Sleeping with Cats (17 page)

W
e found a small apartment
in Cambridge on Upland Road, overlooking the railroad tracks. It was a gray wooden symmetrical building with a red door: we had the second-floor-right apartment. I have three strong memories of that apartment: the kitchen floor tilted toward the tracks so sharply that anything that fell would inevitably roll toward the outer wall. Second, the heat for our half of the building was controlled by three MIT students, who, when they went home for vacation, turned it off. They were also much too curious about us and had to be firmly, even rudely discouraged from dropping in.

My third memory concerns the first Siamese cat I ever knew. She belonged to a friend from Michigan, Dori, who was going off on a trip. I liked the cat immensely—she was a strong and intelligent presence and had come to know us at Dori's. She took over. She instructed us where she would eat—on the kitchen table only—and where she would sleep—between us in bed. She was an unusually big female Siamese, sturdy, confident. Then, unfortunately, she went into heat. She had two targets of choice: one was me and the other was the Siamese cat in the full-length mirror. We got little sleep that week, but I still liked the cat very much.

We hung out during that period mostly with guys from Robert's small computer company and their wives, but also with one of the few women
who worked as a computer programmer there, a woman of Greek descent I'll call Sophia. The programmers were an eccentric lot, well paid and fond of male toys—fancy cars, fancy stereos and actual toys like miniature racing cars. Some were married, some had children, some were divorced already, some were set-in-their-ways bachelors. Some were straight and others were into boho. I began to learn to cook, as Robert was a gourmet. Since we were living at first on money I had saved on my negligible salary and that helped get him out of debt, he insisted I not take a job for those months, but rather write full-time. I was pleased to do so. I remember learning many ways to cook hamburger and hot dogs, since we had little money.

That spring was a particularly happy season. I was writing full-time and making good progress on my novel and new poems. We took little trips to New York, into the White Mountains, into the Berkshires, to Cape Cod. We found each other's company stimulating and satisfying. We also explored Boston, which he had not done previously. We walked in Mount Auburn cemetery and the Granary Burying Ground, bought vegetables and fruit in Haymarket on Saturdays, meat and pastries in the Italian North End. We enjoyed the lilacs and the peonies in the Arnold Arboretum. I was happy and my joy was contagious.

His parents' wedding present to us was to pay off the Porsche finally. Robert considered himself a great driver, but he had caused several accidents already, as I learned later. One Sunday when it had been raining and he was driving too fast, he slammed into a tree. Breaking the windshield with my head, I had a concussion and a pelvic injury that manifested itself in an agonizing bladder that flared up on and off for the next year. I also broke a couple of teeth. The concussion fiddled with my short-term memory. For the next few weeks, I would be fine one moment and dizzy the next. Pain in my head and my pelvis came and went. Robert felt guilty, but having suffered as a child, he was convinced others should endure pain silently. He took the painkillers prescribed for me and gave them to a friend of his who liked to get high on them. For the first weeks, it hurt me to have sex, which annoyed him. It was a bad time. I had been writing the first draft of a new novel that was by far the best thing I had
done. I had just worked out the ending the day of the accident. I never managed to remember what I had planned, and I was haunted ever after by the conviction that I wrote a poorer ending than I might have.

At the end of August with the Porsche finally fixed, Robert's company sent him out to San Francisco to work on a project with a large computer firm in Palo Alto. We were told it would take about three months, so we would be back in Boston by December. We moved out, put our things into storage, threw a couple of suitcases into the Porsche and headed west. The Porsche broke down in Fargo and again later on in British Columbia. It never ran well after the accident. Locating a Porsche mechanic each time was a major nuisance.

The first stop I remember vividly is Glacier National Park. I found the rocks magical in their formations and rich colors, red, black, buff and green. It was the first week in September. We took short hikes, saw bears and eagles, then camped. It began to snow. It snowed so hard that the next morning we had to dig our way out of our tent. That night we went to a motel on a Blackfoot Indian reservation and ate in the local restaurant, where I encountered something that has happened many times since: Native Americans assume that I am one of them. When I said I wasn't, they kept telling me I should not be ashamed of my heritage, and I kept explaining that I look like Jews from Kazan, who have some Tartar in them. Suddenly I understood something that happened to me on the way to Yellowstone when I was ten. When we stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming, I went to use the bathroom, but the gas station attendant, who did not see my parents, told me, “We don't want you people using our bathrooms.” I thought he meant Jews. Now suddenly it all made sense. He too thought I was an Indian.

