Touchy Subjects: Stories Page 9

  Dr. McGraw came in then, spoke to the cat as if he was her best friend but stroked her in the wrong place, above her tail, which flapped like an enemy flag. When he took hold of her face, her paw came round so fast that she left a red line down the inside of his wrist. Liz and Sophie apologized over and over, like the parents of a delinquent child. Dr. McGraw, dabbing himself with disinfectant, told them to think nothing of it. Then he called in Rosalita to wrap the cat in a towel.

  Swaddled in flannel, Cleopatra stared at the doctor's face as if memorizing it for the purposes of revenge. He put a sort of gun in her ear to take her temperature and bared her gums in an artificial smile to see if they were dehydrated. He squeezed her stomach and kidneys and bladder, and she made a sound they'd never heard before, in a high voice like a five-year-old girl's, but it was hard to tell if she was tender in the areas he was pressing, or just enraged.

  Liz had to make out the check for fifty dollars as Sophie was already up to her Visa limit. They carried the basket to the car, Cleopatra's weight lurching from side to side. They joked on the way home that the vet wouldn't try calling her Sweetums next time.

  That night on the couch Sophie yawned as she put down her book, let her head drop into Liz's lap, and asked in a lazy murmur what she was thinking. In fact, Liz had been fretting over her overdraft and wondering whether they could cancel cable as they hardly ever watched it anyway, but she knew that was not what Sophie wanted to hear, so she grinned down at her and said, "Guess." Which wasn't a lie. Sophie smiled back and pulled Liz down until her shirt covered Sophie's face, then they didn't need to say anything.

  Cleopatra still wasn't eating much the next day, but she seemed bright-eyed. Sophie said the clinic had rung, and wasn't that thoughtful?

  The following evening when Liz came home the cat wasn't stirring from her chair. Liz began to let herself worry. "Don't worry," she told Sophie as she dropped her work clothes in the laundry basket. "Cats can live off their fat for a good while."

  The two of them were tangled up in the bath, rubbing lavender oil into each other's feet, when the phone rang. It was Rosalita from the clinic. Liz felt guilty for the cheerful way she'd answered the phone and made her voice sadder at once.

  Rosalita was concerned about little Cleo, how was she doing?

  Liz didn't like people who nicknamed without permission; she'd never let anyone call her Lizzy, except Sophie, sometimes. Not bad, she supposed, she told Rosalita; hard to tell, about the same really.

  By the time she could put the phone down, her nipples were stiff with cold. She'd left lavender-scented footprints all the way down the stairs. When she got back to the bathroom, Sophie had let all the water out and was painting her nails purple. What did she mean, the cat was not bad? Sophie wanted to know. The cat was obviously not well.

  Liz said she knew. But they could hardly take her for daily checkups at fifty dollars a go, and surely they could find a cheaper vet in the Yellow Pages.

  No way, said Sophie, because Cleopatra had already begun a course of treatment with the clinic and they were being wonderful.

  Liz thought it was all a bit suspect, these follow-up calls. The clinic stood to make a lot of money from exaggerating every little symptom, didn't they?

  Sophie said one of the things she'd never found remotely attractive about Liz was her cynicism. She went down to make herself a cup of chamomile and didn't even offer to put on the milk for Liz's hot chocolate. When Liz came down, Sophie was curled up on the sofa with the cat on her lap, the two of them doing their telepathy thing.

  Sophie was probably premenstrual, Liz thought, but she didn't like to say so, knowing what an irritating thing it was to be told, especially if you were.

  She knew she was right about that the next day when Sophie came in from a pointless interview at a salon downtown and started vacuuming at once. In five years Liz had learned to leave Sophie to it, but Liz was only halfway down the front page of the paper when she heard her name being called, so loudly that she thought there must be an emergency.

  Sophie, her foot on the vacuum's off switch, had dragged the velvet armchair out from the wall and was pointing. What did Liz call that? she wanted to know.

  "Vomit, I guess," said Liz.

  Why hadn't she said something?

