Here Kitty Kitty Page 3

  I heard slippers scuffing.

  “My precious,” she purred.

  White caftan, black eyes. Bony hands weighted with turquoise, gold, opal, diamond. Short brown hair tucked behind ears. She set her coffee on the foyer table. The house had broken-down glamour: sand in rugs, dead dragonflies in candy bowls, drapes stained from rain.

  “Where did you come from, you baby-boo?” she said.

  I said it had been a long time, my mouth muffled as she hugged me.

  “Lee,” she rasped, floating into the courtyard. “You are stunning, but you look like you slept in a jail cell or something.”

  Art, though he’d already squeezed me to his huge chest, pinched my cheeks, and tried to force money on me, was back to reading his paper.

  “Doesn’t she look stunning,” Becca prompted. “A little washed out, maybe.”

  We ate lunch. Wasps droned over melon soup, dragging stingers. Art alternated between pushing up glasses, breaking off cornbread, and passionately refolding the Sports section.

  I didn’t know how to bring it up, so I let her talk. Becca wandered from Janice’s Vero Beach wedding to bars in Spain to Coney Island in the old days. Each time she mentioned one of her teenaged loves, she stole a glance at Art, but he wasn’t biting today. Blue beams refracted through the swimming pool and crisscrossed the yard, wavering, and we smoked Becca’s slim cigarettes, ashing on our cake plates.

  “I’m putting the house up for sale,” I finally said.

  * * *

  —

  Art had always liked to sit on his patio with watercolors and easel. Painted poppies: slashes of scarlet, black beads. Jazz station on transistor radio. I once found him watering impatiens naked. But he was lawyer to mobsters, boxers, Wall Street traders. Often in the papers, leading the accused through an angry crowd.

  Art walked me home, steering my elbow. He said we’d talk after I’d had time to think. I said I’d done all the thinking I was going to do. I asked for a local Realtor reference. He said nothing for a while.

  “You don’t want to do this, Lee.”

  We stood facing each other, his white Mexican shirt sloping down his chest like God’s cloak. Hands in pockets. Horn-rims sparkling in sun. I tried not to cry.

  “I do,” I lied.

  He sighed. “For many reasons, you don’t.”

  “I need to. It’s not about want. I need the money.”

  “Lee, I can tell you’re going through a rough time. Selling a house, especially when it’s the only property your mother owned, is not something you decide to do in a hurry.”

  “I—”

  “No, you obviously have not considered this for very long. I can tell. What you need to do is work harder. We’ve all been where you are, Lee.”

  “I’m working as hard as—”

  “Don’t tell me that. I don’t mean to be so rough, but I know you can swing it. You’re a smart girl. Think out of the box.”

  “I—”

  “When the going gets tough…you know the rest. Your mother didn’t want you to sell this. It’s the only heirloom she had to leave you.”

  “It’s just a house.”

  “You’re not going to think that in twenty years.”

  * * *

  —

  Sunshine had drowned the yard. The light blurring the weeds reminded me of a photograph from playing cards Kai left behind.

  I sifted through them sometimes, when I was talking on the phone, or getting drunk by myself, as if they had the mystical significance of tarot cards. Shot in the seventies, the pictures on the cards weren’t airbrushed, the girls weren’t skinny, and everything was real. A blonde on a wicker throne, pulling beige crochet bikini aside. A girl on a black couch, kneeling away from us, red bra, black bob, lavender star points of asshole. A brunette on a beach shack porch, legs spread, sand crusted on knees and shoulders, glass of white Zinfandel in her hand.

  The queen of hearts was a strawberry-blonde in a golden field. Hair feathered. Grass up to her pussy. One hip forward. A black-eyed Susan to her nose. She looked like she smelled of patchouli, drank jug wine, did macramé, flew kites. She had a little belly.

