Vieux Carre

  Joke, is it, is it a joke?! Foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath nowhere to hide His head!

  WRITER: Don’t you know you’re delirious with fever?

  NIGHTINGALE: You used to be kind—gentle. In less than four months you’ve turned your back on that side of your nature, turned rock-hard as the world.

  WRITER: I had to survive in the world. Now where’s your pills for sleep, you need to rest.

  NIGHTINGALE: On the chair by the bed.

  [Pause.]

  WRITER [softly]: Maybe this time you ought to take more than one.

  NIGHTINGALE: Why, you’re suggesting suicide to me which is a cardinal sin, would put me in unhallowed ground in—potter’s field. I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost . . . you’ve turned into a killer?

  WRITER [compulsively, with difficulty]: Stop calling it asthma—the flu, a bad cold. Face the facts, deal with them. [He opens the pillbox.] Press tab to open, push down, unscrew the top. Here it is where you can reach it.

  NIGHTINGALE: —Boy with soft skin and stone heart . . .

  [Pause. The writer blows the candle out and takes Nightingale’s hand.]

  WRITER: Hear the rain, let the rain talk to you, I can’t.

  NIGHTINGALE: Light the candle.

  WRITER: The candle’s not necessary. You’ve got an alcove, too, with a window and bench. Keep your eyes on it, she might come in here before you fall asleep.

  [A strain of music is heard. The angel enters from her dark passage and seats herself, just visible faintly, on Nightingale’s alcove bench.]

  Do you see her in the alcove?

  NIGHTINGALE: Who?

  WRITER: Do you feel a comforting presence?

  NIGHTINGALE: None.

  WRITER: Remember my mother’s mother? Grand?

  NIGHTINGALE: I don’t receive apparitions. They’re only seen by the mad.

  [The writer returns to his cubicle and continues as narrator.]

  WRITER: In my own cubicle, I wasn’t sure if Grand had entered with me or not. I couldn’t distinguish her from a—diffusion of light through the low running clouds. I thought I saw her, but her image was much fainter than it had ever been before, and I suspected that it would fade more and more as the storm of my father’s blood obliterated the tenderness of Grand’s. I began to pack my belongings. I was about to make a panicky departure to nowhere I could imagine . . . The West Coast? With Sky?

  [He is throwing things into a cardboard suitcase. Nursie appears at the edge of his light with a coffee tray.]

  NURSIE: Mizz Wire knows you’re packin’ to leave an’ she tole me to bring you up this hot coffee and cold biscuits.

  WRITER: Thank her. Thank you both.

  NURSIE: She says don’t make no mistakes.

  WRITER [harshly]: None, never?

  NURSIE: None if you can help, and I agree with her about that. She’s phoned your folks about you. They’re coming down here tomorrow.

  WRITER: If she’s not bluffing . . .

  NURSIE: She ain’t bluffin’, I heard her on the phone myself. Mizz Wire is gettin’ you confused with her son Timmy. Her mind is slippin’ again. Been through that before. Can’t do it again.

  WRITER: We all have our confusions . . . [He gulps down the coffee as Nursie crosses out of the light.]

  NURSIE [singing softly]: “My home is on Jordan.”

  WRITER: Then I started to write. I worked the longest I’d ever worked in my life, nearly all that Sunday. I wrote about Jane and Tye, I could hear them across the narrow hall.— Writers are shameless spies. . .

  SCENE ELEVEN

  The studio light builds. Jane is sobbing on the bed. Tye is rolling a joint, seated on the table. The clearing sky has faded toward early blue dusk. Tye regards Jane with a puzzled look. Faintly we hear the black singer-pianist. “Bye, bye, blues. Don’t cry blues,” etc.

  TYE: Want a hit, Babe? [She ignores the question.] How long have I been asleep? Christ, what are you crying about. Didn’t I just give you one helluva Sunday afternoon ball, and you’re cryin’ about it like your mother died.

  JANE: You forced me, you little pig, you did, you forced me.

  TYE: You wanted it.

  JANE: I didn’t.

  TYE: Sure you did. [Jane is dressing again.] Honey, you got shadows under your eyes.

