How Did You Get This Number Page 14

  “But that’s what she responds to,” said my father.

  And that we couldn’t argue with. My sister had been out of the house for years, and I was off to college in a matter of months. Someone had to come when called.

  So we kept quiet, both of us privately knowing that a cat with a name like that wouldn’t live past a year at the outside.

  It didn’t help matters that Kitty Kitty had a thing for cars. Not only did she possess a quarter of Bucky’s yard smarts, she seemed not to have been raised by cats at all. By auto mechanics, maybe. When she wasn’t plowing headfirst into the garage door, she’d hop onto the trunk of any car that came up the driveway. She was manning a one-pussy drive-through safari. She’d chase cars down the road, dense as a Dalmatian prancing after a fire truck.

  How, we wondered, did we come to be in possession of such a suicidal animal? Maybe she was not suicidal at all but simply running after these strange vehicles as if to say, “Take me with you!” Could she sense our ambivalence? Was it that obvious? A lifetime of pet affection had worn us down. All those different cans and bags of food! The different sizes and consistencies of waste pellets! The jingling and the squeaking and the neediness! The tongues alone. Paper-thin lizard tongues that looked like they’d been clipped with shirring scissors, dry bird tongues, humid dog tongues, tiny rabbit tongues, rough cat tongues that loved you by accident if you got in the way of a bath.

  A year to the day after we took in the kitten, my mother was backing out of the garage when she heard an unnaturally high-pitched meow. This time I was the one home from college for the weekend. I pulled into the driveway and she was waiting for me, looking sullen. The cat had not hopped on my hood.

  “You killed her. Didn’t you?” I said. I didn’t have to ask how it happened.

  “I’m sorry.” She nodded.

  “Sure.” I sat next to my mother on our front steps. “You’re not even sad.”

  “I’m a little sad.”

  “Are not. You killed our cat today—show some remorse, woman!”

  “Actually”—she covered her mouth—“I killed her yesterday.”

  “I told you guys you never should have named her that.”

  THE END

  Those pets who weren’t flushed down the toilet or euthanized by the vet (oddly, a licensed veterinarian will not just hand over a dead iguana in a bag) got buried in the backyard. But not in the way most house pets get buried in the backyard. My father puts the animals in Tupperware. Each creature is buried in an aptly sized container that has been duct-taped into a silver blob. This is meant to ensure that their eternal slumber, along with the newly seeded lawn, remains undisturbed by other animals. But when I imagine the rounded plastic pools of rotting bones and gas, I have to ask: Who is this really helping? Not us when we imagine it. Not the animals that are buried in a manner that flies in the face of Mother Nature.

  Instead of asking, we just accept it. My sister says this is part of becoming an adult, accepting our parents’ illogical behaviors just as they used to accept ours. The Tupperware coffins are but one of my father’s many questionable schemes. Walk into any room of his home and you will spend an inordinate amount of time slapping the wall, trying to turn the lights on, because a switch so high-tech you have to blow on it has just been installed. Pour yourself a glass of water from the kitchen sink and see if one of the jiggered spray settings doesn’t soak your shirt.

  My sister was at school and I went to the movies the night Kitty Kitty was buried. My mother, not guilty but ambivalent, wanted no part of it. I felt like we were missing something as a family. Despite her low rung on the ladder of favorites, Kitty Kitty held the distinction of Last of the Childhood Pets. I thought it might be good to have a real funeral. Not good enough to miss out on a trip to the movies, but just enough to think about it in general.

  “There’s a joke about Jewish holidays,” one of us would begin, “that each holiday has the same theme. And that theme is: They tried to kill us. We lived. Let’s drink. Well, as we look around at our pets today, we think: We tried to love them. They died. Let’s bury them.”

  Then we’d stand around a headstone and drink some nice beer and listen to the crickets. We’d have a dinner outside that involved asparagus, because for some reason asparagus always gets in there. And my father would raise his bottle and toast to the many tongues that supported us throughout the years.

