Crescent City Connection

twenty-seven, they were close to being contemporaries. She’d had dates with men who were twenty-five.
    They might be contemporaries, Lovelace thought, but they couldn’t be more different. Lovelace didn’t get him at all. There was almost nothing about him she understood, even his obsessive angel art, which seemed to be about her.
    Despite that, she adored him. She knew in her bones he had as beautiful a spirit as anyone she’d ever met and that they were deeply connected, the two of them. She felt close to him, drawn to him—safe with him. There was something about him she’d never felt with anybody else—she felt he had her best interests at heart. So here she was lying in his bed and feeling like a baby in a crib.
    It wasn’t as if she didn’t have a life. But how the hell did you go back to school when your own dad was stalking you? God knows what he’d told the administration by now—maybe that she’d been in and out of institutions, that she’d threatened to kill herself, that she was so depressed she was suicidal.
    If he’d said that—and she knew he probably had—they’d be dying to get her off campus. Blood was so embarrassing to a college. Then, too, there was her name—if she did anything that made news, it would make double news because of her grandfather. She’d be a very high-profile suicide. And the school would be putty in her dad’s hands.
    So there was no going back. Which brought up the problem,
In that case, what now?
    She slept on it.
    And in the morning, the answer was obvious—she’d have to stay here till her mother got back from Mexico. Jacqueline wasn’t good for much, but she could probably get Lovelace out of this one.
    But how to make it through till then? Isaac obviously couldn’t afford to support her, and anyway, she had to have something to do. She’d done temp work before and she could do it again.
    She found a coffeehouse, where she perused newspaper ads, and from which she made a quick call to her roommate.
    Michelle squealed. “Omigod. You’re alive.”
    “Have you reported me missing?”
    “I didn’t till yesterday afternoon, but by then I was out of my mind. I hope I did right. They said you’d been called home unexpectedly.”
    “And you believed that?”
    “I’ve been tearing my hair out, Lovie. I called your house in Florida and nobody answered. Tomorrow I was going to go to the cops—or at least a shrink.”
    “Well, I’m okay, but this is dicey.” She ran down what had happened, and then admonished Michelle not to breathe a word to the authorities even if they tied her up and tortured her.
    “Hey, no problem. I never heard of you. The last thing I want is your grandfather in my life.”
    That done, Lovelace registered at three different employment agencies, and spent the rest of the day prowling around. She hadn’t been to New Orleans before, and she found it had a strange, languid air to it, an anything-can-happen kind of feeling. It was a hot day—much too hot for March—but she found herself oddly energized, excited somehow. By what, she wondered? The weather? It made her feel languid and sexy and kind of exuberant, but she didn’t think that was what the excitement was all about. It was partly the beauty of the architecture—Lovelace wanted desperately to go to Paris, which she hoped would look like this. It was partly the beauty and the foreignness, and partly the weather, too. But there was also a kind of
rife
feel—as if every moment was a bud that could open up into some wonderfully unexpected flower, something as exotic as it was irresistible, something lush and bruised and dangerous. She thought it no accident that so many vampire stories had been set here.
    She walked by the river, strolled the French Quarter, and explored the Faubourg Marigny. She felt something like an American in Paris and something like a time traveler. Who she didn’t feel like was Lovelace Jacomine, conscientious (if not brilliant) student at a midwestern university. This place was nothing like Evanston and nothing like Florida and nothing like anywhere she’d been.
    The next day she was in an ordinary, airless office, filing for an oil company.
    By ten A.M. she started to cough; by noon she was sure she was choking. It was the mold, people said—in a city this old, it got to you. If you had allergies, they kicked up; if you didn’t, they kicked in.
    She went out at lunch and had an extraordinary thing called crawfish bisque and then,