The_Circe_Spell-chapter4

20.

4. Circe’s Jaunt

New Orleans, January 2000

It was well past midnight, but he knew he had to call Lauren right away. She was probably worried sick about Circe.

"Hello?" She obviously hadn't been sleeping.

"You won't believe this, Lauren."

"Marc? What is it?"

"Circe hasn't come back, has she?"

"No. I keep going out and checking. No sign of her. I'm worried she got hit by a car or something."

"She's here, Lauren."

"Your house? But how? You're way uptown, aren't you?"

"Yes, about three miles from you. And yet, here she is." He was sitting on the edge of his bed, and Circe now came to sit on his lap. "Can you hear her purring?"

"You didn't, Marc . . . did you? You wouldn't . . . take her?"

"Of course not! I--"

"She ran after you and hopped into your cab, right?"

"I didn't take a cab! I took three different streetcars. No, the only explanation is that she found me, somehow. You said she loved me."

"But could she do that, walk and run . . . all that way in, what? How long has she been there?"

"I figure the most she could've had was seven hours from when you lost her."

"I guess it's possible. No! You took her. You had to!"

"I didn’t, Lauren, I swear to God."

"I don’t really know you. Why would you do this?"

"She followed me somehow. You’ve got to believe me."

"If she did, those are some powerful pheromones you’re emitting."

You feel them too, I hope, he wanted to say, hearing her sigh over the phone.

"Do you have something to feed her?" she asked. "I'll come in the morning. You'll be home?"

"Yes to both. I have some canned tuna I can give her. And I'm closed on Mondays."

"All right, then, I'll see you in the morning. Good thing I just bought a carrier. I'll call before I leave and you can give me directions. Circe didn't need them, apparently, but I do."

21.

He had the feeling she still thought he’d taken the cat. Strangers once again, just when it seemed they had connected so well. He stroked Circe's spine. "I know you're not bad luck, are you my pretty black cat? Let's get you something to eat." He carried her down the stairs and into his kitchen. As he opened the can of tuna, he remembered part of his dream. Edgar Allan Poe tossing him the cat. He thought the book he'd bought the other day could have triggered the weird dream. After putting the tuna in a little glass bowl and putting it on the floor for the cat, he went into the living room and picked the heavy hardcover up off the coffee table. He thumbed through it a bit, but since he didn't know Italian he had no idea why he was doing this, so he put the book down.

He went back to bed, leaving the bedroom door open. It wasn't long before he was dreaming again. First he heard a flutter, then he saw a crow alight on top of the tall dresser facing the bed against the opposite wall. "What are you?"

"Not you, not you!" Bobbing its beak at him. "Here's my man now." The crow spread its wings and flew to meet the person coming through the open bedroom door. The bird settled now on the stranger's shoulder and stayed there as the man took a seat in the room's only chair, by the window. His head was large and square, Marc could just make it out, a forehead of unusual breadth, against the white curtains in the dim light from the street. He could see the mustache, too, though faintly, like it was still growing back from having been shaved. He tried to say something, but couldn't even move his lips.

"I have reached these lands but newly," Poe said, then turning his head he addressed the bird. "You said you would never leave me. I suppose you preferred the Night's Plutonian shore."

The beak squawked. "Not quite, not quite."

"Then why did you desert me, like everybody else?"

The crow could even smirk. "Everybody else?"

Poe appeared to understand the bird's point. "Very well, except Muddy. It was I who deserted her"—turning now to Marc—"when I died. Left her in that pathetic cottage in Fordham." Back to the crow: "But tell me why you left."

"I don't care for your Valley of Unrest."

"No? Listen, resting in peace is not as it has been advertised. The truth is, Unrest is preferable; at least I'm doing something: I'm haunting this gentleman." He turned again to Marc. "I'm sure you've read your share of ghost stories, Mr. DiCaso. You're expecting the formula, are you not? The murdered-souls-never-rest routine. I hate to disappoint you, but I was not murdered."

"I know that. Didn't you die of alcohol poisoning?"

"How do I know? I had a brain lesion and a bad heart."

"In college my lit. prof said there was a theory that you died of rabies."

