DIARY OF A BLUES GODDESS

ERICA ORLOFF

resides in south Florida, where she enjoys spending her free time with her extended “family” of friends and relatives, as well as several unruly pets. She confesses to being virtually tone-deaf, but does adore jazz music and the blues, particularly the music of Django Reinhardt.

Erica is also the author of Spanish Disco, as well as the upcoming Divas Don’t Fake It. She can be reached at her Web site, www.ericaorloff.com.

Diary of a Blues Goddess
Erica Orloff

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dedicated to my father, Walter Orloff,

who taught me about jazz

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to, first and foremost, thank my father, Walter Orloff, who provided advice, ideas and historical background about jazz and the blues. As far as I am concerned, he is the world’s greatest jazz expert, and his extensive—some would say exhaustive—record and book collection helped greatly, as did our e-mails and conversations. I’d especially like to thank him for reluctantly giving up several of his Django Reinhardt albums.

I must, as always, acknowledge my wonderful agent, Jay Poynor, who remains my greatest supporter. We talk daily, and it truly helps to know he is in my corner at all times. “Darlin’, you’re my Luv.”

Thank you to Margaret Marbury, the best editor I could imagine. When I decided to take the tone of this novel in a different direction, she was not only supportive but excited. Thank you. I look forward to our collaboration for many years to come.

What would I do without Writer’s Cramp? Pam, Gina and Jon. Thank you for giving me discipline as a writer—and wine. Let’s not forget the wine.

Thanks to my friends Pam, Nancy, Cleo and Kathy for being such totally cool women. In the immortal words of Miss Bella: “You rock.”

I acknowledge the late Viktor Frankl for giving my life philosophical meaning.

Thanks to my mother.

Whenever I felt like procrastinating on finishing this book, I called her, which was daily. And she happily obliged. But then would tell me to get back to work.

Finally, to Alexa, Nicholas and Isabella. You can’t possibly imagine what inspiration you are. To J.D., for everything. Always.

“All I know is when I sing the blues,

the notes are like tiny shards…

proclaiming how my heart is broke in a million pieces.”

—Irene “Honey” Walker

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

chapter
1

I live in a house with a dead prostitute.

More precisely, I live in a house with her spirit. At least that’s what my grandmother, Nan, thinks.

New Orleans is filled with spirits. We’re so used to them, we don’t give them a thought. Mist-filled cemeteries are tourist attractions, and houses on St. Charles have ghosts. Halloween is more important than Christmas—at least to the drag queens. Voodoo priestesses still practice their art, and superstition is interwoven through our lives as much as the bayou and crawfish.

Our house in New Orleans used to be a brothel and has been in my family since 1890. My grandmother ran the brothel briefly, until Sadie Jones was murdered over sixty years ago. A customer with an obsession for the redheaded whore with the alabaster skin and green eyes stabbed her in an upstairs bedroom. He’d been wordless, with the vacant-eyed look of a man possessed, and my grandmother has never forgiven herself for not turning him away. Another customer, a senator with a handlebar mustache, who enjoyed the brothel every Friday night, shot the murderer dead with a pistol and a single bullet as the man ran outside. My grandmother cradled Sadie’s head in her lap as the young woman took her last breath. After that, Nan closed the brothel, married my grandfather, who’d been her most faithful customer, and set about becoming one of the more colorful characters in New Orleans, a city known for colorful characters.

When I was eighteen, I came to live with my grandmother in this house with twenty bedrooms. I soon found out that the spirit of Sadie had opinions on the opposite sex. According to Nan, if she felt you were making a big mistake with a man, she would slam the door of the bedroom in which she’d been murdered. If she approved, the house was at peace.

Considering my track record over the last ten years, there’s been a whole lot of door-slamming in New Orleans.

chapter
2

“O h my God, why’d she have to die!” Dominique wailed like a Greek woman throwing herself on the casket of a loved one. “Why? Tell me why?”

“Here’s a tissue,” I said, calmly passing her one as we sat up against huge pillows, side by side on her bed. We were watching Steel Magnolias for the third time in two days, huddled beneath Dominique’s pink Laura Ashley quilt, with a bowl of popcorn swimming in a tidal pool of melted butter and a pitcher of Sex on the Beach on the nightstand—Dominique likes any drink with sex or genitals in the name.

“I don’t understand how you can just sit there, stone-faced like that, Georgia Ray Miller. It’s unnatural,” she sniffled at me.

“Dominique, you know Shelby dies in the end. You’ve known this since the first time we watched this video together in high school, and through every single solitary fucking time we’ve watched it since then. I just can’t cry anymore. I cried myself out five years ago.”

“But the cemetery scene…” She hiccuped, and with that, she started blowing her nose.

Drag queens are rarely subtle. Give Dominique a feather boa, platform shoes and a new platinum-colored wig, and watch her strut her stuff. But believe me, a drag queen with a nightclub act—and Dominique has a sellout one—doesn’t begin to hold a candle to the sight of a drag queen with a broken heart.

Dominique was actually our only lonely heart at the moment. Good thing, since she was practically a full-time job. One of the benefits of having a house with twenty bedrooms is providing refuge for the lost and lonely. Nan rarely turns anyone away. She has two rules: no weapons and no drugs. Beyond that, if someone’s a friend of mine, he or she is welcome to stay as long as necessary. Rent is minimal. And everyone contributes to meals and kitchen cleanup. We’ve had as many as six lonely hearts at one time following Mardi Gras two years ago when it seemed as if nearly everyone I knew, including myself, walked in on his or her lover in the arms of someone else. That’s Mardi Gras. Getting blind drunk, flashing your tits in the street and fucking up your life.

Dominique sighed, flinging her head against her pillow like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. I stared at her cocoa-skin and her long jet-black lashes curled slightly and framing eyes such a dark brown you couldn’t see the pupils in the irises, just coal black. She was beautiful, her cheekbones so high they seemed to carve out cavernous hollows beneath them, like a runway model’s, her chin a dainty point with a tiny dimple in its center. She was stunning, even without her usual Velvet Mac lipstick and eyes made up like two wings of a butterfly. “I’m swearing off closeted men, Georgia. I am.” She looked at me. “And closeted white men are the worst.”

“No, married men are the worst. What am I saying? They’re all bad, Dominique. It’s men. Straight, gay… Of course, I don’t include you in that category, Dominique. You’re a woman even if…parts of you aren’t.”

“Thanks…I think.” She clutched her tissue, then dabbed her eyes. “Is my mascara running?”

“Running? Honey, you cried it off a half hour ago during the kidney transplant scene. Look, two days in bed is enough, Dominique. Come on…you’ve left Terrence before.”

“But this time there’s no going back, Georgia.”

“Don’t say that.”

She lifted her head from the pillow and shook it vigorously. “I am saying it.”

“But this moping, this…” I waved my hand at the television. “Endless watching of Julia Roberts on her deathbed…isn’t helping, Dominique. You’ve got to get back out there. You don’t see me moping around in my nightie, do you?”

She stared at me. I was wearing a Victoria’s Secret black peignoir set. “As a matter of fact, I do see you in a nightie.”

“This is sympathy nightgown wear. For movie watching. I meant that as a figure of speech. I mean, you don’t see me moaning and groaning over my love life. In a nightgown or otherwise.”

“Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes at me. “Georgie, you are the original magnet for bad men. Might as well hang a sign on the front door. Married men and mama’s boys apply here.”

“Yes, but that was the old me. Now I have a system.”

She snorted. “System? You call what you have a system?”

She was referring to Sadie’s ghost.

“Yes, it’s a system.”

“A door slams, and you take that as a sign. Baby Girl, that’s no system. That’s plain crazy-talk.”

“Yeah, well, you just moved in. You’ll see. She’ll be slamming doors for you, too. Anyway, at least I have a system. I’m not the one who went through two boxes of tissues this afternoon.” I stared at the wastepaper basket overflowing with crumpled tissues.

“That’s the point. What don’t you understand here? This is Heartbreak 101. Steel Magnolias is our four-hankie movie. I was supposed to have a good cry. We both were. But you didn’t so much as shed a tear. You are one cold-blooded woman, Georgia Ray. Cold.” She pretended to shiver. “I might have to call you the b word.”

“I am the b word.” I stroked Dominique’s white Persian cat, Judy Garland. “Dominique, there’s nothing wrong with me. I sing at weddings every weekend, and before long, I’ll sing at the weddings of the second marriages of the very people who were so madly in love with someone else not a year or two before. If I stay in this business long enough, I’ll start singing at their third and fourth weddings.”

“Sugarplum, if you’re trying to cheer me up, you’re doing a pathetic job of it.”

“That’s what best friends are for.” I winked at her. “But it’s true. Just look at the conventions. Every weekend a new group descends on the city—dentists, insurance salesmen, stockbrokers, engineers, proctologists. I see these guys with gold wedding bands—or telltale tan lines where the wedding band should be—and I just know they’ve got a wife, 2.2 children, a dog named Spike, a picket fence and a minivan at home somewhere, yet they’re making a play for every woman at the convention—including the entertainment. It’s not a ringing endorsement of the power of love.”

