Louisiana Lament

St. Clair.”
    This produced a completely different reaction. “Oh, shit! Oh, fuck! How could she do that to me? Oh, my God, what a
bitch
!”
    “Who is she?”
    “She’s a client, damn her eyes! Big patron of the arts. I introduced them.” Big ironic sigh. “I thought she could help him.”
    “Mmm. That’s rough. I feel for you.” She would have, even if the client had been a stranger. But she knew Babalu. Knew how nurturing, how kind she was. How much she wanted to be loved. “Listen, let me make
you
some tea.” And so she stayed awhile, trying to heal the healer, and thanking the stars for her own boyfriend, the admirable Darryl Boucree.
    That night, thinking about Babalu’s pallor, her herky-jerky movements, her near hysteria, Talba was so disturbed she couldn’t watch TV with her mama, and, in the end, couldn’t even enjoy a recreational session of surfing the net. She wanted nothing so much as to call Darryl, to be reassured by the kindness and decency of her own man. Darryl was a high school teacher, musician, and sometime bartender, a guy who worked three jobs to help support his out-of-wedlock daughter. But he had a gig that night, and anyway, she would see him the next.
    Images kept coming to her. In the end, the only thing to do was write a poem. But even at that, she wasn’t successful. The images were of birds in an oil spill, soaked and miserable, so much tinier than when their feathers were fluffed; doomed if they tried to remove the taint. They were too disturbing to work with.
    As if he knew—as if he’d guessed—Darryl arrived the next night with flowers. “I don’t deserve you,” she blurted.
    “You do.
You
are a baroness.”
    “True, so very true.” Baroness de Pontalba was the
nom de plume
she used, and when she said it, she always emphasized the pronoun—as in, “
I
am a baroness.” She had named herself after the pioneering nineteenth-century white woman who developed and built the famous Pontalba apartments at Jackson Square. Quite a figure in her day, she was hated by her father-in-law, who eventually pumped her full of lead. But the intrepid baroness survived and, with two fingers missing and two bullets in her chest, went on to earn a place in history, which was more than you could say for the father-in-law. To this day he’s remembered only as the man who shot the baroness.
    But none of that was the reason Talba chose the name. She picked it for two reasons—the first was that she wanted to steal something from a white person, or rather from white
culture
—in fact, very specifically, she wanted to steal a name. She had her reasons for this, and they had nothing at all to do with hating white people, which she didn’t at all, or else she wouldn’t have been able to abide Eddie Valentino.
    The second was that she wanted to be a baroness.
    “Does Your Grace plan to invite me in?”
    Actually, Talba hadn’t planned to. The fact was that, after a string of losers, Talba had finally brought home a boyfriend who delighted her mama so much Talba suspected her of wanting him for her own. Miz Clara would offer him supper and try to keep him around as long as she could. And Talba desperately wanted to go out. Now.
    Even now, Miz Clara was getting impatient to see him. Talba could hear real shoes clicking behind her instead of her mama’s accustomed scruffy blue slippers. “ ’Zat Darryl Boucree I hear?”
    “Sure,” Talba said to him. “Come on in.”
    Miz Clara was all over him. “Darryl, how ya keepin’ yaself? How come you been such a stranger?”
    He hadn’t, of course. Talba met him away from her mother’s cottage as much as she could. She liked living with her mother—had moved in just for a few months and stayed—but a person had to have some semblance of adult life.
    “Miz Clara,” he said, “you know I can’t stay away from you for long.”
    “Hmm. From my food, ya mean. I been makin’ smothered chicken. Y’all want some?”
    “Ohhh. That sure sounds good.” He’d stay and eat it if Talba’d let him.
    “Nosiree, Mr. Boucree,” she said. “You promised me Italian.”
    “Okay. Italian it is.” He’d promised no such thing, but he was a quick study. She liked that about him.
    “My car or yours?” he said when they’d made their escape. “Yours, of course. I hate that damn white thing.”
    He opened her door. “Have you looked for a new one yet?”
    “I checked out the ads on Sunday. But I can’t really afford anything