A Beautiful Cat of the Universe.rtf
by Alex Manley
did you hear the thing about josh?
josh?
josh eltenbrand
oh, yeah
that
yeah i heard
it was a while back now
a few months
omg
i only found out just now
i’m freaking out
yeah. it sucks, doesn’t it
it sucks so much!!! what the fuck
like
i can’t believe we met that guy
gillian hosted him in her apartment!!! and now.
this!!
yeah
i can’t believe it. i had no idea
i never suspected anything
did you???
tbh? i kind of did
in a weird way
omg what
explain
hold on
let me see if i can find it
***
I dug it up. The file was from three years ago. Had it been that long? I started reading.
The whole cab ride back Marie kept thinking it was a bad idea, staring out the window, picking at the edges of the clear sticker on the window with the different fare rates. She had a hard time putting into words just what it was she was in the process of doing but it made her stomach tense up, and she got annoyed at the driver for trying to talk to her about the weather and wouldn’t respond, which was impolite and she wouldn’t have usually, usually she would have played along, but she was thinking about what the house would be like when she got there, and what Charlotte would do when she came home from school and found her mother home a day early.
It had been Maggie’s idea.
“Tell her you’re coming back a day later than you really are. That way you’ll know if she was doing anything while you were gone. If she doesn’t have anything to hide,” Maggie had said, “Then it should be fine. She’ll be happy to see you back. Right?”
“Right.” She paused. “But?”
“But if she’s up to something, then you need to know, Mar. That’s how I found out about Gabby and that Swedish guy she was screwing. Otherwise she’d probably be pregnant by now, God help her.” Marie had been too proud to admit she was worried about Charlotte. She didn’t believe much that certain ages were harder than others in and of themselves—it was only the things that happened in your life, the school and the breakups and the not getting the part in the play, that kind of thing—but ever since Char had turned sixteen it was just disastersville every month or two. Parties she wanted to go to. Skirts she wanted to wear. Concerts she wanted tickets to. There was no end to it as far as Marie could tell. So she planned it out, just like Maggie had said, in the hopes of coming home a day early and finding everything just as it was supposed to be. It wasn’t much of a plan; in fact, she’d even left her tickets out on the kitchen counter for two days before leaving, secretly hoping that her daughter would notice the dishonesty—but she hadn’t.
When Marie got to the door, a sort of calm came over her. She hadn’t made out anything through the living room window. The living room was where the kids would cause a ruckus if Char had held a slumber party. There would have been beer bottles everywhere probably and there weren’t, so she could breathe easy.
She let herself in and dropped her bag and let her back relax against the door. It was fine, it was gonna be fine. She didn’t know why she got so worked up about this stuff sometimes. Then. A voice from downstairs. Yelling.
“You frickerrr!”
Male. She yanked the hall closet open and stuck her arm in, fumbling through the umbrellas for the baseball bat, keeping her eyes on the door at the far end of the kitchen. God. “You Satanic frick! I’m gonna get mobbed up on you real quick, ya little dumbo!” It was male but it was nasal. And it was shouting things. There was a crazy man in her basement. Something about the pitch scared her. Like a man-child.
“You think this is over? Oh you’d better believe it’s not. It’s only just begun! I’m gonna slay a goat on your front yard! You’re gonna regret messing with my dad!”
Then thumps. He was coming up the stairs. She gripped the tape with both hands and tried to feel menacing. The basement door swung open and he popped out, a skinny guy wearing tight jeans and a hoodie, holding a white laptop with both hands. He stopped mid-shout. They stared at each other. He looked ridiculous. He wasn’t even as tall as she was.
“Who are you,” she said at him, wrestling to get her voice under control. Her chest was heaving from the intensity of her heartbeats.
“Um, hi.”
“Who are you, and what are you doing in my house.”
“I’m Josh. Are you, um, Charlotte’s mom?”
“Josh,” she said. “Josh, what are you doing in my house.”
“Oh,” he said, brightly, and put the laptop down on the island in the kitchen. “I’m staying here for two days. On my West Coast tour.”
“Are you a magi—” she started, and tried again. “Are you a musician?”
“I’m a poet. I’m friends with Charlotte. She’s letting me stay here. I’m doing a reading tonight downtown,” he said. “You should come!”
She exhaled heavily and realized she was still holding the baseball bat. She tried to lean it against the threshold between the hallway and the kitchen, but it fell to the floor with a clatter. She strode forward and took a glass down from the cabinet and poured herself some water at the sink. She was too rattled to deal with the Brita right now. There was no way Char had changed the filter while she was gone. “Sorry,” he said, and he closed the laptop. “If I scared you.”
“You did, a bit, yes.”