“Well, I still believe in love,” Dominique said. “And even if you’re too damn cynical and stubborn to admit it, you do, too.”

Judy rolled over on her back and stretched, demanding, in her regal cat way, that I stroke her belly. This was Dominique’s second stay in our house, nicknamed the Heartbreak Hotel. Last time she went back to Terrence again, and I was pretty sure if he turned up at her show tonight with a dozen mauve roses—her favorite—she’d go back to him this time, too.

“I do not,” I said rather unconvincingly.

“Yeah right. How is it that I remain best friends with such a liar?”

“Look, you’ve got a show to think about. You’ve had your cry. Now it’s time to get out of this room and do what you do best, my dear.” I stood up and went to her trunk at the foot of the bed that was full of her stage accessories. I pulled out a purple feather boa and flung it around my neck, sending several feathers floating through the air. I sang the first line of Gloria Gaynor’s classic, “I Will Survive,” the headlining song of Dominique’s act.

“That’s my song, girlfriend.”

“Then belt it out yourself.” I spun around. “Or maybe you’ve lost your falsetto.”

She gasped as if I’d slapped her.

Never challenge a drag queen to a sing-off. Even without her wig, false eyelashes or makeup, Dominique leaped off the bed, grabbed her own feather boa from her trunk and started singing, transforming before my eyes into her stage persona.

“Get her off the stage,” I mock shouted. “She’s got five o’clock shadow.”

Dominique finally broke into a grin, revealing her dimples. “Thanks, Georgia Ray. Love you.” She hugged me, my head against her chest. “Girl, you are so cute, you’re lickable.”

“Well, I love you, too. Even if your chest does need waxing.”

She stepped back in panic. “God! I’m on in six hours. A girl’s got a lot of waxing and shaving to do.” She dashed out of the room toward the shower across the hall. Before she went in, she turned to me and blew me a kiss.

I smiled at her, then lifted Judy the cat and kissed her nose. I left Dominique’s room and went into mine and opened the French doors to my balcony. Stretching the length of my room, it has an intricate black wrought-iron railing and a chaise lounge for nights when I want to look at the moon and drink a glass of wine. From this vantage point, I have tossed down beads on the screaming crowds of Mardi Gras. But today I leaned over the railing and saw just a few clusters of tourists and a couple of college kids walking around the French Quarter; otherwise the street was surprisingly quiet. The day was stifling hot, and it was only May. New Orleans has an oppressive humidity. It contributes to the general insanity around here.

I shut the doors to keep the cool air in and went and flopped down on my bed, the goose-down comforter fluffing up on either side of me and letting me sink down into it. With the return of Dominique, the Heartbreak Hotel was officially open.

Heartbreaks seem to come in sets of three. That’s another bit of superstition from Nan. I looked up at my ceiling fan spinning slowly around and around. It wasn’t a question of when, around this place. It was just a question of who was next.

chapter
3

I didn’t have to wait long. The next morning, Jack, my band’s guitarist, arrived on my doorstep, suitcase in one hand, Fender guitar case in the other.

“It’s over,” he sighed, setting down his suitcase. “Is my old room still available?”

I rushed forward and hugged him, my hand instinctively brushing back one of his blond curls from his cheek. “You know the Heartbreak Hotel is always open,” I said, stepping aside and sweeping my arm up toward the staircase in a gesture of welcome. He hefted his suitcase again, which bulged at the seams and apparently contained everything he owned, and walked through the frosted-glass front door. Following behind him, I silently clapped my hands and shook my hips back and forth in a sort of we-hate-Sara-and-we’re-so-glad-she’s-gone dance.

“She was cheating on me,” he called over his shoulder, looking at me as he mounted the carpeted staircase. “With her cousin’s husband. And you don’t have to look so positively ecstatic that we broke up.”

“I’m not ecstatic.” I widened my brown eyes to look innocent. “Just mildly pleased,” I muttered under my breath.

He turned around as he reached the landing. “I heard that.” He faced forward and walked down the hall, continuing, “I know I was an idiot for putting up with her. I know it. But let’s leave the I-could-have-told-you-so-Jack looks alone.”

I contorted my face into my best effort at looking appropriately sad and nodded. I tried to refrain from taking the remaining stairs two at a time and skipping down the hall to his old room, two doors down from mine. He opened the door and set his suitcase and guitar on the Oriental rug one of Nan’s old lovers, the mysterious Mr. Punjab, had shipped her from India, with a letter professing his undying devotion.

I sat down on the bed, and Jack came over and sat next to me, exhaling slowly. “Just like old times. Two years ago, was it? The Mardi Gras I found Leigh in bed with her old boyfriend?”

“Yeah. That was the year we all took leave of our senses.”

“Well, I can’t say I like finding out my girlfriend was fooling around on me, but I do love this place. I was almost relieved to move out, knowing I was coming here. Knowing you were here. And Nan.”

“And Dominique.”

“She’s here? God help us all. Yes…even Dominique. Though if she comes at me with any of her mud masks or aromatherapy treatments, I’m going to lock her in the room with Sadie’s ghost.”

“She doesn’t believe in Sadie.”

“Yeah, well, wait until she’s home alone some night and hears the door slam.” Jack draped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer to him. “Did everyone know except me?”

“Know what?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Georgie. About Sara.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Jack. You always seemed more in love with her than she was with you, but it wasn’t my place to tell you. Or any of the guys’.”

“Hey, next time…if there is a next time…I give you permission to stop me. Between you, Gary, Tony and Mike, someone in that band had better talk some sense into me. You guys are my best friends. You’re supposed to prevent me from dating women like her.”

“And what exactly is a woman like her?”

“Trouble. Two-timing trouble. I don’t know. See…I’m not even sure I can spot them when I see them. But you can. You knew. It’s that women’s intuition.”

“Women’s intuition. Bullshit. Look…she flirted with every guy in the room. But even if we had all tried to say something, it wouldn’t have mattered. People in love don’t listen—especially men. You go on autopilot. And the pilot is your penis.”

He grinned at me mischievously. “Then you better talk to Jack Junior down there and stop me from making another mistake.”

“I make it a point not to be on a first-name basis with my friends’ penises. As far as I’m concerned, Jack Junior is on his own.”

“That’s not very nice, leaving Jack Junior with no sense of direction.”

“His direction is up—and hard. Jack, you—and Jack Junior—always go for the blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty queen with ice water in her veins. Do you not see a pattern?” I shook my head. “Why is it up to me to point out your woefully bad taste in women?”

“Because I’m a man. We’re stupid. It’s a genetic failing in our chromosomes. I admit it.”

“Thank God. It’s about time.”

Jack and I have been friends ever since he joined Georgia’s Saints, our band, replacing our old guitarist, Elvis, who got into channeling “The King.” Shortly thereafter, Elvis showed up at a society wedding in a sequined polyester jumpsuit instead of the requisite tuxedo. We were sad to see Elvis head for fame and fortune in Vegas—or at least a gig singing “Love Me Tender” at this little wedding chapel. But Jack fell into a groove with us, as if he’d always been part of our group.

I flopped back on the bed. “I am sorry about Sara. I never liked her, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy that you caught the little bitch with someone else.”

He fell back next to me. “You’re practically oozing with sentimentality, Georgia.”

“Yeah. I know. It’s one of my many shortcomings.”

“I don’t know that you have as many as you think. Anyway, I figure a night blinded by tequila, a few clubs, some R and R at the Heartbreak Hotel, and I’ll be over her in no time.”

I rolled over and kissed his decidedly stubbly cheek. “That’s the spirit…. You’re face is all scratchy. You need a shower and a shave. I’m going to go take a nap before the wedding tonight.”

“Didn’t you just get up?”

“Yeah. But that means nothing to us creatures of the night.” I feigned a Transylvanian accent.

He stretched. “Sara and I fought all night long. A little shut-eye sounds good to me, too.”

I got up and walked to the door. “Sleep tight. Watch out for Sadie.”

“I’m more afraid of the wandering drag queen and her mud masks.”

Hours later, Jack frantically knocked on my door. “You ready to go?”

“Of course not.”

He opened my door, handsome in his black tux. “Jesus Christ, you’re not even dressed?”

“You know I am genetically incapable of being on time.”

That is my stock answer. I also blame it on pantyhose. And sequins. They’re a deadly combination.

Sequins are unforgiving. If you want to wear something that screams out that you’ve indulged in a chocolate binge of epic proportions, including Junior Mints, followed by a pint of Heavenly Hash ice cream, wear sequins. If you want to remind the world—no, flaunt to the world—that you use the treadmill in your bedroom as a coatrack, wear sequins. If you want proof that God in heaven, indeed, has a fucking sense of humor, then look in my closet. In the colossal cosmic joke that is my life, I wear sequins every weekend. I live in sequins.

And so there I was, in my best bra—which simply means my two cats haven’t chewed it—and a body shaper, staring at six sequined dresses like a sparkling, spangled rainbow, and dreading putting any of them on.

“Gary’s going to kill us,” Jack said, his hair still wet from the shower.

“You shaved. Very baby-faced now. Cute.”

“Sara liked that whole slightly edgy musician look, complete with perpetual five o’clock shadow, so it’s outta here. She also hated the earring—” he pointed to the small diamond stud in his left ear “—so it’s back. Now stop talking, Georgie, and start dressing.”

