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

by De Vries, Peter

  He rose and began slowly to pace the floor in those meowing shoes.

  “Abroad once a year, and between times little side trips to like Lake Louise or Sea Island, always eating at least as well as at home, because flanking my cookbooks is a shelf of eating guides, beginning with the Michelin.”

  “Pete called them Belly Baedekers.”

  “Please! Not while I’m proposing. That dreadful four-letter word. Where were we? Travel. The main thing is that, wherever we’ve been, we’ll always be glad to get back, whether it’s our little nest out here or the apartment in town. In either place you’ll find everything a woman can reasonably expect in this world. Food, clothing, shelter, amusement, friends, parties—and a husband to see you through the disillusionments of marriage. Oh, there’s your mother. I knew there was something else to dispose of. I met her only once, but I felt instantly I’d known her a lifetime,” Jimmy said, sitting down again. “She seems all right of her kind, but as you know, she’s on her way to becoming one of those little old ladies who are taken to Hamlet and then say that it’s all quotations. And she’d vote for Ronald Reagan for President because anyone who had both legs amputated, as he did in that old movie they keep reshowing, and then went on to become Governor of California deserves our admiration. No, she’ll have to go, along with that block-front chest-on-chest you have in your alcove. Darling, how could you? You see how you need me. Well, I guess that about wraps it up.”

  This time he rose to go.

  “Done and done. Goodbye for the present then. Now I must go and prattle about us.”

  “Couldn’t we make it a secret for the time being?”

  “Of course. Else what would there be to prattle about?” He stood in the doorway with a finger upraised. “But don’t you breathe a word. One busybody in the family is enough.”

  For a long time after Jimmy had gone, Tillie sat with her heels on the chair, hugging her knees, her cheek reclining on them. She could already hear Gertrude explaining to her “faction” the nature and frequency of such marriages. “Men of that sort are notorious for liking women who are, oh, not dowdy, I won’t say that, but not feminine smashers who pose a threat to their anti-women concept.” Tillie wanted to cut her throat. So that was the set in whose league she did not bat! How cannily Jimmy had stated her need for protection against them; how persuasively put the case for his ability to get her in. She saw herself holding a teacup on the society page of the Times, snugly incorporated into a committee planning a fashion show for which he had designed something or which he would emcee. What an adroit chatterbox he was in the limelight. She would be dressed in anything but the tweeds that made her the sort of striding-on-the-moors type to which such men theoretically gravitated. So her only defense against gossip of the sort her marriage to Jimmy Twitchell would arouse was to marry him. Very interesting. Life was endlessly amazing … But could he really succeed in making her chic? She had changed no spots on the leopard she’d married. Maybe Jimmy would have better luck …

  Tillie lay down for her afternoon nap, stretching out with a sigh. Not that she could sleep, or even remotely wished to. She just wanted to lie there and think about her fortune with no immediate regard for whether it was good or bad. That she had the option of an answer was the pleasure in which for the moment she luxuriated. She did not think; she merely lay afloat in a sea of vague considerations among which there was no hurry to choose, lapped by pros and cons themselves in no urgent need of sorting out or evaluation. Their contradictions themselves constituted the repose in which her tired mind drifted. Even the fatigue was a kind of volitionless suspension. She had arrived at the eye of her storm, and the inertia was pleasant. The glow in which she lay was not unsuffused with the sense of flattery normally adhering to any proposal. A line of Eliot’s bobbed into her mind. “Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.” She bet Jimmy couldn’t place that.

  There was a rap on the door and the nurse again thrust her head in.

  “There’s a telephone call for you, Mrs. Seltzer. You can take it in the lobby booth.”

  Tillie was dressed, but she drew on a wrapper anyway before going down. She descended the stairs like someone somnambulating, and in that mood sat in the booth for a moment before picking up the receiver. When she did, it was with the same hazy deliberation.

  “Hello.”

  “’Tis I. Well, you don’t look as bad as I expected.”

  It was Pete, though it took her a moment to recognize his voice.

  “I hear they’ve locked you up with all the Aunt Sukeys.”

  “Hello, Pete. How are you?”

  “All right. Whuh hoppened?”

  “Oh, not now. I don’t even know for sure. Keeping busy?”

  “Oh, sure. We’re test-marketing an odorless cologne. Hey, wake up. Remember the end products we used to make up? How did we miss that one?”

  “That’s a good one. High time somebody developed it, too. How are things there?”

  “Oh, you know New York this time of year. Crawling with Americans. But look, why the hell didn’t you get in touch with a man? I had to find out through some friends in the C.I.A.”

  She suddenly realized something about Pete just then. It struck her all of a heap. You tried for years to put your finger on what was “wrong” with him, what his “faults” or “flaws” were. Now it came to her. He had no faults at all. He was just hopeless. Of how many people could you say that, and then go on to add, at least to yourself, that that was why you had married them? Was, indeed, what you “saw” in them.

  Her spirits began to rise. In fact, she thought she might be going to cry. But she smiled to herself as she said:

  “What does C.I.A. mean, Pete?” She put the question to him in the old teasing, catechism manner he had never resented, quizzing him on current events. “What do the initials stand for?”

  There was a blank silence at the other end, fully conveying his bafflement.

  “I’ll be damned. I don’t know. Something Intelligence, obviously. What is it?”

