Big Easy Bonanza

little smile. I was watching you. Why so sad on Mardi Gras? Especially this one?”
    “Mind your own business, okay, Jo Jo?”
    “I heard your divorce is final.”
    Marcelle said nothing. Sometimes she wished she’d married Jo Jo. After Lionel’s drunken rages, his vacant sweetness seemed a lot more appealing than it had in high school. She couldn’t remember why she’d married Lionel anyway, or why she hadn’t married Jo Jo. He hadn’t asked her, she supposed. They’d been too young anyway. But he was the first boy she’d been to bed with—only it wasn’t bed, exactly, it was the lakefront.
    “How ’bout a kiss for Jo Jo? For old time’s sake.”
    Why not? He was about the only man in town she hadn’t kissed in the last six months. Why not Jo Jo? She lifted her face.
    He kissed her gently, sweetly. Then he put both arms around her and kissed her for real. Right there in the Boston Club, in front of everybody. But did anybody notice? She’d be amazed if they did. Not a little thing like a kiss. Everyone kissed everyone at Carnival. No one would remember who they’d kissed themselves, much less who else had kissed whom. You could go to church on Ash Wednesday and sit next to someone you’d done God knows what with and not even know it.
    Jo Jo’s body felt unexpectedly, familiarly good. Familiar and yet forbidden. Jo Jo was married now. But everyone was married, and that didn’t seem to stop anyone else. Even her own father. It had never stopped Marcelle either.
    It must be two weeks since I’ve been with a man—some kind of record for me.
    Jo Jo was pushing her back toward the wall, toward the nearest doorway, his heavy body against hers, his breath redolent of Bloody Marys. I’m burning, she thought. I’m burning up. Her suit jacket was sticking to her, her corsage must be crushed.
    I can’t do this, it’s crazy.
    But lately she didn’t seem to have much control. Oh, hell. She didn’t want to be in this awful crowd anyway, with her mother and Henry and her fossil of a grandfather. They disgusted her.
    Why shouldn’t she fuck Jo Jo if she wanted to? Everything she did today she was doing for her father. Why shouldn’t she do this one thing for herself? There would be time before the St. Amant moment of glory. (Plenty of time, if Jo Jo hadn’t changed.) It was going to be a long, long day. She’d have her hands full in the next few hours. Why not take a moment first? It would help relax her. She wondered if Jo Jo had a rubber with him the way he always had in high school.

2
    Henry was dead sober. So sober dead would have felt preferable. On the other hand, he was coked to the gills. He had to be, for the ordeal to come. But he felt as sick as if he’d been drinking martinis by the quart.
    “Henry, ol’ son, what’s a ten?”
    “A ten?”
    “Like in the movie. ”
    “Oh, a woman. I don’t know.’’
    “Four feet tall, flat head with a six-pack on it, and no teeth.”
    Much more in that vein and he was going to lose it. Too much meaningful colloquy with these upper-class twits and he might just bash heads, not merely fall on the floor. Falling on the floor was more Bitty’s style anyway. And Marcelle’s, when she got going. Passive resistance. The thought nearly made him laugh. When you got down to it, none of the three of them had been more passive than he had, given up more … no, that wasn’t true. Bitty had. He wished he could make it up to her, somehow give her back what Chauncey had taken away.
    Oh, Bitty, Bitty, Bitty, are you all right? Will you get through this?
    Where was she anyway?
    He was wearing a suit and tie for her, a normal tie too, nothing flamboyant, nothing embarrassing. And how he would have loved to wear something really outrageous. Something to shock the pants off his father and all these Country Day graduates who were now budding bankers and lawyers and doctors.
    Fortunately there weren’t all that many young people in the place. Henry probably wouldn’t have been there himself if his grandfather hadn’t been who he was. Even his father’s status as king for a day might not have gotten him in—men who weren’t members weren’t welcome at the Boston Club. But you simply didn’t argue with Haygood Mayhew; you deferred to him and pretended the honor was all yours. The combined membership of the Boston, Pickwick, Bienville, and Louisiana clubs couldn’t have kept Henry out of any place in the city if his grandfather wanted him there.
    So much