Here Kitty Kitty

by Jardine Libaire

  He looked at me for a long time, but I wouldn’t look up. So he’d taken out his checkbook right there at the bar.

  “I feel like Heidi Fleiss,” I whispered conspiratorially, even passionately, thinking that the second time had been easy, even exciting.

  But now I felt like shit.

  Something scuffled on the floor. Yves walked into the living room, snapped on the light. Hurried after it. Snapped on the kitchen light: the bird strutted under the butcher-block table.

  “C’mere, birdie,” Yves said, crouching and approaching. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I bet he’s got rabies.”

  “He’s just scared. Birds don’t have rabies, Lee.”

  The pigeon launched itself at Yves, boomeranged off his shoulder, fluttered around the loft. Yves started to chase it. Somehow, the gray bird found its way back to the fire escape window, which was open a foot, and burst out.

  Yves, panting, walked stiffly to the bar.

  “You okay?”

  He poured a glass. Sipped. “Yes,” he said in a steely voice.

  “Are you getting geriatric on me?” I said.

  He gave me a hard look.

  * * *

  —

  It was a stormy night, and half the reservations had bailed. Kelly read Mr. Boston in his California lilt.

  “Yo,” he said to no one in particular, turning stained pages. “Check this out. ‘Golden Cadillac. Cream, OJ, crème de cacao, Galliano.’ Nice.”

  He flipped pages.

  “ ‘Wedding Bells. OJ, gin, Dubonnet, cherry brandy.’ That’s lovely, that really is. Sweet.”

  Martine, Vanessa, and Josh sat at the bar as if their favorite uncle was telling a bedtime story. I eavesdropped as he displayed his tattoos: on one wrist, Black Flag lyrics his friend had inked into his skin with a needle when they were sixteen, and on the other, a honeysuckle blossom he’d had done in Amsterdam. No one else could see through this guy. He acted humble and innocent, and got everything he wanted. When he had a break, he jotted notes in a spiral notebook that was falling apart. He was playing the intellectual, the poet, the vagabond, the beggar. But he was just an interloper.

  I couldn’t even depend on Shannon, although he held out the longest. He could be a prick, in general. Tall and skinny, with a long face, wireless glasses, dishwater-blond hair he wore in a ponytail. Chinese star tattooed in green on neck.

  Shannon made a point of ignoring Kelly, even knocking into him when he unloaded glasses behind the bar. But at the end of last night, in the kitchen, a couple busboys huddled around the two men. Shannon held an oyster in his fingertips. He shrugged like a boxer. Then snorted it.

  “That,” Kelly said, arms folded, “was magnificent.”

  And Shannon blushed.

  * * *

  —

  Belinda called the next morning to invite me to dinner.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Matt, Jane, and I just got back from Miami. I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  “I’m so busy; I’m overwhelmed.”

  “How’s your work? Are you painting?”

  “More than ever,” I lied.

  Against my intuition, I agreed to come over Wednesday of the following week.

  The last time I’d been in Miami was with Belinda, three years ago. Delano lobby at two in the morning. Celestial curtains hung from the ceiling, and Belinda and I walked through this luscious dream. Two men approached, asked if we had dates. We didn’t know what that meant in Miami, so we coyly said no.

  Sapphire sky, black windows of cubic buildings painted chalk or banana or rose. Junkies and runaways waltzed through the streets. The night air hot with wrongdoing. The men walked us to another bar. We stopped at an all-night drugstore for cigarettes. The citizens of Miami, God love them, reminded me of children who weren’t too bright, who’d grown up in thin-walled houses where they had to hear their parents fuck and fight. These kids walked around the drugstore wired, dazed, and drunk, their golden toxic bodies statues of debauchery.

  Over gimlets, my guy finally popped the question: How much?

  “Excuse me?” I’d said.

  “What do you charge?” he asked.

  The past couple hours were torn backward, like film ripped through a projector. Nothing had been what I’d thought it was. I leaned to Belinda, deep in earnest conversation with her guy.

  “Yo,” I said, tugging at her skirt. “They think we’re hookers.”

