Here Kitty Kitty Page 2

  “I have an idea,” he said in that European murmur.

  I looked at him scornfully. “What.”

  “Take tonight to think about it and then call him tomorrow.”

  This flooded my eyes again, but the tears lodged in lashes like beads. He stepped toward me, brushed one hand through my hair. He held my hand so I could go nowhere, and ordered me home.

  * * *

  —

  Walking from the subway to my building, the sun beat so hard on my face I could hear my eternal sinus infection bubbling.

  * * *

  —

  I dropped out of college after my freshman year and moved to Cape Cod. Two years of living like a bum there, I moved to the city, and within a couple years, I was living with Kai.

  We both worked in kitchens, but he was in culinary school at the same time. Kai always pretended to be destitute, disappearing to the men’s room when the check came. We were kids together. We joked about farting and fought over drugs.

  Kai had a dirty mouth. He looked, with his blond crew cut and pink cheeks, like somebody’s baby brother. He left two and a half years ago to apprentice in Paris. He left with no warning. I would have gone with him, even though he was an idiot.

  When Kai and I made love, if it was good, I went to a dark place. Not as in morbid or sinister. Literally: a void. Occasionally, images bubbled up like gardenias surfacing, with clean petals, in a pit of tar.

  I’d been seeing Yves for almost a year now. He was a regular at the restaurant, and he’d courted me politely. One day, after we’d flirted a couple months, he started sending gifts.

  White-truffle oil. A black Celine scarf. Red lipstick in a gold case. This guy was bringing me Richart chocolates when I couldn’t afford toilet paper. Sherry was over the morning of the first snowfall when an antique blond fur collar arrived. She tried it on, and the yellow tufts against her ebony skin looked elegant and crazy.

  “You should take it,” I said.

  “Come on, girl. Don’t give away a man’s gift. You got no manners.”

  “It’s beautiful on you.”

  “Maybe one day I’ll borrow it,” she drawled, smoking, stretching out on my couch. “It’s very movie star. It’s very gangster’s girl.”

  “Fully,” I agreed, turning the collar in my hands.

  Each time Yves gave me something, I got sweet. It was so linear. I was a kitty cat lapping milk, swishing its tail. Because I’d been hung out to dry by Kai, these luxuries made me safe.

  Yves took care of me. When I was disorderly, he looked around the room, wide-eyed, and declared: My God, she’s a hellcat. Or he’d get me another drink and tell me to sit down and shut up. I often got hiccups; he’d summon a lemon slice doused in bitters from the waiter, hold it to my mouth.

  My only complaint was his music. At Virgin I took him through the aisles, filling his shopping basket. I slipped his old CDs to the housekeeper: Paula Abdul, Big Audio Dynamite, Hanson. I think it was a European thing. Movies, too. He watched Titanic eighty times. He chain-smoked as the ship went down, clutching the leather arm of the couch as though the loft were sinking too.

  I eventually learned through gossip about the women right before me. The Hungarian countess sounded like a melancholic delicacy. Once in a while, she still came to Raoul’s to drink wine at the bar with older men. She never spoke, never laughed. The hollows around her eyes were darkly glamorous, her mouth sullen: she had the beauty of an insomniac. I didn’t know her name but called her Ophelia in my mind.

  Marcelle was French like Yves, a couple years older than him, taller, and at least as tough. She’d modeled her way from a farm town to New York City at the age of sixteen. Married a series of international visionaries, amicably divorced them. Became indispensable to a couturier, and was now exalted and consulted by everyone. I saw her at a museum party. She was turned away from me: her architecture was brutal as that of an Egon Schiele subject. Black jersey clung to her and pooled on the floor. Jade chandelier earrings hung to her shoulders like rain. People said she and Yves were more expatriate siblings than lovers.

  Friends had often paid me this backhanded compliment: You’re one of those girls, Lee, that needs an older man, someone who can appreciate you, a connoisseur. But I finally understood when I got to know Yves. He was beguiled instead of bewildered by my desperate morning champagne, my fur jackets and cowboy hats, my need one day to track down Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack. He even called rare book dealers. When I decided we had to have quince jam for breakfast, or hard-boiled quail eggs for lunch, he escorted me on the hunt.

