by Alix Ohlin
“What’s wrong?”
“Look,” I said, pointing at the cat. “My roommate is going to kill me.”
“Oh, no,” Robin said.
“I know!”
“Is it our fault? What did we do wrong?”
“I don’t know!”
“You gave him the medicine last night, right?”
“Of course I did.”
“Then it’s not our fault.”
“She’s still going to kill me.”
Robin sat down by the bay window next to Beowulf’s body. Even his fur looked stiff. “Poor sweet baby,” Robin said, gently rubbing the cat’s head. “Poor sweet little thing.”
“What are we going to do?”
When Robin looked up, there were tears in her eyes. “Make a coffin,” she said.
I found a shoebox and lined it with a couple T-shirts. After we nestled Beowulf inside, we debated whether to put the lid on or not. Closure seemed cruel, somehow, even though the cat wouldn’t know the difference. Then we talked about the weather: it was hot and humid, and the apartment didn’t have air conditioning. What if the cat began to decompose before Emma got back? So we covered the shoebox and put it in the fridge, next to the eggs.
Almost immediately I felt better, and I tried to talk Robin into a plan for the day: we could bike to the Goodwill store, I proposed, or have a picnic on campus. But the death of the cat had unsettled my sister.
“I think we should stick by Grendel,” she said. “What if he’s lonely?”
“Grendel is a she,” I said.
“Oh, you’re right,” she said, examining the cat’s grey underbelly. Grendel was also blind, and almost as stiff in life as Beowulf was in death. Every once in a while she lifted a paw and craned her neck as if to go somewhere, then gave up. Though she’d always bared her two teeth at me, she allowed Robin to stroke her head and closed her milky eyes in something that looked like pleasure.
“I’m not sure she can tell anything’s different,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous! Of course she can.” Robin’s tone was aggravated. She seemed to find me pitiless. Growing up, we rarely fought—united as we were against our mother’s unpredictability—and I couldn’t remember her ever snapping at me. Now I found her judgmental, and thought she was posturing; there was no reason for her to act heartbroken over an animal she’d only just met. It was a cat, an old cat, and not her cat.
“Come on,” I said. “Beowulf had a good long life and Grendel will be fine.”
“I bet she got them together,” Robin said, sniffling. “I bet they’ve been together their whole lives.”
“They never seemed to like each other all that much,” I said.
“You never pay attention to animals.”
I was hurt. “That’s not true.”
“You always complained about having to be quiet for the cats.”
Always seemed a strong statement from someone who’d been visiting for just a few days. It was true I’d made fun of Emma to my sister, mocked her attachment to the cats and how she used them as mouthpieces for her own complaints; feline ventriloquism I’d called it, but I was only trying to entertain.
“So you want to sit here and pet the cat all day?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“Okay, then,” I said, stalking off. “Suit yourself.”
I rode my bike to the Worthen library and tried to watch Fantasia. I thought the movie would be a welcome distraction, but it only seemed dated and weird, and cycling past Gordon’s dorm on my way did nothing to lighten my mood. I wanted something darker, and checked out All About Eve instead; the story of two women plotting against one another struck closer to home, but it also made me shift in my seat. I’ve watched the movie many times since then, and each time I see it differently; sometimes its wit makes me laugh, other times I’ve shuddered at the meanness of it, its smartly directed blows. On that day, which was my first viewing, it made me feel as if something had been taken from me, though I couldn’t have said what; like all films, it showed me a reflection of myself, and the reflection was injured and dented, open to theft.
I gave up and got home a few hours later, to find my sister on the couch in Emma’s living room with Grendel on her chest, the cat purring in blind pleasure.
Robin was crying, a steady stream of tears and snot coursing down her cheeks. A snowbank of crumpled tissues next to her testified that she’d been crying the whole time I was gone. Her shirt and hands were whiskered with cat hair. I lay down next to her, pushing her over slightly to make room, and the cat put out a feeble paw in protest.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “Please.”
