by Lily Pond
The Sangers looked insulted; they went into a kind of sulk—their eyes shining with anger—but they said nothing. You knew they wanted to say something like Okay, but what kind of a name is Owlie? But Owlie was black and it was possible that Owlie was a special black name, maybe Swahili, or else meant something interesting, which—and this was obvious—Brucie didn’t.
Unexpectedly, Margaret Duboys said to Cooper, “Taking good care of your dog—is that funny? People go to much more trouble for children. Look at all the time and money that’s wasted on these Embassy kids.”
“You’re not serious,” Cooper said. “I mean, what a freaky comparison!”
“It’s a fair comparison,” Margaret said. “I’ve spent whole evenings at the Scadutos’ listening to stories about Tolly’s braces. Guess how much they cost the American taxpayer? Three thousand dollars! They sent him to an orthodontist at the American base in Frankfurt—”
“I’m thinking of going there,” Lornette Jeeps said. “I’ve got this vein in my leg that’s got to come out.”
“They didn’t even work!” Margaret was saying. “Skiddoo says the kids still call him Bugs Bunny. And Horton’s kid, eight years old, and he’s got a bodyguard who just stands there earning twenty grand a year while Horton Junior plays Space Invaders at these clip joints in Leicester Square—”
“It’s an antikidnap measure,” Erroll Jeeps said. “It’d be easy as shit for some crackhead in the IRA to turn Horton Junior into hand luggage—”
And then the two Sangers smiled at each other, and while Margaret continued talking, Al Sanger said, “We’re pretty fond of Brucie. We’ve had him since Caracas—”
There were, generally speaking, two categories of bores at the Embassy dinner parties: people with children, and people with animals. Life in London was too hectic and expensive for people to have both children and animals. When they did, the children were teenagers and the animals disposable—hamsters and turtles. One group had school stories and the other had quarantine stories—and they were much the same: both involved time, money, patience, and self-sacrifice.
“You certainly put up with a lot of inconvenience,” I said to one woman with a long story.
“If that’s what you think, you completely missed my point,” she said.
She was proud of her child—or perhaps it was a puppy.
Margaret Duboys was still talking!
I said, “Are we discussing brats or ankle-biters?”
“It’s still Brucie,” Tina Sanger said.
“Give me cats any day,” I said, sipping my gin and trying to keep a straight face. “They’re clean, they’re intelligent, and they’re selfish. None of this tail-wagging, no early-morning sessions in the park, no ‘walkies.’ Dogs resent strangers, they get jealous, they get bored—they stink, they stumble, they drool. Sometimes dogs turn on you for no reason! They revert! They maul people, they eat children. But cats only scratch you by accident, or if you’re being a pest. Dogs want to be loved, but cats don’t give a damn. They look after themselves, and they’re twice as pretty.”
“What about kids?” Al Sanger said.
“They’re in between,” I said.
Erroll said, “In between what?”
“Dogs and cats.”
Margaret Duboys howled suddenly. A dark labored groan came straight out of her lungs. I had a moment of terror before I realized that she was just laughing very hard.
I had been silly, I thought, in talking about cats that way, but it produced an amazing effect. After dinner, Miss Duboys came up to me and said in a purr of urgency, “Could you give me a lift home? My car’s being fixed.”
She had never accepted a ride from me before, and this was the first time she had ever asked for one. I found this very surprising, but I had a further surprise. When we arrived at her front door, she said, “Would you like to come in for a minute?”
I was—if the Embassy rumors were correct—the first human being to receive such an invitation from her. I found it hard to appear calm. I had never cared much about the Embassy talk or Miss Duboys’s supposed secrets; but, almost from the beginning, I had been interested in offering her a passionate friendship. I liked her company and her easy conversation. But how could I know anything about her heart until I discovered her body? I felt for her, as I had felt for all the women I wanted to know better, a mixture of caution and desire and nervous panic. A lover’s emotions are the same as a firebug’s.
