Touchy Subjects (11 page)

"What?"

"If you stop heaving about and let me get some sleep, OK, you can change the colour."

Halfway through his morning bagel, Leroy grinned at Shorelle. "So you agree it's a bit too purple?"

"No, I think it's beautiful, actually."

"But honey—"

"You win, OK, Leroy? Do it—tell Rod to throw away all that paint and start again, never mind the cost. Whatever makes you happy," she said, checking her watch.

He pored over the latest brochures. What if the colour he chose came out even worse than the first? Delphinium was pallid; Foggy Dusk looked like dirty water; Deep Shale was depressing. Denim Jeans had the potential to be glaring; Lake Prospect was plain navy. Leisure Time—what the hell kind of name for a colour was that? "Maybe we should err on the safe side and go for Rocky Creek," he suggested, sliding over the catalogue.

Shorelle looked at it without much interest. "That's grey."

As soon as she'd said it, it was true. "Bay of Fundy?" he suggested, tapping the card.

"Urgh."

"You barely looked at it."

"It only takes a second to hate something," she told him. "Imagine living with that for the next however-many years..."

Leroy consulted the couple of neighbours he knew to say hi to; they all agreed the current patch of Evening Sky was an eyesore. Several suggested cream; he had to be polite enough to pretend to be considering it. He asked a guy going by with his short-haired poodle, and a woman from FedEx. Shorelle came out with Africa on her hip. "Timothy's going to drop by Monday morning," she announced.

"Oh yeah?" he said neutrally.

"I thought, if you're polling every passing dog, it's time to call in an expert."

"Rod's an expert," Leroy pointed out.

"No he's not; he's just some guy who happens to paint houses for a living. Décor is Timothy's business."

"Interiors," said Leroy, aware he was quibbling. "He'll probably suggest pistachio or cerise."

"Oh, for Christ's sake." She mouthed the swearword, so Africa wouldn't hear it. "You have got to get over your gay thing."

"Since when have I had a gay thing?"

"Since forever. You get all sulky like some rapper thug."

Leroy chewed his lip.

"Timothy's in the business; he knows about colour. We've got so stuck on this, I thought we could do with an objective opinion."

But there was no such thing as objectivity, Leroy was coming to realize. Colours were private passions and weaselly turncoats, bland-faced losers and enemies in disguise. His head ached from pursuing, through a forest of azures and cornflowers, cyans and midnights, the perfect slate blue.

On Monday he was sitting waiting for Rod on the gritty primed porch. "Hey," said the painter, getting out of his van. "You picked a colour?"

"I think so." He scanned the strip in his hand nervously, checked that he'd folded it so the right one showed. "It's not absolutely what we had in mind, but it seems the nearest to it, at least as far as we can tell." The
we
was a lie; the last time he'd brought out the brochures for a discussion, Shorelle had screamed and said she was going to put them down the Garburator.

The painter adjusted his baseball cap.

"It's called Distant Haze," said Leroy as he handed it over, immediately wishing he'd used its number instead.

Roy glanced at it and put it in his back pocket.

Was that it? No endorsement, after all this work? Leroy heard a car door open and looked over at the slim guy getting out of a black PT Roadster convertible. "Timothy!" he called, overdoing the enthusiasm. "Friend of Shorelle's," he told the painter in an apologetic undertone. "This'll only take a second—"

"Rod, my man!" Timothy and Rod were embracing.

Leroy blinked. Well, it was a bear hug, he supposed. "You know each other."

"Rod's done a lot of great work for me over the years. Looking good, man," said Timothy, giving the painter's shoulder something between a whack and a rub. "Where've you been?"

"Busy," said Rod, with a brief grin.

Leroy hadn't known the painter was capable of cracking a smile.

"I've got half an hour, you want to grab a coffee?"

"Why not," said Rod, heading for the convertible.

Leroy's jaw was throbbing. They weren't even going to ask him along. "Hey, what about the house, Tim?" He knew the guy hated to be called Tim. "That's the colour Shorelle likes," he added mockingly, pointing at the upper section of paintwork.

