Grace walks through a door and finds a man staring at a long-haired cat. She’s at a party where she knows almost no one—hardly knows the host—but she knows this cat. She once spent five days doling out its meals, stroking its fur, learning its habits. Seeing it now in this private moment with a stranger, she feels a small spike of jealousy, but of course that’s silly.
They’re in the bedroom—Grace has come here to drop her coat. The cat’s on the bed, and the man is squatting on the floor, so they’re eye-to-eye. He isn’t petting the cat, isn’t acting the way people normally do with small animals. He’s speaking in a low, serious voice, saying something that Grace can’t quite catch.
Then he sees her and hastens to his feet, but he doesn’t seem embarrassed. His glasses have slipped askew, and he adjusts them with an assured, fluid motion. Grace decides he’s charming—confident, a bit unconventional, warm-hearted.
“You know Toughy?” Grace asks, meaning the cat.
“We just met,” he says.
Grace tells him that she knows Toughy well: that she housesat here a few months ago, and spent days watching the cat stalk along the back of the sofa and sit at the window, flicking its tail. She has a tendency to babble to strangers about things they can’t possibly care about. But the man smiles.
“You have a cat?” she asks.
“Not the right time in my life, I’m afraid.”
They’ve walked down the hall, back to the party, and the man is pulled into another conversation. Grace wanders off. The rest of the night, when she sees him across the room or hears his voice among others, she feels a small, itching interest that she hasn’t yet identified.
She piles a plate with appetizers, then bumps into the host, who squints like she can’t quite place her. Grace must have been invited by accident. Why would this woman—a friend of a friend of Grace’s sister—invite her one-time cat-sitter? Grace slips down the hall to the bedroom, but the cat is no longer there. She wanders into the kitchen, where she tells a bored stranger about her hunt for a new apartment, and then the man from the bedroom appears beside her. He’s overheard, and happens to be looking for a new roommate.
“I’m Roger,” he says as he takes down her phone number.
Grace assumes the apartment will be too expensive. Roger is wearing a collared shirt of good quality, and he looks a few years older than she is—a well-established young professional. Grace is in her early twenties, and moved to New York a year before, planning to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter and work a day job on the side. She hasn’t found much success in either. She works at the box office of a music venue a few days a week and makes little money, not enough to keep up with her rent. Her roommates have told her that she’ll have to move out.
Grace drinks more than she planned to. As she’s leaving the party, she passes Roger in the hall and says, “Good night, cat man.”
“What?” he says.
Explaining what she means—about Toughy and the bedroom and the coats—Grace feels awkward, especially when she notices she’s interrupted Roger’s conversation with a woman. The two are standing close. Grace goes home imagining that he’s changed his mind: he won’t contact her about the apartment. Maybe he’s gone home with that woman. But by the time she wakes up the next morning, he’s already sent her a text.
*
They meet at a coffeehouse near his apartment, in a Brooklyn neighborhood Grace admires. He’s dripping wet because it’s raining and he hasn’t brought an umbrella. The apartment is close, he says, and he’s sure the rain will let up before they leave. He shrugs, but keeps shaking and squeezing at his damp clothes. She feels a sudden desire to wrap him in a blanket. There’s a pleasant roundness to him; women probably call him cuddly.
He asks about her job, and she tells him about the music venue, adding that she’s looking for something more full-time.
“And you pet-sit?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says, omitting that Toughy was her only client. Roger nods, smiles. Grace wants to add that she’s a musician, but she’s played only one open mic since she moved to New York, so it doesn’t seem relevant. Roger tells her about the apartment, the neighborhood. He names the rent. It’s surprisingly low. She almost asks, “Are you sure?” but doesn’t want him to change his mind. He says it would be great if she took the room, because, although they’ve only just met, he feels like he can trust her.
