Sorry for Your Trouble Read online

  Above, in the cold plane trees, unseen wings fluttered. The dog didn’t look up. His finger was throbbing, as was his head. Another light opened in the flat he was soon to return to, as though a door had been pulled back. Nelli stood with light behind her, wearing a white bathrobe and making a beckoning gesture. Her lips were moving.

  How long had he been in this dark garden? He’d lost the time. It was the moment to return inside, however. Behind the low clouds, sky was lightening. He turned to go.

  Leaving for Kenosha

  Louise had the dentist at four—a cleaning and her night guard adjusted—then the two of them were off for early dinner at Cyril’s, the place she liked out the Chef Highway, a higgledy-pig roadhouse-on-stilts the hurricane had comically overlooked. Later on they’d head back to Hobbes’ condo for homework and later still a Bill Murray movie before bed. It was the great storm’s second anniversary.

  Tuesday was Walter Hobbes’ day with his daughter Louise. Her mother was driving out to appraise some subdivision plats over in La Place, then sleeping at Mitch Daigle’s across the lake. Ultimate mojitos, a big doobie, and some boiled shrimp. Walter and Betsy had been divorced a year. Betsy’d “fallen in love” with Mitch while showing him a house—a present he’d planned for his wife that hadn’t quite come off. Now and then Hobbes bumped into Mitch’s wife Sissy at the Whole Foods. Once a great, auburn-haired, husky-voiced Miss Something or other at UAB, she’d grown sturdy and caustic in young middle age. In the Whole Foods she’d frowned at Walter as if he’d dispatched his now ex-wife to commit espionage on her already-less-than-perfect marriage. He’d turned unexpectedly, and there Sissy was, in front of the lettuce and fennel. He’d instantly smiled, and a silly, dauntless smile had begun on her face, too. Then her shoulders sagged. She’d pursed her lips, shaken her head, chin down. She put her ringless hand up like a traffic cop. Keep away. Then she’d pushed her basket along.

  “We observed a moment of silence today for the poor flood victims,” Louise was saying as they crossed Prytania, past the French consul’s residence, the drooping tricolor in front and the big black Citroën in the circular drive. Outside was ninety-eight, but with the a/c it was pleasant. Kids with their uniform shirttails out were pranking along the steamy sidewalks, whooping and laughing. Privileged kids from another school. The dentist was close. “Today’s the second anniversary of the terrible hurricane,” Louise said officiously.

  “Yes,” her father said. “Did any of your classmates lose someone?”

  “Of course.” Louise was in the sixth grade and knew everything about everything. “Ginny Baxter—who’s black. She and I opened our eyes at the same time and almost laughed. It was like praying, but it wasn’t. It was weird.”

  “Did you remember your device?” She’d begun grinding at night, and daytime, too—when night guards weren’t socially welcomed. Francis Finerty, her dentist, believed “broxing” was a result of the divorce when Louise was exactly ten years and two months old. Louise believed it was the result of the hurricane and wasn’t such a big deal in contrast to what others had suffered.

  Louise sighed a profound sigh, placing her small hands atop her green plastic book bag and began twiddling her thumbs. She ignored her father’s question as if it were too mundane to discuss. “I have two requests,” she said, staring out at the last of the school kids.

  “The court will entertain two only. As long as one of them isn’t skipping the dentist.” Hobbes was a litigator.

  Louise sometimes liked her dentist, though not always—the jowly round-belly Irish jokemeister who went on silent Catholic retreats, read Kierkegaard and Yeats alone in the woods, and thought about Thomas Merton. Louise felt this was pretentious. Finerty was likewise divorced—from a pleasantly round-faced Presbyterian woman who’d returned to County Down somewhere in the past. Finerty always complimented Louise on her perfect white teeth, praise she preened over.

  “Ginny’s family is taking her out of school. They’re moving away tomorrow. I want to take her a card or whatever.”

  “That’s very considerate,” Walter said. School had been going only a week. Louise had her hands deep in her bag, digging out the plastic case that held her night guard. They were on the dentist’s street already. St. Andrews, off of Magazine. The old Irish Channel, appropriately enough. An apartment block. A Chinese takeout. A Circle-K. “Why’re they leaving now?” Hobbes was angling into the curb. He intended to wait in the waiting room, read Time, then chat up Finerty about fishing off Pointe à La Hache (something they never did together but talked about).

