THEM!, page 2
In addition to the mothballs and insecticides we’d already acquired, we purchased—on the advice of several online posters who’d also dealt with moths—a slew of moth traps, which were triangular cardboard tents with sticky interiors that operated on the same premise as Roach Motels: They enticed the moths inside with a moth-attracting scent (undetectable to the human nose) and then held them fast.
We placed the moth traps atop our tallest bookcases and highest shelves—higher, we thought, than even Fanny was able to go. Clearly, however, we had underestimated the zealousness of Fanny, our little huntress, in her pursuit of airborne quarry.
Laurence and I were downstairs on the living room couch watching a movie when we first realized something was wrong. Ever the film buff, Laurence had curated a collection of giant-bug movies from the ’50s for us to watch during this, our time of insect affliction. With a new appreciation, we rediscovered (or, in my case, discovered for the first time) such noteworthy entries in the subgenre as The Deadly Mantis, Earth vs. the Spider, Tarantula!, The Wasp Woman, and, of course, the classic Them!, which was about a swarm of giant, irradiated ants that sprang up in the New Mexico desert, near the nuclear test sites.
Clayton was sound asleep on my lap, so when we first heard the rapid-fire thudding of feline paws on the floor above our heads, we assumed it was, as we call it in our house, a “Fanny Frenzy”—which is when Fanny goes to town on Rosie the Rat (her favorite plaything), swatting and tossing the toy from one bedroom to the other in a burst of hyperactivity. But then we heard the clatter and thump of unknown objects flying from their perches, and the crash of a bedside lamp hitting the floor. Those noises weren’t at all typical of a Fanny Frenzy. Swiftly dislodging a thoroughly unhappy Clayton, I leapt from the couch and ran upstairs to see what was going on.
The sight that greeted me as I entered our bedroom looked like a crime scene. The pillows on the bed and the pictures on the walls were all askew. Everything that had once been on top of a piece of furniture now lay in a heap below it—books had been swept from the bookcase and were lying open and bent upside down with their pages wadded up; pens and earrings had been tossed from the top of the dresser onto the floor; the lamp, clock radio, and tissue box that customarily resided on the night table were lying at odd angles on the ground. In the midst of all this chaos, Fanny was crouched on the floor. Her pupils were so dilated with fright that her golden eyes appeared black.
Glued firmly to the end of her long, long tail was one of our tented moth traps. Unable to detach it, she’d obviously tried to outrun it instead—alas, to no avail.
“It’s okay, Fanny.” I deliberately made my voice low-pitched and calm as I walked slowly toward her, not wanting to alarm her further. “It’s okay, baby girl. Let mommy help you.”
Laurence came up the stairs behind me just in time to see Fanny turn her all-pupil eyes briefly in my direction (Don’t come any closer! I REMEMBER THE STICKER!) before darting under the bed, the triangular moth trap still stuck to her tail skipping merrily across the floor behind her. In vain, Laurence and I knelt on opposite sides of the king-size bed and then lay down on our sides, trying to get to Fanny so we could pull her out. But neither of us had arms long enough to reach the spot in the middle where she’d curled herself into the tightest ball she could manage. The only way reaching her might have been possible would have been if Laurence lifted the bed, and it seemed unwise to risk adding the complications of a back injury to the problem we already had.
So, for the moment at least, Fanny had us at a stalemate. “She’ll have to come out eventually,” I finally said with a sigh. Bending down, I picked up the lamp and clock radio and restored them to their appointed spots on the night table. “And she’ll probably be calmer when she does.”
Fanny had bolted under the bed at around one o’clock in the afternoon, and it was nearly midnight before she finally reemerged. She’d missed both her lunch and dinner—although I’d done my best to tempt her out of hiding, carrying the cans up two flights from the kitchen to the bedroom, just so I could open them next to the bed. In my experience, the sound of a can opening and the rattling of a treats bag are the two sounds likeliest to summon even the scaredy-est cat. Accordingly, I’d also gone up periodically to shake the bag of Greenies in the hallway just outside the bedroom. But Fanny had remained unmoved by either of these lures.
