Holy Pictures
For nearly a year
Tom lived with Camilla and her three cats on the first floor of an otherwise empty three decker. The cats roamed
the cellar, hallways, and stairs during the day, preferring these places to the tenement. Each evening when Tom
and Camilla drove up to the house, one or another of the cats would be looking out from the third floor hall window.
Camilla would laugh and make kissing noises, but the still, distant figure was not a soothing sight to Tom. The
cat seemed both menacing and vigilant, like a gargoyle on a medieval cathedral. When Tom and Camilla opened the
outside door, he could hear the soft thumps of cats leaping from the sills of hall windows above, and from appliances
and shelves below, then the patter of their running and their meowing and little trilling noises of greeting. The
cats would crowd around Camilla, rubbing their jaws against her briefcase, lifting her dress with their tails as they
slid between her legs.
In the months
and years after he and Camilla parted, there would be many things he would remember about the cats and Camilla.
Chief among them would be winter mornings, particularly the first: Camilla putting on the old rubber boots her
father had left behind and a ratty wool coat Tom hadn't seen before --
preparing herself to carry the three cats
outside. It had been Camilla's habit to put her cats out for a while each morning so they'd relieve themselves
in the loose dirt by the house -- nudging them with a small, slippered foot, if
necessary -- but she could not bring
herself to do this when snow covered the yard, even though the cats could still dig in the bare strip of earth
between the fence and her neighbor's garage. The cats did not like the snow on their paws, she explained to Tom
on the morning after the first significant snowfall; to spare them, she would herself deliver the cats to that
patch of damp soil in the back. Leaning over, the coat moving in front with the slight flexing of her knees, she
lifted Carlos, the largest and most placid of the cats. It was this particular motion that Tom would not forget,
the solemn lifting of the cat, its four limbs and tail hanging limply down.
One day Tom's
newborn son would be taken up from his bath and an image of snowy mornings and the elevation of Carlos
would flash through Tom's mind, though at other similar moments he might become aware only of the rising of the hair
on the back of his neck and a warmth spreading over his skin. He would never realize why Camilla and her cat came
to mind or why he grew tremulous watching spaghetti lifted from a cauldron of boiling water, would not, in fact,
even wonder about it, the examination of consciousness being no more to his taste than the examination of conscience
had been in his Catholic boyhood. Tom was a lawyer; he was neither by nature nor by education the sort of man to
consider why some stray thoughts he invited in, petted, and fed, and others he banished into the blizzard, and
certainly not what brought them to his doorstep.
In this vision
that haunted him, Camilla continued the preparations, drawing on her gloves, slowly, ceremoniously, as if she were
a saint and intent on dedicating each movement to a higher purpose. The trouble was, she seldom stopped moving,
however much Tom might want her to pause, to hold a pose, and in any case, she could not hold it forever. How much
less than forever could satisfy him? He thought -- fleetingly, and without knowing
why -- of Mozart, who both enthralled
and frustrated him. Accustomed to the unrelenting rhythms of rock music, Tom would listen to the operas, waiting
for some particularly beautiful bit in one of them to repeat, to press in on him, for one more quasi-orgasmic rush,
and it never would; instead there would be some other beautiful bit. So with Camilla. Her movements were here and
then gone, leaving nothing of their passing, leaving unsated whatever indefinable appetite they had elicited. They
left only a flutter in him, a sense of having been stroked, as he had once imagined it might feel to be licked by a
cat. (The real experience was quite otherwise, he found. A cat's tongue was made for business.)
Camilla draped
Carlos around her neck. When Tom was a child, devout women often presented him with holy pictures, images the
size of baseball cards but of suffering, ecstatic saints; when he'd opened his missal during mass, the pictures
had fluttered to the floor like golden wings. Camilla's live collar reminded him of the picture of Saint Agnes:
Carlos with the same docile expression as the lamb around Agnes' neck, Camilla with the saint's half smile.
