Here Kitty Kitty

by Jardine Libaire

  He looked up, eyes bloodshot, half lidded.

  “Pull your sheet up, baby,” I said.

  “What?” he groaned.

  “Everyone can see you.”

  * * *

  —

  My boarding school was in rural Massachusetts, and its art studios looked onto fields of tall grass. The sports program was dinky, but we had all the linseed oil an art student could desire. Of a population of freaks, an elite corps spent its days in those rooms. We played mixes on the paint-speckled radio, Doc Martens kicked off, heels of woolen-socked feet propped on the lower bars of a stool. One minute it was early afternoon, the palette’s colors distinct and pure. The next minute, the fields were lit by the blue fire of evening, the shoulders ached, the palette was destroyed. In the winter, we wore coats while we painted and flirted in the ethereal light of the snow. If someone got cookies in the mail, the parcel was immediately divided up. We earnestly consulted one another on whether or not a piece was finished.

  But college was different. It was everything I’d wanted and should never have gotten. I skipped all lectures and crammed the day before tests. I started going to Dart Night at the local pub. My roommate taught me to do bong hits using a gas mask, the eyes black with resin. We went to house parties where people set things on fire and had sex in the laundry room. Granted, I’d misbehaved in high school, but it was only in fits and starts, and always relegated to somewhere outside the walls of the school. Now we went camping in the Adirondacks and missed a week and a half of classes, and no one noticed I’d been gone. I hung out at the local coffee shop and drank cup after cup with the skateboarders.

  The art studios there were silent. No music allowed. People pretended to wash their brushes in the sink just to look at your easel. The first semester, almost all we did were chiaroscuro studies of wooden blocks. I’d often turn my cafeteria grilled cheese black from the omnipresent charcoal on my fingertips.

  The instructor wore shapeless black clothes and white socks under black sandals. Her salt-and-pepper hair was long and unruly, almost obscuring her John Lennon glasses. Finally I summoned the courage to show her what I’d been doing privately. I brought the canvases to her office after class. The three-foot-by-foot-and-a-half full-body portraits were on white backgrounds. There was a track star, a prom queen, a gay boy, a girl nerd. Their figures were outlined carefully but were barely filled out in patches of candy colors and dirt colors, unfinished, like Kitaj’s painting of the foot soldier.

  She looked for a few minutes, pressing her lips with her thumb. “They just don’t reach me,” she offered, gesturing. “They don’t touch me.”

  She kept talking, but I couldn’t hear her.

  The day after, she came to my easel. “I hope I wasn’t too hard on you,” she said.

  “No, of course not,” I answered.

  She gave me a long, inquisitive look, but I stared blindly at my work, eyes burning with hatred.

  * * *

  —

  By the end of that first semester, I was on academic probation. By the end of the year, I knew I didn’t want to come back. My Cape Cod plan was risky, but my mother believed in it, and so did I, and for a year, it worked: I supported myself and lived as an artist.

  At work, I’d take a break from scrubbing the shower stall, lie down on the motel room bed, and look around. Wearing my yellow rubber gloves, I sketched hand-washed lingerie drying on chairs, paperbacks with red-foil embossed titles, a pink comb on the maroon carpet. When I went home at night, I turned the sketches into paintings.

  I lived with Jeremy, my college roommate’s older brother, and a girl named Megan in a big, shabby house in the cheap part of town; it was rented from an old couple who’d moved to Florida, and the rooms were overstuffed with their knickknacks.

  My housemates were creative and solitary. Megan was into silk-screening. She was a big girl with enormous breasts, and she actually enjoyed hanging our laundry on the clothesline. Jeremy was a kitchen boy, pale and anxious. He played Joy Division and worked on sci-fi paintings of robot deer, sun gleaming on their metal flanks, and fields of cactus plants with glowing pink blossoms. A mechanical butterfly swooping by the moon. A bare-breasted woman with white-fur boots and a titanium caveman club, indigo mist obscuring her landscape.

