Twins

My birthday gift from Richard this year was to be a cat. But on May 27 (in Gemini), no cat had appeared, despite our extensive search.

We didn’t know that the next day (May 28, still Gemini) two brothers were born in a family of five.

We didn't know how we would ever replace our affectionate, talkative Turkish Angora, Marley, who had moved with us to Paris.

We didn’t know that a Turkish Angoran mother was nursing five kittens as we searched.

We didn’t know that ten weeks later, we’d board a train to the town of Boissy-St-Léger, half an hour south of Paris.

We didn’t know that two of the five brothers were so bonded that we couldn’t adopt one without the other.

We didn’t know we’d board the train back to Paris with two kittens not yet named.

We didn’t know for a week what their names were.

We watched as they boxed and galloped around the kitchen and foyer, and thought of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, of Greek myth.

These twins, a tamer of horses and a boxer, were so close that they were later placed in the sky by Zeus as the constellation Gemini.

What else could we call them but Castor and Pollux?

What Fresh Hell Is This?

 

Yes, he said, yes, he said yes!

We were at dinner at Anahuacalli, our favorite Mexican restaurant in Paris, and he asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year. 

A cat! I said.

Okay.

Seriously? You mean it?

Sure. If that’s what you really want. It's your birthday.

We’ve been having a certain dialogue for two years, since Marley died in July 2013. Still grieving, we both agreed that no cat could ever replace our white and gold wedding cake cat. But then I started yearning for, not a replacement, but a Marley brother or sister.

But we want to travel, Richard said, that's one reason we're in Europe. Although… if a cat came to our door the way Marley did in Venice in 1997 and asked to join this family, I’d say yes.

But what cat can wander in through our Paris courtyard, unlock the door to the building and find his way to the fifth floor and knock?

Right, said Richard.

We stopped at our veterinarian’s on Blvd. Saint-Germain for the first time since that summer, to ask if he knew any cats who needed a home.

Doctor McCarthy (who revealed to us once that he was really a cat) wasn’t in, but in the waiting room, a woman in army fatigues with a cocker spaniel suggested we go to the SPA weekend offering at Bastille that weekend, a once-a-year event (by the French equivalent of the SPCA). What timing! What a stroke of luck! 

Saturday, we walked over two Seine bridges the twenty minutes to Place Bastille to find a temporary exhibition hall set up under white tents. The canvas cages, with plexiglas windows, were set cheek-by-jowl on top of rows of tables, the cats hunched inside. From the next room, came a staccato cacophony of dogs. We walked through the rows. The first cat I saw was a white beauty who looked like Marley. But no, we couldn’t duplicate him—why even try?

We looked at tiger-striped and calico cats, and various-colored kitten siblings. But the kittens were all sick with coryza, a common shelter cold that comes from close living with other cats, which can be serious.

We chose three cats who appealed to us. But petting them, you could see that they weren’t that affectionate. We returned to the white cat. He’d been adopted two minutes before. I offered to give the woman adopting my card in case the cat wasn’t compatible with a cat she had at home. Oh, no, she said, she would never give up a cat once adopted. Bien sûr, neither would we.

We decided to come back earlier the next day, since a new batch of chats et chiens was arriving. Sunday morning we felt lazy, didn’t want to get out of bed.

Let’s just hop in a cab and go over there and see, Richard said. And so we did. We had a plan. He would start at one end, and I at the other. We each noted a cat that appealed to us, then checked out each other’s choice. No, no. Then went back to look at a tortoiseshell female, three years old, a bomb-shell beauty, with black, red and white patches.

I had the thought that she was like our friend Edith who recently died, who only wore black, red and white. Her papers said she could live in either a pavillon (a house with grounds) or appartement, but advised she needed to be the sole cat in the place, and that we shouldn’t have a child or dog.

I unzipped the cage and cautiously held out my hand. The cat, Jade, came over and lowered her head, asking to be petted. She was sweet and câlin as the French say. A cuddler.

What do you think, Richard?

He put his hand in her cage and she moseyed over to him for more petting.

We asked the woman in the orange vest if we could hold her. Yes, she said, and turned the cage around to unzip and free her. Richard picked her up. She was câlin, then balked, and scratched his hand. Natural for a cat caged and surrounded by chaos, we figured.

We glanced at each other. Yes?

Yes.

