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mallorys_cameraPussycat's been missing for 48 hours now. We have bad luck with pussycats – Charcoal, whom we imported from the Bay Area with us when we relocated, got knocked up, had kittens under the sink and then promptly moved out. We would see her sometimes with her new owner, a strikingly beautiful French student at the International Institute who spoke babytalk to her and fed her canned tuna. She was well mannered then, but when we ran into her alone in the alley, she'd slit her yellow eyes at us and do something disdainful with her rump and tail.
The beatified Fritz was our second cat, though less a cat than a perfect Buddha Master who'd chosen to incarnate – for mysterious reasons of his own – in feline form. When he was hit by a car a couple of years ago, I grieved more for him than I did for my own mother who'd died just two weeks before.
Meezer came to us through attrition. After Fritz, I did not want another cat. As a kitten she'd lived with the feral teenagers over the garage. My landlord has a rule – he will only rent the apartment over the garage to single mothers named Lisa, and those Lisas all have to have flunked some kind of standardized parenting test given by county social services. The Lisa offspring all have to be girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen, working hard on their first abortion and rehab debut.
Anyway, when that set of Lisa and Lisa daughters moved out – presumably to a nice trailer near Hollister where they could start their own methamphetamine factory – they dumped their kitten. For several days we watched the kitten shiver in the morning drizzle and forage around in garbage pails for scraps.
Eventually we adopted her.
Because of her traumatic kittenhood, Meezer was always a wild little creature. Her idea of affectionate display was to grab your hand with her claws while you were petting her and thump you mercilessly with her strong back haunches. What can I say? Love wears many faces. And all cats become familiars, channeling some part of your personality that has no other expression. I don't know what could possibly have happened to her – she has a collar with a tag, and you'd think if someone had run across her cold, stiff corpse they'd have the common courtesy to call us. This morning I am into that bargaining stage with the God I'm not sure I believe in – what would I give up to have Meezer back? Meezer is a living creature – surely her wellbeing is worth at least one unwritten bestseller, maybe the disappearance of a favorite piece of jewelry. Not a single hair from either of my children, of course, but maybe I could afford to sacrifice a finger...
In other news – near the end of my long beach hike yesterday with Jean, the money-is-cowry-shells lady from Judaism 101, I realized she is very, very rich. "What are you doing this weekend?" she asked me.
"Oh, I dunno," I said. "Maybe I'll wash the kitchen floor. Something exciting. What about you?"
"Oh, I'm going up to San Francisco to play."
"That sounds fun," I said. "Where are you staying?"
"Oh, I have a house up there."
I also had a very strong presentiment that Jean would be dead within six months – and this was exceedingly spooky. Something about her face in the filtered light as we sat on the rocks talking about art. It was one of those afternoons where the high cloud cover had desaturated the landscape so that hue was just an overlay of gray tones. Jean's face was like parchment, there was something colorless in her eyes that was growing from the inside out. Three weeks ago she'd had a meeting with an art dealer, and the art dealer had told her she was marketable. "Give me 20 paintings," he said. "I'll do a show."
In her beautiful Victorian house in Pacific Grove, she already had twelve paintings completed. Miniature landscapes, dilute acrylic washes on paper, applied to opalescent effect. But after she talked to the art dealer, she found she couldn't paint anymore. "It's really stupid, isn't it?" she said.
"Not really," I said. "Can I ask you a question? When do you decide that something is compelling enough to paint"
She sighed. "I don't. I'll bring a sketchpad somewhere. Maybe I'll decide to sketch those rocks over there – although I wouldn't, they're not very interesting –"
"They're not?" I said. "Why not?"
"People have seen rocks like that a million times. They're sofa art."
I wish I'd seen something compelling in those rocks to prove her wrong, but I didn't. They were just rocks. But then, I don't have a visual imagination. If I did, everything would be interesting to paint. My act of will would make it interesting.
"Why can't I paint?" said Jean. She was struggling to make her melodramatics funny.
I shrugged. "Maybe you're scared of what happens when you're finished painting." And I turned around to smile at her and that's when I saw it, absolutely – the woman's dying. And she knows it.
Then I talked to Abe for two hours on the phone last night. We're seriously thinking about going to Israel together for a couple of weeks this summer. He'd just gotten back from NYC where his book received some good attention – intelligent review in the NYT and an hour long meeting with Ruth Reichell at the Conde Nast palace on Times Square. They want him to write for Gourmet magazine. His agent thinks he should move to NYC –
"Oh, you have to –," I said.
