She cringed at the words “fall apart.” She hadn’t fallen apart. She’d just cried a little bit. Okay, she’d cried a lot. But for heaven’s sake, since when was crying the same as falling apart? She felt very annoyed with him. And he was separated! She’d done that in front of someone soon to be single! Of course, she wasn’t in the market for another relationship, not yet. But she might as well cross this one right off the list. Already there were two strikes against him: “too handsome,” and “seen me in my bathrobe.” No, three: “lonely and predatory.”
They were at her building. “The mornings are the worst, aren’t they?” he went on, ignoring her silence. “I’m still not used to it. You should come by in the morning, if you want. It’s just us lonelyhearts, at that hour.”
“Oh, I quite like being alone, now,” she lied, brightly.
He was looking up at her building. “Do you have one of the balcony apartments?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I’m on the top floor.”
“I bet it’s a great view.”
It sounded like a line. She didn’t say anything.
Still, he didn’t move to go.
“I better go in,” she said. “I hope you feel better.” That didn’t seem right, but the conversation was well beyond her now. She felt tired and overexposed, hurrying up her steps to get away from him.
SHE TRIED TO WATCH THE MOVIE PHAN HAD GIVEN HER. It seemed promising in the store, but paled in comparison with The Godfather, once she started watching. She found herself missing James Caan and Al Pacino and Diane Keaton. She turned it off and went to take a shower.
She used a new shampoo she’d just bought. It was something of a splurge, but it had a wonderful coconut smell that reminded her of the beach. While she was in the shower she left the radio on to Prairie Home Companion, so as to have a little company. She wrapped her hair in a towel and put on her pajamas and slippers, then sat down and ate leftover Chinese food from the night before, listening to the end of the program. While she ate, she contemplated what it would be like to sleep with Garrison Keillor. The chopsticks made a harsh scraping noise against the paper container, making her teeth itch.
Maybe she should have invited John Owen up. It would be nice to have some company. But, lord, had he made her nervous. He was like a raw, gaping wound, and she had only just started to scab over, herself. No, it was a bad idea. Best to keep her distance from such need.
She finished eating and threw away the containers and washed the chopsticks and put them in the drainboard next to the sink. She found the Churchill biography she’d borrowed from the library, and took it to the other room to read while waiting for Patsy.
A few minutes later, she put the book down. Patsy’s things were spread out all over the room—her green knapsack, her few clothes, the hairy yak boots she’d arrived in, makeup and books. Patsy had not been impressed with Pru’s paint job. “What is that?” she’d said, so close to the wall that her nose was almost touching it. “Just plain white?”
“It’s lavender!”
“No, Pru, lavender is a color,” Patsy had said.
Pru went to work piling Patsy’s things neatly in the corner that used to hold the TV. She looked at the titles of Patsy’s books— MORE Zen Koans; Kabbalah, Re-Mystified; and, with many of its pages dog-eared, Your Two-Year-Old. Pru smiled and stacked the books next to the pile of things she had made. She should see more of Annali, she thought. Soon she would be in school, then a teenager, and Pru knew so very little about her, really. On one of her visits home, Annali was just a little peanut in a striped receiving blanket. Then, the next time, she was starting to walk, stumbling around in her lurching gait, her hat-lovey clutched in one hand. Then she was actually speaking, saying “Hello, Aunt Pwoody” into the phone, and it seemed Pru had missed out on everything she meant to do.
She picked up Your Two-Year-Old and read for a while, running her fingers through her damp hair to dry it. Two-year-olds sounded rather scary. The author used words like “impulsive” and “accidents” and “moody.” When she could barely keep her eyes open any longer, she put the book down. She sat up and yawned and stretched, and looked at the clock over the little stove in the kitchen. It was almost one, and Patsy still wasn’t home. The apartment was perfectly still, and clean, and neat. There was nothing else to do, then, but go to bed.
