Here Kitty Kitty

by Jardine Libaire

  “That’s what I assumed.”

  I lit my cigarette elaborately, and nodded and gestured vaguely. “I can have that taken care of immediately,” I lied, when I exhaled. “I just need to call my accountant.”

  “Can I?” he asked, stubbing his cigarette out and indicating my pack. I knew he had his own in the drawer.

  “Of course,” I said emphatically. “You don’t have to ask.”

  “Well, I just won’t do anything; I’ll put them off till you have it figured out,” he said, sipping his drink.

  “Thanks.”

  “You know what I think? I think maybe we each need an ice cube. This is pretty syrupy.”

  He looked meaningfully at me until I went upstairs for ice.

  * * *

  —

  I crossed under the BQE, dust hanging in late sun. The pavement smelled sweetly of human urine. I stepped around condoms, rainwater rainbowed with gasoline, bottles. A man sat in lotus position, needle between toes. Most junkies who lived under there were white, hair greenish-gray with oil. But one, an emaciated Sammy Davis Jr., slept now on a lavender mattress, matchstick limbs clutching dirty baby blanket to his torso.

  A girl trailed me, walking as though stricken with cerebral palsy: one crooked arm stuck to her chest, bunched fingers thumping her sternum. Lips turned out like a baby blowing bubbles. In the shadows under the highway, her skin glowed. A gash down her forehead stitched with black thread. She followed me, waving, grinning.

  “They won’t give me no soda over there, lady,” she whined, pointing to the bodega.

  I’d seen this one before, and moved away. She turned tricks for drugs between the Dumpster and the candle factory on the side of the service road. She followed me to my building, and I closed the door in her face.

  * * *

  —

  Dozed on couch in blue light. When I was lonely, I sometimes thought of Kai. I still wondered how I could have gotten invited to Paris, what chess piece I should have played. It was the same old shit: I didn’t want to go, but I hated being left behind.

  He liked to look while he fingered me; he would lie, curled like a fetus, down by my knees, stare into me, then up toward my eyes. In the dark, his face floated, pale and rabid, like a disembodied head.

  He hadn’t loved me absolutely. He’d saved something for the Frankenstein in his head, made of schoolgirls, hookers, women he hated, strippers, me, and his own cousins.

  Once, when he was trashed, he clutched me in a cab: “I’m gonna ride you like a hobbyhorse, you little bitch.”

  I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed hysterically. “Oh my God,” I finally wheezed. “Strike that from the record.”

  “Why?” he’d slurred petulantly, looking up from where he slumped like an angry child. “Strike what?”

  He was eternally a teenager. Loving him kept certain glories alive: fast cars, public sex, stolen liquor, menial labor, cheap cocaine. But that part of him, and of us, eventually began to curdle.

  In a Vermont motel room, after celebrating his brother’s college graduation, I brushed my teeth, came out to find Kai snoring, cock in hand, muted porn on the TV.

  “You retard,” I said.

  I remember the female star’s laziness, glazed eyes, sly smile. It made the guy crazy. I leaned against the headboard, eating mints and deconstructing her style while my boyfriend twitched beside me.

  * * *

  —

  Couldn’t sleep.

  Was Yves reading in bed, light reflecting yellow off bifocals, teacup steaming next to pajama sleeve? Or was he at Lot 61, cloistered at a table with French and Russian girls, champagne chilling in a dewdropped bucket, arms draped across the backs of their chairs?

  Slipped on black kimono. Sipped Dewar’s at the kitchen table and scribbled on a pad.

  What should I draw? Objects were suspended in my imagination: Kai’s gold razor, my mother’s white glove, the airplane liquor bottles in my purse, Yves’s money clip. Mystical and potent like the candlesticks and cupboards floating down the rabbit hole, and then debris when they clattered to the floor.

  Opened the window when I recognized the crying as human. In a doorway alcove of the candle factory, the stitched forehead. Denim jacket, rocking herself. Glass glittering around black sneakers.

  “Stop it,” I yelled, my voice echoing in the night.

