Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  By the fifth day, his shirtsleeves were stained with butter and his arms with scratches. And an unsettling thought had dawned on Jim. He had booked a flight home to visit his mother. He was leaving in less than a week.

  Whenever he was away, Jim would get Dave’s kids, Stephanie or Sam—or sometimes Kenny Wong—to take care of Molly. But he didn’t feel right subjecting them to the new routine. He needed to find someone who could wrestle a sick cat.

  He got Gwen’s name from the vet. Gwen was a part-time veterinarian assistant who did cat-sitting on the side.

  “She’s great with all animals, but she’s passionate about cats,” said the receptionist.

  Gwen arrived at his door a few evenings later. She came to meet Molly and receive her instructions. She didn’t look to Jim like the sort of woman who was passionate about anything. She was wearing a tired wool toque and a dull blue parka with appliquéd penguins marching around the hem.

  She appeared to be in her early forties, plump and earnest-looking with a broad forehead and a small mouth. The only remarkable thing about her was her shock of orange hair. As he took Gwen’s coat and hat, Jim stared at her hair, wondering if it could possibly be her natural colour.

  “So,” said Gwen as she kicked off her boots, “what’s Molly’s routine?”

  Jim stared at her blankly. “Routine?”

  “Her day,” said Gwen impatiently. “What does she like to do?”

  “What does she like to do?” Jim realized that he was repeating everything Gwen said.

  “She’s a cat,” said Jim.

  As if that explained everything.

  It didn’t seem to explain everything to Gwen. Gwen was staring at him expectantly.

  Jim tried again. “She’s a twenty-year-old cat. She sleeps. She eats. If I’m lucky, she uses her litter box.”

  “What about exercise?” said Gwen, undaunted. “What do you do about exercise?”

  “Well, I go to the gym,” said Jim.

  Gwen was glaring at him.

  “Okay, fine. I used to,” said Jim defensively.

  “I was asking about Molly,” said Gwen.

  “Sometimes,” said Jim apologetically, “she goes outside.”

  Gwen looked horrified. Gwen looked as if Jim had just said that he used the cat for scientific experiments.

  “She goes outside?” said Gwen. “Don’t you know that the average life expectancy of an outdoor cat is two years?”

  “She’s twenty,” said Jim.

  Gwen wasn’t listening. She was waving her hands about as if she were swatting at flies. “There are predators,” she said. “There is disease. Not to mention cars.”

  Jim took a step backward.

  “But she’s twenty.”

  It was all Jim could think of saying. Life expectancy seemed a moot point at this stage.

  “She’s been very lucky,” said Gwen. “She could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

  Twenty cat years are about the equivalent of ninety-five human years.

  By the time anyone reaches ninety-five, thought Jim, being run over by a bus might be better than the alternatives. He glanced at Gwen and decided not to voice the thought. He offered her a chair instead.

  “I’d rather meet Molly,” said Gwen.

  Molly must have sensed that she was wanted. It took Jim half an hour to find her. When he dragged her from under his bed and held her out to Gwen, Molly was covered in dust bunnies.

  “Poor baby,” cooed Gwen, taking Molly from Jim’s arms.

  Gwen spent half an hour with Molly that night. She made it abundantly clear that she felt Molly was being taken for granted.

  “Understimulated,” she said.

  At the door, pulling her toque down low over her orange hair, her expression toward Jim softened slightly. “You know, Jim,” she said quietly, “cats are people too.”

  “Well … actually …” Jim began. The softness disappeared from Gwen’s face like butter on a cat’s tongue.

  For the second time, Jim decided not to finish his thought.

  Instead, as Gwen headed down the front steps, he said, “Thanks for coming.”

  Jim got the call at his mother’s an hour and a half after he arrived in Nova Scotia. “I thought you’d want an update,” said Gwen.

  Jim had hardly been away from his house longer than he might be on any average day. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder about Molly.

  “She seems relatively perky,” said Gwen, “but I think she misses you.”

