The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  It is a beautiful day. Although sunny, almost balmy, it is not quite warm enough to bring the Halfmoon’s guests out to the swimming pool, which is ready for the season but not occupied; the lifeguard’s high chair is empty, as empty as it was on that damp November day so many years gone when Billy came out here to fall or jump into this water. Powerlessly I am drawn to the pool’s side, and Morris does not stop until his foreclaws have come to grip the pool’s edge. My attention is diverted from the awful water and the memory of what happened there by the uncustomary presence beside me of this old peculiar yellow cat whom my novelist’s imagination keeps trying to turn into Dan.

  My novelist’s imagination killed Billy but did it veritably, not imaginatively. One time, I thoughtlessly blurted to him that he was not the equal of Travis Coe, that he was like a novel reader who couldn’t understand what he was reading and therefore couldn’t be deeply moved by it (although the analogy may have been lost on him: Billy never read anything, not even magazines). Not once in the year and a half of our relationship did he ever seem to experience the face-wrenching, shoulder-quivering, buttock-lunging ejaculations that Travis had. Billy was docile, polite, eager to please, and industrious to a fault, compared with Travis’s laziness, but Billy seemed always only mildly aroused or impassioned by our lovemaking, as if he were…I hesitate to continue the analogy, but there it is: as if he were the reader of novels who is never caught up in them, who can never suspend disbelief, who is too timid or jaded or leery to surrender himself to the pleasure.

  When Billy was already turned fourteen and the novelty of his companionship as well as the charm of his physical attractiveness were both evaporating, I told him of my plan to visit my native Svanetia (of which I had regaled him with many stories, often trying out on him those that I would publish in Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain) and I gave him a choice: He could either go with me on the trip, or we would end our relationship.

  “I’ll have to ask my mother,” he said. I was taken aback, because during the time I had known him he had rarely mentioned either of his parents; indeed, he had no father, as I was to learn when it was his mother’s “boyfriend” who came to the Halfmoon to claim the body after the inquest. Billy did have a house, or cottage, on one of the most craggy precipices of Halfmoon Mountain, and I had picked him up there in Silvia several times, but I had never even seen, let alone met, his mother. She was, I gathered, a busy woman who took little interest in Billy’s whereabouts and often permitted him to “stay over with a friend,” his common excuse for spending the night with me.

  “You’re not going to tell her about me?” I said to him in response.

  “Oh, she sorta knows, anyhow,” he said.

  I pestered him for an explanation of just what his mother knew, and he was able to reassure me that his mother didn’t know about our sexual relationship but knew that Billy often visited a “rich lady on the top floor of the Halfmoon who gave spending money in return for errands and other stuff.”

  All he had to do, he said, was tell his mother that the rich lady wanted him to take a trip to Europe with her for a couple of weeks or so. “She’d be glad to get rid of me for a while,” he said to me, of his mother.

  But that may have been too much as far as the woman was concerned, because she wouldn’t consent to the notion, and Billy was heartbroken, for he truly had been building up his anticipation of flying to Georgia and Svanetia. I couldn’t console him, and I mistakenly thought that the best thing to do, as I had done with Travis, was to “pay him off”—more handsomely than the severance pay I’d given Travis, by three times the amount.

  He stared at the money offering with disdain. “Don’t you want me anymore?” he asked. “Don’t you want to see me again when you get back from Svanetia?”

  “I’m going to be awfully busy when I get back,” I declared. “I’m going to write a stage play about the four ghosts who inhabit the Halfmoon.”

  “I could help,” he offered. “I could play like I was one of the ghosts and say some stuff.”

  I smiled, touched at the offer and the thought, but I said, “Billy, I wish for you much happiness. I wish for you that you will stay out of trouble, perhaps go back to school, be a good boy.”

  He screwed up his face. “Haven’t I been a good boy?” he whined. “Haven’t I sorta made you happy?”

