Here Kitty Kitty

by Jardine Libaire

  He was relaxed, and talked about some art opening incident that involved a ferret. I chain-smoked, half listening. Once in a while, pouting, I sneaked a glance at my heart-shaped face in the window. I visited the ladies’ room. When escargot arrived, I couldn’t eat. I smoked, watched him fork meat from the broth.

  “I don’t want to eat them all, love,” he said. “Share.”

  “I saw a documentary on snails, darling, and I just can’t,” I lied.

  He apologized, continued eating and telling his story. I put on lipstick in the reflection of a spoon. Let a smile play over my lips as though everything in the world were innocent and pleasing.

  * * *

  —

  At the movie I was scattered, my mind chattering, but ever since I was young I’d had a crush on Marilyn Monroe, and she always enchanted me, coaxed me away from the world. Watching the satin gloves crease on her plump arm, the diamond wink on her white neck, I wondered why no one saved her. The million-dollar question. She threw herself to the public, rained down like wedding rice till there was nothing left. She gave away the part that isn’t for giving. But I guess that’s how God created her: a spy’s instructions to be burned once they’re read.

  * * *

  —

  It was about a week later when I got the unexpected call.

  I sat on a stool at the far end of the dim and dirty Mars Bar. Strange meeting place. A Rubenesque girl on my left with blond pageboy and tongue ring smoked Capris; exhaling, she narrowed heavily lined eyes at me. I held two pointer fingers at her in the sign of the cross. She looked away.

  “Lee,” he said behind me, and I jumped.

  My coat lay over the stool on my right. He pointed, asked if he could sit there. “Long as you don’t fart on it,” I said, crushing my cigarette and lighting another.

  What the hell did I just say?

  Kelly stared at the bartender, a platinum-blond man with a dimpled chin and black stubble. Kelly seemed not so much thirsty as unable to look at me.

  “Totally didn’t expect to hear from you,” I said.

  Big shoulders hunched forward in a button-down so thin his tattoos showed through the pale fabric. Hair dark at roots. Pink sheen on cheekbones. He darted a look at me, coughed. Spoke a whole sentence that couldn’t be heard over loud Ramones. I cupped a hand around my ear, motioned for a do-over.

  “We got off on the wrong foot.” He took a sip of beer, foam mustaching his upper lip. “I was hoping to clear the air. I don’t like burned bridges.”

  I looked into my scotch, stirred the oily drink.

  “You going to sue me for your job back or something?”

  He shook his head vehemently, like a child, tendrils of hair flapping. “I want to apologize. I was a jackass. I’m going through some weird stuff at the moment.”

  Wet brown eyes. Mottled cheeks. Uh-oh, was he about to cry? No. Sneeze.

  “God bless you,” I said.

  “Allergies,” he said, blowing his nose in a cocktail napkin.

  “You were a jackass,” I mused, scanning the graffiti on the walls.

  Kelly looked at me, alarmed.

  “So was I,” I said quickly. “Yves almost killed me when I told him you were fired.”

  He nodded, as though I’d said something profound, then clapped hands on big thighs. “Well,” he said, “I gotta run. I’m glad we did this. I mean, thanks for meeting me.”

  “That’s it?”

  He looked me in the eye. “Yeah. That’s it.”

  As he stood, I told him to come back to work the day after tomorrow, to be there at four.

  I realized he was about to hit me. I’d fired this man. I braced myself; he towered above me, the dark face, the fists clenched. He leaned down and kissed me, his mouth hot on mine. His hand gripped my jaw as if he could turn me somehow toward him more, closer to him, but the intensity of his mouth didn’t change. He just yearned, a feeling I tasted: beer, blood, a dark red love that blossomed petal after petal after petal into my own mouth.

  As he hurried to the door, he stubbed his toe on a stool. “Shit,” he hissed, tucked his hair. He didn’t look back.

