6.

2. A Chance Disorder

New Orleans, Louisiana
January 2000

Several times in his life Marc DiCaso woke up from sound sleep with sore knuckles. He would also find himself perpendicular to his original position, with covers all twisted around his legs. The bruised knuckles must certainly have been from punching the headboard in his sleep. So it should not have been a complete surprise to him when he accidentally bloodied his girlfriend's nose in his sleep. It was the beginning of the end for them after only a few months as a couple.

Marc always had a tendency to make poor decisions. All the good things that had ever happened to him were the result of pure chance--like the inheritance from his father of Ristorante DiCaso, in the Warehouse District. Most of the bad things, however, were direct or indirect results of choices he'd made. It was now becoming clear that his decision to start sleeping with his hostess and accountant, Charlene Montanet, was a disastrous one.

The dispute that led to her dumping him was whether flying fist or errant elbow had given her the bloody nose. She was worried that he had actually been dreaming of punching her. He remembered her shaking him awake. 

"Marc, wake up!" she cried. "You punched me in the nose!"

"What? I was dreaming. What's the matter?"

She got up and headed for the bathroom. "I told you. You punched me!" Turning on the light, she looked in the mirror. "Please go get me an ice pack."

7.

Most of the dream stayed with him as he continued to embrace her. A fist fight! He'd had only one in his whole life, as a nine-year-old. He was not the type to get into fights, except in his dreams. This one involved a stranger, a figure he'd dreamed a few times before, sometimes hooded, always hounding him, going on about things that made no sense.

She will find you, he said. A cowl, thought Marc, that’s what he’s wearing.  Coming closer and closer as he spoke, until Marc could see his eyes were all black. You may come to think her evil, but she is not. She follows you at my behest.

Back away from me! I don't want to breathe your breath.

I have no breath.

Go away and leave me alone.

I cannot. I'm sorry, it's out of my control.

I'll push you back.

The hooded figure continued to approach. Don't hit me, please, you may hurt your mate. Don't you recognize me?

 Back off now.

Please tell me you recognize me.

The punch hit the stranger's face, which then dissipated as Marc was suddenly shaken awake.

8.

They continued to work together though, and even occasionally to have sex, usually in his office after hours, when everyone else, including her father the chef, had gone home. Marc thought about it for a week or so, and decided against seeing a doctor. He thought once the bandage and bruise were gone and she no longer felt battered she would come to her senses and realize it was just an accident. By this time, he had actually forgotten most of the dream. He admitted he might have jerked in his sleep, accidentally slamming her face with an elbow.

Insisting he was in denial, Charlene moved her things out, packing up her Mazda coupe with as much as it could hold. "All you had to do," she said from the driver's seat, "was get some treatment. You wouldn't even do that."

He stood next to her car to talk through the open driver's side window. "You're giving me the treatment right now, Charley. You're using this unfortunate accident as an excuse to get out of a relationship you've decided is a mistake."

“Isn’t it, Marc? We never hooked up in college, when we had the chance. There’s a reason for that.”

He'd first met Charlene fifteen years before, in Lafayette, where they both attended the University of Louisiana. As part of his restaurant-management curriculum, he had to take basic accounting, which he dreaded, putting it off until his senior year. She was in the accounting class as a freshman, and when he saw how good she was with numbers he asked her if she could help him. Their tutoring sessions eventually led to friendship, which never grew into intimacy, for reasons neither of them had ever quite figured out. One of them, it seemed, was always involved with someone else whom they considered more desirable. And when Marc returned to New Orleans, he said he would visit her in Lafayette, but never did in the three years she was there and he was here. Nor did she visit him. They stayed in touch through email.

After Charlene graduated, she returned to New Orleans without a job. Living at home with her widower father Louis, a Creole cook, she waited tables at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen and read tarot cards and palms in Jackson Square. Marc kept meaning to call her, but his father was dying, the restaurant was languishing, and his mother was in constant need of support. When he took over the business after his father’s death, he fired half the staff and started from scratch. That was when he finally called and offered Charlene a job. They got together, had many glasses of wine, and she convinced him to hire her father as well, who was working in a bistro whose rich owners, she slyly asserted, were underpaying him. Marc didn't actually decide to turn DiCaso's into a fusion of Italian and Creole, it just kind of happened that way. And it was a hit; he and Louis worked magic together.

