by Paul Theroux
Cat-worship was merely a handy label I had thought of to explain her behavior. Within a few weeks it seemed an amazingly accurate description, and even blunt cliches, such as cat-lover and cat-freak, seemed to me precise and perfectly fair. Cats were not her hobby or her pastime, but her passion.
I got to know her garden apartment. It was in Notting Hill, off Kensington Park Road, in a white building that had once been (I think she said) the residence of the Spanish Ambassador. Its ballroom had been subdivided into six small apartments. But hers was on the floor below these, a ground-floor apartment opening into a large communal park, Arundel Gardens. The gardens, like the apartment and most of its furnishings, were for the cats. The rent was twelve hundred dollars a month - six hundred pounds. It was too much, almost more than Miss Duboys could afford, but the cats needed fresh air and grass and flowers, and she needed the cats.
On her walls there were cat calendars and cat photographs and, in some rooms, cat wallpaper - a repeated motif of crouching cats. She had cat paperweights and cat picturebooks, and waste-baskets and lampshades with cats on them. On a set of shelves there were small porcelain cats. There were fat cats stenciled on her towels, and kittens on her coffee mugs. She had cats printed on her sheets and embroidered on her dinner napkins. Cats are peculiarly expressionless creatures, and the experience of so many images of them was rather bewildering. The carpet in the hall was cat-shaped
- a sitting one in profile. She had cat notepaper, a stack of it on her desk (two weeks later I received an affectionate message on it).
And she had real cats, six of them. Five were nervous and malevolent, and the sixth was simple-minded - a neutered, slightly undersized one that gaped at me with the same sleepy vacuity as
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those on the wall and those on the coffee mugs. The largest cat weighed fifteen or twenty pounds - it was vast and fat-bellied and evil-spirited, and named Lester. It had a hiss like a gas leak. Even Margaret was a bit fearful of this monster, and she hinted to me that it had once killed another cat. Thereafter, Lester seemed to me to have the stupid, hungry - and cruel and comic - face of a cannibal.
There was nothing offensive in the air, none of that hairy suffocation that is usual in a catty household. The prevalent smell was of food, the warm buttery vapor of homecooking. Margaret cooked all the time; her cats had wonderful meals: hamburg in brown gravy, lightly poached fish, stews that were never stretched with flour or potatoes. Lester liked liver, McCool adored fish, Miss Growse never ate anything but stews, and the others - they all had human-sounding names - had different preferences. They did not eat the same thing. Sometimes they did not eat at all - did not even taste it but only glanced and sniffed at the food steaming in the dish and then walked away and yowled for something else. It made me mad: I would have eaten some of that food! The cats were spoiled and overweight and grouchy - 'fat and magnificent,' Margaret called them. Yes, yes; but their fussy food habits kept her busy for most of the hours she was home. Now I understood her huge shopping bills. She was patient with them - more patient than I had even seen her in the Embassy. When the cats did not eat their food, she put it into another dish and left it outside for the strays - the London moggies and the Notting Hill tomcats that prowled Arundel Gardens. Why the other dishes? 'My cats are very particular about who uses their personal dishes!'
I said, 'Do you use the word "personal" with cats?'
'I sure do!'
And one day she said, 'I never give them cans.'
It was the sort of statement that caused me a moment of unnecessary discomfort. I ate canned food all the time. What was wrong with it? I wanted to tell Margaret that she was talking nonsense: Good food, fresh air, no cans! Me and my cats!
No, absolutely no cans - the cats drew the line there - but they were not particular about which chair leg they scratched, or where they puked, or where they left their matted hairs. They sharpened their claws on the sofa and on the best upholstered chairs, and went at the wall and clawed it and left shredded, scratched wall-
paper, like heaps of grated cheese, on the carpet. The cats were not tierce except when they were protecting their food or were faced with the London strays; but they were very destructive -needlessly so - and it made me angry to think of Margaret paying so much money for rent and having to endure the cats' vandalism. She did not mind.
I made the mistake of mentioning this only once.
She replied, 'But children are a hundred times worse.'
I said, 'How does it feel to have six children?'
If it seemed that way, she said - that they were like children -then how did it seem from the cats' point of view? I thought she was crazy, taking this line (look at it from the cats' point of view!), but she quoted Darwin. She said that Darwin had concluded that domesticated animals which grew up with people regarded human beings as members of their own species. It was in The Voyage of the Beagle, where the sheepdogs treated sheep in a brotherly way in Argentina. From this, it was easy to see that cats regarded us as cats - of a rather inconvenient size, but cats all the same, which fed them, and opened doors for them, and scratched them pleasantly behind their ears, and gave them a lap to sit on, and pinched fleas from around their eyes and mouths, and wormed them.
'Darwin said that?'
'More or less.'
'That cats think we're cats?'
'He was talking about dogs and sheep, but, yes,' she said uncertainly. With conviction she added, 'Anyway, these cats think I'm one.'
'What about their natural instincts?'
'Their instincts tell them no, but. their sympathies and learning experience tell them yes. These cats are sympathetic. Listen, I don't even think of them as cats!'