  "Because I didn't know about it," said Liz, feeling absurdly like a suspect. Yes, she'd been home all day, but she hadn't heard anything. A cat being sick was not that loud. Yes, she cared, of course she cared, what did Sophie mean didn't she care?

  That night Sophie didn't come to bed at all. Liz sat up reading a home improvement magazine and fell asleep with the light on.

  The next day Rosalita called at eight in the morning when Liz was opening a fresh batch of bills, before she'd had her coffee. Nerves jangling, Liz was very tempted to tell Rosalita to get lost. She wondered whether the clinic was planning to charge her for phone consultations. "Hang on," she said. "I'll be right back." She went into the kitchen to look at Cleopatra, who was lying on her side by the fridge like a beached whale and hadn't touched her water, even. Sophie was kneeling beside her on the cold tiles. Liz wanted to touch Sophie, but instead she stroked the cat, just how she usually liked it, one long combing from skull to hips, but there was no response.

  Sophie went out to the phone and asked Rosalita for an appointment. "Please," Liz heard her say, her voice getting rather high, and then, after a minute, "Thanks, thank you, thanks a lot."

  Liz took the afternoon off work and brought the car home by two, as promised.

  That afternoon the two of them stood in the examining room at the clinic, staring at the neatly printed estimate. Rosalita had left them alone for a few minutes, to talk it all over, she had said with a sympathetic smile. The disinfected walls of the little white room seemed to close in around them. Cleopatra crouched between Sophie's arms. Liz was reading the list for the third time as if it were a difficult poem.

  After a minute she said, "I still don't really get it."

  Sophie, staring into the green ovals of Cleopatra's eyes, said nothing.

  "I know she's sick. But surely she can't be as sick as all that," Liz went on. "Like, she still purrs."

  Sophie scratched behind the cat's right ear. Cleopatra shook her head vehemently, then subsided again.

  "It's not that I'm not worried." Liz's voice sounded stiff and theatrical in the tiny room. She went on, a little lower, "But eleven hundred dollars?"

  It sounded even worse out loud.

  "That's an extraordinary amount of money," said Liz, "and number one we haven't got it—"

  At last Sophie's head turned. "I can't believe we're even having this discussion," she said in a whisper.

  "We're not having it," said Liz heavily. "It's not a discussion till you say something."

  "Look at her," pleaded Sophie. "Look at her eyes." There was a tiny crust of mucus at the corner of each. "They've never been dull before, like the light's been switched off."

  "I know, sweetheart," said Liz. She stared at the crisp print to remember her arguments. "But eleven hundred dollars—"

  "She's our cat," Sophie cut in. "This is Cleopatra we're talking about."

  "But we don't even know for sure if there's anything serious wrong with her."

  "Exactly," said Sophie. "We don't know. We haven't a clue. That's why I can't sleep at night. That's why we're going to pay them to test her for kidney stones and leukemia and FOP disease and anything else it could possibly be."

  "FIP," Liz read off the page. "FIP disease. And it's a vaccine, not a test."

  "Whatever," growled Sophie. "Don't pretend to be an expert; all you're looking at is the figures."

  "Hang on, hang on," said Liz, louder than she meant to. "Let's look at it item by item. Hospitalization, intravenous catheter insertion ... Jesus, sixty dollars to put a tube up her ass, that can't be more than thirty seconds' work. IV fluids, OK, fair enough. X-rays ... why does she need three X-rays? She's less than two feet long."

  S
ophie was chewing her lipstick off. "I can't believe you're mean enough to haggle at a time like this."

  "How can you call me mean?" protested Liz. "I just get the feeling we're being ripped off. This is emotional blackmail; they think we can't say no."

  There was a dull silence. She tried to hear other voices from other rooms and wondered if Rosalita was standing outside the door, listening.

  "Look," she went on more calmly, "if we left out these optional blood tests we could trim off maybe three hundred dollars. What the hell is feline AIDS anyway? Cleopatra's a virgin."

  "I don't know what it is, but what if she has it?" asked Sophie. "What if two months down the road she's dying of it and you were too damn callous to pay for a test?"