Robin sighed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Staring at the ceiling, her voice a low-throated murmur clotted with snot, she explained the real reason she’d come to stay with me. It didn’t have to do with Marianne, at least not directly. The problem was Marianne’s boyfriend, Hervé. When they’d first met, he was charming, with genteel European manners. He took the two of them out to dinner at an expensive restaurant, and when Robin faced a menu filled with choices she didn’t recognize, he smoothly ordered for her. He was always telling Marianne she couldn’t possibly be old enough to have a teenage daughter, and as a sort of elaborate courtesy he would pretend that Robin was ten years old, that she was seven, that she was four. “Are you learning your multiplication tables?” he’d ask in mock severity, raising an eyebrow. “Are you working on your finger-painting technique?” It became a running joke, at which Robin and Marianne would laugh excessively, anxious to please and be pleased by him. Although odd, it seemed harmless, and gratifying to Marianne. Otherwise Hervé seemed to have few flaws, except that he could be fussy. When Marianne served him dinner at the apartment, examining his face nervously, he would lift his knife and frown, ever so gently, at its smudges.
Marianne preferred to meet him at his hotel or at a restaurant, but Hervé said he liked to come to the apartment, “to play the family man,” he said, in a tone of ironic amusement, “to dandle the young one on my knee.”
Whenever he visited he brought gifts: jewelry and scarves and perfume for Marianne, clothes for Robin. He thought her outfits were slovenly. He instructed Marianne to take Robin to a seamstress and have her measured, and then took the measurements to Milan and returned with silk blouses and shirtwaist dresses, beautifully made and classic, not exactly unfashionable but certainly nothing like what other girls were wearing. “I couldn’t just walk around in them like I’m Audrey Hepburn or something,” Robin said. She put them on only when he came over or they went out to dinner, and while the dresses were not revealing she noticed that men paid her more attention when she wore them; heads turned on the street; waiters hurried to fill her glass. It was as if Hervé had unlocked some secret to her appearance and chosen to share it with other men without her consent. She felt like a marionette. Worst of all was the look on Marianne’s face when this happened: desperate and greedy, grieving and tentative. “I hated to see her so sad,” Robin said. “Like I was taking something away from her. And I didn’t even want it.”
My sister escaped to her piano practices, and when Hervé came to town she often made excuses as to why she wasn’t free to see him or to go out to dinner. “Hervé missed you,” our mother would say. “You’re hurting his feelings.” And Robin would promise to be around the next time, would play up to our mother with jokes and sweetness, watch movies with her, cuddle next to her on the couch. During this period the mood in the apartment was tense, and yet somehow, perversely, they were closer than they’d ever been before. The unspoken was papered over and the papering had a force of its own. “She’s not so bad, sometimes,” Robin said. “Remember when we were little and she’d play Stevie Wonder for us and we’d have dance parties and hot cocoa? She can be fun.”
One day in the spring Robin arrived at her piano teacher’s home after school, as usual. The piano teacher finished her lessons for the day by six p.m., and after Robin’s lesson she was allowed to stay and practice on her piano for several hours. This agreement had been reached years earlier, through the intervention of Mrs. Gasparian, who’d connected them in the first place. On this particular day the teacher acted strangely—giddy and unusually complimentary of Robin’s performance—and when Robin finished, at nine in the evening, Hervé was sitting in the living room with her teacher, drinking tea. “Not bad,” he said approvingly, raising the cup in her direction. “Not bad at all.” Marianne was not there, and Robin felt chilled. The message, she felt, was clear: there was no place she could go where his gaze wouldn’t follow.
Of course he’d charmed the piano teacher. He even offered to buy Robin a piano, and only the space limitations of our apartment—“Where would we put it? In the bathtub?” Marianne said—prevented him.
Once Robin came out of school to find him there in a car with a driver, offering her a lift to her lesson.
Once she came back from practice to find that all her clothes, the T-shirts and jeans and running shoes she favored, had been removed from her dresser, and replaced with the tailored Italian clothing he preferred.
Once she woke up in the middle of the night to find him sitting on my bed, looking at her.
