The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story by Julia Reed Read Free Book Online Page B

walls and floors in pristine shape while battalions of people stomped in and out carrying things like bathtubs and table saws.
    We would end up doing the floors two more times, and we had to do the walls again anyway because the painters had no idea what they were doing. Countless dead bugs, nap from their cheap rollers, spiderwebs, you name it—they were all painted onto my parlor walls along with the gorgeous Farrow & Ball paint in “Sutcliffe Green” I had ordered all the way from their North American plant in Canada. (I spent at least a thousand dollars on shipping and paint before I realized that the local Benjamin Moore store could easily color-match Farrow & Ball, but then, that was before I realized a whole lot of stuff.) At my insistence Eddie fired them and the next round was even worse. One day I walked in to find a guy painting the powder room with a roller that could only have been made with the very long hair of a Tibetan mountain goat. The walls looked like stucco and paint stalactites hung from the ceiling. Nice, neat short-napped rollers were, apparently, very, very difficult to find, and brushes, requiring as they did a modicum of skill, were obviously out of the question. I managed to get my hands on one, but when I held it up to stucco boy, he was blank faced: “ Qué es ?”
    When this crack team got done with the second-floor front bedroom I’d claimed as my office, I walked through with Eddie marking the numerous mistakes he had failed to notice with a red wax pencil. About five minutes into it, I was so irritated that I quit making my marks and scribbled instead a big red and very profane message to the painters that immediately became legend. Within days, Benton reported that he had heard about it from one of his clients who had heard about it from one of her friends who happened to be my most ladylike neighbor. After much consultation between Eddie and the chief painter, new rollers were brought in, everybody was going to pay attention. They dutifully sanded down the powder room and reapplied its pretty, rich red, but not just on the walls—they painted the woodwork, the ceiling, everything. The effect was like being inside a bloodbath and I was ready for one. Instead, I marched out of the house, removed the paint contractor’s sign from our iron fence, threw it in the middle of First Street, and stomped on it repeatedly. Shortly thereafter, a paint moratorium was declared.
    Even before my street tantrum, we were something of a curiosity. Abel reported frequent sightings of determined ladies in workout suits, walking through the house on uninvited tours. I’m sure they, along with everyone else in the neighborhood, were wondering what in the world we were going to do to the place. By local standards I was an unknown quantity, viewed, I think, as something of a “bohemian,” a journalist who lived in the Quarter and then not even all the time. I was spotted on TV occasionally, at Galatoire’s a lot, and at “nice” parties rarely—in my life so far I’d attended exactly one Mardi Gras ball and that was in the interest of anthropological research. For years the only people in the city I knew well enough to put on my Christmas list were a small handful of close friends, including the McGee sisters, and the gatekeepers at what were then my most frequented restaurants: Arnold at Galatoire’s, Patrick at the Bistro, and Lee at Peristyle, who was also invited to our wedding. During our house hunt I ran into a realtor, a grande dame of sorts who knew my mother through the Garden Club of America, and the first thing she asked me was why I had not tried to join the local chapter. I had no idea what to say, but in retrospect I should have been flattered that she thought I might actually be allowed in.
    John was far better integrated than I. His musical career had come to an abrupt end when he was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, and though he is famous in very select circles for his late night