  In reality, it was just a man alone with his Tupperware collection of dead animals. See him there, in the dirt, digging at dusk. A shovel put back in the garage, a light switch brutally smacked, an alarm clock mistakenly set for p.m. so that the buttons have to be clicked all the way around again. Behind all our great pets—even behind all our mediocre pets—is the man who bought and buried them. These dead animals are so sad. They are the only things we buy and bury with the intention of covering them up for good. Buried treasure, flower bulbs, umbrellas in the sand: they’re all meant to come back up. But with dead pets, you just have to say good-bye, cut your losses, and start over. I used to know the location of every plastic coffin in the dirt, but I haven’t gone back there in such a long time.

  Le Paris!

  It’s incredibly difficult to get yourself banished from a city. A country is not so tough. There are words for that on both sides of the border. Emigrate. Defect. Deport. But when New Yorkers use those words to explain their residency here, what they really mean is that they packed their bags and got on a plane and it meant more to them than it did to anyone else. No one stopped them. No one checked their papers in Hoboken. No one kept them in quarantine in Queens. No one earns a living being stationed at the Lincoln Tunnel and scowling. At least not technically, they don’t. Because as it is with most cities, this one is porous. We absorb the new and sweat out the old and put about as much conscious effort into it as we do into actually sweating. Once you’re in, you really have to get creative to be pushed back out.

  It’s not so tough to get yourself banished from a person’s apartment. Smoke in the freshly painted bathroom. Feed the dog chocolate. Ask the hosts if they think it’s weird that their two-year-old hasn’t started talking yet. The door shuts, the bolt locks, the whispers commence, and your passport to game night gets revoked faster than you can say “baby fish mouth.” But in order to get bounced from a city, that place in between, you have to break the public transit system. Or execute some very specific offense on par with killing your young lover’s cousin in a vicious street fight in Verona. Or run for office.

  I didn’t do any of those things to Paris. I loved Paris. Which is why it’s especially painful knowing that, like a boarding school reject, I will not be “asked back” anytime soon. Though I was not formally banished, Paris has made it clear that it would prefer to continue on in its Frenchness sans moi. To sweat me out. Imagine what it is to be rejected by the most sophisticated and casually stunning place in the world. A place filled with the highest percentage of women on the planet able to pull off chinchilla wraps with jeans. To not be welcome in the City of Love is tantamount to being rejected by love itself. Why couldn’t I have gotten thrown out of Akron, Ohio? City of Rubber.

  MY FRIEND LOUISE HAD SUBLET AN APARTMENT IN Paris for a month, so I found the cheapest red-eye possible and booked my flight. Because this is what you do when your friend calls from Paris to tell you how wonderful the very worst of everything is over there. You go out and buy an international adapter plug kit, lay the plug heads on your bed, and stare at the beveled prongs. You feel the sudden urge to travel sixteen hours to Fiji just to plug something in. A toaster, maybe. But Fiji, she will have to wait. Paris is calling! The entire city is spinning with sophistication, like a child’s top. The Eiffel Tower is the handle.

  Having just successfully deplaned, I was already trying on the Parisian version of myself. This version of my personhood was distinctly laid-back. Sometimes forcefully, if the situation required it. What? No, honestly, take this taxi. You were here first in spirit. Laid-back Me was sewn to m
y heels, a shadow with its own motivations and interests. A silhouette with a joint in one hand, a package of Ding Dongs in the other, and bunny slippers on its feet. Not that the shadow wasn’t adaptable. That was part of the deal. If I had gone to Montana, I would have been laid-back and prone to liking horses. If I had gone to Tokyo, I would have been laid-back and unfazed by pornographic comic books and confounding soft-drink packaging. If I had gone to Rome, I would have done as they do. Now I had returned to Paris to be laid-back and—who knew what? The shadow knows. Consume unseemly quantities of macaroons, maybe.