  The county coroner was never able to determine conclusively that Billy had deliberately drowned himself in this swimming pool. It was highly possible, the Halfmoon’s management suggested, that he had slipped on the wet tiles (it had been raining) and fallen in. I stare down at this water, and I speak aloud to the old cat who is also staring at it. “Morris, it wasn’t an accident, was it?”

  Morris slowly turns his old head and looks up at me. “Noo,” he says. It could be simply a feline utterance, but it strikes me more as the way a Bodarks man would render a negative.

  “I’m going on down the hill a ways,” I tell him. “You go on back inside, if you want.” Like my apartment door itself, the large French doors on the east side of the Halfmoon’s lobby have a Cat-Port cut into the bottom pane of glass, expressly for Morris’s convenience, with even steps, like a stile, leading up and down for his arthritic egress and ingress. Morris could easily go back to the lobby and the adulation of the hotel’s guests, if he wanted, or he could return to the apartment. But he doesn’t want. He wants to follow me.

  Cat owners know that even those cats who uncustomarily do follow their masters for brief stretches will not stray far beyond the known delimits of their domestic domain. No cat wants to leave the boundaries of its known world, and I am certain that Morris, in the entire course of his life, except for the few occasions I’d taken him (reluctantly and complainingly on his part) for a ride in Silvia, has never been beyond the property line of the Halfmoon.

  “Go home, Morris!” I snap at him as he continues to follow me down the steep slope that drops off the eastern side of the Halfmoon’s front yard. But he will neither turn nor slow his determined dogging (or unwonted catting) of my heels.

  The descent of a spiderweb of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps takes us, in time, to the significant place where the newly restored Victorian gazebo marks Halfmoon Spring; it’s a copper-pagoda-roofed gingerbread Gothic structure that has been one of my favorite resting places on my hikes. It is within easy sight of the Arcata Springs Public Library, where I first laid eyes on Travis and where there are now three whole shelves of my books in their domestic and foreign editions, donated by the author in grateful recognition of all the research I’ve done in that old building.

  I sit in the gazebo. Morris sits on the bench beside me, but far enough away that he can look up into my eyes without getting a crick in his neck. “Well, Morris,” I say. “You have wandered a long way from home. What have you got to say for yourself, dear cat?”

  “It is time, dear Kat,” he says, “that you face the real reason Billy drowned himself.” It is the sort of thing I might say to myself, and thus I am reluctant to believe, at first, that he has actually spoken. He certainly has not moved his lips. He doesn’t have lips. But the words, I convince myself, came from his mouth.

  The suggestion itself appalls me so much that I find it difficult to reflect upon this strange circumstance of his speaking not in mews and ows and mees and noos but in human speech. “I am a tired and frightened woman approaching middle age,” I declare, “and I refuse to allow myself to believe that my loneliness is making me hear you speak to me.”

  “You’re certainly frightened,” he says, “and this hike has tired you. But you are a good sight short of even approaching middle age. And it isn’t your loneliness that lets you hear me. It’s my impatience. Do you think I’ve had it easy, being silent all these years?”

  I laugh, but nervously. “Hush, Morris,” I say. “I refuse to believe that you are talking. It won’t wash, not even in one of my novels.”

  “This isn’t your novel,” he says.


  “Oh?” I say. Then, “No, you’re right, it isn’t a novel, it’s a memoir.”

  “At the moment, it isn’t even your memoir. You aren’t writing, are you? Didn’t you set aside your pencil to follow me downstairs?”

  “Then who is writing this?”

  “I am,” he says.

  “In my voice? In this present tense, in my first person?”

  “Keep your person, sweet Kat. You won’t have it much longer.”

  I shudder at this suggestion of an approaching ending. Endings are hideous. In the writing of each of my books, the ending has gone too fast and too painfully for me, like…like Billy’s premature and weak ejaculations. “Morris,” I say, addressing him thus because I am not going to admit, even to myself in my deluded state, that this cat is actually Dan, “why don’t you tell me why Billy killed himself?”

  A tourist couple strolling on Spring Street pause and turn to stare briefly at me. Are they wondering at this weird “local character” with red hair and dark shades talking to herself? Or can they actually hear the talking cat?

