Another thing that irked Annabelle was that not only was Evan still living with us, but I also still kept my own open-door policy for friends to stop by whenever they wanted, day or night. Weren’t they there for me when I was pining after Annabelle not all that long ago? The life I had constructed without Annabelle had suited me well, and for all intents and purposes, I’d thrived in it. What’s more, I had been able to keep my espresso machine immaculate!
I secretly feared that maybe the whole moving-in-together thing might not have been the best idea. At the same time, I was in love with Annabelle, and it was wonderful to wake up beside her every day and hold her in my arms before she’d push me away to go get her coffee. I just had to find some way to balance all that was good about living with her with all that was troubling. And the thing that tipped the scales for the better was Annabelle’s cat Stinky. The very same one Annabelle left me to care for as a kitten when she was away doing a play in New York. Stinky was still the champion of cat cuteness, affection, and nonstop lovability. Maybe Annabelle wasn’t perfect, but Stinky was.
Late one night the three of us were in bed, all warm, cozy, and purring. I woke up thirsty and went downstairs for some water. In the darkened kitchen, I was dumbstruck by what was at Stinky’s food bowl: the ragged, knotted fluff of some strange cat crunching away at seafood Friskies. I thought I was seeing things. How did this cat even get in the house? I took a small step to get a closer look, but the black puff of ratty fur fled off in speedy terror. I searched the whole house to find it, but it had simply vanished. Was it a ghost cat? Was I losing my mind?
The next morning I told Annabelle of the spooky feline apparition, and she offhandedly disclosed that it wasn’t a phantom kitty at all, but her other cat, Esme (perhaps the worst name ever for a cat). Annabelle had two cats? Since when? And why hadn’t I ever seen her before? Annabelle told the sad tale of Esme’s socializing problem that had sent her to live most of her life inside a closet. She had thought Stinky needed a companion, but even as a kitten, Esme was just too skittish about everything to interact with anyone. Obviously, this cat has some issues. Annabelle feared that this really shy cat was even further traumatized by the move to the new house. I had always fancied myself a major cat person and I boldly predicted that I could get Esme (God, I hate that name) out of the closet and into our house proper.
After breakfast I hunted in all the house closets in search of the mysterious feline. The extensive exploration had me using flashlights, opening tins of tuna for dietary enticement, making clicking come-hither sounds as well as meowing as if it were some sort of feline sonar detection. Finally, I found her in the back of the deepest, darkest, and hardest to reach closet in the entire house. I set down a fishy can of tuna, which in Catlandia is as enticing as foie gras to gourmets and shooting speedballs to junkies. Yet all it did was back her up even deeper. I cooed at her and made sure she knew I meant her no harm. This just led her to push up farther against the back wall as if she were trying to thrust herself through to the other side. Then I reached my hand out to gently give her a loving, reassuring pet. Although she neither hissed nor scratched at me, when the tip of my outstretched finger touched her outermost wisp of fur, she somehow, contradicting many established rules of physics, managed to diminish herself so compactly in the far corner that she virtually disappeared. At that instant she let out a choked, garbled, sickening meow that I swear was additionally accompanied by a copious (for a cat) amount of drool. Annabelle’s other kitty was not just “shy” and “traumatized,” she was a drooling, freaked-out, significantly emotionally disturbed mess of a mammal. She was hopelessly afraid of any form of contact or interaction—human, cat, or otherwise—hence I rechristened Esme “Fraidy Cat.” The nickname stuck like feathers on hot tar from that moment forth.
Annabelle agreed that Fraidy was perhaps the most pathetic pet ever, but felt bad for her and hoped that someday she might miraculously recover her wits and start behaving more like a normal cat and not one who needed a kitty straitjacket. All we could do in the meantime was pray she didn’t starve herself to death in the closet, leaving us to fish out her stiff, furry corpse.
Living with Annabelle, I was quickly learning, was a Tale of Two Kitties. Sure, she could be confident, well groomed, and extremely charming, like Stinky. Yet she could also be neurotic, insecure, and tentatively fearful, like Fraidy Cat. I would have to find a way to effectively contend with Annabelle’s Fraidy if I was to have a shot at getting to her Stinky.
