The Dispensable Man

The Life and Adventures of Gillian McKenna

“Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.” -Spinoza

Part Four

31

On her break the following Saturday, Gillian saw that Erin had left a message, and she hurried to call her friend back. Erin was now a freshman at LSU in Baton Rouge, lived on campus, and only occasionally returned for the weekend in New Orleans. When she did, the two made sure to set time aside to see each other. Erin’s unique combination of warmth and pragmatism had always been a stabilizing influence for Gillian, and she couldn’t get enough of it. They arranged to meet at the restaurant as soon as Gillian’s shift was over and have dinner.

“I’d have thought you’d be tired of eating here,” said Erin as they slid into the most isolated booth available. 

“I’m sick to death of eating here. But it’s free.”

“Gotcha.”  She noticed that Gillian was beaming at her. “What is it?”

All through school, Erin had never been what one would call a girly-girl. Not unattractive, but her feminine appearance was the same as her personality: plain, straightforward, and understated. Now, she wore jeans and a white button up blouse, untucked but neat, and her dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail to fully reveal her open, intelligent face. 

“I just gotta say, you’re looking very collegiate,” Gillian said. “And you wear it very well.”

“Thanks.  And I gotta say, you’re the best friend those uniforms ever had.”

Gillian still had her pad with her, and when Erin decided what she wanted, Gillian coded both meals on the ticket. “Waitresses don’t wait on each other,” she explained. She walked over and placed the order on the spinner in the cook’s window. 

When she retuned to their table, Erin said, “So tell me everything. Your own apartment, your own car… and a new boyfriend.”  When Gillian looked surprised, Erin added, “Your mother gave me a full report when I called over there looking for you.”

“I should have known. Well, the apartment’s in Gretna. It’s tiny, one bedroom, not much more than an efficiency. The car is a heap. It gets me from point A to point B when it’s not in the shop.”

“Who could ask for more? And your boyfriend? What’s he like?”

“He works a lot of construction, houses mostly. He helped me buy the car. If I get into trouble, he’ll help me with rent.”

“Nice guy,” said Erin. 

“So how’s school going?” Gillian asked.

Erin laughed. “Wait, that’s all you’re going to tell me? That he’ll help you with the rent?”

“He’s just a working guy, not much to tell. He’s cute, he’s…” she searched for words, found nothing, and looked at Erin helplessly. 

After an extended silence, “He’s what?”

“He’s married.” Gillian rested her forehead in her hands for another long moment, then lifted her eyes to the ceiling and exclaimed, “I know, I know, I know!” 

“Married…” Erin seemed to be pondering the meaning of the word.

“I didn’t know he was married when I started up with him,” Gillian went on.  “As soon as I found out I broke it off. But then he went into this tailspin, not eating or sleeping, following me around everywhere, he lost a bunch of weight, he looks like a cadaver. I really felt sorry for him but you don’t have to tell me, I understand, it’s fucking stupid.”

“Gillian, I’d never rag you about it. You’re doing a good enough job of that already.”

Gillian folded her arms and sulked for a while. 

“We do have a lot of fun together,” she at last said sheepishly.

They exchanged glances and laughed. 

Gillian quickly waved her hand, as if brushing away gnats. “Anyway, that’s enough of that. How’s school?”

“School’s fine- look, this is what I wanted to talk to you about. Why don’t you come? You can enroll next semester.”

“Enroll at LSU?”

“Yes. We can room together.”

Gillian shook her head, saying nothing. 

“No?” said Erin. “Just, ‘No’?” 

“I never considered going to college. It never occurred to me to go.”

“It’s occurring to you now.”

“No one in my family ever went. We just don’t do that.”

“That’s not a reason.”

It seemed to Gillian that there must be a reason. “My mother’s a waitress. My father doesn’t even pay his child support. As far as Schulz, I wouldn’t ask him for help if my life depended on it. He’d expect “reimbursement,” if you know what I mean. I’ve never looked into scholarships or loans or any of that. If I mentioned college to my mother she’d look at me like I had canaries flying out of my ears.”

“Gillian, you can pay for two semesters- that’s tuition, room, and board- at LSU or any school in Louisiana except Tulane— with what you earn here in one summer. You could get a part time job on campus, too, if you wanted. Lots of people do. We could share a dorm room or get an apartment with some other girls. You’d have to move back home over the summer to save the money, but it’s just for the summer. This is so do-able it isn’t funny.”

Gillian’s head continued to shake. 

“Your grades in every subject but math were as good as mine. In English, yours were better.”

“It’s not that I think I’m too dumb to go to college. Look, I just don’t want to go. I don’t like school.”

“What the hell kind of reason is that? Nobody likes school!”

For the first time, Erin appeared to be angry.

“Are you actually mad at me?”

“Mad? No, I’m not mad. You’re smart, you’re ridiculously beautiful, you’re even talented—I’ve heard you sing, and the ballet thing didn’t work out but that wasn’t your fault— but rather than use your head and get an education, you prefer to schlep patty melts for tips at a crappy diner and run around with some married loser! That’s what’s fucking stupid!”

“Order up!” the cook called. Gillian collected their plates at the window and set them on the table. 

“And I’m not leaving you a tip!” said Erin. 

When she saw the ad for the Sonny and Cher concert in Biloxi, she made up her mind that J.J. was going to take her. She had to get out and go somewhere. They never did anything but have sex in her apartment and see a matinee once in a blue moon. On top of that, as soon as she had moved in, J.J. locked her in a vice grip. He knew how long it took her to drive home from work and began calling the moment she set foot in the door.  He called her at work to make sure she was there, as well. If her schedule deviated even a few minutes, to pick up something at the store on the way home, for instance, he had a thousand questions and demanded to know whom she was with and what she’d been doing. He was belligerent whether he accepted her explanation or not. Whenever Gillian had enough and complained about this he responded in one of two ways. He usually became furious and threatening until Gillian dropped it.  Less often he would whine that it was because he loved her so much that he had to keep tabs on her. He worried about her safety, he said, and because he had family obligations he needed to know where she was at all times so that he could go to her the moment an opportunity arose.

Gillian knew he would use his wife and kids as an excuse not to take her to the concert, so she gave him plenty of advance notice. “Figure something out,” she told him.

“Sonny and Cher? In Biloxi? I don’t know if I can get away for that long. And that concert will be sold out. I’m not taking a big risk just to sit in the rafters.”

Gillian held up two tickets. “I called the ticket company and told them I was legally blind,” she said. “We’re in the front row.”

One week before the concert she changed clothes at work and headed to the mall to meet her mother. She told J.J. where she was going and not to expect her to be at home right away. 

“I can pick you up and take you,” he said.

“No, I have the car. I’ll be fine.”  She realized her assertion was untenable. Her Dodge Charger was a broken down lemon that spent most of its time in the shop. As often as not, she relied on taxis, J.J., or rides bummed from other waitresses to get to and from work.

True to form, the Dodge waited until she had made it onto the West Bank Expressway before the engine stopped with a loud clatter. She looked into the rearview mirror in time to see a fist-sized metallic structure bounce twice on the road then split into two, one half disappearing over the rail. She put the car in neutral, pulled as far as she could onto the narrow shoulder and coasted to a stop.

She drummed her fingers on the wheel, considering what to do. She was nowhere near an exit, and the expressway at that point passed over a residential section. Even if she wanted to knock on doors to use a phone, it would take her a good while to walk to point where she could climb down from the elevated roadway.

The minutes passed. Her mother would be worried. Traffic was heavy, and cars whizzed by dangerously a few feet from her door every couple of seconds. 

Just as she made the decision to start walking, she watched as one of the cars slowed, pulled over and stopped, then backed slowly towards her until its rear end was right up against her front bumper. An elderly man emerged and, seemingly oblivious to the speeding traffic that missed him by inches, walked back to his trunk, opened it, and pulled out a rope with thick metal hooks attached to either end. Gillian opened her door as much as she dared and shouted.

“Hello, Sir? Sir? Hello? I was on my way to the mall and…Sir? Hello?”

He didn’t look at her or in any way acknowledge that he heard her. Gillian watched him slowly sink below the level of her hood as he bent down and got to his knees. She heard metallic clanging, then a period of silence long enough for her to wonder if he had gone to sleep down there. Eventually he reemerged between the vehicles.

“Sir? Sir!” 

Still without so much as a glance in her direction, he got back into his car and started the engine. He crept forward until Gillian felt one jerk as the rope lost its slack, then another. He quickly picked up speed and in a moment they were merging with the traffic.

Gillian pulled her door shut wishing she had remembered to take the car out of neutral. But it was too late, they were traveling the speed limit down the expressway. Her brain raced to the only logical conclusion: she was being kidnapped. She rolled down the window and shrieked for help, waving her arms at everyone that passed. Her shouts and gesticulations grew more uninhibited as they passed one exit, then another, but no one took notice. She was completely in his control. He could drive her to a secluded spot and do whatever he wanted. Her terror increased, as she more fully realized the gravity of her situation, until she felt a change in direction. She looked up to see that he was getting off the expressway. It was the mall exit. 

She calmed herself enough to be able to apply the brakes when they came to traffic lights and stop signs. He pulled her into a parking space as close to the mall’s main entrance as possible. He unhooked the rope and returned it to his trunk as methodically as before while Gillian stood by and watched, still trembling somewhat. 

“Thank you,” she managed weakly as he pulled his door shut and drove off. 

Her mother was of course agitated. “He could have been an axe murderer!” Their outing had to be postponed in order to make arrangements to have the car towed to the shop. She didn’t know how she was going to pay for repairs this time, or how she would get to work in the morning. Schulz came and picked them up, and when he finally dropped Gillian at home, the phone was ringing off the hook, undoubtedly an irate J.J. on the line. 

“Yessiree,” Gillian thought. “This is what freedom feels like.”

32

Gillian named the monkey “Sonny Boner” because, first, she came across it at a snake farm on the way to the Sonny and Cher concert, and second because it had a seemingly permanent erection with which he tormented Gillian’s poodle, Teddy, by attacking him from the rear. When she was still living at her mother’s, she acquired Teddy from another waitress who was moving and was unable to take the dog with her. As soon as Gillian took him home, he promptly bit Emily, so in spite of the large pet deposit required by the apartment, Emily insisted Gillian take the dog with her. 

With about an hour to kill before the concert, she and J.J. had stopped at a roadside snake farm in Mississippi. The establishment consisted of a low slung shack set in the dust about seventy five feet off the road. A jungle scene painted on the enormous plywood sign depicted lush green forests inhabited by animals from every continent on the planet. The stacks of dirty cages inside held mostly rodents, lizards, and snakes. They did have one mangy bobcat and their big ticket item, a Cinnamon Ringtail Monkey. Gillian stared into his all-too-human eyes set in a tiny, scrunched-up face like a little old man’s. He looked into her eyes and shook his cage back and forth, as if to say, “Take me out of here, lady!” Gillian was immediately enchanted with him.

“Look,” she said to J.J. “He’s enchanted with me!” 

They didn’t have the funds on them to buy the monkey, which cost $250, to Gillian a bargain at twice the price. She was determined to have it, so she told the proprietor they would be back the next weekend. J.J. did have some cash on him, and with that they put a down payment on the monkey. 

J.J. was dead set against buying the animal. “What the fuck are you going to do with a monkey?” he kept saying. He insisted the apartment owner would not allow it, deposit or not. 

Gillian did not ask J.J. what excuse he used to be away from home from two P.M.on Saturday until two A.M. the next morning. The pang of guilt she felt for lying to the ticket company about being blind vanished at the performance, which she enjoyed immensely from about two and half feet away from Sonny and Cher, close enough to look up and see their nose hairs. 

The next weekend they drove to the roadside snake farm in Mississippi and completed the transaction for the monkey. The owner threw in the cage for another ten dollars. Sonny Boner cuddled in Gillian’s lap during the return trip, looking gratefully up into her eyes. He could be very endearing when he wanted to be, but he seldom wanted to be. From then on he was mostly a colossal nuisance. You can’t separate a monkey’s virtues from the defects of his virtues. 

She kept Sonny in the cage when she was gone and let him out when she came home. It was impossible to monkey-proof the apartment. His favorite activity was to insert his erect penis, which had the dimensions of a pencil, into the anus of Teddy the Poodle. This was the only time J.J., who actually seemed jealous of the creature, found him tolerable. “Pencil dick is at it again,” he laughed. 