  The talking cat says to me, “You tried to get Billy to do something that you could never ask of Islamber, Dzhordzha, or Kenny, and that even Travis could bring himself to do only once.”

  The cat’s reminder brings back the recent voice of Travis, mature, without a trace of his old Bodark accent, who, when I teasingly reminisced on the telephone about that one rare occasion, jokingly declared, “And look at me now! The chicks call me the best ‘face man’ in Hollywood!”

  “Are you going to lecture me with analogies,” I ask Morris, “on how the novelist demands the oral gratification of all his readers?”

  The cat grins. “No,” he says, “make yourself comfortable and I’m going to tell you a story.”

  III

  Ekaterina you were, and you were not at all. You were from a land far away, once upon a time and upon no time at all, where stories always begin, “There was, and there was not at all…,” as if to confute truth or affirm invention, in celebration of the imagination’s freedom to transcend the stubborn facts of “reality”: you were, and still are, Ekaterina: all of this is real, and not a word of it is true: you escaped the clutches of a sadist named Bolshakov (a real name) who could not separate truth from fiction, and you came to America…

  All afternoon the cat talks. There are a few more pedestrians on the sidewalk of Spring Street who pause to observe this woman listening—or appearing to listen—to an old yellow cat who does not move his lips, who in fact doesn’t even have any lips, just that cute bowed dimple beneath his harelip.

  The cat tells me his story of my story: my coming to America, my months in Pittsburgh, Knox Ogden, Kenny, Ingraham. I have told this story in more objective form, with little reference to any “ghosts,” in Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen of this memoir, and I invite my reader to refer to it. I am enchanted with the cat’s fanciful conception of Daniel Lyam Montross as a sort of ghost-with-a-resume, and I am so intent on the story that I scarcely notice that among the scant traffic on Spring Street there is an old gray Jeep that has passed me more than once.

  I become convinced it is indeed the cat, not my wild imagination, when Morris tells me things about Pittsburgh that I did not know: for example, why did Kenny never ask, as both Travis and Billy were to do, to see me undress? The answer, Morris/Dan tells me, and I’m sorry you’ve had to wait this long to learn the particulars from me, was simply that he did not need to ask. And then he tells me about that peephole that Kenny had in the broom closet—spying upon me! I am blushing, but I am also eager to hear the rest of this cat’s story, and even more eager to get back to my writing desk and revise certain parts of this memoir. I’ll do it first thing tomorrow…But no, the woman from Paris Review is coming to interview me.

  It is near on to suppertime when Morris says, Dusk was fallen. The long day was over. My bag of tricks was empty, but I had you here…almost. You needed time to think about it, but both I. and I were confident you’d stay, because, you see, you had absolutely nowhere else to go.

  Riding down to the yellow house in I.’s Blazer, going off to meet his friends, who would become your friends too, you informed him, “I love the little serendipities of life, but this coincidence I like best: in Svanetian, Lisedi, the name of the town I came from, means ‘to remain, to stay more, to stick around.’”

  I wait. The cat appears to have quit talking. A little girl, broken away from her strolling parents on the sidewalk, rushes into the gazebo, stares down at the trickle of Halfmoon Spring, shuts her eyes, and throws a penny into the water. “I hope your wish comes true,” I say to her, and she smiles bashfully and runs back to her parents, who walk on. The old gray Jeep passes me slowly once again, and I try to detect its driver, to see if he could by any chance be Bolshakov, but he is not driving slowly enough for me to have a good look at him. I return my gaze to my cat and wait. Morris says nothing. Finally, I decide that his story is concluded, and I remark, “That was lovely. Truly. I have only a few questions. First, if indeed you are Dan Montross, or his spirit, why did you leave the Bodarks to journey all that way through time and space to Pittsburgh in search of me? Or was I just the accidental subject of your attentions and affections?”

  Morris says nothing.

  “Can’t answer that one, huh?” I challenge him. “Then tell me this: Have you obliterated Anangka? Are you in full control of my destiny now?”

