Day 12

January 11
9pm


When we walk in, the place is empty except people we know and a girl reading a book at the far side of the bar. She’s wearing clear-framed glasses and her hair’s in a messy ponytail but still, she looks stylish in the way almost anyone in New Orleans can look stylish if we just have the right attitude. I love people who read alone at bars, and I smile for a second and think, She’s one of us.

Noah’s sitting with Lisa and a girl I don’t recognize at a table by the window. We give them short hugs, and I meet the other girl, whose name is Maya and who is Noah’s brother’s girlfriend. She’s from New Orleans too, and I remember Anne telling me about her and how nice and smart and pretty she is, and we have the Who’s Your Mama and Where’d You Go To High School conversation, and we establish that maybe she knows one of my cousins, and then we move on and talk about other things.

The adorable bartender asks if I’m still hooked on Smithwicks and I hesitate for about one second before I say, “Totally.” It’s just a little too good to pass up. Anne, however, really is done with beer for a while, but she doesn’t know what to get instead, and the adorable bartender and I strategize for a bit and in the end he pours pinot noir into a tall Spanish glass, and it’s perfect. “Let’s go back and sit with the youngsters,” we say.

A man in a red fleece pullover and a ski cap walks in and kind of looks around for a minute before walking over the girl who’s reading. He sits down and they begin having a polite conversation, and I hear the girl say things like “I’m the kind of person who…,” which makes me think they don’t know each other very well. “Blind date, you think?” I ask Anne, motioning in their direction.

“I don’t know,” Anne says. “She looks so comfortable.”

That’s ‘cause she’s awesome, I think.

Maya and I are telling stories about how, on different occasions, both of us have cut off our ponytails with the intention of giving them away to Locks of Love, but instead we’ve lost the ponytails only to find them years later, crouching like forlorn and decrepit animals in the unused corners of our closets and drawers.

“One time,” Maya says, “My friend and I were looking for something in the freezer, and we were digging and digging around, and then finally we pulled something out ‘cause we thought it was what we were looking for, and we unwrapped it but then we realized it was our pet bird. He’d died a few years before that, and my dad had wrapped him up and put him in the freezer.”

“Whoa,” someone says. “I have so many questions to ask about that.”

Out of the window I see a white car pull up, and a beautiful couple gets out and starts heading our way.

The youngsters are making motions to leave. They are planning on crashing a party, but first they have to stop by the Mardi Gras Zone and get something to bring. This is so New Orleans, I think, how it’s totally okay to go to a party you haven’t been invited to, but how you’d never, never, never show up without bringing food for everybody.

The beautiful couple walks up to our table, and I realize it’s not a couple at all but two people I know from entirely different contexts and who are, it turns out, very good friends with each other. I talk with one of them about my cousin, who he was best friends with in high school, and then the other one gives me a long warm hug and I ask how she’s doing and she says, “Well, actually, I’m kind of in crisis,” and we talk about how she’s just broken up with her boyfriend, who I know and respect and who is brilliant and beautiful and a good person, because he was cheating on her and lying about it for a very long time. We talk about how people can be good people and make terrible mistakes with no malicious intent, but still cause such deep devastating hurt, and I feel my own heart break a little bit under the weight of her dark consuming sadness, all that betrayal and disillusionment.

All around us the bar’s filling up and we start melting in with everybody else; tonight it’s just regular people in their Monday-night clothes, smoking and playing pool and heading upstairs with instruments, and we are just two more regular people in the ever-deepening crowd.

We end the night with Anne’s precious friend Devin, who I’ve loved for years even though this is the first time I've ever actually met him. Devin’s one of those people who’s been a New Orleanian his whole life, before he ever even came here; before he ever even knew what New Orleans was. We talk about how, after his first visit here a few years ago, every week or so he’d drive fourteen hours from Charleston, South Carolina, just for a night or two of sleeping on Anne’s couch and breathing this air, which makes some of us feel more alive than we’d ever feel, anywhere else in the world. And now he’s here, and that’s it; he’s never going anywhere else, and at twenty-five he can say this with utter certainty, which I also understand, because when it comes to true love, you just know. I talk about how, when I was living in New Mexico last year, I spent the whole year carrying on what felt like a long-distance relationship with New Orleans, spending all this money on plane tickets just for thirty or so hours in this lush broken land, and finally I realized that I’d become one of those people who’d be a shadow of myself if I ever lived anywhere else, and I moved back.

Ultimately even after years of thinking about it I’m still not sure what it is that keeps so many of us pulled in so tight to this place. It’s more than family, and home, and the deep sad complicated history we’re all still living out together; and more than the food and the music and the culture and the way we talk to each other, and more than the joy and celebration even in the midst of utter tragedy, and the costumes and sequins and feathers and craziness, and the honest basic beautiful living we all do here; I think in the end it’s something simple and physical, like roots or gravity, like the way at night our arms reach, in sleepy darkness, for the imperfect arms of our beloved, before we allow ourselves, finally, to rest.