Here Kitty Kitty

by Jardine Libaire

  * * *

  —

  New Year’s Eve. It’s a promise of a night. Single, married or widowed, in love, loveless or lovelorn, we all leave our apartments and pick through snow in high heels, or descend subway stairs in tuxedos, lured to wherever we’re going—whether we know it or not, would deny it or not—by the kiss of a stranger.

  * * *

  —

  Few dinner reservations showed in the blizzard, and those that did were good old downtown natives, eccentric and tolerant. The staff drank so much champagne they were practically roller-skating from table to table.

  Right before midnight, most of us went outside.

  Martine always turned ghetto when he was drunk. “Start that countdown, yo. Drop that fucking ball, dog.”

  “Okay there, Eazy-E,” Shannon said, lobbing a snowball.

  “I’m-a put a sparkler up your ass,” Martine warned.

  “Play nice,” I said.

  “Sorry.” Martine dropped his head, truly chagrined.

  “Here, baby.” I handed him a bouquet of sparklers.

  “Tight,” he said, started fencing with Ozzie.

  We made snow angels in the street. The snow was high, so the angels were deep. Our bodies dropped lavender shadows on the white as we stood, and staggered, out of our silhouettes. The boys all compared wingspan.

  Shannon held the phone out the door.

  “It’s for you,” he said. Then, after covering the mouthpiece, he shrugged. “It sounds like Chico.”

  I reached greedily for the phone, my wet coat heavy as lead on my arms.

  “I wanted to tell you first,” Chico said.

  The street shone like a Rothko: white mounds lit yellow by streetlamps and shadowed in blue. When I finally hung up, I turned to the quiet staff.

  “There’s a brand new person in the world.”

  EIGHT

  The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, from Walden

  It’s April now. I sit at a gunmetal desk dissecting a jasmine flower fallen from a sprig in the water glass. My fingertips smell like heaven and perfume the handles of my brushes. This room is a riddle with one answer, being too small to arrange any other way. Angel sleeps, moving to stay in the sun like the hand of a sundial. The light turns her coat yellow. Orange sections on a saucer, juice pooling. Springtime comes calling, curls around the window’s edges, beckons like a long white glove with no arm inside.

  Don’t get up, I tell myself. Don’t go anywhere.

  * * *

  —

  I’m still in Brooklyn.

  * * *

  —

  It’s raining on the Union Square Market. Buckets of lilacs, lilacs for sale. Everyone is selling lilacs, and the lilacs are wet with rain. Riots of white, lavender, and violet disrupt the slick black surface that is the city today. I wouldn’t call lilacs lush: the flowerets are prim, and they come too early in the year. But they are generous.

  Every spring, I’m reminded that no one has duplicated this scent. Perfumes are built on the oil of lilacs, certainly, and come close to the real thing. But there is nothing scientists can do to replicate the way the essence is released by the plant.

  Too many umbrellas in Union Square today. I’ve just left the restaurant, where I’m still working. I struggle through the crowd with a loaf of bread and a newspaper cone of lilacs. People duck each other’s barbs, almost turn to glance back in dismay, but everyone is dizzy on aromatic rain, so no one gives a damn.

  I walk as if following footprints painted on the sidewalk, down the stairs, across the subway platform. Not as fancy as a foxtrot diagram: just the way home.

  * * *

  —

  168 Kent Avenue, #1C.

  A ground-floor studio in a warehouse converted to apartments. Barred window looking onto orange mud, river twinkling through fence. Curtain pulled aside. Desk and chair facing out. Jasmine plants on sill.

  Wood floor sanded but marked by fossilized burns, stains, digs. New walls. Galley kitchen. Bed, bookcase, stereo, night table. Turquoise horsehide on floor, ballerina on wall.

  Vacuum cleaner, mop, bucket, rags, solvents under sink.

  Closet. Box of sunglasses, jewelry. Trench coat, Fendi fur, jeans, white sequin skirt, black leather skirt, black tracksuit, black turtleneck, men’s V-neck sweater-shirts in black and gray, white T-shirts, white scarf, black underwear and white socks, black flip-flops, black stilettos, black kitten-heel boots, red-and-white Adidas sneakers.

