The Last Lovely City (7 page)

She cannot resist the further superstitious thought that
maybe
getting a new cat will bring Linda magically home to her, rather in the way that couples with a fertility problem at last adopt, and then become pregnant.

In the animal shelter, which is encouragingly clean, well kept up, and staffed by very nice and cheerful young women, Mary looks through the rows of cages, all containing cats with one or
another sort of appeal, any one of whom she would no doubt in time learn to love. But no cat there is as beautiful as Linda is (or was); there is no one whom she instantly, totally loves. In the last cage, though (of course the last), there is a thin, lithe, graceful gray cat named Fiona—to Mary an appealing name; years ago she had a friend, an English actress, Fiona Shaw (just as she once had a friend named Linda, years back). A small typed notice states that Fiona has just been spayed; she is fine, but not quite ready for adoption—a few days more. Mary watches Fiona for a little while; she is an exceptionally pretty little cat, shy and graceful. (And if Linda
should
come back, they might get along?)

On the way home Mary sees some new neighbors, a nice young couple, both architects, who have heard and been kind and sympathetic over Linda.

“I saw this very pretty cat in the shelter,” Mary tells them. “A small gray one. She’s named Fiona.”

Almost in unison they say, “But Linda might come—”

“No,” Mary tells them, very firmly. “The raccoons got her. They must have.”

At which the young man frowns. “I’ve seen a couple around. Mean-looking little bastards.”

And the woman, “I think they’re sweet. And I could have sworn I heard a cat outside last night.”

“Well, you’ll have to come for tea very soon and meet Fiona,” Mary tells them.

Every return to her house, which now does not contain Linda, is sad for Mary, and as she walks in, the raccoons now return to her mind, unbidden; she sees them vividly again, their hideous claws and their small mean shining eyes. Firmly she forces herself instead to imagine pretty Fiona as she walks through her house to the deck, and down the steps to her garden.

Where she is just in time to see a flash of brown fur, a plumey tail—Linda!—who tears across the grass and into Mary’s basement, which contains a clutter of broken, discarded furniture, empty boxes, old luggage. Where Linda instantly hides herself.

The basement entrance is wide, with no door; there is no way to block it off, to prevent a bolting Linda—except for Mary herself to stand across it, or to sit down, as she does, and to stretch her legs across the opening.

But was that really Linda, that flash of fur? Mary begins to doubt her own vision. Could it, God forbid, have been a raccoon?

In her softest, most caressing voice she calls to Linda; she calls and calls, a stream of loving syllables that Linda must know (if cats know anything) and always her name. “Linda, Linda-loo, lovely Linda—” On and on, with no answer.

She would like to go upstairs and phone the nice neighbors for help; she could block the escape route while they went in and banged around, but she does not dare leave. She would also like a glass of water. But she has to go on. “Linda, loopy Lou, Linda-pie—” On forever.

At last, after maybe ten minutes, there is a sort of rattling among the boxes; an old broken bamboo table moves, so that Mary sees a glimpse, a quick tiny glimpse, of what is surely Linda.

After another five minutes, probably, of calling, and of small but increasingly certain sighting, Linda emerges into a small cleared space, a safe twenty feet from where Mary sits. Linda emerges, she stares, and retreats.

She repeats all that several times, each time flicking her tail, back, forth.

And then she emerges into another, smaller space, about ten feet from Mary. Looking at Mary, she rolls over—the first sure friendly signal, or even acknowledgment that she has ever seen
Mary before. She does this three or four times, each time somehow managing to roll through still poised for flight.

And so Mary does not reach out to grab her, restraining herself until she is absolutely sure of reaching and grasping Linda. Which at last she successfully does, with a firm, strong, loving, and furious grip.

“You rotten little slut, where in God’s name have you been, you little bitch?” She whispers these harsh new words, rising and clutching Linda, who is struggling hysterically to get away—away from this sudden stranger who has seized her unawares.

But this time Mary wins. She carries fighting Linda out of the basement, up the stairs, and across the deck and into her house.

Dumping her onto the rug she asks, “Oh Linda, how come you’re so
crazy?”
and, again, “Where on earth have you
been?”

No answer.

