The Red Retro Chair

Posted on March 25, 2007 in Cats

The red retro chair is a contested zone in this house. I have a sign on the wall over my computer that says “If you want the best seat in this house, move the cat.” The red retro chair, blocky and slick, is the best seat and Fiona is the cat you must move.

She’s there now, all twenty pounds of her. A neighbor of ours had her baby out the other day. I mentioned that I had seen her husband carrying the little one. He was panting. “How much does she weigh now?” I asked. “Sixteen pounds.” Still lighter than our cat.

I sometimes say when a cat is kneeling on all fours that it is contemplating the Mystery of the Seventh Claw. Don’t ask what that’s all about because it is a Mystery and that’s why you don’t know what it is all about. Fiona is not contemplating. She’s curled up, sacked out, squeezed out of wakefulness. If I were to want the red retro chair for reading A Maggot (we are short on furniture), she would whimper and be slow, very slow on moving her body to the floor. I might have to push her, tip her off the edge.

We have this ongoing battle, she and I. It happens at dinner time when I want to sit in the red retro chair and consume the evening repast. I move her, begin to eat. In the course of the meal, I rise to have seconds — a trip of maybe 30 seconds — and when I come back, she is back on the cushion, licking her bum and whining because she knows that I want the seat back.

Now she sleeps in the red retro chair and I won’t be disturbing her. Instead, I am reading my book at the computer:

For an amorous encounter with the Quaker Maid, Reader, thou had’st best count thy Gold first. This is no silver Queen, despite her modest Appellation, nor no modest One, neither, despite her first appearance. Thous must know nothing pleases your true Debauchee better than to be obliged to force and such is this cunning Nymph’s Device — to blush, to flee, to cry for Shame, until at last she’s brought to Bay.*

This is what I read in Fowles. If I read this aloud while Fiona slept in the red retro chair, of what might she dream?

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*DISCLAIMER: I’m just citing from the page I happen to be on. John Fowles knows how to bring out the worst in past eras, doesn’t he now?