I looked out at the sagging, delapidated Louisiana landscape, the vines covering the telephone wires, the broken-down motels melting into the grass, the rusted fast food stands. Every emblem of modern America looked like a missionary outpost here, a piece of junk left over from a colonization attempt that had failed over and over again. But we were almost into the city proper, and I love the city proper.
She had her brush out of the overnight bag. And she whipped at her hair, her face flushed, the pins flying out as she brushed her hair free. I loved seeing it come down like a shadow enfolding her. I grabbed her and started kissing her again, and this time she backed up, pulling me with her, and it seemed we were circumnavigating the whole car for a few minutes, me kissing her and kissing her, and just eating the inside of her mouth. She kissed like no woman I'd ever kissed. I couldn't figure out exactly what it was. She kissed like she'd just discovered it or something, like she'd fallen from another planet where they never did it, and when she shut her eyes and let me kiss her neck, I had to stop again. 'I feel like I want to tear you to pieces,' I said clenching my teeth, 'I want to just break you into pieces, I want to just get inside.'
'Yes,' she said. But she was trying to button her shirt and her vest. We were lumbering along Tulane Avenue in that silent unreal way limousines travel, like they are tunneling unseen through the outside world. And at Jeff Davis, we turned left, heading for the Quarter more than likely, and I grabbed her again, gauging, well, at least another delicious dozen kisses, and when she pulled away this time, we were in those narrow claustrophobic little streets of row houses, heading towards the heart of the old town.
Chapter Twenty-One
21 -- Elliott
Over the Threshold
When we went into the office of the hotel, she was all lovely with her hair pushed back over her shoulder and the hat askew and her shirt collar undone, but she was trembling so badly she could hardly hold the pen. She wrote Lisa Kelly in a scrawl like an old lady would write it and when I fought with her about who was going to use whose American Express card, she got all flustered and shut up like she wasn't sure what she wanted to happen. I won and they took my American Express card. The place she'd chosen was perfect, a renovated Spanish townhouse about two blocks from Jackson Square, and we had the servants' quarters cottage at back. The purple flagstones were uneven the way they always are in these old New Orleans courtyards and the garden was a thicket of enormous, wet, gleaming, green banana trees and pink oleander and jasmine crawling over the brick walls with a few electric lights here and there like lanterns. The fountain nymph was covered with green moss and the water choked with irises, but I loved it. The thump of a jukebox came from somewhere on the block: 'Beat It' by Michael Jackson, which brought back the real life I'd left in California a little more vividly than anything else around here. And there was a nearby racket of restaurant pots and pans and the smell of coffee. She was shaking even worse when we got to the door, and I just held onto her for a moment, the light rain pelting us, the little yard a kind of symphony of water sounds with the rain on the banana leaves and the roof and the plants, as two of the most beautiful mulatto children I'd ever seen in the whole world put the bags inside. I didn't know whether these kids were girls or boys, and I still don't know.
They were wearing khaki shorts and white T-shirts and they had waxy oily skin and dark liquid eyes like the Hindu princesses in Indian paintings, and they glided almost sleepily into the big white-washed room with one load of bags after another until they had it in a heap. Her luggage was the kind you have when you travel private planes, all matched caramel leather with gold initials on it, and she had about as much as people used to take with them on the grand tour of the Continent in 1888. I gave the kids