began to feel hot under the mask almost immediately. Lexy didn’t speak as we negotiated our passage through the crowds. What was she thinking as we pushed our way through those packed streets, the sweat running down my face beneath my mask? I don’t know. I couldn’t see her face.

We stayed out late, walking through the festivities without really joining in. Lexy didn’t take her mask off once. When we finally returned to the quiet of our hotel room, I lifted the mask from her face.

“Are you all right?” I asked. I took her in my arms, and she rested her head against my chest.

She shrugged.

“You know,” I said, “just because that woman wasn’t Blue Mary doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist. We could go out and look for her right now.”

She shook her head and put a finger to my lips. Then she took my hand and led me to the bed. Slowly, she began undressing me.

“Oh,” I said. “I see.”

When I was naked, she pushed me down gently until I was sitting on the bed. She leaned down and kissed me long and soft. Then she held up one finger, indicating that I should wait a minute. She went into the bathroom.

I settled myself underneath the sheets. It was dim in the room, but when Lexy came in a moment later, I could see that she was wearing a white nightgown and that she had her mask on.

“Ooh,” I said. “That’s unusual. Should I wear one, too?”

She didn’t answer me. She got into bed next to me and pulled the sheet off me. I closed my eyes as she rolled herself on top of me and began to move against me. I could feel the stiff edge of her mask against my face as she lifted herself up and guided me inside her.

“Hey, slow down a little,” I said. “What’s your hurry?” I opened my eyes, and in the moonlight from the window, I saw that Lexy wasn’t wearing the lioness mask. She was wearing Jennifer’s mask. The mask of the smiling girl.

I started to pull away. “No, Lexy,” I said. “Take that off.”

She held me down on the bed and shook her head no.

I could have resisted more. If I could go back to that night, I would. If I could take that moment back, I would lift the mask from her face and kiss her own soft lips. But I didn’t. I let her go on. She made love to me wearing the mask of a smiling girl, and I lay there and let her do it. When I came, I felt as if I had betrayed us both.

That was March. Lexy died in October. We were already running out of time.