Mimi (4 page)

So now, a martini to the left of me, fire to the right of me, piano in stasis before me, and all of Manhattan in motion behind me, I sat in torpor, my foot on its footstool, my head in its fool's cap, and a pad of foolscap on my lap in case I wanted to jot down anything melancholy. This activity was not new: my List of Melancholy Things pre-dated my break-up
and
the sprained ankle. It's my life's work.

 

LIST OF MELANCHOLY

– Liszt himself—such bombast, and for what?

– MimÌ, a torn and tender woman

– being alone on New Year's Eve

– forced marriages among five-year-olds

– master's degrees in highway lighting

– the rushed minimal morning walks of a million Manhattan mutts

– puppetry

– pep talks

– the Great Auk

– shrimp-eating contests

– unpredictable air fares

– pregnant women pushing strollers uphill like Sisyphus—just stop
breeding
, why don't you?

– the existence of
Walmart

– Superman T-shirts

– Bach's solo cello suites, especially No. 5; also, 2 and 4. . . aw, throw them all in (they all exhibit “exquisite melancholy”)

 

My kitchen is triangular, which turns out to be the perfect shape for a kitchen to be: everything's visible and within reach. There's even a little table and chair in there for eating sandwiches in a hurry. My kitchen's equipped with every gadget known to man, gifts from grateful patients and patient girlfriends, or worry-warts like Bee (who sprang a juicer on me some years back when she noticed the only Vitamin C I was getting was from the celery in my Bloody Marys). I've got technology up the wazoo in there: a milk-frother from a cappuccino-lover who'd hurriedly assumed, on the basis of a few nights together, that we'd be sharing breakfast more often than we ever did. A lemon-zester, from a patient who claimed it was symbolic of her new zest in life since the rejuvenation job I'd done on her. An egg-boiler (for one egg at a time), a panic-buy of my own when I realized I'd reached maturity without knowing how to boil an egg (but
had
I reached maturity? And how would
eggs
help me if I had?). And an olive-pitter I mistakenly thought necessary for making martinis. A bread-maker, that had continued kneading its dough long after the girl who gave it to me walked out for good. An electric nutmeg-grater that must have cost more than a lifetime's supply of nutmegs (this, from a woman much taken with my Eggnog and our Eggnog snog out on Gertrude's porch one Christmas). And its rival, Gertrude's five-hundred-buck coffee machine that took up half my counter space and looked like it would be of more use printing revolutionary pamphlets. I also had a big fancy stove with six burners and an inbuilt griddle I never used, microwave, fridge, automatic ice-producing freezer full of gin, vodka, and an ancient carton of sherbet (which somehow always got forgotten at the sight of the gin), dishwasher, prehensile-mangling blender, my mother's long-retired Revere Ware pots, and the weighty tortilla pan I purchased at a medical conference in Bilbao, under the influence of an attractive anesthesiologist and too much Rioja. All the conveniences of modern life were there! (
And
I'd even read the manuals.) And crackers—a guy can't have too many crackers.

But I went in the kitchen on New Year's Eve and thought, how the hell do I just heat something up in here? And my appliances stared back at me, seething with resentment and hope. use me! choose me! abuse me! take me! shake me! bake me! at least plug me in, you dope! It was scary in there! I cautiously backed out and, with the assistance of an old cane (bought long ago in a moment of self-deception, for the purpose of hill-walking), hauled ass down to the diner on the corner and got me a nice big bowl of matzo ball soup. You can survive a New York winter as long as you know where to go for soup.

Revelers were trying to revel outside in the snow. I watched them rush past the windows, and felt another pang of New Year's exasperation about my lovelessness: no kiss at midnight for me. No Mimì either. But it was a fairly abstract concern, since Gertrude had ruined me for other women. Love now seemed ridiculous and Wagnerian to me, like the Bugs Bunny cartoon when he dresses up as Brunhilda and Elmer Fudd falls instantly in love, bellowing, “Bwoonhiwlda, you're so wuvvawy!” and Bugs sings, “Yes, I know it. I can't help it!”—Wagner
and
all of human sentiment, mocked in one cartoon. Wagner deserved it. no chair, not even a box at the Met, equips you for such interminable spectatorship.

