Kiko

    Just before Valentine’s Day my cat started vomiting regularly and losing control of his bladder. Spencer was only about eight years old and had always been extremely healthy. I couldn’t find anyone who would see him in less than six weeks -his last vet had died of cancer- so I took him to an urgent care center. They didn't seem too worried but took some blood and said they’d call me in a few days with the results. They called that night and said he had terminal kidney disease and that wanted me to have him put down the next day. I was stunned; I had assumed he just had a urinary tract infection or something. I asked them if it would be a mistake to wait until the following weekend. The vet got real quiet but finally said I should bring him in the moment he stopped eating.

    That week I went home after work every day and spent time with him. I knew I was being selfish and prolonging his suffering, but they gave me some pain meds for him and aside from the vomiting he seemed his normal affectionate self. He would curl in my lap while I drew or watched movies, and I slept with my arm around him every night. By the end of the week he was really starting to slow down though, and not eating anything aside from his treats, and so I finally called the clinic.

    I was late getting to the appointment but the women there didn't say anything. I sat in on a cot in a room with green painted walls and a wave machine whooshing in the background. On a little table sat a jar decorated with paper hearts and filled with treats. A woman with pink hair brought him in swaddled in a blanket. They had given him a sedative so he was quite docile until I gave him one of the treats, which he attacked as ferociously as if he was completely healthy, as if these weren't the final moments of his life. I sat there petting him for a little while and when I was ready I pressed the buzzer and the vet came in and gave him an injection in his front leg. He stopped breathing almost immediately but because he was so tightly wrapped I didn't notice until she said, "He's gone." I saw that eyes were glassy and lifeless. She said I could sit with him a while if I wanted to, but I said I couldn't do it and handed the body to her. She said I should take all the time I needed and closed the door behind her. I sat with my head in my hands and sobbed for a few minutes then got up and left. A week later I received a package with a paw print baked in clay and a tuft of his fur, and this is all that remains of my darling Spencer. It had been six years nearly to the day since I’d brought him home. 

    A few months went by and my friend Amy said she wanted to take me to the Humane Society. "Just to browse," she said. "Besides, Analee wants to look at the rats even though I told her she can't have one. "

    The cats were all being housed temporarily in a cordoned-off section of the dog kennels because of renovations to their usual area. Analee skipped and sang to herself while I went from cage to cage. You could look at the pets but you couldn’t meet with them unless you first filled out a form online. There weren't many there anyways. One gorgeous honey-colored cat gazed up imploringly but she was 14 years old and I couldn't bear the idea of taking home some animal that was going to die in a few years. The entire experience was discouraging but I knew I probably wasn’t ready to adopt yet anyways. Besides, I didn’t actually want a new cat; I wanted my old cat to still be alive. 

    My mind was ragged and fraying. I was fifty years old and every day I felt freshly crushed by the realization that my entire life needed to change. My foot was fucked up again, I was being eaten alive by loneliness, and things at work were a nightmare. My anxiety, which has always remained at more or less manageable levels, was raging out of control. And now I no longer even had a furry friend to comfort me. I finally scheduled some time off for late spring, in the hope that getting away for a while would help me relax enough to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. I planned on looking for a new cat when I returned.

    A few weeks before I left for vacation, Amy told me her boss had a kitten she had to find a new home for in a hurry. While I had been hoping for an adult cat rather than a baby, and the timing was not ideal, I thought I needed to take the chance. Maybe this was fate. I tell myself I'm not superstitious and that I don't believe in signs and portents but this is not in the least bit true.

    I expected to just meet the cat and maybe decide in a day or two, but Cindy told me to bring my cat carrier, so I grabbed it and hopped on the bus to the other side of the river. I felt like I was on a blind date. It wasn't a long ride and their home was only a few blocks from the bus stop, in the pretty neighborhood of Alameida. Cindy and her husband took me out back to the garage. 

    "Leo just showed up one day and wouldn't leave," they said. They had two other cats in the house and none of them got along, so the kitten was staying in the garage. The garage was full of boxes and clutter and a small fleet of motorbikes. I caught a flash of fur between the tires but the cat wouldn't come out. They offered me a drink and we sat on the patio to wait. Eventually Leo came to the glass door of the garage and looked out through a dusty pane. He was a gorgeous animal, very pale gray with darker gray stripes and dazzling blue eyes. He looked remarkably like Robyn's cat who had disappeared years ago. It was uncanny, as if Nootenboom had come back as a kitten. 