Sonny’s behavior was at best erratic. He could be pleasant company, as mentioned, but he usually wasn’t. He might suddenly leap up and bite Gillian on the face with no provocation. He would rummage through the cabinets for breakfast cereal, which he loved, only he would crawl inside the box to eat it, rending the box asunder and spilling cereal everywhere. Any other type of food he would make sure to smear all over himself— and Teddy, if the dog was nearby— while eating. If he saw an uncovered container with liquid in it— a glass of milk, a bottle of pop— he would pour it over his— and Teddy’s— head. Gillian did her best to bathe him but she was usually unsuccessful. He refused to be immersed in standing water and he detested the shower, leaping out of the way or climbing atop the spigot head. Gillian once tried to give him a shower while he was inside the cage. He became terrified and enraged, throwing himself so violently against the wire mesh he was sure to injure himself while screaming with the voice and volume of a woman being murdered. He kept it up long after Gillian had turned off the water, and people from two different apartments banged on her door in a panic. If she hadn’t shown them the source of the ghastly sound, they would have called the police. 

When J.J. asked if he could take the monkey home for a few days so that his daughters could play with it it, Gillian immediately agreed. This was partly because she needed a break from Sonny Boner, and partly because of a desire to retaliate. Her relationship with J.J. had become antagonistic bordering on hostile, and a few days with Sonny would serve him right. 

J.J. made Gillian account for her whereabouts every minute of the day and tried to tell her where she could go and whom she could see. He didn’t like her spending time with her mother or with Erin when she came in on weekends. He would sometimes leave work to follow her, becoming furious if he caught her going someplace he didn’t approve of. Since Gillian went where she wanted, they fought constantly. J.J.’s anger grew steadily until one day it made a qualitative shift. In the middle of a shouting match, Gillian declared that if he didn’t stop attempting to shackle and fetter her, she was going to end it. J.J. walked into the kitchen and returned with her twelve-inch chef’s knife. He reached down, lifted Teddy by the scruff of the neck, and held the blade to the poodle’s throat. 

“You even think of leaving me and I’ll cut his fucking head off. Try me.”

Gillian recognized this as a whole other level of possessiveness, but she told herself he would never actually do anything like that. While threatening to behead her dog, J.J. had much more fear in his eyes than Teddy did. She didn’t like the man any more, but she felt responsible for him somehow. She felt sorry for him, too. 

  A couple of days later J.J. brought Sonny Boner back to her, dead, stuffed in a shoe box. He was ice cold to the touch.

Gillian cradled the stiff little monkey in her arms and blubbered, “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” J.J. said sullenly. “He just died. Maybe he got pneumonia. It really upset the kids.”

“But why is he so cold?”

“Well, I put him in the freezer until I could bring him back. I didn’t want him to stink.”

On a Saturday that both Gillian and Emily had off, they made plans to meet at the mall. She had been looking forward to it all week, was dressed and ready, had transferred all the necessities to the wooden-basket purse that went with the outfit she’d picked out to wear.  J.J. showed up out of the blue, dirty and sweaty from having worked a couple of hours that morning. Gillian told him that she was going shopping with her mother and asked if he could give her a lift to the mall. Her car was again in the shop.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “I took the rest of the day off to be with you.”

“I didn’t know you were coming over. Mom and I planned this a week ago. She already took a cab there.”

“No,” he said.  He went into the bathroom and closed the door. She heard him getting undressed and thought, “Good, he’s taking a shower.”

  Gillian immediately called a taxi, then stationed herself at the window. J.J. took his time but eventually she heard the water running. It took forever but the cab finally showed up. She hurried out to meet it.

J.J. was right behind her, soaking wet with a towel around his waist. She got into the back seat but didn’t have time to shut the door before he grabbed her by the hair, yanked her out of the car, and dragged her toward the apartment. She stumbled to the ground more than once as he pulled her along, hitting her with her wooden-basket purse. 

The cab driver jumped out and suggested he go easy. 

J.J. barked at him to fuck off, that she was his and he could do what he wanted with her. Once inside he hit her repeatedly with a broom stick while screaming that if she wanted to go to the mall, he would take her to the mall. He dressed in no great hurry, shouting obscenities, while Gillian sat on the couch, crying from shock and shame and the pain of cuts on her wrists, elbows, and knees. When he came out he told her to get into the fucking truck. On the drive he cursed her for being selfish and inconsiderate. He paused briefly once, taking a sip of coffee  from a travel mug he kept in the holder, then throwing the whole thing out the window. He stopped at the edge of the mall lot, reached across her and threw open the door. He then spun and kicked her out of the truck with both of his feet before she could climb out. She sprawled to the pavement in a heap. 

Her mother saw the cuts and the blood and her tear-streaked face and mussed up hair and disheveled clothes and insisted she move back home, which she did. J.J. continued to follow her and called her incessantly, apologizing and pleading and promising to do better.  He showed up at her house one day when he knew Emily and Schulz were not there, but he left when Gary ran outside shouting “leave my sister alone!”

He kept up the payments on the apartment rent and he convinced Gillian to return to it. They were back together in two weeks. Emily was displeased. 

“Do you have any fantasies?” J.J. asked. 

“I guess so. Doesn’t everyone?”

“I mean, you know, sexual fantasies.”

Gillian thought about it. The closest she came was pretty much what she was doing now, lying peacefully in bed, talking with a lover on a quiet evening. “Not really,” she said. 

“I have one. Handcuffs.”

“You want to have sex while you’re handcuffed?”

“No, while you’re handcuffed.”

Gillian didn’t say anything.

“So? Would you?”

“J.J… I don’t really want to.”

“I don’t see what the problem is. People do it all the time. Stop making it into such a big deal. Why won’t you do this for me?” He was starting to get angry. 

Peace was a rare thing between them. She acquiesced in order to keep it.

He went quickly into the next room and returned with two pair of handcuffs. Apparently he’d planned on this and brought them in the tool pouch he used for work. Gillian arranged herself in the middle of the bed with her arms out. 

“No, on your stomach,” he said.
“What? Why?”

“That’s how I imagine it, is all.”

She turned over and he cuffed her wrists to the bedposts. 

She was very uncomfortable. She felt him straddle her thighs. A moment later he tried to enter her. At first, she thought he had made an honest mistake. 

“J.J., come on, your aim is off! That’s the wrong one.”

Throughout the assault, Gillian wondered where the neighbors were. She was screaming at least as loud as the monkey had been, and for much longer. J.J. ignored her. She blacked out once from pain, and passed through a couple of intermediary states of consciousness in the attempt to exit her body. In one of these, Benny spoke to her but only repeated what he had told her in the last dream, to “Keep going and you’ll come out the other side.” Snippets of thoughts flitted by. They were of the type one experiences in the hypnogogic state that seem profound at the time but upon waking are simply incoherent or silly. “Fear is the mother of rage just as red is the mother of purple,”  was one example.

She awoke in the middle of the night. J.J. was gone. Feeling a warm flow of liquid and believing she was incontinent, she tried to get up but found she was unable to stand. Colored spots caused by pain swam in her vision as she crawled to the bathroom. It wasn’t urine but blood, and it was everywhere. She made it to the phone, called her cousin Moira, and asked her if she could come get her and take her to the hospital. Moira replied that it was very late and she was sleepy, then told her to call back in the morning. Hurting too much to panic, Gillian could only hang up in despair. It turned out that her cousin had been sound asleep, and she called Gillian back minutes later with, “Wait… what did you say?” 

Moira arrived quickly, with towels already on the seats, and helped Gillian into the car. They arrived at the hospital in no time, and Gillian again passed out, this time due to blood loss. 

She woke up the following day. As she slowly came to, she saw the tubes that fed her intravenously, and she became aware that someone was in the hospital bed with her, groping her. It was J.J. As soon as he knew she was awake he began mewling solicitously, apologizing, assuring her that he was going to change, and telling her about the gifts he’d brought. 

Although it hurt to talk, Gillian screamed curses at him and told him that if he didn’t leave instantly, she would call the police. She added, as he all but ran out the door, that she’d better not ever see or hear from him again. He believed her. 

33

Once she had been released from the emergency room and admitted, she called her mother and told her that something was wrong with her colon. She never told her the reason. Only her cousin Moira would ever know what had happened. After five days in the hospital she returned to live with Emily and Schulz. She let the job at Shoney’s go. 

When she felt fully recovered, Gillian decided to go looking for her father. Ritza had successfully prevented her from visiting him at home or meeting him out somewhere, so she thought she would surprise him at work. Maybe they could go to lunch together. 

She left the house early, took the bus across the bridge to Canal Street downtown, and walked the six blocks to the jewelry store where her father worked. She went in and pretended to be shopping, perusing the glass cases until she could see his work space in the rear. He saw her just as she spotted him. He got up and hurried out the back of the store. 

She stood there for several minutes, confused. Perhaps he hadn’t recognized her, she told herself. He hadn’t seen her in a while. His leaving could have been a coincidence. It was lunchtime after all. 

She walked down Canal and came across a cafeteria style restaurant, the type she used to work in. It wasn’t crowded. As she got in line, she saw her father at the register. He looked directly at her, then asked the cashier for his order to be put into a to-go box. He left quickly, food in hand, without glancing back at her. Unsure of whether to be heartbroken or dumbfounded, she decided on both. She went into the restroom and stood for a while in front of the mirror. What could be wrong with her, she despaired, that he would behave that way?

She emerged back onto Canal Street, squinting into the midday glare. She headed towards the river, and when she came to Dauphine Street, rather than turn left into the French Quarter, she crossed and went down Baronne Street. The window shopping was good on Baronne. Two blocks in she came to a Merle Norman Cosmetics studio with a “Help Wanted” sign on the door.  She did need to go back to work, but a job in a cosmetics store was probably too good to be true. She went in, though, having nothing to lose. 

The place was dark, with a musty smell, and it was a mess. The counters were cluttered and disorganized, items were piled up along the walls. 

“Is anyone here?”

It appeared to be abandoned. She turned to leave, saw the call bell next to the register, and tapped it. It rang so loudly she leapt backwards, startled.

She heard laughter from above. A deep voice called out, “Come in, dawlin’! That bell scares everyone!”

She looked up at an immense burly gentleman smiling down upon her from a desk on the balcony overlooking the studio. 

“Come on up. Be careful on the steps.”

The iron spiral staircase shuddered and swayed as upward she crept, wondering how the thing held the guy upstairs. On the landing she saw that the balcony was in more disarray than the floor, strewn with paper, order tickets, boxes of all sizes, and half-opened product crates. Old fashioned dress stands and coat racks lined the walls and were overburdened with antiquated feathered hats, chic but dated lingerie, museum-piece dresses, and an ornate wedding gown. It looked like the attic of a wealthy New Orleans socialite from half a century ago.

“Neatness is not my strong suit,” he said.  He rose to his full height, the top of his head grazing the low ceiling, and extended his oversized mitt. “Frank Patterson.”

“Gillian McKenna,” as his hand engulfed hers. 

“Glad to know you, McKenna.” He gestured at the chair opposite. “Please. Sit down.”  

His hair was permed and dyed auburn, and he had used mascara to color his eyebrows and mustache to match. He wasn’t the giant he had seemed from the first floor, but he was still a big guy, tall and heavy set. He pushed an application across the desk and handed her a pen. The one page document asked only for basic identifying information, so she finished quickly.

“Great,” he said the instant she set the pen down. Without so much as a glance at the application he again stood and shook her hand. “You’re hired. There’s not much to the place- it’ll only take a minute to show you around. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to  the owner. She’s a little eccentric, but a peach.” 

The bus ride home was peaceful. The whole thing had happened so naturally and unceremoniously she wasn’t even surprised. 

Mrs. Tinsley, the owner of the local Merle Norman franchise, was a wealthy New Orleans socialite from half a century ago. She met her general manager and her newest employee for brunch in the courtyard of the Court of Two Sisters. Gillian was instantly enamored. The elderly lady dressed in the best of everything, but nothing matched. She wore a mink stole and a hot pink boa around her neck; an orange skirt, blue blouse, and a purple straw hat with bright pink feathers. Her hair was florescent burgundy. She wore fire-engine-red lipstick smeared carelessly around her lips. She reeked of Jungle Gardenia and radiated affection. She was New Orleans to the core. 

They sat at a secluded table under a trellis dripping with pale purple Wysteria. Waiters flitted and hovered around them like bluebirds in a mythical garden. Mrs. Tinsley ordered everyone a Shrimp Remoulade Salad to start. 

“More sauce wit’ dat, dawlin’?” she asked Gillian.

“No, Ma’am, thank you, this is perfect.”

“It is at dat. Da secret’s in da mynez. If ya never got it here before, I recommend da fried catfish wit’ da jumbo lump crabmeat and tartar sauce. It’s wunnerful, I ain’t lyin’ to ya.”

“It does sound good… but a little heavy.”

“Yah you rite. I oughta watch my figure but it’s just for today. It ain’t da seafood dat makes ya fat anyway, it’s da butta.”

“Love the skirt, Dorrie,” said Frank. “Is it new?”

Mrs. Tinsley glanced down. “No I been havin’ dis. Urnge is one of my fav’rit colluhs.” She turned to Gillian. “Franky sez you stay across da rivah, ova on da West Bank.”

