“Why don’t you bring it home?” she asked, scrutinizing it as it made itself comfortable on his desk.
He answered, “It keeps me company here. When I’m doing paper work at night.”
“Does it have a name?” She tried to stroke it, but the cat moved away from her.
“I call it Porky,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it eats everything anybody gives it,” he said, feeling embarrassed, as if caught in an immodest or unmasculine thing.
“The girls would love it,” Fay said. “You know how they’ve been wanting a cat. Bing is too big for them, and that guinea pig they got at the museum did nothing but crap all the time and hide.”
“It would run away,” he said. “The dog would scare it.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Bring it home. We’ll keep it inside. I’ll feed it; it’ll be much happier there. You know you’re only down here at night once a week at the most — look, it’ll be in a warm house, which cats love, and it’ll have all the bones and scraps from three meals –” Petting the cat, she added, “And I want a cat, too.”
In the end she persuaded him. And yet, watching her try to stroke the cat, he felt convinced that she did not really want the cat around the house; she was actually jealous of it because he liked it and wanted to keep it away from her, down at the plant. He kept the cat separate from his life with her, and to Fay that was intolerable; she strove to draw the cat in as a part of her world, dependent on her. In his mind he had a quick image of Fay weaning the cat away from him, pampering it, overfeeding it, getting it to sleep on her lap — not because she loved it but because it was important to her to think of it as belonging to her.
That night he brought the cat home in a box. The two girls were delighted and set out milk and a can of Norwegian sardines for it. The cat stayed in during the night, sleeping on the couch, apparently contented. The dog was kept locked up in a bathroom, and neither animal came in contact with the other. For a day or so Fay fed and cared for the cat, and then one night, when he got home, he found the front door open.
With apprehension he tracked down his wife. He found her out on the patio, knitting. “Why’s the door open?” he demanded. “You know we’re keeping the cat in for another couple of days.”
“He wanted out,” Fay said, her expression lost behind her huge sun glasses. “He cried, and the girls wanted to let him out, so we did. He’s around somewhere, probably down in the cypress trees chasing squirrels.”
For several hours he roamed around with a flashlight, calling the cat, trying to catch sight of it. He saw no sign of it. The cat had gone off. Fay did not seem worried; she served dinner calmly. The two girls never mentioned the cat. Their minds were on a party that some boy had invited them to on Sunday morning. With despair and fury he choked down his dinner and then arose to resume searching.
“Don’t worry,” Fay said, as she ate her dessert. “He’s a fullgrown cat and nothing’ll happen to him. He’ll turn up in the morning, if not here then back at the plant.”
In a frenzy, he said, “You think it can hike twenty-five miles across to Petaluma?”
“Cats travel thousands of miles,” Fay said.
They never saw the cat again. He put an ad in the Baywood Press, but no one reported having seen it. Every evening for over a week he drove slowly around the area, calling the cat and searching for it.
And all the time he had the deep, intuitive sense that she had done it on purpose. Got the cat home so that she could let it go. Had deliberately gotten rid of it because of her jealousy of it.
One evening, with wariness, he said to Fay, “You don’t seem especially disturbed.”
“By what?” she said, glancing up from her pottery. On the big dining room table she was busy shaping bowls from clay. She wore her blue smock, shorts and sandals, and she looked quite pretty. Resting on the edge of the table, mostly ash now, her cigarette burned away.
“By the cat disappearing,” he said.
“The girls were quite upset,” she said. “But I told them that a cat is more adept at taking care of itself than any other kind of pet that gets out and goes off. And up here there’re gophers and rabbits –” Tossing her hair back she finished, “It probably caught the scent of game, and now it’s gone wild, having a hell of a good time out there in the woods. They say a lot of cats brought up here do that, get the scent and go out after it.”
He said with cane, “You didn’t mention that when you got me to bring it here.”
To that she did not bother to reply. Her strong, effective fingers shaped the clay; he watched and noticed how much pressure she was capable of exerting on the material. The muscles along her arms rose and changed shape; the tendons stood out.
“Anyhow,” Fay said at last, after he had said nothing but still remained, “you were too emotionally involved with it. It’s not healthy to be that involved with an animal.”
“Then you did get rid of it on purpose!” he said loudly.
“No I didn’t. I’m just commenting. Maybe it’s better that it ran off. This proves you were too deeply involved, on you wouldn’t be carrying on so. My god, it was just a cat. You’ve got a wife and two children and you’re carrying on about a cat.” The sharp contempt in her voice made him shiver. It was her most effective tone, full of the weight of authority; it recalled to him his teachers in school, his mother, the whole pack of them.
Unable to carry it any further he turned and walked off, to pick up the evening paper.
There in the post office, recalling his lost cat, he felt a terrible loneliness and sense of deprivation. After buying his stamps he set off, back to his parked car, recognizing that the failure on his part to make contact with the boy and girl had linked itself in his mind with the loss of the cat. The breakdown of relationships between living things… the gulf between him and other living things. Why? he asked himself as he got into the car.
Fuck it all, he thought with bitterness.
He drove reflectively, doing a bad job of getting the car from the lot and onto the street. And then, just past the Mayfair Market, he saw propped up against the loading dock two racing bikes. Their bikes — they had gone into the Mayfair Market. Without reflection he brought the car to the curb, leaped out, and hurried across the street and up onto the sidewalk and through the open door and into the dark, cool old wooden market building, among the vegetables and displays of wine bottles and magazine racks.
Toward the back of the store the boy and girl lingered together at the shelf of canned vegetables. He hurried toward them; he had to approach them, or have the weight of conscience on him for months. Fay would never forgive him — impelled toward them, he arrived to confront them as they filled a wire basket with cans and packages and a loaf of bread.
“Hey,” he said, his ears ned and burning. Astonished in a controlled manner, they turned toward him. “Listen,” he said, plucking at his belt buckle and staring down, then back up at them. “My wife and I noticed you yesterday — or the other day, I mean. We live up here, at Drake’s Landing, about five miles down the road around Paper Mill Creek, past Inverness Park. My wife’s up at the house dying for company.” He added, “We’ve got a horse if you like to ride. How about dropping by and chewing the fat? Could you be talked into staying for dinner?”
Wordlessly, the boy and girl exchanged glances. As he stood there, they communicated silently between them and came to a conclusion.
“We just recently moved in up here,” the girl said in a soft, low voice.
“You’re newly weds?” Charley asked.
They nodded. Both of them seemed shy and reserved, but glad that he had approached them.
“It’s hard to get to know people around here,” he said to them, feeling immensely pleased with himself for having made the contact with them; he had done it, been successful. Fay would be filled with respect. “You have a car?” he said. “Oh that’s right — you’re on bikes. We noticed the bikes.” He heard himself chuckle. “Well, we can toss them in the back of the car.”