Quarter Romance

By Guy Gallo

Set in the French Quarter, New Orleans -- on of the most exotic places in America -- Quarter Romance traces the relationship between a jaded side-walk artist and a cajun girl come to the big city.

Jason is a true New Orleanian. He lets nothing get in the way of a good time.

When Claire becomes pregnant their lives change and their expectations collide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guy Gallo
• Release date: Jul 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452337821

Guy Gallo

Guy Gallo was born and raised in New Orleans and has lived in the Northeast since escaping soon after high school.Among his produced screenplays: Under the Volcano, directed by John Huston; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, directed by Peter Hunt; The Enormous Radio, an episode of Tales from the Dark Side.His poetry and fiction have been published in BOMB and the Mississippi Review.Guy has taught screenwriting at the Film Division of the Columbia University School of the Arts for over twenty years. He also teaches at Columbia and Barnard College. And has taught the history of modern drama at Princeton and NYU.

Book preview

Quarter Romance

a novel by

Guy Gallo

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010, Guy Gallo

Discover other titles by Guy Gallo at Smashwords.com.

Contents

Assumption

All Hallows

Thanksgiving

Advent

The First Noel

Epiphany

Twelfth Night

The Lord of Misrule

Carnival

Rain in Lent

Assumption

Jason Bordelon, Jay to most, Jayjay to some, never set an alarm clock. On Tuesday and Thursday the Dempster Dumpster rattling garbage from The Napoleon House startled him awake. Other days, he slept until the French Quarter’s sounds sifted into his dreams, bending them beyond recognition, and he would wake wondering which random ruckus had turned his swan into a speedboat. But today no accidental noise interrupted his sleep. What woke him on this day was a longing for Claire.

He untangled from the sheets and turned, groggy–eyed and morning–mouthed, to groan into Claire’s dark, full head of hair. She wasn’t there. Her pillow still dented, her share of the sheets bunched at a turned–down angle. Claire was missing.

Puzzled, Jay groaned anyway, a little loudly, hoping she would hear from the other room and come padding in with a cup of coffee and any news from the half–dead day. He lay, clutching her pillow, listening for Claire. He heard no rustling of newspaper, smelt no coffee.

Claire! he called.

Where on earth? Jay frowned, a deep double crease appearing between full, almost furry, eyebrows, thinking Claire must have told him of some engagement and he had not heard or had forgotten. He hated being found out in such a lapse of attention or memory. Normally he would shrug and smile winningly and rely upon an easy charm, a disarming self–deprecation. But this time he had caught himself. He had no audience. If he had forgotten a Claire story it was only his loss, only he who felt cheated by his inattention.

Jay groaned again, rolled over, buried his head in the sleep–sour pillow. It was no good. He was awake now.

He kicked a sneaker as he crossed to the balcony door. He stood looking down at the Quarter, inhaling the acrid odor of stale beer and cooking food and the fresh pungent smell of the Mississippi.

Claire! he called once more, almost yelling. He couldn’t stop a surge of fear that she had gone for good, vanished without a note, without packing, without a word of warning or good–bye. Gone out of his life.

With sudden ferocity, Jay imagined––no, remembered —the hours of waiting, the anger building through sadness, the dry mouth and fogged thinking, the leaden gut and sour–shits of jealousy and fear and betrayal, the heartsore waiting to know, hating to choose, if she were gone or dead or simply pissed.

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes hard. How’d Maggie get in here? Maggie. The one who left. He could still taste the bile.

Claire would not leave. She wouldn’t give up on me already. Not like that. She wouldn’t just vanish. There had to be some other explanation. He’d forgotten.

Okay, okay. Time to get a move on, he thought, but did not move.

Jay stood eyeballing Rue Chartres: followed a street sweeper, followed a hurried couple of businessmen, followed an awkward gathering of tourists. Would that same group of tourists appear at his side later in the day, asking the price of his pastel portraits, shyly giggling amongst themselves as they decided which of the group would go first?

It was enough to send him back to bed.

Shit, man, no biggie, he said aloud.

