![]() By time she made it back to Bluff City that particular weekend, Paul had blotted up the stain and the smell with a combination of baking soda and an enzyme he'd bought at a pet store. The first time it happened, on the stairs, Paulĭid not tell Elizabeth about it. Charlotte began at the top of the stairs that led up from the front door, then she peed on the sofa cushions, on Paul's secondhandĮasy chair, and finally, by an inevitable progression, in the bed-on the pillows, in the middle of the mattress, among the rumpled sheets in the morning while Paul was still in the shower. Junk the landlord stored below, but then Paul stepped barefoot one morning in a wet spot on the carpet. At first they thought the smell might be coming from raccoons nesting in the Paul and Elizabeth lived in a comfortable apartment over an old garage. Within the last couple of months, however, Charlotte had begun to pee where she wasn't supposed to. He even lookedįorward to the warm, silky, gliding pressure against his calves, the little throaty purr. The first couple of times this startled him, but he had gotten used to it. Lately she had taken to winding slowly between his legs as he sat at his computer, or when he stood in the kitchen preparing a meal. Sometimes, though, on the nights Elizabeth was away, Charlotte would settle in with Paul, sprawling across his chest as he lay reading on the couch, or nosing her way in under the covers beside Even when Paul or Elizabeth lifted her, she would endure it for roughly a count of ten-by Paul's reckoning-and then scramble out of their grasp with a petulant croak, only to sit a few feet away with her back to themĪnd her raccoon tail out straight behind her. She was intelligent and high-strung, and she wasn't particularly affectionate, even for a cat, hissing and scratching at strangers who tried to Her eyes were rimmed in black, as if by kohl. But in direct light the black turned out to be blended with fine brown hairs that spread in faint stripes down her head and back, faintly ![]() She looked black-and-white at first glance: black across her back, and over her eyesĪnd ears like a mask, and as white as ice cream across her chest and jaws and along her forelegs. She was an indoor cat, ten years old, with no front claws. Charlotte, their cat, stayed with Paul in Iowa. She was tenure-track at Chicago University. Paul lived in Bluff City, Iowa, where he was finishing up a three-year postdoc in the English department at the State University of Iowa Elizabeth lived four days a week in Chicago, where Neither of them was certain what the problem was, but they both thought that it might have something toĭo with their complicated domestic arrangement. She was peeing outside of the litter box, and driving her owners to distraction. ![]() Something was wrong with Paul and Elizabeth's cat, Charlotte. ![]()
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