“I hate these dresses. Every damn one of them,” I moaned. “Sure, you all get to wear classy black tuxedos, but I have to look like a refugee from the 1970s.”

“And you would rather wear…what? Your bra onstage?”

“No. But not this.” I held up a silver-sequined gown. Being in a wedding band is like being stuck in the disco era. Think of every song you’ve ever heard by ABBA, and imagine singing them each and every weekend while grandmas and aunties, often in sequins themselves, take to the floor, usually dancing with prepubescent nephews and grandsons who roll their eyes and wish their private-junior-high hell would end. Playing conventions is worse. Imagine two thousand dentists converged on one dance floor in the grand ballroom doing the ’gator. That’s a lot of bicuspids you’re looking at. Now picture that you have no time for a personal life because you’re singing for other people’s personal lives, and you get the idea.

Georgia’s Saints is the most popular wedding band in New Orleans. We do a set of zydeco at conventions. However, most white men can’t dance, and they sure as hell can’t dance to zydeco, no matter how generic we play it, so truthfully, what we do is pretty basic, though the guys are excellent musicians and my voice can even make a ballroom full of funeral directors get up and dance. I’ve been friends with Gary, the keyboardist, since my freshman year of college, and we formed the band seven years ago while we were still in school—first for extra money, then, as we started getting booked even a year in advance, we devoted ourselves to it full-time. Gary is stuck in another dimension. He actually likes ABBA. He also likes leading the hokey-pokey, singing to grandmas in sequins and getting a room full of computer geeks from Silicon Valley to do the electric slide. He was positively giddy when the macarena craze began. Gary is balding, and probably all of five foot four, married now with three kids born in four years—like he doesn’t know what causes that?—always short on money so he accepts any job that comes our way. He’s also a great keyboardist and gifted arranger—even if what he arranges are KC and the Sunshine Band songs. I forgive him his eccentricities, like the fact that he refuses to believe disco is dead, and the hippest he gets is listening to vintage Madonna, and he forgives me mine.

He accepts that I am always late, always have a run in my pantyhose, crave Junior Mints, often have chipped nail polish and, to cap it off, lipstick on my teeth, and that I always cry, no…sob…at weddings. Something comes over me, and so I keep a tissue tucked in my cleavage just in case. I also wear waterproof mascara. Dominique is wrong. First of all, she wears mascara that runs despite my arguments for waterproof. Second, though she accuses me otherwise, I also still believe in love. I don’t know whether I cry because I think the love between two people taking to the dance floor for the first time as husband and wife is so beautiful, or because I’m not sure I believe it ever really lasts. Or because some of the greatest guys in my life prefer wearing pantyhose and mascara, just like me, and want to borrow my clothes. Or because no one’s ever asked me to marry him.

I want to get married someday. But after all I’ve seen as a wedding singer—grooms making out with maids of honor in upstairs hallways, the bride’s side ending up in a massive brawl with the groom’s side, and even a couple of no-show grooms on the big day—I picture, instead, me growing old like Nan. Still in this house surrounded by my friends and a few cats. I’ll be the Crazy Cat Woman of New Orleans. Though, with all the eccentric characters in this town, I’m sure that coveted title is already taken.

“Georgie! Decide already!…Come on! What about the red sequins?” Jack pulled me back to the immediate crisis of what I was going to wear at the wedding we should have left for twenty minutes before. He grabbed the red dress on its hanger and thrust it toward me.

“Convention-wear.” I hung it back up. “Stuffy parents of the bride do not want their wedding singer dressed in red. They prefer silver, pale blue…lavender, even.”

“Then wear the silver. The silver is fine.”

“Well, I have a slight problem with that.”

“What?”

“Guess?”

“Your fucking pantyhose.”

I nodded. “The silver’s got a thigh-high slit.” Pantyhose is the bane of my existence. They can put a man on the goddamn moon, land a probe on Mars, but they can’t make a pair of pantyhose that are runproof? If men wore pantyhose, I can assure you they’d have an entire Pentagon division devoted to finding a way to make them. I know that it’s oh-so-sexy to go without pantyhose, but I rather like my control tops. It’s the runs that kill me.

“Georgie…honest to God, we don’t have time to stop at the drugstore to buy a pair.”

“I know.” I shook my head. My hair was amassing into ringlets, thanks to the fact that I hadn’t left enough time to blow-dry it straight. My hair has a life of its own. I look white—sort of. People ask if I am Spanish or “something.” The “something” is pretty accurate. Nan’s mother was black, my father had some Cuban on his mother’s side, and my paternal grandfather was half-Cherokee. Down through the generations what I have from the maternal side of my family, besides a love of New Orleans and music, and great pride and a pretty strong stubborn streak is willful hair.

“Come on, Georgie,” Jack urged. “Just wear the silver, and we’ll worry about the pantyhose on the way.” Jack, quite possibly, knows more about pantyhose than the CEO of Hanes or L’eggs. In fact, every single member of the band has at one time or the other raced out on break to buy me a pair. And Jack and Gary have also bought me tampons in an emergency. Being in a band with four guys is like having four very tolerant brothers.

I threw the silver dress over my head, Jack zipped me, snagging my hair in the zipper and causing me to shriek in pain. After extricating my curls, and Jack pulling the snagged hair out of the zipper, I grabbed my makeup bag and the one pair of hose I did have that had a smallish run that might be stopped in its tracks by Wite-Out. Yes, clear nail polish works better, but when none is available, Wite-Out will do. It sort of glues the run to your leg. Elmer’s is a close second. I’ve even tried Crazy Glue in a pinch, though I very nearly glued my fingers to my leg.

Jack and I flew down the stairs, blowing kisses and waving to Nan as she sat on her balcony, watching us pile into Jack’s old Buick. If I have willful hair, he has a willful car. I settled into the passenger seat and started putting on my makeup, while he put the key in the ignition. We both crossed ourselves simultaneously in prayer that the car would start. It did. A testament to the power of miracles and the Patron Saint of Jack’s Car, whom we’d named Saint Mary Emmanuel of the Buick. Jack drove us out of the city of New Orleans toward the plantation where the wedding was to be held.

In the tiny little mirror on the visor, I watched my crimson lipstick smear on my chin as I applied it at the precise moment we hit a bump. I sighed. What the hell was I doing? How did I get to be a wedding singer in sequin dresses, pantyhose and cat-chewed bras? What I really want to do has nothing in common with dental conventions or weddings. Or leading a roomful of thirteen-year-old bar mitzvah boys on the make in the limbo (which inspires them to try to look up my dress). Or the macarena.

I want be a blues singer.

But I’m a prisoner of a fear so cold it wakes me up in the middle of the night—when I find myself talking to the spirit of Sadie. If you sing at a wedding, you have a captive audience. A roomful of people are probably so drunk they wouldn’t know an off-key C from an A-flat. They’re happy with disco and cheesy standards. Conventions are more of the same. People pretending to be single for the weekend grope each other in grand ballrooms. But blues and jazz enthusiasts are a breed apart. They’re obsessed with jazz, with what makes one instrumentalist a wedding-band player, and another John Coltrane. And the great ladies who have sung the blues are legends who cast a very long shadow. So I’ve been taking the easy way for a long time—so long that I sometimes tell myself I don’t mind being where I am. Singing ABBA instead of Billie Holiday.

Sometimes I think I haven’t earned the right to sing the blues. I’ve had a dozen relationships go up in flames, but I’ve never met The One. I haven’t loved a man so much I thought I would rip my own soul out for the chance to see him once again. I haven’t suffered enough.

I’m also not like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys, writhing around on top of the piano without being so klutzy that she rolls off the piano. Nor am I like Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, hanging from a swing and inspiring a roomful of men to sigh. Yes, singing bubblegum pop is one thing, standing in a spotlight like a true chanteuse is something else entirely.

So while I bide my time, waiting to evolve into a blues goddess, waiting to get the nerve to stand in that hot light and belt out a song that speaks to other people, in the way that static electricity can send a shock through one person’s hand to another, I sing the words to every song I wish I didn’t know.

“Get Into the Groove,” by Madonna. Know it.

“My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion. Know it.

“Oops! I Did It Again,” by Britney Spears (know it and particularly hate it).

“Celebration,” by Kool & the Gang. Can sing it blindfolded.

Unless, of course, it’s at the Wedding of the Year, and I get the shock of my young life.

Cammie Winthrop was to marry Dr. Robert Carrington III, the plastic surgeon who can liposuction your Heavenly Hash-enhanced thighs away, on this particular beautiful sunny day in May—with no humidity—as if her father had ordered up the weather from God himself, which he might have because if God can be bought, Roger Winthrop is buying. He is the king of New Orleans real estate, and the reception Jack and I were racing to in his Buick was to be held in the ballroom of the Winthrop family’s very own plantation. That’s another side of New Orleans for you. Plantations and Greek Revival mansions surrounded by moss-draped oaks. You feel as if any moment someone’s going to hog-tie you into a corset and a hoop skirt.

Jack and I arrived at the Winthrop plantation. Gary was pacing as we entered the ballroom.

