At night I oil the door, whose hinges have been squeaking all year, and in the morning when I open it, they’re quiet. The rest is the same. I don’t wake anyone. The cat follows me into the bathroom. After I sit down, he jumps onto my lap, which is half-fleece, half-skin. Each paw, cold as a child’s nose, lands at a slightly different moment. He circles for a few beats, presses his paws into the tops of my thighs, an action that wakes and soothes me. Within seconds, his paws are warm. They quickly absorb me. We have a routine.
My friend Jane believes all relationships are transactional. I sense she’s not comfortable with this belief. She doesn’t mention it until we are in the foyer, near the steps that lead to my husband’s room. We are saying goodbye. I think she would like me to counter her theory, to swiftly refute it with examples, to reassure her in some profound way that life means more than that, but she has to go. When I hug her, I can’t help but wonder what the nature of our transaction might be. I hope, if she has come to my house to meet a particular need, that I have met it. For the next several weeks, I think about Jane’s theory intermittently. I, too, would like to believe that relationships are not purely transactional, but there is conflicting evidence.
As a child I was required to write down my New Year’s resolutions. Now, every year, I obsessively compose promises in my head and absolve myself from ever recording or keeping them. I’m especially averse to those that restrict or forbid behavior, e.g. No Netflix for a year. Or: I will never eat bacon again. I live a life in which constraints are already deeply embedded. Instead, committing to doing more appeals to me. Last year I resolved to say “no” to my child more often. This year, the resolution I have made in my mind is: More sex. It’s too early to tell if I’ll succeed. I have been accused, by more than one person, including my husband, of being an optimist. Long before it became a campaign slogan, I confess I was one of the “Yes we can!” people. When Obama was running for president, my husband said, not without sorrow and bitterness, “It’ll never happen. He can’t win.” I kept saying, “It’s possible! He can win!!” When he won, I felt at once triumphant and guilty.
My husband is fond of criticizing the cat. “Have you ever noticed,” he says, “that cats only have one expression?” Our child giggles as if her father is telling a joke, but I know he’s trying to diminish the cat. I am silent. “It’s true!” he says, “their eyes are always the same, no matter what!” The two of them begin making (what to them are) cat expressions and then laugh hysterically with their mouths open. They throw their heads back, their eyes close, their faces turn red. When we’re sitting on the couch and the cat climbs onto my lap, my husband says, “Cats just want a warm body. It doesn’t matter whose body it is.” As if all cats are alike, as if our cat hadn’t just selected my lap from a row of three different laps, as if my relationship with the cat is transactional. I know, from hours spent with the cat, that if there’s ever an obstacle between us—if I’m standing at the computer or sitting in a chair with a laptop on my lap—rather than leave the room in search of another lap, he’ll sit as near to me as he can get. He will choose proximity to me over someone else’s lap. He prefers me above all others. I’m the one he wants to touch. It makes sense that my husband would want to criticize him. Deep down, my husband knows the cat is more of a husband to me than he is.
We knew a painter who believed in love. He was the grandfather of our child’s babysitter. Our child was enchanted by this babysitter, and I had met the grandfather at an art opening. We decided to have them over for dinner. It was summer. We ate in the garden at the round glass table. I put a red-and-white floral tablecloth out, and they brought a strawberry rhubarb pie. I’ve forgotten what I served. What I remember is the old man asked to see our child’s drawings. He had taught art to children for many years. She showed him a mysterious, colorful drawing that I’d always loved and viewed as somewhat abstract. Immediately, he identified it as a large house with children’s faces looking out of the windows. Our child’s eyes lit up with recognition when he said it. He had been right. At the end of the meal, without our prompting, he gave us a piece of marital advice. Do more of what you love. Whatever it is you enjoy doing together, do more of it. Later that year he died in a gallery while looking at a painting.
Today when I open the door, the absence of sound reminds me: a new year has begun. The cat purrs into the silence. To sit for too long is detrimental to one’s digestion. But he only purrs in the morning and his purr shouldn’t be squandered. He kneads me with such passion that a tiny marble of blood appears on my thigh. I dab it away with my middle finger. I put the blood-smeared fingertip in my mouth. “Let’s go,” I say. I suck my finger clean, then rise from the toilet. After I wash my hands, I bend down to pet him again. He looks at me with his yellow eyes, and already, I can’t wait for tomorrow to come.
Jennifer Tseng is the author of The Man with My Face, winner of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Competition and a PEN American Open Book Award; Red Flower, White Flower, winner of the Marick Press Prize; Not so dear Jenny, winner of the Bateau Press Boom Chapbook Contest; and The Passion of Woo & Isolde, winner of the Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Award. Her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, was a finalist for the Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award, and has been translated into Italian and Danish. An assistant professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz, she believes in Kundiman forever.