The Cloud of Unknowing (20 page)

“No,” Kitty said, “It's nothing like that. Your parents' clock was not
sentient
. This is the whole problem, this right here.”

“Don't worry,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I learned my lesson.”

“What lesson?”

“Don't shave the dog.”

“I'm not just trying to be right, you know,” Kitty said. “It really bothers me that you haven't learned anything from this.”

“Fine. If we ever get a cat, I won't shave that either.”

“I can't believe you're still joking about this.”

“You know what I can't believe? I can't believe you're still bitching about it. Jesus Christ, get over it, Kitty. The dog is fine. Aren't you fine, Mothra?” The dog, who had been lying on the floor shifting her eyes from Isaac to Kitty and back again, perked up at the sound of her name. “Anyhow,” he continued, “who bought her? Me. I bought her, she's my dog, so fuck off.”

Kitty took all the money in her pocket and threw it at him. “You want your thirty dollars?
Here
.”

“No sale.”

Isaac and Mothra were driving through the utilitarian drear of Northeast Philly looking for a floor supply warehouse. It was here somewhere, in one of these shitty industrial parks. While Isaac was scanning the parking lot signs on the side of the road, he noticed someone scuttling along the ditch with a red plastic gas can. Short, scrawny, frizzy grey hair. He looked familiar. Oh yeah, that guy from the dog park—Kitty's wasteoid friend. He pulled alongside the guy and rolled down the passenger side window.

“Hey, I know you,” he yelled.

Don didn't immediately recognize Isaac. He walked over and leaned in the window.

“Hey, uh . . .”

“Isaac.”

“Yeah, right—Isaac, Isaac,” said Don.

“What are you doing walking around out here?”

Don waved his gas can.

“Let me give you a lift,” Isaac said. He reached across and opened the door.

“Man, I'm glad you stopped,” said Don, sliding in. He leaned over the seat to put the gas can in the back and Mothra stood up to say hello. “Hey, lookit you.” Don gave her neck a scruff. “Her fur's growing back. Is she gonna be grey like this now?”

“I think that's just her undercoat.”

“I gotta say, she looks a lot better with a little fluff.”

Isaac ignored it.

“I mean, she looked pretty fucking weird,” Don added.

“I guess.”

“Like a plucked chicken or something.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. I thought I'd never hear the end of that one.”

“Kitty's a nice girl, man. My old girlfriend would've kicked my ass if I pulled a stunt like that.”

“I know,” Isaac said with a sigh. “She's a class act.”

They filled the gas can at a Sunoco and headed back toward Don's car. Isaac turned on the car radio and found the Drexel station.

“Oh yeah,” said Don approvingly when a Dictators song came on.

“Hey Don, are you a musician?” Isaac asked.

“No, why?”

“You look like Handsome Dick Manitoba. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Really?” said Don, pleased. “You really think so?

“I guess it's the hair.”

By the time they got back to Don's car, they were having such a nice time chatting about this and that—punk rock,
Don's settlement check and how to spend it—that they decided to pick up a six-pack and drive around some more. Enjoy the sunset. The check was coming in any day, and Don was going to take Kitty's advice. He was going to buy a little row house, maybe somewhere down near Packer Park where the prices were still low. He was living in a motel in South Jersey right now. He'd had to get rid of the cats, which broke his heart. But at least he still had his rat, and of course Mandy, and soon they'd have their own little place. Kitty and Isaac could come over sometimes, and bring Mothra.

“Tell you what,” said Don after a while, “I have a little bit of coke here. You want to pull in somewhere and do a line? Just don't tell Kitty, okay?”

Isaac hesitated. “I don't really like coke.”

“I have a joint . . .”

“I can't smoke weed either.”

“What
do
you like?”

Isaac thought for a minute. He liked acid, but that was probably out of the question. “Heroin. I like heroin.”

“Well, why didn't you say so?” Don said. “Turn around.”

They headed back south. Mothra sat up in the back seat and watched the drive-thrus and car lots and clusters of vinyl-clad row houses roll past in the growing darkness. Soon they were traveling under the Frankford El, through the dollar store corridor of Juniata, and into the nefarious Kensington gloom. They stopped outside a bar with a glass brick front. Don went in and came outside with a guy in a do-rag and an enormous white t-shirt. The two disappeared around the corner. Don came back a few minutes later, alone. He got in the front seat and handed Isaac a glassine bindle. It had a little skull and crossbones and the word FLATLINE stamped on it.

“That's the high-test,” said Don. “So, you're not gonna tell Kitty about this, right?” He pulled something else out of his
pocket: a needle. Isaac hadn't thought of that, but what the hell.

It was high-test, all right. Isaac woke up on the ground in the lot behind the glass brick bar with a flashlight shining in his eyes and a shot of Narcan in his arm. He was suddenly not high at all, and Don was nowhere. The scenery sloshed past as the paramedics rolled him onto a gurney: a urine-streaked wall, a shot-out street light, a row of houses across the street staring back at him with distempered plywood eyes. As they lifted Isaac into the ambulance, he saw that the front doors of his car were wide open.

“Mothra,” he said, or had he only thought it?

the_lettuce

Kitty met Isaac a few weeks after her thirtieth birthday and stayed with him for eleven years. He was gloomy and angry, chronically disorganized, estranged from his family. A few years into their relationship, when she realized how dependent he'd become on her, Kitty considered leaving, but she didn't. Maybe this was just adult life, she told herself, this feeling of entanglement. It wasn't easy living with someone; everyone said so. Instead of breaking up, they bought a run-down row house in South Philadelphia and worked on it together over the years, never quite getting it past the construction-site stage.

