News from the World by Paula Fox Page A

Avenue in Manhattan. The optician who owned it was an old friend, and I had joined him for a brown-bag lunch. We were sitting at the rear of the narrow store, eating sandwiches when Tone, wearing a beret, opened the door and leaned in.
    In that first moment of my recognition of him, though like me he had grown much older—I lost my breath. He smiled at me and it was such a lovely smile! All his old charm for me was in it. He asked Lou, my friend, when his eyeglasses would be ready. The optician replied but I couldn’t hear language. What I felt at that moment was beyond words. My hearing returned in time to hear Tone’s thanks and goodbye to Lou.
    Upon first seeing him years earlier, I had been astonished by the emotions his screen presence had brought to life in me. I had loved him, in a make-believe way—the way most emotion begins—for years.
    That intensity of feeling prepared me, in some fashion, for love itself, its contrarieties, its defeats, its beauty.

WAY DOWN YONDER
    I N 1942 , WHEN I lived in the city for many months, New Orleans was an earthly paradise for me. In 2005, it was a dreadful calamity for hundreds of thousands of people because of Hurricane Katrina and still is.
    On my first morning there on an autumn day sixty-six years ago, I walked along a street bordering the French Quarter. I spotted a dusty envelope on the ground and picked it up. It was unstamped but had the address of a woman in Baton Rouge. I looked up at the wall of a city jail. The letter, I guessed, had been dropped from a slit window in a cell on a high floor. It was unsealed, and I read it:
    How come you was so hard with me? I be here so long without your comfort. How come you didin bring me smokes? Didin I ast you for them? You blame me and blame me and blame me. Im dyin here with nothin to do to pass my time.
    It was written in pencil and unsigned. I carried it around with me all day then I sealed, stamped and mailed it.
    On my last day in New Orleans the following spring, I went to a department store on Canal Street to buy a pair of stockings. On the first floor, between elevators, I saw two fountains next to each other. Above them, large signs read: White and colored.
    In a novel I wrote that was published in 1990, The God of Nightmares , I included the text of the letter along with an invented incident that occurs at the drinking fountains. Separate fountains, and the letter, represent to me a large part of the life in the deep south of those days.
    Since last September, 2005, I’ve heard two words repeated in many voices on radio and television news, Lake Pontchartrain.
    It was on the broad steps on the western side of the lake where I occasionally sat with a writer friend, Pat, and his two nearly grown sons. The elder would gradually move away from us until he was sitting on the lowest step close to the grey-blue water that eddied faintly.
    I was nineteen. I had driven across the country from California to New Orleans in a second-hand Chevrolet. I had hardly any money and needed a job and a cheap place to live. I don’t recall how I found work but I did find a place to live in a former mansion on Royal Street in the French Quarter that had been converted into a rooming house. During the weeks I lived there, I always found the lower steps of the once grand stairway flooded with water. I learned, in time, that it came from a bar around the corner whose toilet had bad plumbing.
    I shared a vast room with a woman who had been a member of an acting troupe in her youth. I saw her sober infrequently. She slept mostly, and when she was awake, showed me an elaborate blurred courtesy. I slept in a cot across from her large bed, and before my eyes closed at night, I would stare up at the ceiling far above with its zodiac symbols painted on a dark blue background.
    From the balcony off her room, I could see two streetcars rumbling along Royal Street. One carried a sign that read. Desire, the other Piety. The