  We spent time alone on our own projects more than we spent time together. Sometimes I’d recognize a vague strain as blindness; I’d worked for hours into darkness. I’d discover I was ravenous. Sometimes Jeremy and I convened in the kitchen, starving, and made meat cereal: ground chuck and onions cooked in a pan and eaten with a spoon from a bowl. I ate tomatoes like fruit. Dinner might consist of four hard-boiled eggs consumed while standing over the sink. Once I drank chicken broth from the can because I was so hungry I thought I’d faint, my stomach too tight to accept solids.

  But for financial reasons, a prep cook from Jeremy’s restaurant moved in after the first year, and suddenly we were living in a house of kitchen folk. Bedrooms and basement teeming with bad ideas. They were roamers. Most had left home at fifteen or so, and in their hearts, they were forever homeless, no matter where they lived. Most had warrants out for stupid mistakes. Vegans and acidheads. They had two modes: neutral and destructive. I don’t believe they meant to break everything all the time, but they were built to do so. A surreal contrast existed between the switchblades and empty Vivarin boxes and the doilies and needlepointed pillows.

  This is when things got crazy. This is when I got fired from the motel and started bussing tables at a seafood place. This is when joie de vivre started to mutate into mania. This is when I started painting less and less often, with less and less passion. Big Megan checked out. Jeremy slipped through the cracks. Suddenly it was me and a herd of anarchists playing house.

  I have a photograph of two skinheads in the kitchen. In the background, brown tiles with yellow daisies. The black boots look ominous on the linoleum. Mike D. bends to light a cigarette from the stove, and Mikey N. holds up a lobster oven mitt whose tip is on fire. He smiles, waving at the camera.

  THREE

  But there were no words. I had to pray, to say some things; there was a prayer in me like an egg. But there were no words.

  —JOHN FANTE, from The Road to Los Angeles

  We sat in the Le Jardin Bistro backyard. Candlelight reflecting off the leafy trellis turned Yves’s hair green. On each table, autumn roses were so lush that petals fell as I watched. The blossoms cast pink and red shadows on skin.

  As Yves talked, I thought back to a high school trip to Paris. We had seen the hookers at Pigalle from a tour bus: white boas, magenta go-go boots, black eyeliner. Their reflections undulated on wet pavement. Even as teenagers, we knew what they were. It wasn’t the fake pearls, or the toy-sized purses, or the standing in the rain. Musk came off them, atoms like pheromones, particles that could pass through steel.

  Plenty of women reek of love, but the minute you get paid, everything changes. The taste of your kiss changes. The silk of your lingerie changes. When you walk down a sidewalk, the meaning of the street corner changes.

  “This is the last place in the city my mom and I ate together,” I lied, just to make trouble. “She loved it here.”

  He looked up from his menu, leaned forward. “I hope being here doesn’t upset you.”

  “It might,” I said, looking around. “I can’t tell yet.”

  He looked around as well, then at me, until I shrugged.

  “Oh, well,” I said, opening my menu. “Never mind. What am I going to eat? I’m sick of eating.”

  Going out to eat was the backbone of our relationship. Until recently, if anything was wrong, all we had to do was enter the creamy churchlike calm of Chanterelle, or the black-lacquer disco of Nobu, and within moments we’d be in love again. While he read through Montrachet’s bible of wines, even though he knew it by heart, I simply radiated in my chair. I was a figure from a religious painting, gold shards of light shooting from my head. Ours was an infinity of con
tentment: I loved being taken out, he loved making me happy, I knew he loved to make me happy more than anything, so I was happy that I’d pleased him, and so on.

  But tonight I was nervous, as if on a first date. “How come we never do anything besides go to dinner?”

  “It’s all you ever want to do, Lee.”

  “Well,” I said, straightening silver, “I’m getting fat.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he muttered, staring at the tablecloth.

  “Did I tell you I fired that friend of Guy’s?” I confessed.

  Then he sat up straight. “Are you kidding? What is with you, Lee?”

  I smiled.

  “You have become antagonistic,” he pronounced.

  “You can’t buy me, you know.”

