“Now, I tried to pretend I liked Frank and Lulu tried to pretend she liked Lucy, but Lulu gave up pretending a lot sooner than I did. I guess maybe neither one of them, the cat or the woman, could stand being a hypocrite. I don’t think Lucy was the only reason Lulu left hell, I know it wasn’t – but I’m sure Lucy helped Lulubelle make her final decision. Pets can live a long time, you know. So
the present I got her for our second was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. Tell that to ‘Dear Abby’!
“The cat’s talking was maybe the worst, as far as Lulu was concerned. She couldn’t stand it. One night Lulubelle says to me,
‘If that cat doesn’t stop yowling, L.T., I think I’m going to hit it with an encyclopedia.’
” ‘That’s not yowling,’ I said, ‘that’s chatting.’
” ‘Well,’ Lulu says, – ‘I wish it would stop chatting.’
“And right about then, Lucy jumped up into my lap and she did shut up. She always did, except for a little low purring, way back in her throat. Purring that really was purring. I scratched her between her ears like she likes, and I happened to look up. Lulu turned her eyes back down on her book, but before she did, what I saw was real hate. Not for me. For Screwlucy. Throw an encyclopedia at it? She looked like she’d like to stick the cat between two encyclopedias and just kind of clap it to death.
Sometimes Lulu would come into the kitchen and catch the cat up on the table and swat it off. I asked her once if she’d ever seen me swat Frank off the bed that way – he’d get up on it, you know, always on her side, and leave these nasty tangles of white hair.
When I said that, Lulu gave me a kind of grin. Her teeth were showing, anyway. ‘If you ever tried, you’d find yourself a finger or three shy, most likely,’ she says.
“Sometimes Lucy really was Screwlucy. Cats are moody, and sometimes they get manic; anyone who’s ever had one will tell you that. Their eyes get big and kind of glary, their tails bush out, they go racing around the house; sometimes they’ll rear right up on their back legs and prance, boxing at the air, like they’re fighting with something they can see but human beings can’t. Lucy got into a mood like that one night when she was about a year old – couldn’t
have been more than three weeks from the day when I come home and found Lulubelle gone.
“Anyway, Lucy came pelting in from the kitchen, did a kind of racing slide on the wood floor, jumped over Frank, and went skittering up the living room drapes, paw over paw. Left some pretty good holes in them, with threads hanging down. Then she just perched at the top on the rod, staring around the room with her blue eyes all big and wild and the tip of her tail snapping back and forth.
“Frank only jumped a little and then put his muzzle back on Lulubelle’s shoe, but the cat scared the hell out of Lulubelle, who was deep in her book, and when she looked up at the cat, I could see that outright hate in her eyes again.
All right,’ she said, ‘that’s enough. Everybody out of the goddam pool. We’re going to find a good home for that little blue-eyed bitch, and if we’re not smart enough to find a home for a purebred Siamese, we’re going to take her to the animal shelter. I’ve had enough.’
” ‘What do you mean?’ I ask her.
” ‘Are you blind?’ she asks. ‘Look what she did to my drapes I They’re full of holes!’
‘You want to see drapes with holes in them,’ I say, ‘why don’t you go upstairs and look at the ones on my side of the bed. The bottoms are all ragged. Because he chews them.’
‘That’s different,’ she says, glaring at me. ‘That’s different and you know it.’
“Well, I wasn’t going to let that lie. No way I was going to let that one lie. ‘The only reason you think it’s different is because you like the dog you gave me and you don’t like the cat I gave you,’ I says.
‘But I’ll tell you one thing, Mrs. DeWitt: you take the cat to the
animal shelter for clawing the living room drapes on Tuesday, I guarantee you I’ll take the dog to the animal shelter for chewing the bedroom drapes on Wednesday. You got that?’
“She looked at me and started to cry. She threw her book at me and called me a bastard. A mean bastard. I tried to grab hold of her, make her stay long enough for me to at least try to make up – if there was a way to make up without backing down, which I didn’t mean to do that time – but she pulled her arm out of my hand and ran out of the room. Frank ran out after her. They went upstairs and the bedroom door slammed.
“I gave her half an hour or so to cool off, then I went upstairs myself. The bedroom door was still shut, and when I started to open it, I was pushing against Frank. I could move him, but it was slow work with him sliding across the floor, and also noisy work.
He was growling. And I mean growling, my friends; that was no fucking purr. If I’d gone in there, I believe he would have tried his solemn best to bite my manhood off. I slept on the couch that night. First time.
“A month later, give or take, she was gone.”
If L.T. had timed his story right (most times he did; practice makes perfect), the bell signaling back to work at the W.S. Hepperton Processed Meats Plant of Ames, Iowa, would ring just about then, sparing him any questions from the new men (the old hands knew.
. . and knew better than to ask) about whether or not L.T. and Lulubelle had reconciled, or if he knew where she was today, or –
the all-time sixty-four-thousand-dollar question – if she and Frank were still together. There’s nothing like the back-to-work bell to close off life’s more embarrassing questions.
“Well,” L.T. would say, putting away his thermos and then standing up and giving a stretch, “it has all led me to create what I call L.T. DeWitt’s Theory of Pets.”
They’d look at him expectantly, just as I had the first time I heard him use that grand phrase, but they would always end up feeling let down, just as I always had; a story that good deserved a better punchline, but L.T.’s never changed.
“If your dog and cat are getting along better than you and your wife,” he’d say, “you better expect to come home some night and find a Dear John note on your refrigerator door.”
He told that story a lot, as I’ve said, and one night when he came to my house for dinner, he told it for my wife and my wife’s sister.
My wife had invited Holly, who had been divorced almost two years, so the boys and the girls would balance up. I’m sure that’s all it was, because Roslyn never liked L.T. DeWitt. Most people do, most people take to him like hands take to warm water, but Roslyn has never been most people. She didn’t like the story of the note on the fridge and the pets, either – I could tell she didn’t, although she chuckled in the right places. Holly … shit, I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell what that girl’s thinking. Mostly just sits there with her hands in her lap, smiling like Mona Lisa. It was my fault that time, though, and I admit it. L.T. didn’t want to tell it, but I kind of egged him on because it was so quiet around the dinner table, just the click of silverware and the clink of glasses, and I could almost feel my wife disliking L.T. It seemed to be coming off her in waves. And if L.T. had been able to feel that little Jack Russell terrier disliking him, he would probably be able to feel my wife doing the same. That’s what I figured, anyhow.
So he told it, mostly to please me, I suppose, and he rolled his eyeballs in all the right places, as if saying “Gosh, she fooled me right and proper, didn’t she?” and my wife chuckled here and there
– they sounded as phony to me as Monopoly money looks – and Holly smiled her little Mona Lisa smile with her eyes downcast.
Otherwise the dinner went off all right, and when it was over L.T.
told Roslyn that he thanked her for “a sportin-fine meal” (whatever that is) and she told him to come any time, she and I liked to see