Standing Room Only

by Heidi Mastrogiovanni

  And it was almost as though the cat heard her. In the moment that Lala unceremoniously grabbed the bottle from Atticus as he was in mid-sip, causing a small shower of port to splatter on Atticus’s chin and neck, the little cat turned around yet again and made a mad dash immediately into the opening of the trap. Lala and Kenny and Atticus heard the cat loudly chomping on the pungent tuna cat food that was in the trap as bait, and in the next moment they heard the trap loudly snap closed.

  The cat started howling. Lala and Kenny and Atticus jumped up from their hiding place. Kenny folded the towel over the front of the trap so that the cat would be in complete darkness. The terrified little girl was immediately silent. Atticus picked up the trap and calmly walked up the stairs to Lala’s apartment with Lala while Kenny stayed behind to monitor the two other traps that remained and were still empty.

  “It’s okay, little girl,” Atticus intoned in a soothing voice as they quietly made their way to Lala’s front door. Lala held the door open and Atticus gently put the cage down on the thick rug on a spot next to the couch.

  “Okay,” he said. He gave Lala a quick hug. “I’ll head back down to help Kenny monitor the other traps.”

  “And make out,” Lala said.

  “Definitely,” Atticus said as he closed the door behind him.

  Lala stood at the door and quietly drummed her fingers on the wood as she debated what to do with herself so that she wouldn’t run to the trap and grab the poor terrified cat right out of it so she could shower the little creature with hugs and kisses.

  I know, Lala thought. The comforting quality of carbs.

  Lala took off her shoes so she could keep the apartment as peaceful and quiet as possible so the cat could get a chance to relax. She opened the cabinet and the refrigerator with a stealth that would match an attempt to surprise an entirely unsuspecting James Bond with her superior spy skills before he engaged in edgy, contentious, incredibly hot flirtation with her that ended with the two of them in a huge canopy bed in a luxury hotel in Monte Carlo.

  Lala came back into the living room with a large bowl of cold spaghetti. She had chopped the spaghetti, with silent energy and enthusiasm, into very, very small pieces using one of those salad choppers that looked a bit like a guillotine blade with a handle on it. Lala sat on the couch and turned on the television at a very low volume.

  I should name this little girl, Lala thought. Assuming she’s a girl. It’s just so hard to tell with cats. I think we need a pan-gender name. Robin. Let’s go with Robin.

  “Robin?” Lala said in a gentle and low voice. “Have you ever watched The Young and the Restless in French? Assuming you understand French, mon petit ange?”

  Lala sat back and scooped the bitty pieces of pasta with a large spoon.

  “This is the only way to eat pasta, in my forever-less-than-humble opinion, Robin. I know some people swear by the spear and twirl with a fork and spoon method, but I don’t seem to have the manual dexterity to pull that off. Oh, okay, I remember this episode. They’re about a year behind here with the show. This is a whole months-long shit storm where Nick and Sharon are getting back together and Adam is being a total tool. Sit back and listen and learn, my little Robin.”

  Lala watched dubbed soap opera episodes and did an ongoing patter to Robin for the next two hours. She hoped that the cat would be starting to get used to her voice and to being inside. And then she got twitchy and crazy and she, against her better instincts regarding what to do with a terrified cat who might very well be entirely feral, picked the trap up off the floor and put it on the sofa next to her and lifted the towel off the front so that she could see the cat and the cat could see her. The cat was sitting near the opening of the wire trap. She looked at Lala when the towel was lifted and she let out a tiny hiss, but she didn’t move away toward the back of the trap.

  “Okay,” Lala said. “So far, so good, huh, Robin?”

  Lala turned back to the television and calmly continued to talk to the cat.

  “So, Robin. You should keep a close eye on Victor. He is not to be trusted. Personally, I have always been Team Jack. Victor never takes responsibility for his mistakes. That is something I find quite insufferable in a person.”

