A Cheese written and translated by Lotte Brown

The bronze plaque in the entrance hall shows the year of construction: 1962. And some information about the architect and the co-op. No, this apartment building at the intersection of Essex and Grand, overlooking two basketball courts, couldn’t possibly be the one where a writer David loved grew up. In one of his books, this American writer, whose name escapes me now, describes the apartment and the neighborhood of his youth. Because of the many similarities, I long thought, or rather hoped, that Miriam lived in that apartment building. I was wrong. And will therefore not crawl onto the roof via the fire escape ladder like this now-deceased writer and his friends. And there, lying on my stomach, peek at the rabbi having sex with his pointy-breasted wife. Sometimes with a wig, sometimes without. It doesn’t matter. 

Miriam lives in the two-bedroom apartment with her three cats. The last time I was here, just before Christmas, Miriam and the cats shared the apartment with her mother and sister and Charlie the dog. You couldn’t call it quiet. Miriam, her sister, and her mother have the kind of relationship where walking around naked is standard and talking is replaced by yelling. Meanwhile, mother, sister, and dog moved to Rome. Miriam is in Rome now, visiting. Her cats stayed home with me. I’m not good with cats. I’m afraid of almost all animals, just like my mother. Picking up an animal, no matter how small, is impossible. Miriam said it wasn’t a big deal. That picking up isn’t really necessary, and most cats don’t even like it. Last Sunday, she spent an entire afternoon trimming their nails. That same Sunday, I received an email with a description of each cat. That’s how I knew that Mika is the cat that usually manages to walk into the hallway. Jacky is the scared cat who is always hiding. According to Miriam, Jacky is ‘very vocal.’ This means that she responds well to voices and usually announces herself with a sound. Wozzle, the third and youngest cat, is more mischievous but less complex and sensitive. He likes to play, loves to knock over glasses, and jumps on the walls ‘like a maniac.’

I go from the bedroom to the living room. All cats follow. The orange one first. Three cats is a completely different situation than one or two. Three Cats is National Geographic. Three cats mean they are the majority. You are just an element in their world, not an unimportant element, because you give them food and attention. And adventure. For example, when you enter and give them an idea of life outside the cave, it stays limited to an idea, because you always shout when you come in and barricade the door with the bag you carried that day. 

For several days now, the cats and I have been doing more than talking. Yesterday, the orange one slept next to me on the sofa.

I didn’t sleep well last night. The cats tried to open the door, and the last conversations with David kept playing in my head. It feels like I missed something somewhere. Missed a whole lot. He used to help me find it. Now I feel like he doesn’t even want me to find it so he can say, “See, you don’t see.” From the sofa, I look out the window. Or I try to. Sitting on the window sill like motionless statues, the cats could come to life at any moment and distract me. As I look out the window at the Williamsburg Bridge, the cats stare at me. “Think further,” they seem to be saying, “we want to know; we want to know everything.”

My cell phone reminds me that it’s been exactly two years since we drove through Iowa City. And got a fine. And slept in a hotel that used to be a student house. On the way to Iowa City, I read from Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal, which is of such desperate honesty and Christian naiveté that it almost made me cry. My favorite part is where she describes herself as a cheese and begs God to make her a mystic. She immediately adds that she doesn’t know if God actually makes mystics out of cheese.

While on the road, I accidentally did some ‘free bleeding’. David said I looked like a female Christ. At the gas station without a shop, he fashioned sanitary napkins from paper towels.

In Iowa City, we went to a diner where everything was blue, and we prowled thrift stores. I bought dark wood salt and pepper shakers and some postcards. As he left the antique shop, he said he wanted to go to the drug store and the bank, but that I didn’t have to go on those boring excursions.

“I’ll drop you off somewhere.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

The place where he dropped me off turned out to be Flannery O’Connor’s church, the one I read about in her books, where she went to pray when she was in college in Iowa City. The church was closed, but I didn’t mind. As the happiest woman on earth, I sat on the steps of Flannery’s church. When David reappeared, he had cold drinks and a mushroom sandwich in his hands. It was hot, and I remember him sweating. He took four pictures of me at the church.

As I scroll through my photos, when I’m at the folder of the right month, I hear a high-pitched sound. I look up and see the frightened cat sneak into the living room. I stay as quiet as possible and hope she comes to the chair. To me. Maybe I’ll be the person she trusts. She doesn’t come, and she settles down on a pair of sneakers at the door.