  I once heard a kitten wailing under a sidewalk grate, and a crowd gathered to stare down at her marmalade face, but there was no way to get her out.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, I threw on jeans and trench coat, fake Chanel hoop earrings. Walked a few blocks to Phoebe’s Café and had lox on a bagel and cappuccino. At the thrift store across the street, a cat snaked under hemlines, set gowns swaying. I tried on a pink coat that said Scarsdale wife, that said box seats at the ballet, orchid club, deviled eggs, black Mercedes. Her heart must have been settled, made tight as a hotel bed, unlike mine.

  I bought red leather gloves on which I could smell the snow of many winters, and a white clutch with gold butterfly clasp. I’d spent almost everything again and couldn’t pay October’s rent, so balancing the old checkbook no longer mattered.

  At this point, I loathed my own company so much I took the L to Union Square just to avoid the solitude of my apartment. I wandered through the cool, purple-lit market that was closing. I inhaled the green perfume of zinnias and thyme as they were reloaded into trucks. Steam rising from a cauldron of cider reminded me of fairy tales. A man withdrew wheels of cheese from a glass case, wrapped them in wax paper.

  Maybe I could bum a ride to his farm, where goats kicked like toys in fields. Where magenta leaves crowded thorny branches that drooped with late blackberries. Where someone dragged that morning’s trout through flour, laid it in a hot buttered skillet. I knew this Never Land must exist.

  * * *

  —

  On the way home I called Belinda from a pay phone, so she wouldn’t see my number, but hung up after one ring. My heart was beating hard. What was wrong with me? It was like making the first call to some boy I loved.

  That night, I sat in my orange butterfly chair as if thrown there, unable to get up. It’s amazing how a certain time in your life can seem to be a prelude, but when you look back, you realize it was a whole work, with a beginning, middle, and end. Belinda and I got off to a shy start, trying to guess how our agendas differed. The way new friends do. Quickly we discovered we had the same plan: to have no plan. She offered the blank slate I wanted after moving from the Cape.

  Such lazy scavenger hunts. Wandering around Chinatown, trying on turquoise silk jackets, beaded sandals. Rubbing rice paper between fingertips. Holding up black-and-gold chopsticks, clicking them once in the air. We’d end up at a Malaysian place, eating roti telur and coconut rice, drunk on tea, a rain of trinkets and china and figurines falling in my mind. Putting days together was like designing a painting: a Hitchcock movie at the Sunshine one snowy afternoon, then steaming pierogis in Greenpoint. Or junk jewelry shops on Thirtieth and Broadway, then fried pork chops at a Spanish restaurant near Delancey, sipping Él Presidentes and looking through our fake gold.

  The things we wore were talismans. Sometimes she swiped a gift from a shoot, and I cherished the Vivienne Westwood corset not because it was valuable but because it had been procured subversively, and with a twisted version of generosity. We treated certain clothes as uniforms and, by never taking them off, defined our private eras. Belinda’s gray sharkskin jacket was safety-pinned along every seam because she wore it even to sleep. My Costume Nationale boots with the witchy toes were resoled four times. We sometimes rode the train to the Hartford Goodwill, reading the paper on the way, savoring coffee and cheese danishes. The journey was more urgent than the red Jackie O suit one of us might bring home.

  Some nights, we spent hours trying on pearls, alligator stilettos, hats, until we looked at the time and realized it was too late to go anywhere.

  We didn’t
belong to anyone, although we tried. We spent time at a Southampton share with third-class models Belinda knew. They played badminton in gold bikinis, speaking a pidgin English made of inside jokes, fashion-world lingo, and bits of every language. Such a strange and beautiful tribe. I sat by the pool while they ridiculed an Italian girl for putting birth control pills inside of her; finally she broke down and cried, and then one held her like a baby. They raced around the lawn shooting water pistols. Two hid in the shade, one brushing the other’s long black hair. Late one night, I walked into the kitchen, where the dregs of a party had gathered; the Italian was on hands and knees, snorting Special K from a shag carpet, where it had been spilled, with a straw. I was in awe, sometimes in love, and often horrified by them. But I was not one of them, and neither was Belinda.