"Rubbish. Catterina never bit or even clawed me. Neither did Circe, of course. Which brings me to the reason for my visit. Or visitation, if you prefer. Circe. Soul-tracker: she has led me to you, Mr. DiCa--"

22.

Ca-ca-ca! the crow screeched its opinion and took off, stopping right in front of Poe's face, flapping its wings while hovering like a hummingbird. Through the flutter Poe's face seemed to flicker. Beneath the strobe-like blur of the wings the square face smoothed out to an oval. The mustache faded away. A younger Poe? No, it looked like a woman now, dressed in red and black. She was wearing a gold Venetian carnival mask, with black plumes shooting out wildly in all directions. The crow faded into the dark. The woman got up and approached the bed, Marc sitting up now could see what she was wearing, a stiff red bustier, shiny black stockings. Her cold hands pushed his shoulders back to the bed and she straddled him. She lay on top of him, supporting none of her weight. Dead weight, he thought, can't breathe. Underwire pressing on him, lace rough in his face. He noticed that she had red hair. Let me peak beneath your mask. He lifted the mask. Darkness there, nothing more. He was shocked awake.

Circe was purring on his chest, his heart was pounding. "What was that all about?" he asked her. "Poe again?" Poe morphing into a lady dressed for Mardi Gras, which was just about a month away. And didn't he mention Circe? He took the cat off his chest but let her curl up beside him as he fell back to sleep.

The next morning, needing coffee badly, he walked on Magazine Street a few blocks to P.J.'s, where he bought a giant bran muffin and a large cappuccino. His phone vibrated in his pocket. "Marc? Can I come get Circe now?"

He gave her directions and told her he would open his gate for her so she could park in his driveway. Finishing his muffin, he headed home with his coffee. When he got there, he found Circe sitting on the coffee table, not far from the Italian Poe book. He figured just looking through the book must have triggered that dream. While waiting for Lauren, he opened it again and looked at the table of contents, trying to guess which Italian titles corresponded to well-known tales. A few were easy, like "Metzengerstein" and "Berenice"--same in Italian as in English. "I wonder how you say 'The Black Cat', that would be you, right, Circe? According to my dream, anyway." He opened his laptop and Googled the title, adding the word "Italian" to the search. "Il gatto nero. I don't see it here. Sorry, Circe, you're not included." He used the computer to translate all the other titles, just to kill time, but the last story in the book, "I Veggenti," didn't seem to correspond to any tale he could find. The closest was "The Visionary," but the Italian title was plural. He knew this from Google, which translated it as "The Clairvoyants." A mistake perhaps, although he did remember from his college class that a few Poe tales had alternate titles.

Circe got up and darted to the door. "You need to go, don't you? Well little kitty, you'll have to hold it until Lauren gets here. Just don't pee or poop in the carrier, okay? She either thinks I took you or blames me for your defection." The cat gave up and wandered off down the hall. When she came back a minute or so later, she sat on the living room floor cleaning herself. He checked the hall bathroom where she appeared to have been going, and sure enough, she had left him a gift in the tub. "Good of you to use the tub, Circe. Easy to clean." He petted her.

Hearing Lauren's car pull up, he went out to greet her. "Great house!" she said.

"A little run down, but it has its charm."

23.

"The color. What is it? Teal?" She opened her back door and got out the carrier.

"It was pink before. I wanted it beige. This color was the result of a compromise with my mother." He held the door open for her. "C’mon in."

"You absolutely swear this isn’t some prank you’re pulling?"

"Absolutely. Why would I? I want you to like me."

Circe came up to her and smelled the carrier as she put it down. "I can't believe you, my kitty!" Lauren picked up the cat and held her nose to nose. "Are you trying to tell us something, Circe?" She opened the carrier door and put the cat in it, closing it quickly. No meow of protest.

"You do believe me, then, that I didn't take her?"

"I think so. Yes, I guess I do. I'll stick to the pheromone theory."

"Would you like a cup of coffee or something? A quick tour of the house?"

"I'd like to get her home, and I've got more unpacking to do. Rain check?"

"How about lunch tomorrow, at my restaurant? On the house, of course."

"Will you be able to join me?"

"Sure thing. How about 11:30, before it gets busy?"

