Mister Cat was home. I turned on all the lights, and we sat on a box by the window in my room. There were people working outside, tearing up West Eighty-third, same as they’d been doing for the last couple of years, day and night, except Sundays. They’re probably still at it. I listened to the jackhammers, and I thought about how noisy New York is all the time, everywhere, and how you get so used to it you never even notice. Maybe I was so used to it I wouldn’t be able to breathe someplace quiet, the way I already felt I couldn’t breathe in this empty apartment. I’d probably just die of quiet, over there on some farm in Dorset, and nobody’d ever figure out why. I started to cry myself, thinking about it. It felt great, but Mister Cat got annoyed at me sniffling and honking into his fur, so I quit, and we just sat there at the window together until Sally and Evan got home.
The whole trip to London is one miserable blur, and I don’t want to write much about it. Evan tried to put Mister Cat in his travel cage while I was still asleep, but he quit while he still had everything he was born with. So I had to get up way early and spend an hour talking Mister Cat off the ceiling and into my lap, and then finally into that little tiny box. He gave me a look, just one long yellow look, and then he walked in by himself and lay down facing the back, facing away from me. He was so mad at me. I can get depressed right over again when I think about that time, even now.
It was four in the morning, something like that, and I was so out of it I never actually got to say good-bye to anything. Maybe that’s just as well, but I don’t know. I remember the limo sliding up to the curb like a submarine, and a couple of street people staring at Sally and me crawling into the back with suitcases stacked around us, because the trunk was so full. Evan got up front with the driver, and Sally put her arm around me. I had Mister Cat on my lap, and every now and then I’d bend down and whisper to him, “It’s all right, I’m here, it’ll be okay.” I could see his eyes in the darkness, but he wouldn’t talk to me.
And that was all, that’s how we left New York. Nobody to wave to, no tears—no feelings even, exactly. Four in the morning, and it’s all just gone, nothing left to take with you except suitcases.
I’d been on a plane one time before, when Norris was doing something with the San Francisco Opera, but I don’t remember any of the details because I was five years old, maybe six. They gave me a coloring book on the plane, and I loved the food in the little plastic trays. Not a lot of training for flying across the ocean to your wild new life, especially when you have to hand your cat over at the ticket counter like a damn garment bag. I saw other cats and one dog in cages like his, and that helped a little, because I knew at least he’d have some company in the baggage compartment. All the same, when I held the cage up for the last time and looked at him through the mesh, and he stared back at me and let out one single ice-cold miaow, it just went right through me, it was really awful. I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Sally put her arm on my shoulder, and it was all I could do not to slap it away.
The clerk put the cage on the conveyor belt. It bumped slowly away, with suitcases and packages piling up behind it until I couldn’t see it anymore. The clerk tried to be nice. He said, “Your kitty’ll be fine, honey. They’ll take him off the belt and put him in a special safe place with all the other animals. Everything but the in-flight movie.” He winked at Sally and Evan over my head. I can still see it, that fucking stupid wink.
The only thing I really remember about the flight is taking off, because we flew in a long circle over the city, and I’m still sure I saw old messed-up Eighty-third Street, even though I probably couldn’t have. But I know I saw the Park, I know that much, so for just one second it was all right down there under us—Jake and Marta, and William Jay Gaynor Junior High School, and the crystals-and-auras place on our corner, and the tiny Jamaican market on Amsterdam where Sally used to buy mangoes and papayas, and I’d get my reggae tapes. The woman in the Navy pea jacket, walking up and down Eighty-first all day, jerking her thumb at the cabs, yelling at them, trying to get one of them to stop and take her out of here. The big blind guy with the nose rings, who liked to scare the people having their dinner outside the Columbus Cafe, and the two old men I’ve seen on Broadway all my life, shuffling along arm in arm, yelling at each other. The black woman who runs the newsstand, who saved piano magazines for Sally, and kept telling me how I should do my hair. And the Siamese Hussy, wondering and wondering where Mister Cat could have gone. All down there, my life under our wings.
And after that it was all clouds, all the way to London. Nothing to see, no ocean, no sky, about as romantic as the IRT. I couldn’t sleep, but I wasn’t exactly awake either—I got one of those tiny pillows and crammed it up against the window and leaned my head on it, trying to get halfway comfortable. I tried to let my mind just float off, like it does in class half the time, but it kept seeing Mister Cat in the baggage compartment, lonely and crowded and being jolted around, not knowing what was happening to him, scared for the first time since he was a kitten and those boys were dangling him off the roof. I couldn’t stand to think of Mister Cat being scared, but I couldn’t think about anything else.
Meena says I have to describe landing at Heathrow, but it’s hard to remember what’s really that first miserable gray evening, and what’s from other times we’ve been there. Tunnel after echoey, endless tunnel, and the three of us pushing four luggage carts. Sally nudging me every minute, pointing to the people going through Customs with us, whispering, “Jenny, look at them, those are real monks, from Tibet!” and “Jenny, look, see what that lady’s wearing, that’s called a sari!” Evan helping a tall old black man in red and yellow robes and a red hat like a flowerpot to carry his duffel bag… like I said, things blur. And I didn’t want to look, or notice, or remember anything—not then.
We didn’t have any trouble at Customs, except for having to stand in line forever, and all that time Sally and Evan were waving to Evan’s sons, Tony and Julian, who were waving back from behind a big high window, along with a red-haired woman, Evan’s sister Charlotte, whom they’d been living with while he was gone. Everybody in the world was waving like mad, except me, even when Sally grabbed my arm and pointed up toward the window. I just kept looking somewhere else, all that time.
You can imagine all the hugging and gushing and carrying on when we got out of Customs. I’m not going to write about it, mostly because I still feel bad about the way I was with Sally then. Here she was, just off the plane and meeting an entire new family—stepchildren, sister-in-law, the works, and more coming—and nobody but me from the bride’s side, and I wasn’t about to deal with any of it. I saw a young guy holding up a sign saying GOSHAWK FARM CATTERY, and I was over there like a shot, because it gave me an excuse to duck out on all the at-long-last stuff, and I took it. I’d be different today, but that doesn’t do yesterday any good.