Bono

Chapter Seventeen

TEARING MY HAIR OUT

Cats are people, too.

Bono still looked like a famine victim. His coat was duller than ever. I worried his health was failing under our haphazard care. I’d been hoping he’d soon be in the arms of his caregivers at Bideawee in the next day or so. Jon and his helpers were far more capable of ministering the medication he needed. But Lydia had put an end to all that. If Bono was to survive with me, I’d need a new, workable regime.

I rang the shelter. A woman answered the phone.

“Is Jon there?”

“I’m sorry, he’s out today. Can I help you?”

Out? How could a cat whisperer take a vacation?

“It’s Bono,” I said. “The little black cat with the . . .”

“We all know Bono,” she said with a smile in her voice.

There was a shuffling sound under my bed. Bono was listening to every word.

“Well, I’m worried about him. He refuses to take a pill. I’ve tried everything.”

“Is he drinking?” she asked.

“Yes. But he hasn’t done number two. And he’s so skinny.”

I waited for the nice woman to tell me to return him immediately.

“He’s always been a fussy eater,” she said. “There’s medication in the canned food we gave you.”

“He doesn’t like that much, either.”

“Is he eating any of it?” she asked.

“A little, now and then.”

“Well, that should be enough to keep him stable.”

“What about the chicken?”

“If he doesn’t like that anymore, you could try fresh fish.”

I remembered Olivia once telling me wild cats demand more variety in their diets than domestic felines. If a street cat has a slice of rat fillet here, a chomp of cockroach there, he’s likely getting all the nutrients he needs. A kitchen cat, by comparison, may have all her nutritional requirements met in a single can (or pile of dried food). I wondered if Bono’s pickiness was more to do with his homeless days than his illness.

“When will Jon be back?” I asked.

“In a couple of days. Meantime, just relax and enjoy Bono. He’s a great little cat.”

Relax? With sole responsibility for a seriously ill cat?

* * *

Lydia would be with me for just two more days. I decided it was time to drag her to my personal mecca—Broadway. I wanted her to love musicals as much as I did. When I was growing up in small town New Zealand, musicals were my religion. I soaked up amateur productions of South Pacific and The King and I along with the milk from our local dairy farms. To me, Rodgers and Hammerstein were philosophers who understood everything about love, life, and death. In Oklahoma! they even showed they knew what it was like to live in a tiny community on the edge of the Earth. I adored musicals because they affirmed that all a spirited girl had to do was fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

To visit the birthplace of these works and walk the same streets as Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews, and Hugh Jackman was living the dream.

“Just think,” I said, slipping my arm through hers. “We’re breathing the same air as Sondheim!”

I might as well have said we’d be having toast for breakfast. It was an odd reversal of our roles when I visited her in her Sri Lankan monastery. Perhaps this was karmic payback for not understanding the thrill of meditating for twelve hours in 100 percent humidity inside a sweltering temple frequented by scorpions.

Sitting inside the Eugene O’Neill Theatre waiting for the curtain to rise on The Book of Mormon, my excitement was, I think, almost too much for her. Perhaps she was uncomfortable with the musical’s theme of young, naive white people inflicting their religion on African villagers. But even she laughed out loud in the opening act when an actor dragged a dead donkey across the stage. No doubt it resonated with her experiences in the third world.

However, while I loved everything about The Book of Mormon, Lydia seemed to merely tolerate it. How she had missed out on the family musical theater gene remains a mystery. Her grandmother had starred as Katisha in three (admittedly amateur) productions of The Mikado. I couldn’t believe there was not a hint of greasepaint in Lydia’s veins. I guess some people just cannot get the hang of actors erupting into song every five minutes.

“Didn’t you love it?!” I asked as we made our way out of the theater.

Her answer was short and muffled. It sounded like “quite”.

On our way back to the apartment, she pointed out a poster for a play by Norah Ephron also running on Broadway. Lucky Guy was Ephron’s last play. Starring Tom Hanks, it was about a newspaper columnist living in New York in the 1980s. I wanted her last night to be one to remember. If I couldn’t change her mind about musicals, I thought she might at least enjoy a play. Miraculously, seats were still available. I booked two for tomorrow, her last night in town.

