Here Kitty Kitty

by Jardine Libaire

  My father had reminded me of a gorilla: more human than humans, but not human at all. His beard stank, a filter for his bad breath. On one of his rare visits, we walked in woods that were blue with the prospect of rain. For his every stride, I skipped three times. I finally confessed to not knowing what kindling, which we were supposed to be collecting, was.

  “The little ones,” he’d said, “that get the big ones burning.”

  Echoes of genius or importance: whatever poem he was memorizing written on a scroll and tucked into his hatband, a smokehouse blueprint sketched on the wall by the toilet, a fly tied one Christmas dinner with tinsel, an ornament hook, and a fur tuft from my jacket.

  When he stayed with us, it was less as the man of the family and more as an art fellow, a visiting lecturer.

  His career as an architect lasted ten years, and Art introduced him to my mother at the end of those years, before that end was evident. He’d burned bright. And then he was done. When the relationship began, he’d been working on a museum in Denmark, and everyone involved believed the building would be a groundbreaking and historical monument. By the time my mother fell in love and conceived me, the building was millions over budget, and my father was known internationally as a man who was failing, who was going down. His brilliance had been tied to a narcissism that allowed him to believe he could create anything he imagined. But his disdain for reality couldn’t support his dreams. He’d become Unhappy. He died of Exhaustion. He left us Some Money.

  I’d always suspected that his mammoth black beard, whose gray was as delineated as streaks of paint, had strangled him. I’d believed my mother refused to marry because she was a free spirit. I’d assumed we owned the house we lived in. I’d always trusted that our little world was safe because we deserved safety, not because she worked hard to make a nest for us. I’d been convinced that my mother recovered from losing him. But these were the activities of my mind. My heart perceived wildernesses of contradictions and impossible truths and mystical lies.

  My mom worked at an antique store in East Hampton, a job I’d thought she did to keep from being bored. A dish of peppermints sat next to a calculator on the French pine table where she sat. In the drawer, money was filed big to small in a white envelope. A black Westie, whose hair was oily and plastered to its stout body, lay coiled in a basket and farted all day. I played with dolls on the kilims in the bitter fragrance of wood and rug. Sometimes I sat under the table, in the company of her freckled legs. We were warm and cozy, and we needed no one.

  She divided her time between reading magazines; gossiping, hands on hips, with visitors; and arranging knickknacks and paintings. Once, she spent a day on two porcelain teacups. A peony branch had been painted on each one to grow from the exterior into the cup. After trying every corner of the shop, she settled them on a nightstand, exactly as if some dreamer in the middle of the night could actually reach out for a sip.

  * * *

  —

  The Stinger Club. Bordello gloom throughout the place, and a back room where bad things happened. I once watched a wheelchairbound man in gang colors, leg outstretched in a metal halo, crash around in the red dark, too drunk to drive his electric chair.

  But tonight white boys were playing bluegrass. Kelly and I sat in a booth, shared a Coke with grenadine like a couple at a soda fountain. Something about the banjos: they promised that no matter how hard we’d worked, someone else had worked harder, and if he could let go, we should, too.

  Kelly knew by the way I held his hand. He knew by the weight of my head on his shoulder. I never had to say a word. When the band broke, the players dropped their instruments on the stage to get beers, like kids abruptly abandoning toys for candy, and Kelly led me out. He walked me home as if I was a sleepwalker, as if it would be dangerous to wake me.

  * * *

  —

  We stood in my dark kitchen, the stove and walls and refrigerator and our bodies streaked by blue headlights. We stood in that classical pose: my back against the wall, one knee raised between his thighs. His forearm on the wall above my head, our foreheads touching so we could look down onto each other’s lips.

  * * *

  —

  I woke to French toast smoke. We shared a big plate in bed. He licked syrup from my fingers. Angel moved around, disrupted by our own movements but wanting our heat. She glared at us.