And Isaac never stopped being exhausting. He wrecked her car and picked fights with the neighbors and followed her around the house ranting about the housewives who hired him to install kitchen cabinets and refinish their floors. Increasingly, Kitty found herself asking, “What if this is
not
adult life?” If it wasn't, she was running out of time. It was already, practically speaking, too late for children—not that she had ever actively wanted them; Isaac was enough. In the end, she picked a moment when they weren't fighting and took him to the diner across the street to tell him, over hamburgers, that she couldn't be with him anymore. She was moving into the spare room. He didn't ask for an explanation. He seemed to have been expecting it.

They kept living together as roommates, waiting out the bad real estate market. She didn't do his laundry anymore, but they ate dinner in front of the TV several nights a week. Once, they watched a movie about a strange, religiously ecstatic
young bride in a backward Scottish village. In the movie, her husband is paralyzed in an oil rig accident. She believes God has punished them for their carnal happiness. Her husband tells her to sleep with other men and describe their encounters for him, which she does, and in her strangeness and simplicity, she becomes convinced that she is keeping him alive in this way. As his health fails, her assignations become more desperate. She ends up battered and ruined, and she dies in disgrace, denied a church funeral.

Kitty thought it was the saddest movie she'd ever seen. She and Isaac were both crying by the time the credits rolled, and they ended up together in their old bed. When she woke up in the middle of the night, his arms were clamped around her waist. She pried herself free and went back to the spare room. In the morning he tried to kiss her when she poured him a cup of coffee, but she turned her head away and said, “I'm sorry.”

Kitty had no idea how a forty-one-year-old was supposed to meet someone new. Before she moved in with Isaac, her social universe had seemed to contain infinite romantic permutations. She'd worked in crowded places—a coffee shop, a bookstore, a rock club—wandering in and out of flirtations and affairs; but the crowds were gone now. No one called on Friday to tell her where the weekend's parties were, and if she did find herself at a party, it was no longer a labyrinth of erotic possibilities.

Someone at work told her about a free online dating website called
cupid.com
.

“You're not really going to do this, are you?” her friend Nancy asked when she brought it up.

“Sure, why not? Aren't you curious?”

“So, you put up an ad? Like an escort?”

“Not exactly. You create a profile, a little homunculus, and
you give it all your essential qualities so that it can attract appropriate suitors while you are busy beach-walking, reading great books, feeling equally at home in sweatpants or an evening gown.”

Ironic distance made the idea more bearable. Kitty chose the name “foam_core” for her online identity and uploaded a picture of herself wearing a heavy winter coat and rubber boots. Then she turned to the lifestyle questionnaire. Most of the questions were optional, designed for a balance of sincerity and display.

In my bedroom you will find___.
She skipped that one.

____
is sexy; ___ is sexier.
Skip.

Five things I can't live without; 25 years from now I see myself; The last thing that made me laugh out loud was.
She left these blank as well.

The door slammed downstairs. “Hey,” she yelled to Isaac. “How would you describe me in one word?”

“Crabby.”

The only two questions you had to answer were
Why You Should Get To Know Me
and
What I'm Looking For.
She could not think of a way to address the first one without sounding like an asshole. The second one, though, uncorked a stream.

“Reclusive geniuses,” she wrote. “Hyperactive lunatics, charismatic vulgarians, obsessive motor-mouths.” Lists were her favorite mode of self-expression. “Collectors of arcane knowledge and useless ephemera.” She typed without pausing for a while, then reviewed what she had written. She added, “You can be a kook as long as you're an interesting kook, and I don't care if you have a high school diploma.”

Her
cupid.com
mailbox began filling up, but the men who wrote to her comprised a different sort of list. They were U2 fans and jet-skiers, sad-eyed home-brewers and readers of medical thrillers. She was considering deactivating her account
when she got a message from “expunk63,” a video editor who liked Flipper and Black Flag. He was the first person she'd encountered who seemed like someone she might know socially, in real life, so she agreed to meet him at a bar in Old City.

The evening was a traumatic failure. In person, expunk63 was combative and jittery. She'd forgotten the agony of first-date small talk.

“What do you edit,” she asked. “Movies? TV?”

“Documentaries.”

She said she liked Werner Herzog's documentaries. “You mean you like
Grizzly Man
,” he said. “You've probably never even heard of
Fata Morgana
. You don't understand Herzog if you haven't seen that.”

She took a long break after expunk63, but eventually she went back to the website. She went out with an improv comic and a goateed architecture student and even a Wharton professor, whom she dated twice, mostly because she was so surprised he asked her out again. On their second date she mentioned her roommate situation, and when she got home she found an e-mail from him outlining the life actions she would have to agree to if they were to continue seeing each other—number one on the list being a complete financial separation from Isaac.

The biggest surprise was how many men only seemed interested in writing back and forth. They would suggest moving from
cupid.com
over to their regular e-mail addresses, and then they'd draw out the correspondence for days and sometimes weeks, strafing her with questions about her family, pets, and food preferences, asking her for lists of her favorite records and movies and supplying their own. Some probed her for increasingly intimate details about her romantic history. As long as the guy was kooky and interesting enough, she'd keep answering questions. She didn't want to seem like a prude, and, frankly, she enjoyed the attention. A few managed to get her to supply
enough anatomical details (nipple extension, areola color, pubic styling) to produce customized smut. But these men, who were happy to send her pictures of their erections, would vanish when she pressed them for live meetings.