New Orleans When It Rains by Maxim Jakubowski

Some cities smell of diesel fumes, others of cats, and then there is the smell of the sea, or mown grass, or the sharp odour of curry cooking endlessly in basement flats, or again the acrid combination of industrial waste and low-hanging fog.

New Orleans smells of spices, the humid twang of nearby Mississippi bayous and swamps and, in early morning, the unpleasant waft of stale beer on the Bourbon Street sidewalk following yet another night of drunkenness and minor-league bacchanalia before the high speed hoses complete their work and sweep away the detritus of the previous evening’s boisterous excesses. Mardi Gras adds yet another dimension of smells and spills and noise, or the Jazz Festival or New Year’s Eve when it can take almost a quarter of an hour to walk through the massed crowds from Jackson Square to the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon. A cocktail like no other.

Even the music rising from bar to bar on each side of the street, battling for your attention, blues against jazz, show-tunes fighting hard rock, Broadway schmaltz wrestling with tentative folk melodies, it all seems to hold yet more fragrant promise of sensuality unbound.

There is no place like New Orleans.

And, year after year, I kept on coming back.

It was a city that talked to me, whispered to me from faraway through to my European shores of melancholy and I would treat myself again to the long plane journey, with the customary stop-over in Chicago or Atlanta (and once Raleigh-Durham) to catch the right connection, arriving at Louis Armstrong Airport as night was falling, bone tired but my mind on fire, my senses waking with a sense of delight to the smells and sounds of the French Quarter.

Some cities are male. Others are distinctly feminine. New Orleans was assuredly the latter.

The way it tempted you, caressed you, kissed your emotions, licked your soul, fed you with sumptuous plates of jambalaya, warmed your stomach with okra-sticky but succulent bowls of gumbo, and its raw oysters once split open made you think of a woman’s cunt as you sucked on them with undisguised greed and swallowed their juice and spongy flesh in one swift and easy movement.

It was a city I had brought women to.

Often.

In a spacious 12th floor room at the Monteleone I had undressed a preacher’s wife from the Baton Rouge suburbs I had met on the Internet. She had driven down in her SUV to join me and timidly tapped on my shoulder while I examined the shelves at Beckham’s on Decatur, where you could once often find some interesting first editions amongst the morass of worthless book club editions. That was where we had arranged to meet. I turned round.

‘Martin?’

‘Hi ...’

She was voluptuous, a lovely face, somewhat bigger than I had expected from the photos she had sent me but I knew those curves and the demure clothes she was wearing concealed terribly guilty urges and a determination to be bad.

Once in the hotel bedroom I stripped her and buried my face between her high but generous breasts, licked and bit her nipples to gauge her reaction while I cupped her cunt with my hands. She was terribly wet. Her kisses tasted of cotton candy.

When I undressed, she looked down at my half tumescent cock and exclaimed that it was so big. Which warmed my heart of course, although I knew it wasn’t particularly so, just that her husband’s (she had known no other man, she had once confessed) was smaller.

I drowned in the folds of her flesh, my thrusts inside the cauldron of her innards setting off concentric waves of shimmering movement across the surface of her skin.

We fucked ceaselessly, between walks through the Vieux  Carré in search of beignets and praline-led sustenance. She only had two free days before family duties required her to be home.

‘Where have you told him you are?’ My finger inserting itself into her anus, feeling her squirm with added pleasure.

‘It’s not important. I don’t want to talk about him.’ Her regal thighs clinching me in a mighty vice, her hand roaming hungrily across my balls, nail extensions dangerously grazing me.

Even though she lived barely a couple of hours away, it was only her third time ever in New Orleans. A city of sin that represented everything that was evil in the eyes of her social set. Which made her brief affair with me even more of a thing of the night, and a temptation her frustrations had been unable to resist. Meeting a foreigner with a quaint accent, for purposes of the flesh, in such a den of iniquity somehow felt right. We would never meet again after those frantic two days but before we lost contact I heard that she had left her husband and shacked up with a pharmaceutical salesman who was happy to fuck her once a day at least unlike the monthly diet her religious fanatic of a man had restricted himself to, and always in the dark at that. I had, inadvertently lit the fire and set her on the right (or wrong) path.