The tourists would be there later, tomorrow, next spring. He had done enough bad paintings of philodendron–draped courtyards. He had already sold enough this month to cover his half, more or less. Really, he thought, we live well, well enough, well enough not to worry much.

Once upon a time Jay bragged. He used to like the proclamatory ring: I’m a painter, as if insisting upon an identity between his work and his self, no difference between his day and night dreams.

He could not now remember, and did not try to recall, when he had stopped bragging. Perhaps the company he kept failed more frequently to care what he said he was or did or wanted from his life.

Jay had settled into compromise with jovial grace, blaming none, accepting the slow accommodations without complaint, until his greatest ambition lay in making his friends laugh. Imperceptibly, he had come to care less and less about making a name other than Jayjay. He relaxed into his life, cozying down to the role of relentless good timer, French Quarter Character, Habitué of half–a–dozen joints. His ambitions diminished, his world shrank toward easily walked distances. His indifference blossomed.

I’m a New Orleanian, Jay invariably replied when asked now what he did. If pressed he might say, I’m a local colorist.

Painter had come to conjure only the image of angry men spattered in white latex, balancing on municipal scaffolding, cursing one another in the patois of poverty.

What was it I once thought I would be?

This, he insisted, this very thing.

Again Jay managed the trick. Faint shades of past ambition darkened his brow. He felt the fear and ignored it. Turned it away. Colored his failure so prettily it seemed to him glorious choice.

Jay struck a match to the pilotless stove and put water on to boil. His morning rituals, only slightly different for Claire’s absence, followed without thought: teeth, shower, shave, assemble clothing and crawl into them, step out onto the creaking balcony.

The day was bright, the wind irregular and strong. The low slung clouds racing overhead would soon stop and gather and hang there. What was now only an occasional bite of damp would soon be steady winter chill. Jay liked fall.

The kettle whistled. He spooned coffee into the Chemex funnel and poured, waited for the sodden brown grounds to settle, poured again. The smell of chicory and dark bean filled his head with groggy morning hope. He watched the lower chamber steam, and tried again to recall if Claire had told him of an appointment, tried to figure where she might’ve gone.

Claire watched a steady stream of tourists pass the door of the Laundromat. They peered through the streaked plate glass expecting another jazz bar or antique store or tee–shirt shop. Their faces fell, confused, almost affronted, to find the row of Maytag washers, as if some portion of their hard earned vacation had been corrupted by the ordinary.

This yours? asked an enormous woman wrapped in a faded blue print shift.

No. I don’t think so, Claire replied.

I found it by the washer you was using.

The woman shuffled closer, a frayed green sock dangling from her fingertips like a rotting trout.

Not mine, Claire insisted.

The woman rolled the sock into a tight ball and handed it to a dirty–faced boy–child dressed only in gray and drooping Fruit of the Loom.

Here you go, Eugene. Go on and play now. The woman sat next to Claire and pulled a National Enquirer from a shopping bag. Eugene slammed the sock against the back wall and frowned when it failed to bounce.

Claire watched the street again, and the reading woman, and Eugene. She pictured herself sitting, waiting for clean laundry. Who is that pretty young thing, she said to herself, and what’s a girl like that doing in a place like this? Shouldn’t she be in school; in a law office; at the beach; in a dance class; married? She shifted in the metal folding chair.

Eugene tugged at Claire’s elbow.

Hey, lady. Lady.

The woman slapped the child.

It’s okay, Claire protested.

Go on, Eugene. Get!

The child wailed. The woman turned back to her tabloid.

Claire had lived in New Orleans for almost three years and only recently, since living with Jay, did she feel entitled. Without Jay she was still a tourist. Were he to leave, stop loving her, fall for another, would she, she wondered, stay? Or would she return to her clan, contrite and humbled?

Home had been a small fishing village in the heart of Cajun country, a land no one wanted, an ominous country filled with shadows and pestilence. Her people had made a life, a language, a music. It was an antique life, mired in provincial pleasures, simple, pious, clinging to French, living in harmony with the cruel swamp. She had committed an unpardonable sin. She had run away to the city. Most likely they would not have her back. She was ashamed that it did not bother her more.