Fortified by soup, I inched my way through the snowy wastes. For fear of being knocked over by the movers and shakers, I turned down a dark alley, feeling like an Antarctic explorer who'd had to leave his sled team behind to eat each other. “I may be some time.” The snow was a foot deep in places; I tackled each glacier as it arose. It was peaceful in the alley, an ideal spot for the unloved. Heaps of trash and tinsel peeked out from under snowbanks, and I came upon a ten-foot-high Styrofoam Santa who stood with his face against a brick wall, as if he'd just slipped out of some bar for a pee. Poor old Santa—his day was done, adoration time over. I stumbled on toward the North Pole (represented by the lights at the end of the alley) until I heard a voice. Not Santa's luckily, but a muffled
miaow
. A cat, out in weather like this?

“Ain't a fit night out for man nor beast!” I said to him, and the cat miaowed louder. A W. C. Fields fan! I headed in his direction, as unthreateningly as possible, to see if the cat needed any help. The miaowing seemed to be coming from behind a snow-covered mound of trash, and it became more frantic the closer I got. I scraped the snow away and, under a pile of crumpled bikes and lost umbrellas, finally saw a small form moving around. I put out my hand to pat him, and he obligingly tried to reach it but was prevented by a bunch of spokes. Maybe he'd gone under the bikes for shelter in a blizzard, and they'd shifted under the weight of the snow, barring his exit. Anyway, what might have seemed a safe sleeping spot before the snowstorm had become a potential tomb. It was freezing out there! He couldn't survive the night.

Luckily, Pick-up Sticks was my ancient rainy-day specialty. I'd honed my skills by making Bee play it again and again when we were kids. (A talent that had proved handy in surgery too.) So I now carefully removed one knot of metal at a time, trying to prevent the whole structure collapsing onto the cat, who continued to cry out to me as I worked: he was a friendly little guy. When I finally got him out and placed him gently on a thin patch of snow, he limped right over to me and rubbed himself against my legs. A limp?! That did it. I couldn't leave a fellow crip out in the cold. I'd search for his owners some other time—for now, he was coming home with me. And when I picked him up he clung to my shoulder like a baby, but weighed so little I had to keep checking he was still there beneath my thick glove.

Back in the apartment, I put him in a sink full of warm soapy water to raise his core body temperature (and clean him of
f
), an ordeal he tolerated pretty well, for a cat. What emerged was a handsome young fellow, with black, white and reddish fur.

“What's black and white and red all over?” I asked him. No answer. “A newspaper. Get with it, man!”

In the kitchen I found him some milk and an old ham sandwich, which he politely ate. So easy to please! Then he investigated my whole place, every nook and cranny, undaunted by his limp. He was particularly taken with the scalloped window seat below the slanted window in the living room, instantly recognizing it as the longest cat bed in the world. He jumped up and paused to stand there on his back legs, front paws on the window sill, looking out at New York.

I was about to lay down some newspapers in a closet, for him to use as a temporary cat-box, when I remembered an extremely bijou tray of 100% organic Irish peat-bog mulch, or some such thing, that Gertrude had lugged over at some point and dumped on my terrace intending me to grow tarragon or lemon thyme in it, maybe sorrel. Thanks to the gaudy phosphorescent swirls and curlicues around its rim, I was able to find it in the dark and brought it in. Bubbles, as I now called him since his bubble bath, instantly recognized the true purpose of Gertrude's agricultural gift and scrabbled energetically in the dirt. He was clearly not feral. He was sophisticated, trusting, and accustomed to human contact and the demands of domesticity. But so
thin
—he must have been faring for himself on the streets of Manhattan for some time. And now he was sitting on my lap, licking my finger, and looking up at me with love. I hadn't felt this good in years! Gertrude rarely licked me, and never liked me. Hell, she'd hardly even noticed me.

