“Jesus, what are you going to do with the thing?” Chris had come out from behind the bar and he was standing beside me now, looking awed.
I told him that I didn’t know. That I hadn’t planned on owning a wildcat, hadn’t even known they existed—servals, that is—until five minutes ago.
“You live around here?”
“Bayview Apartments.”
“They accept pets?”
I’d never really given it much thought, but they did, they must have—the guy next door to me had a pair of yapping little dogs with bows in their hair, and the woman down the hall had a Doberman that was forever scrabbling its nails on the linoleum when she came in and out with it, which she seemed to do about a hundred times a day. But this was something different. This was something that might push at the parameters of the standard lease. “Yeah,” I said, “I think so.”
There was a single slot where the door of the cage fastened that was big enough to receive an egg without crushing its shell, and Daria, still cooing, rolled first one egg, then the other, through the aperture. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the cat, hunched against the mesh, shifted position ever so slightly and took the first egg in its mouth—two teeth like hypodermics, a crunch, and then the soft frictive scrape of its tongue.
Daria rose and came to me with a look of wonder. “Don’t do a thing till I get off, O.K.?” she said, and in her fervor she took hold of my arm. “I get off at nine, so you wait, O.K.?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“We can put him in the back of the storage room for now, and then, well, I guess we can use my pickup.”
I didn’t have the leisure to reflect on how complex things had become all of a sudden, and even if I had I don’t think I would have behaved any differently. I just nodded at her, stared into her plenary eyes and nodded.
“He’s going to be all right,” she said, and added, “He will,” as if I’d been disagreeing with her. “I’ve got to get back to work, but you wait, O.K.? You wait right here.” Chris was watching. The manager was watching. The regulars had all craned their necks and half the dinner customers, too. Daria patted down her apron, smoothed back her hair. “What did you say your name was again?”
So I had a cat. And a girl. We put the thing in the back of her red Toyota pickup, threw a tarp over it to keep the rain off, and drove to Vons, where I watched Daria march up and down the aisles seeking out kitty litter and the biggest cat pan they had (we settled for a dishpan, hard blue plastic that looked all but indestructible), and then it was on to the meat counter. “I’ve only got ten bucks,” I said.
She gave me a withering look. “This animal’s got to eat,” she informed me, and she reached back to slip the band from her ponytail so that her hair fell glistening across her shoulders, a storm of hair, fluid and loose, the ends trailing down her back like liquid in motion. She tossed her head impatiently. “You do have a credit card, don’t you?”
Ten minutes later, I was directing her back to my building, where she parked next to the Mustang I’d inherited when my father died, and then we went up the outside stairs and along the walkway to my apartment, on the second floor. “I’m sorry,” I said, swinging open the door and hitting the light switch, “but I’m afraid I’m not much of a housekeeper.” I was going to add that I hadn’t expected company, either, or I would have straightened up, but Daria just strode right in, cleared a spot on the counter, and set down the groceries. I watched her shoulders as she reached into the depths of one bag after another and extracted the forty-odd dollars’ worth of chicken parts and rib-eye steak (marked down for quick sale) that we’d selected in the meat department.
“O.K.,” she said, turning to me as soon as she’d made space in the refrigerator for it all, “now where are we going to put the cat, because I don’t think we should leave it out there in the truck any longer than we have to, do you? Cats don’t like the rain, I know that—I have two of them. Or one’s a kitten, really.” She was on the other side of the kitchen counter, a clutter of crusted dishes and glasses sprouting colonies of mold between us. “You have a bedroom, right?”
I did. But if I was embarrassed by the state of the kitchen and living room—this was my first venture at living alone, and the need for order hadn’t really seemed paramount to me—then the thought of the bedroom, with its funk of dirty clothes and unwashed sheets, the reeking work-boots and the duffelbag out of which I’d been living, gave me pause. Here was this beautiful apparition in my kitchen, the only person besides my aunt who’d ever stepped through the door of my apartment, and now she was about to discover the sad, lonely disorder at the heart of my life. “Yeah,” I said. “That door there, to the left of the bathroom.” But she was already in the room, pushing things aside, a frown of concentration pressed between her eyes.
