The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  Nothing happened after that either. Tattersall could hear its claws on the kitchen linoleum as it trotted toward its food pan. After snuffling at that for a few moments it went to its accustomed warm corner and flopped down to sleep. Angry, out there in the cold, Tattersall said, “God damn it all!” and, getting down on all fours himself, he unwound his bulky muffler and thrust his head through the aperture to have a look.

  He had a clear view of the kitchen, the lower half at any rate, and could satisfy himself that things were precisely as he suspected. The animal was sprawled out in his cozy corner, already fast asleep.

  “You’re a great help. Raymond! Raymond!”

  Here Tattersall could resume his shouts to better advantage. His head at least was in the house. So he bellowed at the top of his voice. There was still no response. The house was silent. That meant Raymond wasn’t looking at the television. He was asleep. And he slept the sleep of the dead. Only the most prolonged and violent shaking could possibly awaken him. Shouts, never. Certainly not from this distance. All these thoughts ran through Tattersall’s mind while a far more chilling realization came over him. He couldn’t get his head out again.

  The dog door was in a sense a kind of circular shutter. The triangular wedges converging, sliced-pie-wise, at the center were of a brown plastic, similar to artificial leather, their wide ends attachéd to the circumference of the aperture on hinges which permitted them to swing in or out with equal ease. But the whole was so constructed that it had to be pushed all the way before it could be reversed. Tattersall naturally could not complete the process. It stopped where his shoulders met the frame. His head could only thrust the door in halfway, where it locked in an inconclusive position around his neck.

  He wished now that he had not removed his muffler, though it would probably have done him no good in the long run. Already the wedges, which were reenforced with steel ribs, were beginning to cut his neck, so that he had not only to remain still for fear of garroting himself, but even to stop shouting. Therefore his calls for help were infrequent. Little confidence was to be put in them in any case since they went unheard here and in the houses next door, and, certainly, in the streets. Once he dimly heard somebody putting a car in a garage, and he set up a last tumult, fading at last into silence.

  That was nearly an hour later. The snow had been falling steadily, and the wind rising. Cold gusts were blowing up the stairs and even around the porch. He could sense the snow drifting behind him. By morning it would certainly have covered him over, wrapping him close in its woolen coat.

  He was soon no longer cold, then actually rather warm, pleasantly numbed. A giddy feeling came over him, and he began to laugh, as he had the time he’d gotten high on marijuana. He imagined the spectacle he would offer those fortunate enough to be chosen by fate to come upon him. The sight would be unique in human annals, that much was sure. There would never have been anything quite like it. There never would be again.

  He began to imagine that he heard voices. Was he growing delirious? The fear crossed his mind that help might come in time. Then he laughed again. Of course, he might have known—it was the Doppelgänger. Come one last time, come for a parting shot.

  “Well, your end is in sight, Tattersall,” he said. “I think we can safely say that.”

  “And so, thank God, is yours,” Tattersall answered with a gentle, grateful sigh, and remembering, as he did so, that death by freezing was not by any means the worst of fates.

  He had only one regret. It was too bad Lucy Stiles had not meant any more to him than she did. She had never meant anything at all to him. Nothing, really, at all.

  2

  Witch’s Milk

  One

  When Tillie Shilepsky first laid eyes on her husband-to-be she thought, “No. Uh-uh. He’s out.” One’s school-girl fancies of course ran to dark, deferential strangers who accosted you in foreign lands to warn you against the local drinking water and then, Homburg in hand, asked whether you believed in fate. Such dreams are soon liquidated, but fate was at least not going to deal her a bloke with a cigarette on one ear who called everyone Frisbee. When he lit the cigarette it would probably be with a kitchen match struck on a thumbnail. There would almost certainly be that. “No, I’m sorry. He’s out. Thanks just the same though.”

