A Density of Souls (14 page)

Monica stood on her front porch and searched the shadows of oak branches. The air was bitterly cold and the glass in her hand seemed melded to her palm. She lifted it to her mouth and gulped. For a brief moment she pondered whether or not she had imagined the gunshot; maybe the day’s grief had sparked old fibers of pain, some hallucination of Jeremy’s suicide.

She realized she was wrong when she heard the low wail of sirens in the distance.

Part Two

The Bell Tower

“I was that silly thing that once was wrought, to practice this thin love;

I climb’d from sex to soul, from soul to thought; but thinking there to move,

Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then From soul I lighted at the sex again.”

—William Cartwright, “No Platonic Love”

1

T
wo weeks before he was to graduate from Princeton University, Jordan Charbonnet had a nightmare about his younger brother, Brandon. Jordan awoke to a darkened dorm room, thick with shadows of half-packed cardboard boxes.

In the nightmare, Jordan was younger, running after his brother and three of his friends as they rode bicycles down Philip Street in the Garden District. The surreal landscape featured a shockingly blue sky unobstructed by oak branches, houses seemed to melt and wrought iron gates tilted and sank in twisted patches of filigree iron. Brandon had left something behind at the house, and it was desperately important that Jordan catch him. In the nightmare, Jordan kept calling out his brother’s name, but Brandon continued to pedal. At Brandon’s side rode Greg Darby. Greg—like Brandon—appeared as Jordan best remembered him, as a well-developed boy of fourteen. The other two friends were unrecognizable as they swerved out of Jordan’s path as he neared the rear wheel of his brother’s bicycle. At the moment when Jordan could have reached out and touched the spinning rubber tire, Greg Darby turned his head to Brandon, revealing a fractured face, its cracks filled with blood. Greg pursed his lips like a blowfish and spat a thin geyser of blood into Brandon’s face. Jordan halted, breathless, and watched as the two boys pedaled off down the street, Brandon wiping the blood from his face with one hand and shouting, “Aw, gross, dude!” through peals of laughter.

Jordan Charbonnet was graduating with an AB in English. It had taken him five years to get it.

After his freshman year, Jordan decided to take a year off. His par-100

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ents had been horrified and blamed a girl, Katie, a graduating senior who encouraged Jordan to spend a year with her living in New York City. Katie put Jordan up in her new apartment for a year. The following summer, when Jordan told her he would be returning to school after the summer was done, Katie changed the locks on “their” apartment. Jordan returned to begin his delayed sophomore year and never bothered to tell Katie that despite her elegant beauty, her voracious sexual appetite, and the glimpse she offered of a glitzy world of New York money and society, she had not been the reason Jordan had left Princeton behind for a year.

That first year away from New Orleans had been dizzying, at times sickening. He had found himself tossed into a throng of young minds suddenly liberated to embrace the heady pain of their own lives. He sat awestruck and alienated on dorm room floors, listening to fellow freshmen confess their traumas, usually defining their entire lives in terms of mistakes made by other people (namely, their parents). Jordan felt like he didn’t belong and he was forced to ask himself, Why do these people like pain so much? And how did all this pain pass me by?

At those moments, when he could gaze unblinking at his past, Jordan could acknowledge what had eased his way. He had spent the previous four years as a poster boy for the Cannon School ideal. He had learned from the batting eyelashes of prom dates and the lascivious glances from the Garden District Ladies’ Society that his physical beauty was a weapon capable of spurring admirers to lapses in deco-rum. His physical appearance reduced people to their hunger, desire, and dependence—three qualities Jordan had to admit he did not seem to possess. His world was fascinating, but it rarely threatened him. His six foot two frame of solid muscle, stretched across broad shoulders, crowned with a handsome face, an immaculate olive complexion—all of it had somehow exempted him from the pain that seemed to make most of his classmates what they were. But it wasn’t something that stirred either pride or guilt in him. His beauty was not an accomplish-ment; it was a fact.

Katie had snatched him up like a trophy and whisked him off to a year in Manhattan that was studded with wild sex, shopping trips to Versace, and loud parties hosted by Katie’s boss at her advertising firm.

