There is a bar in New Orleans named Desire. Very early in our life together, still separated by a thousand miles, Elizabeth and I rendezvoused in this city of iron lace and fire-eaters and soprano-sax riffs and it was the time of kissing when there is a newness to your lover's lips that fills you both with the spirit of

improvisation, like the best of the jazz that spills into the narrow streets of the French Quarter. But you do not go to New Orleans to kiss inside a bar. Inside, the bars are redolent with intent — to make music and to hear it, to make friends and to go elsewhere, to drink and drink and thus to give over your senses to the embrace of the alcohol. Still, we stopped, on a warm night that September, at this bar on the ground floor of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, at the corner of Bourbon and Bienville. We stopped though we were sober and wished to be so, wanting our senses to be altered only by our touching — earlier that day I did not even wear my sunglasses in the terrible Louisiana glare, wishing to see nothing but the actual color of her skin, her hair. We stopped at the bar and we did not go inside. We stopped for the sign. It floats just beneath the first of the Sonesta's balconies, over the bar's beveled-glass doors. The word spells itself out over and over, running with yellow neon like the trill of sex. Desire, it cries. Desire. And this is, it seems to me, the best way to make out in a bar in New Orleans. You kiss out in the open, standing beneath this sign, you kiss in the smell of the heat and the river and the roux and the carriage horses and the smell of the passing crowd — their sweat and their perfume and their cigarette smoke — you kiss with the brush of the crowd, too, the faintest touch, and with the murmur of their voices like a bass line under all the music, you kiss with blues and with zydeco and with jazz all gumboed up in your head, but especially with the jazz, you find a saxophone from all this and you let your lips move to wherever that sax is going, you kiss out here in the street in New Orleans with your desire blazing above your heads and the deeply sexual river-current of the city rushing past you.

Desire at the Royal Sonesta Hotel
300 Bourbon Street, New Orleans
(504) 586-0300
Recommended drink: The Desire Cooler — rum, banana liquor and fruit juice.
(Photograph by Libby Nevinger)

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