Cat Food and Cigarettes
Dedicated to ‘I’
She was buying cat food and cigarettes at three in the morning and I told her that seemed weird to me. She just looked at me and smiled; her eyes glowed painfully lovely as she said, You’re weird.
I told her, Yea, I am weird.
She laughed and agreed and then grabbed her smokes and her cat food and told me to have a good night, and I told her to have a good morning. I paid for my own cigarettes and walked outside and struck one alive when I noticed her down the sidewalk.
Without thinking I walked over to her and said, Hello, and then she said, Stalking me?
Yea, I said.
She shook her head and smiled again and told me I was weird again and asked me for a light, which I gave her, and then asked me my name, which I also gave her.
James, she said, I like it.
Good, ‘cause it’s the only one I have, I said.
And she called me clever and we talked for an hour, chain smoking and laughing and stomping our feet in the cold before she told me she had to go and I asked if she was a vampire trying to escape the sun and she laughed and shook her head and when I asked for her number she said, Sure, but don’t call me while the sun’s out.
And I remember walking away and even five minutes after we said goodbye I was already remembering her like something beautiful you saw once a long time ago and know you will never see again but will always carry with you to reveal to yourself in times of trouble like a solemn prayer.
Her name was Clara.
It was midday and I was on a bench in the park smoking a cigarette.
I’d hide it from view when I saw little kids with their parents walking by and for some reason this fact made me feel a little bit less awful about myself, despite the fact that I was out in the sun smoking to try and beat back a hangover.
In the sky the colors of hell reigned supreme. Oranges and reds attacked one another in an unholy battle that lit the sky like a battlefield. I would learn later it was due to forest fires in Canada that cast their sooth and ash into the stratosphere and winds that carried it south. The sun could not make its way unadulterated through this maelstrom.
Then I heard someone stop just to my right and I turned my head and blinked dumbly for a moment and said, Hello, Clara.
Hello yourself, she said. I thought that might be you.
It might be, I said and she walked over to me and held out her hand for my cigarette. I handed it over and when she took a drag and gave it back I could taste her lip-gloss on it and I knew that I never wanted to smoke another cigarette that she wasn’t sharing with me.
She asked how I was and I shrugged my shoulders and said, Alive, barely.
She seemed to appreciate this and sat down next to me and we shared another cigarette together while talking again. This time, unlike the night before, we talked about more substantial things and when I let slip that my uncle recently died of cancer she sympathized and told me about her mother’s own fight with the pest and before I knew it I was looking at her hands and wondering what the ring on her middle finger would feel like against my own fingers if our fingers were laced.
Warm, I guessed.
You haven’t called me yet, she said to me as she readjusted the puff of hair atop her forehead created by pinning her bangs up.
It took a lot of willpower not to, I said, and she laughed and I wondered if she knew that I was serious. I promised to call her soon. She smiled and I wondered at how her eyes always seemed to shine and only got brighter when they narrowed with her smile.
Like the beam of a flashlight concentrating as you twist it, only getting brighter as the field of illumination becomes lessened.
I called her one night and asked if she’d like to go to dinner or something, and she said she wasn’t sure if she should. I asked why and she said she had a boyfriend, and it felt like the world fell from beneath my feet but I just said, Oh.
We’re going to the bar tonight, she said though, with an upward lilt that made it sound like a consolation prize. You should come.
So I sat with her and a few of her friends and her boyfriend and drank whiskey that burned like fire and fought like Jack Dempsey. I was across the table from her, her boyfriend to her left, another friend of hers to her right, and me flanked by two others. But the whole time almost all my attention was focused on her and she spoke to me just like she did that night outside the CVS.
For a while the bar melted away and all I could see were her eyes and the wide, dark freckle on her neck and I wondered what it would be like to kiss it but I stopped myself from letting that thought get out of the gate.
Her boyfriend and I exchanged a couple of words but he never warmed to me and I remember thinking that this guy hated the core of me.
At the end of the night I walked with her and her friends and her boyfriend to their apartment building, which was the complete opposite direction from where my car was parked and when I said goodbye and struck up a smoke she asked if she could bum one or just deuce that one with me.
Sure, I said, and she told her boyfriend she’d be right up and we stood out in the cold and smoked the cigarette talking for a bit and twenty minutes later I hugged her good night and my arms ached when they realized they’d have to let her go.
