“Not your choice,” B answers.
“About Daisy’s expiration?” C says.
“It began with vomiting. Not the usual cat upchucking. Hair balls and the like. But rather extensive, continuous vomiting—a signal that something more fundamental was occurring. Enough accumulation and cleanup to signal a trip to Meguro.”
“You’ve ordered new tatami already?” B says.
“Of course,” A replies, “but our vet, Madame Vincouvier, about seventy years old and with an amazing stacked shock of grey and very curly hair, insisted a cleanse would restore Daisy to her peak health for an animal of ‘such advanced age.’”
“What we might ask,” C says, “was a French woman veterinarian doing in Meguro, unless of course, she’d been there for over six decades.”
“Of course, she had. Haven’t we all? Aren’t we all honorary Japanese with annual visas?
“Thank God for Seoul’s proximity,” A says. And for more than a moment conversation ceases as each relives the latest quick round trip to Seoul for a visa renewal. A recalls his miserable night at a Korean yogwan, adjusting his sitting on the fire-hot floor. B remembers the dazzling quickness of Wi-Fi in his five-star hotel, and C recalls his overnight with his wife’s oldest friend, a language teacher living an hour out from the Seoul; her two rambunctious sons, aged five and seven, kept him up well past midnight. C reflected it was such shared discombobulations of seeking permission to live in Japan that kept the group together past all imagining—a kind of desperation of companionship and shared inconvenience. And now, C thought, it is death itself that threads us together. The vaunted red thread A mentioned ties us to Seoul’s visa renewal and the certainty of expiration at some point, perhaps over the Japan Sea, could that be it?
A continues, “Ah Madame Vincouvier, surely the wisest of all the cat vets in Kanto and surely the most thorough. ‘A little cleanse for your Daisy and voila! She’ll be bright as new, as lithe as the lolloping leopards. And if the cleanse doesn’t work, we have lots of options, and we’ll explore them all till she’s as right as rain, as thrilled and thrilling as any kitten in Tokyo.’”
“And how much did the cleanse cost?” B asks.
“Five hundred dollars. Daisy spent two nights in Meguro.” A answers, betraying a miniscule flash of discomfort at the mention of price. “But that was just the start. The flush didn’t work, didn’t sweep into oblivion the shards of innards knotting. In a week I took her back to Meguro and Madame Vincouvier revealed herself to be compassion’s most blossoming agent, with, evidently, a near limitless sympathy for Daisy’s plight. Three more days of intravenous injections and finally a diagnosis that diabetes had complicated Daisy’s intestinal aggravations. But she was responding well to the antibiotics and the loving Meguro evening massages.”
“Massages?” B asks, incredulous.
“Yes. Cat shiatsu, ever heard of it? The gentlest and most expensive conceivable.”
“And Madame Vincouvier spent evening after evening reading about cat digestion in her linoleum-lined room above the clinic in Meguro? Say it isn’t so?” C says. Then answers himself. “Alone with her copy of Proust and her clinical studies while the Yamanote-sen rattles nearby and Daisy rests beneath her manipulating fingers.”
“Not at all. Vincouvier insisted on the best masseuse in Tokyo, a spry elderly Japanese woman named Yamaguchi, who cost only one mahn for each eight-minute treatment. And at the end Daisy, she argued, was purring. But I didn’t hear that ever. On the contrary when I brought poor Daisy home she continued vomiting and lying in the mock leather lounge chair I myself had used to recover after my rotator cuff operation. I remember leaning down toward sleeping Daisy and wanting, ever wanting, to hear the music of her purr, but nothing— only the rasp of uneven breath and an occasional very low moan. Nine mahn into massages and nothing like even a mild improvement.”
“Nine mahn?” B asks, “nine mahn for a cat?”
‘Madame Vincouvier is a very erai sensei, a very, very erai sensei.”
“I don’t give a damn. I’d hesitate to spend nine mahn on my mother, let alone my cat.”
“You have a cat?” C asks
“Am I nuts?” B answers.
“You ought to understand that Daisy has been with us from the very start, right after I met Sanae,” A says.
“Longevity is some kind of exoneration, justification for excessive care?”
“There is no escape from care—even you must sense that. Even you. But the point is extraneous. What is pertinent was Madame Vincouvier’s passion to heal Daisy, to prolong her tired existence on this mortal plain. Her devotion to Daisy’s well-being. That’s what I responded to, what inevitably I bankrolled.”
C says, “You thought, here is something I can care for, something worth devoting my life too? Was that it?”
“Of course, that was it. What else could anyone say?” B says.
A says, “I’m only saying that after a long time caring for Daisy I wasn’t prepared to simply walk away. Who could have? And Madame Vincouvier radiated such concern that anyone would have responded to that. And there was Daisy looking so pathetic and imploring for some relief, some gesture of continuing care.”
“Out of shame or guilt or both,” B says.
“But,” A continues, “even Madame Vincouvier failed to convince her staff, and that failure shifted opinion about Daisy’s future . . . It began with her suggestion that further tests were important, despite the expense already invested in the various rescue procedures—all of which had fallen short. So now she argued that Daisy needed an ambulance trip to Sendai for an MRI, yes, a cat MRI. Cost? Approximately ni jeu mahn yen. Yes, two thousand dollars U.S. to find out that Daisy was dying, had been dying, as do we all, from the moment she was born.” A looks around sheepishly, imagining he has enunciated the most obvious yet most hidden remark. “But to grant Madame Vincouvier some self-consciousness, she said to me, and loud enough for her staff to hear, ‘But I suppose, that is an expense more than you may be willing to undertake, given all that her illness has already inflicted on you.’”
“Perhaps you had informed her Daisy’s costs had already prevented your boat payment?” B asks smiling, then laughing.
“Not precisely,” A answers, “but spiritually quite correct. I muttered something about Daisy being at least twenty years old—for a cat in Japan, well beyond lifetime expectation. Far longer than my own. And Madame Vincouvier nodded, but seemed disappointed and with somewhat sharpness said, ‘Well, take her home and let God resolve the situation. I apologize for inflicting such unwelcome expenses on you already. I often misjudge an owner’s commitment to his pet. I suppose you have spent something like fifteen hundred dollars U.S. by now. It would be untoward to ask for more. Staff will help you get Daisy back into her travel cage.’ And there was exemplary gentleness in staff’s lifting of Daisy back into her towel-lined wire and wood travel cage. She cowered at the end of the box, on her green fluffy Turkish towel.
“And for a couple of days Daisy seemed better. She neither vomited nor moaned at all. But I noticed she bloated again and by the third day I began to worry that she was not normally excreting or urinating at all. I enticed her with green tea, even warm milk, but she stopped eating or drinking, as if trying herself to tame the bloating. She slept on her side and her visible limbs just extended straight out from her swollen body, as if directing an invisible tide, a wind from somewhere she alone could experience. And then a quiet, very quiet occasional whimper. So, it has come at last, I thought. And I face-timed with Nigel who, as the youngest, had been closest to Daisy. He was in pajamas (something he’d never worn as a child) and said sweetly, ‘She looks bad. Looks like the end.