Day 6

Jan 5
8:30 pm

I’m so hungry I could eat my hand off. We sit at the bar and I’m trying to order food but the bartender is deeply engaged in a conversation about darts with an intense-looking guy in a beret. It’s not the adorable bartender tonight, it’s another guy who I vaguely recognize and think I’m supposed to know. We smile noncommittally at each other; that’s enough for now.

Anne’s perched on the barstool next to me, drinking Blue Moons and smoking Parliaments, and she is beautiful tonight and radiant and everyone notices. She has gotten two tattoos on her ribcage and this inspires me, and now we are both getting tattoos next week, and we are strategizing as the bar fills up and my hunger gnaws at parts of my stomach I didn’t know existed.

Finally I order empanadas and it’s all I can do not to drool on top of the bar in wild anticipation.

I scan the crowd a few stools down for the Mohawk guy, but he’s nowhere to be found. I miss him; I’ve started thinking of him as a friend, in the way that you think Britney Spears is your friend when you’ve been reading a lot of Us Weekly.

The beret-clad darts man is back, engulfing the poor bartender in another vortex of conversation. The bartender tries, politely, to get away but he’s failing miserably. Those eyes are like black holes. I’m beginning to wish I’d ordered spinach on bread; I’m hallucinating about food; I’m thinking about running across the street to Floras to get a muffin, but I don’t even have the energy. Because I’m so hungry.

Anne and I tell each other the epic tales of our love lives. “Hallelujah,” I hear someone behind me say. “It’s raining men.”

I’m wondering if it would be possible to eat my mittens when the bartender comes back. “Um,” he says. “In the rush I think I forgot to order your food.”

“Cool!” I say, with way more enthusiasm than I feel. “Could I change it to the spinach on bread?”

Anne wants her next tattoo to be about the River, and I agree.

“When I first got here right after Katrina with Marianne,” she’s saying, “we both thought it was so beautiful and striking that people were calling us Miss Anne and Miss Marianne, and that was one of the things that made us start falling in love with New Orleans, how everything, even the way people talk to each other, is so different here. And every day we’d drive across the bridge to the Westbank and see the green signs that said Miss River, and every day I’d be like, ‘Marianne, they even call the river Miss River! It’s amazing!’ And Marianne would be like, ‘Yeah, I know. Amazing.’ It took us about three weeks before somebody pointed out to us that it was Mississippi River we’d been crossing that whole time. We had no idea.”

I chew on my knuckles. The Smithwicks is helping to curb my appetite a little.

And suddenly, before you know it, there’s a feeding frenzy: the spinach on bread arrives in about two seconds, and then in about fifteen more seconds an adorable girl named Milo’s giving us this plate of figs and kumquats and other lusty, succulent fruits all dipped in honey, and I can breathe and think and talk again. From near-starvation to decadence and back in a matter of seconds: this is our life these days, in this little bitty corner of the world.