by Sarah Hina
There are the lesser titles in the main stacks, the great majority of which I have never heard of. A few stick out in sharp relief, like welcome friends in a room full of strangers: A Room with a View, The English Patient, The God of Small Things. Old friends. A few authors are more intimately known: Jane Austen’s a beloved, spinsterish aunt who brings gossip and excellent advice; e.e. cummings is that shy, might-have-been boyfriend from college with the awful acne and scary talent; Patricia Cornwell is the embarrassing, experimental “friend” I took up with during a confusing phase and will never speak of again; and Jonathan Franzen is the hermetic, alcoholic uncle who shows up out of the blue to symbolically shit on your neat suburban lawn one day in order to demonstrate the constipated state of your soul, which might be annoyingly obvious were it not for the fact that he does it so goddamn well.
Some of them might find the company of the others suffocating (I can well imagine Franzen shriveling before Austen’s glorious, surface directness). But they all mean something to me—oddly, maybe—for it is a distinctly lopsided relationship we keep. I can never return the favor of their friendship, yet I have held onto something dear and unintelligible from each, fingerprinting the cadence of their words, and the burden of their characters, onto some untouchable place in my heart, like a charcoal grave rubbing that smudges with time, but never entirely fades.
This is why it’s nearly impossible to find the perfect book for someone. Movies, art, and music are universally shared experiences. Books are a sweetly solitary affair. The author can invent the characters and nudge them along an arc, but the reader is the most important character of all, the one who sees and judges everything: the architect of that supple third dimension. And the question is: what kind of world does Mathieu want to preside over? What will I be saying about myself and how I view him when—
Oops. I am not alone.
There’s a puckish kitten with a pink nose and green eyes stretched out, at eye level, between Samuel Beckett’s First Love and Other Shorts and (Sister) Wendy Beckett’s Joy Lasts: On the Spiritual in Art. She yawns at me and demonstrates her pink, fuzzy belly.
“Bonjour, little friend,” I coo. She mews in return and responds eagerly to my petting, running her whiskers through my fingers, the long nails gouging the book she sprawls across with a limpid entitlement that cats just naturally possess. No wonder the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as goddesses. They are nervy without showing us anything so humble as effort. “You’re a funny little girl,” I laugh, as she sits up and contemplates me with her head cocked to the side.
“She doesn’t really belong here,” an American voice says.
“Excuse me?” I don’t feel so drunk anymore and can’t understand why I would be hearing voices. Or seeing cats.
A girl’s face peeks out from behind the kitten, and she chirps, “Hi. Sorry.” She has a snub nose spotted with freckles and a do-rag covering a mess of hair.
I give an awkward wave. The kitten licks her nose with a sandpaper tongue.
“Yeah, this cat doesn’t belong here. We already have a shop cat. This one just wandered in here this morning, and nobody had the heart to kick her out yet.” She sighs and pets the kitten, which arches her back and lifts her tail. She’s missing half of it, though the cat seems unconcerned of this fact, waving it about like a mast without its flag.
“She seems friendly,” I say. I have always been a dog person. Cats I don’t entirely trust.
“Yeah. They all are,” she replies, like it’s a common thing for homeless animals to seek refuge here, along with their human counterparts.
“What do you think will happen to her?” I ask, with a sense of foreboding. Little tiger kitty yawns again, revealing her saber-tooth incisors, before resuming her washing.
The girl shrugs. “We can’t take another one on. There’s enough cat fur around here as it is, and George would never allow it. So I guess we’ll have to throw her out before closing tonight, or someone will take her to a shelter.”
The kitten stops licking herself. She mews and settles down on her books, resting her pert chin on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. She blinks, content to wait forever.
“What will happen to her at the shelter?”
