You carry him out like a proud purchase, a chiffon shirt from a ritzy store, in a meringue paper bag, finished with a wide satin bow. You set him on the passenger seat and he begins to purr; a bottomless animal hum, drowned as you switch on the engine.
You run into Mrs. Kowalski in the hall and she holds the door open for you. “I’ve got a cat,” you say, lifting the basket toward her. “I can see that,” she replies. “Oh, I can see that.” She looks you up and down, pursing her lips together, her lipstick cracking into spidery ducts.
You release him into the bedroom, he slips vaporously from his basket, navigating the boundaries of the room. “Here kitty,” you call, dangling a felt bell. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” He sniffs the bell and turns from you, slowly, hopping onto the bed and sitting down, with a calculation you can only describe as sociopathic.
His name comes to you as a complete and indisputable truth; just popping in your brain one morning, like a balloon. Hank. His name is Hank.
You find to your dismay that Hank is a licker. There is something unpleasantly insipid, something uncharacteristically pandering, about a cat that licks. You extend your hand as he laps conscientiously at it, looking up for your approval. You feed him only tinned fish; mackerel in tomato sauce, sardines in olive oil; after the peculiar philosophy Do Not Feed Him What You Yourself Would Not Eat, occurs to you, as clear and as certain as a shard of glass. You scoop salmon from the can, breaking it up with the side of your fork, and watch the gray pink flesh scatter and ooze.
Hank is a big cat. You had not anticipated such a big cat. You feel like you are sharing your home with a beast roaming wild across your living room, all id, jumping on furniture, forcing his face into your food. Last Wednesday, he defecated into your hand, he literally defecated into your hand. Oh!—but he looked so embarrassed afterward! His little tail down, like a limp paintbrush, swirling steady circles around his bowl. You would forgive him anything. You understand people who have cats that walk all over their babies, why they let them do it, I mean, who are they hurting, really?
You have a date. You are finished going out for dates, now you have them in. You have them in your flat; these are my insides, do you like what you see? He is late but he has brought wine. You turn on the radio. Hank loiters at the door in uncertain investigation. You have cooked dinner; scrambled egg, grilled peppers and a dollop of mashed potatoes. “This is a really weird dinner,” he says.
He fetches more wine from the kitchen, pulling open the drawers, searching for the bottle opener. You follow him in, forcing your hands down the back of his trousers, just to see if you can, removing them swiftly. “Can I get you some dessert?” you ask, thinking whether you could leave, whether you could just feasibly leave, come back in a few hours, and hope that he has gone.
You sit on the couch. “I had a cat when I was a kid,” he says. “Did you ever have a cat when you were little?”
You did. You did have a cat. Your mother gave you a cat for your birthday, a few weeks before she left. It was a fragile cat, a cat on borrowed time, with brittle bones and fur sprouted in patches, as though it was only just managing to be there at all. It didn’t live much longer after she had gone. You wept when it died, which is perhaps strange, as you didn’t particularly like this cat; the dopamine trance of its stare, its hesitant way of creeping onto your lap. You let it out one morning, and while sipping from a cup of tea, an amber calm descended, and you understood it wouldn’t be coming back. And you cried.
Hank hops onto the couch and you cup his face in your hands, touching his cold, wet nose with your own. Your date sighs. “What is it with women and cats?” he asks.
Your mother was very catlike. The feline italics of her gestures, the liquid flicks of her eyes, the supple grace of her walk. More catlike than the cat even. How you would approach her, tentatively navigating your way across the living room, on ballerina toes, slipping a nervous arm around her waist, scared too bold a gesture might frighten her away. Sometimes she would let you brush her hair while she was watching television. You would comb your fingers through her glossy curls, all the while knowing this was something she was tolerating, just; something she was very much putting up with, her shoulders tense, her cheekbones sharpened into dull, flat flintstones.
Not like the cat who rolled and bloated into your hand at the slightest suggestion of affection.
When she left it came as no surprise, like the ending of a book you’d already read. She just gave up and crawled out.
What is it with women and cats?