“You’re going to have to clear this out,” she said. “The bed, everything. All your clothes.”
I was standing in the doorway, watching her. “What do you mean, ‘clear it out’?”
She lifted her face. “You don’t think that animal can stay caged up like that, do you? There’s hardly room for it to turn around. And that’s just cruel.” She drilled me with that look again, then put her hands on her hips. “I’ll help you,” she said. “It shouldn’t take ten minutes.”
Then it was up the stairs with the cat, the two of us fighting the awkwardness of the cage. We kept the tarp knotted tightly in place, both to keep the rain off the cat and to disguise it from any of my neighbors who might happen by, and, though we shifted the angle of the thing coming up the stairs, the animal didn’t make a sound. We had a little trouble getting the cage through the doorway—the cat seemed to concentrate its weight as if in silent protest—but we managed, and then we maneuvered it into the bedroom and set it down in the middle of the rug. Daria had already arranged the litter box in the corner, atop several sheets of newspaper, and she’d taken my biggest stewpot, filled it with water, and placed it just inside the door, where I could get to it easily. “O.K.,” she said, glancing up at me with a satisfied look, “it’s time for the unveiling,” and she bent to unfasten the tarp.
The overhead light glared, the tarp slid from the cage and puddled on the floor, and there was the cat, pressed to the mesh in a compression of limbs, its yellow eyes seizing on us. “Nice kitty,” Daria cooed. “Does he want out of that awful cage? Hmm? Does he? And meat—does he want meat?”
So far, I’d gone along with everything in a kind of daze, but this was problematic. Who knew what the thing would do, what its habits were, its needs? “How are we going to—” I began, and left the rest unspoken. The light stung my eyes, and the alcohol whispered in my blood. “You remember what that guy said about feeding him, right?” In the back of my head, there was the smallest glimmer of a further complication: once he was out of the cage, how would we—how would I—ever get him back into it?
For the first time, Daria looked doubtful. “We’ll have to be quick,” she said.
And so we were. Daria stood at the bedroom door, ready to slam it shut, while I leaned forward, my heart pounding, and slipped the bolt on the cage. I was nimble in those days—twenty-three years old and with excellent reflexes despite the four or five Jack-and-Cokes I’d downed in the course of the evening—and I sprang for the door the instant the bolt was released. Exhilaration burned in me. It burned in the cat, too, because at the first click of the bolt it came to life as if it had been hot-wired. A screech tore through the room, the cage flew open, and the thing was an airborne blur slamming against the cheap plywood panel of the bedroom door, even as Daria and I fought to force it shut.
Sign in front of a home in Van Nuys, California:
FOR SALE
SIAMESE CATS
BEAUTIFUL AND INTELLIGENT
THE CADILLAC OF CATS
| 1951 |
In the morning (she’d slept on the couch, curled up in the fetal position, faintly snoring; I was stretched out on the mattress we’d removed from
the bedroom and tucked against the wall under the TV), I was faced with a number of problems. I’d awakened before her, jolted out of a dreamless sleep by a flash of awareness, and for a long while I just lay there watching her. I could have gone on watching her all morning, thrilled by her presence, her hair, the repose of her face, if it weren’t for the cat. It hadn’t made a sound, and it didn’t stink, not yet, but its existence was communicated to me nonetheless—it was there, and I could feel it. I would have to feed it, and after the previous night’s episode, that was going to require some thought and preparation, and I would have to offer Daria something, too, if only to hold her here a little longer. Eggs, I could scramble some eggs, but there was no bread for toast, no milk, no sugar for the coffee. And she would want to freshen up in the bathroom—women always freshened up in the morning, I was pretty sure of that. I thought of the neatly folded little matching towels in the guest bathroom at my aunt’s and contrasted that image with the corrugated rag wadded up on the floor somewhere in my own bathroom. Maybe I should go out for bagels or muffins or something, I thought—and a new towel. But did they sell towels at 7-Eleven? I didn’t have a clue.