  “Stop being theatrical.” His hand tore cash from his wallet, pressed it on the table. He spoke quietly. “We’re taking a break, Lee. We are not going to see each other for a while. Do you understand?”

  “Good,” I said as he stood to leave.

  “No, it’s not good. You need to do some thinking. Straighten yourself out.”

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?” I asked as he threaded through tables.

  “Think about your work,” he turned back to say. “Your life.”

  “Are you angry, Yves?”

  * * *

  —

  That night, sleepless in my bed, I tantalized myself with ideas of suicide. Ideas like the white lace-up stilettos, or the black whip, or the red teddy I owned: I wasn’t into this stuff, it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t me, I forgot how I’d come to own it, I would never wear it or use it, but I simply could not bring myself to throw it out.

  * * *

  —

  Monday was the first chilly evening of autumn. I was still stunned, head spinning. After work, I didn’t know what to do, so I wandered. I ate a slice at the corner of Thompson and Spring, then walked, hands in pockets, wind blowing open my violet coat. I clicked along the sidewalk in black boots with tiny spike heels. Stopped to watch a gold-painted mime. He called to someone faraway, then cupped hand to ear.

  At Florent, I ordered coffee and a slice of midnight cake at the counter. I was alone, and I looked around at people, looked too long into the eyes of strangers.

  After my coffee, I nursed a snifter of Baileys, milk glazing the ice cubes. I hung my coat on the rack to indicate permanence and looked at my face in the mirror above the bottles of liquor. The cool air had pinked my mouth. The night had fallen quickly, the world hurrying to end itself, like I often did, rushing to darkness.

  Eventually a tall gangly man, who’d been meeting my gaze in the mirror, slid stool to stool till he was sitting next to me. His head was shaved but for a fuzz of blond. His whiskey drink, which he dragged down the counter, left a wet trail.

  He opened his newspaper. His voice gravelly, tremulous: “What’s your sign, little lady?”

  “Taurus. Can’t you tell?”

  He grunted, making a smile out of the wrinkles in his face. Scanned the page with knobby finger. Black dirt under nail. He started to read.

  “To be candid,” I interrupted, “I don’t give a shit about my horoscope. If you want to talk to me, buy me a drink.”

  He pulled out his pockets to indicate he had no money. I laughed at him, bought him a new whiskey, and we sat companionably, like two hoboes.

  * * *

  —

  Bade good-bye to my lunch-counter friend at 2:00 AM. I ambled to the Eighth Avenue L, shadowed by a transvestite in gold lamé shorts, Burberry trench. Maroon scars shining on legs.

  “Beautiful night,” she purred, and other niceties, one lady to another. Seeking civility, humanity, at this dark hour.

  Clip-clop, high heels on cobblestones, her calf muscles knotting, kneecaps working, like a horse.

  “Sweet dreams, sister,” she eventually growled lovingly, and fell behind, releasing me to my own future.

  Before descending into the station, I turned back. Her burnished figure lost to the clutter of brick, steam, tar, graffiti. But then, a wink of starlight: peering into compact mirror, she fingered her bangs.

  How did they do it, those writers who drank all night at the bar, bought cigarettes and coffee at the deli and joked with the two Pakistani guys, flirted with the lady cop on the corner, then went home, rolled a page into the typewriter, and made prose? Or the photographers who went through their days with a camera slung around their neck? Distilling the city in the image of two boys making out on the subway, or an old woman peering at the sun? It was a miracle to me that anyone spliced work and life.

  If I could only invent a machine that transcribed my dreams without reducing them to the literal. This problem reminded me of a newspaper story my mother clipped about a man in Maine. He’d handcrafted a boat in his basement. The mahogany hull alone took three years. Only when finished did he realize it would be impossible to get it out.

  * * *

  —

  To get up to the Stock Exchange Luncheon Club, my handbag had to be X-rayed. The guards and I looked at skeletons of lip gloss, tampons, keys. The market had just closed, and the back bar was a madhouse. Red-faced men yelled, one hand in cashews, the other clutching highball. Ancient white-jacketed waiters tottered with trays through the forest of gilded columns.