Timothy shook his head. "Stylish in itself, but not on a west-facing street."

Leroy should have felt vindicated.

Rod produced the folded chip from his back pocket. "That's their latest."

Timothy tilted it to the light. "Grey?"

Leroy stalked over. "It's slate blue; it's called Distant Haze. If you put it up against real grey—against the pavement, even—you can see how blue it is."

"OK," said Timothy, as if humouring a child. "Listen, tell Shorelle I'll call her later?" He made that annoying finger-and-thumb-spread gesture that meant a phone.

"So Tim, what would you do?" Leroy was leaning on the hood, aware he was holding them up, trying to sound casual.

"With this house?"

"Yeah."

"Cream, probably," said Timothy.

"Can't go wrong," said Rod.

"Classic."

Leroy waved them off with a rictus smile. He shut his eyes, saw hot and red.

Cleopatra was exactly the same age as their relationship. They found this very funny and always told the story at dinner parties. Liz would mention the coincidence a little awkwardly, then Sophie, laughing as she scraped back her curls in her hands, would persuade her to spit out the details. Or sometimes it would be the other way round. They prided themselves on not being stuck in patterns. They each had things the other hadn't—Liz's triceps, say, and Sophie's antique rings—but so what? Friends would probably have said that Sophie was the great romantic, who'd do anything for love, whereas Liz was the quiet dependable type, loyal to the end. But then, what did friends know—what could friends imagine of the life that went on in a house after the guests had gone home? Liz and Sophie knew that roles could be shed as easily as clothes; they were sure that none of their differences mattered.

They had met a few months before Cleopatra, but it was like a room before the light is switched on. After the party where they were introduced, Sophie decided Liz looked a bit like a younger
Diane Keaton, and Liz knew Sophie reminded her of one of those French actresses but could never remember which. At first, their conversations were like anybody else's.

Then, on one of her days off from the gardening centre, Liz had come round to Sophie's place to help her put up some shelves in the spare bedroom. Sophie insisted she'd pay, of course she would, and Liz said she wouldn't take a dollar, though they both knew she could do with the money. When the drill died down, they thought they heard something. Such a faint sound, Liz thought it was someone using a chain saw, several houses down, but then Sophie pointed out that it was a bit like a baby crying. Anyway, she held the second shelf against the wall for Liz to mark the holes. They were standing so close that Liz could see the different colours in each of Sophie's rings, and Sophie could feel the heat coming off Liz's bare shoulder. Then that sound came again, sharper.

They found the kitten under the porch, after they'd tried everywhere else. Its mother must have left it behind. Black and white, eyes still squeezed shut, it was half the size of Sophie's cupped hand. Now, Liz would probably have made a quick call to the animal shelter and left it at that. She didn't know then how quickly and completely Sophie could fall in love.

It knew it was on to a good thing, this kitten; it clung to Sophie's fingers like a cactus. They said
it
for the first few days, not knowing much about feline anatomy. It was hard to give a kitten away, they found, once the vet told you she was a she, and especially once you knew her name. They hadn't meant to name her, but it was a long hour and a half in the queue at the vet's and it started out as a joke, what a little Cleopatra she was, said Liz, because the walnut-sized face in the corner of the shoe box was so imperious.

Sophie was clearly staggered by the bill of two hundred dollars for the various shots, but soon she was joking that it was less than she spent on shoes, most months. Liz was a little shocked to hear that, but then, Sophie did wear very nice shoes. Sophie plucked out her Visa card and asked the receptionist for a pen, it having been her porch the kitten was left under. Liz, watching her sign with one long flowing stroke, decided the woman was magnificent. Her hand moved to her own wallet and she spent ten minutes forcing a hundred-dollar bill into Sophie's breast pocket, arguing that they had, after all, found the kitten together.

Cleopatra now belonged to both of them, Sophie joked as Liz carried the box to the car, or rather, both of them belonged to her. It was—what was the word?—
serendipitous.

That first evening they left the kitten beside the stove in her shoe box with a saucer of milk, hoping she wouldn't drown in it, and went upstairs to unbutton each other's clothes. So, give or take a day or two, they and Cleopatra began at the same time.