  "It's probably just crystals in her bladder," said Liz weakly. "The doctor said so, didn't he?"

  Sophie curled over Cleopatra, whose eyes were half shut as if she was dreaming. Liz stared around her at the cartoon cats on the walls, with their pert ears and manic grins.

  After a few minutes silence, she thought they'd probably got past the worst point of the row. Now if she could only think of something soothing to say, they'd be onto the homestretch.

  But Sophie stood up straight and folded her arms. "So what is she worth then?"

  "Sorry?"

  "A hundred dollars? Two hundred?"

  Liz sighed. "You know I'm mad about her."

  "Yeah?"

  "I can't put a figure to it."

  "Really?" spat Sophie. "But it's definitely under eleven hundred, though; we know that much."

  "We don't have eleven hundred dollars," said Liz, word by word.

  "We could get it."

  Liz was finding it hard to breathe. "You know I can't take out another loan, not so soon after the car."

  "Then I'll sell my grandmother's fucking rings," said Sophie, slamming her hand on the counter with a metallic crack. "Or would it make your life simpler if we just had her put down here and now?"

  "Give me the damn form," said Liz, pulling the estimate towards her and digging in her pocket for her pen.

  Sophie watched without a word as Liz signed, her hands shaking.

  Dr. McGraw carried Cleopatra away to the cages. The cat watched them over his shoulder, unforgivingly.

  Out in the car, Sophie sat with the empty basket on her lap. Liz couldn't tell if she was crying without looking at her directly, but she had a feeling she was. Liz thought of their early days when they went to the cinema a lot and Liz always knew just when Sophie needed her to reach over and take her hand.

  She drove home, taking corners carefully.

  "I'm just curious," said Sophie at a traffic light. "What would you pay for me?"

  "What?" Liz's voice came out like a squeal of brakes.

  "If I was rushed into the emergency room and a doctor handed you an estimate. What would I be worth to you?"

  Liz told her to shut the fuck up.

  Rosalita rang the same evening, her voice bright. Crystals in the bladder, that's all it was. Little Cleo was doing fine, had taken well to the new diet, and they could pick her up the next morning. That would be just ninety-eight dollars.

  So the cat came home, and for a while everything seemed like it ever was.

  And when six months later Sophie left Liz for a beautician she met at the cosmetic academy and moved into the beautician's condo in a building with a strict no-pets policy, Liz used to hold on to Cleopatra at night, hold her so tight that the cat squirmed, and think about the cost of things.

  Pluck

  On rare occasions, over the years that followed, if he was having a few pints with a mate, Joseph thought of asking, Would you break up with your girlfriend over a hair on her chin? Don't laugh, he'd add, it's not funny.

  But the question sounded impossible when he put it in words, so he never did ask it.

  It was most unlike him, the whole thing. He'd always been glad Roisin didn't cover her fuzzy peach face with layers of foundation. He relished her bushy black eyebrows that almost met, like Frida Kahlo's. Perfection Incarnate, that was one of his names for her. They were in agreement that Roisin was not only the brains of the relationship but the beauty as well. Joseph was the pancreas, maybe, or the kneecap.

  For seven years they'd lived in a skinny terraced house and had no problems. None that Joseph knew of, anyway. Then after a while they hadn't the time for problems, because they had Liam instead. Liam was never a problem; he was the opposite of all problems. So when Joseph was made redundant from a telesales job he'd hated anyway, they decided it was perfect timing: he'd stay home and mind the boy.

  One Sunday, Liam was up till two with a tickly cough, so the next morning there wasn't a peep out of him. Joseph lay among the pillows, relishing the lie-in. He scratched his stubble and watched Róisín run in and out, power-dressing. Tights half up, she dipped into the wardrobe for a pair of heels and stubbed her forehead on the hinge. Then she stumbled over to the bedside table to scoop up her watch and earrings. Joseph leaned out far enough to hold her legs in a rugby tackle.

  Róisín told him to get lost, but not as if she meant it.

  "Stay home today," he offered, "and I'll kiss every inch of your body." He used to say that a lot in the old days, when they were students and every day was twice as long. She stooped down to kiss him now and he arched up like a turtle to meet her mouth.

