T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  So far, I’d gone along with everything in a kind of daze, but this was problematic. Who knew what the thing would do, what its habits were, its needs? “How are we going to—?” I began, and left the rest unspoken. The overhead light glared down on me and the alcohol whispered in my blood. “You remember what that guy said about feeding him, right?” In the back of my head, there was the smallest glimmer of a further complication: once he was out of the cage, how would we—how would I—ever get him back into it?

  For the first time, Daria looked doubtful. “We’ll have to be quick,” she said.

  And so we were. Daria stood at the bedroom door, ready to slam it shut, while I leaned forward, my heart pounding, and slipped the release bolt on the cage. I was nimble in those days—twenty-three years old and with excellent reflexes despite the four or five Jack-and-Cokes I’d downed through the course of the evening—and I sprang for the door the instant the bolt was released. Exhilaration burned in me. And it burned in the cat too, because at the first click of the bolt it came to life as if it had been hot-wired. A screech tore through the room, the cage flew open and the thing was an airborne blur slamming against the cheap plywood panel of the bedroom door, even as Daria and I fought to force it shut.

  —

  In the morning (she’d slept on the couch, curled up in the fetal position, faintly snoring; I was stretched out on the mattress we’d removed from the bedroom and tucked against the wall under the TV) I was faced with a number of problems. I’d awakened before her, jolted out of a dreamless sleep by a flash of awareness, and for a long while I just lay there watching her. I could have gone on watching her all morning, thrilled by her presence, her hair, the repose of her face, if it weren’t for the cat. It hadn’t made a sound, and it didn’t stink, not yet, but its existence was communicated to me nonetheless—it was there, and I could feel it. I would have to feed it, and after the previous night’s episode, that was going to require some thought and preparation, and I would have to offer Daria something too, if only to hold her here a little longer. Eggs, I could scramble some eggs, but there was no bread for toast, no milk, no sugar for the coffee. And she would want to freshen up in the bathroom—women always freshened up in the morning, I was pretty sure of that. I thought of the neatly folded little matching towels in the guest bathroom at my aunt’s and contrasted that image with the corrugated rag wadded up on the floor somewhere in my own bathroom. Maybe I should go out for muffins or bagels or something, I thought—and a new towel. But did they sell towels at the 7-Eleven? I didn’t have a clue.

  We’d stayed up late, sharing the last of the hot cocoa out of the foil packet and talking in a specific way about the cat that had brought us to that moment on my greasy couch in my semi-darkened living room and then more generally about our own lives and thoughts and hopes and ambitions. I’d heard about her mother, her two sisters, the courses she was taking at the university. Heard about Daggett’s, the regulars, the tips—or lack of them. And her restaurant fantasy. It was amazingly detailed, right down to the number of tables she was planning on, the dinnerware, the cutlery and the paintings on the walls, as well as the decor and the clientele—“Late twenties, early thirties, career people, no kids”—and a dozen or more of the dishes she would specialize in. My ambitions were more modest. I told her how I’d finished community college without any particular aim or interest, and how I was working setting tile for a friend of my aunt and uncle’s; beyond that, I was hoping to maybe travel up the coast and see Oregon. I’d heard a lot about Oregon, I told her. Very clean. Very natural up there. Had she ever been to Oregon? No, but she’d like to go. I remembered telling her that she ought to open her restaurant up there, someplace by the water, where people could look out and take in the view. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, that would be cool,” and then she’d yawned and dropped her head to the pillow.

  I was just getting up to go to the bathroom and to see what I could do about the towel in there, thinking vaguely of splashing some aftershave on it to fight down any offensive odors it might have picked up, when her eyes flashed open. She didn’t say my name or wonder where she was or ask for breakfast or where the bathroom was. She just said, “We have to feed that cat.”

  “Don’t you want coffee or anything—breakfast? I can make breakfast.”

