Читать книгу A Widow’s Story: A Memoir - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 29
Оглавление“Oh Reynard! How could you.”
It seems that our elder tiger cat Reynard has urinated on a swath of documents which in my desperation not to misplace anything crucial among Ray’s many papers I’d spread out on the floor of his study.
A dozen or more manila folders, spread out on Ray’s desk and spilling over onto the floor—in block letters carefully designated MEDICAL INSURANCE, CAR INSURANCE, HOUSE INSURANCE, IRS DOCUMENTS (2007), BANK/FINANCES, SOCIAL SECURITY, BIRTH CERTIFICATES, WILL etc.—and sometime within the past several hours Reynard has surreptitiously defiled a copy of the death certificate and the IRS folder so that I must A) wipe the pages dry B) spray Windex on them C) wipe them dry again D) place them in our (unheated) solarium in the hope that by morning they will have A) dried B) ceased smelling so unmistakably pungent.
“Reynard! Bad cat.”
My vexed/raised voice provokes both cats to run in that panicked way in which domestic pets will run from irate masters on a hardwood floor—skidding, sliding and slithering—toenails scraping like cartoon animals. I feel a sudden fury for the cats—both Reynard and the younger long-haired gray Cherie—that they have ceased to care for me. In this matter of Ray’s disappearance they blame me.
You would think that, with Ray missing, they would be more affectionate with me, and want to sleep with me—but no.
Barely they condescend to allow themselves to be fed by me. Eagerly they run outside, to escape me. Reluctantly they return when I call them for meals and for the night.
The defiled IRS papers are not the first evidence that the cats are taking a particular sort of feline revenge on me since Ray’s disappearance, but this is the most serious.
Where grief couldn’t provoke me to tears, cat pee on these documents does. It’s the weeping of sheer despair, self-loathing—This is what I am, this is what I’ve become. This is my life now.
