The Cat's Pajamas (14 page)

“Till dawn, nonsense! Midnight, maybe.
My
cat, you mean. Catherine.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Silly, but my name's Catherine.”

“Don't tell me your nickname.” He almost laughed.

“I won't. Yours?”

“You won't believe it. Tom.” He shook his head.

“I've known a dozen cats with that name.”

“I don't live by it.”

He tested the bed as if it were a warm bath, waiting.

“You can stand if you wish, but as for me—”

He arranged himself on the bed.

The kitten snoozed on.

With his eyes shut he said, “Well?”

She sat, and then lay on the far side, prepared to fall.

“That's more like it. Where were we?”

“Proving which of us deserves to go home with Electra.”

“You've named the cat?”

“A noncommittal name, based on personality, not on sex.”

“You didn't look then?”

“Nor shall I. Electra. Proceed.”

“My plea for ownership? Well.” He rummaged the space behind his eyelids.

He lay looking at the ceiling for a moment and then said, “You know, it's funny the way things work out with cats. When I was a kid my grandparents told me and my brothers to drown a litter of kittens. We kids went out and they did it, but I couldn't stand it and ran away.”

There was a long silence.

She looked at the ceiling and said, “Thank God for that.”

There was another silence and then he said, “An even more peculiar but better thing happened a few years ago. I went to a pet shop in Santa Monica, looking for a cat. They must've had twenty or thirty cats there, all kinds. I was looking around and the saleslady pointed to one cat and said, ‘This one really needs help.'

“I looked at the cat, and it looked like it had been put in a washing machine and tumbled. I said, ‘What happened?' She said, ‘This cat belonged to someone who beat it, so it's scared of everyone.'

“I looked into the cat's eyes and then I said, ‘This is the one I'll take home.'

“So I gathered the cat up and he was terrified and I took him home, put him down in the house, and he ran downstairs and wouldn't come out of the basement.

“It took me more than a month of going down to the basement and leaving food and cream until finally I lured him out, step by step. And then he became my pal.

“That's quite a difference in stories, isn't it?”

“Gosh,” she said. “Yeah.”

The room was dark now and very quiet. The little kitten lay on the pillow between them, and both looked over to see how the cat was doing.

It was sound asleep.

They lay, studying the ceiling.

“I've got something to tell you,” she said after a while, “that I've put off saying, because it sounds like a special plea.”

“Special plea?” he said.

“Well,” she said, “at home, at this very moment, I have a piece of material I've cut and sewn into something for my little cat who died a week ago.”

“What kind of material is that?” he said.

“Well,” she said, “it's a pair of cat's pajamas.”

“Oh my God!” He exhaled. “You've won. This small beast here is yours.”

“Oh no!” she cried. “That's not fair.”

“Anyone,” he said, “who makes a pair of pajamas to fit a cat deserves to be the winner of the contest. This guy is yours.”

“I can't do that,” she said.

“It's my pleasure,” he said.

They lay for a long while in silence. Finally she said, “You know, you're not half so bad.”

“Half so bad as what?”

“As what I thought when I first met you.”

“What's that sound?” he asked.

“I think I'm crying,” she said.

“Let's sleep for a while,” he said at last.

The moon went down the ceiling.

 

T
HE SUN ROSE
.

He lay on his side of the bed, smiling.

She lay on her side of the bed, smiling.

The small kitten lay on the pillow between them.

At last, watching the sunlight in the window, she said, “Did the cat move either way during the night to indicate which of us it was going to belong to?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “The cat didn't move. But
you
did.”

S
HE TRIED THREE DRESSES
, and none fit her body. They belonged, in that moment, to someone else. Excitement changed her color so it went with none of her clothes. The glow so expanded her slender flesh that everything seemed corseted. Then the powder spilled to the floor like snow and she painted her lips upside down and blinked in the mirror as if she had seen a ghost.

“My land, Lydia.” Helen stood in the doorway. “He's only a man.”

“He's John Larsen,” said Lydia.

“That's even worse. His hair doesn't fit his head, his arms are too long, his mouth is thin, his eyes are like a squirrel's, and he's only up to
here
.”

Lydia was crying. She sat watching the tears in the mirror.

“I'm sorry,” said Helen. “But he's such a fool.”

“Helen!”

“You're my own baby sister, that's all.”

“I think he's God.”

“Don't cry anymore. Anyone you say is God is God. It's just with our folks dead, I'm mother now, I want things right for you. I've had enough men experiences to know they are foolish liars, the whole bunch. Right out of the carnival—apes, clowns and calliope tooters.”

Lydia was in a summer dream. “I think he's kind, handsome, and good. He tips his hat on the street to us. He's never come to our house before, has he? Never said boo. And then, suddenly, calling me on the phone today, saying he'd like to drop by for an hour to see me. I cried all afternoon, I was so happy. I've wanted him to call for years. I've seen him in front of the United Cigar store ever since I was sixteen years old, that was twenty years ago, and always wanted to stop and say, I love you, John, take me away from all this, be mine. But I always kept walking. And, do you know, once in a while, in recent years, when you and I walked by, it seemed there was something in his eyes, as if he were noticing me too. But he always smiled and tipped his hat.”