'That's one step further than Darwin,' I said.
By now I knew a great deal about Miss Duboys's cats, and quite a lot about Miss Duboys. We had spent the past five Sundays together. Neither of us had much to do on the weekends. It became our routine to have Sunday lunch at an Indian restaurant and, after a blistering vindaloo curry, to return to her apartment and spend the afternoon in bed. When we woke, damp and entangled, from our sudden sleep - the little death that follows sex - we went to a movie, usually a bad, undemanding one, at the Gate Cinema near
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the Notting Hill tube station. Sunday was a long day with several sleeps - the day had about six parts and seemed at times like two or three whole days - all the exertion, and then the laziness, and all the dying and dreaming and waking.
London was a city that inspired me to treasure private delights. Its weather and its rational, well-organized people had made it a city of splendid interiors - everything that was pleasurable happened indoors: the contentment of sex, food, reading, music, and talk. Margaret would have added animals to this list. When she woke blindly from one of these feverish Sunday sleeps, she bumped me with an elbow and said, 'I'm neglecting my cats.'
She had no other friends. Apart from me (but I occupied her only one day of the week), her cats were the whole of her society, and they satisfied her. It seemed to me that she was slightly at odds with me - slightly bewildered - because I offered her the one thing a cat could not provide. The cats were a substitute for everything else. Well, that was plain enough! But it made me laugh to think that for Margaret Duboys I represented Sex. Me! It made life difficult for us at times, because it was hard for her to see me in any other way. She judged most people by comparing them with cats. In theory this was trivial and belittling, but it was worse in practice - no one came out well; no one measured up; no humans that she knew were half so worthwhile as any of her cats.
'I make an exception in your case,' she told me - we were in bed at the time.
'Thanks, Marge!'
She didn't laugh. She said, 'Most men are prigs.'
'Did you say prigs}'
'No, no' - but she dived beneath the covers.
> Usually she was harder on herself than on me. She seemed to despise that part of herself which needed my companionship. We saw each other at parties just as often as before, because we concealed the fact that we had become lovers. I was not naturally a concealer of such things, but she made me secretive, and 1 saw that this was a part of all friendship - agreeing to be a little like the other person. Margaret thought, perhaps rightly, that in an informal way the Embassy would become curious about our friendship and ask questions - certainly the boys on the third floor would keep us under observation. So we never used the internal Embassy phones for anything except the most boring trivialities. There was plenty
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of time at the dinner parties for us to make plans for the following Sunday. People were still trying to bring us together! When I did phone her, out of caution I used the public phone box near my apartment, on Prince of Wales Drive. Those were the only times I used that phone box, and entering it - it was a damp, stinking, vandalized cubicle - I thought always of her, and always in a tender way.
She was catlike in the panting gasping way she made love, the way she clawed my shoulders, the way she shook, and most of all in the way she slept afterward, as though on a branch or an outcrop of rock, her legs drawn up under her and her arms wrapped around her head and her nose down.
/ don't think of them as cats. A number of times she repeated this observation to me. She did not theorize about it; she didn't explain it. And yet it seemed to me the perfect reply to Darwin's version of domestic animals thinking of us as animals. The person who grew up with cats for company regarded cats as people! Of course! Yet it seemed to me that these cats were the last creatures on earth to care whether or not they resembled an overworked FSO-4 in the Trade Section of the American Embassy. And if that was how she felt about cats, it made me wonder what she thought about human beings.
We seldom talked about the other people at work or about our work. We seldom talked at all. When we met it was for one thing, and when it came to sex she was single-minded. She used cats to explain her theory of the orgasm: 'Step one, chase the cat up the tree. Step two, let it worry for a while. Step three, rescue the cat.' When she failed to have an orgasm she would whisper, 'The cat is still up the tree - get her down.'
From what she told other people at dinner parties, and from Embassy talk, I gathered that her important work was concerned with helping American companies break into the British market. It was highly abstract in the telling: she provided information about industrial software, did backup for seminars, organized a clearinghouse for legal and commercial alternatives in company formation, and liaised with promotional bodies.
I hated talking to people about their work. There was, first, this obscure and silly language, and then, inevitably, they asked about my work. I was always reminded, when I told them, of how grand my job as Political Officer sounded, and how little I accomplished.
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These days I lived from Sunday to Sunday, and sex seemed to provide the only meaning to life - what else on earth was so important? There was nothing to compare with two warm bodies in a bed: this was wealth, freedom, and happiness; it was the object of all human endeavor. I was falling in love with Margaret Duboys.
I also feared losing her, and I hated all the other feelings that were caused by this fear - jealousy, panic, greed. This was love! It was a greater disruption in the body than an illness. But though at certain times I actually felt sick, I wanted her so badly, at other times it seemed to me - and I noted this with satisfaction - as if I had displaced those goddamned cats.
It was now December. The days were short and clammy-cold; they started late and dark; they ended early in the same darkness, which in London was like faded ink. On one of these dark afternoons Erroll Jeeps came into my office and asked whether he could have a private word with me.