  This laid-back version of me decided to surprise Louise by navigating public transport from the airport to her apartment. Having been to Paris once before, I had a vague sense of its layout. In New York, I couldn’t find my way out of a paper bag. Or, more accurately, a used paper bag. I forgot the paths to the same locations no sooner than I had found them. But the Parisian streets were generous with me, rewarding my instinct to veer left or turn right with the correct street names drilled to the walls of each corner. When I located Louise’s address, I realized she was right: the worst of the worst here looks a lot like the best of our best. Everything about the building was perfect, right down to the doors—sturdy but worn wooden twins that earned their distress. Like a great pair of jeans. I exchanged grins with a woman who entered the building ahead of me. This would be a double surprise. Any closer and Louise would wake up with me sitting creepily at the end of her bed, watching her sleep.

  “Bonjour, Louise,” I’d say, all Hello, Clarice.

  Maybe just inside the door was far enough.

  The woman held the door. I was still mute with embarrassment, my tongue like the neck of a turtle retracted in the shell of my face. I speak “get by” French. Also known as “bicyclette rouge French” to anyone who’s ever cracked open a blue, white, and red textbook. Est-ce que vous avez une bicyclette rouge? Oui, ici est ma bicyclette rouge. If McGraw-Hill is to be believed, red bicycles are government-issued in France. Also, everyone in France is très fatigué all the time, likely from their late nights buttering bread and sending telegrams.

  The woman allowed me to follow her, rolling my suitcase clumsily over the cobblestone of the courtyard. When she slid a key into a door on the first floor, she glanced back over her shoulder and smiled again, this time more furtively, which I translated to mean “You gonna be okay out here?” but which probably meant something along the lines of “Please don’t kill my family with whatever’s in that bag.” I sat on my suitcase and called Louise, somewhat horrified by the expensive trip the signal took, ricocheting between hemispheres.

  “Well, hello there,” I said, anxious to surprise her with my presence not at the metro stop, as planned, but delivered right to her front door. Quel service!

  “Guess where I am.”

  “At the metro stop?”

  “Non! In your courtyard.”

  “What?”

  “In your courtyard?”

  I didn’t understand why she couldn’t get on board with my enthusiasm. I had saved her much clunking up metro steps with an obvious fellow tourist, and this allowed her another day of native make-believe. One’s own touristicity is easily submerged—watch what you put on your feet, lose the raincoat, try not to look up so much—but two tourists are a different story. It’s the same principle that allows one to dart like a pixilated frog across oncoming traffic when alone but forces one to wait for a blinking light when with a group, watching old ladies with walkers and mothers with strollers dart past. It’s why spies don’t have friends and serial killers don’t start book clubs. There is no safety in numbers.

  “That’s impossible,” said Louise, waking up.

  “Well”—I gave my haughtiest chuckle—“the laws of time and space would beg to differ.”

  “I don’t have a courtyard.”

  In a moment of temporary dyslexia, Louise had e-mailed me the wrong address. Worse, she couldn’t recall her own address. This is not a problem! said my laid-back-ness, as it waited for Louise to go downstairs and consult her front door. But when I went to leave I discovered that the giant doors to the street had locked behind me. The metal knobs refused to turn, despite my repeated attempts to convince them. I shook them, imagining how futile a couple of vibrating doors on a bustling Parisian avenue appeared from the other side. I went back into the courtyard, but there were no signs of life, just a few curtains blowing in the open windows above and some very annoying birds. It was nine a.m. I glanced at the door on the first floor. This is not a problem! said my laid-back self. Louise got back on the phone, at which point I explained that I was being held hostage by this strange building.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m coming to find you.”

  I didn’t know how French blocks worked. I knew only that I was somewhere on a street as long as Broadway and the address had been botched using four digits. I had some time. The first pangs of jet lag washed over me. Sometimes the worst of the worst is actually the worst. Tired of fiddling with the lock, I stepped back and roundhouse kicked it for my own amusement. I did this at the exact right angle to set off the security alarm. Like its cousin, the ambulance siren, this alarm blared in a French accent—singsongy and oddly un-urgent. But it echoed like a bitch.

  This is not a problem! said my laid-back-ness. I needed to unstitch this slacker shadow before I punched it.

