The essential peter s be.., p.34
The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volume 1, page 34
Millamant herself had apparently been quite docile on the flight from New York—even banging around on the luggage conveyor belt didn’t seem to have fazed her. Uncaged in my house, she didn’t exhibit any of the usual edginess of a cat in strange surroundings: she stretched here, strolled there, leisurely investigated this and that, as though getting reacquainted, and finally curled herself in the one good chair, plainly waiting for the floor show to begin. I looked at Emilia, who shrugged and said, “Like the washing machine when the repairman arrives. Wait. You’ll see.”
“See what? What the Baptist hell are we waiting for?”
“Dinner,” Emilia said firmly. “Take me out to that Caribbean place—I don’t know the name. The one where you took Sam.”
I hadn’t been back since the time we celebrated his being down to two cigarettes a day. I ordered the ropa vieja again. I don’t remember what Emilia had. We talked about Sam, and about her work for the Bergen County newspaper—she’d recently won a state journalism award for a series on day-care facilities—and I went into serious detail regarding the technical and social inadequacies of the Pacific Rep’s new artistic director. We didn’t discuss Millamant at all.
The evening was warm, and there was one of those glossy, perfect half-moons that seem too brilliant for their size. We walked home the long way, so that I could show Emilia the little park where Sam had told me about her. We sat on the swings, as I’d done with Sam, and she told me then, “He lied about his age, you know. I didn’t realize it until you told me you were two months younger. He’d been taking seven years off, all the time I knew him. As though it would have mattered to me.”
I’d had a second margarita with dinner. I said, “He was two months and eleven days older than I am. We were both born just after three in the morning, did he ever tell you that? I was about an ounce and a half heavier.” And whoosh, I was crying. I didn’t start to cry—I was crying, and I was always going to be crying. Emilia held me without a word, as I’d once held Sam when he wept just as hopelessly, just as endlessly. I have no idea how long it went on. When it stopped, we walked the rest of the way in silence, but Emilia tucked her arm through mine.
Back home, we settled in the kitchen (which is bigger and more comfortable than my living room) with a couple of cappuccinos. The director ex-wife took the piano, but I hung on to the espresso machine. Emilia said, “I was thinking on the flight—you and I have already known each other longer than I knew Sam. We had such a short time.”
“You learned things about him I never bothered to find out in forty years. I thought we had forever.”
Emilia was silent for a while, sipping her coffee. Then she said, very softly, not looking at me, “You see, I never thought that. Some way, I always understood that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending for us. I never said it to myself, but I knew.” She did look straight at me then, her eyes clear and unmisted, but her mouth too straight, too determinedly under control. “I think he did, too.”
I couldn’t think of an answer to that. We chatted a little while longer, and then Emilia went to bed. I stayed up late, reading Heartbreak House one more time—no one’s ever likely to ask me to play Captain Shotover, but the readiness is all—had one last futile look-around for Millamant, and turned in myself. I slept deeply and contentedly for what seemed like a good fifteen minutes before Emilia shook me out of one of the rare dreams where I know my lines, whispering frantically, “Jake—Jake come and see, hurry, you have to see! Jake, hurry, it’s her!”
The half-moon was shining so brightly on the kitchen table that I could see the little sticky rings where our coffee cups had been. I remember that, just as I remember the shuddery hum of the refrigerator and the bloop of the leaky faucet, and a faint scratching sound that I couldn’t place right away. Just as I remember Millamant dancing.
It’s a large table, older than I am, and it lurches if you lean on it, let alone dance. I don’t know how Millamant even climbed up, arthritic back leg and all, but there she floated, there she spun, tumbling this way, sailing that, one minute a kitten, the next a kite; moving so lightly, and with such precision, that the table never rocked once, but seemed to be the one moving impossibly fast, while Millamant drifted over it as slowly as she chose, hanging in the air for exactly as long as she chose. She was so old that her back claws no longer retracted entirely—that was the scratching noise—but she danced the way human beings have always dreamed of dancing, and never have, not the best of them. No one has ever danced like Millamant.