Signed the ream of French paperwork, showed our identity cards, paid 90 euros, got a certificate that she’d been sterilized and received all her shots.

We stood on the curb and tried to flag a taxi. None stopped, though many were free. A French couple on a nearby bench railed about the rude cab drivers in Paris. 

One finally stopped, but seeing the cat in our carrier, said, Not in the car, in the trunk.

No, we said, we can’t do that to this cat, we just rescued her from prison at la Bastille.

He relented and as we headed home, told us he adored cats, but was allergic to them, was so sad to have no cat in his life. But if you’d told us that, we’d have understood, we said.

At a stoplight, he turned around in his seat to get a closer look at Jade. Oh la la, qu’elle est belle! he exclaimed.

At home, we put out food, water, and lined with a trash bag a temporary litter tray cut from a cardboard box. We’d walk the next day to get another litter box at the department store near city hall, having thrown Marley’s away.  

We sat at our oak table and watched Jade pad along the edges of the living room, and then every room in the apartment, sniffing, investigating. And then she settled on the couch, looking regal and quite content. We’ll let her come to us, we decided. Let her determine when she wants contact.

That night, I stretched out on the couch to read All the Light We Cannot See. She approached me gingerly, hopped up and walked across the blanket from my feet to my hand. She butted up against it, looking for affection. I stroked her head, and she ronronnait. (You know what that means.) Then suddenly, no warning from ears or tail or viper mouth, she bit and scratched my hand, hard. It hurt.

It was probably a sign she’d been traumatized with all those dogs and other cats and humans, and being in a cage, and so we’d be patient.

Later that evening, she approached Richard in his office and bowed her head to be petted. Then turned on him and slashed his hand, with no warning.

We went to sleep uneasy. Something felt wrong about this creature. She did not speak, only squeaked as if she’d never been to meowing school.

The next day, the scratches and bites were worse. For both of us. We were now on guard when Jade approached. It was the same pattern; ask for affection, then attack without warning.

That night she bit me so hard that she raised a lemon-sized bump on my right hand that began to turn half-purple. Now I was feeling more than uneasy. I was beginning to be afraid of her. She did the same thing with Richard, biting his finger and drawing a drop of blood.

The next morning, she awakened us with a crash. She’d knocked a sculpture my sister, Jane, made of a bumble-bee bird from the mantel to the floor. Its wing was damaged at the tip.

I had a feeling that morning that I’ve never had about a cat: hatred. Her eyes were not golden, they were urine-yellow like a goat’s. She didn’t cover her shit, had never learned to do so. Was clearly a wild cat. My hand hurt, and I was worried about infection. I said to myself, I cannot live with this cat. I will never love this cat. But I’m married to a man who lived in and out of foster homes from the age of 12 to 14. To bring a cat back to the SPA, how traumatic for the cat. Unthinkable.

I had appointments that day, including a visit to my doctor. She examined my hand and said, I’m sure it’s okay, just bruising. But returning home, I felt a deepening dread of this demon cat and the decision we had to make.

Later that night Jade raked Richard’s hand so badly the wound looked like a red zipper. He called it his Heidelberg dueling scar.

With leaden hearts, we made the decision to return her to the pound. Richard made the call. After 13 weeks of study at the Sorbonne, he was able to navigate a phone conversation in French, describe the adoption, the cat behavior, find out where we could take her back that required no car. 

Street art © 2013 by JAZ

And that is how my birthday began: we rounded her up, cornered in the kitchen, hissing (she knew!), lifted her wrapped in a towel to immobilize her razor-sharp claws, got her into Marley’s old carrier, and boarded the RER train for an hour ride to the nearest shelter at suburban Gennevilliers.

The first French woman we spoke to at the shelter was skeptical and thuggish. No, they could not take the cat there because she didn’t come from this pound. Richard explained that the central SPA office, hearing that we didn’t have a car to drive to the cat’s shelter of origin several hours outside of Paris, had given us permission to bring the cat here. 

She shook her head in that French fashion that says, I will find a way to obstruct this, that is why I exist.

The second, third, and fourth employees were sympathetic. Oui, they said, they would take her, though it wasn’t the center from which she came. 

In our interview, we learned some French as it applies to cats. Câlin, we knew. Pavillon ou appartement? We’d thought it was a rather snobbish way of saying, Certain cats must have estates in Paris, with grounds.

