(illustration credit 20.12)
It is pleasing to watch kittens practicing these revisionary impulses—stalking a shadow with sidewise hops, and so on, or playing with parts of their own bodies and those of Mama and their littermates with that odd regard for the intended nature of the tail, paw, or ear which makes us tend to say that the kitten chasing his tail doesn’t know that it is his tail. What the kitten is born to know is that it is his or her own Tale, the tale of the cat’s limitlessly metamorphosing stances toward us and the rest of the world.
I feel again the hot breath of someone wanting to give me a lecture from the opening series in Life Sciences 121a: The Interpretation of Behavior, and tell me that the behaviors I am talking about are explainable as the result of predatory mechanisms in the cat. There is, as usual, an implied “merely” in this, as if in the first place something as difficult and as important as hunting weren’t a likely basis for play and tale, and as such also a source of figures of thought in the development of friendships. Believing such a notion consistently would entail denying that any utterance can be a poem, because all or some of its grammar and diction can be shown to have sources in survival modes necessitated by, say, droughts during the Pleistocene.
There are differences between the friendships of humans with cats and those with other human beings. The cat’s insistence on being himself brings pleasure, whereas such an insistence in human-to-human loves is too often done clumsily and painfully and may result in the static of Quarrel rather than in the Heart of philosophy. But I have been for too long trying to indicate in prose what is more properly celebrated in verse—those turns and graces by means of which not only those who are Beloved Others but philosophy itself consoles us for the very fact of Otherness which drives us to philosophy. Some Eastern thinkers speak of “the gap” and then say no more about it. Dogs, people, and horses are all likely to try foolishly to close the gap, to deny what Stanley Cavell has called our “differences from one another—the one everything the other is not,” and to deny “human separation, which can be accepted, and granted, or not. Like the separation from God.” Cats live in a kind of ever-changing song or story in and of the gap. Here is “Kitty and Bug,” by John Hollander:
| 1986 |
KITTEN IN A GRAVEYARD
You pick your way among the dead
With padded and fastidious tread,
Your tail so high, your fur so sleek.
You are the strong and I the weak
Who fear this quiet spot of serried
Tombs where everything is buried
Except the evergreen and stone
For you to whet your claws upon.
I ask to live, if only that
I may be here to stroke you, cat.
—SELMA ROBINSON | 1932 |
TOOTH AND CLAW
Fiction
* * *
T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
The weather had absolutely nothing to do with it—though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair were the mildest term in the dictionary—because I would have gone down to Daggett’s that afternoon even if the sun were shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light. The problem was work. Or, more specifically, the lack of it. The boss had called at 6:30 A.M. to tell me not to come in, because the guy I’d been replacing had recovered sufficiently from his wrenched back to feel up to working, and, no, he wasn’t firing me, because they’d be on to a new job next week and he could use all the hands he could get. “So take a couple days off and enjoy yourself,” he’d rumbled into the phone in his low, hoarse, uneven voice, which always seemed on the verge of morphing into something else altogether—squawks and bleats or maybe just static. “You’re young, right? Go out and get yourself some tail. Get drunk. Go to the library. Help old ladies across the street. You know what I mean?”
It had been a long day: breakfast out of a cardboard box while cartoon images flickered and faded and reconstituted themselves on the TV screen, and then some desultory reading, starting with the newspaper and a couple of National Geographics I’d picked up at a yard sale; lunch at the deli, where I had ham-and-cheese in a tortilla wrap and exchanged exactly eleven words with the girl behind the counter (“No. 7, please, no mayo.” “Have a nice day.” “You, too”), and a walk to the beach that left my sneakers sodden. And, after all that, it was still only three o’clock in the afternoon and I had to force myself to stay away from the bar till five, five at least.
(illustration credit 21.2)
I wasn’t stupid. And I had no intention of becoming a drunk like all the hard-assed old men in the shopping-mall-blighted town I grew up in, silent men with hate in their eyes and complaint eating away at their insides—like my own dead father, for that matter—but I was new here, or relatively new (nine weeks now and counting), and Daggett’s was the only place I felt comfortable. And why? Precisely because it was filled with old men drinking themselves into oblivion. It made me think of home. Or feel at home, anyway.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. The whole reason I’d moved out to the Coast to live, first with my Aunt Kim and her husband, Waverley, and then in my own one-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and a three-by-six-foot balcony with a partially obscured view of the Pacific, half a mile off, was so that I could inject a little excitement into my life and mingle with all the college students in the bars that lined State Street cheek to jowl, but here I was hanging out in an old-man’s bar that smelled of death and vomit and felt as closed in as a submarine, when just outside the door were all the exotic, sunstruck glories of California. Where it never rained. Except in winter. And it was winter now.
