“Was there a cat named Victoria in the poems?” he asks suddenly. “Excuse me, I didn’t mean...”
“That’s okay, I was just rattling on, anyway. When he talks about the names families give their cats, he gives Victor as an example, but not Victoria. And also, he mentions that Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer live in Victoria Grove, which is an actual section in London, have you ever been to London?”
“Yes, many times.”
With my wife, he thinks, but does not say.
“But what’s interesting is that Victoria is the only straight name in the show,” she says. “All the other cats are given what Eliot calls their particular names. Which he rhymes with perpendicular, by the way. Have you read the poems?”
“Yes.”
“Mediocre, right? Like the show. God knows why it’s a hit. Dress people up like cats, and you’ve got a hit, go figure, no matter how boring it is. Would you like to go to the crafts fair? When we’re finished here. Or do you have other plans?”
“No,” he says. “I have no other plans. Who’s Ron?”
“Ron? I don’t know. Who’s Ron?”
“In the program, you thanked...”
“Oh. That Ron.”
“You thanked your sister...”
“Bess, yes. Well, Elizabeth, actually.”
“...and especially Ron...”
“My God, did you memorize that dumb thing?”
“...for their support and encouragement.”
“Ron was someone I used to know.” Her eyes meet his. “Why?” she asks.
“I just wondered. I’ve never understood why performers thank people in the program notes...”
“It’s stupid, I know.”
“...sometimes even dedicate their performances to this or that person...”
“Absolutely idiotic. How can you dedicate a performance? Mom, Dad, I dedicate this next pas de deux to you. Unless my partner objects. In which case, I dedicate the entrechat.”
“And yet...”
“I know, I know, you surrender to the stupidity. Everyone else is thanking everyone in sight, you figure the people you know and love will be hurt or offended if you don’t thank them. They put that in the program when I rejoined the show in January. After the Miss Saigon tour ended in Detroit. If you liked me in a white fur hat, you should’ve seen me in a black wig and slanty eyes.”
“Was Ron in Miss Saigon?”
“Well, yes, actually. He played the Engineer.” Her eyes meet his again. The Green Lantern’s eyes. Flashing across the table at him like a laser beam. “Why?” she asks again.
“Just wondered.”
“Mm,” she says. Eyes refusing to let go of his. “I had a dream about you,” she says. “Last night, when I washed and ironed your handkerchief, isn’t that odd? The very night you saw the show. That’s very peculiar, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“I washed and ironed it when I got home. It must’ve been two in the morning by then, some of us had gone out for Chinese after the show, we’re always starving after the show. Anyway, I washed and ironed it last night because I planned to drop it off either today or on Tuesday. There’s a three o’clock matinee today, but I pulled something in my leg last night, so I’m off, aren’t we lucky? We’re dark on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have a very abnormal Broadway schedule. Anyway, it was on my mind, you see. That I hadn’t yet returned it to you. Which is probably why I dreamt about you last night.”
“What’d you dream?”
“I dreamt you and I were making love in front of my mother’s house in Westport.”
David says nothing.
“On the lawn,” she says.
He still says nothing.
“Naked,” she says. “Well, in the dream, I’m wearing a white blouse, but that’s all. You’re entirely nude. And we’re making passionate love. Which is odd, since I hardly know you.”
David nods. He feels suddenly as if he is taking unfair advantage of her. He is a skilled analyst, a person trained to interpret dreams. He should not be listening to...
“My mother comes out with a huge pail of cold water and throws it on us. The way they do with dogs who get stuck, you know? But we keep right on going. I guess we were enjoying it.”
He nods again, says nothing.
“So how do you interpret that?”
“How do you interpret it?”
“Oh-ho, here comes the shrink.”
“Force of habit,” he says, and smiles unconvincingly.
He is feeling suddenly very threatened.
And guilty.
He is feeling that he’d better get the hell out of here fast because his wife and two adorable daughters are too far away on Martha’s Vineyard and he has no right sitting here with this beautiful dancer, never mind the wedding band on his left hand, never mind the purity of eggs over easy on an English muffin, side of bangers, please, sitting here openly and innocently in the noonday sun for all the world to see, but with a faint tumescence in his pants nonetheless, hidden under the table, a dangerous and guilt-ridden hard-on covertly ripening in his pants because this girl, this woman, this delicate and desirable creature sitting opposite him has dreamt of them making love together, making passionate love, as she’d put it, in fact enjoying it so much that not even a huge pail of cold water could break them apart.
Oh yes he knows, of course he knows that the forty-six-year-old man in her dream could easily stand for her father, and he knows yes of course that the intercourse on her mother’s lawn, naked on her mother’s lawn, could stand for a flaunting of whatever unresolved Electral feelings she may still nurture. And he knows, yes yes quit it already, that her mother throwing water on them, trying to stop them, most likely stands for society’s taboos against incest, he knows all of this, he realizes all this, but the developing hard-on in his pants keeps reminding him that the person she chose to be Daddy’s stand-in and stuntman is none other than David himself.
Moreover, she has confessed it to him, she has revealed her unconscious choice... well, not confessed it, surely. She has only mentioned it to him, actually, rather matter-of-factly, as if she’d dreamt of the two of them merely having tea at the Plaza — but mentioned it nonetheless. Which means, the way he interprets it to his now insistent hard-on, that she’d wanted him to know, wanted him to understand that the person she’d chosen for her fantasy, albeit unconsciously, the person with whom she elected to fuck her brains out on her mother’s lawn was none other than David Chapman, M.D., P.C.
“You come all over the blouse,” she says. “In the dream. Your semen stains my blouse. I guess that refers to the handkerchief, don’t you think? My getting blood on your handkerchief?”
“I... would imagine,” he says.
“In the dream, I have to wash my blouse to get the stain out. Your semen. In the dream, I’m standing topless, washing my blouse and then ironing it.”
They are staring at each other across the table.
“Do you really want to go to the crafts fair?” she asks.
Her cat is named simply and sensibly Hannah.
She is a great fat tubby thing that Eliot might have called a Gumbie Cat, her coat “of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.” She sidles up to Kate the moment she enters the apartment, rubbing against her, and then looking up at David as if knowing in her infinite cat wisdom that he will soon be making love to her mistress. David knows this, and Kate knows it, and the cat knows it, too.