“I’m sorry, I forgot myself,” she says.
“That’s very flattering. But if this is what happens when I kiss you, I’d be a bloody mess if I went any further. Wait.”
More bandages on your neck. Out again to kiss her.
“Easy does it, baby. We’ll take in the beach and I’ll give you a lecture on the evils of running with Michael Horn.”
“No matter what I say, you’re going ahead with the novel, Rob?”
“Mind’s made up. Where were we? Oh, yeah.”
Again the lips.
You park the car atop a sun-blazed cliff a little after noon. Anne runs ahead, down the timber stairs, two hundred feet down the cliff. The wind lifts her bronze hair, she looks trim in her blue bathing suit. You follow, thoughtful. You are away from everywhere. Towns are gone, the highway empty. The beach below with the sea folding in on it is wide, barren, with big slabs of granite toppled and washed by breakers. Wading birds squeal. You watch Anne go down ahead of you. What a little fool, you think of her.
You saunter arm in arm and stand letting the sun get into you. You believe everything is clean now, and good, for a while. All life is clean and fresh, even Anne’s life. You want to talk, but your voice sounds funny in the salt silence, and anyway your tongue is still sore from that sharp fork.
You wade by the waterline and Anne picks something up.
“A barnacle,” she says. “Remember how you used to go diving with your rubber-rimmed helmet and trident in the good old days?”
“The good old days.” You think of the time past, Anne and yourself and the things that used to work out for you together. Traveling up the coast. Fishing. Diving. But even then she was a weird creature. Didn’t mind killing lobsters at all. Took a relish in cleaning them.
“You used to be so foolhardy, Rob. You still are, in fact. Took chances diving for abalones when these barnacles might have cut you, badly. Sharp as razors.”
“I know,” you say.
She gives the barnacle a toss. It lands near your discarded shoes. As you come back up you skirt it, careful not to step on it.
“We could have been happy,” she says.
“It’s nice to think so, isn’t it?”
“I wish you’d change your mind,” she says.
“Too late,” you say.
She sighs.
A wave comes in on the shore.
You are not afraid of being here with Anne. She can do nothing to you. You can handle her. You are confident of that. No, this will be an easy, lazy day, without event. You are alert, ready for any contingency.
You lie in the sun, and it strikes through your bones and loosens you inside and you mold to the contours of the sand. Anne is beside you, and the sun gilds her tipped nose and glitters across the minute pellets of perspiration on her brow. She talks gay talk and light talk and you are fascinated with her; how she can be so beautiful and like a hunk of serpentine thrown across your path, and be so mean and small somewhere hidden inside where you can’t find it?
You lie upon your stomach and the sand is warm. The sun is warm.
“You’re going to burn,” she says at last, laughing.
“I suppose I am,” you say. You feel very clever, very immortal.
“Here, let me put some oil on your back,” she said, unfolding the shiny patent leather Chinese jigsaw of her purse. She holds up a bottle of pure yellow oil. “This’ll get between you and the sun,” she says. “Okay?”
“Okay,” you say. You are feeling very good, very superior.
She bastes you like a pig on a spit. The bottle is suspended over you and it comes down in a twine of liquid, yellow and glittering and cool to the small hollows of your spine. Her hand spreads it and massages it over your back. You lie, purring, eyes closed, watching the little blue and yellow bubbles dance across your shut eyelids as she pours on more of the liquid and laughs as she massages you.
“I feel cooler already,” you say.
She continues to massage you for a minute or more and then she stops and sits beside you quietly. A long time passes and you lie deep, baked in a sand oven, not wanting to move. The sun suddenly is not so hot.
“Are you ticklish?” asks Anne, behind your back.
“No,” you say, your mouth turning up at the corners.
“You have a lovely back,” she says. “I’d love to tickle it.”
“Tickle away,” you say.
“Are you ticklish here?” she asks.
You feel a distant, sleepy movement on your back.
“No,” you say.
“Here?” she says.
You feel nothing. “You aren’t even touching me,” you say.
“I read a book once,” she says. “It said that the sensory portions of the back are so poorly developed that most people couldn’t tell exactly where they were being touched.”
“Nuts,” you say. “Touch me. Go ahead. I’ll tell you.”
You feel three long movements on your back.
“Well?” she asks.
“You tickled me down under one shoulder blade for a distance of five inches. Likewise under the other shoulder blade. And then right down my spine. So there.”
“Smart boy. I quit. You’re too good. I need a cigarette. Damn, I’m all out. Mind if I run up to the car and get some?”
“I’ll go,” you say.
“Never mind.” She is off across the sand. You watch her run, lazily, sleepily, in patterns of rising hot atmosphere. You think it rather strange she is taking her purse and bottled liquid with her. Women. But all the same you cannot help but notice she is beautiful, running. She climbs up the wooden steps, turns and waves and smiles. You smile back, move your hand in a brief, lazy salute. “Hot?” she cries.
“I’m drenched,” you cry back, lazily.
