Wish You Were Here

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My jealousy really knows no boundaries. When you spoke, that Tuesday afternoon, of the saxophonist on Bourbon Street, I felt old and unwanted. It’s like that with everything you admire or find beauty in — the museums and gardens, the artists who move you, the music you love. When you speak of these things, when your eyes glitter like a memory of the future, I am reminded of my own ugliness, my lack of grace. It is when you are the most beautiful that I hate you. I think you have always known this about me, but it confuses and hurts you.

I am standing in an anonymous garden, admiring a tree of excruciating beauty: the smooth trunk is thick and majestic, like a marble column; dancing branches stretch out to pierce the grey sky. A low branch hangs near me, a single drop of dew collecting on the end of a twig, and in the depths that tiny pearl of water my reflection is formed, unfolds, and grows into sharp clarity. A slight breeze shakes the drop almost imperceptibly, dissolving my image and replacing it with Annie’s. I turn around and there she is, sneering at me. “I used to admire you,” she says. I back up against the tree, seeking reassurance in the hardness of its trunk. “I used to love you,” she says, and opens an umbrella. The branches of the tree squirm like snakes, and twist towards me, gripping me against the trunk. I can’t move, I can hardly breathe. There is thunder, and the heavy rains come flooding down. Annie sadly informs me: “You are the enemy of life.” I open my mouth to protest, but I am choked by the rain. Annie laughs contemptuously, walks into the rain and is gone. As I struggle to free myself from the tree, the drops of rain become hard and cold as ice, and I realize in horror that it is not water but broken glass falling from the sky. My body is lacerated and bleeding, my skin hangs in strips. “Annie!” I scream. “There’s been a terrible misunderstanding!” My mouth fills with glass and blood, and gasping, I sat up in bed, sweating. Annie was sleeping peacefully beside me, smiling.

I never had an interest in New Orleans. I already knew that the city had died long ago; it was Annie’s desire that brought us here. I did not, as Annie did, try to fill myself with the pale ghost of this city. I did not try to package it, wrap it up to take home. I took no pictures, bought no postcards or souvenirs. And yet, it seems to me that the city has already claimed me. I know the narrow sad streets that sprawl with the drunken memories of better years like I know the twisted circuitry of my soul. Annie, with her camera and umbrella, remains a tourist, a visitor. I carry no umbrella, and I am already filled to the head with the heavy rain of New Orleans.

The jazz was old and stale; not even you could pretend to enjoy it. I think by then you had finally realized what was meant by “a time to bury the old dead.” Whatever bonded us died long ago. Most of me died with it, but somehow enough of you survived to pose by the bar, flirt with the young man with long blond hair. I read your soul in the movements of your delicate shoulders, and found nothing. Perhaps I was mistaken after all; perhaps there is nothing that separates you from other women: the part of you that remains captures my desire but not my love. The ghost of a memory, like the pain an amputee feels in his missing limb.

I got your postcard today. Thanks. I liked the picture of the San Francisco bay. You told me it was sunny and warm there. You wrote “Wish you were here,” and signed your name. I think of you often, and perhaps someday I'll write you. Maybe I will tell you something new about New Orleans, something you must have overlooked in your guidebooks and brochures and pictures and maps.

The city, as you know, lies just above sea level. But did you know that this intimacy with the sea prohibits the digging of graves? Yes: they would fill up with seawater — the dead would float, rise through the grass and mud, and bones would wash out into the streets. The dead are therefore laid to rest in dry crypts above ground. But even so, there are heavy rains, and the gravekeepers must exercise constant vigilance to protect the coffins from flooding. In this city, even the dead are in danger of drowning.