A Cat Tells Two Tales (15 page)

4

I stared at the creature from the box with a kind of shocked disbelief.

It was one of the most beautiful cats that ever hissed at me. My first thought, as I moved toward it slowly, was that it was an Abyssinian; it had that long-legged cougar look which so distinguished the breed.

But then I realized my identification was nonsense. There is no such thing as a white Abyssinian. And, to make matters even more absurd, this cat, now elongated against the banister as if it was about to spring, had black spots on its face and rump.

“Now, be reasonable, Clara,” I said to her as I inched my way forward, not having the faintest idea why I called her Clara. She wasn’t impressed. When I was about ten inches away, she leapt lightly off the banister and came to a stop in front of my door. She sat and stared at me.

Inside my apartment, my cats were scurrying. I could hear them through the door. Reality dawned on me. I could not take Clara into the apartment with my own cats. It was too dangerous . . . too problematic—God knows what would happen!

I stood still and silently cursed that idiotic young man who had left me Clara. Was this the way he expressed his adolescent love? God help me if he falls out of love, I thought—he’ll deposit a real cougar on the stairs, gift-wrapped also.

What were my options? Well, I could just leave the cat in the hallway and hope that it would wander to a different floor and someone kindly would give it a home. Or I could take it to an animal shelter. But that was dangerous—cats in shelters are two cans of tuna fish away from the gas chamber. No, Clara couldn’t go there.

Clara stared at me. I stared at Clara. The solution was obvious. Board Clara out until the next class at the New School, when I could demand that the retarded Lothario retrieve his poor cat.

But with whom could I board her? I knew only one person close by . . . only one person well enough for me to have the audacity to ask.

I walked quickly down the hallway to the last door on the left and knocked, calling out: “Mrs. Oshrin. It’s me, Alice Nestleton. It’s all right. It’s me.” I had to talk loud because Mrs. Oshrin was a bit hard of hearing. She opened the door. She was a very stout woman, about sixty-five, a retired teacher. We always went shopping together on Saturday mornings, to the farmers’ market at Union Square Park. For some reason she called me Alice and I called her Mrs. Oshrin. Maybe she intimidated me a bit. She used to be a minor Democratic-party official and she still talked incessantly about city politics when given the chance.

“What is the matter?” she asked, frightened. She always thought something was the matter. I pointed down the hallway, where the white cat still sat.

“Who is that?” Mrs. Oshrin asked. As if it were a distant relative who had suddenly arrived and was about to ask a favor. She was right.

“Her name is Clara,” I said.

“Clara,” Mrs. Oshrin repeated, as if the name rang a bell in her memory.

“Yes, Clara, and she needs a home for just a day or two.”

My voice was pleading. Mrs. Oshrin could never withstand my needs. She was a very nice lady. She stared out down the hallway again.

“But what do I do? I never had a cat.”

That was all I needed. I rushed to my shopping bag, took out a can of cat food, ran into Mrs. Oshrin’s apartment, opened it, strolled down the hallway to Clara so she could get a whiff, then carried the can back to Mrs. Oshrin’s apartment. I left the door open and placed the can about ten feet inside.

Then Mrs. Oshrin and I sat down on her sofa. We waited. We waited. We chatted.

Then we saw one white ear. Then a black-and-white nose. Then a long lean body flitted through the doorway.

Clara was inside. We beamed at each other. Mrs. Oshrin watched Clara inspect the food and then walk regally away. The cat was beginning to explore.

“Why doesn’t she eat the food?” Mrs. Oshrin asked.

“She will,” I said.

We watched.

“My sister had a cat,” Mrs. Oshrin noted.

I realized that Mrs. Oshrin and I were about to lapse into one of our constant Pinteresque dialogues that went on and on and nowhere at all. Usually I enjoyed them, but now I wanted to feed my poor cats.

“Everything will be all right, Mrs. Oshrin. Just talk to her once in a while. I’ll call you tomorrow.” And then I was gone, leaving the bewildered woman with a new companion.

I called Mrs. Oshrin five times the next day to make sure she and Clara were getting along. Mrs. Oshrin did not seem to be enjoying the stranger but she was calm, stoic, and asked me only three or four times when I would get Clara out. Soon, I said, soon.