These days she was a stout, voluptuous five-year-old, her glossy black and white hairs drifting through every room of the ground-floor apartment where Liz now paid half the rent, never having meant to move in exactly but having got in the habit of coming over to see how the kitten was doing so often that before she knew it, this was home. On summer evenings, when Sophie took out the clippers to give Liz a No. 3 cut on the porch, Cleopatra would abuse the fallen tufts as if they were mice. Cleopatra had commandeered a velvet armchair in the lounge that no one else was allowed to sit on, and in the mornings if they delayed bringing her breakfast, the cat would lift the sheet and bite the nearest toe, not hard but as a warning.

They had a fabulous dinner party to celebrate their anniversary, five years being, as Liz announced, approximately ten times as long as she had ever been with anybody else. Three of their guests had brought champagne, which was just as well, considering how hard Liz and Sophie were finding it to keep their heads above water these days. Sophie's hair salon had finally gone out of business, and Liz's health plan didn't stretch to same-sex partners.

Over coffee and liqueurs they were prevailed upon to tell the old story of finding the kitten the very day they got together, and then Sophie showed their guests the marks Cleopatra had left on her hands over the years. Sophie had bought appallingly expensive steel claw clippers at a pet shop downtown, but the cat would never let anyone touch her feet. Her Highness was picky that way, said Liz, scratching her under her milk-white chin.

They knew they shouldn't have let her lick the plates after the smoked salmon linguini, but she looked so wonderfully decadent, tonguing up traces of pink cream. That night when they had gone to bed to celebrate the best way they knew how, the cat threw up on the Iranian carpet Liz's mother had lent them. It was Sophie who cleaned it up the next morning, before she brought Liz her coffee. Cleopatra wasn't touching her food bowl, she reported. "She must still be stuffed with salmon, the beast," said Liz, clicking her tongue to invite Cleopatra through the bedroom door.

The next day she still wasn't eating more than a mouthful. Liz said it was just as well, really—Cleopatra could do with losing a few pounds—but Sophie picked up the cat and said that wasn't funny.

They'd been planning to take her to the new cat clinic down the road to have her claws clipped at some point anyway. It took a while to get her into the wicker travel basket; Liz had to pull her paws off the rim one by one while Sophie pressed down the lid an inch at a time, nervous of trapping her tail. The cat turned her mutinous face from the window so all they could see was a square of ruffled black fur.

The clinic was a much more swish place than the other vet's, and Liz thought maybe they should have asked for a list of prices in advance, but the receptionist left them alone in the examining room before she thought of it. Cleopatra could obviously smell the ghost aromas of a thousand other cats. She sank down and tucked everything under her except her thumping tail. The place was too much like a dentist's waiting room, but Liz, who knew that Sophie relied on her to be calm, read the posters aloud and pretended to find them funny,
W
H
Y
Y
O
U
R
F
U
R
R
Y
F
R
I
E
N
D
L
O
V
E
S
Y
O
U
, said one poster on the wall,
I
N
S
I
C
K
N
E
S
S
A
N
D
I
N
H
E
A
L
T
H
, began another. The two of them whispered to each other and gave the cat little tickles, as if this sterile shelf was some kind of playground.

Dr. McGraw came in then, spoke to the cat as if he was her best friend but stroked her in the wrong place, above her tail, which flapped like an enemy flag. When he took hold of her face, her paw came round so fast that she left a red line down the inside of his wrist. Liz and Sophie apologized over and over, like the parents of a delinquent child. Dr. McGraw, dabbing himself with disinfectant, told them to think nothing of it. Then he called in Rosalita to wrap the cat in a towel.

Swaddled in flannel, Cleopatra stared at the doctor's face as if memorizing it for the purposes of revenge. He put a sort of gun in her ear to take her temperature and bared her gums in an artificial smile to see if they were dehydrated. He squeezed her stomach and kidneys and bladder, and she made a sound they'd never heard before, in a high voice like a five-year-old girl's, but it was hard to tell if she was tender in the areas he was pressing, or just enraged.