The coffeeshop is muffin-themed, and all the food—even that completely unrelated to muffins—is forced to involve muffins in some way. Grace orders a muffin salad, which turns out to be an ordinary salad with a savory cheese muffin on the side. She eats half the muffin and offers the rest to Roger, who spears it with a fork, leaning in close and smiling as if they’re co-conspirators.
“You know,” Roger says, “how cats knead people with their claws? When they’re purring? Another name for that is ‘making muffins.’”
They walk to the apartment. The rain has not let up, and they huddle together under Grace’s umbrella. So close, Grace can smell food on his breath when he laughs. It’s not an unpleasant smell; rather, sweet and bready, something reminiscent of home. When they enter the building, Roger hesitates at the bottom of the stairs and their eyes meet. He looks away and laughs, removes his jacket and shakes it. Drops of water splat on the tile.
The apartment is on the second floor and is not very large but is light and pleasant inside, simply decorated with a few houseplants and black-and-white photographs. Grace sees nothing related to cats except a porcelain figurine high on a shelf. A vitrine is filled with tiny models made out of paper: castles and monuments from around the world, with carefully printed labels. Taj Mahal, Mount Vernon.
An old hobby, Roger explains. Now he’s lost interest in buildings. “Just people pretending to be civilized,” he says. She asks what he means, and he says, “We’re animals, but we build things to pretend that we’re not.”
He leads her to the available bedroom, which lacks a closet but has a wardrobe left by a previous roommate. Though the rent is cheaper, this apartment is far nicer than the dark and cramped one where Grace currently lives in the far northern reaches of Manhattan. There, the lock on the front door is broken, and people come in from the street to sleep in the lobby. Twice, a toilet upstairs has overflowed and leaked down onto their bathmat.
She doesn’t hesitate: she tells Roger she’ll take it.
She moves in almost immediately, on a weekday when Roger is at work. She unpacks her clothes, then wanders the apartment, feeling the strange intimacy of being alone in another person’s space. There’s a medicinal scent in the bathroom, and in the living room, an old rolltop desk, locked, nicked in several places so a light wood shows through the dark stain. On a bookcase are two shelves of self-help books, and beside them, the vitrine with paper buildings.
She takes out a tiny Centre Pompidou. It’s coated in thin dust. She feels the delicate edges, the careful work Roger has performed with knives and glue.
Just then, her phone rings: Roger. Surprised, she jerks a finger and leaves a small crease in the side of the Pompidou. She fumbles the building back into the vitrine and answers the phone.
“Everything OK?” Roger asks.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” she says. Why is he calling her?
“It’s about work, actually,” he says, as if reading her mind. He remembers she’s looking for a new job, and a position has opened at his office. He works as a technical writer at a mid-sized software company. The position is temporary, but could be extended if they like her work.
There’s a pause, and then he adds, “Just so you know, I find working here a little … unfulfilling. A job like this—it’s not saving the world or anything, you know?”
“Oh, well, that’s OK.” Grace doesn’t expect to save the world; the company Roger works for makes business software.
She applies and gets the job. Roger has put in a good word for her. She starts immediately—sending emails, filling out spreadsheets. The office is nice, with free snacks, and nobody seems to expect much of her. She works on a different team than Roger, and on her first day, she sees him only once. He’s walking quickly, talking to a colleague. He smiles and makes a flurried gesture.
Roger stays late at the office most days, and Grace has an hour or so alone in the apartment. She takes out her guitar and tries to write new songs. She still hasn’t told Roger about her music; now it feels like too much time has passed, and it’s taken on the weight of a secret. She doesn’t want him to hear. She plays only ten minutes before getting nervous he’ll return, and she puts the guitar away.
She expects to have more time on weekends, when she assumes Roger will be out with friends or on dates, but he spends most of his time at home. She listens for the sound of a woman’s voice coming from his bedroom. Mornings, she waits to find a woman making coffee in the kitchen and wearing one of his shirts. No such person ever appears.
“Independence and solitude are part of my nature,” he says with a shrug, as if this were a sentence that could be uttered casually.
