Day 9

January 8
8:30 pm

The beautiful people are here. There are entire flocks of them, people I’ve never laid eyes upon before tonight, with narrow waists and storklike legs and sultry eyes; they are wearing things like high-heeled ankle boots, and see-through blackish tunics, and feathers. Not New Orleans–style feathers, which are bright and spangly and, usually, the main attraction: these feathers are subtle, tucked behind an ear or amassed in a curly arrangement of black hair.

“Where did they all come from?” Anne asks.
I know. Do they live here? It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like they have been teleported here, from their exotic homelands, to take a collective field trip in our sinking, gritty world.

The adorable bartender greets me with a formal nod. “What can I get for you,” he asks.
My heart cracks a little bit, and I ask for a Smithwicks.
He nods again, and moves down the bar.

Over the past couple of days I’ve begun a small love affair with an artist, who is now sending me a text message which says, “I may try and come find you tonight." I’m intrigued but not sure if I’m up for anything more than this: my full pint, the drafty barstool, looking at people with Anne for a minute and then going home soon, early, and alone.

Eric breezes behind us, a minuscule party hat perched incongruously on his head. He hugs us both at the same time, says, “I’m super-busy,” and weaves back through the crowd.

I think I see my New Years lover standing by the pool table, but I can’t tell if it’s really him because it’s far away and my long-distance vision sucks and I lost my glasses in Katrina and still haven’t gotten new ones. (I know. Four and a half years ago. I know. I definitely could’ve gotten new glasses by now. I know.)

The beautiful people are lounging; they take languid sips from clear glasses; they rest lazy elbows upon the bar; they speak to each other, unexcitedly, in slow soft sentences. They do not care who else is here, or who is looking at them, so we look at them, but they are not looking at us.

I forget this sometimes, that there are whole elements of culture out there in the rest of the universe where practiced, detached apathy is the norm. There are entire worlds of people, just like all these stylish beautiful people, lazily drinking and studiously not observing their surroundings, but I don’t run into them on a regular basis. One of the things I love most about living in New Orleans is our unbridled enthusiasm for even the tiny incidental aspects of life most people barely notice: The weather’s cold! The mail came today! Look, I’m wearing my silver cowboy boots!

When I was living in New Mexico, I had troubles every now and then with people who thought I was secretly pining away for them just because I’d tell them things like, “Ohmygosh, you are totally beautiful and amazing!” People would be like, “Um, well, I mean, um. Well.” Here, you say that to the guy at the corner store, and he just nods and goes, “You too, baby,” while ringing up your hot sausage po-boy.

Noah walks in with this cute person from Ohio who’s in New Orleans for the first time, and he’s got the Zapatista thing going on again, and they’re both antsy, skittering around like little birds. “I’m gonna go see Eric,” Noah says, and they scoot upstairs through the crowd.

I settle into my chair and pull my scarf around me. It’s drafty. I fight off a yawn.

A woman in a floppy black hat, alone at a table in my line of vision, looks right into my eyes and gives me a significant nod. I kind of nod back and look around. People are talking to Anne, and the adorable bartender is way way down on the other side of the bar, and the beautiful people are swirling around us, and for just a fleeting second I notice that it feels kind of empty, here in the middle of everything, sometimes.

I guess it was my New Years’ lover after all over there by the pool table, because now he’s coming up behind Anne and giving us hugs and squeezing a stool in between us, and now his hand is on my knee and I’m feeling for his shoulderblades beneath his scratchy gray overcoat. We talk about fiction and the military and community organizing, and he gives me shit a little bit for having done Palestine work because there’s so much going on right here in New Orleans (which, you know, I’ve kind of noticed), but that’s cool; I can take it; and he’s distracted and looking around and I wonder who he’s hiding from, or searching for. But it’s still fun, anyway, leaning up against him in this moment right now, and I love being with people who launch right into the important stuff without fanfare or preemptive smalltalking, and when he finally gets up to leave I take his hand in both of mine and give it one of those courtly Renaissance-style kisses.