Maybe the Parisians (being so enamored of their bureaucracy) have a system in place, some established protocol, with reams of absolutely necessary paperwork involved, whereby adorable, abandoned waif-animals are corralled into shelters and dispersed by government clerics into the rustic French countryside. There, they take up residence in charming barns, chateaus, and wineries, where they can live out their days with the cows, gentle people, and luscious grapes of the Bordeaux region, picking off a mouse here and there for sport, staring down sheep dogs with a superiordetachment when queenliness is called for. This is why people love socialism, right? It takes care of everyone, from mighty cats to lowly humans.
“The same thing that happens back home. If she’s not picked up after a couple days, she’ll be killed.”
Ugh. My faith, such as it was, in France’s bleeding heart is officially dead. Someone wipe away the cobwebs, and stamp the death certificate.
A little American initiative is in order.
When Mathieu, lounging on his bench, sees me emerge from Shakespeare & Co. with a reconstructed box in my arms, he smiles his confusion. Ah, she could not decide on just one. How sweet. As he hears me baby-talk to the box, he drops his smile and looks wary. Can she still be drunk? As he sees the plucky feline head pop over the edge of the box, his eyes widen in alarm. Has she gone completely insane?
I smile sheepishly. I wish I had dimples like Camille’s. They might be useful in these kinds of situations.
I approach him breathlessly and relay as rapidly as a child in a toy store, “I know I shouldn’t have, but she would have died—no, been murdered, Mathieu—and I couldn’t have that resting on my conscience, not when I’ve had the best day of my life. We couldn’t send an animal to her grave on a night like this, could we, darling? And really, I know I was supposed to get you a book, but isn’t receiving a living, breathing creation of God’s—or random happenstance, rather—better than getting a book that you’d read in a couple nights and then ignore as it faded away on your bookshelfnext to a hundred more? And if you’re not a big cat person, that’s okay, because I am a huge cat person—really—and I could always take her when I, you know … go home.”
I appeal to him with my lapis blue eyes. “I know I’m changing our history here, Mathieu. But Fonzie was our first dog, that’s all. We simply forgot, in our pre-Alzheimer’s state, about our first kitty.” I place one of the kitten’s paws in Mathieu’s limp hand, and do my best simulation of a cat’s handshake. “I’m Beckett, Mathieu.”
Mathieu slowly removes his hand. And looks at me. I smile. He glances around, his shoulders growing heavy with resignation. I feel the faintest exultation of a real wife. I am totally going to guilt him into this. And yes, a moment later, he clears his throat, and says softly, “Enchantée, Beckett. Let me show you to your new home.” He reaches forward to take her paw again.
She promptly summons a guttural sound in her throat, somewhere between a grrr and a yowl, and starts to gnaw on his finger with a sense of limpid entitlement that cats just naturally possess. Mathieu extracts his punctured appendage and looks at me again.
I laugh nervously. “Silly Beckett.” I reach for Mathieu’s handkerchief from my jeans pocket, and thump the little carnivore on the head. “That’s your Daddy, don’t you know?”
Not two minutes later …
“Why call her Beckett? Why not Godot?”
“Who’s Godot?”
“Well … hypothetically—”
“Yeah, no, exactly.”
Chapter
18
After buying cat food, a dish, a rhinestone collar (she is a Parisian kitty), and a litter box from a twenty-four-hour supermarket, we hop aboard the metro. While retreating into daydreams (Daisy Lockhart: Saving the World … One
Cat at a Time), Beckett accomplishes a slippery escape, taking up a haunched, dismissive stance behind a pungent, drunken man’s legs, and only returning to us once a proper bribe—salmon, equally rank—is offered. Gashing a couple holes in the side of the box, I shut it and, daydreams contained, make for Mathieu’s quartier in the fourteenth arrondissement.
