The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (2 page)

After more than ten years of self-imposed exile, first in Washington and then in New York, I had no idea how much my Southern soul had all but shut down. Now, suddenly, I couldn’t get enough of the heat and the swampy terrain, the eccentricity and the humor, the music and the food. I realized how much I had missed the slower rhythms of life in general and even the oft-cruel rhythms of the Mississippi, which I had grown up alongside. Simple things like riding around in a big car with the air conditioning blowing and the radio blaring and all the windows rolled down brought me immediately back to the reckless summers of my youth; sitting down in a bar with the newspaper, a cold beer, and a bowl of gumbo for lunch was a joyous interlude. It felt like home because it was, but it was also foreign enough, and still fresh enough in those days, to be dazzling. This wasn’t the South or even the Delta—people always comment on the New Orleans Caribbean connection, but the late Johnny Apple once wrote that he found it more similar to Marseille, with “a civic culture marked by crime, corruption, humidity, poverty, and poor education on one hand, and a love of good food, good drink, and good times on the other.” Either way, it was at once familiar and entirely exotic, and I realized that even the most regular of out-of-towners could not begin to understand New Orleans with all its mysteries and complexities—good and bad. You had to stick around, so I did.

In the decade or so after I first opened that door on St. Philip Street, Edwards would win the election in a landslide, stand trial for extorting money in exchange for riverboat casino licenses, and receive a ten-year sentence to the federal penitentiary, which he is currently serving five hours north of New Orleans in a place called Oakdale, which is also the home of Enron’s Andrew Fastow. The man for whom I had fallen, A., came in and out of my life for long stretches, and I took a series of increasingly better apartments in the Quarter, including one in a former stables which had been renovated by Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman who stood trial for conspiring to assassinate JFK. Another, on the third floor in the 1200 block of Royal, had eighteen-foot ceilings and was so high up I could see the lights of the river bridge from the balcony at night, and so infested with termites that my high heels punched holes in the floor.

I still wrote for
Vogue
, where I’d worked since 1988, and I still had my apartment on the Upper East Side. But as the months and years passed, I realized that I was spending far more time in New Orleans than in New York, where I voted, paid taxes, and—occasionally—turned up at an office. It made no sense but it was a ratio that became more or less permanent when I found my last apartment on Bourbon Street.

I
HADN’T REALLY
been looking, but on the street one day I ran into Betty, a woman I knew from Mississippi who owned three fabulous places in the Quarter—an apartment was available in one of them, would I like to see it? Of course I would, so off we went to a not very interesting, mostly residential block on Bourbon Street, but when she opened the green painted gate and led me down a moss-covered brick walkway, we were in an entirely other world. There, behind the seemingly simple red Creole cottage that fronted the street, was an enormous courtyard shaded by an even more enormous stand of banana trees, a two-story slave quarter with a balcony across the front and a breezeway running through the first floor, and a back courtyard walled by bamboo. I told her I’d take it before setting foot inside.

My part of the compound, the slave quarter, was built in 1810 as the kitchen and living space for the slaves, and later paid servants, for the family who lived in the house up front. (A Creole cottage, consisting of four large square rooms with no halls and a rear gallery, is a relative of the French half-timber house, and would’ve been the home of a middle-class merchant, as opposed to the grander, more formal townhouses that were the city residences of River Road sugar planters.) When I was there, the cottage apartments were taken by mostly absentee renters, so the whole place was, in effect, mine.

I reined in the bamboo, planted six kinds of jasmine, and put huge pots of lemons and satsumas, kumquats and Key limes any place there was room. I had never gardened in my life, but the courtyard, bounded by tall old brick walls and the always damp, smooth stucco finish of the houses, was like a terrarium. When wind or hail or a bit of cold would cause the tops of the bananas to die off, Betty would come over with her giant machete and we’d hack them down. Within months, they’d be back, their trunks the size of telephone poles, their leaves grazing the top of my second-story roof. Betty maintained they were so big because they were planted on the site of the former outhouse, and it’s true that everything we put beneath them—gingers and ferns, elephant ears and Kashmir bouquets—grew like crazy, but so did everything else. “If it smells like sex, it grows here,” Ellen Gilchrist once wrote, and the best embodiment of that was my night-blooming cereus, whose leather-like leaves belied the mysterious, otherworldly beauty of the luscious, bowl-like blooms that lasted for a single night, appearing a few hours after sundown only to close, spent forever, at sunrise. Mine put out as many as a dozen at a time and their musky scent so overpowered the rather more rank odors of Bourbon Street that I could tell it was blooming from a half a block away. In the summers, deep pink Rose of Montana vines appeared out of nowhere to crisscross the entire courtyard; when a rare freeze killed off the blue plumbago covering one wall, rosemary, which had been lurking somewhere in the mortar, emerged in a tumble of branches to take its place. Within a few years, the place was so overgrown that when the normally unflappable François Halard arrived to photograph it for
Vogue
, I heard a sharp intake of breath before he recovered. “We’ll simply shoot it at night,” he said—the plan being that the interior lights might define the house enough so that you could actually see it.

