Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  The weather here is becoming more like summer. Our bus strike continues. I sit at my desk and try to write between showing people my house which I’m going to rent for 10 dollars a week. Lucas thinks it’s all a game. At first he was shy but now he acts spiritual when anyone comes (calls, I mean) and everyone wants to take him, the little devil. He now insists on behaving like the Frog

  Prince in the fairy? story who lived in the palace on condition that he accompany the princess (that’s me, ha ha) everywhere.

  ‘I must eat at your table and sit on your chairs and sleep on your bed,’ the frog said, end of quote.

  And end of crazy letter. I’m thinking of you, much missing you, & send undiluted love to my 3 live oaks of Montecito

  NOVEMBER

  117. Dunedin November

  Dear B P and N, but chiefly N because this letter will be all cat-talk, my last for many a day until I see Ned again, though there will be an interval in Auckland when I see Tinky. Lucas is gone and it’s a big heartbreak for me. My only consolation is that it’s a bigger heartbreak for me than for Lucas whose investment in me was perhaps more practical than my investment in him. I told him he was going and I don’t know if he knew—of course he did—and all yesterday he practised his eloquent glances with more compassion than I had expected from him. He used the inscrutable resigned glance more than the what-are-you-doing-to-me-who-have-done-so-much-for-you glance, reminding me that he has always been a brave, patient little cat, ever since he was whisked untimely from mama and put in a cage in a shop window when he could scarcely balance on his hind legs. He behaved very maturely, indeed. About the time the people were to call for him he went and sat on the wide windowsill of the sittingroom where he could see the entire city as well as the street outside. He studied the city for a while and then turned his attention to the cars coming up the street. He watched each one with indifference. He had no means of learning from me which car was his new people’s car, for I did not know it, and I was not watching the street. As soon as one particular car appeared over the brow of the hill, with about seventy five yards more to go to reach 61 Evans Street, Lucas knew that was the car. I don’t know how he did. He ‘stiffened’—as the novelists say and concentrated his attention on that one car. It stopped outside the gate. He stayed in the window watching it while I went to the door and his new lady and manservant told me they could see him watching them from the window as they approached. He liked his new manservant instantly. He prefers men and boys though he’s only seen a couple of women and one man who came with his wife to look at the house. The woman who said at first she would take him, phoned before they arrived to say she had been rather hasty and it would be her husband’s decision and her husband would look him over. He did. He was bitten and scratched and played peekaboo with but he liked Lucas very much and so they took him away as a present for their little boy and that was that; and Jay went stricken to bed and slept, as the novelists say, ‘a fitful sleep’, and woke, still stricken, and went to the back door (this was five a.m.) to find cat next-door there, also stricken. Cat-next-door came in, searched the house, meowing plaintively (few meows are not plaintive), and appeared inconsolable. Jay has learned, however, and cats soon learn that there’s no such thing as permanent inconsolability.

  So, once more, that is that.

  My own grief has a wide range and includes the regret and shock (though why it should be a shock to me I don’t know) that I feel my only friend in Dunedin has been Lucas. I would like him to have gone to an artist of some kind or to someone I know.

  It is all over now and, like royalty, I am ‘confined to my home with a feverish cold’—as the novelists, pardon me, the reporters say

  to cover every little emotional upset of our kings and queens . . . In truth, I’m fighting fit but so sad, so sad. I learned so much from Lucas. It was an ideal situation for studying learning between woman and beast. Cats are so full of knowing on (to us) invisible evidence and I think they could teach us a way of reaching the invisible evidence.

  Eh, Ned?

  Well enough of that cat-talk.

  But how do the cats know so much? Already the big black and grey tom, an old man cat if there ever was one, complete with all his block and tackle, has returned to haunt my garden. I saw him this morning and he gave me the long long look he used to give me, as if he had never been away. I think he’s courting cat-next-door and was making an early call to press his suit. It’s suit-pressing time in the Antipodes. Old Black and Grey lives about half a mile away.