“I was recording a video for my YouTube channel. I post these online and people like them a lot.” She stared at him.
“Just, of me yelling silly stuff. Like, Satanic stuff. Illuminati stuff. You know.”
“Uh huh.” She didn’t.
“Charlotte really likes them. That’s how I know her. She’s a big fan of mine.”
“Oh, she is.”
He nodded.
“She, um, added me on Facebook I guess about a month ago and we started chatting about life and stuff. And I said I was doing a West Coast tour and I’d be in town and we should meet and she offered to let me sleep here.”
She stared out the window, trying to gauge the situation. The cab driver had been saying something about a storm.
“I’m mostly sleeping on people’s floors and couches and stuff. To save money.”
She looked back over at him, at his facial hair. He wasn’t particularly tall.
“She said you wouldn’t be coming back until tomorrow. You are her mom, right? I cleaned up after myself in the basement. I didn’t leave a mess or anything.”
“Josh, how old are you?”
He met her eyes and he kind of smiled at her strangely.
“I don’t know. How old do you think I am?”
It was the tone he’d been using when he was shouting at his laptop; high-pitched and off-kilter and joking, but in an unpleasant kind of way, like the joke was on her.
“You’re not a high school student, are you.”
“No, ma’am.”
“If you were you’d be in class right now.”
“I guess I would be, yeah.”
“Josh, how old are you?”
He looked at her for a few seconds. She didn’t like it, that he wouldn’t answer a straightforward question like that. Then he spoke.
“Is this about me, or about Charlotte?”
“Josh, I don’t know how old she told you she was, but she’s sixteen.”
“That’s how old she told me she was.”
This was too much.
“You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”
He looked at her like a child, a hurt child who didn’t want to believe he was really being punished.
“Get out of my house. Get out. Now.”
Then the look was gone.
“My stuff’s downstairs.”
“I don’t care. Get out.”
And she walked up to him and grabbed him by the arm and she could tell that he wasn’t going to fight back even though he was as big as her, could easily have complicated matters, could have had her scrambling for the bat again, but she was Charlotte’s mom and for the first time in her life Marie was glad of her daughter’s desirability for the power it was conferring to her in that instant. Her daughter wasn’t, Marie knew, in her heart of hearts, even that beautiful. She had admitted this to Maggie last time the two of them had gotten drunk together. She had always wished for a daughter who was the most beautiful girl in the world and she knew that wasn’t what had happened. But there was something to Char’s personality, this infinite playfulness, that Marie knew was her daughter just not being done growing up quite yet, but that she saw others take for something else, for flirtation. And there Char was, right in the middle of those two, like a Venn diagram.
____________
/ \
/ -----------------
/ / \ \
/ Child / Charlotte \ Adult \
/ / \ \
----------------------------------- \
/ _________________________ \
***
Did a janky TextEdit Venn diagram make sense within the context of the story? I wasn’t sure. It was weirdly off-center. Who could remember why one made little decisions like that, in a writing context. I hardly ever wrote fiction anymore—not that this was straight fiction, exactly, per se. Speculative fiction, but the speculation is about the present, or the past, not the future. Other people’s lives. In this case, a literary guy we used to think was cool. I had used his real first name, and the girl’s name was the name of a real sixteen-year-old he seemed to be hanging out with at the time. Then, a few years later, it turned out he’d been sending sexual messages to minors. Before I’d started to get a weird feeling, I’d watched so many of his YouTube videos, had bought all his books, could quote things he’d said or written out loud. My mom had even sent him money, once, on my behalf, early in his career, when he was a “struggling artist.” And now, this.
I read on.
***
Sometimes it was hard to tell which Char was closer to, or which people perceived her as, child or adult. Marie hoped Josh perceived her daughter as an adult. That was the misperception she was more comfortable with.
She had him in the vestibule now, and couldn’t push him out the door, would have to get him to pull it open or brush by him and do it herself. She paused, and he gave her the child eyes again. “Can I at least get my laptop?”
“You can get it when she gets home and I’ve had a word with her.”
“What am I going to do until then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. You’re going to think about what you did.”
She almost laughed at herself, but there she was, issuing stock mother phrases at a strange man she had caught in her house, possibly a statutory rapist, God, for all she knew.
“I haven’t done anything, you should know. I haven’t, I really haven’t.”
“Then why are you in my home, Josh.”
“Charlotte and I, like… truly get along.”
“She’s sixteen.”
“I think you’ll find that she’s very mature for her age.”
“How old are you.”
“I’m twenty-three.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She reached for the door and yanked it open.
“Go.”
She couldn’t believe this was the guy her daughter brought home to sleep in her basement. What a disaster. Maggie was right.
“What time is it, anyway? I mean how long am I going to have to wait?”
