GWEN: Can’t you clean it? With all the moth mishegas I’m behind on my deadline.
LAURENCE: I thought you’d want to look at it first.
GWEN: Why would I want to look at it first?
LAURENCE: I don’t know . . . I thought you might want to check viscosity and breakdown.
GWEN: What does “viscosity and breakdown” even mean?
LAURENCE: It’s from that old motor oil commercial—remember those commercials?
GWEN [muttering]: You and your old commercials.
LAURENCE: What’d you say?
GWEN: I have to turn in this story to my editor tomorrow. Are you going to clean it or not?
LAURENCE: I really think you should examine it first.
GWEN: They probably just ate too many moths or threw up a hairball or something.
LAURENCE: It doesn’t look like moths or a hairball.
GWEN: How would you know what a hairball looks like? You never clean up their hairballs.
LAURENCE: Because I always think you’ll want to look at it first.
GWEN: Why do you keep saying that? What do you think is so compelling about a puddle of cat vomit that I have to drop everything and race over like it was a flash sale at Barneys?
LAURENCE: What if one of them is sick?
GWEN: Cats throw up sometimes. It’s what they do. I’m sure it’s fine.
LAURENCE: But you don’t know that it’s fine—you don’t even know who threw up.
GWEN: What am I, a cat CSI unit? How am I supposed to know which cat threw up? Was one of them standing near it?
LAURENCE: They were both gone by the time I found it.
GWEN: Found it and left it for me, you mean.
LAURENCE: I can never clean it as well as you can.
GWEN: Oh, come on!
LAURENCE: It’s true! I’m not as good as getting it all up as you are.
GWEN: Well, as my mother used to say, practice makes perfect.
LAURENCE: Did she?
GWEN: She also used to say, God gave you two arms and two legs. Didn’t your mother ever say anything like that?
LAURENCE: Don’t bring my mother into this.
GWEN: I’m sure she’d agree that you’re a full-grown man who’s perfectly capable of cleaning up cat vomit all by himself.
LAURENCE: But I’m on the third floor. You’re so much closer.
GWEN: Wait . . . you’re upstairs? I thought you were still downstairs. How’d you get all the way upstairs?
LAURENCE: I walked on the two legs God gave me.
GWEN: Sarcasm’s definitely your best play right now.
LAURENCE: Why are you asking a question you already know the answer to?
GWEN: So . . . you saw the throw-up on the first floor, decided to leave it for me, walked all the way past me on the second floor without saying a word, and now you’re on the third floor?
LAURENCE: I can make you a sketch of my route, if you’d like.
GWEN: Very cute.
LAURENCE: Well, I’m obviously too far away to do anything about it now.
GWEN: Only because you walked up two whole floors before you said anything!
LAURENCE: What’s done is done. Besides, I thought you’d want to look at first.
GWEN: Stop saying that!
LAURENCE: It’s true!
GWEN: Like I don’t know that this whole you should look at it first routine is just so you can stick me with a gross job.
LAURENCE: My intentions were pure.
GWEN: Pure?!
LAURENCE: Not to mention that Fanny’s already so comfortable on my lap. It would be cruel to disturb her.
GWEN: Don’t use Fanny against me! And anyway, Clayton’s on my lap. So we’re even.
LAURENCE: But I’m up on the third floor. What am I supposed to do about cat throw-up that’s all the way downstairs?
GWEN: It’s too bad we had those one-way-only stairs installed. How will you possibly get “all the way downstairs” ever again?
LAURENCE: Now who’s being sarcastic?
GWEN [mimicking him]: Now who’s being sarcastic?
LAURENCE: I heard that!
GWEN: Isn’t it enough that I just did, like, fifteen loads of laundry to get rid of the moths? Can’t you do this one thing when you know I’m on a tight deadline?
LAURENCE: Fine! I’ll go down and clean the cat vomit. Go back to your writing.
GWEN: FORGET IT! I’VE ALREADY LOST MY TRAIN OF THOUGHT!
LAURENCE: This is going to end up in your new book, isn’t it?
GWEN: Don’t be ridiculous . . .
Scene.
4. Ping!
Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here’s old Bill Barley. Here’s old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back like a drifting old dead flounder, here’s your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I always say that when I turned forty, it was like a warranty expired. There wasn’t any single catastrophic failure, but all kinds of little things started going wrong in unpredictable ways. The gradual breaking down of my previously resilient body began, in point of fact, on the night of my fortieth birthday itself. Laurence and I were celebrating in Paris and had gone out for an extravagant dinner at an over-the-top restaurant (Napoleon had courted Josephine there, our guidebooks breathlessly informed us), and the six-course meal left me—despite having always prided myself on my billy-goat stomach—wide awake and tossing for the better part of the night with the kind of intense heartburn I’d never even suspected was possible.
As the months went by, new and unmistakable signs of aging cropped up. I’d find dark hairs sprouting on my chin, whereas the hair in other, more private, regions began to fall out. Suddenly I had knees that could forecast the weather: I’d feel a certain twinge in the right one and be able to inform Laurence, with near-perfect accuracy, “It’s going to rain tomorrow.” Getting around New York and environs was definitely more of a challenge than it had been in younger, sprightlier days. Upon reaching the top of the endless flights of stairs at the Christopher Street PATH station in the West Village, for example, I’d find myself too winded to speak for a good minute or two.
This catalog of minor grievances could go on, but you get the point. Still, nothing truly awful had gone wrong until one afternoon, about a month into our moth infestation, when I was in hot pursuit of a particularly large and resilient moth that Fanny had flushed out in the living room. I had a rolled-up newspaper in one hand, and had just bent over to swat the bugger as it made a sudden dive toward the floor, when I felt a ping! in my lower back. And then, everything stopped.
More specifically, my legs stopped. Working, that is. The last thing I remember thinking, as I fell to my knees and cried out for Laurence, was that aging is the absolute worst thing in the world.
Well . . . except for the alternative.
A visit to our neighborhood chiropractor revealed no injuries of a serious nature—no herniated or slipped disk, or anything requiring drastic intervention. “Just a good old-fashioned pulled muscle,” was the chiropractor’s diagnosis. After cracking my spine a few times, he advised, “Spend as much time as possible lying flat on a firm surface. A firm mattress would be ideal. Everything should settle back into place within a day or two.”
At the risk of making my cats sound heartless, it must be said that Clayton and Fanny are always positively elated when I’m sick enough to require a full day in bed. It’s usually a cold or flu that takes me down, and the cats take great pleasure in requisitioning my heating pad (to lie on) and my box of tissues (to tear to shreds). The aspirin bottle I’ll keep on the bedside night table for easy access makes a charming rattle when peremptorily swatted off the table to roll around on the floor—and, no doubt, my cats must ask themselves whether it wouldn’t be more sensible on their humans’ part to simply keep this enthralling cat toy easily accessible on the night table all the time.