My Funny Valentine

(7/27/08 Construction notes: I've added a new Part V.)

I

It’s Easter break my senior year in college, a raw rainy night typical of Pennsylvania springs, and the yard is swathed in mud. My friend Kristin, who grew up in nearby Erie but whom I never met till college, is sitting with me on the outside swing so that she can smoke a cigarette while we chat. Her chipper, round baby-doll face, half obscured by her curly baby-doll black hair, grins up at my shoulder. Like me, she walks on the outskirts of acceptability at our tightly conservative school, and her company makes my loneliness less lonely, particularly as she possesses the rare gift of complete acceptance.

I first met her looking crazy on the sidewalk bordering the Quad next to my dorm. It was a crisp late September day, that perfect kind when the leaves riot in wild stabs of color and hurl themselves into the air, and, drunk on the autumn smell, I was cavorting around trying to catch them, one hand already full of the leaves I’d found remarkable. Kristin and her boyfriend Eric, one of my fellow English majors, came upon me just as I straightened up with an armful of leaves and a branch or two clutched to my chest.

"Tree lady!" Kristin said delightedly as they stopped. She laughed at me, but it was an exuberant, joyful laugh, one that didn’t say, as others’ laughter usually did, My God what a freak; it said, Oh how interesting!

As such acceptance is still rare, I drum my heels into the mud and laugh with her, staring happily into the empty small town streets. An indefinable something, a noise or a movement, catches my attention, and I turn my head to see, several yards behind me, the black cat Mom told me about, hiding behind the front wheel of our ‘87 Volkswagen Golf. His eyes are fixed, wide and fearful, on my face.

"He won’t come near anyone," Mom had said, "and he looks hungry."

Fear in any creature transports me to an overwhelming compassion, yanks out of me the passionate need to soothe and comfort, and my love for cats has defined me since early childhood; so I ease away from the swing, putting a little more distance between me and the cat, and crouch down the way any cat lover knows to crouch when trying to woo one.

"Heeeere, kittykitty," I croon, one hand extended, fingers rubbing in a soft shh. "Kittykittykitty, priiitty kitty."

I can hear Kristin telling me something that sounds like, You’re weird, but it only breaks halfway into my consciousness. All my attention focuses on willing the cat to come to me.

He inches out from under the car. He takes half a step in my direction, changes his mind, cringes back, and then begins to pace – quick, jerky paces, a movement I recognize as desire combating terror. Just before I change tactics, I see him take a breath as if gathering all his courage to him, and then he shoots across the yard and thrusts a ragged head under my hand and freezes.

I look down at him; his eyes are tightly closed. I croon again and begin, slowly, to stroke his head. His eyes pop open, he casts one look of relieved exhaustion at me, then flops on the ground, rolls around and begins to purr a throaty black-cat purr (which always sounds a little junglier than other cats’ purrs).

"I can’t believe that," Kristin says. Running my hands over the rough bones of starved ribs, I look up at her and smile.


II

"We named him Simon," Mom says.

I hold the phone away from my ear and stare at it in horror. Simon? I should have tried to sneak him back to school somehow. Of all the awesome names in the world for a black cat, "Simon" was never one that crossed my mind.

I can hear the phone buzzing, so I shift it back to my shoulder and say, in a defeated tone, "Simon...okay. How is he adjusting?"

I hear her masking worry under an irritating cheerfulness. "Oh, well, he’s still getting used to the other cats," she says.

As it turns out, "getting used to the other cats" isn’t so much a process as a state of being. Simon hates the other animals. When I move back home for the summer after graduation, I always find him hiding in the basement, looking sullen. If I cajole him for long enough with little tickles under the chin, he’ll usually emit a reluctant purr; but he prefers to be alone.

Occasionally a mood swing takes over and he follows me all over the house, charging from room to room, whirling in circles like a hairy dervish, and bolting back out again.

"Weird cat," is my sister’s remark.

"I like him," I respond.

Mom looks after him disappearing into the basement after growling at the dog one morning, and says, with a sigh, "Well...he still likes you best."

"Darn straight," I say.


III

"Okay, baby, we’re hooommme," I say in my crooning-to-Simon voice, pushing open the door to my apartment and wedging the cat carrier through. All my luggage still waits in the car, suitcases and bags and boxes of Christmas loot; but I wanted to take my best present right upstairs.

I’m terrified he’ll hate it here; the five-and-a-half hour ride seemed to traumatize him. I’m still mad at the State of Indiana for thundering uncalled-for hailstones down on the car just as Simon was starting to relax and cautiously emerge from under the coat I’d thrown over him, but I mask my worry under an irritating cheerfulness, close the door, set down the crate and pop its door.