Sure, we had lots of laughs and morning sex, but at the same time, Annabelle was calling me at work every hour on the hour with another complaint from the home front and how it was making her miserable and impossible for her to concentrate on her work. It could be said of our budding communal experience: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
She Says
After becoming the latest participant in Casa Kahn’s open immigration experiment, I began to notice aspects of Jeff’s behavior that gave me pause too. A Tale of Two Kitties? Please! It was a Comedy of Errors over at Kahn House.
In truth, things like decorating aren’t that important to me; it wasn’t as if I insisted that we adopt the oppressively shabby-chic interior decor that everyone in Los Angeles was slouching around in at the time. Yes, Jeff had some furniture that didn’t require assembly, but what was on his walls I can only describe as “early dorm room.” I found it startling that he would consider a poster of a band to be living room worthy. What would be next? Would our wedding reception be a kegger? Jeff suspected that he was being asked to hang a portrait of me painted by my ex-husband, that I was the nude woman with the well-formed posterior in the large canvas, but anyone who has ever seen me naked knows that my behind never looked as good as the one in the painting. Ultimately, Jeff can’t resist a great ass, so the canvas went up.
I did made a mistake in insisting that we purchase our armoire. What seemed attractive in the store looks so different out of its retail environment, so clunky, so like something we could go over Niagara Falls in together. It still occupies center stage in our living room: a squat barrel-shaped, brightly painted albatross that holds our big old TV. But given its coffinlike shape, and the state of our retirement accounts, it’s possible that when the time comes, Jeff and I could be buried in the fucking thing.
These things were all just small potatoes, really, because I was being confronted with the fact that I had put enormous pressure on our cohabitation by insisting that we were going to get married. Having been divorced once, I didn’t want to make a mistake a second time, so I began to look at every aspect and little habit of Jeff’s through the lens of forever. Is this the penis I want to wake up to forever? Will I love his smell forever? How did I not notice that ear hair? How much more of that is in our future? How about that funny little sound he makes when he swallows? Is he sneezing to get my attention? I mean how can a sneeze be so loud? Will he ever once put the toilet paper roll on the dispenser, or am I going to be doing this for the next who knows how many years? Because life expectancy has increased by ten years in our lifetime, till death do us part can loom like a freaking eternity, so it might not be a bad question to ask yourself, “Can I live with this forever?”
An example of this was something I termed the Curse of the Socks, not the Red Sox, which I quickly learned is Jeff’s favorite team, but the athletic socks. Jeff always wore socks, even during sex, but it didn’t occur to me until after I moved in that I had never really gotten a good look at his feet. Sure, we had taken some showers together, but these were “dating showers,” candlelit, romantic, watery sexual-trysts where a brief glimpse of feet might be had—not cohabitating in the cold light of day actual washing-to-get-clean showers. Now that we were living together and potentially sharing a home, forever, this struck me as troubling, maybe a little sophomoric, and moreover, what was under those socks? Webbed feet? An extra toe? Was he going to wear those tube socks forever? I went on a campaign to de-sock him. Actually, I j
ust deployed that old standby strategy, which works almost every time for almost every problem with almost every man: “No more sex unless you [fill in the blank].” In this case, insert “take your socks off.” It turns out that there was nary a web nor an excess number of toes, but what I didn’t realize was that he had been wearing socks for so many years that leg hair no longer grew under the sock encasement zone, giving his legs a surprisingly smooth surface that, unexposed to sunlight, perhaps since birth, lent his pale bare calves and feet an almost spectral appearance. It was also possible that even Jeff had forgotten what was under there, because now, sans socks, I was being grazed by toenails that were kept just a tad too long and were too hastily trimmed. “Get those suckers back on!” I demanded. Let this serve as a warning to all women who have ever looked at a potential mate like an old house and thought: good bones—he’s a fixer-upper. Some things you just need to accept as is.