  Kitchen. Salt, pepper, herbes de Provence, oil and vinegar, milk, jam, mustard, butter, tea. One bar of soap, one pack of incense, one box of tampons, one stack of toilet paper, and one roll of paper towels. I don’t cook much. I make plates of hard-boiled eggs, sausage, cheese, mango. Get the handles of my brushes greasy even though I wipe my fingers on my jeans.

  Linen, turpentine, coffee cans, brushes, the alligator briefcase of paints, a palette, an easel.

  One vase of lilacs.

  * * *

  —

  I picture him on a ladder, in jeans and boots, no shirt. A carpenter apron tied around hips, drill bit between teeth. His broad back swirling with green light and green shadows as wind tosses palm trees.

  At night he drinks beers at bars I don’t know, and when he leaves the bar, he might get into a friend’s pickup, and in silence they’ll turn down sandy streets until they get to his house, where the friend stops. When he steps down from the truck cab, he inhales deeply of an island air I don’t know. Lying in his bed, he might see a lizard on the wall, and he thinks it’s his imagination until it moves. Someone might be lying next to him. When sun comes through the shutter slats, he might miss me. Or he might not.

  * * *

  —

  This is what went wrong.

  I’d already packed the apartment on North Seventh Street. My plane ticket was for January 30, in ten days. Wearing bifocals and earmuffs, Art picked me up at the icy, glittering train station. When we walked into their house, the steam of potato and lamb fogged the windows.

  Becca wore one of her getups: black tunic, black leggings, and Moroccan slippers. With a Capri in her mouth, bloody Mary on the foyer table, she held a Dustbuster in her hand.

  “Oh, my dear!” She shut the tiny vacuum off. “Just last-minute cleaning, you know.”

  She took a big drag before we hugged, and I heard her exhale over my shoulder. “Let me look at you,” she said, holding me away. “Oh,” she said, clucking.

  We ate the kind of lunch I’d never even make for dinner. Potatoes au gratin, lamb stew. The house was winter dark, and its green walls and Oriental carpets, without being dirty, were oiled by years of life.

  Art and Becca were going to rent the other house to Margaret Landry.

  “A dear friend of mine,” Becca said. “A wonderful, wonderful, wonderful writer—and she’s bringing a horse—we’re making a paddock.” Pointing to the window, she drew a vague circle with her hand and ashed on the table accidentally. “Her husband died a few years ago. His liver.” She stared at me meaningfully. “Very, very hard on our Margaret. But I tell you, she’s stronger than ever. And she looks great, without having had a thing done.”

  Margaret would use my furniture until I one day had a place to move it all. But I had to deal with the boxes of clothes and papers and jewelry I’d left in the library of the house for two years. Becca wanted to help, insisted it would be fun if we did it together, but I thanked her and declined. Folded my napkin, walked onto the icy field alone. She stood at her open door, smoking, arms crossed against the cold, and waved each time I looked back.

  * * *

  —

  I worked in the library, expecting, a
s I had each time I’d come out here, the house to reignite with grief like a gas pilot touched by a match. I opened boxes, unfolded dresses, sprayed perfumes, skimmed books. Whatever I’d been afraid to feel, I readied myself to feel.

  I clipped on earrings, clusters of blue glass beads that had shimmied and clicked even when she was still. Onto my big wrist, I slid the ivory bangle that used to fall up and down her skinny, freckled arm. I even held to my nose the apricot slip. Lingerie, even if it’s washed a hundred times, keeps some trace of the woman. It’s the closest thing to a ghost.

  The most dangerous objects were in her jewelry box. Strangely enough, things that had belonged to me and become hers were the most radioactive. Previously unbearable, they were what I forced myself to touch that day. My own baby tooth. Grade-school quizzes, in the purple ink of old photocopies, gold starred. A curl of baby hair tied with ribbon.

