Because of her white coat and her stainless-steel grooming instruments, they take her for a medical person. They assume
she will be interested in hearing the ghastly and humiliating details of their husband’s last illness or of their own illnesses, and as it turns out she
is
interested, and her deep interest brings most of them back a week later with home-made cookies and bottles of jam and pickles and, incidentally, the cat.
Of course, there are also people who really do come for the sake of their animals. With them, Emma ends up doing most of the talking. They hover. To distract them from delicate procedures (cutting matted fur, cleaning out ears), she asks did they know that cats prefer Italian opera to country-and-western? That according to market research the more cats you own the more likely you are to wish that Sonny and Cher would get back together? She has acquired enough cat trivia to go on for the whole forty-five minutes, if it ever came down to that. Also cat stories—the Burmese that lived twenty-six months without water, the cat that was nursed by a spaniel and barked like one, the two-headed cat, and then all those cats that roamed thousands of miles to find their owners. If the client seems up to it, she tries out a couple of Marion’s pet-death stories. “Did you hear about the tom that sprayed the high-voltage transformer?” is her best cat one … is the one Karl Jagger says made him want to unbutton her white coat and caress her breasts with the tail of his Balinese.
The initial attraction, Emma’s father always maintained, were the tendons in her mother’s neck, but he said that what swept him off his feet was the reptilian flesh between her fingers. When her mother was older he sighed over the splendour of her wiry, grey hair. He pushed together the skin on her thigh to see it pucker. “God, it’s beautiful,” he said, “like a peeled litchi nut.” Her mother, who by then had learned not only to swallow the comeback but to fall right in with his strange
raptures, regarded her leg as if it were a new and noteworthy landscape.
As a teenager Emma was in a continual state of mortification over these routines, especially if they took place in front of people. When her father started in on her mother or herself, that was bad enough, but he might go for anyone. He said to Emma’s piano teacher, a cranky, vain woman devoted to her compact mirror, “Don’t ever have that gold-crested wart removed.”
“It’s not a wart,” Emma’s piano teacher retorted. “It’s a beauty mark.”
“The gold-crested wart is the glory of the spadefoot toad,” her father said.
Emma’s friends assumed he was an artist of some sort—he had a goatee and longish hair, and all over the house there were naked figurines and gigantic abstract paintings and never fewer than six cats wearing brilliantly coloured collars from which dangled huge hand-made Algerian cat bells—but in fact he sold life insurance from an office in the basement. Over his desk was a photograph of Wallace Stevens, who had also been in the insurance business.
“My job,” he told his clients, “is to convince you to part with money that you’ll never see again as long as you live.” On the chair where the client was supposed to sit there was usually a cat. Cats slept in the old-fashioned wooden file trays. If the client hated cats, Emma’s father pretended to feel the same way. “Mind your own business!” he’d yell at a cat off in a corner washing itself. “Just keep us out of it!” he’d yell. “Okay?”
People either figured he was kidding (usually when he wasn’t), or they were disarmed by the look of starry-eyed, unflappable love he planted on everybody. Or they bought wholesale whatever he said. They believed, for instance, that if every square inch of your skin was splotched with huge freckles you resembled the sun-dappled forest floor at dawn.
Emma considered herself immune to his doting rhapsodies. She might have thought she was a big deal when she was a kid, but she knew by the time she started high school that looking like a fruit bat wasn’t something you bragged about. She was short and had a sharp nose and chin. Otherwise, she wasn’t bad. She
did
have huge dark eyes and she remained proud of them. It wasn’t until she left home and fell in love with a creep named Paul Butt that she discovered how much flattery she had actually bought.
For her size she had unusually long fingers and toes—like a tarsier, her father raved, and since “tarsier” sounded so exotic she went through her adolescence believing that everyone envied and adored her hands and feet. Then Paul Butt told her that Elvis Presley would never have dated a girl with scrawny hands like hers. He also said that her lips were too thin and that she should have electrolysis done on her arm hair.