  Lala and Robin stayed on the couch dozing in front of the television until it started to get lighter outside. Kenny and Atticus had texted Lala several hours earlier to report that they had trapped two more cats and would be keeping them in Kenny’s apartment until they could be taken to the veterinary clinic in the morning.

  Lala had the sense that Robin was getting used to being around her, so she took another risk and moved closer to the trap. When that didn’t make the cat move away, Lala was thrilled. She put her feet up on the small coffee table and leaned against the back of the sofa, her right arm draped over the top of the trap.

  “Let’s get some rest, little pumpkin pie.”

  When Lala woke up, a not entirely soft-core porn film was playing on TV.

  “Robin, avert your eyes!” she gasped. She looked at the trap and was relieved to see that the cat was curled up against the mesh and had not moved from being quite close to her, nor had it been disturbed by the continental coupling on the screen.

  Ohh, I’ve got a kind of crazy idea, Lala thought. What time is it?

  Lala stayed on the couch until she determined the best sequence of events.

  I’ll need a cushion for the floor, she thought.

  Once again moving very slowly and quietly, Lala took a cushion from the couch to the bathroom and put it on the floor against the bathtub. On her next trip, she took her laptop in and put it on the closed toilet seat. She came back out into the living room. Robin was awake and was staring at her.

  “Okay, young missy,” Lala said. “Let’s get a little crazy. I would not be doing this if I weren’t so exhausted and if I weren’t feeling so unmoored in my life.”

  Lala lifted the trap off the couch and carried it into the bathroom. She put the trap on the floor next to the cushion and closed the door of the bathroom so she would be safely in a small space with the cat so the cat would feel secure and wouldn’t be able to wedge herself behind the stove or something else crazy that would necessitate calling a repairman. And then she let out a deep sigh and opened the door to the trap. For a moment, no one moved or breathed. And then Robin slowly came out of the trap and sniffed Lala’s knee, and Lala felt like she was having a joy heart attack as the cat calmly walked over her legs. Without standing and while moving to the minimum extent, Lala grabbed a thick bath towel off the rack and bunched it up on the floor and Robin curled up on it and feel asleep, purring loudly.

  Yeah, she thought, and that is what rescue is all about, people.

  “David needs to meet you,” Lala told the cat.

  She inched over to get the laptop, moving at a pace that would have made a snail’s travels look like it was winning the Indy 500, all in the service of not startling or upsetting Robin. Her return to the cushion on the floor with the computer proceeded at an equally somnambulistic speed. At last she was sitting next to the still-sleeping cat. She sent an e-mail to David, asking if he was available to Skype. He responded in just a few minutes to say that he was just about to go out to dinner with a few of his colleagues from school and could they Skype later today? Lala wrote back that they could and that she was looking forward to introducing him to the tame cat they had finally managed to get safely inside, to which David responded with, “Excellent! Love you!”

  Lala shut her laptop and, without thinking, put her hand on the cat to pet it.

  Ohhh, merde, she thought, but before she could pull her hand away in fear of getting it slashed by a possibly and understandably still nervous cat, Robin just snuggled against her hand and purred more loudly.

  “That is what rescue is all about, people,” Lala whispered.

  As they sat together in their new and comfortable
friendship, Lala thought about the cat Terrence had had when she met him. Mr. Joe was a devastatingly handsome grey tiger with a perfect white triangle on his nose. He was full grown when Terrence adopted him from the ASPCA in Manhattan four years before he met Lala. Mr. Joe had clearly been miffed when Lala moved in with them, but she won him over by taking charge of the task of putting his tasty wet food in a dish three times a day and putting it on the kitchen floor for him to lap up. Once Mr. Joe started associating Lala with food, he was besotted with his new mama, and Lala was equally madly in love with him. She was always carrying him around the apartment, wrapped up in her arms in a big hug, or she was reading or working with him on her lap. He started sleeping on her side of the bed, which made Terrence happy because of the harmony in their home and jealous because Mr. Joe had chosen to stop sleeping next to him.