My boyfriend doesn’t like you, she said one night, leaning against me after her third vodka tonic.
I sipped a cheap bottle of beer I’d bought with the change I found in my car. I’d come to the bar simply because she called me to tell me she was going out. She was there with some other friends but not her boyfriend.
Everyone else was at the bar itself, gathering beverages and chatting up the bartender. She and I hung in a corner like reprimanded children. Like we were being punished for doing something wrong.
So I asked her, But do you like me?
Yea, she said, I love hanging out with you.
So why doesn’t he like me?
Because, she said, her voice trilling like a four year old with a secret, I think he thinks you were hitting on me all night.
And maybe the beer and lack of sleep were making me delirious or bold but I told her I was and she said she knew.
I asked her to go out to dinner with me again and she sighed and argued with herself over it and then agreed but told me it would be just as friends. I said ok and she said I couldn’t kiss her and I said ok.
Sometimes when I was at my house in my rented room I would be reading a book and she would come into my thoughts like a truck through the side of a storefront Christmas display.
I’d put down my book or stop paying attention to the movie and let her wreck my train of thought until the smoke had cleared and I could begin to rebuild.
At dinner I asked if she told her boyfriend what she was doing and she said no, she’d just told him she wouldn’t be able to do anything until later.
She mentioned how she had no confidence in herself or her looks and I felt like I’d just heard Santa Claus saying he didn’t believe in himself. Without thinking I said, You’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. Everything about you is completely devastating. You’re eyes alone make me believe in something better.
Her smile was unrestrained and she blushed and her voice got that trill in it again. She said she didn’t take compliments easily and never believed them.
I don’t care if you think you’re beautiful, I said to her, I think you are. Then I reached out and patted the puff of hair from her pinned back bangs and she gave me a look like a rabbit trying to be threatening.
I felt myself float. I never came down.
One day, I don’t remember when in the chronology of our knowing one another, I was outside smoking a cigarette and I felt like no matter how much I exhaled the smoke never left my lungs.
I took deep, powerful drags of smog into myself and then blew out and only the gray cloud of my breath came. I was in the city just outside of a movie theater I went to sometimes. I coughed trying to dislodge the smoke but it didn’t work.
I crushed out the cigarette and gave the rest of my pack to a homeless man.
Once I got home I bought a new pack and didn’t open it for two days.
I helped her over the chain link fence onto the other side of the dock and then threw myself over it. I landed with a graceless thud and collapsed onto my ass and she laughed at me a bit so I had to laugh at myself.
When I told her about my idea of breaking into the marina she thought I was joking. No, I said, I have something to show you there. You’ll like it.
So we went to the marina and the gate was locked but I said that anything worth doing was worth breaking the law over.
The dock creaked and the water lapped against the pylons as we trotted down the dock, our feet making a dull clapping sound on the water-swelled boards. The twisting, strained lines holding the ships to the dock sounded like wounded cats. Above, clouds hid the moon from us. We didn’t even know if it was still alive.
I found the boat, a pretty sailing ship with golden inlays, and stepped in front of it, holding out my arms.
Ta-dah.
She looked confused and then her eyes caught the name painted on the bow and her smile was sloppy and goofy and completely un-made, which made me sure of its sincerity.
The boat was called the Bella Clara.
I told her how my friend and I would break into this marina to drink and smoke on random ships and how I remembered the name. She called me sweet and said the boat was beautiful. I grabbed one of the lines holding up the mast and swung myself on deck and helped her up and pulled a pint of vodka from my jacket pocket.
All night we drank and shared cigarettes on the deck and talked and I kept looking at her hand and her eyes and her neck, catching her in glimpses but never in whole, always trying to find one more thing. One more thing to think of when she was gone.
She was like a mystery I never wanted to solve but enjoyed finding the clues to.
We went over to the apartment of a mutual friend and drank. I spent the whole night talking to her. I had barely registered that her boyfriend was even there with us until he left, getting in a small fight with Clara before storming off.
They blew up an air mattress for her and placed a pillow and blanket on a couch for me. Everyone went to bed and it was Clara and I alone in the living room, silent, charged. I told her Goodnight, and then went to lay down on the couch.
After a minute I heard her say, I hate you.
I sat up, suddenly feeling sober, and asked her why, worried I had done something she found offensive.
She didn’t answer me.