“Do you live to torture me?” he asked. Then he put up his hands. “Don’t answer that. I know…the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will ride through the French Quarter before you’re ever on time.” He looked at my leg. “Wite-Out? Please…. please, I am begging you, tell me that’s not Wite-Out. Georgia…when you go to buy pantyhose and tampons, can you not just make a mental note to purchase enough for a few months? Like pantyhose—buy every last pair in your size. I mean, why do I know more about your preference for control tops than you do? Why? Tell me why!”

Gary was clearly panicked, and his voice was rising into a falsetto range usually hit only by Dominique. Did I mention, the Winthrop wedding was the social event of the year? If we played well, which, after years together, we did effortlessly, we would have weddings and functions filling our schedule for the next two years. But Gary thrived on panic. That and ABBA made him tick. Just like antagonizing him brought me small comfort and wrought revenge for the sequins.

“You need to seriously take a Valium. Go to the bar and have a shot of something.”

“Georgie, you are the reason I live on Tums,” Gary whined. “See these?” He pointed to beads of moisture accumulating near his receding hairline. “You cause these.”

“Fine. But I’m the only person in the band who can fill out a sequin dress.”

Endgame.

Soon, I was singing my heart out, hoping, as I often and ridiculously do, that there among the tables-for-ten surrounding the dance floor was some record executive waiting to discover me—the easy way. All right, so this isn’t exactly a formula for being discovered, but I tell myself it’s possible. Like run-proof pantyhose being invented.

I was, this day, quite specifically, singing the infamous, crowd-pleasing, no-wedding-will-be-complete-without-it song, “Celebration.” Ever notice how few words it has? It’s pretty much just endless repeating of “Celebrate good times” and “Come on.” Doesn’t take Billie Holiday to sing it. But Cammie Winthrop wanted to dance to it with all her blond sorority sisters (not a brunette in the bunch, though the band and I had a betting pool on the number of natural blondes, which was likely considerably smaller). And whatever Cammie wanted, Cammie got. Including a five-thousand-dollar muted oyster-colored Vera Wang dress and a diamond tiara.

I was on the small stage that had been built by the dance floor, sparkling in my silver gown, with not one but two pairs of pantyhose on. Well, not exactly. I had one leg each of two separate pairs. I arrived at the wedding in the Wite-Out pair, which I had put on while Jack screeched his way onto the plantation’s grounds, me wriggling into them on the front seat, and which had a run in the left leg—held in check by a smear of white. Gary, obviously tired of my ruining a pair of hose at every wedding, and always in the leg visible through the slit of my dress, almost always keeps an extra pair of my size B’s in nude, with control top, in his keyboard case. I had counted on that all along. I had grabbed them from him as he mopped at his forehead, and I raced to the bathroom, sweating all the while, making my hair frizz and curl faster than ever. Putting on the new pair, my nail made a run in the opposite leg. Again, I cursed the geniuses who could send a probe to Mars but not make a run-proof formula. However, with some creative cutting with a steak knife borrowed from the kitchen, I had, ostensibly, one full pair of pantyhose. One of each leg, with a double set of control tops. I was feeling very tight-tummied.

And I was singing the aforementioned simple-to-remember words to “Celebration.”

And I glanced across the dance floor.

And the words to “Celebration” left my mind.

Gone. Like a giant black hole had sucked them from my brain. Nothing in my mind but “la, la, la.” Gary looked at me imploringly. Jack stared at me desperately, as if willing the words into my brain. But it was hopeless. Because there, across the dance floor, standing on the perimeter, looking slightly older but still confident and handsome, was Casanova Jones.

The only man I’d ever, even briefly, thought might be The One.

chapter
4

I t was the shriek heard round the world. Or at least round the French Quarter.

The day after the Wedding of the Year and my momentary attack of amnesia, my friend Maggie came over to cut my hair and dye Dominique’s eyebrows to match her new platinum look. As soon as I told them that I had run into Casanova Jones, Dominique shrieked and began hugging me and jumping up and down.

“Did you fuck him in the men’s room?” Dominique squealed.

“No, I did not!”

“The ladies’ room?”

“Give me a break.”

“You thought about it though.” She stepped back and wagged her finger as if scolding a child.

“God help me, you’re impossible.”

“This guy must be something if he’s a possible bathroom screw,” Maggie said, directing me toward the sink. “I need details. Like who is he? And what the hell kind of name is Casanova Jones?”

“I can’t tell you yet. I’m in hair shock. What, exactly, are you doing with your hair?”

Maggie works at a trendy salon near the Garden District. She makes a ton of money—in cash. She makes a whole lot more than a wedding singer, I can tell you—though I guess that isn’t really saying a whole hell of a lot. Still, she doesn’t have to wear sequins to do it. She’s considered one of the best stylists in the city and even does the hair of a couple of well-known actresses when they are in the Big Easy shooting movies. But somehow, despite knowing everything there is to know about cutting hair, and highlights, and foils and all of that, her own hair is what I would gently term “experimental.” It’s art. What kind of art, I can’t tell you. This particular Sunday, I would perhaps call her hair color raspberry, though it was more accurately some strange hybrid of red and purple. And the cut was lopsided. As in uneven.

“It’s asymmetrical. That’s very in this season.”

“It’s lopsided.”

“You call it lopsided.” Her hazel eyes played peekaboo as her hair fell in front of her face as she moved. She has a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and though her skin is very pale, she never wears makeup—which drives Dominique insane. “My clients call it asymmetrical and pay a hundred and fifty bucks to have it cut this way.”

“Fine, but while you’ve got sharp scissors in your hands, remember that I’m still in favor of both sides being even.”

“You can carry the asymmetrical look.”

“I don’t want to carry it.”

“Why are we even talking about hair? Tell me about this guy you two are screeching about.”

“All right. He was my one unrequited love. The one guy that if I could go back and do it all over again, go back to high school knowing what I know now, I would have fucked him. More precisely, I would have lost my virginity to him instead of the asshole I finally did lose it to my freshman year of college.” I liked to pretend my entire two-month relationship with Dan What’s-his-name, Virginity Bandit, never occurred.

“So what happened between you?”

“Nothing much. A lot of flirting. I don’t know. We just never acted on it. Maybe it was timing. That and he was one of the ‘beautiful people.’”

“I know you’ll find this impossible to believe,” Dominique interjected. “But Georgia, despite being one smokin’-hot, overwhelmingly sexy thing now, and me, being the delectable creature standing before you…we were outcasts in high school. For God’s sake, I was a boy in high school.” She shuddered.

“You—” Maggie raised an eyebrow and playfully stared up and down at Dominique “—I could see. But Georgia?”

I nodded. “And he was…I can’t really explain how I couldn’t even speak every time I was within five feet of him. Total lust.”

I knew Maggie would understand. Maggie had wanted Jack from the first moment she laid eyes on him five years ago. He was her one unrequited lust. Jack, on the other hand, gravitated toward magnolia queens, not a Goth, pale-skinned, raspberry-haired woman with a pierced belly button and tribal tattoos encircling her arms.

“We just called him Casanova Jones because he was such a damn slut,” Dominique added. “His real name was…what the hell is his real name, Georgia?”

“Rick.”

The night before, Rick had approached me between sets, raising the eyebrows of my bandmates. Certainly, I was their lead singer, but to them, I was the woman with panty lines and lingerie-obsessed cats. I was the woman who spilled cocktail sauce down the front of her one white gown—which no dry cleaner could salvage. In short, to them, I was Georgie, the woman least likely to attract a guy who owned—didn’t rent—a custom-fitted black Armani tuxedo.

“I thought it was you.” Rick had smiled, leaning in to kiss my cheek, and allowing his lips to stay there for that fraction of a second too long. He took my hand and held it, his index finger stroking the inside of my wrist ever so slightly. “You’re still as beautiful as ever, Georgia.”

“Thanks. You look the same. Shorter hair… A little more corporate, but other than that…” His eyes still crinkled in the corners when he smiled, and his teeth were toothpaste-commercial perfect. His hair was still thick and a deep black; he had a strong jawline and very broad, former football-player shoulders.

“You know…you were the one girl I’ve wondered about…. Have you stayed in New Orleans this whole time?”

“Can’t get beignets anywhere else.”

“I never left either. Even went to law school here. New Orleans is my town. Must be destiny that we ran into each other finally.”

Yeah. Destiny. Or another cosmic mind-fuck.

“And then what?” Maggie asked.

Dominique held up her hand. “Wait…was the kiss on the lips or the cheek? There are more important things to discuss first.”

“Cheek,” I said firmly. “Ladies, he was there with a date. A gorgeous date, I might add. She looked like a Swedish supermodel. And she was perched on these four-inch stilettos and walked around in them like she was in sneakers. Effortlessly.”

“Don’t you hate women like that?” Maggie asked as she stuck my head under the faucet and started washing my hair.

“Hold on, girls.” Dominique sashayed over to the counter and hopped up on it, sitting there, legs crossed and fluffing her hair. “I walk effortlessly in stilettos—you can’t judge a woman for that.”

“Yes, we can,” Maggie said.

