A note before we begin. After more than a year of Substack of writings’ about design, travel, and the work of building a life I love, this is the first piece of fiction I have ever published here. I had no plans to write fiction. Then I went to a party in the French Quarter on the last night of Jazz Fest, and a story arrived that wouldn't let me write anything else until I had written it down. Here it is, in two parts. If fiction isn't your thing, the regular posts will be back next week. If it is, I hope you enjoy the visit.
We almost didn’t go.
It was the last night of Jazz Fest, and we were tired in the particular way you only get tired in New Orleans in May, when the sun has been on you all day, and the bourbon has been in you all evening, and your feet have a long memory of brass bands and aging rockers. Camila was already on the bed, shoes off, halfway through the argument she makes when she’s trying to talk herself into staying home. We don’t really know them. We’ll be the only ones nobody knows. The baby might need a sitter tomorrow; we should save our energy. I stood in front of the mirror and put on my necklace anyway. I had a feeling about the night ahead that I couldn’t have explained, even if she had asked me.
The address was a house in the Quarter with a wall instead of a front yard, on one of the more residential blocks where not many tourists come looking. I was excited to get a glimpse behind one of these famous walls that undoubtedly held charming courtyards where sinister or romantic history was made. We arrived a little before eight. The Jazz Fest revelers were still trickling back from the fairgrounds, or still in their own showers washing off a day of warm beer and porta-potty regret. The Saturday night version of the Quarter was holding its breath in that brief window before it started to heat up, the bars not yet loud, the streets not yet full, the city quietly limbering up for the long part of its evening. We even found a parking spot, only two blocks away on Rampart, which Camila said was a sign. (Camila, who moved here from Miami three years ago and is still calibrating, treats parking the way the rest of us treat omens. The good, the unbelievable, and the inconvenient. Three years in, she still expectantly hopes for the good or the unbelievable and grudgingly accepts the inconvenient.)
We’d been told to look for a black iron door in a stretch of brick that didn’t advertise itself, and we found it the way you find anything in the Quarter, which is by walking past it twice and then noticing it had been there the whole time. The wall was both old and freshly painted, a sign that the house was on the road to a painstaking and probably pricey recovery. Along the top, set into the mortar, were the broken-off bottoms of glass bottles, all of them the same sparkling green, looking like broken teeth. People still do that here. Intruders can be a problem in the Quarter, and pigeons are also unwelcome; you can solve both at the same time if you don’t mind your wall looking a little dangerous on top.
When we pushed the door open, a small breath of cold came out to meet us. New Orleans can be unpredictable this time of year as we work our way toward the inevitable steamy summer, especially when the moon is full. I pulled my wrap a little closer, wondering why the cold seemed to be seeping out of the old brick. The smell of jasmine arrived a half-second later, and underneath it the heavier perfume of magnolia from somewhere I couldn’t yet see, fragrant comfort reminding me that I really did live in New Orleans now.
And then the courtyard.
I have lived a little over half a life and seen a lot of courtyards, and I will tell you that some places are good at first impressions and some places are good once upon a second look, and the truly enchanting ones are good at both. This one was good at both. The walls felt like they guarded all the stories (and secrets) of the family who had lived here for almost two centuries. The floor was worn, irregular flagstone that had been smoothed by carriages and feet you’ll never know the names of. There was a fountain off to one side of the courtyard, closer to the back wall than to the middle, and it was a true New Orleans relic: a big black cauldron of a basin, dark and heavy cast iron in a greenish black patina, with decorative cherubs spitting water from their mouths into the bowl below. Lily pads bloomed on the surface. On a hot summer day, I might be tempted to take a quick dip; the water lent an air of cool calm.
I found the source of the magnolia scent in the form of branches drooping over the wall from the neighbor’s yard, heavy and white. There was an old fig tree that someone had been letting go a little wild on purpose. A lemon tree in an oversized decorative planter sat in an awkward spot, probably to catch as much sunlight as possible.
We were early, it turned out. Sound was not coming from the courtyard but from inside the house, where a kitchen window glowed amber, and a few other early arrivals had gathered around the island, talking about the music that day, half of them still in their festival clothes. A few more house guests were upstairs, showering off the dust and the sun; you could hear the pipes working. Somebody had opened a first bottle of something white and was pouring slowly, the start of a long evening when there is no rush at all.
