The Illustrated Heart

It was as Inez remembered, but their table was too big now. Sam would sit there, chair pushed at an angle against the wall, left shoulder and head leaned into the hotel’s red bricks that were almost bleached pink. Left arm across his part of the table. Fingertips dancing the rim of a wine glass, an occasional swirl to watch the legs run. He would slouch, legs out but crossed at the ankles, right over left. Maybe a toe tap to music only he heard, like a secret from the buskers in Jackson Square. On different trips they sat here, slightly drunk, watching shadows in the hotel courtyard go long and blue before surrendering to the gravity of their own darkness. He might say something like,“Yves Klein believed Blue has no dimensions, it’s beyond dimensions”, and order another bottle.

Yves Klein killed himself at age 34. Sam waited until he was 38.

They were both right about Blue. It wasn’t just a color. Grief was something like Blue. Something like the ocean, cold and unfathomable. You were pulled in, increasingly crushed by the pressure of unanswered questions, sinking, alone and not knowing bottom.

That was three years ago, but Inez was determined to come back here.

“It’s important to have a place that makes you happy,” he said. “A space in the world you know exists where you can go. An idea in your mind you run to when it all becomes too much.”

More words, she thought. If Sam really believed that, why didn’t he come here instead?

Instead.

They flew here on Labor Day weekend. That was the first time she felt she might be in love. She had never been and Sam shared all he knew about New Orleans, the kind of nuanced experiences gained from spending more time in a place he made less of a favored destination and more of an escape for…

“Your fictionalized life,” Inez said out loud as an accusation to an empty chair.

The bartender finished setting up and made his way around the courtyard, from the older couple closest to him, then to her.

She glanced the wine list to make sure the hotel still carried it.

The bartender asked, “What can I start you with?”

“Ascension.”

“Merlot or Cabernet?”

“A glass of Merlot.”

“Very good.” He drew out a menu and laid it on the table. “The kitchen is only small plates right now but everything is half off for another two hours.” He lingered a bit for her to consider the fare.

“Just the wine. Thanks.”

“Let me go ahead and get that for you.”

Ascension.

That was one of their jokes.

“Sounds ‘churchified’,” Sam said, one eyebrow arched, exaggerated, and eyes set above tortoise-shell sunglasses sliding to the edge of his nose from the damp September heat. “New Orleans Archdiocese making wine? Well if it’s good enough for Jesus I guess it’s worth a snort.”

That was his humor. Boozy and sacrilegious. Ever since that moment, that was their ritual, tradition and wine.

The bartender returned with an unopened bottle, a glass and a mini carafe. He showed it, uncorked it and poured a splash into the glass. She swirled once and sipped. Velvet, blackberry, plum and memory. She nodded and he poured into the glass and then into the carafe.

“Lagniappe,” he said and wiped the bottle’s lip with a cheesecloth. “If you need anything---” He made a retreat from the table but caught his foot on the strap of her bag. “---Almost stole your purse.”

She scooted back and reached down to unloop it from his shoe. “It must have slipped off the chair.”

“No problem.” He turned his heel out and freed himself. He picked the bag up. “Whoa. Heavy.”

“Books,” she said, amused but self-conscious as the older couple looked on at their predicament.

A package in brown butcher paper barely fit inside the bag. He asked, “Birthday present?”

“Mystery bundle,” she said, taking the package and laying it on the table. “There’s a used bookstore on Dauphine that throws a few books together, wraps them up like day old fish and leaves them on a table outside the door. Five bucks down and try your luck.”

“On Dauphine?”

She took a deep pull of the wine. “Mmm..hmm. You wouldn’t notice the store unless that table was out front. It’s like the owner doesn’t want people to know it’s a business. It’s a cramped labyrinth of books with no real organization. You might turn a corner and find David Bowie waiting for you.” Inez paused for laughter. “The Goblin King?” She felt embarrassed for dating herself. “Nevermind.”

“No, I got it. I’ve been stalking Jennifer Connelly ever since I saw the movie, but the restraining order....”

His own pause for laughter.

She tightened her lips to something like a smile and blinked.

“Joke.” He dabbed imaginary flop sweat off his brow with the cheesecloth. “So this bookstore---”

“A friend brought me there.”

He asked, “Are you local?”

“No. But I’ve been here before.”

“You seem local.”

“I do?”

“Well,” he made a quick scan of the courtyard, “---comfortable. Like you know where you’re at.”

“My ‘fictionalized life’,” she said. “It’s been awhile but I visited a lot.”

A bachelorette party appeared at the courtyard’s threshold. A few of them took a table while the rest rushed the bar. “Welcome back,” he said and slalomed around the tables to greet them.

She set the glass down and unwrapped the books: a beat up paperback of “Mythology” by Edith Hamilton that looked passed down from generations of New Orleans’ high schoolers, a mass published English poetry collection and a book titled: “Wine” with a slip of paper peeking out of it.

Inez tugged it until it came loose. Used books sometimes carried ephemera from old owners. For Inez, it was one of the charming artifacts, along with marginalia, that gave old books their soul.

A wine label.

