Читать книгу Death Wishing - Laura Ellen Scott - Страница 8

3.

Esplanade was a shady avenue but not completely peaceful, lined with houses, small absurd businesses, a few wrecked places, and ancient trees that thrived on ashes and rain. A lot of garbage collected in its corners, but somehow our trash was a little less filthy and more homey than the rubbish on Canal Street, which was over exposed to traffic and impersonal commerce. Val’s Vintage occupied the ground floor of our town home, and it was a dark, gloomy shop, luridly portentous with a lot of indirect and unhelpful lighting, some of it on the novelty side—neon sculptures, illuminated masks, and the like. I had a corner in the back, a workshop space filled with my fabrics, dummies, and an industrial serger.

Saturday morning that’s where my dearest friend, Martine Bernier, teetered on a plastic milk crate, his ample midsection aglow from a gooseneck work lamp. My latest travesty was stitched around his abdomen. I’d started out running Val’s website and a service: V3C. Victor’s Cape and Corset Cleaning. It was a natural leap into corset construction. Seriously, you’d be surprised what a feller gets up to when his main vices, such as binge eating and drinking, are curtailed. Martine was a big man, taller than me but just as wide, and he’d stripped down to what looked like an old man’s v-neck undershirt but was really some luxurious silk blend thing. Subtle, antique styling was all the rage amongst well-heeled clubbers. A tranny dabbler on the holidays, Martine was tickled to loan his body to my art. Even so, he could only handle posing for about a half hour at a time before he’d want to go out for a Pimm’s or some other touristy libation. It also didn’t help that Martine would tolerate no serious drawing in of laces. He couldn’t take much pressure on his esteemed, well fed gut. Frustrating because I really wanted to test the engineering.

He’d found the whole business with Gerald Pollin distasteful, especially the gory details. I never even got to the to say the worst part out loud—Martine wouldn’t let me. So there I was, stuck on the subject, going around and around the edges of chance. I asked Martine, “What’s your take on this Wish Local business? My weight loss leader quit the program after twenty-four years to join up with them.”

To which Martine said, “Change is a soul kiss from a strange boy on New Year’s Eve; he doesn’t know you from Adam and doesn’t care, because the kiss is as far as it’s going to go, Buster Brown.”

“I am not going to even ask you what that’s supposed to mean.” Because I knew what he meant. He didn’t want to talk about what everyone else wanted to talk about. I understood. Worry and action, those are a young man’s games.

Martine was my age or thereabouts, French Canadian, with a pile of eerie blond curls and a square smiling face so sun-cooked that his eyes were always in squints. I couldn’t even tell what color they were. He owned, but did not run as far as I could tell, a gay-themed greeting card and gift-wrap shop on Bourbon Street, and he had an inordinate amount of leisure time. A team of young, gorgeous athletes managed the business, and to be honest I had no idea how they made money. The card shop was ghostly empty most days, but Martine never worried. He must have had some subsidy interest supporting them all.

“There’s a presentation on Sunday.” I pulled a thread through four layers of stressed, taut fabric.

“No,” he said before I could invite him. I shushed him, vaguely threatening with the big curved needle. The reorganization of Martine was almost complete. We had managed to sculpt a meaningful inward curve with this latest prototype. Our previous attempts merely compacted his torso into a dense cube. But in this model Martine could almost breathe. He said, “You know who’d make a beautiful queen is your boy. An’ he’s got a girl’s name already.”

I nodded. I’d heard this point made before. “He already looks too much like his mother.” I traveled around to Martine’s backside—kind of a long trip—and took the laces in my fists, like a carriage driver picking up the reins. “Ready?”

“Never.” He sucked in a preparatory breath. “You know, I look like my mother,” Martine said, his voice a half step higher. “Oof. Easy Vic, easy there.”

“Yes, well Val’s already got his drag. All that gothic Anime cowboy crap.”

Martine laughed easy, which was one of his most pleasant features. At this moment he guffawed, and I waited for stitches and grommets to burst. They didn’t. “He’s a dish Victor, a real dish. You’re just jealous because he has like what, eighteen girlfriends? Are they all baristas? Anyway, he’s a hell of a kid. Took your fat ass in.”

Which was true. There aren’t many twenty-eight year olds who want to keep their dads so close. “Did you know that Val was an overweight child?” I loosened the laces, and Martine grunted dramatically as his flesh returned to its authentic levels. It was almost beautiful to watch all that meat find itself and settle down.

