Chapter 1: Royal Signet

It's hard to find a quiet place in New Orleans these days. The temporary yet ceaseless tourists on Bourbon Street and Jackson Square seemed to have colonized even the residential and outer areas of the sinking city, pushing out the citizens who have lived here their entire lives. I've been able to avoid Bourbon Street since the sewers started lifting up through the sidewalks and the shops were bought out by lewd bars and other lascivious services. Nonetheless, it is still beautiful to me. It's beautiful to pass a tacky souvenir shop whose insides are a capitalist regurgitation, a polar contrast to the Creole architecture that serves as its face. It's beautiful because it is home, my home.

The faded colors of downtown New Orleans shops were once bright and vivid, clean and new. The Big Easy has been defaced with decades of recessions, demoralization, crime, tourism, and the inevitable will of the Gulf of Mexico to one day swallow it whole in her muddy recesses.

My days are mostly spent on the campus of Tulane. Before I retired 10 years ago, I kept to my office and lounge areas in the building where I taught. Between my retirement and Mary's death, I stayed at home with her and took care of her during her final days, spending mornings in the kitchen, afternoons in my garden, and nights in the living room watching the nightly programs we had watched together for so many years. We'd become masters at Wheel of Fortune. For the past three years, in my solitary, I spend the entirety of my days on campus. The dean of my department offered to give me my office back due to my consistent presence, which made me feel quite like a cockroach, but I passed on the offer to let them save it for a young professor who would come along and take my place.

My station in the lonely corner of the university coffee shop was taken as I walked in this spring morning. A young man was sitting in my seat, lurched over his laptop, hands typing away at a speed my hands never knew. He didn't even notice me as I approached him, standing over the little circular white table situated at the corner of a purple leather booth seat attached to the wall. The heavy brown leather bag I carried started to hurt my shoulder.

My shadow over his laptop caught the young man's attention, and he looked up at me, eyes going wide at what I first believed to be the surprise of seeing an 80-year-old woman with a walking cane standing in front of him in the middle of a university café.

My beliefs were proved wrong when his mouth fell open, the gruff depth of his voice matching his muscular physique. He looked like the average football player, with his cap sitting backwards on his head of brown tufts. "Dr. Hayes," he greeted me by my name, the surprise on his face fading into a sort of an awestruck smile.

"Young man," I greeted him back with an edge of confusion in my tone. My eyes squinted over him, trying to see if I recognized him from one of my courses. I've taught thousands of students, but I've always been able to remember a face.

He stared at me wordlessly for a moment, and the discomfort of it made me imagine that his eyes kept getting stuck on the wrinkles in my face in their trek to recognize me. He then quickly snapped out of it, looking around himself and realizing that he must be sitting in my usual spot. He let out a rather dumb noise reminiscent of a cartoon giant before he quickly stood up and scooped his computer in his arms. "I'm so sorry, Dr. Hayes." He kept looking between me and the items he was taking from the table, which also included his cell phone, backpack, and a few empty coffee cups.

His arms full of his array of belongings, he shuffled out of the table space and to another table further away, letting his things all fall out of his arms, causing the multiple coffee cups to bounce off and to the floor. He scrambled to pick them up as I carefully took my seat on the booth, bent knees shaking until I was sitting down fully. I scooted over so that I was in front of the table, resting my cane down on the adjacent leather bench next to mine.

When I was settled, I looked up to see the young man was already looking at me. "Thank you, sir," I told him as I slowly leaned over to pull my bag up onto my lap. "But I must tell you, for your own sake, that your chivalry is accompanied with a staring problem."

He blinked, averting his eyes away. "Sorry..." He lightly chuckled before shyly looking back to me. "I just... I'm a Creative Writing major and... Well, I never took your class, but you're like... a total legend. Your picture is hanging in the building."

"A total legend, you say?" I echoed him with a smirk as I zipped open my leather case.

"Yea, totally," he said enthusiastically without catching my slight mock of his word choice, and there must have been a fresh burst of excitement that shot through him, because he nearly lifted off his seat. "I've read all of your works. You're my role model."

I paused from what I was doing to look up at this young man for a moment. While I was a writer, I was never a popular one. By the time I stopped teaching French to schoolchildren and pursued my Doctorate's to teach writing, the market of writers was oversaturated, and no one wanted to read old stories about old people in Louisiana. I wrote to teach, and I taught to write.

