The upshot of all this was that I found myself in the cool subterranean glow of Daggett’s at three-thirty in the afternoon, nursing a Jack-and-Coke like one of the regulars while Daria, the ring finger of her left hand as unencumbered as mine, cleared up after the lunch crowd and set the tables for the dinner rush. Chris came on at five, and he called me by my name and refreshed my drink before he even glanced at the regulars, and for the next hour or so, during the lulls, we conversed about any number of things, beginning with the most obvious—the cat—but veering into sports, music, books, and films, and I found myself expanding into a new place altogether. At one point, Daria stopped by to ask if the cat was settling in—Was he still pacing around neurotically or what?—and I could tell her with some assurance that he was asleep. “He’s probably nocturnal,” I said, “or something like that.” And then, with Chris looking on, I couldn’t help adding, “You’re still coming over, right? After work? To help me feed him, I mean.”
She looked to Chris, then let her gaze wander out over the room. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah,” and there was a catch of hesitation in her voice. “I’ll be there.”
I let that hang a moment, but I was insecure and the alcohol was having its effect and I couldn’t leave it alone. “We can drive over together,” I said, “because I didn’t bring my car.”
She was looking tired by the end of her shift, the bounce gone out of her step, her hair a shade duller under the drab lights, and even as I switched to coffee I noticed Chris slipping her a shot of something down at the end of the bar. I’d had a sandwich around six, and then, so as not to seem overanxious, I’d taken a walk, which brought me into another bar down the street, where I had a Jack-and-Coke and didn’t say a word to anyone, and then I’d returned at eight to drink coffee and hold her to her promise.
We didn’t say much on the way over to my place. It was only a five-minute drive, and there was a song on that we both liked. Plus, it seemed to me that when you were comfortable with someone you could respect the silences. I’d gone to the cash machine earlier and in a hopeful mood stocked up on breakfast things—eggs, English muffins, a quart each of no-fat and 2-percent milk, an expensive Chinese tea that came in individual foil packets—and I’d picked up two bottles of a local Chardonnay that was supposed to be really superior, or at least that was what the guy in the liquor department had told me, as well as a bag of corn chips and a jar of salsa. There were two new bathroom towels hanging on the rack beside the medicine cabinet, and I’d given the whole place a good vacuuming and left the dishes to soak in a sink of scalding water and the last few molecules of dish soap left in the plastic container I’d brought with me from my aunt’s. The final touch was a pair of clean sheets and a light blanket folded suggestively over the arm of the couch.
Daria didn’t seem to notice—she went straight to the bedroom door and affixed her eye to the peephole. “I can’t see anything,” she said, leaning into the door, the muscles of her calves flexing as she went up on her toes. “It’s too bad we didn’t think of a night-light or something.”
I was watching her out of the corner of my eye—admiring her, amazed all over again at her presence—while working the corkscrew in the bottle. I asked her if she’d like a glass of wine. “Chardonnay,” I said. “It’s a local one, really superior.”
“I’d love a glass,” she said, turning away from the door and crossing the room to me. I didn’t have wineglasses, so we made do with the milky-looking water glasses my aunt had dug out of a box in her basement. “I wonder if you could maybe slip your arm in the door and turn on the light in there,” she said. “I’m worried about him. And, plus, we’ve got to feed him again, right?”
“Sure,” I said, “yeah, no problem,” but I was in no hurry. I refilled our glasses and broke out the chips and salsa, which she seemed happy enough to see. For a long while, we stood at the kitchen counter, dipping chips and savoring the wine, and then she went to the refrigerator, extracted a slab of meat, and began patting it down with paper towels. I took her cue, donned the gauntlet, braced myself, and jerked the bedroom door open just enough to get my hand in and flick on the light. The cat, which of course had sterling night vision, nearly tore the glove from my arm, and yet the suddenness of the light seemed to confuse it just long enough for me to salvage the situation. The door slammed on a puzzled yowl.
Daria immediately put her eye to the peephole. “Oh my God,” she murmured.
“What’s he doing?”
“Pacing. But here, you have a look.”
The carpeting—every last strip of it—had been torn out of the floor, leaving an expanse of dirty plywood studded with nails, and there seemed to be a hole in the plasterboard just to the left of the window. A substantial hole. Even through the closed door I could smell the reek of cat piss or spray or whatever it was. “There goes my deposit,” I said.
(illustration credit 21.7)
She was right there beside me, her hand on my shoulder. “He’ll settle down,” she assured me, “once he gets used to the place. All cats are like that—they have to establish their territory is all.”
“You don’t think he can get inside the walls, do you?”
“No,” she said, “no way. He’s too big.”
The only thing I could think to do, especially after an entire day of drinking, was to pour more wine, which I did. Then we repeated the ritual of the morning’s feeding—the steak on the fork, the blur of the cat, the savage thump at the door—and took turns watching it eat. After a while, bored with the spectacle—or perhaps “sated” is a better word—we found ourselves on the couch and there was a movie on TV and we finished the wine and the chips and we never stopped talking, a comment on this movie leading to a discussion of movies in general, a reflection on the wine dredging up our mutual experiences of wine tastings and the horrors of Cribari red and Boone’s Farm and all the rest. It was midnight before we knew it and she was yawning and stretching.