    Cindy and her husband were kind enough to give me a ride home. Leo climbed right into the carrier without any coaxing and purred placidly beside me in the back seat. When I got home and let him out, he bolted for the closet. He didn't emerge for two days. I could hear him climbing around but I couldn't see him. 

    I got home from work a few days later to find most of the plants in my studio apartment had been knocked over. That night I was woken up by Leo's pounding back and forth across the room, jumping off the furnuture. My upstairs neighbor had a cat which did the same thing nearly every night; I had barely had a decent sleep in the past nine months. Now I was inflicting this same punishment on the guy below me.

    The next day I noticed the faint odor of cat urine wafting through the apartment, though I couldn't tell where it was emanating from. That day Leo was moderatly friendly, and would occasionally jump on the bed and let me rub his belly. He wasn't like Spencer though, who used to meet me at the door every day and was by my side or on my lap almost constantly. Also unlike Spencer, Leo was enormous. The paperwork said he was only six months old but I didn't see how that could be true. I had never seen such a gigantic kitten, and he didn't seem to be a Maine coon or any of the other large breeds. He was just huge.

    The following morning I propped open the balcony door and did some housecleaning. On either side of the balcony is a window, one of which is quite small. When I went back outside, I saw Leo crouched in the smaller windowsill, which was much to narrow for his bulk. He looked at me and meowed in terror. I felt a moment of panic and then he leaped across the chasm into my arms.  I staggered against the railing, then ran inside with him and shut the door. He bolted for the closet and I collapsed onto the couch and waited for my heart to stop pounding. 

    I realized I could live with the stress brought on by this animal but I felt so guilty and embarrassed, especially when Amy texted me to tell me how much Cindy had liked me and had said how happy she was to have found a good home for their baby. I texted her back saying I was losing my mind and didn't know what to do. She was at a picnic but she called me immediately. I was nearly hysterical but she said not to worry, that she would take care of things. 

    The next day she texted that she had found a new home for Leo in Hood River and that she was driving out there this weekend and could come collect him. In the meantime Leo continued to dig in my plants and urinate in locations that I still could not pinpoint, despite the fact that is is not a large apartment. But that weekend Amy came and took him away. I felt sad not so much to see him go but for the idea of him, the void left by this big beautiful monster that had appeared so suddenly in my life and was just as suddenly gone. 

    I went on my trip and it thankfully ended up being the restful, rejuvenating experience I needed it to be to help me feel human again. I returned feeling ready to face the challenges my stupid life. 

    A few weeks after I got back, I asked my friend Mia to take me around to start shopping for a new cat. We went to the county shelter first. It's not the nicest place but it was where I had found Spencer all those years ago. He had been lying in the back of his cage and when I looked in he looked back at me, stared me right in the eye for a full minute. I had them open the cage and he came running over to me and headbutted my hand and started purring and that was that. 

    There weren’t many cats in the shelter and most of them were kittens. I asked to be allowed to meet a handsome tuxedo cat and they put us in a little room together, but he showed no interest in me, started climbing around looking for ways out. I met another cat with shaggy tan hair who was a little friendlier but it just didn’t feel right, there was nothing there. I couldn’t tell if it was me being defensive or not ready, but I trusted that feeling and we left without him. I had managed to make an appointment to see one cat at the Humane Society, a tiny gray two year old named Kiko. We had a lot of time before the appointment so we had lunch and she asked if I minded stopping by her old apartment so she could pick up some cleaning supplies. I’d never been there before. It was an unsavory feeling place, carpeted and moldy and smaller than I’d imagined. There were two bathroom sinks for some reason and both were situated not in the bathroom but in a pointless hallway separating the bedroom and the kitchen. 

    “Was this place originally a motel?” I asked. She said she didn’t think so. "I'm glad you're getting out at least," I said. 

    We dropped the cleaning products off at her new apartment, which was just a mile up the road but much less creepy feeling, then drove to the Humane Society. We were early but they said we could wait in the feline area. They had moved the cats back into their old quarters but it was still under construction so whole parts of it were unfinished. The sections had names like the Purr Palace and the Cattery. We circled the cat area three times but I didn’t see Kiko.

    It was peak kitten season and there were rooms filled with nothing but kittens, most of them kept in big common areas or paired in cages. A bunch of them were named for meats; Salami, Pastrami, Pepperoni. I watched a tiny black kitten named Prosciutto bat at a ball trapped in a plastic ring. Those toys always make me nervous for some reason. I want to free the ball from the ring, and watching a cat paw at it fills me with anxiety. His cellmate, a grey kitten with a head not much larger than a golf ball, stared at me with tiny blue eyes and would not look away. 

