“She’ll be living here in no time,” Vernon said.
“Nonsense. She’s too wary.”
Imogen fed the cat. By knocking on nearby doors, she found the family who had owned her and lost interest. It turned out her name was Brandy. The vet pronounced her healthy and in no time she got less wary.
A dozen cats have followed. They tend to show up after Gen talks too much with her socially maladjusted vet friend at the shelter. They arrive in groups of two or three, like the Pascal recordings, based on the same sketch but in different colors. Several have been lost to cars, so the current trio—Vargas, Llosa, Yolanda—are strictly indoor cats. The dogs are long gone. Vernon doesn’t miss their barking, their hair, their smell, their need for walks. He never wanted dogs, either.
Vargas breathes against his neck. The one thing Vernon is still good for: providing a warm platform for a cat.
She moved into Mark’s old bedroom so suddenly. No more of that! she said. You can just forget about that. That was six years ago.
Get your fat self out of my sight.
You called Susan a whore. I’ll never forgive you for that.
He sweeps Vargas to the floor, gets his fat self up. All his family was heavy, it was in their genes. There isn’t anything moral about it. Doesn’t it say something about her?
Wanting to get that tinny 127 out of his head, he returns the Pascal to the shelf, takes down Budapest’s performance of the same quartet. Kicks Vargas out, closes the door. It’s only a screen door, there’s no other ventilation in the room, unless he wants to rotate the blower crank and wail. Vargas scratches at the screen. Vernon swivels away from him, puts on his headphones, takes the score into his lap.
The opening chords: more balanced, more “chordal.” Mischa Schneider’s wonderful cello sound. He never realized until he bought the Dover scores that half of these opening chords are off the beat. Is a listener supposed to be able to hear that? It was a revelation when he first heard the Budapest play on the radio while he was at RAND. Suddenly the late Beethovens sounded both righter and stranger. The innovative architecture was there. (Vernon is groping; he reminds himself that he knows nothing.) He bought their middle and late quartets as soon as they were issued in stereo by Columbia in 1962. By then, he had this room for listening.
Here comes the Adagio. One of those gorgeous melancholy slow movements in late Beethoven that seem to want never to end, and almost don’t. One false cadence after another, one more variation, one more doodle. A coda that goes on long enough to wag the dog. Vernon is probably reading in too much, but these lingering adagios sound to him like a dying man kicking against his mortality.
Irascible, lonely old wretch, unlucky in love all his life. He didn’t even have a cat to sleep on his chest.
Vernon puts the LP back on the shelf. Opens the screen door. Vargas has disappeared. It’s past eleven, and Gen is still not home. She and Carlos drink while they gab in Spanish. A couple of weeks ago, driving home, she was so drunk she was seeing double. No doubt she’s sorry she admitted this to Vernon.
He stands for a moment in the narrow doorway, looking at the original basement.
He still wonders why the company contacted him. It was 1961. Sure, in his last months at RAND he’d helped out with an absurd civil defense study, but his new job at the Geophysics Lab was unrelated. The Berlin Crisis was all over the news that summer, so maybe the company assumed he’d get back into the Armageddon business. Anyway, the company president called him up and addressed him by his correct name, fed him some boilerplate claptrap and offered him a top-of-the-line home fallout shelter for free. This in exchange for the possibility—which of course would not be construed by the company to imply a commitment—that if Vernon were satisfied with the result, he might lend his name to the company’s advertising, in conjunction, perhaps, with a testimonial that Vernon could craft himself if he so wished, or leave to the firm’s top-notch team of copywriters. Vernon was still furious at the whole booming business—bombs, fear of bombs, more bombs to allay fear of bombs—and at every product, advertisement, and pusillanimous political utterance that fed off it, so he said, Sure, come build me a shelter. In addition to liking the idea of wasting the company’s money, the engineer in him was curious to see how they’d spend it.
They told him they’d treat him well by building the most secure and convenient model, usually reserved for new home construction: a 7’ by 11’ belowground room opening off the basement. Space for six people plus storage.
Vernon asked if they could build him something larger. Say, 10’ by 11’.
After a moment’s hesitation, the company president said, “Of course.”
“I’d rather invite in our closest neighbors than shoot them,” Vernon explained.
“That’s commendable,” the president said. “But may I ask, what about your other neighbors?”
“I’m hoping that the neighbors I let in will shoot them.”
Two seconds passed, after which the president decided to laugh.
One golden autumn day a backhoe and a small bulldozer showed up and proceeded to dig a far larger hole in the side yard than Vernon had anticipated. Subsequently he could see that its size was necessary to permit access and egress to the machines digging it, but Christ, was Imogen pissed. A team of three mixers set concrete footers in the ground and poured a 4” pad, after which a barrel-shaped mason named Hugh constructed the walls out of 12” concrete blocks. The mixers returned to cap it all with a 6” concrete roof. Since the basement floor was only 61” below ground level, the top of the roofing slab exceeded it