  After eleven wonderful years, Mr. Joe developed kidney failure and had a stroke. Their vet came to their apartment to put him to sleep. Lala and Terrence were stretched out on the floor next to their beloved cat and whispered to him about how much they loved him as he passed away.

  “You and Mr. Joe would have loved each other,” she told Robin. “And you and Terrence, too.”

  But you’ll never meet them, Lala thought. I can tell David about you. I can’t tell Terrence about you. I can’t tell Terrence about anything ever again. Oy vey, this is getting way too intense for so early in the day.

  “Robin, when Terrence got sick, we were surrounded by our wonderful friends and family. And when he died, they all continued to surround me with love and care. Our friend Gary? He’s a hoot. Sometimes I kind of want to smack him because he likes to argue a point just for the sake of arguing. About two years after Terrence died, people were starting to think about maybe finding someone for me to date. I was thinking about it, too, truth be told. So Gary asks me if I would consider dating someone who wasn’t mean to animals, but didn’t love them the way I do. You know, someone who was basically indifferent to animals. I’m, like, ewwwww, Gary, no.”

  The cat woke up and stirred beneath Lala’s hand. Then she stood up, did a downward facing cat stretch on the towel, and then head-butted Lala’s laptop. Lala quickly moved the laptop to the floor and Robin quickly took over the space on Lala’s lap, where she turned around twice, kneaded Lala’s thighs, and then curled up and fell back asleep. Lala wrapped her arms around the cat and gently rocked her.

  “It’s scary,” she said, “but we promise we’ll be okay, right, sweet girl?”

  The day’s filming was going to involve scenes with Clive’s co-star, Rebecca, sobbing at a small jazz club on the Île Saint-Louis after Clive’s character cruelly rejects her attempts to win him back. As a result, Clive had a day off. He called Lala early that morning to invite her to a “sojourn of stimulation.”

  “Clive,” Lala had said during their phone call, “I really enjoy spending time with you. You are delightful. So when I say ‘yes’ to your invitation, I just want to make it clear that you shouldn’t have any expectations. I am, as you will remember, and please don’t snicker because I will have to smack you if you do, engaged-to-be-engaged.”

  “My only expectation,” Clive had responded, “is to have an intellectually and culturally stimulating day with a very smart woman.”

  “Okay, well, in my defense, I feel quite sure you intended for your invitation to be misleading when you said ‘stimulation’ without adding any qualifiers,” Lala had huffed.

  They started the day with a walking breakfast. They stopped at Clive’s favorite patisserie, which by delightful coincidence was located not far from Lala’s apartment. Clive asked how many pain au chocolat Lala wanted, and she responded, “We better get four. For me. How many are you having? Wait, if we also get croissants, which look delicious so why would we not, I can probably make do with three of each. For me. How many are you having?”

  They each clutched their white paper bags filled with treats and their small paper cups of espresso. They had decided, on quite a whim, to walk back and forth across the gorgeous bridges of the Seine until they crisscrossed their way to the Musée d’Orsay. On each bridge, they paused in the middle and gazed out over the river and the buildings along the banks. After stopping on the Pont des Arts, Clive started to walk toward the other side of the river, and Lala reached out to touch his arm to halt his retreat.

  “This is my favorite view,” she said. “Let’s stay here a bit longer?”

  They stood together and looked at the Île de la Cité in the distance and the medieval-looking Pont-Neuf, which they had crossed a few minutes earlier.

  “You are so nice,” Lala said. “I’m thinking of women I can fix you up with.” Clive gave her shoulder a quick squeeze and chuckled.

  “Lala, I’m a movie star. I do pretty well on my own. But I really appreciate the thought.”

  “You’ve never been married, have you?”

  “Not yet. I was engaged once.”

  “Right,” Lala said. “I remember reading about that. You were both very young. You went to the Royal Academy together, right?”

  “Yup. She’s with the Royal Shakespeare Company now. Which is why I can never set foot in Stratford-upon-Avon because my heart would break.”

  Lala wrapped her arm around Clive’s waist and hugged him.

