Krazy Kat

It was going to be a very long time, Krazy decided, before she played with that Ignatz Mouse again. His games were just too strange! In fact, the last one he'd invented—called psychoanalysis—had so throwmetized her that she had spent two whole weeks lying on her back, in the middle of her rug, arms and legs rigid in the air. Supposedly, Ignatz' psychobusiness was going to fix Krazy's terrible stage fright. Now look! She still couldn't go back to her comic strip, to her adoring and bereft fans! Heck, she could hardly move her legs!

The mouse had malpracticed her, but he had come to visit her every day, spoon-feeding her strawberry ice cream till she could at least Pogo-stick around her house by herself. And his new game—fantasy—did sound intriguing. Ignatz said they were to imagine the sort of human beings they would be if they were human beings.

Lips pursed, Ignatz took a judicious sip of tea and a ginger cookie from the flowered plate on her dining-room table. Fantasy, he said, was a necessity for Krazy. Her therapy hadn't succeeded before because flat comic-strip characters didn't know about sex. But when they were people, they would have the real sweet stuff, and Ignatz would be able to psychoanalyze Krazy more deeply. When they returned to Coconino County, the cured, guilt-free Krazy would be able to move her legs easily. And they could work again.

Krazy considered. They hadn't worked for more than 30 years, for her heart had gone on strike from the day she had realized that her brick-to-the-bean art was harmful to your health. For their comic strip was advising everyone, Always mix love and pain! Imagine how she felt when she realized she was mouse-coding that message to the world! Guilty, that's how! It made K.K. personally responsible for lemon used cars, summer reruns and the A-bomb!

"Of course, it means you'll have to fuck, and you know...."

Krazy shuddered. Her legs stuck straight out beneath the table. Sex! Comic-strip characters couldn't even swear! What was Ignatz hiding? And how could it be worse than sex? "And what?"

"Well, you know ... die. A little, I mean. I mean, I think we'll age."

Krazy's sensitive Kat ears picked up Ignatz' tremolo. He, too, was scared. Die, Krazy thought. Her fur on fire. No more fur. No more her. A thing she couldn't imagine. Still, Ignatz the artist eternally impressed her. Now, so that he and Krazy might work again, Ignatz would risk humanness—even if it meant their doing really embarrassing things and ... dying. "OK," she said. Her brain bubbled a bit with carefree champagne. After all, it was only a game. "I'll have nice breasts," she said. And, surprisingly, her words left the taste of honey on her tongue.

"Yes!" Ignatz shouted. His big front teeth glistened with delight. Krazy was very pleased that he was pleased. His pleasure meant, Print it. She would have nice breasts.

"And I'm a blond Satan. The smooth thickness of my arms, legs and body, the sag of my big rounded shoulders, make my body like a bear's. It is like a shaved bear's: My chest is hairless. My skin is childishly soft and pink."

Oh, Krazy knew that fellow! It was Sam Spade. Ignatz worshiped the gumshoe. He wouldn't play the sap for any bimbo, even lovely, guileful Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Well, not this time! Krazy thought. This time, Ignatz will play the sap for me. "No," she said. "You're thin, and small." But he was still too threatening. "You have big ears. And you wear glasses." There, she thought, now I can love him. He needs my protection. She sipped some tea contentedly. Fantasy Ignatz wouldn't be a spiteful tough guy. He'd be cream-centered candy, Stan Laurel-like—sensitive and very quick to weep.

"Couldn't I be a little taller?"

"OK. But you're still thin."

"The Thin Man?" the mouse asked hopefully.

"No. Just a thin man. Nothing special. Except to me." She hummed My Funny Valentine, but Ignatz didn't smile. "You can have the hairless chest," she added. "And the soft pink skin."

"Ugh!" Big-eyed, he stared across the table at her, half afraid of her power.

Wow! She fixed his shape! He had to take the part, because he wanted to star in her fantasy! She bent down to lap tea from her cup and, giggling with pleasure, spluttered some on her black fur. This was great! She licked herself clean.

As for Krazy, Ignatz said she would be pretty, with a thin nose, widely spaced almond eyes, good cheekbones, nice breasts and long, full legs. She would be very desirable.

That was nice, Krazy thought. Well, but sure, he was just pleasing himself! Men! (And strawberry ice cream, she remembered, was his favorite flavor, not hers.)

