TWELFTH NIGHT 2004
THE FRENCH QUARTER
The bar downstairs was closed, and we had to leave by a side door in an alley, held open by one very tired-looking kitchen employee. “Y’all be safe now,” he said half-heartedly.
The street was quiet. Someone’s footsteps echoed between the facing buildings. I felt the breeze off the river just a block away and the clouds moved quickly overhead, streaming past slanted roofs and chimneys. There was no moon out. Only thick clouds. A truck rumbled by and the building behind us shook, just barely, almost unnoticeably, the foundations shivering.
Christopher pulled a bottle of champagne from his jacket, where he had been cradling it against his side. “I grabbed this on the way out. I thought we might need it.”
I almost said no, I was feeling so gross and exhausted, but then that impulse felt ridiculous at this point in the night and so I took it from him. It was pleasantly heavy, the neck of the bottle cold and smooth against my palm. “Thanks.” He looked pleased and it felt nice to have made him happy. “I’m sorry you didn’t find your friend in there.”
He rocked back on his heels. “Maybe it’s better. There will be other times. That was really something, wasn’t it? My folks go to Carnival balls but I’m pretty sure they aren’t like that.”
“They don’t go to the Rex Ball, by any chance?” I asked maybe too eagerly. “I watch that on TV every year with my mom.”
“You do? How can you stand it? It’s so boring. It’s like four hours long.” He hesitated, clearly weighing something. “I was a page,” he admitted finally.
I laughed. “No way. You were one of those poor little boys in ostrich feathers yawning next to the thrones?”
“Yeah, it was maybe the most humiliating moment of my life—the blond wig, the lipstick, the stupid velvet outfit. God. And everyone is talking to you like it’s the most glorious moment of your life. I just wanted to fucking kill myself.” He shivered a little in the remembering. “I puked all day that day because I was so nervous about it and they still made me do it.”
“I wonder if I saw you? Probably. My mom and I never missed a year.”
He groaned. “Can we stop talking about it?”
“Sure.” But I kept thinking about it. I liked the idea that unknowingly, we had been having the same experience together. Two memories overlaid, from different parts of the city but caught in the low-budget splendor of local broadcasting.
We had instinctively turned left as we started to walk, and I knew where we were going. It was that time, when the night had ended but the day hadn’t begun yet. The time to be on the edge of things, the boundary where soggy land gave way to fierce currents. Somewhere quiet. “To the river?” I asked. We were only a few blocks away.
“To the river,” he echoed as if it were obvious. Where we could drink his champagne undisturbed. Where we didn’t have to really be anywhere, a place to rest.
“Is that too heavy?” he asked. “I can take it.” He indicated the bottle.
Now that I had accepted his gift, I didn’t want to relinquish it. “No, I got it.”
We crossed up and over the hill of the levee to the narrow strip of boardwalk where the shore of the river was just a big dark space against the lights of the town. Planks and benches and enormous wooden steps leading down into the darkness. I never knew the point of that staircase leading straight into the water, waves lapping up one step or ten, depending on the time of year and height of the river. They were mysterious in the best way, a passage to nowhere, a stately point of egress for drowned pirates and mermaids.
We found a bench. It was strange to stop here, these same benches we had flown past on his bike only a few hours ago. That exhilaration was long gone. Things felt cold now, flat, like an extinguished match. He took the bottle and pressed on the neck of the champagne. The cork rang out like a shot and I started. I tucked the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. We passed the bottle back and forth. Thankfully, Christopher’s chattiness had finally worn down and he sat silently plucking at the foil on the neck of the bottle.
The last time I saw my mom, when I stopped by with Ida, she had that same cough as that old guy at the party. I had been telling her to go to the doctor for ages and she always waved me off and we had sat at her kitchen table in irritable silence. Who was I to tell anyone how to take care of themselves? I had enough to deal with, with my poor fucking dog.
But I knew it was coming. I had known forever. The empty bottles, the clanking garbage, the alternating rhythm of cheerful evenings and daytime stupor. Those days pierced by the low voices and odd musical cues of the daytime soaps constantly playing. Those muted voices making an already quiet house feel even emptier, her hangover like a fog around us, a sudden drop of barometric pressure and the same feeling in my stomach.
But there was knowing and there was knowing, and the kind that was rearing up in me now, unavoidable and ugly, was raw in my chest. “Why does everyone in this town drink so much?” I said finally.
“So they can forget.” Christopher handed me the champagne.
“Forget what?”
“What have you got?” He smiled. “It’s our way. My grandmother is so steeped in port, she’s almost pickled. She’s trying to forget that she’s a racist bitch who hates the maids and nurses that keep her alive. My dad is trying to forget how much he hates his mom even though he’s just like her. And so on for my whole family. On the other hand, Ryan drinks to forget he grew up waiting on welfare checks and getting punched by his dad.”
“And you?”
He took the bottle back. “You first.” He drank. “Or maybe we all drink to forget we’re on borrowed time.” He pointed at the river. “All that cancer stuff upriver, poison. Just pouring down on us.”
“That sounds like a cop-out,” I began, but he interrupted me.
