Coffee with Kitty

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Coffee with Kitty
Heading to the café with Kitty in a bag.  Kitty is borrowed.  She likes me, perhaps too much: her owner has threatened to sue me for alienation of affections because Kitty perches on me whenever I visit and, I am told, sits by the door and cries when I leave.  I don’t know if this is true, but it is flattering since I grew up with cats who were all indifferent to me in that aggressive way that only cats can be indifferent. Kitty’s reward is to go out for an airing.  She goes in the bag because I can’t trust her in the streets, though we aren’t far from her apartment.  Once in the café, she is docile, sitting on my lap and occasionally standing up to try to dip her paw in my coffee.  Having some  pretty good notion of where her paws have been, I have put a stop to this by ordering her a demitasse with a milky café au lait. The waiter refuses to charge me for it. His reward is Kitty tries to bite him whenever he tries to pet her. It’s not that Kitty is antisocial.  She takes a great interest in everyone in the café and passersby.  Our favorite time to go is in the middle of the afternoon, after lunch and before the after-work drinkers show up.  There are regulars, always there before us and there as well when we get up and leave after about an hour on the terrace of the café in good weather or by the front window when it’s cold or raining.  Indoors or out, the regulars always take the same places, immovable themselves and amazingly constant in relation to one another.  I imagine they probably mumble a greeting at one another when they arrive and leave, but this is only a guess.  By the time we arrive, they look as if they have been always there, nailed and glued down by a carpenter who knows his business, and no less as if they will always be there.  Perhaps they are permanent, having no need after all to greet one an other because all of them are always there.  Always have been. When we sit ourselves down, but after we order, Kitty looks at each of them in turn and surprisingly her glance (she doesn’t make a sound) seems to attract them all in order.  They look at her, smile at her (never at me), and go back to their pastis or coffee, their newspapers or books, their thoughts or vacancies. This is an important ritual for Kitty, but she doesn’t spend much time at it: a minute is usually enough.  This done, she starts examining the people passing in the street.  To do this, she will sometimes stand up and put her paws on my shoulder, looking behind me, which is annoying because I can’t see whom or what she is looking at. By the time I manage to turn without dislodging her, it’s too late to tell what she was studying.  I think she enjoys doing this to me. Dogs passing with their owners following in their wakes don’t bother Kitty or even get much attention from her, and they don’t seem interested in her.  No incidents, except just one time, when a yappy little dog strained to get at her. She did nothing more than hiss, which caused the dog’s owner, a yappy little man, to say something about a dangerous cat.  “She’s not a cat,” I told him, “she’s a margay.  They come from South American and eat small mammals.  You could look it up.”  Evidently, he did because we only saw him once after that—and then he and his dog were on the other side of the street moving quickly. The real treat for Kitty is a stranger in the café, and there aren’t that many.  It’s a neighborhood place.  It’s near a couple of places that draw tourists, but it just isn’t obvious enough and there are flashier places closer to the points of interest.  When a stranger sits down, Kitty stretches up from my lap and hoists herself onto the table, then stretches out in the position that cats believe makes them look like fearsome hunters but which can just as likely be a prelude to a nap (of course, nearly everything is).  Playing feral cat, she stares at the strangers until they notice her. The boring ones (most of them) say something like, Oh, you’ve got a cat?  I usually look blank or say, No.  The more interesting ones try to engage her by making faces, noises, or wiggling their feet.  If she likes them, she rolls onto her side, looks at me, then looks back at the stranger. This is my signal to invite the stranger over.  The stranger is always a foreigner: I don’t know why.  I begin by explaining, first in French then in my accented English, that Kitty is French and does not understand English (she claims to be bilingual, but carries an EU passport).  This, I tell my new friend, requires me to translate what we are saying into French so Kitty will understand.  This news is always accepted with solemn agreement, although a German once complained that all Germans are required to study English from a very young age so why not cats in France? The conversations would be dull except for the constant translations from English for Kitty and then from feline for the stranger.  It is amazing how elaborate a conversation about the nearest Métro…
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