And Linda, in character, runs off and hides. She does not even seem very hungry, nor does she have the look of a starving lost cat. She has obviously done well for herself, but Mary will never know where, or how. Or
why
. Mary pours herself a glass of white wine and collapses on the old chintz sofa, thinking, God
damn
Linda, anyway.

How much, or what, do cats remember? Can anyone comprehend at all the memory of a cat? Over the next few days Mary wonders and ponders these questions, sometimes staring into the round yellow eyes of Linda as though there might be a clue. As though Linda knew.

She considers too the fact that both she and her friend Bill the biologist have chosen cats of their own gender for major loves. Could this mean that love of one’s cat is really love of one’s self? Was it she herself who she feared was lost and hungry, possibly dead?

At other times she simply holds her hands around that small warm vibrant body, the delicate strong ribcage and the
drum-tight rounded belly, and she thinks, and she says aloud, “You’re home, darling Linda. You came
home.”

Mary has had the wit not to talk much to her friends about the loss of Linda, and so now she does not make much of her return. Only to her sometime lover, who is also in a way her closest friend, she confides, “I’m embarrassed, really, when I think how upset I was. And that night when I was sure the raccoons had got her, well—”

“Mary dear, you were great,” he says. As he might have said, as people did say, of some performance of hers, which, come to think of it, in a public way it had been. No one really knew that for Mary the loss of Linda had been the end of the world, or nearly. None of her friends or her lover knew that she would have sacrificed any or all of them for her cat.

Or at least at moments she would have.

Soon after Linda’s return there is a small dinner party for some visiting old friends from New York, and at which Mary very much enjoys the sort of theatre gossip that she is used to: “But Maria’s always great.… I hear Edward’s new play is even better.… Poor Colin is really sick.… No, Gilbert’s still okay … they are not getting a divorce … the problem was that she loathed L.A.… I must say, you’re looking wonderful.…” She comes home in a mood of slightly wistful but pleasant nostalgia. She goes upstairs and finds Linda, as usual, curled on the foot of her bed. She pats Linda, who looks up, blinks, purrs briefly, and goes back to sleep. Soon Mary too is sound asleep.

She wakes an hour or so later, and at first she thinks, I should never have had that last glass of wine, I didn’t need it. I know I can’t drink red. But then she hears a scratching, rustling sound on her deck, which may have been what woke her up.

She gets out of bed, slowly puts on slippers and robe, noting as she passes that Linda is not there. She goes downstairs, flicks on lights—and there on her deck, lined up, are four raccoons, one large, three smaller. They keep a certain distance, and perhaps for that reason are not quite as threatening as they were before. They look both formal and expectant; they could be either judges or penitants—impossible to tell. Or, they could be asking for Linda. Demanding Linda?

Mary turns off the lights and goes back upstairs, where she does not find Linda anywhere in her bedroom; she even looks under the bed. She spends an anxious half hour or so in this search for Linda, at this ungodly hour, at the same time telling herself that this is ridiculous. There is no way that Linda could have gotten out; all the doors are locked, her bedroom window is only opened a crack. She also thinks: I cannot go through this again, I really can’t—as she calls out softly, “Linda, darling Linda, where are you?”

She at last finds Linda asleep on the studio couch in her study, a not unlikely place for her to be, though more usual in the daytime. As Mary approaches, Linda wakes and raises her head; she blinks and looks at Mary as though to say, This is the middle of the night; I was sleeping here quietly. What is your problem?

The next night, after feeding Linda, Mary is moved to put out a little food for raccoons, really for whatever creature wants it. She puts a little plate of dried kibble and one of water down in the garden, where she cannot hear if the plates are rattled.

And whether the impulse that moved her is one of simply nurturing or of a more complex propitiation, or some dark exorcism, Mary has no idea.

Mildly upset by a phone call, Lucretia Baine, who is almost old but lively, comes back into her living room and stares for a moment into the large white driftwood-framed mirror there, as though to check that she is still herself. Reassured, she smiles briefly, but continues to look at the mirror. In the soft, kindly lamplight—this is an early evening, in October—she is beautiful, still, even to her own harshly critical (large, green) eyes. But she knows perfectly well how she looks in her cruelly accurate bathroom mirror, first thing in the morning. Now, though, she looks all right, just upset; on the other hand, she may look better than usual. A little more color?

