On the Eve of Hurricane Isaac

Joanna Kauffmann

 

It’s times like these when I feel an overwhelming need to be in New Orleans. Not a want; I want to be there for things like Mardi Gras and Halloween and Jazz Fest and friends’ birthdays. But when the city is vulnerable, when its people are coming together to face something difficult and stand up to something hard, that’s when I hurt for the place the most.
I owe everything to that city. New Orleans was ready and waiting for me when I needed someplace to go. It was patient with me. It gave me time to find my footing.

We worked together, the city and I. It let me stand and fall and get up and misstep and ready myself a thousand times over, and for my part I loved it endlessly and unconditionally. I ached for it when the rains came, when the crime reports were issued. Whenever anyone tried to reduce it to a liquor-soaked frat party, I shook my head and had a sip of my beer and firmly disagreed. I celebrated its very existence. I stood in line at the daiquiri shops and music festivals, and when the flood of beads began pouring down, I raised my hands high and tried to catch every drop.

I found my people there too, amidst the glitter and grime. The ones who wanted to dance in the street and drink in the dark and get to know each other without limit. We laughed and cried; we destroyed each other and gave each other a reason to survive. The group of us – we clung to each other like air.

Jordan and I sometimes talked about what would have happened if even one of us were taken out of the equation. None of us would have put ourselves there if we had been given a choice at the time, but we’d ended up there all the same. What if, we liked to say, one of us hadn’t.

I insisted we’d have found each other anyway. I believed in my heart of hearts that we were soul mates. We were meant to exist in overlapping worlds, and that would have happened no matter what. Jordan wasn’t as sure.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he’d say. “I love y’all like the hills and I can’t imagine my life without our freakish family of friends. But I think we need the city too bad; it’s the twine that ties our little bundle together.”

We were like the ensemble cast of a television show. We spent too much time all together, all seven of us, close as bugs in a rug. But it was important we broke out sometimes too, into smaller groups. We each needed our own episodes, our own antics, our own corners of the Earth. Sara and Will liked Christmas movies and Sara and Jordan went to breakfast every Sunday. Alexa and Hannah worked in the same office and hosted dinner parties at their apartments and were prone to initiating group emails. Max and Will liked blue cheese, which everyone else despised. Jordan and I had spicy food and whiskey and this conversation.

When we first met I was the youngest, but a year later Hannah came and I knew that she belonged with us, so I scooped her up. There was a complete lack of boundaries between us, and as is always the case, not just anyone could handle it. Some people need structure and guidance and rules to determine what they can and cannot do. Those people are not me, and I knew they weren’t Hannah either. They aren’t any of us.

By the time Hannah did come along, Jordan and I were considering being in love with each other. We had been testing the water for months, trying everything we could think of. He’d meet me out on some impossibly sunny afternoon and we’d have a drink and read our books and only murmur to each other occasionally. Or I’d have a bad day and he’d order takeout and we’d fight over egg rolls and he’d let me pick the movie. Or we’d waste away the night at a bar with the people we needed more than the moon. I’d wear a short dress and shoot a decent game of pool and he’d buy me drinks while I reapplied my lipstick. At the end of the night we’d kiss our other friends farewell and walk back to his place and he’d take off all my clothes and push me into bed.

No matter what happened though, the next day was always business as usual. Someone would make a brunch reservation and we’d go in different cars and I’d get into an argument with Sara over nail polish trends, and Jordan would talk about anything else with anyone else.

“Can I ask...?” Hannah had said once, in my car. I was driving her back from a game night and she’d had three glasses of wine because Max had insisted she could.

I’d just laughed, though it was one of those times when it didn’t seem funny. “I don’t know really,” I’d told her. “I used to think it was only a matter of time. That there was some combination of words I would find, or some strategic move I hadn’t thought of yet, and once I did, we would get it together and fall into place. Now I’m not so sure, and I don’t think Jordan has ever thought of it that way. But we’re not ready to give up trying.”

“Isn’t it hard, though? To see each other every day and be such close friends and then have something more, but not know how things are going to work out in the long run?”

“Yes and no,” I said, stopping at a light. “It’s impossible sometimes, when I want him and he doesn’t want me. He knows my insides, and it can be immobilizing when he turns me down. But the thing that keeps me sane is that I do know how things are going to work out in the long run. I know we’ll be fine, no matter how many times we come together and fall apart and break each other down and build each other back up. We have too many hooks in each other. If we were to turn and run in opposite directions, we’d both be ripped to shreds. I would never do that to him, and I trust him to never do it to me.”

That was really the root of it, not just for me and Jordan but for all of us. We signed our pact with blood.

 

The nights we could let pass us by – the time we could waste. Sitting on a back porch or a living room floor, drinking from short, clear glasses and scratching at each other’s screen doors. Let me in, I know you’re home. Or claiming an outside table at our favorite bar, eating popcorn from plastic baskets and taking turns buying the drinks. I would corner Jordan while he was getting ice in the kitchen or standing in line for the bathroom and force him to talk to me, just us, all bets off. How are you, what’s new, are you having fun? Are you in love with me yet, and why not, and do you think you ever will be? And he’d say fine, and nothing much, and yes. Not yet, I don’t know, I hope so but I really can’t be sure. Then we’d return to our friends and sit opposite each other and laugh as if there were no two people in the world as lucky as we were.