Then there was Natalia, a Lithuanian waif and single parent who lived in Delft in Holland, who had been a regular fuck buddy back in Europe. My evocative stories of New Orleans and its sweet craziness had convinced her to accompany me across the Atlantic. She made it a regular habit to meet men she came across in chat rooms and I knew all too well I was not her only sexual companion (I was aware of the Korean business student she had been giving Russian lessons to; the English engineering export rep; the married car dealer who wanted to leave his wife and live with her; and the many others she had no doubt omitted to inform me about).

She fell in love with New Orleans. The hotel I had booked us into upgraded us to a suite and she wandered naked and free across the lush carpet, the angle below her pert white buttocks always just that touch apart, a sheer invitation to grab her and do my worst. She was playful, capricious, deliciously wanton. No post-coital sadness for Natalia: the moment I’d withdraw from her following each frantic fuck, she was up and about, eager to go out and sample more French Quarter atmosphere, tip-toeing away from the bed on her heels towards the open window and looking out from the balcony in the buff, attracting whistles and cries from the street beneath on most occasions, and then rushing back with a cheeky smile on her face at having exposed herself and straddling me, or standing above my still exhausted form on the bed, her legs obscenely spread, affording me a voyeuristic close-up of her still wet cunt and her luxuriant and curly dark pubic thatch.

One morning, she had arranged for a local pen pal to pick her up from the hotel in his car. We shook hands, both introduced to each other as just friends. He was supposed to take her for a drive along the nearby bayous, but I suspect they spent most of that morning in his bed. No matter, it gave me a handful of hours to rest from the fucking.

In my memory, Natalia and New Orleans went hand in hand in perfect harmony. The fragrance of southern flowers, magnolias et al and the intoxicating smell of her cunt. The delicate curlicues of wrought steel of the Crescent City balconies and architecture and the cheerful curve of her snubbed nose and the gap between her front teeth. The Queen of the blow jobs who always insisted on going pantie-less when we went out for walks or to eat. I’m still in touch with her. She finally gave in and married the car dealer and had a son with him although it hasn’t worked out and they are now separated.

Another bittersweet New Orleans memory is the Finnish interpreter from Seattle. High cheekbones, square jaw and a monstrous tease it took me ages to finally get into bed proper (days of foreplay and petting until she finally agreed that having spent an eternity in bed naked together, we should finally fuck ...). She knew of my attraction to New Orleans and suggested I join her there; she was in town for a conference and had a large room in one of the massive impersonal hotels on Canal Street, with a view of the Mississippi from her window.

By then, she was beginning to lose her looks and I was no longer as much attracted to her, I must shamefully confess, but the lure of New Orleans was too much to turn the opportunity down. I entered her from behind, her pale body squashed against the bay window, suspended above the void, like in a bad erotic movie (which is probably why I enjoyed fucking her thus ...). Her plaintive voice endlessly calling out my name, invoking it in fear, in lust, as I dug roughly into her, slapping myself into her, against her. She liked it rough, made you know wordlessly that she wished to be manhandled, to end up with bruises across her arms, her rump after the deed was done, although in private conversation before or after, during meals, or normal social interaction, she would always refrain quite religiously from raising any matters sexual. She still sends me birthday and Xmas wishes every single year.

And then there was Pamela, who was married to a famous experimental jazz trumpet player. We’d met in New York at a party. She was a friend of a friend. We would get together on every trip of mine to Manhattan where she shared a flat with a girlfriend near the Columbia campus. Her husband was always away on tour somewhere. God, Pamela, so many years ago now! Dark, lustrous, long hair, sublime arse, heavy breasts, how we fitted together so well! She joined me for a Bourbon Street Mardi-Gras folly, walking up and down the alcohol-soaked road at snail’s pace, screams from the balconies for women to lift their tops and show their tits and be rewarded with cheap, colourful beads. Which she did, roaring with laughter, on a couple of occasions. Her breasts so shapely. Dead drunk, we finished up in someone else’s hotel room with a group of local acquaintances of hers, which ended in a fumbled orgy in which all present ended up in bed together; I even think her husband might have been there too and watched us fuck before dutifully taking his turn with her, while I was being indifferently blown by his blonde companion, my cock likely still coated with Pamela’s sweet juices. New Orleans madness!

