Free A Cat Tells Two Tales by Lydia Adamson Page A

asked to read for many parts that I would have been delighted to read for. So, hoisted on that peculiar contradiction, I was always forced to have those strange, frustrating lunches with “some people” who were about to do a play or a movie or a PBS special.
    The whole thing was a sham anyway, because I hadn’t done any straight theater for a long time. I wasn’t interested in that stuff anymore. I was looking for parts that stretched the imagination, that took reality apart, and one didn’t find them with “some people.” I never left a lunch with them without muttering, “God bless cat-sitting.”
    So there I was, sitting on the sofa, indulging my latest bad habit—touching the small crescent-shaped scar which remained on the top of my forehead after they removed the bandage.
    A variant of my usual theatrical fantasy was beginning to form. I was appearing as a guest artist in some exotic foreign company like the Moscow Art Theatre. My role was minor, but as the play unfolded, I spoke my lines and exhibited such awesome stage presence that my character totally overwhelmed the major characters in the play. At the end, roses were flung at me—large bloodred roses—as if I were a ballerina. It was such an egotistical adolescent fantasy that it always embarrassed me—but it never went away. And the fantasy always afforded me, during its course, intense joy, and why not?
    It was a magical, mystical, lunatic fantasy, and in each reenactment the vehicle changed. It was a Victorian costume drama. It was a sleazy detective drama. It was a Brechtian interpretation of the Theban Cycle.
    “Oh, Bushy,” I said, “how stupid and weary I am . . . and how bizarre my whole life has become—lunches and fantasies and kitty litter.” Bushy understood. That is what cats are all about.
    The phone rang. I figured it was my agent calling to tell me how the lunch had gone, how those “people” were excited by my talents. I let the phone ring a long time because I really didn’t want to talk to her. She was a nice, foolish woman but she had begun to harp on my stopping all that avant-garde nonsense and going back to where I “belonged”—Eugene O’Neill? And I kept saying, “Sure, get me some skinny Colleen Dewhurst parts.” Both of us were lying.
    When it didn’t stop ringing, I picked it up. It wasn’t my agent. It was Charlie Coombs, the trainer.
    He said he had something even better than horse stories to tell me. He said that an exercise rider who works for him lives in my neighborhood and will drive me out to the track in the morning to see how a great—
chuckle
—trainer like himself really trains racehorses.
    I stared at the phone. For the past few weeks I had thought about Charlie Coombs many times, but only in relation to Jo and her troubles, and I had not heard from Jo since she returned to Long Island, disgruntled at my defection.
    But the moment I heard his voice on the phone, I knew that we would become lovers.
    I don’t really know why I thought that. The theater is no place for love. Actresses can’t stand actors, and vice versa. The only men I met who weren’t actors or directors were bankers and lawyers and businessmen on the fringes of the theater. They were perpetually fascinated by and panting for actresses who they thought would provide a new world of erotic and intellectual excitement. It never happened that way. The magic never emerged. I was by now more or less resigned to celibacy.
    But how would it be with a man who had nothing to do with the theater?
    I said I would be delighted to go out to the racetrack again.
    “Malacca,” he said, which was the name of the exercise rider, “will be in front of your house at four thirty tomorrow morning.” Then he hung up.
    I turned to Bushy, who had just jumped up for some attention, and was just about to tell him about the Charlie Coombs phone call when the phone started ringing again. This time it had to be my agent. This time I had to let it