An ornate, art nouveau heart framing a young woman with flowing hair much in the style of Mucha but a less refined imitation of his Moet & Chandon labels. It was for a 1975 Merlot, “The Illustrated Heart”. Traces of glue like crystallized honey affixed to the back.

She opened the book. Journal pages and more labels with handwritten dates, places, occasions and taste notes.

A label of a knight on a chessboard for a sparkling wine called “King Horse” began the story. Written in blue ink below:

“July 6th, 1976. Home. Leftover bottles from C’s bicentennial party. Champagne. This must be what seeded my hangover. C has bad taste.”

Entries were three or four lines long.

She searched where “The Illustrated Heart” might belong and found it almost a year later. Below a blank space was the entry:

“April 23, 1977. New Orleans Jazz Fest. C tricked me into meeting a girl so he could hit on her roommate. They disappeared and me and a girl named Sarah were left to split a bottle of ‘The Illustrated Heart’ on the Fairground lawn. Have you ever had a glass of Merlot in a plastic cup with a girl you just met while Bonnie Raitt sings ‘Kokomo Blues’? It was surreal. It reminded me of something Baudelaire said: ‘In the life of a dream don’t be surprised to find yourself in a place where all accepted behavior has become confused, all established ideas contradicted and where the impossible mingles with the real.’ To be honest, I hope it wasn’t a dream.”

“May 13, 1977. I asked Sarah if a first date on Friday the 13th was inauspicious and she said dryly, ‘In New Orleans? Naw. And technically this is our second date’. We went to a fortune teller in Jackson Square just to make sure we weren’t headed for a bad romance. The prognosticator told me to ‘Marry this girl’. We had a Merlot, ‘Kalypso’.”

The descriptions became less about wine and more about moments.

“May 5, 1979. New Orleans Jazz Fest. It rained at the Fairgrounds. Sarah didn’t want to go but it was the festival’s 10th Anniversary and she gave in. I snuck in a bottle of “Illustrated Heart”. We were under a plastic tarp when I asked her to marry me. Music was playing but all I heard was the rain dancing on plastic over our heads. We sheltered in our little fort, muted light shining off her skin. Her floppy hat. The brim crushed into my face when she kissed me and said ‘yes’. We fell over on the grass. People thought we were hammered.”

“June 21, 1980. Wedding Day. Many bottles. Labels attached. We kept it small. Family, friends. Sarah looked like one of those women on “The Illustrated Heart” labels: ethereal, celestial in her dress, her gaze something different, transformed---still the girl I met three years ago but her meaning to me is so much more. I never want to fall in love with anyone else.”

Inez read on, more wine, more reflections from the author. Labels from a trip to Europe. A getaway to Argentina on their third anniversary. Champagne for the birth of a daughter, Nicole. Champagne and cigar labels for a son, Anthony.

Then a gap of a decade or so.

Suddenly, Sarah’s 45th birthday and their twentieth anniversary in the year 2000. Nicole's graduation celebration. Anthony graduates two years later. Sarah buys Champagne, they’re empty-nesters now. Labels from 2005, a 25th Wedding anniversary celebration with friends at Commander’s Palace. A second honeymoon in Prague. 2011 they visit Nicole in Miami for her engagement. They rent a convertible and drive to The Keys for a week. Sarah, inspired by the vast, blue ocean, wants a sailboat. She’ll paint the world they travel. Nicole’s wedding. New Orleans 45th Jazz Fest in 2015, they don't attend because Sarah doesn’t feel well. They decide to drink wine in the backyard instead and listen to it on WWOZ. She’s looking forward to the 50th incarnation of the fest and suggests they celebrate their own 50th anniversary at the Fairgrounds, just the two of them with no big deal and a bottle of “Illustrated Heart” if they can find it.

Last entry.

A 2017 label of “The Illustrated Heart”, opened in 2019.

“The wine is different. It shouldn’t taste the same. A bottle of wine, like a person is a living, breathing thing. Once it’s open, its life slips and a slow, elegant decline to its inevitable end begins. But we shouldn’t dwell on how it goes but how it lives, how it made you feel when it first engulfed your senses---bright, young and beautiful. How it opened up to you over time and you discovered the complexity of its character, the richness of its aging soul and the simple beauty of its immortal, unconditional heart. The wine is different. It shouldn’t taste the same. It is as much about the memory of taste as it is the moment. And you only fall in love like that once. I wouldn’t want it the same because inside that rare, ephemeral instant in 1977 I met a girl, and my heart was drawn. If Sarah had lived, she would agree.”

The bartender poured the last bit of “Ascension” but Inez didn’t notice. Her eyes moved from the journal to Sam’s empty chair. New Orleans’ shadows were now long and blue and somewhere, beyond the hotel courtyard, music played.

“Good book?” the bartender asked.

Inez, lost in a contemplative sip of wine, roused from herself as the bartender was about to leave. She asked, “Can you save that label for me?”

“I’ll soak it in water,” the bartender said. “More wine while you wait?”

“Something else,” she thought aloud. “Champagne?”

“I’ll get you a list.”

Inez searched the journal for the author’s name but found none, just blank pages absent of story but pure in its space. She was suddenly seized by the possibilities of a vast, deep and boundless new empty waiting to be fulfilled.