  JANE: Blackbirds kissed me last night. Isn’t that what they say about shadows under the eyes, that blackbirds kissed her last night. The Brazilian must have been blind drunk when he took a fancy to me in the Blue Lantern, mistook me for a hundred-dollar girl. —Tye, I’m not a whore! I’m the Northern equivalent of a lady, fallen, yes, but a lady, not a whore.

  TYE: Whores get paid for it, Babe. I never had to.

  JANE: You little—prick! Now I’m talkin’ your jive, how do you like it? Does she talk like that when she’s smearing you with lipstick, when you ball her, which I know you do, repeatedly, between shows.

  TYE: —Who’re you talkin’ about?

  JANE: That headliner at the strip show, the Champagne Girl.

  TYE [gravely]: She’s—not with the show no more.

  JANE: The headliner’s quit the show?

  TYE: Yeah, honey, the Champagne Girl is dead an’ so she’s not in the show.

  JANE: You mean—not such a hot attraction any more?

  TYE: Don’t be funry about it, it ain’t funny.

  JANE: You mean she’s actually—

  TYE: Yes. Ackshally. Dead. Real dead, about as dead as dead, which is totally dead— So now you know why I needed a needle to get me through last night.

  JANE: —Well, of course that’s—

  TYE: You was jealous of her . . . [Jane looks away.] I never touched the Champagne Girl. She was strictly the property of the Man. Nobody else dared t’ touch her.

  JANE: The Man—what man?

  TYE: The Man—no other name known by. —Well—he wasted her.

  JANE: —Killed her? —Why?

  TYE: ’Cause she quit deeping with him. She was offered a deal on the West Coast, Babe. The Man said, “No.” The Champagne Girl said, “Yes.” So the Man . . . you don’t say no to the Man—so if she’s going to the West Coast it’ll be packed in ice—

  [Voices are heard from the courtyard.]

  TOURIST 1: My slippers are wet through.

  [Piano music is heard.]

  TOURIST 2: What’s next on the tour, or is it nearly finished?

  TYE: When the Man is annoyed by something, he piles his lupos in the back seat of his bulletproof limo and he let’s ’em loose on the source of his annoyance.

  JANE: —Lupos?

  TYE: Lupos are those big black dawgs that’re used for attack. The Man has three of ’em, and when he patrols his territory at night, they sit in the back seat of his Lincoln, set up there, mouths wide open on their dagger teeth and their black eyes rollin’ like dice in a nigger crapshooter’s hands. And night before last, Jesus! he let ’em into the Champagne Girl’s apartment, and they—well, they ate her. Gnawed her tits off her ribs, gnawed her sweet little ass off. Of course the story is that the Champagne Girl entertained a pervert who killed her and ate her like that, but it’s pretty well known it was them lupos that devoured that girl, under those ceiling mirrors and crystal chandeliers in her all white satin bedroom. —Yep—gone—the headliner— Y’know what you say when the Man wastes somebody? You got to say that he or she has “Gone to Spain.” So they tole me last night, when people ask you where’s the Champagne Girl, answer ’em that the Champagne Girl’s gone to Spain. —Sweet kid from Pascagoula.

  JANE: Please don’t—continue—the story.

  TYE: All champagne colored without face or body makeup on her, light gold like pale champagne and not a line, not a pore to be seen on her body! Was she meant for dawg food? I said, was she meant for dawg food? Those lupos ate that kid like she was their—last—supper . . .

  JANE [who has now managed to get round the table]: Tye, Tye, open the shutters!

  TYE: Why? You
goin’ out naked?

  JANE: I’m going to vomit and die—in clean air . . . [She has moved slowly upstage to the gallery with its closed shutters, moving from one piece of furniture to another for support. Now she opens the shutter doors and staggers out onto the gallery, and the tourist ladies’ voices are raised in thrilled shock and dismay.]

  TOURIST 1: Look at that!

  TOURIST 2: What at?

  TOURIST 1: There’s a whore at the gallery window! Practically naked!

  [All gallery speeches should overlap.]

  JANE [wildly]: Out, out, out, out, out!

  NURSIE: Miss, Miss Sparks! These are Festival ladies who’ve paid admission.

  JANE: Can’t endure any more! Please, please. I’m sick!

  TYE: Fawgit it, Babe, come back in.

  JANE: It isn’t real, it couldn’t be—

  [The writer shakes his head with a sad smile.]

  But it was—it is . . . like a dream . . .