We never got there of course, him and me. One morning I woke up in his bed, and heard the rest of our group making breakfast in his kitchen downstairs. He was still asleep and I could hear them laughing and the covers were far too hot. It was all I could do to keep myself there, lying next to him, watching his closed eyes. When he finally opened them to see me, we were both sad and final. I told him no more and he kissed my hair while I cried, and I asked for just a five minute head start. I slipped on my dress from the night before and went to pour myself a glass of orange juice.

“Just so we’re all on the same page,” I said without my voice breaking, “that’s it for me and Jordan. We’re done trying to be something more than what we usually are. We need to be done now. I know it.”

The five people filling up the space around me had known it for years. Jordan and I would never have drawers in each other’s rooms or go home with each other for holidays or have whole nights entirely to ourselves. “You have to mean it,” Max said.

“I do,” I told him, and I cried for just a moment and they all pulled me in and held me tight. Three minutes later, when Jordan joined us, I was getting down plates and wearing Sara’s sweater. He and I sat down next to each other as if the last hour of our lives hadn’t happened. We passed fruit salad and toast and slowly began to forget the things about each other that were no longer useful – the friction of our hipbones, the pressure of our fingertips, the width of our rib cages. Eventually it was as if we had never known them at all.

 

I was the one who went. We wouldn’t have guessed it, but it didn’t surprise any of us either. Especially not when Chris came into the picture. I had suspected, and they had likely always known, that it was only a matter of the right boy asking me to leave before I started packing my bags.

He’d worked his way in slowly, the way the boyfriends and girlfriends of the past had. Looking for cracks in the foundation, holes in the wall that might be big enough to slip through. We were comfortable, the seven of us. We didn’t make room for others easily. Max had said it at some point, when we were making dinner and playing cards and talking too loud. “If I ever do start dating someone,” he said, “there is no way I’m bringing them around you all.” We had protested, but not fiercely; we all secretly agreed.

Chris survived because he didn’t want to be one of us. He wanted to come out for sushi and watch football games and have me to himself occasionally, but he had no interest in going dancing until three in the morning or the status of Jordan’s sister’s engagement.

He got a job and promised we’d find an apartment and couldn’t bear the thought of giving me up or leaving me behind, and it came as no shock to anyone that I couldn’t resist being wanted like that. Jordan had confessed to me months earlier that he’d made a mistake – that he wanted to give us another go, for real this time – but not even that served to knock me off course.

In the weeks before we were to set off, just us and the big, bad world, I saw as little of Chris as possible. My official stance was that I was ready to leave and excited about what would come next. But I needed to soak up every second of the souls that had sewn me together all of the countless times I had managed to rip myself into pieces.

Whenever I had imagined a hazy someday when I wouldn’t live in the confines of my friendships, I had always planned to put my goodbyes down on paper. A piece of me that I could leave behind; my handwriting on signature stationary. They were all different. A recounted memory for Will, and expression of eternal thanks for Max. For Alexa, a listing of all the things I admired in her. For Sara and Hannah, all the ways in which I was grateful for them.

In a movie, Jordan’s would have been the hardest. I would have struggled with it for days, ruining pages with tears. Eventually I would simply write, “Goodbye, I love you,” and fold it up and send it on. But I had said goodbye to Jordan so many times in so many ways, and this was just another grain of sand on top of the dune.

“Of all the people I’ve met since coming to New Orleans,” I wrote, “you have had the most to do with making me the person I am. I mean that as the highest compliment I can give. I didn’t notice it at the time – I wonder if you did – but I know now that the moment I first saw you, something shifted. There was a spark, a hum, a ripple in the air. Nothing has ever been the same.”

The last time the seven of us were alone together, I wore a pretty dress and opened a bottle of champagne and looked at every precious friend before me and said how desperately I loved them. “You are the hearts that make up my heart,” I told them. “And there is nowhere in the world I could go that you wouldn’t be with me.”

It’s been years since that moment, and we’ve grown up and things have changed. Chris and I aren’t together anymore; Jordan and Alexa will be married next year. Sara just got a raise and sends me a picture anytime she’s wearing an outfit she thinks I would approve of. Hannah and I tell each other things we don’t tell the others. There are moments when I ache to be in Jordan’s bed, on Will’s couch, in Sara’s kitchen. Max may move back to New Orleans this summer, but I know I never will.

Instead, I send care packages and birthday presents and visit for an engagement party or a Mardi Gras parade. I call on my walk home from work or when I’m waiting for a prescription or if it’s a holiday. I watch the weather reports and hold my breath, and wish I were in a torturously hot room with the lights cut out and the six people I love the most in the world sweating in silence.