Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) (13 page)

Germany invades Poland.

The year’s big song is “Three Little Fishies” and someone, somewhere, is playing it.

11/30
. Understand that your cat is a whore and can’t help you. She takes on love with the whiskery adjustments of a gold-digger. She is a gorgeous nomad, an unfriend. Recall how just last month when you got her from Bob downstairs, after Bob had become suddenly allergic, she leaped into your lap and purred, guttural as a German chanteuse, familiar and furry as a mold. And Bob, visibly heartbroken, still in the room, sneezing and giving instructions, hoping for one last cat nuzzle, descended to his hands and knees and jiggled his fingers in the shag. The cat only blinked. For you, however, she smiled, gave a fish-breath peep, and settled.

“Oh, well,” said Bob, getting up off the floor. “Now I’m just a thing of her kittenish past.”

That’s the way with Bob. He’ll say to the cat, “You be a good girl now, honey,” and then just shrug, go back downstairs to his apartment, play jagged, creepy jazz, drink wine, stare out at the wintry scalp of the mountain.

12/1
. Moss Watson, the man you truly love like no other, is singing December 23 in the Owonta Opera production of
Amahl and the Night Visitors
. He’s playing Kaspar, the partially deaf Wise Man. Wisdom, says Moss, arrives in all forms. And you think, Yes, sometimes as a king and sometimes as a hesitant phone call that says the king’ll be late at rehearsal don’t wait up, and then when you call back to tell him to be careful not to let the cat out when he comes home, you discover there’s been no rehearsal there at all.

At three o’clock in the morning you hear his car in the
driveway, the thud of the front door. When he comes into the bedroom, you see his huge height framed for a minute in the doorway, his hair lit bright as curry. When he stoops to take off his shoes, it is as if some small piece of his back has given way, allowing him this one slow bend. He is quiet. When he gets into bed he kisses one of your shoulders, then pulls the covers up to his chin. He knows you’re awake. “I’m tired,” he announces softly, to ward you off when you roll toward him. Say: “You didn’t let the cat out, did you?”

He says no, but he probably should have. “You’re turning into a cat mom. Cats, Trudy, are the worst sort of surrogates.”

Tell him you’ve always wanted to run off and join the surrogates.

Tell him you love him.

Tell him you know he didn’t have rehearsal tonight.

“We decided to hold rehearsal at the Montessori school, what are you now,
my
mother?”

In the dark, discern the fine hook of his nose. Smooth the hair off his forehead. Say: “I love you Moss are you having an affair with a sheep?” You saw a movie once where a man was having an affair with a sheep, and acted, with his girlfriend, the way Moss now acts with you: exhausted.

Moss’s eyes close. “I’m a king, not a shepherd, remember? You’re acting like my ex-wife.”

His ex-wife is now an anchorwoman in Missouri.

“Are you having a regular affair? Like with a person?”

“Trudy,” he sighs, turns away from you, taking more than his share of blanket. “You’ve got to stop this.” Know you are being silly. Any second now he will turn and press against you, reassure you with kisses, tell you oh how much he loves you. “How on earth, Trudy,” is what he finally says, “would I ever have the time for an affair?”

12/2
. Your cat is growing, eats huge and sloppy as a racehorse. Bob named her Stardust Sweetheart, a bit much even for
Bob, so you and Moss think up other names for her: Pudge, Pudgemuffin, Pooch, Poopster, Secretariat, Stephanie, Emily. Call her all of them. “She has to learn how to deal with confusion,” says Moss. “And we’ve gotta start letting her outside.”

Say: “No. She’s still too little. Something could happen.” Pick her up and away from Moss. Bring her into the bathroom with you. Hold her up to the mirror. Say: “Whossat? Whossat pretty kitty?” Wonder if you could turn into Bob.

12/3
. Sometimes Moss has to rehearse in the living room. King Kaspar has a large black jewelry box about which he must sing to the young, enthralled Amahl. He must open drawers and haul out beads, licorice, magic stones. The drawers, however, keep jamming when they’re not supposed to. Moss finally tears off his fake beard and screams, “I can’t do this shit! I can’t sing about money and gewgaws. I’m the tenor of love!” Last year they’d done
La Bohème
and Moss had been Rodolfo.