  The cat, who was so loquacious all afternoon, has become mute. But do I detect a slight shaking of his head? Cats do not shake their heads. They toss them, or vigorously nod them when they’re washing themselves, but they don’t shake them.

  “Did you,” I ask of the cat, with a mounting sense of futility, “arrange for Ingraham to enter the story simply in order to bring me here to the Bodarks?”

  Cats are self-conscious creatures, and if you talk to one intensely enough, he will begin licking himself in embarrassment. This is what Morris now does, although the nodding of his head as he does so could be an affirmative answer to my question.

  “How do you suppose Ingraham would feel,” I demand, “if he knew that his whole purpose in life was simply to bring me to the Bodarks? Answer me that. Or has the cat got your tongue?”

  But the cat has his own tongue, and he will not respond.

  “Morris,” I upbraid him. “At least tell me what you meant by pointing to that inscription over the fireplace earlier today, that business about being my ardent lover ‘when the snow the earth doth cover.’” When my continued questions draw no further response from the old cat, I ask in desperation, “If you are Dan, what do you want of me?” And when he doesn’t answer, I entreat, “Are you waiting for me to join you in the ‘spirit world’? Do you want me to die?”

  The old gray Jeep has now come to a stop beside a parking meter across the street, and a tall man exits from it and places a coin in the parking meter, then crosses the street to the gazebo, glances at Morris, and says to me, “Is that you, Ekaterina? Are you reduced, in your dotage, to talking to cats?”

  IV

  I haven’t seen him for years. It is Ingraham. I am a bit put out by his question and his feeble but mocking laughter. “Ot!” I say, “or Och, as the case may be.” He appears not to hear me. I make a sign language, a pantomime of wishing to write something, and he hands me his ballpoint and a few of his note cards. I write, What are you doing here?

  “I heard about the séance they’re having tonight,” he says, “and I thought I’d like to go. I’ve never been to a séance before. Are you going?”

  I nod and write, I’ve never been to one either. And I’m scared.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think there’s anything to be afraid of,” he says.

  Not about the séance itself. I don’t think any of the Halfmoon’s—or the Mezzaluna’s—ghosts will actually he conjured. If they were, I’d be as delighted to meet them as I would have been to meet Lawren Carnegie or Knox Ogden or Dan Montross when we were in Pit
tsburgh.

  He is patient while I write, as if he really has nothing better to do. He reads the card twice, frowning, then asks, “How do you know that Dan Montross—or his ghost—was in Pittsburgh?”

  I smile and write, He told me. I am tempted to write for him the whole story just as I’ve heard it from Morris, if for no other reason than to convince him that Morris has been talking to me, but I am afraid that Ingraham might steal the story and appropriate it for some future fiction of his, beating me to it.

  “So,” he says, “in your dotage you talk to both your cat and the ghost of Montross.”

  Or maybe they are the same, I write. Ingraham stares at my cat, then hesitantly reaches out and attempts to stroke Morris’s back. Morris shies away from his touch. My cat gives me one more look, as if a final look, and then, despite the arthritis that has often left him almost unable to drag himself from floor to floor of the Halfmoon, he bounds out of the gazebo and scampers up the hill toward home. I smile at a memory and write, The last time you took notice of Morris was when we were leaving the Halfmoon after that BOW convention—when you were still pretending that I was Cathlin McWalter—and when I said good-bye to Morris and told him I’d be back, you said, “How come you can talk to the damned cat, but not to me?”

  “Was that”—he gestures in the direction Morris has disappeared—“the same cat? He must be ancient.”

  In finger language I count eighteen, for Morris’s years.

  We reminisce, Ingraham and I, about that long-ago springtime of my first coming to the Bodarks. I refresh his memory of the wonderful speech he gave to the bow, equating the genuine writer’s addiction with the genuine drinker’s addiction, the precepts of which often came back to me during my struggles to become a writer. Ingraham says that he no longer drinks at all these days—“Except a glass of wine on special occasions. And I think I’ve become dull and uninteresting. I’m not any fun anymore.”