T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

Daria immediately put her eye to the peephole. “Oh my God,” she murmured.

“What’s he doing?”

“Pacing. But here, you have a look.”

The carpeting — every last strip of it — had been torn out of the floor, leaving an expanse of dirty plywood studded with nails, and there seemed to be a hole in the plasterboard just to the left of the window. A substantial hole. Even through the closed door I could smell the reek of cat piss or spray or whatever it was. “There goes my deposit,” I said.

She was right there beside me, her hand on my shoulder. “He’ll settle down,” she assured me, “once he gets used to the place. All cats are like that — they have to establish their territory, is all.”

“You don’t think he can get inside the walls, do you?”

“No,” she said, “no way, he’s too big—”

The only thing I could think to do, especially after an entire day of drinking, was to pour more wine, which I did. Then we repeated the ritual of the morning’s feeding — the steak on the fork, the blur of the cat, the savage thump at the door — and took turns watching it eat. After a while, bored with the spectacle — or “sated,” maybe that’s a better word — we found ourselves on the couch and there was a movie on TV and we finished the wine and the chips and we never stopped talking, a comment on this movie leading to a discussion of movies in general, a reflection on the wine dredging up our mutual experiences of wine tastings and the horrors of Cribari red and Boone’s Farm and all the rest. It was midnight before we knew it and she was yawning and stretching.

“I’ve really got to get home,” she said, but she didn’t move. “I’m wiped. Just wiped.”

“You’re welcome to stay over,” I said, “I mean, if you don’t want to drive, after all the wine and all—”

A moment drifted by, neither of us speaking, and then she made a sort of humming noise—“Mmmm”—and held out her arms to me even as she sank down into the couch.

I WAS UP before her in the morning, careful not to wake her as I eased myself from the mattress where we’d wound up sleeping because the couch was too narrow for the two of us. My head ached — I wasn’t used to so much alcohol — and the effigy of the cat lurked somewhere behind that ache, but I felt buoyant and optimistic. Daria was asleep on the mattress, the cat was hunkered down in his room, and all was right with the world. I brewed coffee, toasted muffins and fried eggs, and when she woke I was there to feed her. “What do you say to breakfast in bed?” I murmured, easing down beside her with a plate of eggs over-easy and a mug of coffee.

I was so intent on watching her eat I barely touched my own food. After a while, I got up and turned on the radio and there was that song again, the one we’d heard coming home the night before, and we both listened to it all the way through without saying a word. When the disc jockey came on with his gasping juvenile voice and lame jokes, she got up and went to the bathroom, passing right by the bedroom door without a thought for the cat. She was in the bathroom a long while, running water, flushing, showering, and I felt lost without her. I wanted to tell her I loved her, wanted to extend a whole list of invitations to her: she could move in with me, stay here indefinitely, bring her cats with her, no problem, and we could both look after the big cat together, see to its needs, tame it and make it happy in its new home — no more cages, and meat, plenty of meat. I was scrubbing the frying pan when she emerged, her hair wrapped in one of the new towels. She was wearing her makeup and she was dressed in her Daggett’s outfit. “Hey,” I said.

She didn’t answer. She was bent over the couch now, stuffing things into her purse.

“You look terrific,” I said.

There was a sound from the bedroom then, a low moan that might have been the expiring gasp of the cat’s prey and I wondered if it had found something in there, a rat, a stray bird attracted to the window, an escaped hamster or lizard. “Listen, Junior,” she said, ignoring the moaning, which grew higher and more attenuated now, “you’re a nice guy, you really are.”

I was behind the Formica counter. My hands were in the dishwater. Something pounded in my head and I knew what was coming, heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she ducked her head and averted her eyes.

“I can’t — I have to tell you something, okay? Because you’re sweet, you are, and I want to be honest with you.”

She raised her face to me all of a sudden, let her eyes stab at mine and then dodge away again. “I have a boyfriend. He’s away at school. And I don’t know why…I mean, I just don’t want to give you the wrong impression. It was nice. It was.”

The moaning cut off abruptly on a rising note. I didn’t know what to say — I was new at this, new and useless. Suddenly I was desperate, looking for anything, any stratagem, the magic words that would make it all right again. “The cat,” I said. “What about the cat?”

Her voice was soft. “He’ll be all right. Just feed him. Be nice to him.” She was at the door, the purse slung over one shoulder. “Patience,” she said, “that’s all it takes. A little patience.”

“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Will I see you later?”

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

AS SOON AS her pickup pulled out of the lot, I called my boss. He answered on the first ring, raising his voice to be heard over the ambient noise. I could hear the tile saw going in the background, the irregular banging of a hammer, the radio tuned to some jittery right-wing propagandist. “I want to come in,” I said.

“Who is this?”

Junior.

“Monday, Monday at the earliest.”

I told him I was going crazy cooped up in my apartment, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “What is it?” he said. “Money? Because I’ll advance you on next week if you really need it, though it’ll mean a trip to the bank I wasn’t planning on. Which is a pain in the ass. But I’ll do it. Just say the word.”

“No, it’s not the money, it’s just—”

He cut me off. “Don’t you ever listen to anything I say? Didn’t I tell you to go out and get yourself laid? That’s what you’re supposed to be doing at your age. It’s what I’d be doing.”

“Can’t I just, I don’t know, help out?”

“Monday,” he said.

I was angry suddenly and I slammed the phone down. My eyes went to the hole cut in the bedroom door and then to the breakfast plates, egg yolk congealing there in bright yellow stripes, the muffin, Daria’s muffin, untouched but for a single neat bite cut out of the round. It was Friday. I hated my life. How could I have been so stupid?

There was no sound from the bedroom, and as I laced my sneakers I fought down the urge to go to the peephole and see what the cat had accomplished in the night — I just didn’t want to think about it. Whether it had vanished like the bad odor of a bad dream or chewed through the wall and devoured the neighbor’s yapping little dogs or broken loose and smuggled itself onto a boat back to Africa, it was all the same to me. The only thing I did know was that there was no way I was going to attempt to feed that thing on my own, not without Daria there. It could starve for all I cared, starve and rot.

Eventually, I fished a jean jacket out of a pile of clothes on the floor and went down to the beach. The day was overcast and a cold wind out of the east scoured the sand. I must have walked for hours and then, for lack of anything better to do, I went to a movie, after which I had a sandwich at a new place downtown where the college students were rumored to hang out. There were no students there as far as I could see, just old men who looked exactly like the regulars at Daggett’s, and they had their square-shouldered old wives with them and their squalling unhappy children. By four I hit my first bar, and by six I was drunk.