She would have the shape of Mary Astor, Krazy said. Ignatz nodded. Brigid, Krazy thought, had had special sap-making feminine power. It had something to do with wearing hats. When she was human, Krazy decided, she would get herself a lot of beautiful hats with mysterious veils. Krazy clapped her paws together above her head in anticipation and shouted—as when a brick used to land on Nogginsville—"Oh, play that junk-yard music, Ignatz!"

"But you're very troubled," Ignatz added. Krazy's high spirits fizzled. Ignatz wouldn't like a woman without petite ears and big bazooms, so he made her flaw inward. "You're a graduate student in art history. But you're blocked. You can't finish your dissertation. That's why you're seeing a therapist. Me. Dr. Ignatz."

Krazy scrunched her eyes, making him disappear. Ignatz always had to play doctor. A respected M.D. son was what Ignatz' immigrant father had longed for. Which meant Krazy had to play patient.

"You're a blocked graduate student at Harvard," the mouse offered in a wheedling tone.

Big ivy-covered deal! Well, probably he wanted to be her therapist because he wanted to be needed, too. He wanted to have a hand in reshaping her. "OK."

"You can be blonde," Ignatz offered grandly.

"I don't want to be." She wanted to be the dark-haired fatal one with the spicy hair and the almond eyes. The one who didn't feel guilty about anything! "You can be blonde. Your wife can be blonde." But Krazy knew her hair would be strawcolored. That was what Ignatz wanted, so—stop the presses!—it became what she wanted, because what she really wanted was to be what he wanted. Just as he wanted to be what she wanted him to be. Mirrors looking at mirrors!

"My wife?" Ignatz said, exhaling slowly.

"You're married," Krazy said. She could see that they were both relieved by this turn in the story. "But you're separated from the Mrs." Why separated? Why not divorced? Why not never happened? Well, then he'll have to choose me, Krazy thought. Besides, he won't always be in my hair, my lovely blonde—I mean black, oh, hell, blonde hair. "Every Tuesday, you visit your estranged wife. You stay over till Wednesday. And I have a husband, too." So there, mouse. But her left side shivered with anxiety.

"Your husband's a psychiatrist also."

Santa Ignatz was handing out nice Jewish doctors! Strangely, Krazy grew depressed.

"You're separated," he added.

"Thank God!" Krazy said. Why? But to wake up every morning beside a body stale from sleep—that awful sour-cream smell—she would have to lick him all day! How could she ever get her dissertation done?

"And I'll have hands," Ignatz said quietly.

"Of course you'll have hands," Krazy said. Ignatz had always been so proud of his near-human-quality paw dexterity, his skill with his claws. He was even able to thread a needle! But paws, she saw, were as nothing. If she gave him hands, he would be able to be affectionate with her, stroking, unrushed. In this, she thought, I will please myself utterly. "You have beautiful hands, with long, thin, aristocratic fingers." She felt them smoothing her black fur and purred lightly. Fantasy was fun. She hadn't felt so nearly mingled with Ignatz since the bricks had started to hurt. Today they drank from the same cup.

"Thank you," Ignatz said softly, with the downcast eyes of a grateful supplicant. "And I'd like to have...to have a big...cock."

"What?" Large? Loud? Doodle-doo?

"A big, you know, penis ... a big cock."

"What? Why?" What earthly difference did that make? Who would ever know? Oh, well, if it was something he wanted. But then she saw that Ignatz looked rounder to her, less like, a flat comic-strip character, more like a human who bent the light around his shoulders. Ignatz must truly be telling her something she wanted, too. Even if she hadn't known she wanted it. Even if it wasn't exactly nice. "Yes," she said, as if from a trance, her own eyes downcast.

"Thank you."

"Thank you," she said.

•

Dr. Ignatz remembered the second time they had shaken hands, at the end of the first month's sessions. She had held his hand longer than he expected. "You have lovely fingers," she had said with unself-conscious appreciation. Her hand was soft, supple, not the almost rigid thing that had half grasped his at the beginning of their work together. "Thank you," he had said. Her touch had made him feel mixed with her, fused for a moment. I am her doctor, he had thought, I should not feel this—even as he prolonged the press of her hand on his. Already, he had been bewitched by her. Her skin was dark, yet her hair was naturally blonde, and her broad cheekbones, bright almond eyes and full lips had something unplaceable about them, perhaps a surprising conjunction of many nationalities—her face a poem. A figure at a bazaar. "Thank you," she had replied, with that same openheartedness—and just enough irony so that neither of them had to be embarrassed.

He had gone back to his desk then to bring order to the month's notes. Fifteen minutes till the next patient. He remembered that he had thought it had been a good beginning. A good hysteric!

