The Cat Sitter

Jade wears her heaviest clothes on travel days because they’re too bulky for her backpack. Her heaviest clothes are, incidentally, her blackest clothes, and the jeans suck to her thighs as she climbs the stairs, Alba’s keys in one hand, the other hand grasping a paper bag with tetilla from the market, where it hadn’t smelled, but now, in this heat. She hasn’t had a free hand to remove her sunglasses, andthough it’s so dim in the corridor she barely sees the door, only a black pit in the wallpaper that smells of oiled wood. 
          Jade has a history with European locks. Once in Milan, she let herself out of an apartment she was sitting but she couldn’t open the door at the bottom of the stairwell. The key turned, yet no matter how far it rotated, the lock remained jammed. She stood for ten minutes, torquing the key, untorquing, growing so agitated she began boxing the steel door with the flats of her palms until the door swung open. An apostrophe of a woman scowled on the other side of the threshold, her hair folded inside a headscarf, a bag of eggplants swinging from her elbow. She picked her path around Jade to the stairs. 
          So Jade has been nervous about this lock. She asked Alba to send a video in advance. Six or seven deadbolts were connected by an iron rod. Her key is a thin prong of brass that seems unlikely to loosen so many bolts. It’s not a high tech security system. Just Borgesian. You don’t find locks like this in Vermont. You find dogs. Alarm systems. Stickers that threaten dogs and alarm systems. You don’t find locks like this in England either, where Jade has also lived. You might need the key to unlock the door from the inside, which is a fire hazard, and sometimes you miss deliveries. But doors like this. With six slugs of metal fastening the frame: it’s continental. More than that. As Jade considers this lock, the door in Milan, the punishing deadbolts in Berlin… It would be unfashionable to compare them. Certainly to a local. But this is a display of fortitude, might and elegance that only twentieth century fascism could achieve. 
          Jade’s been visualizing her arrival from the station, how she will slide the key into the hole and twist to the right, twice, until the bolts give way, releasing into her palm. She imagines, too, how she will shuck her pack first, then stand on the balcony to feel the green breeze on her back, cooling the sweat that has gathered. Maybe she’ll remove her jeans right there and walk down the long apartment, her feet cooling on the tiles. She’ll find the cat and take a photo for Alba. She likes to take photos of the cats. 
          The key sticks to her palm. She inserts it in the hole, jiggles the brass until the ridges catch the grooves. Push it as far as it will go, Alba’s text instructed. Further than you think. When the key can’t be pushed deeper, turn it to the right. The first click releases without effort. There isn’t a second click. The door pushes open. 
          It’s dark inside. The apartment is deep, not wide. The rooms tunnel into the heart of the building, rather than along the facade, so only the outer rooms—one over the street, another over the courtyard—receive light. The one over the street is the sitting room. Luna, a grey short hair with resinous yellow eyes, sleeps on the velvet sofa, crunched between the sofa arm and a pillow. The balcony door has been left open, and Jade squeezes behind the sofa to step back into the light. A current of air tightens the sweat on her shoulders. She stands with her eyes closed, sun seeping through her eyelids a fleshy neon colour. Could she remove her jeans on the balcony? Would anyone see? An arid woman in a leather jumpsuit walks her expensive dog down the sidewalk. 
          Jade takes a photo of the woman and texts it to her mother. Caption: I have arrived. Her mom likes to mock rich people too. She returns inside to take a video, which she will send to Mom also, this time to boast. The ceilings are twelve feet high and painted with a fresco of waterfowl. The pigment looks old, but that might be water damage. A white pelican leans off a rock, his beak heavy with trout. The painter has detailed a crumb-sized dot for his bum hole. Jade tilts her phone up, to capture the bum hole. Then she scans down the wall toward Luna on the sofa. She steps forward, careful to steady the phone as she edges down the hallway. The tiles are geometric and dizzy, rust brown. She reaches the end of the corridor, where light drops in from the courtyard, and finds the dining room table crowded with plastic cups and open bottles of wine. A husk of cantaloupe has been used as an ashtray. Jade veers the camera away, so her mother won’t see the mess when she sends the video.
          That’s when she notices the feet.
          There’s no door to Alba’s room. Her bed is visible from the dining table, where Jade stands. Two pairs of legs lie on top of the covers. She nearly drops her phone.
          How long she stands there, she doesn’t know. Did Alba throw a party and oversleep? When she shifts nearer, she finds two men she’s never seen before. They have kept their shoes on. 
          Later, when she replays the footage, she will notice the lag between when the camera lands on the men and when her eyes do. The video reveals the raw jeans one of them is wearing, which have been cut at the ankle so they hug the lower calf. Then the camera lurches. She plays it only once. It feels like a clue in a detective show, and this unsettles her, the evidence of her unawareness. Blithely capturing the tiles and sphincters of waterfowl, only to find two men sleeping in Alba’s bed. 
          The guest room doesn’t have a door either. Alba said her son might pick up a few things, but he knew she was arriving. It was two pm; he should have come and gone by now.
          Jade sits on her bed and removes her heavy shoes. The lint from her socks clings to her feet, which are tumid with blood flow. Then someone walks past her room. He’s not wearing a shirt. She waits for the shuffle of clothes, for him to return to her doorway and apologize, to say he’ll clean up and be out of her hair. But he doesn’t. Then someone else passes, a towel tied around his waist. This person has not emerged from where the other sleeping man should be. He’s walked from the other direction. After a minute, two further men pass. They don’t wear shirts either. One of them pauses in her doorway. He squints, brow creased in focus, as if trying to identify a face in a blurred photograph. She returns the squint. Somewhere, a shower whines on. Somewhere else, two men speak in Catalan. They could all be Alba’s son. 
          On the bed, Jade’s phone lights up. Her mother has texted: is that a löwchen.
          She will find coffee, she decides. Take a book with her. Give them two hours. She opens her suitcase, pulls out strappy sandals, and wedges her swollen feet inside. 