All this to explain the guilty attraction for New Orleans that simmers uncontrollably beneath my skin.

The spicy food, the oysters and crawfish diet I could live on, the voodoo fumes, the rumbling and heavy flow of the river, the fireworks off Jackson Square on New Year’s Eve as all the riverboats on the Mississippi toot their horns on the stroke of midnight as the traditional glitterball concludes its descent on the sidewall of the old Jackson Brewery, the drunks and druggies in Louis Armstrong Park, the endless causeway across Pontchartrain Lake, the antique shop windows on Royal Street, the antebellum mansions of the Garden District, the halting tramways, the diners dotted across Magazine, the sounds of every conceivable sort of music filtering like smoke from the bars and clubs, the noise, the warmth, the humidity, these have all become the foundation stones of who I am and entrenched New Orleans in my blood.

Why I always go back.

Even when I have no reason to do so.

No touristic urges.

No woman.

When it rains in New Orleans, it pours. The skies open wide. It’s the climate, you see, a sheer avalanche of water. Within a minute or so, the streets are like rivers. It never lasts very long, and in late spring or summer, within minutes, it has all evaporated as if by magic.

But if you happen to get caught, you’re drenched from head to toe in the blink of an eye. Best take shelter fast.

I was wandering aimlessly through the French Quarter, smelling the smells, drinking the sights, my mind both at rest and empty, although my soul, as ever, yearned for things unsaid. I’d already strayed beyond the main Vieux Carré area which is always so full of bars and stuff, and walking by mostly boarded-up buildings and all-night groceries. I recalled that there was a small park a few blocks further to the north. Maybe I’d sit for a while, collect my thoughts, read a bit from the old pulp paperback I’d picked up earlier at the Rue Dauphine Librairie Bookshop.

My short-sleeve shirt stuck to my skin and sweat painted a sheen on my bare skin. I took a sip of water from the Coke bottle I carried along in my tote bag and looked up at the sky. A mass of dark clouds was passing across the sun, and there was a touch of electricity in the air. A big storm was nearing. I knew from experience how quickly it could break and looked around for possible shelter. The park I remembered was too far, even if my memory of its location was correct.

A drop of water cascaded over the tip of my nose. None of the buildings nearby extended canopies across the pavement, unlike in other areas of the French Quarter. I darted down a side street, hoping for a bar or a store where I could take refuge. The sky darkened.

There.

A small neon light advertising something just fifty yards away on the other side of the street. I hastened my pace. Reached the door of the joint just as the heavens opened, water splashing against my loafers.

Inside, the smell of stale beer and centuries of cigarettes impregnating wood and bodies.

I’d thought it was just a bar but noticed the small badly-lit stage at the back of the room. A titty bar! A strip joint away from the normal beat. The sort of place I’d never really cared for much, whether in New Orleans or elsewhere. Muted sounds of a Rolling Stones song shuffling in the background. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, I recognized. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the ambient darkness.

Men along the bar, or at small tables, nursing drinks, hushed conversations. I found a gap at the bar. Ordered a Coke and was told they only had Pepsi. Fine with me. ‘No ice, please.’

As the barman, a swarthy red-haired bull of a man, delivered my glass, the lights illuminating the stage area at the back were switched on proper. The music on the juke-box fell to an abrupt halt and with an asthmatic click the club’s sound system came to life. Conversations ceased, punters shifted in their seats, glasses clinked.

Just as the new music took flight, I briefly heard the monotonous sounds of the rain outside beating against the pavement and the club’s unsheltered windows. It was a big one.

