The heat was making me crazy. No air-conditioning here, either, just fans, pushing the damp air around.
I rushed through the dinner of red beans and rice and hot sausage; someone ordered a round of beers and I gulped mine down to cool the sausage. No one spoke much. Martha’s here, better keep it low-key, guys. I decided to do them a favor and disappear after the meal. There wouldn’t be much chance of running into me at any of the nude bars, nothing to be embarrassed about. Thanks for tolerating my presence, fellas.
But they looked a little puzzled when I begged off anything further. The voice blew over to me as I reached the door, carried on a wave of humidity pushed by one of the fans: “Maybe she’s got a headache tonight.” General laughter.
Maybe all four of you together would be a disappointment, boys. Maybe none of you know what a woman is.
They didn’t look especially wild, either.
I had a drink by the pool instead of going right up to the hotel room. Carl would be coping with supper and homework and whatnot. Better to call later, after they were all settled down.
I finished the drink and ordered another. It came in a plastic cup, with apologies from the waiter. “Temporarily short on crystal tonight, ma’am. Caterin’ a private dinner here. Hope you don’t mind a go-cup this time.”
“A what?”
The man’s smile was bright. “Go-cup. You take it and walk around with it.”
“That’s allowed?”
“All over the Quarter, ma’am.” He moved on to another table.
So I walked through the lobby with it and out into the street, and no one stopped me.
Just down at the corner, barely half a block away, the streets were filling up again. Many of the streets seemed to be pedestrians only. I waded in, holding the go-cup. Just to look around. I couldn’t really come here and not look around.
“It’s supposed to be a whorehouse where the girls swung naked
on velvet swings.”
I turned away from the high window where the mannequin legs had been swinging in and out to look at the man who had spoken to me. He was a head taller than I was, long-haired, attractive in a rough way.
“Swung?” I said. “You mean they don’t any more?”
He smiled and took my elbow, positioning me in front of an
open doorway, pointed in. I looked; a woman was lying naked on her stomach under a mirror suspended overhead. Perspiration gleamed on her skin.
“Buffet?” I said. “All you can eat, a hundred dollars?”
The man threw back his head and laughed heartily. “New in the Quarter, aintcha?” Same honey in the voice. They caress you with their voices here, I thought, holding the crumpled go-cup tightly. It was a different one; I’d had another drink since I’d come out and it hadn’t seemed like a bad idea at all, another drink, the walking around, all of it. Not by myself, anyway.
Something brushed my hip. “You’ll let me buy you another, wontcha?” Dark hair, dark eyes; young. I remembered that for a long time.
Wild creatures in lurid long dresses catcalled screechily from a second floor balcony as we passed below on the street. My eyes were heavy with heat and alcohol but I kept walking. It was easy with him beside me, his arm around me and his hand resting on my hip.
Somewhere along the way, the streets grew much darker and the crowds disappeared. A few shadows in the larger darkness; I saw them leaning against street signs; we passed one close enough to smell a mixture of perfume and sweat and alcohol and something else.
“Didn’t nobody never tell you to come out alone at night in this part of the Quarter?” The question was amused, not reproving. They caress you with their voices down here, with their voices and the darkness and the heat, which gets higher as it gets darker. And when it gets hot enough, they melt and flow together and run all over you, more fluid than water.
What are you doing?
I’m walking into a dark hallway; I don’t know my footing, I’m glad there’s someone with me.
What are you doing?
I’m walking into a dark room to get out of the heat, but it’s no cooler here and I don’t really care after all.
What are you doing?
I’m overdressed for the season here; this isn’t Schenectady in the spring, it’s New Orleans, it’s the French Quarter.
What are you doing?
I’m hitting my sexual peak at thirty-five.
“What are you doing?”
Soft laughter. “Oh, honey, don’t you know?”
The Quarter was empty at dawn, maybe because it was raining. I found my way back to the Bourbon Orleans in the downpour anyway. It shut off as suddenly as a suburban lawn sprinkler just as I reached the front door of the hotel.
I fell into bed and slept the day away, no wake-up calls, and when I opened my eyes, the sun was going down and I remembered how to find him.
You’d think there would have been a better reason: my husband ignored me or my kids were monsters or my job was a dead-end or some variation on the mid-life crisis. It wasn’t any of those things. Well, the seminars were boring but nobody gets that bored. Or maybe they did and I’d just never heard about it.
It was the heat.
The heat gets inside you. Then you get a fever from the heat, and from fever you progress to delirium and from delirium into another state of being. Nothing is real in delirium. No, scratch that: everything is real in a different way. In delirium, everything floats, including time. Lighter than air, you slip away. Day breaks apart from night, leaves you with scraps of daylight. It’s all right – when it gets that hot, it’s too hot to see, too hot to bother looking. I remembered dark hair, dark eyes, but it was all dark now and in the dark, it was even hotter than in the daylight.
It was the heat. It never let up. It was the heat and the smell. I’ll never be able to describe that smell except to say that if it were a sound, it would have been round and mellow and sweet, just the way it tasted. As if he had no salt in his body at all. As if he had been distilled from the heat itself, and salt had just been left behind in the process.
It was the heat.
And then it started to get cool.
It started to cool down to the eighties during the last two days of the conference and I couldn’t find him. I made a half-hearted showing at one of the seminars after a two-day absence. They stared, all the men and the women, especially the one who had asked me to go shopping.
“I thoughtyou’d been kidnapped by white slavers,” she said to me during the break. “What happened? You don’t look like you feel so hot.”
“I feel very hot,” I said, helping myself to the watery lemonade punch the hotel had laid out on a table. With beignets. The sight of them turned my stomach and so did the punch. I put it down again. “I’ve been running a fever.”
She touched my face, frowning slightly. “You don’t feel feverish. In fact, you feel pretty cool. Clammy, even.”
“It’s the air-conditioning,” I said, drawing back. Her fingers were cold, too cold to tolerate. “The heat and the air-conditioning. It’s fucked me up.”
Her eyes widened.
“Messed me up, excuse me. I’ve been hanging around my kids too long.”
“Perhaps you should see a doctor. Or go home.”
“I’ve just got to get out of this air-conditioning,” I said, edging toward the door. She followed me, trying to object. “I’ll be fine as soon as I get out of this air-conditioning and back into the heat.”