  “Oh,” said Jim. It was all he could think of saying.

  “I do hope that woman is calling from her own house,” said his mother when he got off the phone ten minutes later. “She’s not calling long-distance on your phone, is she?”

  Gwen called every day Jim was away. At the end of the week Jim knew more about the state of his geriatric cat than he would have if he’d been at home. He knew how much water she’d consumed. He knew if and when she’d used the litter box.

  He knew how long she’d played with her new fur mouse (not long), and how long she’d been sleeping (hours).

  Jim couldn’t believe how Gwen went on. But if he were being honest, he’d admit that he was enjoying the calls. After a couple of days, Jim and his mother had reverted to the relationship they’d had when Jim was a teenager—when Irene focused on the myriad ways Jim could improve himself.

  “You know what would help you out?” Irene asked three days into his visit. “A nice pair of slacks. I think we should go get you a nice pair of slacks.”

  Jim responded the same way he always responded to her helpful suggestions—with sulky silence.

  That afternoon, Irene plunked a small box on the kitchen table. “I bought you some green tea,” she said. “Betty says it helps with weight loss. I imagine you’ve already tried everything else.”

  A few days after that, she got to the nitty-gritty.

  “You know where you could meet some nice ladies?” she said. “The bingo. I meet the nicest ladies at the bingo.”

  By contrast, Gwen’s suggestions about Molly, and she had more than a few, didn’t seem so bad.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of making a few changes,” said Gwen cryptically on Jim’s last day away. Jim didn’t ask her what the changes were.

  When Jim got back home, Molly was standing expectantly at the front door. When the cat saw it was him, her tail dropped and she turned away, clearly disappointed.

  “Hey,” said Jim, following the cat down the hallway.

  It wasn’t that he’d expected a warm welcome. Usually when he came home Jim found Molly curled up on the couch. Usually, if she gave him any response at all, she lifted her head with an air of bored indifference. But she had been standing at the door, and it bugged Jim that she’d obviously been expecting someone else.

  “Hey,” he said again.

  In the kitchen, Jim found a two-page typed memo taped to the fridge. Gwen had logged all the medication and food Molly had consumed each day.

  She had switched Molly to a more expensive cat food. “The feline geriatric digestive system requires some dietary accommodation,” she had written.

  She’d brought a sheepskin sleeping mat and introduced organic catnip. Jim had to admit that Molly looked better for all the changes. Her coat had a shine, her fur brighter—so orange, in fact, that it reminded him of Gwen’s hair.

  It was two nights after Jim got home that Molly had her seizure. Jim had opened a beer and was about to sit down to a bowl of chili when Molly got up suddenly from the sofa, stumbled over to a corner of the living room, and began to pant. Her sides were shuddering, her small mouth was open, and her eyes looked glassy and strange. When Jim put his hand on her back, she growled softly. Jim felt a mix of panic and dread wash over him.

  He watched the cat shaking and heaving in the corner for a few more seconds and then dashed to the phone. “Gwen,” he said when she answered, “something’s wrong with Molly.”

  By the time Gwen got over to Jim’s pl
ace, Molly had settled. She was still in the corner, but she was lying down. Her breathing was laboured, but her eyes had cleared. Gwen crouched down and put her hand out.

  Before long, Molly was sitting on Gwen’s lap. Gwen was stroking her ears and whispering to Molly, their two orange heads close, as if they were sharing a secret. Molly began to purr. Then suddenly, with a flick of her tail, she leapt down and headed into the kitchen to her bowl. Gwen sat alone on the couch, her hands in her lap, looking thoughtful.

  “You might want to take her to the vet for another checkup,” said Gwen. “But there probably isn’t much he can do.”

  Jim nodded.

  “You know,” Gwen said kindly, “twenty years is pretty remarkable. She’s not going to last forever.”

  “Yeah,” said Jim, “I know.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Gwen said, “That sure smells good.”

  Jim offered her a bowl of chili. It seemed the polite thing to do.

