What I find relatable in Cat Person
they texted nearly non-stop, not only jokes but little updates about their days. They started saying good morning and good night, and when she asked him a question and he didn’t respond right away she felt a jab of anxious yearning.
On the drive, he was quieter than she’d expected, and he didn’t look at her very much. Before five minutes had gone by, she became wildly uncomfortable, and, as they got on the highway, it occurred to her that he could take her someplace and rape and murder her;
she wondered if the discomfort in the car was her fault, because she was acting jumpy and nervous, like the kind of girl who thought she was going to get murdered every time she went on a date
as if being polite were an obligation that had been imposed on him.
he was expecting her to say no and that, when she did, they wouldn’t talk again. That made her sad, not so much because she wanted to continue spending time with him as because she’d had such high expectations for him over break, and it didn’t seem fair that things had fallen apart so quickly.
“I’m not sulking,” she said. “I’m just a little tired.”
Maybe, she thought, her texting “lol r u serious” had hurt him, had intimidated him and made him feel uncomfortable around her. The thought of this possible vulnerability touched her, and she felt kinder toward him than she had all night.
It was a terrible kiss, shockingly bad;
It seemed awful, yet somehow it also gave her that tender feeling toward him again, the sense that even though he was older than her, she knew something he didn’t.
Margot laughed along with the jokes he was making at the expense of this imaginary film-snob version of her,
maybe that had hurt Robert’s feelings, too. She’d thought it was clear that she just didn’t want to go on a date where she worked, but maybe he’d taken it more personally than that; maybe he’d suspected that she was ashamed to be seen with him. She was starting to think that she understood him—how sensitive he was, how easily he could be wounded—and that made her feel closer to him, and also powerful, because once she knew how to hurt him she also knew how he could be soothed.
she spoke self-deprecatingly about the movies at the artsy theatre that she found boring or incomprehensible; she told him about how much her older co-workers intimidated her, and how she sometimes worried that she wasn’t smart enough to form her own opinions on anything. The effect of this on him was palpable and immediate, and she felt as if she were petting a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear, skillfully coaxing it to eat from her hand.
“Well. This is my house,” he said flatly, pushing the door open.
Robert was watching her closely, observing the impression the room had made.
Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon.
fell on top of her with those huge, sloppy kisses, his hand moving mechanically across her breasts and down to her crotch, as if he were making some perverse sign of the cross, she began to have trouble breathing and to feel that she really might not be able to go through with it after all.
this was what she loved most about sex—a guy revealed like that. Robert showed her more open need than any of the others,
she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.
she imagined his arousal, the more turned-on she got
but then he poked her too hard and she flinched, and he jerked his hand away.
Yeah, right, she thought,
she felt a wave of revulsion that she thought might actually break through her sense of pinned stasis
he moved her through a series of positions
Robert got up and hurried to the bathroom
Margot lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling,
she imagined that somewhere, out there in the universe, there was a boy who would think that this moment was just as awful yet hilarious as she did
and the two of them would collapse into each other’s arms and laugh and laugh—but of course there was no such future, because no such boy existed, and never would.
“I should go home, probably,” she said.
“Really?” he said. “But I thought you’d stay over.
she’d imagined that Robert might murder her, and she thought, Maybe he’ll murder me now.
“A date,” she said to her imaginary boyfriend. “He called that a date.” And they both laughed and laughed.
“Wait,” he said, and grabbed her arm. “Come here.” He dragged her back, wrapped his arms around her, and pushed his tongue down her throat one last time.
she already had a text from him: no words, just hearts and faces with heart eyes and, for some reason, a dolphin.
hopeful possibility that he would disappear without her having to do anything, that somehow she could just wish him away.
She told herself that she owed him at least some kind of breakup message, that to ghost on him would be inappropriate, childish, and cruel. And, if she did try to ghost, who knew how long it would take him to get the hint? Maybe the messages would keep coming and coming; maybe they would never end
She began drafting a message—Thank you for the nice time but I’m not interested in a relationship right now—but she kept hedging and apologizing, attempting to close loopholes that she imagined him trying to slip through (“It’s O.K., I’m not interested in a relationship either, something casual is fine! ”), so that the message got longer and longer and even more impossible to send.
she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she’d realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she’d imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.
“He’s a nice guy, sort of,” Margot said, and she wondered how true that was.
Perhaps she was being unfair to Robert, who really had done nothing wrong,
