Free The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin Page A

there for what seemed to be forever. Then she took a half-step back and looked me directly in the eye. “So do I,” she said. Taking my hand, she raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “You can’t grow a vagina, can you, Russell?”
    “I can’t even try.”
    “You know what I said? That there are two ways out for you. The first—”
    “Spilling my gut for a year on a couch.”
    “The couch is optional, and a little old-fashioned, but yes, a year at least. Maybe ten.”
    “And the other way?”
    “Do something.”
    “I just tried, and got... rebuffed. Unmuffed, maybe. Turned down.”
    “You tried to make me into another woman who is supposed to give you comfort, solace, direction even. When that doesn’t happen according to your needs, your bottomless needs, you go looking for the next. No, I mean
do
something. As a man.”
    “And women doesn’t count?”
    “Not for you,” she said, putting down my hand with such tenderness it was as if it would break if she let it go too abruptly. “As a man.”
    “As a man?”
    She stepped away, then as she turned said it so quietly I almost did not hear the words. “Among men,” she said, and continued down the street, leaving me looking after her, as much unsure of what she meant as sure that she was right.

9.
    Eugene del Vecchio, head of the Honors Program at Brooklyn College, was a translator of Macchiavelli and Bembo, and a poet whose work I had read in anthologies when I was still in high school. A tall man with tumbles of prematurely gray hair over a craggy face, half-frame tortoiseshell glasses always slipping down the slope of a seriously Roman nose, he spoke in the same lovely mutated English I had learned on the streets of Brooklyn—his acquired in Bensonhurst, a rather more pleasant area of trim attached single-family homes, each with its own concrete virgin in the postage-stamp front yard. Professor del Vecchio followed professional football, had boxed as a youth, and worshipped Hemingway (whose death by suicide two years earlier caused him much public grief, and provided fodder for a string of poems and a couple of essays). He was in short no one’s clichéd idea of an aesthete, a college professor or a homosexual. He was also no one’s idea, especially not mine, of someone who might be found sitting on a couch in Shushan Cats’ suite at the Westbury. He rose when Ira let me in. Myra was gone.
    “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Professor del Vecchio said with that familiar mixture of the wise and the street-wise, each peculiar enunciation coming through clearly, a spoken palimpsest, one sound overlapping the next.
Palimpsest
was in fact one of Professor del Vecchio’s favorite terms, along with
villanelle
and
sestina
. He took my hand, pulled me close to him until I could smell the scent he used, some sort of bottled musk, part tobacco, part bay leaf. “Truly a tragedy.”
    I looked to Shushan, seated on his crate as though it were a throne. Whoever had devised this Jewish tradition of ritualized discomfort during mourning never considered the possibilities hidden in the term
hard-ass.
Shushan was thriving. He’d probably gain weight on a diet of grubs and water. The man was even tougher, I thought, than his reputation, which was not saying a little. His dark eyes, aglow with beneficence, seemed to shower blessings. It was hard to believe this Shushan Cats would next week stand trial on a laundry list of felony indictments.
    “Mr. Cats must have told you it’s
his
mother who passed away,” I said after del Vecchio released me. “Probably a mix-up on the phone.”
    “Oh, there wasn’t any, Russell,” the professor said. “I wouldn’t take anyone into the Honors Program without knowing his family background, love of animals, if and how much he or she drinks, does dope. That kind of thing. Hell, I interviewed your high-school English teachers. A brilliant orphan, they said. I don’t get too many of either brilliant or orphans. So I