Shirley Murphy - Cat Under Fire

"Good color on you. Don't sit down. Go in the dining room."

"What? Are we eating formal?"

"Just go."

He gave her a puzzled look and swung away into the dining room, carrying his beer.

He was silent for a long time, she could hear the soft scuff of his loafers as he moved about the room, as if he were viewing the work from different angles and from a distance. When he returned to the kitchen he was grinning. "I thought, from the way you talked and from what Charlie said, that her work was really bad, that art school was a waste of time."

"It was a bust," Charlie said, coming in. She was dressed in a pale blue T-shirt with SAVE THE MALES stenciled across the front, and clean, faded jeans and sandals. She had blow-dried her sweaty hair and it blazed around her face as wild as the vanished sunset. "I should have gone to business school. Or maybe engineering, I've always been good at math. I'm sorry I didn't do that, maybe civil engineering. It was a big waste of time, that four years in art school. Big waste of my folks' money."

Clyde shook his head. "Those drawings are strong. They're damned good."

Charlie shrugged. "I enjoy doing animals, but it's nothing that will make me a living."

Clyde raised an eyebrow. "Don't put yourself down. Who told you that?"

"The fine arts department. My drawings-any animal drawings-are way too commercial, they have no real meaning. Just a waste of time."

"But you took commercial art, too," Clyde said. "You got a BS in both. So what did the commercial people say?"

Charlie gave him a twisted, humorless smile. "That there is no market for animal sketches, that this is not commercial art. That you have to use the computer, have to understand how to sell, have sales knowledge and a strong sense of layout. Have to be a real professional, understand the real world of advertising, bring yourself up into the electronic age. That this-drawing animals-is hobby work"

"Rubbish," Clyde said.

"Trouble is, I don't give a damn about commercial work." She got another beer from the refrigerator and picked up the silver flatware that Wilma had dropped in the center of the table. As she folded the paper napkins neatly in half, she gave Clyde a long look. "They know what they're talking about. I can draw for my own pleasure, but as for making a living, right now my best bet is CHARLIE'S FIX-IT, CLEAN-IT. And I like that just fine." She tossed back her hair and grinned. "I'm my own boss, no one telling me what to do." Reaching across the table, she arranged the silver at their three places and set the napkins around. At Clyde's angry look, she laughed. "My illustration instructor said I can draw kitties as a hobby."

"Who the hell do they think they are?"

"They," Wilma said, "are our rarefied and venerable art critics, those specially anointed among us with the intelligence to understand true art."

Clyde made a rude noise.

Wilma studied Charlie. "I'll admit I didn't like your landscapes. But these-these are strong. More than strong, they're knowledgeable, very sure. Do you have more?"

"Some horses," Charlie said. "Lots of cats, all my friends in San Francisco had cats. A dog or two."

"Did you bring them with you?"

"They're in the storage locker with my cleaning stuff and tools."

"Will you bring them home?" Wilma said patiently. "I'd like to see them all."

Charlie shrugged and nodded. "The sketches of Dulcie are yours, if you want them."

"You bet I want them. Dulcie will be… is immortalized," Wilma stumbled. She caught Clyde's eye, and felt her face heating. "I'll take them down right away, to be framed." She rose and began to fuss at the sink, her back to Charlie, and hastily began final preparations for dinner, again checking the roast, making sure the noodles were still warm.

She was going to have to be more careful what she said to Charlie, and in front of Charlie.

And, she'd have to get those drawings out of the house before Dulcie saw them. The little cat could be as careless as she. If Dulcie came on those drawings unprepared, she would be so pleased she'd very likely forget herself, let out a cry of astonishment and delight that, if Charlie heard her, would be difficult to explain.

It was poker night at the Blankenships'. Frances served an early supper of canned spaghetti and a limp salad, then hustled Mama off to bed. Returning to the kitchen, she made a stack of baloney and salami sandwiches, wiped the counters, and dutifully removed from the round kitchen table its collection of animal-shaped salt and pepper shakers, pig-shaped sugar bowl, the cream pitcher made in the image of a cow, and the potted fern. Varnie slapped a new unopened deck of cards and a rack of poker chips on the table, and checked the refrigerator to assess once again his stock of cold beer. Dulcie watched the preparations from a dark little space between the end of the stove and the kitchen wall.

But, crouching in the shadows, she was tempted to nip out the open laundry window or return to Mama's room before the kitchen filled up with boisterous jokes and cigarette smoke. She expected Frances would retire to her own secluded part of the house, to the pristine little lair at the back, which Dulcie had investigated just this morning.

When Frances had made a quick trip into the village for groceries, Dulcie had been able for the first time to inspect closely Frances's small office. Heretofore she had only looked in from the hall. Certainly the room was off-limits to both Mama and Varnie; neither seemed welcome there. This morning she had slipped in quickly, padding across the bare wood floor, staring up at the unadorned white walls. The plain white desk was bare, except for Frances's computer. White desk chair, white worktable, low white file cabinets. No clutter anywhere. She could see nothing on any surface, certainly no china beastie or tatty fern plants. Leaping up onto the desk she paced its bare surface, brushing by the computer. And she could not resist the slick surface, it was perfect for tail chasing-she'd spun, snatching at her tail, whirling until she fell over the side, landing hard on the oak floor.

She tested the white leather typing chair, found it soft and inviting, and then atop the white filing cabinets she had investigated the copier. It was very like Wilma's copier at the library. Next to it stood a state-of-the art white telephone with answering machine and fax.

A fax still unnerved her. Though she had watched the library's fax, she couldn't get used to it spitting out pages suddenly without any apparent human input-as if the messages were generated by nothing living.

But she had felt that way about the telephone, at first, shivering with fear. As Joe pushed the headset off, punched in a number, and talked into the little perforated speaker, she had deeply distrusted the disembodied voice which answered him.

She felt easier with a copier. She had played with Wilma's copier, and that machine seemed to her more direct. You pressed a paw into the sand and created a pawprint. You put a page in the copier and got a copy. No invisible, offstage presences.

Even computers seemed more straightforward. You punch in CAT, you get CAT on the screen. She considered a computer to be a glorified typewriter-until you got into modems. Then the ghosts returned.

Frances had a modem; Dulcie had watched her from the doorway and knew that she received many pages via modem. These she edited, making changes, putting in appropriate punctuation, then sent the material away again to some mysterious, unnamed destination.

Mama, complaining that Frances neglected her for the computer, said Frances typed some kind of medical report. Mama had even less notion than Dulcie herself about the workings of a modem. And Dulcie had no idea whether Frances did this work to help support the household or to get away from the old woman. Maybe both. Whatever the reason, she spent a good part of the day in there. And who could blame her. Anything to get away from the oppressive clutter in the rest of the house-there was nowhere to go in this house that didn't make Dulcie herself feel trapped.