Say You're Sorry Read online

  “How long were you married?” Rob had asked her on their second date, about six months earlier, just before Thanksgiving.

  Their second surreptitious date. Dinner at a place out by the lake where no one ever went anymore.

  Diana closed her eyes and settled into the streetcar’s mahogany slotted seat, rainwater dripping off her cherry-red raincoat. Audubon Park disappeared, and a bit of her anger, too, as she let the memory of that evening wash over her.

  It wasn’t really the done thing, a department chair dating an adjunct, one of that roving band of academic gypsies who subsisted by stringing together a class at one college here, another there, praying for full-time faculty to retire or die so a real job, with benefits and decent pay, would open up.

  Also, Rob was twelve years her junior. Boy toy. Diana could just see the smirks.

  “Honey, I was divorced before you were born,” she’d laughed, that second date.

  “Awh, come on.” Rob had laid his slow grin on her. Cocked one eyebrow beneath dark golden locks.

  He was a near dead ringer for Harry Connick, Jr., that lean, languorous home-grown crooner, that hunka hunka burnin’ love. Rob had then tapped her hand with one long finger, his touch like heat lightning.

  *

  Now the streetcar was passing Temple Sinai, a simple stone building with three tall iron doors. Diana never passed the temple without smiling at the memory of David Markson, Abby and Steve’s son, manfully delivering his bar mitzvah speech from the bema with not a hint of the stutter that had tortured his childhood. He was an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon now, doing a postdoc. Diana couldn’t be prouder of David.

  She had no children of her own.

  She often said that her students were her children. Not the same, of course, but she did invest enormous passion and energy in them. Something very much like love.

  *

  “Nawh, really, tell me,” Rob had insisted. “How long did that lucky man enjoy the supreme pleasure of your company?” Exaggerating his south Alabama drawl.

  Sharecroppers, he’d said, his people. Po’ whites. Diana wasn’t so sure that that was true, but it fit Rob’s bad-boy image. The slightly dangerous English instructor/bartender/writer. He was working on a noir screenplay. L.A. Confidential meets The Big Easy.

  Diana had been writing a collection of short stories for a couple of years now, stories linked by various characters’ connections to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, just around the corner from her house.

  “And how could that fool stand to give you up?” Rob kept pushing. “Or did he die of consumption or somethin’?”

  No, that wasn’t what happened to Richard, the smart-as-a-whip, thin-as-a-whippet, handsome young Jewish dentist she’d met in grad school in Cambridge. Richard had always thought New Orleans was “ever so romantic” and had been thrilled to pieces when the university had tendered Diana a position.

  He’d also been thrilled with the house they’d found in the heart of the Garden District, on Fourth near Coliseum.

  He’d been thrilled with fixing it up, spending endless hours in antiques and junk stores on Magazine Street. Talking fabrics and color chips with designers. Meeting with armies of landscapers, gardeners, painters, plasterers.

  What hadn’t thrilled Richard was Diana’s snuggling close to him after they switched off the ever-so-charming lamps he’d chosen for their ever-so-handsome bedside tables. He was the only man Diana had ever lived with, so it had taken her a long while to realize that she wasn’t the problem.

  She’d been crushed, then furious, and, ultimately, humiliated when Richard, and the truth, finally came out.

  “Three years,” she’d answered Rob, letting him lead her onto the dance floor of the place out by the lake where nobody went anymore. Nobody she knew, anyway. “We were married three years from start to finish.”

  Diana loved to dance. She and Richard had been like Fred and Ginger on the dance floor, one of the ways, she’d realized later, he’d seduced her into marrying him.

  And why? Now there was a mystery. Richard had said he’d loved her, truly, deeply loved her, but—

  It was a big but.

  She’d been talking about Richard earlier today in her creative-writing seminar. Obliquely, of course.

  Revenge was the theme she’d assigned the class for their next stories, and they’d spent nearly an hour discussing that primal urge: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

  One girl recounted her humiliation by a bully at summer camp, and how she’d stolen the bully’s diary and photocopied the juiciest pages, then turned them into mess-hall placemats.

