Privileged Glimpses

“We haven’t met for many years,” said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.

“Five years next November.”

The automatic quality of Gatsby’s answer set us all back at least another minute.

- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

We hadn’t met for many years. Over three, last September. The last time I’d seen him we had, fortuitously, run into each other in London, while I was on the first leg of my European friends tour that didn’t actually include him since he lived in Louisiana. Over a pancake brunch during an abnormally warm English morning, he had lamented to me the foibles of his current girlfriend while also espousing the need for a sex museum that he planned to build in his hometown.

“A sex museum like the one in Prague?” I had asked while pouring syrup.

“Well there are several...” he began, and started listing the cities.

I couldn’t always keep up with Nikolaus’ research. I often knew just enough to sound cultured and prompt the discussion but then he’d continue down an obscure vein of inquiry that proved he’d already spent the last one hundred hours investigating this topic. At that point I’d usually just start eating my pancakes and listening to a tale that frequently involved some very odd characters.

Some twenty years earlier I had met Nikolaus in California, riding horses and playing polo. He was married, and had just sold some kind of invention that I will freely admit at the time I had very little knowledge of. When I learned later that he had yet another invention already turned into a product, I started to find the whole thing all kinds of curious. Decades later whenever he’d come up in conversation, I would tell people he was an actual inventor for a living, and then someone like my hairdresser would say, “You know the most interesting, unbelievable people!” (For what it’s worth, I told her I also personally knew the leader of the Egyptian revolution, which was true.) I felt I could hardly take credit for that, as if running into someone were an accomplishment, but I am honest when I say I love telling a story, even if it’s not mine.

And then one day Nikolaus got divorced, had a going away party in San Francisco that I attended with other polo friends, and left to move home to New Orleans, with hardly another word to anyone. It all seemed very sudden, but I shrugged and got back on my horse and played more polo, and then one of our joint friends said, “You were the one Nikolaus wanted.”

“What?” I had said, and dropped my polo mallet so that it hung from my thumb by the wrist strap.

⊱༺༒︎༻⊰

Over the ensuing years, I would visit Nikolaus very randomly and infrequently in Louisiana and listen to his stories, alongside his simultaneous praise and grievances for the various women who cycled through his life. On one trek, a friend was moving from California to Virginia and we had embarked on a three woman road trip across the southern U.S., stopping at the Grand Canyon, getting pulled over for speeding in a Prius in El Paso, visiting Elvis’ house in Memphis, and of course popping into New Orleans to meet Nikolaus. He was in the throes of renovating a very old house in the French Quarter, but he was kind enough to pause and take us all out to learn how to eat crawfish. Another time I was turning forty-five and had a party hosted in New Orleans with four of my longest running friends who collectively knew me on average twenty-five years, and Nikolaus came by to party with us. His house was considerably further along by this time and he gave us a tour of it and I realized he lived in a veritable museum, which was prescient of me since this was quite a long time before he would open an actual museum. In the middle of all of this I moved from California to Texas, which would coincidentally make Louisiana a lot closer, but then I simply didn’t return for three years, ostensibly caught up in life and its accompanying madness.

It was originally Celeste’s idea to go to New Orleans as a spontaneous weekend adventure. I remember pursing my lips at the idea because I hadn’t actually talked to Nikolaus in three years, but then I told her I knew someone there who was a terrific partier, and she was sold. Luckily for us, Nikolaus was not out rescuing women from the Ukraine or driving his Porsche across Germany for the rest of the year (these being standard pursuits for him the last time I had seen him) and was happy to host us. The general theme every time I managed to visit him was his quest for a passion project and a woman he wouldn’t get bored of in five minutes. At least, that’s what it had appeared to me in the brief moments I’d been able to talk to him while surrounded by other friends. I turned out to be only partially correct in my assessment.

Celeste became regrettably ill two days before our flight, and cried that I was going without her, but I promised her without asking Nikolaus that we would return again. I had hardly been able to grab my suitcase from my Uber when it stopped in front of his house in the early morning and he came stumbling out into the street, having texted me earlier that he’d been out until 3 a.m. It seemed I had missed nothing during my time away and his life was still one great, uninterrupted party. He was better a few hours later when we went out for breakfast, a bit bleary-eyed but characteristically rowdy, flirty, and wicked.

There was always a strange, unspoken dialogue between us that had never really resurfaced except in the thought bubbles of our personal graphic novels. In the life outside our heads we bantered freely, as people do who have a long but intermittent history. Nikolaus had finally built his museum, he told me. It wasn’t the sex museum he’d described to me in London, but rather a history of New Orleans, which is not that different from a sex museum if you know anything about the town. He’d found his passion project, his muse, he said, something that channeled his energy into invention again. I leaned over my pancake breakfast, propping my left elbow on the table and resting my chin on my index finger as I listened. He was all animation as he spoke, his spirited discourse smiling and rising up in the restaurant like lyrical music.