  The worst was an envelope in her bedside table, kept close for when she couldn’t sleep. Inside were my letters from boarding school. Most were pages long. As detailed and florid as ancient books hand-copied by monks. On one, I diagram the messy experience of dyeing my roommate’s hair pink: there’s Lily in the drugstore, then in the room wearing white bib and gloves, me washing the pink from her hair into the sink. A dead deer lies by the roadside, its blood falling up into the sky in teardrops. A rainbow over the dining hall with this caption: It’s Spaghetti Night!!! Glued to the pages, in between grades and lacrosse scores and art projects, were notes from boys, detention notices, a paper-thin leaf torn from an anthology of poetry, a matchbook from the diner. We missed each other so much when I went away. Nothing could ever be the same. The closest I would come was in mailing these encyclopedias of hopes and fears.

  Seeing those letters also reminded me how natural art used to be. How it was not delineated from love. Easy as dipping a sieve in the river and pulling out gold.

  Taking what I wanted, and repackaging the rest for Art and Becca’s attic, I cried until I had a migraine. But something had changed in my attitude toward her belongings. Now they were souvenirs of love. I would no longer use them as bait. I’d been holding them out like meat to a falcon, hoping to win her back down.

  * * *

  —

  Last train out. The snowy suburbs glowed mauve in moonlight.

  The first death is like the first crush. Every detail of the beloved, his Big Red breath, her milk-blue earlobe, his pigeon toes, her bobby pins, these details hurt so much they make it hard to breathe. They knock the wind out of you all day long, then all night.

  The beloved looms in the mind, obscuring all else. Over and over, his black-and-white-checkered Vans sneaker grinds the cigarette butt, making sparks. Over and over, in a taxi’s mirror, she applies rose-scented lipstick to the top lip, then presses lips together. How does anyone else stand to be near him, when everything he does breaks the heart? How can anyone else bear to even think her name, when her name alone, without fail, strikes up a fever of loss? Does no one else suffer? Are they all so blind, shallow, unfeeling?

  Then poof. One day it’s over. He’s still a good kisser, but it’s not the same. Her name no longer takes the breath away.

  Instantly, we miss that heartbreak, the pain, the dizzy, crazy intoxication of loving too much, loving too hard, loving so the love eclipses the rest of life. And suddenly we feel guilty for letting go, and we feel common for having thought we were singular.

  “Ginger,” I said as quietly as possible, and one passenger turned. I had to say it again, though, to make sure. “Ginger.”

  * * *

  —

  Exhausted, I took a scalding shower when I got home. Huddled in blankets. So dark I couldn’t see my hand, and I tried.

  No thoughts. More of a physical attempt to register the void of the room, the emptiness of the night. And then I saw her.

  Don’t know if my eyes were open or closed, but she rose on a geyser of pearls and flames and scarves and doves. My mother came back, radiant as Venus from the shell, in a hot-pink cocktail dress, and real.

  These are the pyrotechnics of faith.

  * * *

  —

  I made the phone call the next day. I heard words come out of my mouth and knew how I sounded. Normally, I would have been forceful, insisting he listen and believe. But I had used up all credibility with Kelly Bradley. He’d earned the right to give up.

  At first, he tried to change my mind. “Lee, I’ll work. It’s not expensive to live, and you can paint during the day. You’ll have the house to yourself—”

  “Baby, it’s not that. I don’t just need eight hours to be alone. I need to be alone all the time. If I had you, I can’t explain it, but I wouldn’t do it.”

  “You sound like you’re going into the Army or something.”

  “I know you think I’m a flake,” I said.

  He didn’t argue. Instead, he was quiet while I explained how I needed to fall apart and be ugly and be useless for everything except living and making money and painting. How I needed to get a toehold on a new life, and had to do it by myself or I’d never be confident it would last.

  This is the one mean thing he said: “You’ve been useless.”

  He apologized, but the apology was bitter since we both knew he was right.

  “Maybe we should talk tomorrow after you’ve slept on this,” I suggested carefully.

  He snorted, then sighed. “How long is this going to take you, Lee?”

  I couldn’t lie. “Four months. Three years. I don’t really know.”