9.

Charlene wasn’t, anymore. She considered the unconscious wallop a sign of ill omen. So she used her coworkers as a way in to the way out. From her car she asked, "Haven't you noticed how suddenly, as soon as they knew we were dating, all the wait staff started hating me? Resenting me, thinking I'm getting all sorts of perks they're not getting, being now both the chef's daughter and the boss's girlfriend."

"So you admit the real problem is that I'm your boss. Not this alleged sleep disorder."

"Okay so it's both. But I'm serious, Marc. This isn't just an excuse." She rubbed her nose. "I really don't want to be battered in dreamland."

"You could always quit, you know. Find another job, give us a chance."

"I'm not quitting, Marc. I love the job. The only chance we have is if you see a doctor, either a sleep specialist or a psychiatrist, preferably both."

"So now you think I'm crazy.”

“I do, if you don’t get yourself tested.”

He shook his head. “I guess we both always knew we weren't really right for each other. Maybe we were 'just friends' for so long we seem more like brother and sister now."

Her laugh was a bit sardonic. “So it was incest to you. You do need a shrink, Marc. I'll see you tonight. Unless you're thinking of firing me."

"You're beginning to tempt me, but--"

"You wouldn’t, I guess. You can't risk losing Papa Montanet."

"Hey, I hired you first, before your Papa."

She shrugged as she started the car. “Accountants are expendible. Chefs, not so much.” She drove away.

 A few weeks later, he met Lauren in an old bookstore on Chartres, the one he frequented mainly to visit the large fixed male Siamese cat they called Scallywag. One of the things Charley always liked in Marc: he was a cat person, not a dog person, even though he’d never even owned a cat. In the rear of the store, a woman dressed in a tight pine-green skirt and matching jacket was bending down with some difficulty to pet the cat. What one always noticed first about Lauren was her copious and obviously natural red hair, which was practically all he saw as she stooped to stroke the cat in the aisle between stacks.

"Did you notice the sign when you came in?" asked Marc.

She looked up, revealing a lightly freckled face, nodding. "All bags subject to feline inspection. Cute. This may be my kind of place."

"I come here once a month or so, mainly to see this cat." A gamble, he thought.

      "Fixed male Siamese are never high-strung, always so mellow. Aren't you, big boy? What's his name?"

"Scallywag." The cat decided to run upstairs, where there was an old sofa he loved to lounge in.

"What's up there?" Lauren asked.

"Mainly old books, out-of-print stuff. Also foreign. What are you looking for?"

"Old weather books that might have accounts of old nameless hurricanes. My research area."

"Are you a student?" He followed her up the steep and creaking staircase.

"No.  I'm a meteorologist." At the top of the stairs. "I just got a job at Channel 4. Weekend weather-lady."

"Cool. I'll look for you. I don't normally watch the local news, but I just might start now." He hoped that didn't make him sound like a stalker.

"I don't start until week after next. Nice meeting you." She smiled and went off to search in the science/nature section. He headed for Wag's sofa, but the cat suddenly jumped off and skulked into the stacks, his tail fur suddenly fluffed out. He was after something, Marc hoped not a rat. He followed and saw near the wall another cat, this one all black, curled up asleep against some books on the bottom shelf. They were in the foreign language section.

"Be nice. No fighting." The black cat, with somewhat scraggly long hair, stood up and stretched, forepaws extending claws to a book. As Scallywag attacked, the black cat's stuck claws accidentally pulled out the book as she scrambled to get away, darting off to easily outrun the aging Siamese. Marc picked up the book. Racconti Grotesci Arabesci. He couldn't read Italian. He was about to put it back when he noticed that it was by Edgar A. Poe. His tales translated into Italian by one Paolo Culotta.

