Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist Page A

just friends, not committed to anything as foolish as monogamy. We’re proud of each other and we like the way we look and we like to be together and we’d been looking forward to our New Orleans trip for months. We had three weeks of hard-earned vacation saved and we weren’t in the mood to have it cut short by a hurricane. We had wardrobes, connections, cash, and we weren’t finished in New Orleans yet. We were shopping for antiques to tone down Dean’s minimalist tendencies. We have a town house in the canyon and we’ve been redoing it all year.
    We had driven to New Orleans so we could bring things home. We rented a red 2006 GMC Envoy and drove through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and on down to New Orleans, “The City that Care Forgot.” Let the good times roll, we had decided. We’re ready.
    So we weren’t finished having fun yet and we didn’t evacuate. So kill me. Mea culpa. Dean’s an insomniac. You can talk him into anything if you don’t wake him up in the morning on his time off.
    WE DIDN’T EVACUATE because WE DIDN’T WANT TO. Dean was sleeping until noon every day and I was power flirting with a tall, good-looking native New Orleanian, and besides it’s the nature of our jobs to run toward natural disasters and not give in to fear.
    We’d been having the best, best time and we’d both been super careful. Well, Dean was careful and I wasn’t doing anything, as usual. I wasn’t sticking my thing into any strange places without blood tests first when there was plenty of fun to be had power flirting, shopping, sashaying down Bourbon and Royal Streets, eating oysters Rockefeller and pompano meunière and drinking white German wines and French reds.
    We’d gone to Antoine’s twice in two days, once for lunch, once for dinner. And to Galatoire’s three times. And to every other good restaurant in town. We found an oyster place called Casamento’s that I’ll put up against any in the world.
    I was power flirting with a man named Charles Foret, who was a bit player in
The Runaway Jury,
besides being the only living male heir to an old New Orleans coffee fortune.
    Then Charles invited us to stay with him for the hurricane and we did. “The Pontalba is the oldest apartment building in the United States,” he told us. “Stay with me until it goes by. It will turn east. They always do.”
    We had barely shown our faces at the paramedical convention. Just went by the first day and got our credentials and listened to half of a boring speech about epidemiology and left our phone number at the hotel with a woman who was supposed to be our group commander.
    Places we shopped that may never open again include A Gallery for Fine Photography, Harbison and Hunt Antiques of Royal Street, Boots and Belts, Your Grannie’s Chairs, and Britannia Bed and Bath. God forbid I should ever think about the walnut and blue velvet chair that was in the back of the GMC when it was hotwired and stolen. The sales slip was in the glove compartment, Dean’s idea. I will have the canceled check for the insurance but who knows how that will turn out.
    STANDING IN LINE outside of Galatoire’s is where I first met Charles Foret. Like he’s the most elegant man I’ve ever seen this side of Durham, North Carolina. Tall, tall, tall and dressed in an unlined white summer suit with a pale blue tie he had made to match one described in a William Faulkner novel. “It’s a copy of the tie V. K. Ratliff was given by the Russian woman after he may or may not have made love to her in the back of her shop in New York City. It’s my lucky tie. I knew if I wore it today something good would happen.”
    That’s one thing I’ll always remember about Charles. The other thing was after the hurricane, when we were alone on the levee watching a ship come down the river and he told me, “. . . Only one ship is