  Louise had her night-guard case in both hands. “Her father works for UPS.”—she said it like “ups.” Versus “downs.”—“He got transferred. To Kenosha. Where’s that?”

  “In Wisconsin. If it’s the same one.”

  “Ginny said that. I forgot.”

  “It’s on Lake Michigan.” He’d gone across on a ferry once with some students when he was in law school in Ann Arbor. A million years ago, though only twenty. “It gets cold.”

  “Do you think there’re a lot of black people living there?”

  “There’re a lot of black people living everywhere. Except Utah.”

  Louise was silent. This was enough to know.

  Louise was getting out, or starting to. “Would you go buy a nice card? For me? Please? While I’m inside dying, because of you. Then can we go out to her house, and I can give it to her.”

  “Where does she live?” The afternoon was being diverted—which could spell trouble, since Louise liked routines but said she hated them.

  “I have the address.” It was in her book bag. Louise said the name of the street—out St. Claude, where the most houses had been destroyed two years ago. It was like farmland now. “She’ll be surprised.” His daughter had long, rather mousy brown hair and wore glasses that made her look business-like. Sixteen rather than twelve. She was wearing her plaid school kilt and standard wrinkled white blouse and white knee socks. To Hobbes she looked perfect. Was perfect.

  “We can do that,” he said.

  “They have cards at Walmart. Gobs ’n’ gobs,” Louise said. She liked saying that. “I bought one for you this year.” Her mother took her to Walmart for durable play-wear, book bags. And cards.

  “What would the right card say?” Hobbes asked.

  Louise looked in at him gravely, from outside the door. She’d been thinking about this. “We’d love to have you come back. Love, Louise Hobbes.”

  “I doubt I’ll find one that says that,” Hobbes said. “You’ll have to write in a message. I’ll get you a plain.”

  “Get an extremely pretty one. No flowers. No birds.” Gasping afternoon heat swarmed into the car. Louise was staring in at her father as if he needed better instructions. “Maybe one with a New Orleans theme. So she’ll remember me and be miserable.” Louise had the night-guard case in her small hand. Her nails were painted a similar green. Nothing frightened her or seemed impossible yet. “Watch after my book bag,” she said. “Please.” She closed the car door.

  OFTEN ON SUMMER NIGHTS WALTER LAY AWAKE, HIS BACHELOR APARTMENT high above the swank curve of the river—containers and tanker ships at anchor, running lights smudged in the dense darkness. It hadn’t seemed at all necessary for Betsy to divorce him. Mitch Daigle wasn’t a bad fellow, but not someone to leave a life over. He’d known Mitch in the Young Barristers, been friendly for at least one summer at the River Bend Club. Mitchell from Mamou, suavely handsome, nervous-eyed, come to the city the way Hobbes had from Mississippi—for a big lick in the oil and gas exuberance, now long finished. There’d been a slew of them—boys—ready to make their stand and get rich. New Orleans didn’t require old family ties for that. He and Mitch had gone into staid, white-shoe firms, then drifted to smaller outfits on the money tide. Betsy had found Mitch a suitable Greek Revival on Palmer Street, then, in the come-back showing, fucked him in the client’s bed. Betsy explained she’d read a book in college about lost children caught in a cy
clone on a South Sea island. All the island animals—lizards, birds, fuzzy creatures—had gone crazy before the storm. It was fashionable to blame bad things on the hurricane—things that certainly would’ve happened anyway. As if life weren’t its own personalized storm. You needn’t think too long about why things happened, Hobbes believed. It was enough to admit that things did. Still, you tracked back to the cause of harm out of habit, lived in your head. Even Louise Hobbes did it.

  Betsy was living alone in a condo, a part-time mom, spending evenings on a hot screened porch, drinking rum, staring out at the distant city lights, becoming bored all over again.

  THE WALMART PARKING LOT WAS HOTTER THAN ANY PLACE HE’D been so far today, the paper-strewn expanse buttery with fumes from the river. After the hurricane, it had been looted, then looted again for good measure and not been re-opened long. Ants swarming a cupcake. A large black woman in tight fuchsia shorts trailing three tiny kids and a muscular young man in jeans and a Saints jersey—were strolling out the exit, navigating shopping carts.

