Chapter 70: Trips Now and Later

Wednesday, December 28, 1983

The breakfast place was just as good as we’d all remembered. It turned into something similar to last night: sitting around, dawdling over coffee, and feeding each other bits of beignet.

Yes, that meant that Angie and Paige were more or less obviously a couple, at least if you were paying attention. That felt okay, here in this small, nearly empty, quite friendly restaurant hundreds of miles from home. New Orleans was a pretty cosmopolitan city, after all, and it was likely fine. I’d seen my first ever pink triangle shirt here during my first life. I had no idea what it meant until a friend clued me in, but it said something that they were selling them and people were wearing them. Of course, that was ... six years from now, if I remembered correctly. Or was it seven?

The two of them likely knew better than I did how their lives would have to be constrained to avoid negative reactions. My guess was that public shows of affection would largely be a bad idea while we were in college and on into the 1990s. There would be exceptions, but it’d be a long time until Angie and Paige could act like Jas and I could act every day.

Of course, even we would face some negative reactions. There would just be far fewer than what they’d face.

We talked about the rest of our trip as we ate. The consensus was that we’d decide tomorrow if we wanted to stay into Friday or go back early, likely with an overnight stop in Lake Charles or Lafayette and some touring in western Louisiana or Southeast Texas.

I called Gene from the restaurant’s pay phone as we were wrapping up. Curtis answered. Instead of asking for Gene, I just talked with Curtis. He said he was looking forward to seeing us and invited us to come by anytime this afternoon. Marsha and Gene were out, but he expected them back by around two. I got his address, just in case (though I already had it), and told him we’d be there.

We went back to the hotel for a bit, but were quickly off on the streetcar, heading downtown. We didn’t have a lot of time to explore, but we’d see what we could.

It took us perhaps fifteen minutes to make it from the hotel to Canal Street, right across from the entrance to Bourbon Street. We’d already agreed that we weren’t going to attempt to sneak any bourbon (or anything else) on this trip, but it was still the heart of tourist country, so we ventured in and spent the next couple of hours wandering around, especially visiting shops that were more unusual (while still welcoming teenagers and not just adults — some had ‘adults-only’ signs, and it wasn’t worth challenging them).

Everyone wound up with a souvenir or two. Nothing elaborate, but we needed something. It all found its way into a shopping bag that (of course) I wound up carrying.

Jasmine wound up translating plenty of bits of French into English. None of it was all that complicated, but she had a lot of fun with it.

On the way to the Richardsons’ house, which wasn’t really all that far from our hotel, we passed Lafayette Square. Just past the square, we could see a small part of Curtis’s new office, the John Minor Wisdom courthouse. From what little we could see of it, it looked imposing in exactly the way one might expect of a courthouse.

We left the streetcar a few blocks past Napoleon Avenue, then walked several blocks south. The Richardsons’ new house was both stately and relatively modest, in keeping with the neighborhood around it. It had a big front porch with columns, a small but nice front lawn, and a fenced-in back-yard.

When we made it to the door and knocked, Curtis answered.

“Angie, Jasmine, Paige, and of course Steve! How wonderful to see you!” he said. “Gene, Sue, and Marsha are in the kitchen.”

Sue’s face appeared in an arched doorway a bit down the hall. “Hey!” she called, then vanished.

“Sue!” Angie called. “We didn’t expect to see you here!”

She popped out again. “Mom and Dad decided I could come visit for a couple of days. Growing up, I guess,” she said, chuckling, then added, “Well, either that, or the cow’s out of the barn after we spent the night in Dallas.”

Marsha said, “It took the cow that long to get out of the barn?”

“Well...” Sue said, stretching it out. “Again?”

That got everyone laughing. I hadn’t seen that side of Marsha before. Sue, yes, but not in front of her boyfriend’s parents. It said something that they were all so relaxed about things. To me, it boded well for their future together.

Curtis said, “How’s your trip been so far?”

“Relaxing!” Angie said.

The rest of us nodded.

“We haven’t done a lot,” I said. “We’ve made it out to breakfast, walked around the French Quarter, then rode the streetcar past your office out to here.”

“Someday you’ll have to actually see the courthouse,” he said. “It’s quite impressive! I’m still getting used to having an office there.”

“Don’t let him kid you!” Marsha called. “He’s been hoping for this forever!”

“Fair enough!” he called back, then said, “But that makes it more remarkable, not less. A lot of judges hope to be called up a level, but the actual number who are is much smaller, of course.”

“I was talking to Lewis Mayrink about that,” I said. “He said that he’d always wanted to be the sort of lawyer who wrote opinions that everyone quoted, but that most everyone wants that.”

“Lewis is a good guy. How do you know him?”