She did miss the land. She remembered now, and traveled through, the fields of sugar cane; the cypress–lined bayous, slow and brown as syrup; walked long lawns dotted with moss–hung oak trees; could almost feel the gulf breeze as her father’s shrimp boat skimmed the marshland.

Claire pictured her father’s face, his wet blue eyes, the deep lines about his lips and lids; the fine web of red filaments in the hollow above his cheek bone: a blood vessel that had given up under the strain of constant squinting against the Gulf glare. His face was like his land, she thought. He wears his place.

She peered again through the grimed window out at the French Quarter. What would her father say could he know what her life had become? Would he even recognize her, understand the day to day hurts and pleasures of her life with Jay?

She imagined too clearly the tight–lipped condemnation, the silent, palpable anger covering his face like shadow.

Why, she asked herself, does it still matter? It does. And probably always will. Idn’t that a bitch? Probably always will. Trapped.

I just want them to be happy I’m happy, Claire thought, and then had to suppress a laugh. See how silly that sounds? The only happiness her parents might allow had to have a familiar shape. Like learning to sew better and like it. Like joining the local bake club. Like loving Philip. Like raising his children and singing in the choir. Those were their joys, the joys they expected Claire to embrace.

Her family and friends had assumed Claire would delight in Philip’s proposal. Everybody saw it coming. Everyone liked Philip. They all thought she was very lucky. They all expected they would make a beautiful couple. They anticipated a fall wedding, a two–pirogue affair beneath the moss hung oaks, two dugouts chocked full of ice and beer.

Looking at Philip so sure of her affection, listening to him propose marriage and avow love, Claire realized how little this world, her world, her only world, held for her. She saw the outline of her life too clearly in her mother and her aunts. She saw nothing but a wrenching solitude, a loneliness unbroken by the crowds of children, the relentless necessities.

She remembered now, with bitterness and a grin, how Philip’s face had fallen when she lied and told him she was not a virgin. It was that, his dismay, more than love or lust, that had determined Claire to lose it right then and there on the front porch at around midnight with her parents asleep not fifteen feet away. She wanted to know if Philip’s love could survive the brute fact of their bodies, unadorned by his idiotic notion of virtue or the assumptions of their clan. Of course, it could not. Even as he nervously entered her virgin self, even as she thrilled at the surrender, Claire could sense his withdrawal, could feel his love ebb. No betrayal since has seemed so thorough, so final. It pleased her, at least, that no man would boast taking her virginity. She had given it to Philip without his knowledge.

When Philip finished she said nothing. The next morning she boarded the bus to New Orleans.

What Claire felt most as she sat in the speeding Trailways was that she had escaped the kitchen. She chuckled. Yep, that’s right. Too damn hot.

She breathed easier in the stifling heat of the close bus. She inhaled the rancid mix of cheap perfume and cologne and labor’s sweat and old food and squashed chocolate and diesel fuel and thought it a very sweet smell.

Hey lady, Eugene tugged at her elbow, whispering, hiding huddled behind Claire.

What? Claire whispered back.

I think you pretty, Eugene whispered and blushed.

Why…thank you.

You got any money? Eugene asked.

How much you need? asked Claire, grinning inside.

You got a dime?

Sure.

Claire snuck a dime into Eugene’s palm. He ran to the gum machine before his mother caught him and made him give it back.

The Laundromat crackled and hummed with the relentless knocking of a tennis shoe inside a dryer, the insistent whir of a spin cycle, the slosh, slosh of a rinse. Claire watched her tumbling laundry, trying to stare the last bits dry.