"I know," he said. "I decided a long time ago that whenever anybody gave me the choice between a big world and a small world, I would always take the big world."
Have about 2500 words done on the new Monterey novel, following Mr. Gruber's advice. Not bad. Still doesn't grab me. But the prose is very smooth.
The beatified Fritz was our second cat, though less a cat than a perfect Buddha Master who'd chosen to incarnate – for mysterious reasons of his own – in feline form. When he was hit by a car a couple of years ago, I grieved more for him than I did for my own mother who'd died just two weeks before.
Meezer came to us through attrition. After Fritz, I did not want another cat. As a kitten she'd lived with the feral teenagers over the garage. My landlord has a rule – he will only rent the apartment over the garage to single mothers named Lisa, and those Lisas all have to have flunked some kind of standardized parenting test given by county social services. The Lisa offspring all have to be girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen, working hard on their first abortion and rehab debut.
Anyway, when that set of Lisa and Lisa daughters moved out – presumably to a nice trailer near Hollister where they could start their own methamphetamine factory – they dumped their kitten. For several days we watched the kitten shiver in the morning drizzle and forage around in garbage pails for scraps.
Eventually we adopted her.
Because of her traumatic kittenhood, Meezer was always a wild little creature. Her idea of affectionate display was to grab your hand with her claws while you were petting her and thump you mercilessly with her strong back haunches. What can I say? Love wears many faces. And all cats become familiars, channeling some part of your personality that has no other expression. I don't know what could possibly have happened to her – she has a collar with a tag, and you'd think if someone had run across her cold, stiff corpse they'd have the common courtesy to call us. This morning I am into that bargaining stage with the God I'm not sure I believe in – what would I give up to have Meezer back? Meezer is a living creature – surely her wellbeing is worth at least one unwritten bestseller, maybe the disappearance of a favorite piece of jewelry. Not a single hair from either of my children, of course, but maybe I could afford to sacrifice a finger...
In other news – near the end of my long beach hike yesterday with Jean, the money-is-cowry-shells lady from Judaism 101, I realized she is very, very rich. "What are you doing this weekend?" she asked me.
"Oh, I dunno," I said. "Maybe I'll wash the kitchen floor. Something exciting. What about you?"
"Oh, I'm going up to San Francisco to play."
"That sounds fun," I said. "Where are you staying?"
"Oh, I have a house up there."
I also had a very strong presentiment that Jean would be dead within six months – and this was exceedingly spooky. Something about her face in the filtered light as we sat on the rocks talking about art. It was one of those afternoons where the high cloud cover had desaturated the landscape so that hue was just an overlay of gray tones. Jean's face was like parchment, there was something colorless in her eyes that was growing from the inside out. Three weeks ago she'd had a meeting with an art dealer, and the art dealer had told her she was marketable. "Give me 20 paintings," he said. "I'll do a show."
In her beautiful Victorian house in Pacific Grove, she already had twelve paintings completed. Miniature landscapes, dilute acrylic washes on paper, applied to opalescent effect. But after she talked to the art dealer, she found she couldn't paint anymore. "It's really stupid, isn't it?" she said.
"Not really," I said. "Can I ask you a question? When do you decide that something is compelling enough to paint"
She sighed. "I don't. I'll bring a sketchpad somewhere. Maybe I'll decide to sketch those rocks over there – although I wouldn't, they're not very interesting –"
"They're not?" I said. "Why not?"
"People have seen rocks like that a million times. They're sofa art."
I wish I'd seen something compelling in those rocks to prove her wrong, but I didn't. They were just rocks. But then, I don't have a visual imagination. If I did, everything would be interesting to paint. My act of will would make it interesting.
"Why can't I paint?" said Jean. She was struggling to make her melodramatics funny.
I shrugged. "Maybe you're scared of what happens when you're finished painting." And I turned around to smile at her and that's when I saw it, absolutely – the woman's dying. And she knows it.
Then I talked to Abe for two hours on the phone last night. We're seriously thinking about going to Israel together for a couple of weeks this summer. He'd just gotten back from NYC where his book received some good attention – intelligent review in the NYT and an hour long meeting with Ruth Reichell at the Conde Nast palace on Times Square. They want him to write for Gourmet magazine. His agent thinks he should move to NYC –
"Oh, you have to –," I said.
"I know," he said. "I decided a long time ago that whenever anybody gave me the choice between a big world and a small world, I would always take the big world."
Have about 2500 words done on the new Monterey novel, following Mr. Gruber's advice. Not bad. Still doesn't grab me. But the prose is very smooth.
