Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans by Rosalyn Story

then go home to an empty place. Why not?
    The restaurant on Tchoupitoulas Street where he’d taken her had been lit with geranium-scented candles that turned the ends of her hair to deep red. The suspended stereo speakers above their heads dispensed a dreamy, big band version of “Moonglow,” and they had talked until the waiter had asked them for the third time, with practiced subtlety, if they “needed anything else?” And then until the chairs were flipped onto the tabletops.
    He’d taken her home, where they’d talked outdoors in front of her apartment for another two hours. She spoke thoughtfully, her timbre low and eyes flashing, her hands in constant motion. She was an artist, a painter: mostly figurative stuff, occasional abstracts, some collage. She liked the play of bold colors in neo-Afrocentric themes, and managed to sell at least two paintings a year, each bringing in enough for about two months’ rent.
    She liked jazz, she told him, the older stuff mostly, Peterson on piano, early Miles. For a living, she taught art to thirteen-year-olds in the school district—her real passion. Teaching delighted her—the silly jokes, the sharp, curious challenges of her smartest kids—and he loved that she loved it. When she talked about them, the air around her seemed to amplify, charged with light. Her brown eyes warmed to amber, and her smile nearly took his breath away.
    He’d started to leave sooner, but wanted to memorize her face, trace her profile in his mind so he could call it up that night while he slept—the loose, raw beauty, the strong features gently framed in red oak skin.
    Within weeks, they were a thing. They spent long hours talking on the phone, then met for even longer dinners at Dooky Chase’s or Parmenter’s, where his father sent special hors d’oeuvres from the kitchen, or floated winks and smiles between the stage and the back table while he played the late set at Snug Harbor. They rode their bikes through Audubon Park and jogged along the levee by the river. He washed her car on Saturday afternoons, and she picked up his shirts when he was running late. She fixed him cinnamon coffee while he practiced arpeggios in her studio, and he baked his special lasagna while she painted, her stereo rolling out vintage Miles.
    Their engagement ended abruptly. To this day, he couldn’t remember what happened between them at the end, just the muddy weight of his heart after it was over. He was in New York when he heard the news of her marriage, a few months later, to a man he thought she barely knew. That sent him reeling. And a year later, news of her divorce left him just as dazed.
    One good thing had come out of it all. From her, he learned to play the blues—the deep-down, been-there blues. After their breakup, everything in his playing shifted; he dared to reach deeper inside, walk the tender landscape she had bruised, and turn the journey into liquid sound. Minor thirds, salted with tears, spilled from his downtilted bell, and soulful riffs of heartbreak became his signature. When he arrived in New York, heart scarred and mind numbed, music flooded from his horn, from him, unstoppable.
    He could even say it was Velmyra who’d made him famous. It had taken him a while to put the whole business behind him; but when the heat of his hurt had cooled and he could walk upright again, the memory of her, which had been dense and imposing, thinned to vapor. The stamp she’d made on his music, though, was still there. The pain let him tap into something real, something everybody knew, and it had taken his playing from good to great. From that point on, his life hummed. Things came easily, quickly, perfectly. A recording deal with a major label. A great deal on the best apartment on a gentrified street in Brooklyn Heights. Dates at the best clubs in town—the Village Vanguard, The Blue Note, Birdland—and a major network TV appearance that fell into his lap.
    He fashioned an image that was cool,