  As he wiped bread crust on the plate, I found my way down to his knees. Embraced his thighs lazily with one arm, sucked him like a baby fallen asleep with a rattle in her mouth. My negligee stretched almost to ripping, threadbare as lace left in the rain.

  * * *

  —

  Before he went to work one day, we walked to stretch our love-strained legs. At a ninety-nine-cent store, we bought gifts, exchanged them outside in the magnificent cold white light of that Brooklyn morning. He got Old Spice aftershave. I got a white polyester nightgown.

  “Decadent,” he said.

  “Glamorous,” I agreed.

  While waiting for him to come home that evening, I made old-fashioned meat loaf. Like a new bride, I put on the nightie and with bare hands worked egg into the raw beef. Before I put it in the hot oven, I laid bacon strips over the loaf as gently as tucking a child into bed. My negligee held creases where it had been folded and smelled of store, but when Kelly came home, we would break it in, make it mine.

  * * *

  —

  I got up as early as he did now. Sometimes at midnight my words still slurred, out of physiological habit. And in the mornings, I woke with a hangover on occasion, before realizing that was impossible. Most days I got up famished because I was used to consuming thousands of calories in liquor a night. Some days I woke up burning with anger, and I walked it out, worked it out, yet there was nothing to do but burn. His kisses burned my back. The cold shower burned. The cool bedsheets burned. But every time I brushed my teeth and picked out clothes for the day, no matter what else was happening in my head, I was amazed to find no damage, no destruction to inventory. That blessing never ceased to be revolutionary.

  Standing this morning at the window in my black kimono, hair tangled in a bun, I watched ladies in black lamb’s wool and pink lipstick totter to church. A new town unfolded in these early hours, new to me. These women spent afternoons in housedresses and curlers, hanging out their windows, talking across the street. I used to think they never left their apartments. I used to feel sorry for them.

  I turned to Kelly, who lay in bed with arms behind his head. “Don’t you love it here?” I asked.

  He looked at me, and finally answered. This was how it all got started. The plan blossomed like a tropical flower, hot and fervent.

  “I couldn’t,” I said, when I crawled back into bed.

  “But you could.”

  I lay across his chest, face turned sideways on his sternum. Drunk on the musk of his armpits. “Where?” I asked.

  “Anywhere.”

  I almost dozed off, but managed to say in a sleepy voice: “You knew from the beginning that this would happen.”

  But he didn’t answer.

  * * *

  —

  He dragged me up the hallway ladder to a roof I’d never explored. He said he couldn’t believe I’d never come up here. The tar-paper surface was slightly slanted. The December night was lush, impossible for snow. Giddy, we turned around, surrounded by a planetarium of stars and city.

  It wasn’t too warm to pretend we were cold.

  “Come here,” he said, and we huddled against the cement-filled chimney.

  Somehow we opened our coats to each other, as if they were wings, and nestled like turtledoves. I pulled down his zipper, he pushed up my skirt. Like a tusk, it angled up, but he missed as often as he scored. Somehow this made me want it more than I ever had before.

  One arm around his neck, I bit my own thumb. In the blindness of it all, he stumbled, knees locked by blue jeans. We laughed, steadied ourselves, started again.

  �
�Come on,” I said, tremulous. “Keep going.”

  Through my tears, I couldn’t tell the stars from the skyline.

  * * *

  —

  In the golden sun of the slow afternoon, Kelly cut limes. The light turned the fruit to green crystal. A backward S, from the restaurant’s name painted on the window, was emblazoned on his white shirt.

  “It’s a place for outsiders,” Kelly said. “The resort of last resort.”

  I turned the pages of the book. White gingerbread porch, gecko on the post like a mezuzah. A rooster like a small fire under a larger fire of bougainvillea. Bikers eating Cuban sandwiches at a café, tattoo of a peace sign on one’s beefy shoulder.

  “People like us,” I said, and blushed.

  Making this plan with him made me blush when it crossed my mind, even while I was alone. Such things are few and far between that turn our cheeks red by innocence, not lewdness.

