The Bachelor's Cat
by
Lynn Hoffman
Then he heard someone else crying - a baby. The sound was coming from right outside his front door. You might think that he would have been too percolated through with self-pity to investigate, but you'd be wrong. There was a species of people a long time ago that didn't respond automatically to a baby's cry and they are, naturally enough, extinct.
The artist was, in several important respects, dead but his kind was not extinct. Through the open door he felt a face full of cold and then the heat of the cup on his knuckles and the warmth of the coffee cloud reaching his chin. The crying was coming from a gray kitten, tinier than most that he'd seen. It had tucked itself in the lee of his stoop, its ears plastered to its head. It saw him or maybe it got the scent of the slightly warmer air from the open door. Here was a creature who filled an unthinkable slot in the universe: she was visibly more miserable than he was. She was more uncomfortable too and, if cats can be allowed, with more reason to despair.
He saw some men across the street, horsing a few pieces of furniture in to a house. Moving day he thought, somebody lost their kitten. Down the stoop, pick up kitten, shout across. Wind cuts through the bathrobe. Negative negatory uhuh. Ain't our cat pal (and don't you try to palm it off on us either).
He picked the cat up and took it to the top of the steps. In his hand he could see how infantile she was, barely a cat, more like an embryo, almost womb-wet, some unspecific baby four-footer. He put her down on the top step, his hand pulling back quickly from the little fertility-possibility message she brought with her. Later, he would remember noticing from above her a suggestion of light and dark stripes along her back.
He was slipping into a Flotsam Phase, feeling feckless, carrying a bad case of shrunken heart. He couldn't just bring a cat into the house. OK, maybe he could if she wanted to come. She looked up at him as he pushed the door open. He actually said "Do you want to come in?" It didn't seem anywhere near as silly at the time as it does now. She ran inside and he followed her, closing out the cold behind them. From the middle of the living room floor, she cried. He picked her up again, more impressed for a moment with her size than with her need. Tail and all, she just covered the palm of his hand. This was a cat that had been taken from its mother. He recalled an image from an early morning kid's TV show: a baby bird being fed from an eyedropper. There was milk. He put some on her nose, then some in a spoon and then more on a saucer. He knew she needed more than that and he knew that he had no money in the house. Nothing. Another regret, but he felt this one more sharply than the others, a hot stab, not a cold dead ache.
Pockets and bureau drawers and the crack in the sofa: 77 cents. He dressed with a purpose and went to the corner deli. There was a sign - liverwurst on sale - 77 cents a half pound. The stupidity of coincidence would ordinarily have made him laugh. Today it made him ask for exactly half a pound. When he opened the door of the house, she was standing, crying. Looking at him and the open door, she fled. He found her under the couch, crying again. He lured her out slowly with kissing sounds and the smell of his package. He made a paste from liverwurst and milk and fed it to her on the flat end of a toothpick. He trimmed her little needle claws with his nail clipper and she didn't struggle. A few minutes later she was asleep and he took her upstairs and put her on his bed with a soft sweater over her.