Restoration Read Free

name, having grown up in a home crowded with paintings by the artist. My father had been a collector, chasing antique pictures of the bayou the way other men chase Bourbon Street strippers and sure bets at the Fair Grounds. Drysdale was Louisiana’s answer to Claude Monet, his oil washes possessing the same ethereal,haunting quality as the French Impressionist’s portraits of lily ponds and flower gardens, but his prices being considerably more affordable. Dad found his at garage sales, junk shops, flea markets and consignment stores, rarely paying more than twenty dollars for a picture. At the time of his death he owned twenty-three Drysdales, one image barely distinguishable from the next, as well as twenty or so other paintings by long-dead Louisiana artists. After we buried him my mother found it difficult to live with the paintings, just as she found it impossible to open the armoire in their bedroom and keep from sobbing at the sight of his clothes still neatly hanging. On a Friday morning I loaded my car with Dad’s clothes and donated them to the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store on Jefferson Highway. In the afternoon I consigned his paintings to the New Orleans Auction Galleries on Julia Street. It hurt me to let the paintings go, knowing how he’d loved them, and the weekend when they came on the block neither Mom nor I were on hand to watch them being sold.
    Although Dad famously steered clear of auctions, in the end he would’ve been pleased with the results of the sale. The John Francis Charbonnet Collection, assembled over thirty years of picking through junk, netted his family nearly $200,000. I offered the entire sum to my mother, but she insisted we split the money. As I was waiting in line at the bank to deposit my share, it came to me that every story I’d ever written had been for the old man. And if they were all for him, I wondered, then who would I write for now? When I arrived at the office later that morning I found my editor outside, where she was permitted to smoke. “I’m quitting,” I said.
    “You’re not quitting shit, Jack,” said Isabel Green, then flicked ashes at me.
    “I’m telling you I quit, Isabel.”
    “Jack?”
    “I’m going,” I told her.
    “You can’t leave me like this.
Jack?
Jack, you bastard, come back here.”
    I saw her cigarette fly past my head. “Too late,” I said.
    I’d given ten years to the job, and I frankly was tired of words—tired of speaking them and having them spoken to me, but also tired of writing them. My fatigue had intensified during my father’s long ordeal with lung cancer. I’d sit by his bed and read newspaper stories to him. My column appeared three days a week, and they were always the toughest to get out of my mouth. I wondered why he didn’t grab me by the throat and rip out my voice box. “How do you tolerate such torture?” I asked him one day. The only good thing about Dad’s dying—for both of us—was the end of my lousy readings.
    I don’t claim to be the first of my generation to face the crisis of professional burnout before he’d succeeded in paying off his college loans, not to mention finding a wife and buying a home. But I probably differed from most quitters in that I was leaving at the top of my game. Giving it up when you still have some good years ahead isn’t a concept that most people would dare apply to their own experience. Readers mailed in letters to the editor pleading with me to stay. My friends said I was being stupid. To judge from their reactions, one might’ve thought I’d publicly torched a winning lottery ticket. My last column appeared under the heading “To Your Own Self Be True,” and it basically was a finger shot at those who would keep me employed. I might’ve been the paper’s “award-winning humor columnist,” as my obit was certain to read one day, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had any fun at the job. More than anything I longed for the freedom of observing a