  There was talk of turning the other cheek.

  Destroying someone with kindness.

  And what exactly did that Bible passage mean: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”?

  It had been more than twenty years now since Richard had left Diana for Jeffrey, a lighting designer. At first she’d lain awake night after night, plotting to burn down their ever-so-elegant house, just around the corner, dammit, from hers. When she did sleep, poison, knives, guns, ropes, and bottomless caverns filled her dreams.

  After a while, she’d rested easier, but she’d never forgiven Richard. She’d tried, but maybe she was too much her daddy’s little girl. She knew her dad had never meant the first half of that old lawman’s adage: Forgive your enemies, but never turn your back on them. When Richard was dying of AIDS, there was a little part of her that felt—not that she was proud of it, but there it was—Serves you right.

  Diana had never married again. Not even close. Which is not to say that she hadn’t had her share of good times. This was New Orleans, after all, the country’s epicenter of good times. Laissez les bons temps rouler. Diana had dated quite a bit, in fact, keeping rather steady company with more than one beau.

  But there’d been no one with whom she was willing to take the plunge—the risk of incurring that kind of pain again. Not that the decision was conscious. Diana had scores of rationalizations for avoiding commitment. Her suitors were too needy, too controlling, too depressed, too married to golf, too fat, or too just plain damned boring.

  And they all drank too much.

  Of course, nearly everyone in NOLA overindulged. The philosophy was you might as well drink, smoke too, eat all the fried foods you wanted here in the murder capital of the U.S.A. Carpe diem was the general consensus, ’cuz any day now a bad guy might hit you in the head just a little too hard.

  (In fact, just this week, there’d been two home intrusions in Diana’s very own block, one especially frightening, as the owners had been home, the burglars armed.)

  Then there were the poisons spewed by the petrochemical plants up and down the river, delivering cancer to the water, the air, the land.

  And don’t forget the surety that one of these days a hurricane would blow your house down.

  Such fatalism was part of the city’s charm. That sense of living on the edge lent a certain frisson to the everyday, the humdrum.

  Just like the part-time, no-strings (no-pain) pleasures of a handsome man.

  As Handsome Rob had twirled Diana around the floor on that second date, he’d asked the question she’d heard a million times: “How come nobody’s snagged you since?”

  “Maybe I’m just too picky.” Her standard response.

  “Picky? I can sure understand that. Woman like you, picky, that makes sense.”

  Then Rob had flung her out with one strong arm, let her stay there distanced from his touch, his body’s heat, his scent—a mix of lime, smoke, leather, and sweat—until she began to long for him as if he were cool water on an August afternoon. An eternity, then he reeled her back in.

  She’d laughed, trying to cover her yen for him. He was an adjunct, for chrissakes, and way too young.

  Buckwheat Zydeco came on the jukebox with “Give Me a Squeeze, Please,” and she’d begun a step-pause-step-step by her lonesome.

  “Or maybe nobody’s been able to keep up,” she’d teased.

>   In north Louisiana, where Diana was raised among the Southern Baptists and the even more conservative sects—Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene—dancing was frowned upon if not outright forbidden.

  What was that old joke…?

  Why do Baptists disapprove of screwing?

  Because it looks too much like dancing.

  There was, of course, the flailing around that the Pentecostals called divine: a kind of non-partnered floor-flopping punctuated by speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth.

  South Louisiana, NOLA its capital, was a whole other continent. In NOLA everybody danced.

  “Can’t keep up? Oh yeah?” Then Clever, Handsome, Hot Rob had grabbed her in his arms and whirled her around the floor in one floating side step after another until she was breathless. And damp.

  Then he’d taken her home and slid her right into bed.

  *

  Over her own thoughts, the drumming rain, and the hum of the streetcar, Diana heard a familiar voice from a few seats up. “I’ve got so much work, really, I’m ready to kill myself.” Pause. Giggle. “And a hot date with You Know Who.”

