Andrew R. Touhy

LOVER My girlfriend says she’s jealous of my cat. My cat, she tells me, is the sole recipient of all my attention and affection. All? I’ve had to say. She says I love the cat more than I love her.             This situation’s not a new one for me, I admit. Other girlfriends have been jealous of other cats. My girlfriend in Charlotte, for instance, was uncharacteristically jealous of a rowdy kitten I kept only months before the dorm RA found us out. Then there was my high school girlfriend and my first cat. . . . I do, I pay my cats a lot of attention. So you could say a lot but not all.             Unlike dogs, I like cats. What I mean is, I’m a cat person. Their small faces are lovely to me, their paws perfect when they double up in pleasure, or fan out in a sharp-clawed stretch across the carpet or against a wall. And when they wake from a nap and arc their backs and kick out their hind legs and half-close their eyes in the sun and suddenly mew softly. . . .             My cat’s fur is the cottony long kind, and smells of laundry just out of the dryer and brewing coffee. To the touch she can be both warm and cool as the underside of a pillow. It’s gratifying to kiss her tiny black nose, which is often moist, to hear her purr and make pigeon sounds when she’s happy. I tell my girlfriend to listen to that, how my cat crackles and pops when she’s happy. Isn’t that a rich and immensely rewarding sound for the petter?             But my girlfriend doesn’t reward herself by petting my cat. Instead she crosses her arms and gives ultimatums. Either the cat goes, she’s said, or she will.   My girlfriend is a pretty good girlfriend. I don’t want her to go. Her breasts are the shape of teardrops, her nipples the color of lips. She puts her mouth to the back of my neck and says, “How are you feeling this morning?” She sends random postcards, miniature reproductions of William Russell Flint paintings—half-clothed women who look seductive yet seduced, reclining on the steps of Egyptian temples—just to say she’s wholly mine and wants me to be hers.             These are no ordinary arty postcards to a boyfriend; she’s a very good writer and knows calligraphy. One postcard started like this: This is a letter of possession. Because for me desire is easier to write than to speak, how else can I tell you how the friction of your skin against mine creates. . . . Another one had this line in it: I want to have you everywhere, want the places I go to be marked by having loved you there. The script in every postcard is perfect. Perfect. Royal looking and viney, it flourishes across the allotted message space like well-behaved wisteria.                          But she doesn’t have fur.             As good as my girlfriend is, she doesn’t sprint from wherever she is down the stairs when she hears my key in the door, or settle in a place on the comforter I’ve patted and smoothed especially for her to curl on. With a little coaxing my cat comes crashing to me, hops onto the bed for the spot I’m clucking and kissing her toward, circles, and settles in the crook of my arm, placing her paws in the palm of my hand, her chin on top.             Once my girlfriend came down the stairs in my bathrobe with a cup of coffee. But that was because I had locked myself out. She said, “I thought you just left?”   But all of this is moot in light of what’s been going on around here.             All this week I can’t feed the cat without it hissing at me. Same as last week. I’ve been dumping food in its bowl and just backing away. Mornings she’s taken to setting up shop on my girlfriend’s chest, exposing her tangled neck hair for my girlfriend’s long fingernails. If I come too close, reach for the cat even, it recoils, back-crouches around the apartment like a soldier under fire. When my girlfriend calls “Hey sweetie” or “Hey baby” to me, the cat rushes to her.             I called a friend from college who wanted to be a veterinarian. I asked him what to do when betrayed by your cat. Why would something like this happen? He said sometimes animals act out when their owners take lengthy vacations. Creatures of habit, he said. I said I hadn’t been out of town all year. “Did you scold her?” he wanted to know. “Do you keep her litter box clean?” No and yes, I said. “Well,” he said. “You like dogs?”             I went to the pet store. I’d read in the paper they had Kitty Condos, fully carpeted, half off. I bought the most expensive food, fish-shaped treats, a towering scratching post, a toy stick with feathers on the end of a string. I dumped it all on the checkout counter. “Will this bring back my cat?” I said to the cashier girl. She looked at me with confusion then horror. “You’re buying all that for a dead cat?” she said.             The other day I come home from work and there my cat and girlfriend were on the floor, frolicking. I stood there for a full minute thinking, They frolic.             We may have tussled.             Kind of romped.             That cat and I never frolicked.             And yesterday, my girlfriend, she shooed me off the bed when I “took the cat’s place,” which she said she’d been saving.             Enough I told her. “Enough what?” she said looking surprised, her lips beginning to curl at the edges.             “Enough enough.” I said.            