“She gets home around 3:30. Then I need to talk to her for a bit.”
He squinted at her and sort of half-shrugged and then started walking away. She closed the door and then went into the living room and watched him cross the street through the window. He had bad posture and he made insane videos for YouTube and he was twenty-three and he’d been sleeping in her basement. He dressed like he was maybe eighteen, nineteen. Twenty-three had been even older than she’d expected. She did the math—almost one-and-a-half times Char’s age. It would be like her dating a sixty-year-old.
Well, no. No, she was forty. She was allowed to date whoever she wanted. Char was sixteen and didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground. Char hadn’t known what a blowjob was until last year. Char should not be around twenty-three-year-old scruffy men from the internet. Poets or otherwise.
Marie went into the kitchen and opened up the cupboard above the fridge where she kept the liquor cabinet. It was all still there, intact, and she thanked God for the small blessing of that. At least she hadn’t been getting drunk. Of course, she thought, Josh was twenty-three. He could have bought her anything. He could have bought her drugs. He could have bought date rape drugs and she reached for the Red Label that she’d had since John had left and poured what was left of it, maybe two shots’ worth, into a tumbler, and knocked it back in two gulps. She remembered just afterwards the Tylenol she’d taken for the flight, flights always gave her a headache, but then she didn’t care that much. She didn’t know what to do. A few raindrops flicked against the kitchen window and she felt incredibly alone so she forced herself to go upstairs and sit in Charlotte’s room. She looked at the pictures of little Char. Char when she was six, riding that awful too-big bike, Char at eight or nine taking swimming lessons, sitting on the edge of the pool, all smiles and all braced-teeth, Char at her junior prom with what’s-his-face and all his zits. She didn’t have any pictures of her after that, so she looked for Char’s laptop, but it wasn’t on her desk or her bed or her floor. She must have brought it to school—of course. Then she remembered Josh’s laptop in the kitchen.
He didn’t have a password on it. The last image from the video he’d been shooting was on the screen. He was looking sheepish. She found Firefox and opened it. He already had Facebook open, and there were three chat windows open. One was with Char.
Mostly, she was shocked by how tame the whole thing was. He couldn’t type or spell to save his life; she wasn’t sure how he could call himself a poet. She thought he might have been a fraud, but then, who would pretend to be a poet? He was probably just a bad poet. Anyway, some of his phrasings were kind of interesting. She supposed he might have some talent, maybe, or anyway, something that Char saw that she couldn’t because she was too old.
But he wasn’t, like, sexting her or whatever. There was nothing of that in there. It was a terrible way to see your daughter, though, flirting with some creep, stooping to his level and refusing to spell anything correctly. This wasn’t, she thought stubbornly, this wasn’t how she’d raised her daughter. Then she saw it, right there, the word “mom,” “hold on my moms calleing mi 4 dinner :3,” and she felt ill.
It was from three weeks ago. He had known about her for three weeks and she had found out about him this afternoon. Was it possible that this man knew more about her daughter than she did? She had known Char as a little girl. The person she was now was different. And now she shared with Josh things she kept from her mother. Josh was in. Mom was out. This was just how things would be, now. This was parenthood—slowly being abandoned.
She kept reading, but outside the fact that Josh was twenty-three, there was nothing she could really throw at Char. There was no alcohol, no drugs, no tattoos, no sex. She couldn’t even find anything about kissing. Maybe Josh was like Char, halfway between adult and child, not ready to let go of being young yet. She wondered whether it was worse for a twenty-three-year-old to be like that. She wondered if this wasn’t Char having daddy issues. Seven years older? Probably. She cursed herself for the breakup. If he’d been around more she wouldn’t be fooling around with twenty-three-year-olds. But then she’d be fooling around with guys her age. Maybe that was worse.
She looked out the window. Maybe this was better somehow.
***
After I’d read a few pages I sent the file over to Alexandra.
Look, I said in the email. From three years ago.
Usually if you want a friend to read a short story you wrote—outside the context of a creative writing workshop—you have to wait a while. I guess the presence of “hot literary gossip” speeds things up. Unfortunately “hot literary gossip” too often means sexual impropriety. She messaged me back about fifteen minutes later.
wow
so you really called it
yeah, kinda
Cassandra vibes in this bitch!!
lol
christ
yup
the musing on his affect—that’s interesting
there’s this comedian
brandon somebody
who did a bit about guys who wear nail polish
and the joke was like, how many sex crimes have they done?
