The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story Read Free Page B

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