Some calls of nature, however, are harder to resist than others, and I think Fanny was heading for the litter box, some eleven hours later, when she finally crept down the stairs. But the sound of the moth trap dragging behind her, thumping against each step as she descended, sent her into another, quite literal, tailspin.
Fortunately for us, though, this time Fanny didn’t head up and back toward the bed. Instead, she flew down the remaining stairs and began running in desperate circles around the living room. Up and over the couch, across the coffee table, onto the mantelpiece, then back down to the floor—the triangular trap on her tale a whirling mace that sent throw pillows, coasters, coffee-table books, and framed photographs into brief, dizzying flights before they crashed to the ground. Laurence and I threw up our hands to protect our faces from any flying shards of glass from the picture frames, only lowering them once Fanny was safely earthbound again among the wreckage as her spinning continued.
Clayton, clearly laboring under the misapprehension that Fanny had invented some fascinating new game (We’re running in pointless circles! Wheeeeeeeee!) hippity-hopped after her, working desperately hard to keep up and make sure he didn’t miss out on any of the “fun.” I don’t know if Fanny thought that Clayton was chasing her, or if his presence simply egged her on, but the harder he pursued, the faster she ran. The moth trap still attached to Fanny’s tail bounced gaily between them, like a child’s pull-toy.
I knew that Fanny’s inevitable next move—once the futility of running in circles had fully revealed itself to her—would be to try to get back upstairs and under the bed. Accordingly, I stationed myself in front of the staircase and hunkered down like the catcher in a baseball game. Soon enough, Fanny came winging toward me. Upon seeing me waiting for her, she tried to make a last-minute swerve beyond the reach of my arms. But this time I was quicker than she was and—at last!—I scooped her up in my arms.
Shooing Clayton away with one foot, I cradled Fanny against my chest for a moment, both hands supporting her from beneath as I pressed my cheek against the top of her head and tried to slow the anxious pounding of her heart with the calmer rhythm of my own. “I’ve got you, Fanny,” I murmured. “I’ve got you, little girl. It’s all going to be okay.”
Gesturing Laurence toward the middle of the living-room rug, I carried Fanny over and sank slowly into a cross-legged position. Holding Fanny out at both arms’ length for a moment—the moth trap now dangling limply from her tail like a flag that’s lost its wind—I turned Fanny around and pressed her against my side, so that my hands were still supporting her beneath her chest and hindquarters, her head was wedged firmly beneath my elbow, and her backside with the sagging moth trap was facing toward Laurence, who was now seated across from me.
“I’m going to kind of squish her against my side, so that she feels a little safer and doesn’t see what’s coming,” I told Laurence. “And you are going to rip that wretched moth trap right off her tail.”
Laurence, his eyes passing over Fanny as she continued to squirm, looked dubious. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
“It’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Ready?” I pressed Fanny a bit more tightly against my side.
Laurence grasped the end of Fanny’s tail and, with agonizing slowness, began to peel it from the inside of the moth trap, one strand of fur at a time. Fanny struggled in earnest now, one of her hind claws raking through my shirt and into my skin. Although we kept her claws fairly well trimmed, she dug in hard, and I knew it would leave a nasty scratch.
Gritting my teeth against both the pain and Fanny’s tussling, I said to Laurence, “You have to rip it off in one clean shot, like tearing off a Band-Aid.”
“But I don’t want to hurt her,” he repeated.
“She’s hurting me,” I told him. “Just get it off already.”
Laurence’s hold on Fanny’s tail tightened, as did his grip on the moth trap in his other hand. He hesitated for a second and then, with one decisive tear, tail and moth trap were finally separated. I loosened my own grip on Fanny just a little, but that was all she needed to wriggle free. Racing back upstairs, I could hear the sound of her claws skidding across the floor above us as she once again retreated under the bed. I knew we wouldn’t see her again for the rest of the night.
When I examined the moth trap, I found a fuzzy black strip that Fanny’s tail had left behind but, fortunately, no skin and no blood. I, however, hadn’t fared as well. A few dots of blood from the scratch Fanny had given me seeped through my nightshirt. Laurence noted it, too.
“I’ll go get the alcohol,” he said, standing up and helping me to my feet.