    I heard someone call my name and a cute woman with gray-frosted dreadlocks and a clipboard came running around the corner. I asked her if I could just lie down in one of the rooms and let kittens crawl all over me. She laughed and led us into one of the meeting rooms and told us to sit down. “I like to sit on the floor myself,” she said, and proceeded to do so. I sat on the bench and Mia sat down next to me.  I thought of introducing her but I didn’t. The woman asked what I was looking for and I explained about Spencer dying and she said she was sorry, that she had just lost her Chihuahua of 18 years. 

    She flipped through the pages on her clipboard and seemed to be stalling for time. Finally she warned us that Kiko was not the loving, cuddly kitty that she sensed I was searching for. She was being kept away from the other cats because she seemed so skittish and unsociable. The woman took out her phone and read us the comments her previous owners had made. “They say here that she’s affectionate but... She will head butt me and let me pet her but she also gave me a warning nip,” she said.  "So I don't know." 

    I felt myself deflate. I hadn't realized that, despite how guarded I thought I was, and careful not to harbor any sort of hopes or expectations, I had really been secretly wanting this cat to be the one. I wanted to feel that magical connection that only ever seems to happen when you're not looking for, when you're not ready for it. I thought about asking to meet Kiko anyways but I knew it was a bad idea. What if I caved and took her home, even though she wasn't right for me?  The woman didn’t offer to bring her out but started to scroll through her phone, saying maybe I could meet another available candidate.  But she kept shaking her head; all the cats left had health or personality issues or both. “There’s a reason they’re still here,” she said. 

    As we drove past the strip clubs and construction equipment rental places, past the fast food joints and cannibis shops, I wondered again if I shouldn’t have had her bring Kiko out anyways. Maybe I would have been the one person she warmed up to. I had already been there, why hadn't I at least given her a chance? What was I afraid of?

    When I looked on the website a few days later, all the kittens named after meat had been replaced by other kittens named after pasta. Capellini, Fettuccini, Linguini. Kiko was nowhere to be found. Had someone adopted her, had she finally found someone to love her? Or -more likely- had they euthanized her for the crime of being too antisocial? Could I have saved her life? Could I have given her that poor, unhappy kitty the home she needed? I felt awful. I thought about Leo and hoped he was happy in Hood River. When I got back to the apartment I pressed my finger into Spencer’s paw print in the clay. And that night I was awoken on the hour by the cat upstairs galloping back and forth, back and forth, until finally I screamed shut up, shut up, shut up. 

Tinas Cuban Cuisine (Melencolia)

    My first day in New York was kind of maddening. I’m not even going to go into it. The second day was better. I went to the Breuer Building, which used to be the home of the Whitney Museum before they moved downtown. After that, the Met rented it out for a while, but they could never really make it work. Currently it’s the temporary resting place for work from the Frick, which is being remodeled. I’ve been to the Frick a few times, it’s never been my favorite museum but it certainly houses some impressive stuff. This time I was going to see the building as much as the art. I have lots of good memories of visiting the Whitney, going back to my first visit when I was in high school. I spent a long time lounging around on a bench in one of the stairwells with a bunch of the cool kids, who for some reason decided to take pity on me and let me hang out with them. Since then I’d seen some incredible shows, including retrospectives of Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko. The last time I’d been there was before the pandemic, when the Met was having shows there. I’d seen an Edvard Munch retrospective that had blown me away. 

    Removing the paintings from the plush mansion and plopping them into the brutalist spaces of the Breuer really allowed them to shine. Work I’d never paid much attention to –especially the Fragonards, of which there were many- suddenly seemed fresh and exciting to me. The Vermeers were out on loan for a once-in-a-lifetime retrospective in Amsterdam, and all the Spanish masterpieces were likewise spending time back in their homeland. But the rest were all there- the Turners, the Van Dycks, the Holbeins, the Pieros. And unlike the Met, which had been crammed to capacity when I’d visited the day before, the fake Frick was nearly empty aside from a number of Russian tourists who spent the time screaming across the galleries at each other and standing in my way no matter where I moved. 

