The house, white stucco and well cared for, sprawled over every allowable inch of space on the lot. He estimated it had six bedrooms, at least, and a porch large enough to sleep a dozen. Right now the porch held a party in progress, but Belinda wasn’t among the partiers.
On the porch he stopped a young woman and shouted Belinda’s name questioningly, but she frowned and shook her head. The second woman he asked cupped her hand behind her ear to hear him better, but he wasn’t sure she ever did. He made his way into the house, where the din was muted, and found two men in their early thirties loading up plates from a dining room table groaning with food. Three women carrying casseroles appeared and disappeared, leaving their bounty behind.
“Get you a plate,” a broad-shouldered man in a madras shirt and Bermuda shorts said.
“I’m just here to find Belinda Beauclaire. Somebody told me she’s living here now?”
“She is.”
“Do you know where she is right now?”
“She’s off seeing Zulu.” The man seemed absolutely sure. As much as Phillip wanted the information, he would have been happier if the man was a little less sure of himself. And of Belinda.
“Do you have any idea how I might find her?”
“It’s hard to tell where Zulu will be about now. Why don’t you just eat and wait? She’ll come back when she gets tired.”
“I think I’ll go look for her. I’ll come back here later if I don’t find her.”
“Want me to tell her who was here?” The man gave Phillip the once-over with narrowing eyes. He didn’t look as friendly as he had at the beginning of the conversation.
“That’s okay. I’ll be back.”
“Try Jackson Avenue,” the other man said. He waved a bottle of beer in the general direction.
Out on the street again, Phillip wound his way toward Jackson. He was halfway there, skirting a rugged-looking crowd of pirates, when he saw Belinda. She was coming toward him across the street on the neutral ground, dressed in stark white. A tight white skirt cupped her perfect bottom, and a gauzy blouse flowed over the curves of her torso. A white satin mask with two gracefully drooping feathers covered the top half of her face.
“Belinda!” There was nothing much in the way of traffic to dodge. He avoided pedestrians and made his way into the madness again.
She stopped and stood very still.
He lifted her mask and searched her eyes. She had never looked more beautiful or desirable to him. He wanted to kiss her, but one look told him what a bad idea that would be. She was a woman capable of great emotion, a woman who could melt with passion and ignite a man in the process. But the Belinda staring back at him was a woman who had hidden her feelings well.
“I’ve had a hell of a time finding you,” he said.
“No one asked you to look.”
“I wanted to.” A crowd of shoving adolescents knocked him closer to her. He took her arm to steady them both. She
didn’t shake him off, but she looked as if she wanted to. “I was just at your new place. Why did you move?”
“I moved in with a friend.”
He pictured the man in the madras shirt and the narrowing eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me where you were?”
“How would I have done that?”
“You could have left a message with Nicky.”
“Could have.” She nodded.
“Why didn’t you?”
She pulled her arm from his grasp and started across the street. He stopped her. “No, you don’t. Don’t go off like that. I want to talk this through, right here and now.”
“You made your wishes known, Phillip. You always do. I didn’t see any reason to leave you messages.” She shook off his hand once more, and this time she made it across.
“Belinda.” He took her arm gently this time. “We need to talk. Will you talk to me?”
“I’ve got nothing to say. I’ve got a new life now, and you’ve got the life you always had. The one you want.”
“What do you mean, a new life?” When she didn’t answer, he made his worst fears a guess. “I met a man at your house who seemed to know you pretty well. Is he part of that new life?”
Before she could answer, a woman came up beside them. “Belinda?”
For a moment, Phillip didn’t recognize her, then he realized it was Debby, the teacher he’d met at Club Valentine on the last night he and Belinda were together. She wore a dress of leopard spots and a black half mask that turned her pert face into something feline and mysterious.
“What are you doing here, Phillip?” she asked.
“Just looking for Belinda.” He dropped Belinda’s arm. “And I guess I found what I was looking for.”
“How’d you find her? She just moved in with us.”
“Us?”
“Us. Vicki and me and my family.”
“Vicki?”