I checked his legs for any sign of a wound that might cause the limp, but nothing seemed amiss. He'd probably sprained an ankle, or the feline equivalent (my veterinary knowledge was scanty), but at least he didn't seem uncomfortable. He luxuriated in the warmth and companionship offered, and stretched out on his back to have his stomach rubbed. This cat really knew how to live!

At midnight, we went out on the roof terrace together. I held Bubbles to my chest so he wouldn't get lost out there in the dark, and we watched the faraway fireworks that seemed to mark his arrival.

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2011

 

For hygienic reasons, I set up a bed for Bubbles on the window seat he liked so much in the living room, and left him there when I went to bed, but he soon nosed his way into my room. The door slowly opened a crack and then he peered in, looking comically astonished at first to find me lying there. Then with great self-satisfaction he joined me on the bed. He filled almost as much surface area as Gertrude ever had, but was a lot more fun to have around. He slept more soundly too! When we got up in the morning, he moved to a sunny spot on the window seat, while I went out to get cat food. He wolfed it down while I drank my coffee. I hadn't felt this heroic since childhood!

Childhood is a largely dishonorable business and I remember very little of it (this is what
Bee
is for). My early years were notable for one vaguely heroic act on my part (among a lot of unheroic ones), an act so mythologized, sentimentalized, eulogized, and fetishized by my family that it eventually had to be
catheterized
to restore some sense of scale. Now it seems nothing compared to the heroism of an ant. Imagine being born an ant and having to uncurl yourself in some musty, dusty, rustly nest, realizing there's no time to lose, your life of running around starts now, and a whole realm of unexplained duty awaits you.

I uncurled myself in the twin towns of Virtue and Chewing Gum, incorporating just about all the dualism a body can stand. Chewing Gum came first, established in 1880 by a gum manufacturer lured there by the mighty Chevron River, which suited his methods for dispersing the toxic by-products of the gum-making process. The gum was so good, a Bible town grew up right alongside: half the town chewed, the other half chewed your ear off.

My infancy was cozy, cozy to the point of being oppressive. I was a sitting
duck
in that high chair, with Bee stealing my food and poking me in the eye all the time with her Barbie dolls (even the tits on those things are sharp!). Mom cleaning all around me—back and forth with the vacuum cleaner, the mop, the dusting, the polishing, the folding, the ironing, the instant wash-a-rama of every plate and spoon we touched, the militaristic straightening of the eagle ornaments that hung on every wall, as if the nation depended on the surveillance work of these bas-relief birds. A million naps undertaken listening to Mom talk to some doofus on the phone while I pondered dust motes. (Phones and vacuum cleaners still fill me with melancholy, even in their dormant states.)

But my mother loved me! I know everybody thinks he was a cute baby, but I have it
in writing
—a letter my mom wrote to my teacher once, when I was in some kind of trouble at school (as was my custom):

 

Harrison was such a delightful

baby. He would totter over to you,

arms outstretched, always smiling.

He was the sort of child someone

might try to steal! And better than

a puppy at cheering you up. He was

so trusting, he had no idea there was

anything sad or bad in the world.

Give him a wooden spoon and a

cardboard box and he'd be happy

as a clam banging on that box all day.

He also liked making piles of stuff. . .

 

I gave you the facts, man—I was once a cheerful dimpled baby who pleased his mother.

This cozy setup of ours was punctuated by the precise arrivals and departures of my father, the great unknowing, unknowable American dad. Out he'd go every morning, with his old briefcase echoing the angularity of his suit on his slightly pudgy 1960s body; and later return, giving off a whiff of car smell from the jalopy his parents had given him when they got themselves a new Chevy. Armed with these accoutrements, our father displayed an obtuseness which at best amounted to kindly indifference—No hard feelings, kids, I just don't give a damn what goes on here all day—compounded by his determined obliviousness of his wife's concerns, chief among them being me, a distinction that often elicited his fears for my masculinity.