I have never seen Maggie in a pair of heels. She always wears black boots, even in the dead of summer. If she dresses up, it is only to wear her black boots with a black skirt, topped with a black jacket. She saves all her color for her hair.

Maggie lathered me up with her secret shampoo. I talked loudly over the water, my voice kind of echoing in the sink. “So his date was hovering in the background, a few feet away, trying to look disinterested but giving me the evil eye. And he asked if he could take me to dinner on Friday. For old time’s sake. To catch up.”

“Once a male whore, always a male whore,” Dominique called out over the sound of the faucet.

“I don’t know. I didn’t get the feeling she was his girlfriend. But I barely know him. I don’t even know if we could figure out enough things to talk about over dinner.”

“Oh please,” Dominique clucked. “I thought he would bend you right over a desk and take you from behind the way you two talked in homeroom. I remember wishing someone would talk to me that way.” She sighed. “If things go right, you won’t be doing very much talking at all.”

Maggie finished rinsing and piled my hair into a towel, which she did up into a turban.

“Shut up, Dominique! I don’t usually have sex on the first date.”

“You don’t usually date, period,” she countered. “You’re always busy with the band. You should take up sleeping with one of them—not Gary. One of the other ones. Not Jack—Maggie has dibs. That leaves Mike or Tony. And Tony has a British accent, so I vote for him.”

“Irish.”

“Irish what?”

“It’s an Irish accent.”

“Fine. I mean, if you’re going to spend every weekend with those guys, you might as well.”

Maggie sat me down in a chair and started trying to pull a comb through my hair, which is akin to pulling a comb through Brillo. My hair falls to the middle of my back, though with the curl in it, when it’s dry, it’s usually just past my shoulders.

“Ouch! What are you doing?” My eyes teared up from the tugging.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “Listen, you have to go out with him. Come on. I’d go out with Jack in a heartbeat.”

“And I’d go out with George Clooney if he asked,” Dominique said. “Well, if he begged.”

Dominique takes her Clooney obsession very seriously. And she firmly believes if he just for a moment put aside his rampant heterosexuality, he would, indeed, go for a six-foot-two-inch drag queen with platinum hair and a collection of vintage transvestite go-go boots.

“Look, dating is hard enough without being with a guy so good-looking that all the women in the room want to sleep with him.”

“Is that what this is all about? Personally, I want to date a man everyone wants to fuck because I’m so deliciously fuckable myself,” Dominique said, pushing her fake tits together and admiring them. “You know, Georgia Ray Miller, you have had some ridiculous theories before. And this from the woman who takes advice from a ghost.”

“Fine. Don’t come screaming into my room in the middle of the night when you hear her footsteps in the hallway and her slamming doors.”

“Uh-huh, girlfriend.” She hopped from the counter and wiggled her hips. “Let’s put aside the ghost for a minute, and consider Casanova Jones. First of all, I don’t know what it’s going to take for you to realize how beautiful you are. I have to work for my beauty! You think all this waxing and dyeing and primping and plucking is easy? Hmm? Georgia Ray, I remember Casanova, and he was one of the fuckable gods of high school. But you—” she came over and stood directly in front of me “—you are an equally fuckable goddess. A beautiful, sexy, voluptuous goddess. I have breast envy. I mean, yours are perfect.” She reached out and squeezed one of my breasts. I didn’t even blink. She’s had breast envy since I got my first padded bra in seventh grade, and feeling me like an overripe cantaloupe was just typically Dominique.

“Well, you’ve slept with your quota of men since high school, so I’d say it’s time to consummate things with this Casanova guy,” Maggie said. “Most of us would do anything to be with that one guy we crave.”

Maggie is fearless enough to wear lopsided hair and not care about it. She gets her tattoos without getting drunk first, and she doesn’t even flinch. She will speak her mind to anyone—from a drunken Mardi Gras reveler, to a snobbish customer, to her very formidable father. She was the first person I knew to pierce her belly button. And the only person I knew who pierced her nose—and her tongue. She eventually took out the stud in her tongue, but a tiny diamond in her nose remains. Maggie never cares what anyone thinks about her. Not when her hair is pink, not when her tattoos are displayed in all their glory when she’s wearing a tank top.

Dominique is also fearless—though not about spiders or scary movies or any one of a dozen things she’s ordinarily terrified by. Still, she was a he—Damon—in high school. After we graduated, Damon told his father, a retired captain in the army, that he was gay. When his dad promptly threw him out of the house, he came to live with Nan and me, heartbroken, with a black eye, but grateful our door was open. Three years later, he was Dominique, and the beautiful voice he had raised to the rafters in his gospel choir was now used to belt out show tunes and disco hits onstage. His father has refused to see him all these years, yet Dominique will not change who she is, not even for her family. She volunteers at an AIDS crisis center, and instead of beads, she hurls silver-foiled packages of condoms at Mardi Gras. She’s vocal and in-your-face sometimes. And she tells everyone she’s not gay—but queer. And proud of it.

Maggie finished combing my hair, and the three of us went out on the side porch so we could sweep up my hair cuttings when we were done.

I continued, “But you should have seen this girl he was with. She had cheekbones to die for and perfect hair. Shampoo-commercial perfect. You know, like the one with the blonde who’s acting like she’s having an orgasm while she’s getting shampooed by young, hunky men.”

“I love that commercial,” Dominique cooed.

Maggie began snipping. “He obviously hasn’t forgotten you, so go for it. What’s the worst that could happen? A bad date. Big deal. You’ve had plenty of those.”

“Amen.” Dominique chimed in.

I looked up at Maggie, hearing the metal snip-snip of the scissors clicking away. “Remember…I want a trim—not lopsided hair.”

“What about a bob? A sort of European, angular thing?”

“If you cut my hair in a bob, I’ll look like a troll doll. I like it longer, and I like to go with my natural curls. For God’s sake, you’ve been cutting my hair for four years now. You know what I want.”

This was true—after much trial and bad-hair error. Dominique and I were Maggie’s guinea pigs. This fact itself was a mark of our friendship, because long before she was cutting her own hair lopsided and dyeing it raspberry, she was doing all kinds of things to ours. I’ve had bobs and pixie cuts, punky spikes and Madonna-like platinum. Dominique has had fades that make Grace Jones’s hair look conservative. She once even ended up bald thanks to a chemical straightening process gone awry.

“So…you’re finally going out with the love of your life.” Dominique clapped her hands.

“He’s not the love of my life.” I shot her a glance.

“Then the lust of your life,” Maggie offered as she bent over and cut angled pieces near my face.

“Well—” Dominique put her manicured hands on her hips “—I say go for it.”

“I’m not even positive I’m going.”

Maggie picked up a pair of clippers from her “house call” bag of scissors and combs. “If you don’t go I’m buzz-cutting you right now.”

“Georgia’s-gonna-get-some,” Dominique singsonged, waggling her hips. “A little sucking. A little fucking.”

“Why is it queens don’t know the meaning of the word understated?” In Dominique’s case, I’d settle for mildly dignified.

“I’m going to ignore Her Royal Bitchiness. Maggie, you should have seen the stare-downs between them.” Dominique twirled. A pair of tourists walked by, and she waved at them and struck a pose, daring them to take her picture, which they obligingly did.

“Seize the moment,” Maggie said, moving around to my left side and trimming away.

Dominique leaned over and grabbed her own rear end. “Seize some ass, honey. Some tight little ass.”

I shook my head; she was on a roll. There was no stopping her.

“Stop moving!” Maggie shouted at me. She finished my cut and we went back inside so she could blow out my hair. When she was finished, it looked shiny, straight and perfect. Of course, with my luck it would rain the minute I stepped out the door.

Next up was Dominique, with bleach across her eyebrows. She looks beautiful in platinum hair. When I see how striking she is, I just know occasionally the heavens screw up and send a girl down in a boy’s body.

Jack came into the kitchen, stretching, bare-chested, in a pair of plaid-flannel pajama bottoms.

“Hello, ladies.”

“Hey, Jack.” Maggie smiled. For a chance to be near him, she joins us at gigs every opportunity she gets. We tell the management she’s our manager. Maggie has partied with morticians, the national gathering of Kappa Alpha Phi fraternity, the New Orleans Fire Department (when, despite her love for Jack, she went home with a sexy captain who was Mr. November in a firemen calendar), orthodontists, the navy (when, again, despite her love for Jack, she went upstairs with a sailor who looked a lot like Tom Cruise) and the gathering of a Scottish Highland clan—who partied with us afterward and made us all drink single-malt scotch until we were sick.

“Mags.” Jack smiled back. “I love Georgie’s hair. You did a great job. Georgie, you look very sexy.”

“As opposed to my usual appearance?” I was getting tired of my band thinking I was little more than sequins and pantyhose.

“Give me a break. You always look hot, but this cut shows off your eyes, and how exotic-looking you are. Don’t tell me all this is for that guy last night.”

“Casanova Jones?” Dominique crossed her arms, waiting for the bleach Maggie applied to her eyebrows to work. “So tell us how he looked, Jack.”

“Nothing great. Not as beautiful as Georgia.”

“Get off it, Jack,” I muttered.

“I’m not. He just looked like any average on-the-make guy. In a penguin suit.”

