A Density of Souls (8 page)

Jeff wandered the house, pretending to ignore the admiring glances of underclassmen, some of them beaming at being in the presence of next year’s first-string quarterback. Most of the guests were outside around the pool and he found a spot in the relatively empty living room, where he struggled to concentrate on the ten o’clock news.

Then he heard Brandon Charbonnet’s voice tear through the backyard.

“That fuckin’ faggot gets a brand-new Jeep and I’ve gotta drive my dad’s shitty Cadillac!”

“Got a big pink bow on it, too!” Greg Darby chimed in.

“That’s what you get if you fuck your own mother!” Brandon yelled.

“How can he luck his mother if he’s a fag?” Greg asked.

“Maybe she straps on a dildo and gives it to him doggie-style!”

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Jeff rose from the living room sofa amid the chorus of squeals and the obligatory shouts of “That’s disgusting, dude!”

If Cameron Stern could get Kate Duehamp into the bedroom after only three shots, he could find his own ride home. Jeff left.

Brandon’s pantomime of Monica Conlin sodomizing her own son provoked drunken laughter and high-pitched cries that lifted Meredith out of her drunken haze, as she lay in a dark corner of Kate’s lawn flat on her back. She sat up on her elbows. The pool area was a halo of light a few yards away. The Brandon and Greg act was finished. A fellow cheerleader was standing on a pool chair, making an earnest speech about how next week they would be sophomores, and then a year after that juniors, and then seniors, and then they would never be together again, and they had to enjoy the moment before . . . The girl exploded into tears and was embraced by her friends.

Meredith noticed that Brandon and Greg had suddenly vanished.

On his way home, Jeff Haugh was cut off at the intersection of Jackson and St. Charles by Brandon’s father’s “shitty Cadillac”. Jeff slammed on his breaks and cursed before he saw the Cadillac veer right onto Jackson. As it rounded the corner in front of him, Jeff recognized the two teenagers behind the wheel. He also guessed where the Cadillac was headed.

Jeff gripped the steering wheel for a full minute. The car behind him was honking at him in staccato beats. Jeff felt his mouth open, as if he were going to say something to himself, but then he pursed his lips shut as he eased his foot off the brake and coasted through the intersection, safely on his way home.

Earlier that night, Monica had let Stephen drive her around in the Jeep unlicensed. He had never driven above twenty-five miles per hour, and he had taken them both on a meandering journey through the streets of the Garden District. He expressed his enthusiasm for the car with excited questions about the gauges on the glowing red dashboard and whether or not it was true that running the AC would drain the gas tank faster. Monica had answered all of them with a slight hint of a smile in her voice. Her son seemed at once boyishly curious and The Falling Impossible

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mannishly competent, which led her to believe the gift had served its purpose.

Now Stephen was upstairs and Monica was listening to Mahler’s Second Symphony, “The Resurrection”, which was escalating to its grand crescendo. At first, the sound of shattering glass was nearly lost in a peal of strings. But then Monica heard it again.

She sat paralyzed in her favorite reading chair, a Sidney Sheldon hardcover spread across her lap.

The symphony had almost concluded by the time she remembered that the Jeep did not come with a car alarm.

She heard Stephen’s footsteps on the stairs.

Monica rose from her chair, the book falling to the floor. She heard the front door slam behind Stephen.

Through the frosted glass panes of the front door she saw her son’s spidery shadow before the black silhouette of the Jeep. She opened the door with a hand so sweaty, it greased the knob.

Something was wrong, but at first she could not tell what. Gradually she realized that the Jeep was slouched on its carriage, as if the tires and axle had suddenly failed to distribute the weight of the car evenly.

She went down the front steps to see what had happened.

The driver’s-side rear tire had been gouged repeatedly. It sat like a cluster of molten rubber around the hubcap. A clean white line ran down the passenger side, arching in an erratic sweep before angling up to meet the side-view window. The front passenger window had been smashed in; the pieces of glass glittered like diamonds across the plush leather of the seat. Over Stephen’s shoulder, she could see the word spray painted across the windshield, but in reverse. It took her a minute to make out the proclamation: COCKSUKR.

