A Cat Tells Two Tales (7 page)

“That’s right. We gave it up.” I noticed the way he looked at me, was really listening to me. I was flattered and my hand rose unconsciously to pat my hair.

“Jo told me you were both almost killed by a drunken driver.”

“It was close. Very close.”

“I see the scar,” Coombs said, pointing to my forehead. I touched it once and pulled my hand away. I played with the uneaten Danish. I felt good sitting there. He made me feel very comfortable. His maturity was leavened with a kind of childishness. Maybe it came from working with horses.

He leaned over the desk a bit toward me. “By the way, are you a famous actress?”

“Not really. I’m more famous as a cat-sitter.”

“I mean, should I know who you are? Should I have seen you in something?”

“If you were in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in April 1985, you would have seen me do a very respectable Hedda Gabler. I’m not respectable anymore.”

“My father used to tell me,” Coombs said wryly, “that one has to be respectable to make it in the world. But what do fathers know?”

“What
do
fathers know?”

He didn’t answer my absurd question, but instead looked mournful for a moment. He snapped out of it quickly, though, and laughed. “Do you want me to tell you more horse stories?”

I leaned back. “Tell me whatever you want to tell me,” I replied. We were flirting with each other now, I realized. I didn’t want to do that. What did I want to do?

He started to play with his coffee cup. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come out here on such short notice,” he apologized.

“Actually I like short notices. It seems as if a crisis exists—but there is none. One gets excitement and relief at the same time.”

“There was a crisis,” he said.

“What?”

“You. I wanted to see you.”

“Well, you’ve seen me.”

“Yes, the crisis is over. But I was always good at crises. Actually, that’s why I’m a trainer. The racetrack is about crises. Something bad is always happening. A horse throws a rider. A cinch breaks. A dog bites a horse. A horse bites a vet. A trainer makes the wrong claim. I was always good in crises.”

“Is that why you don’t wear enough clothes in winter?” I asked.

“Right. Stay light. Stay mobile,” he replied, laughing, his rough face crinkling into an incredibly kindly smile.

“Do you come into Manhattan often?” I asked.

“About once a week.”

“Where do you live?”

“I have a small room about ten minutes away from here.”

I looked at his hands holding the coffee cup. I could imagine them wrapped in a rope halter. I had seen them only an hour before, running up the leg of a horse, searching for a swelling. One of his hands disengaged from the cup. He reached it across the table and placed it down, palm up. I reached across and placed my hand in his.

I stood just outside my bedroom door watching Charlie Coombs sleep. I had never gone to bed so quickly with a man, no matter how much I had been attracted to him—except for my brief adventure in promiscuity, which really didn’t count.

The sex had been very good. We had been very good. Perhaps, I thought, my emerging middle age was going to unflower into a new world of eros. I laughed at my own arrogance.

Two sudden darts of light on the bookcase startled me. Then I smiled. It was Pancho, awake and cruising in his particular fashion. “Go to it,” I whispered to him.

I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. The plaster was cold but I was happy. It had been a long time since I had truly experienced intimacy, that sense that one partner was looking out for the other’s pleasure. Charlie was old-fashioned, as he had said. As we made love, he kept telling me how good, how beautiful, how unique I was. It was hokey and charming and ageless and very heady—like a snifter of Napoleon brandy after chocolate cake.

He had, I realized, an ability to give credence to clichés. It was a gift which, oddly enough, I should have had but didn’t—because it was what made actresses great, the ability to transcend a silly fiction, a role, and transform it into something that moves an audience to view the world differently.

There was a flash in the darkness. The eyes on the bookcase had vanished. I scanned the pitch-dark bedroom. I heard a furious but nearly silent rustle somewhere.

Then I located Pancho’s eyes again . . . and lost them again. Then the eyes seemed to flash off and on like a traffic light that has gone berserk. Finally I realized what was happening. Poor dear crazy Pancho was actually playing with sleeping Charlie Coombs. He was bouncing from one end of the bed to the other and then to the floor and then to the bookcase, and he was doing it all so swiftly and quietly and elegantly that the sleeping man was not disturbed.

It was a good omen. I went back to bed.