This is the sort of thing he needs you for: to help him with his box. Kneel down beside him. Show him how one of the drawers is off its runner. Show him how to pull it out just so far. He smiles and thanks you in his berserk King Kaspar voice: “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” He begins his aria again: “ ‘This is my box. This is my box. I never travel without my box.’ ”

All singing is, says Moss, is sculpted howling.

Say, “Bye.” Wheel the TV into the kitchen. Watch MacNeil-Lehrer. Worry about Congress.

Listen to the goose-call of trains, all night, trundling by your house.

12/4
. Sometimes the phone rings, but then the caller hangs up.

12/5
. Your cat now sticks her paws right in the water dish while she drinks, then steps out from her short wade and licks
them, washes her face with them, repeatedly, over the ears and down, like an itch. Take to observing her. On her feet the gray and pink configurations of pads and fur look like tiny baboon faces. She sees you watching, freezes, blinks at you, then busies herself again, her face in her belly, one leg up at a time, an intent ballerina in a hairy body stocking. And yet she’s growing so quickly, she’s clumsy. She’ll walk along and suddenly her hip will fly out of whack and she’ll stop and look at it, not comprehending. Or her feet will stumble, or it’s difficult for her to move her new bulk along the edges of furniture, her body pushing itself out into the world before she’s really ready. It puts a dent in her confidence. She looks at you inquiringly:
What is happening to me?
She rubs against your ankles and bleats. You pick her up, tuck her under your chin, your teeth clenched in love, your voice cooey, gooey with maternity, you say things like, “How’s my little dirt-nose, my little fuzz-face, my little honey-head?”

“Jesus, Trudy,” Moss yells from the next room. “Listen to how you talk to that cat.”

12/6
. Though the Christmas shopping season is under way, the store you work at downtown, Owonta Flair, is not doing well. “The malls,” groans Morgan, your boss. “Every Christmas the malls! We’re doomed. These candy cane slippers. What am I gonna do with these?”

Tell her to put one slipper from each pair in the window along with a mammoth sign that says, M
ATES
I
NSIDE
. “People only see the sign. Thom McAn did it once. They got hordes.”

“You’re depressed,” says Morgan.

12/7
. You and Moss invite the principals, except Amahl, over to dinner one night before a rehearsal. You also invite Bob. Three kings, Amahl’s unwed mother, you, and Bob: this way four people can tell cranky anecdotes about the production, and two people can listen.

“This really is a trashy opera,” says Sonia, who plays Amahl’s mother. “Sentimental as all get-out.” Sonia is everything you’ve always wanted to be: smart, Jewish, friendly, full-haired as Easter basket grass. She speaks with a mouthful of your spinach pie. She says she likes it. When she has swallowed, a piece of spinach remains behind, wrapped like a gap around one of her front teeth. Other than that she is very beautiful. Nobody says anything about the spinach on her tooth.

Two rooms away the cat is playing with a marble in the empty bathtub. This is one of her favorite games. She bats the marble and it speeds around the porcelain like a stock car. The noise is rattley, continuous.

“What is that weird noise?” asks Sonia.

“It’s the beast,” says Moss. “We should put her outside, Trudy.” He pours Sonia more wine, and she murmurs, “Thanks.”

Jump up. Say: “I’ll go take the marble away.”

Behind you you can hear Bob: “She used to be mine. Her name is Stardust Sweetheart. I got allergic.”

Melchior shouts after you: “Aw, leave the cat alone, Trudy. Let her have some fun.” But you go into the bathroom and take the marble away anyhow. Your cat looks up at you from the tub, her head cocked to one side, sweet and puzzled as a child movie star. Then she turns and bats drips from the faucet. Scratch the scruff of her neck. Close the door when you leave. Put the marble in your pocket.

You can hear Balthazar making jokes about the opera. He calls it
Amyl and the Nitrates
.

“I’ve always found Menotti insipid,” Melchior is saying when you return to the dining room.

“Written for NBC, what can you expect,” Sonia says. Soon she is off raving about
La Bohème
and other operas. She uses words like
verismo, messa di voce
, Montserrat Caballe. She smiles. “An opera should be like contraception: about
sex, not
children.”

Start clearing the plates. Tell people to keep their forks
for dessert. Tell them that no matter what anyone says, you think
Amahl
is a beautiful opera and that the ending, when the mother sends her son off with the kings, always makes you cry. Moss gives you a wink. Get brave. Give your head a toss. Add: “Papage
no
, Papage
na
—to me,
La Bohème
’s just a lot of scarves.”

