Table of Contents
For Dean, Mom, and anyone who ever missed New Orleans.
CATS
1.
The night that cats were wished away was a hard one full of wine, tears, and spectacle. Even those of us who were indifferent to feline companionship felt heartbroken for those who weren’t, and together our humid, grieving silence was more tangible than the awe-filled silence that followed the disappearance of cancer. We were united by that particular loss. Despite the media promise that Japanese scientists were hard at work trying to re-engineer the common house cat, my beautiful neighbor Pebbles had lost her faith, burning all of her leopard spotted, tiger striped panties and bras in a small, neat fire out on the banquette in front of our building on Esplanade.
The flame-crumpled rayon impressed me enough that I drained a bottle of cabernet in tribute. We lived in a jazz/pot community on the fringe of the French Quarter called Faubourg Marigny where I worked in my son’s vintage clothing shop as a cape and corset cleaner. Thus, my interest in her underthings was mostly professional.
Miss Pebbles stood over the ashes of her underwear and cried, and my respect for the phenomenon of Death Wishing deepened. They say Wishing started when some Army PR flak declared on his deathbed that there were alien bodies at Roswell back in ‘47. “Hunnerds of them,” he swore. There weren’t any aliens, of course. But the man said his piece and expired, and then all of a sudden there were. Rows and rows of the dusty bastards, stacked up on shelves in a shed in the desert. This occurred a couple of years ago.
Pebbles’ panty fire had melted already. She deserved better—antique lace, satin, velvet trim. Especially if she was going to burn the stuff. She made me crazy with her red hair and baby fat, and the way she smelled like Lisa, the hand soap they put in Quarter hotels. But I was far too old and fat for her. Hell, my son was too old for her too, but I held the minority opinion on that.
She sniffled in my direction. I maintained a respectful distance. “Is Val coming out?” she asked.
It’s two for flinching, so I didn’t. “I think he has a date.”
It no longer burned me that she had a thing for my son Val. I was quite comfortable dividing my fantasy from reality, and to a certain degree I preferred my love life to be all my own, compartmentalized, unrequited, and unspoiled. I had been married long enough, then divorced long enough, to appreciate the benefits of a purely invented reality. But human invention has its limits.
Upon dissection, we learned that every detail of alien physiognomy had already been imagined by scientists, artists, writers, etc. It was all very exciting, but ultimately there was nothing to be learned from hundreds of copies of an all too generalized ideal. The aliens didn’t come from anywhere, and they couldn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. They were the perfect ambassadors of our limits.
“There he is,” said Pebbles, sounding brighter, breaking my heart again. My son had rounded the corner, deepening his lazy stride once he spotted us. All Pebbles could see was the swinging black hair, scuffed boots, stained T-shirt and jeans—he went for that semi-retired rock star look. All I could see was how much he looked like his mother, Brenda. She and I lived a thousand miles away from each other, but Val was her easy surrogate.
He