The weeks of winter began to grind down. I landed a small but lucrative part in an avant-garde German film shot in, of all places, Bayonne, New Jersey. My agent started some “promising” negotiations with “some people” for a possible role as the wife in an off-Broadway revival of Pinter’s
The Homecoming
. I was asked to teach an acting course at the Neighborhood Playhouse for their summer session. And I landed two new cat-sitting assignments, one of them an overpaying job consisting of visiting and feeding a large, somewhat eccentric Siamese on nine consecutive weekends while her owners took a series of jaunts. Ah, the rich. Anyway, I like German films, I like Pinter, I like teaching, and I love Siamese cats. So things were going quite well.

And Charlie Coombs began to spend at least two or three nights a week at my apartment.

The magic, as they say, was continuing. It was odd. We never spoke about what defined us—the theater or the racetrack. We did speak passionately and honestly about the stupidest things: candles, flashlights, cats with tiger stripes, vegetarian cats, cheeseburgers, boots, uncles, and the relationship, if any, between brown eggs and white eggs.

We kept speaking nonsense to each other because we were so enthralled with each other—with the wonder of it all. It was so delicious and crazy that I even enjoyed making coffee for him in the morning.

And so it went. I was finally living the life I should have lived twenty years earlier. I mean, everyone deserves at least one fling at a sublime domestic fantasy.

The bubble, alas, burst on the first Monday in March. It was not Charlie’s fault. It was mine. Out of nowhere a face from the past rose up and took me with him.

The bubble burst this way: I was brushing Bushy on the living-room floor. Grooming a Maine coon like Bushy is always a problem, given the thickness of his coat, but the coat itself was a minor chore compared to the cat. Bushy had this peculiar attitude toward being groomed. He acted as if he was about to run away, so one had to hold him firmly. What was worse, he acted as if I was literally torturing him to death.

Once it was finally done and I stared down at my perfectly groomed cat, I had a memory flash so clear and so powerful that I folded my hands like a schoolchild.

I remembered the first time I saw Harry Starobin groom one of his Himalayans.

He had combed the cat out so quickly and so playfully and with such an awesome combination of gentleness, strength, and precision that I had been unable to respond to a question he asked me during the brushing. I had been hypnotized by the perfect harmony of cat and master.

The memory vanished, as they always do, and in its wake came a profound sense of remorse, as if Harry Starobin had risen from the crushed gravel of the Starobin driveway to make a bitter accusation: I, Alice Nestleton, had allowed Harry Starobin to be forgotten.

I could see his craggy, happy, lined face. I could hear him talk. I could see him wearing those green Wellington boots.

The bizarre apparition was so real that I literally started to tell Harry that Jo and I had no choice: we had almost been murdered. But whom was I speaking to? Bushy? Pancho?

The phone started to ring. I ignored it. I went to the bedroom and lay down. When the phone began ringing again, I let it ring. I didn’t care at that moment for anyone or anything.

Turning my face into the pillow, I could sense Charlie Coombs’s recent presence. He had slept there; we had made love. I turned on my side, feeling bitterly that my life now consisted of making love with Charlie Coombs and cleaning up after Charlie Coombs.

The domestic fantasy was deflating quickly. It dawned on me that a single memory of Harry Starobin had negated what I had considered a profound joy.

As I turned over on the other side, I realized that nothing I had done in my life had provided the intense excitement I had felt during the few days I had spent searching for Ginger Mauch and searching for the source of Harry’s secret money. Not making love with Charlie Coombs. Not the theater. Nothing.

I had to do something, I realized. I had to rectify the betrayal. I had to go somewhere.

I sat up. I laughed to myself cynically, remembering the last two lines and the final stage instructions of
Waiting for Godot
.

Vladimir asks: “Well? Shall we go?”

Estragon answers: “Yes, let’s go.”

The stage direction reads: They do not move.

11

I opened my eyes and found myself staring into Charlie Coombs’s eyes. I started to turn away, but his hand reached quickly around my waist and pulled me even closer to him on the bed.

“It’s the first time that we’ve made love and you’ve had other things on your mind,” he said.

“Life is harsh,” I replied sarcastically, and then added: “What’s the matter, Charlie? Didn’t you enjoy it?”

He released the pressure of his arm around my waist. I turned away from him.

“Hell, Alice, I train horses for a living, remember? I know when a horse is keeping her mind on her business and when she’s not.”

I was about to retort angrily that I was not a horse and lovemaking wasn’t running—but I said nothing, because he was right. My mind was on other things. I touched him gently on the knee in a kind of apology.

