“Um. We’re looking for Liza’s place?”
I swung the door full open and stepped aside. “Ladies, you’ve found it!”
Our single-file troupe up the stairs was silence of the non-comfortable variety. At the landing I smiled as wide as possible. “Can I take your coats?”
“Um. I’ll keep mine.”
“Me too.”
“Can I just lay my cape over the banister?”
“Of course. Liza is just rising from a nap right now, at least I hope she is.”
“So you’re, um … Liza’s boyfriend?”
“Yup.”
“I’m Krysta.”
“Winifred.”
“Destiny.”
We shook hands like business associates.
Liza popped out of the bedroom door. “Oooh, you guys are here.”
The ladies all traded hugs.
Simon appeared. “Whoa. Was there a dress code for tonight?”
“Hah ha. Say hello to Liza’s music buddies. Krysta, Destiny, and … Winnie?”
“Winifred.”
“Got it. Simon, here, is a psychologist. So if you’re feeling the least bit unstable, feel free to …”
“… Keep it to yourself.” Simon had found a glass and was pouring wine. “And drink with quiet desperation.”
The women accepted this with somber countenance.
“Hah ha. He doesn’t like to work off the clock. Not to mention stoned. But seriously, he’ll speak with penetrating insight when called upon. That’s what I keep him around for.”
“Hah ha …”
No one but me was laughing.
Simon kept his grin. “More interesting is the Holocaust resonance you guys elicit.”
“Huh?”
“The ‘I am dead’ proclamation that especially … is it Destiny?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Especially Destiny’s white-on-black visual iconography. There’s no denying the elegance of casket regalia, the final fatal self-admission that the grave is only a matter of indeterminate time.”
The girls stood silent and staring.
“I’m sure it’s quite liberating.” Simon continued his polemic. “There is equivalence in many cultures for a ritualized and sometime jovial celebratory kind of embracing of fate …”
“Well, I can see this is going to be an interesting conversational extravaganza. Shall we proceed to more comfortable surroundings?” I managed to coax the assemblage from the hallway to seats in the living room. To my relief everyone present agreed to drink. This was a mixed benefit; things would inevitably loosen, something I prayed would happen sooner than later, but none of Liza’s ghoulish gaggle had brought wine, beer, a flask, a cauldron or anything else resembling the traditional polite liquid contribution to a dinner party. I rued that my vino supply would be run over this night and left as dead as these girls seemed to be trying to look.
I put on some John Cage—the only “out there” music I owned—then dashed to refuge in the kitchen to get everything ready. I pulled a couple more bottles of white out of the cupboard and got them cooling in the fridge, then started in on drinking seriously myself.
The phone rang. A weird feeling that it might be important, and the fact it was so near at hand, made me violate my firm anti pick-up principle and get it. It was Paul. “I left my cigarettes.”
“Huh …” I looked around. “I don’t see them.”
“They’re there. They’ve got to be there.”
I walked with the phone into the living room. The pack was on an end table. I held a hand to the mouth-piece and grabbed them. The silent room stared at me.
I galloped back to the kitchen. “Yeah they’re here. There’s only three left. Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“I was bugged, trying to remember where they were.”
“Well now you know. Go to sleep.”
“I actually was … Did. I had a nightmare.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.”
“So you called to tell me about it. In the middle of my dinner party.”
“I had to talk to somebody.”
“Well … Gee. Okay. Was it a bad one?”
“The ditch in Richmond. Me in the cab, hanging sideways.”
“Oh. I wondered when that episode was going to rear its ugly ass again.”
“I mean. I survived, right?”
“Of course you did, Paul. You’re alive. This is not a dream.”
“I started shivering, even under the covers. I woke up and was shivering and sweating at the same time.”
“Well you know. Sounds like you might be ready.”
“For what?”
“Therapy.”
“Gaa …”
“Breathe deep.”
“Man. That’s a cold beer in the face.”
“Forget about the rising water?”
“Whew. I gotta breathe. Yeah. I might get to sleep now … Thanks. Hoo man. Okay.”
“Atta boy.”
“I think I’m gonna be all right.”
“Glad to be of help.”
“Yeah. Speaking of which, how’s it going?”
“The dinner?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s fine. There’s a good mix … You want to come over?”
“Naw naw. I’ll be okay. But thanks, eh.”
“Don’t mention it.
“Don’t drink too much.”
“You’re a little late with that advice.”
“Sounds like you’ll need to keep your wits about you.”
“That’s actually darn true, it’s measuring up to be a tetchy crowd. I’m a little past it already, too.”
“Try to control your mouth. You’ll thank me …”
•
Once the food was on the table things did improve. In fact, from my perspective there finally occurred in my dining room the kind of free-for-all verbal melee I’d fought hard down the years to facilitate. The synergistic giddiness translated into complete lack of inhibition as far as risky conversation was concerned. My recall features fragments, though there were several recurring themes. One of them, about past relationships, got me expounding wistfully on wasted love:
“I sure do regret her heartbreak. There was no need for that.”