She was so crazy about him that she underwent one agonizing electrolysis session, but even then, even at her most insecure, she never really saw herself through his eyes. Arm hair to him was still, secretly, “down” to her. When he dropped her for the electrolysis technician, she blamed her father for making her unjustifiably vain.
Eleven years later all she can think to blame her father for is marrying someone so unlike himself, because she is convinced that a person’s character is nothing more nor less than the battlefield where the personality of the mother and the personality of the father slug it out. When she told Karl Jagger this, at the beginning of their affair when they were indulging each other’s confessions, he said that his parents were exactly alike, and he speculated that the complete absence of contention creates a personality vacuum in which the animal nature of the baby takes over.
“Wild?” she said.
“Black.”
“Dark,” she said, because he isn’t black. Once, she asked him why he had never killed anybody, and he said, “Shackled by compassion.”
Why she asked was that he makes a lot of money writing pulp fiction about ex-marines and decent police officers getting even with crack-dealing paedophiles and mutilators. In every one of the twenty-three books he’s published, there are at least ten grisly murders, over two hundred and thirty in total, and he claims that no two murders are the same and that every one is described in authentic, meticulous detail. If some guy’s brains are all over the sidewalk, he says, and it’s winter in New York, those brains better be steaming.
It occurs to Emma that Karl and Marion might be made for each other, so when Marion and Craig break up just around the time that sex with Karl starts to get predictable, she tries to arrange a blind date. Karl is game, but Marion takes offence at being told she has something in common with a man who invents stories about humans slaughtering each other.
She
doesn’t invent her pet-death stories, she says, and it’s not as if she goes out of her way to collect them either. It’s that being in the pet-store business and also the sister of a veterinarian she hears things other people wouldn’t.
“I don’t find them
entertaining,”
she says.
“Well, no,” Emma agrees.
Marion picks dog fur off her sweater, one of five pet-motif sweaters she knit to wear in the store. Emma regrets that Karl will probably never see Marion in this sweater with its psychotic-looking parrots all over it.
“I guess I’m just one of those people who are haunted by the gory details,” Marion says.
“Yes, I know,” Emma says soothingly. “I am, too.” And she sees that there really is this difference between Karl and Marion, and between Karl and herself. Karl can laugh at what haunts him. She and Marion don’t laugh.
There is something Emma can’t stop thinking about.
Nicky was eleven months old. She was about to poke her finger in the new kitten’s eye when Emma grabbed her hand and slapped it, something she’d never done before, and Nicky, after looking at Emma with more astonishment than Emma would have thought a baby was capable of summoning, slapped her own hand. Afterwards, almost every time she crawled near one of the cats, she would bring her finger close to its face, then pull her hand away and slap herself.
Sometimes this memory strikes Emma as a message from Nicky, Nicky telling her that the way to cope with the biggest shock of your life is to replay it until it becomes commonplace. Which is what Emma supposes she is doing, indirectly, whenever she reads supermarket tabloids or pumps Karl and Marion for the worst possible story, for the story that will reduce her own story to the status of contender.
She was still mourning Paul Butt, still sobbing in the washroom at the investment house where she worked as a typist, still toying with the idea of going to another clinic for more electrolysis, when Gerry came over to her desk wearing red track shorts and a shirt and tie, his suit pants draped over his arm.
“Emma,” he said, reading the name plate on her desk. He’d only been at the firm a week, and this was the first time he’d spoken to her.
“Gerry,” she said.
“Listen,” he said, “I was wondering if you had a needle and thread. I’ve split a seam.”
“Sure,” she said sarcastically, opening her desk drawer, “I’ve got an ironing board, pots and pans, diapers …”
He looked as if she’d slapped him. “I’m only asking because
I saw you mending something a few days ago,” he said. “Your skirt—”
His eyes, she saw for the first time, were different colours—the left one blue, the right one gold. They were as round as coins and red-rimmed, almost as if he had on red eyeliner.
