The Last Lovely City by Alice Adams

Author:Alice Adams [Adams, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, United States, Short Stories, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780679454410
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Islands

What does it mean to love an animal, a pet, in my case a cat, in the fierce, entire, and unambivalent way that some of us do? I really want to know this. Does the cat (did the cat) represent some person, a parent, or a child? some part of one’s self? I don’t think so—and none of the words or phrases that one uses for human connections sounds quite right: “crazy about,” “really liked,” “very fond of”—none of those describes how I felt and still feel about my cat. Many years ago, soon after we got the cat (her name was Pink), I went to Rome with my husband, Andrew, whom I really liked; I was crazy about Andrew, and very fond of him too. And I have a most vivid memory of lying awake in Rome, in the pretty bed in its deep alcove, in the nice small hotel near the Borghese Gardens—lying there, so fortunate to be in Rome, with Andrew, and missing Pink, a small striped cat with no tail—missing Pink unbearably. Even blaming Andrew for having brought me there, although he loved her too, almost as much as I did. And now Pink has died, and I cannot accept or believe in her death, any more than I could believe in Rome. (Andrew also died, three years ago, but this is not his story.)

A couple of days after Pink died (this has all been recent), I went to Hawaii with a new friend, Slater. It had not been planned that way; I had known for months that Pink was slowly failing (she was nineteen), but I did not expect her to die. She just suddenly did, and then I went off to “the islands,” as my old friend Zoe Pinkerton used to call them, in her nasal, moneyed voice. I went to Hawaii as planned, which interfered with my proper mourning for Pink. I feel as though those islands interposed themselves between her death and me. When I needed to be alone, to absorb her death, I was over there with Slater.

Slater is a developer; malls and condominium complexes all over the world. Andrew would not have approved of Slater, and sometimes I don’t think I do either. Slater is tall and lean, red-haired, a little younger than I am, and very attractive, I suppose, although on first meeting Slater I was not at all drawn to him (which I have come to think is one of the reasons he found me so attractive, calling me the next day, insisting on dinner that night; he was probably used to women who found him terrific, right off). But I thought Slater talked too much about money, or just talked too much, period.

Later on, when I began to like him a little better (I was flattered by all that attention, is the truth), I thought that Slater’s very differences from Andrew should be a good sign. You’re supposed to look for opposites, not reproductions, I read somewhere.

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