“Men teach each other tricks like that. A front like a palace, and all outhouse and stucco behind. Put your face back on and wear something green to go with your red complexion.”

“I didn't mean to cry it red.” She looked at the old mouth on her wadded kerchief. “Helen, Helen, was it like this for you, ten years back, when you loved Jamie Josephs?”

“My bedclothes were cinders every morning.”

“Oh, Helen!”

“But then I found he was playing that shell game you see at circuses. He asked me to bet everything on a hunch. I was young. I did. I bet that if I spent of myself freely, when the time came I'd know where to find him. But the time came and I lifted up one of three shells and Jamie wasn't there. He'd moved his little act up the street, and out of town on the Skokie Limited. I wonder if
any
woman ever found Jamie?”

“Oh, don't, let's be happy tonight!”

“You be happy by being happy. I'll be happy by being cynical, and we'll
see
who's happiest in the long run.”

Lydia painted a new mouth and made it smile.

 

I
T WAS A TENDER EVENING IN
S
EPTEMBER
, the first smoky fire starting in the maples around the old, softening house. Lydia floated in the cavernous living room, lights out, only her face a pink lamp, so she could see him far away, like a figure in a melodrama, before he turned and rustled the leaves crisply on the front sidewalk. She heard him whistling an autumn song, down the street. She hurried over her speeches, and suddenly the words were a crumpled series of started but unfinished letters to her own spirit and flesh, heaped and blown about her mind. She started to cry again, and this made the precious words run and blur, the polite stage instructions to her hands and feet threatened to be lost forever. She stopped the process by slapping herself, once, on the side of her face. Now he was walking up the steps to the silent house, now he sounded the silver doorbell, taking off his straw hat, which was a trifle late for the season, and clearing his throat three times, a customer demanding service from an inattentive clerk. He muttered under his breath, as if he too were shuffling the lines of his part, abysmally.

“Good evening!”

As if a gun had gone off in his face, John Larsen fell back from the door. Staggered by the sound of her own voice suddenly exploded from her mouth, Lydia could only sway in the doorway until the man out there found his smile and used it. Then, somehow, she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

“It's such a nice night,” she said. “Let's sit in the porch swing.”

“Fine,” said John Larsen, and they sat in the shadowy vined, secret porch swing, away from the gaze of the town. He helped her elbow into the swing, and where he had touched was a brand that smoked and ached and promised to leave a scar for the rest of her life. She sat down dizzily, and the world moved this way, that way, she thought herself sick and then discovered it was the swing taking her up and down and this man still silent, wretchedly turning his hat in his hands, reading the size tag with his small eyes, reading the label and the old price-insertion. The hat sounded like a piece of wicker furniture in his lap. He kept reaching into it to find his first speech and then, in confusion, looked as if he might get up and bolt the evening. Somewhere between the sidewalk and here he had lost his notes.

Out of a face that was a roaring torch, the flesh sunburned by her blood, the bones aching with warmth, Lydia felt her puffed mouth say, “It's nice to see you, Mr. Larsen.”

“Oh, call me John,” he replied, and propelled the swing with his shoes that now, with demon voices, squeaked at every motion.

“We've been hoping that someday you might drop by,” said Lydia, and then realized it was too much to say.

“Have you, have you really?” He turned and gazed at her with childish delight, so it was all right, what she had said.

“Yes, we've often said we'd like you to drop by.”

“I'm glad,” he said, on the edge of the swing. “You know, it's a very important thing I've come to talk about tonight.”

“I realize.”

“Do you? Have you guessed?”

“I think I have.”

“I've known you sisters for a good many years, to speak to in passing,” he said. “I've seen you walking by together so many times. And I never got up the courage—”

“To ask to come to the house.”

“That's right. Until tonight. And then today I got the courage. Do you know why? Today's my thirty-fourth birthday. And I said to myself, John Larsen, you're getting old. You've been a drummer too long, you've traveled too much. The gay life's dead for you. Time to settle down. And what better place to settle than Green Town, your own hometown, and there's a certain girl there, really beautiful, maybe she's never looked at you—”

“But she has—” said Lydia, obliquely.

He looked stunned and happy. “I never dreamt!”

He leaned back in the swing, grinning. “Anyway, I said to myself, you ought to go call. Make yourself known. Spit it out. I never dared. You see, women can be so beautiful and far away, untouchable, the right kind of women. And I'm a coward. I really am, about women. The correct women. So what do you suggest I do? I had to come and see you first, to talk to you, to plan things, to see if you could help me.”

“First?” said Lydia. “Help you? Plan things.”

“Oh, your sister's really lovely,” said John Larsen. “Tall and pale. I think of her like a white lily. The long-stemmed variety. So stately and grave and beautiful. I've watched her passing by for years and been in love with her, there I've said it, for ten years I've seen her walk by but I was afraid to say anything.”

“What?” The torch flickered in her face and went out.

“So you say she likes me too? To think all these years wasted. I should have come sooner. Will you help me? Will you tell her, will you break the ice? Will you arrange for me to come see her soon?”

“You're in love with my sister.” It was a statement of fact.

“With all my heart.”

She felt like a stove on a winter's morning, when all the ashes are dead and all the wood is cold and frosted over.

“What's the matter?” he asked.