Bono

Chapter Twenty-four

EMOTIONAL ACCOUNTANCY

To love a cat is to love life itself.

“Looks like you’ve got a fan club, Bono,” I said.

The cat blinked up at me from his favorite black and white polka dot pillow and mewed. He had always pretended to be deaf when I used his name.

“So, you know your name, after all?” I said closing the laptop. “Hungry?”

My roommate bounced after me as I walked to the fridge. He moved with such grace, he seemed to be surfing on a cloud.

“Have you ever considered a career in modeling?” I asked. “You could have your very own catwalk.”

Bono padded across the floorboards and flipped his back leg up in the trademark arabesque. It was good to live with a feline who appreciated my sense of humor.

He lowered his haunches in front of the fridge door and fixed the handle with an expectant gaze.

“What does Monsieur feel like today? A little fish? A slice of chicken, perhaps?”

Bono gave me a sharp meow. As I spooned the chicken into his bowl, he emitted an appreciative purr.

“Such a well-mannered cat,” I said, running my hand over his back. I was gratified to feel the beginnings of a layer of fat under the wiry fur. My famine victim was filling out.

After a quick stop off at the litter box, Bono trotted toward me and pounced on my shoelace. I pulled out Lydia’s fishing rod and we wasted a good ten minutes behaving like fools.

He had a lot of energy for a sick cat, but after a while he retreated to his pillow, purring to himself all the way. It was sweet and musical, the sound Mozart would have made if he’d been a cat.

I’d noticed Bono’s purring was becoming louder and more frequent these days. As he puttered about the studio, the little cat could hardly stop humming to himself. It was as if he couldn’t believe his luck to be in a place where he was fussed over and fed. And yes, now I had to admit it, loved.

I hadn’t meant to fall in love with Bono, and now I was beginning to understand why I’d fought so hard not to. Since the cancer, I’d shut myself off from the possibility of loving new things. To love is inevitably to lose, and I wasn’t sure I could take any more pain. But Bono was teaching me the whole point of being alive is to remain open to the possibility of love. No matter how much physical and emotional hurt a person has endured, the heart must stay open. It’s the whole point of being alive. The alternative is bitterness, isolation, a living death.

A city takes on a different hue when there’s love in it. Faces on the street seem softer. The spring breeze is more like a kiss than a knife. Sunset over the skyscrapers gleams as pink as a schoolgirl’s lunch box.

The problem with love is sooner or later the heart receives an invoice. Bono was such a demonstrative little fellow, returning him to life in a cage was now out of the question. Which left me two options: (1) Find him adoptive parents through the blog or (2) Failing that, arrange for him to be shipped to Australia in the hope he and Jonah wouldn’t scratch each other’s eyes out.

The more I investigated option two, the less likely it seemed. Exporting a healthy cat is complicated enough. Even if Bono passed the vet’s check, subjecting him to quarantine and harrowing flights could be more than his delicate system could endure. For the moment, I couldn’t even think about going back to my old life anyway.

There was an option three. But I needed to talk that one over with Philip. Wild and potentially dangerous, option three involved me staying on in New York, adopting Bono, and hoping my husband and Jonah would follow. Option three would need to be presented to Philip with a great deal of tact and strategic thinking—two things I’m hardly famous for.

Anyway, I didn’t need to worry about options two and three because a woman called Angie had fallen in love with him through the Huffington Post blog. I phoned Vida with the exciting news.

“Angie wants to adopt him!”

“That’s wonderful!” Vida squealed. “I’m so happy. What part of New York does she live in?”

I scrolled down through Angie’s email.

“Berlin. Germany. Do you think that’s a problem?”

“Not if she really wants him,” Vida said. “I’ve had friends take cats all over the world. I’ll look into it for you.”

“Hang on. She’s written a postscript. Though I would love to adopt Bono immediately, I’m afraid my husband is allergic to cats.”

“Oh,” Vida said. “Maybe Bono will have to keep looking.”

After a while, the charm of the thirty or so people with feline allergic partners started to wear thin. Why did they bother contacting me if adoption was out of the question? A Florida man wanted to fly up to meet Bono. I wasn’t upset when his enthusiasm waned. He resembled one of those silver-haired Facebook suitors who posts self-portraits proclaiming he’s “single and looking for fun.”

It was as I’d always suspected. To “Like” a cat photo and ooze adjectives online is easy. To show up and take a breathing, vulnerable life in your hands, however, that’s a kitten of a different color.

After the second blog post went up and a new tide of Bono worshippers washed in from all over the world, I pinned hopes on Lucy from Brooklyn. She seemed a sensible young woman with a genuine love of animals. She adored Bono’s looks, especially his haircut. More important, she wasn’t daunted by his prognosis.

On the afternoon she planned to visit, I hurried out to the flower shop and bought acres of red and yellow tulips. As I carried them past Patrick’s door, it burst open.

“She’s dead!” he shouted jubilantly.

I froze and almost dropped the flowers. Though I was aware Patrick was probably borderline eccentric, I hadn’t put him in the murderer category. Remembering my journalistic days, I drew a breath, adopted a calm tone, and asked the name of the deceased.

“Maggie Thatcher!” he said, his eyes swiveling wildly behind his glasses.

“You mean the woman who used to be the British prime minister?” I asked, immensely relieved he wouldn’t be asking to borrow towels and help him hoist an oversized trash bag down the garbage chute.

“Good riddance, I say. We hated her in Ireland.” he said, beckoning me into his lair. “This calls for a whiskey.”

Though I didn’t love Margaret Thatcher when she was in power, I wasn’t eager to dance on her grave—or anyone else’s for that matter. Besides, hard as I’ve tried, I’ve never managed to appreciate the subtleties of whiskey.

Patrick must have sensed I was finding his vehemence perturbing.

“Been poaching in Central Park, have we now?” he asked, softening his tone and casting his gaze over my tulips.

I told him the wake would have to wait for another day on account of my visitor. I regretted saying the word the moment it left my lips.

“And what sort of a visitor would that be?” he asked, folding his arms and leaning against his doorframe as if he had all afternoon, which he undoubtedly did.

A friend of a friend, I said. Not in the publishing world, so nobody he’d know.

Patrick made a point of reminding me I owed him a book, and perhaps I could bring it down for afternoon tea tomorrow around three. I nodded and hurried upstairs to prepare the apartment for our important guest.

Bono greeted me at the door and bounced toward me with his tail aloft.

“This is the beginning of your new life,” I said, sinking the tulips into vases.

Before long, the place resembled a house and garden show. Sensing something was up, Bono even let me brush the end of his tail.

The cat stretched out like a movie star on the window ledge while I played Scrabble on my iPad and drank too much coffee. The light softened to shades of lilac as the outlines of office workers in the other building packed up their desks and left for the day.

An hour later, I sent Lucy a text, but there was no reply. As hope faded to disappointment, I wasn’t angry with her. She hadn’t meant to let us down. This experience was probably just a piece of flint she’d tripped over on her road to maturity. Perhaps now she understood the gulf between meaning well and doing something can be as deep as the Grand Canyon.