  Meanwhile in the above-foot world, people continue as pallid as ever. The bus strike finished yesterday after a month, and the buses returned today. The Government has introduced a mini-budget. Jay is getting down to work, with grief as a reliable foundation and fountain, and hope of seeing dear friends next year as sustenance.

  Jay’s rude humour continues in spite of adversity.

  More exciting news in a few days. Sensational love to

  118. Dunedin November

  My dears three,

  Here I am, après-bain, wearing nothing but my bifocals, writing to you from a Lucas-broken heart that is, however, beginning to mend very slowly. What a love affair I had with my little cat! I feel like Swann, in Proust; or like anybody who loved and was bereaved; and one part of me studies the affair detachedly, observing closely, saying to itself, Now that is interesting. Much of my grief went today when, assiduously as any lover, I traced from the pet shop the place where Lucas was born and where his three-year old mother still lives. I spoke to the people on the phone. Lucas’ mother is mostly Siamese which is where he gets his intelligence, I suppose. She too is white. And he was one of a litter of three, all toms.

  Well, my dears three, am I not quite crazy! No-one here that I know shares the delight in creatures. My friend Ruth whom I phoned understood about the loss. The other woman I know said in a putting-down voice, Oh, I’m not one of those people who fall in love with animals. Cat-next-door understands.

  So now I have a pet spider. Yes, I have. I had it while Lucas was here. It lives in the kitchen where I have a double light bulb, one of low wattage which I leave on all night, the other of higher wattage. A string dangles from the bulbs, with a puller on the end. Spider lives at the end of the string at night, spinning and hanging by his thread and when I turn off the light in the morning he climbs up the thread and sleeps on the still-warm lightbulb all day.

  So. That is Spider. I don’t know. I guess I was meant just to live among creatures.

  And how are you three creatures? I hope Paul’s cold is better and that all was well with B’s journey and that Hallowe’en was fun—oh I wish I were not human; if I were one of the other creatures—say, a spider—I would spin a silver web on this page and that would be my letter and there would be no silly words, just a thought-sparkle for all at Live Oak Inn.

  Ecology—we and the creatures and the earth, sea and sky.

  Goodnight.

  And pure wicked love.

  MORNING AGAIN.

  Cat-next-door sits purring on my lap. She comes in early every morning to look for Lucas and together we share our grief. I think she’s having kittens some time soon.

  Enough of that.

  It’s five a.m. The world is not quite awake. A day’s work ahead—I’ve discovered I’m trying to write two books at once.

  Ah to be in the peanut butter world.

  End with a rude rhyme. The optometrist’s name is Peter Dick believe it or not. I’ve just got my new glasses from him.

  The optometrist Peter Dick

  devised an ingenious trick:

  he, bedded, benighted,

  and feeling short-sighted

  wore bifocals on his prick.

  . . . . . .

  Goodbye again. And purer wickeder love than ever.

  119. Dunedin November

  Dear Bee dears three, yours to hand, in hand.

  I was overjoyed

  and relieved

  to get your letter and
hear about the trip east and the safe return home. It is sad about your mother and father, Bill. I was spared the tragedy of age in my parents—and they were too, which is more to the point; yet though I feel relieved they did not live through old age, I also feel deprived of something I know I would never have been able to face—how mixed can one’s feelings be! I miss my visits to the Old People’s Home to see my aunt and the other depressing sights—I think because being with the old people is a kind of death-play, a rehearsal; as necessary as the grownup play of children; but more secret.

  But I don’t know. Life would be so much less a burden if one never had parents at all; the age of other people’s parents is so much easier to bear.

  Well, again, I don’t know. Thus speaks Dame Frame Clutha, all excited from her postcard from Mae West—come-up-and-see-me-sometime when I’ve got nothing—on.

  So to New York. Your time there did seem fun—people, music, paintings, dinners, feasts—and the Natural History Museum with Anne. Did you walk in Reptile Hall? When I was in the Natural History Museum I made a note of Reptile Hall as a title for a novel (subtitle The Cold Dream of the Copperhead).