"That's very kind of you, young man," I told him as graciously as I could. Over the years, I had been given many compliments on my teaching of the art, but no student had ever told me through their own will that they were a fanatic of all my works.

He nodded heroically and smiled, finally tearing his eyes away and looking back to his laptop, but he was restless in his seat and obviously trying to stop himself from talking to me further. When I reached into my bag and took out my baby blue typewriter, the young man's eyes were drawn to me again. I placed the heavy machinery onto the table with all my strength, as I do every morning. It's my daily workout my for my old, wrinkled hands, and I imagined that the young man staring at me could have probably punted the typewriter across the room like it were a football.

It might have been odd to have a 1960 Royal Signet manual typewriter in the middle of a café with electric menu screens, all-white modern interiors, and about fifty students all with at least two technological devices in their hands. I was too old to even attempt to understand portable computers when they first arrived and became accessible to everyone. The farthest I ever got were the blocky computers—the "dinosaurs" as young people call them now.

As flattered as I was by this young fan, I appreciated the fact that he continued to focus on his laptop rather than me. The last interaction he had with me, unknowingly, was taking a discreet picture of me with his phone which I noticed and ignored as I loaded my typewriter.

At the bottom of my typewriter's case were the two pictures that I took everywhere with me. One was a picture of Greg and I that I have kept with me for my entire life. As my eyes passed over that one, my shaky fingers took the other small glossy square and lifted it out of the bag, the familiar black-and-white shot of an even more familiar face becoming clear through my thick glasses. It was a picture of Mary that I took somewhere in the 70's. She's lounging on our dusty brown couch with a glass of lemonade in her hand, smiling at the camera mid-laughter. She always had such a charming laugh—it was a goofy, unrhythmic bell which rung from the smartest woman I ever knew.

In 1970, women made up only 5% of physicians in the United States. Mary was one of them—and a damn good one. She was a doctor, and I was a teacher. In a way, our roles changed over our lifetime together. She became my teacher, and I her doctor. She taught me to love, to cherish, to grow, to kindle. In my retirement years, I was her doctor. I took care of her declining health until she passed away in January of 2020.

I loved Mary dearly and deeply. We met in the fall of 1973 and were together until 2015 when we could legally marry in Louisiana. We were two 72-year-old women in wedding gowns, and we spent our honeymoon in our own home. When the news first came that gay marriage was going to be legalized, we nearly laughed. Why should we get married when we had been unofficially married for 42 years? We lived together, raised animals together, handled finances together, fought like a married couple, made love like a married couple. It was Mary who told me that we had spent our entire lives thinking we would never see the day when the law would be passed, and that we were incredibly fortunate to still be alive when it happened. So, with dentures and walking canes, we became newlyweds. My university held a bridal ceremony for us, and it was also the same year that I was awarded the Weiss Presidential Fellowship award from Tulane. It was undoubtedly the best year of my life.

I love Mary, but this story is not about my wife. This story is about my life before I met Mary. Mary and I were together for a total of 47 years up until she passed, and this might sound scandalous to say, but she was not the love of my life. Mary was certainly my love, but our love was slow and even. It was deep and foundational. For a certain person to be considered what pop culture has labeled as "the love of my life," I believe that love had to have been a different kind of passion. It had to have been a fire that burned the ends of your fingertips. It had to have been a pain deep in your stomach that drove you to sleepless nights and utmost agony. It had to have been a fever that melted away all your sense of logical thinking. It had to have been something you cannot put into words, that cannot be described, that only happens in the movies. Mary was my love, but Joanna Donnelley was the love of my life.

Mary knew about Joanna, though we were married long after Joanna was gone—every detail, she knew, I told her. She was the only one who knew. She always told me that my story with Joanna should be a movie, that it would sell out every theater in the nation one day when the world was more accepting. Mostly, she urged me to write it.

Oftentimes, I would ask Mary to ghostwrite a version of it for me, because as a younger adult, the memories were much too extreme and painful for me to recount. She told me that stories belonged to people and that the worst stories out there were written by people to whom they do not belong. She said my story did not belong to her, it belonged to me, so I should be the one to write it. She also said the grandiosity and drama with which it entails could never be done justice without being told by a first eyewitness. Mary was sure to tell me that if I ever needed a checkup, her medical license proved her reliable enough to help me with that, but she was about as good with words as I was good with technology.

So here I am. I do hope you take my story with even an ounce of acceptance. I was young. Joanna was young. The world was ours. This is the story of Joanna, told in all her charm, melodrama, and devious fashion.