I didn’t have to ask why she didn’t turn to Marianne, knowing the answer already: because she would have received no help at all.
He never touched her; he never raised his voice.
I held my sister’s hand as she cried. “You see why I couldn’t stay there, right?” she said, and I said, “Yes.”
Robin was more like Marianne than I was; she didn’t have my meekness or my fear. She did three things. She pierced her nose, so that when he looked at her face he would see a choice she’d made. She threw out the beautiful clothes, stuffing them in a dumpster behind our building, the colorful silks flapping from beneath the lid. And she stole all the money she could find in the apartment and used it to buy a bus ticket to the United States.
16.
We decided that Robin wouldn’t go home. Like me, she was a dual citizen—why couldn’t we just stay together? The hazards and difficulties of this plan we pushed aside. We spent the rest of the weekend relaxed and happy. On Sunday we cleaned the apartment and settled down to wait for Emma’s return. Grendel cuddled on Robin’s lap; if she felt any grief over the death of her longtime companion, she didn’t show it. Maybe they’d been enemies all along, just like their namesakes, but had grown too old and tired to fight.
When Emma came in, sweaty and red-faced, with her backpack heavy on one shoulder, my sister carefully lifted Grendel off her lap and stood up.
“Emma,” she said, and gathered my roommate in her arms, pressing her close. I could see Emma’s face melt into worry. “What is it?” she said. “Oh, God.”
Robin whispered the cat’s name in her ear and Emma began to shake, dropping the backpack on the floor.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, “I promise we gave him his medicine.” I’d prepared myself for shouting and blame, steeled myself to mount a defense, but no accusations came. Instead, Emma’s shoulders quaked and she leaned into Robin, who guided her to the couch, her arms circling Emma’s neck. I don’t know if they’d even had a conversation before.
“Please, where is she?” Emma said.
Robin gestured to the fridge. Emma got up, opened the door, and looked inside the box. “Oh, God,” she said again. “He looks so peaceful.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “He was eighteen,” she said to no one in particular.
“That’s a long life,” Robin said.
“Just like Beowulf,” Emma said. She took a glass out of the cupboard and poured herself a shot of tequila, then another one, her shoulders still shaking.
“Why did you name him that?” Robin asked.
“I don’t know. I read a comic-book version of the story in elementary school. When they were kittens they wrestled all the time so it seemed like Beowulf and Grendel fighting.” She swayed a little. “My dad and I picked them out at the shelter.”
“Emma,” I said. I went into the kitchen, but I lacked Robin’s ease with people; I put a tentative hand on her shoulder, waiting for her to flick it away.
“ ‘His soul left his flesh, flew to glory,’ ” she said. “I still remember that line, from the story.”
Then Robin was in the kitchen too. “How did Beowulf die?” she said.
“He ruled as a king for a long time, and then died an old man. They gave him a huge funeral with a pyre.”
“Then that’s what we should do,” Robin said.
Emma nodded. Her hair was matted with sweat; she looked frail and drenched with grief. “You’re right.”
Robin took charge. She made Emma sit on the couch with more tequila and got her to phone some of her friends. She sent me out to the store for snacks and candles. By the time I returned, Emma’s friends Julie and Suvarna were there, looking sombre. Grendel was on the window seat, ignoring us all.
The shoebox sat on the coffee table. I arranged the candles I’d bought around it, and lit them. Robin raised her hands like a conductor, and we all stood up at her bidding. Then she nodded at Suvarna, who opened a book I’d had to buy for English class. She read the poem by John Donne that begins, “Death be not proud.” As soon as she said the word death Emma sobbed, and Julie hugged her.
“This is about love, and remembering what’s left behind,” Robin said softly. She seemed completely comfortable in her role, as if directing cat funerals were something she did all the time. “Beowulf, we’ll never forget you.”
