by Julia Reed
Stuff, Sweet Stuff
About three weeks before my now ex-husband and I were slated to close on our New Orleans house, I thought it might be a good idea to take a gander inside our storage unit—the one we’d rented nine years earlier, the one where we’d stashed a ton of stuff while we endured the tortuous renovation of the Greek Revival pile we were selling, the one I figured must still be chock-full because otherwise, why had we been paying for it once a month every month for all that time? It was not full, not even close. Instead, it contained: six boxes of birds’ nests, two carrying cases of cassette tapes, a broken vase, four boxes of magazines, and, most thrillingly, a Carolina Herrera cocktail dress still inside the shipping carton from my former Manhattan drycleaner Madame Paulette.
Looking at all that space, my first thought was, naturally, “You idiot.” And then there was the slightly unsettling time capsule nature of things. The mix-tapes I couldn’t bear to give up had been rendered obsolete by my iPod Nano (invented in 2005). The magazines (House & Garden, Southern Accents, Vogue Living, Domino) that had served as inspiration for so much of the house’s décor were no longer in print. The dress, a thing of beauty adorned with black feathers, had last graced my body ten years earlier, at my rehearsal dinner. But as interesting (and, in the case of the magazines, bittersweet) as the discoveries may have been, my main emotion was relief. Though I’d secured a rather vast temporary apartment from which to ponder my next move, I knew I would still need that mostly empty unit. For one thing, I’d already managed to collect a great many more birds’ nests.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned: Houses and apartments come and go, but your stuff is, well, your stuff. For example, some of the House & Gardens in the box date from 1980, the year I had my first solo apartment, near Washington’s Dupont Circle. Since then, I’ve lived in at least eight more places, all influenced at least a little bit by the stacks of magazines I move from place to place, and by the ever-increasing amounts of possessions, from books to birds’ nests, I’ve acquired.
Lots of words have been written about home being where your heart, your love, your dog, your parakeet, whatever, is. I get it—bricks and mortar don’t make a home and all that jazz (though if the Waterworks Empire tub I’m leaving behind in my bathroom counts as bricks and mortar, then it was well worth the investment). For me, home is where you find the touchstones of your life: the yellow and white “wedding” china that was a gift from my grandfather prior to nuptials that never happened; the John Alexander portrait of my noble cat Sam (and his ashes that are somewhere in the armoire that holds the sheets); the giant tortoiseshell I smuggled out of Grenada during a hilariously hellish cruise with my dear departed cousin Frances and our grandfather. And then there are the nests: the nest of the weaverbird I smuggled out of Tanzania much to my mother’s profound horror (and fear—she refused to come anywhere near me at customs in Atlanta), the rare Carolina warbler nest my friend Bobby Harling’s sweet father found for me still attached to the branch. I have an odd connection to these nests (especially since messing with them as a child earned me a bout with histoplasmosis). They are beautiful and heroic (I mean talk about daunting construction problems) and I’m sure a shrink could make much of their symbolism regarding my own nesting needs. But I’m actually a bit of a vagabond—I just need to know I can take my nests with me when I go.
And that’s the thing about touchstones: unlike a house, you can take them with you. After all, generations of Southerners have made a semiprofession out of toting around and lavishly tending to family heirlooms and prized possessions—though that’s not exactly what I have in mind. The only family portrait I have is of a relative so stern and scary no one else would take her, and while (note to my mother) I am wildly grateful for the generous amounts of silver sent my way, I am even more crazy about the handsome bronze bear that once sat on my grandmother’s back hall telephone table and the countless porcelain ashtrays where she rested her steady stream of Pall Malls. Recently I came across my great-grandfather’s caramel leather suitcase, the back of which I used as a headboard of sorts while lying in my grandmother’s luggage room, reading books deemed unsuitable for my age. A garret off the tiny but much-trafficked bar, the luggage room also afforded frequent visits to the mini fridge where I gorged myself on martini garnishes and monitored the ever diminishing contents of the label-less vodka bottle refilled by the houseman, Louis King, every morning. Proust had his madeleines—pimento stuffed olives and cocktail onions will forever be my own.