He carried the book away, hoping it could be used to start up another conversation with Lauren. The two cats were now involved in a truce or detente of some sort, sniffing each other's noses. Wag was no longer horripilating; he was purring as he let the black cat follow him toward his sofa--where Lauren was now sitting, leafing through what looked like an old Time/Life annual picture book. "Look what I found," she said. "An article on the 1909 Grand Isle hurricane. I actually don't have this one."

"You do now," said Marc. "Look, Wag has a new friend." The black cat jumped up on the sofa and stepped confidently into Lauren's lap, right on top of the book. "She acts like she’s yours."

11.

"So what did you find?" she asked.

"Actually your new friend found it.  She got her claws stuck in it, and as Scallywag attacked she pulled it off the shelf. Poe tales in Italian."

"You know Italian?"

"No, but I like Poe. Maybe this will help me learn Italian. I've wanted to learn, I'd like to go to Italy some time. Rome and Venice, especially Venice, I seem to be drawn to Venice. Although I should go to Sicily, distant relatives there.” Talking too much. “Where are your roots?"

"Upstate New York. I'm from Albany originally." He guessed she didn't want to take him any further back. Van Aken—Dutch colonialist roots probably. She seemed preoccupied with the black cat, whose nose she now scratched with a forefinger. "Look, she has a scar." Running across the cat's nose was a horseshoe-shaped gray streak.

"I hope you won that fight," said Marc, "though you don't look like much of a fighter."

12.

            She was probably not used to the southernism. But she agreed with him. "Listen to that purr." She said to Marc, “I’ve been planning to get a cat, just not till after I’m settled in. But why deny fate?”

“She sure looks sweet on you.”

“Okay,” she said to the bookseller. “I'll take her too, her and this book." Impulsive, thought Marc. May be a good sign.

"I'll only charge you for the book. The cat is free."

"You'll be depriving Wag of a friend," said Marc.

"Oh he has lots of friends--as you know," said the bookseller. "He'll be fine."

Lauren handed him her business card. "Do call or email me if it turns out she has an owner."

Outside, Lauren with her hurricane book in a large black purse in one hand and the cat in the other. "I hope you don't have far to go," said Marc.

"Can you do me a favor and get me a cab?"

"Of course. Can I have your number?"

She handed him the cat, took out another business card from her purse, took the cat back--claws having to be extracted from Marc's jacket--and handed him the card. "Email me. We'll have coffee."

He was looking down Chartres Street for a cab. "We may have to walk to Canal."

"She's clinging to me with her claws. I have a feeling my jacket will be shredded." They started walking. "It's okay, Circe,” she said. “You'll have a home now."

"Circe? You've already named her?"

"Odd how it just came to me. The perfect name, don't you think?"

 Marc worried, if for only a moment, that his attraction to the fair-skinned redhead Lauren was simply a rebound. In old New Orleans Charlene would have been called an “octaroon.” One of the reasons she had gravitated toward tarot and palm reading was that she looked the part, could easily make herself resemble a Carribean witch, a gypsy fortune teller, or any other dark exotic stereotype expected by Jackson Square tourists. Since working for Marc she had given up the readings.

13.

"So, how are you adapting?" he asked.

"I love it here!" She tried to wipe the sugar off her jeans but only succeeded in spreading it and smudging her lap.

"Must be weird, feeling this warm in January."

"That I can get used to very quickly. I hate the cold! In spite of my Northern genes." As she continued to attack her beignet, she was more careful that the sugar would snow onto her plate, not her lap. Quite a bit on her very red lips, which she dabbed with another napkin, now stained with most of her lipstick. "So you're in the restaurant business?"

It was an effort for him to concentrate on the conversation and not just stare at her beautiful face. "Yes. I inherited DiCaso's from my father. I'm not a master chef—didn't go to the Culinary Institute—though I do have a degree in hotel and restaurant management. I learned to cook from my mother—so I handle most of the Italian dishes, while Louis does the Creole. Sometimes we fuse."

"Sounds great! I'll have to try it soon. DiCaso’s, you said?"

