The Last Lovely City

by Alice Adams

  They begin to kiss, and minutes later they have moved to Alison’s bedroom, where, on her bed, once more, they have great—the greatest sex.

  Raccoons

  Every evening, despairingly, Mary Alexander, a former actress, puts out tin bowls of food for Linda, her cat, who is lost: stolen, starving somewhere, locked in a strange garage—maybe dead. In any case, gone. And every morning, on the deck of her small house in Larkspur, California, Mary examines the bowls and sees that nothing is gone, and her heart seems to shrink within her, her blood to chill. Out there among all the pots of luxuriant roses, bright geraniums, and climbing, profusely flowering bougainvillea, Mary looks blindly at all that color, that bloom, and at her pretty house, in the rare fine August sunlight, and she mourns for Linda; she is inhabited, permeated with loss. She takes in the plates and washes them off; she makes and eats her own breakfast, and then goes out for a walk. She spends the day in an effort to pull herself together, as she looks and looks, and calls and calls for Linda. And then at night she puts out the food again, and she waits, and hopes. For lovely Linda, who is as beautiful and as shy as a little fox.

  This is very neurotic, Mary lectures herself, rather in the voice of her very helpful former shrink, a gentle, kindly, and most courteous man from Louisiana, who spoke in those attractive accents, and whose sternest chiding was, “That’s just plain neurotic.” And he would smile, acknowledging that they both already knew she was neurotic; that very likely most people are, including himself.

  For comfort, Mary sometimes thinks of a man she considers the least neurotic among her friends: Bill, a biologist. Internationally known, he goes to conferences all over; he does a lot of work in Africa on AIDS. Bill is absolutely devoted to Alison, his wife, herself a distinguished watercolorist. Bill is also intensely attached to Henry, their cat. Once, in fact (this is the memory from which Mary takes comfort), Henry was reported missing by their housesitter; Bill and Alison were on a rare vacation in Paris. Many transatlantic phone calls ensued; Bill was almost on the plane to come back from Paris, to walk every block of their San Francisco neighborhood—when, of course, Henry strolled into their house, insouciant and dirty. But Bill, this internationally famous scientist, had been poised to cut short a trip with his much-loved wife, to come home from Paris to look for Henry, his cat. All of which now makes Mary feel a little less crazy, less “neurotic,” but no less sad.

  Mary’s own life, viewed by any friend or acquaintance, would be judged comparatively rich, and in many ways successful. Early days in New York included occasional Broadway parts, some off-Broadway, and mostly good reviews. Too little money, usually, and too many (but generally good) love affairs. Then the move to San Francisco, the Actors Workshop, and ACT, plus some TV ad work, boring but well paid. More love affairs, some of which became rewarding friendships. Even now, at what she herself considers an advanced age, there is a man with whom she sometimes sleeps (Mary much dislikes the phrase to have sex, but they do), a man of whom she is most extremely fond (which surely beats being in love, has been Mary’s conclusion). They would see each other more, except that he has a very mean, vindictive lawyer wife; it is not all perfect, but then, what is? In any case, Mary’s life does not fit the stereotype of the lonely old woman whose only companion is her cat.

  Mary was never beautiful; as a very young woman she was too thin, almost gaunt, with a long thin nose, a wide and sensual mouth. But she was both intelligent and talented, capable of projecting passion, irony, and humor, qualities that she could be said to contain within herself. Her friends, including fellow actors, generally liked her, and several men loved her extremely.

  Aging is easier, somewhat, for a not-beautiful actress, Mary has thought; critics are less apt to point out that you are not as young as formerly. But this must be true for all women, not only those in her own narcissistic profession? You do not suddenly observe that heads are not turning, if few or any ever did. These days Mary could have more TV ad work than she does, if she would accept more happy-grandmother shots. The problem is that her capacity for tolerating boredom has diminished, she finds. She can no longer endure certain endless hours before hot cameras—as she can no longer listen raptly at dull dinner parties. She cannot escape into steamy trash fiction as she once did, in dressing rooms, awaiting calls. (She has lately been rereading Colette, and has recently discovered Carl Hiaasen, who makes her laugh aloud.) The move from San Francisco up to Larkspur constituted a sort of retirement; she lives mostly on residuals, a little stock. She believes that she lives fairly well, with Linda.

  Still, certain things have happened, inevitably, to her face and body that she does not like, and cannot much change. Mostly she objects to dry skin, and increasing fatigue.

  Mary has—or she used to have, with Linda—certain small rituals. Rituals of love and intimacy, you might say. One was that whenever Mary went upstairs, Linda would race ahead of her, and then stop and lie across a step, in Mary’s way, so that Mary had to stop. And to pet Linda, to scratch her beautiful yellow stomach as Linda stretched along the step. They always did this, and now, as Mary walks up the stairs alone and unimpeded, she misses Linda as acutely as she has ever missed a lover, and she thinks, in somewhat the same way as she used to think, He’s gone!

  So that now she thinks, I must be truly mad. All this about a pretty little cat? I carry on as though it were a major love affair?

  Linda now has been gone for five days, and nights. Mary continues her nightly routine of putting food out on the deck and bringing in the untouched dishes in the morning. Washing them out.

  Getting through the days.

  And then one night, as she lies upstairs in bed, alone, she hears from down on her deck the rattle of tin plates—her plates, with Linda’s food. Linda! In an instant she grabs up a robe, shoves her feet into slippers; she runs downstairs and flicks off the burglar alarm. She rushes to the french doors that lead to the deck. Where she sees, to her horror, three raccoons. Two large, one smaller, all with their round black staring unfrightened eyes and their horrible bent clawed feet. At times Mary has argued that raccoons are cute, nice little visitors at picnics. But tonight she sees that they are hideous intruders, feral and dangerous, fearsome.

  She is afraid that if she opens the door they will run in, searching for more food (they have eaten all of Linda’s), and so she only bangs on the glass, afraid too that it will break, and she will be defenseless. But the raccoons, having eaten, now leave, loping, ungainly on their short legs and ugly feet, back across the deck.

  Very slowly Mary goes upstairs, and gets back into bed.

  Raccoons attack cats; they sometimes hurt or kill them. Everyone says that.

  Mary gets up, and in her bathroom she takes a tranquilizer, then gets into bed again.

  She lies there, coping as best she can with the probable fact of Linda’s death (later she does not understand how she did this). Linda must be dead, killed by horrendously ugly, murderous raccoons; if not those, some others, equally hideous. Mary only hopes that it was quick, as one hopes for air-crash victims. Poor crazy fearful Linda could well have died of fright before she was hurt, Mary thinks.

  She tries to sleep, and at last she does, and she wakes in the morning very calm, and much, much more sad.

  And although she has more or less accepted the fact of Linda’s death, she continues in a minor way to look for her, and she still puts out the food.

  “What you need is another cat,” the few friends in whom she has confided begin to say, and in theory Mary agrees; she does need another cat.

  One day (it is now September, Linda gone for a week) the sun comes out earlier than usual, burning through fog and leaving only a few white mists that hang above the tall dark trees, above the town of Larkspur. Mount Tamalpais is sharp and clear, less distant, more inviting. And Mary’s mail comes earlier than usual, just before lunch. In it there is a check that she has been owed and has needed for some time, from her agent in L.A. These are all good signs, she thinks; M
ary has certain unvoiceable, eccentric superstitions. Perhaps this should be the day when she goes to the animal shelter and finds a new beautiful cat.

  She cannot resist the further superstitious thought that maybe getting a new cat will bring Linda magically home to her, rather in the way that couples with a fertility problem at last adopt, and then become pregnant.

  In the animal shelter, which is encouragingly clean, well kept up, and staffed by very nice and cheerful young women, Mary looks through the rows of cages, all containing cats with one or another sort of appeal, any one of whom she would no doubt in time learn to love. But no cat there is as beautiful as Linda is (or was); there is no one whom she instantly, totally loves. In the last cage, though (of course the last), there is a thin, lithe, graceful gray cat named Fiona—to Mary an appealing name; years ago she had a friend, an English actress, Fiona Shaw (just as she once had a friend named Linda, years back). A small typed notice states that Fiona has just been spayed; she is fine, but not quite ready for adoption—a few days more. Mary watches Fiona for a little while; she is an exceptionally pretty little cat, shy and graceful. (And if Linda should come back, they might get along?)