Mais non. Pavillon means: This cat is so wild, so unsuited for living with not just dogs, other cats, and children, but even adults who worship cats. She can only be adopted by humans who have their own private jungle where jaguars can roam.

Street Art © 2014 by Toc Toc

Elle n’est pas une écaille de tortue, this is not a tortoise shell, said one young woman, Morgan, named after the sorceress in the medieval King Arthur’s tales. It’s a tricolore. They are always female, and they’re known for having caractère. 

Caractère translates in French to bitch. (Our cat-whisperer friend, Lisa Fimiani, told us, “Male cats are supposedly more friendly—females can be bitches, however it all comes down to the cat's personality and their interaction with you.”)

Égratigner means to shred the skin of a human.

Mordu means bitten to the bone.

They looked at our hands and nodded gravely. This cat cannot live indoors.

No, we said, she’s the demon cat from hell.

(We didn’t really say that. We know that cats understand everything you say.) We walked away feeling years lighter, and said it to each other. 

Street art © 2015 by M. Chat

* Footnote: A line attributed to American author/critic/poet and wit Dorothy Parker, who is reported to have exclaimed, "What fresh hell is this?" when her train of thought was interrupted by a telephone. She then started using it in place of "hello" when answering the phone or a knock at her door.

Carolyn Kizer: December 10, 1924 - October 9, 2014

She was my poetry mentor, great friend and goddess.

We now live in what was once her Paris apartment, full of many of her poetry books and some of the novels she loved. I am too full of emotion to do her justice yet. 

But here is one anecdote that says everything about her: an admirer wrote her a letter, but did not have her current address, so simply wrote on the envelope: The White Goddess, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The letter was delivered to Carolyn.

Richard and I ran a poetry series with three other poets (Jeanette Clough, Jim Natal and Jan Wesley) in the late 1990s at the Rose Café in Venice. Just as we launched it, Richard and I met Carolyn at the Petaluma Poetry Walk with Jackson Wheeler. She and I fell instantly in love with each other. She was one of our first readers in the Rose series, which helped to make it a success.

Carolyn was one of the first feminist poets in America. Long before I met her, I relished her sharp, witty, clear poems, recognized in them something very close to my own taste. I loved the deep subject matter, the light tone and style of her mind and her poems.

She went to Sarah Lawrence College, which I attended for a year, studied mythology with Joseph Campbell, who was one of the writers whose books saved my life in my twenties. Most of her poems are mythological or erotic or celebrating friendship. She once told me she considered friendship more important than marriage. I said, marriage for me is more important, the romance in marriage. But there was romance in our friendship, too.

She was an editing maniac, generous, but outrageous. When Richard’s first book of poems, What the Heart Weighs, was published, he gave her a copy over dinner in Venice. When he stepped away from the table, she immediately began editing the poems (in ink in the book!). I worried about his response, but when we left her, he said, I’d be incensed if it were anyone else, but not Carolyn. The edits were minor tweaks, but all good.

When I sent my manuscript of poems, The Minotaur Dance, to her, asking for a blurb, she edited every one of them and every one was improved. And the blurb was a delight.

When she stayed with us in Playa del Rey, our cat Marley visited her in the guest bedroom. She made a huge impression on him. Not only was she as appreciative of his handsome white and gold-furred self as we, but even better she took him to bed for the night, a treat he never got from us who value our sleep. 

I cherish the books we have from writers we know. But the one with the inscription that I treasure most is Carolyn’s note to me in Cool, Calm and Collected: Poems 1960-2000: 

     “for beloved Kaaren,

     the best friend of my eighth decade—

     what a joy you are to me!

                               Carolyn”

written in her distinctive handwriting that is as easy to read as print. (No rococo flourishes there—she was direct and clear and unpretentious in all things.)

Speaking of unpretentious, I accompanied her to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books one year. She spoke on several panels; we went to various events as audience. I remember one panel discussing poetry, in which we sat in the front row. One of the poets on the panel was a woman we both knew, a fine poet, but a rather abstruse thinker. The woman was expressing some modern, convoluted, deconstructive babble that Carolyn just couldn’t stand. We listened, growing bored, until Carolyn had had enough and shouted at the woman from the audience. I was mortified, though I agreed with her.

