“Or have cats.”
“Quite a lot of men have cats.”
“So, you don’t love your wife?”
She didn’t sound judgmental, just curious. She could have been asking, so you don’t drink? Or you don’t have a cellphone? As if not loving my wife was an interesting eccentricity.
“Of course I love my wife. I love her so much it’s embarrassing. That’s why I married her.”
It was. I think that’s all most people want, to find someone they love so much they’re embarrassed to talk about it. Oh, and to be loved back as embarrassingly much.
The first snowfall of the first year we were together, we lay in bed watching the tissue-y flakes transubstantiate into silver puddles on our windowsill and made the mutual decision to call in sick. She was standing naked in the kitchen. Her tiny belly was distended from the pancakes we’d eaten in bed. I was making hot chocolate, the marshmallows bobbing and oozing in the pot. She had open Pound’s Cantos. We were still luxuriating in the slow bliss of consuming each other’s minds.
as for the vagaries of our friend Mr. Hartmann,
Sadakichi a few more of him,
were that conceivable, would have enriched
the life of Manhattan
Sadakichi almost made her like what she called “conceptual bullshit.” A half-Japanese half-German, he was in love with Japan but never made it back. He died alone and alcoholic in the desert. But before that he conducted a failed opera of smells and wrote the first English haikus.
Miranda closed the book and said, “Stein has this quote, ‘Sadakichi is singular, never plural.’ She meant it as a compliment but I always thought it was so sad. He didn’t know anyone like himself.”
Miranda sniffled, and I knew it had less to do with a long-ago paper and more to do with the abstract loneliness she felt growing up in Wisconsin among a herd of fat, blue-eyed cousins. She scratched at the tears running down her cheeks, fingers leaving white trails in the flush.
“This is stupid. Really stupid. He’s dead for fuck’s sake.”
I turned off the stove, and I kissed her on her lovely shoulders.
“Hey, hey, hey there. We can be singular together. Me.” Here, I touched her nose. “And Me part II.”
And I began kissing her under her gold-flecked eyes. Each one bright as if God were marking his commendations of my girlfriend. I kissed her until she stopped crying and the smell of burning chocolate filled the apartment.
It became our joke. I woke her up in the morning with tea and a “hello Me.” Which became with time Me Me and then Mimi. A silly pet name perhaps. Until finally, Mimi was just the name that came to mind when I thought of her, speckled eyes and twitchy lower lip. At first, the grammar of it out loud confused our friends, but they too got used to it. We were each other’s misspelling—that is how much I loved my wife.
19.
Berlin, October 2016
“So then you’ll put it down.”
Celeste was never an It. No one, not even Mimi, called Celeste an It.
“It isn’t that simple.”
I had been planning, yes, on putting Celeste down. Eventually. But I’d just re-encountered my mother. Wasn’t that traumatizing enough? I needed Celeste today. Her heart was rattling against my supporting hand. I bent down towards Celeste’s prone body and inhaled the smell of living cat. My mother coughed, a deeper, more guttural noise than Celeste’s. But what else could I do about her? Yukiko was right. It was ridiculous to save her now if I was going to have to put her down next week.
It was then that Celeste stretched one paw outward. Her back flexed. And she looked up at me with wide, blue eyes. I could almost hear her, Et tu Brute? Yep, me too.
It was exactly because I was the sort of idiot who had imaginary conversations in Latin with his cat that I couldn’t make what was a fundamentally simple choice.
“Life is just a series of shit decisions,” Yukiko said. She was already stepping out into the street. There was an aphoristic shrug in her voice. She didn’t seem to expect a response.
The vet’s people were expecting us. The office smelled of disinfectant and sawdust. The girl at the desk had her white-blond hair pulled into a tight tall ponytail; not a wisp escaped. She and Yukiko talked briefly in low, urgent voices. The walls of the office were painted with cartoon cats and dogs wearing hats and buckled shoes. Which if I was a sick animal, I would have found deeply disturbing.
The vet, when he emerged, was younger than me. This new stage of life when professionals had begun to look like children scared me. He was a tall, Aryan-looking kid, and I was immediately suspicious of him. He led us into an operating room, where he glanced between the two of us. Yukiko stood straight-backed. She spoke in short, firm sentences, gesturing toward Celeste. Her German sounded so much more authoritative than her English.