I discussed the problem with Bushy, my Maine coon cat. He was noncommittal. As for Pancho, he never stayed still long enough to listen.

As the hours passed and I came closer to my class, my anger toward that young man grew to truly monumental proportions. I envisioned an almost Elizabethan scene of vengeance and condemnation. Then I mellowed somewhat—after all, the young man was in love with a forty-one-year-old actress with long golden-gray hair and a reputation for dramatic innovation—me. I was, to be truthful, just a bit vain. And it had been a long time since I had elicited that kind of passion from anyone. Besides, that kind of crazy young man was what kept the theater alive. No wonder he had gone to Arkavy Reynolds’ funeral. The young Arkavy had been a bohemian firebrand. Theater or death! It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t an art. It wasn’t a pastime for speculators or dilettantes. The theater was life itself. Did
I
still have any of that commitment?

I arrived at the class earlier than usual and sat at my desk doodling. The students straggled in. The heavyset woman who had asked about Portobello smiled at me. I nodded to her, signifying that yes, indeed, I would deal with her inquiries in this class, this evening.

The young man never arrived. As I was giving my disjointed lecture, I kept anticipating the door opening and a lovesick young man with a ghastly sport shirt flitting in.

Thirty minutes before the class was about to end I abandoned the lecture, which they were all obviously finding boring, and asked point-blank if anyone in the class knew the missing young man who wore loud sport shirts and wisecracked all the time. Did anyone know his name?

The students looked at each other. They were perplexed. Curious. This was the New School. In Manhattan. No one asked or gave names in a formal sense. No one called the roll. At most, one student would say to another, “I’m Jo Anne. Hi.” As for me, I had been given a list of the names of all the students who had signed up for the course—but I had discarded it immediately.

“He left something in the classroom,” I told the class, a gentle half lie. No one in the seats in front of me uttered a word. I dismissed them early and angrily.

As I was gathering my things from off the desk, that ingenue in the tank top said: “He told me his name was Bruce. He asked me to have a cup of coffee with him after the first class. I said no.”

I smiled my thanks. She waited to see if I was willing to talk theater with her. Then, seeing that my thoughts were elsewhere, she left. My thoughts were indeed elsewhere. The name Bruce didn’t help me. What was I going to do with poor Mrs. Oshrin?

5

There was a new line on my face, on the left side, going from the edge of the mouth to the chin. It was ever so gentle and straight—but it was there.

“You are getting old, Alice Nestleton. And you are getting quirkier. And you are . . .”

I stopped speaking to myself in the mirror and concentrated on my brushing. Pancho was on the high bookcase, his rust-colored whiskers quivering just a bit, and his gaunt gray body with the scar on one side in a state of extreme alert for the unseen furies which were always chasing him. I raised the brush slowly and, in the mirror, watched his eyes follow the movement.

It was ten o’clock in the morning. I had overslept. Several times during the night I had awoken with a start from the same nightmare. In the dream I was lying in a coffin in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on Madison Avenue and Arkavy Reynolds was paying his last respects to my body. But then my grandmother appeared and she and Arkavy got into a terrible row. And I kept waking up to stop their fighting. It was not just arguing—it was something horrible they were doing to each other. Each time I awoke, my heart was beating fast. But now the fear was gone. For the first time in days there was a cool breeze moving through my apartment; a promise of the autumn soon to come.

When I finished brushing, I made a cup of coffee and took it into the living room. Bushy was snoozing on the sofa, his head lying on a script. I removed the thin folder gently, but it woke him. He looked up at me, hurt, and then leapt to the floor to continue his nap on the carpet, groaning a bit at my incredible lapse of manners.

The script itself was only thirty pages long and bound into a strange-colored binder, a dull yellow. It had been sent to me by an old friend who taught at Boston University but who spent all his money and time on theatrical productions in the New England area. We had only one thing in common—we both craved, sought for, and aspired to theatrical pieces that were far outside the mainstream. We both wanted to explore the reality of the stage and the players and the relation of both to “what there is”—so we were both perpetually frustrated. I held the dull yellow binder in my hand with a kind of weariness. After all, I knew that the theater was so tyrannized by normalcy that even a Brecht play was not considered avant-garde.

