A Rumor of Elephants by Richard Louth

Director, Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project

How strange the twists and turns we take. One hour ago, at 9:55, I arrived at the corridor of the Paul McCartney suite after spending the morning sitting by the river and having a breakfast of waffle, bacon, orange juice, and coffee at Café au Lait on Chartres. I arrived as unconcerned as could be about the others, a change from the last few days.

I had talked to Doris from my cell phone by the river. She was chipper. So was I. I had returned to the spot where we had sat together yesterday when she was here. I wonder how many times I will do that. How many times she will do that. Will one of us, eventually, return alone and remember this spot when the other is gone? Which one of us? Does it matter? No. I think not. What matters is that we have created a spot in New Orleans. Not the Monteleone Hotel, where we have slept together so many times, nor the Richilieu, where we have tested the resilience of the Paul McCartney Suite. Not the Café du Monde, Galatoire's, Mr. B's, or even my apartment on Royal. After all the time, the food, the love, the place that now is more ours than any other in the city is a curved, black iron bench by the river, overlooking the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf, where we sat long enough last week to see the lights light up the Crescent City Connection at 8:12 p.m., and where we sat again yesterday to see the river in the morning.

She had asked to go to the river. It was out of the way, the opposite direction from the hotel, and I needed to be back there to greet the others in 15 minutes. At first, leaving the Croissant D'Or, I hemmed and hawed and looked at my watch once, twice, as if in the looking I'd make time stand still. I said, "Well, maybe we should go back," but still we headed forward. Then we got to Decatur Street, where one direction led to the hotel, the other to the river. One of life's moments, though of course you never realize it at the time. And that's a reason for writing, because I really didn't realize it until I wrote it down just now. And we turned right, towards the river, because I knew she wanted to go there, and I knew I wanted to go there too, and I also wanted her to have what she wanted. So we crossed the tracks, walked up the same steps we'd walked up the week before, sat on the same bench, and talked. I can't recall now what we had talked about the week before, nor even what we'd talked about yesterday, but she would, of course. And then it was time to return.

So, today, finding myself walking the vacant streets at 8 a.m., my stomach queasy from last night, my head a bit faint, I wondered where to go. Silently, I passed Tracy by the pool, immersed in her writing. Out to Decatur, where Laura and Liz, walking towards me on the other side of the street, pointed and said as if spotting some strange species of bird in the jungle, "There's a writer." I waved my composition notebook at them, passed them too in silence, still not knowing where I was going, simply pulled or pushed forward. I paused by an adult toy store to study a purple plastic vibrator called "The Bullet" and a device that claimed to be an inflatable buttocks. I moved on past the mannequins in chains, leather, and motorcycle caps, passed three or four closed bars. Even Angelli was closed though it door said "Open 24 hours." Only the Abbey was open, and through the hanging columns of transparent plastic that served as a door, I glimpsed pieces of people around the bar and heard the grunts and sounds of morning drinkers. Past Molly's closed window. Without thinking, crossing the street at the place I must have known my feet would take me, then over the tracks and up the stairs to the river.

When I sat at our bench, I knew it was our bench. A pigeon swooped from the sky and landed like an ink blot before me, looked at me with his red eye, and did his fancy pigeon strut on red claws, the back of his neck ruffled. Then a man in yellow approached from upriver, one of those silly walking joggers, arms akimbo, hips moving more than legs, walking just like a pigeon.

I have tried to walk like a pigeon a few times and never have been able to do it, that simultaneous forward movement of the feet and backward movement of the head. That forward/backward movement. That forward/backward movement. And it occurs to me now that this is what my walk today actually was. I may not have looked like a pigeon, but coming again to this seat was my own forward/backward movement.

So I called Doris and caught her in a good mood, and she told me about the news—Saddam's sons shot dead, the Eiffel Tower afire, and the news that she relished most—that the circus had been to New Orleans yesterday and that she'd seen them washing the elephants near the Arena and that she had followed Kim's advice to seek rumors, and had gone yesterday from store to store asking "Do you know about the elephants? Do you know where they are?" and each storekeeper said, "No," but wanted to know more, and she envisioned them calling their friends and neighbors and asking these same questions, and so as she walked through the Quarter yesterday asking strangers if they knew about the elephants, she suddenly realized that she had been an agent of sorts. She had created a rumor of elephants throughout the Quarter. I remember from Greek literature how Homer would describe fleet-footed Rumor flying above the heads of crowds, and I see in my mind's eye Doris, in her straw hat and white dress, walking down Chartres, behind her floating in the air the giant, fleet-footed elephant of her imagination.

As I sat on the bench this morning, she told me she had gone home and begun a short story. It was her first, and she'd written only one paragraph, but she had a title, "Rumor of Elephants."

Day 2

July 23, 2003

In Melanie's kitchen, with Kim, Melanie, Andre, Todd, Nancy, 10:55 a.m.

This came pouring out, unexpectedly, and had as much to do with the place where I was writing and the comfort of the group I was with, as it did with the memory itself. We paused for a photo outside her house, and she seemed surprised that we wanted to go in. We went straight through to the back yard, watching out to not let the cats escape, then came back in and settled quickly into writing. Melanie served drinks, made coffee, and attempted to clear the detritus off the kitchen table—cigarettes, matches, papers, candles, a thick dictionary in the center. By the time I sat down I knew that the table's clutter didn't matter. I could have continued writing if someone had not called for a stop. We moved on to Port of Call for thick, charbroiled hamburgers, and discussed what to make of all this marathon writing, then split up in the rain looking for Spike along the river. Kim and I, soaked, observed the Holocaust Monument, hid out under the Aquarium's portico, and then talked at O'Flaherty's. This was my one real piece of writing that day, but it led to another the next morning.