Two Dinners

by Groucho Marx, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The cat had two names and answered to neither, which put him, in Harold Pinsker's professional opinion, one up on most of the witnesses Harold had taken down. Witnesses answered to everything. They answered questions nobody had asked them and questions they had been specifically asked not to answer, and for forty-one years Harold had written all of it down in Gregg at two hundred words a minute for the Superior Court of the County of Los Angeles, without once being permitted to say a word himself. In 1961 the county gave him a fountain pen with his name engraved on the barrel, the first time it had put his name on anything, and he retired to the downstairs half of a duplex on Ninth Street in Long Beach, two blocks from the ocean and a good deal closer to the landlord.

The cat was gray, with a white bib and a notch out of the left ear, and he had come in through the kitchen window one evening in April as though he held the lease. Harold called him Sam. He fed him at half past five, a can of StarKist, on the grounds that the cannery was over on Terminal Island and practically a neighbor. Afterwards Sam sat on the arm of the chair and they listened to the Dodgers on the radio, Sam with his eyes shut, which was how Harold had always listened to lawyers.

The lease, paragraph fourteen, said: No animals shall be kept on the premises. Harold had read it carefully, because he read everything carefully, and had concluded that Sam was not kept. Nobody kept Sam. Sam arrived at half past five and left at a quarter past six, and in between he was a guest. On guests the lease said only that they were not to be noisy after ten, and Sam had never once been noisy after ten. Where Sam went after ten Harold did not know. He had the decency not to ask.

The landlord lived upstairs. Dr. Lyman Prosser had been for twenty-two years Dean of Humanities at Sepulveda Junior College, and he wore a gray cardigan as though it had been conferred on him at a ceremony. On the stairs he addressed Harold as "Mr. Pinsker," with a slight weight on the Pin, like a man correcting a pronunciation. Harold addressed him as "Dean." He could see that Prosser enjoyed this, and he himself enjoyed it a good deal more.

What Harold knew about the Dean he knew through the ceiling. The duplex had been put up in 1924 by somebody who was sparing with plaster, and every evening at a quarter past six a chair scraped overhead and the Dean began to read aloud. It was Cicero, mostly: the Latin first, then the English, then the commentary. "You will observe," the Dean would say, "the ascending tricolon." Some evenings there were questions. Nobody answered them, and after a while the Dean would answer them himself, correct the answer, and give it a B-plus.

Harold had spent forty-one years unable to keep his hand from writing down whatever was said in his hearing, and he had taken down a good deal of this. He told himself it kept the hand in. He had four notebooks of it by September. He did not think about why.

In the second week of September Sam stopped jumping up onto the arm of the chair. He looked at the chair, and then at Harold, and then he lay down on the linoleum with the expression of a man who has been shown his seat in the second balcony. Harold made an appointment with Dr. Ocampo on Atlantic Avenue for Thursday at ten. On Thursday he set his alarm, caught Sam on the back step at seven with a sardine, put him into a laundry basket with a bath towel tucked over the top, and carried him nine blocks. Sam gave his opinion of the arrangement through the towel the whole way.

In the waiting room, with an empty wicker carrier on his knees, sat the Dean.

They looked at each other. The Dean looked at the laundry basket. The laundry basket said something low and continuous.

"Cicero," said the Dean.

"Gesundheit," said Harold.

The Dean stood up. "That is my cat."

"Then what's in your box?"

"I have had an appointment for that animal since Monday. I was unable to locate him this morning."

"I bribed him," said Harold. "It's the only way to get anybody to a doctor."

The girl at the desk had a card in front of her and a pencil over it. "Which of you gentlemen is the owner?"

"I am," said the Dean, "in the sense that—"

"He's the owner in a sense," said Harold. "I'm the owner in a laundry basket. Write us both down. I'll check your shorthand."

Dr. Ocampo was a short, unhurried man with a stethoscope in the pocket of his white coat and a cigarette behind his ear that he seemed to have forgotten. He lifted Sam out of the basket with both hands, the way you lift a full pot, and set him on the scale. He moved the weight along the bar, and then he moved it some more.

"Seventeen pounds four ounces," he said. "Your cat isn't sick, gentlemen. Your cat is eating two dinners."

It was quiet in the examining room. On the table Sam washed one paw with the air of a man whose lawyer has advised him to say nothing.

"Chopped liver," said the Dean at last. "At a quarter past six."

"Tuna," said Harold. "Half past five."

"Then he comes to me," said the Dean slowly, "directly from you."

"He goes up to you directly from me, with my tuna in him, and you sit him down to liver. Dean, you've been feeding a cat that already ate. That's not a cat. That's a faculty dinner."

