82 Desire

setup.
    The very air smells different. You notice it as you step off the plane—there’s a hint of mildew, heavy with history. Then, if it’s the right season, there’s also jasmine, and sweet olive.
    Urine and vomit as well, along with plenty of Pine-Sol to take the edge off.
    In the bars, a hundred years of cigarette smoke.
    In the streets, frying oysters from restaurant vents.
    Sweat.
    Vodka fumes.
    Pheromones.
    In the spring, the air is more like velvet than silk—luxuriant, but a little smothery. In summer, it lies on the body like three-inch fur. Tangled fur, at that.
    The very name New Orleans conjures up the sins of another century: riverboat gambling, black marketeering, bordello revelry, wicked skulduggery, and relentless scalawaggery.
    Today the city’s gamblers wear oversized T-shirts instead of ruffles, its black marketeers are drug dealers, its prostitutes transvestites and underage addicts, its skulduggery institutionalized.
    But everyone wants in on the scalawaggery.
    The name conjures up Southern graciousness as well. This exists today behind the elegant facades of the French Quarter and the iron fences of the Garden District, yet it is beginning to fade at some of the city’s landmark restaurants. Lately, jeans have been seen amid the dark wood and white linen of old-line eateries; on the streets, sartorial standards are a plain disgrace. Men think nothing of taking off their shirts as if it were the beach—and not only young gay men showing their pecs.
    Tourists urinate on the nineteenth-century town houses.
    Angry residents will stop sometimes to chastise them, but the tourists answer that if the Quarterites don’t like it, they should move to the suburbs.
    The tourists peek through the iron grilles at the lush courtyards (and who can blame them for that?), but they do not draw the line at mixing drinks on the residents’ stoops.
    Gutterpunks are drawn to the Quarter as hippies were drawn to the Haight-Ashbury, yet they will move along if asked. They have chosen lives on the fringe, and they know the consequences of crossing the line.
    It’s the tourists who give lip.
    Ladies who’d call the cops if a stranger touched weary butt to their own immaculate steps will argue that in the Quarter, surely everything is public. They are weekend outlaws, and proud of it.
    Before they go home, they may shed their denim skirts in merry abandon, or they may not—but they will certainly understand, perhaps for a change or even for the first time, what it’s like to want to.
    On weekends, living in the French Quarter can be like camping out in the middle of Disneyland.
    Yet around midnight (if nobody’s driving by playing rap at full volume), mules clip-clop on the streets and ships whistle on the river. You could swear it’s a hundred years earlier, though you know the boats are full of petroleum products and the mules are trudging home after a hard day of hauling tourist buggies.
    At about three or four A.M ., the drunks commence to shouting, and the paper thuds on the balcony. Sometime after, quiet descends.
    Then at eight Monday morning, people open their shutters and greet their neighbors. You hear them up and down the streets: “Good morning, Alice.” “Good morning, Donn.”
    So civilized.
    So very nineteenth century.
    And for five days—until the tourists arrive for the next weekend—the Quarter is the closest thing to a European village this country has to offer.
    Some visitors, usually those who stay more than a weekend, lose not only their reputations and their decent denim skirts, but their hearts—and, ultimately, a good chunk of their cash. They buy property on a whim and repent while they renovate.
    For this reason, Skip Langdon worried about her beloved, Steve Steinman, late of Los Angeles—he’d fallen hard for a little Victorian cottage.
    “Are you sure,” she entreated at first, “that you know what you’re getting into? Can you handle pee-ers on the porch?”
    “Listen to you,” he said. “Don’t you remember? You used to want me to move here.”
    “At the time, I thought you were tougher.”
    “Thanks a lot.”
    All that was months ago. Now he was working on the house, getting it ready to move into. The relationship, which had finally evened out after a few rocky years, was starting to wear as a consequence.
    “Goddammit,” he fumed, “why didn’t you tell me this was a third-world country?”
    “I tried.”
    “In California, when the plumber says