Here Kitty Kitty

by Jardine Libaire

  I pretended to sleep so I could catch them but always seemed to fall into dreams before they began. In the mornings, my mother pointed out the dolls’ exhaustion. I thought they were selfish to exclude me, and I glared at them, but with respect.

  Last week I bought a hatbox at a junk shop: flamingo pink, with a forgotten store’s name in script on the lid. Now when I finish a new sketch, I lay it in the box. I turn off the light and get into bed and imagine that life on those pages not only continues but maybe even begins. It’s the primordial soup of art. When I wake, I find the sum of the pages has added up in the darkness to more than its parts.

  Even in the blackest night, my eyes can find a rosy spot under the desk.

  Don’t look at it. Let it be.

  * * *

  —

  I force myself to imagine him at a restaurant, tiki torches reflected in the water, his companions’ faces undulating in amber light. The paper place mats show diagrams of knots. The ice of a raw bar glimmers in the background. The strong men have creased necks and brown arms, the stories of waves and shrimp and storms written on their bodies.

  Maybe a woman sits next to him, a honey-streaked brunette. Her crow’s-feet are deep, her forehead freckled: the summer never ends. Her body shows some effects of fried clams and piña coladas, and is muscular from trimming sails, riding bicycles, planting, weeding. She’s beatific, shoulders shiny, and she sits back in her Hawaiian sundress and smiles throughout dinner, one hand on Kelly’s blue-jean thigh.

  The men stare but catch themselves, clear throats, paw through plates of clamshells and cocktail sauce for napkins they don’t need. They concentrate on drinking. If it was anybody but Kelly, they’d be jealous, even wily, but Kelly deserves only good things now. Everyone, after all, knows about the girl up north.

  * * *

  —

  After work today, before I go home, I walk to Chelsea.

  Audrey’s father’s name is Bill. He’s come from Oregon on a Greyhound to meet his granddaughter. His chin is plump, with whiskers growing out of tiny dimples, like a strawberry. His clothes smell stale, and every ten minutes he leaves to have a cigarette in the hallway of the building. I get the feeling it’s a long wait between smokes.

  When he returns, he resumes his place on a kitchen chair, pulled into the bedroom, by the door. He sits as if waiting to be called into an office. Every once in a while, he pats the Winstons in the breast pocket of his flannel. He answers questions, even when he’s heard them, with “Mnnh?” followed by “Well, let’s see now.” His face drags with the disappointments of a rough and ugly life, but his eyes feast on the infant.

  Chico drapes a scarf over the lamp because Mabel is asleep, lying the length of Audrey’s lap. Mabel clings to her mother’s pinkie, dreaming.

  I drop by often, bring roast chicken, raisin bread, green-bean salad. I avoid the foods Audrey says are bad for nursing mothers. The assertion I’d made to myself that my friends had forsaken me, and not the other way around, is still privately embarrassing.

  I used to treat Audrey like a child. Now I’m grateful to sit here, at the foot of her bed, in a half-lit room and watch her do nothing.

  * * *

  —

  Strolling home, I watch boys skateboard in sleeveless shirts. Their white arms are pink with cold, but it must feel good to ride jacketless. Blustery and delicate winds blow at the same time: one will rip off your hat, the other will riffle your hem. My naked leg feels vulnerable, capable of disintegrating like a sugar cube dropped in water.

  An old woman points out to me, as if we’re old friends, the crocuses that have survived the late snow of last week.

  “Every year they come up earlier,” she says, shaking her head at them with reproach, even going so far as to point an agitated finger, as if she didn’t like to scold but did so for their own good.

  I stop to look at a wedding cake in the window of a Polish bakery. Superimposed on the white tiers: my dark face, wreathed by rust-red hair. The evening air, which has collected from hidden backyards the lilacs, the cherry blossoms, the soil, and the laundry, has driven my heart a bit mad.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  * * *

  —

  My building is so new it smells of paint. I never see anyone. I hear noise from apartments when I walk the hall, and sometimes notice scuffling above me, but I don’t know my neighbors. The vestibule is empty now, weak sunlight glinting off the wall of mailboxes that is unscratched, innocent of graffiti. The tiled floor wet from the mop of an unseen janitor.

