A Cat in the Manger by Lydia Adamson

Author:Lydia Adamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

The weeks of winter began to grind down. I landed a small but lucrative part in an avant-garde German film shot in, of all places, Bayonne, New Jersey. My agent started some “promising” negotiations with “some people” for a possible role as the wife in an Off-Broadway revival of Pinter’s Homecoming. I was asked to teach an acting course at the Neighborhood Playhouse for their summer session, And I landed two new cat-sitting assignments, one of them an overpaying job consisting of visiting and feeding a large, somewhat eccentric Siamese on nine consecutive weekends while her owners took a series of jaunts. Ah, the rich. Anyway, I like German films, I like Pinter, I like teaching, I love Siamese cats. So things were going quite well.

And Charlie Coombs began to spend at least two or three nights a week at my apartment.

The magic, as they say, was continuing. It was odd. We never spoke about what defined us—the theater or the racetrack. We did speak passionately and honestly about the stupidest things: candles, flashlights, cats with tiger stripes, vegetarian cats, cheeseburgers, boots, uncles, and the relationship, if any, between brown eggs and white eggs.

We kept speaking nonsense to each other because we were so enthralled with each other—with the wonder of it all. It was so delicious and crazy that I even enjoyed making coffee for him in the morning.

And so it went. I was finally living the life I should have lived twenty years earlier. I mean, everyone deserves at least one fling at a sublime domestic fantasy.

The bubble, alas, burst on the first Monday in March. It was not Charlie’s fault. It was mine. Out of nowhere a face from the past rose up and took me with him.

The bubble burst this way: I was brushing Bushy on the living-room floor. Grooming a Maine coon like Bushy is always a problem, given the thickness of his coat, but the coat itself was a minor chore compared to the cat. Bushy had this peculiar attitude toward being groomed. He acted as if he was about to run away, so one had to hold him firmly. What was worse, he acted as if I was literally torturing him to death,

Once it was finally done and I stared down at my perfectly groomed cat, I had a memory flash so clear and so powerful that I folded my hands like a schoolchild.

I remembered the first time I saw Harry Starobin groom one of his Himalayans.

He had combed the cat out so quickly and so playfully and with such an awesome combination of gentleness, strength, and precision that I had been unable to respond to a question he asked me during the brushing. I had been hypnotized by the perfect harmony of cat and master.

The memory vanished, as they always do, and in its wake came a profound sense of remorse, as if Harry Starobin has risen from the crushed gravel of the Starobin driveway to make a bitter accusation: I, Alice Nestleton, had allowed Harry Starobin to be forgotten.

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