  She threw back the blanket and I saw that her legs were bare—she was wearing the Daggett’s T-shirt over a pair of shiny black panties; her running shoes, socks and shorts were balled up on the rug beneath her. “Sure,” she said, “coffee sounds nice,” and she pushed her fingers through her hair on both sides of her head and then let it all fall forward to obscure her face. She sat there a moment before leaning forward to dig a hair clip out of her purse, arch her back and pull the hair tight in a ponytail. “But I am worried about the cat, in new surroundings and all. The poor thing—we should have fed him last night.”

  Perhaps so. And certainly I didn’t want to contradict her—I wanted to be amicable and charming, wanted to ingratiate myself in any way I could—but we’d both been so terrified of the animal’s power in that moment when we’d released it from the cage that neither of us had felt up to the challenge of attempting to feed it. Attempting to feed it would mean opening that door again and that was going to take some thought and commitment. “Yeah,” I said. “We should have. And we will, we will, but coffee, coffee first—you want a cup? I can make you a cup?”

  So we drank coffee and ate the strawberry Pop-Tarts I found in the cupboard above the sink and made small talk as if we’d awakened together a hundred mornings running and it was so tranquil and so domestic and so right I never wanted it to end. We were talking about work and about what time she had to be in that afternoon, when her brow furrowed and her eyes sharpened and she said, “I wish I could see it. When we feed it, I mean. Couldn’t you like cut a peephole in the door or something?”

  I was glad for the distraction, damage deposit notwithstanding. And the idea appealed to me: now we could see what the thing—my pet—was up to, and if we could see it, then it wouldn’t seem so unapproachable and mysterious. I’d have to get to know it eventually, have to name it and tame it, maybe even walk it on a leash. I had a brief vision of myself sauntering down the sidewalk, this id with claws at my side, turning heads and cowing the weight lifters with their Dobermans and Rottweilers, and then I fished my power drill out from under the sink and cut a neat hole, half an inch in diameter, in the bedroom door. As soon as it was finished, Daria put her eye to it.

  “Well?”

  “The poor thing. He’s pacing back and forth like an animal in a zoo.”

  She moved to the side and took my arm as I pressed my eye to the hole. The cat flowed like molten ore from one corner of the room to the other, its yellow eyes fixed on the door, the dun, faintly spotted skin stretched like spandex over its seething muscles. I saw that the kitty litter had been upended and the hard blue plastic pan reduced to chewed-over pellets, and wondered about that, about where the thing would do its business if not in the pan. “It turned over the kitty pan,” I said.

  She was still holding to my arm. “I know.”

  “It chewed it to shreds.”

  “Metal. We’ll have to get a metal one, like a trough or something.”

  I took my eye from the peephole and turned to her. “But how am I going to change it—don’t you have to change it?”

  Her eyes were shining. “Oh, it’ll settle down. It’s just a big kitty, that’s all”—and then for the cat, in a syrupy coo—“Isn’t that right, kittums?” Next, she went to the refrigerator and extracted one of the steaks, a good pound and a half of meat. “Put on the glove,” she said, “and I’ll hold on to the doorknob while you feed him.”

  “What about the blood—won’t the blood get on the carpet?” The gauntlet smelled of saddle soap and it was gouged and pitted down the length of it; it fit me as if it had been custom-made.

  “I’ll
press the blood out with a paper towel—here, look,” she said, dabbing at the meat in the bottom of the sink and then lifting it on the end of a fork. I took the fork from her and together we went to the bedroom door.

  I don’t know if the cat scented the blood or whether it heard us at the door, but the instant I turned the knob it was there. I counted three, then jerked the door back just enough to get my arm and the dangle of meat into the room even as the cat exploded against the doorframe and the meat vanished. We pulled the door to—Daria’s face was flushed and she seemed to be giggling or gasping for air—and then we took turns watching the thing drag the steak back and forth across the rug as if it still needed killing. By the time it was done, there was blood everywhere, even on the ceiling.