In her sleep she kept rearranging Patsy’s things in her apartment. The knapsack here, the boots there. Over and over, like a Rubik’s Cube, she moved her things around in her mind. Finally she woke up just in time to see the sun beginning to come up, and she watched out her bedroom window as the black sky became perceptibly lighter, until it was gray, then almost smoky white. Finally, when she was thinking she would have to call the police, she heard the front door open. She got out of bed and went into the other room.
“Did you eat?” Patsy said, slamming the door behind her. “I’m starving. What time is it?”
“Just after six,” said Pru. “Let me see the dress.”
With an aggrieved, insulted look on her face, Patsy opened the raincoat. Pru made her turn around so she could inspect the back, too.
“So,” she said, trying to sound disinterested. “How was it?”
Patsy had disappeared inside the refrigerator, where she was rummaging around. “God, let’s eat first. Do you have any eggs? Oh, you do.” She pulled out a carton of eggs and the milk. “Where’s your whisk?” Patsy began opening all the drawers, pulling everything out. “I’ve never met anyone like him. Why can’t I find a friggin’ whisk?”
“Here,” said Pru, closing the drawer Patsy was digging through and opening the one below it. “Let me do it.”
“Okay, but you let me clean up. Can I take a shower? I’m freezing. Don’t cook the eggs too much, okay? Oh, and make the coffee really strong, put in one more scoop, please. And don’t let me forget to call home.” Then she disappeared into the bedroom.
Pru toasted bread and cooked the eggs, the little coffeemaker gurgling away contentedly. She was trying to shake off her annoyance at Patsy. They’d hardly spent any time together. Wasn’t the point of this little visit to cheer Pru up and keep her company? Or to make sure she wasn’t contemplating some horrific, desperate act? Everyone took her sanity for granted, she thought, shaking salt and pepper over the eggs. She could be going off the deep end, here. Anything could have happened last night, while Patsy was out on her little tryst. She could have done something stupid. Hunted Rudy down and beaten him with a club. Jumped off the Woodley Park Bridge. Anything at all. She turned off the burner, plated the eggs, and dumped the skillet into the sink, filling it with hot, soapy water. She glanced up at the kitchen clock. It was still early. They could still make the zoo before Patsy’s flight, if they wanted to.
Patsy came back from the shower, talking as if she had never stopped: “. . . what time my flight is?” She wore Pru’s white bathrobe, a towel around her neck. She was using one end of the towel to clean out her ear. Pru admired her sister’s physical ease. She seemed so perfectly at home no matter where she was.
“Your plane leaves at two,” Pru said. “We have plenty of time.”
Patsy sat down at the little table. She was clean and shining with happiness. Pru brought the eggs over and put them in front of her, then poured two cups of the strong coffee. Patsy ate ravenously. She never stopped chewing, even to answer Pru’s questions.
“So?”
“There’s not much to tell,” Patsy answered through a mouthful of eggs. “This is it. It’s him. Do you have any ketchup?”
“What’s ‘him’?”
“Him is it. You know, it.”
“It?”
“Yup. You know . . . the One.”
“He’s the One? Like, the One, the One?”
“You got it.” She touched Pru’s hand. “Ketchup.”
Pru went to the refrigerator for the bowl of restaurant ketchup packets she kept on the door. She put the bowl in front of Patsy. Patsy tore a package open wit
h her teeth. Pru continued to stand over her. “And, what, you just know this?”
“Yup.”
“How?”
Patsy squirted ketchup on the eggs, making a squiggly pattern. She shrugged. “I don’t know. What they say is true,” she said. “You just know.”
Pru looked down at Patsy’s tousled blond head. She was tempted to reach out and yank on her hair. Or push her face into the plate of eggs. “And does he feel the same?”
“I don’t know, Mom. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say yes.”
Pru didn’t know what to say. Patsy really wasn’t the type to go around making declarations of love. She liked to think of herself as the proverbial bird that must be free. As soon as a guy began to fall for her, she began bashing herself against the imaginary bars of her cage. Pru felt even more annoyed, though she forced herself to sit down and listen to the details of Patsy’s night.