“Yes, Ma’am. I live in Gretna.”

“I know some people dere. Who’s ya mama?”

“Emily Gruttadauria.”

She shook her head. “No…no… Da only Gruttadaurias I know are from Destrahan.” She put her hand on Frank’s. “Franky, you train dis one good, she’s a real beauty. We got plans fa’ her.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Soon’s she’s up to speed, she’ll be a good fit fuh Gentilly.”  She took Gillian’s hand. “It’s over by Elysian Fields, you know, where dey all wear dem shoits wit’ da little ‘gators on ‘em.”

“Yes,” said Gillian.  “I know exactly where that is.”

Frank’s similarities to Charles were not lost on Gillian. Gentle and kind, a teacher and mentor, twenty years her senior, and nothing to look at. Frank was a wealth of information on a number of topics, but what he didn’t know about cosmetics could fit on the tip of an eye liner pencil. The women who came into the store marveled giddily in the mirror at the transformations he performed on them. He instructed Gillian in every nuance of the craft and never hesitated to let her know when she was applying her own makeup incorrectly. “Tone down the blush and mascara, McKenna. You look like someone who made a wrong turn on your way to Bourbon Street.”

Frank managed seven Merle Norman stores in New Orleans, circulating among them, making out time sheets, distributing paychecks. But when Gillian was at work on Baronne Street he was with her every minute of the time. As Mrs. Tinsley had instructed, he brought her along quickly. He taught her every aspect of operating an outlet but put great emphasis on the art of cosmetics. It was a portable skill, he said, and would hold her in good stead long after her time at Merle Norman. Gillian learned quickly, despite her share of mishaps. During one of the first sessions in which she made up a customer herself, Gillian became determined to sell her a set of false eye lashes. To that end, she had donned a pair herself. She batted her eyes often to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ocular prosthesis. This worked well until the left eyelash flew off and into the customer’s cup of coffee. 

Gillian got along well with the easy going Frank. On a typical day they might lunch at Cafe Maspero and then walked around in the French Quarter for a while, stopping in at The Four Season’s for pastry or treating themselves to cafe au lait and beignets at Cafe du Monde. 

Frank could expound on the Quarter’s history, and on St. Anne Street he showed her the location of a certain beauty parlor in business one hundred years before. The proprietor had been a social worker, religious leader, and activist for the black community who visited prisoners and provided support for women in need. She had an unusual method of raising funds for her civic projects: blackmailing wealthy locals. She got the dirty lowdown on them from their servants while doing their hair. The servants gladly told her whatever she wanted to know because she had convinced them she was a witch. She was known in New Orleans and elsewhere as The VooDoo Queen. Her name was Marie Laveau. 

Gillian learned that Frank was divorced. Some years back his wife took off with their young daughter, simply vanished one day. It took him forever to find them, as his wife had returned to her home country of Germany. He traveled there several times to search for them. The last trip was about a year ago. He had finally located them and went to visit his daughter, but it was too late. The girl, at twenty one years old, had died of leukemia. 

“Oh my heavens,” Gillian said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Her death was unreal to me,” Frank said. “I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid. I kept half expecting her to walk into the store some day.”  

Emily and her sister, Gillian’s Aunt Marietta, often went dancing on The President, the five deck, 285-foot sidewheeler steamboat docked on the Mississippi River at the end of Canal street. The boat was a music venue, gambling then being illegal, with a large stage and ballroom that could accommodate a thousand people.  Gillian’s cousin Moira wanted to go with her mother and Aunt Emily one Friday night and asked Gillian to come along. She was still somewhat disgruntled with men from the J.J. fiasco, but she went anyway. 

It didn’t take long. In the ballroom of The President, Gillian stood on the vast polished wood dance floor beneath the sparkling chandeliers and looked up into the surrounding balcony. The young man looking down at her had light hair, light eyes, and a calm, handsome face. They held each other’s gaze as they moved slowly toward the staircase, meeting at the bottom. They danced together until it was time for her to leave. He got her phone number, and as they parted for the night the band played “You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello.” 

He calls early the next morning and they make a date for that evening. Gillian is decked in a shimmering green dress and heels, her auburn hair done up elaborately at the hairdresser’s that afternoon. She went all out because he was so good looking. His name was Mathew. Emily, reading a magazine at the kitchen table, glances up as she heads out the door. “I can’t believe you’re getting in the car with an axe murderer,” she says. Unless you knew them well, all men were at least potential ax murderers.

  Mathew has a nice car and it is spotlessly clean. They smile at each other as she climbs in. He makes her feel at ease, but the axe murderer comment still flashes in the back of her mind. 

They drive to the New Orleans Marriott to have dinner at the posh restaurant on the top floor. The hotel is just a stone’s throw from The President, where they had met on the previous night. Mathew pulls into the hotel drive and a parking attendant comes out to greet them. After an awkward moment of silence, the attendant asks for the keys. Mathew tells him he’s not touching his car. The confused attendant explains apologetically that that’s the way they do it. Mathew then says he has stuff in the car that nobody can mess with. He says he has guns in the trunk. He then starts the car and roars out of the drive. “Goddamn nigger,” he says. Gillian looks out the window. The sun in sinking fast, and she sees the silhouette of a bird land atop the building across the street. She wonders if it’s a robin. Probably just a mockingbird. 

Mathew turns off of Canal onto St. Charles, then cuts the wheel suddenly into a small parking lot. He says they are going to Kolb’s, a German restaurant further down St. Charles. It turns out to be nine blocks further down. They were doing some construction on the street, the sidewalks broken up, and the terrain was pretty rough going. It had rained earlier in the day and an evening breeze was becoming more brisk by the minute. In a few blocks the bottom of her dress was muddy and torn and her hair was a windblown disaster. They pass a drunk snoring on the sidewalk and a man peeing onto the front, not the side, of a building. 

The walk takes over twenty minutes but they’re finally there and they get a table. When the bus boy comes to fill their water glasses, Mathew says, “Watch it, he’s gonna spill it on you. Goddam niggers are clumsy as hell, they’ll spill shit all over you.” He says this right in front of the man. Gillian, now angry, tells Mathew sharply, “Please don’t act like that!” 

As soon as they order, Mathew tells Gillian that after dinner he is taking her to his apartment. Gillian tells him she can’t go, that she lives with her mother and she has a curfew. It was the only thing she could think of on the spur of the moment. “I don’t give a shit, I’m taking you there,” he says, adding, “and you’re going to stay all night. I have a gun in the car.” He doesn’t bother to lower his voice and the cashier hears his every word.

Gillian says she is going to the restroom. She picks up her purse but Mathew snatches it out of her hand. “You can’t take your purse with you,” he says. Gillian picks up a spoon, cracks him on the head with it, and yanks her purse away from him. He scowls and glares but doesn’t do anything.

In the bathroom, Gillian is shaking from head to toe when the cashier comes in. “You have to get out of here,” she says. “You’re not leaving with him.”  She sneaks Gillian out the back door. In the alleyway Gillian is able to get her bearings. She is only two blocks from Baronne Street, where her store is. She cuts across in that direction to Carondelet and hurries as fast as she can in high heels toward Canal. Up ahead she sees an older couple getting into a taxi and screams for help. They stop immediately and ask her what is wrong. Gillian blurts out the whole story, probably unintelligibly, but the couple puts her in the taxi with them and takes her home.

“What the hell happened to you?” her mother screams when she sees her completely disheveled daughter come through the door.

“He really was an axe murderer!” Gillian breaks down in sobs thinking, “I just want to be with a nice guy. Why is that so hard?”

34

I know I need to be in love.
I know I've wasted too much time.
I know I ask perfection of a quite imperfect world,
And fool enough to think that's what I'll find. 
          From “I Need To Be In Love” by Richard Lynn Carpenter, John Bettis, and Albert Louis Hammond

General Andrew Jackson reared his horse and tipped his hat to Gillian as the sun peeked over the levee, igniting the spires of St. Louis Cathedral. Frank’s apartment occupied the second and third floors of 540 St. Peter Street, overlooking Jackson Square. The scene was peaceful early in the morning, before the shops opened their doors, before the vendors and the artists and the street musicians and the tourists arrived. 

She closed the window, darkening the room, and climbed carefully back into bed so as not to awaken Frank. But the big man stirred, lifted his head briefly, and looked at her. 

  “McKenna. What time is it?”

“Not quite six.”

He rolled over, punched up his pillow, and sank heavily into the mattress. In moments he was back asleep. 

This would be the last time they spent the night together. Frank never said so aloud, but from the start it had been obvious to Gillian that Frank preferred black women. He really lit up when interacting with them, and he’d just started dating a girl in whom he was very much interested. He’d never pretended that it was a “serious” relationship with Gillian, which might be the reason she knew they would remain friends.  She suspected, too, that it was the reason every one of their seven or eight sleepovers during the past two years had been so good. She would miss them.

They would never sleep together again, but Gillian wondered if they would ever again work together.  For the time being they sold t-shirts and souvenirs at a Royal Street shop. Today was their last day at that establishment, Frank having given notice, and Gillian doing the same, after he had been robbed at gunpoint.  

Gillian hadn’t been present at that robbery, but she was no stranger to the experience. While she and Frank still worked for Merle Norman, she was robbed three times, once with a gun in her face. 

It happened at the Gentilly location. After her training had been completed, Mrs. Tinsley placed her there as manager.  The store did well and things went smoothly for a good long time. One Saturday they’d made so many sales she called Frank at noon and told him excitedly about the bang-up morning they’d had. It slowed down after lunch, and around 1:30 a nice looking black man walked in and said he was looking for a Mother’s Day gift. Gillian showed him a selection of scarves and some hand painted jewelry. The fellow was very personable. “I really appreciate you helping me,” he said, and picked out a few items. While checking him out at the register, she looked up and found herself staring down the barrel of a gun. 

“Ok, stay calm,” she said. “You can have anything you want. You won’t have any problem from me.” She was shaking all over, but she wasn’t so frightened that she didn’t notice he was shaking just as much. She began handing him the money in the register, items off the counter, and offering other stuff from around the store. He gathered up what was in front of him, took the money Gillian had in her purse as well, and backed out pointing the gun at her. 

The moment he was gone her knees gave out and plunk she went, right down on the floor. It was a couple of minutes before she could stand. She called Frank, babbling incoherently. Frank was unable to understand a word and told her to hang up, calm down, and call him back. Gillian screamed “No, I just got robbed at gun point!” When he arrived she was crying, not from fear but because he took all the profits from her banner day, over $300 dollars, and all of her own cash besides. Frank asked her how much she lost. It was about fifty bucks, which he gave her. The store was on the ground floor with the second floor occupied by an Italian restaurant. Frank took her up there and Gillian, her teeth still chattering, sucked down three screwdrivers in a row and got looped. Frank gave her two weeks off with pay.

Frank reassigned her to manage another location after that, a new store on Airline Highway. They were open for business but still building shelves and unpacking boxes. Gillian was there by herself when a couple of black guys came in. They split up, one of them handling things that were on the shelves and dropping them, obviously to distract her. By the time they left she’d noticed several items missing along with her purse, which this time had $150 dollars in it. She’d put it on top of a crate she’d been unpacking. Frank reimbursed her for that, too, and immediately relocated her to the store in Oakwood Mall where, he said, it was safe. 

Gillian enjoyed working at that store. One of her employees was a hispanic bombshell named Lydia, big hair, big boobs.  They were all the time laughing and cutting up. Lydia would stand in the doorway and attract attention, one male gawker actually knocking himself unconscious when he walked straight into a column while looking back at her. Gillian had to call mall security and tell them to get an ambulance. One day Lydia pointed out a couple of gringo shoplifters, then went after them. She chased them both out of the store, hitting them with a broom. 

While at the Oakwood location, Gillian would walk around the mall at lunchtime. Her favorite store was the Téte-á-Téte  Boutique, which sold expensive women’s clothes. She got to know the owners, Buddy and Rhonda Moran, pretty well. Buddy spoke in a distracting nasal tone and was always squirting steroid spray up his nose. He suffered from a deviated septum, he said. Rhonda had teased-up black hair and a New Orleans accent as pronounced as Mrs. Tinsley’s. They were nice people. Besides the boutique, they owned Sharpshooter’s Lounge, a small bar off one of the side streets beside the mall. It was popular with singles, had a stage and a dance floor and a fairly popular house band.

Directly in front of the Téte-á-Téte was an insurance kiosk manned by an annoying salesman named Duane who accosted her both coming and going. His kiosk wasn’t much bigger than a phone booth and she never saw a single customer at the window, so she would occasionally stop and talk. She always regretted it. He invariably asked her out, and even after she refused and bid him good day, he wouldn’t stop talking. She ended up walking away from him while his mouth ran in the background. 