“I’ve really got to get home,” she said, but she didn’t move. “I’m wiped. Just wiped.”
“You’re welcome to stay over,” I said, “I mean, if you don’t want to drive, after the wine and all—”
A moment drifted by, neither of us speaking, and then she made a sort of humming noise—“Mmm”—and held out her arms to me even as she sank down into the couch.
“Never, ever, think outside the box.” (illustration credit 21.8)
I was up before her in the morning, careful not to wake her as I eased myself from the mattress where we’d wound up sleeping because the couch was too narrow for the two of us. My head ached—I wasn’t used to so much alcohol—and the effigy of the cat lurked somewhere behind that ache, but I felt buoyant and optimistic. Daria was asleep on the mattress, the cat was hunkered down in his room, and all was right with the world. I brewed coffee, toasted muffins, and fried eggs, and when she woke I was there to feed her. “What do you say to breakfast in bed?” I murmured, easing down beside her with a plate of eggs over easy and a mug of coffee.
I was so intent on watching her eat that I barely touched my own food. After a while, I got up and turned on the radio and there was that song again, the one we’d heard coming home the night before, and we both listened to it all the way through without saying a word. When the d.j. came on with his gasping juvenile voice and lame jokes, she got up and went to the bathroom, passing right by the bedroom door without a thought for the cat. She was in the bathroom a long while, running water, flushing, showering, and I felt lost without her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, wanted to extend a whole list of invitations to her: she could move in with me, stay here indefinitely, bring her cats with her, no problem, and we could both look after the big cat together, see to its needs, tame it, and make it happy in its new home—no more cages, and meat, plenty of meat. I was scrubbing the frying pan when she emerged, her hair wrapped in one of the new towels. She was wearing makeup and she was dressed in her Daggett’s outfit. “Hey,” I said.
&
nbsp; She didn’t answer. She was bent over the couch now, stuffing things into her purse.
“You look terrific,” I said.
There was a sound from the bedroom then, a low moan that might have been the expiring gasp of the cat’s prey, and I wondered if it had found something in there, a rat, a stray bird attracted to the window, an escaped hamster or lizard. “Listen, Junior,” she said, ignoring the moaning, which grew higher and more attenuated now, “you’re a nice guy, you really are.”
I was behind the Formica counter. My hands were in the dishwater. Something pounded in my head, and I knew what was coming, heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she ducked her head and averted her eyes.
“I can’t—I have to tell you something, O.K.? Because you’re sweet, you are, and I want to be honest with you.”
She raised her face to me all of a sudden, let her eyes stab at mine and then dodge away again. “I have a boyfriend. He’s away at school. And I don’t know why … I mean, I just don’t want to give you the wrong impression. It was nice. It was.”
The moaning cut off abruptly on a rising note. I didn’t know what to say—I was new at this, new and useless. Suddenly I was desperate, looking for anything, any stratagem, the magic words that would make it all right again. “The cat,” I said. “What about the cat?”
Her voice was soft. “He’ll be all right. Just feed him. Be nice to him.” She was at the door, the purse slung over one shoulder. “Patience,” she said, “that’s all it takes. A little patience.”
“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Will I see you later?”
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”
As soon as her pickup pulled out of the lot, I called my boss. He answered on the first ring, raising his voice to be heard over the ambient noise. I could hear the tile saw going in the background, the irregular banging of a hammer, the radio tuned to some jittery right-wing propagandist. “I want to come in,” I said.
“Who is this?”
“Junior.”
“Monday, Monday at the earliest.”
I told him I was going crazy cooped up in my apartment, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “What is it?” he said. “Money? Because I’ll advance you on next week if you really need it, though it’ll mean a trip to the bank I wasn’t planning on. Which is a pain in the ass. But I’ll do it. Just say the word.”
“No, it’s not the money, it’s just—”
He cut me off. “Don’t you ever listen to anything I say? Didn’t I tell you to go out and get yourself laid? That’s what you’re supposed to be doing at your age. It’s what I’d be doing.”
“Can’t I just, I don’t know, help out?”
“Monday,” he said.
I was angry suddenly and I slammed the phone down. My eyes went to the hole cut in the bedroom door and then to the breakfast plates, egg yolk congealing there in bright-yellow stripes, the muffin, Daria’s muffin, untouched but for a single neat bite cut out of the round. It was Friday. I hated my life. How could I have been so stupid?
There was no sound from the bedroom, and as I laced my sneakers I fought down the urge to go to the peephole and see what the cat had accomplished in the night—I just didn’t want to think about it. Whether it had vanished like a bad dream or chewed through the wall and devoured the neighbor’s yapping little dogs or broken loose and smuggled itself onto a boat back to Africa, it was all the same to me. The only thing I did know was that there was no way I was going to attempt to feed that thing on my own, not without Daria there. It could starve, for all I cared, starve and rot.