My Medaglia d’Oro instant coffee, however, was black and sweet and bracing, and the breeze in the living room was truly delightful, so I opened the stiff front cover and began to read.

I burst out laughing when I read the title page:
Rats: An Alternative to Cats.

The “Cats,” of course, being the long-running Broadway musical of that name.

It wasn’t really a script. It was a discussion of a performance. There are seven rats in the cast, part of an extended family which lives beneath the theater where
Cats
is playing.

The rats speak a kind of fractured Shakespearean English and they are hopelessly violent, oversexed, venal, and lunatic—a kind of murderous Marx Brothers.

A new litter is born, and this new litter, which lives offstage in large boxes among the audience, develops a decided taste for human flesh, particularly for the actors and actresses who play the cats in the musical of the same name.

It was a delicious, bizarre, very funny dramatic mess and I was just getting deep into the gory theatrics when I heard someone knocking.

At first I thought it was someone on the street. But no, someone was at my door. I approached cautiously and said hello through the wood.

“It’s me, Alice,” said the voice. Mrs. Oshrin.

I opened the door. She was standing there in a housedress, her arms folded, looking very clumsy and gloomy.

The sight of her unnerved me. I had forgotten all about Clara, the white cat, while reading the script.

Mrs. Oshrin marched in and sat down on the sofa. She seemed to be very upset but trying to control herself. I knew there was trouble because she was wearing a very bright and new housedress. That was one of Mrs. Oshrin’s sure signals that things were not going well with her. Another sure signal was the fact that she didn’t look around my living room with her usual critical stare. Mrs. Oshrin didn’t like my living room. The furniture didn’t bother her. She liked the large French sofa I had bought at Pierre Deux in the Village when I was temporarily affluent. She liked the long, narrow oak dining room table. She liked my three cane chairs near the window and my beat-up coffee table. What she never liked was the clutter. But there was nothing I could do about that. My kitchen was small. My bedroom smaller. The long, very narrow hall which ran the length of my apartment had to be kept clear if it was to remain passable. So everything ended up in my living room. I truly lived in my living room, and the clutter was just too much for her. Oh, there was no question Mrs. Oshrin was out of sorts.

“Can I get you some coffee?” I asked.

“No, thank you.”

I sat down on the sofa next to her.

“Is Clara giving you any trouble?” I asked.

There was no answer.

“I was going to bring you some more cat food this afternoon,” I said.

There was no answer. I could see that she was glaring at poor Bushy.

“Alice,” she finally said in a very peculiar voice, “I am going to visit my sister in Connecticut.”

“Well, that’s nice,” I replied happily.

She reached into her housedress and retrieved a single key attached to a rather large piece of wood.

Now she was staring at the ceiling. Poor Mrs. Oshrin; by this time I had surmised the visit had to do with Clara. Once again I silently cursed that young man who had caused all these problems.

“And when I come back,” she said firmly, “I would like very much if that cat was in its new home.”

“Of course, Mrs. Oshrin,” I said quickly. It was obvious that Clara was ruining our relationship.

“Has she been much bother?” I asked.

Mrs. Oshrin didn’t answer. She stood up, smoothed her housedress, gave me the key, smiled kindly, and just walked out, not letting me know what kind of horrendous behavior Clara had exhibited.

That killed my day. If she would be back in a day or two, I had to find someplace else for Clara to reside, very quickly.

In the next ten hours I must have made about fifty phone calls. The range and variety of excuses why these people could not board orphan Clara were mind-boggling. But they all said no. No matter how endearingly I described Clara, the answer was the same: no.

It was around ten o’clock in the evening that I finally made an intelligent move. I called John Cerise. Now, John has absolutely nothing to do with the theater. He’s a cat man, pure and simple. In fact, he was always a source of cat-sitting assignments for me. We met years ago when I first started cat-sitting for a rich lady on Central Park West whose passion was English shorthairs. Cerise was a cat-show judge and breeder who lived somewhere in New Jersey. He is a gentle, knowledgeable man, now in his sixties, whose love for cats is proverbial. We rarely speak to each other more than two or three times a year, but there is a genuine affection between us, and he has a special spot in his heart for crazed Pancho, who, he once said, is a reincarnation of one of Napoleon’s marshals.