The disturbing call did not involve bad news; it was simply that Lucretia momentarily confused two men: Simon, whom she is crazy about (hopelessly, irreversibly, it seems), with Burt, who in his way is crazy about her. He loves Lucretia permanently, he says. Burt called, and just for an instant she thought he was Simon. Although she would have thought that two men more unlike did not exist, including their voices: Burt’s deep and friendly, Midwestern, and Simon’s very New England, Cambridge, slightly raspy.

“Crazy about.” Like many people, Lucretia tends to think in
the argot of her youth, in her case the forties. However, in this instance, the instance of Simon, the phrase seems accurate. At her age, to harbor such feelings is crazy indeed, and so, for that matter, are Burt’s feelings for her, at his advanced age. Lucretia sighs. If only Simon were gay and in love with Burt the circle would be perfect, Shakespearean, she thinks. She sighs again, at what seems the silliness of it all. Simon is not gay, and the two men have never met. And she only confused their voices because she was expecting a call from Simon, sort of.

She did not do anything so crude as calling Burt “Simon”; she was only a little cool at the onset of the conversation, cool with disappointment. But then poor Burt was probably used to cool, from her.

This living room of Lucretia’s, though comfortable and exceptionally pretty, too often called “charming,” in a sense resembles an archaeological dig; there are layers, and remains. Traces of former husbands, three of them, two divorced, one dead. Tokens and presents from former lovers, quite a few of those, and from good friends, even more. And clear signs of a long and steadfast career: Lucretia is a reporter, a dedicated newspaperwoman. She has always worked in that way. The driftwood mirror is, in fact, a present from her longtime editor, now an elderly gentleman, who is gay—a much-loved friend; Lucretia is less sure how she feels about the mirror.

Thus the room, which has never exactly been “decorated,” is full of trophies, of carefully, tastefully selected objects, and of whimsically, impulsively bought
things
. A jumble of books and pictures, lots of framed photographs; anyone can see that Lucretia, young, was quite ravishing, and that most of the men she knew were tall and good-looking. Pots and vases of flowers stand about, more carefully arranged than they look to be: a great clump of growing gold chrysanthemums, smelling of earth, and of fall—and a slender silver vase of yellow roses, unscented
but beautiful, chosen by Lucretia, for herself. She sometimes wonders how she could feel lonely in such a room, and, for that matter, in such a house, but sometimes she does.

Souvenirs, then, of love and friendship, but also of work. Lucretia has done a lot of travel writing for many years, as the assistant travel editor of her paper; shelves of travel books, as well as atlases and stacks of maps, attest to those years, along with one wall’s collection of masks, from Mexico and from Haiti, from India and Africa and Egypt. For idle pleasure Lucretia sometimes picks up a map of Italy, say, and goes over it carefully, naming out favorite towns to herself: Orvieto, Todi, Arezzo, Fiesole, as another person might read a familiar novel, happy to recognize Barsetshire again.

She was working throughout all those marriages and love affairs, which no doubt kept her sane (she herself is sure of this), but these days her work creates certain problems in “relationships” when the men involved are retired, as Burt is—Burt especially, demanding, intrusive (more “in love”), does not like to hear about Lucretia’s deadlines, her work obligations. He has often suggested that she retire. What he means is, marry him. But Lucretia plans to postpone retirement for as long as she can, and in the meantime to take whatever assignments the paper offers. She has gone back lately to doing more interviews than travel writing, although last December she wrote a long piece about Christmas in Venice, lights in the Piazza San Marco, processions of gondolas. Extremely handsome gondoliers.

Lucretia’s first marriage took place when she was eighteen. There should be a law against marriages under thirty, she has sometimes thought, and said. Surely under twenty, and probably twenty-five. Jim, the young husband, was in law school; her second, Tommy, a reporter. Years later, speaking of marriage, she
also said, “I married the first two times for sex. How dumb can you get?” Sometimes adding, “Tommy was dear, well, really they both were, Tommy and Jim. But Tommy drank so much, and besides, I really needed to get out of Boston.”