  “Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “What would I do without you? Which brings me to …” He cleared his throat, clearly wretched in the way he was when forced to something personal, or sentimental—or confronted with the crisis of having to call Mrs. Shilepsky something. How long ago that all seemed now! A lifetime ago.

  “Look, this separation isn’t working out,” he said, weaseling out of the sentimentality again. “People sometimes can’t make a go of them either, you know. And all this expense. I can’t pay your bills there on top of everything else. It’s no good. Why don’t we sell the house in the country and move back into the city?”

  “We don’t own it.”

  “There’s that. I was just using the cliché of the moment—people are doing it in droves now. I don’t like this pad. I know of a bigger one for not much more money. In that new west side neighborhood they’re redeveloping.”

  “Is it protected by the Mafia?”

  “What?”

  “That old joke you used to have about that flat where you first seduced me. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “I can tell you if you’re interested. And I’ve still got it.”

  “You always were lubricious, Pete.”

  “You don’t have to flatter me. But I’m sick of this—this—whatever it is,” he brought out in a flustered rush. “My plumber tells me that pursuit of women is flight from woman.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “How the hell do I know? Call me Alfie, but you find it isn’t satisfying, these one-night stands at the Everlasting Arms. I’ve come to realize that when you reach a certain poosenstock things are apt to get a little ribbiquacky.”

  “I know just what you mean.”

  “And you haven’t heard the best part. I’ve got a job lined up for you. I’ve got spies in the—Christ, I can’t remember the name of this either, but it’s got something to do with the state welfare department. Fred Crando
n works in it and he’s got charge of some section of it. You’d be a case worker, investigating families with problems, broken homes and stuff. Didn’t you take a lot of sociology in college? Don’t tell me I flapped my lip too soon.”

  “Some. In case I didn’t knock them dead on Broadway. Look, are you doing all this because you feel sorry for me?”

  “Yes, and myself too. Twinkletoes called me into his office the other day and laid it on the line that I can’t go any higher in the firm, though I can bank on what I’ve got. So we can use a second income. There couldn’t be a better time for things to get shambly for both of us. So look. Why don’t I come out tomorrow to see you? How’s that, me proud beauty?”

  “This is all great, Pete, and I’d damn well like to try again. But there’s one snag. I promised Jimmy Twitchell I’d marry him.”

  “Is that what you’re in for? Why did you go and do that?”

  “He brought me a box of candy. Nobody’s ever done that before. It’s five pounds.”

  “I’ll bring you ten, if you can let me have five bucks till Saturday. So I’ll pick you up at the foolish farm then around seven. I’ve got a new secondhand car. A Ford that’s as good as new except for some fluckage in the rebrifuge or something. Will they let you out?”

  “I think. I’ll see you then. And skip the candy. I’d rather the money went for a good bottle of wine.”

  “Right. And keep your chin up. We all have to do that, especially when we begin to get two. That’s life. And so in conclusion, I say to you what I have always said. When the consofrinkles seem at their greemest, that’s the time to stermify your happaphoids. And if you do this with faith, then all will still be ragasocky. And if you think I’m lying, you can go and look it up for yourself.”

  “I believe every word of it.”

  She had planned to cry, but now she didn’t. Her tears would keep. She felt the same exhausted calm, but, beneath its surface, a hint of new excitements brewing, as of slowly heaving seas. She was needed. Here it was again, the eternal second chance. She suddenly thought, from left field, “Redemption Center,” and laughed aloud, a little unstably. It was a family joke. That was what the Green Stamp place past which the three of them had so often driven called itself, and they would laugh as they went by, imagining a file of white-robed souls turning themselves in for salvation and the life everlasting.

  “So you see I’m with you still,” she said, nearly aloud as she left the telephone booth. “Always thinking about you no matter what else I may seem to be doing at the time. I’ll walk the streets of the city with my raving heart, dreaming of my demolished faun. But I’ll be on my way to work, the day dedicated to you. This life too, whatever I can still make of it. Oh, my brave, bright, still seedless boy.”

  Perhaps, once over the first grief, you could come to share the memory. “Hey, Pete, how’s this? Haircuts while you wait. Pete?” She could see him look up from his homework to call over to his idol. She thought of all that as she slowly mounted the stairs to her room, at the same time wondering what she had to wear tomorrow night. She was determined it would be a gay evening. There would be problems to brace herself for, but they would keep too.

  She paused, her hand on the rail, to smile at another particular memory. Pete had once said she must excuse him from listening to any more Shostakovitch, as he always laughed in the wrong places. What she was saying, she supposed, was: “Thank God I’ve got Pete Seltzer to see me through the disillusionments of marriage.”

  About the Author

  Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born in Chicago to Dutch immigrant parents. His father wanted him to join the clergy, but after attending Calvin College and Northwestern University, De Vries found work as a vending-machine operator, a toffee-apple salesman, a radio actor, and an editor at Poetry magazine. His friend and mentor James Thurber brought him to the attention of the New Yorker, and in 1944 De Vries moved to New York to become a regular staff contributor to the magazine, where he worked for the next forty years.

  A prolific author of novels, short stories, parodies, poetry, and essays, he published twenty-seven books during his lifetime and was heralded by Kingsley Amis as the “funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” De Vries was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, taking his place alongside Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and S. J. Perelman as one of the nation’s greatest wits.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1968 by Peter De Vries

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-6972-7

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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