Four French Cats & a Monster
Updated: 2 days ago
by Hannah Grieco
You expect this to feel familiar. Like riding a bike. You don’t expect to be pulled around the National Gallery by a woman half your age, your hand sweating in hers, in search of someone who can tell you what floor the French cat exhibit is on. Then to discover you’re in the wrong wing entirely. That you have to take a moving walkway through a shimmering light tunnel to get to the right spot, according to the man in the gift shop.
Except the shimmering lights are off today.
“They’re broken,” the security guard says. “They’ve been off since Tuesday.”
“Is this a metaphor?” you ask.
“She’s an English professor,” she tells the security guard. “She writes poems.”
“Sure,” he says.
***
“I love how people always look like their pets,” she says.
“Yeah.”
Painted in 1887, a portrait of a young girl who, yes, looked just like her cat. And it’s beautiful, the idea that you can grow to look like someone or something you love. People often tell you how your daughters are your clones. But also, do people always look like their pets? Is this her being lighthearted and you being overly literal, or just further proof that you are far too old for her? You knew this from the start, even though she’s the one that sat down next to you at Starbucks and she’s the one who had the audacity to be this attractive. Her skin smooth and glass-like. Her hair spiked the way the drag kings in Dupont Circle used to style theirs. Back before she was born. Jesus Christ.
***
“Think he looked like his cat?” you joke. She squeezes your hand.
Earlier, you wiped both palms hard against your jeans, fast, in secret, praying Please, for the love of fuck, can I stop sweating? But no, you can’t.
In the women’s room, you smell your armpits and recoil. Now you have to keep your jacket on the whole time. Occasionally you can still smell yourself as you walk, as she points to a particularly cute or weird cat, and the smell, either real or in your head, is both alarming and weirdly sharp. It isn’t normal, the way you smell. The way your body responds to fear.
***
“This was the face you made when I asked you out,” she says. Then she leans toward you and before you can say something stupid and profoundly awkward, she kisses the tip of your nose.
“I’ve wanted to do that all afternoon,” she says.
“Now you look like the cat,” she says.
***
“Picasso wasn’t French,” you say. “What the hell?”
“This was donated from some Picasso museum in France.” She examines the plaque. “Yeah, that’s all it says. Hysterical. What were they thinking?”
“I’m not a fan,” you say.
“Of Picasso, or his fake French cat?”
The conversation is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. And she reminds you of your college students, picking a shared academic moment as a doorway to flirtation. This makes sense, since she only graduated a few years ago.
She’d wanted to see this exhibit for months, she’d told you in the Uber. She showed you photos of her three cats, all tuxedos, black and white, fat and friendly like Labrador Retrievers. She called them her babies.
You don’t have a cat. Your husband is allergic.
“I have three human daughters,” you said, attempting to reestablish normalcy. To slow the beat of your heart, which you could picture thumping visibly in your throat. Your husband once said he could always tell when you were scared or horny because he could see the blood pulsing in your veins, as if your skin grew thinner the less regulated you got.
“Show me pictures,” she said. You made a joke about how they never let you take any. But your phone was full of them, of your life before that moment, of the five of you around a campfire, your husband and you side by side just a couple of years ago, and on opposite ends by December.
“Picasso was a piece of shit,” you say. “And this painting is monstrous.”
You are irrationally angry about Picasso. About this mistake, probably made by an intern. About how ugly you sound, how bad you smell, how old you somehow got in the last twenty years.
“I mean, he was obviously a genius,” you say.
“This cat is a self-portrait,” she says. “I don’t give a solitary fuck about his genius.”
***
“My mother had this puzzle when I was a kid,” you say. “She glued it together after she was done and framed it. I think it’s in my attic somewhere.”
“Cool. Do you like puzzles?”
‘I can’t do them.”
“Now that sounds like a metaphor.” She grins. “About mothers and daughters, maybe?”
“I can’t look at a pile of random pieces and picture them as one big, beautiful thing.”
“Ah, about how we see ourselves.”
“What, and I’m the poet?”
“A pile of broken pieces just putting itself back together,” she says, then pulls you close all of a sudden, wrapping her arm around your waist. “Into one big, beautiful thing.”
Your oldest daughter will be going to college in the fall. She’s deciding between UVA and Radford. Her father’s alma mater and yours. Her friends threw her a UVA acceptance party and her father gave her a three-hundred-dollar gift card to Zara to buy a dress, then gave her the silent treatment when she wore a black hoodie and jeans instead. “Her mother’s daughter,” he said.
“I really don’t like puzzles,” you say. “That’s probably why I’m getting divorced.”
“I do.” She points to the cats begging for milk. “I’m sure there’s a metaphor here.”
Hannah Grieco is a writer in Washington, DC. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.
