The Esplanade

“Have you heard about Serafine, then?”

It might have been his tone, a change in its timbre. I am not exactly sure what it was that clued me, but I sensed some subconscious warning before the answer to his question was even voiced. I listened anyway, of course, in hopes that I was wrong.

“She is dead.”

Following in the wake of these chilling words came an eerie hum, as though a switch had been flipped letting loose an unbridled electrical current; a low frequency, sensory drone which seemingly originated from within the very ether itself, as if the sound could not have come from anyplace else but that “other world” where live only the unborn, and the dead. Like a radio my conscious energies dialed into the hum, tuning the force of my being to the frequency of the cosmos, to God, and to eternity, all connected now by a sound and feeling that stilled the blood in my veins as Luc’s words sped through the inner hammers and anvils of my ears, and on into the gelatinous mass that made up my comprehension forming plasmas. My equilibrium faltered next, as the meaning of the words, together with the hum, hit home, yanking from beneath me the rug of every reality that I stood upon. Without my even being aware that life was in actuality only a cheap party game, the music of the world suddenly stopped, leaving no chair left for me, and it was in that pulse stopping moment that I realized, too late, my unseverable tie to Serafine Broussard.

Luc Benoit and I were on our work breaks, squatted against the brick wall out back of The Pony, where we worked, our expressions blank as we watched thin contrails blossom and rise from the ends of harsh, generic cigarettes. Between drags we took turns from a secreted bottle of cheap, peach-flavored brandy. Luc said it almost as an afterthought, that Serafine was dead.

“You must be mistaken, mon ami,” I replied in a thinly stretched voice. “I saw Serafine just last night.”

“Yes? It happened this morning, Paul. She jumped from the rooftop of Le Building Blanca.”

I knew then that it was so, for that was where I’d left her.

Serafine was a friend, although not really, but I did know her... in a sense. It was strange to think on it, that she had been around my life long, always close by, and that lately I had come to know every square inch of Serafine, yet I could tell you nothing about her; not her hopes, her dreams, her favorite food, her favorite color, her middle name. Serafine was that woman that every man knows, but who also no man can know. It could be argued whether Serafine was a good woman or not, and whether beautiful or not, but it could not be argued that she was a woman, more woman than most in many ways, not as much in some others, but a woman who, despite all of that, melded perfectly into any man’s arms, her love offered, if not freely, at least still offered, to any lonely man who would pay her price.

She was from a poor family, like me, her family with only a mother to raise them, mine with only a father. Serafine grew up in the next shack down the highway from ours. As I said before, I have known her my whole life, as one is aware of one’s neighbors without really knowing them. She was the younger sister of Jaimie and Johnny, my bayou friends. We three boys fished together through the days and gigged frogs through the nights, together always as brothers. I did all of that for the love of it, and for them, but also for the chance to be invited to their home, time-to-time, for the chance to catch a glimpse now and then of the sister who looked so seriously at me from steely black eyes like magnets, pulling me in. We rarely spoke, Serafine and I, though she always loomed. When we did speak it was awkward, my words too quick, their pitch unnatural. I knew her mainly from pulse quickening glimpses here and there as she passed me by at school, or church, or the department store downtown, sometimes smiling, but like as not paying me no mind. She was just one of those people who show-out in our lives time-to-time, creating snippets of memories, and secret longings.

I wish I could say that people like her family and mine clawed and scrapped our ways through life, but it was not so. It is truer to say that people like us take the easy-outs. I, for instance, work only when absolutely necessary, which is why I work at The Pony. Management there requires no schedule of me, allowing me to show up at noon on any given day, and to work through to closing for cash money, paid at that day’s end. Such a situation is rarely found, and leaves ample time for the leisurely style of life that I enjoy.

And then there was Serafine, who chose to work in the easiest, surest of ways for a beautiful young woman to work... or not to work, as her job’s description reads to some.

Back inside The Pony I broke two dishes that night, unable to keep my head in my work, as it instead chose to follow Serafine into the abyss.

It began a little over a year ago. Our kind, lazy and poor, were not long for school, prefering to venture forth trusting to our own devices. Serafine, at eighteen, was scarcely more than a child when she left her mother’s shack to live and work in the famous, or infamous, Le Building Blanca. Despite her youth, however, somewhere along the line Serafine must have learned something of advertising, for when she got it in her mind to sell herself, she thought it would be smart to display her wares. She chose Esplanade Avenue to place her live billboard, in the midst of a beautiful, June, weekday afternoon. And why not there? The Esplanade is the busiest, richest, most beautiful background in all of New Orleans for one to display one’s goods, and to promote their sale. Serafine, a simple creole girl, pulled off an advertising feat there that would have made Madison Avenue blush... and in so doing she paraded directly past the The Pony.