Grace starts staying home with him. When friends text—not that she has many friends in the city—she makes excuses. She and Roger cook dinner together and watch movies and have long conversations. She marvels at how much her life has changed in only a few weeks: new apartment, new job, Roger.
*
One night, they’re sitting on the couch, watching a television drama, and Grace leans her head on his shoulder. He strokes her hair. Grace’s heart beats hard, and she almost stops breathing. His hand runs over her arm, and then his lips are at hers. They’re half undressed when they move to his bedroom. She’s on top of him, then he’s on top of her, and she can’t stop kissing him, as if his mouth has something she needs but can’t quite get. She slips her hand over his back, which is covered with hair, surprisingly soft. She slips her hand down, and just above his butt, she feels a hard, bony bump.
She draws her hand back. They carry on, but now Grace is distracted. What was that thing? Roger must know she felt it, and yet he keeps going as if nothing happened. And then it’s over, and they’re lying next to each other, and Roger says, “It’s a tail.”
“What?”
“I’m growing a tail.”
Grace has never heard of anyone growing a tail––maybe cases of infants born with something tail-like, but a tail growing on an adult? She doesn’t know what to say. She ventures, “I’m sorry?”
Roger smiles. “I want the tail. It’s something I want.”
This is when Roger tells Grace that he’s turning himself into a cat.
*
Grace wakes early in her own bed. Roger is gently snoring in the next room. She slips on clothes, pulls a hat over her unwashed hair, and heads out the door.
The day is wet and unpleasant. Old women wrapped in coats carry heavy loads of groceries. Their steps are impossibly slow. Grace takes the train into Manhattan and despite the weather heads to the park. It’s early December and the last leaves are brown and falling. Few people have ventured out today, so if Grace’s face betrays emotion, no one sees. Occasional shadowy figures keep their heads down as they pass. Grace weaves about the paths for an hour, then leaves the park and heads to the art museum, where a slight donation allows her entry to a place that is dry and warm. She finds herself first in an exhibit on paintings of a monarch’s private menagerie, but leopards, tigers, and lions feel too close to home, and Grace moves on to safer subjects. She spends several hours in rooms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits, admiring minute details: the ribbons, the ruffles, the changes in corset shape. The women in these paintings—with slight smiles and flushed cheeks—look like romantic heroines from old novels.
At last, Grace gets on the subway and heads home. She feels calmer, full of reason. The train rumbles through its tunnels. Last night, she at first thought Roger was joking, but he insisted. Every inch of his body would change, he said—every limb, every organ. He would no longer walk on two legs. He’d no longer speak. He would cease to be human.
As Grace exits the train, she shivers. Is Roger delusional? Should she find a new apartment?
Walking home from the station, she passes a vintage clothing store, the muffin-themed coffeehouse, a bustling restaurant. It’s a charming neighborhood, and her rent is so low. She remembers her old apartment, with the broken lock, the leaking toilet.
There’s no harm, she supposes, in remaining Roger’s roommate, as long as she doesn’t get too emotionally involved. What happened last night—that should never happen again.
She pauses at the door to the building. The rain has turned to something approximating snow: a slushy mix that half floats, half plummets. It’s close enough to snow—the first of the winter—for Grace to find it beautiful.
*
A few days later, Roger knocks on her bedroom door. Grace has been avoiding him, but earlier that day, she learned that her temp job is being extended to a permanent position, just as Roger predicted. She feels grateful. She agrees to listen.
He leads her to the living room sofa and explains that he’s achieving his transformation through homemade medications and mental exercises, a regimen he’s cobbled together through extensive research.
The coffee table is spread with books and stacks of paper. He picks up a paperbound journal. He wants her to understand that this is real, that changes like his are described in resources that seem reputable. He flips through yellowed pages and holds open an article with the title “On Probable Future Advances in the Mutability of Species.” Grace tries to read further, but he shuts the journal and picks up another.