Camilla's eyes were full of something and glowing with it, as Agnes's had been. She raised her chin and drew
the cat's paws down on her chest. The motion realigned nerve endings in Tom's brain like a magnet on iron
filings, and later any similar movement made by any woman would fire up synapses in certain seldom used corridors
in his cortex. A woman smoothing a collar or absently stroking her hair might lead him helplessly, inexorably,
to think of Camilla, or of Saint Agnes, or even of Mozart. But these moments would come on as unexpectedly and
leave as quickly as the motions that inspired them, and he was not given to ponder what was not frozen for his
admiration; he would shrug and not think, moving on the way the moments themselves did rather than standing
bereft in their wake. In fact, it was sometimes only the wake that he'd be aware
of -- a slight tingling, a
flush.
Next Camilla
tucked the remaining cats under each arm. In later months Tom would picture her stepping heavily away from him,
down the unshoveled walk toward the garage. Her old coat with its Carlos collar reached past the top of her boots,
and Ratchet and Sashimi's tails stood up straight in the feline position of anticipation and good cheer, their tiny
pink anuses like tail lights on either side of the receding figure. He would remember Camilla standing in the snow
near the back corner of the garage, entirely motionless at last, one cat in her arms now, another unseen on the
ground behind the garage, the third sitting on the trash can lid awaiting its turn. Camilla had her back to him,
bowing her head, perhaps against the sun in the south and its reflection off the snow, perhaps to speak softly to
the cat in her arms. The cat in profile on the trash can had his head bowed too. From the kitchen window they
looked like penitents, Pilgrims in the snow, pausing at a roadside shrine
Tom would
later try to remember these moments, to run them through his head at will, but they would only arise in all
their glory if they were not deliberately summoned. The conscious memory almost immediately started to degrade,
bleached out like a video tape that had been played too many times. Camilla's gestures lost their definition,
the specificity in which lay their power. When he and Camilla were apart for even a few hours, her face became
indistinct, blurred, the face of every woman. A photograph of her helped tease out of his brain the Camilla-spirit
there, but it too would soon lose its strength and he'd have to take a new one.
When the first
cat was finished, she rotated them. Tom later asked why she didn't put all three cats down at
once -- there was
enough room and the cats tolerated -- if not exactly cherished -- each other's company. He had an image of toddlers
in a Chinese nursery school, lined up on their potties, but the cats were fussier than Chinese babies apparently,
for Camilla said they would never agree to this. They were quite strict about some things, Tom gathered.
When she returned to the kitchen, Camilla took Carlos from her neck like a priest removing his stole at the end of mass, and from that day forward, on any of those rare occasions when Tom would go to church, if his eyes drifted to the altar at the proper time, he would for a moment see Camilla.
There were other
events in Tom's life with Camilla that he would later think back on, and within those memories there were always
images which marked him, though without his knowledge, rather the way a note pinned to his back by a prankish
schoolmate might. For instance, there was Ratchet, a large black and white male, who liked to look down on them
from the top of Camilla's wardrobe, to watch skeptically while Tom and Camilla made love. This unnerved Tom and
he became intermittently impotent; every once in a while, at some critical point in his love making, he would
suddenly glimpse himself from an alien and not very sympathetic point of view.
When the bed
ceased heaving, Ratchet jumped from his perch and joined them, glowering at Tom, curling up in some
Camilla-defined space -- in the small of her back, behind her knees, or between her thighs and her stomach. It
did not help matters that in her playful, post-coital moods, Camilla would alternately stroke the man and the
cat and croon, "Tom is very hirsute, but Ratchet wears a fur suit."
Until he slept
with Camilla, Tom thought only fat women and old men snored. She had a badly deviated septum and the idea of
surgery frightened her. The snoring didn't really matter, she said --
the cats thought she was purring, and were
comforted by the sound. Tom doubted this until he awoke one night to find the bed crowded with cats purring
backup to Camilla, furry little tugboats to her bass note ocean liner. (Years later, Tom would meet a woman
whose bed contained not cats, but plump throw pillows, and to his surprise and delight, he'd be impotent no
longer. He'd tell this woman about Camilla -- that would be easy; what he would never reveal was that at the very
moment when their newborn was lifted from his daily bath, Tom would be filled with something like reverence, and
he'd think of a certain orange cat on snowy winter mornings.)