  She laughed all night while we lay on our hotel beds, watched Leno, ate candy from the minibar. I tried to take it as lightly, since that’s what we were good at doing. But some part of me stood accused by the mix-up.

  * * *

  —

  A wet day. I spent half my shift at the window, arms crossed, watching rain pound the street, pound the purple Japanese maple leaves, the yellow awning with red lettering: CANDY CIGARETTES NEWSPAPER COLD SODA.

  Martine slunk in an hour late. Tendrils of wet black hair on his forehead. Almost a foot shorter, he had to look up at me: violet and apricot bruises around one eye.

  “What’s up, Spuds MacKenzie,” Ozzie greeted him, grinning around the tub of dishes on his shoulder.

  Martine continued his hangdog stare. I suppressed a smile, asked what happened.

  “Tried to get on someone’s girl,” Josh said, without looking up from the espresso machine.

  Martine turned at him. “I didn’t know,” he spat.

  Later, I lit a cigarette at the bar, the boys turning chairs onto tables. Lights extinguished.

  Those orchids from the other night hung in my head, a mobile turning in a dark nursery, me looking up from my crib as they spun lazily. Ghostly toys of lavender and ivory, a hot perfume shed from them like dust, like the particles of sex.

  And then Martine’s face joined the vision, cheekbones blued and yellowed in circular shapes—the paisley bruises symbolizing desire.

  And all of it was fused, suddenly, into a man’s face filigreed with orchid petals, the pistil of an eyelash dropping pollen, sulky mouth the red lip of flower, periwinkle skin. This three-dimensional bust loomed in my mind.

  I did want to paint. But for some time now, whenever I committed details to a cocktail napkin, the heart of the idea stopped beating.

  * * *

  —

  I inherited this halfway syndrome from my mother. At five two, my mother weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Her simian face was playful, her orange curls innocent, but she wouldn’t have been, and wasn’t, caught dead without lipstick. She was half child, half woman. She’d light up after crushing a half-smoked cigarette and never waited to finish a drink before she refreshed it. She slept on the couch and ate in bed. She could never fall asleep and always slept late.

  No one could help loving her. Guests would arrive at eight and find her in a damp bikini, only beginning to scour cookbooks for ideas. But the night would be unforgettable: midnight dinner on the porch, an impromptu reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, children playing in the rhododendrons—their bodies illusory as vapors. She never read the books for the book club, and missed most meetings, but when it was her turn to host, she warmed the winter afternoon by serving hot cider and gingersnaps and jazz. The girls laughed, gossiped, and forfeited the book. In the community center dressing room, my mother painted on a geisha face. Her kimono belt was wet from the toilet, and there weren’t enough bobby pins to secure her wig, but she cracked deadpan joke after joke till the cast was crying, literally, dabbing white makeup with tissue. On stage, she froze, but she made that backstage room, with its mirrors and hot lights and cheap costumes, into theater.

  Too many unconsummated plans, though. Dead dogwood saplings leaning against the house, roots trapped in burlap sacks, unplanted. Yellowing patterns and fabric for dresses never sewed. A white upright with a bench full of unlearned standards. She’d half loved men, and they’d half failed her. Combing my hair with her fingers, when one had finally left after dinner, she explained how he’d have
made a great husband but a bad father, or vice versa. Even I could be counted among her unfinished dreams. I was not anything. I was an incomplete work. She died quickly, but not peacefully. She fought like someone caught in the doors of an elevator.

  * * *

  —

  I believe, in fact, she lived her whole life caught between the fifties and the sixties, stranded between convention and freedom. Stuck between what she was supposed to be and what she wanted to be.

  My mom took me to meet my grandfather only once, even though he lived in New Jersey. At ten, I’d just had my first growth spurt, and while we waited on his stoop, my mom told me to pull my rabbit-fur jacket over my belly. The ice on the steps was studded with rock salt. A bird feeder, empty of seed, dangled from the eave.

  “Well, well,” he said, as I’d imagined he would, and he shook my mitten.