You feel the sweat crawling on your body. The heat is in you now and you sink down into it, as into a bath. You feel the sweat pouring down your back in torrents, faint and far away, like ants crawling on you. Sweat it out, you think. Sweat it all out. Streaks of sweat well down your ribs and along your stomach, tickling. You laugh. God, what a sweat. You never sweated like this before in your life. The smell of that oil Anne put on you is sweet in the warm air. Drowsy, drowsy.
You start. You head yanks upward.
On top of the cliff, the car is started, put in gear, and now, as you watch, Anne waving to you, the car flashes in the sun, turns, and drives away down the highway.
Just like that.
“Why you little witch!” you cry irritably. You start to get up.
You can’t. The sun has made you weak. Your head swims. Damn it. You’ve been sweating.
Sweating.
You smell something new on the hot air. Something as familiar and timeless as the salt smell of the sea. A hot, sweet, sickish odor. An odor that is all the terror in the world to you and those of your kind. You cry out and stagger up.
You are wearing a cloak, a garment of scarlet. It clings to your thighs, and as you watch, it encases your loins and spreads and grows upon your legs and ankles. It is red. The reddest red in the color chart. The purest, loveliest, most terrible red you have ever seen, spreading and growing and pulsing along your body.
You clutch at your back. You mouth meaningless words. Your hands close upon three long open wounds cut into your flesh below the shoulder blades!
Sweat! You thought you were sweating. And it was blood! You lay there thinking it was sweat coming out of you, laughing about it, enjoying it!
You can feel nothing. Your fingers scrabble clumsily, weakly. Your back feels nothing. It is insensible.
“Here, let me put some oil on your back,” says Anne, far away in the shimmering nightmare of your memory. “You’re going to burn.”
A wave crashes on the shore. In memory you see the long yellow twine of liquid pouring down on your back, suspended from Anne’s lovely fingers. You feel her massaging you.
Narcotic in solution. Novocain or cocaine or something in a yellow
solution that, after it clung to your back a while, deadened every nerve. Anne knows all about narcotics, doesn’t she?
Sweet, sweet, lovely Anne.
“Are you ticklish?” asks Anne, in your mind again.
You retch. And echoing in your blood-red swimming mind, you give an answer: No. Tickle away. Tickle away. Tickle away... Tickle away, Anne J. Anthony, lovely lady. Tickle away.
With a nice sharp barnacle shell.
You were diving for abalones offshore and you scraped your back on a rock, in rough streaks, with a crop of razor-sharp barnacles. Yes, that’s it. Diving. Accident. What a pretty setup.
Sweet, lovely Anne.
Or did you have your fingernails honed on a whetstone, my darling?
The sun bangs in your brain. The sand is beginning to melt under you. You try to find the buttons to unbutton, to rip away this red garment. Senselessly, blindly, gropingly, you search for buttons. There are none. The garment stays. How silly, you think, foolishly. How silly to be found in your long, red woolen underwear. How silly.
There must be zippers somewhere. Those three long cuts can be zipped up tight and then that sliding red stuff will stop sliding out of you. You, the immortal man.
The cuts aren’t too deep. If you can get to a doctor. If you can take your tablets.
Tablets!
You fall forward on your coat, and search one pocket and then another pocket, and then another, and turn it inside out, and rip the lining loose and shout and cry and four waves come pounding in on the shore behind you, like trains passing, roaring. And you go back through each empty pocket again, hoping that you have missed one. But there is nothing but lint, a box of matches, and two theater ticket stubs. You drop the coat.
“Anne, come back!” you cry. “Come back! It’s thirty miles to town, to a doctor. I can’t walk it. I haven’t time.”
At the bottom of the cliff you look up. One hundred and fourteen steps. The cliff is sheer and blazing in the sun.
There is nothing to be done but climb the steps.
Thirty miles to town, you think.Well, what is thirty miles?
What a splendid day for a walk.
THE CAT’S PAJAMAS
2003
IT IS NOT EVERY NIGHT driving along Millpass, California’s Route 9, that one expects to spy a cat in the middle lane.
For that matter, it is not every evening that such a cat could be found on any untrafficked road, the cat being, more or less, an abandoned kitten.
Nevertheless, the small creature was there, busily cleaning itself, when two things happened:
A car traveling east at a rapid rate suddenly braked to a halt.
Simultaneously, a much more rapid convertible, traveling west, almost ruptured its tires to a dead standstill.
The doors of both cars banged wide in unison.
The small beast remained calm as high heels clattered one way and golfing brogans banged the other.
Almost colliding over the self-grooming creature, a handsome young man and a more than handsome young woman bent and reached.
Both hands touched the cat simultaneously.
It was a warm, round, velvet black ball with whiskers from which two great yellow eyes stared and a small pink tongue protruded.
The cat assumed a belated look of surprise as both travelers stared at the placement of their hands on its body.
“Oh no you don’t!” cried the young woman.
“Oh no I don’t what?” cried the young man.
“Let go of my cat!”
“Since when is it yours?”
“I got here first.”
“It was a tie.”
“Wasn’t.”
“Was.”
He pulled at the back and she at the front and suddenly the cat meowed.
Both let go.