But outside the gates was where the real jungle lay. Willie Morris once said about the South that “it’s the juxtapositions that get you,” and nowhere are they greater than in New Orleans. Behind the back courtyard was the Cathedral Academy, which meant that I woke up to a tone-deaf nun singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” over a loudspeaker, and, since I was also in between the two biggest gay bars in the city, I fell asleep lulled by the bass beat of “I Will Survive.” The night Tammy Wynette died, they played the disco version of “Stand By Your Man” in a touching tribute for twelve hours straight. Just one block up, the neon crassness, topless bars, and karaoke hell that is straight Bourbon Street began. (There are plenty of juxtapositions there too—at one tourist restaurant, depending on the day, the all-you-can-eat-fried-shrimp-for-$4.99 sign is held up by either a white male midget or a young black woman, each wearing the same filthy “antebellum” hoop skirt.)

During Mardi Gras and other such indigenous holidays as Southern Decadence (a gay Labor Day weekend celebration that draws thousands from all over the world), the crowds on my block were so thick it was impossible to get in or out of the gate, which was just as well. One sunny Mardi Gras morning I opened it to find three men—one giving another a blow job on the steps, and the third filming it. In his 1968 essay for
Harper’s
, “New Orleans Mon Amour,” Walker Percy wrote that “the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.” Had he spent any time in my neighborhood he would have been forced to add “naked men,” but the residents are mostly inured to them. When a guy on my corner dropped his pants at five o’clock one afternoon for the benefit of the patrons of Lafitte’s in Exile on the balcony across the street, not a single person passing on the sidewalk so much as even slowed down to look.

Still, for all the mayhem outside, the inside of Bourbon remained my own private island. I worked, most days, in my nightgown; when I needed to clear my head, I’d simply wander through the French doors of my office and hack away at the bamboo or pluck the yellow leaves from the gardenia. I ate and entertained almost exclusively on the stone-topped table in the back courtyard and left the whole house open to the outside for seven or eight months out of the year. I wrote a lot, threw great parties, and spent indulgent afternoons with A. playing “tropical nurse” (she restored the patient back to health with homemade Hurricanes featuring mango syrup, a lot of rum, and the juices of the citrus from the courtyard trees).

The place was less a house than an elaborate stage set—with oriental carpets and slip-covered sofas, collections of coral and shells and birds’ nests, the odd French chair, a four-poster black iron bed—but I found a better way to live there than any I’d found so far. Tennessee Williams, who had a place around the corner, called New Orleans his “spiritual home” and said, “I found the kind of freedom I’d always needed.” Sherwood Anderson was said to have lived in my very house in the 1920s, and deemed New Orleans “the most civilized place” he’d found in all of America. Anderson was from Ohio, so of course he did, but he and Williams were both right about what the place could do for you. The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines “to civilize” as “to instruct in the arts of life.” The time spent on Bourbon afforded me plenty of instruction.

I had lived there for more than five years when John, my husband, and I began seeing each other, but we had met much earlier, almost two years before I arrived in New Orleans. It was at a wedding in Atlanta, when he was married and I was engaged. He was with his group of friends and family and I was with mine, and we all desperately wanted to leave the reception and get back to our mutual hotel for a drink and to parse some of the stranger aspects of the evening, which included dead ducks and hares decorating the food tables, in keeping with the medieval theme of the festivities. We arrived to find the bar tragically closed, but John didn’t miss a beat. He palmed the young desk clerk some folded bills, created a bar on the lobby table from the ample array of whiskey and mixers he’d brought up from New Orleans—just in case—and sat down at the piano to bang out all seven rock-and-roll numbers he remembered from his days as lead singer in a band called The Mersey Shores (the Beatles were from Liverpool and Liverpool is on the Mersey). I thought he was sexy as hell and I’ve always been a big fan of anyone who can so effortlessly save the day (or the night, as it were). My fiancé was passed out on a sofa, John’s wife was huddled in a corner with her sister, and I would have run off with him right then and there, except that John is a far more upstanding human being than I.