My mind was on Harry Starobin. Maybe I had been wrong about the attempted murder with the pickup truck—maybe the driver had been drunk, as the police speculated.

I looked at Charlie. He still had that hurt expression in his eyes. I moved close to him and tenderly kissed him on the shoulder.

After I had made that gesture, it infuriated me. I edged away from Charlie. What was I doing? It was the same old story again. In all my relationships with men, I had always placated them. I had vowed never to do that again—and there I was, doing it. The moment a little tension had appeared, I had started accommodating his fears.

But I had to defuse the situation—it was too unimportant to keep me engaged with it. I had to defuse it . . . deflect it . . . and to do so, I indulged in a little harmless lunacy. I started to neigh like a horse. Then I asked him if I was now keeping my mind on business like I should. He found that very funny. I found it easy to do. Then we both started acting stupid together, neighing and whinnying like horses. And then we made love again.

We lay there in the dark stillness. Only faint noises from the street could be heard. Even Pancho had ceased his travels. And Bushy was curled up on the far side of Charlie Coombs’s pillow.

“Charlie,” I said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Ask.”

“Suppose I wanted to write a book about that horse you told me about.”

“You mean Cup of Tea?”

“Right.”

“You didn’t even know who he was, Alice.”

“Charlie, just imagine I’m writing a book about Cup of Tea. Where do I get information on him—stories, pictures?”

“In both the regular newspapers and the racing press. There have been thousands of stories printed about that horse.”

“What is the racing press?”

“I mean papers and magazines that specialize in the racing and breeding of horses.”

“Are there many?”

“Sure. There’s the
Daily Racing Form, Chronicle of the Horse, Equus, Spur, Thoroughbred Record
—hell, there must be at least fifty.”

Bushy, becoming upset because Charlie had raised his voice, contemptuously vacated the pillow and the bed, walking off stiff-legged down the hall toward the sofa in the living room.

“Your cat is telling me something,” Charlie said.

“Fool,” I said tenderly, and then added, “Go to sleep, Charlie.”

I turned away from him and waited to hear the slow, rhythmic breathing which signaled that he had indeed gone to sleep.

For my part, I was filled with anticipatory excitement. I was going to go back in time and find out about that horse called Cup of Tea whose exercise rider had been none other than Ginger Mauch. It was back again to sly Ginger, duplicitous Ginger, dangerous Ginger. Perhaps even dead Ginger. Or perhaps even innocent Ginger—child rider, child lover, fleeing only from a broken heart.

As I lay there in the darkness, I had this tremendous confidence that I had made the right decision. That it was necessary to complete the Harry Starobin file . . . that I had to find Ginger to do that . . . and if I couldn’t find her through regular channels, I had to take a different path. Yes—different path—the concept excited me, like it was some kind of Oriental truth or something like that. But it really meant that this time I was starting with a horse—Cup of Tea.

Alice Nestleton was now engaged in writing a book on Cup of Tea. A third career.

It was ludicrous. I stifled a giggle. I was never good at composition, although I had once won a prize in the very early grades for a cat limerick that was so bad it had to win:

There once was a cat named Lily.

Her face was sweet as Chantilly.

She milked the cow

and herded the sow

But her kittens were downright silly.

The next morning, Charlie, as always, gave me a long, desperate embrace before he left, as if he would never see me again. I drank my coffee standing at the window. I was happy that Charlie had left early. The whole affair was getting strange. I looked forward to Charlie’s visits. I wanted him to sleep over as often as he could. But on the other hand, I had absolutely no desire to share anything with him other than my bed. Perhaps I had been alone too long.

At ten I left the house to begin my new pseudo-career as biographer of a horse called Cup of Tea. I walked uptown toward the Mid-Manhattan Library on Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue. It was a clear, crisp morning, and I walked easily in a denim dress and wool sweater, my hair loose. Sometimes I slipped into a long-strided gait—what they used to call shit-kicking—the only thing that remained of my childhood on a dairy farm. It was the way my grandmother used to walk.

When I reached Thirty-fourth and Fifth I slowed down and began to window-shop. Something was bothering me. My anxiety, though, had nothing to do with where I was going or what I was going to do there. I felt that someone was watching me.

Pausing in front of a store which had an enormous selection of athletic shoes in the window, I turned halfway and saw that I had a clear shot of Fifth Avenue looking downtown.

