The following week the tiny bell on Mrs. LaSalle's nightstand rang when Mr. Julian was in town. Ladiceclimbed the stairs and stood in Airs. LaSalle's doorway in her maid's black dress and frilled apron. "Yes, ma'am?" she said. Mrs. LaSalle had forced her husband to put iron grill-work over the windows, although there had never been a burglary on the island, and she never allowed the windows to be unlocked or opened. The air in the room was oppressive and smelled of camphor and urine. Mrs. LaSalle's skin looked like candle wax, her hair like a tangled red flame on the pillow of her tester bed. Her eyes were dark, larger than they should have been, luminous with either the cancer in her body or the fits of insanity that took possession of her mind. "What happened to the other nigra girl?" she asked. "Mr. Julian said you wanted her sent away, ma'am," Ladice replied. "That sounds like someone's fabrication. Why would I want to do that? Never mind. Come here. Let me look at you." Ladice walked closer to the tester bed. Mrs. LaSalle's pink nightgown was sunken into her chest, where her breasts had been removed. "Why, you're a juicy little thing, aren't you?" she said. "Ma'am?" "I'm incontinent. I want you to rinse my panties." "Excuse me?" "Are you deaf? Remove my panties and rinse them. I've soiled them." "I cain't be doing that, ma'am." "You impudent thing." "Yessum," Ladice said. She turned and left the room. That night Mr. Julian was at her door. "My wife says you sassed her," he said. "I don't see it that way," Ladice replied. He opened the screen door and stepped inside without being invited. He was much taller than she, his shadow blocking out the evening light that shone through the trees outside. But she didn't move. She wore jeans and sandals and a blue V-necked T-shirt and a gold-plated chain with a small purple stone around her throat. Her body felt cool and fresh from the cold bath she had just taken, and she had put perfume behind her ears, and one lock of her hair hung down over her eye. "I need to know what happened today, Ladice," he said. "If Miz LaSalle want her clothes laundered, I'll be glad to carry them on down to the washing machine. I'll iron them, too," Ladice said. "I see. I think maybe this was just a miscommunication in language," he said. She didn't reply. His eyes softened and moved over her face and studied her mouth. His hand touched her arm. "My momma and uncle are picking me up to go to town," she said. "Will you be back later?" She moved the lock of hair from her eyebrow. "I t'ink my momma want me to stay over wit' her tonight," she said. "Yes, I'm sure she's lonely sometimes. I'm very fond of you, Ladice." "Good night, Mr. Julian." "Yes, well, I guess good night it is, then," he said. But his words did not coincide with his immobilityand the longing in his face. She held her eyes steadily on his until he actually blinked and color came into his throat. Then his jawbone flexed and he let himself out the door. She watched him through the window as he crossed his yard to the back of his house, tearing angrily at the knot in his necktie. Maybe your wife will let you rinse her panties, she said to herself, and felt surprise at the vitriolic nature of her thoughts.
In her naiveté she thought their arrangement, love affair, whatever people wished to call it, would aim itself at a dramatic denouement, like a sulfurous match suddenly igniting the dryness of her life, bringing it to an end in some fashion, perhaps even a destructive one, that would set her free from the world she had grown up in. But the long, humid days of summer blended one into another, as did Mr. Julian's nocturnal visits and the depression and sleeplessness they engendered in her. She no longer thought about control or power or her status among the other blacks on Poinciana Island. Her familiarity with Mr. Julian made her think of him with pity, when she thought of him at all, and his visits for her were simply a biological matter, in the same way her other bodily functions were, and she wondered if this wasn't indeed the attitude that all women developed when they coupled out of necessity. It wasn't a sin; it was just boring. Then it was fall and she could smell gas from the swamp at night and the faint, salty odor of dead fish that had been trapped in tidal pools by the bay. Sometimes she would lie awake in her bed and listen to the mothshitting on her screens, destroying their wings as they tried to reach the nightlight in the bathroom. She wondered why they were created in such a way, why they would destroy themselves in order to fly onto an electrically heated white orb that eventually killed them. When she had these thoughts, she covered her head with a pillow so she could not hear the soft thudding of the moths' bodies against the screens. But the venal and pernicious nature of her relationship with Julian LaSalle and his family and Poinciana Island, and its cost to her, would reveal itself in a way she had never guessed. In November she boarded a Greyhound bus and rode across the Atchafalaya Swamp to Baton Rouge. She stayed in the old Negro district called Catfish Town, where juke joints and shotgun shacks left over from the days of slavery still lined both sides of the streets. Her first morning in the city she took a cab to the campus of Southern University and entered the administration building and told a white-haired black woman in a business suit she wanted to pre-enroll in the nursing program for the spring semester. "Did you graduate from high school?" the woman asked. "Yessum." "Where?" "In New Iberia." "No, I mean what was the name of the school?" "I got a certificate from plantation school. I went to St. Edward's, too." "I see," the woman said. Her eyes seemed to cloud. "Fill out this application and return it with your transcripts. You could have done this through the mail, you know." "Ma'am, is there somet'ing you ain't telling me?" "I didn't mean to give that impression," the woman replied. When Ladice walked outside, the air was sunlit and cool and smelled of burning leaves. A marching band was practicing beyond a grove of trees, the notes of a martial song rising off the brass and silver instruments into a hard blue sky. For some reason she could not explain, the expectation of football games and Saturday-night dances and corsages made of chrysanthemums and gin fizzes in the back of a coupe had become the province of others, one she would not share in. One month later the mail carrier told Ladice he had left a letter from Southern University for her at the plantation post office. She walked down the dirt road in the dusk, between woods that smelled of pine sap and dust on the leaves and fish heads that raccoons had strewn among the trunks. The sun burned like a flare on a marshy horizon that was gray with winterkill. She took the envelope from the hand of the postal clerk and walked back to the garage apartment and put it on her breakfast table under a salt shaker and lay down on her bed and went to sleep without opening the letter. It was dark when she awoke. She turned on the kitchen light and washed her face in the bathroom, then sat down at the table and read the two brief paragraphs that had been written to her by the registrar. When she had finished, she refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope and walked down to Julian LaSalle's front door, not the back, and knocked. He was in slippers and a red silk bathrobe when he opened the door, his reading glasses tilted down on his nose. "Is something wrong?" he asked. "My credits from plantation school ain't no good." "Beg your pardon?" "Southern will take my credits from St. Edward's. The ones from plantation school don't count. You must have knowed that when you said you would get me a scholarship to Southern. Did you know that, Mr. Julian?" "We provide a free school on Poinciana. Most people would find that generous. I'm not familiar with the accreditation system at Southern University." "I t'ink I'm gonna be moving back to the quarters." "Now, listen," he said. He looked over his shoulder, up the curved stairs that led to the second floor. "We'll talk about this tomorrow." She wadded up the envelope and the letter and threw it over his shoulder onto his living room rug.