Top 5 Most Romantic Cities

I started to walk on. “Sorry I bothered you,” said Blue Eyes. “You know, just never know.” Something in me snapped–because he was right. I handed him my card, and he said, “Wow, I’m honored.” He handed me his, and wrote his number at his hotel. “Maybe you’ll think about it and give me a call if you’d like to have a drink while you’re here.”

His card said “Composer.” From New York. Well, I’ll be damned. A few minutes before, I’d passed a hand-lettered sign in a gris-gris shop that read MERCURY RETROGRADE. MAKE NO DECISIONS ‘TIL TUES. Yet perhaps God rewards
boldness. I would take a steaming, luxurious bath back at the Soniat House, maybe have some hot cocoa by candlelight. Maybe I would call the blue-eyed guy, I thought shivering. Yes, definitely I would light candles. I was saying all
this out loud as I headed away from the convent where they used to lock up single women. But that was OK. New
Orleans is a good town for muttering in the rain.

MEET at Tipitina’s, 501 Napoleon Avenue, where every Sunday night they have a rip-roaring fais do-do (Cajun family dance), which starts at 5 and ends promptly at 9 so everybody can have dinner and get the kids to bed. But when it starts, the men run across the room and grab the women. Everyone–the chubby, the senile, the teen-agers, children, and shy out-of-towners–dances.

FIGHT inside the Saturn Bar. You’ll have had too much to drink by now, but at this place, that’s a prerequisite. It used to be an air-conditioner repair shop by day. The end of sanity, of the world. Slug away. Saint Claude Avenue: suitably scary neighborhood.

HIDE & SULK a few paces off Jackson Square, in the Faulkner House, an I-Dream-of-Jeannie’s bottle of a shop on Pirate’s Alley. Tiny, it’s a bit of literary magic, literally inhabited by kindred spirits: William Faulkner (who wrote his first book here), Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty and Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, John Kennedy Toole, and other, younger stars, such as Nancy Lemann, who was mentored by the god known as Walker Percy. The proprietor, Joe DeSalvo, lives upstairs, and if you peer through the glass, you can see an edge of his garden, gargantuan elephant ears and intricate old plantings reined in on trellises, with lovely green-and-white striped garden chairs resting invitingly on cobblestones beside trays of frosted tea.