  It was then he noticed it. One dark bristle, just under her chin, a quarter of an inch long.

  He must have let go of her legs, because she said, "What?"

  Joseph shook his head as if he didn't know what she meant.

  "You were looking funny."

  He lay back against the pillows and denied it with a laugh.

  "Dadda!" In the next room Liam sent up his wail. Róisín made a lunge for her briefcase, and Joseph struggled out of the sheets.

  It wasn't like Joseph went round thinking about it all day every day after that; he wasn't some kind of Neanderthal, like his father. He'd been born in 1970, for god's sake. He could ask for Tampax Super Plus in the chemist without lowering his voice more than a notch. He'd never wanted Róisín to be some airbrushed pinup or Stepford Wife. He'd always liked the dark fuzz on her thighs, her crazy-paving bikini line, the scattered hairs that danced their way to her navel. He had a habit of burying his face in the spiral curls under her arms. So why would it bother him, one little hair on her chin?

  But somehow he couldn't shed the childhood image of an old great-aunt with a full set of quivering whiskers, and how once when she'd tried to kiss him he'd run away screaming. And every night now when he read fairy tales to Liam, the book seemed to fall open to the same picture of a toothless, mole-studded, hairy-faced witch.

  Joseph was aware he was overreacting; he knew he'd have to snap out of it soon. It wasn't that he brooded, exactly, only that being home all day left a lot of little chinks of time free for thinking.

  One evening he was waiting up for Róisín and couldn't find the remote, so he flicked through a magazine she'd left on the coffee table, FREE YOURSELF FROM FACIAL HAIR FOREVER, a headline ordered. His eyes scuttled over the diagrams. The follicles looked like blueprints of mining shafts.

  When he heard Róisín's key in the lock, Joseph stuffed the magazine down the side of the sofa.

  She was still peeling off her coat in the hall when he rushed out and hugged her. Under cover of a kiss, he stroked her chin. But he couldn't feel a thing.

  The next morning the demented chirp of the alarm clock woke Joseph first. Róisín's face was half immersed in the pillow. He bent over, very carefully, to see if the hair had grown at all. Was there really only one? How many could sprout below the line of her jaw before she'd notice?

  Her eyes were very blue. He jerked back. She grinned up at him confusedly.

  It wasn't a turnoff; it wasn't as simple as that. It was more that Joseph would be sitting beside Róisín on a park bench as she played clap-handies with Liam, say, and suddenly she'd turn her head a fraction and h
e'd see it. It interrupted the smooth curve of her chin. And a little frisson would go through him, like lust but not quite.

  It had become a sort of dc, this habit of peering at his girlfriend's chin. The little hair there wasn't sharp like the ones that pushed out of his own skin overnight. It was so soft he could barely feel it when he found a pretext to stroke her face. It was just a wisp, really. There was no harm in it. So why did he long to take it between his nails and yank it out?

  It was like an itch in his fingers, too deep to scratch. It disgusted him.

  Another man might have simply asked her to pluck it.

  But Joseph couldn't imagine saying those words. Not to Róisín. This sort of thing was a delicate matter; you didn't just tell a woman she was growing a beard. They were sensitive about these things. It would be best if it came up naturally in the course of conversation, but if he tried to lead their dinnertime conversation gradually round to female facial hair he knew he'd make a hash of it. She might be cross that he thought it was any of his business to tell her which bits of her body were acceptable. Or worse, she might be hurt; she might think he didn't fancy her anymore, now she wasn't twenty-one, now she had stretch marks and other proofs of a body that had been lived in.

  Not that he was God's Gift to Womanhood himself. He never had been. Joseph stood at the bathroom mirror, these mornings, and stared at the hair matted on his brush. Had he always shed that much? His hairline seemed to be in the same place it had always been, but maybe the change was so infinitesimal he wouldn't notice until the day he woke up bald. He tried to laugh at that thought, but only managed the half grin of a stroke victim. He ran his fingers across his head, and another hair came away, wrapped round his thumb.