A Cat Called Cupid: A Romantic Comedy Novella (3 page)

The loaf of bread, as a realistic imitation of a feline body being struck by a car in motion, could not have been better. I waited until Craig
had shut off the engine. Then I darted under his car. I flung myself against the back of his front passenger-side tire, obscuring the flattened loaf of bread as fully as possible, went limp and waited.

I couldn’t see Craig, of course,
with my eyes closed. But as soon as he caught sight of me, he employed one of Cat Hater’s favorite words. Normally not a practice I smile upon, but appropriate in this case.

I let out a piteous moan, just to let him know I was still alive. Craig then used
Cat Hater’s second favorite word. I let out another piteous moan and opened one eye halfway.

Craig had his phone out. I could feel him messing with the tags hanging from my collar. It was all I could do to keep from smiling to myself and giving the game away.

“Hello,” I heard Craig say. “Are you Ann? I’m terribly sorry, but I think I just ran over your cat.” 

The vet said it was a miracle. Right after “the accident,” I’d taken the precaution of refusing to get up. Of course, I made a show of trying. I’d struggle to get on my feet, and I’d manage to get up on my front legs for a second before sinking back to the ground. From time to time I’d give out another piteous moan, as if I were, even at that very second, being interviewed by St. Peter at the pearly gates. Cats go to heaven, you know. I’m sure felinekind will be much more highly represented in the green fields of paradise than, say, Senators or Boston Terriers.

My ruse
worked. Beautifully. In response to Craig’s frantic phone call, Ann came rushing down to the parking lot. There were hurried introductions. Craig was beside himself with remorse for running over me, a completely sincere show of contrition which was sure to win him points later on when I turned out not to be mortally wounded after all. Ann stayed beside me while Craig went to get a box lined with a clean towel. On his return, Craig lifted me into the box, and we all got into Craig’s car and made a long silent journey to the animal hospital. I had hoped for more in the way of chitchat, but I suppose the presence of my broken and possibly expiring body in the backseat put a damper on things.

The vet did a very
thorough exam. It’s my understanding that the human male fears undergoing prostate exams. Getting one’s temperature taken the old-fashioned way is much the same. After a check of my vital signs had been dispensed with, I was bundled off to the x-ray.

“No broken bones,” said the
vet. “It’s a miracle.”

Ann was so relieved that she started
to cry. Craig, who’d remained with us throughout, patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.

“Normally,” the vet said, “I
’d suggest keeping him here overnight, but with no broken bones and no evidence of internal injuries—”

“
I just don’t understand it,” said Ann. “There’s not a scratch on him.”

“I
’m amazed too,” said the vet. “But animals often surprise us with their resilience.”
 

T
hey took me home. Craig accompanied us up the stairs, and, after Ann set my box down in a sunny spot on the living room floor, they exchanged phone numbers.

“I can’t say how sorry I am,” said Craig.
It was the fiftieth such of similar statements.

What followed
was a lot of back and forth about who should take responsibility for the vet bill. It seemed that Craig had already paid it, but Ann argued that he couldn’t be blamed. It was her fault for letting me wander free. If Cupid—referring to me, of course—didn’t know enough to stay out from under cars, then perhaps he—again, referring to me—should be an inside-only cat.

I seeth
ed with indignation. Inside-only cat, indeed! And after I’d risked life and limb for her future happiness. However, my wounded feelings were soothed considerably when—after Craig had departed—Ann opened a can of salmon and coaxed me to eat.

I couldn’t wolf it down, of course. I certainly wanted to. I’d missed my breakfast
, and the old tummy was putting up a hearty protest, but I restrained myself and took small feeble bites. No good could come of a premature recovery.

I lazed around the apartment for another couple of days. I was hoping that if I waited long enough to agitate for a return
to my former free-range lifestyle, My Lady would have forgotten that I was too stupid to be let out on my own. I wasn’t, of course—stupid, I mean—but there is always a price to pay for feigning ignorance.  

It was
during the third day of my confinement when Cat Hater came crawling back on hands and knees. Not literally, of course. That would have been too dignified. No, the groveling came in the form of a series of texts, each one more loathsome than the last.

It
is my theory that Cat Hater had realized that getting take-out every night quickly adds up. Either that, or he’d run out of clean socks.

Whatever the real reason, it was not the one he gave. I sat on the back of the couch and
peeked over Ann’s shoulder as the revolting volley of messages came through.  I won’t subject you to a play-by-play, but I will reveal that there were a lot of PLZs and U NO I LUV U BABYs. Why the human male persists in the belief that comparing a fully grown woman to a puking, crying, pooping, newly-minted juvenile is an appropriate term of endearment, I’ll never know. 

Against all expectations—and reason—My
Lady took him back. Within the hour, Cat Hater was back in his customary spot on the sofa. He arrived without dirty laundry, however. I suppose even the dimmest of human males knows when not to push his luck.

Later that evening, there was a
conjugal retreat to the bedroom, and Cat Hater left his phone sitting unguarded on the couch.

I took th
is opportunity to resume my survey of Cat Hater’s text messages.

This time,
tucked in amongst a lot of idiotic back and forth about football between Cat Hater and some guy named Rory, I struck gold.

There
was
another woman. Her name was Vanessa. It appeared that Cat Hater and Vanessa had met online, and although their relationship had not yet progressed to the actual meeting stage, this Vanessa and Cat Hater had been communicating almost daily for months. In almost every instance, the tenor of their texts soon degenerated into the obscene. Some of the indecent suggestions Vanessa put forward would have been enough to make a feral feline with twenty-two litters of unknown patriarchal parentage blush from tail-tip to whisker.