  * * *

  —

  I lay in bed that night like an angel, a baby bundled in white cloth, a kitten wrapped in a white cardigan. The scuttle of roaches, flies tapping against the window, the highway thunder: nothing bothered me. Nothing. I lay bathed in cold gold light and felt that hand gripping me, felt it grip my jaw over and over again as if it were the hand of God taking me like his daughter and breathing life into my throat, touching my lips with possibility. I just lay there on fire, not a raging fire that would turn me to ashes, but a fire that started as one lavender flame between my legs and traveled along a line of gasoline straight to my heart.

  * * *

  —

  I walked up my street under an autumn sun that was white in the center, white around the edges. Passed the one-eyed pug whose empty eye was a flower of black leather. He slept in that shade every day. A trail of ants ran up his saucer; I’d seen an old lady reach from the basement unit window to fill the dish with sugar and milk. I felt him watching as I walked away, and I heard, from a window high above the yellow leaves, someone waking up to Al Green.

  I was remembering my fat friend Stuart, curly headed like a cherub, almost forgotten forever until today. When we were ten, we’d wander into the woods and lie on top of each other. My God, I remembered the musk of dirt, the bugs crawling on our skin, the perfume of lilies of the valley. Hands sticky with pollen and chocolate, and all I had to do was kiss his cheek and I would come. But what did that mean? There were no sexual parts yet. Only an afternoon lush with heat and body and heart and breath and pleasure and dirt and blossom, coming through us in rushes of love.

  On the way back from the store that evening, I paused to shift the paper bag to my other hip. It was an Indian summer night, and I was sweating in my coat. Buildings loomed red or avocado green in streetlamp lights. A dog snorted through an overturned garbage pail. On the corner of North Fifth and Driggs, a garden was enclosed by a chain-link fence: a small, glossy darkness. Here and there, the pale smudge of flower. And occupying the square, dozens of fireflies. I put my groceries down, pressed my face to the fence, clung to the wire. I watched them loop around one another, golden abdomens flushing with light.

  * * *

  —

  When Kelly walked into work, my hands started shaking with stage fright. He wore blue jeans, white button-down, yellow necktie hand-painted with roses. Wet hair combed back into elastic. Wide, easy smile.

  “Hey, jackass,” I greeted him, and looked at his tie since I couldn’t look at his face. “Find that thing in a Dumpster?”

  He froze, then picked up his tie, pondered it. “No, at the Salvation—”

  “Better step on it,” I said in a strangely paternal voice. “Don’t make me doubt my decision.”

  I regretted each and every word as it came out of my mouth. Down in the office, I chain-smoked till the room was opaque. Pulled red hair across my face.

  “I’m a loser,” I said over and over in a surprised voice, as if it were a discovery. “I’m a loser. I. Am. A. Loser.”

  * * *

  —

  Kelly and I spent the week like butterflies, jerking around each other. Every time I saw him, I became embarrassed. I said stupid things. He’d throw the dish towel over his shoulder and smile. He seemed intent on waiting it out.

  One day, he asked if I was, in fact, painting.

  “There are paintings in my head,” I said, unable to lie. “But if I manage to start them, the ideas will be ruined.”

  He laughed, buffing champagne glasses. “Can you talk about them, or is it secret?”

  “They’re about nothing,” I said, warming up to the topic.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Nothing is the only expertise I’ve gained in a number of years, you see. So I want to show nothing.”

  “So you want to mak
e something out of nothing,” he conceded, shelving the glasses.

  “But that would negate the whole statement,” I reminded him. “So I’m at a crossroads. Nihilism is a bitch.”

  Walked down to the office, hit my palm against my forehead.

  At closing that night, I was counting money at the bar when someone knocked on the locked door. Yves had been out on the town. Refracted through moonlit glass, he looked like a hologram.

  “I brought you something from the party,” he said when let in, and held out a Louis Vuitton shopping bag. I made a fuss over the gift so I didn’t have to kiss him in front of Kelly.

  “Yves, I take it,” Kelly said, extended his hand, and they shook. “I get to thank you in person for helping me out.”