Aimee saw us before we saw her. Elle. Camila. Get in here. She came around the island with the easy welcome of a woman who has been throwing parties since she could walk. She was tall and slim in a long-lined way, with light brown hair worn in a long pixie that she kept tucked behind her ears, she was somewhere in her late fifties on paper but looking ten years younger than that, not in any worked-on or lucky way, but because she had been paying attention to what works for her since she was old enough to make her own decisions, and had never been distracted by what works for anyone else. She was a therapist by profession, which I had only registered properly the second time I met her, when I understood that she was more reserved out of interest rather than shyness. She is also, I learned as time went on, an excellent seamstress and a phenomenal cook. Not in a Betty Crocker kind of way, not even a Martha Stewart kind of way, in a classic talent kind of way that I thoroughly admire. The dress she had made for our children’s wedding could have been a Dior original, and I had said so at the time, and she had laughed and changed the subject. That was Aimee. Real talent and quiet about it.
I am terrible with names; I always have been. The synapse that connects a face to a syllable was apparently not included in my original wiring, but I knew Aimee by her laugh (although at this point, I also actually knew her name), low and surprised and warm, and I had filed her under that laugh ever since. Her husband Benoit was at the stove behind her, prodding something in a heavy pot. He had grown up in Louisiana and then left for the life of a music-loving city lawyer (his forever file category), and he had the relaxed authority of a man who had recently decided to come back home and was not going to waste a minute of it.
The introductions began. There was a couple from Napa, fresh-faced and lit up from their first Jazz Fest, who told us about their vineyard and their travels with the eager generosity of people who love meeting other people. We have all this solitude up there, and we just want to fill it with friends, the woman said, and I believed her. I would not remember either of their names by morning, but I would remember their unified enthusiasm, her hand on her husband’s back the whole time she spoke.
Next to them was a tall gentleman who wore his success lightly; his linen sleeves were perfectly tailored yet pushed back to the elbows as if he were always ready to help or offer a handshake. He listened more than he talked. I noticed the way he asked Camila about Miami as if he needed to know in the same brief beat. I saw his toenails were painted baby blue as he shifted his fabulous leather sandals, and I instantly wanted to know what he had to say about anything. His wife was beside him in bright red reading glasses pushed up into her silver hair and forgotten there for what I suspected would be the entire evening, and when she leaned in to tell us a story, she put her hand on my forearm in a way that said we are old friends now, you and I, and the conversation that follows is going to be worth your while.
It was. She was telling us how badly she wanted a grandchild. Her son had just gotten married, she said, and she was almost there; she could feel it. My father told me when I was twenty-two, she said, leaning closer. He said, Margaret, I don’t care if it’s legitimate or illegitimate, I want a grandchild. Get busy. She laughed. I thought he was a monster. Now I get it.
Camila, who is fifty-nine and has just become a grandmother for the first time, laughed so hard she had to put her glass down.
The party found its second gear. New Orleans parties always do, without anyone announcing it. The upstairs guests came down with damp hair and clean shirts. A man with a guitar appeared and then disappeared again without playing it, which I took to be a good sign. Somebody put on Professor Longhair quietly enough that you had to want to hear it, and the conversations rearranged themselves the way conversations do when a piano comes into the room.
I drifted with Camila through the kitchen and out into the front parlor, which is what they would have called it once and what I will call it now because the room asked me to. There was a man in the middle of it who had clearly been brought along to be the entertainment, though he didn’t seem to think of himself that way. He was telling a story with both hands. The hands were doing most of the work. He had wild brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses that were doing their best Clark Kent, and he was wearing, at a French Quarter party in May, Bermuda shorts and a plaid shirt the color of a pumpkin patch in October, not to be outdone by his pulled-all-the-way-up tube socks that were dingy on the bottom from wearing his Wellies all day at the fest. He looked like a college professor who had agreed to come along on the condition he could wear what he wanted, and he was talking like a man trying out new material on an audience he could afford to lose. I was instantly certain he was a screenwriter from somewhere out west, road-testing a story to see how it played in a room.
The story was about a stepfather, a poker game, a diamond the size of a quail’s egg, and the diamond’s mysterious disappearance on a foggy night in 1922. Or 1924. Or somewhere in there. Nobody is sure when, exactly, he said, but they are sure it was a great big stone, and they are sure it vanished, and they are sure that whoever has it now better not be wearing it where Lucinda can see.