I am surprised, after witnessing the sumptuousness of his father’s place, and knowing that they still maintain a relationship, to find Mathieu living in near squalor in a tiny studio whose window is open on this cool October evening. Everything is in order, but there’s not much to it: a bed, a bedside table, a bureau, a few abstract prints by artists I cannot place in my limited contemporary lexicon. For someone who supposedly loves to cook, the kitchen is little more than a galley, the refrigerator of the miniature, neglected kind. But there are the predictable mountainranges of books that, overlying imagined fault lines, list heavily, with the occasional erosive boulder tumbling toward the valleys below. I see French and English titles on the crooked bindings. Les Liasiones Dangeures, meet Dangerous Liaisons two peaks over. Strangely enough, a copy of Camus’ The Fall is in English, while Shakespeare’s sonnets have been served up in a yeasty French.
There is a cleared path pointing to an ancient typewriter, chained, with padlock, to its desk. The legs of the chair have worn grooves into the hardwood floor. When I sit down, the chair squeals its complaint. I stand, flinching at the rebuke. A breeze enters and swirls around me. His walls are decorated with torn scraps of paper, French and English words slashed across their surfaces. Some are yellowing. They rustle in the wind. I hear their brittle whisper.
I am voiceless, and shy again here.
While Mathieu is in the bathroom, Beckett, in a frenzy of alpha-kitty payback, establishes the borders of her new territory, knocking an English paperback copy, as thick as my thigh, of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, off its high pedestal. It glumps open to a random, tissue-thin page, where the words prelude, obstacles, and volume have been underlined in light pencil by, I presume, Mathieu’s youthful, questioning hand.
So this is how he does it. Proust must be marginally more interesting than a French-English dictionary, though maybe as much effort. Mathieu had no need of travel, at least in the literal sense. He’s acquired English the impossible way, through literary osmosis. I feel guilty for picturing him as some kind of French spy in Wichita, and maybe disappointed. Yet I still wonder at his total devotion to learning a language spoken by people he has so little use for.
I hear the toilet flush and hurriedly place Proust back atop a biography of someone named Derrida. When Mathieu emergesfrom the bathroom, I am trying to convince Beckett that climbing Mathieu’s curtains is an overrated tourist jaunt from Fodor’s, four years ago. But she does an awfully good impression of a vulture, roosting on her curtain rod, and starts to drift off, a sentry patrolling her castle turret with half an eye out for trouble. Mathieu wordlessly relocates some books and sets up her bowl and litter box in a cobwebbed corner of the room, while I try to swallow the guilt that is starting to blister the back of my throat.
He doesn’t want us here. He has been violated, now that I’ve barged, with my cat, into his chambre before he even extended the offer. He feels wary, burdened, as asceticism seems a more worthy and familiar companion. Mathieu is a writer, an artist. And aren’t they legendarily crotchety and foul-tempered? Can he afford my problems on top of those of his own invention? How many marriages did Hemingway attempt before he put a gun to his head? I search my head, desperate for anecdotes about happy writers and their equally sanguine lovers. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were relatively happy, right? Does that count? Maybe it is just men who are the problem.
That’s too easy, of course.
Edgy, I walk toward his desk again, creaking the floorboards, and notice something written on the paper kept by the carriage of the typewriter. I don’t linger over it. Instead, I focus on the photographs pinned to the wall above his work space. One is of a hauntingly beautiful woman, turned slightly away, her face obscured by shadow. She must be Mathieu’s mother. Unaware of the camera, she smiles to herself, and I can imagine the torment of this—how that resistant profile and private conversation must gall him into fits of remembrance for what he lost, or never quite had.
There are other girls on the wall who bear a striking resemblance to the same woman, and are likely his three sisters, though the pictures must be quite dated. One wears a flimsy, high schoolgraduation gown—strange how traditions transplant themselves around the world—and is posing with a diploma, uncertain to be mock proud or the real thing. Another rests her head on the shoulder of some mystery person, who has been excised, the elusive smile of her mother’s stretching the girl’s heart-shaped face, widening the margins, while the third has her eyes squeezed shut and is cheerily—and boldly, considering her youth—giving the finger to the camera. They seem an aged progression of the same person, and I reflect upon which of the three I most identify with. I’d like to say the second sister, with her easy, liquid drowsiness, but it is the first, with that phony, perfunctory smile shrouding her insecurities. She is the overachiever of the bunch, and the worrier. I wonder what she thinks of her little brother. If she acts as a stern, substitute mother (Mathieu, when are you going to get a real job?), or if the years swimming between them were too daunting after the awful deed—her losing a mother at the time she needed one most, during the tumultuous time called puberty—was done. Now she may be only a memory on Mathieu’s wall, a fading reminder of some alternative life, a longed-for collage. A place Mathieu can point to and say, Things could have been different, if only . …
His obsession with English was born the moment his mother stepped foot in America. His contempt, too.