“Not to mention the fucking levees. Why not get drunk if you’re already doomed?”
“You’re taking a very broad view of causality here.”
“You’ve got to. When you think about how fucked we all are as a community, it makes you feel less bad about the bad shit that’s happened to you in particular.”
“Does it work?”
“No.” He paused and reconsidered. “Maybe. I don’t know, we’ve lasted this long. I’m glad I’m here with you tonight though.”
On either side of us, the sparse line of benches spread up and down this old stretch of boardwalk. We were the only people here except for two women in bright pink scrubs, their backs to us, sitting on the wide wooden steps.
Christopher was also looking toward the dark buildings of Bywater and the industrial canal. “Oh, and pandemics, yellow fever and stuff. Don’t forget those. They filmed Panic in the Streets right down there, you know. The Governor Nicholls Street Wharf.”
More movies. “I’ve never seen it.”
He grunted in exasperation. I ignored him because I was straining to overhear the two women. They had big foam daiquiri cups but didn’t seem as drunk as one would expect at this hour. One kept glancing back over her shoulder nervously at us.
“It’s relaxing here,” her friend said assertively. They had clearly been arguing about it. “Just wait. In another half hour, it’s going to be worth it.”
The first woman shifted. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt like me, but pink, like her scrubs. She looked back again at us, suspicious. I remembered a cab ride I once took. My driver was off-duty NOPD and told me she lived out by the airport and never came downtown because it was too dangerous. I didn’t know what was more outrageous—that the police department paid so badly officers had to moonlight as cab drivers, or that for a whole segment of people, the slice of city where it seemed like I passed my whole life felt too dangerous. Everyone I knew was afraid of black people, and nice black police officers with set curls and quiet, gentle voices who drove cabs in their spare time were afraid of “downtown.” That nurse was clearly afraid of two degenerates like Christopher and me. How caught we all were in this intractable web of fear.
Proximity to the water made their voices carry and I realized these women had just gotten off a night shift. They were having an after-work drink. The shift in perspective was dizzying.
Christopher and I were careening to the burnt-out end of a night on the town, while these women were settling in to the easy relaxation of five in the evening, when your efforts of the day were done, and your time, suddenly your own, spun out inviting. “They say she’s doing so well, she might get on one of those competition teams. Mathletes or something, they’re called,” one of the women said, one leg extended and massaging her knee.
“Mathletes,” the other woman echoed, amused. “What a name.”
“I know.” The first one took another sip of her daiquiri and switched legs, massaging the other knee. She chuckled. “But really, I’m so proud of her. I don’t know where she gets it from.”
I felt my insides curdle up, a special sour milk kind of memory. Gaby was a mathlete. In lower school I used to watch her finishing her quizzes before the rest of us, and the way she would sit back and quietly play cat’s cradle with whatever bits of ribbon or string she had at hand. She wasn’t a show-off about it. Instead she bowed her head, electric with a rainbow of plastic balls at the end of her braids, and watched her own hands at work. I often rushed through because I wanted to be done next. I wanted to be able to sit with her in shared, silent victory while the sounds of scratching pencils of everyone who wasn’t us rustled through the room. Sometimes she would turn around to check on me and in order to be ready to meet her eyes, I sometimes had to leave a question or two blank. It was a small sacrifice for that moment of communion. She was smarter than me. She always had been. I missed her so much.
The fog was rolling in deep and heavy now. Algiers on the opposite shore had completely disappeared. This sweet, steady winter fog that fell hard at twilight and dawn, blanketing those painful transitions in warm, obscuring mist. The lamps above us blurred, melting into the condensation falling around them and I didn’t care about my hair anymore. Although I noticed both of the nurses pulled their hoods up and tied the strings tightly around their faces. The sun hadn’t risen, but the darkness was different, shading out into an eerie in-between gray, waiting on a change that hadn’t happened yet. More of the river sank into the gloom, the bend in the distance, the span of the bridge farther up all vanishing in this visible air. The blurry backs of the women were all that remained. We disappeared together.
Christopher was staring at the bottle of champagne in his lap, still picking at the label.
“Where are you going to go after tonight?” I asked.
“I can probably sleep in my parents’ bushes or porch swing or something if I wait for them to leave for work. Although they did call the cops on me the last time I did that. Assholes.”
“I’m sorry. It sucks to fight with your friends, to lose the people you depend on.”
“Yeah.” He was kicking the toe of his sneaker into the cracks of the planks of the boardwalk. “The funny thing is, I’m not the first guy to grab his dick. Some baseball coach was all over him in little league.” He got his foot caught for a minute and struggled to get it out. “Catholic school, man. We had that in common.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. “So, he should know none of it matters. Grabbing your friend’s dick or ending up neck deep in gash, it’s all just fucking body parts and what the fuck, you know? But like, we were there for each other.”
“Is that what you wanted from me, to be neck deep in gash?”
He winced. “Don’t say it back like that, you make it sound so bad. But I don’t know, maybe. Maybe I wanted to be around you because you’re pretty and it makes everything hurt less when you’re being nice to me.”
