Suki

I WANT TO tell you about a cat — a sublime creature entrusted to me in my youth — that I allowed to die. There were extenuating circumstances, but there always are. I forgive myself nothing. She loved me, and I let her down. I committed a terrible crime.

I don’t remember where this cat, Suki, came from. My boyfriend at the time, a speed freak people called Nicky D., had an inordinate attraction to delicate things, including fine art — he regularly stole expensive art books from the Harvard Coop — and animals. The first time I went to Nick’s basement apartment, I discovered a menagerie. Lassie, a feisty but sad-eyed Welsh terrier, could jump from the floor to the couch like a pygmy goat: all four feet took flight simultaneously, and in a single hop he would land on the sofa. We howled with laughter as we got him to do it over and over. Petey was a red and green parrot who could say only, “Foo.” Nick said he had tried to teach Petey to say, “Achoo,” but “the dumb fuck didn’t get it.”

Nick usually giggled when he said that. Sometimes, though, he said it with such contempt it was scary. I still can’t unravel the tangled strands of Nick’s personality, and I don’t know how much of his darkness was caused by the drugs he was doing. He was uneducated but bright. I’m sure he named the terrier Lassie for both humorous and sentimental reasons. I imagine Nick in the alcoholic, debt-ridden New Jersey home where he grew up in the 1950s, his tender heart aching while the boy on TV called, “Lassie, come home!” What relief Nick must have felt watching Lassie, stuck on a cliff after having rescued a family of orphaned animals from a landslide, at last find a footing and struggle to safety.

Suki was not named after anyone. A true exotic, a foreigner who was out of her element, she lay stretched luxuriously, like the queen she was, across the most comfortable chair in the apartment, an easy chair with a purple velvet cushion that Nick had made himself during one of his speed-driven, nighttime decorating binges. He had pasted magazine pictures of rock stars on every inch of the walls, and a mobile composed of Janis Joplin photographs floated above Suki’s chair. Never once did I see Nick even request that Suki get out of that chair. If people came over and there was no place for him to sit, he would squat on the floor rather than eject Suki from her throne.

One night, after I had been coming by Nick’s apartment for a while, Suki got down from the chair and crossed to the couch where I sat. Then she lightly climbed up into my lap and sat down, facing outward and swatting me gently with her tail. Nick observed this incident with a mixture of admiration and skepticism, figuring Suki’s gesture would be a one-time event. Suki was not given to sitting on people’s laps. Until then, she had witnessed the goings-on in the apartment from her purple seat, watching Nick with cool fascination and thinly veiled displeasure. I believe Nick respected Suki because he hated fools, and he knew that anyone who maintained a wary distance from him was no fool.

But it was to become a regular occurrence. Suki would abdicate her chair in favor of my lap whenever she saw that I was settled and she wouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps Suki loved me because I was another delicate thing. Her pale green eyes, framed by gorgeous black markings, narrowed at Nick’s sudden moves, though the rest of her body never expressed any fear; she knew he would leave her alone. But if he left the room, her eyes closed as if she was finally relaxing, and on my lap her purr began, almost inaudible, but I could feel the vibration with my hand against her white throat.

WHEN I MET Nick, I was eighteen, a freshman at Boston University, the sheltered eldest child of Midwestern parents: vain, spoiled, ambitious, and, like Nick, yearning. I don’t think a girl with my upbringing today would go for Nick, who was practically a street person and clearly trouble. But back then, the streets were a festival. Nick set his sights on me, wooing me with yellow pills. I could compose a twenty-page paper in a single night on one of those pills. They obliterated all my anxieties, so that when I saw Nick knock an ex-girlfriend to the ground, I made no connection between that event and my possible future. He confused me. I had never known a person of such extreme contradictions. Tall, dark, and truly handsome, with a missing right bicuspid, Nick lived off welfare, proud that he was beating the system. He was cold steel walking into drugstores and using stolen prescriptions, yet so deferential to me in the face of the fat novels I read, so careful not to push me too quickly into sex. I felt myself melting almost from the first, even as I felt bemused by our situation. 

Throughout that first autumn, I kept an emotional distance from Nick. I saw other boys; my life at school remained at center stage. We both left town in December for Christmas. When I returned, Nick had been back for several days, and his mood at our reunion was buoyant. The candlelit apartment was scented by the spaghetti dinner he had prepared. Suki stared up at me, butted her head against the back of my hand, and took her usual seat on my lap once I’d settled on the couch. Lassie’s greeting was uncharacteristically subdued. Then he went slinking over to a corner of the room and lay down, chin on his paws, sad brown eyes rolled up at me.

I asked what was the matter with Lassie. Nick said Lassie had “shit all over the apartment.”

“Why?” I asked.

Nick had spread newspapers in the kitchen for Lassie, but he had been gone longer than he’d expected. He’d attempted to visit his mother in New Jersey, but his father had refused to let him in the house, so he’d made a detour to Florida, spending a week there with friends from high school.

“You left them alone here?” I said. My legs tensed, and Suki jumped down.

Nick emerged from the kitchen in a full-length flowered apron and did a goofy little dance.

“You left them in the apartment for a week?” I said. Then I noticed the absent bird cage. “Where’s Petey?”

Nick giggled. “Lassie got hungry, ate Petey, yum-yum.” 

I followed him into the kitchen. “You didn’t leave food?”

Disgruntled, stirring the sauce, he repeated blandly, “I was gone longer than I expected.”

The room blurred and refocused in sharp, glaring detail: a prison, a torture room. I went for my coat. Suki was hiding. 

Nick came after me, but on the street I stuck out my thumb and jumped in the car that stopped, telling the driver, “That man is following me.” We sped away.

Alone in my dorm room, I cried almost to the point of retching, as if I could expel what I had learned. I was a sensitive, dreamy, idealistic girl, and I had loved animals all my life. I’d also developed an early attachment to the escapes of fiction, and I’d long identified with innocents, foreigners, outcasts, and those who’d been wronged. Once I understood what had happened, I knew that Nick had beaten Lassie. The parrot’s death felt as if Nick had beaten me.

I fell asleep in my clothes with the light on and awoke to the ringing of the phone. I was told that I had a guest in the lobby and should come down to get him.

That was the instant when I could have said no. But I didn’t. I went down and got him. I had never seen a man cry so inconsolably before, and I forgave him. I was no match for his ocean of need. It was as if, at twenty-two, he had already traveled the world — alone, shivering, hungry, and certain that he would never obtain what he sought.

A Good Deal. A Great Gift. Give The Sun as a holiday gift and save up to 30%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE