Lisa lived in a comfy one-bedroom in a brownstone in Center City, not far from the hotel. “Maybe we should combine our resources and get one apartment that’s larger,” I said. “If you think we could find a place that’s big enough for both of us and Pilar.”
“You think so?” Lisa asked, smiling. “I think we could do that.”
I nodded. “As long as we’re going to live together, we might as well get married,” I said off-handedly. I looked at Lisa. “What do you think?”
“I think that’s the most unromantic proposal I ever heard of,” she said.
I picked up Pilar and put her on the floor. She gave me an offended look. Then I scooted over close to Lisa, who was looking away from me. I took her hand in mine, and again I marveled at how soft and warm it was. “I love you. You’re the sun and the moon and the stars to me. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?”
“That’s a little more like it.” She turned toward me, smiling again. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
We kissed, and I felt like I always do when I kiss her, that I’m falling into a deep and wonderful river, giving up to the current and letting it ride me away. Then Pilar jumped into our laps, and we broke apart, and laughed. “I suppose that means you’re saying yes, too, Pilar,” I said. “We’ll be husband and wife... and cat.”
***
I started to have second thoughts within a day or so. I didn’t know why I had asked Lisa to marry me-- spur of the moment, maybe. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I was ready to get married. It was a big enough step just living together. Why complicate matters? And to top it off, Lisa wanted to get married at Christmas.
“Why then? It’s barely a month from now. How can you plan a whole wedding that quickly?”
It was Sunday morning, and we were sitting in my living room, looking through the apartment ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“I always wanted a Christmas wedding,” Lisa said. “From the time I was a little girl. I wanted to get married in front of a Christmas tree, with the house decked in holly and ivy, and carols playing in the background. Besides, both our leases expire December 31, so we might as well move fast.”
She looked at me. “Let’s be honest, Ryan. Neither of us have a lot of friends or family to invite, and my parents were already planning to come up here for Christmas. Isn’t your mom coming, too?”
My father died when I was young, and my mother moved to Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina, when I went off to college in Miami. She wasn’t too thrilled about coming up north during the winter, but I’m her only son, and I hadn’t seen her for ages. “Yeah, she’s already got her ticket.”
“Then it’s settled. Now look, here’s an apartment we might like.”
So the subject was closed. I’d done this kind of thing before, let my mouth get ahead of my brain, and usually I’d been able to wiggle my way out. But I’d never cared for anyone the way I loved Lisa. Maybe it was for the best. Get married and get on with our lives.
We decided to have the ceremony on the day after Christmas, in one of the small meeting rooms on the second floor of the hotel. It had big floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out at the hotel grounds, where several tall pines had been decorated with tiers of glittering lights. So Lisa would be able to have her Christmas trees, thought they wouldn’t be in the room with us.
The big disadvantage to our profession is that we have to work on the holidays other people have off. Our hotel was doing a big promotion for its Christmas dinners, opening the main ballroom to its full length and serving a massive buffet. I was on the phone constantly, to the local press, and helping Lisa when I could with printers, florists and other suppliers.
In between, we planned our own wedding. I was still having second thoughts, but I kept pushing them down every time they came up.
“I always said I knew so much about banquet planning I could do my own wedding in my sleep,” Lisa said one night, when we were working late in her office. I was going over the cloth napkin inventory for her, and she was sitting at her desk surrounded by piles of paper. “Now I feel like I’m doing it. All I want to do is put my head down and go to sleep, but if I don’t finish looking over this menu we’ll be eating cat food at our wedding.”
“Pilar would like that.”
“I’m thinking one of our menu choices should be the salmon,” she said, “because Pilar can eat the leftovers. What do you think as the other entree choice, roast breast of chicken or rock Cornish hen?”
“Six of one, half dozen of the other. Why did the Cornish hen cross the road?” I stood up and walked over to her desk, where I took her arms and gently pulled her up from her chair.
“I don’t know,” she said, and yawned. “Why?”
