Cat by Any Other Name (9781101597729) (2 page)

BOOK: Cat by Any Other Name (9781101597729)
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Chapter 3

Tim didn't call me. Instead he simply appeared on my doorstep one afternoon. He was carrying
two
boxes this time.

His appearance put the seal on what had already been a difficult morning. I had spent the day up to that point trying to sell packets of dried catnip to gourmet shops and the fancier grocery markets in my neighborhood. We were all still reeling from Barbara's death, but we'd decided to carry on the work of the herb garden anyway, because Barbara would have wanted it that way. We maintained the division of labor that had been decided upon: We all harvested, but Sylvia and Ava dried the plants, and Renee packaged them, and me, I sold them. It was a task for which I would never have volunteered. But my sister gardeners had somehow come to the I suppose rather logical conclusion that an actress should make an ideal saleswoman.

By ten thirty that morning I had already been in and out of four stores, without a sale.

My fifth stop was a brand-new, upscale health food store on Second Avenue. It was called Nature & Nurture. I walked in boldly, remembering Ava Fabrikant's pep talk, designed to assure me I'd be a successful salesperson. “But, Alice, you're an actress—remember? An
actress
. You know how to make an entrance, right? You know how to persuade, inspire trust, charm. You'll just sweep in grandly and turn it on. You'll blow the competition out of the water.”

“What competition is that?” I asked.

“You'll be irresistible,” she assured me.

But my grand entrance into Nature & Nurture was wasted. The place was entirely devoid of people. It did look like a well-stocked operation, however: jars and jars of organic, pesticide-free jams and spreads . . . cans of scrupulously prepared vegetarian soup . . . bottles of gargantuan mega-vitamin tablets . . . racks of books on the subjects of health and exercise and holistic healing . . . even a small refrigerator stocked with bottles of goat's milk and containers of mysterious murky liquids whose labels were printed in colorful Japanese lettering.

I walked over to the deserted counter. How quaint—there was a little bell. I gently tapped on it, but the tinkle wasn't loud enough to rouse a mouse. So I slapped it hard. I'll flip back into the charm mode as soon as the proprietor appears, I told myself.

“Coming, coming,” I heard someone grumble from the back of the store. A man appeared a minute after that. He was dressed in black T-shirt and jeans, and was covered with dust. I noticed he was carrying a pair of pliers and a light bulb, obviously having been repairing something in back. He didn't seem excited at the prospect of what, for all he knew, was a paying customer.

“What can I do for you, miss?” He ran his hand through the wisps of graying red hair above his round face.

By way of an answer, I took out one of the small packets from my shoulder bag and held it up. “I'd like to interest you in carrying our wonderful organic catnip. It's homegrown, right here in the city in a lovely herb garden downtown. It costs you only seventy-five cents a unit, and you could sell it easily for a dollar and a half or even two dollars a bag.”

I guessed my pitch wasn't working, because he didn't reply. He looked from my face to the bag of catnip and then back at me. Before I could go on with my spiel, though, he began to laugh. Not just a chuckle but a huge laugh—one I might have appreciated if this had been a production of
Private Lives
, for instance.

I didn't understand. What had I done?

After a minute he composed himself. “I'm sorry. Please excuse me. It's just that I come out here like Jeeves the Butler, in answer to that ridiculous bell, and I see this tall, gorgeous woman in a forties suit jacket my mother would have killed for, and then you launch into a spiel about catnip, and then I realize you were Kate in the last play I ever took my mother to. It was all just too funny.”

“You saw me in
Taming of the Shrew?

“The Cherry Lane. Nineteen seventy-one. You were exquisite.”

“Well, aren't you nice? And you like my clothes, too.”

He laughed again. “Guess you never know how things are going to turn out, right? I'm managing a rabbit-food emporium, and you're pushing— I mean . . .”

“Yes,” I jumped in. “Well, anyway, this really is a fine product. Would you consider trying a few packages?”

“Look. Thanks, anyway. But we can't use it. There's a pet store around the corner. Why don't you try them?”

“I could leave it here on consignment,” I pressed on, though I wanted nothing more than to be out of there. “You pay nothing unless you sell it.”

“I'm sure we won't have any call for it.” He shook his head. He was starting to walk away. I was losing him.

“One minute more!” I called out, knowing now the literal meaning of “Don't take ‘no' for an answer.” “You do know, of course, that catnip is not just for cats?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you know, for instance, that catnip was brought to the New World back in 1620 by a Captain Mason, who had selected it as one of the essential herbs to be planted in the gardens of Newfoundland fishermen?”

I'd done it now. But since he'd obviously already decided I was a nut, I went on. “Why, the Romans used it for ailments of the nose and throat. The American colonists used it as a remedy for mild stomach disorders in children. And trappers used it to relieve poison ivy burns.”

