The Second Line

I came to New Orleans by Greyhound, in the rain, with one suitcase and a heart I had stopped answering the phone for. The city didn't ask why. That was the first thing I noticed, standing on the corner of Rampart while the driver swung my bag down from the hold — New Orleans doesn't interrogate its newcomers the way other places do. It takes you in the way the river takes everything in, and asks only that you stay awhile.

In Chicago I had been sensible for twelve years. I married a sensible man, bought a sensible house behind sensible trees, and kept my days in a neat row of small dependable things. Then one spring evening he told me, gently, that he had met someone else, and the terrible part was not the news itself but what I felt when I heard it: relief. I had been holding my breath for a decade without noticing. So I did the only unsensible thing of my life. I gave away the furniture, kept the car, and pointed it south. New Orleans was the first name on the map that sounded like a place where a person might learn to breathe again.

Miss Odette's apartment was a single room off Royal Street with a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the courtyard, where a magnolia held its blossoms up like a woman holding her skirts. The kitchen was a corner. The bed was a bed. The rent was small enough that I could afford to decide nothing at all. You'll hear the music, Miss Odette told me, in the unhurried way she said everything. Everybody hears the music. Her parrot, King Cake, studied me from his perch and said nothing, and I took that for a good omen.

For four days I heard nothing, and I began to wonder if the city had oversold itself. I unpacked. I ate beignets at Café du Monde until the powdered sugar dusted my sleeves like snow, and I drank chicory coffee strong enough to argue with. I walked the streets until my shoes learned the curbs. And on the fifth evening, the trumpet found me.

I was standing on the balcony, watching the evening come up from the river, when the first notes arrived — a single horn, no band behind it, playing something slow and searching. It wasn't sad, exactly. It was the sound a person makes when they are speaking to someone they miss, and I stood very still and understood that I had been weeping for months in complete silence, and this was the first thing in all that time that had made me want to listen instead of brace.

I followed it past the candlelit courtyards and the galleries full of laughter, down toward Jackson Square, where the cathedral rose out of the dusk like a white ship, and out to the levee. The man stood at the foot of the steps, his back to the river, horn lifted, eyes closed, and the river behind him was wide and dark and full of the city's reflection. I watched him the way you watch something you have been missing without knowing its name. When the last note faded, the silence had weight. He lowered the horn, opened his eyes, and found me standing there like a woman who had been summoned and had no idea what to answer.

He smiled, easy as anything. You look like you needed that, he said. I'm Eli. Nora, I said. He nodded, as if my name were a thing he'd been keeping a place for. Welcome to New Orleans, Nora. It was such a small thing, and still my chest ached with it — to be addressed like someone expected.

The trumpet became my clock. Every evening at dusk it started up from the levee, and I began arranging my days around it the way other people arrange their days around appointments. I found work at Arceneaux's Used Books on Chartres, shelving and dusting and alphabetizing the poetry, quiet work at which I was excellent, having had twelve years of practice. The shop smelled of old paper and patience, and for the first time in months I slept through the night without dreaming of Chicago.

We kept meeting, Eli and I, the way you keep meeting someone in a small city: at the grocery in the checkout line, at the farmer's market by the river, once at midnight on the levee, him leaning on the railing watching the water slide past like a long, dark thought. We talked in the small ways you talk with someone you keep meeting — about the weather, about the book I was carrying (he borrowed it and returned it a week later with a pressed magnolia leaf for a bookmark), about what the river was doing tonight. Nothing was said that mattered. Everything was said that mattered.

One Sunday I asked him about the band. He played trumpet in a brass band that worked the second lines, he said — the parades the neighborhoods throw when one of their own goes home. My grandfather put this horn in my hands when I was nine, he told me, and he said: the city goes through grief and joy, both, and it's your job to play them both straight. He died last winter. I played for him in the church on St. Louis Street, and then I played him home in the second line, and by the end of the street people were dancing, because that's what the music does — it remembers joy on behalf of everyone. Grief is only joy, he said, that hasn't found its way back to dancing yet. I repeated the words to myself later, in the dark of my room, like a promise I was too tired to keep but unwilling to put down.

One Sunday in early September I woke up and decided to go home. It came over me the way panic does — quietly, with terrible manners. I packed the suitcase. I folded the dresses I had bought in this city and told myself they would look just as well in Chicago. And at dusk the trumpet started, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap and listened to the whole song from beginning to end, like a woman at a window watching a ship she will never board. And then I unpacked. I hung the dresses back in the armoire, one by one, and I went down to the levee, and I stood at the edge of the crowd until he saw me, and he played the next song looking straight at me, and I understood that I had not been summoned to this city by accident at all.