                    *

She doesn’t know most of her housesitting clients, but Alba had been her last boyfriend’s dealer when they lived in Barcelona for a year. She’s half Greek, half Spanish, and fifteen years older than Jade, with moorish eyebrows and a canvas of frayed curls, which she hefts using both hands when they weigh too heavily on one side of her neck. It’s not that Mediterranean women are superior—but every time Jade visits Spain or Greece, she knows that Venus didn’t rise from sea-foam in the English Channel. 
          “People buy cocaine before they buy my art,” Alba had told her once. She’d invited Jade over for a drink, which she did from time to time when Jade still lived there. Whether Alba had meant “in advance of buying her art” or “instead of buying her art,” Jade didn’t ask. Alba had aspirated the last word so it sounded like heart. 
          “How much is your heart?” Jade replied. Red wine made her flirt, though Alba didn’t seem to notice. 
          "I’ll show you.”
          She led her to the studio, the room next to the lounge, with a vestibule over the street. She was working on napes. One woman was angled so you could see her ear and the bone of her jaw, hair pulled into a chignon. Another woman sat straight on. Her braid hooked over her shoulder, exposing the slimmest lath of her neck.
          “The most vulnerable parts of a woman’s body are always the most exquisite,” Alba said, her hand lingering at her own throat. 
          Sometimes her source turned up to the flat. Jade had expected him to look fashionable, like Alba, but he smelled of warm raw onions and wore a faded black t-shirt. He had a bushy moustache, which had been clipped crooked so one side burrowed into his nostril. One time he turned up with a woman. Jade waited with her in the doorway while the man followed Alba into the apartment.
          “Cómo estás?” Jade had said. 
          “Bien, gracias.”
          The woman pointed out the corridor’s frosted window and said, in English: “That’s where Oasis lives.”
          Jade followed her eye to the embroidered stone of the building opposite. “All of them?”
          The woman shrugged. “How do I know?”