  I stood in my own field, wanting obligations to fall from me. This is one way of contemplating suicide, yet it’s the exact opposite: what I wanted was to be alive, to escape all the damage, to shed it like snakeskin, to emerge pure and naked and laughing.

  * * *

  —

  Cobalt evening in the city. A rain was falling, warm as tea water, when I got to Yves’s lobby. I buzzed his loft.

  “Hello?” he asked, voice doubtful.

  “It’s me, Yves.”

  A hesitation. Nothing. Then the buzzer sounded. I vaulted up three flights and waited, nervous, hair pasted to face. He opened the door wearing a silk robe and leather slippers, hair sticking up like chick’s fur. When he was pissed, his eyes developed a dark dimension of blue.

  “Come in, kid. You look terrible.”

  He put an arm around me, took my purse, put me on the white leather couch, and fixed me a scotch. I was shaking.

  He helped peel off my clothes and put on his pajamas. We sat together. I touched his bottom lip with my fingertip.

  “My God, you have a temper, Lee,” Yves said.

  “I’m an asshole,” I whispered.

  I scratched at his thigh while he played with the hair that fell down my back as we talked, and I noticed he was stiff under the robe. All I wanted to do was get in bed with ice cream and cigarettes, and watch cartoons, but I owed him.

  I let my hand wander. He kept playing with my hair, but his motions got mechanical and messy and distracted, the way they do when a man starts to feel pleasure. I set my tumbler on the glass table and kneeled between his legs, my body flush with purpose. But as I arranged him and glanced up with the “here I go” look, he suddenly pulled the robe closed and stood, walked away.

  * * *

  —

  My mother used to call me her hummingbird: that was her gentle way of saying I was hyperactive and unmanageable. She didn’t try to manage me; she gave me shelter. On a winter beach, she’d open her coat to let me walk in her warmth.

  I broke or misplaced anything she ever loaned me, from a pink cashmere beret I left at the Roxy coat check to a gold anklet with an aquamarine charm I lost in the ocean.

  I was the child who swiped icing off the cake before it was served. I ate M&M’s I’d dropped on the floor of Penn Station. When we were twelve, my friend and I served hors d’oeuvres at her parents’ Christmas party, and I poured the dregs of everyone’s drinks into one glass, which I drank in the laundry room.

  As an infant, I’d screamed around the clock until my mother made a cradle of a white stole folded into an orange crate. She crossed her fingers. Thus buried, I slept and dreamed.

  When I was a little older, I feigned sleep. Who didn’t? The memory of my mother’s perfumed hand pulling the sheet over my shoulder could still provoke a rush of love. I remembered lying in the dark, breathing as though dreaming, shivering at the promise of footsteps as she came down the hall to kiss me good night. The kiss was good, but that ritual of enclosure was everything.

  When I was five, on the icy night of a cocktail party, I hid under the mountain of coats in the guest room. My face against a silk lining that reeked of opium and cigarettes, my hand clasping a bunch of lamb’s wool that smelled of snow. I must have fallen asleep. Next thing I knew, I woke up in a darkness of fur and wool to voices of people come to get their wraps. I stared at two faces and the pink chandelier behind them. The story was repeated often, how Mary and Kirk found me buried like a stowaway. Since then, I’d rarely known refuge like that pile of coats, but I looked for it all the time.

  As an adult, it was difficult to find my way into the warm lair of another person’s soul. When I got to New York, I took art classes at Spring Studio. Jules had posted an anonymous request there for female models; if he’d included his name, people would pose just to get into hi
s studio. He was in his late seventies then, and breathed like a sick dog. I adored him. I reclined on green velvet, and he let me stretch every twenty minutes. Jules talked to himself; I was caught in his dream. Oh, yeah, she’s a calendar girl. That’s a decadent leg, see. She might be tired of this position. He’d knock the brush around the water jar. Well, let’s see if blue doesn’t work. We should think about the time. We should get down to the liquor store before it closes. Even though I hadn’t seen him in a few years, when I read his obituary a couple months ago, I bawled. The universe had turned another spirit out of this city, and me out of another home.