He flips through countless photocopies, preserved in plastic sleeves. There are pages of tiny print, grainy photographs, and incomprehensible diagrams with dotted lines and arrows. Roger mentions Soviet experiments, twentieth-century medical breakthroughs covered up for unclear political reasons, and ancient tales of alchemy and miracles.
Grace rubs her face, overwhelmed by it all. “But why a cat?” she asks.
Roger nods—eager to explain. “I wanted to be a wild animal at first, but I realized there’d be too much to learn: hunting, avoiding being hunted.” He laughs. “I’m a realist. Cats at least have their independent natures. Like wild animals in the safety of a living room. I’ve always liked cats.”
“But why do this at all? Become an animal?”
He takes a deep breath. He went through a dark time, he tells her. His parents died—a car accident—but the world just went on like nothing had happened. “My eyes were opened,” he says. “There’s so much suffering, and people do nothing about it. We busy ourselves with nonsense.” His job—which he’d previously been proud of—suddenly seemed inane: all that hard work and long hours, and for what? To help launch new software that would only give other people new tasks in their own inane jobs. People barreled around in cars, not caring who they hit. He felt done with humanity. He wanted to cast his humanity off. He imagined living as an animal, and then he learned it was possible.
Grace takes all this in. Couldn’t Roger just have found a different job? Has he seen a therapist? Being a cat won’t help all the suffering in the world. But he’s clearly pained about his parents’ death, so she pauses to think through how to word her questions delicately, and Roger says, “Hold on, I have one more thing to show you.”
He goes to the roll-top desk and takes out a heavy, leather-bound book. This, he explains, is his most important reference. He opens to columns of tiny type. Grace leans in, but finds the text beyond her understanding. Though the sentences seem to be written in English, there are too many long and unfamiliar words, in strange syntaxes. Roger explains that understanding the book’s teachings has taken him many months—almost two years—of study.
He flips through the pages and passes a section of lithographed images. Grace stops his hand and turns the pages back so she can see. There’s a naked man on the left, and animals on the right: dog, horse, monkey, something like a weasel. Then she turns the page to reveal a spread of in-between things: human bodies reshaped, parts lengthened and shortened, features in unexpected places.
Roger pulls the book away and gathers his resources from the table. He stacks them neatly on the surface of his rolltop desk, then pulls down the cover and locks it with a gentle turn of the key.
*
The holidays come, and Grace is relieved to have a few days away. She flies to her parents’ home in suburban California, and tries not to think about Roger, but reminders are everywhere: her sister’s fluffy black slippers, a neighbor’s orange cat walking across the back fence. Her surroundings—the grid of streets, matching houses, tinseled decorations dripping with rainwater—start to seem false and unsettling. How did Roger word it? People pretending to be civilized. Soon, she’s back on the red-eye flight to New York, and when she walks bleary-eyed into the apartment, she’s surprised to find that she feels at home. When Roger approaches, she allows him to hug her, but when he moves to kiss her cheek she steps away.
Roger seems furrier than before, perhaps a little shorter, and there’s something unusual about his eyes. She isn’t sure if these changes are new, or if it’s the shock of seeing him again after being away.
Back at the office, it’s a slow, dull week. She takes a walk during her lunch break. Midtown is a mess of slush and salt. In the shadows of skyscrapers, people hover around kebab carts and dumpling trucks, file into burrito chains and sandwich shops. All these people, in tailored suits and coats, must fulfill their animal need for food. Humans, Grace thinks, are just a kind of mammal, and suddenly the structure of civilization seems tenuous. Perhaps Roger is right—these buildings, these clothes, the lives people lead, are complex forms of denial—and though his reaction is extreme, maybe there’s something to it.
That afternoon, Grace passes a conference room humming with voices. “Birthday party?” she asks a woman walking out.
“Roger’s last day,” the woman says.
There he is: standing in the middle of the room, holding a forkful of cake. He smiles at Grace and shrugs.