We drove into the Canadian Rockies. The Trans-Canada Highway was two lanes and now it was elk-mating season. First we saw one, then another and then yet another, great confident creatures rippling along balancing their weight of candelabra antlers. Frequently cars and trucks were halted in both directions for a mile or two while a couple of bull elks met in the highway—a convenient empty spot—to bellow at each other and then to achieve thundering collision of bone on bone until one
backed down. We went out in a skimobile onto a glacier. I was fascinated with glaciers, both the deep crevasses, the ice caves, the expanse of them and the sense that they were active and moving in their own geological time frame, and the runoff at the bottom of blue-green glacial milk, so cold it made my wrists and ankles ring like glass goblets when I tested those waters. I was smitten with everything I saw.

Driving across the continent in a Porsche loaded with several suitcases, a typewriter and computer paraphernalia, was driving several thousand miles hunched over with my chin bumping my knees. It was a condition of permanent backache, interrupted sporadically by bladder pain from the accident. I was always looking for cranberry juice—an exotic substance in those days which my doctor had told me would help bladder pain. Whenever I found any, I would buy several bottles, but there was little room in the car for even a box of tissues. Still, I was content. I was seeing the world, and I had always been ready to go off traveling at the faintest invitation. I was the navigator, as in my childhood.

When we finally got to San Francisco, we rented a two-room furnished apartment on North Point Street from an amateur landlord who looked like Commander Schweppes and lied constantly: a furnished apartment in which we camped in our sleeping bags among rolled-up rugs that were stored there and without any furniture for the first week. You must not imagine that neighborhood as it is now. The Cannery was not a mall but a tomato cannery. The Chocolate Factory contained no boutiques but made chocolate. Another cannery processed fish. A train ran up the center of North Point until the corner by our apartment and then switched to the street behind. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would waken, sure a train was bearing down on me. Depending on the wind, the neighborhood smelled of chocolate, fish or tomato sauce. It was mixed racially and economically, Japanese, Chinese, Latino people, a few Afro-Americans and a fair-sized gay contingent. North Beach, the next neighborhood, was still predominantly Italian, and we ate a lot of panettone and cannoli. Up on Russian Hill, there were some expensive houses and apartments. Fisherman's Wharf was still a fishing wharf, although tourists came. We bought cooked crabs there, little shrimp and
fish to panfry. Cost Plus was just one warehouse where we found cheap tchotchkes as presents and household furnishings. The washing machine was up on our roof. I would hang my clothes, looking at Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. Never before or since have I done the laundry as often or as sedulously as I did on North Point Street. I was infatuated with San Francisco. I made love to the city by walking.

Robert worked six days a week in Palo Alto. He was swallowed up by the project and I was free to write and to wander around. I soon began working as an artist's model, and I made friends with painters, poets, jazz musicians, writers—would-bes like myself. I had a whole set of separate friends and a life of my own. A Black jazz musician who lived up on Russian Hill in a room in a rambling falling-apart house where several musicians stayed would drop in on me and talk in a slow circling way about his life. It was from him I learned about Watts, where he grew up. He said L.A. was a city built on a sewer, and the sewer was going to explode. The shit, he said, is just going to bury them. Sometimes he would come with his saxophone and play for me.

Soon my Greek friend Sophia was sent out with her son to join Robert, but she could do much of the work in the apartment she rented—so we ran around the city together, guiltlessly. We made friends with keepers in the big cat house at the zoo, who had their own literary zine. John, who was short, black-haired with a pointy beard, was the friendliest. He wrote Beat poetry and loved the tigers. The lions, he said, were just too tame. There was no challenge. They would fuck at the drop of a hat and you became pals with them easily. The tigers were different. They were pussycats until adolescence and then he could not turn his back on them. They were moody and quick to attack. He admired their unwillingness to adjust to captivity. The leopards were harder to understand and read. He often could guess when a tiger was going to give him a hard time, but the leopards could fool him.