Bono was in his usual position under the bed when we opened the door to the apartment. A resident rat would have been friendlier.

While she was in the shower, I opened my laptop. After a few watery bleeps, Philip appeared on the screen. He was sitting in front of the fire with a blanket and Jonah draped over his knee.

“What have you been up to?” he asked.

“Not much. We’ve just been to The Book of Mormon. It was fantastic. You’d love it. And we went shopping. Lydia bought this fabulous handbag and . . .” I needed to play down how much fun we’d been having. “How’s work?”

“Hectic as usual. We had to let someone go.”

I knew how much he hated doing that. Through the years, I’d learned the corporate world is a shark tank, eat or be eaten.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

He looked older than I remembered. I was older too, of course, but only on the outside. Jonah blinked at me and yawned.

“It’s freezing here,” he said. “We’ve got to sort the heating out before winter.”

I’d forgotten how our house was an oven in the summer and a refrigerator by the time autumn came along. It didn’t seem fair to tell him about daffodils in Central Park, and the thermometer climbing by the day.

“How’s that cat?” he asked.

“Bono? He’s a handful. How’s our boy?”

“He’s been licking his fur too much. He’s almost bald down one leg. See?”

Philip held up Jonah’s front leg to show me a pale strip down the side of it. Jonah flicked me a pitiful look.

“Has that gray cat been bullying him again? Are you remembering his pill?” I asked.

“The vet thinks it’s separation anxiety. She says to give him as much attention as I can.”

“Really?” I said, swallowing hard. Poor Jonah. To be honest, with all the worry about Bono, I’d hardly thought of him. Still, Jonah was in good hands.

“Where do we keep the sheets?” he asked.

“In the laundry cupboard.”

“They’re all too small for our bed.”

“Just sort through them,” I said. “Try the green ones.”

I was almost relieved after they melted into the dark screen. I wasn’t about to hurry home to go on a sheet safari. Still, I felt guilty about Jonah. Since the cancer episode, I’d made a point of saying yes to life. But that Skype session had left me feeling more than a little selfish.

I wondered if showing me Jonah’s leg had been Philip’s way of telling me he needed me, too. If he hadn’t mentioned the sheets, I might have been tempted to fly home.

On the other hand, there was so much I’d missed out on through four decades of mothering. I’d spent the last years of my childhood in the 1970s giving birth and raising two small boys, Sam and Rob. The 1980s were consumed with grief after Sam’s death, followed by the joy of Lydia’s birth. The 1990s were about remarriage and giving birth again, this time to Katharine. Through all those phases, I never stopped working, writing for newspapers, magazines, and television. Occasionally, it seemed things had not really happened until I’d made sense of them on paper, and later a computer screen. If I could not find out who I was and complete myself now, in my late fifties, when would I?

Back in Melbourne, all the days seemed the same. Weeks drifted into years. In New York, every moment was etched with intensity. Lying under the purple curtains each night, I would brim with childish excitement for the next day.

Much as I loved Philip, I wasn’t sure I could ever shrink myself down to fit into our old routine in front of the fire again. My parents had spent their sunset years like that, and Mum became bitter about the compromises she’d made. She’d practically died with a tea tray in her hands. I did not know how I wanted to end up, but it was not like that.

After you’ve fallen in love and burst into song a few times, the business of real life begins. There are not many musicals about childbirth, trash nights, and whose turn it is to do the dishes. It’s a shame Rodgers and Hammerstein never wrote about that part.

Once Lydia had returned to Australia, nobody would care if I hummed along with the cast at musicals or made an idiot of myself pretending to be a native New Yorker. Of course, I’d honor my promise to look after Bono a while longer and start the blog. But even if a thousand people read it, he was bound to end up back at Bideawee. Once that happened I’d no longer need to fret over anyone’s emotional development or if they’d done number two.

Like a glorious Persian rug, a life of limitless possibilities lay before me.