I got up from the couch and sat down on the floor by the mattress and she told me her boyfriend had left because she had been spending so much time with me. Obviously, he had said, you don’t need me here.
She told me she knew me better than him and that she and I talked more and she hated me for that. Then I told her that that wasn’t my fault and she turned to look at me and even though she was still in her clothes from the day and she claimed her makeup was messed up she never looked more gorgeous.
I told her I would leave her alone forever if she wanted me to. That the last thing I wanted to do was make her life more difficult.
Are you on the floor? She asked. That can’t be comfortable.
She lifted the blanket on the mattress and scooted over and I lay next to her face to face and we talked for a long while. I was happy. I touched her hand and the ring was actually cold and so was her hand so I took it in mine and told her everything I’d said a hundred times before but this time without the protection of irony or a silly sarcastic voice.
She looked at me for a long time and said, You can’t kiss me.
I won’t, I whispered hoping that someone wouldn’t blunder awake to break the spell of the moon and the darkness and the silence. I looked into her eyes and felt weak and scared and vulnerable but also empowered because if I felt so strongly about someone I couldn’t be harmed by anyone. Except for them.
I won’t kiss you if you tell me you don’t want me to.
She looked at me and she looked scared or nervous and said, Don’t, I can’t.
I didn’t know what he meant. She either couldn’t kiss me or couldn’t say she didn’t want me to.
Do you want me to?
It doesn’t matter.
It does to me.
And she looked at me and her eyes closed and she sighed and moved closer and I took her chin in my hand and tilted her head up and kissed her with closed trembling lips and then her mouth opened and our tongues touched and her tongue was rough like a cat’s.
When we broke I pressed my forehead to hers and said, I will never kiss you again, and then I did it again. I took hold of her hand and she turned her back to me.
Face me, I said and when she asked why I said, Because you’re beautiful.
You’ve been looking at me for a long time.
And I’ll never get tired of it. She turned to look at me and I kissed her and I held her hand and suddenly I was singing Beatles songs until we both fell asleep.
The next day I drove her home in silence and made no move to touch her.
I went home and smoked cigarettes and watched TV and read a book and felt like an idiot for the way I acted but the memory of her kiss was still making me smile.
Sometimes we would go places and I’d drive and smoke a cigarette and she’d share it or have her own or not smoke at all. Either way she always had to be the one to toss my cigarette out the window. She would roll it down all the way no matter how cold and toss it out close to the car and peep her head out of the window so she could watch the flash of sparks from the tumbling cigarette. She said it was like small fireworks.
She reminded me of a puppy, or a kitten.
I ran into her at the bar when I went with a bunch of friends one night and she shouted James and threw her arms around me and pulled me to the bar and bought me a drink. We shared a few pleasantries when another guy she knew showed up and she hugged him and I melted back into the crowd.
For the rest of the night I chatted with my friends and drank myself into a spin. I would sometimes catch her out of the corner of my eye talking to some new guy, leaning on them, touching their arms.
I walked home smoking and staring at the street, not sure how I felt, certain of nothing.
The next day her boyfriend was her ex-boyfriend.
And we talked over and over and deeper and deeper.
Time slipped on but we never kissed and I never held her hand and never knew if her ring was always cold or if maybe it was just something that night.
In the city, once, I saw a homeless man trying to help a bird out of the gutter.
The bird had been struck by a car and was twisted and flapping. The man’s hands were bleeding from being pecked and scratched. I tried to help him. I reached for the bird, speaking to it and cooing. In the end my hand was as cut and bleeding as the homeless man’s.
We sat on the edge of the gutter and I shared my cigarettes with him and we watched the bird as it’s flapping slowed and eventually ended.
It’s good to have someone there, he said to me, during your last moments. Makes you feel less alone.
And I nodded and lit a new smoke and told him, Be well, brother, and then walked to the Metro, my phone in my hand, dialing Clara.
She could never just sit.
Every time she took to a chair she would have to curl into it. One leg or both legs tucked under herself. She looked defensive. Scared. She would look at her hands sometimes when she spoke. It would make it easier to toy with her knee, sometimes through a hole in her pants.
I could watch her for hours.
Sometimes she seemed on the verge of crying, and I would look to her hands, wishing I could reach for them, but instead I would light a cigarette or make a joke.
