Second Line

I took the key card up to eleven oh four at six o’clock, three hours before I was due downstairs in black, and I did not take my dress off.

I stood at the window. Canal Street was coming on gold and the streetcar went by and the whole ceiling went orange and came back, and I put my clutch on the desk and my hand up under four thousand dollars of black silk.

A widow does not do this. A widow sits in the chapel with her ankles crossed. I had my back against the sheers of a hotel window with my dress up around my waist and two fingers in my own pussy, and I was wet already, which was the first surprise. Four years and two weeks of a closed account and the account was open. I thought about nobody. There was no face. I had worn out every face I owned on Marengo Street. I thought about a mouth. A man’s mouth on me with nothing in his head about Washington Avenue, and hands on the backs of my thighs that did not know what a casket weighed. I thought about being fucked in that bed, slow, with the sheers open, before somebody else came in to make it up in the morning.

I got my other hand on my clit through the silk and I did it standing up, slow, slower than I had let myself go in four years, with the streetcar coming and going on the ceiling, and when I came I made a sound in that room that nobody on Washington Avenue has ever heard come out of me. Out loud. At a window. With my grandmother’s pearls in my ears.

Then I stood there and shook for about a minute with my forehead on the glass.

I washed my hands. I fixed my face in the bathroom mirror, both eyes, and I pulled the dress down and put the key card in my clutch next to my lipstick, and I went down to the ballroom to be the widow for four hundred people.

That is what I had in me when I sat down across from my sister.

“I’m getting a room tonight and I’m not sleeping in it by myself.”

My sister had a shrimp halfway to her mouth. She put it back down on the plate.

“Say that one more time.”

“You heard me, Ro.”

“I heard sounds.” She touched the corner of her lip with her napkin, slow, the way she does when she is buying herself four seconds. “I heard my big sister say a sentence at the Augustin Dejoie Memorial Scholarship Gala. With that man’s face up on a screen the size of a garage door. So I need to be real sure what the sentence was before I say anything back.”

“A room. Upstairs. Eleventh floor. I paid for it Thursday with my own card and I did not put it under Guichard.”

“Vonnie.”

“And before you ask me who, I don’t know who yet. That’s the part I like.”

Rosalie sat all the way back in her chair and looked at me for a long time.

“You paid Thursday.”

“Thursday morning.”

“So this is not some feeling that came over you at this table. This is a decision you made three days ago and sat on through two viewings and a repast.”

“Three days ago, and I have rehearsed telling you about forty times, so I would appreciate it if you did not make me do the whole speech twice.”

“I’m not making you do anything.” She picked the shrimp back up. “Who else knows?”

“Nobody.”

“Lucien?”

“Why would I tell Lucien?”

“Because he’s your brother.”

“He is my cousin, he was raised as my brother, and he would drive me to that hotel himself and then sit in the garage all night with the engine running like a chauffeur in a movie. No.”

“He would, though.” My sister laughed into her glass. “He absolutely would. He’d hum the whole time.”

Behind us they were still running the slideshow. Augustin at twenty-nine in a folding chair at a crawfish boil with his head thrown back. Augustin at the Tremé center with thirty kids in front of him and a microphone he did not need. Augustin at our wedding, his hand flat on my back, looking at me like he had gotten away with something.

Four hundred people in that ballroom eating chicken off the hotel’s good plates, and every last one of them had looked at me twice already. Once at the hair. Once at the face, to see how I was holding up.

Here is the part nobody in that room was going to say to my face.

That man died in four feet of water four years ago and the business doubled. Doubled. Calls, policies, the pretty funerals, the ones with the horses. People want a Guichard funeral. People want the widow who carried it so well. I took every dollar of that. Because the building needed it and my grandmother needed it and I did not know how to say no to money that was already in my hand.

So here is the bill. I got paid to keep grieving. I got very, very good at the work. And somewhere in there I stopped being able to find the line between the woman and the job. I have not laughed out loud from my chest one time in four years. My face is a product and I cannot afford a crack in the paint.

