The world was so much more solid when I was a kid. K-Mart clothes from 1985 were better made than that Dior shirt you just bought that’s going to look like a rag after two hand washings. I still have clothes I bought in the 90s that were made in the 60s. The two-year-old front door lock just broke; my parents still have doors that were installed in the 1950s.
But what the fuck am I going to do about that?
I just want to write something fun because my cat is being extra hilarious; also, I can’t feverishly work away at my stop-motion felt-puppet sitcom about a mental hospital right now, because stop-motion involves a surprising amount of physical labor—especially if you do it crammed into a tiny space, wedging your arms and legs all over—and it is currently a hundred frickin’ degrees Fahrenheit in Paris. (I use the exotic temperature scale because it’s a nice, round number.)
Which, thanks to the humidity and pollution, is worse than 120 degrees in Palm Springs, or even 140 degrees, which, shit, I was saying that to exaggerate for comic effect, but I might have actually experienced it.
Anyway, the heat has created a truce amongst all the cats in my building.
Normally, my cat, Stumpler, though being the largest of the crew by far—he’s a Manx, raised and then dumped in Santa Monica, where apparently it makes economic sense to throw away the 2000-dollar exotic stump-tailed kitten that just arrived in the mail because his facial fur looks ever so slightly like a certain landscape painter:
—finds himself at the bottom of the pecking order, because he is also the friendliest.
He weighs as much as a toddler, which gives him a bit of a capybara air; Stumpler is eagerly friendly with everybody because he can be, and so he is shunned.
He must be up to something, hisses the paranoid Siamese who likes to yell at everybody from a safe perch in the rooftops. The diabetic ginger, Toulouse, only creeps around to our door when he figures he might accidentally get a forbidden carb handout. Well, and to try to get possession of The Chair (keep reading) by somehow managing to intimidate Big Stumps. Who always responds by trying to have a friendly chat, which always results in Toulouse running away hissing, like the bad guy in a drug education movie.
Stumpler doesn’t take it personally. He knows how tough and charming he is. He keeps trying.
The only time he isn’t so friendly is when the others make a concerted effort to usurp The Chair, his superior lookout post. This coveted chair, found directly outside our door, is the highest, most commanding viewpoint outside of the rooftops. (For some reason, being the only cat agile enough to command the cornices isn’t enough for the mentally ill Siamese.)
Whether today’s actual vantage point is on top of the chair or under it varies with the intensity of the sun. Aside from being big enough to scare dogs, Stumpler is technically a Cymric cat, which is a Manx cat you’ve smothered into an overwhelming double-coat of long fur, as though the big-boned Isle of Man build weren’t heat-conserving enough. Mental Siamese is equally hairy, although I’m not sure how much cat is under there, and le petit bonhomme noir (I’ve never heard his actual name), another candidate for The Chair, has mercifully short fur but the midnight black of it sucks up the sun.
No, I don’t let my cat free-range in the street, before you start in. In this building, our cats are all lucky, since we have a growing rarity: a usable, locked, completely walled-in courtyard and few enough neighbors for nothing to be anonymous. There’s even a patch or two of a little garden, and our neighbors, though noisy, don’t seem bunny-boiling psycho yet.
I’m a bit nervous about letting Stumps out there, since I have yet to recover from the murder of little Tumblecakes, but I realize that’s a me problem, and I shouldn’t make him sit inside for my benefit when he doesn’t have to.
Especially when it’s 150 degrees in Paris.
When I escaped for the waterpark yesterday, as I corralled him inside the apartment and shut him in with the heat, Stumpler gave me a look of pure hate that made me quickly repent my actions. The moment he was freed, he descended to find, with the same unerring feline calculation that drew all his comrades thither, the coolest spot in the courtyard.
This was under the little clump of trees, next to a stone bench, on a concrete slab, under the tablecloth-like cover of somebody’s goddamn motor-scooter, where the five or six molecules of non-over-excited air in the suburbs had sunk to get away from their fellows. When I found them, it was like an unexpected UN meeting where Putin and Hamas have shown up with doughnuts for everybody and a set of reasonable terms: Everybody was gathered round those molecules, sharing their non-radiation in total, practical, feline peace.
It was like the Anti-Chair.
OK, the Siamese was still occasionally yelling at people, but mostly actual people, like when I went out there to give Stumps an ice pack (now that I think about it, he could have been yelling in envy). As the fluffiest, most well-whiskered head poking out from under the cycle cover, I like to fancy my cat was the lion of the bunch; they certainly appeared to be arrayed around him, like a weird AI-generated response to a “make my cats look like a medieval court” prompt.
Shit, did I say that? I need to get out more.
Anyway, it was total peace. They accepted my icy gift to their leader, and I let them be, till it got cooler inside and Stumps was hungry. He seemed very satisfied with himself.
It’s still hot as hell today, but if people are adaptable creatures, so are our pets. A local-born Parisian was just telling me that people still remember the hot, hot summer of 1967, but every summer recently has been way hotter than that one, and no one remembers them at all; they just flow into one another, and we heroically learn to go on living. I mean, you still shouldn’t drive your SUV around needlessly, but anyway my point is, our cats are the same way.
After one day of an admirable truce, my cat seems to have made an equally admirable defensive decision today: Though I gave him access to the coolest part of the gardin, in the hottest part of the day, I still found him sitting under The Chair.
I guess even under his command, the accords fell apart. Or else he’s a preemptive kind of guy. Either way, I’m worried about him, and keep bringing him ice, and even trying to tell him I’ll put the clim on upstairs—but he seems convinced that’s the exact kind of pussy way out that his enemies want him to take.
It might still be hot as hell, but he isn’t going to let those bastards have his seat. “If I’m going to die of the heat, damn it, I’m going to die king of my territory! S’envoler jusqu’au bout!”
Just a few days ago, as I was in a wave pool with a bunch of other equally impressed humans, all of us going “wuf wuf wuf” with delight, as though a wave progressing through a liquid were the most amazing thing any of us had ever seen, I swore I was never going to make fun of my cat again.
That lasted all of five minutes after I got home.
There’s something inexorably ridiculous about sentient mammals. All that will, and such soft skin.
But damned if our ridiculousness ain’t impressive sometimes.
ok, this was a fun read, your opener had nothing to do with the story but it was nevertheless a delightful little disconnect side story, and your observations and personifications of your cat were wonderful! Such detail!
the object of art is not self-expression; it is truer to say that it is self-restraint. This article exemplifies that, Ann! This was fantastic. And yes, I want to be a cat. Reincarnated as one.....so bad. I am subscribing and hope you do the same! I imagine the bonded willpower over cats will bear much fruit. I'll be in touch.