jog an extra mile tomorrow.”
She turned right from St. Charles and onto her street, where big pampered houses slept behind wrought-iron, stucco, or brick fences festooned with alarm-company shields.
Students of Freret and Fortescue get beautiful Uptown in their blood and yearn to abandon their cold northern native lands for the seductive dank decadence of this wealthy section.
Zola had graduated from Fortescue, and from Freret’s M.B.A. program. A double dose of the Uptown drug. But she was in a sense inoculated, having grown up in her parents’ home, another landmark known as the Fulke-Bruine Mansion, a few blocks away across St. Charles.
“Nick, have you ever considered going back into teaching?”
“Never.”
“I’ve heard that fair-minded people think there was something fishy about your case. We could get your name cleared, if we try. And Mother could certainly land you a post somewhere. Somewhere close, I hope.”
“Zola, I’m off that hamster wheel for good. It’s not as if I’m unemployed, you know. I guess because it’s so popular, just behind stamp and coin collecting, people see genealogy as an exercise in social climbing for the unexceptional masses, not really a reputable or worthy pursuit. Hey, anybody can do this, right? But isn’t the field of education crowded, too? Aren’t most students and teachers boring and insignificant? But oh, no! Teaching is perceived as a noble vocation, a calling that’s on a plane with holy orders. I say, bullshit! You’ve never seen backbiting, jealous, petty, untalented, muddled, lying egomaniacs until you’ve spent a day in a college English department!”
She’d driven into her driveway and killed the engine. Now she laughed at his rage of self-justification.
“Yes, professor. And after I’ve done my homework, will you make love to me all night?”
“Well…I suppose that can be arranged.”
“I think I hit a nerve. I never really meant to put down genealogy. I just hate to see someone as brilliant as you wasting–”
“You’re doing it again. Who’s wasting? What about the guy who teaches for thirty years and realizes he hated every repetitious moment, every know-it-all spoiled brat trying to show-off, every kiss-ass faculty meeting…hasn’t he wasted his life?”
“I see what you mean,” she said, reasonably. “Do what you like, and don’t accept just liking what you do. Not something everyone can accomplish, but it’s nice to remember.” She was silent a few moments. “Nick, I’d like to know more about my own family.”
“Well, uh, sure, one of these days, maybe we’ll look into that.”
“That’s just about what you say every time I ask you,” she said.
“It’s just that you’re so busy, and you have such little leisure time. I don’t want to share any of it with anyone or anything.”
He pulled her close and kissed her until they both simultaneously pushed each other away so they could breathe.
“That settles it,” he said. “We’re saving the chocolate and proceeding directly to you.”
Zola removed from her purse a gizmo that looked to Nick like a television channel changer. She pressed a succession of buttons. Lights came on in the house. “There. Pretty neat, huh? I just deactivated the alarm, switched the coffee maker and the stereo on, even turned down the bed. Come on, lazy. This remote can’t do everything for you.”
She was out of her door and crossing the timed headlight beams before Nick realized she was probably kidding about the bed.
“Be right in,” he said, as she opened the front door of her house. “Forgot something in my car.”
The air was softly humid and warm, the fragrance of sweet olive tinged with the usual New Orleans hint of rot and age. He saw a silver convulsion in the sky and soon heard distant thunder and the deep thrumming of tugs pushing barges up and down the nearby river. Wishing he smoked, he strolled down the sidewalk toward his car; he’d brought along a former student’s novel, which he intended to enjoy in bed the next morning after Zola left for work. He was adapting quite well to being the lover of a very rich woman.
A gray Ford sedan silently lurched to a stop in the street, wedging his car in–not that he had the wits about him at the moment to attempt a vehicular escape. Two very large men in West Coast-hip clothes flowed gracefully out of the car in a hurry that somehow didn’t seem rushed.
They grabbed Nick and threw him back hard against the neighbors’ tall stucco-over-brick fence topped with broken bottles set in cement.
Have I lived for years in the scuzzy Quarter only to get