He stands up, rubbing his face and slips on his jacket. “I’d better get going,” he says. “I have to be up early.” You see him out and he kisses you on the cheek, just once, just on the one cheek. You watch as he shuts the door behind him, noticing he has walked a sycamore leaf into the hall, wrinkled and torn, curled upward, like an offering palm.
Hank meows from the kitchen. He wants to be fed. You pick him up, staring into the stalagmite limestone of his irises, the charcoal velvet surrounding them; he looks back at you, ribbony and endless, weighted with autopsied understanding.
As Understood by the Women
Jared had not expected to fall in love with a posh girl, it did not fit his plan, but he had, and he was dealing with the situation as best he could.
Elise was posh posh, proper posh, with that posh girl bohemia about her, something he used to find exotic, though now found a little daft, wafting around, thinking herself some idiotic hippy, coral painted toenails and how long she had let her hair grow. There was something very vulgar, very entitled about long hair. He had met her smoking outside his studio, hipbones protruding above her jeans, like sharp little beaks, in a fringed crop top and patent boots. She was sexy in a mean way, in a fuck-you-for-not-understanding-the-vagaries-of-being-very-attractive way. He knew immediately she was somebody he wanted in his life, if only in a minor role, and was pleasantly surprised with each development. His disbelief had crested in this most recent development; her agreement to his proposal of marriage, a proposal that wasn’t even romantic or charismatic, a lackadaisical “How about it?”—over a vongole and a pinot noir, met with a conversely non-committal, “Sure, why not?” So watery were its foundations, Jared wasn’t confident it had actually happened, surprised again when Elise presented him with an ivory padded filofax of ribbon cuttings and seating arrangements. “Jared,” she said. “Mummy thinks we should have it in the Spring.”
Since announcing the wedding, Jared had begun sneezing at regular intervals of no more than thirty minutes. It was worst at night and he would often sneeze violently into the early hours of the morning, occasionally sneezing so much he would break down crying; but that did not stop the sneezes. “Don’t be so fucking pathetic,” Elise would say, something she had taken to saying a lot recently, saying it in her posh, sexy way, saying it so liberally the words had lost all meaning.
Jared was an artist, a sculptor, once specializing in giant structures of wood and clay, though now only crafted pieces no bigger than a cat, all of Elise’s collarbone. He’d start a project, thinking it to be a swaggering, ambitious structure, work on it for a couple of days, and find he’d just done another collarbone. He surveyed his studio and could see only her collarbone, the jagged, crooked eiderdown of it; its delicate, slicing foliage. He could never admit this preoccupation and on the rare occasions she visited his studio, picking up the collarbones, turning them over in her sepia arms, he would quickly offer, “This one’s about nostalgia; or; this one’s about intergenerational poverty in the American South.” She would set them down, disinterestedly, perch on the edge of his workbench and light a cigarette. And he would think of a new way to sculpt her collarbone.
The wedding, it seemed, was understood by the women; like the time he and Elise had gone to dinner with her friend, and she had stared at Elise in a significant way, and they had both risen in silent comprehension, making for the bathroom. “What was that about?” Jared asked on the way home. “She needed a t
ampon,” Elise replied, like he had asked a particularly stupid question. The wedding, he felt, meant nothing to him and something to her, but believed the objective appreciation of this fact meant he would make a Good Husband, and Elise, with all her posh, sexy beauty, deserved at the very least, that.
They met weekly with her parents to plan; he and Elise’s father exchanged meaningful eye-rolls beneath meditations on the tonal quality of seat coverings; and in these moments and these moments alone, Jared felt part of some wider confederacy of masculinity, happy at last to have received his invitation. But mostly, he would sneeze and sniff into the handkerchief Elise’s mother had given to him; a white handkerchief, naturally.
On the morning of the wedding, he watched guests gather in the atrium. The sight of so many flowers and fascinators had sent him into a sneezing frenzy, interrupted by one of the bridesmaids, India or Jasmine or some other posh, sexy girl name, hissing, “She needs to see you. She’s in the bathroom.”
“Knock knock,” he ventured, tapping at the door. “Isn’t it bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding?”