If I seriously miss any house at hall, it would have to be my grandmother’s, with its vast basement and warm laundry smell, the formica kitchen table where Louis taught me five-card stud, the elevator where Frances and I hid out and smoked. I will miss the house we sold too, of course. It was lovely and light-filled and possessed of its own memories and life-altering events, the first couple of years of which I put down in a book. But the thing about doing that, about writing a fairly personal book about your house and the road that led to acquiring it, means that everyone who read it thinks it’s their business when you sell it. “Why?” was the chorus as soon as we’d hung out the sign.
The most tempting rejoinder was, of course, “None ya” but there are plenty of reasons. There was the fact that I’d accumulated at least four more boxes full of house mags in the eight years we resided there and I was antsy for a new project. There was the murderous rage that was reignited almost every time I ripped my hand open on the multiple flayed doorknob screws courtesy of my disastrous contractor or came across some similar gift from him that would clearly never quit giving. Mostly, though, there was the instinct to jump off a cliff, shake things up, take a step or two back before the house itself became too much of its own thing, for lack of a better word.
It had taken on so much importance, with its own timetable and demands, that I began to feel like a curator. Though we had a trillion parties, we never had the glam official housewarming bash I’d always envisioned because I was waiting to “finish,” something I finally understood would never, ever, happen.
Then, of course, there was the very real responsibility of the endless hedge trimming (so big and damnably healthy my tree man asked me if I was feeding them chickens), of replacing the forever burnt-out fountain pumps, of fighting the termites and the leaf miners and the buckmoth caterpillars falling like little bombs from the live oaks—not to mention the bees (!) who took up very expensive residence in the columns on our front porch. The week before we finally closed, the bedroom ceiling fell in, another consequence of the aforementioned contractor and his moronic AC man, who long ago wound something the wrong way causing years of steady condensation that finally rotted through the lathes, the plaster, and two layers of Sheetrock as a parting gift.
When that happened, I was reminded of my friend the antiques dealer Peter Patout, who once woke up and rearranged his furniture (beautifully) in the middle of the night. When I asked him what had possessed him to get out of bed and start moving the settees around, he shot back, “Jesus told me to” with a (sort of) straight face. That really should have been my answer to my neighbors: Jesus was clearly telling us to get the hell out of the house as fast as we possibly could. The same day the ceiling collapsed, the paper had a big piece about an incurable citrus virus that might well kill all of Louisiana’s trees, and I swear my lime tree was afflicted.
So we left, with all our respective stuff in tow. I toted off the nests and what seemed like a thousand boxes of books, the cat’s ashes and my grandmother’s ashtrays and the mangy boar’s head everyone kept telling me to leave on the street. It is the same stuff that will land in the next house, and wherever it may turn out to be, I think I’ll go on and have the housewarming the first week. I need a place to wear that feathered dress again and I can decorate with all the nests. I do love a theme.
Say What?
I have made my living as a writer for more than thirty years, and in all that time, the comment I’ve gotten most is “You write just like
you talk.” I choose to take this as a compliment, to believe that what people mean is that I sound (dare I say it) authentic and relatively accessible without too many airs. This is what you strive for, what is called in the trade a “voice,” a slightly heightened version of your actual self. Once, early on, when I was trying perhaps too hard to adhere to the old-fashioned newsman rule of “who, what, when, where, and why” (which never, ever, involved the first person), an editor scrawled in the margins of my story, “Where are YOU??” These days one might well make the case that I am all too present in my prose. But there is one thing I now know for sure. I might have a voice, but I do not write like I talk.
