News from the World (13 page)

The only woman over the years for whom he had felt even a shred of interest was the mother of his friend's child. When he recognized the interest, stirred once more to life after he stopped seeing the kitty-cat girl, a sequence of scenes ran through his mind like a movie: betrayal, discovery, family disruption, himself a stepfather, late child-support checks. She was steadfast and not especially drawn to him.

There had been a time when he took the kitty-cat girl out for social evenings with his friends. Their enthusiasm for her was tinged by hysteria, he noted, as though he'd been transformed from a lone wolf to a compliant sheep. Walking away from a friend's apartment where they had spent an evening, he felt like a figure in a heroic illustration: a woman-saved prodigal son.

Now he was down to a sick dog. An apartment filled with unattractive furniture awaited him. But Grace would not be there.

He was dizzy after downing such a quantity of whiskey. His fork slid from his hand to fall beneath the table. He didn't bother to search for it but continued to sit motionless in the booth, most of the steak uneaten on the plate.

It might be only the strange weakness that had come over him like a swoon, but he imagined he could feel his bodily canals drying up, his eyes dimming, the roots of his hair drying with tiny explosions like milkweed pods pressed between two fingers.

His resounding No to the kitty-cat girl, from months ago, echoed in his ears. What had prevented him from saying yes? She might have laughed and embraced him. By that magic of affection that can convert embarrassment into merriment, they might have averted all that followed. Instead she had turned away and, he thought, gone to sleep, leaving him in an agitated wakefulness in which his resentment at her fatuity kept at bay, he knew now, a harsh judgment on his own nature.

She was, after all, a very nice woman: kind, generous, full hearted. What did it matter that in bending to someone's pet or a friend's small child she assumed a high, squeaky voice, that she held her hand over her heart when she was moved, that she struck actressy poses when she showed him a new outfit or hairstyle? What had it mattered? Body to body—what did it all really matter?

He sighed and bent to retrieve the fork. In the darkness beneath the table he found a whole cigarette lying among the damp pickle-ends and crumpled napkins.
Smoke it
, he told himself as he felt the strength returning to his arms and hands. Smoking was the one thing that aroused the kitty-cat girl to anger. He'd been startled by it, so much so that he'd given up the pleasure of an infrequent cigarette after dinner in the evening. “Don't make it a religion,” he'd chided her. “It's only one of a thousand things that kill people.”

He summoned a waiter and asked him for a match. While he was speaking, he heard a voice boom out, “. . .
and this will impact the economy.”
Someone at the bar had turned up the volume on a suspended television set. John glimpsed the speaker on the screen, an elderly man wearing steel-rimmed eyeglasses. “Impact is a noun, you stupid son of a bitch,” he muttered, puffing on the cigarette.

“Always correcting my English,” she had protested to him more than once. It suddenly came to him that he'd been lying to himself about how the affair had ended. He'd convinced himself that she had left his apartment, angrily, the morning after their quarrel about “kitty-cat.” In fact it had taken a week, during which they met at the end of the day in his or her apartment, ate together, went to a movie, slept in bed side by side. They had not made love. When they spoke, it was of mundane matters, and when they parted in the morning, he to his office and she to the private school where she taught first grade, she had briefly pressed her cheek against his. Life has its rhythms, he told himself.

But at the end of the week, after staring down at the light supper he'd prepared, she burst out at him in words that suggested a continuation of an angry interior monologue, “—and it's not only the way I talk. You're trying to change the way I am!” She paused, then shouted, “Why don't you say anything you really mean? My God! You wouldn't acknowledge the Eiffel Tower if it fell right on you!”

He had laughed, startled at such an extravagant image. “I'd be speechless then, all right,” he'd said. But he admitted he'd been clumsy.

She asked then, as she wept, how he could have said No to her so savagely. Afterward, when she was dying inside, he'd walked around the apartment with a foolish smile—as though nothing had happened between them.

She picked up her purse from the chair where she'd been sitting, not eating while he ate and kept on talking cheerfully.

“You're one big NO!” she burst out. “And you're smiling this instant . . .”

He recalled touching his face. What she'd said was true. “I don't mean to smile,” he'd said. She got up and dropped her key on a kitchen counter and left the apartment.

He'd eaten her untouched supper, his mind like an empty pail. Then he'd waited for her to telephone him. He'd waited for himself to telephone her. But something had gone out of him. He had slumped into a mulelike opposition to her: she skirted life's real troubles, chirping platitudes.

He dropped the cigarette the waiter had lit for him, got to his feet, and hurried from the bar. Behind him came the waiter. John paid his bill on the sidewalk, all too aware of the stares of the public.

I will not think about her, he ordered himself as he walked home. I have cleared the decks. I'm better off.

As he unlocked the door, he called, “Grace!” Then he remembered. “Oh, Christ . . . ,” he said aloud.

