Troublemakers Read Free Page A

since I was in New York...and she said God no. And then she did an awful thing to me. She said the last time she’d been to see Bernice, my ex-wife had turned around and put her finger to her lips and said, ‘Shhh, we have to be very quiet. Paul is working.’ And I swear, a snake uncoiled in my stomach. It was the most terrible thing I’d ever heard. No matter how secure you are that you honest to God had not sent someone to a madhouse, there’s always that little core of doubt, and saying what she’d said just bummed out my head. I couldn’t even think about it, couldn’t even really hear it, or it would have collapsed me. So down came these iron walls and I just kept on talking, and after a while she hung up.
        “It wasn’t till two years later that I allowed myself to think about it, and then I cried; it had been a long time since I’d cried. Oh, not because I believed that nonsense about a man isn’t supposed to cry, but just because I guess there hadn’t been anything that important to cry about. But when I let myself hear what she’d said, I started crying, and just went on and on till I finally went in and looked into the bathroom mirror and I asked myself, face-to-face, if I’d done that, if I’d ever made her be quiet so I could work on blueprints or drawings....
        “ And after a while I saw myself shaking my head no, and it was easier. That was perhaps three years before I died. “
        She licked the powdered sugar from the beignets off her fingers, and launched into a long story about a lover she had taken. She didn’t remember his name.
        It was sometime after midnight. I’d thought midnight would signal the start of the downhill side, but the hour had passed, and we were still together, and she didn’t seem ready to vanish. We left the Café Du Monde and walked into the Quarter.
        I despise Bourbon Street. The strip joints, with the pasties over nipples, the smell of need, the dwarfed souls of men attuned only to flesh. The noise.
        We walked through it like art connoisseurs at a showing of motel room paintings. She continued to talk about her life, about the men she had known, about the way they had loved her, the ways in which she had spurned them, and about the trivia of her past existence. I continued to talk about my loves, about all the women I had held dear in my heart for however long each had been linked with me. We talked across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story’s end.
        She wanted a julep and I took her to the Royal Orleans Hotel and we sat in silence as she drank. I watched her, studying that phantom face, seeking for even the smallest flicker of light off the ice in her eyes, hoping for an indication that glacial melting could be forthcoming. But there was nothing, and I burned to say correct words that might cause heat. She drank and reminisced about evenings with young men in similar hotels, a hundred years before.
        We went to a night club where a Flamenco dancer and his two-woman troupe performed on a stage of unpolished woods, their star-shining black shoes setting up resonances in me that I chose to ignore.
        Then I realized there were only three couples in the club, and that the extremely pretty Flamenco dancer was playing to Lizette. He gripped the lapels of his bolero jacket and clattered his heels against the stage like a man driving nails. She watched him, and her tongue made a wholly obvious flirtatious trip around the rim of her liquor glass. There was a two-drink minimum, and as I have never liked the taste of alcohol, she was more than willing to prevent waste by drinking mine as well as her own. Whether she was getting drunk or simply indulging herself, I do not know. It didn’t matter. I became blind with jealousy, and dragons took possession of my eyes.
        When the dancer was finished, when his half hour show was concluded, he came to our