  On the way home Mary sees some new neighbors, a nice young couple, both architects, who have heard and been kind and sympathetic over Linda.

  “I saw this very pretty cat in the shelter,” Mary tells them. “A small gray one. She’s named Fiona.”

  Almost in unison they say, “But Linda might come—”

  “No,” Mary tells them, very firmly. “The raccoons got her. They must have.”

  At which the young man frowns. “I’ve seen a couple around. Mean-looking little bastards.”

  And the woman, “I think they’re sweet. And I could have sworn I heard a cat outside last night.”

  “Well, you’ll have to come for tea very soon and meet Fiona,” Mary tells them.

  Every return to her house, which now does not contain Linda, is sad for Mary, and as she walks in, the raccoons now return to her mind, unbidden; she sees them vividly again, their hideous claws and their small mean shining eyes. Firmly she forces herself instead to imagine pretty Fiona as she walks through her house to the deck, and down the steps to her garden.

  Where she is just in time to see a flash of brown fur, a plumey tail—Linda!—who tears across the grass and into Mary’s basement, which contains a clutter of broken, discarded furniture, empty boxes, old luggage. Where Linda instantly hides herself.

  The basement entrance is wide, with no door; there is no way to block it off, to prevent a bolting Linda—except for Mary herself to stand across it, or to sit down, as she does, and to stretch her legs across the opening.

  But was that really Linda, that flash of fur? Mary begins to doubt her own vision. Could it, God forbid, have been a raccoon?

  In her softest, most caressing voice she calls to Linda; she calls and calls, a stream of loving syllables that Linda must know (if cats know anything) and always her name. “Linda, Linda-loo, lovely Linda—” On and on, with no answer.

  She would like to go upstairs and phone the nice neighbors for help; she could block the escape route while they went in and banged around, but she does not dare leave. She would also like a glass of water. But she has to go on. “Linda, loopy Lou, Linda-pie—” On forever.

  At last, after maybe ten minutes, there is a sort of rattling among the boxes; an old broken bamboo table moves, so that Mary sees a glimpse, a quick tiny glimpse, of what is surely Linda.

  After another five minutes, probably, of calling, and of small but increasingly certain sighting, Linda emerges into a small cleared space, a safe twenty feet from where Mary sits. Linda emerges, she stares, and retreats.

  She repeats all that several times, each time flicking her tail, back, forth.

  And then she emerges into another, smaller space, about ten feet from Mary. Looking at Mary, she rolls over—the first sure friendly signal, or even acknowledgment that she has ever seen Mary before. She does this three or four times, each time somehow managing to roll through still poised for flight.

  And so Mary does not reach out to grab her, restraining herself until she is absolutely sure of reaching and grasping Linda. Which at last she successfully does, with a firm, strong, loving, and furious grip.

  “You rotten little slut, where in God’s name have you been, you little bitch?” She whispers these harsh new words, rising and clutching Linda, who is struggling hysterically to get away—away from this sudden stranger who has seized her unawares.

  But this time Mary wins. She carries fighting Linda out of the basement, up the stairs, and across the deck and into her house.

  Dumping her onto the rug she asks, “Oh Linda, how come you’re so crazy?” and, again, “Where on earth have you been?”

  No answer.

  And Linda, in character, runs off and hides. She does not even seem very hungry, nor does she have the look of a starving lost cat. She has obviously done well for herself, but Mary will never know where, or how. Or why. Mary pours herself a glass of white wine and collapses on the old chintz sofa, thinking, Goddamn Linda, anyway.

  How much, or what, do cats remember? Can anyone comprehend at all the memory of a cat? Over the next few days Mary wonders and ponders these questions, sometimes staring into the round yellow eyes of Linda as though there might be a clue. As though Linda knew.

  She considers too the fact that both she and her friend Bill the biologist have chosen cats of their own gender for major loves. Could this mean that love of one’s cat is really love of one’s self? Was it she herself who she feared was lost and hungry, possibly dead?