I didn't know whether he believed all of it, but I knew then that I had him. I threw out, as a final flamboyant tidbit: “In medieval Europe it was a common culinary herb for soups and stews. And surely you know how delicious and healthful it is as a tea?”

The man sighed, all the fight gone out of him. “Leave a couple,” he said, and he smiled again.

I stacked twenty packets neatly on the counter and left.

I began the walk home, exhausted.

As soon as I turned the corner onto Twenty-Sixth Street, I spotted Tim Roman on the stoop of my apartment building.

When he noticed me approaching, he straightened, holding my eyes with his own until we were standing face-to-face. His face looked thinner, and his eyes were bloodshot. His wavy gray hair was a little mussed. For the first time, he looked his age—about fifty. But if there was about him a worn-down air, there was also one of sportiness— Tim looked almost rakish. His black turtleneck and overalls gave him a look of downtown artiness. Well, after all, he was a designer.

“I have something to give you,” he said in a clipped voice, nodding at an oblong box lying on the step. But my eye went of its own accord to the other box: a cat carrier.

“That's not . . . Swampy?” I asked, incredulous. Was he going to give me Barbara's cat?!

“Yes, it is Swampy,” he replied. “I thought you might spend a few minutes with him. He's become so morose since Barbara— I think he misses a woman's touch.”

“But I have two cats upstairs, Tim. It wouldn't be fair—not to mention safe—to bring another cat into the house.”

“Couldn't you put them in another room, just for a few minutes? I promise I won't stay long.”

He was obviously still in the throes of grief. There was so much pain in his face that at that moment I would have done just about anything to rid him of it.

We climbed the stairs together, landing after landing, five flights in all. He waited outside while I herded my beasts into the small bedroom. Bushy was no problem; he was sleeping on the living room rug as usual, so I just plucked up the big Maine coon in my arms and carried him down the hall and dropped him on the bed. He yawned and sought out the pillow. Pancho was another story. My no-tailed, scarred, gray ASPCA survivor was on one of his crazy runs through the apartment, in flight from imaginary enemies. I stationed myself at the door of the bedroom, and when Pancho flew by and into the room, I shut the door behind him. Then I admitted Tim and his parcels.

Tim went to the sofa and sat down, wearily stretching out his long legs. His tiredness showed in his every movement. Grief takes a lot out of you—I knew. He closed his eyes and kept them that way for a long moment. I sat quietly in my chair.

Then he roused himself and bent down to open the door of the cat carrier.

Swampy ambled out. I had seen the cat before at Barbara and Tim's apartment, but I never ceased to marvel at him. Swampy was positively thuggish, the quintessential alley cat: a massive, low-framed beast with bright, confrontational eyes, a swaggering gait, and a short coat the blue-black color of a mean-looking gun.

“Barbara talked to him all the time,” Tim said, “and now he has no one to communicate with.” A case of classic projection, I thought smugly, although I never would have said so. Instead I began to speak to Swampy, holding my hand near his head so that he could sniff me. He seemed to be uninterested in what I had to say. He just continued to check out his new surroundings, maybe looking for trouble. Then I got an idea. I fetched one of the packets of catnip and hit him gently on the nose with it, allowing him to get a good whiff. That perked him up. I threw the packet behind the pillow on the sofa. Swampy leaped up and began to search.

With the cat happily engaged, Tim picked up his second package from the floor.

“Here, Alice,” he said, extending it to me, handling the box as though it were a sacred object.

I placed the box on my lap and took off the lid. Inside were a pair of running shoes and a jogging outfit. I continued to look down at the items, not understanding their significance.

Tim leaned forward, pressing his strong, tapered fingers together. “They were Barbara's,” he said quietly. “Alice, you know how much she thought of you. Barbara loved you. She'd want you to have something personal of hers, I just know she would.”

I searched my mind for something to say. “I didn't know that Barbara was . . . I didn't know that she ran.”

“Oh yes, for some time now. She ran every morning. Left the house at six and came back around eight. Then we'd have coffee together before I went to work.” He looked off then, and I could see that he was crying.

“I think I'd better be leaving now,” he said. Tim retrieved the cat and stuffed him into the box. “Thank you, Alice.”

I sat looking at the clothing, shaking my head. Then I closed the lid of the box and stashed it in the hall closet. Weird. The events of the long day were starting to close in on me. I was tired, too. I heard the sounds of a disagreement in the bedroom, so I went in and released my two cats. I lay down with the radio on and fell into a somber, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 4

“Earth to Swede. Earth to Swede. Come in, Alice! Where
are
you, girl?” Tony Basillio was waving his hand in front of my face.