Sometimes for hours after speaking to her I could feel my heart fluttering like the wings of a bee. Often I’d simply drive for a while to clear my head of her.
It never worked.
A month later I had a job offer.
It was north, in New York, far from my current life and from Clara and I told them I would need some time, and they gave me four days, and then said after I gave them word I’d have a month.
When I told her she looked upset, confused.
I still haven’t told them yes or no, yet, I told her.
She nodded and looked at me. What do you think?
I think I don’t know.
She nodded and bit her lip and began picking at the hole in the knee of her pants.
I watched her for a long time, admiring her, missing her already. But I never had her. I could only light a cigarette and tell her I would keep in touch.
One night in the early stages of knowing and caring for her she told me that she trusted and distrusted in tandem.
She gave all of herself to the people she knew and cared about with the expectation of her trust being broken. I wanted to tell her I would never break it, but I knew that I couldn’t say it in good conscience. Still, I knew I didn’t want to.
I told her I liked her for trusting so much. It was rare. It was not like me.
With her, though, I trusted completely.
I never knew what to think. Only what to feel. But I never put a proper name on it.
The last time I saw her we spent a day together in Annapolis.
There were kids and parents everywhere and the day was bright and cool with boats sailing into and out of Ego Alley. I didn’t smoke a cigarette for over four hours, which was a personal record. Clara asked me about it and I told her I couldn’t smoke in front of small children without feeling dirty.
You’re weird, she said.
Have been since you’ve known me.
Some things never change.
Yup.
But some things do.
I looked at her and into her eyes. I could see what she was talking about but didn’t say anything. I reached for her hand and she let me take it and I felt her ring and it was warm. I laced my fingers in hers and for five minutes, a whole lifetime, we sat in silence before she squeezed my hand and we stood up. I drove her home and dropped her off and we hugged and I went back to spend my final night there in a motel before making the drive to Queens the next day.
I’d think about how our tastes overlapped.
I would say I thought in a certain way or my mind worked in a certain way and she would light up and say, Me too, and we would expound on the way we worked.
We were complimentary.
For a while when I moved away we would talk every day. She always made fun of how I would use big words sometimes, just throw them out on a whim and for a while I texted her every day.
Word of the day: Esoteric. Specialized, understood by only a select few with certain knowledge.
She’d text me back when she used it, proud.
I could see her smiling in my mind’s eye. Beautiful. Ethereal.
After four months we stopped talking.
Tonight she called me and I froze.
Hearing her voice was like seeing light after eons of darkness; painful, frightening, awe-inspiring. She asked how I was and I said, Fine, and I asked how she was and she said, Fine.
We paused, listening to one another in silence. I looked at the clock. Two in the morning. She finally told me she moved to White Plains and was just settling in. She asked how long it had been since we’d seen on another and I told her a year and she said that it seemed like longer. I said it seemed like a dream. She asked if I wanted to see her and I said I’d leave now, but she told me that was silly.
You’re worth it, I said.
She replied, You’re weird.
Some things never change, I said.
Some things do.
I paused and thought agonizingly of her face and her freckle and her ring. Are you still wearing the same lipgloss?
She laughed and said, Yea, and I told her that was good news.
Why?
Private.
She sighed and I imagined her eyes and her smile and told her again I’d come now.
It’s over an hour away.
I’ll speed.
Again she laughed and she asked what was wrong with me and I said, I love you.
For a long time she was silent and I could only hear her breathing, or maybe just static in the air. I squeezed a fist so hard I thought my skin would break.
She gave me her address and said, I’ll see you in an hour.
On the road I smoked cigarettes and thought about her and gripped the steering wheel like it might try to get away from me.
As I drove I remembered her words. Some things never change. Some things. My feelings for her never changed, from the moment I met her.
There’s a bodega by my house that sells random items and groceries and the like. I stopped by, knowing I couldn’t show up at her new place without a house-warming gift. In the backseat of my car sat the brown paper bag – patient, meaningful, weird.
I make it to her place around three in the morning and she opens the door for me and hugs me. I look at her. Her puff of hair. Her luminous eyes. Her unpracticed smile. Her ring. I feel like a child.
What’s in the bag, she asks.
I hand it to her and tell her to open it, which she does. Her eyes grow soft, moist, and she smiles her gorgeous, artless smile before looking up at me, speechless.
It is three in the morning and I’ve brought her cat food and cigarettes.