“Please put your cat on the table,” he said.
I did as instructed. He shone a light into her eyes. Pressing his fingers against her upper thigh, he counted out a pulse. Celeste didn’t try to slash him across the face, which I took to be a sign of weakness. She didn’t like anyone but me to touch her. Her head lay limply on her paws.
“Her age?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen?”
“Yes. She is also diabetic, if you think that might have a bearing on it.”
He looked at my mother for clarification.
“Zuckerkrank, diabetisch.”
“This cat is seventeen years old and is die-a-be-chic. Yes?”
“Yes.”
He switched to rapid German, addressing my mother again. I felt like a child at the dentist, waiting for my father to decide whether I needed braces. He gesticulated far too much for someone holding a rectal thermometer in one hand. We were tired. Yukiko nodded in rhythm to his exhortations.
“He says that there is probably nothing new wrong with your cat. But that cats aren’t really supposed to live for so long, you know. If you like, he will put her to sleep; there’s half an hour until his next appointment.”
Celeste sat on the table. I wondered if that would be a kindness, as everyone said. It was better this way. I thought of Mimi, who wasn’t speaking to me. I thought of the bills for Celeste’s pills and the organic cat food. And the fees for the Waldorf day care that Mimi said was just right for Eliot. I thought, too, of the warm weight of Celeste on my stomach in over-air-conditioned, foreign rooms. I thought of the Nike sneaker box she slept in our first week of college.
My phone screamed in my pocket. Mimi, the screen glowed up at me.
“I’ve got to take this.”
I picked up, and we both started speaking at once: “Where have you . . . Everything’s fine now . . . What?”
It had been Eliot, that delicate sack of flesh. She’d started throwing up just after I left for the airport. Not that milk scum. It was pink. Mimi and Eliot had spent the past two days in the hospital, Mimi sleeping on three pushed-together chairs. Eliot had stopped coughing after they got there. Tests were run. Nothing to be seen in the lungs, but an elevated heart rate was present. The doctors decided just to be safe Eliot should stay at the hospital. Mimi had forgotten her phone at home, and honestly, hadn’t thought to call me, hadn’t thought to do anything but stare at our baby and the inscrutable green lines of the graph. But after two days of nothing, the doctors sent them home.
Eliot’s features wove through my vision. Her ball-bearing nose and wrinkled eyelids like tiny accordions ducked over and under each other in a peculiar circle dance. Why hadn’t I spent more time looking at my baby’s face? Why hadn’t Mimi tried to reach me? Hadn’t she thought I could help? That I should know? Wasn’t I a father?
I wanted to cry. Big, stupid tears, the kind I cried at my father’s funeral. A thick, gasping, ridiculous panic. I would never leave. I knew that now.
But the baby was fine. Mimi had said, “Everything’s fine now.” I scrambled for Celeste, then stopped myself, holding fast to the cold edge of the c
ountertop. I never wanted to pass out, never enjoyed it. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could decide not to do. But there I was deciding, my nails bending against the sanitized steel, focusing on the back of the vet’s head, refusing to lose sight of the gold hair. Vision wobbled and steadied; I felt Yukiko’s hand on my elbow, but ignored it, expanding the field of my vision. The vet was at his computer looking at the lines of his Excel graph. On his desk was a picture of a girl and a retriever. On the shelves above him were books in German with neon sticky notes peeking out between the pages.
I gripped tight to the phone and told my wife I loved her. My baby was safe. My wife was safe. But they’d been in jeopardy while I was drinking beer and feeding crows. Celeste jumped from the table, brushing herself against my legs. She was almost dog-like in her loyalty. She always knew when I needed help.
“Tell him to do it. To put Celeste down.”
I was holding the phone so tightly it slipped from my hands like soap and crashed to the floor. The vet looked up. My stomach curdled and soured my tongue. He asked me if I wanted to stay for the procedure, and I said I would. It was the least that I could do. I bent down and picked Celeste up, lifting her onto the operating table, amazed for the last time at the urgent beat of her heart. The frigid steel probably felt unpleasant against the pads of her paws. She struggled and mewled.