As Patsy told it, they’d packed a whole month’s worth of dates into less than twelve hours. They’d eaten at Mira, had a salsa lesson at Brazilia, and driven around looking at the monuments by moonlight. They hit a midnight show at a jazz club, and at three in the morning they were having pie and coffee at a diner in Georgetown. They’d sat on Pru’s front steps to watch the sun come up and finish finding out every last little thing about each other.
Jacob was adventuresome and smart and ambitious. He had a strong, intelligent mother and many women friends—an extremely good thing, in Patsy’s book. He wasn’t a typical Yalie. He had depth. He’d met Lou Reed at a club in New York, when he was a med student by day and a punk scene hipster by night. He knew of a remote island in the Caribbean you could get to only by chartering a private boat. He could actually talk intelligently about Kabbalah. He was confident and exciting, and being around him made Patsy’s head spin.
“He’s all Aries,” Patsy said. “Pure energy. He likes the intensity of emergency medicine. Oh, and guess what—I’m coming back next weekend. With Annali. He wants to meet her.”
“Next weekend,” said Pru, startled. “Really?”
“And guess where we’re going—the beach house! Remember, Grandma’s beach house, in Rehoboth? You know it’s only three hours from here? Why don’t you ever go there? I swear, if I lived here I’d be there all the time.” She shook Pru’s knee. “So, thanks for the invite, but we won’t need to stay with you.”
“Since when do you need an invitation?” Pru said.
“That was irony, honey,” Patsy said. She wiped her plate with a piece of toast, finished her coffee, and burped.
“Very nice,” said Pru.
Patsy laughed. “Prudy Prudy,” she said. She stretched her arms above her head. “I better get some sleep. I’m exhausted.” She stumbled off to the bedroom before Pru could even mention the zoo.
She knew she should feel happy for Patsy, but she didn’t like it, this guy popping up all of a sudden, making claims on her sister and, now, on Annali. Whom he’d never even met! What was the idea, one date, and now a road trip to their family vacation home? And this from Patsy, who never liked anybody, ever?
She went out and got the Sunday New York Times and leafed through it while Patsy slept. She didn’t really like the Times, but she wanted to look at the pictures of the people who were getting married. What was their secret? What did they all know that she didn’t? She thought of that party game where you went through the whole evening trying to figure out who your “partner” was. She couldn’t really remember how it worked, but everyone was paired up at the beginning of the party, and you were supposed to ask questions about all the guests until you found your mate. One time, at a party, Rudy and she had started to play, but Rudy got a tension migraine and they left early.
She examined the photos of brides and grooms closely, to see if there were any clues to be found. How had they known each other? Was it something in the eyes? The forehead? Did everyone already know what it was they were looking for, a shape of earlobe, a smell? What was it? In the pictures, the brides-to-be had had their teeth whitened and their hair done, while the guys looked as if they pretty much wore whatever they’d had on that day. Most of them matched, more or less, in terms of personal attractiveness. If there was an imbalance—her friend Kate referred to it as “couple inequity”—it was the woman who was more attractive than the man, never the other way around.
Otherwise, they all looked different. She had no idea what had attracted them to each other, or how they’d known their partner was someone they could live with for the rest of their lives, and not someone it would be depressing to wake up with a year later. She suspected that nobody ever knew, not really. Still, Patsy had seemed so certain. So certain that it almost bored her to talk about it. Pru wanted to know what that felt like, that surety. She had never “just known.” Never. Not once. It always felt the same—the fizz of attraction, a few fun weeks, then a long, miserableslowing, like a train pulling inexorably into the station at the end of the line, way past the time it should have arrived.
She read the book reviews and the fashion section. She picked up her biography of Churchill, saw that she had only fifty pages left, and put it down again. She would take her sister to the airport, see her to the gate, and watch her plane fly off. Then she would come back to her neat, clean, empty apartment. And then what? The rest of Sunday stretched before her like an endless, dry desert.
WHEN SHE GOT HOME FROM THE AIRPORT, MC KAY WAS sitting on her front steps. Just seeing him sitting there made her happy, and she hurried to meet him. He had a formal and almost stiff way about him sometimes, back erect, hands on knees. Oxo was lying at McKay’s feet, panting. Oxo always panted, in her heavy fur coat. Just lying still, she panted.
