with the door on the left side and two french windows on the front porch. It had been painted a deep rose colour with white trim, and now the paint was peeling softly all over it except where it was covered in vines. It had Corinthian columns and long front steps, and a string of old magnolia trees inside the fence. There was a side garden behind a brick wall that we couldn't see. We stayed a long time, leaning on the gate and kissing each other, and not saying anything until I said we should buy the house.
We would live there happily ever after and we would travel all over the world together and we would come home to our house. It was big enough to have wild parties and houseguests and a darkroom and sitdown dinners for both our families from California. 'And when we get bored with New Orleans,' I said, 'we'll fly to New York for a couple of weeks or down to The Club.' She looked irresistible, smiling up at me in the half dark, her arm wound around my neck. 'Remember, this is our house,' I said. 'Of course we can't live in it for two years, until my contract's up at The Club. But I don't see why we don't make the down payment now.' 'You're not like anybody else I ever knew,' she said. We started walking again, kissing in a soft, dreamy, drunken way without urgency; we would walk a few steps, kiss, lean against one of the trees. I messed up her hair hopelessly. She didn't have any more lipstick on, and I could reach under her dress very quickly before she had a chance to stop me and feel the smooth cotton of her panties between her legs, wet and hot and I wanted to fuck her right where we were.
Finally we managed to pull ourselves across Jackson Avenue and we wandered into the Pontchartrain Hotel, where the bar was still open too, and we had some more drinks, and when we came out we figured everything from then on was rather ugly and seedy so we took a cab back downtown. I was feeling manic, like this night was momentous, and every time I felt it I would grab her and kiss her again.
Those horrible joints on Bourbon were closed already, thank God.
It was three o'clock and we went into some comfortable enough place with a couple of gas lamps and several square wooden tables and we got into our first argument. I knew I was drunk. I should have shut up, but it was over a movie called Pretty Baby, all about the old Storyville red light district on New Orleans, directed by Louis Malle. I hated it and she said it was a great film. It had Brooke Shields as the little-girl whore in it and Keith Carradine as the photographer Belloc and Susan Sarandon as Brooke's mother and I thought it was worse than a flop.
'Don't call me an idiot just because I like a movie you don't understand,' she was saying, and I was stammering, trying to explain that I didn't mean she was an idiot. She said that I said that anybody who liked a piece of garbage like that was an idiot. Did I say that? I had another Scotch and water, and I knew what I was saying was brilliant, about how that whole movie was a lie, and nothing in it had any substance, but when she started to talk it was sexual outlaws again, that the movie had been about these women prostitutes and the way that they went on living and loving and experiencing day-to-day life though they were outcasts. It was all about flowers blooming in cracks; it was about life being unable to crush out life. And I started to understand everything she was saying.
She knew how Belloc the photographer felt, he was in love with the little-girl prostitute (this is the Keith Carradine character in love with the Brooke Shields character) and how he got left by everybody in the end, but the best scene was when the whore played by Susan Sarandon was nursing the baby in the whorehouse kitchen. She was saying how you cannot just make people shut up and die because they are sexual outlaws, that you wouldn't know now that that was what The Club was all about because all you saw was rich people sitting around the pools and