    The paintings were all wonderful but the pieces which moved me the most were two etchings. The first was Durer’s Melencholia I, a picture I’d never been much interested in, despite its skillful execution. This time I found myself drawn into the dark twists of fabric of the miserable angel, and intrigued by the mysterious tools and objects strewn at his feet. The other etching was by Van Dyck, an artist I’ve never felt much affection for, though he is of course a consummate craftsman. I don’t remember noticing his etchings at all, but they had two there; one a sensitive self-portrait, and the other a portrait of Hans Holbein the Younger. I felt myself deeply moved by this portrait for reasons I couldn’t explain. Despite the fact that Van Dyck didn’t etch the plate himself –some anonymous assistant did that, based on his drawing –I felt a warmth and tenderness emanating from this little study, both that of the artist depicted and the artist who created the depiction. And I was there to receive it, the three of us all merging together in a way that made me feel, for the first time in a long while, something other than lonely. 

    I spent a long time in the Breuer, deeply immersed and sharply focused, and though I still had hours before my bus came, I didn’t think I could handle any more art, so I headed down to SoHo to see if the Housing Works bookstore was still there. It was, and I spent a while looking at books and sitting in the café, reliving old times. I’d been going there since the late nineties, and it had always been one of my favorite spots in the city. A tiny woman with a  black bob was running around shelving books and running register, while there were other employees there she seemed to be the only one doing any work, I caught her eye a few times and she smiled, besides being adorable she looked hauntingly familiar, it seemed impossible that I knew her, maybe I’d seen her working there before, though I hadn’t been since before the pandemic. When she rang me up she was friendly but distant; I had noticed a nervousness about her, she seemed to never stop moving, she carried herself with a sort of fidgety grace. For hours afterwards I couldn’t get her out of my head; it’s been a long time since a stranger has made such an impression on me. 

    I took the six train up to Fourteenth Avenue and had some coffee and poked around the few remaining bookstores for a while. I still had a few hours before I needed to start heading toward the bus so decided to sit in Union Square and draw for a while. The park was packed and like the rest of the city seemed to be overflowing with gorgeous, scantily-clad women. My sister- and everyone else I know, for that matter- had complained that it was impossible to afford to live in New York, and while I could see how this might be the case, the fact remains that people do, I mean, a lot of people, and they can’t all be millionaires. I don’t know how they do it, honestly. I remember in the past my friends there all had two jobs and tiny apartments with roommates in order to get by, but now even that doesn’t seem like enough. 

    After a while a pretty young trans woman with pink hair sat down on the bench next to me and kept stealing glances my way, watching me draw. Or at least I thought they were, or maybe I just wanted them to. They took out a book and started reading, and at first I was pleased, I mean who reads books anymore, but then I saw that it was just that book by that smug nihilist A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, even the title is smug, and I thought about making a snarky comment about it, because while they might be insulted and think I was a creep, they might also be intrigued and want to know why I think he’s an overrated windbag, and maybe they were secretly thinking a similar thing as they read, wondering to themselves why this book was so lauded. But I didn’t, I just kept drawing, and though it was only 6:30 or so, I noticed the tan paper of my sketchbook seemed to be darker than it had been, and I looked up and behind me, above the trees, loomed a mass of black clouds. 

    The day had been warm and summery and they hadn’t been calling for rain, I’d made a point of checking so I would know how to dress, but now I took out my new phone –and oh God, it pains me to admit it but I can’t avoid it any longer, two days earlier I had finally caved in and gotten a smartphone, or rather I’d taken the smartphone my pal LaValle had mailed me earlier in the year and got it activated, though I didn’t want to tell anyone because I’d been so outspoken against these contraptions and now here I was, pulling one out of my pocket and checking the goddamned weather on it, anyways my phone informed me that a thunderstorm was about to hit in seven minutes, and everyone around me was also checking their phones and looking nervously at the sky, though the woman with the pink hair just kept reading, I thought of making some comment about the weather to her but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, instead I packed up my sketchbook and grabbed my bag of books I’d bought at Housing Works, and it was a paper bag and I thought oh shit, if it starts to downpour my new books are going to get drenched, and I stood up and started walking through the park, heading north, toward where the bus was set to pick me up in an hour and a half. 

