by Kyra Davis
“I really think so.”
“I don’t want to upset her.”
“I know,” I said. Mr. Katz stood up on the couch and swished his tail, clearly moved by the emotional moment.
Jason looked back in the direction of the files again. “Okay,” he said, quietly. “Okay.”
I escorted him to the door and when I opened it I scanned the street. I didn’t see any Zipcars this time. Whoever had been parked in front of my house was gone.
“So you’re going to read the files now?” he asked. “Or are you going to sacrifice for Anatoly?”
“I’m going to call Anatoly,” I said with a smile. “I’m going to ask him to come home.” And I’m going to tell him I’m frightened. I didn’t trust Jason to protect me from evil Zipcar drivers. I needed Anatoly for that. More importantly, I needed Anatoly to talk to me. Like really talk.
“Good luck,” Jason said. He sounded like he meant it. I watched him walk out to the street before closing and locking the door. I started to make the call to Anatoly when my phone rang. An anonymous caller.
“Hello?” I said, cautiously into the phone.
“Hi.”
I fell back, putting all my weight against the wall behind me. That was Catherine London’s voice.
“I wasn’t sure you’d call.” Ms. Dogz settled into the corner across from me, putting her head on her paws as she settled in for a late-night nap.
“Yeah, I almost didn’t. My mom doesn’t want me to have anything to do with you.”
“I get that.” Mr. Katz entered the room and rubbed up against my legs. “I think right now what matters is what you want.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Catherine, are you still there?” I asked, a little desperately.
“Nobody calls me Catherine,” she said coldly. “Except my mom when she’s pissed. I go by Cat.”
“Right, sorry,” I looked down at Mr. Katz with a smile. Perhaps my little beast would like this girl.
“My dad sometimes calls me Catherine too,” she said, almost begrudgingly. “I played Catherine of Aragon in a school play and since then he’s been calling me Queen Catherine.” She paused before adding, “It’s stupid. Catherine of Aragon was torn away from her daughter, abandoned by her husband and died alone. Who would want to be Queen Catherine?”
She was smart. I also noticed that she was referring to her father in the present tense. I did that a lot after I lost my father, forgetting, or at the very least not fully accepting, that he was gone. “Were you and your dad close?”
Another pause, followed by a sigh heavier than any girl Cat’s age had the right to. “We were,” she admitted, switching tenses again. “I used to look up to him. When I was little I thought he was the smartest man on earth…and the most loyal.” She punctuated her sentence with a sad little laugh. “Now he’s gone and…I don’t know. I knew how sick he was but…I really didn’t believe he would die. It’s…I don’t know…it’s, like, unreal. It’s just unreal.”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering how life had taken on a surreal quality once my father had died too. I had been nineteen at the time, a few years older than Cat. I had done everything I could to avoid facing the reality of life without my father or facing reality at all. Instead I had run off to Vegas with a superficially charming asshole and married him in a wedding officiated by an Elvis impersonator in a Denny’s parking lot. Heavy drinking and drug use would have been less self-destructive.
“My dad never mentioned you,” Cat continued. “I mean, you guys couldn’t have been together for that long, right? If you hooked up after he was single again. Like, she…she ended it all ten months ago so it had to be more recent than that. Unless he was cheating on her, which I guess shouldn’t surprise me.”
“I met your dad the day he died,” I said, almost pleading with her to believe me.
“Yeah, okay,” she said in a voice that implied she didn’t believe me at all. “Anyway, I have questions. I was hoping maybe you’d be cool with answering a few of them.”
“Of course. To the best of my ability.” Mr. Katz settled onto my foot, his subtle way of telling me I was saying all the right things.
“Yeah, okay. But this has to be on the down-low, okay? If my mom found out I was talking to you she’d freak, like big-time. We can’t meet in public.”
“Got it, we’ll keep it on the down-low,” I promised. “Do you want to come here, to my home? That way we can keep it quiet.”