(illustration credit 21.5)
We’d stayed up late, sharing the last of the hot cocoa out of the foil packet and talking in a specific way about the cat that had brought us to that moment on the greasy couch in my semi-darkened living room and then more generally about our own lives and thoughts and hopes and ambitions. I’d heard about her mother, her two sisters, the courses she was taking at the university. Heard about Daggett’s, the regulars, the tips—or lack of them. And her restaurant fantasy. It was amazingly detailed, right down to the number of tables she was planning on, the dinnerware, the cutlery, and the paintings on the walls, as well as the décor and the clientele—“Late twenties, early thirties, career people, no kids”—and a dozen or more of the dishes she would specialize in. My ambitions were more modest. I’d told her how I’d finished community college without any particular aim or interest, and how I was working setting tile for a friend of my aunt and uncle; beyond that, I was hoping to maybe travel up the coast and see Oregon. I’d heard a lot about Oregon, I told her. Very clean. Very natural up there. Had she ever been to Oregon? No, but she’d like to go. I remembered telling her that she ought to open her restaurant up there, someplace by the water, where people could look out and take in the view. “Yeah,” she’d said, “that’d be cool,” and then she’d yawned and dropped her head to the pillow.
I was just getting up to see what I could do about the towel in the bathroom, thinking vaguely of splashing some aftershave on it to fight down any offensive odors it might have picked up, when her eyes flashed open. She didn’t say my name or wonder where she was or ask for breakfast or where the bathroom was. She just said, “We have to feed that cat.”
“Don’t you want coffee or anything—breakfast? I can make breakfast.”
She threw back the blanket and I saw that her legs were bare. She was wearing the Daggett’s T-shirt over a pair of shiny black panties; her running shoes, socks, and shorts were balled up on the rug beneath her. “Sure,” she said. “Coffee sounds nice.” And she pushed her fingers through her hair on both sides of her head and then let it all fall forward to obscure her face. She sat there a moment before leaning forward to dig a hair clip out of her purse, arch her back, and pull the hair tight in a ponytail. “But I am worried about the cat, in new surroundings and all. The poor thing—we should have fed him last night.”
Perhaps so. And I certainly didn’t want to contradict her—I wanted to be amicable and charming, wanted to ingratiate myself in any way I could—but we’d both been so terrified of the animal’s power in that moment when we’d released it from the cage that neither of us had felt up to the challenge of attempting to feed it. Attempting to feed it would have meant opening that door again, and that was going to take some thought and commitment. “Yeah,” I said. “We should have. And we will, we will, but coffee, coffee first—you want a cup? I can make you a cup?”
So we drank coffee and ate the strawberry Pop-Tarts I found in the cupboard above the sink and made small talk as if we’d awakened together a hundred mornings running, and it was so tranquil and so domestic and so right I never wanted it to end. We were talking about work and about what time she had to be in that afternoon, when her brow furrowed and her eyes sharpened and she said, “I wish I could see it. When we feed it, I mean. Couldn’t you, like, cut a peephole in the door or something?”
I was glad for the distraction, damage deposit notwithstanding. And the idea appealed to me: now we could see what the thing—my pet—was up to, and if we could see it then it wouldn’t seem so unapproachable and mysterious. I’d have to get to know it eventually, have to name it and tame it, maybe even walk it on a leash. I had a brief vision of myself sauntering down the sidewalk, this id with claws at my side, turning heads and cowing the weight lifters with their Dobermans and Rottweilers, and then I fished my power drill out from under the sink and cut a neat hole, half an inch in diameter, in the bedroom door. As soon as it was finished, Daria put her eye to it.
“Well?”
