You really can start it all over now. You really can. Please don’t be silly, another part of him said. You really can, he said to himself. You can be just as good a guy as she thinks you are and as you are at this moment.
There is such a thing as starting it all over and you’ve been given a chance to and you can do it and you will do it. Will you make all the promises again? Yes. If necessary I will make all the promises and I will keep them. Not all the promises? Knowing you have broken them? He could not say anything to that. You mustn’t be a crook before you start. No. I mustn’t. Say what you can truly do each day and then do it. Each day. Do it a day at a time and keep each day’s promises to her and to yourself. That way I can start it all new, he thought, and still be straight.
You’re getting to be an awful moralist, he thought. If you don’t watch out you will bore her. When weren’t you always a moralist? At different times. Don’t fool yourself. Well, at different places then. Don’t fool yourself.
All right, Conscience, he said. Only don’t be so solemn and didactic. Get a load of this, Conscience old friend, I know how useful and important you are and how you could have kept me out of all the trouble I have been in but couldn’t you have a little lighter touch about it? I know that conscience speaks in italics but sometimes you seem to speak in very boldfaced Gothic script.
I would take it just as well from you, Conscience, if you did not try to scare me; just as I would consider the Ten Commandments just as seriously if they were not presented as graven on stone tablets. You know. Conscience, it has been a long time since we were frightened by the thunder. Now with the lightning: There you have something. But the thunder doesn’t impress us so much any more. I’m trying to help you, you son of a bitch, his conscience said.
The girl was still sleeping and they were coming up the hill into Tallahassee. She will probably wake when we stop at the first light, he thought. But she did not and he drove through the old town and turned off to the left on U.S. 319 straight south and into the beautiful wooded country that ran down toward the Gulf Coast.
There’s one thing about you, daughter, he thought. Not only can you outsleep anybody I’ve ever known and have the best appetite I’ve ever seen linked with a build like yours but you have an absolutely heaven-given ability to not have to go to the bathroom.
Their room was on the fourteenth floor and it was not very cool. But with the fans on and the windows open it was better and when the bellboy had gone out Helena said, “Don’t be disappointed, darling. Please. It’s lovely.”
“I thought I could get you an air-conditioned one.”
“They’re awful to sleep in really. Like being in a vault. This will be fine.”
“We could have tried the other two. But they know me there.”
“They’ll know us both here now. What’s our name?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Robert Harris.”
“That’s a splendid name. We must try to live up to it. Do you want to bathe first?”
“No. You.”
“All right. I’m going to really bathe though.”
“Go ahead. Go to sleep in the tub if you want.”
“I may. I didn’t sleep all day did I?”
“You were wonderful. There was some pretty dull going too.”
“It wasn’t bad. Lots of it was lovely. But New Orleans isn’t really the way I thought it would be. Did you always know it was so flat and dull? I don’t know what I expected. Marseilles I suppose. And to see the river.”
“It’s only to eat and drink in. The part right around here doesn’t look so bad at night. It’s really sort of nice.”
“Let’s not go out until it’s dark. It’s all right around here. Some of it is lovely.”
“We’ll have that and then, in the morning, we’ll be on our way.”
“That only leaves time for one meal.”
“That’s all right. We’ll come back in cold weather when we can really eat. Darling,” she said. “This is the first sort of letdown we’ve had. So let’s not let it let us down. We’ll have long baths and some drinks and a meal twice as expensive as we can afford and we’ll go to bed and make wonderful love.”
“The hell with New Orleans in the movies,” Roger said. “We’ll have New Orleans in bed.”
“Eat first. Didn’t you order some White Rock and ice?”
“Yes. Do you want a drink?”
“No. I was just worried about you.”
“It will be along,” Roger said. There was a knock at the door. “Here it is. You get started on the tub.”
“It’s going to be wonderful,” she said. “There will just be my nose out of water and the tips of my breasts maybe and my toes and I’m going to have it just as cold as it will run.”
The bellboy brought the pitcher of ice, the bottled water and the papers, took his tip and went out.
Roger made a drink and settled down to read. He was tired and it felt good to lie back on the bed with two pillows folded under his neck and read the evening and the morning papers. Things were not so good in Spain but it had not really taken shape yet. He read all the Spanish news carefully in the three papers and then read the other cable news and then the local news.
“Are you all right, darling?” Helena called from the bathroom.
“I’m wonderful.”
“Have you undressed?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have anything on?”
“No.”
“Are you very brown?”
“Still.”
“Do you know where we swam this morning was the loveliest beach I’ve ever seen.”
“I wonder how it can get so white and so floury.”
“Darling are you very, very brown?”
“Why?”
“I was just thinking about you.”
“Being in cold water’s supposed to be good for that.’
“I’m brown under the water. You’d like it.”
“I like it.”
“You keep on reading,” she said. “You are reading aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Is Spain all right?”
“No.”
“I’m so sorry. Is it very bad?”
“No. Not yet. Really.”
“Roger?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes, daughter.”
“You go back and read now. I’ll think about that here underwater.”
Roger lay back and listened to the noises that came up from the street below and read the papers and drank his drink. This was almost the best hour of the day. It was the hour he had always gone to the café alone when he had lived in Paris, to read the evening papers and have his aperitif. This town was nothing like Paris nor was it like Orleans either. Orleans wasn’t much of a town either. It was pleasant enough though. Probably a better town to live in than this one.
He didn’t know the environs of this town though and he knew he was stupid about it.
He had always liked New Orleans, the little that he knew of it, but it was a letdown to anyone who expected very much. And this certainly was not the month to hit it in.
The best time he had ever hit it was with Andy one time in the winter and another time driving through with David. The time going north with Andy they had not come through New Orleans. They had bypassed it to the north to save time and driven north of Lake Pontchartrain and across through Hammond to Baton Rouge on a new road that was being built so they made many detours and then they had gone north through Mississippi in the southern edge of the blizzard that was coming down from the north.
When they had hit New Orleans was coming south again. But it was still cold and they had a wonderful time eating and drinking and the city had seemed gay and sharp with cold, instead of moist and damp and Andy had roamed all the antique shops and bought a sword with his Christmas money. He kept the sword in the luggage compartment behind the seat in the car and slept with it in his bed at night.
When he and David had come through it had been in the winter and they had made their headquarters in that restaurant he would have to try to find, the non-tourist one. He remembered it as in a cellar and having teakwood tables and chairs or else they sat on benches. It was probably not like that and was like a dream and he did not remember its name nor where it was located except he thought it was in the opposite direction from Antoine’s, on an east and west, not a north and south street, and he and David had stayed in there two days.
He probably had it mixed up with some other place. There was a place in Lyons and another near the Parc Monceau that always were merged in his dreams. That was one of the things about being drunk when you were young. You made places in your mind that afterwards you could never find and they were better than any places could ever be. He knew he hadn’t been to this place with Andy though.
“I’m coming out,” she said.
“Feel how cool,” she said on the bed. “Feel how cool all the way down. No don’t go away. I like you.”
“No. Let me take a shower.”
“If you