  The places we’d looked at online were crude, but not crude enough to be quaint. Linoleum, carport, plastic venetian blinds were what we could afford. But someone once said that luxury wasn’t the opposite of poverty, but of vulgarity, and Kelly and I were planning a luxurious life. We would pay rent on time. File taxes, even. Vote. Volunteer. Recycle. We’d come home from work, toss dirty uniforms into washer, cook steaks on a Smokey Joe under an emerald evening sky, say our Florida prayers, and dream the dreams of good citizens.

  * * *

  —

  We made love for a long, slow time in the pitch black, under the covers. At first, my mind retained his body, even though I couldn’t see. I saw the ghost of him lying with me. The length of leg, the glowing curve of shoulder. Distended like a white doll in black water. We went deeper into each other, and my mind lost his body. What I got instead was bits of white petal and gold fur and red berry. This is what the heart sends up when you enter the dream part of loving. The soul wants visible company but finally lets go of the idea of two people. We kept moving, for hours. Maybe I was falling asleep, or maybe I was waking up. Now I could see his childhood, stretched out in farms and airfields and church parking lots. Planes crossed blue skies above suburbs. I saw the skyline of all his nights. I heard his fights echo off barroom walls, heard sirens chase him down streets, felt turquoise waves crush and lift him. Now I strolled through a vineyard and came upon him with a black-haired girl. Two pairs of jeans folded in wet grass next to toppled wine coolers. A leather-tooled handbag leaned against the vines, wet with rain, rain falling from the leaves. The bag full of teenage-girl things: cherry lip gloss, gum, keys. A bit of blood on his cock when she got off, and he held it up as he waited for her to lie on her back, as they had silently, physically agreed to change positions. And they continued now with him on top. He was younger in this vineyard, but it didn’t make me jealous to see his bony shoulders working, to hear him almost crying. Instead it made me proud to see her eyes turn back, the whites rolling. Because I had become the stars in the sky above them.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of my shift, I went down to the office to put on Adidas sneakers, shoved shoes in a drawer. That’s the way I did things now. I walked over the dusky bridge in my red coat as if communicating to God that I was alive. Kelly met me at Alioli. He asked if I was cold. I asked if he was hungry. We ate hot prawns at the bar with our cold fingers.

  I told him his face reminded me of a figure from a totem pole. He said he’d seen a fire that day on the Lower East Side, but he thought the building was abandoned. I said that I was full. He said that he was sleepy.

  At home he made hot chocolate, but tonight it tasted different. Too much nutmeg, he decided. He wore long-john bottoms to bed; I wore my dollar teddy. He’d heard it might snow tonight, as much as six inches. I said I wished it would, because I loved the quiet after. We couldn’t sleep and stared together at the dark.

  “We’re moving to Florida, aren’t we,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “We are.”

  * * *

  —

  All I had to give was two weeks’ notice, which I’d do after New Year’s. The staff was structured so anyone could be replaced. I paid January’s rent, told Anthony I’d be out by February first. My lease was just a handshake, and he and I both knew I could leave when I wanted. I didn’t want to say good-bye to friends. In the past year, we’d all grown apart, irrevocably. They’d started families or had simply forgotten me. I hoped to be missed but didn’t expect it.

  Almost every day I walked to or from work. When I woke, I felt strong and lucid. My appetite was ferocious, but my sweet tooth was gone. I craved meat, raw carrots, walnuts, yogurt.

  Kelly brought me cardboard boxes from the bodega. Because I had to pack up both the apartment and then the house out east, the sooner I started, the better. My goal was to radically minimize. When I listed the things I would give away, even Kelly was surprised.

  One day our plan changed. Kelly had made calls to Key West friends to find a pull-out couch where we could crash in February so that we could start looking for a place. His friend T.J. called him back. If Kelly went down immediately and helped renovate a unit T.J. owned, we could take possession February first and get the first month free as payment for the work.