Yukiko said something fierce and certain in German. “Jay. We are going home. Your cat,” she said. “I’ll take care of her.”
Celeste had rolled onto her side, her wrinkled skin bunching around her neck. Her eyes were closed, but her tongue shot out to taste the air. Could she smell my swerving emotions?
“Thank you.”
She scrunched a smile. “I’m already a crazy old lady. About time I got a cat.”
We took the S-Bahn, two transfers home. I carried Celeste in my arms. Kids pointed and stared at her skeletal face. At first, Yukiko seemed stiff, almost irritated. Tentatively, after we changed at Alexanderplatz, she reached out and patted Celeste between the ears, just a tap. I realized my mother was shy.
Yuki
1982, Vermillion
In medieval times made with mercury and sulphur. Why were the brightest paints always poisons?
The baby was a wound, raw and pink. Yuki flinched when strangers reached for him. When he screamed, her abdomen winced. She sat in what had been her studio and watched the baby crawl toward her. After the baby’s arrival, she’d thrown out the Dutch oils Edison had bought for their anniversary. Toxic. She’d dropped her craft knives one by one into a black plastic bag. She would’ve tossed the kitchen knives, but Edison stopped her. “What are you afraid of?”
Jay crawled toward her across the polished wood. His hair stuck up like a spiral of cupcake icing. His eyes were large, black, and single-lidded. Edison said they were her eyes. Had she ever looked so sad? Babies weren’t supposed to look sad.
She should scoop him up and hold his hot face to her breasts. But she feared that the pain that haloed her chest would contaminate him. Yuki held the formula bottle in her lap and watched him approach.
She’d wanted to call him Toshi. It’d been her father’s name and signified intelligence. But Edison, who’d allowed her everything, refused. It’d been difficult enough being called Edison.
He suggested Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He said Jasper, Jackson, Roy, Andy would all be fine. He’d let her choose but nothing foreign, nothing that the child’s kindergarten teachers wouldn’t be able to wrap their mouths around and that the other kids would shorten in unfortunate ways.
The day they met, Edison had told her to call him Eddie. Yet she must’ve known that she could never form an attachment to someone named Eddie. Andy and Matthew weren’t her babies. They were lovers of touch football. Her son would be slight like her and Edison. He’d have an oversized brain and accurate eyes. Such a young man couldn’t be called Andy. Even Warhol couldn’t take the wheat out of the name.
In the end, she named him after a bird. The Eurasian jay had tea-brown feathers edged with lapis lazuli. It seemed to sing out from the illustrated encyclopedia. Jay: blue jays of happiness. She thought if she was going to have a baby, she might as well give him wings. He’d leave her the way the Westport birds took off in the winter, going to better places. She’d wish that for him. It was the best she could do.
Edison was skeptical. “Isn’t that a bit girly?”
“Says the man who takes vanilla bubble baths.”
“That’s different,” he said. “Also, it’s bluebirds of happiness.”
She’d rejected the explorers: Christopher, Francis, Lewis, and Clark. She didn’t trust the American presidents and didn’t care for British rock and rollers. So he gave up.
“Yooey, Yooey,” Jay burbled as he dragged himself across the carpet on his knees, his head bobbing with each cry of her name. It was a noise she associated with the English accent of her third-grade teacher who used to call to the students that way as they were leaving the classroom. “Yoo-ee, I forgot, tomorrow please bring—”
Yuki made a fist around the formula bottle. Jay was a year old, and this was his only word. Was this normal? She should talk to him more. Edison stocked the kitchen with fresh fruits and vegetables ready to be macerated, but Yuki had no energy for chopping and peeling. Formula was easier, cleaner. She told herself that if he tried to stand again, she would prepare a mash. He seemed to be tiring, his diaper making an ominous hiss as it dragged along the floor.
It was hard to remember this had once been a studio. She hadn’t painted anything since Jay had been born. Edison bought her a book on post-partum depression that lay on her bedside table, its virginal spine uncracked. Reading it would take more energy than she had. She never thought she’d be the sort of person to own a bedside table. It was a hanger-on piece of furniture, unable to survive without a bed. It was barely a table. One never sat at it, wrote on it, ate at it.
