Over the weeks that followed Laurelie passed many hours in that room, listening to the girl talk about her hometown. It was a place she referred to so often and with such reverence that Laurelie was soon envisioning the phrase lit up in neon lights. The girl would discuss her favorite designers at length, and all the celebrities she’d seen and pretended not to, for this of course was what New Yorkers did, being the most sophisticated people in the world. The girl often took sly shots like this at everyone not from New York, seemed not to even see that they might be insulting, except for when they specifically targeted her roommate, a shy Iowan of large proportions who made her own clothes and admittedly made easy prey for such a rich and fashionable New Yorker. But then everything became her target, including their university and the other students that attended it, not to mention the city of Philadelphia itself. The girl openly despised it as if it intentionally competed with New York, and contemplated having to live there permanently—there or in any another city—with a theatrical shudder. According to her everything that mattered happened in New York or Paris or, occasionally and regrettably, Los Angeles.
And yet for some reason Laurelie could not understand, the doll girl cleaved to her, a native Pittsburgher. As weeks turned to months the girl still insisted they take all their meals together, and study together, and spend their free time going to fraternity parties or else hanging out in her room. Always her room—she hated Laurelie’s “cave”—and it was true that her room was brighter and bigger, and better once her roommate learned to stay away. Then little by little she started collecting other girls too, all of them tiny and exactly like her, girls from New York or LA or other select cities who listened to her City stories avidly and sang along to her pop albums and perused her fashion magazines far more enthusiastically than Laurelie. They brought along their own designer clothes and together, with much laughter and fraudulent appraisal, assembled in the hours before each fraternity party close approximations to what they saw in their magazines, while Laurelie watched silently from the bed. Since Laurelie herself owned no designer brands, the doll girl, disparaging of her T-shirts and jeans, would eventually have to compose an ensemble from the stuff of her own closet, none of which fit Laurelie’s taller, bustier form.
None of it fit Laurelie. And yet she never resisted. It was as if when she was with them her mind whispered from a great distance. In fact the only time it functioned properly was late at night, alone in her dorm room. She’d come back from frat parties and lie sleepless on her bed, listening to the British rock she’d liked in high school and remembering her pre-college self like the funky thrift-shop coat she’d once worn everywhere and then somehow, somewhere lost. How tough she’d been! How world-wise! Growing up basically on her own, her mother almost never home and wrapped up in her boyfriends on the rare occasions when she was.
Now at college, the only thing about herself that Laurelie still recognized was her art. A hobby at home, it became a necessity as that first winter progressed. She began carrying a sketchbook everywhere and drew all the places she found herself in, letting the action roll out around her as if she weren’t a part of it. And then she became the recipient of the other girls’ snide barbs as they minced en masse down the lamplit streets of Frat Row.
They never rejected her, not openly; it was more like she drifted to their furthest periphery, where she still swelled their numbers and they could either ignore or disparage her without letting go completely. Meanwhile she was moving so deep inside herself as to hardly care that she’d become a parody to them. She filled notebooks with noir studies of off-key bands and wasted crowds and status-gauging. Wilting in a corner drinking sour beer, she drew her troupe of doll girls blossoming in fetid frat basement air, attracting males not through any natural allure but with the pungency of artificial sensuality that threaded through their voices and gestures. She drew fraternity brothers cruising the rooms with shark faces. Sometimes one of them would effect some violation like nudging her drawing arm or tugging her ponytail, and then, smiling broadly, catalogue the swell of her breasts. All of this she incorporated into her drawings while playing no active role in those scenes at all, until one night at a spring formal afterparty near the end of her freshman year.
Everyone was still dressed for the runway, but coming apart now at the seams. Laurelie sat sketching the bow ties discarded on the tables, the high heels scattered underneath. A fraternity brother passing by saw the empty beer cup at her elbow and offered to get her a refill. She’d hardly noticed it empty, and now hardly noticed it full, nor the brother who lingered as she drank once, maybe twice from the new cup before the china marker fell from her hand. Her body flooded hot and then cold. Her vision blurred and when she stood she was swept by nausea and would have fallen if the fraternity brother hadn’t caught her.
After that there were only flashes of memory. Endless hallways, endless stairs. Still having thoughts, but her muscles no longer responding. Throwing up somewhere. Voices coming at her from underwater, and someone telling her to lie down, and then her body jolting and shuddering as it was moved around.
She’d woken the next morning in an empty room. It was dawn and the hallway and stairs were deserted, and the only thing she’d felt at first was relief at leaving the place behind. The sunlight was blinding, splashing off the sidewalks as she made her way back to her dorm. Head throbbing as if it’d been struck, she stood under a hot shower until it turned cold while her mind slipped slow vines around the night before, seeking hours she simply couldn’t remember. Back in her room she catalogued her bruises, but shied away from any thought of what might be wrong inside, where it ached and burned. She slept and then wrote a term paper, slept again and wrote another one. She studied for her final exams. She stayed in her room, avoiding the other girls, and none of them sought her out. A week later, when her period came, she cried.