Neither of us could look away, but Emilia leaned close and whispered, “I’ve seen her three times. I couldn’t talk about it on the phone.” Her face was absolutely without color.
Millamant stopped so suddenly that both Emilia and I leaned toward her, as though it had been the planet that halted. Millamant dropped down onto all fours, paced to the edge of the table and stood looking at us out of once-golden eyes gone almost tea-brown with age. She was breathing rapidly, and trembling all over. She said, “Emilia. Jake.”
How can I say what it was like? To hear a cat speak—to hear a cat speak our names—to hear a cat speak them in a voice that was unmistakably Sam’s voice, and yet not Sam’s, not a voice at all. Her mouth remained slightly open, but her jaws did not move: the words were coming through her, not out of her, without inflection, without any sort of cadence, without any trace of a homemade English accent. Millamant said, “Jake. Clean your glasses.”
I wear glasses, except onstage, and the lenses are always messier than I ever notice. It used to drive Sam crazy. I took them off. Millamant—or what was using Millamant—said, “I love you, Emilia.”
Beside me, Emilia’s breath simply stopped. I didn’t dare look at her. I had all I could do to babble idiotically, “Sam? Sam? Where have you been? Sam, are you really in there?”
At that Millamant actually seemed to raise an eyebrow, which was unlikely, since cats don’t have eyebrows. She—Sam—it said quite clearly, “You want I should wave?” And she did raise a front paw to gesture in my direction. Her ears were flicking and crumpling strangely, as though someone who didn’t know how a cat’s ears work were trying to lay them back. “As to where I’ve been—” the toneless march of syllables faltered a little “—it comes and goes. Talk to me.”
Emilia’s face was still so pale that the color on her cheekbones stood out like tribal scars. I don’t know what I looked like, but I couldn’t make a sound. Emilia took a step forward, her hands out, but Millamant immediately backed away. “Talk to me. Please, talk to me. Tell me why we’re all here, tell me anything. Please.”
So we sat in the kitchen, Emilia and I, talking to an old cat as we would have talked to our dear lost friend, solemnly telling her our commonplace news of work and family, of small travels and travails, of his parents in Miami, of how it had been for us in the last two years. Our voices stumbled over each other, often crumbling into tears of still-untrusted joy, then immediately skidding off into broken giggles to hear ourselves earnestly assuring Millamant, “It’s been a miserable couple of theater seasons—absolutely nothing you’d have liked.” Millamant looked from one to the other of us, her eyes fiercely attentive, sometimes nodding like a marionette. Emilia clutched my hand painfully tightly, but she was smiling. I have never seen a smile like that one of Emilia’s ever again.
She was saying, “And Jake and I have been writing and writing to each other, talking on the phone, telling each other everything we remember—things we didn’t know we remembered. Things you maybe wouldn’t remember. Sam, we missed you so. I missed you.” When she reached out again, Millamant avoided her touch for a moment; then suddenly yielded and let herself rest between Emilia’s hands. The arid, rasping voice said, “Behind the ears. Finally, a body I can dance in, but I can’t figure out about scratching.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Emilia was totally involved in caressing Millamant, and I was feeling more and more like the most flagrant voyeur. I didn’t have to look at Emilia’s face, or listen to Millamant’s purring; merely to watch those yearning hands at work in the thin, patchy fur was to spy on an altogether private matter. I make jokes when I’m edgy. I said to Emilia, “Be careful—he could be a dybbuk. It’d be just like him.”
Emilia, not knowing the Yiddish word, looked puzzled; but Millamant let out a brief, contemptuous yowl, a feline equivalent of Sam’s old Oh, good night! snort of disdain. “Of course, I’m not a bloody dybbuk! Don’t you read Singer? A dybbuk’s a wandering soul, demons chasing it all around the universe—it needs a body, a place to hide. Not me—nobody’s chasing me.” The voice hesitated slightly for a second time. “Except maybe you two.”
I looked at Emilia, expecting her to say something. When she didn’t, I finally mumbled—just as lamely as it reads—“We needed to talk about you. We didn’t have anyone else to talk to.”