“How did it end?”
“Nothing traumatic. I just stopped calling her.”
“That’s cold. And rude, too. ”
“Well she was heading for a greater fall and I was getting uncomfortable. There was something disconcerting, too. She started buying me expensive gifts.”
“Like what?”
“Designer clothes. A space pen.”
“What’s that?”
“The kind that writes upside down, has a special gel grip. I found out later the damn thing cost nearly a hundred bucks.”
“So that kind of stuff turned you off.”
“Yeah. Gifts. Eeew.”
In the mind-fog enfolding my brain I cannot remember how that particular strain of conversation was resolved, but soon we were talking about an actor friend of mine with a drinking problem:
“So I’m pulling him out of the car, he clearly wasn’t going to be walking on his own, and when I’m grabbing him by the middle, this weird sensation of something coming out of him jolts me. I leapt back, thinking I’d dislodged a colostomy bag or something. And there is this shimmery, foil thing sticking out of him. For a second I think maybe he’s been wearing some kind of bullet protection body armour or one of those paranoid tin-foil shields to protect against alien brain waves. It takes me a minute to realize he’s grabbed the wine bag out of one of the half-empty cardboard kegs he’d been mauling back at the gala, and stuffed it in his shirt. There was still enough in there to keep him pissed until morning at least. Or enough to start again the next day. I mean I drink plenty myself as you can see, but I don’t fully understand drunkenness at that level …”
We moved on to politics for a bit but it just ended up with Simon and me dominating th
e conversation. Thankfully we got back onto relationships—particularly as regards sex—and it was his turn to hold boldly forth:
“Oh man, for a while there I was indiscriminately screwing just for comic relief …”
“Eeew. When was that ever okay?” One of the Goths—I’d forgotten their names by then—drew back in disgust. “Remind me to be glad I missed that era in male-female relations.”
“Oh c’mon now, there has to be equivalents in each generation.”
“Not if we can help it. We don’t see that kind of men.”
“You mean my kind of men?” I just had to stick my head into the line of fire. “Men like me.”
“However you want to have it.”
Simon rescued me: “Oscar Wilde once said the best way to deal with temptation is to yield to it. My thesis, vis-à-vis guys going after girls, is that the interesting, resourceful men are the ones with the problems. The dull ones, the ones characterized as solid, great guys in fiction and in lore, are simply not presented with the opportunity to dramatize themselves.”
“Whatever that means …”
“Sounds like lame rationalization to me.”
“That’s so cynical! And weak, too.”
“Speaking of which …” Simon smiled at me. “Tell the cat story.”
“The cat story?”
“The one that lived under your bed. When you lived downstairs.”
“There’s not much to that one, you pretty much tell it by asking for it to be told.”
“Oh?” The one I suspected was Destiny, darkened and narrowed her gaze. “You had a cat living under your bed?”
“I didn’t know it was there. It was just a weird time.”
“Oh come on.” Simon wasn’t letting me go. “There was sex involved.”
“Well yeah. But that was kind of a corollary to the thing.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Liza was on the edge of exasperation.
“I told you about it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“He was romancing some girl at the time.” Simon spoke into his glass. “There was a fascinating metaphorical quality to what happened.”
I tilted my head at him. “Maybe you should tell it.”
“With pleasure.” Simon dabbed a napkin to his mouth. “I consider it to be the definitive sexual-political story. It involves equal measures of sexism, racism, arrogance, naked lust and emotional neglect.”
“Not to mention, apparently, cruelty to animals.” Destiny was right with the tale.
“I didn’t do a thing to the poor kitty. It got scared and ran under my bed, that’s all.”
“And stayed for …?”
“A couple of days, I guess.”
“At least two days, if I correctly recall your telling of it those several years ago.” Simon beamed around the table. “Close your ears if you, like myself, consider our host one of the best guys you’ll ever meet.” He ignored the ironic jeers of the semi-drunk Goths sitting about him. “This is a dark shadow of the man, the guy we all love but prefer not to fully know.”
“Well thanks, but I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Indeed it’s true. You are a man who helps his friends, lends money or gives it away, always includes everybody, wishes the best for everyone, seldom speaks ill of the absent, cooks excellent meals to which we are frequently invited …”
“Stop it.”
“Generally the best guy around. But one day he brought home this office girl. And because I lived upstairs at the time I saw the predatory look in his face. Carnal, raw.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I saw you. When you pulled up in the car. From my study window. As you held the door open for her. Whatever her name was. What was her name?”
“Ah, something. I’m almost remembering.” I was more than aware of how increasingly wanton this story would sound without my recalling the woman’s name. “Just a minute, I’ll get it …”
“Never mind. Suffice to say she was a sexy little thing.”
“Hah.” Liza spat out her miffed disapproval. The sound of this unnerved me more than the prospect of having Simon recount the tale with all his threatened X-rated embellishment.
