Last Exit to Brooklyn and Rechy's City of Night. But then she also loved Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire. 'In other words,' I said, 'books about sexual outlaws, people who are lost.' She nodded, but there was more to it than that. It was a question of energy and style. When she felt bad, she would pick up Last Exit to Brooklyn and she would read in a whisper the 'TraLaLa' story or 'The Queen Is Dead.' She knew the rhythms so well she could practically recite them from memory.
It was the poetry of darkness and she loved it. 'I will tell you,' she said, 'what it is that has made me feel like a freak most of my life, and it wasn't having the orgasm at eight years old or listening furtively and shamefully to other little kids describing spankings or slipping off to San Francisco to be whipped in a candlelighted room. It's that nobody has ever been able to convince me that anything sexual between consenting individuals is wrong. I mean it's like part of my brain is missing. Nothing disgusts me. It all seems innocent, to do with profound sensations, and when people tell me they are offended by things, I just don't know what they mean.' I was engrossed. In the light of the bar she looked exotic, her face all angles, her voice low and natural, and it was like drinking water to listen to her. Before we left New Orleans, she said, we had to make the trans-sexual shows on Bourbon, the real raunchy ones with the female impersonators who are actually taking hormone shots and getting operations to turn them into women. She loved these shows. 'You must be kidding,' I said. 'I wouldn't get caught in those joints.' 'What are you talking about?' she said. She got furious. 'These people are putting their sexual principles on the line, they're acting out their fantasies. They are willing to be freaks.' 'Yes, but those are dives, tourist joints.
How far from the elegance of The Club can you get?' 'Doesn't make any difference,' she said, 'Elegance is just a form of control. I like those joints. I feel like a goddamned female impersonator and I like to watch them.' Her whole manner changed when she said this, and she started trembling a little and so I said, well, of course, if she wanted to see them. 'I'm confused,' I said. My tongue was getting thick. I had drunk two Heinekens since we came into the bar. 'You're writing the ticket. Why don't you just say where we're going?' 'Because I just did. And you said, 'You gotta be kidding,' and besides I do not just want to tell you what to do, and I am not writing a scenario!' 'Let's get out of here,' I said. We cut out again, and hung around the gate to the Lafayette Cemetery across the street for about twenty minutes, talking about whether or not we should climb over the wall and walk through the graves. I love these above-ground graves with their Grecian pediments and columns, and broken-down doors and rusted coffins.
I had half a mind to climb the fence. But then we might get arrested. We decided it was a good time to go all through the Garden District instead of doing that. And so we wove back and forth from Saint Charles to Magazine on the various streets, here and there to look at a particular antebellum house, white columns in the moonlight, wrought iron railings, old oaks so big around I couldn't span them with my arms. There is maybe no neighborhood on earth quite like this, these giant sleepy houses, these relics of a former time, all spruce and serene behind their immaculate gardens, here and there the hum of an automatic sprinkler, the faint shimmer of the spray, in the dense and leafy dark. The sidewalks alone are beautiful, made up as they are of long stretches of herringbone brick, and purple flagstone, patches of cement broken into little hills over the roots of the giant trees. She had favourite houses, houses she used to come to look at when she lived here in the apartment and did nothing but read and walk; and we went visiting them now.
We found two houses with For Sale signs on the fences, and one house in particular entranced us, a tall narrow Greek Revival house