  So Gwen and Jim sat at his kitchen table and ate together. After a few mouthfuls, Gwen put her spoon down.

  “I think what you just did was terrific,” she said.

  “What?” said Jim.

  “Spending a week with your mother,” Gwen replied.

  “Oh,” said Jim, a little taken aback.

  “Looking after cats,” said Gwen, “even sick cats, is easy. Looking after parents, that’s hard.”

  They were both quiet for a few minutes, and then the conversation began again. Gwen told Jim about her divorce. And Jim told Gwen about Brenda.

  “My neighbour Dave’s cousin,” he explained. “She drives a taxi in Cape Breton. She hooked up with a mechanic from Sydney last spring, so that was that.”

  Gwen nodded sympathetically.

  “It never would have worked out,” Jim added. “She hated cats.”

  They both looked at each other awkwardly. Then it dawned on Jim that he didn’t know if Gwen had cats.

  “I had two,” said Gwen. “But I just have one right now.”

  “How come you don’t have more?” asked Jim.

  “Oh,” laughed Gwen, “I can’t have more than two cats at a time. If I had more than two I’d be one of those crazy cat ladies with bright orange hair, wouldn’t I?”

  After Gwen left, Molly came up to Jim as he stood at the sink, washing the dishes. She purred around his ankles until he bent down and scratched her behind the ears. She looked … smug. Like a cat that had swallowed a canary.

  “You big fake,” said Jim.

  In the days and weeks that followed Molly’s seizure, there seemed to be plenty of reasons for Jim to call Gwen. He called to tell her about Molly’s vet appointment, and about how much she enjoyed her new sleeping mat. He called to laugh about his mother’s latest advice, and eventually he called to invite her for another bowl of chili.

  As the year unfolds, Gwen and Jim will see more of each other. Most of the time they’ll hang out at Jim’s with Molly. Sometimes they’ll leave her sitting in the living-room window while they take an evening stroll through the neighbourhood. Despite all the time they’ll spend together, despite his mother’s New Year’s request, Jim won’t be thinking of marriage any time soon. Yet when spring arrives, Jim will realize that he and Molly are approaching the twenty-first anniversary of their meeting in the alley. Twenty-one years with someone is no small accomplishment. Even if that someone is a cat.

  And one day in May, as the Virginia creeper greens the garage walls along the alley, Jim will find himself thinking that maybe he is ready to let another person into his life. He would never admit it to anyone but Gwen, but the thought has occurred to Jim that this is what Molly was trying to tell him. And as he and Molly shed their winter coats and seek out sunbeams in the backyard, Jim will stare at Molly and see, not an old tabby in her last days, but the unpredictability of life itself. You befriend a hungry cat. Who wouldn’t do that? And twenty-one years later your life is totally different. Twenty-one years later you find yourself thinking about something you never would have dreamed.

  SPRING AT UNIVERSITY

  Dave’s daughter, Stephanie, spent the first three weeks of spring hovering over her laptop, her heart fluttering, waiting for chilly news.

  It came, finally, on a Monday morning. And when it did, it didn’t come on her computer. It came the way everything comes these days: by text message. Four short words from her friend Scott.

  “O’Neill’s grades are posted.”

  They should have been posted weeks ago.

  Steph stared at the text and sighed. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. She knew her other marks, A’s and B’s all of them. And she had never, not once, failed a course.

  How bad could it be?

  Statistics.

  That’s how bad it could be.

  What had she been thinking?

  Well, she knew what she’d been thinking. She’d been thinking that if she wanted to do some sort of post-grad thing, a stats course would look good on her transcript.

  What didn’t make sense was that she’d opted for the advanced class, the section designed for engineers and science majors. What sort of misdirected ambition had led her there?

  She glanced at her phone.

  She had failed statistics. She was pretty certain of that.

  Her little spasm of grad-school hubris had probably ruined her chances for grad-school admission.

  She stood up, walked across the kitchen, picked up the kettle, and carried it to the sink.

  She should have dropped the course. She should have dropped it after the first class.