We had friends in the coffeehouses of North Beach. It felt as if everybody we fell into conversation with in a bar or at the Marina or in a bakery turned out to be poets or painters or dancers or actors or musicians. San Francisco had powerful energy. When I was not posing for artists, I
wrote five to six hours a day. Afterward, friends came by to visit me or I walked miles or went off with Sophia on some adventure while her son was in school. I climbed every stairway on Russian Hill, on Telegraph Hill. I had the ambition of climbing every stairway in the city. Soon I knew almost as many people as I had in college. I was accepted by some other writers and no longer invisible.

In the evenings, when Robert came home, if he wasn't too tired, we tried restaurants (I was learning to cook, but the kitchen was elementary, just a corner of the living room), visited our favorite bars, listened to jazz, went to poetry readings and foreign films and the occasional opening of some artist we knew through the less successful ones who were friends. Usually Robert worked Saturdays, but sometimes he had weekends off or even a long weekend, when we did all the tourist stops: Yosemite, the redwoods, wine country, Monterey. We went into the hills sometimes for birding, for Robert was an avid life-list man, and had taught me to take an interest. I remember an afternoon in the coastal mountains watching vultures. Sometimes we would go as far as Castroville to bring home a bag of cheap artichokes, which I learned to cook four ways.

We drove down to Los Angeles with Sophia and her little boy. He had been promised Disney as a bribe for being pulled out of his school and hauled off to San Francisco for an indefinite and ever-expanding period of time. In Anaheim, it ashed, to our surprise, as it rains or snows other places. We stayed in a motel and called my brother, whom I had not seen in fourteen years. I'd received letters from him perhaps three times. He had divorced again, leaving his third wife and their two sons, whom I never did meet. Now he was with Lilly, a Chicana widow who had a house in the hills and four children, mostly adolescents, from her marriage. I was struck by her resemblance to our mother. We did not hit it off. Grant appeared with a thermos of premixed martinis and took us on a tour of Forest Lawn, which he thought extremely tasteful. He informed us there were no Blacks in Los Angeles. He was no longer working a dubious real estate business around Salton Lake—that polluted puddle of agricultural chemical runoff in the desert—but was a minor executive at Northrup. We also spent a day with my aunt Ruth, my youngest and
favorite aunt, and her new husband, Eddie. That was easy for us—we clicked, we understood each other.

Robert and I developed a serious interest in wine. We tended to be systematic about any new interest, and we began reading about and sampling California and European wines, as well as methodical tasting at wineries. Robert started a cellar book, taking off the labels and writing notes on each wine we drank. We bought our first dishes, a black and white brush-stroke pattern that we found in a Japanese hardware store in Japantown. I was still smoking then, not yet having paid the price for the habit, so we were able to go to bars. The Buena Vista, now a tourist hangout, was then just a neighborhood bar featuring Irish coffee. I knew a pornographer who used his writing to support his passion for Japanese pots. He had a list of synonyms over the typewriter:
tits, boobs, peaches, pears, tomatoes, jugs,
etc. It was all according to a formula: the first sex scene starts on page five or six, then a threesome, then an orgy, and so on. He amused himself by working into the pages between the obligatory sex events (the lesbian, the sadomasochistic) satires on scenes he knew, and one of his recent books featured all the regulars from the Buena Vista. The San Remo was another neighborhood bar where we passed time.

Sophia and I used to sit in the sand at the little beach at the foot of Russian Hill, watching the freighters and tankers, the pleasure boats and the occasional cruise ship or liner. If it was too cold to sit in the sand by the Maritime Museum, we occupied places on the wide cement steps that looked to be bleachers but to observe what unlikely sporting event we never learned. A race of seals, who visited the docks often? The sea lions that populate the area today I never remember seeing there. I loved that disparate neighborhood.