Instantly they re-seized the beautiful creature, this time the young woman grabbing the back and the young man the front.
They stared at each other for a long moment, trying to decide what to say.
“I love cats,” she explained at last, not able to meet his gaze.
“So do I,” he cried.
“Keep your voice down.”
“Nobody can hear.”
They looked both ways on the road. There was no traffic.
She blinked at the cat, as if trying to find some revelation.
“My cat died.”
“So did mine,” he countered.
This softened their hold on the beast.
“When?” she asked.
“Monday,” he replied.
“Last Friday,” she said.
They rearranged their hands on the small creature and did not so much hold as touch.
There was a moment of embarrassed silence.
“Well,” he said at last.
“Yes, well,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said, lamely.
“The same,” she said.
“What are we going to do? We can’t stand here forever.”
“Looks like,” she said, “we’re both needy.”
For no reason at all he said, “I wrote an article for Cat Fancy.”
She looked at him more intensely.
“I chaired a cat show in Kenosha,” she offered.
They stood, agonizing on their new silence.
A car roared down the road past them. They jumped away and when the car was gone saw that they both still held the wonderful creature, carrying it out of harm’s way.
He stared off down the road. “There’s a diner down there, I see its lights. Why don’t we go have coffee and discuss the future?”
“There’s no future without my cat,” she said.
“Or mine, either. Come on. Follow me.”
He removed the kitten from her hands.
She cried and reached out.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Follow me.”
She backed off, got into her car, and followed him down the road.
THEY WALKED INTO THE EMPTY DINER, sat in a booth, and placed the kitten on the table between them.
The waitress glanced at them and the cat, walked off, and returned with a full saucer of cream, placing it on the table with a vast smile. They realized they were in the presence of another cat person.
The cat began to lap at the cream as the waitress brought coffee.
“Well, here we are,” the young man said. “How long is this going to last? Are we going to talk all night?”
The waitress was still standing before them.
“I’m afraid it’s closing time,” she said.
On impulse, the young man said, “Look at us.”
The waitress looked.
“If you were going to give this kitten to one of us,” he said, “which one would it be?”
The waitress studied the young woman and the young man and said, “Thank God I’m not King Solomon.” She wrote up the check and put it down. “There are people, you see, who still read the Bible.”
“Is there another place we can go to talk?” said the young man.
The waitress nodded out the window. “There’s a hotel down the road. They don’t mind pets.”
That caused both young people to half-jump from their seats.
Ten minutes later they walked into the hotel.
Glancing over, they saw that the bar was already dark.
“This is stupid,” she said, “to let myself be brought here for the ownership of my cat.”
“Not yours yet,” he said.
“It won’t be long,” she said and glanced at the front desk.
“It’s okay.” He held the cat up. “This kitten will protect you. It will stand between you and me.”
He carried the kitten to the front desk, where the man in charge took one look and placed a key on the signature book and handed them a pen.
Five minutes later they watched the kitten run happily into the suite’s bathroom.
“Have you ever,” he mused, “when you got on an elevator, refused to discuss the w
eather, but told a story about your favorite cat? By the top floor, there’s a wild mixture of sounds from your fellow travelers.”
At which point the kitten ran back into the room.
The kitten jumped on the bed and settled itself in the middle of a pillow in the center of the bed. Seeing this, the young man commented, “Just what I was going to suggest. If we need to rest while we talk we just let the cat keep to the middle of the bed and we can lie, fully dressed, on each side to discuss our problem. Whichever of us the cat moves to first and chooses as future owner, that one gets the cat. Okay?”
“You’ve got some trick up your sleeve,” she said.
“No,” he said. “Whichever way the cat goes, that person becomes the owner.”
The cat on its pillow was almost asleep.
The young man tried to think of something to say because the vast bed lay unoccupied, save by the slumbering beast. It suddenly popped into his head to speak across the bed to the young woman.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“What?”
“Well,” he said, “if we’re going to argue till dawn about my cat—”
“Till dawn, nonsense! Midnight, maybe. My cat, you mean. Catherine.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Silly, but my name’s Catherine.”
“Don’t tell me your nickname.” He almost laughed.
“I won’t. Yours?”
“You won’t believe it. Tom.” He shook his head.
“I’ve known a dozen cats with that name.”
“I don’t live by it.”
He tested the bed as if it were a warm bath, waiting.
“You can stand if you wish, but as for me—”
He arranged himself on the bed.
The kitten snoozed on.
With his eyes shut he said, “Well?”
She sat, and then lay on the far side, prepared to fall.
“That’s more like it. Where were we?”
“Proving which of us deserves to go home with Electra.”
“You’ve named the cat?”
“A noncommittal name, based on personality, not on sex.”
“You didn’t look then?”
“Nor shall I. Electra. Proceed.”
“My plea for ownership? Well.” He rummaged the space behind his eyelids.
He lay looking at the ceiling for a moment and then said, “You know, it’s funny the way things work out with cats. When I was a kid my grandparents told me and my brothers to drown a litter of kittens. We kids went out and they did it, but I couldn’t stand it and ran away.”