I decide to put clothes on and go outside. It would take another hour before I could get out of the apartment. Not only were my clothes full of cat hair, but the cats themselves, slow but alert, hovered around the front door. After distracting them with wet food, I squeezed through the narrowest possible doorway as quickly as possible. In the elevator, I hear the cats meowing.

Outside, a beautiful summer evening appears to be in full swing. Both the neon lights of the shops and the lampposts shine brighter. Lots of wild hairstyles too. The fruit in the Malaysian store is arranged by both color and size. When I pass the bakery on my way back, where David once bought me a bialy, I wonder when it will stop. The hassle of the fact that behind every day or event, there is another, an earlier one.

When David calls later that evening to see how the cats and I are doing, I say that two are at my feet. And even though Miriam forgot to link the personality and name of the cat to physical features in her email, I think I know which cat belongs to which name and corresponding personality.

While I’m reading him a text about my mother that I am unsure of, he interrupts me in the introductory part, even before my mother appears. He thinks I’m not being honest about the cats. That it’s not the truth and that I write about the cats as ornaments. That there’s more going on between me and the cats and that I miss tremendous opportunities to talk about them. Or rather, not talk about them.

I reply that I don’t understand what he means and that I’m just trying to take good care of the cats. I never go on the balcony, and I keep the windows closed, afraid that one will fall down.

Sometimes I do forget about them and then rectify it by giving them more food. 

It was also because of the cats that I left early the day before yesterday during a tribute to a deceased filmmaker. As I left, I abruptly broke off a conversation with the man who was there when the filmmaker died. I didn’t give the sad man, whom I had listened to so carefully and who smiled at me, a hug or a handshake. I would have liked to shake his hand. The man had continued to hold his deceased friend’s hand even after his death. Because of this, that hand might not have passed to the other side. The body of the deceased shouldn’t be touched until the Buddhist monk visited. The man seemed to like the idea that his friend’s hand was still floating around, and I wanted to ask with which hand he had held his friend’s hand. I would never know which hand it was because I had to get back to the apartment as quickly as possible.

About halfway through the homage, I began to think about the empty can of Friskies Paté I may or may not have left on the counter. With every testimonial from every half-celebrity, my conviction grew that the orange one, Wozzle, who even walks over the gas stove when water is boiling, would have licked the can. During the last musical interlude, I looked up how long it takes to bleed to death and how much blood is in a cat’s tongue. I would find the orange one bleeding out, and Miriam would hate me forever. I would understand and make endless attempts to make it right, but nothing would help. I had to live with it.

When I got home, I found the can in the trash. Not in the right trash can, though. I would never know how much blood is in a cat’s tongue.

Since David keeps saying “No, no, no,” and I have no idea where he’s going, I change the subject and ask him if he knows whether Miriam has Flannery’s prayer journal yet, as I want to thank her for the apartment. He replies that people in New York usually pay someone to take care of their cats, so I shouldn’t feel obligated to buy anything. He suspects that if the book isn’t on the bookshelf, Miriam doesn’t have it. However, he doubts whether it’s a good choice because of the issue of the letter. In short, it comes down to the fact that recently, letters from Flannery were published in which she writes that she “doesn’t like black people.”

I ask if he remembers that time in Iowa City when he dropped me off at her church. 

“I remember it very well, Anna. I had a panic attack and had to find a way to shake you off. When you were comparing salt shakers and talking to that shop owner about walnut wood, I looked up Flannery’s church. After I dropped you off, I puked in the parking lot of a nursing home.”

I stare at the lights of the other bridge.

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. That I didn’t love you or that it wasn’t a nice day.”

I ask him if Flannery knew love, and he replies that he wasn’t sure but that she had a fine correspondence with Thomas Merton, a wise writer-monk. And that I’d better trade Flannery for thinking about the cats. After we hang up, I look up what happened between Flannery and Merton and read that they never met. Thomas Merton did have feelings for a nurse.

Lotte Brown is a writer and a researcher originally from Belgium. Poems, stories, essays and findings have been published in De Gids, De Revisor, Hollands Maandblad, Deus ex Machina, BONK, Tirade, Becoming the Forest, publications of Antwerp art center Het Bos and elsewhere. Lotte writes and thinks in Dutch and in English. Translation is a part of her writing, revision and editing process.   

26 April 2024

References

Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

Paul Elie, Everything That Rises, The New Yorker, June 22, 2020