  Art had just wired me funds, and after I paid Yves half of what I owed him, I’d have ten grand left. I told Kelly he didn’t need to do this work, that I could pay the first month. But he said it didn’t feel right to him, and that this was a perfect solution. A month without him seemed like a horrible idea, but he was determined. We found him a ticket online for Christmas, four days away.

  We tangoed in my kitchen, euphoric, scared, ridiculous.

  I mailed Yves a certified check. I folded it in the last blank sheet of paper in the box. I’d used all the others trying to compose a letter, but there was nothing to say. Eventually I’d pay him in full. Since the funds were certified, they’d already been removed from my account. It didn’t matter if Yves burned the check—the money could never come back to me. In a perverse way, it would be funny if he never deposited the check. Thirty-eight grand would float in a purgatory of bank transactions.

  * * *

  —

  Christmas Eve. Looking in the mirror, I combed the flames of my hair down onto my shoulders. Wind had made my cheeks eternally pink. Walking had already begun to change my body, sculpting my muscles. I puffed powder between thighs and pulled on a black knit dress, fixed pearls, dabbed red lipstick.

  We spent a good half hour fixing a Santa hat on Angel’s head. We drank mulled cider, his spiked, and I cooked. He sipped, touched the petal of a white poinsettia on the table, pressed the wax of a red candle, but mainly he watched me at the stove.

  “Mnh, mnh,” he finally said. “You should wear that dress every day.”

  “Come on, now,” I said in a Southern accent. “This is baby Jesus’ birthday.”

  “We need some mistletoe,” he said. “We don’t need mistletoe.”

  When I cleared his plate, the brandy on his mouth tasted like nostalgia to me.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you want your present?” he asked.

  I sat on his knee. “Don’t pull any naughty-or-nice shit,” I warned.

  “I got you a good present,” he said smugly.

  “So give it to me.”

  I shook the small package. “Mink coat? Cadillac?”

  An early edition of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

  “You deserve a first edition, baby, but this cowboy doesn’t have the bills.”

  “You’re drunk,” I said, laughing.

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” He stared at the floor with happy resignation. The white Stetson I’d given him tilted at a rakish angle.

  “You know what?” I said.

  “What,” he said.

  “I’ve loved you since the day I met you.”

  “I know.”

  * * *

  —

  The creamy light of dawn let me
think I was asleep, and they sounded like dream words. But then he kissed my forehead, and I woke up for real. I rubbed my eyes. His jacket zipped, his good-bye face on.

  “Did you hear what I said?” he asked softly.

  I shook my head, just to hear it again.

  “You know how I was waiting, that it was on the horizon? The greatest thing I’ll do, Lee, is be with you.”

  * * *

  —

  A couple days later, it snowed enough to coat the streets white. The sun was out, and the world was blinding. On my sidewalk, I passed an old man in an electric-blue tracksuit walking an unleashed Chihuahua.

  “I can’t see nothing,” he said to no one.

  That night I went to a party at a skateboard shop around the corner. A mob crowded the ridges of the half-pipe, which was chicken-wired on all sides. The spectators stood in puddles of melted snow and pulled PBRs from a freestanding bathtub of ice. I watched one kid because I just had a feeling. His hat turned sideways, elbows scarred, and the craziest look, out of all those boys, in his eyes. Moment of silence as his board hung on the lip, and then he dropped in.

  Afterward, I had steak and root beer at Diner’s counter. Inside, candles painted faces red with light. Outside, blue snow burned in the niches and notches of the towering Williamsburg Bridge.

  Later, walking home, I marveled at a shirtless man puking out of the driver’s side of a dark gold limousine pulled to the curb. After spitting one last goober, he gave a war cry, threw his legs back into the car, slammed the door, and fishtailed away.

  I sketched out the four scenes when I got upstairs. It was the first time I’d really focused in weeks. Before I went to sleep, I stretched four canvases. The pieces would make a diary of the day.