Last Easter, day of healed–wounds, Grace’s revenge, Claire had walked assuredly into Jay’s life. He had stationed himself on the Cathedral side of Jackson Square. Well-dressed fathers navigated their families through knots of tourists and drunks toward Mass. Awe–struck out–of–towners mingled with bands of street people, clutches of last night’s revelers. A solitary saxophone argued with the Angelus. A street urchin collected discarded soda cans and stopped to stare with bewildered envy at a little girl in white gloves and bonnet and patent leather slippers. A red–faced man from Nebraska or Ohio munched a foot long hot dog. A spry Creole matron, draped in a white lace veil, clutched a mother–of–pearl missal, longing for the Mass of the Resurrection. New Orleans Easter Parade.

After Mass, families might stop for portraits. Later in the day the tourists, temporarily put off by the locals’ piety, would return. Meanwhile, Jay doodled.

Pad propped on his knee, he sketched his loafered, sockless, right foot. He told each wrinkle in the worn leather, suggested each swollen stitch. Jay smiled as he hinted at a Lincoln head penny wedged into the cross patch.

The heavy Cathedral doors closed. The Mass’ muffled organ punctuated the square’s sudden, queer silence.

Nice foot, Claire, who was not yet Claire to Jay, said.

My foot, my tutor, Jay said, looking up and falling in love.

Claire possessed magically blue eyes, a rich blue, centered in wide white. Her black hair, draped forward over her shoulders, waved slightly all the time, never neatly framing her face. Her complexion possessed a complexity he had never seen, a translucent white through which shone ripples of blush brought on by blood or rough wind, and glimmerings of lazuli where veins rose perilously close to the fragile seeming surface. Jay felt the breathless tug of love. He heard his heart crack a little.

She was neither tourist nor native; she had neither the nervous, hope–filled eyes of the voyeur, nor the casual indifference of the local charmers. She was neither hung–over, nor pious; neither on her way from a night’s adventure, nor into the Cathedral.

Jay forgot to flirt. His critical eye closed. He followed no fantasy. Ordinarily, he would eye the woman standing above him and, in a single quick glance, grasp her greatest imperfection: the shoulders stooped or rounded, the too full waist, the cinched bust, the crooked jaw line, the laborious hair–style, the features not quite in harmony. And he would forgive their flaws. His fantasy would speed furiously to a first naked embrace, to the awkward exciting sex all new lovers promise. He would imagine their appetites, imagine the blush of their passion, the secret uniqueness of their sex. He would imagine their hopes, their ambitions: plays piano, hungers for a family, still believes in God. He would imagine their disappointments, their failures. He would imagine a life with each passing flirtation, imagine his life changed by theirs, theirs by his. And most curiously, it seemed to him, had any one of these fantasies turned more than idle possibility, he would, he was sure, have been happy.

Looking at Claire, Jay could see no future. He could detect no flaw to forgive. He could discern no pattern of despair or hope. He felt shame at the image of this woman naked. Woman! Child. She was a child. Jay tried to guess. She might be seventeen. She might be near thirty. She still had baby fat. But her eyes looked so hard. Her features had angles he’d never seen. She made you look. You had to look.

So. How much for a portrait, mister?

I can’t do this, Jay thought. I’m going to do this. I’m going to. Aren’t I? It can’t be helped. She won’t take indifference for an answer. Jay decided to let it happen. He let himself fall into flirtation, not caring beyond his dangerous and silly–seeming desire.

Oh, I dunno. Shot of something or other’ll do, he said.

I can manage that, cher, I do believe, said Claire.

Her Cajun lilt melded into the muted organ music coming from the Cathedral.

Nice accent.

What accent would that be?

Jay smiled and stood and reached a gentlemanly arm to guide her into the faded canvas folding chair.

Just for the record, Jay started.

Yes?

Well. Can I see a driver’s license?

Very cute, cher.

Curious is all.

I’m legal, she said

Ah, he said.

He clipped a fresh sheet to his board and stared. Claire did not blink.

Look here, he prompted, pointing to a space left of his shoulder.

Only after gathering his heart and deciding Yes, I love this face, did he clear his eyes, look at Claire as an object to be traced, and draw his first fluid line.

Onlookers gathered at Jay’s back, admiring his counterfeit of Claire’s beauty.