“Okay,” she said. “Sorry.” She caught him doing a fast skim of her body, and it came to her, like an illicit jackpot, that it wouldn’t take much to win his life-long adoration. She found her matchbook needle-and-thread kit and held out her hand for the pants. “I’ll do it,” she said.
“No, that’s okay,” he said, shaking the hair out of his eyes. His hair was white-blond and very fine. Whenever he was on the phone he ran his fingers through it. Emma had watched him doing this. Her desk was to the left and slightly behind his, in the big room where all the brokers and typists sat, and she had watched him, not as prospective boyfriend material (she thought she was too heartbroken for that) but because he moved so enthusiastically, banging out phone numbers, racing his buys and sells to the order desk, and because he combed his fingers through his hair as though there was nothing like the feel of it.
“I’ll probably do a better job than you,” she said, coming to her feet. Then, before he could say anything else, she pulled the pants off his arm and headed for one of the empty boardrooms. “Won’t take a minute,” she called over her shoulder.
In the boardroom she lay the pants on the table. They were navy with red pinstripes. She was impressed by the creases in the legs. You could cut a tomato with that, she thought, running a finger along one of them. Her finger was not steady. What was the matter with her? she wondered. Why had she brought the pants in here? She could have sewn them at her desk. She held up her hand and tried to see if she could keep it from trembling. She couldn’t. She investigated her forearm, the bald patch from the electrolysis treatment. Was that stubble? “Jesus Christ,” she
muttered, and she was afraid she was going to start crying about Paul Butt, but she didn’t.
She picked the pants up. There was the hole, a big one, alongside and under the zipper. She stuck her hand through. She brought the pants to her nose and sniffed the crotch. Urine, very faint. Urine and the smell of steamed wool. With her eyes closed she took a deep, resuscitative breath.
When she opened her eyes, Gerry was standing in the doorway.
“Oh, God,” she said.
“I wanted to ask—” He stopped and shook his head and smiled at the floor.
She dropped the pants on the table. She gave a little laugh. In the other room brokers were picking up their phones on the first ring. She imagined sniffing the pants again and saying, “I smell trouble.” She imagined sticking her entire arm through the hole and saying, “Wow!” She imagined throwing a chair out the window and it landing on a bus in which Paul Butt and the electrolysis technician were riding.
“I wanted—” Gerry began again.
“To ask me out,” she said. She had nothing to lose.
After Paul Butt, who had figured that two fingers shoved up her vagina ought to do it and who said that only closet dykes wanted to be on top, sex with Gerry was instantly addictive. During the first six months they made love at least once a night, and then they moved in together and got married and made love most mornings, too. Then things dwindled off a bit when he started leaving the apartment earlier and returning later because of the bull market. It became a joke between them that
he
was the one who complained about having a headache or being too tired.
She was now working at home, grooming cats out of their second bedroom. She’d quit her job at the brokerage firm because management frowned on married couples in the same
department. Her mother had wanted her to go back to university, but her father had said she should take up something serene and uncompetitive.
“Such as hawking life insurance?” her mother had asked in her customary dead-pan.
“Such as brushing her hair!” her father had declared, and eventually that led to the idea of grooming cats, starting with his.
Cat groomer. Emma liked the novel ring of it. She bought a how-to book, a white coat and some combs and brushes and scissors. She stapled advertisements to telephone poles and in laundromats, vets’ offices and pet stores. Her first client, after her father, was an incredibly tall black man with a three-year-old daughter and an old Persian named White Thing, and at first Emma thought this was some kind of joke because the mats all over White Thing’s fur looked exactly like the swarm of little pigtails all over the daughter’s head.
A year later the black man and the cat returned. By then White Thing was matted again, and the daughter was living in New Jersey with her mother. By then Emma had had a positive pregnancy test, and Gerry had said that it made him feel weird during sex, as if they were going at it in front of their own child.
While she cut out the mats, the man, whose name was Ed, lounged on her couch, telling her how he hated his job as a policeman and was thinking of doing something to get himself suspended with pay. “Folding myself into the car is the worst part,” he said. “Those seats don’t go back far enough.”