6/31/85. Catherine Higgs Bosun. (But she insists that her nickname, Kate, should have a K to it.) Twenty-six years old. Recommended to me by my supervisor.

The outlines of Kate's problem are clear. Her work is a sham to her, for to be a woman, she thinks, is to be completely submissive to another's needs. So when Kate tries to do her own work, she feels unwomanly, unlovable. But when she is with her husband, she feels utterly subservient, his "pet." (So she and her husband have separate apartments. And she often has affairs. If she can be between two men, she feels protected from her own desire to be possessed.) Caught in this web of prohibitions, she grows brittle, stiff, unable to have either satisfying love or work.

•

Soon after writing those first notes, Kate had trusted him enough to tell him her most cherished fantasy. A golden oldy, she said: She was on a raised platform, wearing only a felt collar.

"A leather collar?" Dr. Ignatz said. Her voice had dazed him.

"All right. A beautiful leather collar, like the ones pets wear." Kate's voice, too, was drowsy.

Wait, he shouldn't be furnishing her fantasy! And sup's internalized baritone said, Keep silent, Dr. Ignatz!

Dr. Ignatz shivered. The air conditioning. His body now was covered with sweat. Could this have been what his eminent father figure, bow-tied head of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute's analysts, had wanted when he had referred Kate? No, of course not.

•

"No," Krazy said, "that's too fast; it's going too fast. I'm not ready for that yet."

"OK," Ignatz said.

Krazy heard the mouse's anxiety melisma, and that quaver made her want to go on ever more quickly. Where was the cure Ignatz had promised her for her guilt-manacled limbs? Krazy wanted Kate to be a devil in nylon hose, to wear black-seamed stockings, the soft, silky kind that even Krazy's retracted claws would have ripped. But could Krazy even give advice? She and Ignatz were having the fantasy, but it was having them, too, taking them places they hadn't expected. Sometimes she didn't even know what she truly desired until the story showed her.

•

A hysteric, Dr. Ignatz had thought. She needs to be seen, he thought. She disappears when she's alone. He looked over at her, lying on his couch. She wasn't wearing a bra and she had two buttons of her blouse open. He could see the sides of her breasts and her nipples, stiff beneath the gray silk. Her long legs were crossed at the ankles. Then, as if she felt his eyes on her, she uncrossed her legs and raised her knees. Her soft blue skirt fell toward her waist, showing the tops of her stockings and her garters. He hadn't known that women still wore garters! His doodle-doo grew stiff. "Oh," she said nonsensically, "I can bend my knees!" As if that needed to be proved! Really, she was justifying her self-exposure. She hummed, as she often did during her silences, snatches of long-ago popular songs, her motor idling contentedly. What were the words to the song? It was one his mother used to sing. His mother, too, had lovely legs, and Kate's flickery here-and-gone quality. "In olden days, a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking / But now, God knows, / Anything goes!" I can name that tune in five notes, he thought, charmed by Kate's irony.

And then he thought, I'm fully clothed, and I'm watching her fantasy of herself naked. She's teaching me how to unlock her. Could I make love to her? He saw his supervisor's wise face, the long doglike ears of age, the stern yet sorrowful eyes. Don't you want to be an analyst? the sup's gravel-and-ash voice would say. This temporary infatuation could be the end of your career! Dr. Ignatz willed the wilting of his cock. I'm not going to play the sap for her, he told himself. She's making a rapid transference. A good hysteric. But it was already becoming a mantra. Agoodhysteric. Agoosteric. A goose A trick. He wanted to make himself feel as if he were reading about Kate, as if she were a diagram in a textbook. But the soft, sweet feeling, the desire to blend himself with her, to feel truly connected, wouldn't go away. She remained warm, round, compelling. How could he prefer the flat theoretical blueprint of a house to a room that he could enter?

•

Kate picked up her hat from beside the tissue box on the small table by the couch, a round hat made from blue velvet, with a veil (continued on page 174)Krazy Kat(continued from page 107) tucked around the rim, not in any decade's style, yet her style. She swirled her black-stockinged legs over the side of the sofa and sat up.

She touched the hat, straightening the veil forward. "Let's fuck," she said. "Hey!" she added, as if surprised by her own voice. "I can swear!"

"What?" He thought, I am not a good boy anymore and felt his heart beat with hard whacka-whacka willfulness. He went to her and she circled him with her arms.