We were sitting in a dark bar on Seventh Avenue in the twenties. It was a few minutes past noon.

“I'm sorry, Tony,” I said, sipping from my club soda. “I'm distracted, I guess. Was I being rude?”

“I wouldn't say ‘rude,'” he laughed, “but I just told you the best news I've had since I left my wife. Since I decided to chuck the copy stores. Maybe my only good news since you stopped—ahem—sleeping with me. And you just sit there like you've lost your best friend.”

He had just finished an exuberant story about the big break he'd received. He'd landed the job as stage designer for a far-out, modern-dress production of
Julius Caesar
, at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. The original group was long extinct, but a new company had been formed and were using the old theater. Excited at being back in the theater milieu, he couldn't wait to get to work. He was leaving the City for Connecticut in a couple of days.

I had to smile ruefully at the inadvertent sick joke he'd just made. “Truth is, Tony, I
did
lose my best friend. Just about my best friend.”

“What do you mean?”

I gave him the capsule version of recent events. He had known, of course, about my work at the herb garden, thought all of it was hilarious, but I had not spoken much about my friendship with Barbara and what she had come to mean to me. I don't really know why I'd never told him how close we'd become—perhaps because I thought he'd be jealous. I depended heavily on Tony's friendship, too.

He paled. “Oh, God. I really put my foot in it, didn't I?” he said. “Swede, I'm so sorry.” And he leaned over and kissed me.

It was only when he leaned back that I noticed he was letting his hair grow long again. His thin face, handsome but pockmarked, and his deep-set eyes made him look rather like an aging addict. He would be pleased, I thought, to know that he was beginning to look like Julian Beck or better Artaud.

I wanted to bring the conversation back to him. “So who's directing?” I asked. “Some young turk?”

But he didn't answer. “How did your friend . . . ?”

“She went off an apartment terrace. Twenty-three stories up. Or was it twenty-five? I forget.”

He took in a sharp breath and covered his eyes. “Jesus, Swede. Did you see her . . . afterwards?”

“No, no. I didn't.” The smell of frying meat drifted across the little booth. I swallowed a couple of times before going on. “The problem is, Tony . . . it just shouldn't have been Barbara. Anyone else, but not her. Do you know what I mean?”

“No, I'm not sure I do.”

“I mean, not
her
. I just can't stand that it was her.” My voice broke suddenly, and he sat there, letting me cry as long as I needed to.

Tony had long ago finished his second vodka and Coke. It was time for him to leave. He wrote a telephone number on a slip of note paper and handed it to me. “That's where I'll be in Connecticut. I'm there for you. If you need me, just call.”

We walked outside and stood together in the warm afternoon sun.

“Life is sweet,” he said, “but it sucks. Right, sweetheart?”

I had to laugh at that.

He squeezed my hand, turned, and headed uptown. I watched him go, then began to walk east.

***

The moment I was inside the apartment door I kicked off my shoes. Bushy walked by me casually—a sure sign I'd interrupted some mischief. I greeted him warmly just the same.

Ah, Tony. He had turned out—as mercurial as he was—to be a sort of rock for me, a real anchor in life. When he was as understanding and lovely to me as he had been today, I tended to lose sight of why I'd broken off the sexual end of our relationship. As I took off the rest of my things, I thought of all the men with whom I'd once been in love, or what passes for it, and how sooner or later they'd all become just amiable luncheon or cocktail companions. What does that say about me? I wondered. “Oh, well,” I leaned down and confided to the cat, “you know they're in love if they take you to dinner.” It sounded like the hit song from a very bad musical.

Perhaps when all is said and done, I really am a cockeyed optimist, speaking of musicals. It was as though I were determined to extract something light and good out of what was decidedly a downbeat day. I felt the aching need for a few laughs and some honest girl talk with a friend, so, standing in my stockinged feet, I picked up the phone and started to dial—incredibly, insanely—Barbara Roman's number. I slammed down the receiver before reaching the last digit.

Oh, Lord. The sense of loss was as fresh as ever, the stunning, uncomprehending grief, the just plain missing her.

It was at that moment, sitting on the sofa with my head in my hands, that I thought of Tim Roman's ridiculously bizarre gift to me. I hurried to the closet and retrieved the cardboard box. As I sat examining the things inside it, Bushy leaped up for a cursory inspection, then just as quickly decided he wasn't interested. Barbara might well have appreciated the absurdity of the memento of her that Tim had passed on to me—the wild inappropriateness of it—or she might simply have been appalled at his lack of taste and sensitivity.

I unfolded the jogging outfit. It was a satiny one-piece affair that zipped up the front, neither old nor new. It had been laundered a few times, clearly, but had none of the well-worn softness of the gardening overalls and smocks that Barbara wore so frequently. There were no pulled threads, no fraying at the cuffs, no discoloration from sweat. I ran my hand over the fabric again and again, almost as if I might bring forth some spark of energy.

