You could see how tender he was with the cat, how he’d kneel down and extend the backs of two fingers to its nose, which the slender, pumpkin-furred thing nuzzled against, closing its eyes in concentration, rubbing its face there and purring with soft ticking pleasure. He’d look at me then, making me feel real in the room again, his two fingers motionless and the cat rubbing its face there, the smile on my own, enormous, undoubtedly. The cat was a rescue he’d adopted on a whim, and afterward, several years later, it was in the possession of Miriam, who had lived on the floor above him when they lived in the same building, and was like “a sister” to him, or that’s how he always referred to her when I was in his life, as if to preempt jealousy. Honestly Miriam ought to have been the least of my worries, if worrying is how I’d wanted to spend my waking hours. Only a few months ago, she and I met for lunch and after a certain amount of checking on each other, surveying to see who now and where and what we wanted to occupy our present desires and boredoms, she recounted with great tenderness the night when he’d finally grasped how much she’d come to depend on drink, how he went out with her, and let her have as many as she wanted, and when she’d finished another G&T at a crowded bar, he said, “Is that it?” and she’d pulled him outside into the cold again to catch a car, until they were somewhere else, another dim scene with catchy songs droning over the strangers’ conversations around them, and she’d have another, and the whole while he only ordered tonic water or coffee, not saying much, only listening to her and scanning her face with those chiseled vertical lines of concern at the bridge of his nose. Finally, she confided in an undertone, her gaze averted from mine and seeming to fixate in the late May sun on her hardly eaten salad, how she’d found herself on the tile somewhere, and he was holding her hair up, then splashing water from the sink to her face, and asking again, “Is that it?” and she let him take her back to the building on the Upper East Side, in the 60s, near the river, and he marched her upstairs to her apartment, the floor above his own, and started a warm shower, and waited for her outside the bathroom door as she washed away the night, knocking more than once to see that she was conscious, and when she came out in a towel, he put a glass of water in her hands, and she leaned against him on the way to the bed, where he pulled the blankets up to her chin. Then, Miriam said, “He just knelt above me, was just there, right above me, stroking my hair until I fell asleep,” her voice the faintest whisper, her eyes concealed by elegant sunglasses, and I, sitting across from her as the everyday parade of Greenwich Village streamed by, couldn’t help but think of him again with that cat, wondering how much effort he’d actually put into the caress and how much may have been her, pressing her still damp forehead to his stationary fingers. “It was the last time I touched a drink,” she said, then smirked, “at least for a while,” plucking her fork from the table and pronging at the bed of greens.
J.T. Price has lived in Brooklyn since 2001. His fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Post Road, Guernica, Fence, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, Juked, Electric Literature, and elsewhere; nonfiction, interviews, and reviews with The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, The Scofield, and The Millions.