“I’d never seen a picture of her brother.”
“There aren’t many. They say he was very shy around strangers. A true Margay. Just look at him! Those eyes!”
“He died very young.”
“Eighteen,” she said. “Drowned in the Great South Bay a few years after his father disappeared back into Mexico. Water killed the cat. Everyone knew it was suicide.”
It’s tough when a friend you love and respect is doing something you think may be dumb and wrong. “Your mother was still torn up about that and her father’s disappearance when I first knew her,” I said, like I was pleading her case. “She really had no one to talk to.”
Selesta drove in silence. The sun was going down. I looked in her portfolio at the photos she had of Mata paintings. I found The House That Ate the World.
It’s the house in the old rural Hamptons in which Antonio Mata had lived for some years with his wife and children. In the painting it’s distended, bulging. Through open windows and doors flow furniture and phonographs, tennis shoes and radios, refrigerators and easy chairs.
Out of the house and onto the lawn in front and the meadow in back they tumble: cocktail dresses and ice buckets, strollers and overcoats, the possessions of an American household circa 1948.
“Kind of quaint compared to what’s inside an American house today,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s about materialism so much as about wariness and curiosity,” Selesta said. “And maybe fear. He’s a feline in human territory.”
“Are you afraid, honey? Like he was?”
“Sometimes I am. I think it’s good to be a little afraid sometimes.”
We drove for a while before she asked, “Was my mother ever afraid?”
“Not that I saw when she was your age. She only seemed to get scared after you were born.”
We talked a little more about her family. Brief bursts of conversation took place amid stretches of silence.
It was dark when we parked at the entrance to the driveway of the House That Ate the World. Lamps were on inside, but Joan stood on the unlighted porch and smiled as we approached.
“She can see us in the dark,” muttered Selesta. “She just shrugs when I ask her about it.”
We all embraced and Joan asked, “How was traffic?”
“No problem,” said her daughter stepping past her. “How are you?”
By night, it could almost still be the cottage of fifty years before. I caught the tang and murmur of the ocean. A few hundred yards away the tide was coming in.
Through the open windows I saw the easel in the living room with the half-finished painting. Bulbous circa-1950 American cars bore down on the viewer. Antonio Mata had disappeared without finishing it.
“A cat’s-eye view of the highway,” I murmured.
Joan looked at me and then at her daughter, who smiled. Neither said anything, but they moved down the hall to the kitchen, not touching but walking together.
When they were alone, Joan would ask her daughter what she and I had talked about on the way out here. I was glad to have given them that opening.
“Hello, Richie,” said a familiar voice behind me. I turned, and standing at the back porch door was the woman from the 1950s snapshots. Then Ruth Mata Rosen moved and that illusion disappeared. Now she walked with a cane.
Ruth had called me “Richie” the first time we met many years before. There was no reason for it that I’ve ever been able to discover. Nobody else in the world has ever used that nickname for me.
“They’re alone together?” she asked.
“In the kitchen,” I said.
“No yelling? No screams?” she asked. “I don’t necessarily hear. Especially things I don’t want to hear.”
“Quiet so far.”
“At first, with my background in negotiation, I tried to arbitrate their dispute,” said Ruth. “What I discovered was that when you spent twelve years married to the cat man and never asked some basic questions, you’re not dealing from a position of moral authority or common sense.”
“We’ve all done things like that.”
“Truly, have you ever done anything quite like that?”
“Well. ”
“No. I was naïve and bedazzled and just plain stupid. And a lot of misfortune came from that.”
“You did something fine with Selesta.”
“I’d been back to the place where Antonio was born a couple of times. There are still people who remember him as a kid. A few of the locals had folktales about tree cats who can take human form. Rumors ran that his grandmother was one.
“Poor Joan,” Ruth said. “When she was Selesta’s age and wanted so much to find out about her father, there was a travel ban in that area. It was a dangerous place. The government was killing student dissidents. And right then I was busy.”
The kitchen door opened. Selesta emerged and then Joan. A kind of truce seemed to have been arranged.
“Is anyone else hungry?” asked Ruth.
“Yes,” said Joan. “But the sad thing is none of us can cook.” Selesta narrowed her eyes and flashed her teeth. “I can probably rustle up something fresh and tasty from outside.”
Joan winced, but I chuckled. Ruth said, “Suit yourself. But there are take-out menus on the refrigerator door. I thought maybe Thai would be nice.”
In the way of the busy lives we lead, it was a few years before I found myself back at the House That Ate the World. This time I drove out there with Joan and again arrived after dark. It was the middle of the week and a bit before Memorial Day. The neighbors weren’t yet in residence; the season and the Hamptons traffic jams hadn’t begun.
Again by night, with a sea breeze and little sound beside the slow rhythm of the Atlantic, the house could well have been the one in the Mata paintings, the old snapshots of the family.
Adding to that illusion, there were children in the cottage. Joan’s younger sister Catherina was taking care of her granddaughters, aged three and four, and had brought them to see Great-Grandmother Ruth.
The next morning, though, I stood on the porch with a mug of tea, and 1950 was gone. The pond had been drained decades ago and a summer mansion had been built on the site.
A more recent and even larger vacation home now stood on the meadow. The House That Ate the World, by comparison, now seemed like a charming relic of the past.
Joan came out and sat on the porch swing. Two years before, she’d had a brush with cancer. We’d all held our breaths, but it seemed that it was removed in time and she was free and clear. Joan and I had become close again in ways we hadn’t been since we were kids back on East Tenth Street.
She talked on her cell phone with her business partner about a corporate logo they were designing. Then she got a call from Selesta, who was driving out to the Hamptons with her husband, Sam.
They’d gotten married a couple of years before. Sammy was a nice young man with a shaved head. Selesta had a tattoo on her throat that matched the blue of his eyes.
Recently she’d told all of us that she was pregnant and that she and Sam had decided to have the child. That news was always in the background now. Her mother and grandmother discussed obstetricians and hospitals. Selesta didn’t understand why she might need a doctor who was discreet.
“Because you don’t want to end up on the front page of the National Enquirer,” Joan said. She shook her head when she got off the phone.
“Selesta told me once that it was good to always be a little scared,” I told her.
“She won’t know what fear is until she becomes a parent.”