Before the shades of Raymond Chandler and Chuck Jones haul me off to Writer Hell for perpetrating this piece, I'd like to point out that the LiveJournal user known as fmanalyst proposed I take Mr. Cat as a subject and those known as haleysings and mangakachan egged me on. If there's any justice in the cosmos, we'll all roast together for this.
The story is dedicated to the above-mentioned persons.
It was a quiet café in the basement of an old hotel on the Strandgasse with the down-at-heel elegance of an exiled grand duchess. The food was good, but the drinks were better, and a jazz trio played set after set in the corner, rolling out standards as if they were new. It was the kind of place to which a beleaguered ballet teacher with memories of finer things could retreat on a Friday night -- a place where he could knock himself in the head with a Velvet Hammer and forget his troubles until closing time.
Except tonight it wasn't working.
He swirled the liquor in his glass, whiskers twitching. Maybe it was the day he'd had, or the month he'd had ... or the life he'd had: all those years chasing the soap bubble of fame, only to have it burst the moment he put a claw on it. He'd taken the job at the Academy after the touring company into which he'd sunk his skills and his savings had gone belly-up for lack of bookings, but he hadn't expected to rusticate there indefinitely. Since his first day as an assistant he'd been scouting the girls for a partner, someone with whom he could share both the stage and his life, someone with the grace of a Taglioni, the fire of an Elssler, the lyric perfection of a Karsavina ...
He drew his claws along the bar, oblivious to both the screech that set nearby patrons wincing and the damage the bartender noted complacently on his tab. Grace? Fire? Wit? Ha! Instead, Terpsichore saw fit to send him students with the dexterity of ducks, the sensibility of crocodiles and the originality of -- of -- (he hastily suppressed the memory of a homemade faun suit) of anteaters. Their incessant, distracted chatter during lessons was enough to drive any dedicated teacher to drink -- never mind one who also found himself driven to threatening marriage rather than proposing it. What was wrong with the little rats? What was wrong with the rest of the fair sex that he was reduced to such straits, father-henning a brood of unfledged chicks in the as-yet-unfulfilled hope that one, just one of them wouldn't spread her wings and fly south with the cock next door?
It was galling. Incredible. Insupportable.
"I'm swearing off women, Michigan," he said to the frog behind the bar.
"You, Mr. Cat?" the bartender responded, his voice as fruity as hard cider. "You?"
"Yes, me. I'm tired of embarrassing myself on back fences. I'm through picking up the tab at Ebine's for some minx who 'just wants to be friends.' What's the point? No one understands love anymore -- no one." He glowered at his reflection in the glossy black countertop. "And they all assume I'm a queen, anyway."
"You're a tom to your toes, Mr. Cat," the frog replied placidly. He pulled a spotless old-fashioned glass from beneath the bar and began polishing it. "Any woman who can't see that isn't worth your time."
The saxophone wailed its way through the chorus of "Summertime," then handed off the lead to the piano. Holding the old-fashioned up to the light, the bartender nodded; a waiter materialized to carry it and two fingers of Scotch away. Shortly thereafter, the reedsman threw himself back into the music with renewed energy. Subdued applause greeted his next stroll, an eighteen-carat tour de force. The frog checked the level of Scotch in the bottle and expanded with quiet satisfaction.
The cat raised his own cocktail to the band as they spiraled into improvisations, then downed another swallow of triple sec and crème de cacao. "But how do you make them see, Michigan?" he asked plaintively, unable to let the subject drop. "I'm not as rich or handsome as some fellows, I'll grant you, but what beats here -- " he clapped a paw to his breast, his voice rising -- "surely that's a treasure beyond price. 'Our life without love is coke and ashes' -- don't they realize that?"
His last words rang out over the music like a clarion. As one, the café's patrons turned to stare at him; he gave them all a strained smile and slumped back on his stool. The band played on without missing a beat.
"A great mystery, women," agreed the frog as he took his cloth to a second spotless glass. "Can't say I've plumbed it myself, either."
This, from someone paying spawn support to at least three different ladies in Goldkrone, smacked of hypocrisy. The cat's nose quivered; he eyeballed the frog for signs that he was being mocked, but the bartender had a deadpan that Manet would have been hard put to reproduce. Acknowledging defeat, the cat lifted his cocktail and drained it. "I'm just saying there's no call for them to write me off," he grumbled. "I'm still a young man, you know. I've got prospects," he added, then paused, trying to remember what they were.
"Of course," the frog prompted. "The theater never forgets one of its own."
"That's right!" he replied, leaping on the suggestion as if it were a mouse about to vanish under the wainscoting. "The great Mijinsky himself -- "
But at that point he caught the shift in the frog's stance, the subtle tensing of muscles as the bartender braced himself, and realized that he wasn't quite drunk enough to relate a story his auditor had already heard once or twice before. Or thrice. Or ... He rolled the stem of his cocktail glass between his palms, his back fur hackling in sudden panic. Oh, God, had it come to this? Had he turned into one of those has-beens endlessly telling over past glories? Someone whose non-stop, self-involved prattle was to be endured for the sake of a substantial tip ... or a good meal and a night out on the town?
"It isn't them after all, is it, Michigan?" he said, carefully setting the glass on the paper napkin before him. "It's me."
"Now, Mr. Cat," the frog began soothingly.