  —

  After Daria left for work I didn’t know what to do with myself. The cat was ominously silent and when I pressed my eye to the peephole I saw that it had dragged its cage into the far corner and was slumped behind it, apparently asleep. I flicked on the TV and sat through the usual idiocy, which was briefly enlivened by a nature show on the Serengeti that gave a cursory glimpse of a cat like mine—The serval lives in rocky kopjes where it keeps a wary eye on its enemies, the lion and hyena, feeding principally on small prey, rabbits, birds, even snakes and lizards, the narrator informed me in a hushed voice—and then I went to the sandwich shop and ordered the Number 7 special, no mayo, and took it down to the beach. It was a clear day, all the haze and particulate matter washed clean of the air by the previous day’s deluge, and I sat there with the sun on my face and watched the waves ride in on top of one another while I ate and considered the altered condition of my life. Daria’s face had gotten serious as she stood at the door, her T-shirt rumpled, her hair pulled back so tightly from her scalp I could make out each individual strand. “Take care of our cat now, okay?” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I get off.” I shrugged in a helpless, submissive way, the pain of her leaving as acute as anything I’d ever felt. “Sure,” I said, and then she reached for my shoulders and pulled me to her for a kiss—on the lips. “You’re sweet,” she said.

  So I was sweet. No one had ever called me sweet before, not since childhood anyway, and I have to admit the designation thrilled me, bloomed inside me like the promise of things to come. I began to see her as a prime mover in my life, her naked legs stretched out on the couch, the hair falling across her shoulders at the kitchen table, her lips locked on mine. But as I sat there eating my ham-and-cheese wrap, a conflicting thought came to me: there had to be someone in her life already, a girl that beautiful, working in a bar, and I was deluding myself to think I had a chance with her. She had to have a boyfriend—she could even be engaged, for all I knew. I tried to focus on the previous night, on her hands and fingers—had she been wearing a ring? And if she had, then where was the fiancé, the boyfriend, whoever he was? I hated him already, and I didn’t know if he even existed.

  The upshot of all this was that I found myself in the cool subterranean glow of Daggett’s at three-thirty in the afternoon, nursing a Jack-and-Coke like one of the regulars while Daria, the ring finger of her left hand as unencumbered as mine, went round clearing up after the lunch crowd and setting the tables for the dinner rush. Chris came on at five, and he called me by my name and refreshed my drink before he even glanced at the regulars, and for the next hour or so, during the lulls, we conversed about any number of things, beginning with the most obvious—the cat—but veering into sports, music, books and films, and I found myself expanding into a new place altogether. At one point, Daria stopped by to ask if the cat was settling in—Was he still pacing around neurotically or what?—and I could tell her with some assurance that he was asleep. “He’s probably nocturnal,” I said, “or something like that.” And then, with Chris looking on, I couldn’t help adding, “You’re still coming over, right? After work? To help me feed him, I mean.”

  She looked to Chris, then let her gaze wander out over the room. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah,” and there was a catch of hesitation in her voice, “I’ll be there.”

  I let that hang a moment, but I was insecure and the alcohol was having its effect and I couldn’t leave it alone. “We can drive over together,” I said, “because I didn’t bring my car.”

  —

  She was looking tired by the end of her shift, the bounce gone out of her step, her hair a shade duller under the drab lights, and even as I switched to coffee I noticed Chris slipping her a shot of something down at the end of the bar. I’d had a sandwich around six, and then, so as not to seem overanxious, I’d taken a walk, which brought me into another bar down the street, where I had a Jack-and-Coke and didn’t say a word to anyone, and then I’d returned at eight to drink coffee and watch her and hold her to her promise.

  We didn’t say much on the way over to my place. It was only a five-minute drive, and there was a song on we both liked. Plus, it seemed to me that when you were comfortable with someone you could respect the silences. I’d gone to the cash machine earlier and in a hopeful mood stocked up on breakfast things—eggs, English muffins, a quart each of no-fat and two-percent milk, an expensive Chinese tea that came in individual foil packets—and I’d picked up two bottles of a local chardonnay that was supposed to be really superior, or at least that was what the guy in the liquor department had told me, as well as a bag of corn chips and a jar of salsa. There were two new bathroom towels hanging on the rack beside the medicine cabinet and I’d given the whole place a good vacuuming and left the dishes to soak in a sink of scalding water and the last few molecules of dish soap left in the plastic container I’d brought with me from my aunt’s. The final touch was a pair of clean sheets and a light blanket folded suggestively over the arm of the couch.