I made this discovery in September 2015 when I broke my left elbow while crossing one of New Orleans’ typically mean streets. The first (not so hot) doctor set my arm in a hard cast for several weeks, a course of action that turned out to be entirely unnecessary or just flat-out wrong, depending on who you talk to. Worse, my palm was facing up so that I looked like a perpetual waitress, albeit one no good for passing anything other than a very small plate of airy hors d’oeuvres. You’d be amazed at what you need two arms (and hands) for. At one point, on a visit to New York, I had to ask the startled night porter at the University Club to unzip me. What neither the porter nor anyone else could do for me was my job, though almost to a man, everybody I encountered cheerfully insisted that I was lucky, that today’s smart technology would see me through. “Don’t worry,” they said. “That’s what your dictation app is for. It won’t be a problem.”
It was a problem. First of all, like the iPhone’s highly temperamental Siri, Dragon and the rest of the dictation apps I tried steadfastly refused to understand pretty much everything I had to say. Dragon’s trademarked slogan is “NaturallySpeaking,” but apparently none of its coders have spent a natural minute below the Mason-Dixon Line. A smart person could make a lot of money by inventing a Siri for Southerners (and maybe for French folks too). Each time I sent an email asking someone to meet me at Cochon, one of my favorite local restaurants, it came out “kosher,” a supremely ironic substitution considering that Cochon, as the name implies, is a shrine to slaughtered pig meat. When my friend the artist Bill Dunlap dictates an email to me, it invariably begins, “Dear Junior.” Now he calls me Junior all the time, and it’s funny. What is not funny is the fact that the only words my computer unfailingly recognized were the epithets I hurled at its screen, where whole lines of them would dutifully appear. Which meant that I’d have to use my good hand to erase them and start all over again.
All that cussing and deleting and stopping and starting can really slow down, if not entirely derail, a train of thought. But even on the rare occasions when things would go smoothly for a whole paragraph at a time, I finally realized it was no good. I couldn’t even blame the technology. While I’d have appreciated better cooperation on those emails, it turns out that I cannot talk a story. Dictation is better suited for the “just the facts, ma’am” lingo of lawyers and doctors, for whom Dragon was developed. I once threw an orange at my ex-husband for using “pretermit” in normal conversation. Clearly he had been dictating too many lawyerly documents for too long. My own so-called voice is not my literal voice, which is a result of lungs and larynx and all manner of other speech organs working together to enable a sound to make contact. It is a rather more hard-won thing that comes, finally, from putting pen to paper or fingers to keys.
When we talk, we rarely edit ourselves, as anyone (which is to say everyone) who has ever regretted a word that flew out of his or her mouth knows. We tend, as well, to drone on, especially in the South, a place famous for what scholars like to call our “oral tradition.” Loosely translated, this means that we are prone to drink a lot of whiskey and spin a lot of yarns. And since we started out in a rural, mostly agricultural place, no one had anything better to do than gather round and listen. I’ve done plenty of this myself, usually in bars rather than on the fabled front porch. I once spent almost seven hours with Dunlap, who also happens to be a good writer, in Galatoire’s. We consumed at least a case of wine and carried on what we persisted in thinking was the kind of conversation that would solve everything, the kind that Hemingway (who was drunk himself a whole lot of the time) would rather pompously describe as “true.” Of course, neither of us could remember a shred of it the next day. The thing about the oral tradition is that it’s mostly enjoyable for the talkers. And it helps if everyone within hearing distance is drunk too. (Hemingway also said, “I drink to make other people more interesting.”) With few exceptions (Winston Churchill, William F. Buckley, Jr., my old pal Christopher Hitchens), most of us don’t talk remotely as agilely or as thoughtfully as we write. Even Jerry Clower did not just get on the radio or TV and yack. He wrote all that seemingly off-the-cuff cornpone humor down first.