Carolyn was born under a Sagittarius Sun and Gemini Moon. People born at exactly the Full Moon are often visionaries. (You don’t have to take it from me; I was thrilled to read this notion long after I’d intuited it, in William Butler Yeats’ A Vision.) Those born at the Full Moon tend to be what Willy called antithetical, aristocratic, visionary, artistic, passionate not sentimental, valuing the aesthetic over the useful, solitary vision over service to mankind, humor over melodrama. That’s Carolyn.

After we were married, Richard and I used to visit Paris and stay in Carolyn and John Woodbridge’s apartment in the Latin Quarter. (He, an architect, would have preferred the sixth arrondissement, but she wanted to live in the arrondissement where Dante had once studied and taught.) Occasionally over the years, we’d overlap visits with John and Carolyn, and go stay somewhere else. John often cooked dinner, which we ate around their round black dining table. He took us to the best open air market nearby, and introduced us to the only shop we’ve ever heard of that offers excellent frozen food, Picard.

We’d talk for hours about poetry, novels, Paris architecture, people, cats, and tell stories, endless stories.

When Richard and I tired of weeping with joy every time we arrived in Paris and weeping with sadness every time we left, and decided to find a way to live in Paris, we began looking for an apartment. At the time we were staying at Carolyn and John’s apartment, so called them to let them know what we were doing after the first day of looking. John called the next day and said, It’s getting hard for Carolyn to travel. Would you consider buying our apartment?

Would we! It was exactly what we were looking for. We determined the highest we would go, they came to a selling price below which they wouldn’t go, and, voila!, it was the exact same price down to the euro. Now, all we had to do was sell our house in L. A. at the bottom of the worst housing market in memory. We went ahead with applying for a French mortgage, and it was more complicated for Americans to buy an apartment in Paris than all the other financial transactions combined in our lives. But after a year, it was done.

We never were able to host John and Carolyn here, as she did stop traveling such distances, and the early signs of her dementia became evident when we last visited her in Sonoma, before we moved here permanently in January 2011. In spite of the obstacles to communication at the end, we never stopped loving the two of them.

I will be sifting through memories for a while to remember all I can about Carolyn and our friendship. I’m rereading her magnificent Cool, Calm and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. One brilliant poem after another. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, Yin, but she might have won it for any one of her books. There is no one else like her, this frank, eloquent, elegant, beautiful, generous, sharp, funny goddess. A great poet, great friend, great soul. Irreplaceable.

                                *

CAROLYN, DEPARTING

        (Carolyn Kizer: December 19, 1924-October 9, 2014)

Moon, bright eye

in a cloud-shrouded face.

Great blue heron, I see you

sailing away.

Le Café des Chats

On Saturday, we heard a third mention of Le Café des Chats from yet another friend. 

What else could we do but go there on Sunday?

A café where you can eat, drink and talk to cats: the idea originated in Taiwan in 1998, and quickly spread to Tokyo, where there are now over fifty cat cafés. Weeks ago Le Café des Chats opened in the third arrondissement in Paris.

We walked from Shakespeare and Company where we were compelled to find one or two or eight essential books, then on to 16 rue Michel Le Compte in the Marais.

Standing in front of the window, you could see cats nestled in cat tree nests, and one curled up beside a young woman on a couch.

At the reception desk we were instructed to use an antiseptic lotion, to protect the cats from our germs. But since the cats were adopted, some abandoned, what was protecting us from germs they’d picked up in the streets?

We found one open table at the back of the room, and watched as young felines wandered here and there and down the stairs to the cave below.

 

I popped downstairs to see the cat situation there. Two French women sat in a room at the back, one stroking a white kitten with orange and buff splashes, on her lap, and a tortoise shell grooming himself on a third seat at their table.

We chatted. The two women lived in apartments too small for cats, but loved them, bien sûr. They beamed with joy, and the cats looked content. 

A Japanese girl expertly captured the attention of a mature black cat in the top nest of a cat tree with red feathered lure attached to the end of a supple pole. The cat had the head of the Egyptian goddess Bastet.

Back upstairs, Richard and I had a salade italienne and a tarte aux épinards et chèvre avec salade. Good!

A tiger cat wandered over and seemed to be asking for something. I picked her up and felt her heart beating so fast, I quickly put her down. Some of these felines may want to be held, but some might just be looking for food, or escape. This one jumped up on a ledge behind us and gazed longingly out the window. A dense screen stopped her from leaping out.