Gillian’s and Frank’s time at Merle Norman came to a sad and abrupt end. He called her one day and told her that Mrs. Tinsley had died and a California company had bought out the New Orleans franchise. The new owners told him they had their own people and gave him two week’s severance. Frank had been there 20 years and was a beloved boss, so Gillian and most of the other staff didn’t wait around to see if they were still employed or not, but quit straightaway. That’s when Frank found the job at the Royal Street t-shirt shop and hired Gillian. 

She and Frank worked together on Royal Street for only about a month. It served its purpose for Frank, but he needed to find a real position, which he did, at a regional oil company in their downtown New Orleans office.   He would have stayed on selling t-shirts for as long as it took for Gillian to find something, but she already had another job lined up back at the Oakwood Mall in Gretna. Buddy and Rhonda Moran hired her on at the Téte-á-Téte  Boutique. 

She fit right in. She found the couple to be kind people who seemed to genuinely care for her. True, Buddy did his share of leering at her, to which she, and Rhonda as well, responded by rolling their eyes. 

The one downside to working there was Duane the ultra-chatty insurance salesman stationed in his kiosk just outside the front door. Peering from his little window he assailed her unflaggingly, until Gillian finally agreed to go out with him. 

The evening began innocuously enough, with Duane picking her up at home, but it ended badly, with Gillian being knocked unconscious by a roundhouse punch from a nice man in a parking lot. 

The path from point A to point B was downhill all the way. Gillian had supposed he was going to take her out to eat and had  dressed up nice for dinner. But Duane had other ideas. Instead of to a restaurant, he drove her to a Winn Dixie.

“Do you mind if we stop here first?” he asked. There’s one or two things I really need for tomorrow and it will be closed later. It’ll only take me a minute.”

“All right,” Gillian said. 

When he returned not one but twenty minutes later with his arms full of grocery bags, Gillian was hot, sweaty, and not in the best mood.

“I bought us a couple of steaks,” he said cheerily. “I’m going to cook you dinner!”

“No you’re not,” Gillian said. 

“Sure I am.”

“Duane, I’m not going to your apartment.”

“Sure you are,” he said. With Gillian protesting the whole way, he took a circuitous route through a section of town unfamiliar to her. When they arrived at his apartment building, she had no idea where it was.

She sat on the couch and listened as he threw the meat in a frying pan and set about chopping up whatever else he had in the bags. In a few minutes he served her a rubbery, nearly raw steak with a side of sinewy asparagus and a salad composed of iceberg lettuce and some unidentifiable substances. None of it was palatable, but he didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t eating. 

As soon as he was finished, he turned on a football game, plopped on the couch, and patted the cushions next to him.

  “Come sit down,” he said. He gestured at the TV. “Texas at Georgia.”

The only thing less interesting to Gillian than sports was watching them on television. When she expressed this to him, he ignored her. Finally she asked him to take her home. 

“After the game.”  

She insisted, politely at first, then vehemently, but apparently the discussion was over. She grabbed his telephone and called a taxi. On the line with the dispatcher, she realized she didn’t know her location. “What’s your address?” she asked Duane. 

He refused to tell her. Gillian apologized, hung up, then sat down on the couch to confront her irritating captor. 

In moments, Duane changed from tiresome and overbearing to aggressive. He moved close to her and became grabby, repeatedly insisting that she tell him she loved him while attempting to kiss her, finally doing so with his hands clamped around her face.  She broke free and ran out of the apartment and into the parking lot in search of assistance. She saw a middle aged man getting into his truck and hurried over. She put her hand on his shoulder- “Sir-.”  That’s when he reacted, just spun around and cold-cocked her. 

She regained consciousness on the couch in his apartment, the fellow and his wife hovering over her, he apologizing profusely, she clucking solicitously. They’d put a cold steak on her eye. Things were quickly sorted out, about Gillian’s bad date and how she came to be in the parking lot, and a few minutes later she called her mother and Schulz to come pick her up. 

The cosmetics skills Gillian had learned from Frank made it easy to cover her shiner when she went to work at the Téte-á-Téte Monday morning. Hiding her bruised sensibilities was another matter. Store robberies notwithstanding, things had been going well the past couple of years, in great part due to Frank’s friendship both during and after work and in and out of bed. “The instant he’s no longer in my day-to-day life, I’m fleeing bad dates and getting slugged in parking lots,” she lamented. More vexed than angry and more sullen than depressed, she began humming along with the mall’s piped in music, not with ebullience but with gloom. She was stocking shelves in the main show room when the Carpenter’s “I Need To Be In Love” came through the speakers. She let fly with all the moroseness her pipes could muster, which was considerable, since she had a deep tone and timbre similar to Karen Carpenter’s. Turning to open another box, she saw Buddy and Rhonda and several customers lined up next to the lingerie dummies, staring at her. 

She stopped singing. “Right, sorry,” Gillian said.

“Can you stay late this Friday?” Buddy asked.

She looked at the unopened boxes. There weren’t that many of them. “I should be through way before then.”

“No, no,” Buddy said. “I need you to come meet the band.”

35

Hey Little Red Ridin' Hood,
You sure are lookin' good.
           From Little Red Riding Hood by J.P. Richardson

Once upon a time, Gillian would have informed the band leader, Ned James, that she was about to leave the bar in the middle of a set. She wanted to step over to the Chinese restaurant next door to grab a bite. Had she let Ned know ahead of time, instead of simply leaving, Ned would have insisted that she remain in the bar so as to be available. And she might never have met the Frog Prince.

When Buddy and Rhonda Moran heard her singing that day at the Téte-á-Téte Boutique, they insisted she meet Ned James and try out for his band. The James Gang performed regularly at their bar, The Sharpshooter’s Lounge. The group consisted of Ned and his twin brothers, Larry and Barry. The latter two were fraternal twins, but to Gillian they didn’t even look like brothers. Larry, on drums, was thin with dark frizzy hair; Barry, the keyboard player, was chubby and blond. Or was it Larry who played the keyboards?

Ned was a pretty good Elvis impersonator.  At least it seemed so to Gillian, who couldn’t stand Elvis. Ned behaved, however, as though Elvis was the one doing the impersonation. He was the band’s front man and star and he made sure it stayed that way. When Gillian tried out, she chose “Crazy” and sang it in Patsy Cline’s key. Five lines into the song, Buddy, who was listening at the bar, turned to the stage with his arms up, and Barry and Larry simultaneously stoped playing.

“Are y’all ok with this?” said Buddy.

“Hell yeah,” said either Barry or Larry, whichever one was on drums.

“Sure,” Ned nodded.  But Gillian thought he seemed bothered by something. She soon found out what it was.

Buddy and Rhonda let Gillian pick out dresses she liked from the boutique to wear at the gigs. They asked only that she use the arm pads to protect the dress from sweat. For her first performance, Gillian picked out something she calculated would have the patron’s at Sharpshooter’s Lounge shooting holes in the ceiling. Her calculations were correct. After a steady diet of tall lanky Ned singing Elvis tunes while gyrating his skinny hips, the crowd was primed and ready when Ned introduced the new singer and Gillian stepped into the spotlight in a swirling green dress and her shimmering auburn hair. Excitement grew as she explained, every bit as plaintively as Linda Rondstadt did, that she’d been cheated, mistreated, put down, pushed ‘round, made blue, and lied to. And it exploded when she demanded, “When will I be loved?” As the number ended, no one heard Ned say “thank you, Gillian” through the din of applause and hollering and whistling, nor did they hear him tell her to take a seat at the band table to the left of the stage and stay there until he called her back up again. He was good to his word, he did call her to the stage at every gig.  Once per hour, on average.

The rest of the time, her job was to relax at the band table and look fetching. Gillian could look fetching without any trouble; what she couldn’t do was relax. It didn’t matter how often she got up on stage and knocked ‘em dead, she sat there worrying herself into a state of near panic over whether or not she would sing the next song well enough or if she did justice to the elegant dress she’d borrowed from the Téte-á-téte Boutique. She remembered that as a girl she once asked her father why he smoked. He puffed away in the car and despite the window being open the stench was nauseating. He said it relaxed him.  Tired of her stomach churning from nervous fits sitting idly at the band table, she went over to the vending machine and examined the brands of cigarettes. On the front of a cool green package was a picture of a pretty, bare shouldered woman in a garden. Gillian took them back to the table and lit one up. She began choking and heaving violently, her eyes watering. She considered bolting outside to vomit but was too dizzy to stand up. The second drag wasn’t much better, nor the third, but she got used to them, by and by. They kept her hands busy. They helped her kill time.

Besides resenting her presence on stage, Ned resented paying her. He put her off with one lame excuse after another. He had nothing but hundred dollar bills, he would say, or Barry (or Larry) accidentally took the cash home. Sometimes he just ducked out the back without handing over her cut. Finally she complained to Buddy, who simply paid her himself, sixty dollars a night.

It was a nice amount that she couldn’t afford to relinquish. On paper, she wasn’t drowning financially, but it sure felt like it. She had a car note, to begin with. Schulz and her mother didn’t ask her to pay rent or expenses when she moved home after the J.J. debacle, but living there was costly in other ways. Schulz’s animosity towards her grew exponentially. Emily never missed an opportunity to characterize her as a round heeled strumpet. Both of them complained strenuously about her coming in at 3 A.M. on nights she had gigs. On the following mornings, Schulz made certain she didn’t sleep in, rousing her early out of comatose slumber loudly jeering the “sleeping beauty.”  It all took its toll, and to get out of there she needed to save up some money. On top of this she would make matters worse by shooting herself in the foot. One day she went to a high end dress shop called Casual Village and bought everything she wanted, charging up a couple grand in expensive clothes. The fallout was predictable. Listening to her mother’s officious rant on how “People like us don’t shop at Casual Village,” Gillian was reminded how “people like us” didn’t go to college or study ballet, either, and felt like charging up another two grand in expensive clothes. Her mother paid the bill and Gillian started paying her back, another  expense.

Gillian couldn’t afford to lose the sixty bucks in cash for showing up at Sharpshooter’s, but soon the prospect of sitting at the band table for four hours and sucking down cigarettes just to sing five songs the whole night was unbearably oppressive. One Friday afternoon, too listless to move and still in pajamas, she called Ned and told him she wouldn’t be there that night.

Ten minutes later he showed up at the front door.

“Come on, sweetheart. You need to get yourself up and go.”

“I don’t really want to, Ned.”

“You’re a member of the band. The show must go on.”

“It’s just not in me.” She sat on the couch, rested her head in her hands.

He sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. He made his voice deeper and smoother, doing his best Elvis impersonation. “Of course it is, sweetheart.” He gave her a gentle squeeze.

“I’ll be there tomorrow night, promise.”

“I need you tonight, honey pie.” He leaned in and kissed her.

She looked at him. “I really don’t want to, Ned.”

“No, no, sweetheart,” he intoned. “it’s very important. You’ll be glad you did.” He kissed her again.

He wasn’t exactly threatening her, but she did need the sixty bucks per show and he was the boss. Plus she hadn’t had any in a while, and although Ned was no prince, he wasn’t repulsive. Finally she shrugged and let him take her upstairs. Calling it a “quickie” would be gross overstatement. He lasted all of two minutes. She didn’t even have time to get bored. She might have regretted it had there been anything to regret.

As it turned out, Gillian did regret “having sex” with Ned, and she was glad she went to work that night, but not for any reason she could have foreseen. When she arrived at Sharpshooter’s, there was a woman seated at the band table. It was Ned’s wife, Sophie. For a while, Gillian felt mean and low down having just been with the woman’s husband, because she and Sophie hit it off instantly. They remained friends long after Sophie divorced Ned and indeed for the rest of their lives. Sophie was petite and pretty, with a genuinely sweet disposition and a heartfelt smile. She could be solicitous of her husband while not taking him seriously. After sincerely complimenting him to bolster his stage-hog ego, for example, she would turn and look at Gillian with her eyes crossed. Gillian wondered what this woman could possibly see in Ned, finally assuming it was about their four children, one of whom had Spina Bifida.

Although Sophie was not at Sharpshooter’s that night, it was her influence that led Gillian to leave the bar without informing Ned when she decided to walk next door and get something to eat. She’d just finished a song so it would be at least an hour until Ned allowed her back onstage, anyway.

She waited until Ned was well into the next tune, an old hit by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, but even then he seemed to be urging her to stay put: “…I don’t think little big girls should go walkin’ in these spooky old woods alone.” Exiting through the front door, she was hit with the stultifying New Orleans humidity common after a rain. She lifted her skirt and threaded her way through the deep puddles that had formed on the asphalt. She was aware of an eerie, sultry silence. The parking lot was packed with cars but strangely devoid of people, and there was a complete absence of traffic on the boulevard. The only sounds were those of her footsteps on the wet pavement and the din of bullfrogs bellowing in the canal that ran behind the mall.