One night, Camilla
lay awake beside Tom, her back arched against his, the bed for once empty of cats. In her soft, nocturnal voice she
told him that there was something weird about how sensible he was. He took normalcy around the bend. This wasn't
quite it, she was quick to add; he suspected it was as close as she was willing to come. There was a blankness in
him, she continued, and she had filled it in to please herself. She did allow that sharing her life with Tom was
pleasant in many ways. For two years she had lived alone with her cats and clutter, and he had introduced a pleasing
kind of order; very soon after he'd moved in, her house looked more or less like everyone else's with no effort on
her part. She had complimented him about one other thing, too: he had adapted well to life with Ratchet, Carlos,
and Sashimi. The cats had not been especially welcoming she acknowledged --
they were jealous and disdainful, like the
children of a former marriage. In a voice slightly muffled by the bed clothes, Tom said that he'd always admired the
grace and dignity of her cats.
Not long after,
he spent part of an evening cleaning and arranging the linen closet, something Camilla herself had never done.
When he finished, he stepped back to admire his work. The sheets lay on the bottom, folded with care, then the
bath and hand towels. On the top shelf were the face cloths, not folded, but seemingly thrown helter skelter,
in premeditated disarrangement, like a woman's artfully tousled hair or the crest of a strange bird. Tom felt
an indescribable bliss as his eyes moved up and down the stacks. In fact, the multicolored rows of muslin and
terry cloth made him feel much the way Camilla did. Then he became aware of Camilla's eyes on him. She'd been
watching him a long time, he realized. He felt both anger and shame, as if she'd been spying on him as he
masturbated. He could see that Camilla thought that the blankness she'd noted in him was filled with pyramids
of canned goods, stacks of towels, and row upon and row of shoes, arranged according to color, from yellow to
purple, like the rainbow. She looked worried and even frightened, as if she had indeed run into a man exposing
himself on the street. He thought: Camilla and he had shared the same house, the same neighborhood, the same
bed, the same dishes, but his mental universe was furnished differently; they hadn't selected the same objects
as landmarks. Or perhaps they had but had assigned them different meanings. The same star could be part of two
different constellations, he knew -- Ursa Major or the Big Dipper, for instance. But the sky was one
thing -- it was
unimaginably distant and didn't matter, and Camilla did not often look up so what patterns he might see in the
night sky did not concern her; but now, in the house they shared, he had arranged a closet to fit his alien
mental landscape and that was a very different thing. It did not surprise him when Camilla asked him to
leave.
He moved
back to the condo by the waterfront, where he'd lived before he'd met Camilla. The condo had no yard, just
a crumbling parking lot, and beyond it, the harbor. He yearned for Camilla's yard, a double lot in which
she'd taken little interest. During the year they spent together, it had received Tom's devoted attention.
Under his care the bushes had assumed a precise, formal shape. Whenever he worked on them, the cats gathered
on the porch and watched -- sternly, Tom thought, as if they suspected that without supervision he might create
something unseemly in their front yard, perhaps a topiary zoo. He bought a small pair of hand shears so he
could trim closer to the rusting chain link gate. He would have liked to coax the bushes into an arch over it,
but Camilla wouldn't hear of it. Enough is enough, she said.
Looking at
the bushes which he had so carefully shaped gave Tom more pleasure than he cared to admit. After he and
Camilla broke up, he would often drive slowly by her house, while the cats, as motionless and inscrutable
as idols, watched from the porch. If he were to have asked himself why he did this, he might have told himself
that it was to get a glimpse of Camilla, though he sometimes drove by when she was not likely to be
around; he
didn't ask himself anything, however -- he was a criminal lawyer and he had learned to avoid questions to which
the answers were not both foregone and fathomable. As the autumn approached, the bushes grew dishearteningly
ragged again, and Tom stopped visiting the three decker and its little yard.
Tom had
also cut the grass during his time with Camilla. He'd done so in what his books informed him was the English
fashion, in oblique angles to the lot, forming a corrugated diamond not unlike the wood and yarn objects he
had made as a child in summer camp. Since the view from the front was blocked by the hedge, the pattern
could be best appreciated from above, from the small hallway window on the third floor. There one or another
of Camilla's cats would sit, gazing out over the abandoned lawn. Day by day the pattern faded, softened,
blurred with new growth -- gone forever in just a few weeks.
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