  She tried to push me into the art world. We went to openings, but the artists were just carbon copies of rock stars, circled by groupies drinking bad wine. These people weren’t villains, but I didn’t have the credentials or confidence to be invulnerable to all the attitude in the air. I could not kiss the ass of the gallery owner, whose aboriginal face tattoos had been done on the Lower East Side and funded by inherited IBM stock; I could not tell her that pubic hairs taped to a drugstore receipt and selling for six grand was a genius installment.

  At Spring Studio, many students were mastering lifestyle, not art. Shuffling around in flannels and chain-smoking like Pollock, but not actually putting paint on canvas. Eventually I met a few true nerds. We’d go out for cheap hamburgers, collaboratively draw for hours on napkins like Ernst did with Breton and Magritte, or we’d design an alphabet of Miró-like hieroglyphics. But one night I got chastised in class for eating the pear from a still life, and I never went back. I used to make fun of the philistines who made fun of modern art, but I missed Jeremy and his aluminum stingrays and his orange moons, his loinclothed Tarzan wading through a lake of stars.

  Belinda and I, it seemed, were an indestructible pair. Even Kai didn’t break up our sisterhood. In fact, we sometimes felt like family. Once, a photographer gave Belinda ballet tickets. She invited David, and the four of us got decked out and took the subway to Lincoln Center. Sitting in that dark red-velvet cavern, seated between friends, spellbound by the chandelier and the jewels in the ballerina’s hair and the wet eyes of the dancers and the dim lights in the orchestra pit, I couldn’t tell where the love I felt began and where it ended.

  Kai and I hosted film nights, renting the Godfather series, or a couple Truffaut movies. He made old-fashioned popcorn, pouring melted butter over the bowl, and handed out cold root beers. He and I and Belinda would lounge on big pillows in the flickering light and laugh, cry, throw kernels at the screen.

  We took Belinda along on a late-August weekend in Brookhaven. Trevor, the head chef where Kai worked, owned a summer home on a canal where morning glories bloomed in the reeds. We took his boat to the flats near Fire Island, clammed while the American flag snapped in the hot wind and blue from the waves flashed on the hull. Even after Kai and I took a cold shower that evening at the house, the sun was still in me and with me. He and I were shucking clams in the kitchen when first Trevor then, a few minutes later, Belinda emerged from Trevor’s bedroom: sheepish, tousled, and beautiful. We sat at the glass table on the porch. The bluefish, under a layer of aioli and fat tomato slices, had been baked in tinfoil. We drank a Pinot Gris from the North Fork. The only light was a candle in a hurricane glass, and our shadows stretched through the screen onto the lawn, almost touching moonlit water.

  We did scrape together, over the years, a crew of bandits. Outcasts and reactors. But the freedom of being on the outside faded into habit. Belinda and I went to the same places, but they’d either gotten louder, or the crowd had become younger, or the DJs had gone commercial. The turquoise silk was polyester, and the chopsticks were cheap plastic. We should have changed, but we didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t. My mother got sick. Then she got sicker. Belinda tried to help, but she didn’t understand. So when she tried to talk, I wanted to be alone. When she left me alone, I accused her of being selfish. It’s possible I did the same thing to Kai. What I know was that we couldn’t find the heart of the city anymore, no matter how hard we looked, when it had at one point been everywhere.

  One day, Kai said something about my mother. I’d probably provoked him into agreeing with something I didn’t really believe. I stormed out of the apartment and went to Belinda’s without calling. She buzzed me in, and I stomped up the stairs. At this point she was seeing Matty, but not exclusively. I found her on her bed, in a dress from the night before, cheap cologne hanging in the air. Her eye makeup was iridescent and greasy. She let me kiss her.

  I clomped around the place as if I lived there, high on anger.

  “Let’s just have a drink, B, because this girl needs one. Deserves one.”

  In the bathroom: red heels kicked off in front of the toilet, a tampon whose end was barely pinked floating in the bowl.

  “Hair of the dog, sweetheart,” I said when she didn’t answer.

  Reentering her room, I cocked my head; she hadn’t moved, her blond head sunk in the pillow, eyes half open. When I told her she’d make the perfect drawing model and dug my book from my bag, she barely shrugged. But the minute I started sketching her bare feet, she pulled her body up. Standing to look out the window, she struck a match four or five times before it lit.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

  I was silent for a moment. “That’s okay. I’m not really feeling artistic anyway.”