  * * *

  —

  I followed Yves into the bedroom, where he was sitting on the bed, hands clasped between his knees. The bedside light spread a golden umbrella that included him from the waist down; his face was dark. I hovered on the threshold, arms crossed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked meanly.

  “I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep, worrying about you,” he said. “And now you want to erase your misbehavior with what I will concede is a generous gesture but a gesture nonetheless.”

  “I said I was sorry,” I muttered.

  “I know, I know.” He turned away.

  Now this is strange, I decided. This man who shows emotions like a movie star is at a loss for words. A part of me wanted to walk out the door, leave a note in the kitchen, the kind of note I’d never written, or maybe no note at all.

  “You should see a doctor,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “For your health, Lee, why else. You can’t take pills and drink like you do, and you can’t do coke and then take those pills. You end up speaking gibberish, you know. You’re a mess.”

  “Well, fuck you very much,” I told him.

  He sighed. “Can you just bite the bullet and look at yourself?”

  “I look at myself all the time.”

  “No,” he said. “You need to get it together.”

  “But Yves,” I said, exasperated. “That’s not who I am. I’m not together.”

  He pondered the floor for a while. “You can’t run away like that. You can’t take my car.”

  “Is this about me taking your car?”

  “I’m only saying there has to be a line. I have to draw a line.”

  His eyes, blue diamonds in the gloom. I crossed the floor and sat on the bed. Then I put my arms around his body and my head to his chest. We stayed like that for a long time.

  “Something has to change, Lee.”

  TWO

  She stands in front of the washbasin and picks up her lipstick. Camera pans across to her reflection as she applies it. Still reflected in the mirror, we see her turn and pick up a brassiere from a chair behind her. Camera tilts down as she picks up the rest of her underwear from a stool in the foreground.

  Medium shot of SEVERINE coming through a deserted apartment, carrying her underwear. Camera pans right round to show her from behind as she goes into the drawing room, where a wood fire is burning. Then it tracks in as she sits down beside the fireplace and throws her underclothes and stockings into it; they catch fire immediately.

  —from the script of Belle de Jour, by LUIS BUÑUEL, on Severine’s first day as a prostitute

  Before bedtime, Yves ritualistically lowered shades in every room. At night, the edges of the shades glowed lavender, and in the morning, golden. He woke early and circled his loft, raising each shade. He moved slowly, as though he’d created the city in his sleep and was now unveiling it.

  Tonight I slipped out of sheets, breathless, afraid of waking the light sleeper. In the living room, I raised one shade to see without turning on a light. Blue shadow beads of rain dotted the white Hermès couch. At my own house, I alleviated insomnia with PlayStation, a vibrator, warmed strawberry milk, Ambien, but all I could do here was take an ashtray and smokes to the bathroom.

  My body was so dehydrated, I pissed urine like molasses. Sprayed Chanel cologne into the air for no reason. My image was repeated in black tiles like a hundred fairies. My face in the mirror: collapsed from scotch and nightmares. I stared. Ever since the day my mom told me about her lungs, a paranoia had been mounting: the outside might be fine, the inside, disaster. The image I couldn’t banish was a pint of raspberries. On top the ruby berries looked juicy. Unwrapped and spilled into the colander, they revealed undersides black with rot.

  Of course, two weeks had gone by and I’d ignored Anthony’s warning. The previous morning, an eviction notice was stapled to my door: waking up to the noise, I thought someone was breaking in.

  I lit a cigarette. I had three options.

  * * *

  —

  I could move in here. But we had different ideas about housekeeping. I’d left his milk out overnight more than once. I spilled red wine on the white couch when I tried to take a sip lying down. I almost overflowed a bubble bath; he caught the foam when it was level with the rim. And while Yves kept Purex hidden in every drawer, me, if I ran out of panties, I turned a pair inside out. I brought home a Versace lipstick left in a ladies’ room, and Yves stealthily pulled it out of my hands as if prying a loaded pistol from a toddler’s grasp.