  “I know. Me, too.” Sigh. “The work, not the hot date. But I’m kinda looking forward to doing that story for Banks.”

  It was the mention of her own name that made Diana crane a look forward, and, yes, there two rows directly in front of her, she spotted the unmistakable red-gold mane of Amber Reynolds.

  Amber would be the one with the hot date: a real dazzler, campus queen bee, and a bit of a bitch, but still, one of Diana’s favorites. Amber was a talented writer with a great eye for detail.

  Beside her, Chloe McClain, Amber’s dark-haired, less attractive, and even more talented friend.

  Diana was quite fond of both of them.

  Probably going downtown to shop, she thought.

  “I’m going to write about my wicked stepmother,” said Chloe, in that penetrating voice all girls seemed to have these days. Too nasal. Too loud. Broadcasting their business. “You know, about how I really tried when my dad married her, after my mom died, but she was so awful to me. Though she was sweet as pie when Dad was around. Then one day—”

  *

  The streetcar rattled on past the columned mansions of St. Charles, the sidewalks a tumble of concrete uprooted by dripping oaks. It stopped every couple of blocks. Thirteen miles from one end, Carrollton and Claiborne to its terminus downtown at Canal, though it was only about ten, the part of it from the university to Erato Street, just before Lee Circle, where Diana would get off to walk a few blocks to the auto shop. The trip would take forty-five minutes, more or less. Breakdowns on the streetcar line were more common than not.

  Up ahead Diana spotted the Milton Latter Library, housed in a Neo-Italianate mansion, a gorgeous old pile occupying the entire block between Soniat and Dufossat Streets and one of the city’s two small hills.

  And a landmark in her love affair with Rob. How fitting, she always thought, that it was a library where their games had begun.

  *

  Chloe’s voice rose even higher. “I was always telling Wicked Stepmom she ought to be more careful about locking the car when she parked it. And she always blew me off. Like, Yadda yadda, Chloe.

  “Then one day she had borrowed Dad’s BMW that he loved more than life itself, and she drove it, like just two blocks, to the store, she coulda/shoulda walked her fat butt, and left it unlocked, naturally, in the parking lot. So I stole it.”

  *

  “Vivien Leigh lived there, in what’s the library now,” a tourist with a tight blond perm said to her red-faced husband, the two of them sitting directly in front of Diana, behind Amber and Chloe, “when she married a rich local lumberman.”

  “Actually, it was Marguerite Clark, a star of the silent screen,” said Diana, leaning forward despite her desire for solitude. She couldn’t resist correcting the tourist, the schoolteacher in her, she supposed.

  “Oh, really?”

  Yes. The house had been built by a department-store magnate, then was bought by elegant Harry Williams, the lumber baron and aviation pioneer who was said to have charm to burn—the charm that won Marguerite, a rival of Mary Pickford. The house was given to the city for a public library by a later owner, in memory of a son who died in World War II.

  “It’s worth seeing,” said Diana. “The two front downstairs rooms are gorgeous, with frescoed ceilings imported from France. The large reading room has a Flemish mantel over an onyx fireplace.”

  *

  It was the green Louis XIV French parlor that was Diana’s favorite, however, with its curtains and wall panels of cherry-red brocaded damask and a magnificent crystal chandelier.

  “Let’s go to the Latter tomorrow afternoon,” Rob had said casually, about a week after they’d discovered themselves to be a sweet fit.

  “The library?”

  Diana had really meant it when she’d told Rob that, no, she obviously couldn’t resist his charms, but really, truly, they were going to have to be discreet.

  “Just pretend that I’m married,” she’d said. “It simply won’t do to have us gossiped about around school. It isn’t appropriate.”

  “Inappropriate,” he’d teased. Then he’d lowered his voice to that husky register that made her bone marrow vibrate and commanded, “The library.”

  The truth was Diana was so lust-struck at that point, she’d have followed Rob if he’d jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” he’d added. “I’ll meet you in the parlor. Wait for me there.”