There is some gulping of wine.

Only Bob looks at you and smiles. “Here. I’ll help you with the plates,” he says.

Moss stands and makes a diversionary announcement: “Sonia, you’ve got a piece of spinach on your tooth.”

“Christ,” she says, and her tongue tunnels beneath her lip like an elegant gopher.

12/8
. Sometimes still Moss likes to take candlelight showers with you. You usually have ten minutes before the hot water runs out. Soap his back, the wide moguls of his shoulders registering in you like a hunger. Press yourself against him. Whisper: “I really do like
La Bohème
, you know.”

“It’s okay,” Moss says, all forgiveness. He turns and grabs your buttocks.

“It’s just that your friends make me nervous. Maybe it’s work, Morgan that forty-watt hysteric making me crazy.” Actually you like Morgan.

Begin to hum a Dionne Warwick song, then grow self-conscious and stop. Moss doesn’t like to sing in the shower. He has his operas, his church jobs, his weddings and bar mitzvahs—in the shower he is strictly off-duty. Say: “I mean, it
could
be Morgan.”

Moss raises his head up under the spray, beatific, absent. His hair slicks back, like a baby’s or a gangster’s, dark with water, shiny as a record album. “Does Bob make you nervous?” he asks.

“Bob? Bob suffers from terminal sweetness. I like Bob.”

“So do I. He’s a real gem.”

Say: “Yeah, he’s a real chum.”

“I said
gem
,” says Moss. “Not
chum
.” Things fall quiet. Lately you’ve been mishearing each other. Last night in bed you said, “Moss, I usually don’t like discussing sex, but—” And he said, “I don’t like disgusting sex either.” And then he fell asleep, his snores scratching in the dark like zombies.

Take turns rinsing. Don’t tell him he’s hogging the water. Ask finally, “Do you think Bob’s gay?”

“Of course he’s gay.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He hangs out at Sammy’s in the mall.”

“Is that a gay bar?”

“Bit of everything.” Moss shrugs.

Think: Bit of everything. Just like a mall. “Have you ever been there?” Scrub vigorously between your breasts.

“A few times,” says Moss, the water growing cooler.

Say: “Oh.” Then turn off the faucet, step out onto the bath mat. Hand Moss a towel. “I guess because I work trying to revive our poor struggling downtown I don’t get out to these places much.”

“I guess not,” says Moss, candle shadows wobbling on the shower curtain.

12/9
. Two years ago when Moss first moved in, there was something exciting about getting up in the morning. You would rise, dress, and, knowing your lover was asleep in your bed, drive out into the early morning office and factory traffic, feeling that you possessed all things, Your Man, like a Patsy Cline song, at home beneath your covers, pumping blood through your day like a heart.

Now you have a morbid fascination with news shows. You get up, dress, flick on the TV, sit in front of it with a bowl of cereal in your lap, quietly curse all governments everywhere, get into your car, drive to work, wonder how the sun has the nerve to show its face, wonder why the world seems to
be picking up speed, even old ladies pass you on the highway, why you don’t have a single erotic fantasy that Moss isn’t in, whether there really are such things as vitamins, and how would you rather die cancer or a car accident, the man you love, at home, asleep, like a heavy, heavy heart through your day.

“Goddamn slippers,” says Morgan at work.

12/10
. The cat now likes to climb into the bathtub and stand under the dripping faucet in order to clean herself. She lets the water bead up on her face, then wipes herself, neatly dislodging the gunk from her eyes.

“Isn’t she wonderful?” you ask Moss.

“Yeah. Come here you little scumbucket,” he says, slapping the cat on the haunches, as if she were a dog.

“She’s not a dog, Moss. She’s a cat.”

“That’s right. She’s a cat. Remember that, Trudy.”

12/11
. The phone again. The ringing and hanging up.

12/12
. Moss is still getting in very late. He goes about the business of fondling you, like someone very tired at night having to put out the trash and bolt-lock the door.

He sleeps with his arms folded behind his head, elbows protruding, treacherous as daggers, like the enemy chariot in
Ben-Hur
.

12/13
. Buy a Christmas tree, decorations, a stand, and lug them home to assemble for Moss. Show him your surprise.