  * * *

  —

  Or I could ask for a loan. But we never actually talked about money. It was silently acknowledged he had more, but to admit I was being sued by creditors and evicted would be humiliating. He looked aristocratic but was actually self-made.

  Yves was closemouthed on his past. A business partner of his, while we were waiting for Yves at Nobu, told me Yves quit school at fifteen to work on barges. By twenty-two, he’d made his way into the buying and selling of whatever cargo the barges transported. He was soon buying and selling barges, then buying and selling the companies that owned barges.

  Tucked into his humidor was a yellowed photograph with scalloped edges. A dark, bulbous car on a dirt road. The blur of a chicken. A thin boy scowled at the sky. Shadows cast by brow bones obscured his eyes. Mouth blanched from sun, making shadow under lower lip. One shoe open at the toe. His head reached the car door’s handle. His hands hung neither clenched nor relaxed, but curved; this boy was precociously self-conscious. He could see the loneliness and unpleasant work required of him if he discarded his natural destiny and tried to write a new one.

  Watching guests at his own parties, Yves reminded me of a cat crouched on an indoor sill, tracking starlings in the yard.

  * * *

  —

  When Yves walked into the bathroom, I was twisting out my eighth cigarette. He asked what I was doing.

  “Selling my house,” I answered, as if that were obvious.

  He looked at me a moment, scratched his chest. “Start from the beginning.”

  “Nothing to explain.”

  “You’re selling your house at five in the morning.” Yves stepped to the mirror to push and pull his face. Then he put the toilet lid down, sat, placed one ankle on the other knee and stared at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  After a while, my face got hot. I turned away from him.

  “You’re out of money,” he said.

  “I am not,” I said, blushing.

  “It’s funny,” he started, “I’ve wondered for a long time now how you were paying your rent.”

  “You think I’m a screw-up.”

  “I think you’re a young woman living in a big city.”

  “Art, the guy who lives in the main house, said I should work harder. And he was right,” I said earnestly. Then I shrugged. “What I should do is be someone else.”

  He actually laughed. “Art probably just doesn’t want someone building on the lot.” Then he looked at me and sighed. “Are you going to regret this?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “How about this,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”

  Yes, he’d bought me things, taken me to dinner. And I’d plucked a twenty here, a fifty there from his wallet. If he gave me a
hundred to pay for a round of drinks, I pocketed the change. But I spent that money on toys: marzipan, gold mascara, vintage Playboys. This transaction would put us in a different league.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yes.” Blue eyes unwavering.

  “No,” I said weakly.

  He smiled at the floor, amused. Looked up at me again. “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “I need a pretty big loan,” I warned him.

  “I’m not loaning you money. This is a gift.”

  “Yves, I can’t, that’s just—”

  “A gift, or nothing.”

  We squabbled, and my refusals got less and less sincere. We sealed the deal with a kiss: closemouthed, since he didn’t like sleep breath. He got up to leave as I lit the last smoke in my pack.

  “One thing, though,” he said. “You can’t smoke like that in here, love. The towels”—he gestured at them—“absorb the smell. Let’s change them tomorrow.”

  * * *

  —

  Broken by storm, umbrellas lay along Spring Street like birds shot from the sky. We sat in a red banquette, the earliest table. The staff was sleepy. I breathed in coffee, baking bread, cigarette smoke. Triangles of gold fell across white tablecloths. I ordered a chocolate croissant, espresso, a French 75.

  “Are you all paid up now?” he asked. “How does it feel?”

  “It feels amazing. I’ll take this opportunity to thank you again.”

  “Please don’t. It was my pleasure,” he said.

  When Yves finished, he swiped bread over yolk. Patted a napkin to his mouth. “I wonder if you could do me a favor.”

  I looked at him.