He paused. There was something wrong with the portrait. Something he had missed. He tried to discover what moved him so in Claire’s face, what about her presence commanded his respect, demanded his admiration. The longer he examined Claire, the less simply beautiful she became. Her nose is too flat, he thought. Her eyes too wide apart. Look at that mole there beneath her ear. Yet there was an openness in her gaze, a directness in her posture, a self–possession in her pose he wanted for himself.

Jay resigned. This was as close as he would get. He dropped the nub of graphite into the ridged tray, wiped his hand and looked at Claire softly again, the clinical stare replaced by a different sort of searching.

Lemme see, she said.

Just a sec. I’m not done, he insisted, folding his arms, leaning back. Hold still please.

She squirmed. She turned her head to meet Jay’s persistent gaze. She stood and walked around to Jay’s back. She looked down over his shoulder at the simple charcoal drawing. She was surprised and pleased and just a little embarrassed at the affection evident in Jay’s rendering of her lips and her eyes.

That’s beautiful, Claire said.

Yes, Jay said. You are.

Do I really look so very scared?

The question startled Jay. She was right. No matter the strength evident in her eyes, the seeming sturdiness of her shoulders, there was a trace of fright upon her lips, a barely concealed quivering which he had felt and somehow captured. She’s vulnerable, Jay thought, not to the world, but to me.

Look, Lady, Jay joked, I jus’ draw what I see.

My turn, Claire said, reaching for a fresh sheet of paper and a stick of blue pastel. She settled back into her chair and propped the drawing board upon her lap; she stared at awkwardly smiling Jay. She drew nothing.

Hold still, please, she said. Look here. Here.

Jay shifted in his seat and then settled back to let her look her fill.

Let me see, Jay said.

I’m not done.

Jay waited a moment, watching Claire watch him, then rose and crossed to her back. He looked over her shoulder at the blank sheet of paper.

I like it, he said. Quite a good likeness. Sign it, please. She did.

Jay rolled both sheets carefully, snapping a rubber band about the tube. He handed them to Claire.

Where shall we go? Jay asked as he began packing his sample sketches.

You pick, Claire said.

Easter Sunday grew humid. They sat in the air–conditioned Cafe Pontalba, Jay drinking neat sour mash, Claire sipping iced tea. Tables filled with touring families, emptied, filled again. She watched his eyes; she watched his lips as he told her stories; she watched his neck; she watched his hands: thick, hardened hands, the nails long and filled with colors, the fingertips smudged with pastel.

How old is your father? Jay asked.

Excuse me?

I was just wondering.

Wondering what?

Well. I could be. I think. Strictly speaking. It might be I could be the same age. As your father.

I’m twenty–one.

Ah. Yes. Well. I’m right, then. Technically.

You have a problem?

That’s young.

Like I said. Legal.

You seem older.

Thanks bunches.

I mean.

He’s fifty–five.

I’m thirty–nine.

That’s not so terribly old. Really. She smiled.

The afternoon passed into early evening. A summer–like stillness settled. The air hung dull and lifeless and filled with sour smells from a nearby brewery. They had exhausted the day trading stories about their disguised hunger and the various accidental victories that composed their pasts.

Now what? Jay asked.

I have no idea, Claire replied, her eyes narrowed with anticipation.

Come down by the levee, cher, I’ll show you da moon rise.

Claire laughed. You bad.

Go out by the lake front and watch the submarine races.

Very bad, Claire said.

Let’s go home, Jay said.

Home. Claire puzzled over the word. As if hearing it for the first time.

She looked at Jay. She tried to see and measure his capacity for cruelty. She saw none. She saw only his deep and generous eyes. She guessed at his carelessness, but saw no cruelty. Surely this is a bad idea, her self said in caution. Surely, she replied. Dangerous. I’ll be wounded. I am wounded. Damage already done.

Her lack of expectation made Claire brave. Let him hurt me. Let him hurt. What’s the problem? What’s so odd? Isn’t that the way of things? What’s supposed to happen?

She said nothing.

Jay rose. He reached a