“I’m not listening to this. I’ve got to go. I have a date.”

“Not with that guy, I hope.” Jack’s brotherly protective side took over.

“A certain piano player. Ta-ta, gang,” I said, brushing my shirt. “I’m off to get depressed or drunk enough to sing the blues.”

“Tell Red I said hi.” Dominique waved.

“I will.” I left the house and headed down the street. Whatever weather Cammie’s father had paid for the previous day was gone. New Orleans humidity hung as thick as Spanish moss. I tried to soak in the Crescent City’s native moodiness. If I was ever to become a blues goddess, it had to happen here, in the city I called home.

chapter
5

R ed Watson is the blues. We found each other a couple of years ago when I kept returning to Mississippi Mudslide to hear him play the piano and sing. He won’t tell me how old he is—well, he does, but the number often changes—but I would say he is pushing eighty.

When I first heard him play, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu, as if all my life I’d had a tune in my head I hadn’t been able to quite remember, to give voice to. And then I heard his song, and it was as if it was already a part of me. As if the blues were in my blood. As if the song was mine.

I had finally grown the nerve to ask him to teach me the blues, to work with me. I’d been listening to jazz since I was born. Before that even, in my mother’s womb. But Red wasn’t interested. Not only wasn’t he interested, he brushed me off like a buzzing fly. So Tony, the band’s sometime-bass player and my partner in scouting out jazz music, and I went back to the Mudslide again and again. And again. We were tireless. Tony and I had always stayed through the last set to talk to Red, no matter how late it got.

“Now, you two here again?” Red had asked us.

Tony had just smiled and lifted his beer in salute.

“The Irishman and the lady.” Red sat down at our table. It was almost three in the morning.

“Incredible second set,” Tony said, his brogue made thicker by the beers he’d had.

“Now how’d a man from clear across the ocean—you told me you’re from Dublin—come to know so much about the Delta blues is what I want to know.” Red smiled.

Tony shrugged, always somewhat taciturn until you got to know him.

“Come on, now, how come you’re here most every night I play…when you two ain’t playing?” By now he knew we were in a band. Albeit one that played ABBA.

“I may be an Irishman, but in another life I must have been a Delta bluesman. Since I was this high—” Tony stuck out his hand “—they’re all I’ve wanted to play.” Tony’s black eyes had a faraway look.

“Another life? You a Buddhist, man?” Red asked.

Tony laughed, his smile always having the ability to change his face from incredibly serious and tough-looking to something childlike. He shook his head. “Maybe I am…maybe I am.”

“And you?” Red turned his head to me. “You still got some fool idea you want to sing the blues?”

I nodded.

Red just laughed. More like a hoot. “Child, now singin’ the blues isn’t like singing wedding songs. You gots to feel it, here.” He tapped by his collarbone. “Inside.”

“You ought to let her sing you one,” Tony said almost inaudibly, staring into his beer bottle, the little vein on his forehead throbbing.

Red looked at me. “But do you have it? Inside. See…I used to travel this country in a bus with ten other stinkin’, sweatin’ men and a blues goddess or two. We’d play in club after club until we was so worn-out. Hungry sometimes. Laughing and good times, too. But half the guys, they’re into reefer and sometimes worse. Sometimes a lot worse. And ’cause we’re black, we play the biggest shitholes this side of the Mississippi. We play the chitlin’ circuit. We know the blues, ya see.”

“Let her sing,” Tony said simply, with authority. Something about Tony made people take him seriously. Then he leaned over to me. “Just sing a few lines of ‘At Last.’ Go on, gorgeous.”

So it wasn’t an audition. Not really. Just the three of us in a club still smelling of lingering smoke as the bartenders and barbacks were breaking the place down for the night, glasses clinking, the place sort of echoing now that nearly everyone had left. Half the houselights were up, the floors were sticky with spilled alcohol. I sang the first verse of the Etta James classic, my voice echoing. I had nothing to lose. Red had been telling me for months I was too much of a kid to sing the blues. I wasn’t hardened by the road. I had no right to sing the blues. Not like the first ladies of the blues who all did time in jail, or got hooked on heroin, or went through five and six marriages, unable to find lasting love.

I sang the lines, thankful I’d had four black Russians to give me some extra nerve. And when I was done, Red leaned back in his chair, mouth open. Tony looked smug and bemused. Red didn’t say anything for a good minute. Finally, eyes twinkling, he leaned forward and said, “Now, child, how come you never told me you could sing the blues before?”

I knocked on the door of apartment 1A, the ground floor of an old Southern courtyard home. Red rents it for a song, literally, from an eccentric dot-com millionaire (there are still a few of them left) who trades cheaper rent for weekly piano lessons—even though the guy’s still struggling with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

“Is that my girlfriend?” Red smiled and opened the door, enveloping me in a hug and pulling me inside.

His apartment is nirvana to me. Original posters of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Sidney Bechet, Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey and Duke Ellington hang in frames covering every square inch of wall. It’s a shrine to all things blues and jazz. Each week I walk in and knock on the framed Mildred Bailey picture for luck. Though I don’t know how much luck poor Mildred had. She had an unbelievable voice, a way of singing that made you feel it deep down. But she was sort of homely and overweight, consequently overshadowed by the blues singers who would be packaged and powdered like sex.

“Drink, sugar?” Red winked at me and pulled out a bottle of Chivas. It’s our Sunday ritual. We each have half a glass—all his doctors will allow him each day now—and toast to life, the blues, sometimes even to death. Whenever a blues or jazz legend dies, we observe a moment of silence. On those days, we cheat and have a full glass.

He poured me a scotch, which I drink out of deference to him, but which feels like hot fire sliding down my throat. It used to make me want to retch. I don’t know if it’s an acquired taste or what, but now I don’t cringe when I drink it. Because I am always striving for a more raw blues voice, I pray before each glass that it’s doing the trick.

“To Ma Rainey and Mildred, and all the jazz and blues goddesses, including this one right here in my livin’ room, Lord.” He poked a bony finger gently into the hollow between my collarbones. We clinked and swallowed.

“Mighty fine.” He smiled.

I blinked away the tears hard liquor always brings to my eyes. “Yeah, Red. This stuff is gonna kill me.”

“Ain’t killed me yet, and I’ll be eighty my next birthday.”

“I thought you were going to be seventy-nine.”

“Truth is, I got no idea.” He shrugged his shoulders, staring into his now-empty glass. I waited patiently to see if he might say more. He was often closemouthed about all he had seen and done, even about what his given name was, certainly not Red. But sometimes, a fragment of memory, maybe even a single chord on the piano, a song, a note…would carry him away to another time, playing piano with blues legends, riding in a bus in the Deep South during segregation. During times when he might have looked out a bus window at the countryside and seen a lynched black man hanging from a tree in the distance. Billie Holiday sang about that sight in a song entitled “Strange Fruit.”

“My mama died in childbirth, and I was sent off to live with my grandma,” he said softly. “My pa was always traveling in search of work. Then Grandma died…had to be when I was maybe ten. And I struck out on my own, but I never did know for sure how old I was because there wasn’t much fuss over birthdays in our house. Always too worried about feeding me, keeping warm in the winter…stuff like that. That was a long time ago. Different times, Georgia. Of course, my grandma was a good woman. She meant nothin’ by it—we just didn’t put too much stock in birthdays.”

His face was the color of pale coffee, and his eyes were coal-black and, with age, seemed to be perpetually teary, rheumy, the whites turning a yellowish color. He wore a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses, and his hair was now a soft silver-and-black Afro, with a bald spot the size of a small saucer on the crown of his head. What fascinated me most were his hands. His fingers were long and graceful, wrinkled, the nail beds wide and pale. The tops of his hands were crisscrossed with raised veins, and when he put them to the keys of a piano, magic happened.

He stood up and went to the shiny black baby grand—a Steinway—by the window. He said it had taken him ten years to pay it off. Closing his eyes, he sat down and rocked back and forth a few times, hearing something in his head, some melody. Then he began to play, humming along to the tune he envisioned while playing complex harmonies and bebops I could only hope to one day come up with on my own.

Each Sunday was the same; he would start playing, and I would wait. He told me you can’t rush the blues. You have to hear the blues in your soul first. Actually, feel them first. So he would play and hum, and when I felt that my voice could be quiet no longer, I sang. Sometimes I sang old songs from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, sometimes newer arrangements, maybe some Diana Krall or Norah Jones. Sometimes I would just scat, which means singing nonsense syllables in a way that imitates a trumpet or maybe a tenor sax. With Red, I sang from deep inside, the place that was just instrument and soul. The place I shared with no one. Not even Maggie or Dominique. Most definitely not with Gary or Jack. Sometimes Tony, I guess. But only if we were both drunk. We all have that space. Maybe for some it comes out in prayer; for me it comes from my song.

I started singing, but Red stopped me, sighing with frustration.

“Dig deeper. You call that the blues?”

I gritted my teeth. He never questioned my voice. I hit every note. I came in on the right beat. I got the tempo. He questioned my soul.

“Red…I’m singing the song as best I can.”

“I heard better blues from a goddamn alley cat.”

