Once she found the location for her shop, she made herself of it. “I live in the Lower Quarter,” she would say when potential clients called her. She’d think it to herself when Clay talked about the Garden District or referred to himself as an uptown degenerate—that sliver of wealthy old New Orleans that could think of nothing better to do with its money than spend it on vices and watch the world go by, often in bars and rather early in the day, or else all night long, or both.
As Johanna learned the general history of the place, she began to populate it with individuals. Not actual historical persons but people who were at least a little more than types — vague-faced but specific individuals representing history’s larger tides. She imagined these people living not quite in her studio and apartment but at least in the neighborhood — on lower Decatur or around the corner on Barracks or Governor Nicholls. One person she imagined inhabiting her apartment, or one much like it, was a dapper man: one of the last of the well-to-do Frenchmen living in the neighborhood, dealing in sugar, minding his store, dressing carefully for opening night at the French Opera, whose former site was now a hotel she often walked by, preferring to look straight ahead so she would not see that it was no longer the Opera House, decades ago burned to the ground, a place she felt nostalgia for though she had never seen it except as a photograph in a book.
Down the street, a block or so toward Jackson Square, there still stood an Italian market, which until the storm had been busy all year long, the noontime line for sandwiches out the door for half a block. The former inhabitants there were easy to imagine; she was face to face with their direct descendants, some of whom she guessed still made a prickly wine from oranges, though that product you could not buy from their store, which sold imported pastas, cheeses, olives, and meats.
She imagined, too, though in less detail, other representatives of the Quarter’s history: a black family whose children played boules on the street, the short-haired women of the 1920s literary circle that formed around Lyle Saxon and Sherwood Anderson (such good American names), gay men almost out in the open in the 1960s and ’70s, the nuns of the Ursuline Convent with the heron pond in the back, the famed musician James Booker, eventually one-eyed but still bedding dozens of men and women singly or multiply. Mud if it moved, people said of his libido. Lighter fluid if it would get him high, people said of his addictions.
She was working in types and clichés, and no doubt she had some of her facts wrong, but having her own place gave her a history. If it was a faulty one, or even unoriginal, that mattered little because it was a rich and good one, much better than the one she’d shed and considerably better than having none at all.
And this belief in progression on the part of someone who believed in very little, and certainly not in human goodness, gave Johanna an unlikely optimism that she knew was not universal in the months following the storm. When she thought this way, there was only after Belgium and then her imaginary before nestled in the history of New Orleans. There were waves of good lives here before, and there would be waves of good lives here again. The city could give that to people, at least to those who were willing to see it. The city could give this to her.
This way of thinking had something to do with her work, too. She understood that her vocation made her, by choice, a person who believed that at least some damage can be undone, that original states can be recovered or at least approximated, that life can go on as though some things never happened. She knew, too, that you could also simply paint over a canvas, change the picture for good, so that without an x-ray machine it looked like the former story had never even existed.
Perhaps this was why she felt sympathetic to the young woman in her studio. The girl had an unanchored quality exacerbated by the fact that she looked as though the wind could knock her down, the determined expression on her face be damned. She would curse and shake her fist as she fell, but fall she would.
When the girl spoke, she wanted to know first about prices. Most restorers would not even hint at a price until they saw the work, but for this girl money was crucial, as it is for most people in the world but not for most people seeking to have art restored, not even in Johanna’s world of lesser works, where she encountered plenty of uptown degenerates with bottomless bank accounts and sentimental attachments.
“I cannot tell you for sure without seeing, but if you can tell me about the paintings — sizes, materials, degree of impasto, kind of damage and how much — I can come close. The most important thing is probably going to be what has happened since they got wet — how they were stored, whether they were moved, how soon.”
Johanna kept her studio nearly free of furniture on purpose. She preferred to work standing and did not like clients to linger. Drop off, go away, pick up, go away for good. Her business was with people’s canvases, not with them. Now, though, she wished she had a chair to offer this girl who looked like she had been on her feet all day. What she told Johanna was not good, and she was obviously talking about paintings she had done herself and not without aspirations. Most artists know something about how to care for the works they make; this girl was what Peter would call a disaster.
Johanna willed her face to be kind and said the truth that she knew was crueclass="underline" “Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and start over.”
One thing Johanna had learned after the storm that she should have known before but had not is that you cannot predict who is the crying kind and who is not. People she had barely known from the neighborhood broke down upon seeing her again for the first time, as though she were some long-lost child or lover or dear, dear friend. Others at the Mojo Lounge could describe incredible loss with no emotion at all. She was thinking particularly of a woman whose elderly father had made her swim away from the home they shared, leaving him to drown in the attic that contained all their family pictures because she understood that he really did prefer that she save herself. From that woman, not one public tear.
At first glance Johanna would have pegged this girl — Marion, she said her name was — as a crier despite the toughness, or because of it, but she would have been wrong. Marion simply nodded at the bad news, and Johanna admired her for it. Some people know when to try to change their luck and when to get used to things as they are. This was the trait Johanna most admired in herself: the proper timing of effort. Far too many people either give up too soon and permanently or else waste their energy and luck by ramming their heads against the wrong wall or by not waiting for the wall to weaken.
“Look,” she said to the girl, “why don’t you bring in one or two? Either the ones that have the least damage or the ones that are the most important to you. I can at least assess them for you.” She watched the girl for a moment and then said, “For free. That way you can make an informed decision.” She wrote down her phone number. “Call before you come — make an appointment, but most times are fine.”
When the girl left, Johanna found herself unsettled by the double interruption. The first one bothered her more, but the second one also pricked at her memory in a way that didn’t quite make sense. Upstairs she topped off the food and water for the little dog, brewed half a pot of coffee, and took inventory of what was wrong. What was wrong, of course, was that her whole life could be undone, her false but necessary history ripped away and replaced with the real one, the one she thought she had escaped. She wondered if it would be a slow unraveling — a loose thread that eventually unweaves the whole fabric — or a fast tearing away. She wondered which would be worse, knowing that every bad fate is its own strange bag of torments.