  I was so happy to get your letter—as I said, I was overjoyed and relieved.

  It’s grim about Felix’s closing down his gallery. There will be some other place to show? And it’s exciting about your exhibition and Paul’s too. If all goes well with my visa I’ll be able to fly into L.A. on the Friday evening or the Saturday evening (Jan 29 or 30) around 6.30. Which would be more convenient?

  Somewhere between here and L.A. I get tangled up with the date line international, going backwards and forwards from yesterday to tomorrow so it’s possible to leave here on a Thursday and then get permanently lost in a pocket of Wednesday and then miss Friday or somesuch—all very fascinating. I’m going up to Auckland from here in the first week of December, I think, and staying with my sister until I leave for U.S. I’ll be there for Christmas, I think. It sounds crazy but it’s quite awful here now without Lucas. I think he’s settling down quite well where he has gone, though, for he’s young enough but I do miss his complete satisfaction in being here and owning the place; it was such a wonderful satisfaction he showed; there was no question of occasional grateful glances at me to say, you know, it’s awfully good of you, Jay, to have me; no, just a wonderfully accepting satisfaction. This was his place, he’d been born to it, the chairs were his chairs, the cane chair was his to sharpen his claws on its southeast leg, and the spare bedroom window was his, to go in and out of, and always, coming in, to call out to me to see where I was; the trees were his to climb, and the lovely places in the grass were his to hide in, and oh how pleased he was with it all! And I was part of the furniture, more movable than the other parts, but just a furniture to be accepted and used. You said just the right thing in your letter, Bill, to give me the right comfort about Lucas—the quote ‘may make a journey and still abide’. I cherish having had a devil-angel take over my heart and home. And as I named him Lucas Burch I have to accept him as such, and therefore quote about him from Cat in August: ‘Having drawn upon the reserve of patient and steadfast fidelity upon which the Lucas Burches of this world depend and trust, even though they do not intend to be present when the need for it arises.’a

  Quote from William Faulkner’s novel Light in August, in which one of the main characters is called Lucas Burch.

  And, ‘I don’t reckon I need any promise from Lucas. It just happened unfortunate so, he had to go away.’

  ‘When he first heard about how he might have to leave, he knowed then it would be best to go. He had got the word about how he might have to leave a long time before that. He said he would stay if I wanted him to. But I said for him to go. Going away among strangers like that a young fellow needs time to settle down. Especially a young fellow full of life like Lucas, that likes folks and jollifying, and liked by folks in turn. Lucas always did like excitement.’

  And so on. A great book, Cat in August.

  Nice that you’re enjoying the tape. The story about Gipsy is my story, ‘Swans’, from The Lagoon. The Lagoon stories were written when I was twenty-one and so I’m ashamed of them, and rather depressed when people say they are my best work—there’s nothing so crippling being told that your earliest work is your best.

  I had a long moving letter from Elnora. The only happy part was her delight in her Afro hairdo.

  Stars to precede light relief.

  I had to go for a final check to my doctor here, a Dr Sidey.

  A treat for Jay on Fridey

  an appointment with Dr Sidey.

  Her health is so rude

  she’ll surely go nude

  as befits a Dunedin lidey.

  And on Monday I go to the dentist.

  Next, to the dentist, Perry,

  whose face is exceedingly herry.

  For drilling so thrilling

  I’m strangely unwilling

  —how chilling! Well, not very merry!

  My limerick battery needs recharging.

  I’m still trying to let my house with no success so far, though there have been few people to look at it. Some interesting characters—one, a woman, talked all the time about her ‘teal suite’, or rather their teal suite. They’re getting married soon and I gathered that the chief reason for their getting married was the teal suite, so they can sit on it and admire it. And when they phoned to say they would not take the house, the woman said, ‘You see, I just don’t think there’s room for the teal suite’. I could always have let the house to the teal suite alone . . .