So I wrote out my letter of concession. Dinner? Just the two of us? I suggested a fine restaurant in the city, one of my girlfriend’s favorites. My treat, I wrote. I folded and slid it under the bathroom door, where she and the cat were “bathing.”             I went to the park for a jog, ran along the bay until the lapping water turned a slate then foreboding blue. I passed dog people walking their personalized dogs, their dumb tongues wagging; strolling couples, huddled together as though for dear life, hands dug in each other’s back pockets.             I came back to a Post-it stuck to the bedroom door. We’ll see.             I don’t know.             I mean, what am I to do? Seems to me, the climate around here’s getting to be either I go or I go.             Of course I can’t expect my girlfriend to have a feathery tail (it is! it’s like a fox’s tail!). Or to crawl up my chest to sniff my breath as if it was a sweet thing. I don’t. How fair would it be, expecting a human to have as strong a sense of hearing as an animal? Cats have very poor eyesight, you understand, so their ability to recognize the slide-and-crunching sound a key makes lifting the tumblers of a deadbolt, is vital.             Can you see my girlfriend, balling up to fit the crook of my arm?             I don’t know what I see in that cat anyway. It sheds. I could make a new cat, a better cat with all that fur. It requires an ungodly amount of courting, really. And it has never willingly sat in my lap. That cat can’t begin to know the lengths I’ve gone to learn the way it likes to be petted, how long I’ve been in the business, what moves I’ve still got.             Neither does my girlfriend.             I remember as a kid, a twelve-year-old boy up late, searching the FM waves on my Walkman. Eyes closed and in the dark, I’d slowly run my thumb tip over the dial station by station, so as not to miss the songs I longed for: Pop ballads from the mid ’80s by one hit wonders with a temporary lease on the secret to love and life. I refused to go to sleep until given that dose of heartache and heartbreak, of making love and failing love, of lust and unrequited lust—of instruction, one last lesson for world I had yet to enter. I wanted to be a lover. A good lover. When I finally had sex, and my partner asked how I knew to do what I’d done, I told her about those nights. I told her what I’ve told every girlfriend since: A man who knows how to pet a cat, knows how to touch a woman. A line, even then, I’d rehearsed as much as the way I’d touched her just minutes before.             That formula’s worked for a long time.             From the bedroom, I hear my girlfriend calling me. Her name is Sarah.           NEW PLAN I want to put a rock through your window whoever you are. I’m not sure which car is yours, exactly—there’s a whole row of them down there—but I think it’s that dirty blue-green one, the VW Beetle, with the mud-caked tires. Or it’s the other greenish-blue Beetle parked directly across the street from it, in the tight row of cars lining that block of cantinas and whatnot.             Question: Why the goddamned chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp? Your car, it’s just sitting there, whichever it is, not running, no one inside, nobody within inches of it all afternoon. And yet . . . there! . . . chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp—every thirty seconds, like the goddamned thing is keeping time, like it’s telling me another thirty seconds of my life is gone. How does it know anyway? I’ve got time, believe me, time and then some. I’m at this hotel to wait for as long as it takes, and when my wife comes out from hers . . . well . . . I don’t know . . . God alone knows. . . .             Meantime, I’m going to find a nice rock. I don’t have one now but you bet I know where to get one. I saw plenty across the highway this morning, in the dry riverbed and on its banks, lying there with all the kinds of trash in the dirt and little tufts of brown grass. What I’m going to do is go pick out the best two rocks and bring them back here. I won’t even dust them off. Then I’m going to step onto the balcony with the first rock, my favorite, cradled in both hands, and drop it straight through your windshield. If that car doesn’t stop chirping, or do some sped-up version of the chirping, I’m going to step inside for the second rock—this one I’ll hoist to my shoulder—and throw it through the windshield of the other car. End of story.             What’ll I do if that car doesn’t stop chirping? Or make some faster chirping sound? . . . well, I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I’ll do then. . . . I’ll . . . I’ll have to think of something different, I guess. . . . Realistically, I mean, I don’t know how keen I am on just waltzing down there to retrieve my rocks to drop again on the next cars. Or how willing I am to go for rocks at the river every day till I get the right car. They’ll be big rocks, you know―or biggish―and heavy enough, and all of those trips . . . I’m counting thirty-two cars down there, total.             