  He got out fast and hurried in, where it was instant, cold relief from the cooking heat outside. He was dressed for the office, not for Walmart. No one looked at all like him. The general feel, once inside, was of vast, unboundaried space, stretching farther than you could see. Families, shoppers, grannies in wheelchairs, abandoned kids, bored young-marrieds in from the country—making a late afternoon of it, letting Walmart be what the day offered. The size of the room made it feel empty—which it wasn’t. He hadn’t been here in a while.

  He asked a checker where greeting cards could be found and went straight there—between school supplies and the discount wines—where no one was around to help. The air here was freezing and chlorinated. Hobbes had sweated along his hairline and shirt collar. There was no reason, of course, to make a complex assignment of this. What he’d choose wouldn’t please Louise anyway. Left to herself, hours would be expended finding the perfect card, which would be rejected later.

  Most of the tiered offerings, Hobbes found, were for conventional occasions—graduation, birthday, anniversary, confirmation, birth, sympathy over a mother’s death, illness, other events requiring good humor. But no messageless cards, except two with sex themes—one, a wit had written on and drawn in a picture of a large penis with a mustache.

  Lots of cards depicted black people—tan, clean-cut men wearing chinos and oxford shirts, and pretty women smiling out at fields of bright cornflowers, wearing gold wedding bands, with children who looked like they’d done well with their science projects. They weren’t like the people in Walmart today. Ginny Baxter might conceivably resent a card designated for her race. It was because of her race that she was moving. Tempting to ask one of the red-smocked associates, a person of color, if she’d be offended by a well-meaning white child giving her child a friendship card in which the humans depicted were more or less “black.” Would it be insensitive? One more thing white people didn’t get in the advancing cavalcade. It was exhausting.

  Here, though, one said, “Have a Wonderful Trip!” A bright red minivan full of waving, smiling tan children, pulling out the driveway of a blue suburban home with a leafy oak tree in the grassy front yard. Festive balloons rose into a clean blue sky. The message said, “We won’t be happy ’til you’re back!” Louise would think it was queer and also “inappropriate.” The people pictured were also obviously headed to Orlando, not Kenosha. This task was past his capabilities, Hobbes realized. Louise could’ve easily made a card of construction paper and written her own clever but tender message. Only she’d have been unsure, then mortified. A father’s job, this was. Louise never asked for much.

  When he first knew Betsy—he was a new lawyer in New Orleans—he’d given her cards he’d customized. Walter specials. “Sorry to hear you’ve been in the hospital.” To which he’d hilariously add “mental.” “It’s your birthday!” “100th” written in. Betsy loved “funny,” or thought she did. Usually they made her say “You’re a weirdo,” or, “Pretty wild, and likely dangerous.” None of which was accurate. He was Walter G. Hobbes from Minter City, a skinny, good-natured oil and gas guy who wore Brooks’ suits with loafers and occasionally loud bow ties and argyle socks, voted Democratic and simply hoped all this meant she would marry him. Which she did for a while.

  He plucked a card with a big cartoon goose on the front with its orange beak taped shut and its big goose eyes bulging in exasperated excitement. “It goose without saying . . .” Opened up, little red hearts were floating round the inside, where the goose was pictured smiling, its beak un-taped and “. . . I miss you” splashed across in big electric-yellow letters. On the drive out, Louise could add something personal from her bag of colored Sharpies—once she got over hating the card. Ginny would forget all about Louise in two days. Her card wouldn’t make it to Kenosha. Which Louise understood. There were no ready words for Ginny and Louise’s loss.

  FRANCIS FINERTY WAS STANDING OUTSIDE HIS LITTLE DENTIST’S office—a comfortable, 1920s, Mediterranean family home converted to an office when he and Mary came in the 1970s. A fresh go, away from bombs and soldiers in the Bogside. He was talking animatedly to Louise on the front steps, still in his pink dentist’s smock. Louise was the day’s last patient. He wouldn’t want her waiting by herself. Finerty was Walter’s dentist, too; and Betsy’s dentist. Possibly Mitch Daigle’s dentist. He was round and exuberant with drooping blue eyes and bushy hair, and a predilection for laughter that made you like him, if not quite warm to him. He enjoyed telling disgraceful stories from his youth when your mouth was propped open. He didn’t tell these to Louise.