“So that he could go to bed and wake up fresh the next morning, and get skewered all over again,” I said. “Come on, let’s go home.”
We were spending most of our nights together, at my apartment, so that Pilar wouldn’t get too lonely. Even so she resented it, and I often came home to find mischief she’d made while I was gone, just to remind me who was boss in our house.
In between work, cat care and wedding planning, we found an apartment to rent near Lisa’s, a big spacious two-bedroom that took up the entire first floor of a narrow brownstone. It had access to a nice yard in the back, and tall Georgian windows that looked out to the street. I thought Pilar would be happy there, with so much to watch outside.
That year, Christmas came on a Wednesday, and we both worked the whole weekend before the holiday, swamped with a hotel full of Yuletide parties. Sunday night we split up and staggered to our respective apartments to begin packing for the move, which we planned to do the next day. Neither of us had that much stuff, and we thought we could accomplish the combination of our respective apartments pretty quickly.
Though I was exhausted, I wanted to get a head start on packing my clothes, but Pilar wanted to play. She blocked my way in the closet so I couldn’t retrieve my shoes. When I shifted to the bureau and began folding shirts, she tried to drag them away by their sleeves, and then grabbed a ball of socks and retreated under the bed.
“It’s almost like you don’t want us to move, Pilar.” I got her red rubber ball from the bureau top and sat on the floor, bouncing it. Almost immediately, Pilar poked her head out from under the dust ruffle, watching the ball. “Maybe you know something I don’t. Huh? What do you say? Is this a bad idea?”
Pilar was still watching the ball. On one upswing I grabbed it and threw it directly at her. She leaped out and snatched the ball, then brought it back to me.
As I got to know Pilar, as a kitten, one of the most surprising things I learned about her was that she liked to fetch. It seemed a very un-cat like thing to do, but when I read up on Abyssinians, I learned it was common for her breed. So I sat on the floor, throwing the ball to her, and talking out loud about my dilemma.
“Is it too late to back out?” I asked as I threw the ball toward the bathroom. Pilar scampered after it. “It’s not that I don’t want to marry Lisa. It’s just I’m not sure I’m ready. I mean, OK, twenty-eight is a good age to get married. I know lots of people my age who are married. But is it right for me? Am I ready for it?”
Pilar brought the ball back to me and dropped it in my lap. She looked up at me. “I wish you could talk, Pilar.” I picked her up and held her against my chest, and she mewed and licked my face. “Then you could tell me what to do. I’d trust you, I’d do whatever you said.”
Pilar struggled out of my grasp and jumped down to the carpet again. She nudged the ball against my legs. “All right. Here.” I threw the ball toward the hallway and her claws skittered across the wooden floor as she chased it. “I guess I just have do what I think is right.” I stood up and started packing again.
The next morning dawn overcast and cold, with occasional rain and sleet. It was the kind of day you want to spend inside, in front of a fire, with a cup of hot chocolate and the one yo
u love.
Or, in my case, the kind of day that makes you want to leave Philadelphia forever, just hop in the car with the cat and head for Key West. Instead, I finished packing my clothes, food, and household stuff. Just after noon, I left Pilar to roam around the sealed boxes in my apartment and drove a van to Lisa’s.
It took us hours to load her boxes and furniture. By then we were drenched with rain and sweat, and our tempers were building. “Be careful with that,” Lisa said, as I dropped the last box into the back of the van. “I’d like to find we still have some dishes left by the time we get settled.”
“If you didn’t have so many dishes, we’d be settled already,” I said irritably, and slammed down the back of the van. I drove the few blocks to our new place, and while I unloaded Lisa went around the corner for sandwiches. That was when I remembered I’d packed Pilar’s food and water bowls, and hadn’t left anything out for her.