He took a long hot shower, emerging slack limbed and unpleasantly warm. Naked, he walked through the rooms, letting the air dry him, waving his arms, a heavy object trying to fly.

He paused before the bedroom window that looked out on Central Park. Perhaps the comradely woman out for a run, who had remarked on Grace's tits, would look up and observe to a friend, “See the cock hanging up there in that window?” But he was on the seventh floor, invisible to everything but passing birds.

He put on a ragged T-shirt and turned on the television set. As a rule he watched opera, a Friday evening news program, and now and then an old movie. Tonight he would settle for diversion. He was finding it hard to keep his mind off the way he'd left the bar without paying his check.

A news anchor was saying, “The crisis centers around . . .” He switched channels and turned up a psychologist with devilish red hair and a sharp jaw who was discussing role models and sharing. “We must share,” she asserted in a tone John found menacing. “Share what!” he asked the screen. “Give me a noun or give me death. And isn't ‘role model' a tautology?”

On another channel a middle-aged actress declared that after years of substance abuse—“yeah, cocaine, the whole megillah”—and loveless promiscuity, she had become a sexually mature woman, in charge of her body and her life. The male interviewer smiled and nodded without pause.

On a call-in interview, a very large Arab emir was addressed as Abdul by a caller who then asked him, “How ya doin'?” The emir's expression of stolid indifference didn't change, but he appeared to send out a glow like a hot coal.

John switched channels more quickly. In every mouth that spoke from the screen, that word, “hopefully,” ownerless, modifying nothing, inserted itself amid sentences like the white synthetic packing material that protected china or glasses.

The telephone rang. Startled—no one called at this time of evening—he picked it up, and a buoyant male voice asked, “John?”

The voice was not familiar. Perhaps he'd forgotten its owner; he wasn't good with voices. “Yes,” he answered. He discovered at once that it was a selling call. “Do you know me?” John asked. The voice chuckled. “Well, no, John. I don't,” it replied. John hung up.

It was nearly midnight when he turned off the set and went to bed. On a nearby table lay a volume of short stories by a British writer. In one of them, the writer had stated: “You can't help having the diseases of your time.”

He thought of the letters to the newspaper he'd thrown away. Why had he bothered? The apocalypse would not be brought about by debased language, would it? “I've been cracked in the head, Grace,” he said to the absent dog.

His body, his brain, began a slow descent into the formless stuff of sleep. His hands fluttered at the light switch until, with what felt like his last particle of energy, he pressed it off.

At once his heart began to pound. His eyelids flew open, and he was fully awake, recalling the kitty-cat's account of her only brother's death. It had happened several months before he met her. Her brother was visiting her from the Midwest. While shaving one morning in her bathroom, he toppled over, dead from a heart attack. He had been twenty-eight.

She'd telephoned the news to their mother in Norman, Oklahoma. Their father had died of the same ailment several years earlier.

“Oh, Lord—where will we get the money to fly him home and bury him?” were her mother's first words, she'd told John.

He had expressed indignation at such petty concerns in a woman whose son had died.

“You don't understand,” she had cried. “She was putting something in front of her grief—like you bar a door against a burglar. And money isn't petty when there's so little of it!”

She had been right and wrong, as he had been. But he could hardly have pursued the subject while her cheeks were covered with tears.

He turned the light back on and picked up the book of short stories, opening it at random. He read several sentences. Unable to make sense of them, he dropped the book on the table. The phone rang. He grabbed it, aware that he was breathless with hope it would be the girl. “Hello, hello?” he pleaded. A muffled voice at the other end asked, “Manuel?”

The next morning he returned to the vet's office. The waiting room was crowded with animals and their owners. Dogs panted or moved restlessly or whimpered. A brilliant-eyed cat sat on a man's lap, one of its ears nearly severed from its bloodied head.

To John's relief, the receptionist sent him at once to an examining room. The doctor was waiting for him with a grave expression on his face.

“I'm sorry to inform you that”—he turned to glance at a card lying on the table—“Grace has passed away.”

John was astonished to hear himself groan aloud. The doctor gripped his arm. “Steady! Relationships with pets are deeply meaningful,” he said softly. “You shouldn't blame yourself. Grace was a casebook of diseases. But it was the heartworm that finished her off.”

“Heartworm!” cried John.

“It's carried by mosquitoes,” the doctor replied. He relinquished John's arm.

“She didn't seem that sick,” John said dully, leaning against the examining table.

“She was,” the doctor stated brusquely. “And please don't lean against the table or it'll give way. Let me advise a grieving period, after which, hopefully, you'll move on. Get a new pet. Plenty of them need homes.” He nodded at the door.

John held up a hand. “Wait! Had she littered?”

The doctor frowned momentarily. “Yes. I believe she had.”

“What do you do with the bodies?” John asked at the door.

“We have a disposal method in place. You'll be notified,” the doctor answered, taking a bottle of pink liquid from a shelf and shaking it.