I finally had concrete evidence of what I’d suspected all along.
Cat Hater was cheating, or close enough. Unfortunately, being in possession of this incriminating information did me no good unless I could figure out a way to use it against him.

I could hear things winding down in the bedroom
, so I hastily signed off and knocked the phone into a little crevice between the seat cushion and the arm of the couch. I then curled up over the crevice and pretended to be asleep. I wanted to see how Cat Hater would react to finding that his phone had gone missing.

He didn’t react well.

“I’m sure it will turn up,” Ann said, but Cat Hater went on a rampage. He looked under the magazines on the coffee table. He checked to see if it had slid under the couch. He even took off most of the cushions and checked beneath them. I hissed at him when he tried to dislodge me, so he skipped the one I was lying on. In the end, he had to go home bereft of his phone. You’d think he had lost an arm, the way he carried on about it.  

After
Cat Hater went off in a huff, Ann went to bed. I waited an hour and then extricated Cat Hater’s phone from its hiding place. I signed in.

Now came the
challenge. As you might imagine, it’s very difficult to text without fingers, but eventually I managed to tap out a message with my nose which did the trick. There were a lot of missing and extra letters, and it’s a testament to Cat Hater’s lack of literacy that Vanessa didn’t catch on that she wasn’t communicating with the real thing.

Shortly before one in the morning, My Lady’s doorbell rang. Ann emerged from her bedroom, tousled and sleepy-eyed. She didn’t bother to turn the light on.

The doorbell rang again. Ann peaked through the keyhole, but she didn’t answer. The ringing turned to knocking, and then a woman’s voice said, “I know you’re in there, Jimmy!”

The name of Jimmy worked better than Open Sesame. Ann had the door open in a flash.

“Who are you?” Ann demanded.

“I’m looking for Jimmy.”

“You said that already. Who are you?”

“Who are you?”
the doorbell ringer echoed back.

“I live here
,” said Ann.

“Isn’t this Jimmy’s place?”

“No. I mean he’s here a lot, but—”

“
I really need to know. Who are you?” The doorbell ringer was persistent.  

“I’m his girlfriend
,” Ann answered. Then, as an afterthought, she once again inquired into the doorbell ringer’s identity. It did her no good.

There was a gap of silence. I left my post on the couch and slunk my way across the living room floor until I was peeking out from between Ann’s ankles.

I looked up at the woman standing in the doorway. She was exactly as I had imagined her: bottle-blond hair, big earrings and impractical shoes. 

“Jimmy texted me
,” the woman said.

“Jimmy’s not here.”

“But he gave me this address. I’m Vanessa, by the way.”

“Never heard of you,” Ann replied and slammed the door in her face.

My Lady didn’t cry
. Instead, she found a bag of chocolate bars in the back of the refrigerator. I felt sick just watching her, but then I’m not much of a one for sweets. I retreated to the living room, partly because it’s always revolting to watch another creature gorge themselves, but mostly because now that Part A of my nefarious scheme was out of the way, I had a little groundwork to lay for Part B.

I nudged the phone out
from under the coffee table where I’d left it after texting Vanessa. I activated the touch screen and signed in. I meowed politely, but the fascination of the chocolate must have been too strong. My Lady didn’t even acknowledge me.  I meowed a bit louder. Ann went right on tearing off chunks of candy bar as if she were taking bites out of Cat Hater’s arm and liking it. Never eat in anger, I’ve always said, but My Lady obviously subscribes to a different philosophy. To each his own.

D
esperate times call for desperate measures, so I gave up on meowing and emitted a full-on fur-raising war cry. It was a yowl capable of putting the most battle-hardened of alley cats on notice, and it certainly got Ann’s attention. She dropped the candy bar and hurried over. At first the focus was all on me, but I calmed right down and started giving myself a tongue bath, so it wasn’t long before she discovered the phone.

She picked it up and took it back to the kitchen table.
For a few minutes there was nothing, then there was a ding which indicated a new text had been delivered. It was not long after that when My Lady emitted a noise not unlike the yowl I had unloosed earlier. It, too, was a battle cry. Cat Hater was dead meat.

The following evening, at the usual time, Cat Hater arrived at the apartment. It was obvious that he didn’t yet know his days were numbered. I felt sorry for him. Almost.

He hadn’t even
removed his jacket or kicked off his shoes when My Lady of Wrath descended upon him, phone in hand.

“I found your phone,” she said. It was like the calm before
a storm: she might have been informing him that she was making lasagna for dinner, or asking if he’d remembered to pick up a gallon of milk on the way over.

“Great!”
Cat Hater grabbed his phone and clutched it to his chest. For one revolting moment, I thought he might kiss it.  Cat Hater and his phone share a profound emotional bond. But he didn’t kiss it. He just put it in the front pocket of his shirt, nestled next to his heart.

“You missed a text last night,” My Lady informed him.

“Did I?” Cat Hater planted a kiss on My Lady. I suspect he was thinking of his phone the whole time, though. I wonder if he thinks about his phone while in the throes of passion. Probably.

“Aren’t you going to look at
your texts?” Ann asked.

“I’ll do it later.”
Cat Hater kicked off his shoes and headed for his customary spot on the couch.

“Do it now!” It was an order
, not a request. 

“OK. OK. If you want me to look at my
####### texts, I’ll look at my ####### texts!”

I could have told him that getting defensive would do him no good, but at this point I didn’t think anything would do him any good, so I retreated to the top of the bookcase by the window
just in case My Lady was once again contemplating using that porcelain puppy in repose as a projectile.

Cat Hater
looked at his texts.

“What the
####### #### ######## #### #######
?
I never ####### sent any ####### text like this! #### ### ####
!
” 

It appeared
Cat Hater had a limited appreciation for my powers of written expression. I have to admit. Criticism hurts.