“My baby. You haven’t seen her yet? My brother’s bringing her up to see Zulu. Jackson’s on a float, but the parade’s late. I’m going to see if I can find them.” With a wave, she crossed the street and headed in the direction of her house.
“It’s Debby you moved in with?”
Belinda didn’t confirm or deny it.
Phillip had a list of questions a mile long, and he knew she wasn’t going to answer them. He had hurt her, and she wasn’t going to let herself be hurt again. He didn’t understand why or how, not exactly, but she had left him as surely as she had left the house she loved.
“Belinda.” He touched her cheek. Her expression didn’t change. He dropped his hand. “Let’s go see Zulu. Maybe we can talk along the way.”
“I’m going home.”
“May I walk with you?”
She started toward the house, and he fell in step beside her. He had just blocks to tell her what he was feeling, and he couldn’t find the first word. In the midst of the biggest party he’d ever witnessed, he was dead sober, and mute besides.
He cast around for something to say. “I didn’t know Debby had a daughter. How old is she?”
“Three.”
“Is Jackson the father?”
“Plans to be.”
“He’s a good man.” He reached down and took her hand. She didn’t resist, but her hand was limp and unwelcoming. “You loved your house and your privacy, Belinda. I can’t imagine you living in that house with all those people. They’re not your family.”
“They’re good people.”
“I’m sure they are. I just want to understand what’s happening here.”
“Why does it matter?”
He stopped and pulled her to a halt beside him. “It matters because you matter to me.”
She studied his face. Clearly she didn’t think his answer was enough. “I wanted to save money.”
“If things were that tight you should have let me know.”
“Why?” She started back down the sidewalk.
He tried to understand her responses. She wasn’t hostile or disinterested, although with a different inflection, most of her answers might have sounded that way. Instead, she seemed merely intent on getting through this conversation, focused so completely on what she was saying that there was no room for emotion in her voice.
They came to a corner, and he heard a familiar chanting. “Come on this way.” He pulled her off Claiborne and toward the sound.
“I have to get back.”
“Come with me, Belinda. I’ve already seen two of the tribes this morning, and I’d like to see this one.”
“What would you know about the Indians?”
“I don’t know about them. I’ve just seen them for the first time today.”
“Why are you interested?”
He detected skepticism. “I don’t know.” He honestly didn’t. He was a journalist, not a sociologist, and he knew there wasn’t a tremendous market for articles on the cultural life of black people.
“Do you think it’s silly?”
“Silly? No.” He pulled her along. The chanting was getting louder. “I think it’s incredible. I don’t understand it. Why do they dress that way?”
“They’ve been doing it for a long time. This is our Mardi Gras you’re seeing. Not the white Mardi Gras everyone knows about. Indians and black people have a lot in common. The Indians hid slaves after they escaped, hid them in the swamps and protected them, because they knew what it was like to be hunted. Some people think that’s how the Mardi Gras tribes began, as a mark of respect. But it doesn’t even matter. Because this is us. This is who we are. This is that culture you don’t understand and don’t want to be a part of.”
“You’re angry at me.”
“No.”
“That night at the club, when I said this wasn’t my home, I wasn’t saying that I didn’t want you.”
She faced him and pulled her hand from his. Her eyes were unwavering. “You don’t want me, Phillip. You want what you thought we had. You want me to be there waiting when you need a place to come back to for a while.”
“I have to travel. I have to be where the news is. In fact, I’ve got to leave for Alabama the day after tomorrow, so I wanted to settle things with you before I left.”
“This isn’t about your job, and you know it.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about being part of something. And you don’t know how to do that. Maybe you never will.”
“I thought you and I were part of something together.” But even as he said the words, he realized it was the first time he’d ever said any like them.
She shook her head. “You stand off by yourself, and you watch. That’s what you’ll do in Alabama, too, whatever happens there. First time something starts to tug at you, you get on a bus or a plane. You do that too many times, you stop feeling anything. I think maybe that’s already happened.”
As he was searching for the right response, she carefully skirted him and disappeared into the crowd that was surging forward to see the Indian tribe just turning the corner. He tried to follow, but he was cut off immediately.