The storm caught us both by surprise, the way late-summer storms do — bragging clouds at noon, and by four the sky split open and the Quarter ran with water. I was coming home from the shop with two bags of groceries when the rain hit, a solid thing, and by the time I fought my way to the corner of Dumaine the world had gone gray and roaring. And then Eli was there, appearing out of the wall of water with an umbrella that had clearly lost its argument with the wind, laughing like the rain was the best joke he'd heard all year. He caught my elbow and pulled me under the gallery of a shuttered house, into the doorway of a closed courtyard, and we stood pressed into the one dry pocket of the city while the storm hammered the ironwork above our heads. The world outside went water. We stayed.

He was close enough that I could smell the rain on his collar and something warm underneath it — soap, or sun. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and I laughed, and then I was crying, and neither of us mentioned it. I wondered if you'd left, he said, over the rain. Why would I leave? Some people come here to get well, he said, and then they get well, and then they leave. Where would I go? I asked him. He looked at me for a long time, and the rain made a roof for us, and I understood that I was being asked something I hadn't known I was ready to answer. I didn't answer it. He didn't push. That was the thing about Eli — he never pushed. He only stood near, patient as the river, and waited for the water to decide.

The rain slowed the way it does when it's finished, and he walked me home through streets that glittered like fresh ink. At my gate he said: There's a second line on Saturday. Sully's send-off. Sully played the trombone for forty years, he said, and the whole neighborhood's going to put him home. You come. I don't know anyone there, I said. You know me, he said.

On Saturday I stood at the back of the crowd outside the church on St. Ann, uncertain, clutching a handkerchief I didn't remember bringing. The dirge came out slow and heavy, the way grief actually goes — in steps, not in flights — and the pallbearers moved like men carrying something sacred. I saw Eli in the band, his horn at rest, his eyes finding me in the crowd for one long moment. He nodded once, and I nodded back, and it felt like being included in something enormous. I thought of my mother, who had died three years ago, and whose sending-off I had handled so competently that no one ever knew I was still holding it.

And then it happened. The last note of the dirge hung in the air, the doors of the church closed, the priest said his final word — and the band turned the corner into the second line, and the whole street caught fire with joy. It wasn't a denial of grief. It was grief turned inside out, held up to the light. Parasols opened like flowers all up and down the block. Handkerchiefs rose and twirled. Old men danced with their canes, children rode shoulders, women in white moved like weather, and the music remembered the man completely, in the only language big enough to hold him. The line moved like the river, and it was coming toward me.

Eli's hand found mine in the crowd — warm, certain, not asking. Come on, he said. I shook my head, laughing and horrified. I don't know how. Nobody does, he said. That's the point. And the street took me the way the city had taken me at the beginning — without asking why — and I danced. I danced badly, and then I danced less badly, and then I danced, and I wept and laughed and wept, and somewhere in the middle of it I let go of a year of holding my breath and my mother and a marriage I hadn't wanted, and I understood, with my whole body, why New Orleans sends its people home dancing.

When it was over, the crowd scattered gently into the evening, and Eli walked me home through streets that smelled of rain to come and fried food and jasmine. You see? he said. We don't leave them sad. We walk them home dancing. I thought of the sensible house and the girl who had held her breath for so long, and I said: Nobody ever walked me home before. He glanced at me, and something in his face went soft. Then we'll make sure you're walked home from now on, he said.

It rained that night — soft, apologetic rain, the kind that barely wets the balconies. We stood under the magnolia in the courtyard, out of it. Eli put his hand against my cheek, slow, giving me time, and I didn't want time. I wanted him. He kissed me the way he played — patient, searching, unhurried — and it was like the first note of a song I already knew I would love for the rest of my life. When he drew back, the world had rearranged itself around us without my noticing. He kept his forehead against mine. Second lines go as long as people keep dancing, he said. I don't know if that was a question or a promise. It doesn't matter, I said. I'm not going anywhere.

Later, from my balcony, I watched him walk down Royal toward the river, his shadow long under the lantern light. The trumpet would begin again at dusk tomorrow. It would call me down to the levee, and I would go, and we would stand together watching the wide dark water carry the city's lights like an offering. I thought about the woman who had stepped off a bus in the rain with one suitcase and a heart that wouldn't answer the phone. She had come here to hide, and the city had not let her. It had given her music instead, and a man with patient hands, and a street full of people dancing their dead home.

The second line had begun the moment I stopped running. And it would go as long as I kept dancing.