Back at the apartment that night, Roger explains, “I can’t keep working as if I were human. I have to act like a cat. Quitting is part of the process.”
“But how will you support yourself?” she asks.
He explains that he’s saved up some money he inherited when his parents died, and that once he’s a cat he’ll have fewer expenses.
Grace thinks about this. “But how will you buy things? If you’re a cat, you can’t just go to the store.” She laughs, imagining a cat standing at a counter and holding out cash in its little mouth. “If I worked at a store, and a cat tried to buy something, I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Roger is smiling.
“What?”
“You believe me now—that I’m becoming a cat. You didn’t fully believe it before, did you? But now you do.”
Grace frowns. “I’m just speaking hypothetically.”
Roger keeps smiling.
“Hypothetically,” she says, “I don’t see how it would work. If you’re a cat and you need to buy … tuna, or whatever.”
“Well,” Roger says, “I’ve been thinking.” He stops.
“What?”
He takes her hand. His palm is warm. “I’ve thought,” he starts again, “I’ve hoped, that you might be the one. To watch over me.”
She pulls back, but he holds her hand firmly.
“I know it’s a lot,” he says. “Maybe it’s too soon. But Grace—” Her back tingles at the way he says her name. “I know we haven’t known each other long, but I feel a connection to you. I like you.”
His thumb tracks a line over the back of her hand. She looks down at their fingers. Small tufts of black have sprouted above his knuckles. So much of this moment is what she wants—what she’s hoped for—but so much is confusing. “I like you, too,” she says slowly.
“Grace,” he says. He’s closer now. And then they’re kissing. A voice in the back of her mind says, No. But a louder voice says, I want this, I want this, and she loses the power to resist.
*
In the morning, Grace slips from Roger’s bed to her own room. She pulls out her guitar, unclasps the case. She hasn’t looked at the instrument in weeks, and she takes a moment to admire the glossy wood, the rounded edges, before carrying it into the living room. She sits. Her fingers brush the strings. Then she takes a deep breath and sings.
The song is simple: slow, sweet, somewhat sad. When she looks up, Roger is standing in the hallway. His eyes are closed. He’s smiling.
That afternoon, they go the property manager’s office to sign the lease over to Grace. “Do we have to do this now?” she says, but Roger doesn’t want to wait. She learns that, as she suspected, she’s only been paying a small portion of the total rent. She looks at Roger. She signs. But when they get out to the street, she says, “It’s expensive.”
“You’re making more money now, with the new job,” he says. “And you won’t have to pay it all—I have that money saved up.”
Grace nudges a cube of broken glass with her boot. The sun is shining—the first day that winter seems finite, a thing that will end. “But if something happens—.” If Roger gets hit by a bus before he’s transferred the money, or something goes wrong with those medications he’s taking—how safe can they be, really? “I can’t afford this on my own.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder. “You won’t have to. Let’s add you to my bank accounts.”
“What, now?”
“Of course.”
She presses her fingers to her eyelids. “Shouldn’t we talk about this more?”
“I trust you.”
When Grace was cat-sitting, Toughy’s owner faltered when handing over the key. “I can trust you, right?” she said, and Grace said, “Of course,” but the woman seemed to expect more. Grace imagined herself through the woman’s eyes: her fraying cuffs, the dark under-eye circles from working too late at the music venue. She might not have trusted herself. But Roger sees something different. Isn’t that worth living up to?
They go to the bank. When it’s all done, she feels relieved. She takes Roger’s hand and points out the sunny weather and suggests they walk to the park. But Roger seems nervous and turns toward home.
From then on, Roger stays within the confines of the apartment. Their relationship is a secret: cherished and kept out of sight. Grace tells her coworkers that Roger has moved—out West, she thinks—but he hasn’t kept in touch. The coworkers don’t ask many questions.
Grace takes walks alone. In the park, blossoms appear on one tree, then another. She imagines walking with Roger in this place, their hands clasped, the sun warming their hair. With such surroundings, it’s easy to believe that it’s not too late—that their relationship has come at just the right time. Roger might yet change his mind. He might stay human for her.