Instead of remaining crouched inside, he flows out and perks his ears, looking down my little hallway toward the living room. As he sniffs the air a few times and begins to investigate, his deep purr rattles from his ribcage. Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room – his expression, as he inspects my furniture and the size of our living space, is self-satisfied. Happy. In fifteen minutes he’s made himself at home.

At bedtime, once I’ve wrestled the suitcase upstairs to dig out my pajamas, I creep under the covers, shivering, and turn off the light. Somewhere in the night I vaguely wake enough to realize that I’m warm; when I open my eyes in the morning, I find Simon curled up on my feet, his blunt profile statuesque against the mirror.


IV

We’re a physical family. Always touching each other, simple absentminded touches: Mom running her hand along my shoulder as she passes me sitting at the dining room table, me whacking my sister gently on the hip to ask her to move to one side so I can get in the bathroom cupboard, Dad reaching for Mom’s hand after she passes him the chicken at supper.

Physical with our pets, too – always scratching the cats under the chin or petting them, sometimes the wrong way just to annoy them; thumping the dog’s barrel when he asks for a little affection. We discipline the pets physically as well, often necessary especially with the dog, a stubborn Doberman who needs constant reminders that he’s bottom of the family food chain.

We kind of control our pets, actually, but I didn’t think of it that way till now, trying to coax Simon out from behind the couch where he’s been hiding for an hour.

I caught him eating my favorite plant, and gave him a smack. Our other cat, Alex, glares at us, offended, when we do this and stalks off with injured dignity; but Simon gave me a horrified, terrified look and fled the room. I’ve spent the last hour in an agony of guilt, trying to love-talk him back to the hand he seems so afraid of.

When he finally creeps into the kitchen and touches my hand with his nose, I carefully stroke him, then gather him up. He starts to purr in my ear, and I vow aloud that I’ll never touch him in anger again.

I never do. And it’s funny how, after awhile, I notice that whether I stretch my hands toward him, or reach out a toe to scratch his jaw the way he loves, he never, ever flinches at my approach.

V

I've never put a whole lot of credence in ghosts. The supernatural, certainly; but the idea of not-quite-departed souls lingering in physical places didn't sit well with the theology in which I was raised.

My childhood best friend Hillori and I had all sorts of theories of our own to explain weird happenstances, particularly the ghost stories surrounding Gettysburg -- we both had a passion for the Civil War, and she reinacted as a soldier in a local regiment. Our pet theory involved rips in time, through which people could occasionally view the past. It didn't matter to us that it was uncorroborated by anyone else; we liked it, and that was that.

Of intense interest to us was an old house, uninhabited but maintained, that rested half a mile outside town. We discovered it one day on one of our after-school rambles, both of us avoiding, for our own reasons, going home. As we trekked down the road talking our favorite kind of nonsense, we looked past two shaggy rows of grapevines and a wild line of trees and saw the house. Small and white, with pieces of colored glass sitting on the inside windowpanes, it gave off every neglected air of a long unlived-in dwelling, although someone had mown the lawn.

The spirit of investigation overtook us, and we walked around peeking in all its windows, then ventured onto the surrounding property. The late spring balminess of the air brought out a charming, distinctly haunted atmosphere to the place. A few enormous lilac bushes in heavy bloom dotted the side yard; on the other side of the house was a tangle of vine-choked pines and a half-rotten cherry orchard. An outbuilding containing a couple of rusted classic cars shored up the backyard, and attached to that were the broken-down walls of something that had once been a cement-block room.

As we started around the back of the fallen walls, our feet crunched on the spiky balls of horse chestnuts. I felt a strange, threatening feeling coming from somewhere around me -- the feeling you get when unfriendly eyes are watching you. The sensation increased, and I looked up and saw the tree.

It was a huge chestnut, looming over the garage and most of the backyard, with its arms thrust violently upward and outward. Immovable, unshakeable, it threw off an aura of menace. I felt distinctly unwelcome.

Hillori and I glanced at each other, and turned without speaking to make our way back to the side of the house, where the feeling lessened considerably and became merely the sadness of an abandoned home.

"Did you feel it?" Hillori asked.

"Yeah," I said. "It was creepy."

"I think it was the tree," she said.

We returned many times to the house over the course of the next couple of years, enjoying the strange blessings the place yielded up -- English roses in early summer, wild grapes in early fall, wide cherry branches to perch on and watch the traffic from hiding while we talked. The lawn was always mown, but we never saw the mower.

And we never went back to the tree. Occasionally we'd creep a little closer to it than usual, to see if the forboding was still there, and it always was. We never came to any conclusions about it, never invented any theories beyond that trees are mysterious, and this one bore us ill will.