  Goodbye now and turbulent love followed by champagne to B and P and N

  120. Dunedin November 15

  Dear B and P and N (and so on), (freeing blades)

  Hello. This is Dame Frame Clutha writing to you from Evans Street Dunedin. I am sitting typing this near my sitting-room window while cat-next-door (as the novelists say) ‘big with child’ sits on the armchair purring. The sky is blue (eggshell) with scatters of white fluffy cloud, there’s a brisk wind blowing, and the red roses in bloom on the fence next door are shaking their heads vigorously, and in the garden of the house across the road the Yellow Flowers are doing likewise. I hear a child crying, a motormower mowing and the wind prowling in the cellar.

  So. The scene is set.

  Meanwhile, back in Santa Barbara I imagine that everyone, including Carnie, is painting and preparing for a one-man or one-plant exhibition. Or for a nice Christmas in Santa Fe. Or for the next meal. Or for the next breath, which may be as far as one can prepare.

  I’ve been sorting things I’m taking with me on my flight north on the 4th and my flight to U.S.A. at the end of January—providing I have my certificate of Labour. I have an ordinary visa anyway. And as I can take only 44 pounds of luggage and that will include an eleven pound typewriter I’ve had to shear myself to the minimum, whatever that means. Work is neglected in the midst of these preparations and though I feel a small panic at the thought that work is neglected I feel that when I do return to it I will be so much more ready for it, and in some way it is writing itself while I am not writing it.

  The past week has been quiet, as usual. To keep my tenants happy I bought them an electric range (I had only a rangette). Most of the young couples who looked at the house decided against it because it had only a rangette and as the young women were all about to be married they all had visions of cooking mountains of food for two. It makes the kitchen look like the flight deck of a jet—that is, the new range. At the moment there are two loaves of bread inside it, almost ready. The smell is wafting into the sitingroom.

  The other afternoon I went to visit my former landlady while I was Burns Fellow. She is eighty-three, the daughter of the first Education professor here, and her working life was spent teaching music. Before I left she played me her choice—part of a Schubert Impromptu. Oh I did not realise how hungry I was for the piano until I heard it played while I sat on the chair beside it (not a red stool). All the notes wer
e correct and she obviously loved the music but it was very tum-te-tum, as if it were being danced to as a waltz and she was reluctant to let the notes go wherever they go to when they are played but held on to them as if they belonged to her (and I don’t blame her); and so the music became confined. As for Dame Frame Clutha she was startled to find she was so homesick for the piano with B playing it.

  Make ready, Steinway!

  Well, except for my visit to Perry the Herry the Uncouth Touth, that was my waking week. Sleeping and dreaming week, night-dreaming and day-dreaming occupied different worlds, naturally.

  Oh, and last week I phoned Lucas’ new servants to find out how he was and how they were and I was very happy to learn that he is at home with them and performing his trick or treat repertoire in the old way. He has the attention of everyone in the household (I felt that one of his minor dissatisfactions while he was with me was with the necessarily diluted attention that one person only could give him. He now has the purest concentrate, and he is thriving on it. His new mistress (?) says she is not sure who owns him (or whom he owns) though he was given to her little son. My heart bleeds a few drops when I think of that awful evening when he sat on the windowsill looking out and thinking (I’m certain) that the world was too much for him; perhaps he caught my infection; anyway, he still runs into the house to hide from the passing cars though he’s brave enough to go outside now but he will only go outside if a member of the household is there. I think he misses his former wild garden with trees. Yes, he is happy. He plays and plays, and goes crazily round on his hind legs, as he loved to do, and eats the newspaper, and he gets into bed with the lady of the house (as he used to do) and his new people are just as absorbed in him as his old person was. What a strange comment on me or on my country and city that the only living thing dear to me, here in this place that is so lonely, with here and now and with memories, that self-sown poignancies sprout everywhere, has been a little white tom kitten with green eyes. (A rather confused sentence which I tried to rescue with commas but failed.)