As the sound of the echoing rain quickly faded into the distance I realised that the music now spreading like a wave through the room was not the sleazy sort I’d somehow expected. No sweaty rock ‘n roll, or brassy big band tune or jazzy effluvia. It was actually classical. I closed my eyes for an instant in an attempt to dredge some form of recognition from my memory. Lazy strings, shimmering beaches of melody lapping against each other, Ravel or maybe Debussy.

A spotlight appeared out of nowhere.

Highlighting a dancer who had also materialized from the undefinable contours of the surrounding darkness.

Again she was not some identikit stripper, all crude make-up, vulgar attitudes and gaudy minimalistic apparel.

She was clothed in billowing white gossamer material, a flowing dress or sheet suspended in an imaginary breeze. Reminded me of Isadora Duncan in photos I’d seen in books or magazines, or maybe from a movie. Her own face was even paler than her thin dress. Just a savage slash of red lipstick, like a still bleeding wound, highlighting a set of perfect features. Cheekbones to kill for. Eyes deep with ebony darkness. A luxuriant jungle of blonde curls like a royal crown, falling all the way down to her shoulders, framing her face in total harmony.

She was almost motionless at first.

I looked up.

Met her eyes.

An endless well of sadness.

Her face expressionless.

The billowing white dress concealed any hint of the shape of her body, just thin legs and delicately-shaped ankles above her bare feet.

Again skin of abominable pallor.

One shoulder moved imperceptibly to the rising beat of the strings carrying the melody.

I held my breath.

Hypnotized.

The next five minutes saw me transported to another time and place altogether as I watched the young woman’s set. Similarly, every other spectator in the room had fallen silent as we all watched transfixed by the spectacle of her dance and gradual disrobing, as her movements invisibly accelerated and she began to dance, sashay, sway, shiver, perform, display herself, lullaby of desire, conjugating the geometry of her sexuality to a factor of infinity, stripping, moving, flying even, suspended in the winds of desire, spreading herself with both grace and total obscenity and making the whole spectacle a thing of innocence and unashamed pornography.

Her slender neck.

Firm small breasts. Nipples adorned with the same fierce shade of lipstick. Fiery. Hard.

Her washboard stomach. The miniature crevice of her navel where the steep descent towards her delta began.

Her shaven mons.

The highlighted straight vertical scar of her cunt opening, again defined by the scarlet hue of lipstick. The coral depths peering with every other movement inside her as she floated between the billowing flow of the thin white material of the dress she had now shed and swam through a world of emptiness and gauzy material to the quiet, peaceful beat of the music.

Darker, brown inner labia, teasing our eyes.

An imperceptible tattoo just an inch or so along to the left of the opening of her cunt. Looked like a gun, or maybe more traditionally a flower.

The harmony of her thighs. The golden down in the small of her back caught by the spotlight. The symmetrical orbs of her arse. The darker pucker of her anal opening as she bent forward and spread herself wide for our edification.

It could have been offensive, vulgar, dirty, but it was anything but.

She was confident with her body. Knew how beautiful she was, Remained in control of every square inch of her immaculately white skin and she was gifting us with its vision.

At no moment did she stray more than a few metres from the fixed spotlight. No need for wasteful movements or poles for acrobatics or seeking tips from the audience. Not that there was anywhere they could be tucked as she had been quite naked underneath the white Grecian-like dress. No exotic lingerie or suspenders or garter belts. No superfluous items of clothing. Once she was naked, it was something so natural, the way a woman should always be.

And her face, ever expressionless. Distant. At peace.

The melody began to fade, the strings shimmering as the journey ended. I felt as if my heart had stopped.

The young pale blond woman’s motion slowed.

Her legs opened at a revealing angle.

Her arms spread wide in both directions.

Christ-like. Crucified.

I held my breath.

The spotlight sharply disappeared and the darkness that took over the room was blacker than ever.

By the time our eyes adjusted, the dancer was no longer there and the small stage was empty.

Every spectator present was silent.

I finished my drink and walked outside.