  “While there is life, there is always a chance,” Lala whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Clive said. “I was awful to her. I have spent years regretting it. If I were Tara, I wouldn’t ever forgive me. Never ever.”

  “You know what the Count of Monte Cristo would tell you. Wait and—”

  “. . . hope,” Clive said.

  They leaned their heads together and looked out over one of the most romantic views of one of the most romantic cities, the city where Lala and her late husband had spent their romantic honeymoon.

  Ohh, Terrence, Lala thought. I could wait forever and still be without any hope of ever seeing you again.

  “Terrence?” Lala gasped.

  She had just walked through the main entrance of the Musée d’Orsay with Clive and had just finished announcing that the first thing she wanted them to do was make a beeline for Whistler’s Mother, when she saw a man walking not far up ahead of them who really seemed to be her late husband.

  Lala stopped walking. It took Clive a few steps to realize that she was no longer advancing with him. He turned around.

  “What’s wrong?” Clive asked. Lala ignored him and ran in the direction of the beloved ghost.

  She lost sight of him in the crowd, but then there he was again. As she got closer, she saw that he had, while he was out of her view, taken the arm of a thin, elegantly-dressed woman with gorgeous silver hair.

  Terrence? Lala thought. You’re . . . you’re cheating on me?

  Clive caught up with her and kept pace as she moved forward.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying very hard not to jump to conclusions about my late husband’s fidelity. This could all be completely innocent. OMIGOD, GÉRARD?”

  Lala had to keep reminding herself not to stare. She had to silently check in with the small part of her brain that wasn’t stunned to see if her mouth was agape, which it usually was, and she then had to snap it shut. She was able to converse, but only at the most elementary levels. Thankfully, Clive was holding court.

  “I think the best time I ever had, though, was when I was in school and I played Sweeney Todd. Such soaring lyrics. Absolute poetry.”

  “Ohh, I can just imagine you in that role! And you must have had fun on the set of Pulling Rank, non?” Marie-Laure flirted. “Such a treat to meet you and to talk about your bodyyyyyy of work with you, Clive.”

  And judging by the beguiled smile on Gérard’s face, he was equally smitten with the handsome movie star and his tales of stardom.

  “That’s one of my favorite movies,”
Gérard gushed.

  “That shoot was delightful,” Clive boomed joyfully. The man was in his element. “And if any of the pleasure we took in our work translated to the screen for you, well, then I’m glad.”

  Lala was sitting at a small table in a bistro near the Musée d’Orsay. The day’s planned visit to see the beautiful art for all four of the people sitting at the table had been cut quite short when Lala caught the attention of her former boss and heart-throbbing crush by braying his name across the first floor of the museum.

  Gérard had turned around, had seen his former employee, and had marched over to give a warm embrace to the woman he hadn’t seen since she had a raging breakdown at the New York offices of the French publishing house of which he was a partner.

  I’ve got a doozie of a story to tell Clive when I get him alone, Lala thought as she smiled in the bistro and took nearly non-stop sips from the delicious glass of champagne that had been poured from the delicious bottle of champagne Gérard had ordered.

  At the museum, Lala hadn’t been able to say much more than that she used to work with Gérard when she lived in New York by way of an explanation to Clive of why this man had so profoundly caught her attention. Gérard had introduced them to the woman with him, Marie-Laure, his girlfriend, and Lala had assured them that she remembered meeting Marie-Laure in New York on the day Marie-Laure arrived to begin working at Atelier Du Monde, also known as the First Ides of March That Busted Lala’s Balls To An Epic Extent.

  And now they were all sharing a lovely assortment of breads and cheeses and olives, and Lala had only been marginally successful in getting the roaring sound of crashing waves that started pounding through her ears the moment she saw the man who resembled her late husband to an extent that was too surreal to abate.

  Yeah, I could also tell Clive that Gérard could be Terrence’s twin. Identical. Eerie identical. Creepy identical. And I could share the fact that I didn’t even notice the resemblance until I went batshit crazy on that March fifteenth and my best friend Brenda pointed out the utterly uncanny similarity.