“Rubbing or drinking?” I asked, hoping for the latter. And Laurence laughed, replying, “Why not both?”
By breakfast-time the following morning, Fanny and I were friends again. A good night’s sleep and the welcome aroma of food after her unplanned fast the day before (Clayton, it would appear, had eaten Fanny’s food as well as his own when she’d failed to show up for her meals) had done most of the work of restoring the balance between us. After her post-breakfast siesta, Fanny returned to stalking moths through the house. Laurence and I were pleased to note that their numbers were in a definite decline. And the retreat continued even after we disposed of the rest of the moth traps—which, we were forced to admit, hadn’t been nearly as effective a moth deterrent as Fanny was, anyway.
People with black cats are apt to refer to them as “house panthers.” It’s an epithet I’d certainly never apply to my roly-poly Clayton, crazy as I am about him. But in Fanny’s case, the comparison between her and her “big cat” cousins seemed apt: the precise symmetry of her lean muscles beneath her glossy black fur; the flawless grace and balance when she leapt from floor to bookcase; the hypersensitivity of the ears, eyes, and whiskers that didn’t miss a single thing that moved, crept, or flew in the terrain around her.
I realized, watching Fanny prowl through the house with as much unthinking confidence in her own prowess as any panther ever had, that the constant stream of sensory input and physical awareness—which made her such a ruthlessly efficient hunter—were also the root cause of the overload that occasionally made her spook a little too easily.
You couldn’t have separated the one from the other, couldn’t have changed the balance without throwing the entire mechanism off its axis. Without question, Fanny could be a pain in the neck sometimes. But she was our pain in the neck, which was precisely why we loved her as much as we did.
And she was still—as we recognized that laundry and pesticides would take us only so far—one of the best weapons we had in our ongoing assault against the moths.
3. Scene from a Lost Harold Pinter Play
ACT ONE – SCENE ONE
INT. GWEN AND LAURENCE’S THREE-STORY BROWNSTONE IN JERSEY CITY – A SUNNY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
LIGHTS UP ON DOWNSTAGE LEFT: GWEN sitting at a sleek black desk in front of her laptop computer. With one hand on the keyboard, another tapping on the desk, and her eyebrows scrunched as she gazes at the laptop’s screen, she’s obviously deep in thought. CLAYTON, a three-legged black cat, is splayed out on her lap.
LIGHTS UP ON ELEVATED PLATFORM, DOWNSTAGE RIGHT: LAURENCE has just sat down at an old wooden desk in front of a large desktop computer. As he arranges himself on the chair, FANNY, another black cat, eagerly leaps onto his lap and daintily makes herself comfortable. LAURENCE shifts to accommodate her as he turns his head toward the offstage door and shouts to GWEN, who is one floor beneath him.
LAURENCE: Hey! One of the cats threw up in the kitchen!
GWEN: Okay.
LAURENCE: Okay.
GWEN: And . . . ?
LAURENCE: You should clean it before it sinks into the tile and makes a permanent stain.
GWEN: Can’t you clean it? With all the moth mishegas I’m behind on my deadline.
LAURENCE: I thought you’d want to look at it first.
GWEN: Why would I want to look at it first?
LAURENCE: I don’t know . . . I thought you might want to check viscosity and breakdown.
GWEN: What does “viscosity and breakdown” even mean?
LAURENCE: It’s from that old motor oil commercial—remember those commercials?
GWEN [muttering]: You and your old commercials.
LAURENCE: What’d you say?
GWEN: I have to turn in this story to my editor tomorrow. Are you going to clean it or not?
LAURENCE: I really think you should examine it first.
GWEN: They probably just ate too many moths or threw up a hairball or something.
LAURENCE: It doesn’t look like moths or a hairball.
GWEN: How would you know what a hairball looks like? You never clean up their hairballs.
LAURENCE: Because I always think you’ll want to look at it first.
GWEN: Why do you keep saying that? What do you think is so compelling about a puddle of cat vomit that I have to drop everything and race over like it was a flash sale at Barneys?
LAURENCE: What if one of them is sick?
GWEN: Cats throw up sometimes. It’s what they do. I’m sure it’s fine.
LAURENCE: But you don’t know that it’s fine—you don’t even know who threw up.