Meanwhile, Jeff and I had significantly different ideas about sharing our home life. Namely, I needed large quantities of coffee and quiet to piece my personality together on a daily basis, while Jeff thrived on constant human contact. It’s not something I’m proud of. I’m cranky in the morning, mildly annoyed in the afternoon, and just plain exhausted at the end of the day. At the time, I was actressing, which, contrary to popular belief, is not at all glamorous. You’re on your feet all day trying to satisfy picky people, hoping they might become regular customers. It’s like waitressing, with moderately better lighting. Plus, what Jeff perceived of as melancholia, I preferred to characterize as contemplativeness. It’s not that I was hoping to build an actual fence around myself like some people would like to see on, say, the U.S. border with Mexico. What I had in mind for us was more like the Canadian border, where a distracted guard might check your passport but not bother to pop your trunk. I imagined this would all work itself out when we were both home at the same time because I could always take a long and restorative bath, my long-standing go-to retreat, and then regroup in our spare bedroom. However, within days of my moving in, Jeff announced that Evan would be staying on indefinitely, and faster than you could say, “But the only bathtub in the house is the one attached to the spare bedroom,” he had a new girlfriend, Heather, sharing our home as well. Suddenly I was living with three people.
Unlike Jeff, I was used to living alone. In college, my first roommate contracted a mysterious disease and had to be removed from our dorm room on a stretcher. Next roomie lasted only a few months with me before ditching school to join a bus-and-truck-traveling children’s theater troupe. My third and last roommate borrowed my clothes and makeup without asking and just plain scared me.* Ex-husband and I lived together less than a year before he moved to Chicago to attend graduate school.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Harvey, a Hobbit who was employed as the manager/caretaker of our home by the owners, who lived in San Francisco, was perpetually hanging about the place. OK, he wasn’t really a Middle Earth Tolkien character, but he was about four foot something with a furry furtive manner and was in the habit of turning up unannounced and burrowing into the house for hours at a time. On a typical day I might come downstairs in my pajamas and find Harvey in the kitchen tinkering with the plumbing or puttering around in the garage. Once I thought I saw him hunched over a pile of our firewood, whittling a sharp stick. According to Jeff, he and the Hobbit had long coexisted in peace, but as soon as I moved in, an alternating passive-aggressive streak marked all of our contact. When we’d complain about the army of ants who were conducting a military occupation of the kitchen, he would produce an obscure city ruling exempting landlords from responsibility for insects smaller than an inch, but when we’d inquire about some ordinary landlord responsibility such as, say, painting the peeling exterior of the house, he’d scowl at us and hiss and demand we do it ourselves—didn’t we have any pride in our home? Then the next day, as if nothing had happened, I’d find him downstairs doing some bidding from those precious nameless, faceless owners in “the north country.”
Meanwhile, living right next door to us was Rudmila, a stylish if faded Serbian version of a Gabor sister if the Gabors had had their blood supply replaced with liquid steel. Rudmila was glamorous, but also one tough broad. It wouldn’t have been hard to imagine that she had at one time greeted her Bosnian and Croat neighbors with a hatchet in her hands. Ironically, although she was incensed by the sound of my telephone ringing in the middle of the day, from the middle of our house we were awakened by the clickety-clack of her high heels and her piercing screams to her little yippety-yappety dogs, Precious and Honey, to do their business on her brick patio every day at four a.m. When her phone calls failed to produce results, she simply yelled at our house when she was annoyed. Then she came up with a truly brilliant strategy: she began bringing over homemade food on her complaint runs. She’d stand in the street, hurling grievances and invectives in our direction, and then leave really fattening but tempting culinary concoctions on the front doorstep: heart-stopping dishes such as an apple turnover oozing with butter lathered in heavy cream, or lamb dumplings wrapped in bacon smothered in lard gravy. Either she was going to get us evicted or have us carried out in body bags.*
Nothing she did bothered Jeff much and really, why would it? First of all, Jeff had a steady gig, so every day he would disappear into the Saab and drive across town to his well-appointed office, while I would find myself at home, making small talk with Evan and Heather, bumping into the Hobbit, or being assaulted by Rudmila’s shrieking complaints. All the while, having removed all traces of food from the kitchen, the ants were now on a Bataan Death March across our counters. By moving in with Jeff, I had become a supporting cast member in the Jeff Kahn Variety Hour, a show playing 24/7.