I nodded self-consciously at the six or seven regulars lined up at the bar, then ordered a Jack-and-Coke, the only drink besides beer that I liked the taste of, and I didn’t really like the taste of beer. There were sports on the three TVs hanging from the ceiling—this was a sports bar—but the volume was down and the speakers were blaring the same tired hits of the sixties that I could have heard back home. Ad nauseam. When the bartender—he was young, at least, as were the waitresses—set down my drink, I made a comment about the weather, “Nice day for sunbathing, isn’t it?,” and the two regulars nearest me glanced up with something like interest in their eyes. “Or maybe bird-watching,” I added, feeling encouraged, and they swung their heads back to the familiar triangulation of their splayed elbows and cocktail glasses and that was the end of that.
It must have been seven or so, the rain still coming down and people briefly enlivened by the novelty of it as they came and went in spasms of umbrella furling and unfurling, when a guy about my age—or, no, he must have been thirty, or close to it—came in and took the seat beside me. He was wearing a baseball cap, a jean jacket, and a T-shirt that said “Obligatory Death,” which I took to be the name of a band, though I’d never heard of them. His hair was blond, cut short around the ears, and he had a soul beard that was like a pale stripe painted under his lip by an unsteady hand. We exchanged the standard greeting—What’s up?—and then he flagged down the bartender and ordered a draft beer, a shot of tomato juice, and two raw eggs.
“Raw eggs?” the bartender echoed, as if he hadn’t heard right.
“Yeah. Two raw eggs, in the shell.”
The bartender—his name was Chris, or maybe it was Matt—gave a smile and scratched the back of his head. “We can do them over easy or sunny-side up or poached even, but raw, I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s ever requested raw before—”
“Ask the chef, why don’t you?”
The bartender shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.” He started off in the direction of the kitchen, then pulled up short. “You want toast with that, home fries, or what?”
“Just the eggs.”
Everybody was watching now, any little drama worth the price of admission, especially on a night like this, but the bartender—Chris, his name was definitely Chris—just wen
t down to the other end of the bar and communicated the order to the waitress, who made a notation in her pad and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment went by, and then the man turned to me and said in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear, “Jesus, this music sucks. Are we caught in a time warp here, or what?”
The old men—the regulars—glanced up from their drinks and gave him a look, but they were gray-haired and slack in the belly and they knew their limits.
“Yeah,” I heard myself say, “it really sucks,” and before I knew it I was talking passionately about the bands that meant the most to me even as the new guy poured tomato juice in his beer and sipped the foam off the top, while the music rumbled defiantly on and people with wet shoes and dripping umbrellas crowded in behind us. The eggs, brown-shelled and naked in the middle of a standard dinner plate, were delivered by Daria, a waitress I’d had my eye on, though I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to say more than hello and goodbye to her. “Your order, sir,” she said, easing the plate down on the bar. “You need anything with that? Ketchup? Tabasco?”
“No,” he said, “that’s fine,” and everyone was waiting for him to crack the eggs over his beer, but he didn’t even look at them. He was looking at Daria, holding her with his eyes. “So, what’s your name?” he asked, grinning.
She told him, and she was grinning, too.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m Ludwig.”
“Ludwig,” she repeated, pronouncing it with a “V,” as he had, though as far as I could tell—from his clothes and accent, which was pure Southern California—he wasn’t German. Or if he was he sure had his English down.
“Are you German?” Daria was flirting with him, and the realization of it began to harden me against him in the most rudimentary way.
“No,” he said. “I’m from Hermosa Beach, born and raised. It’s the name, right?”
“I had this German teacher last year? His name was Ludwig, that’s all.”
“You’re in college?”
She told him she was, which was news to me. Working her way through. Majoring in business. She wanted to own her own restaurant someday.
“It was my mother’s idea,” he said, as if he’d been mulling it over. “She was listening to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony the night I was born.” He shrugged. “It’s been my curse ever since.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s kind of cute. You don’t get many Ludwigs, you know?”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” he said, sipping his beer.
She lingered, though there were other things she could have been doing. “So, what about the eggs?” she said. “You going to need utensils, or—”
“Or what? Am I going to suck them out of the shell?”
“Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”
He reached out a hand cluttered with silver to embrace the eggs and gently roll them back and forth across the gleaming expanse of the plate. “No, I’m just going to fondle them,” he said, and got the expected response: she laughed. “But does anybody still play dice around here?” he called down the bar as the eyes of the regulars slid in our direction and then away again.
In those days—and this was ten years ago or more—the game of Horse was popular in certain California bars, as were smoking, unprotected sex, and various other adult pleasures that may or may not have been hazardous to your health. There were five dice, shaken in a cup, and you slammed that cup down on the bar, trying for the highest cumulative score, which was thirty. Anything could be bet on, from the next round of drinks to ponying up for the jukebox.
The rain hissed at the door and it opened briefly to admit a stamping, umbrellaless couple. Ludwig’s question hung unanswered on the air. “No? How about you, Daria?”
“I can’t—I’m working.”
He turned to me. I had no work in the morning or the next morning, either—maybe no work at all. My apartment wasn’t what I’d thought it would be, not without somebody to share it with, and I’d already vowed to myself that I’d rather sleep on the streets than go back to my aunt’s, because going back there would represent the worst kind of defeat. Take good care of my baby, Kim, my mother had said when she dropped me off. He’s the only one I’ve got.
