John doesn't know what to do
about this girl. She keeps saying, "If you love me, you'll move with me to Texas." She
sulks and smokes Marlboros in the backseat. She has dimpled white skin like balls
of dough pressed together and wears the most wonderful old dresses, flowered
with bell-shaped skirts, the kinds of dresses Doris Day would have worn while
shopping for cucumbers, zucchinis and yellow squash. She has a cherry Life Saver
on a string around her neck. Between cigarettes she sucks it, then lets it fall
onto her chest, where a red stain spreads across the bow of her clavicle. John
leans over to lick the stain and she swats him away. This may not be love, he
thinks, but it's an intriguing facsimile.
At night he lies on his back and listens to the neighbors having sex: first she makes a noise, then he makes a noise, and so on, back and forth. He takes Betty's hand in the dark. When she pulls it away it's as cool and boneless as an empty glove. He stares ahead into the darkness, thinking: I should have gone into advertising.
They end up renting a lousy house with a wonderful porch
and a yard full of feral cats. Everything smells like cat piss. They trot along
the fence and jump on the roof with a soft thud.
He lets his hands wander all over her cotton panties until he feels a wet spot spreading toward the hem.
They shred the State Bird of
Texas and leave it on the porch. The feet are in a separate pile. Betty says
she hates the cats, they're dirty, infested and multiplying, and to please her
he agrees. He agrees with everything she says and she still comes home in a
fighting mood, tucking her legs up under her dress and repeating every joke
she can remember about how lawyers are like sharks, roaches, catfish, gutless
bottom-feeders, because she puts things in files for them all day and takes
things out of files for them all day and is not often appreciated or even looked
at, in her fresh dresses, in her sweet 1950s cat-eyed glasses that make her
look like a sexy librarian in an educational film. John decides he'll love her
anyway, for the sake of her clothes, for her dainty feet and for the mole on
her neck, though she is in every other respect distant and spiteful.
She says she's never stopped thinking about some other guy. Someone less nice than he is, who rides a Harley.
He says, "Fuck you, Betty" and likes it so much
he says it again. He says "women" like some venomous husband on an old
sitcom and with this uxorious pronouncement loves her all over again:
smitten, fucked up, gone.
He spends the days driving around, the land stretching out flat in all directions. Why are there no horses in Texas? No cowboys, no hitching posts, no dinner bells clanging at dusk? He pulls over and buys a donut from Vietnamese immigrants at the Wagon Wheel Donut Shop. He gets the oil in the Caddy changed at a Jiffy Lube — an entire franchise with heavy equipment and credit card verification entrusted to the care of teenage boys. The West spreads out before him, a grid of mini- malls, postal centers and check cashing joints squatting beneath the sunset, the sky crisscrossed by jet streams as orange as poster paint. She lets him fuck her about half the time. He cannot flat-out ask. He cannot murmur any endearments or words of lust. He must wait until she's half asleep and then come up on her from behind, pressing against her in a casual, aloof way; and then act as though he is really asleep and so not actually possessing any desire.
promotion
He lets his hands wander all over her cotton panties until he feels a wet spot spreading toward the hem. At which point she'll usually let him do whatever he can think of.
She has brought him here as though she wanted him for something, but maybe she doesn't want him. Maybe she wants something else. A wheel and not a donut.
One of the cats that turns up on the porch seems to be at least half-tame. He finds Betty standing on the welcome mat, clucking to her. The cat cringes under an old chair and meows. John gives her a saucerful of milk, like the boy scout he once was.
"You're not supposed to give them milk," Betty says.
"Why not?"
She thinks it over. "Because they like it."
The cat is black and silky, a real Breck girl. Once she's tasted milk her personality transforms. She sits outside on the porch all day and cries and cries to come inside. She's relentless. Every time they crack open the door, she makes her face very sweet, very heart-shaped and soft, and emits a pure, high-pitched meeee. If they move to another room, the cat follows and pleads from outside the window. Finally Betty relents and lets her in. She sniffs the baseboards. She crawls under the bed and emerges loaded with dust.
Then the cat sits in front of the back door and cries and cries to be let back out.
The emptiness of days spent on unemployment is wearing John down. He's left everything behind for Betty — maybe
it was not the most brilliant career but it was something; a little design business,
a little D.J.ing on the side, a life full of style if not cash.
She
crooked her finger and he pulled up his pants and ran, a chump for
love.
He ditched it
for her without a second thought; she crooked her finger and he pulled up his
pants and ran, a chump for love, like all of his friends, guys from college who'd
been made fools of, a whole club of guys jerked from the end of a whip by one
girl or another, beautiful girls with histories of abuse or mistreatment, the
flamboyant ones, the ones that needed everything and then fled when they got
it, wild and smart but stupid about life; stupid, stupid—and the boys too, all of them, stupid. It was glorious. The boys were in Rhode Island. He was broke.
At night they take walks when the heat is bearable. The streets are empty of humans, empty of cars, but
six or eight cats are sitting on the sidewalk, grooming themselves or staring
ahead vacantly with their aura of cute badness, like schoolgirls smoking. There
are cats in ones or twos striding down the sidewalks, on missions of roach-catching
or fence-sniffing, full of purpose.
Betty tries to lure them with tongue clucks but they dive under parked cars, terrified.
"You can't pet them at night," he says.
"Why not?"
"You just can't. They're not in the mood."
"How about that one?" she says, pointing to a fat housecat sleeping on a porch swing. "That one looks like it doesn't know it's night."
She tries the tongue cluck. The housecat opens its eyes, tries to go back to sleep, but the tongue cluck is mesmerizing. It does the Halloween stretch and then shambles over.
She kneels down and pets it with a flat palm, like a little girl. The cat allows this for a minute, then rubs against the fence, then allows it again.
"What's it thinking?" she asks.
"Pet me," he says. "Pet me. Go away. Pet me. Go away."
The cat has something wrong with its vocal chords. It cannot properly meow and
instead makes a coughing sound. "That's cute," she says, "like Rod Stewart."
If she can love a cat, he thinks, then she sure as shit can love him.