Being Katie’s kept boy gave a certain sense of purpose to the physical beauty he felt had alienated him from his classmates. As conversation The Bell Tower

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between them grew thin, Katie’s only response was to recommend notoriously noisy restaurants in SoHo for dinner each night with increasingly large groups of coworkers, most of whom were married couples.

Jordan would have had to spend a great deal more time placating his parents about his departure from college if tragedy had not shaken his hometown when seven-year-old Alex Darby was struck and killed by a garbage truck and, in response, Greg Darby, Brandon’s best friend, killed himself. The phone calls from his mother stopped as Jordan’s parents were subsumed by the grief that had overtaken his younger brother.

After more than half a year of silence following his move to New York, he finally worked up the nerve to call his mother. He had what he thought would be good news for her, but decidedly bad news for Katie, which is why he thought his parents should be the first to know.

Elise Charbonnet sounded tired, almost winded, and unaffected.

“How’s New York?” she asked him, with a note of sarcasm that he had never heard in her voice.

“I’m going back,” he said. “To school. This fall.”

There was a long pause. “That’s wonderful,” Elise said, without enthusiasm.

“I thought you’d be glad to hear,” Jordan said.

“I am,” Elise said, sounding bored. “Does Katie know?”

Elise said Katie as if she had taken a bite of undercooked steak.

“No,” Jordan responded.

There was another silence.

“What’s wrong?”

“Your brother’s not doing too well.”

Elise offered nothing more. The last Jordan had heard, Brandon had been skipping school. But that had been months ago. “Have you thought about therapy for him?” Jordan offered. Elise laughed wryly, which unnerved Jordan. “I’m serious . . .”

“I’ve got it covered, Jordan. Thanks,” Elise said tightly, and Jordan was too angry and embarrassed to offer anything more. He returned to Princeton that fall.

Phone calls from Roger became routine. His father’s enthusiasm over his return to school was unconcealed, and Jordan didn’t want to jeopardize the approval he had regained by broaching the subject of Brandon. When Jordan asked about Elise, Roger’s responses 102

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were stilted and vague. “She blames herself . . .” Roger once offered.

“What do you mean?” Jordan had asked.

“That winter . . . it really affected her . . .”

Still, Jordan found himself unable to broach the topic. Roger’s off-handed term—“that winter”—seemed to be a theatrical production that had taken place without his knowledge but involved all of his family as players.

For the next three years, he spent his summers doing internships and his holidays with friends in the Northeast. Neither Roger nor Elise complained about a single missed Christmas.

“Your problem is that you’re perfect, Jordan.”

Melanie McKee threw back beers like a frat boy, yet tugged her dark hair out of her face with one fragile hand during each drink. She didn’t lie about masturbating and, like most of Jordan’s girlfriends at Princeton, she had money. Not Garden District, look-to-the-history-books money, but well-heeled constantly maintained, Newport cottage money. Unlike Katie, she spoke without searching his face for a response when she was finished. Unlike Katie, she showed no interest in keeping him in one place. Jordan considered Melanie to be the first real woman he had ever met. She had no trace of the Southern belle behavior he was so used to—that veil of manners built upon the belief that if a girl made her desire for a man obvious then she would bring about her own ruin.

They met at the beginning of Jordan’s final semester. She was a graduate teaching assistant for one of his last required lecture courses.

Jordan spotted her sitting toward the front of the lecture hall on the first day of class. He took a seat several rows back and was surprised to look up several moments later to find her staring back at him with a smile of confident admiration.

Melanie asked him out. Jordan said yes. After class that day, he went home and called Princeton girlfriend number four, Claudia, a geol-ogy major with whom he had had several dinner dates, some good sex, and complete lack of interesting conversation. After Jordan offered a casual explanation as to how his work load would make dating difficult Claudia had ended their call with a breathy, “I guess it’s for the best,” and slammed the phone down in his ear.