    Park workers were starting to clean up the tables and chairs that were scattered around for people to eat at, and one of the workers had left their cart sitting unattended, and there was a huge pile of plastic garbage bags hanging on it, and I took one and wrapped my books in it and felt instantly better, and just then there was a flash and a crack of thunder right overhead, and everyone was walking fast in every direction, a guy selling cacti was quickly throwing his plants into the back of a truck, and all I could think was that all these women running around in their skimpy summer dresses with their legs and their cleavage were suddenly going to be drenched, and I wasn’t sure I could handle that so I just kept walking, up past the Flatiron Building, which was covered in scaffolding and black netting. The Empire State Building was directly ahead of me, silvery against the black clouds, and there were all these brand new glass towers rising up all around, then the lighting flashed again, a thick white bolt, and I stood under the awning of a restaurant with newspaper over the windows and watched as the lightning flashed again and again, reflecting off the mirrored buildings, though already the thunder seemed to be weakening, and though the rain was darkening the sidewalk it quickly slackened to a drizzle, and I continued on to find something to eat. I stopped at the first pizza joint I came to, a tiny place with only two tables run by a man who only spoke Spanish, the pizza was no worse or better than any other I’d had, everyone who came in also spoke Spanish, I wanted to sit a while but it was kind of a dreary scene so I stopped at the Rizzoli store, also dreary but in a different way, and slowly made my way to where the bus had left me off the day before. 

    The rain had completely stopped so I did some drawing as I leaned against a building, inching further and further away from a urine smell that I couldn’t figure out the source of. The bus arrived fifteen minutes early and left everyone out, then the bus driver looked around and said, Where is everybody, I’m supposed to have fifty-three people on this trip, and one of the women who had been on the bus came over and said she and her mother were supposed to meet their ride but no one was there for them, apparently the bus had changed stops and not told anyone, the only reason I knew was that the driver the day before had said Now be sure to catch the bus RIGHT HERE tomorrow, apparently the old stop was a few blocks away and the bus drivers had been getting tickets for stopping there so the company had changed the stop but apparently not told any of the ticket holders, in fact I pulled out my receipt and sure enough it had the old pick-up spot on it, it said Madison Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets, in front of Tinas Cuban Cuisine and Tooth Docs Dentistry. 

    Then another woman came by to meet her friend and said she’d just been down at the Madison Avenue stop and there were like fifty people waiting there. The driver, whose name was Theresa, was apoplectic and couldn’t figure out what to do. I asked if she couldn’t just drive down to the other stop and she started yelling about how she’d get a ticket and how could the company not have emailed everyone the change, she asked me did I get an email and I said no, and showed her my receipt, and she started yelling some more but told me to get on the bus, and I handed her my paper with the QR code for her to scan (I had printed it out before I had my new phone set up) and she said her scanner was acting up, that I should just tell her my first name, and I did and she crossed me off the list on her iPad and told me to wait on the bus while she figured out what to do. I told her I didn’t mind running the few blocks to tell the other people the situation but she ignore me so I sat in the very front and she got in and called her dispatcher, who didn’t answer, then she called someone else and while she was on the phone with him the dispatcher called back, and she yelled at her for a while on speakerphone and the dispatcher said she should just drive on down there and pick them up. But what if I get a ticket? yelled Theresa and the dispatcher sighed and said she would handle any ticket, though she probably wouldn’t get one, it’s not like the cops would be down there waiting for her when she pulled up. 

    So she started the bus but because it was Friday night and it was midtown and there were vehicles and pedestrians everywhere it took us about ten minutes to go four blocks, and when we arrived sure enough there was a mass of people waiting there with their luggage. I suggested to Theresa that she not tell them about the mix up, that she should just say she got caught in traffic, after all there had just been a terrific thunderstorm. Everyone piled on and right away a little old lady sat next to me, though I’d been hoping to have room to stretch out, but she was tiny and ancient and her face was black and very shiny. I asked if she minded if I kept the light on and said No, why would I mind, like she thought I was crazy for even asking. Once the bus was loaded we lurched into motion but the streets were crammed with Ubers double parking and blocking the road and mopeds weaving in and out of traffic, and huge crowds of people kept jaywalking as we tried to get through the intersections. Theresa refused to slow down for the jaywalkers, some of whom were pushing baby carriages, she just laid on the horn and plowed ahead, causing people to scatter, I was terrified, I thought we really might hit someone, Theresa kept apologizing, saying I’m a really patient driver, honest, I just become another person when I get in the city. I’ll be better once we get through the tunnel. And for the most part she was, though every once in a while she drifted onto the shoulder and her GPS system would blurt out DISTRACTED in its computer voice, it seemed weird that Theresa was using verbal directions but she did the entire trip. Eventually I turned off the light and just sat there with my eyes closed, wishing I were home, even if I wasn’t really sure where that was anymore.