“If not for Jake,” Emilia said. “Sam, if it weren’t for Jake, if he hadn’t known me at your funeral—” she caught her breath only momentarily on the word “—Sam, I would have disappeared. I’d have gone right on, like always, like everybody else, but I would have disappeared.”
Millamant hardly seemed to be listening. She said thoughtfully, “I’ll be damned. I’m hungry.”
“I’ll make you a quesadilla,” I said, eager to be doing something practical. “Cheese and scallions and Ortega diced chilies—I’ve still got a can from the last time you were here. Take me ten minutes.”
The look both Millamant and Emilia gave me was pure cat. I said, “Oh. Right. Wet or dry?”
Nothing in life—nothing even in Shakespeare—adequately prepares you for the experience of opening a can of Whiskas with Bits O’ Beef for your closest friend, who’s been dead for two years. Millamant ambled over to the battered stoneware dish that Emilia had brought with her from New York, sniffed once, then dug in with a voracity I’d never seen in either Sam or her. She went through that red-brown glop like a snowplow, and looked around for more.
Scraping the rest into her dish, I couldn’t help asking, “How can you be hungry, anyway? Are you the one actually tasting this stuff, or is it all Millamant?”
“Interesting point.” The Abyssinian had Whiskas on her nose. “It’s Millamant who needs to eat—it’s Millamant getting the nourishment—but I think I’m beginning to see why she likes it. Very odd. Sort of the phantom of a memory of taste. A touch of nutmeg would help.”
She dived back into her dinner, obliviously, leaving Emilia and me staring at each other in confusion so identical that there was no need to speak, possibly ever again. Emilia finally managed to ask, “What do we do now?” and I answered, “Like a divorce. We work out who gets custody, and who gets visiting rights.”
Emilia said, “She doesn’t belong to us. She was Sam’s cat, and he’s...returned.”
“To take possession, as you might say. Right. We can’t even be certain that she’s exactly a cat anymore, what with Sam in residence.” I realized that I was just this side of hysterical, and closing fast. “Emilia, you’d better take him—her—them—home with you. I’m an actor, I pretend for a living, and this is altogether too much reality for me. You take Millamant home—what I’ll do, I’ll just call on the weekends, the way we used to do. Sam and I.”
I don’t know what Emilia would have said—her eyes were definitely voting for scooping up Millamant that very moment and heading for the airport—but the cat herself looked up from an empty dish at that moment to remark, in the mechanical tone I was already coming to accept as Sam, “Calm down, Jake. You’re overplaying again.”
It happens to be one of my strengths as an actor that I never overplay. The man saw me act exactly three times after high school, and that makes him an expert on my style. I was still spluttering as Millamant sat down in the kitchen doorway, curling her tail around her hind legs.
“Well,” the voice said. “I’m back. Where I’m back from—” and it faltered momentarily, while Millamant’s old eyes seemed to lose all definition between iris and pupil “—where I’m back from doesn’t go into words. I don’t know what it really is, or where—or when. I don’t know whether I’m a ghost, or a zombie, or just some kind of seriously perturbed spirit. If I were a dybbuk, at least I’d know I was a dybbuk, that would be something.” Millamant licked the bit of Whiskas off her nose. “But here I am anyway, ready or not. I can talk, I can dance—my God, I can dance—and I’m reunited with the only two people in the world who could have summoned me. Or whatever it was you did.”
Abruptly she began washing her face, making such a deliberate job of it that I was about to say something pointed about extended dramatic pauses, when Sam spoke again. “But for how long? I could be gone any minute, or I could last as long as Millamant lasts—and she could go any minute herself. What happens then? Do I go off to kitty heaven with her—or do I find myself in Jake’s blender? One of Emilia’s angelfish? What happens then?”
Nobody answered. Millamant sat up higher on her haunches, until she looked like the classic Egyptian statue of Bastet, the cat goddess. Out of her mouth Sam said very quietly, “We don’t know. We have no idea. I certainly wish somebody had read the instruction manual.”
“There wasn’t any manual,” I said. “We didn’t know we were summoning you—we didn’t know we were doing anything except missing you, and trying to comfort ourselves the best we could.” I was calming down, and paradoxically irritable with it. “Not everybody has people wishing for him so hard that they snatch him right back from death. I’m sorry if we woke you.”
