Bourbon Street Lady

Bourbon Street Lady
 
     I pop the cork on a Chardonnay bottle dreaming of drinking our sorrows away till my wine blush cheeks warm.  I lean over the balcony railing gazing down at Bourbon Street with the blues my only hope for sleep this night when neon prayers aren’t enough to keep the raven at bay who watches me with steely eyes. Marsha strips into the lingerie loneliness of a once starry-eyed Catholic school girl who wandered the hallways of “Our Lady of Perpetual Penance.”
     She continues, “You know on nights like tonight I feel awful about how I earn my bread. My patrons come to me for advice or love and I feed them the fermented grape. It just gives me the chills to wonder what happens when I send a drunken man home to his wife.”
     I tell Marsha, “At least you are there to tell them they have had enough and to go home. Imagine if they got a fifth of whiskey at the liquor store and downed it at home. You are a guardian in an ancient profession. You protect your customers from much worse fates.”
     She replies, “Yes and there is the law of averages. Though some deny it I’ve seen it at work in my daily life. I’ve put myself in harm’s way for those I cared about. I didn’t do this out of a sense of duty but rather the love of an army nurse who sees a wounded soldier with a ticking grenade and throws it with all her strength to save a man who was trying to commit suicide because she believes his life is worth saving even though he doesn’t. And the soldier dies of his injuries because even a seasoned nurse like me couldn’t stitch him up enough to stop his bleeding. Then there are the times I ran for my life away from the minefield between me and the certain death I faced if I tried to treat the wounded warriors of my life. But they healed without me being their angel.”
     “Think of the prohibition era. Though it was illegal, bootleggers set up stills and served hooch which left widows to pick up the tab for hungry mouths to feed.”
      Marsha answers, “On the baseball diamond of
life, God is the umpire and he has the last word.”
     This evening we lay in the heat with a ceiling fan our only solace till I stumble into slumber when the sensation of age creeps upon me. “You are like an old lover of my catty youth,” she says.
     “This heat washes over me like a wet dream. Even women can leave the stain of their dreams on cotton. And I’ve done it as good as any man” she muses out loud. In the wee hours of a delicate morning, I feel her shiver against me like an old crone nearing the end. But I know she has many years ahead. Don’t I? I ponder wide and deep. Her ragged breath sounds like a death rattle.
     But I face my personal demons with the strong prospect of immersion in the river Lethe to wash all the taints of my past into oblivion. The sun peeks through the window and touches her sober nakedness with an aura of golden heat which awakens my restless libido. We answer Helios summons with our eyes wide to the opening future.
     Marsha retires to the powder room to wash the sweat from her mascara smeared face. I watch her rub the moistened cloth to wipe away her makeup. Soon her lips are pale, once again, as Poe’s Annabel Lee’s. I tag behind her to wash my face. Each splash of cold on heat feels like a bath in a baptismal font to christen me into a new age.
     Together, we step in the manmade waterfall of her shower and ballroom dance under the pelt of liquid joy. Each hot bead steams my skin into blushed manhood. She shuts off the rush of water. Then I close my eyes and feel the opium rush of cool air on my drenched body.
     With sure feet, I follow her footsteps to the window and stand caressed in the late spring breeze. I know that in the French Quarter her nudity is a form of art which is appreciated by a passerby on streets littered with beer cans and condoms.
     She wraps herself in terrycloth. Her bathrobe looks like pre-exhibition drapery on her nude portrait. She tells me, “I see myself as a Pre-Raphaelite model whose beauty is appreciated by many but seen in the flesh by few. Yet as a barmaid, many are privileged to know my charm.”
     “I am jealous,” I say.    
     She replies, “I will only put on my counselor’s hat in the saloon which I dare not consider home; for the sacred space of our apartment is my womb where my heart beats by itself but not alone in this church for a fallen woman who has done enough penance for an army of adulteresses.”
     And so we emerge into the swelter of lust and beer with Marsha’s witness to me. “I have found a kind of fragrance all my own.”