  One night, we were drinking espressos after a long dinner at his loft with Guillaume, a proper, elderly Belgian. In Yves’s bedroom, I changed into a white feather dress I’d bought that day at the flea market. Turned the lights down in the main room, cranked up Cypress Hill’s “Tres Equis,” and danced like a cabaret star. I shimmied and high-kicked. My hip knocked an end table, setting a Chinese lamp rocking on its base. Yves’s eyes warned me to be careful. A feather seesawed to the floor. When I picked it up and tickled under Guillaume’s chin, the old man glared, gripped the tiny bone-china handle of his cup. I put on Prince’s “Delirious,” but Yves got up and turned it down.

  “I think that’s enough, Lee. This is a shortcut to a migraine.”

  But here’s the thing. Later in bed, I traced Yves’s mouth as he smiled at the dark ceiling.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  He was silent, grinning. Finally he answered. “Did you see his face? He almost tore the cup in half. I wish I’d had a camera.”

  Yves secretly loved chaos.

  * * *

  —

  I got dressed: white capris, leopard sling backs, a dirty black mesh shirt. Bells from two churches were competing. The horizon from my window was cluttered with white-hot buildings, a turquoise mosque, smokestacks. Pigeons reeled around the sky.

  I don’t know how I made it to Raoul’s that night, or anywhere. Every morning, I smeared on makeup, smoked a cigarette, and drank a cup of instant coffee. Sprayed perfume between legs, Binaca in mouth.

  You know when your life is not adding up to more than the sum of its parts? At this point, the sum wasn’t even equal to the parts; it was less. Someone was skimming.

  Days off were rare, but worse than working days. I’d pace or stand by the door—could I bear to put on shoes and run errands? If not, could I bear to stay in the apartment without cigarettes? It was a draw, for hours sometimes, standing there, barefoot, paralyzed.

  Way back in the day, I’d been a good-time girl. I’d made choices without thinking. I’d been a red-blooded American who dug steak, Budweiser, good sex scenes in bad movies.

  On the Cape, I chambermaided at a motor lodge, lifting a pair of cuff links here, a pint of Southern Comfort there. I lived with random people, survived on clam chowder they brought home from where they worked and on hot dogs from gas stations. I smoked PCP-laced weed that made me think the trees were full of bats, not bikinis hung out to dry; learned how to race a motorcycle; fucked two guys at once; had a waterskiing accident; and eventually came back to this city bruised, uninnocent, and never prouder.

  That’s when I’d been strong. That’s when I could drop more acid than the boys. That’s when I could stay up all night, doing blow and slamming Jack Daniel’s, and work all day, and do it again. I was an ox. Kai’s departure was partly to blame for my disintegration. And what happened to my mother. I didn’t know the exact trajectory of my breakdown, but I did know that I’d become weak, holding onto wildness, cherishing the idea of it the way you blow a dying fire.

  To meet Yves, I took the L to Sixth Avenue, the 9 to Houston. My face ghostly in the violet window of the train, fragrance blooming out of my hot skin. No matter how shitty I looked, people stared: I had the smell of a fruit about to split. My flesh somehow demonstrated lethargy, as if I wanted to be lying down at all times. I was five ten, but not exactly heavy. It was the nature of my anatomy that was ric
h, composed as it was of foie gras, cocaine, red Zinfandel, chocolate, quaaludes, brandy.

  Above ground, the night had brought nothing but darker heat. Tangerine lances shot through crevices between SoHo buildings as the sun rolled down the other side of the world. I thought to myself that something had to give. Without asking for help or admitting the scale of it, I had to talk to Yves tonight about the Armageddon of my life.

  * * *

  —

  At the mouth of Raoul’s, I inhaled decades of garlic clove, smoke, perfume, lamb. Yves’s back was to me, his arm resting across the black leather banquette, cuff undone. Across from him, a woman’s face, pale as a refrigerated gardenia, looked up sharply.

  “You know Delphine, love,” Yves insisted.

  “I don’t think I do, baby.” Even though I did.

  “How’s your sculpture series, dear?” Delphine said. “Have you finished?”

