It all started at the bar at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue.
The question ultimately was, whose education?
On Friday nights,
from Happy Hour time on, the bar is crowded with locals, visitors, and
Gemütlichkeit. Tourists who pop in from the avenue and hotel guests
are delighted to discover what the locals know already: that they'll find
fried catfish snacks as well as inexpensive drinks, and that if you're
interested in extending your social circle, that is, in picking up someone,
it's not a bad place to start. Young and not-so-young attorneys drop by
after they leave their offices downtown; doctors, technicians, and nurses
from the hospitals in the neighborhood use it as a watering and mixing
place; some of the cream of city government can be seen there; and dozens
of others from Uptown treat it as a sort of club. Maybe some of the tourists
have found out that this old structure, half-mansion, half-boarding house
(if you were to judge by its appearance), served as the setting for a
French movie about a New Orleans bordello.
That November evening,
we were seated right behind the bar, in the sort of comfort you'd expect
at home--a low table, a sort of divan or padded bench, and four easy chairs.
Usually we sit on the open veranda, but the air was distinctly cool, and
we had been drawn inside to the low lights, mirrors, dark walls, old furniture,
and alcoves, their coziness contrasting with the weather outside, as the
autumn wind shook the sash of a floor-to-ceiling window and made the old
lace curtains shiver at the edges.
Three of us from
the museum and a couple of acquaintances had met there before going to
an opening at Vision, a large gallery downtown--not quite a command
performance for us, but a gesture of professional courtesy and support
for the arts in New Orleans. It was the fall juried show of the Guild
of Graphic Artists--amateurs, more or less. In fact, I had already seen
the exhibit prior to the vernissage, because I'd agreed to serve
on the jury; but I was willing to go again to help swell the crowd, along
with my colleague Elinor Perrin and her husband Roger, Greg d'Hannis--also
on the curatorial staff--and a new acquaintance of Elinor's, a young neighbor
named Jennifer Stevenson, accompanied by somebody she called Richard,
of whom she seemed quite enamored. Jack, my husband, had stayed home;
no art openings for him. We supposed that the buffet at the show
would be very scanty, so starting out at the Columns seemed like a good
idea. Anyhow, it had been a wearisome week and a drink at 5:30 sounded
appealing. After the opening, if we felt like it, we'd go eat somewhere
in the Faubourg Marigny.
Standing at the
bar, almost under the television set, where Dan Rather was relating the
scandals of the day, was a cluster of men who sounded like trial attorneys--not
because they were talking about the law, but because the manner and tone
of each revealed the public self-assurance required for one who, unless
he is to fail, generally must make his interpretation of things
prevail over that of others--by rhetoric and deviousness, if necessary.
(Roger, a lawyer, would not have been insulted by my reflections on certain
members of his profession; he doesn't like some of them much himself.)
Completely engaged in their conversation, which was like a tennis match
without rules, balls being lobbed every which way, not often returned,
they were paying attention neither to the news nor anything else, and
did not notice a woman, no longer entirely young but wishing to appear
so, who approached the bar at their left, apparently alone and trying
to order a drink. She had blond hair, bleached and teased, big rhinestone
earrings, and a small, heart-shaped face, heavily made-up. I like painting
but think that canvases are more suitable than faces for the thickly-layered
stuff put on with a palette knife.
The woman was dressed
in a suit of Pepto-Bismol pink, over the front of which paraded something
that looked like a dog embroidered in black yarn. Her shoes were thin-strapped
sandals of patent leather on stiletto heels--the sort of creation that,
when put on a human foot, seems intended to make walking almost impossible,
like the binding of Chinese women's feet. She looked inquiringly, one
might say hopefully, toward the cluster of lawyers at her right, but they
seemed unaware of anything but themselves and she couldn't manage to distract
them. That just illustrated what I'd been thinking about their preoccupation.
She then turned, got the barman's attention, and ordered a martini, which
she proceeded to sip, one elbow leaning on the six inches of bar she had
managed to homestead, her gaze turned outward toward the room and what
it had to offer. I saw that the hind legs of the woolly poodle--that's
what it was--began more or less at the right hem of the fashionably-short
skirt. Its body crossed onto her jacket at an angle, its forepaws on the
bodice, so that its head reached over where a pocket might have been,
all the way to her left shoulder. At its neck was a collar of white yarn,
with rhinestone studs, to which was attached a small leather leash--a
real leash, dangling down the jacket, its other end hooked onto her left
sleeve. She was walking her dog across her suit, in other words. Maybe,
I reflected, instead of going to the art show we should just look at her
and any acquaintances who might join her later, who might afford some
similar sort of visual entertainment.
Her glance, on a
longer leash than the poodle, wandered around the room, pausing here and
there to sniff, as it were, then moving on. Listening idly to the general
chatter around me and sipping my wine, without attempting to follow what
Jennifer and Richard were saying to each other or engage my other companions
in conversation, I could watching the poodle woman as she watched everything
else. Thus I saw her eye alight on Greg. It stayed there.