With that, I shall write down my own story. Mainly because I got tired of answering the question “How drunk were you?” This was closely followed by “How bad did you hurt him?” (My acquaintances imagine themselves to be at least as amusing as Clower himself.) First, I was not drunk and I didn’t hit anybody, though I really, really wanted to. It was morning, I’d been working, I was taking my dog, Henry, out for what I thought would be a quick walk. But then we ran into the cemetery tourists. I live across from Lafayette No. 1, a bedraggled, constantly crumbling aboveground graveyard that out-of-towners cannot seem to get enough of. Despite all the post-Katrina hoopla about New Orleans’ newly diversified economy, it remains largely tourist based, so we’re exhorted to be pleasant to our visitors. I try mightily, but on this particular morning an irritating couple waiting for their tour guide made a beeline for Henry, who is, admittedly, irresistible, and proceeded to mess with his ears. Henry is a social animal—if the Orkin man, say, were to walk through the door, he’d run around in circles, jump on and off every piece of nearby furniture, mewl and bark, and go into a general paroxysm of joy. But on the street, he tends toward reticence. So I cut the visit short and yanked him away, at which point the predators began to make a fuss about how cruel I was being to my dog. Clearly, they’d never walked a beagle, an ongoing ballet of pushes and pulls, yanks and coaxings, and anyway, I couldn’t be mean to Henry if I tried hard. So now I was stomping mad and in the middle of the street when some newly formed asphalt protrusion launched me like a missile. Henry was not only unhurt, he was too busy sniffing to notice. I knew I was not so lucky, which made me madder still. Apparently the tourists do not spend enough money for the city to do basic things like pave the streets, which are not unlike those of Afghanistan, where I have been. (They also don’t make us enough money to replace the four hundred cops we’ve lost in the last five years. If you don’t fall down, you might get shot instead, but I digress.)
After a couple of months of trial and error, I found a South African miracle worker in Manhattan named David Helfet. My elbow was fixed and I could type and I only had to wear a sling for a week after the virtually painless surgery. Plus, it was not a brain tumor or anything else a really smart Afrikaner couldn’t ultimately fix with a couple of screws and a plate, so I’m lucky. I was also reminded, at this advanced stage of my career, of the importance of putting pen to actual paper. Some of my best writing has always been on the back of vomit bags on airplanes—I’m not kidding—and I was forced to resort to this again (though mostly on a legal pad). I can hear, suspended in the air, the rhythm of my voice—my slowed-down, already edited voice—telling me what to write, quick, before I forget it, so I usually reach for the closest thing to hand.
Shelby Foote wrote six novels, countless letters (notably to his closest friend, Walker Percy), and his unsurpassed three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative in longhand with an ink pen, a real one he called a “dip pen” because you had to repeatedly dip it in a pot of ink. During that one twenty-year project, he put more than a million words on paper, but he didn’t mind. In fact, he felt it was crucial. He told an interviewer, “I like the feel that a pen or pencil gives you, being in cl
ose touch with the paper and with nothing mechanical between you and it. The very notion of a word processor horrifies me.” I can only imagine his horror at Siri and the rest, but it would be a moot point. No dictation app on the planet could have made sense of Foote’s courtly Deep South cadences, and the world is better for it.
I’m with the Band
The other day I ran into a relatively new friend of mine at one of my favorite New Orleans restaurants, Lilette, and when he introduced me to his tablemates, he told the story of our first meeting. He was clearer than I on the details, which went something like this: We were at the same museum gala, there was good food and good music, and during the course of our conversation I asked if he happened to be in possession of a cigarette. Of course he wasn’t. Most people aren’t these days, and I myself no longer smoke—unless, that is, I’ve been drinking and talking and athletically socializing, and on this particular night I’d been doing plenty of all three. When I asked him if he might find me one, he was dumbfounded. Where, he asked, would he procure such a thing? We were near the stage; the band was between sets. There, I said, pointing straight at the drummer. Now, I didn’t know this drummer from Adam, but my hunch turned out to be spot-on. My gallant new acquaintance returned with a handful of American Spirits, and my benefactor gave me a mock salute.