When Monica appeared on the sidewalk next to her son, he jumped, and then his knees buckled. She held him as he moaned. There was nothing she could say.

She clasped Stephen to her for five minutes, her own heart trembling with each sob. When he finally managed to breathe again, he said, “You can’t do anything, Mom. You can’t do anything . . .”

She guided him into the house. “You can’t do anything, Mom,” he kept saying. “It’ll make it worse. Just don’t do anything, Mom, okay?”

She lied to her son and agreed before giving him a shot of Chambord Royale and tucking him into bed.

Three hours later, as Stephen slept, the tow-truck driver arrived.

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Monica handled him three twenty-dollar bills. The driver peered under the Jeep. Both driver’s-side tires had been eviscerated by a knife—“A big one!” he added clinically. The white lines had resulted from a car key held in one fist and gouged through the paint. As the driver struggled to his feet, Monica informed him that she had special instructions.

At two-thirty in the morning, he deposited the Jeep in front of the Charbonnet residence on Philip Street. Monica knew that Elise Charbonnet would discover it in the harsh morning light when she woke up.

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T
he next morning, her head pounding with the pulse of the previous night’s Southern Comfort, Meredith retrieved her secret notebook from under her bed, wrote “I’m sorry about your car,” and then tore the page and threw it in the wastebasket.

Monica got out of bed at eight A.M. after having slept three hours. She went to her son’s bedroom door, cracked it, and saw him curled beneath the comforter. She would keep to herself the memory that had plagued her all night.

She went to Jeremy’s study. On the wall above the doorway, printed starkly in his own handwriting, hung his favorite quote from Death in Venice by Thomas Mann: “For passion, like crime, does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life; it welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.”

In the disorder created by his parents’ deaths, Jeremy and Monica had found distinct advantage.

In July of 1964, Jeremy Conlin decided to break the vow he and Monica had made together—that they were never to see each other’s houses. Jeremy’s parents were leaving town for their annual trip to the Gulf Coast. He asked Monica if she would like to come over.

Until now, their courtship had centered mainly around the St.

Charles Avenue streetcar line. Each evening at six, they would ride the streetcar down St. Charles to Canal Street, before reboarding for their return trip. The red sunlight filtered through oak branches, glint-58

A Density of Souls

ing off Monica’s blonde hair as she leaned against the window. Jeremy would attempt to compose poems in his leather-bound notebook.

Sometimes Monica and Jeremy would get off the streetcar at Audubon Park. They would wander deep into the park, past children playing hide-and-seek around fallen oaks, crossing the bike path where other couples flew past them leaving a laughter in their wake that Monica found to be more contented than her own. One night, half a month into their courtship, darkness took them by surprise and the park became a jungle of shadows. She clutched Jeremy’s hand and talked away her fear.

“I think you write because it’s easier than talking,” Monica announced.

“You’re wrong,” Jeremy corrected her, in the manner of someone convinced the world does not think and suffer as much as he does.

“It’s better than talking. There’s a space between the words you don’t allow yourself to slip into. Maybe it’s because everything I write is about you. You don’t hear the music of the words because you’re just waiting for me to call you a dumb Irish girl or laugh because your drunk mother named you after a retarded boy crying at the moon.”

Monica dropped Jeremy’s hand like a hot plate. He kept walking a few steps before he stopped, bent his head toward a patch of night sky visible through the oak branches, and sucked in a deep, agonized breath.

“If you think I’m stupid why do you show me your damn poems?”

Monica bit back.

“Because you’re not stupid. You’re too afraid,” Jeremy told her.

Monica had not been afraid to clean up her mother’s vomit. She had not been afraid to scare the rats out of her mother’s bedroom. Jeremy Conlin was accusing her of being afraid of paper.

“I try to write about the truth,” he said, his gaze nearly lost in the dusk. “If you don’t like the truth, or if you blame me for it, well then, maybe you are a little bit stupid!”