Then she sang quietly, by herself, “In My Life,” by the Beatles, and by the end we were all sobbing. We were also all drunk, except Suvarna, who was the designated driver. A few miles away there was a small, pretty state park with a pond where Gordon and I had gone for hikes, and we piled into Suvarna’s car and drove there. Emma sat with the boxed cat in her lap, tears running freely, as miserable a person as I’d ever seen. Robin held her hand.
At the pond, Robin asked Emma if she was ready, and she nodded. Julie poured lighter fluid on the box, then held a lighter out.
“I can’t, I can’t,” Emma said, sobbing. She passed the lighter to my sister. “You do it,” she said.
So Robin lowered the box into the water and then set it on fire. The box flared up brilliantly but wouldn’t float away, instead hugging the shore as if it didn’t want to leave us. Finally I found a stick and poked the box until the wind carried it a few feet away; then it bobbed and rollicked beneath a footbridge, and the water extinguished the flames and it was invisible, wherever it was.
There was no one else around, only us and the dark pond water and the summer night, warm and dense and intimate.
I kept waiting for Emma to accuse me, to throw me and Robin out of the apartment in retribution. But she never did. Robin had somehow caught her anger and released it as the sadness it had always masked. The cat funeral was absurd, but it was also magical, and the atmosphere in the apartment was different afterward—thanks to my sister, who knew to join Emma in her grief and comfort her there, without mockery or self-consciousness. Years later, when Robin fell in love with wolves, I remembered Beowulf and the ceremony she’d given him, how I both envied the intensity of her attachment to animals and felt estranged from it, a gap between us that I could never cross over.
After the cat funeral, Emma and Robin were friends. They huddled in conference, Robin listening as Emma talked about the cat, her unhappiness with her work, her lack of love life, her lack of anything life. Within a few weeks, Emma decided it was time for a change: she gave notice at her job, and registered for a culinary program in Great Barrington. She helped us figure out how to
establish me as Robin’s legal guardian and register Robin at the local high school. At the end of the summer, she moved out, leaving the two of us her apartment, and we hugged goodbye tightly, as if we’d known one another for years.
17.
I was watching a film called Close-Up, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and it was unlike anything I’d seen before. In the film, a man presents himself to a family as an acclaimed director, and they welcome him into their home, even going so far as to rehearse with him for a film he tells them he’d like to make. As it turns out, he’s an impostor: separated from his wife, underemployed at a print shop. He’s a melancholy figure, this man, more pitiable than villainous. Once his charade is discovered he is arrested and put on trial, and the film cuts between his gentle interrogation by a bemused judge and scenes of his deception and discovery. Other than money for a taxi, he has taken nothing from the family except their credulity, and their time.
The strangest thing about the film is that it’s both a documentary and a fictional feature; actual footage is combined with reenactments in which all the people involved play themselves, and Kiarostami is part of the film as well. In court, the judge asks the imposter whether his contrition is genuine. “Aren’t you acting right now?”
“I’m speaking of my suffering,” the impostor says.
All his answers at the trial are like this—curiously articulate, he never says yes or no, and delivers statements about the nature of art that seem sophisticated yet humble. His teeth are crooked and overlapping. He confesses to dying his hair to look younger. “You are young,” the judge tells him, and he shakes his head sadly, denying it.
Watching him speak, I found myself crying without knowing why.
I cycled home in the cold October evening, thinking about the film. I loved the idea of a story that was both true and not true, documentary and fiction, art and artifice so intertwined that you couldn’t tell the difference between them. Since Robin had come to live with me, I’d begun to make films—or, not really films so much as very short experiments with light and sound. One was mostly close-ups of Grendel, Emma’s surviving cat, which we still had while Emma got settled, trying to capture the texture of her stiff elderly fur and her rheumy eyes. I called it A Cat Considers Her Mortality and it was not well-received by my Intro to Filmmaking professor, Alice Boryn, or my fellow students. “Why are we looking at this?” said a woman in my class, twirling her hair around her finger, while others nodded in agreement. Olga, for whom I still worked as an assistant, said it was interesting, but she said everything was interesting, in a non-committal tone that seemed to suggest both that I’d failed and that I was capable of better.