  Daria didn’t seem to notice—she went straight to the bedroom door and affixed her eye to the peephole. “I can’t see anything,” she said, leaning into the door in her shorts, the muscles of her calves flexing as she went up on her toes. “It’s too bad we didn’t think of a night light or something—”

  I was watching her out of the corner of my eye—admiring her, amazed all over again at her presence—while working the corkscrew in the bottle. I asked her if she’d like a glass of wine. “Chardonnay,” I said. “It’s a local one, really superior.”

  “I’d love a glass,” she said, turning away from the door and crossing the room to me. I didn’t have wine glasses, so we made do with the milky-looking water glasses my aunt had dug out of a box in her basement. “But I wonder if you could maybe slip your arm in the door and turn on the light in there,” she said. “I’m worried about him. And plus, we’ve got to feed him again, right?”

  “Sure,” I said, “yeah, no problem,” but I was in no hurry. I refilled our glasses and broke out the corn chips and salsa, which she seemed happy enough to see. For a long while we stood at the kitchen counter, dipping chips and savoring the wine, and then she went to the refrigerator, extracted a slab of meat, and began patting it down with paper towels. I took her cue, donned the gauntlet, braced myself and jerked the bedroom door open just enough to get my hand in and flick on the light. The cat, which of course had sterling night vision, nearly tore the glove from my arm, and yet the suddenness of the light seemed to confuse it just long enough for me to salvage the situation. The door slammed on a puzzled yowl.

  Daria immediately put her eye to the peephole. “Oh my God,” she murmured.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Pacing. But here, you have a look.”

  The carpeting—every last strip of it—had been torn out of the floor, leaving an expanse of dirty plywood studded with nails, and there seemed to be a hole in the plasterboard just to the left of the window. A substantial hole. Even through the closed door I could smell the reek of cat piss or spray or whatever it was. “There goes my deposit,” I said.

  She was right there beside me, her hand on my shoulder. “He’ll settle down,�
�� she assured me, “once he gets used to the place. All cats are like that—they have to establish their territory, is all.”

  “You don’t think he can get inside the walls, do you?”

  “No,” she said, “no way, he’s too big—”

  The only thing I could think to do, especially after an entire day of drinking, was to pour more wine, which I did. Then we repeated the ritual of the morning’s feeding—the steak on the fork, the blur of the cat, the savage thump at the door—and took turns watching it eat. After a while, bored with the spectacle—or “sated,” maybe that’s a better word—we found ourselves on the couch and there was a movie on TV and we finished the wine and the chips and we never stopped talking, a comment on this movie leading to a discussion of movies in general, a reflection on the wine dredging up our mutual experiences of wine tastings and the horrors of Cribari red and Boone’s Farm and all the rest. It was midnight before we knew it and she was yawning and stretching.

  “I’ve really got to get home,” she said, but she didn’t move. “I’m wiped. Just wiped.”

  “You’re welcome to stay over,” I said, “I mean, if you don’t want to drive, after all the wine and all—”

  A moment drifted by, neither of us speaking, and then she made a sort of humming noise—“Mmmm”—and held out her arms to me even as she sank down into the couch.

  —

  I was up before her in the morning, careful not to wake her as I eased myself from the mattress where we’d wound up sleeping because the couch was too narrow for the two of us. My head ached—I wasn’t used to so much alcohol—and the effigy of the cat lurked somewhere behind that ache, but I felt buoyant and optimistic. Daria was asleep on the mattress, the cat was hunkered down in his room, and all was right with the world. I brewed coffee, toasted muffins and fried eggs, and when she woke I was there to feed her. “What do you say to breakfast in bed?” I murmured, easing down beside her with a plate of eggs over-easy and a mug of coffee.