                    *

Outside, the shops have shuttered for Easter. Jade doesn’t wait for the green man at intersections because there are no cars. A dullness has settled over the city. All of the shops are closed except the mini mercados. She buys a bottle of water in one. The man at the till addresses her in English. 
          “Gracias,” she says, lisping the c, though she’s never sure if she’s meant to. They do it differently in Latin America, though she can never remember which is correct where. She alternates between lisping and not lisping.
          The atmosphere isn’t melancholy, exactly. There’s just a residue. A clammy coating over every surface, like after the city sprays the trees.
          The coffee place is shuttered too. It’s unsettling not seeing into the shops. All the storefronts become walls rather than windows, or faces with bandages over the eyes—specifically bandages, not blindfolds, streaked with Catalan graffiti. One of the stores is called Big Sur. She recognizes the name, but can’t remember what it belongs to in that moment. Either a tiger or mountain. Or maybe an elephant. From Kipling or whatever. She could look it up on her phone right now, but the name is familiar enough that she knows she should already know the answer. Under the sign, the metal shutter gives no clues. The business could be anything: a cafe. Travel agency. Copy shop. She turns here, at Big Sur, and walks toward the sea, which never closes.
          She didn’t know the Spanish or Catalan equivalent, but Jade always appreciated the French phrase for want: avoir envie de. J’ai envie de toi. When you want someone in French you covet them. With Alba, Jade coveted the space she took. She had thick hips and stood with her heels wide apart. Jade coveted her voice, an octave lower than hers. Like Barry White, she’d told her ex-boyfriend once, testing his feelings toward her. “The walrus of love.” He used to list the features of other women he found attractive. With Alba he liked her side boob. Normally that comment would piss her off, but she liked Alba’s side boob too. 
          To this day, she’s the only woman Jade’s slept with. It started with Alba trying to capture her nape. All those sessions together had felt devotional to Jade—Alba focusing on her for hours at a time. Jade’s own dedication to stillness. To sublimating the urge to stretch or twitch or pee. Maybe this was how Alba finished all her paintings? By unbuttoning her model’s blouse and taking a breast into her mouth. Jade’s bladder had been full, but if she wasn’t going to interrupt her before, she wasn’t going to now. She had had a sense that Alba was still drawing.

                    *

The beach is rammed with pale people. They wear clothes that don’t fit—jeans cling to their thighs so the grain points the wrong way, loosening at the knees, hems torn and darkened at their running shoes. The moment she arrives, she wants to turn around. But the sun blazes and keeps her there. 
          “Sorry,” someone says behind her. “Sorry sorry.”
          She turns. All English sounds addressed to her here.
          A long blonde family straddles the steps. Her ex would have found the mother attractive. He liked blondes most of all. The father digs for something in his son’s backpack, and in the maneuver, knocks a can of cCoke from the side pocket.
          “Sorry,” he says again to his son, laughing. His son also laughs. The other words they speak are German. “Sorry sorry,” he says, bending to lift the dented cCoke from the pavement. Jade rotates back to the sea. “Sorry,” the father still says, and each time her ears prick, though the family hasn’t noticed she’s there.          
          No one on the beach appears local. For one, they wear too many clothes, and their faces are marbled with sunscreen. For two, they do not lay on the beach, but trek to the sea and back again, the task of sea now achieved. For three, it’s Easter, and the Spanish are probably eating or sleeping or drinking or in church. For four, maybe no Spanish frequent this beach—it’s too near to the tourist centre. She strides down the sand a ways to distance herself from the other foreigners. Then she sits. And she does something she has never done on her own in public before. She takes off her shirt. She did not pack sunscreen, and her breasts will burn. But for now, the sun weighs like a heavy cat on her chest. She doesn’t want to disturb her. 
          Jade’s last night with Alba, they shared a plate of bacalao and fried dogfish at the bar downstairs. Jade was drinking San Miguel. Alba had ordered a bottle of wine for herself. What she remembers is that Alba didn’t speak to her. She addressed the bottle. She described a woman she’d “finger-fucked” the week before on the metro. Now and then she smeared an ant on the table with her thumb. When she lifted it, the ant would be crushed under her fake nail and she would scrape him into the ashtray. When Jade tried to reply, Alba spoke over her voice or else yawned. The woman she finger-fucked is a stylist, Alba told the wine. She picks clothes for photoshoots and pins them on the model. She tells the model to suck in her lips so they don’t stain the silk. The stylist doesn’t say “shirt” or “blouse.” She names the textile. This silk is worth more than you are, she’ll tell the model, if she’s in a bad mood.
          The way Alba spoke about this other lover bothered her. She felt like she’d been led down a crumbling rock edge, trusting Alba to guide her footing, but she was gone once she’d opened her eyes. Or not even gone. She was one cliff over, finger-fucking a stylist. Their time together had felt special to Jade.  That was the problem. A case of mismatched sentimentality.