  “My pleasure,” Yves said in his golden voice.

  Everyone waited for them to continue speaking, but they said nothing else. I grabbed my cigarettes and forced a yawn, indicated that I wanted to leave. I wasn’t uncomfortable: no one suspected anyone of anything. I was overjoyed. It had just occurred to me that I could have both.

  * * *

  —

  In Yves’s bed, we went at it kind of hard—hard for us, at least. I called in my pool boys, lawn boys, vacuum-cleaner salesmen. My blue-collar angels with no faces. Who knows what Yves recruited. We were alienated from each other, as if lace separated our bodies: we could feel the other’s warmth but not the skin. I was safe with him, and safe from him.

  When he returned to bed from lengthy ablutions, I asked for a bedtime story.

  His words glistened like icicles in the dark.

  He told me about a fire in his childhood town. The favorite bistro was burning down. He told the story slowly, sparely, taking time to describe flaming curtains flanking a view of cold blue river, but using few words. Before the fire trucks arrived, he and his friend jumped through the falling rafters to the courtyard. Back there the trellises crackled and fell, the burning skeletons of dahlias tumbling to brick.

  My head lay on his chest, his heart warming my ear.

  Yves and his friend knew the fountain pond was full of coins, and they scooped centimes out of the boiling water with their hands.

  “Did you get out okay?” I whispered.

  “What a silly question,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  FOUR

  I drank at every vine.

  The last was like the first.

  I came upon no wine

  So wonderful as thirst.

  —EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, from “Feast”

  The estrangement I’d loved the night before crept into the morning and alienated me from myself. In Yves’s bathroom, my reflection was a half-finished acrylic portrait by an amateur.

  The composition was creepy. Black nail polish picked up black tile, toothpaste in the sink echoed the turquoise burning under the skin of my eye sockets. Negligee askew, the wrinkles unnatural, crooked. Shoulders greasy as hard-boiled egg. Even my roan hair gleamed redder, ruder, cheaper.

  The features didn’t come together to make a face. The clues didn’t combine to tell a story. Mascara-blurred eyes seemed sad, but why? The planes didn’t create a plausible room: dimensions were off, perspective impossible. An unconvincing document, as works of art go.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Camilla was throwing Sam a birthday party. I knew Camilla from high school. They knew each other from Brown. A painter and a photo rep: I didn’t like either of them. Their loft, in the converted McKibbin Street factory, was a diorama of bohemian life: orange Vespa, candles melting on the floor, paintbrushes in kitchen sink. I wore a trench coat and jeans, pearl earrings, cat eyes; I was on a terrible mission, and I didn’t know it.

  Camilla’s sister, Sloane, opened wine while Camilla arranged Stilton, black grapes. Ribbed, snowy neck, fine wrists, and cheeks ripe as cherries. Sloane, who was a filmmaker, also lived here in Bushwick, a helicopter searchlighting the streets even at that moment, but she and Camilla both could have been Westport wives.

  Sam rolled a joint at a paint-scabbed worktable. Behind him on the easel, his wife’s portrait of him: sand, pale body in black briefs, gray tide sliding onto canvas. In the painting, Sam’s curly black hair obscured his profile as he bent to examine the legs of the dead horseshoe crab he held by the tail.

  In life, now, he hunched in the opposite direction, licking the paper to seal it. The tension between him and his image would make a good photograph, and he knew it, and that was the essence of his art-world life: one successful juxtaposition after another.

  * * *

  —

  I stared at a guy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt and a girl in a gypsy dress, dark hair on her arms like a sensual moss. They didn’t belong at this party. They kissed in front of the factory windows. Their bodies reflected in the lavender panes: a triptych of valentines.

  These two probably made out every morning regardless of dragon breath, hangover, or the stranger sleeping on the air mattress next to them. They got fired over and over from shitty jobs. Lived on peanut butter sandwiches, planned road trips that would never happen, and watched cult movies while roommates ranted on the phone to the landlord. Pissed without shutting the bathroom door. They were playmates. They got their hands dirty. All the stories they told each other were true.

