Desperate Characters. Paula Fox

Franzen

      January 1999

       ONE

      Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast. A few feet away from the dining room table, an oblong of white, the reflection from a fluorescent tube over a stainless-steel sink, lay upon the floor in front of the entrance to the kitchen. The old sliding doors that had once separated the two first-floor rooms had long since been removed, so that by turning slightly the Bentwoods could glance down the length of their living room where, at this hour, a standing lamp with a shade like half a white sphere was always lit, and they could, if they chose, view the old cedar planks of the floor, a bookcase which held, among other volumes, the complete works of Goethe and two shelves of French poets, and the highly polished corner of a Victorian secretary.

      Otto unfolded a large linen napkin with deliberation.

      “The cat is back,” said Sophie.

      “Are you surprised?” Otto asked. “What did you expect?”

      Sophie looked beyond Otto’s shoulder at the glass door that opened onto a small wooden stoop, suspended above the back yard like a crow’s nest. The cat was rubbing its scruffy, half-starved body against the base of the door with soft insistence. Its gray fur, the gray of tree fungus, was faintly striped. Its head was massive, a pumpkin, jowled and unprincipled and grotesque.

      “Stop watching it,” Otto said. “You shouldn’t have fed it in the first place.”

      “I suppose.”

      “We’ll have to call the A.S.P.C.A.”

      “Poor thing.”

      “It does very well for itself. All those cats do well.”

      “Perhaps their survival depends on people like me.”

      “These livers are good,” he said. “I don’t see that it matters whether they survive or not.”

      The cat flung itself against the door.

      “Ignore it,” Otto said. “Do you want all the wild cats in Brooklyn holding a food vigil on our porch? Think what they do to the garden! I saw one catch a bird the other day. They’re not pussycats, you know. They’re thugs.”

      “Look how late the light stays now!”

      “The days are getting longer. I hope the locals don’t start up with their goddamn bongos. Perhaps it will rain the way it did last spring.”

      “Will you want coffee?”

      “Tea. The rain locks them in.”

      “The rain’s not on your side, Otto!”

      He smiled. “Yes, it is.”

      She did not smile at him. When she went to the kitchen, Otto quickly turned toward the door. The cat, at that instant, rammed its head against the glass. “Ugly bastard!” Otto muttered. The cat looked at him, then its eyes flicked away. The house felt powerfully solid to him; the sense of that solidity was like a hand placed firmly in the small of his back. Across the yard, past the cat’s agitated movements, he saw the rear windows of the houses on the slum street. Some windows had rags tacked across them, others, sheets of transparent plastic. From the sill of one, a blue blanket dangled. There was a long tear in the middle of it through which he could see the faded pink brick of the wall. The tattered end of the blanket just touched the top frame of a door which, as Otto was about to turn away, opened. A fat elderly woman in a bathrobe shouldered her way out into the yard and emptied a large paper sack over the ground. She stared down at the garbage for a moment, then shuffled back inside. Sophie returned with cups and saucers.

      “I met Bullin on the street,” Otto said. “He told me two more houses have been sold over there.” He gestured toward the rear windows with his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the cat leap as though he had offered it something.

      “What happens to the people in them when the houses are bought? Where do they go? I always wonder about that.”

      “I don’t know. Too many people everywhere.”

      “Who bought the houses?”

      “A brave pioneer from Wall Street. And the other, I think, a painter who got evicted from his loft on Lower Broadway.”

      “It doesn’t take courage. It takes cash.”

      “The rice is wonderful, Sophie.”

      “Look! He’s curled up on that little ledge. How can he fit himself into such a small space?”

      “They’re like snakes.”

      “Otto, I’ll just give him a little milk. I know I shouldn’t have fed him in the first place. But he’s here now. We’ll be going out to Flynders in June. By the time we come home, he’ll have found someone else.”

      “Why do you persist? It’s self-indulgence. Look! You don’t mind at all as long as you don’t have to see the cat looking starved. That goddamn woman just dumped her evening load of garbage over there. Why doesn’t the cat go there to eat?”

      “I don’t care why I’m doing it,” Sophie said. “The point is that I can see it starving.”

      “What time are we due at the Holsteins?”

      “Nine-ish,” she said, on her way to the door with a saucer of milk. She reached up and inserted a small key in the lock, which had been placed on a crosspiece above the frame. Then she turned the brass handle.

      At once the cat cried out, and began to lap up the milk. From other houses came the faint rattle of plates and pots, the mumble of television sets and radios—but the sheer multiplicity of noises made it difficult to identify individual ones.

      The cat’s huge head hung over the little Meissen saucer. Sophie stooped and drew her hand along its back, which quivered beneath her fingers.

      “Come back in and shut the door!” Otto complained. “It’s getting cold in here.”

      A dog’s anguished yelp broke suddenly through the surface of the evening hum.

      “My God!” exclaimed Otto. “What are they doing to that animal!”

      “Catholics believe that animals have no souls,” Sophie said.

      “Those people aren’t Catholics. What are you talking about! They all go to that Pentecostal iglesia up the street.”

      The cat had begun to clean its whiskers. Sophie caressed its back again, drawing her fingers along until they met the sharp furry crook where the tail turned up. The cat’s back rose convulsively to press against her hand. She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire. She pushed out with her other hand, and as the sweat broke out on her forehead, as her flesh crawled and tightened, she said, “No, no, stop that!” to the cat, as though it had done nothing more than beg for food, and in the midst of her pain and dismay she was astonished to hear how cool her voice was. Then, all at once, the claws released her and flew back as though to deliver another blow, but then the cat turned—it seemed in mid-air—and sprang from the