The Cat
Jeffrey Wolf
Long before he met my aunt, or built Chicago’s sixth-largest family law practice, or even entertained the possibility of nephews, my Uncle Barry had a cat.
He was twenty years old, a junior at Champaign-Urbana studying Sociology and Pre-Law and living just off Green Street. Technically the cat was his girlfriend’s, but then she died and he was stuck with it.
Her death was sudden, an accident. Country roads, drunk driver. When it happened, my uncle was at a club hockey match in West Lafayette. He got home to his apartment the next day and found a note stuck in the door. (This was before answering machines.) Denise was her name. They’d been together less than a year, but he had keys to her place. And though it felt wrong standing there among her smells, her bras and sweaters piled on the bedroom floor, he stayed long enough to coax the cat into a duffel bag and bring it home, along with its bowl and four cans of tuna.
Why he even thought of the cat, which he’d never liked and only tolerated for her sake. It was an overweight tabby that hissed at anyone who wasn’t her. When he tried to extricate it from the bag into his tiny living room, it slashed him so many times that he gave up and left it there. Soon it had made a nest in the middle of the floor, a swirl of blue canvas dotted with his used sock and undershirts, which he was too tired to steal back.
He hadn’t loved Denise. Their pairing was comfortable, convenient, attainable. It demanded little effort. They ate pizza, studied together, sometimes they fucked. In an existence consumed by thoughts—of his shifts at WPGU, Gerald Ford’s spinelessness, the blonde in his Philosophy of Law seminar—there were days she barely broke the surface. But now, in her absence, she haunted every moment. Her pork-snort laugh, the shape of her neck. Her voice called out to him on the quad. And alone on his bed, when the fading afternoon glared through the window and his empty sobs turned to masturbation, there was the cat, standing in the doorway, watching.
He brought it water and fresh tuna and scooped the shit pebbles it left across the floor. It also tore apart his sofa, though Barry didn’t mind this as much; the sofa was garbage when he got it. The cat watched him from darkened doorways and hissed when he got too close.
Two weeks after the funeral, Denise’s sister drove up from St. Louis to clear out her apartment, and when Barry showed up to return the cat, she refused to take it. The sister was tall, birdlike, faded by grief. She stared at him coldly, as if he’d offered something indecent, then went back to filling boxes. My uncle stood there for several minutes as she worked around him without looking up—waiting for what? An acknowledgement? He trudged home through the April chill, his shoes squelching in the grass.
None of his friends wanted the cat either. And his mother forbade him from bringing it home for the summer. At the shelter in Urbana, a woman in plaid shirtsleeves eyed my uncle with disgust and told him they were full. “Barely room for the animals without homes,” she said, and her glare followed him well beyond the parking lot.
In the end, he left it in the alley behind Papa Del’s. Late Thursday night, week before finals. He set its duffel in the pitted concrete behind the Dumpster overstuffed with greasy cardboard and sweet blackish rot. “You’ll be okay, there’s plenty of rats here,” he told it, though in truth he had no idea if it could hunt.
Then my uncle pulled his windbreaker tight and turned to walk away, all the while listening for the cat to mewl, beg, protest—but he heard only its silence blaring above the distant shouts on Green Street.
Jeffrey Wolf is the author of And Even This (Cornerstone Press, 2028). His writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has received a fellowship grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and a Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Chicago.
Table of Contents for A Formal Feeling