  The hostess responsible for this misguided piece of blind dating stood at her side, beaming on her catch. She was Gertrude Wilson, an old friend who was hardly one’s speed herself. “He’s called Pete Seltzer.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Tillie meant that the name was so right it had the ring of an adroitly timed thrust. That was the joke, not that a woman so obtuse at matchmaking was likely to get it. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the blue smoke, amid the tinkle of highballs flourished in evening gestures, they watched the Seltzer knock out a couple of girls sitting on the floor at his feet. He was amusing them with double talk, a craft in which he was apparently quite skilled. The party was by now well on the boil.

  “The reason I haven’t gotten married at the age of thirty is for fear of becoming a real person,” he was explaining. “To that in itself I have no objection. But the day-to-day togetherness can finally mucilaginate the smuffockles, if you know what I mean. Till it’s impossible to extropert each other’s thropplestance.”

  “Come and meet him.” Gertrude took Tillie by the hand and towed her through the crowd.

  It was the first time Tillie had ever heard anyone talk double talk in real life. Entertainers doing it had usually amused her, or at least fascinated her with the art as such, which calls for the most minutely calculated effects, the most perfectly timed deflations. Nonsense is such a difficult art! A mere handful of men have achieved it, while the centuries are stocked with Homers and Mozarts. An intellectual escort with whom she had once listened to some double talk in a night club had analyzed the laughter it provoked as “the pleasurable collapse of meaning.” One shook helplessly at having the epistemological rug pulled out from under one, at being dropped through a hatch into the logical void.

  “Why isn’t he hauled over to meet me?” Tillie wondered. By the time they reached him he was smoking the cigarette. So she had missed the manner in which fire had been set to it. Well, perhaps another time.

  “Oh, hi.” The Seltzer type rose from the sofa, also moving aside after the introduction to make room for Tillie on it. The routine was thereupon instantly resumed, the two girls being by no means ready to let it drop. Tillie took them in with almost as much interest as she paid the Seltzer, struck by the amazing similarity between them without their in the least resembling one another physically. They seemed blonde and brunette, thin and plump, tall and short versions of the same low-threshold risibility. Wet-eyed, they took turns egging the Seltzer on.

  “What kind of work do you do, Pete?”

  “Motivational research. We send canvassers out to discover what the public threeks. What they’re looking for in an after-shaving mint or an automatic contaminator. We’re very selective about our clients. We only take people who come to us.”

  “What are some other products?”

  “We’ve just completed a survey for a dietetic shampoo, and are now helping launch a reversible mayonnaise.”

  The term rolling on the floor would not exaggerate the response of the two girls. Pete Seltzer, however, seemed more aware of his date sitting silently beside him, with her arms folded on her chest.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” Tillie answered.

  “Well said. A girl who deserves every thermonsenpoos.”

  They were all presently engulfed in the general conversation, into an unfeatured role in which the Seltzer, somewhat to Tillie’s surprise, seemed perfectly content to sink. He had no interest in hogging the floor, as Gertrude’s interior decorator, Jimmy Twitchell, now did, adroitly steering the talk among matters of gossip in which he was wickedly versed.
Pete Seltzer had no wish to cut a figure, or, apparently, to be the life of the party. He had no opinions about the human scene. He was more interested in personal relations, as Tillie concluded from the steadily solidifying pressure of his elbow against hers. Even the fractured girls took a brisker part in the political debate by which the initiative was at last wrested from Jimmy Twitchell.

  “What do you think about the present administration?” Tillie at last asked Pete Seltzer, point-blank.

  “I think they’re doing their best to bolster the economy and reassure the country by fiduciating the morsnorfles without negromifying the status quo.”

  Either Olympian detachment or abysmal ignorance was on exhibit here, it was too early to tell which. A zealous member of the Americans for Democratic Action had come armed with a petition, which Tillie favored but refused to sign here because bringing it to a party had been rude, but to which the Seltzer had courteously affixed his signature without reading the contents. “Do you always keep your arms folded?” he asked as he reached past her for her empty glass, in order to refill it. She bristled, then sensed that no stricture was intended: he grinned at her in a sort of loose, lupine way, at the same time flicking blue eyes across her person. He didn’t expect an answer, but, plucking up his glass along with hers, rose and headed for the bar. It was then she saw that he was lame.