“Did you get my message?” McKay said, as Pru bounded up the steps.
“No. What’s going on?”
“Tomorrow is the last day in the shelter for Rudy’s cat. I asked the kid at the counter to let me know, and he just called.”
“McKay, I’m in no shape to take care of a cat. I can barely take care of myself.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said McKay. “I don’t know anyone who’s better at taking care of herself than you. I already told him we were coming. I’ll pick you up in the morning, at nine. Unless you have other plans, of course.”
“What other plans would I have?”
“Well, exactly.”
“McKay,” she said, “I don’t want a cat.”
“But this cat needs a home. And you need something to love.”
She opened the door to her apartment. It felt even emptier without Patsy and her things. She put her keys in the silver bowl she kept near the door. It was so quiet she could hear the electric buzz coming from the clock in the stove. Whenever you opened McKay’s front door, a dog came running to you. Cats didn’t really do that, did they? Cats came over to you in their own time and rubbed up against your leg, purring. Well, maybe that was better, actually. She didn’t really feel comfortable with how quickly a dog fell in love with you.
She started to get ready for bed, and then realized it wasn’t even time for dinner yet. Maybe McKay was right. Maybe she and the cat were meant to find each other. She had to admit, she’d felt for the poor thing, in that miserable cage. Dumped by Rudy, when he’d gotten sick of it. Maybe the cat, too, had lost its job and had gotten too needy.
She made a sudden, uncharacteristic decision: She’d save the cat. She’d give it a good, loving home. How hard could it be? Plus, the scheme held the appeal of trumping Rudy. Rescuing his cat would show the world who was the real decent human being in all of this.
Six
When the kid in the cutoff shorts brought out the carrier cage holding Rudy’s cat, Pru faltered.
The kid was struggling with the cage. Its apparent weight, coupled with the fact that the cat inside kept scrambling around, forced him to use two hands to haul it up to the counter. As soon as he was settled, the cat bared its teeth and let out an ear-piercing yowl. The sound made Pru want to turn and
run out of the building. McKay grabbed her arm and held her there.
As Pru and McKay peered inside the cage, the cat thrust a vicious-looking yellow paw between the bars of the front of the cage. They drew back, clutching each other.
McKay was nearly beside himself, trying not to laugh. “Wow,” he said, at last. “He is a beast, isn’t he?”
The cat gave a sudden leap, hitting the top of his container.
“It’s okay, boy,” said the kid soothingly. “You’re going home, now.”
“Wait a minute,” Pru said. But she’d already filled out the paperwork for the cat and paid for it—paid for it! Ninety-six dollars! The cat gave a low growl and hissed at her fiercely, before backing himself into an angry ball of fur in the farthest corner of his cage.
The kid said, “He’ll be okay once you get him home. They always do this in the carrier. They don’t like the movement. He’s just scared, is all. Aren’t you, boy?”
“Are you sure?” said Pru, uncertainly. “He looks dangerous.”
“No,” said the kid, very seriously. “He’s not dangerous. He’s not feral or anything.”
She looked at McKay. He had an index finger pressed to his lips, in an apparent attempt to stay straight-faced. “He’s not feral,” he repeated softly, his eyes shining with barely restrained glee.
“Okay,” said Pru. “But if he doesn’t calm down, you know, I might have to bring him back here.”
“No worries,” said the kid. He smiled at McKay.
On the way out they passed a father and a little girl with a small white kitten in her arms. As Pru walked by with the hissing, lurching cage, the girl’s daddy drew her back behind him, protectively.
Pru put the cage in the backseat of McKay’s car, then got into the front passenger seat. McKay was trying so hard not to laugh that his eyes watered with the effort. McKay wiped his eyes and then started the car. “You’re doing such a good thing!” he said. In the backseat, the cat, which had been silent, began to howl in despair. Pru turned toward McKay and stared at him, not saying a word. “I’m sure it’ll be fine!” he said, through tears.
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