What made me think of John Cerise was the fact that when I first saw Clara I had thought she was an Abyssinian, and Cerise, I knew, was breeding Abyssinians. He loved Abys, as he called them and, while normally a quiet man, would immediately discourse on them if given the chance. About how they are the true descendants of the sacred cats of ancient Egypt. About how they are the only breed with a close wild relative still extant—the North African desert cat,
Felis libyca
. About their wild looks but gentle affectionate nature. About how difficult they are to breed. About the strange fact that they produce predominantly male litters. About what excellent swimmers they are because they actually like water. And on and on.

I didn’t lie to him when I called. But I didn’t quite tell him the truth either. I concocted a gentle, imaginative story. There was this very strange-looking Abyssinian staying at a friend’s apartment. Could he stop over and check it out, and if he didn’t want it, recommend someone who would like it? I told him nothing about the deranged romanticism which had brought the cat to me and Mrs. Oshrin. He agreed. He laughingly asked for clarification of my phrase “a strange-looking Abyssinian.” I got off the phone fast.

He arrived at seven thirty the next morning. It was very good to see him again. He was wearing one of those elegant white linen suits, a blue silk tie, and a lighter blue silk shirt. His still-black hair was slicked back. John Cerise always looked exotic—an ageless relic from another time and another place. It was fitting he was a cat man. He seemed to be perfectly and easily androgynous. He reeked of a kind of cool sensuality which was quite pleasing to watch, although one could rarely identify the object of his passion.

We walked down the hallway to Mrs. Oshrin’s. I opened the door with her key and stepped inside, closing the door behind us.

“She’s white,” I whispered as we waited in the living room for Clara to appear. Why was I whispering?

“White?” John asked, astonished.

I nodded. Clara did not appear.

“Maybe she’s in the bedroom,” I said. We walked into Mrs. Oshrin’s bedroom. Clara wasn’t there either.

She wasn’t in the kitchen. She wasn’t in the closets. She wasn’t under anything.

We were puzzled.

“Make some noise,” John suggested.

I banged one of Mrs. Oshrin’s bronze bric-a-brac against a table leg. It made a dull thudding noise. Clara was not interested.

“The bathroom,” John said.

We walked there quickly and found Clara in the bathtub, staring malevolently at a slow drip from the bath faucet. Our presence seemed to make absolutely no difference to her.

“Get acquainted,” I said to John in an incredibly patronizing tone, and then ran off before he could say another word.

My plan was to leave them alone for two hours. I went back to my apartment, retrieved a shopping list, and went to the supermarket.

I lolled down the aisles. Now that John Cerise was on Clara’s case I had a tremendous feeling of confidence that everything would be all right. In fact, I was so confident I bought a Sara Lee chocolate cake to serve John when I got back.

When I finished my shopping list I took a slow walk around the neighborhood, luxuriating in the suddenly pleasant weather.

Then I headed home, pulling my shopping cart lightly.

When I turned the corner of my block and could see the stoop of my building, I knew something was wrong.

Police cars and an ambulance choked the street. A crowd had gathered.

As I reached the building, pushing my way through the onlookers, I saw the stretcher coming down the steps.

A leg with a white linen covering stuck out from beneath the EMS sheet.

“John,” I screamed, letting go of my shopping cart and rushing to the stretcher.

It was him. His face looked like hamburger meat streaked with red dye number nine. There was blood splattered all over his body and clothes.

He smiled at me weakly. He reached up and patted my hand.

“Who are you, lady?” a burly man in an open blue shirt asked.

“I live up there,” I replied. “What happened?” My composure had returned but I really couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.

Then I saw the badge hanging around his neck like a charm.

“Someone broke in. Your friend on the stretcher got in the way. But he’ll be all right. He looks worse than he is. The thief got away.”

“What about Clara?”

“He was alone.”

“No, Clara is a cat. A white cat.” I held my hands out to show him the size; to show him that Clara was a small animal.

“There was no cat in the apartment, lady. Listen, you don’t look so good. Why don’t you sit down on the steps for a minute? Your friend is going to be all right.”

I sat down and watched them load poor John into the ambulance.