I was bussing tables. Commotion echoed from the street that June day as the freaks showed out, happy for a midweek, afternoon diversion. Their bedlam rose even above the eternal clamor inside The Pony. En masse we spilled from the front door to witness it’s cause. Soon both customers and employees were joined in the dance. I stared at the chaotic scene a long while before realizing that it was Serafine leading the impromptu parade, and a Serafine such as I had never before seen. Slowly she came, purposefully, her long black hair billowing behind, the rest of her body draped only in the radiant robe of youth. She came along high, walking upon the balls of her bare feet as if they wore some fine, expensive, high-heeled shoes which the Serafine I knew never could have afforded anyway. Naked she was, her bronze, vernal skin melting like honey-dew under the Louisiana sunshine where it glimmered atop curvaceous hips and thighs which rolled her onward river-like beneath a tapered and taut waist perfect for displaying a matching pair of youthfully cupped breasts like prideful trophies above, their peaks capped enticingly with ripened, silver-dollar, strawberry buttons. Serafine sauntered past as though tranced; slowly, unconcerned with propriety, her long, slender, arms writhing above and around her like snakes from a basket, rising high at times, stretching her body to it’s rubbery lengths for all to see before falling back, so that her hands slid down along hips greased with perspiration, and then slowly back up her torso, and on higher still, touching her parts until the mouths of onlookers watered with eagerness and disbelief. All the while Serafine’s pouty face remained fitted with a statuesque expression at once demure and youthful, yet also knowing, almost spiteful of the cacophony sounding her. The scene created an ache in me, in my loins, an ache that demanded relief, and promised volcanic release as I realized that the one thing for which I had always lusted could suddenly be had.

But Seraphine’s parade had proven remarkably effective. The demand for her goods afterward became such that the price was driven well past the purse strings of any Regular Joe. It took four, seven day weeks at The Pony to save the price, but when the sum was reached I rushed with my savings straightaway to Le Building Blanca.

The first time proved awkward. I was not any old rich man with money to burn, but was a simple boy from the neighborhood, a friend of her brothers. I had sat with Serafine at table when she was a child, and had played with her at kicking cans in the Crescent City moonlight. It takes time to overcome one’s sense of virtue, but with repetition it can be done. Serafine had balked that first time when she saw it was me, but when I showed her the money she had no choice. Without a word she put the lights out, and crawled onto the bed, neither inviting, nor shunning me. I could tell that she didn’t want to, but I wanted to, and so I pushed ahead. She laid soundlessly as I did what I paid to do, but she did take my money when I got up to go. That was my reminder... this was not the adolescent love affair I had always craved. No, this was business. She was to perform a service. I was to pay for that service. No, that first time did not go the way I wanted it to, the way I had fantasized. I could easily have paid less money at Le Building Blanca and been better handled by another, but that did not matter. Going forward I would work harder at The Pony. My virileness had not shown itself well this time, but I would save, and I would be back with more money, and the knowledge born of experience.

The next time had been different, less hurried. This time I had slowly stripped her naked, my eyes taking her in, my heart beating it’s lust through my loins. Her eyes had closed as my hands followed my eyes over every inch of her skin; slipping, gripping, lingering, squeezing. If only for a short while she was finally mine to hold, mine to touch... mine. What was it to me if she was not agreeable to the situation? After all, it was her own bed she had made... what choice had she, but to lie in it?

And so it went, whenever I managed to save enough. Sometimes it was weeks, sometimes months, but always I returned to her. However this last time had been different. This time she led me by the hand to the rooftop patio outside of her penthouse suite where she climbed atop me, our blanket the starry sky. This time it had been she who held me in her hands. This time it was she who writhed, she who purred and moaned, and it was she who sought out and enjoyed the pleasures of my flesh. And it was this time, for the first time, that we kissed... deeply, passionately, and then later, after we talked, tenderly.

Long we talked that time, our cigarettes glowing red through the black of night. We whispered of the past and the future, of life and death, and of the prospects of each.

And then she shocked me when she told me that she loved me... that she always had.

But she was a whore. Whores cannot love, can they? I paid her what I owed and left her there on our rooftop pallet, inwardly proud of my conquest.

And now she is gone, her body no longer there for my whims. I did to her what the profession could not, what Le Building Blanca could not, what those other patrons could not. I had cheapened her. I had pulled her from her penthouse, and dragged her through the dirty dust of The Esplanade.

Who can see inside the mind of a woman... even a whore? The money I paid her has bought me exactly what I deserved, for it has destroyed me as well as her. And so I stand on the rooftop of Le Building Blanca, seeing the dark stain of Serafine’s life on the sidewalk below. Behind me sleeps a beautiful woman, tired from her night‘s work. This woman had gone about her business as though it was business, mechanized, sterile, quick. That is what is left for me now, with Serafine gone, as no other could ever make my desire burn as she had, and then quench it. But Serafine is dead. So what is there to do now but to aim for her stain and leap, adding my own blood to comingle with hers, two dark stains forever trampled under the endlessly sashaying parade along The Esplanade.