Levade had vanished. I inquired, but no one in town had a phone number. Why hadn’t I gotten it? Because Muskie Lake people don’t phone each other. They take cool walks and tap on screen doors in that old-fashioned, neighborly way. But I still should have gotten her damned phone number.
I rang Ramona, more dejected than before, which was evident by the fact that I’d phoned her, something I never did. Ramona probed until she finally got it out of me.
“You had sex with the woman on the Point? Oh, my God!”
“No, not sex. Near-sex.”
“What is near-sex? Are you Bill Clinton?”
“She wants me, but then she runs.”
“Excuse me, but we’re talking about a woman. Do I need to remind you that you’re straight? You’ve seen more cocks than a brood of hens.” When I didn’t laugh, Ramona sighed. “Okay, Taylor. Listen to me! Frank, your taxidermy guy, killed his wife because she had an affair with a woman, so Frank undoubtedly hates lesbians. Frank was never arrested because apparently the men in Muskie felt that what his wife did to poor Frank and his manhood far outweighed whatever misfortune happened to one of them.
“Levade has sense enough to know it’s a small town and everyone is in everyone’s shorts, so unlike you, she’s probably keeping her panties on to protect your ass. Think about that. If Frank wants to date you, what could possibly go wrong if his competition is once again a woman? That has danger written all over it.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Everyone in town knows all this, except the part about you lusting after women, so stop it. Maybe you’d better come back to New York. If you want sexual experimentation, this place is crawling with lesbians who’ll take you to dine at Per Se, instead of some lake-bump, chigger-bitten island.”
“I’m staying until I get things sorted out.”
“What things?” She seemed exasperated.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly, unable to explain myself lately. “I just feel this amazing attachment to her. Wanting to spend every moment with her. Is that crazy?”
“Yes,” she said decisively, “unless you’re considering a sex change.”
I tried to formulate a response or defend my feelings, but nothing came out. After a beat, Ramona broke in. “Just write something, will you? And be careful. I don’t want it published posthumously.”
* * *
I did what Ramona suggested because I had nothing else to do. I sat at the computer and wrote, then deleted, then wrote. The story had begun as a hard-core mystery about a man stalking his ex-wife because she was having multiple, embarrassing affairs. But I found myself incorporating more love scenes than I initially intended. In fact, I never liked writing love scenes because they felt so mechanical, and now I was gravitating toward romantic encounters.
Maybe it was my current environment, the romance of the Northwoods, or maybe it was meeting Levade. She’s the most sensual being I’ve ever encountered. Maybe she’s my muse. That would explain my feelings.
I typed a sentence. “She looked at her with eyes that severed her soul and left her with half of who she was.” Then I stared at the sentence and quickly struck the S from the first word. It should be He. HE looked at her with eyes that severed her soul. What a Freudian typo. I pushed back from the desk as if the computer were possessed and sipped my coffee, staring at the screen. Finally, I touched the key and put the S back. It’s a love story about two women. It’s She.
Ramona’s been touting my new male-driven mystery, and I’m working on a lesbian love story. I can’t help it. The S makes it sexier. The S excites me and makes me want to write the love scenes. Maybe I should write the love scenes with She and then just change it all to He when I’m done. Or maybe I should just own the fact that a woman has completely upended my sexuality.
* * *
On my next trip to town for groceries, I spotted an orange cardboard calendar tacked to a corkboard above the frozen-food section. It was headlined MUSKIE AREA EVENTS—AUGUST, a jumble of anything happening in the region this month. True Grit was playing at a tiny local theater, the farmers’ market was open today in Pine City, and an upcoming dressage event was scheduled in Duluth. I was surprised that something as elegant as a dressage event was posted on a grocery-store tack board, but I was happy to spot it and wondered if Levade would attend the show, since she loved horses. I jotted down the dressage dates. Then feeling antsy, with nothing to do, I decided to drive to Pine City and check out the farmers’ market.
The drive was beautiful, the roads winding and tree-lined, sparkling water dotting the landscape. Pine City was a small mining town, with a population approaching four thousand. The buildings were multistoried and constructed of huge lake stones, making them seem as impenetrable as a medieval fortress. The farmers’ market was held in the town square, and I purchased Iowa corn and garden tomatoes and leaf lettuce and stashed them in a cooler bag in my car. Then I spotted a coffee shop. “Oh my God,” I said out loud. Not a café that serves coffee, but an actual coffee-specializing shop. I headed in that direction, ebullient.
The store was crowded, packed shoulder to shoulder with coffee aficionados who had found this singular caffeine oasis. People sat in small booths drinking and chatting. I paid for a pound of ground coffee and a cup to go, and was about to walk out the door, when I glanced over at the corner booth and was shocked to see Frank Tinnerson deeply engrossed in conversation with Levade. Frank, who was supposedly dangerous, with Levade, who had mysteriously disappeared. Is she having an affair with him? Is she warning me to stay away because there’s something more between them? A booth near them cleared, and I quickly sat down in it, feeling like a spy in a B movie.
All I wanted to do was stare at her. Actually, no, I wanted to hold her and kiss her, as I had at her cabin. The feeling overwhelmed me, as if she’d cast a spell on me.
“I still have it,” Levade said, her voice low.
“I want it.” His tone was forceful, perhaps even sexual, and my heart pounded as I prayed she wasn’t involved with him. “This is a dangerous game.” He turned menacing. “You know I won’t let go of you. Not after what you did.”