  She exhaled smoke. “That’s not what I meant.”

  I stared at the silhouette left on the blanket. I tried to hide my humiliation.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually I got out of the orange chair and into bed. The next morning I broke down and called Yves, but he didn’t answer. I couldn’t spend another night alone, so I pleaded with Chico to come to Brooklyn. Plan Eat Thai was packed with people smoking, laughing, shoveling noodles, slamming sake.

  We left the hibachi table with clothes smelling of meat smoke. At Blondie’s, a coke spot on the edge of the Northside, we bought a blue bag in an old telephone closet. In the back room, we did lines at a card table. The bartender in the main room, a Latina girl with braces, wore a black spandex skirt that didn’t conceal the bottom inches of her stockings’ control top. She served us beers.

  “I liked Kelly,” Chico insisted, pulling a white pebble from his nostril hair. “He made a good Manhattan.”

  “He rubbed me the wrong way.”

  “You didn’t like how private he was, Lee. That’s what it was. You couldn’t get him drunk.”

  “No,” I said crisply. “I didn’t like that I was forced to give him a job.”

  “Then why did you?”

  I picked at the beer label. “Because I had to.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  I sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  “Lee, you can do anything you want. You just take the easy way out every time.”

  “That’s kind of harsh,” I spat out.

  I begged to stay, but Chico eventually said we had to leave.

  “Lee, I’ve got things to do tomorrow,” he said.

  “Then why did you come out at all?” I asked irrationally.

  “To be honest, to keep you company, girl, and this is the thanks I get.”

  Even though the sun was rising, it pissed me off so much that we were leaving that I stopped talking to him. Before we stumbled out, thugs checked the street since it was past legal closing time. A glossy Town Car waited in the empty landscape. Chico slumped in the backseat. The horizon was creamy orange and blue, though the sky was still dark and starry.

  Chico said good night and tried to kiss my cheek when we pulled up to my house, but I pulled away and said nothing. I slunk up the stairs dragging my purse, clunk clunk clunk, on each step. I wanted to wake the whole building. Even my heart was pale.

  * * *


  —

  I made it to work in a white safari jacket and white jeans picked off my floor. Josh laughed when I wouldn’t take off the black sunglasses, and I gave him the finger. Poison moved sluggishly through my veins.

  The lunch special was cassoulet. All I could get down, though, was half a mayonnaise sandwich. The perfume of dying leaves and blue air was carried in on coats, hair, slacks. I called Yves again, and he answered.

  “Oh, thank God,” I said.

  “Thank God for what?” he asked, but I could tell he was smiling.

  “Will you hang out with me tonight?” I pleaded. “I’ll plan a night. I’ll be proactive and caring.”

  He laughed, but acquiesced. “You’re unbalanced, Lee.”

  “I know, I know, I know.”

  * * *

  —

  When I got home, I decided I should be striking. But the nausea, if anything, was increasing. So I mixed a drink and cut lines.

  I sprayed Jicky behind ears and between legs. Pulled on a vintage black dress with cap sleeves and belt. Very Sophia Loren. A shimmer of blue on eyelids, red lipstick. My Helmut Lang heels with leather ankle ties. I rocked out in the mirror to Run-DMC. Imagined I was in a documentary of my own life.

  In the beginning, knowing I’d never match his generosity, I brought gifts to Yves’s house for fun. I’d arrive with a peony between my teeth, or a string-tied box of eclairs from the Mafia café in Williamsburg. He so loved the creamed herring I got him from Russ & Daughters that he was caught eating from the plastic container, which was, in Yves’s world, a sin. More than anything, I wanted to give him something tonight, but I couldn’t think of what, and I feared anything I got would look inconsequential, silly. Somehow I’d left behind the place where my whims meant something to us.

  After Yves and I kissed and hugged, we squeezed each other’s hands: secret apology, silent forgiveness. The fireplace at Boughalem was roaring, so I took off my white leather jacket. The hostess, her bob so lustrous it was blue, brought me a Johnnie Walker.