  By the time he returned, worming and sidling eccentrically through the steaming congestion, the discussion had shifted to the beatniks, as they were then called.

  “What do you think of them?” Tillie catechized.

  “I don’t know any.” He leaned toward her with an easy familiarity, as though he felt he had known her for years, and with the slipshod grin reported out of the side of his mouth an encounter at the bar with Jimmy Twitchell. Jimmy was being terribly acid about the political pugilist who had brung the petition, not for that reason, but for wrenching the floor from Jimmy precisely when he was going so well about the London season. The A.D.A. organizer’s grasp of the international scene was by no means all he thought. “He doesn’t even know who’s at Cannes this year,” Jimmy had said.

  “That rich?” Pete said, poking her with his elbow.

  “Who’s our ambassador to France?” Tillie tersely asked, persevering in her quiz. She had a right to know precisely what she had been paired off with.

  “Wait, that’s not all,” said Sneaky Pete, his duckbill nose seeming to broaden with his smile. “He not only did this place, you understand,” rolling an eye along the dapper walls, “he’s a damn good dress designer too, one of the best. So he’s a two-time loser. But—this’ll kill you—he sniffed and said, ‘What’s that cologne you’re wearing?’ To me. And I said, ‘Only some shaving lotion I picked up in a drugstore, and I’m not wearing it, for Christ’s sakes, I’ve just got it on!’ We don’t hit it off at all well,” he concluded rather smugly.

  Tillie of course wondered whether any of her questions had been in the least answered by this certainly very slippery character; but another mystery soon supplanted that: how, since he had not asked, had he known she drank Scotch, and that she took water instead of soda, and how much? Had he gulped off her dregs on the way to see? These wonders yielded to others still. Toward midnight he leaned in her direction again and said: “Shall we go?”

  “I have a car. Thanks just the same though.”

  “But I don’t.”

  Bygone ambitions to be an actress had caused Tillie Shilepsky to practice in private the double take, the almost imperceptible head twitch of which only the most skilled craftsmen are capable in its refined form. The art lies in not being too obvious—otherwise it is just mugging. The emotion is almost telegraphed rather than registered. She did such a take now, apparently quite successfully, for the Seltzer himself gave no sign that he had noticed anything. He was gathering himself up to go. “I’m your escort after all,” he said.

  “You mean you want me to drop you.”

  “No, no. I’ll take you home. I’m sure I can get a cab from there.”

  The term unmitigated gall sprang to mind as she rose in response to his example, and said her goodbyes with him. She felt Gertrude’s speculative smile follow their departure, like something burning a hole in the back of her coat. Playing God was not the healthiest of signs in a woman; a regulatory interest in other people’s lives is never far from the urge to meddle in them, nor that ever wholly divorced from the taste for disaster. It was no accident that the most zealous matchmaker Tillie knew, namely Gertrude Wilson, was also the worst gossip. She’s talking to Jimmy Twitchell about us right now, Tillie thought as she reached the dark October street.

  “Turn the clocks back tonight,” said Pete, clumping alongside her toward the parked Chevrolet. “Giving us all an extra hour of insomnia.”

  “That’s right.”

  He saw her settled behind the wheel, then hopped briskly around to the other side, as though afraid she might spurt off without him. Soon they were tooling along toward her place. “You needn’t have troubled,” she said, sensing the irony to be wasted. She thought she saw a way of turning her martyrdom to account, though.

  Like many another woman, Tillie had been trying for years to learn Gertrude’s age. She now felt that putting up with Gertrude’s romantic selection in such stout fashion earned her the right to any information he might have on the score. So after a few circling preliminaries intended to be innocuous, such as how long the Seltzer had known her, etc., she asked negligently, “Have you any idea how old Gertrude is?” He threw out his hands with a comic grunt indicating the universal hopelessness of such a quest. “I don’t even think Burt knows,” he said, meaning Gertrude’s husband.

