Albert E. Cowdrey by The Recreation Room

Author:The Recreation Room
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-29T21:15:22+00:00

That afternoon they took a siesta together, lying side by side in their underwear on Gwen’s bed.

They held each other and Gwen cried for friends she’d known, for houses where she’d partied, for the deleted portion of her youth and memories. Jim wanted to cry, but couldn’t. Grief stifled him. What do you do when your life is nothing but the past, and the past is suddenly swept away?

Bonaparte had a wild night of howling wind, tossing boughs, and crashing trees. It was only the western edge of the storm, but the power went off, the air conditioning died, and Jim and Gwen retreated to the front gallery, where they sat in the tumultuous darkness, holding hands. She said more than once, “Jim, I’m so sorry,” but he only grunted.

Next day the power came back on and they viewed the scope of the catastrophe in New Orleans. Television showed three-fourths of the city submerged in water, with islands of fire. Where was the President, where was the army, where was everybody? Days slipped by like a road without mileposts as the world gazed at hunger, filth, and thirst in the Superdome, exhausted people sweltering on blinding-white freeway bridges that rose out of newborn lakes and marshes, bodies floating and swelling at familiar intersections gone unrecognizable. Looters stumbled through knee-deep water, toting stolen TVs in a city without power. On quiet Uptown streets, oaks gracefully mirrored themselves in canals where no canals were supposed to be.

And Jim was so far away, so comfortable, so safe. He felt bubble-wrapped.

Bonapartians gave fund-raisers for evacuees who’d run out of money; churches prayed for the dead and gathered food and clothing for the living. People Jim had never met stopped him on the street to ask how things were going “down there”—as if he knew! Olivia hugged him and cried against his shirt and refused to take any money for the extra trouble he was giving her. He held her and for the first time cried too, not for anything he’d lost, but for the utterly unexpected kindness of strangers.

The town was full of refugees now, and they had little to do but gossip. They checked maps posted on Google and divided into castes based on how deep their houses had flooded. Jim gained some cachet at a charity jazz brunch when an Uptowner remarked that his house was high and dry on the natural levee of the Mississippi. Jim said, “Mine was on the natural levee of the Seventeenth Street Canal,” and the Uptowner retired from the field, badly worsted. Yet the Davy Jones Award didn’t go to Jim. During a break when the musicians were lunching, the pianist commented en passant that his concert grand at home was under twelve feet of water. Somewhat staggered by this—what were they talking, a fifty-thousand-dollar instrument?—Jim heard himself rather stupidly saying he didn’t suppose it would be worth much now. The musician replied, “Well, not as a piano,” returned to his bench, and launched into a riff, triumphant in this curious sweepstake where you won by losing.

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