"My arms bend, too," she said, with what sounded like genuine surprise. Maybe she, too, was shocked that they were able to do this thing. The keeper of the psychoanalytic laws, the sup, would be horrified. He wanted Dr. Ignatz to be moral, nourished by rectitude, unhappy, like all the Jews since Abraham. Well, who was more important—this lovely woman or the sup? Kate was, would be, had to be. Good, Dr. Ignatz thought, I'm bad! And, as if in response, Kate kissed him with theatrical fury, hurting his lips. He nuzzled a quarter-sized patch of discolored skin on her collarbone, and Kate made a pleasant growly sound from her throat. He slowly stroked the soft skin of her thighs, between the tops of her stockings and her lacy underwear, drinking her with his hand.

"My fingers work," he said, playing with her. But his fingers did feel special, as if he had just recovered from a long, numbing illness, as if Kate and he had almost invented hands, invented touch.

She smiled, her lips together, and purred lightly. He looked down at his once-inadequate, hairless, pink body. As Kate stroked his chest, it was as if this body—oh, impossible!—were truly what she desired, what she had always wanted! "Oh, play that junk-yard music! Whip it, horns, whip it!"

•

His couch was vinyl and had stuck to their skin, making crackling sounds as they rolled about.

"Thank you," she said when it was over.

It wasn't over. His career might be over, but not their lovemaking. He smelled her perfume on the fingers of his right hand mixed with the magical oil from her cunt—a new fragrance called Disaster.

•

It wasn't like what she had imagined, Krazy thought.

Ignatz stared into the distance. "It's different," he said, bemused. Yet there was something about the bitterness that could only be sweetened, satisfied, fulfilled, if they did it again.

"I want to try again," Krazy said.

"Once more," Ignatz whispered.

•

"Thank you," Dr. Ignatz had said.

She had put her stockings back on, snapping them to her garters. Smiling at him distantly, she had smoothed her rumpled cotton skirt.

He watched her walk out, a blonde ignis fatuus, a fairy light. And he knew that he would soon run after her, an Ignatz fatuous. Was that why he wanted her so, because even as she opened her arms to him, she seemed to be moving away, drawing him onward? Perhaps chasing Kate would free him from his unhappy marriage that wasn't a marriage. And throw him out of the career that he loved!

•

"Stroke your cock," she ordered. It was two weeks later.

"Thank you," he said meekly, kneeling in front of her on his office floor. Kate knew that he liked to stroke himself or to hold his cock with his hand gently underneath, like a jeweler—or a butcher—showing off a choice piece of goods, and he performed with a pleasing small boy's innocence, not adolescent cock proud but as if he were delighted and surprised that he had one. Not that his cock was that important to Kate; she loved Dr. Ignatz one and indivisible. But he sometimes acted as if Mr. Cock might have its own favorite flavor of ice cream (strawberry, probably), Presidential preference, plans for secession. In truth, though, maybe she was especially fond of his cock, so much longer and larger than one would have expected.

"Thank you," he said again.

"What?" Kate turned down the corners of her mouth with mock anger.

"Thank you, mistress," he said, looking down at the floor.

That was the signal to continue a "strip," just as saying their special nonsense word—Pupp—would mean that one of them was scared, that they should print for the day. How had this begun? Their strips—and why had they each thought to call them that?—had certainly started with some pretty straight stuff. And even now—she knew from service magazines and ladies'-room gossip—they were still conventional in their plots, a graduate student and a psychiatrist, bourgey S/M, a little spice, like faddish Cajun cooking. After all, it was only a game.

•

But when, Dr. Ignatz wondered, had she thought to take the leading role—hot tomato become top banana? She was an inspired ... entertainer. Kate was an artist, really—witty, deeply empathetic, responsive.

"Beg," she said now, as a director might say "Action." "Beg, my dear little pet, my dreamy little boy." She wore a black-felt hat shaped like a flattened paper boat.

The comedy of that hat, tilted on her head like a wink, with its veil pinned around it, made the scene possible for him, not too serious, yet serious enough, a shared joke, so he was backstage and on stage at the same time. Making the fantasy up and living it out, while knowing it was just a fantasy. On his knees, he cast down his eyes before her cunt. "May I lick you, mistress?"

She pulled him by the hair and brought his lips to her cunt, then—oh, luxury!—she drank from a balloon of cognac while he licked her. Dribbling the last of the brandy on his black springy hair, she lay back on the couch, where as her analyst, he had once given a shape to her by telling her what her fantasies meant. Now, for as long as she held his head between her legs, she knew what he wanted; she drew his shape.