  “For who are you cherching?” said an elderly Frenchman who appeared from absolutely nowhere. He was angry and quasi-bilingual. He spoke while charging at me and tightening his bathrobe. The rough hair springing from his ears was just long enough to allow for mobility, and it waved with his marching. I looked over his shoulder, searching for a hallway or a stairwell or a dumbwaiter. Right now I was cherching for any possible Crazy French Dude point of origin.

  “You frenchfrenchfrench idiot. I get the frenchfrenchfrench police!”

  “Zut,” I said, hands in the air. Are you even allowed to threaten to call the police in your bathrobe anymore?

  “Je suis tres desole. ”

  That’s another thing about bicyclette rouge French. No one in France ever finds himself moderately hungry or reasonably happy. They are always very everything.

  “Mais,” I continued, as he eyed my suitcase stuffed with hypothetically stolen goods, “je pense que j‘’ai le mal building. ”

  Because I could not think of the word for “wrong,” I used the word for “bad.” Ah, influency, recipe for extremes. I had broken into this gentlemen’s building to insult it. Which, come to think of it, seemed like something a French robber would do.

  Perhaps I had inadvertently stumbled on the word “cock-sucker” as well, because then came a torrent of French followed by a mercifully dry spitting gesture. The veins of French vocabulary may run thin with a low word count, but they know how to bleed. I have reason to believe I was called a squirrel at one point. But he may also have been calling me a school. I cocked my head at him. Had the use of “school” as a verb crossed continents? And would this man, with his astonishingly wiry nose hair, be familiar with it? One thing was certain: I was being schooled, run over like a half-dead squirrel. Bump, bump.

  “S’il vous plaît, ” I reasoned with him through the sound of the siren, “pas de polizia. Je suis normale!”

  “Normale?”

  “Ish.”

  “D’accord. Go, go, go,” he said in English, shoving me aside to perform a series of doorknob twists befitting a Rubik’s Cube.

  I peeked outside, hesitant as a cat to leave her cage at the vet’s office. Louise was not there yet. When she finally did arrive, I was sitting on my suitcase, ignoring the coolly revolted glares of people passing by and playing with a zipper. My arms extended, I buried my head in my elbows.

  “I feel like I should give you money.” Louise bent down and hugged me.

  “That’s so weird.” I looked up. “I also feel like you should give me money.”

  Not being the most reliable navigator, I would get Louise
lost many times in the coming days. After a while, it was as much her fault as it was mine for deciding to follow me. But I couldn’t blame her. Looking at a map requires an activation of concentration even if you don’t have spatial-relations issues, the same way cooking raw chicken requires an activation of “let’s just get through this part” even if you’re not a vegetarian. Because we were staying in the Marais, a neighborhood defined by narrow sidewalks and independent shops and very small cups of coffee, neither of us minded the winding routes home. Nothing seemed to take that long, and when it did, we didn’t care: we were in Paris. If we swung especially far off course, we’d pass the old man’s building.

  “Look”—Louise would point, with a shopping bag-weighted arm—“your fake apartment building.”

  We took pictures of it. It became our anti-landmark, how we knew we were headed in the wrong direction. And I’d look at the door and think of how thoroughly unappealing it seemed from the other side. I’d think of the last thing the old man said to me as he escorted me off his property. He gestured at the courtyard, then at me, then at the negative space of the open door.

  “Frenchfrenchfrench,” he said. “I do not frenchfrench think you should come to this place again.”

  He probably meant just the apartment building. But I took it to mean all of Paris.

  AFTER THAT FIRST DAY, I AWOKE TO THE VAGUE BUT identifiable smell of cheese. The kind of cheese where if you didn’t know it was cheese, you’d think someone took a crap on the metro and set it on fire. And then put it out with milk. I meandered into the kitchen to see a composition of French consumption on the table: bottles of red wine, baguettes, leeks, an entire wheel of Brie, and a jar of something that may or may not have been mayonnaise. It also may have been marshmallow fluff. I wouldn’t know. The nutritional information orbited along the outermost rings of my French vocabulary.