“It’s in someone else’s hands, and if anything happens, it will happen to you next.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Levade. Every law-enforcement officer in the state would give his eye teeth to be the friend and fishing buddy of Frank Tinnerson, the Muskie Champion of the world. You know what I mean? In fact, some of them already have! The one thing I don’t have in my taxidermy collection is a white horse. Wouldn’t that look great, right there in my front window, facing the lake?” He laughed, and slapped the table, making a startlingly loud sound, then exited the coffee shop.
I took a deep breath and slid into the seat he’d just vacated. Levade collapsed back into the booth on seeing me. “What are you doing here?” she whispered, obviously drained of energy.
“My question to you. And I have an even better question. What is Frank threatening you with?”
“You have to stay out of it, Taylor.”
“You’re seeing him?”
“No! Of course not.”
“Then why is he so obsessed with you?”
“I have some things to do here over the next couple of days,” she said, not answering my question.
“I heard him threaten Alizar. That’s horrible. Let me help you. I’ll do anything.” I meant it, regardless of what danger it put me in.
She paused, looking into my eyes and judging my sincerity, I assumed. “Okay. Pull your car up behind mine across the street,” she said. I slid out of the booth and jogged to my car, got in, and moved it two blocks, parking adjacent to hers. I was behaving like a trained seal, but I didn’t care.
Her car windows were cracked, and she was parked in the shade, and when she opened the Jeep’s cargo area, I saw a large pet carrier inside, containing the most humongous cat I’d ever seen.
“I need you to take him,” she said.
“Take him where?” I was startled.
“With you. He was my mother’s cat, and Frank has threatened to kill him and stuff him to get back at me.”
“Stuff him? Oh my God! But I don’t know anything about cats!”
“Here’s his food and litter box.” She began unloading items into my car. The cat food was in twenty-pound bags, and the litter box was the size of a small wading pool. “He can’t go outside because he looks so large that someone could mistake him for a wild animal and shoot him.”
“Why is he so damned big?” I was still fixated on his sheer size.
“He’s a Maine coon cat. His name is Sasquatch.”
“Sasquatch, of course.”
“My mother called him Sassy.”
“Okay. How do I get him out when I get him home? I mean, can I just reach in there?”
“It’s a cat, Taylor. If you can’t do this—”
“I can do it, of course. I want to do it. I just have to…how much does he weigh?”
“Thirty pounds.”
“My God, that’s two cats.”
She kissed me right there on the street. Not a full sexual kiss, but a kiss that was enough that I would have agreed to take a six-pack of cats if she’d asked.
She thanked me profusely as I climbed into the car and drove off, heading back to the cabin, waving good-bye to her out of the window. Sasquatch sat on the front seat. His three-foot-long frame more than filled the cat carrier, causing masses of black and gray tabby fur, and no small amount of tabby fat, to stick out between the bars. He had a perpetual frown, large hanging jowls, and tall ears standing straight up on top of his head like two little dunce caps with fur streaming from them, making him look like the pissed-off guy at the costume party. I reached over to touch his nose reassuringly, and he let out a low growl.
“Okay. You’re not the pussy I had in mind, but we have to make the best of each other. And we’ve got to dump the silly Sassy shit. It’s not you. I’m calling you Sass.” He stretched to the extent possible given his tight quarters and let out a big sigh, as if relieved by the name change.
By nightfall, Sass was out of his cage and stalking around the cabin like a mountain lion checking everything out. I closed my bedroom door, feeling vulnerable in my nightshirt to cat scratches and hoping he wouldn’t claw anything in the living room. Suddenly the door began to vibrate, and then the door handle rattled violently. I could see Sass’s huge paw, pad-side up, clasping the underside of the door, shaking it vehemently, clearly demanding I let him in. I told him to stop it, but that only seemed to infuriate him, making him shake the door louder.
I finally relented and opened it. His big green eyes glowed in the dark like alien orbs, scaring the hell out of me, so I pulled the quilt up to cover my face. He bounded up onto the bed and draped his entire body over my head. After extracting him twice, I gave up. “Look, I know you’re upset, and you’ve lost your owner, and you’re being dragged around to strange places, and you don’t know what’s to become of you, but do I really deserve this?” I tilted my head to the side to question the cat, who was snoring so loudly his upper lip was vibrating. A thirty-pound cat sleeping on my head, all because I crave the Lake Goddess. What has become of me?
* * *
At dawn, I called Ramona to ask her what she knew about feeding a cat this size.
“I didn’t get the feeding instructions from Levade, and every time I put a little food down for Sasquatch, he eats it and screams for more. At what point does a cat just bloat and die? And who would even recognize bloat in a cat this size?”
“You’re keeping her cat?” Ramona fixated on his mere existence. “Does he claw anything?” She was protective of her cabin.
“No. He just sleeps on my head. I guess her mother let him do that.”
“No wonder she lost her mind—a huge cat on her head night after night.”
“Do you know anything about the feeding amounts for a Maine coon cat?”
“I have authors who call me about everything in the world, Taylor, but you’re the only one who wants feeding instructions for her lover’s cat.”
“She’s not my lover.”
“Google ‘cat feeding,’ for God’s sake. I have work to do,” she said and hung up.
My lover’s cat. My lover’s cat. I tried the words out in my head to see how they sounded and how I felt about having a female lover whose cat I was babysitting.
Sasquatch let out a huge belch. “My stomach’s upset too,” I told him.