"Oh, that's nice," she hummed. "Now, strut it out!"

He licked harder, and she came skimmingly, as if she were the boat, yet she was the wind, and she was the ocean the boat moved across.

She took his head from between her legs, pulled him up and laid him down on the couch. Straddling him, she sucked and bit his nipples, pulled lightly, then harder on their curlicues of black hair.

"Please," he implored in a sleepy yet insistent voice, "harder."

Her teeth dug into him like claws. Kate hummed another Cole Porter tune, a favorite of his mother's: "So your baby can be your slave?/Oh, why can't you behave?" He would behave, he said; he was her slave. He let himself sink into the mild pain, like a warm bath; the dark pool was a place where she was there with him, for certain; sharply joined; inseparable; fused together.

She rose over him and he entered her. "Come, slave," she said. "Show you belong to me. Give yourself."

He came into her. And she came, too. Lovingly, Kate stroked Dr. Ignatz' hair.

"Thank you," Dr. Ignatz said, his voice still a bit sleepy-slavish, caught in the spider-web ties of a dream.

•

Ignatz Mouse stared at the space in front of the table where the fantasy images formed. It had been so good. Kate had given Dr. Ignatz what Krazy Kat had never given him. Always he had bricked her, pursued her. Now Kate had given him a reciprocal sign; she had given him—well, sort of him—the brick back to the ... the certainty that they were connected.... But then the feeling faded like yesterday's headlines.

If only they would do it again!

•

Later that same week—oh, how long will Krazy and Ignatz remain lost in fantasy? When will they return to their comicstrip work?—Kate sat behind the couch in Dr. Ignatz' tall red-metal chair, smiling at this office furniture's pleasing higgledy-piggledy eclecticism (though his therapy techniques had been Freud-pure until her beauty had—unintentionally!—made him play the sap for her). Probably, the decor was mix and match because he couldn't stand thinking about furniture; his mother had spent too much time antiquing, and he still saw furniture as a competitor. (That, she thought, was a good analysis! She must tell him.)

Dr. Ignatz worked now behind his large old desk, trying to produce the draft of a new paper. To become more than an instructor at the Harvard Medical School, one had to produce 16—or was it 60 or 600 or six quadrillion?—published papers. But Dr. Ignatz' papers were different from the others, not make work but truly brilliant. He would risk anything so that his patients might be OK, even describing really embarrassing things he had done. Dr. Ignatz wouldn't tell her what this paper was about, but she was sure he was analyzing the strips they did together. Which made her an important part of his work.

She heard Dr. Ignatz' sharp chicken-scratch pen stop, so she brought him a cup of Java from the coffee maker she had bought for the office, their secret place. Serving him his coffee, she bent down low so he could see the new half-bra she was wearing, and the tops of her breasts. He would have to have her; the more she seemingly served him, the more he wanted her. "Thank you," he said, and smiled at her. She smiled. How could he want the diagram of a house more than a room that he could enter?

He couldn't. He pushed his papers aside and they walked together to the couch. For so long she had resisted her desire to belong to someone, to be cared for. Soon, he would touch her all over with his beautiful long fingers, petting her, smoothing her, admiring her, warming her.

•

Krazy stared in fascination at the fantasy that formed in front of her dining-room table like the bluest of movies. And bing! went a bulb over our Kat's head! Everyone, she saw, wanted a little spice sprinkled on his or her pleasure, a soupçon of power mixed with the soft sticky stuff of love. It made you feel truly connected. That accounted for Kate and Dr. Ignatz' bizarre strips of masters and mistresses! And sure, Krazy Kat had said with every daily bonk to her bean that love should be mixed with hurt! But it wasn't just Krazy's idea, it was Kate's and Ignatz' and Dr. Ignatz' and yours and mine, too!

•

Entering her from behind, he had one of his beautiful hands on her breast, and one of his long lovely fingers stroked her, insisting that she come. She pressed her cheek up against his. "Thank you," she murmured, "that was ... that was steam-heated!"

•

Krazy basked in the warmth of Kate's coming. While she watched Kate and Dr. Ignatz "doing it"—though she didn't yet understand what all exactly they were doing—she felt as good as anyone. Because Krazy wasn't especially guilty—not as long as everyone was doing it. But then, how could she and Ignatz ever return to their comic strip? She kicked her long, limber legs up in the air, banging the table. They had to do it again!

"She swirled her black-stockinged legs over the side. 'Let's fuck,' she said."