The Wangs vs. the World(64)
“Do you think I’ll hurt you?”
Andrew laughed and flexed the arm under her fingers. “Never.”
“Never,” she repeated.
And then they were in her car together, headed towards the city. Dorrie drove a long, sleek Jaguar from the ’80s, still in good enough shape that it suggested the smell of fresh leather. Andrew’s father hadn’t said a word when he interrupted and said that he was leaving with someone else, just looked at him with eyes so strange and open that he grabbed Dorrie’s hand and rushed out the door.
“You’re a really good driver,” said Andrew, nervous, as she shifted gears and veered into the oncoming lane to pass a slow big rig.
“Are you unaccustomed to women who can drive?”
“No! Women can do anything! I just don’t usually see girls drive stick.” Dorrie turned and raised an eyebrow at him. Andrew shrugged. “I don’t,” he insisted. “I don’t even drive stick.”
“And you’re a man.”
Was that sarcasm? Andrew found that it was always best to ignore sarcasm. It was much easier to defuse that way instead of taking it on directly.
“So where are we going?”
“You said you were a comedian, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How funny are you?”
“I’m funny! I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I’m pretty f*cking funny.” Just outside the blurred edges came the thought of Barbra watching him bomb in Austin, but he pushed it down.
“Good.”
“So where are we going?”
“You’ll like it.”
Too much bourbon. Who knew that wedding punch was so strong? It had tasted like kid birthdays, like Kool-Aid and 7-Up and rainbow sherbet, but those Nash cousins kept tipping their flasks into Andrew’s cup, and when they let up, Dorrie had procured a bottle from somewhere. Really, just too much bourbon.
Andrew wasn’t sure what happened during the rest of the car ride, if he didn’t speak a word or if he couldn’t shut up. He tried to kiss Dorrie at a stoplight but only managed to put his hand in her lap before the light turned green. The streets outside felt dark, dark, dark, and everywhere there remained the detritus of Hurricane Katrina. Monster piles of broken-down buildings that were still empty three years on, bracketed by tipsy telephone poles. The whole world felt abandoned. Andrew remembered Kanye’s rant on the telecast, that whole “Bush doesn’t care about black people” thing. He was probably right. Andrew didn’t realize that his head was nodding towards the cool windowpane until Dorrie patted his knee.
“Ready?”
He sat up and looked around. She had parked in an alleyway behind a set of row houses. On their left was a trash bin piled high with plastic bags. On their right was a Maybach.
“Are you selling me into slavery?”
“Something like that.”
Sometimes, life is like a movie. Andrew had always believed that. And now, spread out all around him, it was turning out to be true. He was caught somewhere between the gangsters at the Feast of San Gennaro in Mean Streets and the bikers tripping through the Mardi Gras streets in Easy Rider. It was awesome.
New Orleans. N’awlins. Wasn’t that how they said it? N’awlins. That’s what Dorrie’s friends kept saying to him in their velvet voices. She would introduce him with words that were swallowed up in the din of acid jazz and clinking glasses, introduce him to tall glittering figures he could barely see, to older women whose dyed-blonde curls and spackled makeup glared out of the crowd, to boys with pouty lips who were gay in a way that made him uncomfortable, boys who held themselves so that they were sexy like girls, without putting on eyelashes or a dress. Each one of them would lean towards him and whisper, “How are you finding N’awlins?” And he’d say something back, too loud, that would make them nod politely and turn their attention back to Dorrie, a star in the murky firmament. He’d read that somewhere, and it was true. That’s what she was. This whole place was a murky firmament, a haze that swallowed up all the other stars besides her.
Actually, no, it was a cabaret. A cabaret! There were real cabarets in the world, and they were sexy. Andrew hadn’t realized that some places could be sexier than others. Nothing made sense here, including all of the rules he had made for himself. After the smiles and the whispers and more shouting and more drinks, they all sat down on folding chairs and shushed each other, and a beautiful man wearing an enormous ball gown made entirely of brown paper—the kind that delis used to wrap sandwiches—swept into the room, his brown-paper train trailing down the aisle, and Andrew decided that it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen. And then the lights went up on the stage, and he realized that that was actually the most amazing thing he’d ever seen. Someone had made curtains out of giant swaths of the same paper, manipulated so that they hung in folds and swayed like real curtains. A riot of brown-paper flowers and foliage grew across them, curling and spreading out across the stage.
The man in the ball gown sang a sad ballad in a bad French accent as powder rose up from his wig and swirled around in the spotlight. A girl covered in whipped cream came out pushing an ice cream cart and did a burlesque number where she wiped off the whipped cream with Popsicles that she handed out to the audience. Andrew got a grape one, which he crunched down in three bites.