The shuttered storefronts look less depressing at night, when they’re meant to be closed. On the walk back to Alba’s,  Jade passes again Big Sur again. She now notices a menu outside in a glass case. They serve sandwiches and orange juice, but that doesn’t give many clues about the nature of its namesake, which she was sure she’d remember by now. 
          Where did Alba say she was this week? In Jade’s mind, she still sits imperially at a bar, crushing ants with her thumb, wine spilling over her glass, wetting her wrist. She lifts her wrist and licks the wine but still won’t look at her. And yet, Jade could sleep, tonight, in her bed. Wash with her soap. Finish her wine. It feltfeels lonely and intimate to be Alba’s ghost. 
          When Jade returns to the flat, the shirtless men have gone. They’ve tidied, or thrown the wine bottles into the trash. The table is gummy when she presses her hand into the wood and lifts it. The ceiling’s so thin, the upstairs cooking sounds could be from her own kitchen. Next door, a man pees raucously into a toilet. Each time voices peal through the hall, she tenses, worried Alba’s son has returned. 
          Alba told her once that the Spanish phrase for dizzy is poco loco, or “little crazy,” from the Latin locus, a place or location. When you’re crazy, and dizzy, something is out of place in your head, dis-located. And that’s how Jade feels, she realizes. Dis-located. Like someone has bandaged her eyes and spun her around. 
          She draws a bath. Sometimes, she likes to squish her body to the bottom of the tub and breathe through a straw. It helps her focus. If you panic, you gulp water and choke. So you can’t panic. She finds a straw in Alba’s kitchen. Half a bottle of wine remains on the counter, along with the melting tetilla, which she forgot to put in the fridge. The bottle floats, but won’t stay upright in the bath. She sets it on the ledge next to the soap dish. Clasping the straw between her lips, she slopes under water. The breath is a pinched whistle—long yet unsatisfying. All she hears is her heart drubbing her chest.
          The water cools before she notices the outside drubbing: the door. At first she ignores it. Then she realizes they must have a key—to enter the building from the street. Unless a neighbour let them in. Unless they are a neighbour. She rises from the bath, leaning heavily on the tile for balance, poco loco from the wine and pinched breathing. She inserts herself in Alba’s bathrobe, a queenly white garment she probably stole from a spa. Jade regrets not locking the fascist deadbolts. It’s too late now.
          “Si?” she calls. 
          “Perdón por molestarla,” a young voice replies, plus more words that exceed her Spanish. 
          She pauses. “Quién es?”
          The voice also pauses, then speaks in a tone that suggests he’s repeating what he’s just said. In embarrassment, she opens the door.
          She’s taken with how elegant he is, more finely boned than his mother. His nose flares out too wide for his jawline, but it’s matched by his lips, which are thick and bright. He was the one in the bed, she knows, as she takes in his jeans. The one who paused in her doorway and squinted at her but not at her—as they both do now.
          “Jordi?”
          “Sorry,” he says. His eyes catch on the bathrobe. He’s only a few years younger than her, but he looks sixteen. 
          “Come in. Did you forget something?” 
          “No.”
          She’s not sure what to say now, but she leads him to the kitchen, which is where hosts lead guests, though he’s not a guest, per se. And she’s not a host. Or maybe she’s the guest now, and he’s the host. In which case— should he be leading her? Whose turn is it?
          “Wine?” she asks. 
          “Only a little,” he says, his hand on his stomach.
          The wine is in the bathtub, she remembers. She can’t bring herself to say so. She turns and smiles at him. 
          “I’m not talking to my dad right now. I was supposed to stay at a friend’s,” he says. “But his mom kicked me out.”
          “Oh. I’m sorry.”
          “Can I stay here?”
          The question catches her off guard. It’s his mother’s apartment, but she’s homed here now. She’s bathed. She was going to lounge in his mother’s bathrobe and be slovenly. 
          “Well, I guess I can still book a room somewhere. What time is it?”
          “No, no. There are plenty of beds.”
          She thinks of all the bodies in the beds. As if he knows what she’s remembering, Jordi blushes. Then the cat mooches in, threading between Jade’s ankles on her way to the food bowl. 
          “Tetilla,” Jordi says then. 
          The cheese she bought from the market still slumps in its plastic on the counter.
          “You want some?”
          “It’s Galician. You know what it translates to?”
          She shakes her head. 
          “Tit,” he says.
          Of course it does. 
          “Tit cheese,” he emphasizes. 
          Then they are both laughing, more than is warranted by the name of the cheese. She wonders if he’s flirting with her. Is he even gay? Or straight like she’s gay: opportunistically.
          “I’m not going to lie,” she says after a moment. “The wine is in the bathtub.”
          He starts laughing again and that sets her off too. 