I exhaled loudly. He started in on the piano. Again, I sang. I shut my eyes and tried to get lost in the song. Soon I realized I was singing without the piano. He had abruptly lifted his hands from the keys.

“Georgia…you got your mind someplace else. Now when I say go to that place, you got to go there! Think why you sing the blues. Why? To sing to some roomful of fancy-assed people? No, you sing the blues ’cause you got the blues. Now sing ’em right or go on home today.”

Again, he moved his fingers on the keys, his feet on the piano’s pedals. I tried again. He’d made me angry. Sometimes I think he does it on purpose. But sure enough, with the anger came the blues.

That Sunday, I sang of a man lost, then found. I sang of mothers gone forever…for both Red and me. An hour went by while he and I made music, while we shared something that others only felt in a place of worship, if they were lucky. I sang in a way that was raw and naked and sacred. When we were done—determined by some indefinable moment when we both sensed we were finished—Red stopped playing and came over to me. I was sweating and spent. Where had that voice come from?

“Sweetheart…you are gettin’ it. You sing from that same spot each time, and you will be a blues goddess like her.” He nodded toward a poster of Bessie Smith.

I looked away. “I’m not sure where that came from. I can’t find it every time, Red. That’s what made her great and me…me.” I still mentally pictured me rolling off a baby grand piano.

He shook his head.

“The blues and jazz are just a part of you. When you come to believe that, your life will change, Georgia.”

He offered me a glass of water. “So how’s your nana?”

“Fine, Red. You should come by and pay her a visit. It’s Sunday. Why don’t you come to dinner tonight? She’s been asking after you.”

We played this game every Sunday. He was, of course, always invited to Sunday supper. I had introduced him to my grandmother shortly after I started singing with Red. Tony and I dragged Nan to a club to hear Red play with a trio. Nan loved the music, and I think she’s grown pretty fond of the man, too. Red played along with me, looking pleased at the invite. “I’d like that very much, sugar. What time shall I call on your nan?”

“You know we eat at eight o’clock. Don’t play too hard to get with me.” I winked and set my glass down. He walked me to the door, and I spontaneously kissed him goodbye on the cheek. I started down the little path to the sidewalk. He called out to me.

“Georgia?”

“Yes, Red?” I turned around.

“I think today your mama and my grandma were sittin’ up in heaven together clappin’ their hands.”

“Thanks, Red,” I whispered, and started toward the Heartbreak Hotel, the New Orleans humidity pressing in on me and making me feel claustrophobic.

chapter
6

W alking home from Red’s, I thought back to high school, when I was the helpless victim of a mother who believed fashion can be bought at places with bright fluorescent lights, wide aisles and endless rows of sales racks—much of it polyester-laden. While the princesses and prom queens of my high school wore designer jeans and carried purses with labels on the outside tipping off others to their two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar price tag, I was relegated to wearing no-name jeans and no-name sneakers, and slinging my shiny pink lip gloss in a worn-out denim purse. My mother refused to believe this mattered in the social feeding frenzy that is high school.

“Georgia, who cares what you wear? It’s what’s inside that counts,” she’d tell me, while she calmly folded socks or cooked her tuna casserole. Easy for her to say. Mom lived in a Carol Brady bubble. She didn’t have to sit in lunchroom no-man’s-land, with only Damon for company. My mother didn’t have to face down Casanova Jones in social studies as he undressed me with his eyes and flirted shamelessly, while I felt hopelessly clumsy, embarrassed by a chest that had unexpectedly grown out of control, as far as I was concerned. Damon and I did our stupid “We must, we must, we must improve our busts” exercises. But I guess my body took that mantra too much to heart. As a woman’s body replaced my baby one, as I developed into this curvaceous 1960s Playboy ideal when the rage was waiflike, I felt even more like an outsider.

My mother, on the other hand, lived her life like a television show. She bought the perfect laundry detergent for the whitest whites and the brightest colors. She whipped up meals she meticulously cut from the back of Campbell’s soup can labels and mounted on recipe cards. She knew one hundred and one ways to prepare Jell-O. She entered bake-offs. She ironed my underwear. She made every one of my childhood Halloween costumes, including a lobster complete with giant claws the year I was obsessed with crustaceans. In short, she was the picture-perfect mother, right down to her hair, which she had washed and set every Friday afternoon at the beauty salon. All she wanted was the perfect daughter. What she got was me.

I pierced my ears five times before I was thirteen, doing them at home with a cork, a needle and Damon’s pep talk to steady my shaking hand. I was hell-bent on being a singer, living my life in rebellion, being like Nan. My father was a jazzman; he played the bass, and from what I remembered of his playing, he was very talented. He was also an alcoholic. Sundays were spent tiptoeing around the house while he slept off his hangovers. Mom pretended he was just “tired.”

I adored him anyway.

Dad taught me how to “phrase” a song by playing endless records, he and I together in the den, the stereo spinning old 45s and 78s and ancient albums with dust all over them. He never seemed happy to me, except when we were playing music—especially Gene Krupa and Jess Stacy, Duke Ellington and Etta James.

He left my mother and me when one of his old musician pals came to New Orleans with a moderately successful jazz quartet, in need of a new bassist. He departed, first for the Chicago blues scene, and then for the Blue Note in New York City, with the Buster Keys Quartet, promising to return home “soon,” and sending money along the way. He wrote me postcards, which I still have in an old shoe box in my room. He was the only person who made me feel beautiful:

Angel, I’m doin’ fine in NYC. When you come visit, we’ll go to the Empire State Building and touch the sky.

Stay beautiful and keep on singing,

Love, Your Father,

Dad

He signed each card that way. He was a dreamer who believed we could touch the sky and talk to God. We could speak to heaven and listen for ghosts in the attic. He was everything imaginative. He was the blues. He was the music. He was everything my mother wasn’t.

But after a while, both the postcards and the money stopped.

My mother’s reaction to this wasn’t anger or rage, hurt or tears of abandonment. Instead, she focused all her energies on creating this fantasy of perfection—and making sure I didn’t become a singer. That I didn’t abandon her, too. And my reaction to her reaction was to try my hardest to infuriate her.

My father had left behind his blues record collection, which was enormous and still lines special shelves I had built for them in my room. I played his music over and over and over again. Sometimes the same song tirelessly. I did it to feel close to him. I did it to hurt her for driving him away with her picture-perfect ways. Etta James’s “At Last” was their song. So what else would an angry adolescent do but play that song morning, noon and night. Music has always been my weapon and my refuge.

At first, I was certain Dad was going to come back. When he didn’t, the blues were already part of me. I played them, then, because they reflected how I felt about adolescence—it was like one long, angst-ridden blues song.

I was never quite sure if I succeeded in hurting her. Besides piercing my ears, I wore dark black eyeliner and bleached my hair blond, though it fried to a vague orange. I stayed out past my curfew every weekend night. I was sullen from the moment I woke up, staring through hostile eyes as she cooked me pancakes with raisins set in them to make little happy faces. Yet she never yelled at me, never grounded me. She kept smiling and cooking and cleaning and ironing, refusing to show how much I was breaking her heart—just like he did. As long as I wasn’t hanging out with musicians, she seemed content that it was all “a phase.” She didn’t want to risk pushing me away. She even let Damon sleep over at our house, knowing, I think, he was my only friend. A lot of the time, I convinced myself the only person holding me back from going to New York City and finding my father was Damon. Later, Damon and I had an elaborate fantasy about going to New York together. He’d be a top fashion designer, and I’d sing with my father’s band.

When I was almost seventeen, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was late-stage before they found it because she was too busy tending to me to take care of herself. Suddenly, hating her for her decidedly bad taste in clothes and bedspreads (mine was still Barbie in high school) was pointless.

I read to her while she was sick in bed. She liked romances with happy endings, and that’s what she got, though I was at an age when I didn’t believe in happy endings. I still don’t. “I can see you rolling your eyes, Georgia,” she weakly said one afternoon.

“Mom, happy endings are bullshit.”

“Georgia Ray, the language.”

“Fine. But they’re still bullshit. Happy endings aren’t for people like me.”

“What exactly is a person like you?” she asked, breathless. Everything, every word, took so much effort.

“An outsider. Different.”

“You’re New Orleans born and bred. How does that make you an outsider, Georgia?”

“No father, for one.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Now that she was sick, I was trying so hard not to wound her, but sometimes my resentments were right there on the surface.

I tried to explain to her that happy endings were for the popular girls, not for me with my kinky hair that I never quite accepted, and my exotic looks in the southern state of Louisiana, the social scene in high school dominated by Magnolia Queens and blond debutantes with beautiful drawls. Happy endings weren’t for Damon either, with his lust for the homecoming king—not queen. His desire to be the homecoming queen. Yet complaining about my hair seemed selfish, when my mother’s own perfect coiffure fell out in clumps in the shower one day, swirling down the tub and clogging the drain. I dropped the subject and kept reading to her.

Damon used to come over and give her makeovers, drawing on eyebrows and tying up colorful turbans out of silk scarves. One time, he did her eyes and eyebrows like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

“You look just like Liz, Mrs. Miller,” Damon said, painting on the last of her new eyebrows.

“Hand me a mirror.”

I went to get a hand mirror, knowing she would freak out the second she saw herself.