The storm had passed and the street was almost dry already, thin clouds of steam rising from the gutters as the rain evaporated in overdrive.

It was late afternoon.

In the distance the calliope of a steamboat on the Mississippi chimed.

Damn, who was she?

I walked all the way back to Toulouse and then, impulsively, trackbacked to the small strip club. The stage was occupied by a black girl with silicone tits and an over-prominent Jennifer Lopez arse and the customers now few, as if all the previous punters knew no one could properly follow the blonde and there was no point lingering.

The barman glanced at me. His eyes twinkled with malice. ‘She only dances once a day,’ he said, predicting my question.

‘Oh ...’

‘She’s dressing right now. Should be coming out any moment,’ he added.

‘I’ll wait, then.’

Away from the stage, she appeared even taller, straight backed, imperious if fragile, now that she had wiped the savage lipstick away, her whole face a symphony of whiteness. I was unable to recognize the fragrance she wore.

She seemed to be still wearing the white gauzy dress she had begun her dance in, under a floor-length transparent plastic mac. And she was still barefoot. A large canvas bag hung from her shoulders. It appeared to be full of books and silk scarves in every colour of the rainbow.

‘Loved your set. Can I offer you a drink?’

‘I just had some water in the dressing room,’ she said. ‘No thanks.’ Looked at me blankly.

‘Going home?’

‘Maybe ...’

‘Hungry?’

‘A bit. Dancing does eat up all your energy,’ she said.

‘My treat. Anywhere you want to go.’

She agreed to share an oyster po’ boy at the Napoleon House.

Even now, I remember very little of our conversation although we must have spent more than an hour together eating and conversing. She never would tell me what her name was or anything about her life. I recall discussing books, she loved F Scott Fitzgerald and let slip she had once lived in Manhattan. Every attempt on my part to find out how come she was now a stripper failed. She wasn’t rude or offended by my questions, just indifferent. The time passed quickly and I assume that yet again I must have done too much of the talking, and bored her stiff with my usual stories and feeble anecdotes and jokes.

We walked from the Napoleon House to the small Faulkner House bookstore in the alley by Jackson Square where I failed to find a copy of a book I had been singing the praises of and had hoped to buy for her.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said, with a faint smile. ‘So?’

‘So?’

‘Do you wish to come back to mine?’

My heart skipped a beat.

‘That would be lovely,’ I replied.

It was a walk-up in a decaying building that might once have been a mansion’s slave quarters just off Dumaine.

She closed the door and took my hand in hers.

‘Kiss me,’ she asked.

How could I say no?

It wasn’t fucking. It was making love in the most absolute sense of the term. It could only have happened in New Orleans.

Her bed became our battlefield.

I knew how pale her skin was but never guessed how soft and pliant her body would prove, a feathered cushion firm and languorous, a perfect treasure offered up for plunder and worse. Oh, the satin of her skin, the marrow-like texture of her lips, the way her fingers caressed my cock with shameless impunity and coaxed it to full length and thickness before she took me into the oven of her mouth, nibbling, teasing, biting with kindness, her tongue delving into my pee-hole with exquisite, measured probing, riding my lust, controlling it.

Her cunt, a map of untold treasure. Yes, it was a tattoo of a gun there, no larger than a nail, a Chinese miniature in the heavenly pornographic landscape of her intimacy, inner and outer folds delineated with mathematical precision, a medical sketch where every feature was drawn with close attention to detail and colour. Beckoning me. Opening for me like a flower of the tropics, swallowing me whole, feeding on me, feeding me.

New Orleans night.

The sound of her moans, the tightness in our throats as we pushed boundaries and held each other in the darkness like orphans in a storm. Every single woman I had touched, loved, brought to New Orleans led to this moment, this epiphany.

Fuck! Why wasn’t it always like this?

Morning. Lazing spread-eagled in a crazy geography amongst the tangled sheets of the bed. Our smells mingling, our sweat a potent cocktail of spent lust.

‘Hello. Shouldn’t I at least know your name?’ I asked, a fingertip lingering indecently across the ridge of her cunt lips.