  TYE: What did you say, Babe?

  JANE: Close the gallery door—please?

  TYE: Sure, Babe. [He shuts the door on the voices below.]

  JANE: And—the hall door—bolt it. Why do you bring home nightmare stories to me?!

  TYE [gently]: Babe, you brought up the subject, you asked me about the Champagne Girl, I wasn’t planning to tell you. Chair?

  JANE: Bed.

  TYE: Weed?

  JANE: —Coffee.

  TYE: Cold.

  JANE: —Cold—coffee.

  [Tye pours her a cup and puts it in her trembling hand. He holds the hand and lifts the cup to her lips, standing behind her. He lets his hand fall to her breasts; she sobs and removes the hand.

  [The singer-pianist is heard again.]

  JANE: . . . Why do you want to stay on here?

  TYE: Here’s where you are, Babe.

  JANE [shaking her head]: No more. I . . . have to dress . . . [She dresses awkwardly, frantically. He watches in silence.] You have to get dressed, too, I told you I was expecting a very important visitor. Tye, the situation’s turned impossible on us, face it.

  TYE: You’re not walkin’ out on me.

  JANE: Who have I got to appeal to except God, whose phone’s disconnected, or this . . . providential . . . protector.

  TYE: From the banana republic, a greaseball. And you’d quit me for that?

  JANE: You’ve got to be mature and understanding. At least for once, now dress. The Brazilian is past due . . . I realized your defects, but you touched me like nobody else in my life had ever before or ever could again. But, Tye, I counted on you to grow up, and you refused to. I took you for someone gentle caught in violence and degradation that he’d escape from . . .

  TYE: Whatever you took me for, I took you for honest, for decent, for . . .

  JANE: Don’t be so . . . “Decent”? You ridiculous little . . . sorry, no. Let’s not go into . . . abuse . . . Tye? When we went into this it wasn’t with any long-term thing in mind. That’s him on the steps. Go in the bathroom quiet!

  TYE: You go in the bathroom quiet. I’ll explain without words.

  [She thrusts his clothes at him. He throws them savagely about the stage.]

  . . . Well?

  [There is a sound on the stairs.]

  Sounds like the footsteps of a responsible man.

  [Tye opens the door. We see hospital interns with a stretcher. Jane stares out. The interns pass again with Nightingale’s dying body on the stretcher. The writer is with them. Jane gasps and covers her face with her arm. The writer turns to her.]

  WRITER: It’s just—they’re removing the painter.

  JANE: —Just!

  TYE: No Brazilian, no buyer?

  JANE: No. No sale . . .

  WRITER [standing in the open doorway, as narrator]: It was getting dim in the room.

  TYE: It’s almost getting dark.

  WRITER: They didn’t talk. He smoked his reefer. He looked at her steady in the room getting dark and said . . .

  TYE: I see you clear.

  WRITER: She turned her face away. He walked around that way and looked at her from that side. She turned her face the other way. She was crying without a sound, and a black man was playing piano at the Four Deuces round the corner, an oldie, right for the atmosphere . . . something like . . .

  [The piano fades in, “Seem like Old Times.” Tye begins to sing softly with the piano.]

  JANE: Don’t.

  [Tye stops the soft singing but continues to stare at Jane.]

  DON’T

  [Pause.]

  TYE: Jane. You’ve gotten sort of—skinny. How much weight you lost?

  JANE: I . . . don’t know . . .

  TYE: Sometimes you walk a block and can’t go no further.

  [Pause.]

  JANE: I guess I’m a yellow-cab girl. With limousine aspirations.

  TYE: Cut the smart talk, Babe. Let’s level.

  [Pause. She extends her hand.]

  Want a dreg? Well?

  [Jane nods and takes a drag off his cigarette.]

  Huh?

  JANE: Well, after all, why not, if you’re interested in it. It hasn’t been just lately I’ve lost weight and energy but for more than a year in New York. Some—blood thing—progressing rather fast at my age . . . I think I had a remission when I met you.

  A definite remission . . . here . . . like the world stopped and turned backward, or like it entered another universe—months [She moves convulsively; Tye grips her shoulders.] . . . Then . . . it . . . I . . .

  TYE: Us?

