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interview. The mother saw me on the program, and checked the newspapers to find out what hotel
we were using for the convention, and she got my room number and called me. I had been out quite
late after the banquet where I’d gotten my award, quite late. I was sitting on the side of the bed,
taking off my shoes, my tuxedo tie hanging from my unbuttoned collar, getting ready just to throw
clothes on the floor and sink away, when the phone rang. It was the mother. She was a terrible
person, one of the worst I ever knew, a shrike, a terrible, just a terrible person. She started telling me
about Bernice in the asylum. How they had her in this little room and how she stared out the
window most of the time. She’d reverted to childhood, and most of the time she couldn’t even
recognize the mother; but when she did, she’d say something like, ‘Don’t let them hurt me,
Mommy, don’t let them hurt me.’ So I asked her what she wanted me to do, did she want money for
Bernice or what...Did she want me to go see her 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