There were so many people, and none of them were watching me. I must be getting weird, I thought. Even if someone had tried to kill me, I hadn’t been looking for Harry’s murderer for two months.

Then a flash of color caught my eye: a fishing feather in the rim of a man’s hat about two blocks away. He was turning off Fifth as I saw him. Then he and the feather were gone.

Was he the one who had been watching me? How could I be sure? Was it only paranoia induced by the fact that I was once again dealing with the murders of Harry Starobin and Mona Aspen?

I started walking again toward the library. When I reached the entrance I leaned against an outside wall. My hands were sweaty. I didn’t feel so good.

I remembered where I had seen a feather like that. At Mona Aspen’s place. A hat like that had been worn by her nephew, Nicholas Hill.

I looked downtown quickly. He had not reappeared. Had Nicholas Hill been following me? If so, why? I remembered that when I had spoken to him about Ginger I hadn’t liked his attitude or response. He had made me suspicious then.

As I entered the library, though, I had to shake it off. I hadn’t been involved in the case for two months. Had he been coming in to New York every day to watch me go to the grocery store? No, it had to be a fluke.

The periodicals librarian, who had never heard of Cup of Tea, told me I should first search the
New York Times Index
before going to the specialty horse magazines.

To my astonishment, I found that there were literally hundreds of references to Cup of Tea. He had obviously been the darling of the
Times’
s sportswriters—there was an article every three days on average. The horse had even been mentioned prominently in an editorial.

I spent the entire day at the microfilm machine reading articles from the
Times
dealing with the horse’s rags-to-riches racing career.

All sorts of innocuous bits of information were scattered throughout the articles: Cup of Tea loved peanut butter spread over a carrot; one of his jockeys was a diabetic; his trainer had been married three times; he won his last three races, before he retired to stud, by a combined total of fifty-one lengths.

I spent two more days on the
Times
and then started on the specialized magazines. I learned much more about Cup of Tea: his stride, his breeding, his training, how he changed leads, how he acted in the barn, what he ate and why.

I really didn’t know what I was looking for, but whatever it was, I hadn’t found it after six days of intensive research. More important, I had not found a single reference to Ginger Mauch being one of Cup of Tea’s exercise riders.

The next week I moved across the street to the main reference library, concentrating on books rather than periodicals. During the years that Cup of Tea had been active as a champion, 1978–1984, dozens of books on horse racing and breeding had been published, and a great many of them at least mentioned him.

My days became very dreary: handing in slips, retrieving books, going through indexes and tables of contents and photo lists and credits. The only reason the stultifying routine was bearable was that I often thought about Harry as I searched the books. Harry would be proud that I had transcended fear and bad faith and returned to the puzzle of his death.

Charlie Coombs, on the contrary, was unhappy. He started complaining about how even on the two nights he slept over, I left him alone with the cats and stayed late at the library. He kept asking me, “Do you really expect me to believe that you’re writing a book on Cup of Tea?”

His discomfort started me really thinking about him. I remember one rainy Tuesday when the thought came to me: Where were Charlie Coombs and I going? Did he really love me? Could we live together? I started creating scenarios for both of us, from the ridiculous to the sublime—scenarios of shouting matches and furious lovemaking afterward, of stormy separations and silent reunions.

It was during one of those scenarios that I reached for a book with a beautiful blue cover. The book was titled
Great Thoroughbreds
and was one of those gushy, extravagant items for young girls who become fixated on horses during adolescence. I leafed through the table of contents—a roster of great racehorses: Man of War, Whirlaway, Stymie, Northern Dancer, Secretariat, Ruffian, Forego—it had them all.

Cup of Tea was also there, listed as being on page seventy-eight. I flipped to the page and froze.

In front of me was a picture of Cup of Tea being unsaddled after a workout. A groom was on one side, holding the horse while the trainer did the unsaddling. An exercise rider was crouching next to the horse, fixing something on her boot, helmet in the other hand.

It was Ginger Mauch.

On one side of the horse was a bucket of water, and seated beside the bucket, gazing at Cup of Tea, was a lovely calico cat. The cat had the exact same markings and appearance as the cat I had seen in the photograph Jo and I found in Ginger’s abandoned apartment.

Jo Starobin had said that the cat in the photo with Harry was the missing calico barn cat, Veronica.