  The living room was shrouded in plastic, even though the dog had died years ago. The visit had been planned for lunchtime, but he offered none. Although the lamps were off, a powerful whiteness that fell short of actual light came through the window from the snow outside.

  I don’t remember why we went, or what they talked about. I probably slouched on the sofa, fiddling with my jacket zipper, staring at him through narrowed eyes. His lips were full and red, and a blueprint for mine, but I found them repulsive on a six-foot-three man with a white crew cut.

  “Glad that’s over, little partner,” my mom said in the car, her hand searching for my fries.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  She squinted, thinking. The turnpike’s shoulder was a gray wall of snow. I unwrapped my steaming cheeseburger from its paper. When I was older, she’d explain that she left home at eighteen because her dream was to be an actress, which he insisted was prostitution. They’d fought violently about many things over the years, but that had been the breaking point.

  “Hmmm,” she said now, hoping to explain this to a ten-year-old. “The problem is, he fears being moved. He hates anything that moves him.”

  She darted a glance at me. I looked up, unaffected, from removing pickles.

  “What that means, Lee,” she continued, “is he doesn’t like to be made to feel anything. He doesn’t like pleasure or sorrow or joy or anger unless he’s chosen it, unless he controls it. He doesn’t like when someone expresses herself. It makes him feel dirty.”

  She lit a cigarette, replaced the glowing lighter, cracked the window.

  “Tell me if this makes you cold, baby,” she said, simultaneously exhaling smoke into cold air.

  Like I said, we only visited him once. He didn’t know where we lived, and I doubt he ever left his house, but I think he visited my mother all the time.

  * * *

  —

  When Yves inquired about Kelly’s performance, I told him the guy was a bit off, seemed to think he was above it all.

  “So, you’ve traveled a lot?” I asked Kelly one day. “Where’ve you been?”

  He was wiping the bar. “Wow. I think it would be easier to say where I haven’t been.”

  Then, after waiting a beat, he looked up and smiled. And that was it.

  The staff used to drink at Liquor Store Bar after closing, and they always invited Kelly.

  “Cool,” he’d say. “Maybe I’ll join you guys.”

  But he’d slip out before we assembled.

  He seemed blank, like a teenage boy in calculus class: he’d learned to fake an attentiveness that would keep him out of any spotlight.

  Once in a while, he relaxed, and then he had a lazy smile. He’d slouch on a stool, or against the bar, pelvis tilted, legs loosely crossed. If he was happy, his big cheeks flushed and shone.

  “Want a dried papaya?” he’d ask me, or anyone around him, as he wriggled two big fingers into a plastic bag of fruit.

  He ate pecan halves, bananas, trail mix. But he came in one hot day with a chocolate sundae in a paper cup. He offered everyone a bite. I watched him eat. He put whipped cream and chocolate sauce in his mouth, then flipped the plastic spoon over and pulled it out. It was the gesture of a hedonist.

  I just didn’t get him.

  * * *

  —

  I walked from the restaurant to Belinda’s house. The first sign of fall was a change in the light. The sky threw down handfuls of gold coins, but they never landed.

  Unlike her old Avenue B roof with its broken, mildewed office chairs and Astroturf and dog shit, this Tribeca terrace was bricked, hedged by lemon trees in planters. Matt was a model. Not too bright, but successful, and by far the best man she’d ever known. He was flipping fish on the grill. I pulled my sweater around me, since it was getting cold these days after sundown. Now that I was here, she didn’t want to talk.

  “Remember that night we got locked up on the roof with those guys from Iran? You left the keys—”

  “Oh, yeah,” she remembered. “We had a jug of something. Of whiskey, I think.”

  “That was so funny. And I wanted to climb down the side of the building. I would be dead right now.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Remember when we had that huge fight,” I said, “about cutting up a pill.”

  “Cutting a pill?”

  “Cutting it in half. To share. You said it was impossible to tell where the drugs were. They weren’t uniformly, uh, distributed. You made me crush it.”

  She looked out over the nightscape. “Oh.”