  “Whassup, lovergirl,” Jamie said in her Bayside accent. She pointed at a seat. “Cheer me up. I lost money today.”

  “Your losing money was probably more lucrative than my making money.”

  Jamie and I met on the ladies’ room line at Cheetah, years ago. We’d almost had a fistfight because one of us cut the other, but we ended up friends. Leaning against the sink counter, we’d spent much of that night talking about men and comparing lipsticks.

  “So Yves dumped you, you dumped Yves, what?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You never call me unless you’re lonely.”

  “We’re taking a break, that’s all,” I answered.

  “Who fucked up, you or him?”

  I stuttered innocently.

  “Baby,” Jamie said, holding my jaw maternally, “you never do nothing right.”

  Kevin was headed over. Only five four, he spiked his ocher hair to look taller.

  “To what do we owe the pleasure?” he asked, cartilage working as he pumped gum.

  “I’ve been dumped,” I told him.

  “Kevin, don’t get her started,” Jamie said. “She’ll talk about herself all night.”

  “I will not!” I said. “It’s just that I’ve never been let go without—”

  “Shut up,” Jamie said calmly.

  * * *

  —

  Our big group strolled from Broad Street to West Street, voices bouncing in the canyon between platinum buildings. The financial district was lit up bright as a room. At Morton’s, our waiter rolled out the cart. He sniffed, displayed one saran-wrapped cut of meat after another. When he raised the lobster, it snapped a claw at us.

  The conversation was raucous, but I was distracted by a handsome man in a sharp suit sitting to our right. His head was bald, and his cufflinks were the gold helmets of Vikings. The night did have a mythic quality. And for dessert, Lady Godiva cake, which had a powdered-sugar stencil of a woman on horseback on top and bled molten chocolate when broken open with a fork.

  I laid a twenty, probably a tenth of what I owed, on the white tablecloth as a gesture. Billy and Kevin told me to put it away, as though I’d embarrassed them.

  “You never heard of an expense account, Lee?”

  As it often happened, we ended up at VIPs. The boys charged pink cash on their credit cards. We draped ourselves on black chairs, talked loudly. Whites of eyes, teeth, ice cubes phosphorescent in low light.

  Gary sponsored a lap dance for me, and I picked the star, a Russian blonde. Down went the Lycra dress, her hand balanced on my shoulder as she picked the scrap of fabric off the Lucite spike of her shoe. White hair t
hrown into my face, trailed down, nails scratching my thighs. Her pink-rhinestone thong embedded like a permanent jewel.

  The strippers at Baby Doll’s, those girls were doomed. Dancing on a stage made from industrial carpet stapled to raw lumber, they nodded off, forgot they were stripping. Strawberry mullets, track marks on their necks.

  But strippers like this Russian seemed to exist beyond the barbed wire of any society. Her blue eyes looked into mine, but she wasn’t home. Floating in a starry sky, she was the Tinker Bell of the city.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, the chef sent me to the wholesale restaurant stores on the Bowery to buy a mixer. The world was hollow and gold. Light shot off the chrome of parked cars, but the kids bouncing a basketball in the street wore zipped jackets.

  On the sidewalk, an ice-cream counter, haphazard as if dropped from the sky. Glass grubby from children’s hands, but tubs obviously empty. Placards still told flavors—Tahitian vanilla, mint, watermelon sorbet—like a eulogy for summertime.

  * * *

  —

  That night, the owner smiled once he’d closed the office door. Brendan looked like Jack Niklaus on crack, khakis pulled too tight across groin. With an almost-finished cigarette stuck between his big white teeth, he grimaced against the smoke in his eyes as he uncorked a sherry bottle and poured two glasses.

  “So, what up, babe? What be happening?”

  “Oh, the usual, you know, just—”

  “So I got a letter from the old IRS,” he told me, bending his features into a look of concern. “Looks like they want to garnish your wages.”

  I had a vision of my paycheck impaled on a red plastic sword with two pearl onions. “Must be a mistake,” I lied.