She opened the door and entered The Golden Ball, the Chinese restaurant next door to the bar. No one manned the hostess’s podium in the foyer, so she walked on through. She appeared to be the only human soul in the place. She’d never eaten there before and was surprised to find, in the center of the dining room, a tiered fountain as tall as the ceiling. She leaned over the edge of the circular pool and saw that its bottom shone with silver coins and shiny pennies. When she looked up, there he was. He was tall and handsome in his headwaiter’s uniform, with blond hair, meticulously trimmed dark beard, and green eyes. He stood gazing at her, as still as a statue, as if he’d been enchanted.

Instantly, Gillian felt a surge of relief. She had on a dress  made of pastel gingham patches, mid-length with spaghetti straps, and she wore a long red wig that tumbled around her shoulders and down her back like a cape. She was alone and face to face with a gorgeous guy, and she knew she looked fantastic.

It was a long moment before he spoke. “You must’ve walked out of a dream,” he said.

Gillian glanced around. No one else had entered. It was still just the two of them beside the fountain. “It feels more like I walked into one.”

It was his turn to look around, apparently getting his bearings. “Would you like a table?”

“No, thank you. I just need to order something to go.”

“Did you come from a dance… or a party?” he said, suddenly noticing her dress.

“From the bar next door. I sing with the band. Occasionally.”

“Oh, that’s great. I’ll stop by and see you. I’m off at ten.”

“All right.”

“I’m Randall Cates.”

“Gillian McKenna.” She extended her hand, which he held gently for a moment before giving it a friendly shake. She asked for a couple of egg rolls, which he retrieved from the buffet and put in a box for her.

“I’ll see you in a little while,” he said as she left.

When she finished her song an hour later, the dancers returned to their tables, and there was Randall, standing alone in the middle of the floor. She had no idea how long he’d been there. As Ned started the next tune, Randall walked to the stage, took her hand, and helped her down. They danced that number and almost every one after that, angering Ned, who reminded her of his rule against dancing with the customers.

“Don’t you remember what I said?” he demanded when she took the stage an hour later. But the band had already started her intro. She cupped a hand to her ear and shook her head.

At the end of the night, Randall asked if he could see her the next day. “I’m off work,” he said. “Maybe you could come over.”

She reflected for perhaps a millisecond that she didn’t know him even as well as she’d known Duane the insurance creep when he made the same offer. The difference was, this time she wanted to go.

He picked her up the next evening and drove her to his home.  “I want to show you something,” he said as he unlocked the front door.

He had obviously taken great care to prepare his place for her. The house was impressive, with a courtyard and an enormous kitchen, and it was meticulously neat. The living room was dimly lit, mostly with candles, and he had incense burning. The decor was unlike anything she’d ever seen. The carpet and his furniture were black, with green accents everywhere which turned out to be frogs- frog knick-knacks, frog bookends, frog porcelain statuary, even frog throw pillows.

They walked to the center of the room, where he stood smiling at her. Over his shoulder she could see, above the fireplace, a large painting illuminated from overhead with track lighting. It showed a girl in a red hood and billowing red cape fleeing through the woods. She was looking behind her at a wolf.

“Oh my god,” Gillian gasped.

“What big eyes you have, my dear,” Randall chuckled.

She didn’t know what to say. “That’s… it’s…” She could only point in amazement.

“Yes. It’s you. It’s like you posed for a portrait.” He turned around and gazed at the picture. “I saw it in a gallery in the Quarter and fell in love with her. She’s always been my dream girl… that’s what I meant when I said you must have stepped out of a dream.”

He poured a couple of soft drinks and they sat on the couch and talked. Right away, they seemed to belong together. It must feel like fate to him, Gillian thought, because that’s how it felt to her. She found this sensation of inevitability immensely pleasing. It pleased her that he knew she would come to his house on the first date, and that the incense was burning when she arrived. And she was pleased to find the candles in the bedroom were already lit.

They were together every possible moment. Gillian found him very easy to be with. On weekend nights he came to the bar as soon as he was off work, and Gillian would get into trouble for dancing with him too much. They would go out or stay in, it mattered not as long as they were with each other. Even when the fairy tale blush of a new relationship wore off, Gillian found that nothing changed. She soon learned that he smoked a lot of pot, but to her surprise it didn’t diminish how she felt about him. He never behaved as if he were stoned or high, and only fleetingly considered the possibility that she never saw him when he wasn’t stoned or high. He didn’t volunteer a lot of historical information, but he wasn’t evasive, either. His house belonged to his family, and while he couldn’t have afforded to buy the place on a waiter’s salary, he paid a fair amount of rent. He’d previously been in a relationship for about three years, breaking up with the woman a couple of months before he met Gillian. It just wasn’t going anywhere, he said. He called Gillian “his beautiful girl.” She would sometimes wake up and find him propped on an elbow, just looking at her. They never tired of holding hands. With Randall it was tender, peaceful, and satisfying, and Gillian was very much in love. She and Randall, she one day realized in a wave of contentment, were one of those couples about whom people would say, “and they lived happily ever after.”

Which they did. Until they didn’t. One Saturday night he was late showing up at the bar. Gillian figured it was because of the rainstorm. She was sitting at the band table waiting for Ned to call her up to the stage when she saw him looking in at her from the front door.  She hurried outside.The rain had stopped. Steam rose from the hot asphalt. She spotted him a ways out in the wet parking lot. He was agitated, fidgety, and smoking a cigarette as if he were gathering his courage. The lot was dark but when she drew close she saw tears streaming down his face.

“Randy,” she said, already getting sick to her stomach.

He tried to speak but only choked. Gillian recognized the attempt as “my beautiful girl.” He got his breath under control and said, “I can’t see you any more.”

By now she was crying, too. “Why not, baby? We’re perfect together.”

He replied, “I kind of have to marry her.”

“What do you mean? Who?” Then she remembered the woman he had told her about.

Someone shouted at her from the door of the bar. Ned wanted her on stage.

“Please wait for me,” she pleaded. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll never love anyone like I love you,” he said. “I have to go.”

“No,” said Gillian. “Please, just wait a second.” She ran across the wet pavement, soaking the bottom of her dress, and stepped into the bar. She told Harvey, the bouncer, that she would be just a few minutes longer, please ask Ned to do one more song. Then she ran back outside to where true love waited.

But Randy wasn’t there. In the place where he’d stood, an enormous bullfrog squatted in a puddle. Gillian put her face in her hands and cried as if her heart would break.

Finally, depleted and empty, she dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Oh, Randy,” she said, and turned to go inside.

“Ribbit.”

36

I don't care what's right or wrong. I don't try to understand.
Let the devil take tomorrow. Lord, tonight I need a friend.
          From Help Me Make It Through The Night by Kris Kristofferson

It was three in the morning. Gillian and her mother were hopelessly lost on a side road somewhere between Houston and New Orleans. Forced to detour off the interstate, Gillian made what she believed to to be the correct choice at every subsequent turn, but the road became narrower by the mile. She tried backtracking, which led literally nowhere. Turning back around they drove through the dark until they arrived at an unmarked fork in the road.

Gillian shook her head. “I have no idea where we are.”

“Maybe we should take the road headed east,” Emily offered. “Isn’t New Orleans east of Houston?”

“Yes, Mom, great idea,” said Gillian. “Which road is headed east?”

“I was hoping you’d know. You’re the one who’s driving.”

“This isn’t my fault. The signs were messed up.”

“That’s right, blame the signs. Everybody else went the right way.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because we’re the only ones here!”

“It’s three in the morning, Mom!”

“You’re saying you want to sit here till tomorrow and then follow everyone else.”

“I did not say that.”

“That’s what you meant.”

“To hell with this. I’m turning left.”

The path from New Orleans to Houston to the fork in the road at 3 A.M. had been a circuitous one. For the better part of a year Gillian worked at three jobs trying to earn enough money to get her own place. Not long after the Frog Prince hopped into and out of her life, she stopped working at the Téte-á-Téte Boutique. Buddy and Rhonda were nice but the pay was lousy. She could make better use of her time doing almost anything else. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights she sang with the band, arriving home between two and three in the morning. She didn’t bother going to sleep because from 6:30 to 9:00 A.M. she swept the floors, wiped tables, and scrubbed toilets at a bar called Calvin’s, in Harvey. The band had an occasional gig there as well, which is how she learned about the janitorial position. From 9:30 until 1:00 she waitressed for the breakfast crowd at Top of the Town, the revolving restaurant on the uppermost floor of the Monument Hotel. Again, she got wind of that job when the James Gang played there one night. Sunday through Wednesday she spent her afternoons trying to avoid Schulz and her mother and catching up on sleep during the night.

She came to the first crossroad when Ned, Barry, and Larry decided to pack up The James Gang and move back to Houston, where they were from originally. They were homesick, Ned said. They asked Gillian to come along. She could stay with them until they were playing regularly and she could get her own place. It was a way out from under Schulz and Emily’s roof, so she jumped at the chance.

When Ned had told her the return to Houston was about being homesick, he wasn’t kidding, because it sure wasn’t about playing more gigs. Once there, he made almost no attempt to find work for the band, and Gillian suffered a kind of panicky boredom. She visited with Sophie whenever she could, but the mother of four was busy most of the time. With nothing to do, Gillian was soon stark raving, alternately staring blankly at the television and smoking like a chimney in the back yard. On top of that her money trickled away. She contributed to her food bill and sometimes taxied to a mall to keep from pulling her hair out by the roots. She was unable to shop without buying something. She considered going back to New Orleans but even mind-numbing indigence was better than being home with Mom and Schulz. Just as she was deciding which wall to start banging her head against, Ned announced he’d found work.

The bar where Ned got the gig, The Last Stop, was a dive. It was dark, dank, smoky, reeked of stale beer, and hosted maybe seven or eight semi-comatose patrons. Gillian didn’t care. It was something to do.

She sat and smoked at her table-for-one as the guys labored through the first set. The music fell on deaf ears, like a tree in the woods, and the band performed listlessly. During his Elvis songs, Ned’s gyrations were perfunctory. Occasionally a patron would turn a dark face toward the stage. A couple dragged themselves onto the dance floor for a slow song, clutching each other tightly to keep from falling down. Then they left. Had there been a game of tug-of-war, the performers would have easily beaten what was left of the audience. Ned turned around and conferred with his brothers. Gillian knew he was worried about getting paid. Ned had countless stories about bar owners stiffing the band on bad nights. Another customer, a frayed old man with a long, moth eaten beard, wandered in. Ned shook his head but started the next song.

During her first number, about forty-five minutes in,

Gillian got a reaction from a fellow at the bar. When he turned slowly on his stool to look at her she saw a huge beer gut, red jowls, and a shiny, sweaty face. He wore a dark suit, tie loosened, shirt untucked. He listened with his mouth slightly open, then watched her return to her table. After a minute he called the barmaid over and ordered another round.

An hour later, when Ned called her up again, the guy slid heavily off his stool and wobbled to the stage. He garbled something at her, apparently a song request.

“Beg your pardon?” Gillian said.

“Help Me Make It Through The Night!”

Ned stepped over and gave the guy a thumb’s up. “Gotcha covered, buddy.”

“No, no,” the man said, shaking his head emphatically. “The girl.”

Ned wasn’t happy— it was a tune he usually performed— but Barry and Larry were already playing the intro in Gillian’s key. While she sang, the man stood in front of the stage, staring up at her with tears streaming down his face. He looked so sad and pathetic Gillian could hardly bear to look at  him.

Not fifteen minutes after she returned to her table, he again approached the stage, pointed at Gillian, and made the same slurred request. “Help Me Make It Through The Night.”

“Sure thing, buddy,” Ned told him.

But the guy knew a brush off when he heard one. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a roll as big as his fist, peeled off a C note for each band member, and waved them under Ned’s nose. “Right now,” he insisted. Ned exchanged quick looks with Barry and Larry, and without another word jerked his head to summon Gillian to the stage. When she stepped up, the man handed her one of the sweaty bills and gave the rest to Ned. Apparently he’d dealt with bandleaders before. Gillian sang, and as before, her new fan stood gazing up at her and sobbing. Then he returned to his stool and ordered another drink.

He made his way back twenty minutes later. Ned had been watching for him and signaled to Gillian. She met the man at the edge of the stage and asked his name.

“Bennet,” he said. “And you are…?”

“Gillian.”

“Nice ta meetcha. Yer great. Yer beautif’l.”

“Thank you.”

He handed her another hundo.

“Bennet, I appreciate it, but it really isn’t-”  She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. She needed the money more than he did, clearly, but it still felt like she was robbing this heartbroken sad sack that reeked with loneliness. He gave three more bills to Ned, who then nodded to Barry and Larry to start Bennet’s song.

One of the couples complained loudly when, at the top of the hour, Bennet again brandished his wad and the band struck up his favorite tune. “Oh, come on!” they shouted. Bennet took up his station one foot from the stage and wept robustly through the song. He swerved by the disapproving couple on his serpentine route back to the bar and shook his fistfull of Franklins at him. “This’s my money, he said.  “And tha’s my band!”