“Oh, I was awake.” The cold voice was still soft and faraway. “Or maybe not truly awake, but you can’t quite get to sleep, either. Jake . . . Emilia . . . I can’t tell you what it’s like. I’m not even sure whether it’s death—or maybe that’s it, that’s just it, that’s really the way death is. I can’t tell you.”
“Don’t,” Emilia whispered. She picked Millamant up again and held her close against her breast, not petting her.
Sam said, “It’s like the snow on a TV set, when the cable’s out. People just sit watching the screen, expecting the picture to come back—they’ll sit there for an hour, more, waiting for all those whirling, crackling white particles to shape themselves back into a face, a car, a box of cereal—something. Try to think how it might feel to be one of those particles.” He said nothing more for a moment, and then added, “It’s not like that but try to imagine it anyway.”
Whereupon Millamant fell asleep in Emilia’s arms, and was carried off to bed in the guest room. She sauntered out the next morning, looking demurely pleased with herself, shared Emilia’s yogurt, topped that off with an entire can of Chunky Chicken, went back to sleep on a fragrant pile of new-dried laundry, woke presently, and came to find me in the living room, settle briskly onto my lap and issue instructions. Fondling your best friend’s tummy and scratching his vibrating throat for a solid hour at a time may possibly be weirder than responding to his demand for more kibble. I’m still not sure.
Presently he remarked, in that voice that wasn’t him and wasn’t human, and was yet somehow Sam, “In case I haven’t said it, I’m very happy to see you, Jake.”
“I’m happy to see you, too.” I stopped petting him once we were talking: it felt wrong. “I just wish I could . . . see you.”
Sam didn’t laugh—I don’t think he could—but a sort of odd grumbly ripple ran through Millamant’s body. “You surprise me. You didn’t actually plan to have me come back with fleas and hair balls?”
“Just like old times,” I said, and Millamant did the ripple thing again. “Truth is, I think it’s easier to accept you like this than it would be if you’d showed up in some other person’s body. You always had a lot in common with Millamant.”
“Did, didn’t I?” For a moment the words were almost lost in Millamant’s deep purr. “We both love peach yogurt, and having things on our own terms. But I couldn’t dance like Millamant the best day I ever saw. Jake, you don’t know—when she was a kitten, pouncing and skittering around the apartment, I used to watch her for hours, wondering if it wasn’t too late, if I could still make my body learn something from her that it never could learn from anyone else. Even now, old as she is, you can’t imagine how it feels....” He was silent for so long that I thought Millamant must have fallen asleep once more; but then he said suddenly, “Jake. Maybe you should send me back.”
Emilia was in the guest bedroom, talking on the phone to her editor in New Jersey, so there was just me to be flabbergasted. When I had words again, I said, “Send you? We don’t even know how you got here in the first place, and you don’t know where back is. We couldn’t send you anywhere the bmt doesn’t run.” No furry ripple out of Millamant. “Why would you want to? To leave us again?”
“I don’t ever want to leave.” Millamant’s dull claws dug harder into my leg than they should have been able to. “If I were in a rat’s body, a cockroach’s body, I’d want to stay here with you, with Emilia. But it feels strange here. Not wrong, but not—not proper. I don’t mean me inhabiting a cat—I mean me still being me, Sam Kagan still aware that I’m Sam Kagan. However you look at it, this is a damn afterlife, Jake, and I don’t believe in an afterlife. Dead or alive, I don’t.”
“And being part of the snow on a television screen, that’s an improvement? That’s proper?”
Sam didn’t answer for a time. Millamant purred drowsily between my hands, and my Betty Boop clock ticked (at certain times of day, you can almost pretend she’s dancing the Charleston), and in the guest bedroom Emilia laughed at something. Finally Sam said, “You see, I don’t think I was always going to be TV snow. There was more to it. I can’t tell you how I knew that. I just did.”
I unhooked a rear claw from my thigh. “Purgatory as a function of the cable system. Makes sense, in a really dumb way.”