Hardly had she gotten home that summer when her mother kicked her out again. She’d gotten remarried while Laurelie was at college and said she didn’t like her daughter’s new attitude. So Laurelie moved in with her father and stepmother. They worked a lot, and after kicking around their house alone for a week she got a job at a local art store. The pay was terrible but she got free paper, and so mostly when she wasn’t working she drew. She copied old masters from the coffee table books in the living room while classical music poured from her father’s speakers; she could no longer stand popular music, anything that might be played at frat parties. Once she went out with some old friends from high school but ended up leaving early; she couldn’t bear the smell of beer and all the smiles looked like masks and all the words sounded untrue. By September she couldn’t walk without limping, having peeled the skin from her heels in blood-beading divots, and was contemplating dyeing her hair black, or shaving it all off.
It was actually a relief to return to college, to busy her mind with school. She had elected to remain in the same dorm room, because even tiny and dark it was now infinitely preferable to sharing space with a stranger. When she wasn’t in class she would hole up there or in the library and draw. She was always either drawing or thinking about it. It helped keep the other images at bay. Flashes of a heavy body pressing down on hers, a few fractured seconds of colors and shapes and scents from that night, distorted and horrifying, yet as vivid as a waking dream. Inside buildings she considered corners and angles, the relative sizes and shapes of objects. Outside, walking between venues, she focused on the views, on the blending shades of the changing leaves and the interactions between temperatures and lights.
She didn’t go home that winter, or the following summer either. Instead she got a job in an on-campus kitchen to pay her summer housing fee. She audited a graduate level class in ancient art history. And drifting between those two landscapes, one so far in the past and the other before her eyes, it felt as if nothing were real.
Then the air cooled again, and fall term of her junior year began. One afternoon, walking through a tree-lined campus courtyard, she
came upon a couple embracing. Backlit by the burnished autumn hues, his blond head was bent to her dark one, and his body curled down around hers with no light at all between them. It was a scene so picture-perfect that she paused for a second look.
After a year, she’d stopped fearing that she’d accidentally encounter him. She’d convinced herself she wouldn’t even recognize him if she did. And then suddenly there it was, that thrusting chin, those pillow cheeks, that smile rising up to smother deep slices of eyes, and once more she lay crushed beneath that chest, tasting that firewater tongue.
Standing there she had felt like she was at the edge of great abyss, like something momentous was about to happen. And then, like a bird sensing currents, the girl had looked over at Laurelie. She was a tiny girl, a porcelain girl. A doll girl in a winter-white coat, a red beret cocked rakishly on her chestnut curls.
She’d looked at Laurelie, and then turned her head and whispered something to the rapist that made him laugh. Both of them had looked at Laurelie then, and laughed.
And Laurelie had simply walked away.
Nothing momentous had occurred, but after that she’d begun crossing streets, using back alleys and fire doors. She’d entered every enclosed space with a nervous heart, everywhere feeling people looking, hearing whispers and laughter as if they were directed at her. She knew what she was experiencing wasn’t real, not exactly. Rather it was a kind of hyper-awareness, her brain taking in each minute detail of a scene and then twisting it, interpreting it in some predaceous relation to herself. And yet still even recognizing it did not lessen this perception; on the contrary it only became more acute as time passed, until every form became a caricature of itself, and every movement a threat she experienced as an actual physical blow. She stopped attending her classes, left her room only to visit the bathroom or the corner store, furtively and after dark, subsisting on granola and fruit and yogurt, which stayed good for a week on her windowsill. She began having flashbacks again, hideous and half-imagined scenes of her assault that her mind birthed and then refused to recall, blanking them out as soon as they arrived. She stopped drawing rather than foster the paranoias that took shape on every page, only to find the four blank walls of her room becoming the canvas for her disintegrating mental state.
It was in this condition that she pulled a tab from an ad outside the corner store for a furnished studio apartment in Queen’s Village. Over winter break she moved in, paying for it with a refund of the remaining portion of the year’s tuition that her parents had already paid. Everything in it was dirty and broken and cockroaches swarmed the sink at night, but there at least she could lie on her bed and hear the cars drive by outside her window and feel completely anonymous. She didn’t enroll in any classes for the spring semester. Instead she prowled the city streets with her head down and music pounding in her ears, always the same Los Van Van album, until she’d internalized every second of its pulsing sound and like an anesthetic it kept her from feeling anything else. At night she dreamed she was still walking, but no matter how far she went it was never far enough. “We feel your pain,” a guy shouted at her once from the other side of the street in North Philly, and she almost crossed to him, hoping he could explain it to her. But she never stopped, not for anything, not until the day she took a shortcut through a junkie park and found a box of kittens in the weeds.
Because she no longer trusted her own observations, it took a few minutes of peering to convince herself they were real. This was late March and the temperature still fell to freezing some nights; it looked like they’d tried to pile together for warmth. The bodies on top were stiff and glass-eyed, but there was movement at the bottom and when she dug down underneath them there were two little bellies, rising and falling.