To prove his point, he made a U-turn and handed up another four bills before Gillian had even finished. He teetered around and shouted to the room, “This’s my band! This’s my money!”  Ned turned to the band and winked, “play it again.”

The disgruntled couple left fifteen minutes later as Gillian began the tune for the sixth time, but the rest of the sparse house was hanging tough. Bennet appeared to have trouble keeping his tear filled eyes open, and Gillian worried that he was about to pass out. He swayed in every compass direction but, impressively, remained on his feet. When the song was over he went back to his stool, laid his head on the bar, and passed out.

Back at her table, Gillian kept an eye on him and smoked ambivalently. She could sure use the money but part of her wished he’d sleep until closing time and stop making her his personal instrument of torture. He was too old and fat to have recently broken up with the love of his life, so how young a man was he on the night that he needed help making it through? Unless the poor guy was recently widowed and that had been their song.

“He’s a piece o’ work, ain’t he?”

Gillian turned around. The voice belonged to a heavy, middle aged woman sitting alone at her table behind a large sized umbrella drink and an overflowing ash tray.

“Oh, you’re talking about…”  she glanced over at the snoozing Bennet.

“Yeah,” the woman nodded. “Bennet. Who else?”

Apparently she knew him. “Did he recently lose someone?”

“You mean like a wife? Hell no. Confirmed bachelor.”

“How long’s he been doing this?”  Gillian asked, dreading the answer. Twenty years? Thirty years?

“He started playing that song on the juke box as soon he got here, ‘bout five thirty.”

“No, I mean-” but she let it go. Gillian doubted she could make herself clear. The woman had been here since at least five thirty herself.

Bennet’s attempt to sleep it off ended when the barmaid roused him. He awoke with a start and looked around dazedly. The barmaid started chirping at him, shaking her head and tapping a finger on the bar. Was she telling him he had to stay awake? Maybe she was demanding he refrain from requesting the same song again and again. Gillian couldn’t hear what she was saying over the music. Whatever it was, the matter was resolved instantly when Bennet handed her a hundred dollar bill.

He included the barmaid in his generosity for rendition number seven, and again for the last song of the evening, a truly heartfelt version of Kris Kristofferson’s maudlin country ballad.  Gillian now had seven double zeroes over and above her usual sixty bucks. It was enough to move out of Ned’s, rent a small apartment, and if she were careful, stay independent long enough for the band to find regular work.

The bar shut down while they loaded the sound equipment in the van. Gillian looked across the lot and saw Bennet leaning heavily against his car. The barmaid locked the front door, then went out and spoke to him. After a short discussion, he handed her his keys, and they drove off together.

As she walked toward her car, the old late-comer with the tattered beard sidled up beside her. She quickened her pace, but he managed to keep up.

“Hi honey,” he said. “How ya doin’ sweetheart?”

“Fine,” Gillian said curtly, glancing back to see if Ned had left. He had.

“Ya sounded real good tonight. Like an angel.”

“Thanks.”

“Say… wanna come home with me?”

“I don’t. I have to go.”

“I got plenty of cash. It’s not a problem.”

“No thank you.” She remembered to dig in her purse for her keys while they were still walking.

He took out his wallet, opened it, held it out. “See?”

She didn’t look at it. Her hands shook a little as she unlocked the door but got in quickly, slammed it shut, started the motor. She could hear him as she put it in gear and drove off.

“Come on, baby, don’t be that way…help me make it through the night!”

Sophie had a cousin who was a realtor, and she helped Gillian find a one-bedroom furnished apartment. She would have preferred a nicer neighborhood but this one suited her budget. Moreover, her car was making worrisome noises, and the apartment was located more or less in the middle of things. All and all it wasn’t ideal but she was relieved to get out of the James’s house. She spent as much time as possible with Sophie and as little as possible with Ned, who had progressed from obnoxious to revolting.  During one of her visits, Ned said, “If you like Sophie so much, maybe we ought to have a threesome.” He tried to make it sound like he was kidding but the guy was absurdly transparent. The two women rolled their eyes and snorted, treating it like a bad joke, but Gillian suddenly understood why Sophie couldn’t take her husband seriously. There was nothing else she could do this side of divorce.

Gillian’s time in Houston came to a halt when she looked out of her apartment window one day and saw a red truck with the name of a construction company painted on the side. She recognized it immediately as J.J’s. Her initial terror deepened when she realized what he had done. He hadn’t just come to visit. He had followed her to Texas and had been stalking her ever since. She had to assume he was capable of anything.

That was the end of it. It was clear Ned wasn’t going to find regular work for them- they’d only had the one gig. It was time to go home. Gillian called her mother and told her she’d seen J.J. “The car’s been acting up,” she said. “I don’t think I should drive home by myself in it.” Emily agreed and took a bus to Houston. Gillian called Ned and told him she was done. Sophie talked to her realtor cousin, who was friends with the apartment manager, and Gillian got out of her lease. It was all coming together for her to hightail it out of there, so it seemed the right thing to do.

The drive back to New Orleans had been uneventful until Gillian and Emily found themselves at an unmarked fork in the road in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning. Both of them were tired and a little testy.

“The hell with this,” Gillian said. “I’m turning left.”

“That’s probably the wrong way.”

“For crying out-“

A great blaring horn honk hit them like a clap of thunder, but even more terrifying was the vehicle that produced it. The enormous semi, idling loudly inches away on the driver’s side, had appeared out of nowhere.

The two sat trembling for some moments listening to the rumble of the huge truck’s motor.

“Didn’t you see his lights pulling up?” said Emily after a while.

Gillian shook her head. “No. I didn’t hear anything, either.”

She gathered her courage, rolled down the window, eased her head out, and looked up. A white-sleeved arm stretched out of the cab and pointed to the road on the right.

Gillian pulled her head in and looked at her mother. “He says to turn right.”

“How does he know where we’re going?”

Gillian shrugged. She turned again to look out the window.

The truck was gone.

“Holy shit,” she rasped.

They sat in petrified silence.

“That was God,” Emily said after a while.

Gillian took the road to the right. In twenty minutes they were on the interstate headed East to New Orleans.

37

Love, look at the two of us-- strangers in many ways.
          From "For All We Know" by Fred Karlin, James Arthur Griffin, and Robert Wilson Royer          

It wasn’t good to be back home. Schulz resumed hounding and harassing her, alternating maliciousness with witless sexual innuendo. Emily’s response, whenever Gillian complained, was consistent: “He’s just teasing you. He does that, teases people.” It didn’t sound like teasing whenever he became angry at her standoffishness and threatened to punch her in the face. Emily also picked up where she left off, accusing Gillian of having indiscriminate sex when she was out of the house for more than an hour at a time. Gillian resented the contradiction as much as the degradation: her mother supposed everyone she met wanted to fuck her— everyone but Schulz. It was just too convenient. If their tired old routine were a ploy to get her out of the house, it was working. But where the spirit was willing, the pocketbook was weak.

She’d found a job right away, receptionist at an insurance company located on the West Bank expressway in Gretna, close to the house. One of their sales agents was, of all people, Allison Cates, the sister of the Frog Prince. Gillian had met her at a party she and the prince attended.  She got along well with Allison, who began helping her try to find an affordable apartment. They had no luck. Gillian wasn’t paid enough as a receptionist to subsist on her own.  She sang in a couple of bar room talent shows for prize money, but nothing lucrative presented itself on the music front, either.

It was beginning to look to Gillian like the only way she would escape from Schulz and her mother was to get married.

Allison heard, from another employee at the insurance company, a guy named Jack Hebert, that there were some empty apartments in his building. Allison took her over there and they walked through a couple of the units. They were nice enough and fairly reasonable, but still more than Gillian could handle by herself. During this time she met Jack Hebert, the employee who had told Allison about the vacancies. He worked as a collector and was usually on the road, so it was a while before they crossed paths at the office.

Gillian’s first impression of Jack was that he was friendly and easy going. She wasn’t bowled over by his looks but he was all right, very tall with olive skin and dark eyes. He was handsome if you thought Tony Orlando was handsome. After they chatted a few times in the office, Gillian thought Jack might be working up to asking her out. It was difficult to tell, since personality wise, the man simply wasn’t there. That was the best description of him she could come up with: “not there.” He was still friendly and easy going, though, so she looked for reasons she would like to go out with him, should he ask her. One day they were talking about movies, and he mentioned he cried at the end of Old Yeller. Gillian seized on that. “Aw, isn’t that sweet!” she told herself. “He cried at the end of Old Yeller!” Not long after that, Allison mentioned that she asked Jack what he thought of Gillian. “Fox no, mink yes,” he’d said.

Gillian scratched her head. “What does that mean?”

Allison had no idea. Gillian decided to take it as a compliment, and when Jack got around to asking her out, she accepted.

They went on a couple of lackluster dates. Gillian tried to pretend she was enjoying herself, that she was interested in the conversation, but it was a lot of work. She once heard that a couple’s sexual life was simply another version of their relationship in general. That was true for her and Jack: lackluster and lot of work. She did wish, however, that his dominant personality trait, being “not there,” was a little more true in bed. As she told Allison, “His wiener is too big. He’s a big guy already, but the thing is disproportionately oversized, even for him.”

When Allison’s eyebrows went up, Gillian shook her head. “Not a good thing,” she said with finality.

He proposed marriage sitting in a hamburger joint in the mall. They’d been going out for a couple of months.  As they waited at the table for their order, the conversation was desultory. Jack related a couple of incidents collecting insurance payments that he considered interesting. At one point a little girl walked by wearing Wonder Woman’s royal tiara. Bob mentioned that Linda Carter, who had just begun playing the character on television, was his idea of the perfect woman: tall, chesty, brunette, blue-eyed. Amazonian, as Amazon women are depicted on TV. Gillian didn’t know quite what to do with that— she certainly didn’t remind anyone of Linda Carter— but their food arrived so she didn’t say anything. They munched in welcome silence for a while. After Gillian had taken a particularly large bite out of her burger, Jack said, “do you want to marry me?”

Gillian worked her mouthful around a little to where she could talk, more or less. “Um, sure, why not?”

The wedding plans were simple. Gillian chose St. Jude in downtown New Orleans. Her cousin Moira had been married there and the family had already approved of the church.

Gillian wanted the Carpenter’s song “For All We Know” played at the wedding, and she got the idea that she’d record the song herself. Why not? People sometimes wrote their own vows, didn’t they? It made more sense for her to sing those words than Karen and Richard, who didn’t know the wedding couple and never would. But the priest became incensed at the very notion.

“Hasn’t anyone done this before?” Gillian asked.

“No! No one has ever used a recording of their own voice during their wedding!” He was quite puffed up about it, saying it wasn’t “proper.”

“I just thought it would be unique.”

“Yes. Uniquely vain.”

Her mother bought her a long white dress on sale in a consignment shop. When she tried it on, Emily decided it was too low cut and told her to sew it up. “Mom, you’re the one who picked it out,” Gillian grumbled, but she made the alteration. The design of the dress, however, was such that a fair amount of cleavage was still visible, and one of the few photographs from that day caught the very proper priest gawking down the front of her dress.

Gillian’s father never responded to her requests to give her away. She was disappointed but not surprised. He ran from her in public, why would he walk down the aisle with her on his arm?  She asked her Uncle Carl instead.

There was no money for a reception or a honeymoon.

Interlude-Present Day 1

It was so dark inside the establishment, situated at the cusp of a vacant lot and a run down Baton Rouge neighborhood, that the only readable decorative sign was one that said, “Bar.” The existing dim light was supplied by the few buzzing, occasionally sputtering, electric booze advertisements the alcohol reps sometimes gave their customers. Five small wooden tables with chairs were situated haphazardly in the limited floor space. An old fellow sat defensively in a corner playing a classical guitar. He wasn’t very good, and the one customer at the bar and the two solitary drinkers at the tables paid no attention to him.

A young woman in a white business suit entered, causing a bell to ring and the patrons at the tables to look up and squint. It was mid afternoon, and the momentary brilliance flooding their tiny hole annoyed them. The woman stood for several minutes in the doorway while her eyes adjusted to the lack of illumination. When she could see, she made her way across the room and chose a stool away from the lone guy at the bar.

She took a drink napkin from the top of the stack and wiped off the bar in front of her. When the bartender emerged she ordered a Corona with a slice of lime. Then she turned and faced the guitar player and listened politely with her hands in her lap.

He didn’t take a break until she was almost finished her beer, so she ordered another. The man leaned his guitar against the small wooden cube that was his amplifier, then made his way to the bar. The bartender met him there with a glass of Scotch over ice. The woman picked up her beer and climbed carefully, as she was very short, off of her stool and moved to one a little closer.

“You play very well,” she said.