  I turned to look at her. Art was more private than sex or love—not the work itself, but the endeavor. I hated being asked, especially since I hadn’t done anything in so long. So I made things up. Delphine was ceramic, like all of Yves’s older women friends. If there was more than one of them, they spoke other languages when I was around. They wore Chanel suits. Front teeth yellowed by tobacco. In the afternoon, they sipped bellinis at Cipriani on West Broadway, smoked Gauloises. They weren’t bad people, but I enjoyed lying to them.

  “Mnh,” I said pensively. “Actually I got sidetracked by a storybook I’m illustrating.”

  “How exciting,” she said. “And how’s that turning out?”

  “Just great,” I said evenly. “I’m almost finished.”

  “But you haven’t even started,” Yves said, smiling.

  I punched him in the arm.

  Delphine politely made a befuddled face.

  “Martini, straight up, filthy, no olives,” I begged the waiter.

  She said, “Everyone these days seems to be doing a book.”

  I said, “That’s true, Delphine. Everyone seems to be doing a book.”

  “May I ask what it’s about?”

  “Fucking, drinking, smoking, loving, living, freebasing, spending, laughing, crying, working, falling apart, kissing, writing, blacking out.”

  “I see.”

  Yves laughed. “I really can’t wait to see it, Lee. I gather you’re still in the research stage.”

  * * *

  —

  I sipped martini three and stared at my steak. Delphine had found a way to escape us. Yves watched my face. I stuck out my tongue at him.

  “Is there something wrong, lamb?” he asked tightly.

  “Lamb? Yves, I’m not your niece. I’m your girlfriend.”

  “Is there a reason you felt the need to speak that way to her?”

  “I’m sure she’s seen and heard worse than me.”

  “She’s an old friend, you know.”

  “She’s worn out.”

  “I’m tired of this,” he said, and pressed his mouth with his napkin, folded it, and tucked it under his plate.

  “You used to think it was cute,” I whined.

  “No, I used to tolerate it because there were other elements of you that were cute.”

  I sat at the table alone. Sipping another martini, I watched him smoke at the bar. What a bad start.

  Yves stood, one hand in his pocket, talking to a man in a beige V-neck who flicked open and closed a gold lighter. Yves’s barbered head nodded at whatever the man was saying, and he didn’t look my way once. The ball was in my court. If we were to have any conversation, I had to approach him.

  When I was very drunk, the world became a slide show. Sneaking up toward Yves, I looked sideways and saw a purple flame in a dark booth, light blossoming on a man’s face as he drew close to the match. An anemic blonde staking a cigarette into a wedge of black cake. My own red toenail peeking from the opening of my leopard sling back.

  “Hey, daddy, I need a drink.” This was my way of apologizing.

  He looked left then right. “No one stopping you.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, glancing at the V-neck guy, then at Yves, trying to communicate with my eyes.

  “Is there something wrong?” he asked me.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I kind of don’t have any money.”

  He took a twenty from his wallet. “Bring me the change,” he said calmly, and turned back to his friend. “As you were saying.”

  I walked toward the bar, but then circled back out of his line of vision. I walked to the table. Isn’t it crazy how anger sometimes feels like joy? Just a crash of blood through your heart. I took his car keys from the sport coat he’d left in the booth.

  * * *

  —

  The L.I.E. swarmed with kids heading from Float in the city to Conscience Point at the beach, or straight into a chintz-wallpapered bedroom at a rented mansion. A Range Rover swerved, going ninety, glow sticks floating in the backseat. Made me feel better about my own steering.

  I stopped at a gas station for candy. I must have been weaving, but a cop car passed, paint shining like a shark, and never came near me. I did get the finger, for changing lanes without signaling, from a porn-star blonde in a yellow Porsche.

  I drove the Lexus through Southampton, red lights blinking instead of changing. The landscape dreamy, moonlit fields of zinnias, fruit stands closed up as though they’d never offered bins of raspberries, baskets of lettuce. Everything was beautiful and frightening, deserted for the night but coming off as forever deserted.

  “Bring me the change!” I’d say every once in a while in disbelief.