Am I supposed to be grateful? Four hundred people came out tonight in good shoes to be sad about my husband with me, and all I wanted the whole time was for one of them to ask me how my week went.

That, and one other thing, which I was not about to say at a table with my sister.

I had not been touched in four years and two weeks. Not one hand on the small of my back that was not steering me toward a casket. I had done for myself, the way a woman does, on Marengo Street with the shutters closed and the house quiet, two fingers and my own mind, and my mind had nothing left in it to work with. More times than not I quit halfway and lay there with my hand wet and my eyes open on the ceiling fan, and I thought, a woman with a building and a grandmother and four hundred people who love her has a pussy nobody has said one word to since 2022. That is not grief. That is a closed account.

So I booked the room. I booked it for the thing I could not say across a plate of shrimp. I wanted a man’s weight. I wanted his mouth on me somewhere a widow does not get touched. I wanted to be fucked in a bed somebody else was going to make up in the morning, by somebody who had never heard the name on that screen, and I wanted to make a sound doing it that nobody on Washington Avenue had ever heard come out of me.

That was the whole order. It had been sitting under my face for three days like a coal, and an hour ago, at a window, it had caught.

“Can I say one thing,” Rosalie said.

“You’re going to anyway.”

“Four years.”

“I can count.”

“I’m not finished. Four years. I have watched you go to four hundred funerals, come home, feed Grandmother, and go to bed at nine thirty. And every person in this room has decided who you are, Vonnie.”

“What am I?”

“A saint.”

“I’m not a saint, I’m tired.”

“I know good and well who you are. I’m telling you what they think.” She pointed her fork at the screen without turning around. “They love that man. I loved that man. He was good to me. He was good to you. He has been dead four years and they love him better now than they did when he was out here aggravating everybody.”

“That’s how it works.”

“So go upstairs.”

“That is what I said I was doing.”

“No, you said it like a confession. Say it like a plan.”

“I am going upstairs tonight.”

“With who?”

“Whoever is down in that bar being interesting at eleven o’clock.”

“And if nobody’s interesting?”

“Then I’ll sleep in a very nice room by myself and order whatever they have got that comes under a silver lid,” I said, “and that would still be the best night I have had since 2022, so do not look at me pitiful.”

“I’m not looking at you pitiful. I’m looking at you proud.”

“Don’t do that either.”

“I’m saying it back so you can hear it in somebody else’s mouth,” Rosalie said. “Go upstairs. Just do not come down in the morning acting brand new.”

“I have never once acted brand new.”

“You act brand new constantly. It is your entire personality. You’ll be at that counter Monday at eight o’clock in a grey suit like none of it happened and I’ll have to look at you.”

“Grey?”

“You own one grey suit and you only put it on when you have done something.”

“That is not true.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t do the noise.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said mm, which is worse than saying something, and you have been doing it since the salad.”

Somebody touched my elbow.

I know that touch. Two fingers, light, just above the joint. The touch of a person who has decided they are entitled to interrupt you and would like it to look like a kindness.

“Mrs. Dejoie.”

“Mr. Panettieri.”

“Gaspard.”

“I know.”

He laughed like I had handed him something. Gaspard Panettieri is sixty-six, built heavy and carrying it beautifully, and his suits come out of a shop in Metairie where a man measured his father. Grey that night. Pocket square the color of weak tea. I have always liked him and I have never once trusted him, and I have made my peace with holding both. Silver hair cut inside the last nine days. I would have put money on that haircut.

“Your sister,” he said.

“Mr. Panettieri,” Rosalie said, and stood. Let him take her hand. Sat back down. Went completely flat in the face, which my sister only does when she is working.

“Sit, please, both of you.” He did not sit. He put one hand down flat on our tablecloth, palm down, right beside the butter, and left it there. “I came over before they get to the presentation. I don’t care to be part of a presentation.”

“You don’t have to do anything at all.”

“Thirty thousand this year.”

“Gaspard.”