  “I was on about explaining the concept of the phantom limb to your young medical scholar, here.” Finerty came down to the car, his brogue all re-ramped for Louise’s sake. Louise had no conception of what Irish was. She had explained to her father on previous occasions she intended to be a doctor. Finerty was holding open the door for Louise to climb in with her night-guard container and plastic bag of dental supplies. He smiled to indicate something had been established as collusive between them. Finerty had grown daughters his wife had left him with, and who were Americans. They frustrated him by living in the Bay Area. Finerty enjoyed forging connections between dentist practice and the priestly vocation he’d chosen against—possibly unwisely. He had a fleshy flat nose, a rucked forehead, and thick Groucho brows he could make cavort during off-color paddy stories from behind his dental mask. Sometimes he closed his eyes when he spoke—to denote pleasure.

  “Are phantom limbs part of night guards and teeth grinding?” Walter ducked to see Finerty through the open door space. Blasted tropical air was crowding in.

  “Along in the general thesis of loss, yes,” Finerty said. His eyebrows jinked up as his dark eyes widened. Finerty had a gargly voice and stiff, curly hairs on the backs of his thick, skillful hands. “Apropos this somber season of remembrance.”

  Louise frowned up at Hobbes in case he was about to say something disallowed—about her. Louise had constructed her “look”: studious, often stern, implicitly skeptical, and—in a way only she understood—sexy. She abruptly smiled to exhibit her new shiny-clean teeth, her smell faintly medicinal.

  Finerty liked engaging in mock philosophical palaver at the conclusion of appointments. To him, a spiritual dimension haunted all tooth extractions and restorations. Francis, Walter felt, was a man fully engaged, and the loneliest man he knew. Going fishing with him would be a trial.

  “Precisely,” Walter said to the issues of loss and the somber season. Eyes closed, Finerty laved his soft hands like an undertaker. “A loss becomes its own elemental presence, which is the essence of Beckett, if you don’t mind your dentist being a reader.”

  “How’re her teeth?”

  Finerty smiled. He had small, blunt teeth of his own, carelessly spaced. “Entirely lovely. She knows it only too well.”

  “And I know how to take care of myself, too,” Louise said, for some reason rudely. She smiled again, garis
hly at her father and revealed the yellowish, translucent Lucite guard she’d just snapped in place over her perfect incisors. “I have to wear this all my life,” she said.

  “At least until the tension in that very life relents.” Finerty pulled a face of mock dismay.

  “’Til I’m sixty,” Louise said.

  “We’re working on that,” Hobbes said. Louise would never be sixty.

  “If we knew what went on between women and men, we likely wouldn’t need dentists a’tall, would we?” Finerty pushed the door closed and stepped onto the curb in a dainty, little hefty man’s hop.

  “He’s a creep,” Louise said. Finerty was only twelve inches from her, sealed off behind the cool window glass, still talking.

  “No,” Walter said. “He’s not. He’s a good man, and he likes you.”

  “Everybody . . .” Louise was starting to say, “Everybody likes me,” but didn’t, her night guard bulging inside her lips as Walter eased them away from the curb. She knew better. Finerty was waving. She waved back.

  “THIS IS SO QUEER!” LOUISE HAD THE CARD OPEN, STUDYING IT MENACINGLY. “Why’s this idiot bird got tape on his stupid mouth? What’s ‘goose without saying’? I said no birds. ‘I miss you’? It’s disgusting.” It made Walter disheartened. Now Louise would be resentful and unapproachably misunderstood for hours. Their evening was cast adrift. He hadn’t considered a goose to be a bird, it was true.

  They were driving out St. Claude, the wide, rubbish-cluttered boulevard through the once-thriving all-black section—now littered with shut-down schools, caved-in, looted appliance stores with white goods scattered on the sidewalk, a boarded-up Hardee’s. A boarded-up gas station. A boarded-up ramshackle bar with an inert neon roof sign. Mars Bar. People were on the streets—mostly black people—observant, missionless. Every other traffic light wasn’t working. The city had yet to restore itself here.