“Do you want to see it?” he said.

A curation of ardor and imagination, Nikolaus’ museum was a culmination of extensive research, found relics, and novel displays he’d created by hand. His sentiment that a museum must be interactive to truly deliver a feeling of the era was evident throughout, and he eagerly showed me his exhibits that integrated visual pleasures with pleasing scents and unexpected melodies. Above all, his intensity was alluring, and it reminded me that we are privileged to see our friends in their element, to witness them doing their best, most beloved work. It made me think about the other people I knew when they rode horses, and raced cars, and created art, and were otherwise engaged in their raison d’etre. I wondered, fleetingly, if I had the same glow when immersed in my kingdom, if I radiated love the way Nikolaus did showing me his craft. Probably I did, I simply was never able to see myself.

At lunch later, Nikolaus told me about his women. It might seem an odd habit, but even more peculiar was his seemingly subconscious need for my approval of them. I had somewhere along the journey become his confidante, and whether that role was appropriate or not for me was a completely different topic that was never broached, just like that secret revealed by the polo friend right after Nikolaus had left California. I never disclosed to him what I had been told, and he never brought up what he had said to that friend, and that was that. Well, maybe except for that night of my forty-fifth birthday, when we partied all night somewhere on Bourbon Street and Saturyne and Nikolaus stayed out later than the rest of us. Saturyne had returned to the apartment in love with the world, climbed into bed with me and wrapped her arms around me and said, “Why aren’t you with Nikolaus? You’re so perfect for each other! You both love horses and you’re both smart and you’re both world travelers and you’re both beautiful!” After a while when I thought she’d fallen asleep I tried to extricate myself from her grasp but she awoke and uttered, “And Nikolaus agrees with me,” and then was out again.

I had no doubt at that moment that he had agreed with her. While some inebriates can be downright annoying, I can’t say there isn’t something charming about drunks who turn into optimists. They’re fun to be around and their entire aura is that of a hippie commune swaying to acoustic guitar riffs and picking flowers. And who hasn’t been even a little persuaded by their sanguine predictions and concentrated attention? It never fooled me when I was sober, but my soul still wanted all the love they offered to be true, long after the alcohol ended.

If you asked Nikolaus directly about his women, he had both been in a serious, committed relationship and not been in any relationships at all, somehow at exactly the same time. One relationship would be casual according to all of his words, yet at the same time he would protect it from all outside interests as if it were exclusive. To this day I have not been able to discern if he was modifying his stories to suit me, or if this existential conflict existed in his own head. I suspected it was a bit of both, as while we were longstanding friends I was hardly an unbiased, nonjudgmental person from whom he could receive impartial feedback about his love life. I had no doubt he knew this, but he was also comfortable with me, and I had never given him a reason to think it was inappropriate. It was as if he wanted to play the part of a world class, cosmopolitan panty dropper while simultaneously marketing himself as husband material, without, of course, the need to get married. This vexed me, because usually when people are players they don’t make the effort required to be perceived as earnest boyfriends, and he spent a great deal of his time doing so.

Nikolaus knew that I would be writing about him, as I told him as much, but originally I had said I’d write about his women. He had no objection to this, but after some machinations on his part surrounding one of them I decided to leave their details out of the story. Suffice it to say that when he talks about either of them he is so ebullient that I can’t help but feel a little left out.

That evening, Nikolaus and I traversed the French Quarter, stopping in to meet his friends at art galleries and watch the visitors stumble about town. There’s a bar near his home named after a pirate, and in the back of the bar is a piano. If you make song requests accompanied by cash bribes you can jump to the front of the queue.

“If you ask him to play ‘Piano Man,’ he’ll play the harmonica too,” Nikolaus said, plopping down on a stool right next to the pianist. I wanted to say something silly, and bring up how he didn’t play the piano for me for my birthday three years ago, but I’d already ribbed him too much about that miss. Nikolaus is a lovely piano player, but, as happens with artists, art often falls by the wayside when other amusements redirect. And Nikolaus had a lot of redirection. I watched as he paid the piano man on his phone so he could get the song of the same name.

“I think he likes singing this song because it’s also about him,” Nikolaus said.

I nodded. No one is as genuine as when they are singing their own song. We sang with the other people surrounding the piano, with the people in the shadowy, stone corners of the bar, and to ourselves. We sang about memories and lost opportunities because that’s what the song was about.

⊱༺༒︎༻⊰

In the vermilion throat of Nikolaus’ ground floor billiards room in his house, there is navy wallpaper with gilded peacocks all over it. The pool table and the walls are crimson, and Nikolaus said, “I thought I would have parties here with the guys and we’d all play pool and smoke cigars, but it’s only happened once.”

I can’t say I wasn’t chuffed by the imagery.

“You’re Jay Gatsby,” I said.

Nikolaus was visibly enamored of the comparison.