He takes the cheese to the balcony while she rescues the wine from the tub. It’s after ten now. She bolts the front door. Outside, Jordi tells her about his friend, whose mother kicked him out, while he removes the tetilla from the plastic. It’s clear this friend is a romantic one, but she doesn’t ask questions.
          The cheese really is shaped like a boob. How did she not notice? A teen-sized breast that tapers into a nipple. It’s around this point that she notices the air grazing her own nipple. The sash around her bathrobe has loosened, but she doesn’t bother to tighten it. She leans back with her bare breast, daring Jordi to say something. She’s not sure of her motivations. Seducing Alba’s son may be the ultimate vengeance. But that’s not why she’s feeling brazen. Is it?
          “Are you warm?” he asks.  
          “A little.” 
          “Take it off if you want.”
          She can’t tell if he’s attracted or amused. 
          “What will you take off?” she asks. 
          “It’s a contest?” he says. 
          “I never strip alone,” she says. “Unless I am alone.” 
          He pulls his shirt over his head and unzips his jeans, stepping out of them one leg at a time. It doesn’t feel erotic as much as childlike. Cousins learning their anatomy or playing truth-or-dare. 
          She slips her bathrobe down her shoulders and parts it around her lap. Then she drizzles Alba’s honey over the round of cheese. It feels good to sit naked, in full view of the road, above pedestrian eye level. Now that they’re naked, they can say anything. But she doesn’t rush her speech.
          The breeze ruffles the petals in the flower boxes. A neighbour’s piano sifts across the street. Maybe it’s Oasis. The thin rind of the cheese yields to Jordi’s spoon. Then her spoon. Neither of them use a knife. She won’t tell Alba about this. Not about the party or the friend. Not about sharing tit cheese naked on the balcony. Not about whatever is to come, or not to come. Beneath the rind, the cheese is dense, freckled with air pockets. It has a rural taste like unpasteurized cream. She chews slowly, holding the animal in her mouth a little longer.

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