Hearts of Sand(10)

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I’m coming. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Then he put down the phone and went out to the hall for his Windbreaker. He didn’t have to dress up and look professional in the Ararat. Everybody there knew him already. They liked to sound impressed about him to people outside the neighborhood, but they would never be impressed about him to his face.

He got the Windbreaker zipped and went back to the kitchen. He looked at the briefcase lying on the table. He considered taking it with him, to show Bennis the pictures. Bennis had been a debutante herself once. There were things she knew that other people didn’t.

On the other hand, Bennis would be coming back to the house before the afternoon was over. There was no need to drag the briefcase to the Ararat now.

He left the briefcase where it was and headed out.

3

Ten minutes later, soaking wet from an angry cloudburst, Gregor was easing into the front booth next to Bennis and across from Donna Moradanyan Donahue. They both looked dry. They both looked impossibly depressed.

Gregor looked at his Windbreaker hanging from the coat tree. It was dripping thick drops of water on the floor.

“So,” he said.

Bennis and Donna had coffee. They didn’t seem to be drinking much of it.

“So,” Bennis said. “We took the cat to the vet.”

“I bought a cat carrier,” Donna said. “Cats hate to ride in cars. You have to be very careful. And we didn’t know about this one.”

“It could have had rabies,” Bennis said. “But the doctor doesn’t think so. There are tests, you know, and he’s going to run them, but he says he doesn’t look like it. The cat doesn’t look like it. It’s a male cat.”

“We thought we’d name it George,” Donna said.

“Assuming we can name it anything,” Bennis said. “It’s in really bad shape.”

“Half starved,” Donna agreed, “if not all the way starved. And it’s got fleas and all kinds of things like that. And it just looked so pitiful.”

“And this is what the two of you are so depressed about?” he asked. “A cat? I didn’t think either of you liked cats.”

“We don’t hate them,” Bennis said. “And it’s like I told you before, it was just such a—he was just so wretched. I don’t know. People shouldn’t do things like that. I mean, you’ve got a responsibility.”

“What did people do?” Gregor asked, mystified. “Who has a responsibility.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Donna said. “Cats and dogs and other domesticated animals. We made them the way they are. We have a responsibility.”

“Okay,” Gregor said as Linda Melajian’s older sister came rushing up to him with a pot of coffee. He tried to remember her name and couldn’t. She turned his coffee cup right side up in the saucer and started pouring. “Start from the beginning.”

“Do you need a menu?” the Melajian girl asked. “The lunch menu is pretty much like the dinner menu.”

“Bring me some yaprak sarma in broth,” Gregor said. He looked from Bennis to Donna. “Who domesticated them? And who has a responsibility for them?”

Bennis let out a long sigh. “Okay,” she said. “It’s really simple. Human beings took some animals and bred them deliberately to be good at living with human beings. Or for being good for being food for human beings. Cows in the wild wouldn’t be that stupid, but there aren’t any cows in the wild anymore, because we bred cows and now they’re dumb and live on farms so that they can become hamburger.”

“And sheep,” Donna said.

“And cats and dogs,” Bennis said firmly. “They’re not really equipped to go back to the wild and fend for themselves. We’ve bred those traits out of them. So we’re responsible, you see, to make sure they’re taken care of, because we’re what made them unfit to fend for themselves to begin with.”

“Except that Father Tibor doesn’t completely agree with us,” Donna said. “He says what we’re suggesting is collective guilt, and guilt can never be legitimately collective. Guilt is always individual.”

“We got a lecture on good and evil and guilt and innocence and tribalism and I don’t know what else,” Bennis said.

Donna nodded. “He even quoted Kant in German.”

“So you see,” Bennis said, “the one thing we didn’t figure out was whether he’d be willing to take the cat if it turned out to be all right. Or, you know, take it later, after I’d fed it and stuff for a while so that it was stronger. He was stronger. Did we tell you we’re going to name it George?”