There was a sound behind the door. It was both motion and sound, like tiny children hurrying on their hands and knees.
“Don’t be shocked,” Miss Duboys said. She was smiling. She looked perfectly serene. In this light her eyes were not green but gray.
Then she opened the door.
Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats
She was stooping to embrace them, then almost as an afterthought she said, “Come in, but be careful where you step.”
There were six of them, and they were large. I knew at once that they resented my being there. They crept away from me sideways, seeming to walk on tiptoe, in that fastidious and insolent way that cats have. Their bellies were too big and detracted from their handsomeness. Why hadn’t she told anyone about her cats? It was the simplest possible answer to all the Embassy gossip and speculation. And no one had a clue. People still believed she had a friend, a lover, someone with a huge appetite, who sometimes beat her up. But it was cats. That was why she had not left Britain for the duration of nearly two tours: because of the quarantine regulations she could not take her cats, and if she could not travel with them she would not travel at all.
But she had not told anyone. I was reminded then that she had never been very friendly with anyone at the Embassy—how could she have been, if no one knew this simple fact about her that explained every quirk of her behavior? She had always been remote and respectful.
That first night I said, “No one knows about your cats.”
“Why should they?”
“They might be interested,” I said, and I thought: Don’t you want to keep them from making wild speculations?
“Other people’s pets are a bore,” she said. She seemed cross. “And so are other people’s children. No one’s really interested, and I can’t stand condescension. People with children think they’re superior or else pity you, and people with cats think you’re a fool, because their beasts are so much better behaved. You have to live your own life—thank God for that.”
It was quite an outburst, considering that all we were talking about were cats. But she was defensive, as if she knew about her mysterious reputation and “Miss Duboys has a friend” and all those coarse rumors.
She said, “What I do in my own home, on my own time, is my business. I usually put in a ten-hour day at the Embassy. I think I’m entitled to a little privacy. I’m not hurting anyone, am I?”
I said, no, of course not—but it struck me that her tone was exactly that of a person defending a crank religion or an out-of-the-way sexual practice. She had overreacted to my curiosity, as if she expected to be persecuted for the heresy of cat-worship.
I said, “Why are you letting me in on your little secret?”
“I liked what you said at Erroll’s—about cats.”
“I’m a secret believer in cats,” I said. “I like them.”
“And I like you.” She was holding a bulgy orange cat and making kissing noises at it. “That’s a compliment. I’m very fussy.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s time for bed,” she said.
I looked up quickly with a hot face. But she was talking to the cat and helping it into a basket.
We did nothing that night except drink. It had got to the hour—about half-past two—when to go to bed with her would have been a greater disappointment than going home alone to Battersea. I made it look like gallantry—I said I had to go; tomorrow was a working day—but I was doing us both a favor, and certainly sparing her my blind bumbling late-night performance. She s
eemed to appreciate my tact, and she let me know, with her lips and a nick of her tongue and her little sigh of pleasure, that someday soon, when it was convenient, I would be as welcome in her bed as any of her cats.
Cat-worship was merely a handy label I had thought of to explain her behavior. Within a few weeks it seemed an amazingly accurate description, and even blunt clichés, such as cat-lover and cat-freak, seemed to me precise and perfectly fair. Cats were not her hobby or her pastime, but her passion.
I got to know her garden apartment. It was in Notting Hill, off Kensington Park Road, in a white building that had once been (I think she said) the residence of the Spanish Ambassador. Its ballroom had been subdivided into six small apartments. But hers was on the floor below these, a ground-floor apartment opening into a large communal park, Arundel Gardens. The gardens, like the apartment and most of its furnishings, were for the cats. The rent was twelve hundred dollars a month—six hundred pounds. It was too much, almost more than Miss Duboys could afford, but the cats needed fresh air and grass and flowers, and she needed the cats.