We all have a trauma in our lives, somewhere to pin the blame when that elusive road of Robert Frost’s seems more a brag than promise. Mine might have been Andy’s breakup with me. It still could be.
There is a gap in the middle of the family photos, a lonely tack wearing a thin rim of white, in that provocative way tacks present themselves when their underlying photographs have been ripped away. I worry over the missing person, wondering where she has gone, why she was discarded. Is that where my picture would hang? On what day would he similarly sicken of me, or I of him? I absently finger the keys of the typewriter while I worry ahead, feeling their cool, contoured smoothness, and look downward. I have to smile. No computers for Mathieu then.
But broken butts, yes. The nicotine-stained papers, the open window. The room is choked by cigarettes. Why did I not notice until now?
“Do not look at that.” Mathieu bounds across the room and rips out the paper from the carriage. Beckett cracks her eyes into slits.
“I wasn’t looking at the paper.” Seeing the fear in his eyes, I lick my lips. “I was looking at the ashtray.”
Mathieu places the paper on a stack inside the desk’s drawer and sinks down into his chair, rubbing his eyes. I frown at his weariness. Beckett allows those second eyelids to slip back over her eyes.
Mathieu looks at his hands. “I am sorry. I did not mean to sound so abrupt and defensive. But I never allow anyone to see what I have written.”
“That’s not what I’m upset about.”
He rumples his hair and jabs a palm into the air. “Would you—do you want me to apologize for smoking, Daisy? Are you suddenly ma maman?”
“No. I just didn’t realize that you were.”
He looks up sharply.
“You lied, Mathieu. In the Orsay, you told me those cigarettes were your mother’s. You acted like she was weak for wanting them.”
“I acted like she was weak because she is. Was.” Mathieu slumps in his chair. “The cigarettes just happened to belong to her.”
“So why didn’t you tell me that you smoked? Why haven’t I seen you light up today?”
“I only smoke when I write.”
“How precious.” God forgive me. I want to be cruel.<
br />
“And sometimes, too, when I want to piss off uptight American tourists.” His chair scrapes backward.
Mathieu slides a cigarette and a book of matches from behindhis typewriter and strikes a match, though his hand shakes slightly. His cupped palm obscures his face. Relaxing, he moves deeper into his chair, the smoke blooming from his mouth.
“I’m allergic.”
He flicks an ash on the desk and grimaces. “So am I. To cats.”
We look at each other.
“I guess we’re screwed then.”
He takes another drag and blows toward the water-stained ceiling. “Guess so.”
I sit on Mathieu’s bed and watch him. My head fills with smoke, and my eyes tear. A part of me wants to shove his face in that ashtray, and a part of me wants to—
No.
I rise. Discard my shirt, unhook my bra. Walk to him. Slide his lap between my legs. Stealing the cigarette from his hand, I gently kill it. He lets me.
He would let me do anything.
“You are still drunk,” he says.
“Am I?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Sing to me, and see if I swoon.”
“I do not sing.”
“What a pity.”
I trace my thumb across his lips, and they follow.
“Whose face used to be up there?”
“Justine.”
“Who is Justine?”
“The girl we saw on the street.”
“Why am I here, and she is not?”
His neck drops back, his jaw slackens. “I grew bored. She caught me with Camille, the sometimes lesbian, the night after my mother died. It seemed a good time to end things.”
I nod. Force my mouth on his ashy lips. His elbow slips, striking the typewriter keys.