“Don’t be so fucking pathetic,” Elise called back, and he stepped in, sniffling. Elise was fussing with her hair in the mirror. “Is everything okay?” he asked. “Can you get me a drink?” she replied, hoisting up her dress, pulling down her knickers and then sitting on the toilet. “Can you get me an old fashioned?” she said, surprising him, always. She tore off two squares of toilet tissue and navigated them beneath the ruffles of lace.
He could see now the marriage would not last. He didn’t understand her, and he hadn’t even tried to; like asking a person with hands for feet why they can’t dance with you, instead of asking why they have hands for feet. He thought she looked beautiful, not in a posh way, not in a sexy way, just properly, classically beautiful. Her wide, slender collarbone had never looked better, her luminous skin pulled taut across it, sinking hypnotically into the geometric perfection of her clavicle. She stood up, flushed the toilet and turned to face him, rubbing her lips together; plump, pouty lips, that seemed everyone’s to kiss, but in this moment, in this bathroom, were his and only his; like water trickling pleasantly through your fingers.
“I love you,” he said. “And I truly believe I will love you forever.”
“Don’t be so fucking pathetic,” Elise replied, taking a tissue and wiping his nose.
Tributaries
As the tears and Tanqueray passed, the listens to Blood on the Tracks less frequent, the horizon staggered into sight, the world stuttered statements of promise again. “C’mon!” Melody found herself exclaiming to her friends, palms heavenward, arms held crooked at her side. “C’mon!” She had not factored this infant joie-de-vivre, her beautiful, bouncing baby, would not be shared by her pals, who had not suffered the recent blow of heartbreak, the rapturous recovery from which, knitting over only the tiny gaps, the “I saw him on Facebook, talking to his ex-girlfriend!,” the “He doesn’t care whether we repaint the kitchen green or lime green! He doesn’t care at all.” She felt like a paraplegic, sensing twinges in her legs—she wanted to go dancing!—but this didn’t fit into the neatly folded tapestry of her social circle’s lives. They had partners and meetings. Kitchens to repaint in lime green. What a life. What an old ballbag of a thing. And so, she went alone, woozy off the audacity of it, the way you feel in the first flushes of autumn. At first, nervous ventures, the occasional gingerbread latte in Starbucks on the way home from work, graduating to trips to the cinema, folding her coat on one seat, placing her bag on the other, chewing fistfuls of popcorn, half salty half sweet, mining kernels from her teeth in the dark. Manchester, the city she had grown up in, felt like an old friend.
Josie canceled their dinner in favor of a spinning class, a cavalier move she was prone to; and Melody went alone, ordering a steak sandwich and a Jayne Mansfield, meat and liquor, sitting at the bar. She surveyed the space, hopeless vignettes sellotaped to their surroundings; the dreadful taxonomy of it; boxing off into would and wouldn’t. It was a hamper of age, being single alone. In her early twenties she had a large group of single girlfriends, dolled up and out, terrifying in their industry and numbers; though in her mid-thirties found her friends were only occasionally alone, their heads popping singularly above the parapet, like Whac-A-Moles. She plucked a pound coin from her purse, slipping it into the jukebox, selecting “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” anticipating the tipsy, Tejano intro, hearing instead the slicing vocal fry, the rippling melancholy of “Blue.” She’d messed up the selection, why did she always do that? She returned to her sandwich, eating with her hands, dabbing blood from her lips. She noticed a man at the other side of the bar; attractive, but roughly so. He looked like a painting with a schlocky title, The Artist Arrives; or Untitled (The Artist Arrives). He was not the kind she readily identified as Her Type; he was too unmade, too unfinished, but found she had started to like that; attraction you had to work for, that you had to earn. She was done, she thought, chasing beauty. It was for sad, lonely people, chasing beauty. She at last understood its secrets, and true to form, its charms were fleeting. She sipped her cocktail wishing she could affect the heavy-lidded, ham-fisted sex appeal of some women. Women who just put it out there. Women who didn’t deal in tricks and winks; stealing glances of him from across the bar, smiles dispatched like roofies. He finished his drink and left his seat, approaching her, placing his hat on the bar top next to her and ordered a drink.
“I thought your hat had a feather in it,” she said, staring straight ahead. These things, she found, were better delivered with little if any post-analysis. She glanced at the hat, thinking if she considered herself cute, she might put it on.