Two puffs of black and caramel with white tufts between their paws and fluffy ruffs around their neck and kohl-rimmed eyes. She fed them with an eyedropper ten times a day. Then when they were bigger she fed them kibble from her fingers, and every sting of their needle teeth was a reason for continuing to exist. She played and ate and slept with them all that spring and summer, imagining she was half-cat herself. She regarded with some trepidation the boy cat developing a friendly and inquisitive nature, and became extremely protective of the girl cat, who shot beneath the bed at any loud noise, even random voices on the street. The only human she trusted was Laurelie, but she trusted her completely, lying boneless while Laurelie stroked her belly and throat and the fine birdlike bones of her legs, all those vulnerable places on a body that even the gregarious boy cat kept out of Laurelie’s reach.
Spending all their lives in one small room was not good for any of them, she knew, and so even as her kittens grew into cats she began the process of transferring to another school, her only criteria that it be far away, and not cost more than the year of tuition money she had left.
4
Laurelie dreamed she found a box in the meadow on the river road, inside it a mewling mass of fur bathed in light. She wanted to save them but try as she might couldn’t figure out a way to attach the box to her bike. She was plucking long grass in order to braid it when a shadow blotted out the sun. But looking up she encountered only blackness where the face should have been. Then panic swamped her and she was on her bike riding away and waking up to wind gusting rain onto her skin.
Her bedroom windows were propped wide open with the weathered sticks of wood she’d found tucked in the sashes when she first moved in. Gauzy white curtains billowed from them like ballerinas in the cold wet air. Her cats were curled tightly in the wicker armchairs beneath, snoring with soft whistle-wails.
Rain shattered puddles up and down the dirt lane, but once she was in the forest the sound was muted to a gentle distant pattering. Everything was quiet inside the trees, even the birds. She imagined them huddled high on pine branches with their heads tucked beneath their wings. Then she emerged and everything went wild again, rain drumming on her helmet and running down her face, and everything, even the light, some shade of green. She buzzed by the meadow, half-fearing to see the box, and then hit the final hill hard. Climbing it, she paid no mind to the fraternity houses, too busy going over her Bobcat panels again in her mind. She’d based them on Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings, using his broad strokes of vivid color and heavily outlined shapes to capture the stark savagery of the bobcat’s swollen belly and bloodied flank. The hiker had come out cat-like as well, following the beast across the panels, both of them moving with silent expertise through a forest where ice still lingered in spring’s shadow. The panels, she thought, were nearly finished, but for the thought bubbles above the heads. Right now they were empty, because she hadn’t figured out what to put inside them yet. She’d looked up bobcats online. According to the blogs they were territorial and predatory, and capable of taking down prey up to eight times their size. Interactions with them almost invariably led to bites and scratches, often with nasty consequences of infection and disease. So what was the hiker thinking to be following a pregnant and injured one? And why, for that matter, did it not perceive him as a threat?
“You’re an art major, right?”
Laurelie halted at the classroom door, unsure if the person was talking to her. Even without turning she recognized the linguistics major’s voice. It would have been impossible not to. Since the term started he’d spent half of each language philosophy class debating fine shades of meaning with the professor while the rest of the class quietly shifted and groaned. Laurelie, who was only taking the course to fulfill a senior elective requirement, didn’t mind these discussions; their sparring was sometimes interesting, and as long as they talked no one paid any attention to her.
So why was he talking to her now?
“I’ve been thinking about Wittgenstein’s argument that all descriptions are finite and therefore idealizations,” he said, coming around beside her. “I think it means he sees art as a language too. If so, then his private language argument would apply to art as well. And I’m wondering if you ag
ree that this would actually be saying something pretty significant, namely that if no one understands a piece of art, then it’s not really art at all.”
She listened with her head down and her hair hanging around her face, hoping that would make him go away. When he didn’t she shrugged, and then when still he stayed she finally mumbled, “Even a single line on a page can mean a lot of things. A single letter on a canvas can be art.” Feeling her cheeks growing heavy as bricks, she left the room and, crossing the entry hall at a near run, headed for the outer door.
But the linguistics major kept pace. “Wow, so once you start combining things, the possibilities must get really complex. But still, there are rules, aren’t there? There must be some way to distinguish good and bad art.”
Hand on the door handle, an expression she’d heard once flashed into her mind. “Learn the rules and then break them carefully. That’s how people make good art.” She said it and then pushed, and the sun flooded in. It had sliced through the dark rain clouds and was bursting through, and the sliver of sky behind them was a perfect blue. And into this scene the linguistics major’s startled laugh rang out, lending to it for an instant an air of miracle.
He kept up with her as she crossed the green toward her bike, oblivious to her desire to be alone, too intent on following the line of his argument. If Wittgenstein was right, he mused, then nothing about art could really be private. Because if art was a visual language then that meant everyone saw the same things, unless of course they were insane or hallucinating, and even that would only be a distortion. And she found that she understood him, and that this understanding, combined with the sound of his voice and the feeling of the sun shining down, formed a kind of weaving that both insulated her from the threat he posed but also held her captive there beside him. And so she opened her mouth and said right but art was something you had to learn before you understood it. Take Warhol’s Monroes, she said, for example, which weren’t really about the woman at all, but rather about how images were perceived, how there was no unmediated access to anything, not even your own face.
The Bobcat Page 3