GWEN: What am I, a cat CSI unit? How am I supposed to know which cat threw up? Was one of them standing near it?
LAURENCE: They were both gone by the time I found it.
GWEN: Found it and left it for me, you mean.
LAURENCE: I can never clean it as well as you can.
GWEN: Oh, come on!
LAURENCE: It’s true! I’m not as good as getting it all up as you are.
GWEN: Well, as my mother used to say, practice makes perfect.
LAURENCE: Did she?
GWEN: She also used to say, God gave you two arms and two legs. Didn’t your mother ever say anything like that?
LAURENCE: Don’t bring my mother into this.
GWEN: I’m sure she’d agree that you’re a full-grown man who’s perfectly capable of cleaning up cat vomit all by himself.
LAURENCE: But I’m on the third floor. You’re so much closer.
GWEN: Wait . . . you’re upstairs? I thought you were still downstairs. How’d you get all the way upstairs?
LAURENCE: I walked on the two legs God gave me.
GWEN: Sarcasm’s definitely your best play right now.
LAURENCE: Why are you asking a question you already know the answer to?
GWEN: So . . . you saw the throw-up on the first floor, decided to leave it for me, walked all the way past me on the second floor without saying a word, and now you’re on the third floor?
LAURENCE: I can make you a sketch of my route, if you’d like.
GWEN: Very cute.
LAURENCE: Well, I’m obviously too far away to do anything about it now.
GWEN: Only because you walked up two whole floors before you said anything!
LAURENCE: What’s done is done. Besides, I thought you’d want to look at first.
GWEN: Stop saying that!
LAURENCE: It’s true!
GWEN: Like I don’t know that this whole you should look at it first routine is just so you can stick me with a gross job.
LAURENCE: My intentions were pure.
GWEN: Pure?!
LAURENCE: Not to mention that Fanny’s already so comfortable on my lap. It would be cruel to disturb her.
GWEN: Don’t use Fanny against me! And anyway, Clayton’s on my lap. So we’re even.
LAURENCE: But I’m up on the third floor. What am I supposed to do about cat throw-up that’s all the way downstairs?
GWEN: It’s too bad we had those one-way-only stairs installed. How will you possibly get “all the way downstairs” ever again?
LAURENCE: Now who’s being sarcastic?
GWEN [mimicking him]: Now who’s being sarcastic?
LAURENCE: I heard that!
GWEN: Isn’t it enough that I just did, like, fifteen loads of laundry to get rid of the moths? Can’t you do this one thing when you know I’m on a tight deadline?
LAURENCE: Fine! I’ll go down and clean the cat vomit. Go back to your writing.
GWEN: FORGET IT! I’VE ALREADY LOST MY TRAIN OF THOUGHT!
LAURENCE: This is going to end up in your new book, isn’t it?
GWEN: Don’t be ridiculous . . .
Scene.
4. Ping!
Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here’s old Bill Barley. Here’s old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back like a drifting old dead flounder, here’s your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I always say that when I turned forty, it was like a warranty expired. There wasn’t any single catastrophic failure, but all kinds of little things started going wrong in unpredictable ways. The gradual breaking down of my previously resilient body began, in point of fact, on the night of my fortieth birthday itself. Laurence and I were celebrating in Paris and had gone out for an extravagant dinner at an over-the-top restaurant (Napoleon had courted Josephine there, our guidebooks breathlessly informed us), and the six-course meal left me—despite having always prided myself on my billy-goat stomach—wide awake and tossing for the better part of the night with the kind of intense heartburn I’d never even suspected was possible.
As the months went by, new and unmistakable signs of aging cropped up. I’d find dark hairs sprouting on my chin, whereas the hair in other, more private, regions began to fall out. Suddenly I had knees that could forecast the weather: I’d feel a certain twinge in the right one and be able to inform Laurence, with near-perfect accuracy, “It’s going to rain tomorrow.” Getting around New York and environs was definitely more of a challenge than it had been in younger, sprightlier days. Upon reaching the top of the endless flights of stairs at the Christopher Street PATH station in the West Village, for example, I’d find myself too winded to speak for a good minute or two.