I wanted to go to her immediately, but I couldn’t leave the van alone, and even when Lisa came back I couldn’t leave her to unload. I wolfed down my sandwich in between trips, and the sky was already darkening by the time we were finished. “Why don’t you stay here and unload, and I’ll get my stuff,” I said to Lisa as I carried the last box in. I was careful to set it down gently.
Frankly, I was fed up with moving, thinking of just going back to my own place and staying there. But Lisa wouldn’t let me go alone. “It’ll go faster if there’s two of us.” We drove to my apartment in a gloomy silence, to be greeted by an irritable Abyssinian as soon as we entered.
“I’m sorry, Pilar,” I said. “We brought you some salmon. Will you forgive me?”
Pilar wasn’t interested in apologies or play. She attacked the salmon as soon as I put it down, on a paper plate, pointedly turning her furry butt toward me.
Lisa and I began to carry boxes and furniture outside and it wasn’t until we were nearly finished that I looked for Pilar. The apartment was almost completely empty, so there weren’t many places she could hide. I checked the closets and the cabinets, getting increasingly frantic. “Did you see her?” I asked Lisa. “When did you see her last?”
“I don’t know. She’s your cat. Weren’t you watching her?”
“And when was she going to become our cat? On the day after Christmas, along with everything else I’m giving up for you? Or were we always going to have what’s yours and what’s mine?”
“I can’t believe you’re acting like this. Come on, it’s late. Let’s just get this finished.”
“I can’t finish. I have to look for Pilar.”
I went outside, calling her name. I walked around the apartment building, then around the block. When I passed the building again Lisa was waiting on the front step. “Ryan, we have to finish moving.”
I knew she was right. We loaded the last few boxes on the truck and drove to the new apartment, where we unloaded in silence. It was almost eleven that night when we finished. “I just want to collapse,” Lisa said as she closed the door behind the last box. “I wish we could leave everything as it is and worry about it tomorrow.” She paused. “But of course, we have to work tomorrow. It’s Christmas eve, and my parents are coming in, and your mother. What’ll they think when they see this place.” Wearily she opened a box and started to unpack.
“I want to go back and look for Pilar. She’s never been out this long before. She’s probably back at the building, mewing and waiting for me.”
Lisa glared at me, then her face softened. “All right, go look for her. But don’t stay out too late.”
I called for Pilar, then hunted down alleys and behind garages, with increasing frustration and no success. I even put some salmon out near the front door of the building and then waited, but a big orange tom cat came along and ate it, then ran away. Finally I went home.
It didn’t seem like home, though, everything still in boxes and no Pilar to snuggle next to me. Lisa and I slept on opposite sides of the bed, and I couldn’t seem to doze off. I kept tossing and turning, worrying about my poor lost cat.
We did more unpacking in the morning, then drove to work in separate cars. On the way, I drove past my old building and I called out for Pilar, but got no response. It was cold and there was snow in the forecast. I felt miserable.
We worked like crazy all day, getting prepared for the big holiday. After lunch, Lisa’s parents stopped by on their way to their room. Her father was tall and heavyset, his white hair in neat waves on his head. He was a bit of a dandy, wearing a pink sport coat and Kelly green slacks. Her mother was short and petite, and as perfectly groomed as her husband, in a designer suit of red wool with brass buttons.
By the time we met, my hair had been slicked back twice with sweat, my shirt tail was out and my legs ached so that I could hardly stand up straight. But I didn’t even care what the Audubons thought of me-- I was so tired, and worried about Pilar. Lisa introduced us, then asked her father to go to the formal wear store and pick up my rented tuxedo. That’s when I noticed her mother was carrying a long plastic bag.
“Let me see the dress!” Lisa exclaimed. She pulled down the zipper and opened the bag wide. Inside was her mother’s wedding dress, lengthened and let out a little for Lisa.
“It’s beautiful!” Lisa said. “Just the way I remembered it. And the measurements are just perfect!” She’d talked a lot about how gorgeous and romantic her mother’s wedding dress was, yards of white silk embroidered with tiny seed pearls. And from what I could see, it was just as beautiful as she’d described.