“Sure,” I said. “I guess. What’re we playing for—for drinks, right?” I began fumbling in my pockets, awkward—I was drunk, I could feel it. “Because I don’t have, well, maybe ten bucks—”
“No,” he said, “no,” already rising from his seat, “you just wait here, just one minute, you’ll see,” and then he was out the door and into the grip of the rain.
Daria hadn’t moved. She was dressed in the standard outfit for Daggett’s employees—shorts, white ankle socks, and a T-shirt with the name of the establishment blazoned across the chest, her legs pale and silken in the flickering light of the fake fireplace in the corner. She gave me a sympathetic look, and I shrugged to show her that I was ready for anything, a real man of the world.
There was a noise at the door—a scraping and shifting—and we all looked up to see Ludwig struggling with something there against the backdrop of the rain. His hat had been knocked askew and water dripped from his nose and chin. It took a moment, one shoulder pinning the door open, and then he lifted a cage—a substantial cage, two and a half feet high and maybe four feet long—through the doorway and set it down against the wall. No one moved. No one said a word. There was something in the cage, the apprehension of it as sharp and sudden as the smell it brought with it, something wild and alien and very definitely out of the ordinary on what to this point had been a painfully ordinary night.
Ludwig wiped the moisture from his face with a swipe of his sleeve, straightened out his hat, and came back to the bar, looking jaunty and refreshed. “All right,” he said, “don’t be shy—go have a look. It won’t bite. Or it will, it definitely will, just don’t get your fingers near it, that’s all.”
I saw coiled limbs, claws, yellow eyes. Whatever it was, the thing hadn’t moved, not even to blink. I was going to ask what it was when Daria, still at my side, said, “It’s a cat, some kind of wildcat, right? A what—a lynx or something?”
“You can’t have that thing in here,” one of the regulars said, but already he was getting up out of his seat to have a look at it—everyone was getting up now, shoving back chairs and rising from the tables, crowding around.
(illustration credit 21.3)
“It’s a serval,” Ludwig was saying. “From Africa. Thirty-five pounds of muscle and quicker than a snake.”
And where had he got it? He’d won it, in a bar in Arizona, on a roll of the dice.
How long had he had it? Two years.
What was its name? Cat. Just Cat. And, yes, it was a male, and, no, he didn’t want to get rid of it but he was moving overseas on a new job and there was just no way he could take it with him, so he felt that it was apropos—that was the word he used, “apropos”—to give it up in the way he’d got it.
He turned to me. “What was your name again?”
“Junior,” I said. “James, Jr., Turner, I mean. James Turner, Jr. But everybody calls me Junior.” I wanted to add, “Because of my father, so people wouldn’t confuse us,” but I left it at that, because it got even more complicated considering that my father was six months dead and I could be anybody I wanted.
“O.K., Junior, here’s the deal,” Ludwig said. “Your ten bucks against the cat, one roll. What do you say?”
I wanted to say that I had no place for the thing, that I didn’t want a cat of any kind or even a guinea pig or a fish in a bowl and that the ten dollars was meaningless, but everyone was watching me and I couldn’t back out without feeling the shame rise to my face—and there was Daria to consider, because she was watching me, too. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, O.K., sure.”
Sixty seconds later, I was still solvent and richer by one cat and one cage. I’d got lucky—or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it—and rolled three fives and t
wo fours; Ludwig rolled a combined eleven. He finished his beer in a gulp, took my hand to seal the deal, and then started toward the door. “But what do I feed it?” I called. “I mean, what does it eat?”
“Well, you don’t look like an experimental psychologist to me.” (illustration credit 21.4)
“Eggs,” he said. “It loves eggs. And meat. Raw. No kibble, forget kibble. This is the real deal, this animal, and you need to treat it right.” He was at the door, looking down at the thing with what might have been wistfulness or satisfaction, I couldn’t tell which, then he reached down behind the cage to unfasten something there—a gleam of black leather—and toss it to me: it was a glove, or a gauntlet, actually, as long as my arm. “You’ll want to wear this when you feed him,” he said, and then he was gone.
For a long moment, I stared at the door, trying to work out what had happened, and then I looked at the regulars—at the expressions on their faces—and at the other customers, locals or maybe even tourists, who’d come in for a beer or a burger or the catch of the day and had all this strangeness thrust on them, and finally at the cage. Daria was bent beside it, cooing to the animal inside, Ludwig’s eggs cradled in one hand. She was short and compact, conventionally pretty, with the round eyes and symmetrical features of an anime heroine, her running shoes no bigger than a child’s, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I’d noticed all that before, over the course of weeks of study, but now it came to me with the force of revelation. She was beautiful, a beautiful girl propped on one knee, while her shorts rode up in back and her T-shirt bunched beneath her breasts, offering this cat—my cat—the smallest comfort, as if it were a kitten she’d found abandoned on the street.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 36