Against his will, he was carried along by the enthusiastic crowd. The beat, the steady insistent beat that had drummed all morning, seemed to swell in intensity. Now it was a primal roar, the throbbing of hundreds of hearts and voices. He was immersed in it, and he couldn’t fight his way out to find Belinda again, no matter how hard he tried. He could feel the heat and soft give of flesh, smell sweat and beer and woodsy perfume. He was carried forward, stumbling once, then righting himself easily, because there was no room to fall.
The crowd was chanting words he didn’t understand. The sound rumbled in his chest until he wanted to chant with them, chant past the strange lump in his throat, chant his own pain. But he couldn’t follow the voices of those around him. He was still a stranger here, and his pain was his own. The words, the ritual celebration, were theirs.
The crowd began to fan out and thin as they neared the
Indians. People were moving to the sides in respect. He was thrown against a small female body clutching a little girl in her arms. He grabbed them both to stop them from pitching forward, and realized it was Debby.
“Hey, are you all right?”
She laughed. “Sure.”
“Let me take her. She’ll be safer.” He reached for the child, and she went to him willingly. She was tiny, a beautiful little girl with a head of soft dark curls and pale brown skin. She clutched a rag doll in her arms. “Is this Vicki?”
Debby said something, but he couldn’t hear her over the chanting. She nodded.
They moved toward the edge of the crowd. The Indians, this time costumed in orange and blue, were surrounded, and only flashes of them were discernible. As Phillip and Debby moved away from the center of the action, the noise lessened.
Phillip lowered his head. He felt required to say something to the child. “I like your doll.”
She held it up for him to examine. The doll was handmade. Dark-skinned, like the child holding it. Someone had wanted her to have a toy that resembled her, instead of the white baby dolls that were the only commercial ones available.
They were far enough away from the heart of the noise that Phillip could be sure Vicki heard him. “What do you call her?”
“B’linda.”
“Did Belinda give you this?” It would be just like Belinda to be sure that Vicki had a doll she could identify with.
She nodded, and her curls bounced against her cheeks.
He smiled. “She’s beautiful, and so are you.”
“I gotta learn to hold a baby.”
“Do you?”
“B’linda’s going to have a baby.”
For a moment he didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”
“B’linda’s got a baby inside her. I gotta learn to hold a baby so I can help when her baby’s borned.”
Debby snaked her way to their side and held up her arms for her daughter. Phillip held Vicki tightly against him. He couldn’t seem to relinquish her. He didn’t know what Debby saw in his face, but her arms dropped to her sides. She pushed her mask back and waited warily for him to speak.
“Why did Belinda move in with you?” he asked.
“That’s for her to tell you.”
“Vicki says she’s pregnant.”
Debby held out her arms again, and this time he swung the little girl into them. Debby tried to move past him, but he put his hand on her shoulder. “Debby, please.”
She lifted her chin. “There’s nobody more careful than Belinda.”
He knew how true that was. They had never made love without birth control. “I know that accidents happen.”
She looked relieved, as if she had been afraid he would think Belinda had gotten pregnant on purpose. “You want to talk about this, you talk to her.”
But he and Belinda had already talked about it, only Phillip hadn’t known it at the time. They had talked casually about children, about making a home together, about commitment and responsibility. She had carefully, subtly, led him into those conversations and listened to his answers. And then she had gone away.
Because none of his answers had been the right ones.
Debby disappeared with Vicki, and the chanting swelled again. The Indians would move on, but they would leave
honor and a fierce, stunning pride in their wake. The lump in Phillip’s throat threatened his breath.
From the moment he left Nicky’s house, he had been a bystander, an observer. He had thought himself above the ragtag mobs in the street, but now he saw the celebration for what it was. Nothing had kept these people, his people, down. Not slavery, not Jim Crow, not the prejudices that would probably rule the city for decades to come. These descendants of the slaves who had defiantly danced in Congo Square, who had developed their own patois, their own religion, their own traditions, had turned their backs on the Mardi Gras that the world knew and made their own. It was a life-affirming celebration, rich in satire, spirit and courage.