about her one big side trip, this plantation house out in the country that she went in by herself when she rented a car and drove to Saint Jacques Parish alone not knowing how she had managed to do it. She just wanted to see the old ruined house and there was nobody to go with so she went by herself. She talked about this powerless feeling she'd always had, even in California where she grew up, that she couldn't do anything unless there was somebody with her, and how this was one city where for some reason she didn't have it. She did things by herself.
I wondered if the noisiness of the dining room wasn't helping both of us. She was beautifully animated and her neck and her hands were extraordinarily graceful and the dress made all these shadows in the right places in the glare of the lights. And then came the barbecue shrimp, which was nothing short of fantastic, and she started in at once. I don't think I could love a woman that couldn't eat this barbecue shrimp. First of all the dish isn't barbecued at all. It's a mess of giant whole shrimp, with their heads on, baked in the oven in a deep dish of peppery marinade. They bring it to the table just like that and you tear off the heads of the shrimp and peel them and eat them with your fingers. It turns you into a gourmet, then a gourmand, and then a barbarian. You can enjoy it with white wine or red, it's so peppery, but the best way is with beer, she agreed with me, and we had three more Heinekens each and dipped the french bread in the marinade and cleaned up both the dishes when we were finished. I wanted some more. 'I'm really starving,' I said.
'I haven't had anything but slop since I went to prison. I saw what the members were eating. Why do you have to feed the slaves such slop?' She laughed out loud. 'To keep your mind focused on sex,' she said. 'Sex has got to be the only pleasure you have. We can't have you looking forward to dinner, you know, when you're supposed to be making love to a new member in Bungalow One. And don't call it prison. It's supposed to be heaven.' 'Or hell anyway,' I said laughing. 'I've always wondered how we masochists that managed to get saved would ever explain to the angels that we would rather be tormented by a couple of devils, you know, I mean, if it's supposed to be heaven and there are no devils, then it's really going to be hell.' That really broke her up. Next best thing to making a woman come is making her laugh. I ordered another dish of shrimp and we both dug into it. And by this time the dining room was thinning out. In fact, we were closing down Manale's and I was doing all the talking about photographing New Orleans and the way it should and shouldn't be done, and then she started asking me how I got into photography, when I had the Ph.D. in English and what they had to do with each other, the Ph.D. and photography. Nothing, I said, I just stayed in school as long as I could, really got a gentleman's education, read all the great books three times. It was photography that I worked at, that I did well, that I liked.
We had two cups of coffee before we left and then we went outside and started walking down Napoleon Avenue towards Saint Charles. It was just about a perfect New Orleans night, not hot at all, and no wind, just the air almost inviting you to breathe it. I said again there was no city in the world like this for walking. When you try to walk in Port au Prince you get stuck in the mud, and the sidewalks are no good and the kids won't leave you alone, you have to pay one of them to keep the others off; and in Cairo you get sand in your hair and in your eyes. And in New York it's usually too hot or too cold or you get mugged.
And in Rome you get almost run over at every intersection. San Francisco's too hilly to walk anywhere except Market Street; the flat part of Berkeley is too ugly. London is too cold, and despite what