  The warning signs had been as plain as day. Twelve students in a lecture hall that seated three hundred.

  Stephanie told herself that the class was empty because the material was famously complicated. She told herself that she was up to the challenge and that the challenge would be good for her.

  She filled the kettle and carried it back to the stove. She opened the cupboard beside the sink and removed a blue and yellow cardboard box the size of a pound of butter. Herbal tea. Harmony Comfort Tension Tamer.

  She slammed it down on the counter.

  In the initial blush of enthusiasm, she’d found the class challenging and fun. Dispersions and tendencies, regressions and boxplots. Unlike everything else she studied, there were rules. All you had to do was apply the rules.

  “Statistics,” she told her boyfriend, Tommy, early in the term, “is just like Sudoku. I like statistics.”

  And then. And then.

  A week later.

  Maybe two.

  “This is impossible,” she said. “I hate statistics.”

  And then there was Professor O’Neill.

  “Loony,” said Stephanie. “Certifiably bonkers.”

  He brought his cat to class.

  The cat was a ridiculously overweight Cyprus that Professor O’Neill would lug around under his arm like a textbook. He’d wander into class, drop the cat on an empty desk near the front, and there it would lie, twitching its tail like a metronome.

  Then Professor O’Neill would begin erasing the blackboard.

  “They all do that,” said Tommy. “It’s like a warm-up exercise. Think of it as academic calisthenics.”

  Sure. Except there was no blackboard to erase. There was a smart board.

  “Same thing,” said Tommy.

  “No,” said Stephanie. “Not the same thing. You’re not listening to me.”

  Professor O’Neill didn’t go near the smart board. Professor O’Neill hated the smart board. Professor O’Neill used the blackboard that hovered just behind his lectern, unseen by anyone else but him.

  “An imaginary blackboard?” said Tommy, perking up.

  “Yes,” said Stephanie, waving her hand in the air as if she were hailing a cab.

  “And after he cleans it, he writes on it.”

  “With imaginary chalk?” asked Tommy, hopefully.

  Tommy was leaning forward. He was listening intensely. He’d never
shown this much interest in any of her courses.

  “Sometimes,” said Stephanie, nodding, “after he writes something, he erases it and starts again.”

  “When he makes an imaginary mistake,” said Tommy earnestly.

  It was all so incredibly weird: the empty lecture hall, the cat, the imaginary blackboard, and, of course, the timetable.

  Monday mornings at eight. Fridays at four.

  How did you get a schedule like that?

  “You pick a fight with the registrar,” said Tommy.

  “Bingo,” said Stephanie.

  Professor O’Neill and the university registrar had, famously, been waging a feud since the 1970s.

  It began, according to legend, the September Professor O’Neill was accidentally mailed a sticker assigning him the registrar’s primo parking spot.

  Security was dispatched to Professor O’Neill’s office to explain the error, and to tell him that he shouldn’t actually park in the registrar’s spot. But Prof O’Neill continued to pull into the space every morning. He ignored the tickets and notices that began accumulating on his windshield. In fact he left them there, driving around campus with the flurry of indictments flapping in the wind.

  According to the story, the apoplectic registrar took matters into his own hands. He arrived at school before dawn one morning and pulled into the space before Professor O’Neill. When the stats prof arrived and saw what had happened, he parked in a visitor’s spot, waited until the registrar left for the day, slid his car into the disputed spot, and took the bus home.

  Professor O’Neill left his car there and got to and from work by public transportation for seven and a half months—until the dean of science retired, and a sign with the registrar’s name went up in the dean’s old spot. The registrar had conceded, but he hadn’t forgotten.

  And that’s why he scheduled O’Neill’s statistics course for the worst possible times. And why the agoraphobic O’Neill was assigned cavernous lecture halls for his handful of students.

  It was also why you had to wait until the end of May to see your marks. It was no accident that Professor O’Neill held on to them until the very last moment. The registrar’s office had to go through an annual scramble to get them out.