A Clutter of Cats

Rachel and Testy moved into half of a large apartment on West 99th. The other half was possessed by an eighty-year-old ex-Rockette named Belle, and her thirty-seven cats.

“There might not be thirty-seven,” she declared at the top of her lungs from her La-Z-Boy in front of the tv. “I just say that ‘cause it’s got a good ring. That’s the number I stopped counting at. They’ve all got names, and if you can’t remember, just make ‘em up. I call that one U-Turn, ‘cause his mother was Eunice. And those are Fee, Fie, and Foe. Fum’s somewhere else. This orange one is Forty-two. I mean that’s his name, not his age. Cats don’t live that long! I never used to think I would!”

Belle had a tv tray next to her recliner, piled high with takeout menus. She watched news and game shows for hours on end, shouting at Peter Jennings and Pat Sajak with equal enthusiasm. She claimed not to have left the place in ten years, and could recite the phone number for every grocery store and restaurant within a five block radius. “Never liked New York. Moved here when I was seventeen, when Lincoln was still president!” She hooted at them. “Yeah, right! But I never liked this city. Why should I spend my old age wandering around it like all those pathetic has-beens with their wire carts on wheels? I’ve got my retirement, I’ve got a little nest egg. And I’ve got eight rooms with rent control, darlin’s, and two of them can be yours. Five hundred a month, combined, just ‘cause I like you. Now. I’m ordering from Ling’s– what’ll you have? I don’t suggest the Moo Shoo Pork. I don’t think they’d know a pig if it snorted at them. Moo Shoo Rat, more like it!”

“We’ll share a room to sleep in,” Testy told her. “I could use the second one for sewing.”

“Suits me,” Belle shouted, raking her beady eyes over Testy. “What do you sew?”

“Costumes, probably,” the dresser told her.

“Ha! Know something about those, myself! Maybe I can hook you up!”

“Thank you.”

And so they moved in and joined the household. Rachel “put those gorgeous tits to the use God intended,” as Testy said, and got a job serving cocktails. Testy made a name for herself as a skilled seamstress with a talent for beads and rhinestones, but not among the city’s drag queens as she’d expected.

“I guess I’m out of touch, babe,” she told Rachel. “These girls are either all slick like Fifties housewives, with little flip hairdos and polyester skirts, or else they’re tatty and threadbare. I saw one queen in a boa that didn’t even have any feathers left, last night. I wouldn’t want to touch ‘em.” But the opera set, she quickly learned, had taken up where drag queens had left off. They understood her kind of glamour– and they had much more money to pay for it. “I’ve got me a good gig, honey,” Testy confided one week after landing at Belle’s. She’d taken to sewing alongside their landlady, shouting at the television and feeding the cats bits of sushi or eggplant parmigiana. Rachel just sighed and took herself to bed.

“Have you heard anything?” she asked once in awhile. She’d formed the idea that Testy’s mysterious friend moved through a sort of underground network, and word of his arrival would come to them through some code or hint imperceptible to the untrained eye or ear.

“Any day now,” Testy told her.

“Really? Because–”

“Don’t worry. He’ll show up.”

Rachel did her best to stop worrying. She picked cat hair off her clothes, and kept trying.

“Ha!” Belle yelled. “You know what a bunch of cats is called? A clutter! A damn clutter! They said it on Hollywood Squares in June, 1992. And dammit if this place isn’t cluttered with cats! Ha!”

Rachel scratched a fat tom called General Tsao under the chin and smiled. Testy pulled a huge tackle box of threads and needles out of the hidden recesses of the Drag Queen’s trunk and sewed rhinestones.

The magic of New York, such as it was, swept them steadily through the weeks and months, as inexorable and uncaring as a street cleaning machine pushing a pile of old New York Times issues and discarded french fry boxes along the gutters of Upper Broadway.

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