We stayed, chastely, in touch. I got disengaged, came to New Orleans, and ran into John occasionally, but not a lot. He’d spent his adolescence in a big house on St. Charles Avenue, where his uncle, a prominent heart surgeon had raised him as his son; he was a partner in a well-known law firm. I, on the other hand, had been spending most of my days wafting around a Bourbon Street courtyard and some of my nights at such rough-and-tumble Ninth Ward bars as Markey’s and Vaughan’s with the newly divorced McGee. Our worlds only occasionally collided. Once, I joined him at lunch with his wife and some friends, and then, out of the blue, he asked me to lunch alone, at Galatoire’s, to tell me he was getting a divorce. He started dating (a lot—there are very few eligible bachelors in New Orleans), but every few months he’d turn up. He insisted that I meet his uncle, who was dying, though I didn’t know it. He insisted that I meet him for lunch—on Valentine’s Day. On my birthday, he showed up at the party McGee gave me with a bouquet he’d assembled by collecting bits of arrangements from every hotel on his route to her apartment. One afternoon he showed up as I was leaving for the grocery store, insisted that he drive me, and then went on his way when I was done. I was always really glad to see him, but the signals were so weird and so intermittently urgent there seemed no point in trying to read them. I was deep in my own romantic quagmire, and John had already told me late one night that he thought unhinging his whole life had made him a little crazy. I believed him. He had two almost-grown children—a man like him doesn’t just pack up and go without sustaining a little damage. So we continued our sporadic dance. Finally, A. took an ill-timed trip out of the country, and John asked me for what sounded like a real date. I went.

The three years from that dinner to the altar were rocky ones, for John, that is, who had to put up with me. Three months into it, he asked me to marry him, in Las Vegas, of all the unimaginative places, and I begged him never to bring it up again. He waited almost a year and asked me a second time, in New York the day after Thanksgiving, and I burst into tears. I was scared—of commitment, of a settled life, of narrowing my options. For more than half my life I’d been living on my own, like a man really, doing exactly what I wanted to do with few encumbrances. There was also the lingering fact of why I’d come to New Orleans in the first place. It was long past time to let go, but historically I have had a hard time in that regard—what if I never played tropical nurse again?

I had to do something, so I decided to take off for Spain for three months, a decision John, who has a great deal of wisdom and even more patience, supported. And in truth, it wasn’t a bad idea. In a city where much of the activity is based largely on what has been done before, an inertia you’re not even aware of can settle in your bones. People inherit houses, waiters, positions of royalty at Mardi Gras balls from the generation before them. They eat fish (or shrimp po-boys) on Fridays and red beans and rice on Mondays and the men don seersucker and poplin the week after Easter (but never, ever before) for the duration of the spring and summer. When a great many of life’s decisions, big and small, are dictated by ritual or blood, free will, gumption, even the tiniest bit of initiative can go right out the window.

Most of the rituals are charming, but even the most unrewarding ones are diligently maintained. “Oh, balls are such a bore, anyway, I don’t know why we keep on doing it,” a female character says, referring to the grueling social obligations of Mardi Gras in Ellen Gilchrist’s
The Annunciation
. Her male companion is quick to respond: “We have to do it. It’s our responsibility. I mean, after all, sweetie, it’s what we do.” A few years ago, when I asked a real-life character here, who is technically in the steamship business, why he had taken on the leadership of one of the more exclusive debutante cotillions, he said, “Daddy,” before asking and answering my next question. “How did he get into it? Daddy. I’m fifth generation. That’s how these things happen.” New Orleans is a place, don’t forget, where you are considered an upstart, or worse, if you call a hotel by the name that it currently goes by, as opposed to the one it hasn’t had in more than forty years.

The flip side of this religious adherence to old habits is that a big segment of the city’s population has turned living for the moment into an art form. We live between a notoriously restless river and a forty-mile-wide lake, and if “the Big One”—a Category 5 hurricane barreling up the mouth of the river—ever does come, FEMA’s incompetence will be the least of our problems. This is not Scarlett’s South, where tomorrow is another day—tomorrow may not come at all. We also have a consistently high murder rate and a life expectancy that ranks with the people of North Korea and Uzbeksitan. The thinking, then, is to let the
bons temps rouler
while we can. In either mind-set, good decisions about one’s future are not always made.

Spain turned out to be a fine choice. Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it definitely makes the mind clearer. I went, ostensibly to learn Spanish and take in the bullfights. But mainly I knew I needed to step off the cliff or at least the curb, and go, alone, to a dramatically different place. At heart, I am a dutiful soul—I worked all through high school and college; there were no summers exploring Europe or bumming around Telluride. Simply taking off for no real good reason was a radical act. I ate and drank a lot, worked a little, and generally roamed around in my self-imposed exile until John came over to Madrid for a weekend. I was exhausted, just off the train from Seville, when he handed me a box with a ring in it. I hit him, hard, on the head with a pillow. When he left he didn’t take the box with him. I put the ring on and it fit. I wore it around town; I wore it in my sleep. I got so used to it—and what it meant—that I realized I’d had it backwards about my options. Marrying John meant I’d open myself up to a lot more than I’d be closing off. I flew back to New Orleans and wondered what the hell had taken me so long.