  At other times she simply holds her hands around that small warm vibrant body, the delicate strong ribcage and the drum-tight rounded belly, and she thinks, and she says aloud, “You’re home, darling Linda. You came home.”

  Mary has had the wit not to talk much to her friends about the loss of Linda, and so now she does not make much of her return. Only to her sometime lover, who is also in a way her closest friend, she confides, “I’m embarrassed, really, when I think how upset I was. And that night when I was sure the raccoons had got her, well—”

  “Mary dear, you were great,” he says. As he might have said, as people did say, of some performance of hers, which, come to think of it, in a public way it had been. No one really knew that for Mary the loss of Linda had been the end of the world, or nearly. None of her friends or her lover knew that she would have sacrificed any or all of them for her cat.

  Or at least at moments she would have.

  Soon after Linda’s return there is a small dinner party for some visiting old friends from New York, and at which Mary very much enjoys the sort of theatre gossip that she is used to: “But Maria’s always great.… I hear Edward’s new play is even better.… Poor Colin is really sick.… No, Gilbert’s still okay … they are not getting a divorce … the problem was that she loathed L.A.… I must say, you’re looking wonderful.…” She comes home in a mood of slightly wistful but pleasant nostalgia. She goes upstairs and finds Linda, as usual, curled on the foot of her bed. She pats Linda, who looks up, blinks, purrs briefly, and goes back to sleep. Soon Mary too is sound asleep.

  She wakes an hour or so later, and at first she thinks, I should never have had that last glass of wine, I didn’t need it. I know I can’t drink red. But then she hears a scratching, rustling sound on her deck, which may have been what woke her up.

  She gets out of bed, slowly puts on slippers and robe, noting as she passes that Linda is not there. She goes downstairs, flicks on lights—and there on her deck, lined up, are four raccoons, one large, three smaller. They keep a certain distance, and perhaps for that reason are not quite as threatening as they were before. They look both formal and expectant; they could be either judges or penitants—impossible to tell. Or, they could be asking for Linda. Demanding Linda?

  Mary turns off the lights and goes back upstairs, where she does not find Linda anywhere in her bedroom;
she even looks under the bed. She spends an anxious half hour or so in this search for Linda, at this ungodly hour, at the same time telling herself that this is ridiculous. There is no way that Linda could have gotten out; all the doors are locked, her bedroom window is only opened a crack. She also thinks: I cannot go through this again, I really can’t—as she calls out softly, “Linda, darling Linda, where are you?”

  She at last finds Linda asleep on the studio couch in her study, a not unlikely place for her to be, though more usual in the daytime. As Mary approaches, Linda wakes and raises her head; she blinks and looks at Mary as though to say, This is the middle of the night; I was sleeping here quietly. What is your problem?

  The next night, after feeding Linda, Mary is moved to put out a little food for raccoons, really for whatever creature wants it. She puts a little plate of dried kibble and one of water down in the garden, where she cannot hear if the plates are rattled.

  And whether the impulse that moved her is one of simply nurturing or of a more complex propitiation, or some dark exorcism, Mary has no idea.

  Old Love Affairs

  Mildly upset by a phone call, Lucretia Baine, who is almost old but lively, comes back into her living room and stares for a moment into the large white driftwood-framed mirror there, as though to check that she is still herself. Reassured, she smiles briefly, but continues to look at the mirror. In the soft, kindly lamplight—this is an early evening, in October—she is beautiful, still, even to her own harshly critical (large, green) eyes. But she knows perfectly well how she looks in her cruelly accurate bathroom mirror, first thing in the morning. Now, though, she looks all right, just upset; on the other hand, she may look better than usual. A little more color?

  The disturbing call did not involve bad news; it was simply that Lucretia momentarily confused two men: Simon, whom she is crazy about (hopelessly, irreversibly, it seems), with Burt, who in his way is crazy about her. He loves Lucretia permanently, he says. Burt called, and just for an instant she thought he was Simon. Although she would have thought that two men more unlike did not exist, including their voices: Burt’s deep and friendly, Midwestern, and Simon’s very New England, Cambridge, slightly raspy.