  * * *

  —

  Ours was originally a guesthouse for the main house on the hill. The area was wooded, and my headlights severed trunks as I turned into the drive. Pulled up to the front path, cut the lights and engine, and stared until details burned out of the dark.

  My mother always read on a wicker chaise under the rose tree in this yard. Bees would devour the blossoms, climbing from turquoise leaf to leaf, their bodies vibrating in the sunlight. They’d step from a petal to her knee, her skin creamy as the rose: they never knew the difference. She never flinched.

  Two years ago, almost, she died in this house. I held her hand. A male hospice nurse pretended to do a jigsaw puzzle of the Manhattan skyline at our kitchen table so we had privacy.

  When she was young, she’d undergone a radical mastectomy and radiation. Somehow, the underdeveloped technology had burned both lungs. The damage wasn’t discovered until, at the age of fifty-nine, she suffered trouble breathing. X-rays revealed membranes around each lung. The doctor compared them to cauls, those sacs found sometimes around fetuses.

  “Those are supposed to be good luck, those ones around the baby’s head,” I said to him.

  “They are,” he admitted.

  “But my mother’s aren’t good luck.”

  He shook his head, looking at his shoes. “No, no they’re not.”

  * * *

  —

  Sitting there in Yves’s car, I was sure I’d mourned; I’d been grieving for almost two years, but nothing had changed. I still didn’t want to go in there. Months ago, I’d come to box the remaining belongings so I could rent out the house. My mother had been an elegant woman in her own carrottop way, and it was excruciating to go through panties with elastics broken, stockings dotted with nail polish, widowed gloves stowed away just in case. Within an hour, everything I came across—the apricot slip hanging from the bedpost, a lipstick in the medicine cabinet, an abalone shell still dusty with ash—loomed and shivered like an object from a nightmare. I’d fled with the job half finished and hadn’t returned until tonight.

  My mother had made my childhood into a paradise. She didn’t believe in ordinary life. Every day should be a kingdom, the proportions of each hour majestic, regal.

  When I’d come down for breakfast in the morning, dragging my book bag on the stairs, yawning, the first thing I’d hear was my mother sing
ing. By my plate of sugared toast: a blue jay feather. In the windows hung glass prisms, and rainbows shot their colors against the walls. To this day, when I open her books, brown wafers of red roses fall from the pages.

  With pajamas on my bath-damp body, I’d find a snowbell on my pillow. My mother always told a bedtime story. Then I’d ask her to tell another, and she would. Then she’d ask me to tell one, and she’d lay on my bed with her eyes closed.

  We played with lipstick. We roller-skated on a summer midnight. We ate pancakes for dinner. Once, I remember, a snow day was predicted. We woke up, and the roads were clear. But she let me stay home. We sat by the fire that whole day, the soles of our feet pinked by the flames, and strung shells onto necklaces. In the evenings, I did homework at the dinner table while she played records: June Christy, Lee Wiley, Billie Holiday. With a cigarette in one hand and a mug in the other, she danced. Red sun burned through her kimono. The fabric seemed to dissolve in the violent light. Sometimes I watched her. Sometimes I danced with her. We never turned on the lamps until we couldn’t see.

  But with the god gone, the house was just a house, and I couldn’t bear to enter it. I adjusted the leather car seat, and closed my drunken eyes.

  * * *

  —

  I rang the main house doorbell in the morning. Rolled my head on my neck to loosen kinks. Geraniums in cracked pots flanked the door. I rang again.

  When I was young, I’d scrutinized Art and Rebecca. As a teenager, I’d watched their Gramercy Park apartment when they were away. I’d worn her chinchilla. Smoked resin out of his hash pipe. I’d toddled around in her sharkskin pumps, studied his dog-eared Kama Sutra. They were my other parents.

  But after showing glimmers of artistic promise throughout school, I’d dropped out of college, run away to Harwich Port to hide out with deadheads, waitresses, methheads. They’d never said so, but I imagined Art and Becca had given up on me. They didn’t have kids, and over the years they’d bought me paints, brushes, linen. They paid for a summer art session at Yale when I was sixteen. It was possible they resented my failure. If so, they concealed it, making me feel worse.