  * * *

  —

  A blond boy sucked the spliff, then coughed and continued hacking, blindly holding it out to the crowd. I took a long drag, held it, blew a cloud. Passed it nonchalantly.

  Immediately, I went deaf. My skin broke out in sweat, and I felt it turn white. I played with the charm on my bracelet as though it was a toy. The blond boy was splayed on the couch like a tuberculosis patient taking in the sun.

  I drifted away to gaze through the glass. The purple tint deepened the heartbroken landscape. In the junkyard, the white Sunnydale milk truck tilted like a shipwreck. Next to it, a dirt backyard. On the porch, a dog threw itself against the restraint of its chain, barking up at us.

  When I recovered enough composure, I poured whiskey into a cup. I took my third piece of cake to the couch. Looked left then right, and unbuttoned the top of my jeans.

  Took a fresh whiskey with me to the record player. Lifted the needle midsong.

  “I put that on.” The blond kid pouted. “It was my favorite.”

  I handed it to him so he could put it back into the jacket. I smiled in a way I hoped would comfort him, and winked. “I think you were alone, there, sailor. You’re putting us all to sleep.”

  Two men stood under the turquoise lantern, the glowing paper painted with orange flowers on black branches. Hands in pockets, the strangers looked Germanic and severe, with boldly sculpted faces, sunken eyes.

  I walked up, beaming, hands on hips. “My name is Lee,” I said brightly. “Flirt with me.”

  I don’t know what I was in the middle of telling them, but I vaguely sensed one of them gesturing to someone. Their friend joined us. I introduced myself to him. Then, with theatrical reluctance, he said they all really had to get going.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” I said.

  The other two agreed, waving good-bye to me as if I were a child, and they moved to the other side of the room.

  * * *

  —

  The blond boy’s eyes were glazed blue slits. I kicked his foot. “Come with me.”

  He opened his eyes a millimeter.

  “Did you kick me?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  On the street, an Isuzu truck was burned out, its charred doors open like wings.

  “I don’t like coke,” he whined.

  “Shut up,” I said, and held my key under his nostril.

  Laughter from the window upstairs fell down through darkness, and a couple straggled out through the stairwell, a piece of cake on a paper plate in his hands, a ratty fur thrown around her bare shoulders. She stopped and swayed, pressing powder to her chin in a mirror while he watched.

  I kissed
the blond boy with my eyes open.

  * * *

  —

  I stumbled up a few flights. Knocked where I heard music. A man opened the door. His black hair was spiked, eyes lined in electric blue. He asked if the music was too loud.

  “No, no,” I mumbled. “Came to get my coat.”

  “Came to get your coat,” he repeated doubtfully.

  “I’m leaving,” I explained, working to form words. “I gotta get my coat.”

  At this, he smiled, with his mouth at least, not his eyes. “Come on in and get your coat, then, honey.”

  After the door closed and I was standing in the middle of the loft, it finally hit me I was in the wrong apartment.

  A cheap standing lamp did little, and most of the space lay in shadow. Inside the gold circle, two white kids slumped on a tartan couch, sneakers propped on a coffee table littered with smoldering ashtrays, tinfoil, soda cans.

  “Sit down,” the man said. “I insist,” he said, when I started to object.

  A short-haired dog kept nuzzling my crotch, and the man watched me push him away.

  “He likes you,” he said.

  No one spoke. So I looked around the loft. Two kids were sleeping on a pink mattress. In the corner, a gaunt black girl played Atari, but she seemed not to be connecting the movements her hands made on the joystick to the Pac-Man in the maze.

  “I have a question,” I said to the host.

  I’d tried heroin many times, but only in dreams. My sleeping mind would send me drifting like a doll through hallways, along highways, on what I just knew was an accurate ride. My soul was somehow acquainted with that high, as if it were my own sea level, an equilibrium to achieve.