lol
i don’t know
i’m making it sound worse than it was
it was couched in a kind of millennial voice
but there were something about it that made me feel uncomfortable
and in retrospect feels
kind of… like…
insidious
yeah
there’s a line you can draw from that
to the
trans women are men trying to infiltrate women’s spaces
panic logic
you know
yah
it’s like anything we see as innately/inherently male
if it’s perceived as moving towards femininity
it’s seen as distrustworthy
yeah
exactly
wolf in sheep’s clothing
yeah
i don’t really have a thesis here lol
it’s true that
like
sexual predators do try to camouflage themselves in like
the “regalia”
lol
of the dominant culture
to me that’s like
teacher, sports coach, priest, friendly neighbour
but i guess, for instance, if you want to blend in to the arts community
it helps to be seen as trustworthy
if you’re not like. outwardly embodying
traditional masculinity
lol
fuck
like when those tote bags came out a little bit ago
the ones with famous books by female authors on them
i saw so many tweets about how sexual predators were going to buy them like. “the worst guy in your MFA program just preordered”
ugh
i hate how true that is
i can immediately think of an Objectively Bad Man who would get one
***
When Charlotte got back from the bathroom she sat down next to him, aiming for a little closer to him than she’d been before she left, and when she lost her balance a little and tilted into his shoulder she let it happen and didn’t make a big embarrassed show of it, just acted natural, like two friends would if they were sitting with each other and their bodies briefly touched. She could feel him looking at her. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she said back, staring at her ankles.
“Hi.”
She looked at him. He was looking at her and his eyes gave off an incredible openness, of a depth she had never seen before. He seemed to have so much in just one look. She didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what was happening.
“Charlotte,” he said. “Charlotte, can I tell you a secret?”
She bit the inside of her mouth a bit and nodded at him.
“You are beautiful… You’re a beautiful cat of the universe.”
He reached over to her and stroked her hair and she felt herself dissolving. It was so easy, like this, to have him over, to have gotten him, to have drawn him from one state to another into her bedroom, like she had ordered him off Amazon, and he was stroking her hair, and she was rating the transaction five stars, and he mumbled it again, “You are a beautiful cat of the universe,” and just like that she felt herself falling to her hands and knees, looking up at him and she meowed, and she heard him laugh, and it was the cutest laugh she’d ever heard, he was opening up a fresh part of him to her, and she wiggled at him, and he stroked her all down her back, and when his hand got to her butt he petted it and said, “And I can feel your tail,” and she purred before she knew what she was doing, and he laughed and kept petting her tail, and she kept purring, and she looked up at him and she caught his eyes and then she didn’t know what was happening but she pounced on him and fell into his arms and he fell to her face, and their faces were together, and they were kissing, just like that, just kissing, and it felt natural enough to her cat mind when his human hand fell between her legs and though it didn’t do anything at first she pawed at it until it did and there it was, right there, and right where it belonged.
Then there were footsteps coming up the stairs and she slipped from under him quick and unpaused the movie and there they were, red and out of breath and on the screen Marty was getting away, a giant truck full of shit was landing on Biff and his boys and then the door was open. “What were you just doing?”
“You know… watching the movie.”
“Which movie?”
“Back to the Future.”
“Mhm,” she nodded, staring out the window. “I heard you unpause it while I was on my way up the stairs.”
Josh looked at her, right in the eyes, all that blue again. “We were making out, Mrs. Hauser.”
“Alright,” she swallowed. “Get out of my house.”
“I don’t have any place to sleep. I was going to sleep here tonight.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me.”
Char was giving her a look that made her want to explode but she was up against a wall. She was not going to let Josh stay in her house. She was not going to, she could not, she would not, she would not. She would weather this, would play hard as long as she possibly could until he was gone and then Char could do what she wanted. Whatever else. But not this, not this, this was wrong and she would not compromise here. If there was a compromise here what would be to stop Char from having over thirty-year-olds, or two guys at a time, and she would be on speed and tattooed before her eighteenth even and it was too much. Too much control and they hated you. Too little and you hated them. Either way she was losing her.
Josh got up first, which caught both Marie and Charlotte by surprise, but it made sense to him. He was caught in the middle of something and that was not a comfortable feeling. He wasn’t going to win Marie over and he wasn’t going to feel good with Charlotte so long as he hadn’t. And anyway he was going to Portland tomorrow, sleeping at Donald’s house. Probably there would be someone else there to make out with, hopefully without an angry mom. He didn’t understand the fullness of Mrs. Hauser’s intensity but he knew lots of people didn’t understand the fullness of his own so perhaps it was something like that.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Creator photo by Blair Elliott
Alex Manley is a Montreal/Tiohtià:ke-based non-binary writer, editor, and translator. Their most recent book, The New Masculinity: A Roadmap for a 21st-Century Definition of Manhood, published by ECW Press, was a finalist for the 2023 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction. alexmanley.com @alex_icon on Instagram.