She agreed, and he helped her situate the now-captive Circe in the back seat of her car. The cat poked her little scarred nose through the carrier's metal grating, and kept her head low between her paws.

After a restful night with forgettable dreams, he showered and dressed for work, donning his usual attire when not cooking: light blue chinos, muted print shirt and navy blue jacket--winter colors. He stopped at PJ's and bought a large dark-roast coffee, black, and as he drove the short distance, he felt a tinge of anxiety over Charlene, who should be the only one there this early, just a little after nine. She was sitting on the high stool at the front reception area, going over a spreadsheet on the computer.

"Good morning, Charley. Got any reservations for lunch?"

"A few, but it's Tuesday, still four weeks from the Fat one. It'll be slow."

"Well, add one more: her name is Lauren, and I'll be joining her."

"Really?" She actually smiled, but not warmly, closer to a smirk. "You met someone already?"

"I did. In Wag's bookstore." They always called it that; he'd even forgotten the place's actual name. "She's the new weather person on channel four."

"I never watch the local news."

"So far, we're just friends."

"Is that really any of my business?" She went back to the screen.

"It could be." He was fishing for an assurance that she wouldn't bring up the unfortunate accident in bed, now that her nose was better. She didn't reply, focusing on the monitor. "I'll be in my office," he said.

24.

Marc's grandfather had tried too hard, perhaps, to transform a New Orleans café into an Italian trattoria. The bright oil paintings in the main dining room of Sicilian and Calabrian coastal mountains looked like they had been painted by a well-meaning but uninspired Jackson Square hack; the effect, Marc had always thought, was to make Italy seem more strange and distant, more alien to this delta city below sea level. But like his father, he couldn't bring himself to throw away or even move the paintings; it might be bad luck. A long corridor--leading past the restrooms to storage rooms, then Charlene's office, then his own--sported more sophisticated if much smaller landscapes and cityscapes of Italy that he had bought in nearby galleries, like all the pictures of Rome and Venice on his office walls. These were dark modernist evocations of the two Italian cities he really wanted most to visit. Traitor to his Mezzogiorno roots, he admitted. So to be less of a traitor, he kept the tacky landscapes.

As he logged on to his computer, the office phone rang. "Hi it's me. Where do you want to sit with your new girlfriend? Somewhere nice and cozy, I assume."

"She’s not my girlfriend, Charley. By the window is fine. What time is Louis coming in?"

"I don't know; I didn't run home to Daddy, you know. He'll be here soon, I'm sure."

"Let me know when he comes in."

"You gonna ask him to fix something special, off the menu?"

"Why not? We're not going to be busy, you said so yourself."

"You must really like this Laura."

"Lauren. Look, never mind. We'll just order from the menu."

"Whatever, Marc." She hung up. A woman scorned? Wasn't it she who dumped me?

Charlene's newly-unbandaged nose was a little red, but no longer swollen. People were looking her in the eye again. But it was obvious to Marc she was still angry that he had ignored her advice--that he would rather be free of her than get help for the disorder he didn't think he even had. He entertained the idea of not waiting by the front door at 11:30, of letting Charley introduce herself to Lauren, but decided Lauren would think it odd if he weren't there to greet her. So he emerged from his office and stood with Charley, being careful to talk only of business.

Just after 11:30 his cell phone rang.

"Hi Marc, I'll be a little late, is that okay?"

"Sure, we have a rez, and, well, I am the owner."

"Circe ran away again! As soon as I opened the door she ran out. I'm looking for her now. I saw her cross two streets, one of them very busy, to get to the park--I saw her head for one of the oak trees. Now no sign of her."

"Maybe she climbed the tree," said Marc.

"I'll give it another ten or fifteen minutes, then I'll come have lunch, okay? Who knows, maybe she'll show up there, if your pheromones are broadcasting. See you in a bit."

When Lauren finally arrived, Charlene was busy greeting and seating lunch patrons. Introductions were mercifully quick, and she escorted Marc and Lauren to their table. "I'll come say hi when I have a moment," she said to Lauren with a hostess smile. She gave them lunch menus and left them in their far corner table.

"Sorry about Circe," said Marc. "Some cats are just not homebodies, you know. She'll show up, don't worry. So how do you like my place?"