  In my mailbox: a package with Florida postmark.

  Inside: the envelopes I’d mailed to him, seals unbroken.

  In my apartment, I light incense, brew tea, rub Angel, arch my aching back. I pour tea, but hold the spoonful of honey over the jar, slowly let it drip back. You never know how much it will hurt until it happens.

  A returned love letter is written in the most violent language, by your own hand.

  * * *

  —

  “Hey, stranger,” Donald says when I finally get him on the phone.

  He sounds disappointed to hear from me, but not surprised.

  “Hey, sugar,” I say, my voice heavy with defeat and regret, although I haven’t done anything yet.

  After five months, why am I calling? Maybe I’ve been waiting for a good reason. Why does a girl sleep with her ex-boyfriend? Curiosity. To dare him to win her back. To see if she can tempt him back. To rub his face in what he can’t have anymore. Or, sometimes, to celebrate something sweet, and good, and lost.

  I knew all along, somewhere deep and dark inside me, that I would do this. I was waiting for the perfect opportunity. A worthy event. I wondered idly if everyone who gets sober plays the same tricks, follows the same AA textbook chapter on pitfalls.

  It’s Friday night and busy, so Donald sends a runner. Chad and I drink Dewar’s and Coke. It tastes like medicine to my newly virgin palate. I sit on my chair, he sits on the bed, as if we’re in a dorm room. He’s handsome like a model, with flaxen hair and square jaw, but a bit off. His ankles thin as broomsticks, a rash on his hand. He doesn’t laugh; he giggles.

  He drains his glass, holds out my stuff. I’ve been building up the strength to cancel. The minute I see the bags and pills, I capitulate.

  * * *

  —

  The goal wasn’t up or down, but sideways. The problem is I’ve lost my touch, and tolerance. Once I get into Black Betty, I can’t get out. Alone in a writhing mob. Red lights and hip-hop. A Niagara Falls of sensations. Everything looks greasy: the pearls of that man’s eyeballs, the black oil of her leather pants.

  I order a drink.

  “You already have one,” the bartender enunciates.

  Crushed against the bar, and I hold on, as the floor tilts like a yacht.

  Later, I try to pay. Stare at the money. It’s not swimming, it’s not that. It jitters, disappears. My eyes can’t lock onto the denomination. So I hold bills up like a hand of cards.

  “Pick one,” I tell the bartender.

  * * *

  —

  Later I’m standing at a door, wet cherry blossoms stuck to my boots.

  “Can I help you?” someone asks.

  The black kid wears a black knit cap. I can’t get my key in the lock.

  “What do you want?” I ask fearfully.

  He turns away from me, hands on his hips. When he turns back, he has steeled his face. Now he talks slowly, trying not to sound angry. “I asked if I can help you.”

  With his key, he unlocks the door, invites me to precede him with a sarcastically formal flourish of the wrist. It’s the hallway of the building where I used to live. I back away.

  “Miss!”

  I come back for my bag, which he’s picked off the ground. He shakes his head at me, enters the building, slams the door.

  * * *

  —

  I wake up with hot face pressed to cold tile floor. Bright light.

>   My mother is sitting on my toilet lid, one foot propped on other knee. Cotton stuck between toes. White sleeves of kimono hang. I blink, and she sees I’m awake. Quickly, she replaces wand of red polish.

  “Oh, baby,” she says, but without anxiety or disdain. “Don’t do that again.”

  * * *

  —

  I work brunch today. Migraine and nausea, but I pour mimosas for hours because that’s my job. I walk home to get air. At the Strand, I look through outdoor shelves without intent to buy. I’ve been trying to live in this city without disturbing it. If I see a vintage silk blouse blowing on a rack outside a store, I admire and leave it. I treat objects of the city like the butterflies at the museum conservatory that land on your hand but will die if you touch them.