Eventually, I fished a jean jacket out of a pile of clothes on the floor and went down to the beach. The day was overcast and a cold wind out of the east scoured the sand. I must have walked for hours and then, for lack of anything better to do, I went to a movie, after which I had a sandwich at a new place downtown where college students were rumored to hang out. There were no students there as far as I could see, just old men who looked exactly like the regulars at Daggett’s, except that they had their square-shouldered old wives with them and their squalling unhappy children. By four I’d hit my first bar, and by six I was drunk.
I tried to stay away from Daggett’s—Give her a day or two, I told myself. Don’t nag, don’t be a burden—but at quarter of nine I found myself at the bar, ordering a Jack-and-Coke from Chris. Chris gave me a look, and everything had changed since yesterday. “You sure?” he said.
I asked him what he meant.
“You look like you’ve had enough, buddy.”
I craned my neck to look for Daria, but all I saw were the regulars, hunched over their drinks. “Just pour,” I said.
The music was there like a persistent annoyance, dead music, ancient, appreciated by no one, not even the regulars. It droned on. Chris set down my drink and I lifted it to my lips. “Where’s Daria?” I asked.
“She got off early. Said she was tired. Slow night, you know?”
I felt a stab of disappointment, jealousy, hate. “You have a number for her?”
Chris gave me a wary look, as if he knew something I didn’t. “You mean she didn’t give you her number?”
“No,” I said. “We never—well, she was at my house …”
“We can’t give out personal information.”
“To me? I said she was at my house. Last night. I need to talk to her, and it’s urgent—about the cat. She’s really into the cat, you know?”
“Sorry.”
I threw it back at him. “You’re sorry? Well, fuck you—I’m sorry, too.”
“You know what, buddy—”
“Junior, the name’s Junior.”
He leaned into the bar, both arms propped before him, and in a very soft voice he said, “I think you’d better leave now.”
It had begun to rain again, a soft patter in the leaves that grew steadier and harder as I walked home. Cars went by on the boulevard with the sound of paper tearing, and they dragged whole worlds behind them. The street lights were dim. There was nobody out. When I came up the hill to my apartment, I saw the Mustang standing there under the carport, and though I’d always been averse to drinking and driving—a lesson I’d learned from my father’s hapless example—I got behind the wheel and drove up to the job site with a crystalline clarity that would have scared me in any other state of mind. There was an aluminum ladder there, and I focussed on that—the picture of it lying against the building—until I arrived and hauled it out of the mud and tied it to the roof of the car, without a thought for the paint job or anything else.
When I got back, I fumbled in the rain with my overzealous knots until I got the ladder free and then I hauled it around back of the apartment building. I was drunk, yes, but cautious, too—if anyone had seen me, in the dark, propping a ladder against the wall of an apartment building, even my own apartment building, things could have got difficult in a hurry. I couldn’t very well claim to be painting, could I? Not at night. Not in the rain. Luckily, though, no one was around. I made my way up the ladder, and when I got to the level of the bedroom the odor hit me, a rank fecal wind sifting out of the dark slit of the window. The cat. The cat was in there, watching me. I was sure of it. I must have waited in the rain for fifteen minutes or more before I got up the nerve to fling the window open, and then I ducked my head and crouched reflexively against the wall. Nothing happened. After a moment, I made my way down the ladder.
I didn’t want to go into the apartment, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t know if a cat that size could climb down the rungs of a ladder or leap twenty feet into the air or unfurl its hidden wings and fly. I stood and watched the dense black hole of the window for a long while and then I went back to the car and sat listening to the radio in the dark until I fell asleep.
In the morning—there were no heraldic rays of sunshine, nothing like that, just more rain—I let myself into the apartment and crept across the room as stealthily as if I’d
come to burgle it. When I reached the bedroom door, I put my eye to the peephole and saw a mound of carpet propped up against an empty cage—a den, a makeshift den—and only then did I begin to feel something for the cat, for its bewilderment, its fear and distrust of an alien environment: this was no rocky kopje, this was my bedroom on the second floor of a run-down apartment building in a seaside town a whole continent and a fathomless ocean away from its home. Nothing moved inside. Surely it must have gone by now, one great leap and then the bounding limbs, grass beneath its feet, solid earth. It was gone. Sure it was. I steeled myself, pulled open the door, and slipped inside. And then—and I don’t know why—I pulled the door shut behind me.
| 2003 |
WET THURSDAY
A stiff wind off the channel
Linking the chimney’s mutterings
With rain; the shaken trees,
Mile after mile, greening the sand.
Turn to the fire as the afternoon
Turns gray. Then, suddenly,
The locked door opens without sound,
Thunder shaking the sky, to usher in
A monstrous cat that seems
Far older than the oldest carp
In the waters under the earth,
Moving like a shadow over the floor
To warm its frozen paws
Before the fire. He turns,
Smiling into the woodbox,
And says, “Felis libyca domestica
They call me, kept by man for catching
Rats and mice. Of Eastern or
Egyptian origin. Now to be
Your spiteful and envenomed shadow. Here
Will I live out my nine and evil lives
Before your very interesting fire.
And the days, months, years, are endless.”
Wind pounds along the coast.
The trees bend double to the sand.
The cat sleeps like an old campaigner
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 38
