A slight pause.
“How’d you even know I was in it? Did I mention...?”
“Actually, I...”
“Because I don’t remember tell—”
“It was just an accident. My being there.”
“Gee.”
“I enjoyed... seeing you. Your performance. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
“Gee,” she says again.
He visualizes her shaking her head in wonder. The golden-red hair. The hair so effectively hidden by the white fur cap last night.
“Everybody else saw me in it ages ago,” she says. “Everybody I know, anyway.” She pauses again. “How was I?” she asks. “I don’t even know anymore.”
“Terrific.”
“Did I look like a cat?”
“More so than anyone else on stage.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Tell me more,” she says, and he can imagine a wide girlish grin on her freckled face. “Tell me I should be the star of the show...”
“You were really very...”
“Tell me how beautifully I dance...”
“You do.”
“And sing...”
“Yes.”
“Take me to lunch and flatter me.”
He hesitates only an instant.
“I’d be happy to,” he says.
He is surprised to learn that she’s actually twenty-seven.
“Which is old for a dancer, right?” she says.
“Well, no, I don’t...”
“Oh, sure,” she says. “Especially a dancer who’s been in Cats forever,” she says and rolls her eyes. Green flecked with yellow. Sitting in slanting sunlight at a table just inside the window of the restaurant she’s chosen on the West Side. Eyes glowing with sunlight. “Now and forever, right?” she says. “That’s the show’s slogan, the headline, whatever you call it. Cats, Now and Forever. That’s me. I’ll probably be in that damn show when I’m sixty-five. Every time I go for an audition, they ask me what I’ve done, I say Cats. That’s what I’ve done. Well, that’s not all I’ve done. I was in Les Miz in London, the Brits call it The Glums, did you know that? And last year I toured Miss Saigon. But Cats is the big one, Cats is Broadway. I’ve been in that damn show practically since it opened, seventeen years old, little Dorothy in her pretty red shoes, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto. That’s right, we’re in a goddamn show called Cats!”
He realizes he is nervously checking out the restaurant as she talks, trying to remember how many people he and Helen know here on the West Side, preparing a cover story in advance to explain why he is here with a young and beautiful girl while his wife is up there in the wilds of Massachusetts. He remembers all at once what Kate said that first day in the park, referring to the handkerchief she’d bloodied and offered to launder — Your wife would kill me — and wonders if she’d been fishing that day, trying to learn if he was available. Well, he’s flattering himself, for Christ’s sake. Why would anyone as beautiful as she is, as young as she is — well, twenty-seven, he’s just learned — why would anyone like Kate wonder whether a forty-six-year-old man, a man about to be forty-six, was married or single or divorced or whatever the hell? Besides, he’d been wearing the wedding band, just as he’s wearing it now, plain to see on the ring finger of his left hand — see, folks, I’m married, nothing fishy going on here, nobody trying to hide anything, I’m married, okay? So of course, she’d already known. She’d seen the ring, and she’d known he was married. Still, he wonders why that particular remark if it wasn’t a fishing expedition. Or maybe a warning. I know you’re married, mister, so no funny moves, okay?
“Where in Kansas?” he asks.
“What?”
“You said...”
“Oh, that was just an expression. Don’t you know the line from Wizard of...?”
“Yes, of course. But I thought...”
“No, I’m not. From Kansas.”
“Then where are you from? You said...”
“Westport, Connecticut. But I’ve been living in New York since I was seventeen. Ten years last month, in fact. That’s when I got the job in Cats. Before then, I was studying dance in Connecticut. No wonder I’m still in that damn show. Where are you from?”
“Boston.”
“I thought you sounded a little like a Kennedy.”
“Do I?”
“A little.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“It’s good, actually. It’s a nice sound, that Massachusetts accent. Or dialect. Whatever you call it. Regional dialect, I guess. Anyway, I like it.”
“Thank you.”
“You promised to flatter me. Tell me about last night.”
He tells her how he’d been invited to see the show with a man he despised, someone whose wife is in his wife’s aerobics class, venturing to mention his wife, watching her eyes to see if anything shows there, but nothing does, and anyway, why should it? This is simply a Sunday brunch in broad daylight, a married man wearing his wedding band for all to see, two people who’d happened to share an unusual experience together, now sitting and chatting in the innocent light of the sun, nothing going on here, folks, see the ring, wanting to waggle the fingers of his left hand so the ring would catch the light of the sun and flash like a beacon to anyone entertaining suspicious thoughts.
He tells her all about how she’d captured his attention because she was so very good...
“Tell me, tell me,” she says, and grins again.
...perfectly capturing a cat’s, well, essence, he supposes one might call it, in a show that was otherwise, well, he hates to say this...
“Say it,” she says. “It sucks.”
“Well, there were things about it...”
“Name one,” she says. “Besides ‘Memory.’”
“‘Memory’ was very moving.”
“I played Sillabub in Hamburg. I got to do the other version of the song. The younger, more innocent version than the one Grizabella sings. In a sort of high, piping voice, you know? For contrast.”
“Yes.”
“But aside from ‘Memory,’ what else is there? It isn’t even a dancer’s show, you know, like Chorus Line or any of the Fosse shows when he was alive, which is odd because you’d think the very notion of cats dancing would inspire all sorts of inventive choreography. None of the dances seem to me like anything a cat would dance, do they to you? Do you have a cat?”
“Not now.”
“I have a cat, well, you’ll meet her, and believe me, if they allowed her to get up on that stage and dance, it wouldn’t be like anything we’re doing up there. It’s a shame when you think of it, the opportunities squandered...”
He is thinking about what she said not ten seconds ago, I have a cat, well, you’ll meet her, and misses much of her dissertation, or what sounds like one, sounds like something she’s said many times before to many other people, about the way cats naturally seem to be dancing whenever they move, the glides, the leaps, the turns, “Even in repose,” she says, “a cat looks like a dancer resting,” but he is thinking I have a cat, well, you’ll meet her, her green eyes unwavering as she leans across the table toward him, fervently intent on making her point, the reddish-gold hair falling loose about her face, he wonders why they didn’t make her a tawny cat, didn’t use her own hair and a rust-colored costume instead of dressing her in white like a virgin, and why the name Victoria, he doesn’t recall any Victoria in the Eliot...