I think of that tree, and those deliciously half-creepy, happy times as I come thoughtfully back to my apartment's bathroom where I had been getting ready for bed. As I washed my face, I distinctly heard, in the upper ranges of my hearing, a faint jangling noise that sounded like my cell phone ringing. Most of my friends, and all of my family, live far away, and I spend a good deal of my off-work hours on the phone; any time it rings I rush to it in the delighted assurance that people love me.

But it hadn't rung. No "missed call" message blinked at me when I flipped open the cover to check. I carry the phone with me back to the tiny bathroom, put it where the volume will blast my ears if it rings, and return to rinsing my face.

And I hear the faint jangling again.

It happens rather frequently, and only when I'm in the bathroom. The house is old for the area -- built in 1901 in one of South Bend's historic districts, it was divided into four apartments many years ago, and I have speculated that my bathroom is one of the most unchanged in the house. It's been renovated, certainly, enough to put in caulked paneling around the cast-iron claw footed tub and rig pipes for a shower, but I strongly suspect that mine is the house's original tub, and there's a feeling in the bathroom -- not, as with the tree, a feeling of malice, but a strange kind of longing.

I conclude eventually that the whatever-it-is -- I still don't buy into the idea of ghosts -- attempts, from time to time, to make its presence known, to communicate something, and in the attempt does a weird mimicry of my cell phone, since that sound always brings me running. I don't talk about it much to anyone, because even I think the idea is crazy, but I'm not much given to hearing things, and this phenomenon is fairly consistent. Since it doesn't bother me, I shrug it off and learn to ignore it.

When Simon comes to live with me, the room he avoids most is the bathroom. Every time I step into the shower, he pushes his way through the door and sits on the floor yowling anxiously until I poke my head out from behind the curtain to reassure him that I'm still there. His worried, sharpened eyes fix on the place of my disappearance until I reemerge, and then he inevitably jumps into the tub to inspect every worn-enameled inch, lap at the standing water a few times, and jump back out to rub against my wet legs.

After a week or so, I realize that I don't hear the jangling half-music anymore. I look at my companion thoughtfully that night, as I brush my teeth and he stares at me, recalling all of the stories I've read claiming that spirits dislike cats. Whatever was or wasn't happening in that old bathroom, now whenever I bend down to wash my face in the cast-iron sink, I hear nothing at all, and when I lift my head to reach for the towel, the first thing I see, sitting in the doorway with watchful eyes tracking my movements, is Simon.

VI

Exhaustion and worry have horrible ways of intensifying each other, and the fluorescent lighting has me sitting with my head in my hands, trying to drive away a headache. Simon hunches as far under the counter as he can get on the other side of the exam room. I've tried reading but I can't concentrate. It's the third time in four days I've had him to the Animal ER, and my stomach hurts with the fear that I'll lose him, or, worse, have to make the choice to give him up.

He hasn't peed in days, and although my friends laugh a little when I tell them this, my tears quiet their scoffing.

"Look," I say, "a cat's urine is very, very toxic. If they can't pass it, it can kill them."

They offered sympathy, then, but now it's far too late to be calling anyone and I feel terribly alone.

Other unfortunate patients crowded the waiting room when my turn finally came to sit in one of the exam rooms -- a teacup poodle that had been standing in the wrong place when his owner kocked a can of Campbell's soup off the counter, a huge Golden Retriever panting in terror and pain from the lawn ornament stuck in his haunch, a mangy cat that looks merely old. Simon stopped yowling once I brought him in, and didn't move except to brush his nose against my fingers when I stuck them through the slats in the crate, until the exam room door closed and I let him out.

I watch him pressed up against the garbage can, trying to hide from the shrillness of the light and my palpable, though repressed, panic. Memories riot in the front of my mind, a montage of moments that made my life with him so idyllic. Me on the phone, saying, "Mom, it's so nice to have something care when I come home!" Simon flopping at my feet to stretch himself full length on the floor, backwards, until he looked so much like a big black hairy piece of elbow macaroni that I started calling him Noodle. Me laughing as Simon chases me in circles around the apartment, doubling back to charge me head-on, rolling triumphantly on the floor every time he startles me into a shriek. Me sleeping better with a heavy lump of warm kitty pressing on my feet. Waking up every morning to a hard furry little skull cracking against my forehead with a sharp purr. Mom saying, "He talks? He barely made any noise here, he's a different cat since he started living with you..."

And Simon sitting at my feet, his yellow eyes fixed on my face, lidding themselves slightly to my singing, "You've made me so very happy / I'm so glad you came into my life..."

I rub my forehead and look up, watching him watching me. He won't come over to me, and his fur looks matted and sweaty, and his eyes are glazed a little with pain.

I take a deep breath and start singing.

VII

The State of Denmark is rotten in summer. I've spent every day so far since the weather warmed up waving insects out of my path.