Laughter from the parlor. Family lore, somebody whispered to Camila by way of context, and Camila nodded the way you nod when you are filing something away for later. I took it for what it was, the kind of charming inheritance every old Southern family seems to keep on a shelf, half-true and well-told and pulled down for guests when the wine got going. I would have to ask Aimee about it sometime. I made a note. I would not, of course, ask Aimee about it sometime. I never remember to ask anyone about anything when the moment comes. But I thought I would.
We worked our way back toward the courtyard, which had been quietly filling up while we weren’t looking. The string lights had come on in the trees without ceremony. There was a card table set up in one corner with a man behind it shucking oysters, and another man tending a small grill against the brick wall where a few oysters were beginning to roast in their own juices. The shucker was young and serious about a craft he had decided belonged to him. The man at the grill was older, in a wide-brimmed canvas hat, and looked dressed for a hike rather than a French Quarter party, with a weathered face that took its color from a lot of mornings on the river. He was talking to a boy of about ten who was helping him, or trying to, and the boy was answering him in French.
That’s Etienne, Aimee said, materializing at my elbow with a fresh glass for me and another for Camila. His son. He goes to the bilingual school. The dad and I… she made a small noncommittal gesture that I read as “long story”, fond of him, nothing for you to think more about. We go back. He lives in one of the Steamboat Houses, can you believe it? Down in Holy Cross, on the levee. Those crazy old Victorian things built by a riverboat captain a hundred years ago. The first floors are tile, so you can hose them out after a flood. He’s been there since after Katrina. She made another small gesture, this one of admiration. He raises that boy alone, and he raises him beautifully.
I made a mental note to remember the man in the hiking hat by his Steamboat House, which is a much sturdier hook than a name. (I never did remember his name. I am not sure he gave it.) He noticed Aimee from across the courtyard and lifted his shucking knife in a small salute, which she returned with the corner of her mouth, and the moment passed without comment.
By the time the courtyard was full, it was full in the New Orleans way, which is to say no one was performing being at a party, they had simply settled into the evening like the evening was a chair. The Napa couple had found someone from Connecticut and were comparing notes on something agricultural. The man with the baby blue toenails had attached himself loosely to a circle that included a woman in a linen jumpsuit and a lawyer telling a story I could not hear but could see was going well. Margaret in the red reading glasses, was somewhere in the thick of it, and I could tell she was somewhere in the thick of it because every minute or so a small wave of laughter rolled through that part of the courtyard, and Margaret was the kind of woman who left small waves of laughter behind her like a wake.
Camila peeled off toward the kitchen for more wine. I want to ask Benoit what we’re drinking, she said, which was Camila for I want to talk to Benoit, whom I have decided I like.
I let her go. I had spotted a step.
My peculiar pleasure is finding the right step at a party. This was a low one, off to one side of the gallery, half in shadow and half in lamplight, with a good view of the courtyard and just enough wall behind it to lean against if I wanted to. Nobody else had claimed it. I sat. I did what I do, which is the thing I have done at parties since I was a girl who learned early that watching is its own form of belonging. I watched.
It was a good crowd to watch. The young people were in one corner, the recently engaged and the recently married and the recently first-jobbed, leaning into each other with the urgent confidence of people who have not yet been disappointed by anything important. The middle generation had spread itself across the gallery and the fig tree and the corners of the courtyard, deep in the conversations middle generations have when they are old enough to know what they think and young enough to still be persuaded.
The older guests, my generation, had divided themselves into two clusters. One had collected near the kitchen door, deep into the topic of aging parents. A cane, a fall, a brother who wasn’t pulling his weight on the assisted-living question. Women in their fifties trading notes about each other’s mothers and fathers, who is still here and how, and for how much longer. (My own parents had spared me this conversation entirely by Swedish-Death-Cleaning their way out of life before the term existed, leaving me with very little to clean up and a great deal of guilty gratitude when I listen to my friends compare notes.) The other cluster had taken up residence near the fig tree and was deep in something else: a frank, low-voiced conference about hormones and GLP-1s, the conversation women in their fifties are having at every party I go to now and have come to enjoy in the way you enjoy anything people are finally allowed to talk about out loud.