Then I took one of the shoes out of the box. The label on the back read
ADDIDAS
. A blue lady's sneaker with sky-blue laces. I turned it over in my hand. That was odd: The tread on the bottom of the shoe was not worn down at all. Again, not a new item, but obviously not a much-used one, either.

I pulled out the other shoe, delaying for just a few seconds my inspection of its heel and sole, making a little routine of the suspense. Same deal.

I sat there thinking, the things still in my lap. How do you go out running every morning for months and not wear down your shoes? How do you manage to keep the clothes you jog in looking almost pristine? You don't. It would be understandable if the suit and shoes were new and there simply hadn't been time enough to break them in thoroughly. But these items weren't new. . . . Well, they were and they weren't.

I got up and went over to the window, the pace of my thoughts as quick and ragged as the steps of the people on the five o'clock street below.

***

By the time I found myself standing at the sink, washing spinach leaves for supper, the sundry speculations I'd been turning over in my head had cohered into absolute certainties. As far as I was concerned, there were no more could-be's or maybe's—I had settled on the cold, hard facts.

Those “facts” were these: Barbara Roman left the house at about six each morning dressed for an invigorating run, and she returned home a few hours later. And every day that she put those clothes on and walked out the door, she was lying to her husband.

Why would she have told Tim that she was out jogging, when she was not? Answer: Barbara had had something to hide. The obvious was obvious. Facts were facts.

So Barbara had had a lover. Why did that so astonish and shock me? I didn't think of myself as a prude, but perhaps the farm girl in me was coming to the surface here, where Barbara was concerned. Loads of married women have affairs—not to mention married men. Why was the thought of Barbara doing what millions of others had done so unacceptable? Had I not only admired and loved her but enshrined her? Granted her sainthood? Yes, of course I had. The fact of the matter was that I had put her up on all kinds of absurd pedestals. Maybe we all had idealized her, paying so much homage to her specialness that we wouldn't allow her to be normal. Except that she
was
special; she
was
different; we hadn't been wrong.

A seamy image came to me then: Barbara in the arms of some well-built young man in a dumpy hotel. Or maybe it wasn't like that. Maybe he was a debonair millionaire with an East Side townhouse. Sure . . . Barbara trotting delicately down the street in her little pink outfit and shoes, turning the corner onto Second Avenue, jumping into a waiting taxi, and speeding to his place each morning. Him watching for the car from a high window, and then the two of them spending the early-morning hours making love in his spare white bedroom.

This sort of thing may have been the stuff of dreams for some middle-aged women, but I was neither titillated nor amused by it. I was, however, angry. I recognized suddenly that I was angry as hell at Barbara. I couldn't think of a single thing about my life that I wouldn't gladly have told her. But she, on the other hand, had kept this enormous secret from me. Enormous and vital secret, obviously. She'd jumped to her death because of him, hadn't she? He—whoever he was—had left her, and so she'd killed herself. No. Impossible. I was in Soap Opera Land. Nobody in this day and age commits suicide over something like that.

Perhaps the lover was dead, then? And she'd acted out of grief for him?

Or perhaps the fact of her lover was the least of her secrets. He was only the tip of an iceberg. Barbara had another life altogether—one hidden from family and friends—and the lover was only one part of it. And something in that second life had driven her to destroy herself. Was the soap opera taking over again? Was any of this possible?

One thing I
wasn't
making up: Barbara was dead. So, double life or no, who was going to benefit from my finding out why she jumped off that terrace? Why should I bother to find out why?

***

Because.

I had finished my instant coffee, and after washing up the dinner things I went after a brandy. Sitting there, feeling all alone in the dark city, I knew I was committed to getting answers to all the whys about Barbara's death. Even if I had to repress the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that I was invading her privacy, trampling on her rights, maybe even defiling the grave of a saint. I had to know, it was as simple as that, even if I never told another soul.

Because
, I thought, as I checked to make sure that the front door was bolted. And as I felt a few tears stinging behind my eyelids, even I realized what a petulant, childish kind of nonanswer that was.

I switched off the lamp. Making my way toward the bedroom in the dark, I heard the cats, who'd been roosting god knows where, fall into step behind me.

I had never been a soap opera fan. I was as grounded in reality as the next actress. And I knew with total certainty that I had not merely imagined that Barbara Roman loved and trusted me.

I drifted off to sleep knowing that I had my work cut out for me, and thinking also about Basillio's earlier flippancy. Life is sweet, but it sucks. And vice versa.

Because!

BOOK: Cat by Any Other Name (9781101597729)
6.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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