On their third date, Melanie McKee indicted Jordan’s personality The Bell Tower

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with the same fervor she had used to pursue him. “Perfection isn’t normal, Jordan,” Melanie said. “See, you’re naive enough to think that you’ve attained everything. That there’s nothing out there you couldn’t get just because you’re a walking wet dream. So you think life is boring. Well, that’s not your problem.”

“What’s my problem?” Jordan asked with a cocky smile, his beer bottle halfway to his mouth. He was prepared to write off her evalua-tion of him as evidence of her hunger and need, as usual.

“You’re a freak!” Melanie announced drunkenly, her fist slamming into the bar.

Jordan laughed loud enough to draw the attention of the bartender.

“I’m not kidding, Jordan. Someone as beautiful as you, it’s not normal. You’re an outsider everywhere you go. But let me tell you something . . .”

She leaned in close enough to kiss him. “You better use it, buddy!

Because freaks, they have a better view of the world than anybody else.

They see things coming that others don’t. So watch out, ’cause if you keep walking around like you’re this god you’re going to miss seeing the devil until it sinks its teeth into that nice ass of yours!”

Jordan had spent most of his life thinking that all desire was secret and sordid, that people who admired him secretly resented him for drawing out the ferocity of their desire. But now Melanie McKee seemed to give his beauty a sense of place in the world, and a sense of purpose. He was a freak. He kissed her right there at the bar.

Roger and Elise Charbonnet flew in the day before Jordan’s graduation.

To Jordan’s and Melanie’s frustration, they had requested that Melanie come along to dinner. Jordan had mentioned her in passing to Roger.

Melanie protested that a dinner with Jordan’s parents would be pointless and stress-inducing. After graduation, Melanie was moving to France and Jordan was returning home to get a job before applying to law school. His father was a Tulane Law alumnus with the network to obtain Jordan a job after he passed the bar. They had their fling and it had been enjoyable, but neither of them had any delusions about marriage. Melanie insisted, despite his declaration to the contrary, that Jordan’s parents would automatically assume otherwise.

They drove to the restaurant in silence, Melanie nervously reapplying her lipstick in the visor mirror. Jordan was suddenly made queasy 104

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by the fact that he would be seeing his parents in person for the first time since they had visited during his freshman year. The casual way he had eluded his parents for five years seemed too enormous to mull over. But the hard reality of it ambushed him as he drove to the restaurant.

As they approached the table, Jordan watched Elise’s face as she took in Melanie McKee. Roger rose from the table first, pushing out the back of his chair and extending his hand. Jordan expected Elise to rise with him and give Melanie that gentle and firm handshake Southern women apply only to other women, a handshake that holds someone in place for a moment while they are surveyed. But Elise did not get up from the table at all. Once he took his seat, Jordan leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Elise smiled numbly in response.

She looked older, as did his father. They both appeared to be pinched, dehydrated versions of the parents he remembered.

She’s still mad at me for going to New York, he thought, angrily settling into his chair.

Roger handed Melanie the wine list. She took it reluctantly. “You’re the one going to France after all,” Roger quipped nervously. Melanie obliged with a chuckle as if she had been poked in the ribs.

Jordan had expected Elise to study Melanie piercingly, as she had every girl Jordan ever brought into the house. But Elise sat listlessly at the table. Gone was the nervous, fidgeting woman at Cannon football games. She hardly looked at Jordan.

“So where are we?” Roger finally asked with a laugh. “I hate not being able to drive. I feel like my fate is in the hands of some cab driver.”

Melanie smiled weakly.

“You could have rented a car,” Jordan mumbled.

“Or you could have been a gracious host and picked us up at the airport.” Roger said, without malice, propping open his menu.

Melanie adjusted and readjusted the napkin across her lap. “Where did you fly into?” she asked, eyes downcast.

“Newark. We had a limo bring us down—Route One, is it?” Roger directed his eyes at Jordan.

Jordan nodded. The waiter arrived. They ordered and a stilted silence fell over the table. “How’s Brandon?” Jordan asked.

Slowly Elise’s eyes moved across the patch of wall she was staring at and landed on Jordan.

“Not well,” she responded with an even tone that forced him to The Bell Tower