I had been keeping a loose eye out for Lucinda. I had met her several times by now, through Aimee, and I had liked her every time. She was a former lawyer who had done away with the lawyer thing without doing away with any of its sharpness, and she had the kind of dry wit that lands a half-second after she’s already moved on, so you find yourself laughing at the place where she used to be. She was shorter than her sister and built differently, more athletically, the kind of woman whose body announces a long history with running or rowing or whatever she had decided suited her, and she wore her brown hair in a straight no-nonsense bob that she had clearly worn for years and would clearly wear forever, the kind of cut that didn’t belong to a city or a decade but just to her. Same age-resistance as Aimee, same not-a-day-over-fifty look, but where Aimee’s beauty was long-lined and warm, Lucinda’s was compact and faintly impatient, the look of a woman who had things to do. She and Hank had only just sold the Manhattan apartment a few months back, choosing the Quarter house full-time at last, and the renovation was still mid-progress: paint cans tucked behind doors, a side parlor that wouldn’t have its furniture for another month, the smell of fresh plaster somewhere in the walls. But Lucinda was the kind of woman who could throw a Jazz Fest party in a half-finished house and make it feel like the house had wanted it that way. She was beautifully turned out tonight, not hostess-dressed, but Lucinda-dressed, which is a different thing. She was weaving through her party with a platter and what appeared to be a remark for everyone she passed. I admired her, frankly. I admired her sister, too. The two of them had welcomed Camila and me into their family the moment our daughter married into theirs, and two years on, they were still doing it without making it look like work.
I caught sight of her then, coming out of the kitchen with a platter and crossing the courtyard at a slight angle, weaving through her guests with the easy distractedness of a hostess who had done this before. From the opposite direction, from the gallery side, came her husband, Hank. I had met Hank a few times at family things, at Aimee and Benoit’s house uptown, mostly, and we had exchanged the kind of warm but unhurried small talk that you exchange with the husband of a woman you know better than you know him, fond, a little incomplete, building toward something that would happen eventually if we kept circling each other at family weddings and christenings and Sunday lunches. He had a calm face that came from somewhere true, and the kind of build you only get from having paid attention to it over time. He and Lucinda were the same height, both fit and compact, and they moved through the courtyard with the matched-step ease of two people who had been crossing rooms together for years. They were not converging on purpose. They were just both moving through, on their separate hostly errands, and they happened to cross paths in the middle of the courtyard a few feet in front of where I was sitting.
They did not see me. I was on my step in the shadow, and they were in the lamplight, focused on each other without trying.
He said something I couldn’t hear. She said something back. It was a half-sentence each; the shorthand long marriages develop when a full sentence would be wasteful. He nodded once. She nodded once. And then they kissed, not a peck, not a public kiss, but the longer kiss that is not for show. The kiss that is an agreement and a reminder, I love you, I see you, we’ll find each other later, I’ve got my half. They were the same height, and so they met in the middle, eye to eye, no leaning. It lasted maybe four seconds. Then they parted, and she went on with her platter, and he went on toward the gallery, and neither of them looked back.
I sat very still on my step. It had warmed me to the bones, the way some things will, and I did not want to move yet.
That was when I noticed them, as if the love and warmth in the air had beckoned them into view.
They were standing by the fountain.
I had been wanting to look at the lily pads up close all evening, and I used that as my reason to get up and drift over. The fountain corner was the quiet edge of the courtyard. The string lights had concentrated themselves where the people were, around the gallery, the kitchen door, and the oyster station, and the fountain stood a little outside that warm, bright weather, lit more by the moon than by anything else. The young couple was the only company there.
She had her hand resting on the rim of the fountain when I came up, resting there as if she had done it a thousand times and always found comfort in the calm of the water and cool iron of the massive black basin. He was a half-step behind her shoulder, listening to her say something I didn’t catch, with that small tilt of the head a man gives a woman he loves. They turned together as I approached, and they did not seem startled to see me. They made room for me at the fountain.
Forgive me, I said. I just wanted to see the lily pads. I’ll go right back to my watching post.
Stay, she said, and laughed. Watching posts get lonely.