“Am I?” I didn’t usually think of myself as nice.
He nodded. “You are.”
I let myself enjoy that for a minute. “It almost feels like you’re making fun of me to talk about me being pretty at this point in the night,” I laughed. “I mean, Jesus.”
“Why do girls think that they can just lose their hotness because their hair isn’t brushed or whatever? You look the same. Exactly the same as you probably always do.”
I looked at a freighter heading toward us from upriver. “Because you can lose anything. Anything you ever have can be lost.”
He didn’t answer for a while. “Maybe I should just leave,” he said. “Get out of town. Go where people aren’t full of shit. I don’t know. Berkeley or something.”
“Berkeley?” I laughed again. He still managed to surprise me in these funny little ways.
He shrugged. “I don’t fucking know.”
“I tried that. It doesn’t work.” The freighter sounded its horn. The cry was loud, insistent, and held on to the humid air longer than it seemed possible and my heart cracked. I wanted it to stop. I was furious at all the complicated, intractable, impossible things flooding my nerves, my body, my heart, overtopping the boundaries of what felt possible and leaving me lost, drained. “You go away because you think you’re different and special, and then it turns out you’re not. Not at all. You belong here, so you just come back.”
“I think you’re special,” he said quietly, and I felt whatever last thing that was holding me together shatter.
It’s what she always said. It’s what she always said, brushing my hair from my face when she’d come home at dawn, stopping to climb into my bed with me when it wasn’t quite light out yet. I could never be sure if she actually came in or if I was just dreaming her, humming that song from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, telling me over and again that I was special. I don’t know if it was hope or a prayer, but whatever it was, it hadn’t come true. If there was one thing I hadn’t turned out to be, it was special. Sorry, Mom. I wasn’t going to be an artist or a teacher or a dreamer or have a house and two kids or whatever she thought she was buying me with all those years of private school. Twenty-two years later and all she got was someone exactly like her: a fucking disaster. “I think my mom’s dying,” I said, before I could even think about it. “She’s drinking herself to death.” The words sounded so melodramatic.
“I’m sorry.” He paused. “You know that shit’s genetic,” he said, handing me the bottle.
“Yes, I know that shit’s genetic,” I said, annoyed, taking it. He sounded young again. Young and stupid and strangely it was a comfort. “I tried to stop drinking for a while, in college.”
“That sounds fucking grim. Lonely too.”
“Yeah, pointless.” I took a long drink of champagne and foam bubbled over the top when I brought the bottle down from my lips.
I looked around and could tell it was morning now. The gray was lighter. The boardwalk split into separate planks, a tugboat chugged by, the streetlamps switched off. There was no glorious moment, no streaming dawn, no revelations. The event we had all implicitly been waiting for snuck past and at some point, hidden by the fog, the sun had risen quietly to itself.
The women near us must have realized it too and stood, adjusting their scrubs. “Well, that was disappointing,” one said.
“Come on, I’ve got to go get these kids ready for school.”
“We’ll come back another time. I’ve seen it be really special before.” She was still arguing with her friend as they strolled away, car keys in hand. “It’s this humidity. When it’s this wet, sometimes my car won’t even start.”
I also wanted to leave. There was something embarrassing about having been sitting here, unconsciously hoping for something to happen and being betrayed, caught out. The clammy feeling of confidences hanging between us. He also felt this shift and stood, a little unsteady, and offered me his hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Take me to your house. You promised.”
“I did?” At this point he knew all my secrets—well, almost all—and this same earnest look still hadn’t left his eyes. This silent entreaty he had been making all night. I did want to go home. I was tired. I wanted it all to be over. If nothing else, I guess I could always fuck him. That would make him happy. Maybe make him happy enough to forgive what a fucking monster I was. I could sink down into the repletion of men and bodies and mornings after. But he was holding out his hand to me and his wrist looked so pale against the dirty white of his cuff and I was so tired and here he was, offering. “Okay.”
He threw away the champagne bottle and it arced gracefully through the air and landed in the trash can with a loud clang. “That’s the first time that’s ever happened,” he said, surprised.
“Congratulations.” When I stood up, my bag felt heavier. All at once, exhaustion plowed through me. I didn’t know how I was going to make it the few blocks to my house, this enormous bag banging against my knee at every step. “I need a coffee.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “A fine idea.”
When we crossed back into the city, the servers at Café Du Monde were sweeping out the restaurant and everything, tables, chairs, floor, was damp from the fog. A woman in the peaked white paper cap of her uniform looked up from the Vietnamese newspaper she was reading. She had seen so many like me and Christopher, walking the flagstones at dawn and she was clearly profoundly bored of all of us. We stopped at the small window and ordered two café au laits, bitter from chicory and sweet from all the scalded milk. A cook propped open the screen door to the kitchen and lit a cigarette, the air heavy with the warm doughnut smell of hot fat and sugar. I cradled the foam cup and the thin cheap lid jabbed at my lip when I drank. The alley behind Café Du Monde smelled like bleach and piss and wet. The strap of my bag dug into my shoulders. I was so tired. It was time to go home.