Greg is a big, beefy
man, with a large head crowned with wavy chestnut hair and a deep, virile
voice. He was wearing Italian tassel loafers and a good-looking brown
tweed suit, somewhat classier than his usual dress at the museum; the
tweed seemed to bring out his masculine strength. Since his divorce, he
hasn't worn a wedding ring. The woman in pink, who herself didn't have
one, may have observed that his finger was bare, though maybe a ring wouldn't
have been much of an impediment anyway. To my mind, he looked like the
intellectual he is. Of course, even if bits of our shop talk had floated
over to her, she couldn't know that he is curator of our Italian and Northern
European collections and has an impressive portfolio of publications.
Still, though her choice showed good taste, I couldn't help supposing
that she undervalued him. Oh well, in brains as in lots of other things,
it takes one to know one. In the meanwhile, no friend had come to join
her; perhaps she had been stood up, or simply had come alone in the hope
of meeting someone.
Greg's gaze,
I could be confident, was not wandering. Badly burned once by the flames
of love, he was anxious not to fall into the bonfire again. I think he
wasn't even aware of her, or of much else, needing instead to empty his
mind for a few moments; good friends are those who let you absent yourself
a while from felicity or other emotion, even in their presence. So the
Pink Lady, as I thought of her, would not find his glance seeking hers;
she would have to act somehow on her own. Without planning it, Elinor's
friend Jennifer Stevenson, who turned out to be a shade too spontaneous,
furnished an opportunity when she got up to order another beer from the
bartender, since the waitress was busy elsewhere. Richard could have done
it for her, but he had just seen someone he knew across the room and had
stepped over to talk to him. So many people were sitting or standing at
the bar that Jennifer needed to squeeze among two or three bodies; she
picked the spot by the woman, who at least wasn't big enough to block
her completely.
As she elbowed her way through, I heard above the din a high-pitched,
rather coy voice, with a local accent we call Yat, attached to the pink-and-poodle-wool
suit. The remark was directed toward Jennifer. "It's awfully crowded here;
I can't find a free table and it's hard to keep a place at this bar."
"Yes, it's packed,"
Jennifer answered. She got the bartender's attention and ordered another
Abita Amber, then, while he drew it, said a few more words to the poodle
woman.
The same yapping
voice, emanating as if from the dog itself, spoke again. "I saw you at
the table, with the others . . . and that handsome man. I mean the one
in the brown tweed suit."
Jennifer must have
been relieved to hear that the particular "handsome man" was not Richard,
to whom she gave an adoring sidelong glance; "Richard is mine," it said.
They exchanged a
few more words before the barman handed Jennifer her beer.
Did I hear correctly
then? As Jennifer was getting out her wallet, it sounded as if the poodle
woman said, "I'd like to meet him."
Jennifer replied,
rather loudly, "You're not with anyone? Why don't you come over to our
table--we've got room enough for someone else on the bench."
She is young; that's
her excuse. Graciously giving up empty chairs is one thing; inviting a
stranger to sit and drink with you so that she can make eyes at someone
in your party is another. Jennifer couldn't know, of course, what complications
would ensue; maybe she wouldn't have seen them as complications, anyhow.
Glass in hand, she came back with the Pink Lady in tow. Just then Richard
returned, with the friend he'd seen, Al somebody. There was pushing of
chairs, followed by squeezing of bodies to let the two new ones into the
company. Brief introductions followed. The woman's name seemed to be Carrie
or Corrie, short for Corinne, I supposed. Presently I discovered that
it was Kori--one of those names with a sound and a spelling suggesting
a commercial product, maybe a hair dye or tonic or laxative for the older
set. Al, the fellow Richard had brought over, cast his line for Kori right
away.
"Do you come here
to the Columns often?" he began.
"Oh, sometimes"
(non-committal); "do you?" (polite in a bored fashion).
"No, I usually go
to the Pontchartrain, or sometimes GB's, because I live nearby, but just
happened to come by this evening and ran into Richard, here."
She was interested
neither in Al and Richard nor those watering places--unless Greg, whose
name she now knew, went there sometimes. Ignoring Al, she turned toward
her left. "I like this place, don't you?" she said to Greg. "But I don't
know GB's; is it nicer?"
Greg showed little
sign of wanting to converse with Kori. I guessed that he had been put
off by the voice, the Pepto-Bismol pink, the makeup, and above all the
poodle, now having to bend at the middle and sit, so to speak, as its
wearer did. Greg wasn't exactly gruff--courtesy was too much ingrained
in him for that--but he gave her very short shrift. "Friends of mine go
there sometimes on Saturdays for mimosas and Bloody Marys--but I've rarely
been there myself."
"Are you in business?"
Kori inquired.
He hesitated a moment,
and again Jennifer helped her out. "He's with the museum--the Orleanian
Institute, you know." (I wondered whether Kori did. know of it) "These
people--Greg, Harriett, and Elinor, I mean--all work there. I'm just a
friend of Elinor's, and Richard, here, he's a broker."
"Oh, I simply adore
modern art!" exclaimed Kori, the same way she might have said at dinner
with a date, "Oh, I just love French fries." Her feathery, mascaraed eyelashes
seemed about to take wing, and her eyes swept over Greg with a suivez-moi
jeune homme look. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, maybe she
thought that what was on her suit was art. She got her art one way, we
at the museum another.
Continued
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