And what, I’m doing all this in broad daylight? Because that would be the way it went, unless I moved beneath the cover of darkness. Shit. Have you been down to the river at night? In this part of town after dark? Nighttime. Both attract the breed of guy coming out of that automotive shop there. The shirtless, fatty, swagger-staggering-in-sweat-stained-cowboy-hat-and-boots type. Jesus those tattoos. Imagine if I’d chucked my rock onto the hood of the truck he’s climbing into? Even drunk he’d spot me straightaway, come up here and hang me from the balcony by my shirtfront, smiling his one-gold-tooth smile. How not good would that be? That would not be good.             Maybe your car’s just breathing. Yeah? Or sighing loudly because it’s bored waiting for you. It could be missing you. Or it could be that your car really is keeping time, that you set it up that way when you did the alarm-installing. What’s happening is, I bet you’re down there right now, in one of the rooms in the hotel where my wife is staying, making love to a woman who is not your wife, thrusting at her from behind but keeping an ear out for the chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp, for the number of chirpings equal to your allotted thirty-minute block of cheating. Or I’m wrong, it’s your wife who’s taken the car today. She’s the one down there right now with a man who is not you; hands braced against the headboard, she is face down under her own sweaty tangle of dark hair, strands stuck to her cheek and neck and in her mouth, and she is whimpering―no, moaning now—faster and louder and just beyond caring how many chirps have passed since she lost track . . . beyond caring anything about you. . . .             Sorry. I’m sorry. Listen, let’s forget about our wives, the whole rock business. Let’s say I move this potted gardenia onto the balcony instead. Not to push off or anything, but to smell, when whoever’s car it is takes me out there. I can’t tell you how I love the smell of gardenias. Wild, in bouquets, in vases. I grew to love them when I was twenty-three and living in St. Louis and working that spring as a gardener and my wife was falling out of love with me for the first time.             Sweet gardenia.             Can you smell that?         PET PETS Rafa wants a pony. Where’s my pony? he says. Then he chirps. The coffee’s still dripping. I don’t have a shirt on yet. It’s cold in the apartment, always especially cold around the floor first thing in the morning. He’s on the top perch of the brightly painted playpen we set atop his cage. I’m the first one up and I put him to bed last night. Who let you out? I say.   We haven’t talked about this. Me and Rafa. This is the first I’ve heard of it. He sounds, though, upset, even resentful. I want a pony, he says, now where is it? I can’t answer that. I say, You are our pony. No, he says, no no! shifting from foot to foot.             He wants a pony.             I don’t know what to say to that.   Rafa says he wants a pony. Did he tell you?             Pony? Rose asks.             A pony.             But, she says, he is our pony.             In know I know.             Well. You better be willing to pay stable fees. Feed is also very expensive. And you have to groom the horse—             Pony, I correct.             You had better be prepared to brush him or her pony, Rose says. You have to clean their—             It’s not my idea, I’m the bearer and so on, I say. I’m not entertaining the idea, even. It seemed like a request worth mentioning to you, is all. He voiced . . . an odd desire. I’m attempting to guess . . . to imagine I suppose . . . what’s at the heart of that desire. Has he said anything to you?             About ponies, no. Nothing.             About horses? I say.             There is such a thing as miniatures ponies, she says.   Twice that week I dream of Rafa, sitting up thinking. Instead of sleeping on his side in the hut we’ve given him, a tiny soft hut colored his own parrot green, he’s perched upright on one of the wooden sticks crisscrossing his cage. I dream he’s just thinking, running through the images and experiences of the day, watching himself, in his mind’s eye, eat seeds or pellets, swing on a swing, grapple with a knotted rope, preen, nuzzle his beak beneath a wing. We’re an image too, then, Rose and I: pausing as we pass the kitchen doorway in a rush for work, waving a quick goodbye. Then I dream of him thinking about the pony. They sit together under a stark black oak, one of the few left in a clearing. The pony stands close to the trunk, chewing grass, a tuft of white-blond hair over its eyes, its tail swaying then jerking, suddenly, at a fly. Rafa is huddled on a root, his claws curled around a golden grape he holds up, like a crystal ball. He sees himself leisurely eviscerate the grape, sees himself looking over, warmly, at the pony, cocking his head to the right, then letting out a whistle. The last image he has, so the last image I have also, is Rafa, little and green, at the center of an enormous worn brown saddle, the pony beneath, a miniature pony now, ambling toward the low pale sun, setting on the reddened horizon.   A miniature pony could fit in our apartment. They’re hardly bigger than most dogs.       - - - - - -

Andrew R. Touhy is a recipient of the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award, Fourteen Hills’ Bambi Holmes Fiction Prize, and a recent nominee for inclusion in Best New American Voices 2008. His work appears in Web Conjunctions, New Orleans Review, New American Writing, Fourteen Hills, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He lives and writes at 857 Haight Street, in the room above poet JANEY SMITH.