  JANE: No, no, that unnatural tiredness started in again. I went to Ochsners. Don’t you remember when the doctor’s letter was delivered? No, I guess you don’t, being half conscious all the time. It was from Ochsners. It informed me that my blood count had changed for the worse. It was close to . . . collapse . . . [Pause.] . . . Those are the clinical details. Are you satisfied with them? Have you any more questions to ask?

  [She stares at him; he averts his face. She moves around him to look at his face; he averts it again. She claps it between her hands and compels him to look at her. He looks down. A scratching sound is heard at the shutter doors.]

  JANE: That’s Beret, let her in. Isn’t it nice how cats go away and come back and—you don’t have to worry about them. So unlike human beings.

  [Tye opens the door. He opens a can of cat food and sets it on the floor, then crosses to his clothes, collecting them from the floor.]

  TYE [gently]: Jane, it’s getting dark and I—I better get dressed now.

  JANE [with a touch of harshness]: Yes, dress—dress . . . [But he is lost in reflection, lighting a joint. She snatches it from his lips.]

  And leave me alone as always in a room that smells, that reeks of marijuana!

  SCENE TWELVE

  WRITER [as narrator]: She was watching him with an unspoken question in her eyes, a little resentful now.

  MRS. WIRE’S VOICE [from off stage, curiously altered]: Why are those stairs so dark?

  [The light in the studio area is dimmed to half during the brief scene that follows. The writer rises and stands apprehensively alert as Mrs. Wire becomes visible in a yellowed silk robe with torn lace, a reliquary garment. Her hair is loose, her steps unsteady, her eyes hallucinated.]

  WRITER [crossing from the studio, dismayed]: Is that you, Mrs. Wire?

  MRS. WIRE: Now, Timmy, Timmy, you mustn’t cry every time Daddy gets home from the road and naturally wants to be in bed just with Mommy. It’s Daddy’s privilege, Mommy’s—obligation. You’ll understand when you’re older—you see, Daddy finds Mommy attractive.

  WRITER [backing away from the cubicle entrance]: Mrs. Wire, you’re dreaming.

  MRS. WIRE: Things between grownups in love and marriage can’t be told to a child. [She sits on the writer’s cot.] Now lie down and Mommy will sing you a little sleepy-time song. [She is staring into space. He moves to the cubicle entrance; the candle is turned over and snuffed out.]

  MRS. WIRE: “Rock-a-bye, b
aby, in a tree top, If the wind blows, the cradle will rock . . .”

  WRITER: Mrs. Wire, I’m not Timothy, I’m not Tim, I’m not Timmy. [He touches her.]

  MRS. WIRE: Dear child given to me of love . . .

  WRITER: Mrs. Wire, I’m not your child. I am nobody’s child. Was maybe, but not now. I’ve grown into a man, about to take his first step out of this waiting station into the world.

  MRS. WIRE: Mommy knows you’re scared sleeping alone in the dark. But the Lord gave us dark for sleep, and Daddy don’t like to find you took his rightful place . . .

  WRITER: Mrs. Wire, I’m no relation to you, none but a tenant that earned his keep a while . . . Nursie! Nursie!

  NURSIE [approaching]: She gone up there? [Nursie appears.] She gets these spells, goes back in time. I think it musta been all that Azalea Festival excitement done it.

  MRS. WIRE: “If the bough breaks, the cradle will fall . . .”

  NURSIE [at the cubicle entrance]: Mizz Wire, it’s Nursie. I’ll take you back downstairs.

  MRS. WIRE [rousing a bit]: It all seemed so real. —I even remember lovemaking . . .

  NURSIE: Get up, Mizz Wire, come down with Nursie.

  MRS. WIRE [accepting Nursie’s support]: Now I’m—old.

  [They withdraw from the light.]

  MRS. WIRE’S VOICE: Ahhhhhhhh . . . Ahhhhhhhh . . . Ahhhh . . . Ahhhhh . . .

  [This expression of despair is lost in the murmur of the wind. The writer sinks onto his cot; the angel of the alcove appears in the dusk.]

  WRITER: Grand! [She lifts her hand in a valedictory gesture.] I guess angels warn you to leave a place by leaving before you.

  [The light dims in the cubicle as the writer begins to pack and builds back up in the studio. The writer returns to the edge of the studio light.]

  JANE: You said you were going to get dressed and go back to your place of employment and resume the pitch for the ladies.