On her walls there were cat calendars and cat photographs and, in some rooms, cat wallpaper—a repeated motif of crouching cats. She had cat paperweights and cat picturebooks, and waste-baskets and lampshades with cats on them. On a set of shelves there were small porcelain cats. There were fat cats stenciled on her towels, and kittens on her coffee mugs. She had cats printed on her sheets and embroidered on her dinner napkins. Cats are peculiarly expressionless creatures, and the experience of so many images of them was rather bewildering. The carpet in the hall was cat-shaped—a sitting one in profile. She had cat notepaper, a stack of it on her desk (two weeks later I received an affectionate message on it).
And she had real cats, six of them. Five were nervous and malevolent, and the sixth was simple-minded—a neutered, slightly undersized one that gaped at me with the same sleepy vacuity as those on the wall and those on the coffee mugs. The largest cat weighed fifteen or twenty pounds—it was vast and fat-bellied and evil-spirited, and named Lester. It had a hiss like a gas leak. Even Margaret was a bit fearful of this monster, and she hinted to me that it had once killed another cat. Thereafter, Lester seemed to me to have the stupid, hungry—and cruel and comic—face of a cannibal.
There was nothing offensive in the air, none of that hairy suffocation that is usual in a catty household. The prevalent smell was of food, the warm buttery vapor of homecooking. Margaret cooked all the time; her cats had wonderful meals: hamburg in brown gravy, lightly poached fish, stews that were never stretched with flour or potatoes. Lester liked liver, McCool adored fish, Miss Growse never ate anything but stews, and the others—they all had human-sounding names—had different preferences. They did not eat the same thing. Sometimes they did not eat at all—did not even taste it but only glanced and sniffed at the food steaming in the dish and then walked away and yowled for something else. It made me mad: I would have eaten some of that food! The cats were spoiled and overweight and grouchy—“fat and magnificent,” Margaret called them. Yes, yes; but their fussy food habits kept her busy for most of the hours she was home. Now I understood her huge shopping bills. She was patient with them—more patient than I had even seen her in the Embassy. When the cats did not eat their food, she put it into another dish and left it outside for the strays—the London moggies and the Notting Hill tomcats that prowled Arundel Gardens. Why the other dishes? “My cats are very particular about who uses their personal dishes!”
I said, “Do you use the word ‘personal’ with cats?”
“I sure do!”
And one day she said, “I never give them cans.”
It was the sort of statement that caused me a moment of unnecessary discomfort. I ate canned food all the time. What was wrong with it? I wanted to tell Margaret that she was talking nonsense: Good food, fresh air, no cans! Me and my cats!
No, absolutely no cans—the cats drew the line there—but they were not particular about which chair leg they scratched, or where they puked, or where they left their matted hairs. They sharpened their claws on the sofa and on the best upholstered chairs, and went at the wall and clawed it and left shredded, scratched wallpaper, like heaps of grated cheese, on the carpet. The cats were not fierce except when they were protecting their food or were faced with the London strays; but they were very destructive—needlessly so—and it made me angry to think of Margaret paying so much money for rent and having to endure the cats’ vandalism. She did not mind.
I made the mistake of mentioning this only once.
She replied, “But children are a hundred times worse.”
I said, “How does it feel to have six children?”
If it seemed that way, she said—that they were like children—then how did it seem from the cats’ point of view? I thought she was crazy, taking this line (look at it from the cats’ point of view!), but she quoted Darwin. She said that Darwin had concluded that domesticated animals which grew up with people regarded human beings as members of their own species. It was in The Voyage of the Beagle, where the sheepdogs treated sheep in a brotherly way in Argentina. From this, it was easy to see that cats regarded us as cats—of a rather inconvenient size, but cats all the same, which fed them, and opened doors for them, and scratched them pleasantly behind their ears, and gave them a lap to sit on, and pinched fleas from around their eyes and mouths, and wormed them.
“Darwin said that?”
“More or less.”
“That cats think we’re cats?”
“He was talking about dogs and sheep, but, yes,” she said uncertainly. With conviction she added, “Anyway, these cats think I’m one.”