I liked her at once. She had a pretty, unfussy way about her. Her dark hair was pinned up, and she was wearing a long, pale dress that wasn’t anything I’d seen at the party so far, but didn’t strike me as out of place either, because nothing strikes you as out of place in the Quarter. The young man beside her had dark hair and dark eyes and the quiet courtesy of someone who had been raised by people who cared about that sort of thing, the kind of young man who would have stood when a woman entered a room and would not have made anything of it. He inclined his head when I introduced myself. They introduced themselves. I lost both their names within ten seconds and filed them instead by what I could hold onto: the woman’s hand on the fountain, the man’s small nod.
We talked. A conversation parties give you when they’re going to give you anything good, easy, unhurried, the kind that makes you wonder afterward what you talked about for so long. They asked where I was from. I told them I’d come up from the suburbs with my partner, who was in the kitchen now arguing about a Sancerre, and that we were here because my daughter had married into the family. They were charmed by that. Married into which side? she asked, and I said the uptown side, Aimee’s, and they nodded as if the geography meant something to them. They asked about the baby. I told them about the baby. The young woman’s face did the small soft thing women’s faces do when you tell them about a five-week-old, and the young man watched her face do it, and I caught the look between them and thought, those two want children of their own, and tucked the observation away.
I asked how they knew the family. Oh, she said, with the quick lightness people use when an answer is going to be vaguer than the question deserves, we’ve been around forever. Our families are old neighbors. He smiled at that. They didn’t elaborate. Neither did I. At parties, everyone has a slightly evasive answer to that question, and it would have been rude to press. It was obvious from the conversation that they knew all of the latest family updates as well as the old Lafont family lore, having remarked on the diamond storytelling in the parlor with a twinkle.
I asked how they were finding the house since the renovation. We knew it before, she said. It’s the same house, really. Lucinda has a good eye. She kept the bones. She moved her hand a small fraction along the fountain’s rim as she said it, not quite a stroke, more an acknowledgment, the way you’d touch the shoulder of a horse you’d known a long time. The metal was wet from the fountain’s spray and dark in the moonlight. She did not take her hand off it.
I caught Camila glancing over from the kitchen window, two glasses now in her hands, taking stock of where I was. She saw me by the fountain in conversation, and she lifted one of the glasses in a small I’ll be right there salute, and then she got pulled back into something Benoit was saying and was gone again. I waved a small take your time in return.
The young man asked about my work. I told him I was a writer, and he said of course you are, with the gentle confidence of someone who has already decided about you and is pleased to be right. I asked what he did. He glanced at her, the way couples glance when one has the better answer, and she said we were going to travel, and laughed, and didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t either. They had the easy incompleteness of two people who had been in the middle of a plan together for a while.
We talked about the moon. We talked about the music that day at the fairgrounds, which they said they had heard from the river, the wind carries it sometimes, when it’s in the mood, and I thought what a lovely New Orleans thing to say, about the wind, about the river, about music traveling. We talked about Lucinda and Hank, whom I had just watched cross paths in the courtyard, and the young woman listened as I described the kiss with a face I couldn’t quite read, fond and far away at once, the way a person looks at a memory they were not party to but somehow recognize.
I lost track of how long we talked. I was told later that twenty minutes is not an unreasonable amount of time for a good party conversation. It felt like ten. It felt like an hour.
From the parlor came a sudden swell of laughter, a crowd letting out a breath when a storyteller finally landed his punchline. The pumpkin-plaid man had gotten somewhere with his sequel to the diamond story. The whole parlor was laughing, and a few people in the courtyard were turning their heads toward the open doorway to find out why. I turned my head too, instinctively, and was about to say to the young couple. Did you hear the diamond story earlier? Do you think it is true? When I turned back, the space by the fountain was empty.
I looked across the courtyard. I looked toward the gallery. I looked toward the kitchen door. There was no one in a long pale dress anywhere. There was no one with dark eyes who had given me a small nod.
I told myself they had drifted off to refresh their drinks. People drift at parties.
My own hand had come to rest on the rim of the fountain where hers had been. The metal was cold under my palm in a way I could not quite explain, colder than the water it was holding, colder than the May night around it, the same cold that I felt waft toward me when we walked through the courtyard door. I lifted my hand off and rubbed it absently against my skirt.
The moon had moved a little. The party went on around me. I went to find Camila.
If you’re anything like me and prefer to binge rather than wait a week for the next episode… I understand completely.
Part 2 will be here next Sunday, May 17.
But if you’d rather not wait, just comment “binge” (or tell me you’re impatient, I won’t judge), and I’ll send you the full story to read now.
“binge”