“You’re kidding me. Hard to imagine it.”

“He was always a big kid. Funny what you’re saying about his girlfriends. In high school he had all these girl study partners, but never one to date. I always felt guilty about that.”

“His metabolism is your fault, is it?”

That wasn’t what I was getting at, but I let it drop. I know I wasn’t a proper parent when Val needed one; I was angry, remote, busy. Plus I was eating my way into an early grave because I sensed, but did not know, that Brenda was losing affection for me (and I was correct; she had commenced an affair with the academic dean who would later approve her for tenure).

“What you need to see is that Val is not damaged,” said Martine. He was talking out his ass, something he did quite a lot. “He’s a clever businessman living a romantic life in a magical city, and women love him. However you may have failed him, he has recovered.”

“Right,” I said, making it clear that he was full of it. “Immediately after Brenda and I called it quits, Val started to lose weight. About forty pounds in his freshman year of college. That’s not supposed to happen. That’s not healthy. You have kids, Martine?”

“Straight folk always make the same jokes, over and over.” He pulled a brick colored polo on over his head, dragging it down with some effort, like a child. Tugging at the waistline, situating it here and there, he drawled, “None that I know of.” He looked parched. An invite to the Napoleon House for an afternoon booze up and appalling service was imminent.

I started putting away my materials. Martine dragged his fingertips across the fabric bolts before becoming distracted by a circular rack of military jackets. He handled those too, with a professional concern, inspecting his own fingertips. “Cat hair,” he pronounced.

“One more charming feature when you buy a dead man’s clothes.”

“Ugh.” Martine shuddered and flicked an invisibility from his fingers.

Martine was right that Val created himself, and he’d done a damned fine job of it. As a teenager back in Viriginia, he had been one of those suburban white boys you hear about, given absolute freedom and an SUV in exchange for perfect grades. He claimed he was high his entire senior year, but I can’t see how that could be true. He was accepted into two almost-Ivy League universities, but he chose to go to a state school near home.

Before I put it away I inspected the corset prototype, which was a bit damp from perspiration but otherwise intact and ready for more. Excellent. “Val lived with us while he went to college. He used to cook meals for us, Brenda and me. Three, four course meals, with paired wines. He was trying to hold us hostage via Sunday dinner.”

“It didn’t work.”

I shook my head. “In fifteen months Val’s mother moved out.” I failed to add that I was embroiled in the federal investigation of the contractor that employed me. Or that Val was on his way to flunking out of that state college so close to home.

Val learned, and I learned later, that Louisiana would welcome our sorry selves. That we would flourish in its swampy, bacterial love. When the Wishing began, Louisianans were best equipped to deal with the drama of fortune, with Poles and Tibetans running second and third, respectively. Because to be successfully lucky, you must also be unlucky; you have to be yourself, no matter what the weather.

“Modeling’s thirsty work Vic. Fancy a tipple?”

“It’s all thirsty work, Martine. All of it.”

I placed the corset on my worktable and snapped off the light. We moved, two large men, like rhinos on a narrow path, towards the front door of the shop. I locked up and dialed the little hands on the Back By paper clock to an unrealistic estimate. As we hit the sidewalk and accepted the bright glare of the afternoon sun, Martine and I moved as slowly as possible and almost in synch. Martine noticed this and started to hum a little goofy tune. “All we need now is some bassoon laden theme music,” he said, and he was genuinely happy.

We passed by the A&P where we saw Bobby Rebar sitting on the ground, wedged in between the newspaper machine and the automatic doors. His scarred knees poked out of holes in his jeans, and his hair looked surfer blond except that it was all clumped with grease. Tears had cleaned paths through the dirt on his face. Bobby was a drug addict, homeless most of the time. His name wasn’t really Bobby Rebar, but we called him that because he hung out in Jackson Square to dance to the jazz bands. His specialty was a dirty jig to “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” that scared the living crap out of tourist children. We should have called him Bobby Rebop, but Rebar amused us more.

Bobby may have had an especially warm relationship with all creatures of the night, given that he was a stray cat himself. I nodded at him, said his name, but it was Martine who stopped and loaded Bobby’s hand with quarters, probably about two dollars worth. The coins were out of sight in a flash.

“Wish local, indeed,” Martine growled. “I can’t get more local than I am right now.”