The other drinker at the bar cleared his throat elaborately.

The musician ignored the review. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s nice of you to say.” He took a gulp of his drink.

The woman sipped hers. “My uncle told me you’d be playing here today.”

“Oh? Are you looking to hire a guitarist?”

“Um… no.”

The man looked crestfallen.

“My name’s Anne Booth.” She extended a hand across the empty stool between them, and they shook.

“Walter Callonet.”

“Yes, I know. My uncle is Steve Landry. Do you remember him?”

After due thought, he replied, “No. I don’t. Sorry.”

“He said you probably wouldn’t. You saw him in your office years ago. He told me that you really helped him out.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“I just finished graduate school in December. Tulane School of Social Work.”

“Congratulations.”

When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything else, she went on.  “I got on at a small agency with a two-year state contract as part of disaster relief. You know, the flood last year. The ‘Great Flood of 2016,’ I should say. Lots of stress and trauma.”

“Goes without saying.”

“Did you flood, Mr. Callonet?”

“Walter, please. No, I did not.”

“Nor did we, thank heaven. My fiancé’s parents did, though. They’ll be making repairs for a very long time.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

She took another dainty sip of beer. “I’m sure you’ve heard all the numbers. 146,000 homes damaged, 11,000 people in shelters, on and on.”

“Yes. Terrible.”

“My little agency got state money to provide free counseling to people who got flooded, if they wanted it. Several case management outfits screened the flood victims, you know, to see who wanted the service. That was a mess… you don’t want to know why.”

“I can imagine.”

“Anyway… the five social workers at my agency ended up with about 5,250 people who wanted counseling.”

“Makes for a full day.”

“Yes. They gave us a screening tool to triage the cases. Clients were measured on scales of depression, anxiety, and PTSD.  No way we could see all five thousand, so of course we started with the most severe. We dove right in. We took complete psychosocial histories, provided full-on psychotherapy, the works. Guess what we found.”

“I give up.”

“The people who were most traumatized by the flood had been traumatized before. Probably as children. Probably by their parents.”

“Stands to reason. Well, good luck with that.”

“Thanks. So I was wondering. I could use some help on a case. Or two.”

“I don’t do supervision any more.”

“That’s fine, I already have a supervisor. Disasters and trauma aren’t really her thing, though. I just want to talk over a few cases. One case in particular. Nothing formal.”

“I’m sure you’re doing fine. I really can’t help you. I dropped all that.”

“You dropped all what?”

“All that. All that mental health-clinical-helping people shit. Excuse my language.”

“I’ve heard the word ‘shit’ before, Mr. Walter. I went to college.”

He nodded a concession. He upended his drink and waved at the bartender, who brought him another.

“I’m not asking for a lot of time. You’d still be able to pursue your musical career.”

The other man at the bar guffawed.

Callonet sighed. “Speaking of, I have to go back to work.”

“Is there a time we can meet that’s convenient? Just once a week?”

He shrugged. “Sure, why not.” He got off his stool, paused. “You said one case in particular.”

“Yes. Very nice lady and a very interesting past.”

“They all have interesting pasts.”

“I’ve only gotten her psychosocial history up to about age 23 or so, right before her first marriage. It’s slow going. She seems to remember every minute of her life.”

“How old is she now?”

“Sixty-eight. She’s been married five times, has had countless lovers. Childhood abuse. Neurotic as hell but charming. Nice sense of humor. Sang in a band when she was young, which is when she started smoking. Now she has end-stage emphysema. Her house was gutted by the flood and she lost everything in it. That’s bad enough, but her only child, a daughter, is dying of cancer. Oh…wait a sec…”

Anne took out her phone, called up the photos. “Here she is now. Still cute. And here she is around age 30.”

“Good heavens,” Callonet said. He studied the picture for a moment before handing back the phone. “So, what piqued your interest in this one client all of a sudden? You’ve been collecting history for some weeks now, you said.”

The young clinician turned her palms up. “I’m not sure. I think it’s— well I’m getting married in a few months myself. I look at it as a beautiful transition into a long, happy life with a man I love. I’m only 27. I’m supposed to look at it that way.”

“No argument here.”

“In our last session, she told me about her first wedding. She was only 23. I wanted to cry, but that’s not what got to me.”

“What, then?”

“That she described that heartbreakingly pitiful state of affairs so matter-of-factly, even a little humorously.”

“So you felt great relief that your nuptial experience won’t be like hers was.”

Ann frowned at him. “No, that’s not what I meant. I’m just asking to talk some things over with you, give me some direction. I feel like I’m floundering with her.”

“All right. Come by around one o’clock any Thursday. That’ll give us an hour.”

“Great. Thank you.”

“What’s her name, by the way?”

“Gillian McKenna.”

38

Not only was there no honeymoon, there wasn’t even a honeymoon phase. It was more of an “I’m determined to give this a chance” phase, fully understanding that she had her work cut out. Gillian did not expect Jack to become a hopeless romantic and scintillating conversationalist once they were married, but she got nothing at all. If anything, he was even more distant and unavailable after they’d said, “I do.” During a visit with her mother, Emily shared that she never liked him.

“He’s a deadbeat narcissist,” she said. “I’ve never even seen him put his arm around you. And he seems kind of stupid, judging by how he talks.”

As disgruntled as Gillian was with Jack, she couldn’t help but think it unfair to write him off as a loser.

To Emily’s point that he was no Braniac, yes, he did spend most of his time at home staring at the television. He worked on his car, but badly. She borrowed it one time and the engine caught fire a mile down the road.

Their sexual activity— “love making” was a misnomer— with his dead eyes and rote mechanical maneuvers became increasingly painful in every way imaginable. This was when intercourse actually occurred, as he was quickly becoming less interested.

His thoughtless comments continued unabated. He said heartlessly cruel things without changing expression, but it was this un-endearing trait that for Gillian, in deciding whether or not the man was altogether a waste or protoplasm, that was a mitigating factor. It reminded her of the startling occasion when his emotions bled out all over the place. Gillian had been griping at Jack about how much television he watched. She  really went at him, backing him into a corner, and she was stunned when he began to bawl inconsolably. His father, he disclosed, had ridiculed him without mercy. The old man would proceed from the specific to the general, making fun, for example, of his lower lip or his hair or a bad grade, then move on to declare him, in the main, stupid, clumsy, or ugly. Jack as a result felt inferior to literally everyone, was afraid to talk to people and didn’t know how. Television was a safe haven because he could be with people without having to interact with them. When his sobs at last abated he collapsed in on himself as quickly as he had laid himself bare, closing up and disappearing until he was again, suddenly, “not there.”

Jack only talked about his father that day, but Gillian realized with a flash of insight how his mother had contributed as well. The woman did not possess a personality. She walked and talked as if in a trance, delivering benign statements such as, “I have to stir the gravy” or “I’ve got to sit down” in such a dully staring monotone she rendered them creepy. Jack had an infant nephew and niece, and Gillian was amazed at how the woman could hold them on her hip and still not interact with them. In a group of people she was invisible, contributing nothing to the conversation. When she did speak it was to make one of those weird toneless declarations— “The roast is on the stove”— that sent chills up Gillian’s spine. She asked Emily what she thought of Jack’s mother after they had crossed paths with her in the mall. “She’s a robot,” said Emily. This was the woman who had been the more nurturing of Jack’s parents, by far. Gillian allowed that her husband’s difficulties in relating to other humans might not be the result of his simply being a deadbeat, as Emily suggested. He came by it honestly.

It was Jack who spotted new hope for the marriage in a newspaper ad: “New Hope Youth Ranch seeks live-in counselors.” Gillian called for information and learned that New Hope was a rehabilitation program for “misguided” youth located on a real ranch, complete with cows, pigs, and chickens, in Oak Grove, Louisiana. It was recently established as an alternative to foster care, found to be ineffective for juveniles with backgrounds of more extreme abuse or neglect. The children were given structure and discipline including, but not limited to, feeding the cows, pigs, and chickens. Group therapy was also provided. Counselors would reside with the children in their care.

Jack very much wanted them to quit their jobs and go live on the ranch so they could help the wayward youths. The positions paid well, and as live-in counselors, they would save on rent and groceries on top of the salary. Gillian was not one hundred per cent certain of her ability to benefit those individuals, but here was Jack interested and enthusiastic about something they would do together. She’d never seen him this engaged in anything, so how could she refuse?

A few days later they drove to New Hope Ranch in Oak Grove for their job interview. The office appeared to be the only permanent structure on the grounds, other than a small barn with one of the doors off its hinges.  One row of double-wide trailers flanked either side of the barn. They met with a man named Sandy Ballinger, who explained that he was a mental health professional and the only permanent staff member on the place. He oversaw the counselors and facilitated group therapy for the residents. Balinger had a clean cut all American look, dirty blond hair, very blue eyes, a nice physique, and a dimple in his chin like Kirk Douglas.

When they walked in the door, Ballinger began ogling Gillian shamelessly. He reminded Gillian of a guy who’d been in prison and hadn’t seen a woman in years. When they shook hands he craned over her, leering down like a sex-starved lurch. Gillian shrank a little and glanced at Jack, who didn’t seem to notice. Ballinger clutched her hand while he guided her to a chair, letting go reluctantly to walk around to his side of the desk. He phrased his questions in the plural— “where y’all from?”— while his eyes roamed lasciviously all over her, taking in every detail. Gillian felt like she needed to wrap up in a blanket, and every time she checked her husband’s reaction he remained as oblivious as ever. Jack answered Ballinger’s superficial questions solemnly, unaware that the man could give two hoots for his answers and only moved on to another question after Gillian responded. After twenty minutes of half-hearted quizzing, Ballinger announced they had the job. He pushed some papers across for them to sign and asked them how soon they could move in.  When Jack slid behind the wheel to leave, he seemed stunned. “Wow. That was the easiest job I ever got.”

In a week they had set up housekeeping with four wayward boys in one of the mobile homes next to the dilapidated barn. Jack and Gillian had a room, the boys paired off in the other two bedrooms. As counselors, their job was to provide the structure, discipline, and supportive interaction the boys so badly needed. Being the wife, it fell to Gillian to show them how to do their domestic chores: laundry, setting and clearing the table, general cleaning. She made sure they were up in the morning in time to do their farm-hand type chores— feeding the animals and baling the hay and so forth. Jack spent time with them as well, mostly watching sports on television.

They quickly settled into a household routine. The boys would steal Jack and Gillian’s cigarettes, sneak out the window at night so that Jack and Gillian had to chase after them through the dark, and try to “accidentally” walk in to the bathroom while Gillian was in there getting dressed.  Sandy Ballinger, the camp director, had shared with them a lot of the boys’ personal history. The details were all pretty horrific, Gillian thought. He gave them some cursory instruction on what to do should any of their charges decide to open up to them. “Support their feelings but maintain proper boundaries,” Ballinger said.

“Boundaries?” Gillian asked.

“Make sure they follow the rules.”

Gillian had expected the boys to be angry and close-mouthed, but they had little problem “opening up.”

“My dad has a tattoo of a swastika on his back,” one of the boys volunteered while helping Gillian fold clothes. “It’s really cool,” he said proudly. His name was Isaac. He was fourteen years old.

“Oh…” Gillian disapproved of the tattoo but remembered she was supposed to be supportive of the boys’ feelings. “That’s… nice.”

“When I’m 18 I’ll be an adult. I can go wherever I want. My dad said I can stay with him. He lives in Shreveport.”

Gillian smiled and pretended to focus on folding a towel, wondering what to say next. Isaac was clearly happy at the prospect of living with his father despite the fact that, as Ballinger had shared, Isaac was in state custody because his father had sodomized him from the time he was 9 until he was caught at it when Isaac was 12.

“Sounds like you…  miss your dad.” she said. It was the best she could do while trying to fathom how anyone could have positive feelings for a parent who treated them that horribly.

“Yeah, I do,” said Isaac sadly. He was quite downcast, but Gillian thought he’d turned a little green as well. Suddenly the boy bolted to the bathroom, where he spent the next five minutes throwing up.

“Are you all right?” she called worriedly through the door. Let’s get you to the doctor!”

“No, no,” he called back. He’d stopped retching and was almost cheerful “I’m fine! Just something I ate!”

Ballinger told Gillian he wanted her to check in with him every day with an update on the boys’ behavior. No special time, whenever was convenient for her. Gillian had initially found the guy somewhat attractive, but she caught on to him quickly. He had an air of, “are you actually resisting my charms?” about him.  Insecure and cocky at the same time. When she went to his office, he began drooling flagrantly the moment she set foot in the door. He would listen to a few words about the residents, then start with the suggestive comments.

“They’re really hard up for cigarettes,” Gillian said. “When they’re not stealing ours they’re finding butts and smoking them.”

“Yes. They regulate their moods with nicotine. Do you ever have trouble with that yourself?”

“With what?”