“Try it on,” Mrs. Audubon said.
Lisa shook her head. “I don’t want to risk getting it dirty. I’ll try it on at home tonight.”
She zipped the bag back up and her parents left. By the time my mother stuck her head in the main banquet room, I was so exhausted I wanted to go over and cry on her shoulder, and have her make toast soaked in milk for me, the way she used to do when I was a little kid. But instead, I introduced her to Lisa, and then we went back to work.
The Christmas eve celebrations at the hotel ran until almost midnight, and by the time we left for home it was snowing. As I made the turn to go past my old building, Lisa said, “Ryan, let’s just go home. I’m exhausted.”
“I want to pass by and look for Pilar again. I’m worried.”
“I’m worried, too. But I’ll bet somebody has already taken her in, fed her and given her a warm place to sleep. And that’s all I want. Just to go to sleep.”
“I have to look. It won’t take long.” I drove slowly past my old building, stopped, and walked around the block, calling for Pilar. No luck. The streets were covered with snow and there was no one anywhere. I got back in the car and, silently, we drove home.
Neither of us had much time for Christmas shopping-- I bought Lisa a card at the hotel gift shop, and a gold pin in the shape of a holly leaf at the jeweler’s. She bought me a watch. We exchanged our gifts awkwardly, then left for work, again in separate cars. I stopped briefly past my old building again on my way. Pilar wasn’t there.
The day passed in a blur. The frantic preparations for the holiday buffet, then the meal itself, trying to make small talk with our parents while we kept an eye on what was going on around us. There were a few minor problems in the kitchen and a couple of lost reservations, but for the most part the day went smoothly. We left around seven o’clock to go home and prepare for the wedding. With each time I passed my old building, I lost more and more hope that I’d ever see Pilar again.
I felt like I was on a train careening out of control. I’d given up my home and lost my cat, and what was supposed to be a wonderful holiday seemed to be full of terrors. I hadn’t even fully convinced myself getting married was the right thing to do.
We tried on our clothes, practiced our vows, and figured out how to squeeze a brief rehearsal into the next day’s schedule. When we finished she sat down at the desk in the living room and I began pacing around the rug in the center of the room.
“Lisa, we
have to talk.”
“I know,” she said. “I feel terrible.” She paused. “I’m sure it’s my fault Pilar got away. She never liked me, and then I probably left the door open and she got out, and it’s just like Nanki-Poo.” She started to cry. “I’m sorry, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to marry me at all.”
I walked over to the desk and took Lisa into my arms. I looked down into my heart for what I could say to her, and I was surprised at what I found. “It wasn’t your fault. Pilar is an Abyssinian, which makes her one of the smartest cats around, but also the most curious. If she got out, it’s because she wanted to. It wasn’t your fault.”
I sat down next to her. “And what makes you say she never liked you? She has very good taste, so I’m sure she loved you just as much as I do. And you know, I do love you a lot.”
That was what really surprised me. When I looked in my heart I knew Lisa was the one for me, and that I’d never forgive myself if I let her go. I was touched at how she felt about Pilar, and I realized that no matter how much I loved my cat, I loved Lisa more. I dried her tears with the edge of my sleeve, and we kissed.
We went to sleep a little while later, cuddled together. The only thing that was missing was Pilar’s warm body at the foot of the bed.
The next morning was cloudy and windy, the blowing snow making visibility difficult. Lisa had planned to get into her dress in her parents’ room at the hotel, but we were running late, so she put it on at home. I got into my tux, and we set out for the hotel. “Do you want to look for Pilar?” Lisa asked.
“We haven’t got time.”
“It won’t take long. Make one pass in front of your old building.”
“If you say so. If we’re going to get married I should get accustomed to doing what you say.”
She laughed and elbowed me. We drove slowly past the building, the windows down, both of us calling “Pilar!” out into the blowing snow.
The Cat Who Got Married Page 3