“Yeah, I guess that’d be good,” Cat said, a little doubtfully. “I’m not going to be able to get away today. My mom’s taken some time off of work to be with me while we, you know, process. And it’s not like a problem for her company. They’re a start-up and let her bring the stuff they’re working on home all the time to test it out or whatever. She could work from home for a full month and I’ll barely be able to get away from her for more than ten minutes at a time. But I think she’s going into the office for a meeting in two days. Maybe we can get together then? I’ll text a time when I have it?”
“Yes, absolutely, I’ll do whatever I need to do to make it work.”
“Yeah, okay…I’ll call or text or something,” she said and then the line went dead.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a moment. Ms. Dogz had woken up and was staring at me with those black eyes. “Do you miss your old family?”
Ms. Dogz tilted her head to the side. I didn’t understand doggie language well enough to know what that meant.
“Did you even know Catherine London?” I tried again. Ms. Dogz simply stared at me.
“Do you identify more as black or as a dog,” I asked. Ms. Dogz tilted her head to the other side.
So tilting the head to the side obviously meant, Are you kidding me?
I could only hope that sussing out the meanings of Catherine’s gestures and words would be as easy.
“Anyone can live without love, but no one can thrive.”
--Dying To Laugh
I sat at the dining room table looking at the notes and articles long after Jason left. But I wasn’t reading them or even thinking about them. I wasn’t even thinking about Orvex or Gun or Zipcars or global conspiracies. I was thinking about Anatoly. I imagined Anatoly riding down Highway 1, the roar of his bike intermingling with the roar of the dark ocean. Maybe it would clear his head and he would come back to me happy, ready to do a little more talking, or a lot more lovemaking. I would be happy with either.
But he hadn’t answered when I called. He didn’t want to hear from me.
So I let the minutes, then the hours tick away as I blindly shuffled through those blog posts, all filled with exclamation marks and italicized words. Ms. Dogz made herself comfortable on the area rug in the living room leaving me in solitude in the dining room. Eventually, I started Googling. About a quarter of the findings in the articles London had hung on his wall seemed to be well supported and widely accepted. The rest, not so much.
Mr. Katz strolled into the dining room and took a seat in the corner, slowly blinking his eyes at me. “You’re right,” I replied to my cat after I interpreted his blink. “We do live in a time when a growing portion of the population thinks the world is flat. So in comparison, believing GMOs are part of a government conspiracy to lower the cognitive abilities of the mass public isn’t all that outrageous.”
I put aside the printed article that claimed exactly that and pulled out my phone as if just looking at it could make Anatoly call me. My fingers hovered over the screen as I considered trying him one more time but then thought better of it. The fear I had felt earlier in the evening had subsided. Now I just felt mildly anxious and…sad. I was sad.
But feeling a little sad was a significant improvement on feeling a little empty.
I looked over again at Mr. Katz. His eyes were closed now even as his tail twitched. I thought about Cat London. Was she sleeping well these days? I wondered if she would text or call me tomorrow to
firm up the details of our meeting. But she was a teenager so it seemed more likely she would wait until the last minute before thinking to set up any meeting details. And as was the case with Anatoly, I knew that pushing her to communicate on my preferred time schedule would simply end up pushing her further away.
By midnight I found myself in our bed alone, again. He came home not long after that and I held my breath as I waited for him to join me. I quickly crafted a fantasy of a repeat of two nights before…with him sneaking beneath the sheets and my hand sneaking beneath his pajama pants. But although I waited with baited breath and all, he never even entered the room. It was only after listening to a few specific doors open and close and a bathroom sink turn on and off that I realized he was setting up camp in the guest room.
He had never done that before.
I considered barging in there, demanding that we talk about what was going on with us. But what was I supposed to say at this point? And I still hadn’t told him about the newspaper with the underlined headline or the invitation I had received to have dinner with Gundrun Volz and his wife. I suppose he’d accuse me of holding out on him again, keeping a secret. But I knew that what really upset him was not that I was keeping secrets but that I had these particular secrets to keep.