“Mood regulation,” he said with half-lidded eyes. “I could help you with that. I know just how I could improve your mood.”

She’d learned to respond with a poker face. As soon as she looked the least bit disgruntled he’d crawfish out of it. For example, “I know several cognitive techniques to combat dysphoria,” delivered in academic tones.

It was irritating but she couldn’t do anything but shrug it off. After the first couple of times she complained to Jack that Ballinger was making sexual innuendos. Jack, who valued his good salary plus free room and board to watch sports with the boys, pooh poohed the idea. Although she didn’t find Ballinger’s smarmy double entendres at all attractive, it was more than she got from Jack. Someone besides adolescent delinquents, at least, thought she was attractive.

Ballinger had no secretary and no assistants, and he began prevailing upon Gillian to run errands and do a lot of the office work for him— run to the store, create some flyers, pick up some copy paper. None of it was in the job description but she went along with it. The more of her time he monopolized the less subtle his suggestive remarks became, until he didn’t even bother couching them in double talk.

“What if I came up behind you and kissed your neck? Would that be ok?”

“No.”

“Oh. Then what if I came up behind you and caressed your breasts and butt?”

Four weeks from the day they moved in she was fed up, and she endured, with increasing ire, another two. As soon as she had concrete examples of Ballinger’s obscene talk she related them to Jack, but he simply didn’t care. Maybe he would care about her constant bitter complaining, she thought. It was the only avenue open to her.

She was delivered from these circumstances, at the end of the sixth week, by an exploding cow. Cows can explode in hot weather, apparently, if they eat the wrong food. This causes the gas in one of their four stomachs to over-expand, and ka-blooey. The noise woke them all up in the middle of the night, and the whole area was permeated with a nauseating stench. Gillian seized on the feeling of righteous indignation this provided to declare she wasn’t staying at New Hope Ranch one more day. They were packed up and gone by the following sunset.

39

They found a small apartment in Metairie. Having quit the insurance company when they signed on at New Hope. Jack, already in the National Guard, found a position with the army.

Their colorless married life picked up where it had left off. Gillian had no reason to believe it wouldn’t, but it was still disheartening. Although Jack did have a complicated and unfortunate childhood, she found herself agreeing with her mother: he was a bit stupid. He was interested in nothing but his comfort, which consisted mainly of lying in the recliner watching television. He was absolutely indifferent to her. Gillian being Gillian, she couldn’t help but feel there must be something lacking in her to cause this behavior. She took a couple of stabs at connecting with him sexually by walking in front of the TV screen in lingerie. On the rare occasion this was successful, she regretted it. It was the worst sex in the world, perfunctory, monotonous, and for some reason increasingly painful. If it kept getting worse, it would soon be outright impossible.

One morning the cops came knocking at the door asking for Jack Hebert. Gillian told them that he left very early in the morning for work. The cops said they needed to talk to him. The neighbor across the way complained that Jack was walking around naked in front of the windows, flashing their daughter.

She didn’t believe he was doing it on purpose, but it still pissed her off. She didn’t call Jack at work but she phoned her mother. “He doesn’t want to get naked with me but he’s walking around the house exposing himself to the girl in the next building!”

The cops had been waiting for him. As soon as he got home at 4:30 they came knocking. When they told him why they were there, he got pale and shaky. He said he had no idea anyone saw him, and what were they doing up at 4:30 in the morning, anyway? You can’t expose yourself in your own house, he declared, then started crying. The officers never changed expression. They explained that yes, you can expose yourself in your own house, if you are intentionally getting naked and showing off to others, for whatever reason. It’s all about intent, they said. In some instances, intent was difficult to prove, so they were just going to issue a warning. This time.

Gillian gave him the benefit of the doubt. She could see the whole thing scared the hell out of him.

When the pain during sex became unbearable, Gillian went to the doctor and learned she had endometriosis, which was described to her as blood blisters on the uterus. She was told she had a severe case, and that there were only two ways to address it. The first was to have a hysterectomy, the second was to give birth.

The first option, at her age, Gillian considered out of the question, and to her surprise, Jack was very much on board with having a baby. She stopped taking her birth control pills but otherwise made no particular effort to get pregnant. She had no interest in having sex with Jack more often.

Gillian wanted to go back to work, so she applied and got on at the Wilson’s department store next to their apartment building. She made a friend there, a woman named Billie who was also trying to get pregnant. They did a lot of cutting up together. Billie once brought a joint to work and they got stoned and stupid. Luckily, it was a slow day. “Jack and Jillian went up the hill-ian to fetch a pail of wa-ter!” They found that uproarious.

The human interaction with Billie, in the absence of such with Jack, helped Jillian keep an even keel. She did her best to maintain contact with friends, even those from childhood when she could. One of these was Laura Ansen, whom she knew in kindergarten. Gillian had often been the victim of harassment and ridicule by the other children, and Laura was one of the few girls who had been nice to her. They kept in touch over the years, although infrequently and usually by phone. They saw each other once or twice a year. During their teens and later, it was Gillian’s turn to be supportive. Laura despaired over ever having a boyfriend, more so of having a husband.  Laura was not the most attractive woman so Gillian made it a point to be encouraging.

Laura did end up getting married. Trevor Ansen was six feet three and obviously of Scandinavian ancestry, with a headful of thick, platinum blond hair. Laura absolutely idolized him. Trevor was a nuisance, but Gillian endured him for Laura’s sake. Whenever they got together, Trevor hit on Gillian relentlessly, making sexual comments, brushing up against her, pawing her ass whenever she walked by, that kind of thing. Laura never seemed to notice. Neither did Jack.

December rolled around not long after Gillian started trying to get pregnant. The Ansens also lived in Metairie, and they invited the Heberts to their New Year’s Eve party. Trevor was up to his usual tricks, which became more flagrant the more he drank. Gillian went into the house to use the bathroom while everyone was outside shooting fireworks, and Trevor followed her in, slobbering drunk. He tried to force her to kiss him. She stopped him but it wasn’t easy.

The incident bothered her tremendously. She didn’t want to lose Laura as a friend over this. She resolved to talk to Trevor and make him understand she needed him to cut it out. She knew the mechanic’s shop where he worked and went there one day around lunch time.

It was a large shop, with stalls for six cars, located at the end of a road that dead-ended near a couple hundred acres of woods.  Trevor came out in his greasy coveralls. He seemed a little annoyed at first that she was there, but he quickly became friendly. Gillian asked if she could have a word with him. Of course she could, he said, and suggested they take a walk in the woods behind the shop. “I don’t want my dad seeing me with another woman,” he said.

He made annoying small talk that Gillian assumed was meant to prevent her from starting her own conversation. They walked for a good while and eventually came to a small clearing with an immense granite boulder that was mostly underground and more or less flat on top.

Gillian interrupted his chatter to come to the point of the visit. “Look, Trevor. I need to talk to you about something. I’d like you to stop grabbing me whenever I walk by and making all the innuendos. We’re both married. Nothing’s going to happen.”

He said nothing, just looked down at her, again annoyed.

“On top of that, Laura is a good friend of mine. She stood up for me in kindergarten, for heaven’s sake, and we’ve been friends ever since. I would never do anything to betray her trust.”

Trevor again made no verbal reply. He grabbed her, pushed her down onto the boulder, and set about pulling her pants off. Gillian fought and screamed even as she realized he’d brought her out into the woods so no one would hear her. Trevor was literally twice her size and It was over quickly. He left her crying on the rock with only her blouse on. She had scrapes and scratches and was deeply bruised from her shoulders to her backside from being forced down onto the granite.

She didn’t call the police because she didn’t want to put Laura through that, but she did phone her. As soon as Laura knew it was Gillian, she interrupted.

“Don’t you say another word,” Laura said. “I already know what happened.”

“You do?” Gillian asked, astonished.

“Trevor told me you went to his shop to seduce him. You asked him to go in the woods with you and you tried to kiss him.”

“No, that’s not what happened!”

“It certainly is. Then when he refused, you got angry and told him you were going to get him in trouble for raping you. And here you are, doing just that!”

“Laura, no, what? That’s not… I’m covered in cuts and bruises from where he had me down on a rock!”

“So you say. And even if you did have them, that proves nothing!”

Gillian sat quietly for a long time, trying to understand. Did Laura actually believe that she would go to Trevor’s place of employment in order to seduce her husband on his lunch break, then fabricate a rape story, complete with real injuries, to retaliate for being spurned by the true blue Trevor?  In retrospect she felt at least somewhat culpable for being stupid enough to go to the shop and then walk with him into the woods, but was she really supposed to anticipate being raped by the husband of a life-long friend? Her confusion and outrage eventually condensed into helplessness; this was the kind of thing that happened to her and there was nothing to be done about it. Telling Jack would have been just as pointless.

It was a joyless pregnancy. Rather than morning sickness, she was ill all the time. She occasionally vomited or fainted but mostly it was a case of snarling indigestion and a vicious upsurge in the stomach afflictions she suffered ordinarily. It was impossible to keep food down. She found a gastroenterologist to see if anything could be done, a Dr. Whittle. He was forty-ish, overweight, with a picture of his wife and her triple chin on his desk. Whittle complimented Gillian unctuously all during her appointments. “I can always tell when you’re here,” he said. “You smell so good. What’s that fragrance? I need to get some for my wife. You look so pretty. Really, you’re a breath of fresh air.” She suffered this with as much aplomb as she could, since he lathered it on in the presence of his nurse, whose expression gave away nothing. She stopped seeing him when he sent the nurse out, took Gillian’s hands in his, and offered to be her sugar daddy:  “I’m very attracted to you,” he said. He tried to kiss her but Gillian deflected him with her cheek. This discouraged him not at all. “Please let me know if you ever want someone to treat you like a queen.” She tried to be polite. “I appreciate the compliment, but I’m already married.” She payed at the desk and never went back.

Gillian had stomach problems of another sort: the bigger hers got, the more sex Jack wanted to have. It was weird. He insisted on the missionary position, which put a lot of pressure on her abdomen. It was as if he was trying to hurt her.

He did so more than he knew. Every time he forced her down, her senses told her she was back in the woods with Trevor on top of her, slamming her repeatedly against the rock; all sex had become a brutal assault. Afterward, Jack complained about her attempts to thrash and twist away from him, something of which she had no recollection. She would apologize, thinking she was losing her mind. She believed this total body hallucination was telling her that the baby was Trevor’s. She worried herself sick over this, living in terrified dread of the moment the child emerged with platinum blond hair. She went to the library and tried to discover whether or not that was a dominant or recessive trait, but she couldn’t find out anything definitive. Laura had dark hair, she and Trevor already had a child, and the boy was a towhead; it appeared the odds were against her. To make matters worse, Jack was elated at the prospect of becoming a father; Gillian imagined in vivid detail first his confusion, then his disillusionment, then his foaming rage— and her everlasting shame— when out popped a baby with Trevor’s silver-white locks. No one would believe it was the child of rape. She couldn’t even imagine herself trying to make anyone understand that in the first place.

So abhorrent was the idea that Trevor was the father that Gillian gradually became aware of a dark part of her soul, comprised of anger and shame, who was trying to eject the child from her body. This was a horrific revelation. It placed her in the untenable role of both victim and perpetrator, recreating the nightmare of her first pregnancy: inescapable images of Chip Thibodeaux lifting her over his head and dropping her on the floor, and the tiny hand, swimming in blood, when she miscarried in the bathroom. It frightened her to think that if the baby was indeed Trevor’s, she wouldn’t want it. It frightened her to think that the child inside her now, regardless of who its father was, could somehow sense she was the cause of her mother’s fear and antipathy.

These worries grew in intensity as the pregnancy advanced, along with one other: when she looked in the mirror, she didn’t see a radiant young mother all aglow with the life inside her, she saw a beached whale. She ballooned up to 135 pounds, a weight she found ungainly, unmaneuverable, and, despite Jack’s peculiar attraction, wholly unattractive.

Miraculously, nine months passed. The contractions came fast and hard but in the delivery room her water had still not broken. She was given an epidural, which was a blessing, although she found the position they placed her in extremely uncomfortable. All she could think about was how badly she wanted a cigarette. A nurse entered snapping on yellow rubber gloves and flexing her fingers, at the ends of which grew astonishingly long nails. “Don’t worry, I’m sanitary,” she said, and proceeded to reach inside Gillian and puncture the sac with one of her talons.

The baby was positioned incorrectly, not a breach but upside down, face up, and they had to reach inside Gillian and turn the child over.  After months of worrying, the moment of truth came unexpectedly when she saw the infant’s dark hair and olive skin. Newborn Audrey— Gillian was a huge Audrey Hepburn fan— was the spitting image of Jack.

She did feel relief, but it was spoiled by the sharp bitterness of the past nine months. Embedded forever in her psyche, soul, and body was one unalterable clarity regarding pregnancy and childbirth: never again.