‘Good morning, lover.’

She rose from the bed, brushing away my greedy hands. Regal. Pale. Naked. My cock hardened again in an instant, despite its rawness.

She smiled and tut-tutted.

‘Later,’ she said. ‘Offer me breakfast.’

We dressed and walked out into the hesitant early morning sun to Jackson Square for traditional beignets and coffee at the Café Du Monde.

She still wore the white, billowing dress, a tall, pale ivory figure making her way across Decatur.

Wiping away the powdered sugar that had spilt across my dark shirt, I looked up to see the sun fading.

She followed my eyes.

‘Seems like another storm is on the way,’ I said.

She nodded.

We began to make our way back to her apartment, hastening our pace as the dark clouds gathered menacingly above.

But only made it halfway there before the heavens opened.

I laughed as the first drops fell on my tousled hair, turned towards her expecting a similar smile. But the look on her face was one of terror.

‘It’s only rain, water,’ I said.

And, one final time, I witnessed the despair that lingered deep down in the dark pit of her eyes.

The rain fell, implacable, surrounding us, submerging us.

Quickly soaking the thin material of her thin dress, instantly revealing the sweet contours of her body, the now transparent gauze sticking to her skin, betraying the dark hardness of her nipples and when she attempted to move, the cleft of her cunt. At any other time, I would have found this highly erotic and arousing. But not at present.

As soon as her total nudity beneath the dress was betrayed, she began to fade.

It only took a few seconds.

Fading.

Like melting in the rain.

Her contours losing their firmness, their definition. Her pale skin disappearing with every new drop of rain.

I stood there with my mouth open.

Her lips parted as if she wanted to tell me something but not a sound emerged and then she was gone.

The rain beat against the pavement with monotonous regularity, cutting through the air where once she had stood. And soon, as ever, the storm passed, and the water just evaporated and disappeared in little swishes of thin steam. Just like she had. And I was left alone, on the corner of Conti and Royal, standing like a fool in front of the Federal Building.

I didn’t know what to think at first.

Was this a joke? Was this illusion, magic?

My mind in a tizzy, I ran back towards her apartment but was unable to find it again. But then, in New Orleans, so many houses look alike and my mind had been on other things when we had first made our way there.

I tried to compose myself.

Went to my hotel to change clothes. Take a shower, reluctantly washing away her scent from my body, from my cock.

Then rushed out to look for the strip joint where I had first come across her. Half believing it also would have disappeared from the map.

But it was there. In the same place as the previous day.

Closed. It was still only mid-morning.

I found a secondhand copy of “The Beautiful and the Damned” at the bookshop on Dauphine. Hadn’t read it in decades. It helped me pass the time until the bar opened.

Standing on the opposite pavement, late afternoon, I saw the blinds rising and the click click of the door’s lock.

A short, greying man was wiping the tables clean with a wet cloth, and no sign of the customary barman.

My questions hit a blank wall.

No, it had been ages since they’d featured dancers.

No, they no longer had a licence.

Elderly regulars slowly streamed in.

None of them had any memory of when, if ever, the place had been a strip joint. Just a good place for a quiet place for a drink these days.

Somehow, it was what I expected.

Made a strange sort of sense.

I finally sat myself at the bar and asked the middle-aged woman now serving for a drink.

As she bent down to get the bottle from the lowest shelf of her glass-fronted fridge, I caught sight of a fading framed photograph crookedly stuck to the large mirror which formed the back wall of the bar.

Squinted.

Recognized the pale features of my heavenly blonde stranger behind the sepia tones.

‘Who is that?’

‘Oh, that ... Just an old photo taken some sixty years ago when the bar was a thriving private club for gentlemen,’ I was told, ‘must have been one of the dancers.’

I gulped down my drink and walked out.

Tomorrow, I will check out of my hotel, stroll down Royal Street and head towards Canal, leaving the mighty flow of the Mississippi behind me, and I will wait for the rain to come and maybe I will melt away and meet her again on the other side of the humid New Orleans curtain of rain.

For sure.