And once again he left the next morning before I had even woken up. A few days earlier Anatoly and I had been fine, I hadn’t had a stalker, no one had been threatening me and I didn’t have an opinion about Zip Cars. I had made a mess of everything.
Except I was writing.
That day I wrote twenty-seven pages. Twenty-seven good pages.
I was beginning to wonder if my creative spirit was somehow tied to the spirits of Hell. At this rate, I’d have to actually burn the house down just to find the motivation to finish the first three chapters.
“If someone tells you they’re doing something for the greater good what they’re really telling you is they’re about to do something very bad. Good deeds don’t have to be justified.”
--Dying To Laugh
I chose white. White was the perfect color to wear for my meeting with the Volzs at their Pacific Heights home. So I put on a white, long sleeved jumper that I almost never wore with a wide wrap belt. My intent was to look both professional and innocent. Like way too innocent to set up an interview with a corporate CEO on false pretenses. I decided the perfect accessory to my professional-innocent look was a butcher’s knife, discreetly hidden underneath my wallet, cell phone, charger and other items that I regularly kept in my handbag. On the one hand, the idea that I would have to knife fight my way out of the eight million dollar home of a pharmaceutical CEO, seemed rather implausible.
On the other hand, Implausible might as well be the title of my autobiography.
I had to park a full three city blocks away from where Gun lived and every time a car rode by or a wind picked up I worried that specks of dirt would come flying at me, and add unwanted patterns to my pristine white clothes.
Still, I was in reasonably good shape when I reached the double doors to Gun’s Victorian mini-mansion. He greeted me in jeans and a sports coat. I was relieved and gratified to see his wife was there, as promised. She was standing a little behind him in her own pair of jeans and a pink, oversized scoop neck top that slid around every time she moved.
“The lady of the hour!” Gun said, shaking my hand vigorously. I smiled but kept my feet firmly planted on the opposite side of the threshold. I had already promised myself that I wouldn’t enter the house unless his wife was there as promised. I was reckless but not stupid.
As if reading my mind, a woman entered the foyer and stood a few paces behind Gun “Allow me to introduce you to the lady of my life,” Gun said as I finally stepped into the house, “Cara.”
Cara was not what I expected. Everything about her screamed kindness and a complete lack of pretension. From her blonde hair pulled back into a careless ponytail, to her lack of makeup and her slightly crooked toothed grin. “I’ve heard so much about you, please come in!” She gushed as she clasped my hand in both of hers.
She ushered us into the living area. On the coffee table was a tray with assorted vegetables surrounding what might or might not have been a homemade dip. There was also a bottle of white chilling in a bucket and two wine glasses out and ready. “That was such a flattering portrait you painted of my man,” she said with a laugh as she poured me a glass of wine. “I have to say, it made me want to take another look at him, remind myself of what I have!”
“Well, that was mostly Tereza,” I said, carefully. “I just helped a little bit with some of the research on Nolan-Volz.”
“You’re too modest,” Gun insisted as he also accepted a glass from his wife. The room smelled faintly of potpourri mingled with Cara’s floral perfume. What I didn’t smell was food. Shouldn’t the smell of freshly baked eggplant Parmesan be detectable to the nose? Or did they have a smell proof kitchen, the perfect accommodation for every incompetent chef.
“Do you not drink?” I asked as Cara reached for a celery stick.
“Oh, I do, sometimes,” she said with a smile as she sat down next to her husband. “Now, Gun tells me you’re a novelist too?”
I looked over at Gun. I hadn’t told him that.
“Forgive me, I Googled you,” Gun explained.
“Oh,” I held my wine between both hands. I still hadn’t taken a sip. “I recently decided I needed to mix things up and try my hand at journalism. I do so much research for my novels anyway, you know? But yeah, normally I just write books.”