“What about their natural instincts?”
“Their instincts tell them no, but their sympathies and learning experience tell them yes. These cats are sympathetic. Listen, I don’t even think of them as cats!”
“That’s one step further than Darwin,” I said.
By now I knew a great deal about Miss Duboys’s cats, and quite a lot about Miss Duboys. We had spent the past five Sundays together. Neither of us had much to do on the weekends. It became our routine to have Sunday lunch at an Indian restaurant and, after a blistering vindaloo curry, to return to her apartment and spend the afternoon in bed. When we woke, damp and entangled, from our sudden sleep—the little death that follows sex—we went to a movie, usually a bad, undemanding one, at the Cate Cinema near the Notting Hill tube station. Sunday was a long day with several sleeps—the day had about six parts and seemed at times like two or three whole days—all the exertion, and then the laziness, and all the dying and dreaming and waking.
London was a city that inspired me to treasure private delights. Its weather and its rational, well-organized people had made it a city of splendid interiors—everything that was pleasurable happened indoors: the contentment of sex, food, reading, music, and talk. Margaret would have added animals to this list. When she woke blindly from one of these feverish Sunday sleeps, she bumped me with an elbow and said, “I’m neglecting my cats.”
She had no other friends. Apart from me (but I occupied her only one day of the week), her cats were the whole of her society, and they satisfied her. It seemed to me that she was slightly at odds with me—slightly bewildered—because I offered her the one thing a cat could not provide. The cats were a substitute for everything else. Well, that was plain enough! But it made me laugh to think that for Margaret Duboys I represented Sex. Me! It made life difficult for us at times, because it was hard for her to see me in any other way. She judged most people by comparing them with cats. In theory this was trivial and belittling, but it was worse in practice—no one came out well; no one measured up; no humans that she knew were half so worthwhile as any of her cats.
“I make an exception in your case,” she told me—we were in bed at the time.
“Thanks, Marge!”
She didn’t laugh. She said, “Most men are prigs.”
“Did you say prigs?”
“No, no”—but she dived beneath the covers.
Usually she was harder on herself than on me. She seemed to despise that part of herself which needed my companionship. We saw each other at parties just as often as before, because we concealed the fact that we had become lovers. I was not naturally a concealer of such things, but she made me secretive, and I saw that this was a part of all friendship—agreeing to be a little like the other person. Margaret thought, perhaps rightly, that in an informal way the Embassy would become curious about our friendship and ask questions—certainly the boys on the third floor would keep us under observation. So we never used the internal Embassy phones for anything except the most boring trivialities. There was plenty of time at the dinner parties for us to make plans for the following Sunday. People were still trying to bring us together! When I did phone her, out of caution I used the public phone box near my apartment, on Prince of Wales Drive. Those were the only times I used that phone box, and entering it—it was a damp, stinking, vandalized cubicle—I thought always of her, and always in a tender way.
She was catlike in the panting gasping way she made love, the way she clawed my shoulders, the way she shook, and most of all in the way she slept afterward, as though on a branch or an outcrop of rock, her legs drawn up under her and her arms wrapped around her head and her nose down.
I don’t think of them as cats. A number of times she repeated this observation to me. She did not theorize about it; she didn’t explain it. And yet it seemed to me the perfect reply to Darwin’s version of domestic animals thinking of us as animals. The person who grew up with cats for company regarded cats as people! Of course! Yet it seemed to me that these cats were the last creatures on earth to care whether or not they resembled an overworked FSO-4 in the Trade Section of the American Embassy. And if that was how she felt about cats, it made me wonder what she thought about human beings.
We seldom talked about the other people at work or about our work. We seldom talked at all. When we met it was for one thing, and when it came to sex she was single-minded. She used cats to explain her theory of the orgasm: “Step one, chase the cat up the tree. Step two, let it worry for a while. Step three, rescue the cat.” When she failed to have an orgasm she would whisper, “The cat is still up the tree—get her down.”