  I do, though, have the vague plan to buy something for the guy in the black knit cap, but decide that what he probably wants is never to see my face again. Painting will have to play one more abstract role: apology. Instead, I get a children’s book for myself, partly because it’s a dollar, and partly for a dose of purity.

  At home, I lie on my bed with Angel, orange sunset glazing us both. The fairy book is full of naked children disfigured by long ears or fur. A girl kneels on chubby knees, butterfly wing and petal and stars exploding from her back as if her soul were too big for her body.

  Voices trail through the window. A gang tramps across the lot with bamboo poles. One kid’s black hair is pinned back like a samurai’s. The bleach-blond guy wears a bike chain around his waist. In the twilight, branches snap back after their passage, spewing diamonds of rain.

  Tall enough to be eighteen, they betray themselves as younger by their walk, by their laughter. They’re not polished. They don’t strut. But they do disappear, jumping from rocks to swamp, arms raised like bat wings as they fall. Nothing like getting stoned and going fishing.

  And I want to go, to be part of it. Absurd as this is, I yearn after the place where they vanished. But in this life we take turns at being enchanting, then enchanted. First we play in the streets, unaware of the freedom burning in the sun on our hair and the cigarette in our mouth, unconscious of the daydreams we inspire. Then it’s our time to sit at a window and watch, and we are moved. Now we get out the brushes and the turpentine.

  * * *

  —

  I make a drawing of Kelly and me into a postcard, hoping he’ll look by accident. Hunched over my desk, I’m a portrait of a lost cause. But taking this last chance, licking the stamp and sending the card down the lobby mail slot, I let go of the need to reach him. I resign myself to being alone, which is what I’d demanded in the first place.

  Through the vestibule’s glass doors that look onto Kent Avenue, I watch a couple carrying a chair, one on each side. The chair must be heavy—their pace is clumsy, slow. The arms of the throne are black ornate wood, the upholstery red silk.

  They pause. Set the chair on the roadside in patches of stubborn snow. She sits down on it. He leans. The sky is extremely dark for this hour, and she holds up a palm for rain. He says something, and she laughs. She gets up. They continue their awkward trip.

  Don’t hate them.

  * * *

  —

  I see Yves all the time. A trench coat in a subway mob, epaulets of rain. A shirt at Cipriani on West Broadway, in a thicket of Europeans and forsythia. At Dean & Deluca, a white-haired man weighing white asparagus as if it were a bundle of dynamite, hesitating the way bachelors do. As I drive by outdoor tables in SoHo, a baby-blue Dunhill box on white tablecloth.

  Of course, these are more hypotheses than sightings. That could have been him.

  Amount by amount, I put money aside. Two hundred and eighty-nine dollars and twenty-three cents one day, ninety-seven dollars and seventy-seven cents another. I would send the money as I make it, but each check will be an insult, so I’d rather do it once. I do understand the inelegance, and I’m sorry for it.

  Sometimes I feel that he never existed, that I dreamed up a sugar daddy. Sometimes I think I should be grateful to him, for what he did do when he didn’t have to, for what he didn’t do when he could have. Sometimes I wake from a wet dream with the abruptness of escaping certain death.

  * * *

  —

  A golden morning in Brooklyn. Lace curtain floats out of a first-story window on Berry Street. The building is mint green. Inside the sill, the red of a child’s hair, the white square of music, a black piano that merges with the darkness of the room.

  The notes are clear and determined, even when they falter. I could listen to it all day. There’s nothing as paralyzing as these keys struck finger by finger, moment by moment. It hypnotizes. While I listen, I’m good for nothing else. This kid is manufacturing innocence.

  * * *

  —

  We meet at the New Museum, wary as bobcats, tails thrashing. Belinda’s kept her trademark bangs and bob, but grown heavy in the hips while staying narrow in the chest and lean in the legs. Wearing a tight magenta raincoat, using her zebra-print umbrella as a cane, she attracts attention, more than ever, as though she is a personage.

  Inside, we move from painting to painting.

  “Oh, I like that a lot.”