“Just?” Cara said with a laugh. “Oh, you really are too modest. I would love to read your novels. Gun, will you get the titles for me? I’ll order them from Amazon first thing tomorrow. You can get them on Amazon, yes?”
“Um, yes…” I brought the wine a little closer to my body, trying to internalize the mellow chill of the glass. “I could just give the titles directly to you if you like?” I said with what I hoped was a discernible amount of humor.
“Oh, of course,” she laughed. “But as I’m sure Gun told you, I can’t stay very long. Our daughter is at a party in Daly City. Can you believe they have parties in Daly City?” She laughed. “I thought the only thing that city had to offer was fog and free parking! Anywho, I promised to pick her up. I actually should get going now if I want to make it on time. You know how traffic is. It seems to get worse by the day! By the minute!”
“You’re…leaving us alone?” I asked, a tiny bit of panic creeping into my voice.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not the jealous type,” she said in what seemed to be an odd non sequitur. She leaned over and gave Gun a kiss on the cheek. “I married one of the rarest species of man. You know, the trustworthy breed.” She laughed merrily at her own joke before getting back up to her feet. “Besides,” she added as she reached for one last celery stick, “I would just be in the way of this follow-up interview. He’s the star, not me.”
I looked over at Gun. He was smiling benignly at me. “There’s no need for her to be here for the second interview, is there? Or is this the third? Seeing that both you and your byline stealing partner have interviewed me in the last week, I suppose this will be the third interview, yes?”
“Oh, don’t be so mean,” Cara said, cheerily. “I’m sure Sophie and Tereza…is that her name? Tereza? I’m sure Sophie and Tereza have some kind of perfectly equitable arrangement worked out, don’t you, Sophie? Or maybe not?” She added as she took in the concerned look on my face. “Maybe we should be bad-mouthing Tereza? I’m perfectly happy to call her an evil bitch if that’s helpful. I try to be very accommodating of my guests.”
“No, no. No need to bad mouth Tereza.” I swallowed and looked down at my wine glass. “You know, I probably shouldn’t have agreed to an interview at this time, after work and all when you should be unwinding.” I gave Gun a weak smile. “It would be better if we rescheduled for sometime during the work day, wouldn’t it?”
“Not at all, Sophi
e. As I told you on the phone, this is the best time. You’ll excuse me for a moment as I walk my wife out?” He got up and placed a hand on her waist. His tone was light and he was still smiling at me but the smile had turned a little sinister. I thought about the butcher knife in my purse. I should have brought the gun despite not having a concealed carry permit. A gun for Gun. A nervous giggle escaped my lips, causing Cara to give me an odd look as she allowed her husband to escort her to the front door.
I kept my seat and listened to the two of them exchange a few more pleasantries while in the foyer. There was the sound of the door opening and then closing again. In seconds Gundrun was back, but his smile was gone.
“So,” he said as he reclaimed his seat.
“So,” I said, quietly.
He reached for his wine and took a long sip. So the wine hadn’t been poisoned. That was somewhat reassuring. He leaned further back in his chair but kept his posture stiff. “The Chronicle has never heard of you.”
Shit. “Well, that’s not really fair,” I hedged. “They’ve reviewed my work twice. Interviewed me for their lifestyle section once--”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
“Yeah,” I lifted my chin, trying to look poised and defiant. “I know it.”
“Why did you want to talk to me about London? Who was he to you?”
“He was…a friend.”
Gun’s nostrils flared. I had never really seen someone’s nostrils flare before but Gundrun had class A raging-bull-like flaring nostrils. “If you’re trying to convince me you were his mistress, I don’t buy it.”
Thank God. At least one person didn’t think I looked quite that hard up.
“He never got over Anita,” Gun explained, adding an almost sarcastic emphasis to the name. “He wouldn’t have given you a second look.”