“What do you want?” she said to him. “Tuna?”
The cat licked his lips and bobbed his head once, as if to say yes.
“Why the hell not,” she said, tossing him a chunk. “I was going to have you euthanized, after all.”
Finally the cat settled himself on the couch, instead of under it, and began to wash himself. She tried to interest him in some of the cat toys, but he was still too scared of her to play.
Before going to bed, she was supposed to put the cat in the bathroom. She approached him as Dr. Bond had instructed, from behind, while talking in a low, soothing tone. “I’m sorry to have to do this, um, Big Whoop,” she said. To her surprise, the cat allowed himself to be picked up and brought into the bathroom. There wasn’t much room in there for him, with the three boxes of cat litter—sand, clay, and pine—that she was to offer to him until he made his preference known. He threw himself into a corner of the bathroom and regarded her resentfully as she closed the door.
She was about to turn out the light when McKay called to see how it went.
“What did you think of Bradley?”
“Not what I expected.”
“You should see his Donna Summer.”
“He’s a drag queen?”
“I’m sure it’s called something a little more P.C., like gender illusionist.”
She tried to imagine Dr. Bond in a sparkly wig and lip gloss. Oddly, it was not impossible. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me this before my appointment.”
“So? Did he give you the Prozac?”
“No. I’m supposed to do the opposite of everything I was doing. I’m supposed to give him everything he wants, whenever he wants it, until his anxiety eases.”
McKay made approving sounds. “He’s very Zen in his approach,” McKay said.
The cat still woke her up at four o’clock in the morning, but he’d stopped hurling himself against doors. When she came home from breakfast at the Korner—no sign of Sexy Yoga Babe, thank heavens—he was sitting on her bed. She changed the water in his bowl, then sat at her desk to work. A few days later, when Pru brought home the new laser printer, he played at batting around the Styrofoam inserts from the box. He sat and watched as she set up all the cords. Presently, he came closer to bat at the pages, with curious fascination, as the first batch of her business cards came rolling out of the printer.
Prudence Whistler
GRANTS, FUND-RAISING, GRAPHIC DESIGN,
LIFE COACHING, ORGANIZATION
She didn’t really know what she meant by “life coaching” and “organization,” but they sounded like things she’d like to try.
She’d had to hold herself back from including “on-air talent.” Rudy (oh Rudy, that shit) used to tell her all the time that she should be on public radio. Oh, he’d told her so many things she’d been all too happy to believe.
She separated the cards from the sheets, and felt a wave of disappointment. They looked cheap, and unprofessional. There were little tufts of perforated paper hanging off the edges. They looked desperate. She wouldn’t hire a person with such a card to come toss out her urine-covered plastic tarps, much less do anything professional. She canceled the rest of the print job and threw the cards in the trash. A week’s worth of work, right there.
At dinnertime, she went into the kitchen for her usual can of tuna. She was feeling defeated and low. The cat followed her in this time, and was sitting up on his haunches, waiting for his scrap, before she’d even opened the can. They had a little routine, she realized, and threw him some. She took her tuna and a sleeve of crackers to the couch, and tried to watch GoodFellas on her laptop. Eventually, though, the violence was too much. Not even the lure of Lorraine Bracco’s dresses could offset it. She winced at every gunshot, until finally closing up her laptop for good. The cat sat nearby, washing. The only sound was the gentle scraping of his rough tongue against paw pads. Now she was regretting having dumped Rudy’s TV set. She would give anything to fill the emptiness around her with the cheerful blather of this season’s young and beautiful, the electronic mirth of a laugh track, the gentle assurances of tampon commercial voice-overs or the entrancing spectacle of B-list celebrities gasping their last on some reality show. Anything but this, the white silence of her loneliness.
On her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth, she noticed that the box filled with clay litter had been used. She threw out the other two boxes, thinking how ridiculously obvious that should have been to her. That night, she put him as usual in the bathroom but didn’t shut the door. Sometime after midnight she woke up to find the cat on her bed. She could feel him sitting there watching her. When she didn’t kick him off, he got up and came to sniff the blankets. Then he sniffed her hand. She could feel his whiskers tickling her wrist. After a while, he settled himself and, tentatively, pushed his head under her hand.
She worked her fingers in a little circle on his head, between the ears. A low rumbling filled his body. He was purring. It was the first time she’d heard that since he’d arrived. She found a spot in front of his ear that made him dip his head with pleasure. He rolled heavily onto his side, paws flexing in the air. He looked so fat and happy that she smiled.
Tomorrow, she would go to the stationer’s on Eighteenth, where Fiona got her wedding invitations, and have them make up new business cards for her. It would cost a little, but she was sure it’d be worth paying to have them engraved. And matching letterhead, she thought, warming to the idea. On some lovely, textured vellum paper.
She closed her
