August 23, 2005

Bloodied gauze muffled those first few words I ever spoke to her.  There had been a fight the night before at the St. Charles Street Pub.  A frat boy had taken liberties with the then-girlfriend of the bartender, a weapon or two had been brandished, and chaos quickly erupted amongst the habitually resigned patrons who frequented the Irish tavern.  The brothers of Theta Xi tore through the place, upturning tables and barstools in use. Spilt pitchers shattered across the hardwood floor, and while making my cowardly escape I slipped and fell face-first into one of the ornate balusters that supported the handrail leading outside.  The fall dislodged two bicuspids at the corner of my wide smile.

She thought it all rather funny.

We met on the street car as I traveled from campus downtown to the unfortunately located university dentists that worked on the cheap.  The car was nearly empty, and she stood in the isle gripping the brass bar overhead with one hand while holding a badly worn paperback in the other.  Erica Jong.  1973.  She was five foot four inches tall with long chestnut waves that reached down her trunk like a home schooled Pentecostal girl from Montana.  Her legs were short, dense at the calf, and only hinted at as light traveled through the thin cloth of her long black prairie skirt.

I said “Good morning,” or something equally incomprehensible beneath the bundle of red and white net soaking in my mouth.  She looked in my direction long enough to let a smirksome grin register and then back down to her book until her stop.  Her eyes didn’t move as she “read.”

It was a crisp Tuesday afternoon and the wait in the dentist’s office was shorter than I had expected.  I flipped through an issue of “Boy’s Life” magazine and counted the American flags as I found them.  I bored somewhere in the early forties and moved on to the Escher inspired abacus of colored wires and wooden beads that had been set up next to the fish tank.  I quickly devised a new set of rules and choosing yellow for the thousandths place slid out 1973 for my own amusement.  “Fear of Flying.”  I laughed to myself and pulled the gauze out for inspection.

The doctor checked for any remains of the teeth still lodged in my gum line.  I was given three choices and their corresponding price, finally opting for the antibacterial mouthwash and a bracing shot of local anesthetic to get me through the day.  On the way out the door I slid a “Highlights for Children” under my hooded over-shirt.

I had never walked the streets of New Orleans so early in the day before.  I visited an art gallery.  They proudly displayed paper plates someone had pasted homemade pornography to and nailed to chunks of driftwood coughed up by Lake Pontchartrain. I walked through the tide of sow-bellied tourists that cluttered Jackson Square.  I admired the Saint Louis Cathedral from a distance and paid too much for a cup of black coffee at the Café du Monde.  I never understood the city in all the years that I had called it home and always wondered that the secret of its popularity might be found mid-day in the heart of its hallowed treasures.  A street performer played the wrong chords to an Arlo Guthrie song and I knew I had been mistaken.

I met the 13 at Canal and rode the packed car down to the pub again.  To my surprise it was business as usual for Erik, the owner, as he swept his bar rag across the glossy cypress counter that separated the kitchen and bar from the rest of us.  Tom Wait’s “Gun Street Girl” played on the seldom working cd jukebox by the pool table and I checked for bite mark tears in the lacquered handrail by the door. Nothing.  I ordered a pint of imported bitter and waited for the night to begin.

The regulars didn’t arrive until well after midnight and I found myself surround by a strange new group of day drinkers and college professors grading the first wave of freshman essays.  A chuckle would occasionally spring up and I wondered what mistake in logic or punctuation caught them as funny.  From the corner of my eye I spotted a wisp of fabric passing between the green columns of the open French shutters that faced the street.  Her head down in her book, she walked towards the bar and sat besides me on the black leather-top stool with the sliced face.

“I’ll have a Berliner and a plate of cheese fries for my friend and I.”

Her drink wasn’t on the board posted behind the bar and based on the wink she received upon ordering it I assumed she knew Erik better than most.  She pulled a small velvet satchlet out of her canvas bag and sprinkled a bit of its contents into her beer.

“It’s woodruff. Care for a taste?”

Her father was a writer.  He had written a book back in the early sixties condemning process philosophy and the later works of Alfred Whitehead for a small university press in New England.  Six years later he wrote a second book, for the same publisher, in which he argued his first and blamed his mistakes on “the errs of polyprogenitive youth.”  Six years after that a third book was written on the subject of the second and he lost his tenure.  He now lives in Bali with a sixteen year-old boy and I had never been more captivated in my life.

Over the course of the evening our stools moved closer to one another with ever cheese fry that we reached for, until eventually her knees were clasped around mine and we had to turn our heads to grab for each sip.  She rattled away scores of the writers and books she was reading for her dissertation.  I recognized several of the names from the introduction courses I had taken during that first year of indecision and for those that I did not recall I bluffed brilliantly.  She talked about Bruce Springsteen and the “Blood on the Tracks” album in the sort of inspired awe that had always sounded insincere to me before, but in that moment left me thirsty for whatever calm logic her sack of woodruff provided.  She talked about movies and movements and men that left her wanting more, and I just listened.

Maybe it was all bullshit, but if it was I didn’t care.  Here was someone that felt and believed thing with conviction.  Here was someone, not willingly to float aimlessly through her collegiate career, who carried a force behind her beliefs and demanded that she be taken seriously.  I marveled at the quickness of her wit and the dry, almost desert like, tinge of her delivery.  This is the sort of person I had always hoped to meet and dreamed of being.  I followed her back to her place with little persuasion.

She lived on Magazine street on the lower level of a vaulted ceiling duplex.  It was a shotgun house, unusually tall for the neighborhood, which rested well West of the hustle and bustle of the tourist flocks.  She quickly excused herself to the restroom and I glided to her bookcase to peruse her collection and pass greater accolades onto her character.  I found myself leafing through a collection of Silverstein cartoons originally published in Playboy and hardly noticed her as she exited the water closet and crossed the living room for a thin brown housedress to slip over her exposed body.  I quickly popped several of the no-doze pills I had purchased earlier at the pharmacy into my mouth and joined her on the edge of her bed.

“We’re not going to have sex tonight if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Me, no, I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
“Good.”

She stood up and walked to the bookcase by her front door.  She pulled a tan volume out from a horizontal stack crammed in the negative space before the next shelf plank.  She sat on the steamer trunk coffee table across the room and read me a poem entitled “Japan” by Billy Collins.

          ‘…And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
          you are the bell,
          and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

          and the moth has flown
          from its line
          and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.’

“That’s a poem that I read to men when I’m trying to seduce them.”
“It’s very effective. Not too breathy or on the nose.”
“Thanks.”

I walked back up to St. Charles and caught a taxi home a little later that night.  On the ride I thought about her. I wondered when she would find the magazine I slipped into the stack of rough drafts and library printouts piled on her computer desk.  I began planning all the things I wanted to say a week later when we agreed to meet at the pub.  The questions I wanted to ask her and the carefully chosen lyrics I planned to quote.

There was a small pile-up on I-10 and we wound up taking the long way by the river.  I had never noticed how the city lights waned across the rolling water before—like bent notes held to the point of breaking.  

They broke five days later when the winds came through.