“Don’t.” The other hand came up. “Don’t thank me. It isn’t a thing a person says thank you about. Augustin took my nephew’s boy into that program the year that child was headed somewhere bad. He is in his second year at Xavier. I will be writing this check when you and I are both too old to hold a pen.”

“Thirty thousand is a lot of pen.”

“It’s lagniappe. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all.”

He smiled. I smiled. His hand stayed flat on my tablecloth.

I have thought one thing at that man across a room for about a year and a half and I have never said it out loud. Gaspard Panettieri does not use the word nothing unless he wants you to hear a number.

“How is Miss Ottilie?”

“She’s eighty-six.”

“She is a queen.”

“She is a queen who cannot be left past dark, so I’ll be making my way out of here before long.”

“Of course you will.” He straightened up. “Come see me about the Marchand order. The twenty-gauge, the brushed. They’re coming in on a truck Wednesday and I want your hands on one before I put them on a floor.”

“Send me the sheet and I’ll tell you Monday.”

“No.” Still smiling. “Come put your hands on it, Yvonne. You’ll tell me no over a sheet of paper. Then I have to drive to Washington Avenue and talk you back around. I am too old to be driving uptown to argue with a Guichard.”

“Monday at ten o’clock, then.”

“Monday.”

He tapped the cloth twice, which is what that man does instead of saying goodbye, and he went.

Rosalie waited until he was eight feet gone.

“I hate him.”

“You don’t hate him.”

“I hate that suit. I hate the hand on the table. He sets that hand down like he is fixing to tell you how your daddy died.”

“He sells us caskets.”

“I know what he sells us.”

“He has sold this family caskets since before you could walk, Rosalie.”

“Mm.”

“There it is again.”

“I said mm because he called you Yvonne. Nobody calls you Yvonne. Grandmother doesn’t call you Yvonne. So who is he to walk over here with his hand out like he christened you?”

The man at table nine went down.

He did not slump. People think they slump. He came half up out of his chair like he had remembered something out in his car. Then his legs were not under him. He caught the edge of the table going down and took two water glasses and somebody’s cobbler with him. A woman screamed in a way that stopped the band in the middle of a bar.

I was already moving. I was not frightened, which frightened me later.

“Sir.” I got both knees down on that floor in four thousand dollars’ worth of black crepe and did not think about it one time. “Sir, look at me. Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

“Rosalie, call nine one one. Somebody get that chair out from behind his head.”

“Is he breathing?” A man above me, loud. “Hey. Is the man breathing?”

“Move your foot, please, sir.”

“Is he breathing?”

“He is not breathing.”

Two fingers under the angle of his jaw, my cheek down almost on his mouth, and there was nothing against my skin at all and nothing under my fingers either. Navy suit. Sixty-some. A wedding band worn thin on the inside the way they get.

“Help me get him flat on his back. You, in the vest, take that chair. Sir, you straighten his legs out for me.”

“Oh God. Oh God, that is Rayford. That is Rayford Soule.”

“Ma’am, I need you to stand back for me.”

“That’s my husband.”

“Yes, ma’am. Rosalie.”

“I got Miss Lenora.”

“Who called the ambulance?”

“The boy at the bar called. They’re on Poydras.”

“Get somebody down to that service door so they don’t come in through four hundred people.”

“Lucien ain’t here, Vonnie.”

“Then grab a waiter. Grab two.”

“Sir. Sir, in the vest. Come here, baby, I need you.”

I put the heel of my hand on the lower half of that man’s breastbone and locked my elbows and started. My knees were down in water and cobbler. Every time I came down I could hear glass crunching under me.

“One, two, three, four.” You count out loud. You count out loud so the room has something to do besides watch. “Five, six, seven, eight.”

“They’re coming,” somebody said. “They’re in the lobby. They’re coming through the back.”

“Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.”

“Baby, you want me to take a turn?”

“No. Get his wife down here.”

“She’s right here.”

“Get her closer, Ro. She needs to be where that man can hear his wife.”

