Who Do You Think You Are

two, and when I reached in to take the second load out, I thought I felt something. I thought, what do I have that’s fur?”
    People moaned or laughed, in a sympathetically horrified way. Rose looked around at them appealingly. She felt much better. The living room, with its lake view, its careful decor (a jukebox, barber-shop mirrors, turn-of-the-century advertisements— Smoke, for your throat’s sake —old silk lampshades, farmhouse bowls and jugs, primitive masks and sculptures), no longer seemed so hostile. She took another drink of her gin and knew there was a limited time coming now when she would feel light and welcome as a hummingbird, convinced that many people in the room were witty and many were kind, and some were both together.
    “Oh, no, I thought. But it was. It was. Death in the dryer.”
    “A warning to all pleasure seekers,” said a little sharp-faced man at her elbow, a man she had known slightly for years. He taught in the English department of the university, where the host taught now, and the hostess was a graduate student.
    “That’s terrible,” said the hostess, with her cold, fixed look of sensitivity. Those who had laughed looked a bit abashed, as if they thought they might have seemed heartless. “Your cat. That’s terrible. How could you come tonight?”
    As a matter of fact the incident had not happened today at all; it had happened last week. Rose wondered if the girl meant to put her at a disadvantage. She said sincerely and regretfully that she hadn’t been very fond of the cat and that had made it seem worse, somehow. That’s what she was trying to explain, she said.
    “I felt as if maybe it was my fault. Maybe if I’d been fonder, it wouldn’t have happened.”
    “Of course it wouldn’t,” said the man beside her. “It was warmth he was seeking in the dryer. It was love. Ah, Rose!”
    “Now you won’t be able to fuck the cat any more,” said a tall boy Rose hadn’t noticed before. He seemed to have sprung up, right in front of her. “Fuck the dog, fuck the cat, I don’t know what you do, Rose.”
    She was searching for his name. She had recognized him as a student, or former student.
    “David,” she said. “Hello, David.” She was so pleased at coming up with the name that she was slow in registering what he had said.
    “Fuck the dog, fuck the cat,” he repeated, swaying over her.
    “I beg your pardon,” Rose said, and put on a quizzical, indulgent, charming expression. The people around her were finding it as hard to adjust to what the boy said as she was. The mood of sociability, sympathy, expectation of goodwill was not easy to halt; it rolled on in spite of signs that there was plenty here it wasn’t going to be able to absorb. Almost everyone was still smiling, as if the boy was telling an anecdote or playing a part, the point of which would be made clear in a moment. The hostess cast down her eyes and slipped away.
    “Beg yours,” said the boy in a very ugly tone. “Up yours, Rose.” He was white and brittle-looking, desperately drunk. He had probably been brought up in a gentle home, where people talked about answering Nature’s call and blessed each other for sneezing.
    A short, strong man with black curly hair took hold of the boy’s arm just below the shoulder.
    “Move it along,” he said, almost maternally. He spoke with a muddled European accent, mostly French, Rose thought, though she was not good about accents. She did tend to think, in spite of knowing better, that such accents spring from a richer and more complicated masculinity than the masculinity to be found in North America and in places like Hanratty, where she had grown up. Such an accent promised masculinity tinged with suffering, tenderness, and guile.
    The host appeared in a velvet jumpsuit and took hold of the other arm, more or less symbolically, at the same time kissing Rose’s cheek, because he hadn’t seen her when she came in. “Must talk to you,” he murmured, meaning he hoped he wouldn’t have to, because there was so much tricky territory; the girl he had lived with last year, for one thing, and a night he had spent with Rose toward the end of term, when there had been a lot of drinking and bragging and lamenting about faithlessness, as well as some curiously insulting though pleasurable sex. He was looking very brushed and tended, thinner but softened, with his flowing hair and suit of bottle-green velvet. Only three years younger than Rose, but