“Oddly enough, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with his son Dave a long time ago. I dropped it the summer before freshman year, and we mostly lost touch, but then I bumped into Dave at a Bellaire Debate tournament, and a bit after that Dave took up Debate himself.”

“Small world! But you’ve already had that a few times.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Not to mention you,” he said, looking at Angie. “It would’ve been much funnier if I’d known Gene was dating Alan Berman’s granddaughter while you were dating!”

“Not my fault!” Gene said, coming out of the kitchen. “I didn’t know either. Not that I knew who Alan Berman was, back then.”

Marsha and Sue came out, and we all wound up in the living room, sharing roughly four conversations. Everyone jumped out of one, into another, then back, or off to yet another. It was a good time, and I think we really did all get to know each other better.

The whole thing was odd. Angie and I had saved Curtis’s life just to have him move away, but even Angie knew him better now, and I knew him much better. Of course, Mike’s going off the rails with Trish was a big factor, too. Had Mike stayed with Sarah, we would probably never have wound up spending as much time with Curtis and Marsha.

As with so many things, a couple of small decisions had led to completely unpredictable consequences. Angie and I would need to be careful of that. It was far too easy to assign either blame or credit for things we might not have caused, or to refuse to act out of concern over things we might not even affect.

That’s where Jas might, hopefully, be a useful extra voice. Paige, too, in theory. Unburdened by the notion of how things went ‘before’, they could look at the future as an open book in a way we really couldn’t.

Just as a simple example, Angie, Laura, and I would all be stunned if Reagan didn’t easily win re-election next year. The margins might vary; the outcome would not. But from Jasmine’s perspective, Reagan hardly looked like a shoo-in at all. If he didn’t win, did we do that? Or were we simply in a different universe with different rules?

Of course, none of that entered the conversation, but it was on my mind the entire time. This conjunction of people would have been essentially impossible in either my first life or Angie’s. Four couples, and three of them would never have happened, thus changing many lives.

We’d likely become more distant friends with Gene and Sue, and that would also add some distance with Curtis and Marsha, but the connections were there. Should I ever need a friendly ear at the Federal Appellate Court level, I had one. Should we visit New Orleans — or the Northeast — we’d likely have friends to drop in on.

As we talked, we could all smell food cooking. It smelled delicious, too. Marsha and Sue left every so often to do something or other, taking turns with each other. Eventually, Marsha announced that dinner was served. We all protested, but it was pretty much pro forma. Things smelled much too good.

Dinner turned out to be shrimp étouffée and chicken and sausage gumbo along with red beans and rice. Marsha had apparently picked up Louisiana cooking quickly. Deliciously, too!

It was eight by the time we headed out. Somehow we’d been there for six hours. It hadn’t felt that long, but then good visits with friends seldom do. Shaking hands and giving hugs and otherwise saying goodbye took at least half an hour, as these things often go.

Instead of taking the streetcar back to the motel, we instead rode it all the way to the end of the line, then rode it back. Many of the houses along the way, as well as Audubon Park, were still decorated for the holidays, and we enjoyed the lights and the scenery in general. The city certainly gave the impression of being a vibrant place to live.

The girls complained a bit about being cold the whole way, but they had jackets and sweaters and admitted it wasn’t that bad. If it had been, we could have gotten off and caught the next inbound streetcar at any point.

We all decided that we would stay here another day, then go back Friday. Our summer trip would likely be a ‘the journey is the destination’ sort of trip, with not a lot of time to explore any one place, but we could use the extra time in New Orleans. We could always explore other parts of Louisiana on another trip.

When we got back, Jas and I decided to simply snuggle up and go to sleep. Less than six months to go before this became the usual, or at least we both hoped so.

Thursday December 29, 1983

We again visited our favorite breakfast place, but we were a bit quicker about it this time and skipped the beignets. After a brief stop at the hotel, we took the car to Café du Monde. It’s pretty much a must-see in New Orleans and supposedly the place for beignets.

Honestly, while I slightly preferred the ones at our regular restaurant, none of us wanted to miss visiting the legend.

Our plan developed over coffee and beignets. Angie and Jas both wanted to look at a couple of New Orleans’ famous cemeteries, and Paige and I were fine with that. Paige found a brochure for a ‘Haunted New Orleans’ walking tour (held at night), and we thought that sounded grand as well.

By the end of the day, it sounded somewhat less grand. Cemeteries are a lot of walking, and it was not a warm day. Last night’s complaints about the cold were threatening to become more serious objections if we took the walking tour.

Instead, we wound up at a seafood restaurant in Metairie that had been there roughly forever. Oysters? Shrimp? Crab? Crawfish? Catfish? Yes, please!