“The poor thing. He’s pacing back and forth like an animal in a zoo.”
(illustration credit 21.6)
She moved to the side and took my arm as I pressed my eye to the hole. The cat flowed like molten ore from one corner of the room to the other, its yellow eyes fixed on the door, the dun, faintly spotted skin stretched like spandex over its seething muscles. I saw that the kitty litter had been upended and the hard blue plastic pan reduced to chewed-over pellets, and wondered about that, about where the thing would do its business if not in the pan. “It turned over the kitty pan,” I said.
She was still holding my arm. “I know.”
“It chewed it to shreds.”
“Metal. We’ll have to get a metal one, like a trough or something.”
I took my eye from the peephole and turned to her. “But how am I going to change it—don’t you have to change it?”
Her eyes were shining. “Oh, it’ll settle down. It’s just a big kitty, that’s all”—and then for the cat, in a syrupy coo—“Isn’t that right, kittums?” Next, she went to the refrigerator and extracted one of the steaks, a good pound and a half of meat. “Put on the glove,” she said, “and I’ll hold on to the doorknob while you feed him.”
“What about the blood—won’t the blood get on the carpet?” The gauntlet smelled of saddle soap and it was gouged and pitted down the length of it; it fit me as if it had been custom-made.
“I’ll press the blood out with a paper towel—here, look,” she said, dabbing at the meat in the bottom of the sink and then lifting it on the end of a fork. I took the fork from her and together we went to the bedroom door.
I don’t know if the cat smelled the blood or if it heard us at the door, but the instant I turned the knob it was there. I counted three, then jerked the door back just enough to get my arm and the dangle of meat into the room even as the cat exploded against the doorframe and the meat vanished. We pushed the door to—Daria’s face was flushed and she seemed to be giggling or gasping for air—and then we took turns watching the thing drag the steak back and forth across the rug as if it still needed killing. By the time the cat was done, there was blood everywhere, even on the ceiling.
After Daria left for work, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The cat was ominously silent and when I pressed my eye to the peephole I saw that it had dragged its cage into the far corner and was slumped behind it, apparently asleep. I flicked on the TV and sat through the usual idiocy, which was briefly enlivened by a nature show on the Serengeti that gave a cursory glimpse of a cat like mine—“The serval lives in rocky kopjes, where it keeps a wary eye on its enemies, the lion and the hyena, feeding principally on small prey, rabbits, birds, even snakes and lizards,” the narrator informed me in a hushed voice—and then I went to the sandwich shop and ordered the No. 7 special, no mayo, and too
k it down to the beach. It was a clear day, all the haze and particulate matter washed out of the air by the previous day’s deluge, and I sat there with the sun on my face and watched the waves ride in on top of one another while I ate and considered the altered condition of my life. Daria’s face had got serious as she stood at the door, her T-shirt rumpled, her hair pulled back so tightly from her scalp I could make out each individual strand. “Take care of our cat now, O.K.?” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I get off.” I shrugged in a helpless, submissive way, the pain of her leaving as acute as anything I’d ever felt. “Sure,” I said, and then she reached for my shoulders and pulled me to her for a kiss—on the lips. “You’re sweet,” she said.
So I was sweet. No one had ever called me sweet before, not since childhood, anyway, and I have to admit the designation thrilled me, bloomed inside me like the promise of things to come. I began to see her as a prime mover in my life, her naked legs stretched out on the couch, the hair falling across her shoulders at the kitchen table, her lips locked on mine. But as I sat there eating my ham-and-cheese wrap a conflicting thought came to me: there had to be someone in her life already, a girl that beautiful, working in a bar, and I was deluding myself to think I had a chance with her. She had to have a boyfriend—she could even be engaged, for all I knew. I tried to focus on the previous night, on her hands and fingers—had she been wearing a ring? And, if she had, then where was the fiancé, the boyfriend, whoever he was? I hated him already, and I didn’t even know if he existed.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 37