He nodded. "On Tchoupitoulas. Please come." He wondered what kind of look Charlene would give him when he introduced them. "So, how's Circe?"

"She's very restless. Always wants to go out. I had an outdoor cat once who insisted on bringing me half-eaten gifts, so I don't give in. She howls a lot.” She paused and widened her eyes at him. “Would you like to come visit her?"

Yes! "Sure."

"Let's walk off these carbs," she said, touching his forearm. "My house is in the Marigny, about a twenty-minute walk from here. On Dauphine. Not far from Elysian Fields. I love saying that to my parents and friends up north. Elysian Fields!"

"That's a great neighborhood."

"I hope you won't mind, I'm not exactly settled in yet."

"Not to worry. My place is pretty unsettled at the moment, and I didn’t even move."

"Let's do the riverfront walk some other time," she said. He began to get his hopes up: okay, she's already thinking of meeting again and she wants to get home as quickly as possible, maybe she’s feeling sex-deprived and I seem worth a try. They walked up Decatur, and she held his arm just below the shoulder as though they had known each other for years. He hoped this wasn't just the new girl in town desperate for any friend she could find.

"So you're from New Orleans?" She pronounced it right.

"It would be tough."

"Let's cross here," she said when they reached the Marigny Brasserie. "We can cut through the park." She was referring to Washington Square, which was, indeed, a perfect square, its perimeter lined with live oaks, and empress palms gracing every corner.  She lived a few blocks from the park in an old Creole townhouse, brick-red wood with white trim, converted into apartments. He noticed her silver Honda with its New York plate parked in front of the building. She unlocked the iron gate, and led him up a few stairs and around the side of the building to her door. "I usually open it slowly, to make sure she's not going to run out." Circe was indeed there, but made no attempt to flee. Instead, as Marc walked in, the cat began to sniff his jeans. "I think she remembers you."

He squatted and stroked her soft black fur. "Hello there, Circe. Good to see you again."

"What can I get you? Coffee? Tea?"

"Whatever you're having," he said, looking around.

"I warned you. I'm still unpacking." She had an L-shaped corner apartment, with the door opening into the skylit living room, which was nicely furnished with leather sofa and easy chair, both now burdened with cardboard boxes. "I decided to save money and not have the movers unpack. Big mistake." He followed her to the kitchen, where they could sit at the bar that served as a divider. "How about green tea?"

He took three streetcars home--the Riverfront, the Canal and the St. Charles--which put him a couple of blocks from his house. It was one of those mid-19th century two-level gallery houses with jigsaw woodwork, wrought iron railings and long shuddered windows; what made it unique was an odd combination of thin Greek revival columns and Gothic arches supporting the balcony. He'd inherited the house from his mother, who now lived in a retirement complex in Metairie. She was still hoping, of course, that he would marry and settle down in the old house now that he was successful--and pushing forty.

Inside was a mess, not like Lauren's from boxes and packages but from a month of neglect after the split. He spent most of the late afternoon cleaning and piling up the rest of Charlene's stuff--pillows, knick-knacks and other things she forgot to take in her haste to get the hell out. When he went to bed that night around ten-thirty, it took him over an hour to fall asleep. He kept reviewing practically everything Lauren had said to him, picturing every warm glance she had given him, every smile, every touch, the way she held his arm as they walked. He did not dream of her, however. Oddly enough, he dreamt he was on a dark city street, certainly not New Orleans, and a derelict who looked a lot like Edgar Allan Poe--large square head and disheveled hair, tattered black frock coat, crooked cravat and pants with holes at the knees--approached him with unsteady gait. Marc noticed the stranger was being followed by a shadowy figure that soon resolved into a black cat. Circe?

Of course, said Poe. She's found a door. He bent down and scooped her up, then quickly tossed her right at Marc, who caught her with both hands. Suddenly he was holding the purring cat above him, and he was lying down in his own bed. No yellow in her eyes now, they were dilated totally black. He figured he was still dreaming, of course, only now it's one of those weird dreams where you're dreaming you're in the bed that you are actually sleeping in. Right? I am not awake, am I?