My sister did not ask me whether a man face up on a ballroom floor with nothing moving in him could hear one single thing. She took that woman by both arms and brought her down on her knees beside me in a beaded gown and said, in the voice I have heard her use on the dead a hundred times, “Talk to him, Miss Lenora. Go on and talk. He likes your voice.”

“Ray.”

“Keep on talking to him, Miss Lenora.”

“Rayford Soule, don’t you dare.”

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight.”

“You hear me? Don’t you dare. Not in front of all these people.”

“Twenty-nine, thirty.” I came up off him one second. “Where is that bag?”

“Coming through. Excuse us. Excuse us, y’all.”

Two paramedics came between the tables at a dead run with a bag swinging between them, and the one closest got a knee down beside me.

“Ma’am, how long?”

“Three minutes. Maybe four. He was down before I got to him.”

“Who has been on his chest?”

“Me. The whole time.”

“You get anything at any point? Any pulse?”

“No.”

“You’re good. We’ve got him.”

I came off that man and sat back on the floor with my palms on my own knees, and they were burning.

They worked him nine minutes. They got something back on the fourth shock. Not much. Enough that the one nearest me said a word into his shoulder radio and the other one started moving faster instead of slower, and anybody who has ever been in a room with that knows which direction it means.

“Ma’am.” The first one again, standing now, gloves off. “You the wife?”

“No.”

“She did the CPR,” Rosalie said. “She was on him inside a minute.”

“All right. Good. Keep that up.”

They took him out through the service hall. Lenora Soule went with them. The band did not start back up.

My sister knelt down beside me on that floor. She got hold of my elbow and she did not say one word, which is the most loving thing Rosalie knows how to do for anybody.

“My hands are shaking.”

“Yeah, they’re shaking.”

“They don’t shake.”

“I know, baby.”

“Is there blood on this dress?”

“It’s cobbler.”

“That’s worse.”

“Peach cobbler, at that,” she said. “Girl, you knelt down in a whole peach cobbler.”

“Help me up before somebody takes a picture.”

“Too late, baby.”

“How many?”

“Girl, do not ask me a question like that.”

“How many, Rosalie.”

“Everybody with a phone and a thumb,” she said. “Mrs. Ancelet had hers up over her head like she was at a Beyoncé concert.”

“Mrs. Ancelet buried her husband with us in March.”

“And she will be telling that story at church tomorrow with your name all through it, baby.”

She was right, and it made me sick. Four hundred people were looking, and half of them had phones down at their hips instead of up. Because this is a city where people have home training. By Sunday afternoon there would be a photograph on somebody’s page of Augustin Dejoie’s widow on her knees in a ballroom, and a caption underneath about how that family has taken care of this city for three generations.

They would not even be wrong. That is the part that is unbearable.

A woman caught my wrist by the doors. I had never seen her face in my life.

“God put you in this room tonight.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“He surely put you right here in this room.”

“Yes, ma’am. Y’all get home safe.”

I went out through the lobby with my shoes in my hand.

That hotel has a bar off the lobby, down two steps, low gold light, a piano somebody is always playing a little too politely. I stopped on the carpet outside with my shoes hanging off two fingers, the key card in my clutch, peach cobbler on the hem. I stood there long enough that the man at the stand asked me twice.

“Ma’am? You need a chair?”

“No, thank you.”

“You sure? Can I get you some water?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I never look fine.”

“You want me to call somebody for you?”

“There isn’t anybody to call, baby.”

“Yes, ma’am. Well. The bar’s open till two.”

“Is it crowded?”

“Nine people. Maybe ten.”

“Anybody down there worth my time?”

That young man laughed so hard he had to put his hand on the stand.

“Ma’am,” he said, “you have got a whole hotel in here tonight and I am not getting in trouble before midnight.”

I could have gone home. My grandmother was with the night girl and the night girl is good, and my car was in that garage. It is eleven minutes to Washington Avenue with every light against me.

If I turned around in that lobby and went home to my grandmother, I would wake up somebody’s good widow in the morning. Same as every morning.

I put my shoes back on, both of them, standing up, with nobody holding my arm.

I went down the two steps.