“And she had that certain something in her eyes, that expectation, that hope. I hesitate to offer the je ne sais quoi cliché, but there’s no other way.”
“I’m not getting you, here.” Krysta’s mauve-tinged eyes were quizzical.
“It seemed to me that she seemed optimistic for something other than sheer sex.”
“How could you tell?”
“By the way she eagerly held his hand. She was affectionate. In a real way. I could tell from where I was watching and I could see it clear when I met her. A few days later.”
I slapped my hand on the table. “You never met her.”
He turned to me. “You’re forgetting the bagel shop.”
“We never …” It came back to me, a day we’d had to walk a little further for a parking spot. “Oh yeah. But only for a few minutes.”
“The way she hung off you. Her look. Her smile. The tilt of her head. She was nuts about you.”
I don’t mind saying I was vexed. Simon seemed about to give away as much of my life as he knew or could make up. It occurred to me that he likely had had an extra dose of the strong weed he customarily added to the wine.
“Not only that, you yourself said that the sex was transcendental.”
“Transcendental?”
“That was the word you used, yes.”
“I’ve never described anything in my life as transcendental. I don’t even completely know what it would mean in terms of sex, or anything else for that matter.”
“Don’t try to pretend there wasn’t a lovely girlfriend involved with the cat incident.”
“Why is it so important?”
“Because, as I recall, you assured her during intercourse that there was no living thing trapped beneath you. She was freaked at the idea, you told me.”
“I must have been drunk.”
“Drunk?” Liza had been listening with a bravely placid expression. “Well that explains it.”
“Naw, you can’t put all this down to the martini marathon I was on.” I paused, hoping to alter the course of the conversation by interrupting its pace. “I was a major womanizer in those days. Everybody knows.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“Uh. Is there more you’d like to know?”
“Have you truly examined it? Why specifically did you turn your charm beam on this woman?”
“It’s like owning a gun. Once in a while you have to whip it out and see if it still shoots.”
“Whoa!”
“So male!”
“Fascinating analogy. Duh!”
“It fits, though. And by the way how can you accuse a man of such lemon meringue pie eminence of being excessively masculine? Anyway. Every so often, no matter how level you might feel generally, no matter how settled and over it and in control of yourself, you so want to whip it out and … Well, who among us still has a sex life?”
“Whoa!”
“You girls, of course. Simon?”
“Sporadic.”
“As for me, since fifty went past it’s declining, of course. But still once in a while it flares up and you connect with your life and times through the simple crazy physical abandon of laissez-faire sexual slam-dancing.”
“Oh how politely you put it.” Liza was on the edge of outrage.
“Thank you.”
“You mean to say you had sex with this woman just to keep your plumbing clear?”
“No no no. Sex all by itself at my age is dull in the extreme. No no. The attraction is the process. The first phase being charm. So I whipped out my charm and shot her with it. To see if I could still hit the target.”
“Ohmigod, I can barely stand all this macho-western movie violence jargon.”
“Sorry, but it’s better than yo
ur building trades metaphor. Please don’t mention plumbing again, okay? At least not for an hour or so.”
“As long as you don’t mention guns.”
“Oh gee is this conversation ever going downhill.”
“I wanna know about the cat.” This from Destiny. Everyone looked at her.
“Well. She snuck under my bed.”
“How did you know it was a she?”
“I didn’t. It could have been a male.” I thought for a moment, recalling our final confrontation, the malice emanating from those ovaline eyes. “Now I think of it, I’m sure it was female.”
“Why would you treat your cat this way?” Destiny’s solemnity stopped the flow.
“Oh, it wasn’t my cat. Actually, that’s the best part of the story. You see, as Simon mentioned, I used to live in the basement of this building. It showed up at the window one summer morning as I was waking. There were two of them, actually. They started roaming around my place as if they owned it. I think a thunderstorm had scared them into trespassing, but they sure made themselves at home once they’d broke and entered.”
“What colour was the cat?”
“Which one?”
“The one that stayed. I assume you didn’t have two cats under there?”
“No, only one stayed. She was orange. With white stripes.”
“She.”
“Yeah, she.”
“You mean the one that stayed?”
“Yeah.”
“Because the one that didn’t—I assume it got away somehow—it was likely a boy cat.” Destiny’s pronouncements had an edge. “I sense that.”
“I suppose you could assume it was a male. It acted like it was in charge.”
I waited for a protest from somewhere around the table. If there was one it was sufficiently under breath to be inaudible.
Simon turned to Destiny. “I’m glad you’re helping me make him stick to specifics.”
“Now what the heck do you mean by that?”
“Never mind. Just tell the story.”
“I’ll tell it for Destiny. You’ve already heard it. I’m sure anybody who’s known me for more than a day has heard it.”
“I might have heard it before but I’ve forgotten certain things.” Liza had been listening intently. “And you change it every time you tell it. I mean, I never knew it was an orange cat.”
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