At the next table were three Italian couples from Bari. They spoke no French, but a few knew some English.

We talked a bit about our respective crazy governments. Berlusconi and Boehner—both nuts.

Were they all cat lovers? No, only one of the women who’d brought the other five along. Two of the men and one woman had dogs, one woman had a parrot, and one man, a rabbit. All animal lovers, they respected this woman’s need for a cat hit, even on vacation.

And why were we there? Need you ask? We miss Marley, whose meow we still hear months after his death. After being out in Paris, we come home and listen for his paws padding across the old oak floor, his voice raised in complaint that we had left him, even for a short time, and we can’t quite believe that he is gone.

Judging by the number of people stopping enchanted at the window, and the full tables, we are certain that this café will soon need to move to a larger space.

Le café des Chats
Open every day from Noon to 10 p.m.
16 rue Michel Le Compte 75003 Paris
Metro Rambuteau     09 73 53 35 81

Adieu to the Lion

 

 

He is old and tired. His right leg drags behind him. His bony skeleton shows pink through the white fur. It is hard for him to jump on the bed or onto a chair beside us.

In May and June, I traveled for a month in the USA, and coming home, wept on seeing our little lion so weak, so sick. You can see it in his eyes, his fur, his slow movement. He has a tumor, inoperable because of his age, and we grind six medications a day into his food. He is 19.

Street art by Miss-Tic (c) 2013 

Richard and I lie on the living room floor, and sing to him. We bring his small statue of Bastet out of her basket, and she blesses him. Marley’s voice is a peep now instead of a roar.

Macho cat, King of the Block, calm, afraid of nothing, no one, resourceful (he adopted us after interviewing everyone on the block), confident, outspoken. He was Richard’s muse and mine, he gave us equal time. He was the familiar of our writing group for six or seven years.

He was seriously pissed at us twice, and both involved moves. Once when we moved from Venice, California a few miles to Playa del Rey. There were so many feral cats in the neighborhood, and he came home beaten up and bitten (and turned into a Cone-head for a few months) that we had to keep him indoors after his years of roaming Venice. (How would you feel? Exactly.) But he did have a sunny inner courtyard all his own in the center of our Spanish-style house.

And then on moving to Paris, because he was ONE pound over the weight limit and so could not ride with us upfront, he was banished into cargo limbo for the plane trip. He hissed at us like a cobra when we picked him up in the fret section of Charles de Gaulle airport. Fret? We did. And later learned it meant freight.  He wouldn’t look at us the whole taxi ride into town.

And then he became a Parisian chat. He learned to modulate his voice, not to be yelling all the time like an American. To trim down. (A friend, Frederic Tuten, tells us that when he lived in Paris, someone told him the only serious crime here is being fat).

Marley learned to be a flâneur. He disguised himself as a fur scarf, and strolled around Paris on Richard’s shoulders, as cool and leisurely as any Parisian cat.

Street art (c) 2013 by C215

In all essential ways, though, he did not change on moving to Paris. He still loved being as close to us as he could get. Either one of us would do, but both of us? Purr-fect.

He was still psychic. When friends Mort and Jeannette were last here, visiting from their houseboat, he sensed Jeannette’s grief at losing their sailor chat, Miranda. In a room full of a dozen people, he stayed close to her, wove around her ankles, comforting her, and who knows, maybe even speaking to Miranda’s spirit. 

Street art (c) 2013 by Fred Le Chevalier

He approved of physical vigor. One morning just a few weeks ago while waiting for my tea water to simmer, I was inventing Hindu ballet moves. Marley nudged my calf and purred. This is more like it, he said. All that sitting around putting marks on paper. Stretch those limbs! Let’s dance!

Today I found him splayed like a frog on the tile near his litter box. I picked him up and placed him on his throne, a big pillow on the floor near the open window he used to jump out of to sun himself on the fifth-floor ledge.

I called to see how late our vet would be there on a Saturday. Till 3:30. I showered. Tried to reach Richard, who was out photographing a parade.

Marley was having trouble breathing. I kept checking as I dressed. He was panting. I lay beside him, talked to him. Tried to give him water. He couldn’t drink. I ran back to the bedroom to grab my purse. Checked again.

Marley was still.

Deeper than words, silence. And tears.