  He spoke with a vague mumble so nearly indistinguishable, almost like some more double talk, that it was half a block before Tillie had deciphered it. Meanwhile he mumbled some more in the same fashion, so that she finally turned to see what the matter was. She thought at first he had a cigarette in his mouth, but closer scrutiny revealed a sickroom thermometer to be jutting upward out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Aren’t you well?”

  “I woke up this morning with a touch of something,” he said, removing it. “Headachy, and a kind of upset in the propinquity.” She asked him drily whether he realized that was an actual word with a specific meaning, at the same time glancing out her window to make it clear that she had little or no interest in the reply. “But I was determined to keep this date,” he said. “Something told me.” He tried to read the thermometer in the fitful light from streetlamps they were passing at increasing speeds, turning it this way and that. Finally he held it down in the glow of the dash. “No fever. I can come in.”

  Then all her efforts to discourage him were nothing more than the time-honored technique for hooking a husband. Indifference, playing hard to get, all that business, were devices to which she had certainly never hitherto stooped, but they apparently paid off. For in the short walk from the garage to her place he hobbled adhesively along beside her, sometimes slipping a bit into her wake. One leg was just a tiny bit shorter than the other, was the thing, and Pete Seltzer amused her now by showing how he would have looked normal by walking with the good one in the gutter. That evened off the difference. Her heart went out to him. (“He doesn’t ask for sympathy”) then was abruptly recalled, like a Yo-Yo on a string (“That’s how he gets it”). He sauntered along in this fashion for a good part of the block, till an approaching car sent him back to her side on the sidewalk. There he continued to patter along like a stray dog that had decided to adopt her.

  Waving a fresh highball, his free arm along the back of an otherwise unoccupied sofa, Tillie watching from an opposing chair, he talked about himself, his past, his family, slaking what would be a natural thirst for all the poop obtainable on a newcomer. His father had been a spiffy gink, enhancing a reputation as a man about town, rather than otherwise, by a succession of business failures. One had been a public gymnasium, or health club, from which a member was h
urried with a heart attack a week after the Grand Opening, following a workout on the parallel bars. The stricken man’s family had sued, not successfully but with a publicity that put an end to the health club.

  “Where is Seltzer père now?”

  “Who?”

  “Your father. Is he still alive?”

  “Practically. He’s in a nursing home not far from here. I visit him every Saturday evening. This time I think I’ll go in the afternoon because I’ve got tickets to a dance that night. Would you like to go? It’s a benefit for my father’s burial society.”

  “I think I’m busy then.”

  “The customer eventually died.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  He was a surprisingly good dancer. His walking gait suggested the eccentric principle of the camshaft, with its regularly irregular rhythm. Dancing utilized that much more the motive strength inherent in it, as of something thrown into higher gear. He pumped them both across the floor with bursts of sure mechanical power. Tillie had trouble keeping up with him, as did the orchestra, which tended to lag a beat or two behind the pace he set. She was grateful for the intermissions, though the crowds were so dense there was no place to sit and they stood facing one another beside potted palms. It was a huge ballroom hung with a single colossal chandelier heavy with menacing reminders of The Phantom of the Opera. The Something-or-other room of a local hotel. They drew on cigarettes, ignited, as it happily developed, from a silver lighter Pete Seltzer carried, and not by a kitchen match struck on the thumbnail, much less swiped across the seat of the pants. He wore a rented tuxedo which he said he was going to sublet to a friend of the same shape and size who needed it the following night for a shindig being thrown here by the Ukrainian Sick Benefit Society. He shook his head with an expressionless snort, whether deploring man’s afflicted condition, or his venality in subcontracting suits of clothing not his own, was not made clear. He critically studied the cigarette given him with the remark that he preferred cigars, as did his father, but that they had for some time been unable to obtain the clear Havanas which were all they liked. He seemed puzzled by this difficulty. Tillie therefore now said, gazing at him above folded arms: