Swan Dive

building and cobblestoned walkways teeming with upscale urbanites drinking at the outdoor cafés and downscale tourists engaged in a perpetual feeding frenzy. You can hardly blame the tourists, given the variety of delights tactically placed around each corner they turn. Souvlaki stands, raw bars, fried dough counters. Mixed fruit on a stick, frozen yogurt atop a cone, shish kebab in a pita pouch. All elaborately festive and apparently successful, until you notice that a chocolate chip cookie costs as much as a loaf of bread in Omaha and that very few visitors wearing J. C. Penney shirts are toting bags from the tony designer shops crammed into ten-by-twenty stalls.
    I appreciate what the market area has done for the city, but I can take it only in small, infrequent doses. At least the folks there that afternoon were laughing and alive, which was more than I could say for many of the people I’d been around lately.

    ”What’s that?” I said, looking down at the kitchen floor.
    Nancy Meagher closed the apartment door behind me. ”A friend of mine wanted to adopt a dog, so I went up with her to an animal shelter in Salem . When I saw this little fella, I knew there was something missing in my life.”
    The tiny kitten, a gray tiger with too-big paws and ears, just stared up at me.
    Nancy said, ”Don’t you want to know his name?”
    ”I could never see naming something that doesn’t come when you call it.”
    ”Oh, John. You’re going to love him. Isn’t that right, Renfield?”
    ”Renfield?”
    ”Yes. Ring a bell?”
    ”Not quite.”
    ”In the Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi, Renfield is the Englishman who goes mad and begins eating small mammals for their blood.”
    I watched Renfield and wiggled my foot. He licked his chops and pounced, sinking his front claws and teeth into my sock, playing tug-of-war with the spandex.
    ”Why don’t you two go into the living room. White wine okay?”
    ”Fine.”
    I dragged Renfield into Nancy ’s bay-windowed parlor and settled onto one of her throw pillows. Prying his grip off my foot, I hefted him in my palm. He was about the size and weight of a brandy snifter. He blinked at me once, then started gnawing on my thumb.
    Nancy came in with our drinks. ”Getting acquainted?”
    ”I think he senses you’re running low on parakeets.”
    She set the glasses down and picked up a Ping-Pong ball. She tapped it with her fingernail, which got Renfield’s immediate and undivided attention. Then she tossed it onto the hardwood floor at the edge of her rug. Renfield sprang from my hand and hit the ground with all legs pumping, catching up to the ball and whacking it till he and the ball skittered out of sight into the kitchen.
    I reached for my drink and Nancy raised hers. We clinked as she said, ”To a fresh start.”
    We cruised through the next half hour on simple, almost domestic small talk. I helped make a salad to go with the swordfish in the broiler, and we ate at her kitchen table. There was a persistent but erratic scratching at my pants cuff, like a determined novice lineman trying to climb his first telephone pole.
    ”Is it all right to feed him from the table?”
    She smiled. ”Softening already?”
    I picked up a morsel of swordfish the size of my pinkie nail. ”Just thinking of my wardrobe.”
    As soon as Renfield saw the treat, he sat up and begged. Well, as much as a cat will beg. I lightly dropped the food onto his nose, his pupils focusing crazily as he tentatively swatted and then gobbled it. I repeated the drill twice more.
    ”Why are you putting the food on his nose?”
    ”I like watching his eyes cross.”
    ”Great,” she said around a bite of tomato. ”If the behaviorists are right, in two months I’ll have a Siamese.”
    We finished dinner and moved into the parlor, dawdling over the rest of the wine as we watched the evening news. About halfway into the broadcast, the male anchor warned that the following scenes might not be suitable for young children. After a pause short enough to retain viewers but not long enough to shoo any kids out of the room, the female anchor introduced the videotape of a courthouse shoot-out involving me a few weeks before.
    Nancy started to get up. ”I’ll change it.”
    ”No.”
    She looked at me questioningly.
    ”No, Nance. I want to see it.”
    The video was disjointed, the camera operator near the witness stand obviously and understandably jumping and bumping the tripod as the gunfire erupted. The