“Now, you just have to go with it.” Damon stood and surveyed his handiwork.

I handed her the mirror, bracing myself for her reaction. But it wasn’t what I expected. She howled with laughter until tears rolled down her face, all the while Damon was begging her, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. It’ll all run.” Soon, she had black tear stains tracing a path down her now-thin face. Then Damon and I started laughing, too. After that, for the first time, my mother started to relax a little, to laugh with us. Maybe she was trying to leave some good memories for me.

Surrounded by death at home, I tried to be a normal teenager knowing my mother was slipping away and my father had stopped sending postcards when I was in the tenth grade. I tried to eat lunch with Damon and study about the Civil War with Mr. Hoffman, my favorite teacher, and learn about sines, cosines and tangents in math class. I tried to carry my lunch tray without tripping and open my locker without getting crushed by the crowds in the hallway.

We eventually moved in with Nan, selling our two-bedroom house in a parish outside New Orleans and coming into the city to live with my grandmother and her ghost. Nan had always been more like Auntie Mame than a grandmother. Strong, adventurous, feminist, stubborn, she tried to will my mother into getting well. But my mother had always wilted in the face of her mother, just as I wilted in the shade of my own mother’s shadow, and so Nan’s will aside, my mother was gone before winter was out. She died in a hospital, something she never wanted to do. Nan and I were there. It was the first time I ever saw a dead body.

That night, I cried until my stomach ached, and then I cried more but without any tears. I had never been perfect for her, and now I wouldn’t have the chance to lose the adolescent brooding and be nice to her, and maybe get a prom date while she was alive. I wouldn’t be able to prove to her that I wasn’t the rebellious girl she thought I was, with the messy room that drove her crazy. “Georgia, I can’t see the floor in here,” was her mantra. I had been angry for so many years, and she had loved me when I didn’t deserve it, and now she was gone.

Casanova Jones came to the wake. I remember sitting in the front of the muffled and velvet funeral parlor, my mother in her best dress—the one she’d been saving for a “special occasion.” She looked serene, but most definitely not like my mother. She was thin and bony and looked as if she was made of wax. Damon was wailing in the bathroom, unable to even come in to view her body. Nan sat next to me, patting my hand and accepting my used tissues, which she discreetly shoved into her vintage clutch purse.

I looked up, face blotchy and red, and mascara-streaked, my hair an unkempt mass of curls, and saw Casanova Jones heading straight toward me. He even had on a tie. His black curly hair fell past the collar of his white shirt, and his swagger, half man, half boy, was still evident, but as my grandmother whispered to me, “He cleans up good.” Rick, aka Casanova, mumbled an “I’m sorry” in the awkward way of high-school kids unsure of what to say when thrust into an adult situation. I loved him in that moment. Actually, I’d been in love with him all of high school. Something about how he pushed his hands through his luxurious head of curls—curls that behaved, unlike my own—and sort of shook his hair into place, about his pale blue eyes, or how he played with a lock of my hair while flirting with me threw me right over the edge. He was my crush. He was my obsession. And he picked my mother’s funeral to show he really cared and wasn’t just toying with me. I was too numb to care.

The last few months of high school passed in a blur of grief. I had originally planned to go far away from my mother after I graduated. I wanted to go to college in Manhattan, rooming with Damon, who longed to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Instead, I chose to go to the Newcomb Department of Music at Tulane. That way I could live with Nan. She possessed the spirit I wanted. She could bring out the Georgia who was buried beneath wild hair, hateful adolescence, and all that eyeliner. In Nan, I had a kindred spirit. She saw something in me—a spark of life she called it. I don’t think she ever forgave my mother for living an ordinary life, for being a homemaker and not burning her bra and changing the world.

Nan was the first person to encourage me to sing. My mother said I had a pretty voice as a child, before my father left, but she was the kind of person who didn’t believe in showing off or attracting attention. I remember once being invited to a birthday party when I was a little girl. More than anything, I wanted to wear my new pink dress with the ruffles and crinoline—okay, so what did I know about fashion then? What I didn’t realize, until years later, was that the birthday girl was poor. If I wore my new party dress, I would outshine her at her own party. So my mother made me wear something old and, to my eyes, ugly. This was another of a thousand misunderstandings that only made sense after she had died.

With the wisdom of hindsight, now I see that she couldn’t risk me leaving New Orleans to follow my fortunes as a musician or a singer. I needed to do something “steady”; I had to have “something to fall back on” when I failed, as she was certain I would. The odds of succeeding as a jazz singer or musician are a million to one. For every Harry Connick Jr., every Wynton Marsalis, every Diana Krall, there are ten thousand men like my father, broken down and tormented by their music just as much as they desire it. Some blues singers, like Billie Holiday, embodied both success and destruction. Strung out on heroin, she was a poster child for how the music business can destroy you. My mother wasn’t about to let me risk anything. Least of all my life.

Now, Nan is a different story. I’m not sure how the two of them were even related. My mother occasionally used to sigh at her own mother and mutter something about “baby-switching” at the hospital. Nan was a rebel and risk-taker all her life. She was the kind of woman who wore flaming-red lipstick and kept her hair short, in the latest “Parisian” styles, as a young woman. She had a sense of self that stares back at you in the black-and-white photos in her albums, her high cheekbones and dark eyes commanding attention. She rode in a motorcycle sidecar across the United States with one of her boyfriends, and she danced on a bar with Ernest Hemingway in Key West. She ran the brothel until Sadie died, and even after she married my grandfather, a professional gambler and whiskey importer, she threw parties that made the newspapers. She also never let her racial heritage define her, even down here where sometimes you step off the St. Charles streetcar and swear it’s another era.

Nan was the one to sneak me off to R-rated movies before I was even thirteen. She bought me Junior Mints and filled my head with talk of love affairs and Paris, and the way a man loves a woman with a “bosom.” My mother couldn’t even say the word bra to me. She couldn’t look me in the eyes when I told her I got my first period. Everything about womanhood embarrassed my mother, while Nan encouraged me to embrace it all. Nan was velvet and lipstick. Mom was a buttoned-up oxford shirt and Ivory soap.

Nan pushed me into voice lessons in high school, and then in college she was always there behind me nudging me into the spotlight, telling me that’s where I belonged, “Out where people can see and hear you, for God’s sake, Georgie. Anybody can stand in the shadows. It takes courage to shine.”

Yes, Nan is a character all her own. And I knew on the pressing issue of Casanova Jones her advice would be quite simple. Nan believes approaching summer drives all of us in New Orleans mad. It has its roots in Mardi Gras, whose long finger extends madness throughout the year. But deeper than that, it has its roots in the bayou and the mist.

When summer comes, she believes we all need romance, because, as she puts it, “Georgia, there’s nothing to do in the Crescent City heat but drink mint juleps, make passionate love, lay naked afterward underneath the ceiling fan and listen to the blues.”

chapter
7

A rriving home, I stood in front of our house, its ancient brick weathered and elegant. The house did seem to be alive. Some nights, Nan and I would hear a woman walking upstairs, her heels clicking across old floorboards. Occasionally, I smelled perfume in my room, a complex mix of jasmine and lily of the valley. Not my perfume, yet an intoxicatingly familiar scent. The way I could smell it just in one spot in the room as I crossed my floor made me feel as if I was being watched by someone. I wanted to whisper to Sadie’s ghost, What is it you want from me? But I think I was afraid of the answer.

I stepped inside the house and found Nan in the kitchen preparing a feast. All the members of Georgia’s Saints would be attending Sunday Saints Supper, along with Dominique, Gary’s wife, Annie, Maggie—and Red.

“Smells good, Nan. What’re you making?”

“Georgia, for goodness’ sake, you’ve lived in New Orleans since the day you were born. Can’t you smell it?”

“Jambalaya?”

“Mmm, hmm. Mighty spicy, too.”

“Red’s coming. I hope that’s all right.”

She looked genuinely pleased—as she did every Sunday we went through this little charade. “Of course that’s fine, Georgia. You set another place at the dining-room table.”

Thank God my grandfather left Nan “loaded,” as they say, because she likes to entertain with style. Every Sunday bottles of good red wine are uncorked to breathe, champagne chills in the refrigerator, and delicious smells emanate from brewing pots and pans. Our dining-room table could fit twenty, its cherry-wood surface polished to a brilliant sheen. The house recalls the grandeur of New Orleans, and the antiques give it character. At any moment, you half expect a Southern belle with a hoop skirt, or a flapper from the 1920s, to walk down the stairs…or Sadie to return to life.

I pulled another plate out of the china cabinet. The plates had been imported from France at the turn of the twentieth century by my great-great-grandmother. It made me nervous serving on them. Each of them, hand-painted with a pattern of tea roses, was probably worth more than the band pulled in on a Friday night, but my grandmother doesn’t believe in saving the good china for fancy occasions. Her motto is: “Having your friends gathered around your table is occasion enough.” We’d lost a plate and a saucer or two, as well as several teacups—three when we opened our house to a Christmastime historic-homes tour—but we still had most of the pieces, and the table did look spectacular each Sunday, with ivory-colored linen napkins and stemware sparkling beneath a chandelier dangling with Austrian crystals.

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