Dr. Ocampo wrote on the card. "One dinner," he said. "One small can a day, and I don't care whose. I want to see him back in a month." He looked up. "Name?"

"Cicero," said the Dean.

"Sam," said Harold.

Dr. Ocampo wrote Sam Cicero and turned the card around so they could see it.

"He sounds like a man who runs a book in Cleveland," said Harold.

They walked home together because there was nothing else to do, Harold with the laundry basket and the Dean with the empty carrier, so that from across the street they looked like a man who had a cat and a man who had a theory. At Ninth and Lime the Dean cleared his throat.

"Strictly speaking, Mr. Pinsker, paragraph fourteen—"

"Strictly speaking, I agree with you," said Harold. "I agree with every word. No animals shall be kept on the premises. And he's on the premises upstairs every night from a quarter past six. So either the lease applies to the landlord, in which case you're evicting yourself and I'll help you carry the books down, or it doesn't apply to the cat, in which case he isn't kept, he's visiting, and he can visit anybody he likes."

"Cicero is not kept," said the Dean. "He is received."

"Received," said Harold. "Like stolen goods."

The Dean walked on for half a block without a word. Then he said, in a different voice, "You can hardly claim he prefers you. He sits with me a full hour. I read to him."

"I know," said Harold. "'You will observe the ascending tricolon.' August the ninth. 'You are the only member of this faculty who has never interrupted me.' August the twenty-second. 'We will take it slowly, there is no hurry, there is no hurry at all.' Last Tuesday."

The Dean stopped on the sidewalk. Harold stopped too, and did not look at him. He had not meant to say it. His hand had said it, the way it had done everything for forty-one years, and the rest of him had only been carried along.

"You wrote that down," said the Dean.

"It's a condition," said Harold. "Ask the county."

A bus went by on Lime. The Dean watched it go all the way to the corner, as though he had some interest in where it went. When he spoke again his chin was up, where it belonged.

"Last Tuesday," he said, "it was the Pro Archia. Not 'Pro Archer.' I assume you wrote 'Archer.'"

"I wrote it the way it sounded through a ceiling."

"Archias was a poet. A Greek. They brought a case to say he was not a citizen of Rome, though he had lived there most of his life, and Cicero defended him." The Dean shifted the carrier to his other hand. "It's chiefly a speech in praise of literature. The citizenship is the pretext."

"Did he win?"

"We are not told. One assumes so."

"One always assumes so," said Harold, "about the fellows with a good lawyer."

The Dean looked at him for a long moment, and Harold could not have said whether the man had understood every word of it or none. He had sat for forty-one years across from witnesses whose faces he could read, and he could not read this one. He decided that this was the best thing he knew about the Dean.

They worked it out on the stairs, which was neutral ground, because neither of them paid rent on it. Half a can at half past five, downstairs. The other half at a quarter past six, upstairs, from the same can, which Harold would carry up himself, covered with a saucer. The liver was out of the question.

"You might stay for the reading," said the Dean, on the landing, with his hand on his own door. "The opening is very fine. Si quid est in me ingeni, iudices. 'If there is any talent in me, gentlemen of the jury.' He says it about himself, you understand, and then he gives the credit to the poet."

"I've heard it," said Harold.

"Through a ceiling."

Harold considered this. "I'll come up," he said. "But I'm not going to be graded."

So for a month, every evening at a quarter past six, Harold carried half a can of StarKist up the stairs under a saucer and sat in the Dean's second-best chair, with a notebook on his knee out of habit and the cat between them on the rug. The Dean read and Harold took it down, and when the Dean asked a question Harold answered it. Twice he was right. The Dean did not give him a B-plus, but he did once say "Quite," which Harold understood, from the delivery, to be about the same.

On the second Thursday in October Dr. Ocampo lifted Sam onto the scale, moved the weight along the bar, and then moved it some more.

"Seventeen pounds seven ounces."

He looked at them over the card. It was the look a doctor gives two men who both swear they never touch a drop. Both of them swore it.

That evening at a quarter past seven the Dean closed the book. Sam got up off the rug, stretched one back leg and then the other, went out of the open door and down the outside stairs, and crossed Ninth Street. The two men watched him from the Dean's front window. On the far side of the street a screen door opened, and a woman in an apron leaned out with a plate in her hand.

"Buster!" she called. "Buster, Buster, Buster."

Sam went up her steps without a backward look, and the screen door banged behind him.

Harold uncapped the pen with his name on it and wrote down Buster. Then, from beside him at the window, for the first time in Harold's hearing, through a ceiling or otherwise, the Dean laughed, and it went on for some time. Harold wrote that down too.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Grouchōne Marx per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Groucho Marx, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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