“Nope,” he replied. “No feather.” She cocked her head and finished her cocktail.
“I could have sworn it had a feather in it,” she repeated, taking a bite of her sandwich. He looked at her, amused.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked, and she told him yes he could.
She met her friends for lunch. “I met someone,” she told them. “I met a Canadian.”
His name was Todd and he was from Ontario, which made him seem a little bit exotic and a little bit approachable. Josie picked up a bread roll letting the rolled oats fall through her fingers. “What does he do?” she asked. It was the peculiar sort of question her friends had taken to asking lately; this strange assessment of estate and cache, this sizing up of value. What does anyone ever really do? I mean, really?
Josie had gotten married in the Spring. “I thought you were against marriage?” Melody had asked. “Oh sure, I’m against it,” she replied. “Oh sure, I’m still against it.” Integrity, Melody had found, seemed less important as they grew older; a show pony quality, all meat and no potatoes. “I’m happy for you,” she had said, but the word had stuck in her throat like something on loan; anyway, the hell kind of a word was happy? Lucy signaled over to the waiter, who was approaching with their drinks. She knocked back a gin fizz, her cheeks flushing crimson. She had started seeing a carpenter. “A carpenter!” she cried. “Jesus Mary Joseph!” She liked to cook the girls dinner on a Thursday. She made them a risotto then ushered them into the kitchen, revealing a glossy mahogany spice rack. “He made me this,” she whispered. “He made me this and I didn’t even ask for it.” She thought about Todd, about having the thing, the thing you didn’t even ask for. She liked him, she thought, she liked how he looked at her; the earthy, earnest look of a man raised on syrups and smiles, on chicory and fiction, with the crisp crunch of snow underfoot and the mountains and sky on high. How when she had told him she was from Levenshulme, he’d repeated “Lebensraum?” How she had wondered how early one should invoke the Third Reich in a relationship. Whether you should just get it over with right from the start.
They ordered more cocktails; vodka and cranberry, a generational thing, like peace signs in polaroids, culottes. Melody felt suddenly giddy, and grabbed their hands across the table, squeezing in a jejune ben
ediction. “Us girls!” she exclaimed. “Us girls!”
* * *
It started snowing. “I love the snow,” Todd said, rolling onto his back. “It’s my favorite part of living in Canada.”
She turned to face him, resting her head on his shoulder.
“I love the snow too,” she said. “It’s like bits of the universe falling down on you. It’s like kisses from the cosmos.”
He stared at her softly, stroking her chin; the way men did when you said something whimsical.
“I need a shower,” he said, huffing himself up and out of bed, kissing her on the way.
She watched him close the bathroom door. It was nice to have someone again. It had been a little over a year since she had split up with her ex-boyfriend, and he felt so completely, so irredeemably, removed.
He started seeing someone just weeks after they split. “He’s just afraid of being alone!” her friends had cooed but it was not to be sneered at. Everyone wanted a sweetheart. Love was sneaky like that. It found a warm nook, a safe space, and crept in, settling there like an unwelcome houseguest; and suddenly you couldn’t go about your business, walk around in your pajamas, without a flush of embarrassment, a blushing, biting knowing. Todd emerged from the shower, shrouded by steam, wrapped in a long, brown bath towel. There was something sturdy about him. He sat next to her on the bed, the soft fold of his stomach pouting over the bath towel like a sullen bottom lip. She studied the side of his jaw. The poppyseed polkadot of his freshly shaved face. He curled his hand around her ear, sending a shiver of pleasure down her spine. She held his face and looked into his eyes. She had never really looked into someone’s eyes and gotten all the way in before. There was always some roadblock, and she’d stumble back on herself, embarrassed to be caught out so far. She wondered how open she was, how much she let in, imagining herself some airy barn, some spirited Bring & Buy, come one come all. Hopelessly, resentfully, she felt she might be falling in love. The nervous high of love. The sick-making knowledge of it. She punched him on the arm. The swirling perfection of the thing! The feathers and jazz of the thing! But when the curtains came down and the showgirls removed their suits; what was left bar the foot rubs and the flowers? I mean, where do you go from there?
A Selfie as Big as the Ritz Page 10