  “I’m going to hang up now,” he said, already sounding faraway. “And we’re not going to talk tomorrow, Lee.”

  “Kelly,” I said, desperate, my mind racing to think of what I meant. “I don’t expect you to wait around for me, but, but I will always—”

  Click.

  I didn’t get the chance to explain fully, and at the time, I didn’t have the words. But I understand it better now. How my life was top-heavy with love, the foundation of integrity too weak. He would have filled in the empty spaces that I needed to fill myself.

  In the past I used men to escape art. But I wanted to disappear, not be anyone’s anything. Now I talk like Jules to the canvas. I look in the mirror after hours of work and see a stranger. I smell different in my armpits, between my legs, after a night of painting. My mouth gets rancid.

  This body of work in my head requires execution. I won’t always live like this, but I have years of paintings to make up before I go forward. An accounting must be done. Before he hung up, I didn’t get the chance to point out to Kelly that I was only taking his advice to heart.

  * * *

  —

  So I’ve assumed half of Kelly’s shifts and kept all my manager shifts. In the mornings, I paint. I paint on days off. Every night, even after double shifts, I paint.

  This evening I get off the subway. Cherry blossoms confetti the streets. Two girls sell books, gloves, handbags from a tapestry on the sidewalk. The carrottop white girl is dumpy, but the Asian girl traveled here in a time machine from 1969 Paris. Black shards of hair hang from under white leather cap, jeans are tucked into white ankle boots. A morose violet pout sucks on a cigarette.

  To get home, I pass Sweetwaters, Level X, Galapagos. Like a dog, I sniff the air. When bar doors open, that heady stink rolls out. I put one foot in front of the other.

  Honestly, what I miss most are not the benders, but the coffee with a raspberry danish in the morning, Sancerre with salmon, a cigarette when stuck under an awning in a sudden rainstorm. Not to sound like Nancy Reagan, but any chemical now would open my gate to the others. So when I get home, I take a hot shower, light incense, brew tea, rub Angel, stretch my aching back, close my eyes for five minutes, then sit in front of the easel.

  It’s usually at this point, looking at a blank canvas, when I think: Fuck you. I’m not doing this. Holing up like this leads nowhere. This is a farce, another way of hiding. Going out to dance and live and love is braver. I shoul
d go out and get my hands dirty. I’m spoiling, like milk left out overnight. But if I pop the cherry and touch paint to linen, I continue. I’ve mailed Kelly three small watercolor portraits. They’re love letters.

  They’re also prayers. At the Laundromat the other day, I was reversing pillowcases, and I thought: Painting doesn’t exactly answer my questions, as I’d always thought it would. One painting doesn’t suddenly expose the meaning of life. But the process of painting turns doubt inside out. Puts me in a new place, closer to the world. Fortifies my courage. Reminds me that doubt and faith are two sides of the same mystery.

  I’ve searched the apartment for sketches made over the years. One by one I’m making paintings of these inked vignettes. Kai lying on the couch in chef pants, exhausted from work. The keys, wallet, gram bags, Jolly Ranchers thrown from his pockets onto the floor. Sherry on a moped outside Limelight. A broken glass in the restaurant sink, blood on the tip of Ozzie’s finger. Belinda sitting on the subway with a stuffed tiger. A pineapple on Yves’s counter. Angel on my bedside table, sniffing a perfume bottle.

  It’s an overdue diary, an afterword to part of my life.

  * * *

  —

  When I was five or six, before the age of reason, my mother confided in me that while I slept, my dolls came alive. This is before the pornography of Ken and Barbie, before the Corvettes and Jacuzzis, before the Sodom and Gomorrah of the pink plastic beach house. The cheeks on these Madame Alexander dolls were apple red. They wore blue felt coats and Mary Janes. Their days were spent changing dresses and pointlessly arguing in haughty voices.

  Nighttime was when their little fireplace crackled, a cake baked in the oven, the chandelier glittered. This is when they danced and loved and lost and learned and raced and sang. The welded fingers I pitied during the day certainly opened at night.