  Belinda fed Jane, and I finished my eighth glass of wine. By the time the moon was high, our dirty plates next to our wooden chairs, I wanted to go home.

  “I’m exhausted,” I said, trying to sound casual and to enunciate at the same time.

  Belinda said, “Exhausted? You’re wired out of your mind. Your jaw’s been grinding since you got here.”

  I was too shocked to speak, not by what she said, but by her tone of voice. Jane was sleeping in her lap, one foot poking from the blanket.

  “Do you remember, sugar,” Belinda continued, “seeing me at Pastis a couple weeks ago? I can’t imagine you would because you could hardly walk and it took you five minutes to recognize me.”

  “Seriously, Belinda, if you’re about to give me a speech, you, of all people—”

  “Not a speech. Not at all. I just want to know if you’re all right.”

  I almost said, Look at me, then decided against it.

  “We both love you,” said Matt, but I didn’t even turn to him.

  “Have you ever thought of cutting down, sweetheart?” she asked. “I mean, simply, have you ever thought of saying no?”

  “No,” I said, and laughed, and slapped my knee.

  “What about your own work?” she asked.

  “What work?” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “What the hell do you mean, exactly?” I asked.

  “What I mean is, what are you doing?”

  “What, are you born-again or something? What the hell happened to you?”

  I left abruptly and caught a look between them as I departed down the hallway. Slumped in the backseat, glaring at the steel web of the bridge above me, I wished things upon her that I cannot even mention here.

  * * *

  —

  Two men had finished dinner and were drinking at the bar. Kelly had already served them a couple drinks each, on top of what they drank at their table. The blond was big as a quarterback and young, but his nose was already gin-blossomed. The other was small and feral, hands jingling pockets, one hand darting out when he sipped his drink, then back. They hadn’t taken their suit jackets off, or loosened their ties. It was as if they could minimize the drunkenness by remaining buttoned up.

  Vanessa stalked up to Kelly, her eyes red with anger, holding the men’s check. She pointed at it, whispered something to Kelly, and glared at the men.

  The quarterback was gesturing expansively, his ash inches long, when Kelly butted in.

  * * *

  —

  He stood, hea
d down, hands in pockets. The office phone rang, and I let it.

  “Who do you think you are?” I asked.

  He acted like a big dog come to be kicked. White shirt unbuttoned to reveal T-shirt underneath, necktie in hand. Jeans sagged, revealing pale skin against tanned skin above, like the white belly of a shark.

  “No one does that,” I said. “You do not chastise a customer.”

  “I’m sorry, Lee. It was a mistake.”

  “The men had overtipped her. Vanessa took a seven for a one, didn’t even look at the total.”

  “A complete mistake.”

  “Guess what, Dirty Harry?” I said. “You’re fired.”

  He looked up, the whites of his eyes wet in the light. I gave him his pay in cash.

  “You’re wired,” he said evenly.

  “I am not.”

  “Yes. You are.”

  “Get out.”

  I knew it was wrong. I even smiled in that weird way I couldn’t control when my mother used to yell at me. The city crashed and whirled around the room, and we stayed silent, a pair of bodies absorbing the blow of my decision, and then he turned and walked.

  * * *

  —

  From what I could tell, there were six of them, a forever-changing cast of Israeli boys, all pale as cream with curly black hair. Their mail, which I often examined since all mail for the building came through the front-door slot, was never personal. They lived on the first floor and crookedly hung blankets for curtains, so I usually could see in. Their loft was cluttered with folding screens and junk antique chairs, an aquamarine fan with a white blade. They sat around and smoked joints, burned incense, played guitar. Sometimes they piled out of a white van, sheepish, beautiful as maidens.

  Coming home that night, I heard no conversation from their barred windows. Darkness. The blanket had fallen from the rod. A young and scrawny one was sleeping on the bed right under the window. Legs and arms twisted, definitely drunk. Stripped to tighty-whities for the street to see. The bumps on his spine throwing blue shadows on his back. Bob Dylan whining. Ashtray on the sill. I reached in through the bars, brushed his cheek.