'Owlie Cooper - remember him?'
'I met him at your house,' I said.
'That's the cat,' Erroll said. 'He's in a bind. He's a jazzhead -plays trumpet around town in clubs. Thing is, his work permit hasn't been renewed.'
'Union trouble?'
'No, it's the Home Office, playing tough. He thought it would just be routine, but when he went to renew it they refused. Plus, they told him that he had already overstayed his visit. So he's here illegally.'
'What can I do?'
'Give me a string to pull,' Erroll said.
i wish I had one - he seemed a nice guy.'
'He laughs a little too much, but he's a great musician.'
My inspiration came that evening as I walked across Chelsea Bridge to Overstrand Mansions and my apartment. I passed the public phone box on Prince of Wales Drive and thought: Owlie Cooper was a man with a skill to sell - he made music, he was American, he was here to do business. He had a product and he was in demand, so why not treat it as a trade matter, Margaret?
I saw her the next day and said, 'There's an American here who's trying to do business with the Brits. He's got a terrific product, but his visa's run out. Do you think you can handle it?'
'Businessman ' she said. 'What kind of businessman?'
'Music/
'What kind?' she said. 'Publishing, record company, or what?'
'He makes music,' I said. 'Owlie Cooper, the jazzman we met at Jeeps's house.'
Margaret sighed and turned back to face her desk. She spoke to her blotter. 'He can get his visa in the usual way.'
'We could help him sell his product here,' I said.
'Product! He plays the trumpet, for Pete's sake.'
'Margaret,' I said, 'this guy's in trouble. He can't get a job if he hasn't got a work permit. Look, he's a good advertisement for American export initiative.'
'I'd call it cultural initiative. Get Scaduto. He's the cultural affairs officer. Music is his line.' Then, in a persecuted voice, she said, 'Please, I'm busy.'
'You could pull a string. Skiddoo doesn't have a string.'
'This bastard Cooper-'
'What do you mean, "bastard"? He's a lost soul,' I said. 'Why should you be constantly boosting multinational corporations while a solitary man -'
'I remember him,' Margaret said. 'He hates cats.'
'No, it was dogs. And he doesn't hate them. He was mocking Al Sanger's dog.'
'I distinctly remember,' she said stiffly. 'It was cats.'
There was a catlike hiss in her cross voice as she said so.
She said, 'People will say I don't want to help him because he's black. Actually - I mean, funnily enough - that's why I do want to help him - because he's black and probably grew up disadvantaged. But I can't.'
'You can!'
'It's not my department.'
I started to speak again, but again she hissed at me. It was not part of a word but a whole warning sound — an undifferentiated hiss of fury and rebuke, as if I were a hulking, brutish stranger. It embarrassed me to think that her secretary was listening to Margaret behaving like one of her own selfish cats.
It was the only time we had ever talked business, and it was the last time. Owlie Cooper left quietly to live in Amsterdam. He claimed he was a political exile. He wasn't, of course - he was just one of the many casualties of Anglo-American bureaucracy. But I felt that in time he would become genuinely angry and see us all
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as enemies; he would get lonelier and duller and lazier in Holland.
Two weeks later I was calling Margaret from a telephone booth, the sort of squalid public phone box that, when I entered it, excited me with a vivid recollection of her hair and her lips. She began telling me about someone she had found in the house quite by chance, how he had stayed the night and eaten a huge breakfast, and how she was going to fatten him up.
I had by then already lost the thread of this conversation. I had taken a dislike to her for her treatment of Owlie Cooper. I hated the stink of this phone box, the bro
ken glass and graffiti. What was she talking about? Why was she telling me this?
I said, 'What's his name?'
'Who?'
'The person who spent the night with you.'
'The little Burmese?' she said. 'I haven't given him a name yet.'
My parting words were ineffectual and unmemorable. I just stopped seeing her, canceled our usual date, and Sunday I spent the whole day bleeding in my bedroom. She hardly seemed to notice, or else - and I think this was more likely - she was relieved that I had given up.
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Under the circumstances there was nothing I could say except 'Thank you' and 'Yuri didn't tell me he was married.'
'He is ashamed!'
I said, 'If I were married to you I'd never stop boasting about you.'
It was exaggerated and insincere, but what else could I say? She had made a little melodrama out of being introduced to me in Green Park, and I was doing my best to turn it into a farce. Spouses who flirted in front of their partners seemed to me dangerous and stupid, and Helena - that was her name - had taken me by surprise. Kirilov had not mentioned his wife. He merely said that he urgently wanted to see me - somewhere quiet. I suggested my office at the Embassy. He said, 'Not that quiet.' I suggested the Serpentine, which I often walked around at lunchtime. 'Green Park,' he said. 'Is better.' Grin Park: he had not been out of the Soviet Union very long.
'I must kiss him for these compliments,' Helena was saying. 'Take my photo, Yuri.'
Kirilov obediently snapped a picture as Helena sat me down beside her and threw her arms around my neck. We were, for a few seconds, the classic canoodling pair, kissing on a park bench.