The sound of tires on gravel knifed the air. Edison already. Yuki leapt up, hurrying toward Jay. He burbled quietly. At a year old, he was heavy. It hurt her back to stand with him. She pressed the bottle’s yellow teat between his lips, and he sucked hard, his chest heaving up and down.
“How’re my two favorite people?” Edison asked.
“What TV show did you get that from?” There was no TV in her house. Keeping up with the news was a social game that adults played, passing back and forth information to fill the silences in their lives.
She thrust Jay at his father. Jay’s fists opened like daisies at sunrise. Inarticulate, the baby still knew who was on his side.
“Shouldn’t he be having solids?”
Yuki looked away from Jay. Her eyes fell to where Edison’s shirt pillowed out above his belt. He had rounded out, as if he were the one who’d had a baby. A Labrador, she thought, loyal and fat. One day the child would want a dog, and then there would be two fat stupid creatures in the house. At least she didn’t have to touch this one’s shit.
“There’s no dinner,” she said.
When had she become unbearable? Cruel and burdensome-sounding even to herself?
“That’s all right. I’ll order in.”
He wasn’t stupid, just kind. Only someone fetid inside would confuse the two.
“No pizza. The smell makes me sick.” Yuki thought Jay must have gotten his placidity from Edison. It brought out the worst in her, made her want to plunge her hands into the liquid calm and find the rocks at the bottom.
“After however many years of marriage, I think I’d know that.”
“However many?” she asked. She knew he didn’t have a mistress in the city. He always came home on time, but no sane person would be on time for this.
“Four years. Four. You think I’d forget?” He looked irritated and worried. That’s how long it would have taken her to finish school. But what had she learned? Only that her hands were weak, her head was weak, that baby shit came in a beautiful spectrum of rotten-lemon yellow to motor oil black, that even her
baby preferred its father.
“No, of course not.”
She and Edison hadn’t had a locked-hotel-door honeymoon. They’d gone to Vienna and stayed in a pretty room with pigeon-gray curtains. Miniature jam jars accompanied breakfast croissants. They appreciated art, so much art—paintings stacked from floors to ceilings, Dürers wedged into hallways, and Rubens shoved into corners. They rented a car and drove to the village from which Egon Schiele had been expelled. She wandered around the town trying to find the houses of the postcard she’d once tacked to her bedroom wall. When had she lost it? No windows were broken, and the only laundry they saw were pillowcases clipped to a plastic rack. Edison admired the steep slate roofs. It had all been very intellectual.
Sometimes Yuki thought she and Jay were the real honeymooners: two people in a locked space, dizzied by each other. Or at least she was dizzied by him. She was mostly numb, but sometimes hunger bled into her vision, making her light-headed.
She looked at her son. He was a hunger. A hungry wound, was there such a thing? A mouth perhaps. His was so small and blister-bright.
Edison rocked Jay, the eighteen-pound mouth.
“Do you want to feed him?” she asked. Jay should eat more. She found him weighty, but she knew he was light for a one-year-old.
“Sure, get the mush would you?”
She hadn’t made any. Yuki walked to the fridge and stared at cannonball apples, javelin carrots and the remains of the last lunch she’d tried to cook—macaroni curled into yellow baby fingers. She’d eaten a single pasta pinkie before refrigerating the rest. Odile wasn’t there to starve for any more, but Yuki had gotten into the habit of deprivation. It at least was a pain she could control.
In the sitting room, Edison was singing. How would she explain that she had failed to perform this most basic of duties . . . but then at the back, the gold-topped jar glittered. A week ago, she’d bought it because of how jolly the label’s baby looked.
“It’s supposed to be nutritious.” She constructed a Mommy-ish sort of smile and handed Edison the jar. She patted Jay. Edison held the baby in the bend of his arm, his shoulders and head torqued down toward the child, every line of his body leading toward Jay. They looked peaceful as a painting of the Madonna and child. They were a complete family unit without her. Despite everything, Jay was a cheerful baby. She wondered how long that would last.
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