The cat held up a paw. "Don't spare me," he said. "The truth, Michigan, the truth: I've taken my last curtain call and they know it." The little minxes. But who could blame the artist or the woman who chose not to hitch her wagon to a falling star? He himself had always refused to settle, to take pity on one of the desperate souls who courted his attention, rolling down hallways and throwing themselves in his path. The heart of marriage, like the heart of ballet, was a dialogue of love, and if one partner were dumb ... But somehow he had lost the thread of the conversation anyway. "I'm a fool," he muttered.
"Now, Mr. Cat," the bartender repeated more forcefully, shelving the old-fashioned with its fellows and splaying his fingers on the edge of the bar, "don't you think -- ?"
The cat waved away his embryonic reassurances. "Let's face it: I'm a failure in life ... in love ... in m-m-marriage ... " He wiped the sweat from his brow with a trembling paw and licked it clean, then shoved his empty glass across the bar. "Hit me again."
The frog blinked at him slowly. "Don't you think you've had enough for one night?" he asked, whisking the glass out of sight.
He gave the little amphibian a smile with more than a hint of fang in it. The bartender shrugged and mixed him another, straining the cocktail deftly from the shaker. "It's your funeral," he said as he hopped off to answer another call.
Ballet's like that, the cat reflected, running a pad around the mouth of his glass. The scenarios that didn't end with a wedding ended with a funeral -- a swell of celli and low brass, a final pas seul and a corpse draped elegantly across the bier upstage. Maybe he'd mistaken his role all these years -- not Desiré, but James, pursuing a dream of love that vanished as he clutched it. Coke and ashes, coke and ashes.
He lapped desultorily at his drink and put it aside half-finished. Even the grenadine tasted off now, as bitter as Persephone's fatal snack. Perhaps it was time to go looking for Lethe in cold water rather than alcohol. The river ran swift and deep past the Academy ...
Then the street door opened behind him and Love walked in.
She was a tabby -- a tabby who'd've had even Farinelli singing bass under her window. Her tail flirted back and forth with the arresting fascination of a feather on a string as she followed the maître d' to an empty table next to the piano. She leaned over and spoke briefly to the penguin at the ivories, who turned to his colleagues and launched them into a plaintive rendition of "Autumn Leaves." The tabby listened, head cocked to one side, green eyes half-closed.
What the hell. He hadn't trod the boards all these years to miss a cue that obvious. He signaled to the bartender. "Michigan," he said, "send the lady a Grasshopper, with my compliments."
He monitored the drink's progress from the frog's grasp to the tabby's in the mirror behind the bar. Her ears pricked as the young waiter presented the glass, but she made no other sign of surprise or interest; she didn't even look over when the salamander flourished a foreleg in his direction. The bartender grunted and the cat stifled a grin: that boy would find himself a limb short soon if he couldn't contain himself around a pretty girl. The frog preferred his waiters to be waiters, not actors or musicians, but such jewels were as rare in Goldkrone as in any other city the Muses blessed.
Once the rough diamond had scuttled off, the tabby sipped the mint-and-cream cocktail, her ears relaxing back against her skull. Every now and then her pink tongue flickered into view to catch an vagrant drop of liquor before it could migrate out along her whiskers. He left her to it until the band segued into "Ain't Misbehavin'." Then he rose, collecting his own drink in his left paw, and sailed across the gently tilting floor without making heavy weather of it between the tables. He was, after all, a cat as well as a danseur: it would take more than a few Hammer-blows to capsize him. Though your eyes might do it, my dear ... Fortunately, they did not lift to meet his until he had discreetly anchored himself to the chair opposite hers, sinking his right foreclaws into the soft wood of its crest rail.
"Good evening," he said. "Mind if I get drunk with you?"
She surveyed him from top to toe, weighing him as efficiently as a butcher with a quick thumb. "Mmm," she answered then, a noncommittal noise that nevertheless set his own purr box vibrating in response.
Casting his fate to the wind, he slid smoothly into the chair and saluted her. She inclined her head and watched him from behind lashes as long and dark as the fringe of a Moorish curtain as the rim of her glass kissed his. Wagner elbowed Waller away from the piano for a measure or three ... or perhaps that was only the wedding bells ringing in his ears. Either way, he thought, savoring the cream as it spread over his tongue, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Author's Note: What, you think there's any way I can explain this? The Velvet Hammer and the Grasshopper are both milk-based cocktails. Grenadine is made from pomegranates; Persephone, ignoring the cardinal rule of underworld journeying, noshed on some pomegranate seeds and found herself bound to Hades for half the year. Marie Taglioni, Fanny Elssler and Tamara Karsavina were famous ballerinas -- Karsavina was a frequent partner of Mr. Cat's hero Mijinsky (i.e. Nijinsky). The ballet students of the Paris Opéra have endured the nickname les petits rats for time out of mind. A "stroll" in jazz is a passage in which the piano drops out. "Our life without love is coke and ashes" is not a drink recipe but a line from Henry David Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (although, since you can order a Tequila Mockingbird, I have little doubt that somebody somewhere has concocted a Coke and Ashes). The lines "A pas de deux is a dialogue of love. How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb?" are attributed to Rudolf Nureyev, and André Soltner is responsible for the remark: "When you find a waiter who is a waiter and not an actor, writer, musician or poet, you've found a jewel." Desiré is the male lead in Sleeping Beauty and James in La Sylphide. Farinelli -- born Carlo Broschi -- was one of the most famous singers of the eighteenth century. If you have to ask how he was "prepared for the career of a soprano," you do NOT need to know. No points for identifying the Casablanca reference (suggested by the incomparable Professor Suzanne Deschênes), but anyone who catches the ones from Ladyhawke and Red Dust can collect his or her five pounds from the prize office.