  “Oh, yeah, I like the shimmer there, the heat wave or whatever it is.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”

  We walk on, fuming with awkwardness, and I regret coming so passionately that I almost decide to go to the ladies’ room and disappear.

  “Oh, wow. That’s crazy. Look at the colors.”

  “Yeah, it’s really vivid. It’s almost overwhelming.”

  Over lunch, we make more silence than conversation. Belinda sips tea, appraising me, puts the cup down. “You just hate me, don’t you.”

  I stare, agape, truly amazed. “My lord, no.”

  “You do,” she says, smiling faintly.

  “It’s the other way around,” I insist. “You’re the one who got it together. I’m the one who fell apart.”

  “I’m the one who jumped ship,” she says, looking into her tea, then at me. “I got all straight and narrow.”

  “Well, I’m biting your rhymes.”

  She laughs, runs fingertip on mug’s rim. “I’m pregnant again.”

  My face breaks with pleasure. “That is so wonderful. That’s so wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She shrugs. She won’t talk because her eyes have teared up.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” I say, reaching for her hand.

  “I missed you,” she finally says, wiping her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  The box is wrapped in brown paper, postmarked Florida. I take it upstairs, hands shaking.

  Inside the cardboard box, an object wrapped in muslin. A page of loose-leaf tucked beside it. The note reads: Lee, Found this in shed of botanist while renovating. Old guy, cool. He can’t remember origin. Maybe Fiji. Plant shallow in deep pot, it might sprout. No promises. K.

  Pull away the fabric, letting the bulb roll in my hand. Big as an ostrich egg, with skin like an avocado. Already, two small white horns have ripped through its leather.

  * * *

  —

  How have I come to talk to you, Ginger? That’s a good question. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, I fear. Did I believe you were listening, so I arranged something to say? Or was I moved to speak, knowing you weren’t there, then made breathless by awe and joy and relief when you answered?

  I see you now, on a mustard-yellow love seat, the velvet worn to a shine, your arm draped over the sofa’s back, a sling back hanging casually from your toe. You’re so much more relaxed now that you’re dead. I like how we dabble, moving straight from your Waldorf salad recipe to the phenomenon of desire. We deal now on the highest level of etiquette: truth.

  You shift on the love seat, cross your pale blue legs, almost languorous.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d love to thank my editor, Ale
xis Washam, and absolutely everyone at Hogarth for this new edition of the book, and many thanks to my agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, too. And here are my thanks as written in the 2004 edition: Jack and Deb, of course. Asya Muchnick. Emily Mead and Alyson Richman, fire-starters. James Swink, Mrs. Richmond, Pat Jones, Marjory Reid, Barry Goldensohn, Steve Stern, Kathryn Davis, Charles Baxter, Eileen Pollack, and Nicholas Delbanco, my teachers. Jake, for help with the Vashon Island Grant. Julien for pellets and inspiration. The Crugers, for the Houston Margarita Madness Grant. Mister Michael Martin and Miss Tobin. Sunny Delight and Duggan’s Dew. Dark Crystal, Desmond, Bianca, Kim, Molly and Gabe, Larry, Zoe, Cecilia and Scott, Bruce Mason (figurehead), Gigi, Marisa from Peru, Darling and Gangster, and all the other partners in crime. Love to the angels: Jane, Mary Anne, and Jackie. I know you pulled strings up there.

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Shambhala Publications: “The bee emerges…” from Narrow Road to the Interior by Matsuo Bashō, translated by Sam Hamill. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, www.shambhala.com; Don Bachardy: Excerpt from Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood reprinted with permission. Copyright 1959, 1961 by Christopher Isherwood. Copyright renewed 1987, 1989 by Don Bachardy; Diane di Prima: Quote by Diane di Prima from “Revolutionary Letter #1” in Revolutionary Letters, © 1971, 1979, 2004. All rights reserved by author; Elizabeth Barnett: Excerpt from “Feast” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. From Collected Poems, HarperCollins. Copyright © 1923, 1951 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.