But as I soon discovered, Jeff has little regard for any concept of personal space. To him, my bending down to place a dish in the dishwasher seemed to be the perfect occasion to put his hand down the back of my pants and touch my ass. Tying my shoe? An invitation to slip his palm under my skirt. The guy had some sort of nudity radar. I would take my clothes off even for a second, and he’d be in front of me cheering as if he’d scored box seats at Fenway Park. I suppose the shuttling back and forth between our respective homes had mitigated this tendency, but now he was everywhere I turned. Door closed? No matter, he’d think nothing of walking into the office when I was rehearsing or writing some of the inane journal entries I was given to in my thirties. “Why do I still define myself based on what other people think of me?” “I am worth it!” “My only competition is me!” or some other positive-thinking crap I was forever trying to hypnotize myself with and that demanded my undivided attention. On the phone? Not a deterrent. Jeff would jump in my lap! Jeff also had suggestions for how everything should be done in the house. He corrected my baristing technique, assessed my bed-making skill, and commented on my admittedly massive consumption of beef, pushing me to try his assorted faux meats: tofu wedges that tasted like rubber bands soaked in liquid smoke. If I hadn’t spit them out, I’d still be chewing on them today.
I started to see Jeff as a kind of virus, multiplying and absorbing everything around it; like the Andromeda Strain, he just spread. The years of living with roommates had made it OK with Jeff for strangers to drop by, friends to move in, acquaintances to phone until one a.m.—it was as if Jeff had a sign around his neck: ALWAYS OPEN FOR BUSINESS. I have always been the diametric opposite. Even when I was ten, my mother needlepointed my sister and me little greetings for our bedroom doors. Lisa’s read COME ON IN, while my sign announced DO NOT DISTURB.
It was just not in my nature to share so much. I’ve never been a supporter of the don’t ask-don’t tell policy for the military, but in a relationship it makes sense—hence the popular phrase “too much information.” Maybe I did neglect to mention that I had a second cat that happened to live in my closet; was it really that important?
There happens to be a perfectly logical explanation for the two-cat situation. Since the
first day I acquired Stinky, she has been a flirt who sits on everyone’s lap. Long and lean, she is the feline incarnation of supermodel Naomi Campbell if she successfully completed an anger management course. Esme, on the other hand, was a cat I rescued from the streets. She came into my life with dirty matted hair, a persistent drool, and a paranoia that made her shun all society, and that’s how she remained for her entire little life. Her husky gravelly meow made her the Brenda Vaccaro of cats, with the wild wasted look of Amy Winehouse after a long night, or for that matter, Ms. Winehouse at any time of the day. I had thought Esme could become a beta companion for alpha Stinky, but Stinky lorded it over that psychotic foundling. She basically kept her prisoner in the closet—Esme came out to eat only late at night when number one cat had gone to bed. I reject Jeff’s perception that these two cats were somehow embodying my two natures. I saw rescuing the frizzy neurotic ball of drool from the streets as an act of kindness and generosity. Could I be expected to toss out a cat because she wouldn’t be my best friend? What kind of person does that? Anyway, those two cats were never seen together, so the only two kitties as far as I could see were Stinky and Jeff.
That’s right. Perhaps the most startling revelation upon moving in with him was that Jeff kept up a constant stream-of-consciousness dialogue with himself. In cat language. Some guys hum, some snore, some unconsciously tap their feet, some masturbate with alarming frequency and ferocity. Jeff meows. Jeff wasn’t just a visitor to Catlandia, he was a citizen. Maybe its president. From the first tentative meow he’d make upon rising in the morning, he’d keep it up, right until bedtime, when I’d hear little mewing sounds punctuated by staccato meeps, one for each step he climbed to our bedroom. It never ends. If you’ve ever heard that recording of cats singing “Silent Night,” and you chuckled, you know you really need to hear it only once. Any more than one time and the words cloying and grating start to form in your head, and then the phrase “OK, I get it” might escape your lips. I had never experienced anything quite like Jeff’s meowing. Even with actual cats.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 5