  At the appointed time Diana had settled herself onto the parlor’s crimson loveseat. Moments later, an older, elegant couple, in their seventies, had taken chairs to one side of Diana’s perch. They began leafing through travel books, planning a trip to France, obviously not their first.

  Then another man entered the parlor. For a moment Diana didn’t recognize Rob. He’d donned serious horn-rims and slicked his hair back with a silvery gel. A baggy jacket made him look older—and heavier.

  She had to stifle her hoot of surprise and delight. A disguise! Oh, Clever Rob. She’d said discreet and…

  But he warned her into silence with a raised finger and a shake of his head.

  “Here’s the book you asked for, miss,” he said, as if he were a librarian, handing her a large-format volume.

  The older couple looked up briefly, smiled, then bent their heads back to their research.

  “Let me show you what I was talking about.” Rob gestured with an open hand. Could he join her on the loveseat?

  The book was a collection of exquisite erotica. Beautifully rendered line drawings of the seduction of a young man by a voluptuous older woman.

  “Where did you find this?” she’d whispered.

  “Shhhh,” he’d cautioned. Library. No talking.

  The older couple smiled once more.

  Five minutes later found Diana and her younger paramour locked together in the single-occupancy Ladies’ Room, half naked and crazy, crazy, crazy.

  *

  “Maybe we’ll come back and see the library tomorrow,” said the permed blond tourist. “Howard wants to go back to the hotel and take a nap before we have dinner.” She paused, then added smugly, “At Antoine’s.”

  Of course. Sure, the Oysters Rockefeller were still good, and the pommes de terre souffles terrific, but Diana could have told the blonde of a hundred better places both high and low, Bayona to Domilise’s Po-Boys. But tourists always wanted to drop Our dinner at Antoine’s into conversation back home.

  *

  Once again, the girls’ voices. “Shut up!” said Amber. “You did not steal your dad’s car!”

  “Oh, yeah. I’d been scheming for this. I was so ready. I’d nabbed a pair of her panties out of the clothes basket—”

  “Yewh!”

  “And I left them under the driver’s seat with a ripped condom wrapper. So the cops find the car about five minute
s after Dad dials nine-one-one, a Beemer emergency, all ranting. And then, when the cops bring it back, he’s going over his ride, inch by inch, and—”

  “Hello! Panties! Condom! But how would he know for sure they were hers? Not the girlfriend of the banger who pinched it?”

  “’Cuz she always wore this one kind of black panties, really expensive, and REALLY big—”

  Diana laughed. So did Howard, the tourist hubby in front of her. The wife elbowed him.

  Not funny, Howard.

  *

  After the Latter, Diana and Rob had fun seeing just how creative (and discreet) they could be.

  Let’s Pretend was a good model.

  The operating principle was fantasy and role-playing (while hidden in plain sight).

  And disguises were an essential part of secrecy, weren’t they? The weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, with its masks and costumes, had been a particularly interesting time.

  But there were parades and dress-up balls of one kind or another in New Orleans practically every day.

  Not all of their encounters were production numbers, of course. Many nights Rob came visiting, and they made dinner and then love with no games, no frills.

  Oh, maybe just a bit of “Let’s pretend I’m the cable guy.” Rob tapping on the sun-porch door, the front doorbell broken for eons. Diana answering his knock in the black silk dressing gown he loved.

  Or she’d remind him, “…that time you had me meet you at the bar in the Maple Leaf, and we pretended that we were strangers.”

  “Yeah, and you let someone buy you a drink before I got there, and then we almost came to blows over who you were going home with.”

  “I loved that,” she sighed.

  She loved him, too.

  *

  “I’m crazy in love with him,” cooed Amber.

  Passengers up and down the streetcar grinned. Ah, youth.

  “He is so much fun. Last weekend we went dancing at the Rock ’n’ Bowl. He’s a mad dancer, and when we rolled out of there, like one a.m., he said, “Wanta go for a drive?’ And the next thing I knew, we were all the way down in Grand Isle. A friend of his has a beach cottage there.”