It’s moments like these—thinking of Roger when they’re apart—that Grace is happiest. When she returns to the apartment, she sees the soft fuzz growing on his face—a fuzz that quickly grows denser, like the hair on the rest of his body. His deep brown eyes shift toward yellow, the irises grow larger, the pupils oblong.
She comes home from work one day to find Roger meowing along with a recording of a cat. He rolls around on the living room rug, or paws at the dish towels hanging in the kitchen. He bats Grace’s hand away. “Sorry,” he says. “Just something I’m trying.”
His black fur becomes dense, covering his body. He shrinks, and soon he’s shorter than Grace, and though he still walks on two legs, his posture becomes hunched, and his arms reach for the floor. His nose flattens, begins to turn up, and his fingers shorten and the nails sharpen, sometimes leaving scratches on Grace’s skin. When they kiss, she must beware his teeth and rough tongue.
And yet she wants him. The more the human recedes, the more she wants to seek it out. While at the office, she pictures him lying coiled on the sofa, as he often does now: an awkward attempt at a cat’s pose. It’s irritated her—the way he has to use his hands to pull his legs closer to his chest, how he strains to get his head and shoulders around his knees—but now she imagines putting her hand right in the center of that coil, making him unfurl and sit up, more human-like, so that she can straddle his lap. And then, while she’s on top of him, she’ll see something change in his eyes, a little flicker of the less cat-like Roger, and this will be a thread she can pull until he’s back to the way he was.
She comes home in the evening to find him curled just like she pictured—even the same side of the sofa, beneath the window. She crosses the room, reaches her hand for the center of his imperfect circle, and just as her fingers graze his shirt and the soft hair on his arms, he leaps up and hisses. Grace stumbles back and hugs her hand. When she looks up at him, the apology on his face makes her stomach turn.
“We can’t,” he says, “not anymore.” Their intimacy is a mental block in his process of transformation. “At a certain point,” he adds, “well, it’s not really appropriate, is it?”
Grace’s face flushes. “So what, now I’m just supposed to act like you’re my pet cat? For the rest of our lives?”
“You knew this would happen,” he says.
Did she? She’s hoped it wouldn’t get to this point. That he’d change his mind. That at least this wouldn’t come so soon.
“It’s not the rest of your life,” he says. “It’s the rest of mine. The length of a cat’s life, not a human’s.” This does not make Grace feel better—quite the opposite.
The next morning, Grace again pulls her guitar from its case, again plays a sweet and mournful tune, but this time, Roger sings along in chilling, groaning meows.
“Don’t,” she says, but Roger meows again.
Grace plays music less and starts reading more— long and intricate nineteenth-century novels in which everything goes wrong but all ends well for the romantic protagonists.
In June, Roger gives up human food, and Grace goes to the pet store. She picks up stainless steel bowls for food and water, and selects the most expensive cat food, cans with pleasing graphic design that claim to be filled with ethical seafood and quality meat from free-range animals. At the register the cashier holds up the bowls and asks, “New kitty?” Grace fiddles with her credit card.
That night, Grace fills Roger’s bowls and sets them on the table, but he says, “No, feed me on the floor.” He crouches over his food bowl, awkwardly because he’s not yet quadrupedal. As he eats, he forces a smile and says, “Delicious.”
Roger speaks less and less, limiting communication to the necessary. He stops wearing clothing, as it no longer fits his changing form. He becomes smaller and smaller and when he is three feet tall, he starts walking on all fours. At first this is awkward but, as time passes, his limbs even out, and soon he can’t walk on two legs at all. His ears grow to points and creep up the side of his head. His face alters. Grace shrieks when she comes upon him unprepared.
One day, she can’t recall the last time she heard him speak.
“Roger?” she says.
He stares but doesn’t respond.
“Can you speak, Roger?”
