The Axeman's Jazz

something that had happened with her daughter, not her mother. And what did the dolls and teddy bears mean?
    “I’m Leon and I’m codependent.”
    “Hi, Leon.”
    Despite the heat, Leon wore a coat and tie, the tie loose at the neck.
    He could have just taken it off.
    But she suspected Leon hardly ever took off his tie, maybe slept in it, if the worry lines around his mouth were any indication. She remembered Cindy Lou’s remarks about obsessiveness. Leon looked as if he had it in spades. He had thinning blond hair and a wiry body, could have been attractive if he’d known how to smile.
    “We don’t have vulnerability in my family. We work in banks or maybe shipping companies and we rise to the top.” He said the last four words in a mock bass and he did smile. And he
was
attractive.
    The teddy bear in his lap was the size of a two-year-old. He stroked it as if it were a real animal.
    “We don’t get hurt, we get mad. We’re an entire family of rageaholics. If somebody says to us, ‘Hey, Leon, baby, it kind of gets to me the way you always forget my birthday and never come home till midnight and always have to go to the office on Saturday,’ and I think, ‘I’ll divorce you now,’ do we get upset? Do we say, ‘Hey, I’m losing my wife, I must have really screwed up, this really hurts’? Not in my family we don’t. We stuff all our feelings of hurt and guilt and spew out bile. After we yell at her awhile, we say, ‘You know, she never was good enough for the likes of us. Her family comes from New Iberia and her butt’s too big and always was.’ And then we say, ‘If she thinks she’s getting a penny of our money, she’s out of her pathetic Cajun mind.’ ”
    Skip realized she knew who he was. He was Leon Wheatley, whose divorce was infamous Uptown; for days while it was happening, Alison Gaillard had fed her chilling stories of Wheatley arrogance and penuriousness. But here was Leon, from one of the fanciest families in New Orleans, making what amounted to a public confession with a teddy bear on his lap.
    “We always make it the other guy’s fault. We’ll do anything to keep from admitting we might be hurt. We don’t have an inner child. In fact, we never get to be children even when we’re under ten. So I’m having to kind of…” He paused, sweating from the effort, Skip thought, of what he was saying “…give birth to one. He feels bad sometimes and I let him do that. I just let him know that’s okay, it’s okay to feel bad. Nothing like that’s ever been okay in my family.”
    His voice was almost a whisper by the time he was done. He was still caressing the bear with strong, sensual strokes that he seemed to be using to distract himself. There was something weird about it, something raw and embarrassing—as if he were doing it to the bear because it was what he wanted for himself. Skip wanted to hug him, to comfort him, and understood that his need was so strong, had been so openly expressed, that it was practically impossible not to feel that way.
    Leon Wheatley!
    She couldn’t believe any adult on the planet could do what he’d just done in front of strangers, and certainly not Leon Wheatley.
    Again, she wanted to applaud, to go up and clap him on the back. Half of what he’d said made no sense at all to her, but the way he said it had seemed so real, had reminded her so much of Elizabeth speaking, that she couldn’t help being moved.
    A man named Abe shared next, another tall wiry one, wearing glasses. “I was the kind of kid who always got everything I wanted. I mean I came from that kind of family.”
    I bet. You’ve got that smug voice guys get whose mothers told them every day how great they were.
    And I’m jealous.
    “I’m trying to deal now with what happens when you can’t have what you want. I realize my kid just never developed those muscles—the ones that handle vulnerability. There’s a lot of things I want right now that I can’t have. I don’t even want to live in this city, but I have to now. I don’t want to be the age I am; I want things I can’t get anymore.”
    Things! You mean women, right?
    “I have to talk to my kid; I say, ‘Listen, I’m trying to be a good parent—to you, and to my own birth-children—but it isn’t easy because I’m kind of a kid myself.’ ”
    Skip decided this wasn’t getting her any clearer on the concept and let her mind wander. She thought Abe seemed to be talking to someone in particular, and looked