“If I’m Gatsby, then who are you?” he asked.

“Nick Carraway, the narrator,” I said, almost impulsively.

Yet no sooner had the answer left my lips did I realize this was wrong. I was, at one time, perhaps sometimes, Daisy Buchanan. But I was also Myrtle Wilson. To my surprise, Nikolaus remembered a lot of the story, even that Gatsby had been doing something illegal to make all that money.

“Gatsby amassed all that wealth to try to win Daisy back,” I said. “But in the end he didn’t succeed.” I mused for a moment. “Maybe if he was just nice to Daisy he could have gotten her?”

Nikolaus wasn’t convinced that would have worked. But he wasn’t any more persuaded that Jay’s exotic, extravagant parties would win her over either. He knew, fundamentally, the issue, and that was that she was with someone else. And isn’t that the problem often, that we are with someone else, or our heart is with someone else, much to the unknowing grief of the person whose waist we cling to in public?

⊱༺༒︎༻⊰

In Nikolaus’ back garden there is a verdant Xanadu the likes of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself might have written about during an opium fueled dream. Towering bamboo and luxurious, tangled vines eclipse the brick borders. The former slave quarters, since converted to an in-law unit, are pressed against the back wall and the porch light illuminates a steaming, heated pool. I had made the mistake of calling this oasis a “small pool,” but Nikolaus corrected me and made clear it’s actually a very large hot tub.

“I think I’ve only ever loved one person ever,” Nikolaus said to me while holding his champagne flute at the far end of the pool.

I was sitting on the other side and I could barely make him out through the fog rising from the water. He didn’t tell me who it was and I didn’t ask. I was instantly crushed by curiosity. Who could this woman be who won his heart? A Bond girl or a librarian, or someone in between, a clever daytime ruse with thick framed glasses and hooded eyes, but by night a hypnotic Ida Saint-Elme? Or maybe none of these things? Maybe she wasn’t in any of these tales but the unassuming author of them. Maybe she sits at home writing stories that she will never be a character in.

I sipped my champagne. Celeste had once asked me if I had ever been in love. I remember the exact moment she asked that, in the sultry Texas summer on the back deck of the little track where we raced Miatas together, while we lounged in blue plastic Adirondack chairs. There was a faint breeze, and my hair twisted around my face, and I had said that I didn’t know now, that maybe I had misinterpreted it at the time or maybe it was mental illness. And then I had asked her what the difference was between mental illness and love, and she laughed, but I could also see she thought that was very clever. I had been telling Celeste about Nikolaus as the trip wore on, since she was still sick at home, and when she heard about his many women she texted back that it was not her jive. “Just love me or get the fuck out,” she wrote, regarding her ideology. I didn’t know how to respond to this so I didn’t. I hedged constantly between freedom and her philosophy of soulmates, unable to choose.

There was a rustling in the green leaves overhanging the water and I looked up, clutching my glass to my chest. I heard the unmistakable squeaking of rats.

“There are rats in the vines,” I said to Nikolaus, and then I slowly moved away from the wall.

“There are not,” he said, and laughed. “I mean, sure there are rats around here but they aren’t in the vines.”

But I could still hear them, and I saw the leaves quivering in the moonlight, and I knew they were there. I have a dark romance with the subversive, of images of gardens in colonial India, of a former slave quarter with pure white crown moulding, of red rooms that smell of cigars and slander, of the quick indrawn breath of someone else’s lover. I think it reminds me that there is decay behind shimmering things. Gatsby’s story is actually one of tragedy, but if there was tragedy here it was probably my own.

Back when Nikolaus was still remodeling his house, I had gifted him one of my photographic prints on metal. I had been an amateur travel photographer for decades, but despite selling some work I still considered myself a hobbyist. This particular photo had won a prize at the county fair, but more significant was that it was an image of a street in Lisbon called Rua da Saudade. A Spanish boyfriend I once had taught me the word, who in turn had learned it from a Portuguese ex-girlfriend. And so it came to be that this stunning Portuguese word was passed among lovers over time and geography, and one day while I was walking through Lisbon alone with my camera, I encountered this street by sheer coincidence. “Saudade” has no direct translation into English, but the closest expression is “a longing for something that will never be.” Unlike nostalgia, which relies on the memory of past experiences, saudade is the feeling of a place you will never go to, a situation that will never happen, or a person you will never have. If nostalgia is full of whimsy then saudade is full of unrequited desire.

I don’t know where Nikolaus ended up hanging that photo, but he remembered it when I brought it up. I sometimes wonder if he knows why I ever gave it to him. He speaks more often of the time I sent him a Christmas card with glitter in it and it got all over his living room, so the lesson here is if you want to be memorable, be more annoying than you are profound.

Nikolaus waded to my end of the pool to peer up at the foliage. Hearing nothing and satisfied that I was being sensational, he held his champagne up to me and I brought my glass to his and they clinked.