He answers back a nearly silent meow.
He starts to avoid her, slinking around rooms and dashing under beds, then suddenly showering her with affection. He rubs his strange body against her legs.
One day, the doorbell rings and Grace answers it, believing Roger to be hidden away in another room. But as the deliveryman hands over a package, she feels movement around her ankles. Her heart stops. Roger slinks in front of her, whisking his tail and sniffing at the man’s boots. The man reaches down and pats Roger’s head. “Now that,” he says, “is a friendly cat. My girlfriend’s cat looks just like him, but that thing—” He makes a quick movement with his hands, miming a cat dashing away.
When the door shuts, Grace picks Roger up by the midsection and stares into his face. He blinks. She examines him all over, looking for some sign of the former Roger. He wriggles and claws her arm, drawing a bead of blood. She sets him down, and he walks away, tail in the air and proudly swishing.
*
Spring comes again. Grace does all she can to make Roger happy, buying him jingling toys and catnip and a towering cat condo that overwhelms the living room. He seems content, but it’s hard to tell. He spends most of his time on the windowsill, looking out with what could be casual interest but that Grace worries might be tinged with longing. She considers looking among Roger’s old things for the key to the rolltop desk. She could train herself to read his transformation book. There might be a way to change him back. But Grace doesn’t try. He’s gotten what he wanted.
Much is going well in Grace’s life: she’s been promoted again at her job, and she’s started a flirtatious text conversation with a friend from the music venue she used to work at. One night, she meets this man for drinks, and then she takes him home with her. When they enter the apartment, Roger is sitting in front of the door, as if he’s been waiting. “Oh,” says the man, “is this your cat?” He reaches out a hand, but Roger springs away, disappearing somewhere behind the cat condo.
Grace sits on the sofa with the man. He kisses her. As his hands run over her body, Grace finds herself thinking about how Roger is hiding somewhere in the room. She stands and pulls the man into her bedroom, where they lie on the bed and undress each other down to their underwear. He moves on top of her and kisses her cheeks, her neck, pulls down her bra straps, but Grace feels wrong and it’s hard for her to breathe. She tries to shift out from under him. She feels trapped. He removes her underwear. Once they’re fucking, it’s not so bad. Grace even feels a bit of pleasure.
In the morning, after the man leaves, Grace cries. Roger rubs against her legs, then hops to her lap. Her hand moves automatically to stroke his back. Through one of the mind’s invisible portals, she finds herself back cat-sitting: those five days she spent listening to the purr of a long-haired cat. The woman’s apartment was so tidy and quiet and comfortable. And Grace talked to Toughy about everything: her dreams of becoming a musician, of meeting someone and falling in love. Things so earnest and so longed for that she’d not been bold enough to tell anyone else. The animal fixed her with a steady gaze, non-judgmental, like a compassionate listener.
Then the woman returned, and Grace went back to her own apartment, with the broken lock, the flooding toilet, the angry roommates, the rent she couldn’t pay.
Once, a few weeks later, Grace went out of her way to walk by the woman’s apartment. The fourth-floor window shone cheerily in the dark night. Little was visible from below: a framed photograph on a beige wall. How Grace longed to be up there. Standing alone on the sidewalk, she was hungry—food smells wafted out of restaurants she couldn’t afford. A passerby bumped her shoulder. She cast one last look up at the window, and Toughy hopped into view—silhouetted—and flicked his tail.
Yes, Grace thinks now, her life is so much better now than it was then. She has a nice apartment of her own, a decent job. She even has her own cat.
But does any of that matter? Her guitar remains locked away, this isn’t the life she hoped for, and she can’t stop missing Roger—Roger as he once was. A quote from a novel comes to mind, something about women loving longest after all hope is gone. But the writer was thinking of different circumstances; it’s ridiculous to apply such an idea to her situation. Grace decides she’s happy. She must be. She strokes Roger’s head, the softness of his fur. He stretches his paws out over her lap and purrs.