The silence between them was punctuated by the drone of cicadas and the bleat of a horn as a ship pushed up the Mississippi.

“I want to make love to you!” he finally declared to the darkness.

She convulsed with laughter that bent her at the waist, then put her hands to her lips.

“You’re laughing?”

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“Yes,” Monica gasped.

“Why?”

“Because you sound like a little boy!” she said, patting back the locks of hair.

“People want other people,” Jeremy said in a measured, authoritative tone. “And the only way for them to get—”

He halted. She saw the shadow of him shake back and forth, as if to shed itself of the thought.

“I write about you all the time. Even when you’re sleeping, I write about you. And take something from you with everything I write. I won’t do that anymore unless I’m sure I can give you something in return.”

Every July, Samuel and Amelia Conlin drove out of New Orleans, stopping in Biloxi, Mississippi, for dinner and then staying at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama. When Jeremy announced he would not be going with them, they were neither surprised nor upset.

A listless unease had overtaken their son since his graduation from Jesuit High School. However, they both knew it could be worse. Jeremy’s room did not reek of marijuana and he preferred classical music—Mahler, in fact—over the Beatles. They had no idea he planned on copulating with a girl from the wrong side of Magazine Street in every room of the house.

When Monica first entered the Conlin residence, she was struck most by the way the light from the chandelier sparkled across what seemed at first to be a sea of glass—a profusion of glass etageres hous-ing sets of crystal and mirrors that forced her to realize that with the exception of two front windows and a bathroom mirror there was not a shard of glass in her own shotgun house on Constance Street. She exclaimed over the front parlor drapes, to which Jeremy responded,

“All that cloth to make a window seem more purposeful!”

When Monica laughed, Jeremy stayed still in the doorway. His gaze on her softened. She met his eyes, seeing that he seemed more comfortable in his own home with her now in it.

One stifling August night, when she was sixteen, Monica awoke to find the half-crippled Willie Rizzo standing over her bed. She screamed, flailed one arm at him, and sent him stumbling backward across her 60

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bedroom on his bad leg until he fell with a pathetic gasp. Monica’s anger turned to pity. Just the sight of her naked body was a gift Willie desired. Feeling like the possessor of some strange secret, she let him stare at her for three minutes before she slid into her nightgown and guided him through the house and out the front door.

It was the closest Monica had ever come to sex, and she assumed that lying pinned and burning beneath Jeremy Conlin wouldn’t be much different. All pain with a tinge of awe. But the burning of Jeremy inside her turned into a warm bath that washed through her legs. His black hair brushed against her chin, sending tingles down her sternum, making Monica aware of every single inch of skin she possessed. And beyond that skin was the hard and dedicated press of Jeremy Conlin—who, for all his passion, brooding, and poetry, had finally organized his muscles toward a single goal.

That night, as Monica slept with her head on Jeremy’s bare chest, Samuel Conlin’s Buick lost a back tire. The tire went spinning out from the car with such velocity that the driver behind him thought it was an animal darting across the foggy highway. The Buick plunged through the guardrail and a green wash of water slammed into the windshield. Samuel and Amelia Conlin were carried to the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain.

The answer was simple. Monica had to marry Jeremy immediately.

Jeremy’s vision of haunting Parisian cafes with Monica beside him was subsumed by a mansion, an inheritance that could last for decades, and a family obligation that would break his spine if he had to tend to it alone.

By marrying Monica, he gained a companion and a refuge from the surviving Conlins. Likewise, taking up house with a girl from the wrong side of Magazine Street would be an ideal rebellion against his parents’ legacy of old money. Jeremy asked Monica to marry him less than an hour after he heard of his parents’ deaths. He went to one knee with a force and determination that bordered on desperation.

Jeremy’s desire for her was so obvious, intense, and new that Monica could not think of saying no.

Stephen didn’t knock before entering the study. Monica let out a small cry. He recoiled slightly into the doorway as if he had been slapped.

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“You’re awake,” she said stupidly.