A man sat alone in his room with his cat. He had known the cat for a long time, in fact, for most of his life. He and the cat were friends.

The man was retired. He would read and listen to his records and talk to his cat. The cat liked it very much when the old man read to him. The old man read Nietszche and Conrad and Faulkner and Dostoyevsky. He read great works, and the cat would pause its washing and sit listening to the old man spin tales of hope and despair.

Every day, the old man would go to the park and feed the pigeons, for it made him happy, and it helped to pass the time. The cat did not care for this diversion, but it let the old man go to the park, for the man still loved the cat. After all, the old man enjoyed it so, and who is a cat to interfere in the happiness of an old man?

Then one day, things changed. The man came home from the park with a silly grin on his face. That night, over supper, the man told the cat about his woman he had met. She was so beautiful, he said, and had so much grace and culture. She had read all his favorite authors, and she knew Latin, and French. The man was love-struck, and the cat didn't know what to say, so it simply listened, and nodded wisely.

The man went often to feed the pigeons, and to visit the park, and the woman, and the cat grew lonely. Soon the man was spending evenings with the woman, and once, he was gone the whole night. The cat fretted and fretted, but still it did not know what to do.

For half a year, this continued. The man never forgot about his cat, but he began to treat it differently. Where before, he used to read Kafka to it, and leave the newspaper out for the cat to look at, he now called his cat fluffkins, and would give it din-dins. He gave the cat skratchies on the tum-tum. So, the cat decided that something had to be done.

The cat first tried going to the park and scaring away all the pigeons, so the man would have no reason to leave the house. When this failed, he went to the woman's apartment, and hid her car keys between the seat cushions, and put runs in her stockings and salt in the sugar bowl, and unplugged her alarm clock. He mixed up all the numbers in her Roladex and plugged up her garbage disposal. But none of these measures seems to stop the old man from spending time with her, and time away from the cat.

So the cat tried another ploy. He introduced the woman to a wealthy, thirty-year-old bachelor. She swooned and fell in love with him, and the two got married and were transferred by his company to another state.

The old man grieved over the sudden loss of his sweetheart. He moped around the apartment all day, sometimes not even getting out of bed until well after mid-day. He spent hours talking to his cat about her. The cat listened to the old man, and kept silent, like a good friend should.

One day, the man put on his coat and hat, and grabbed a loaf of bread from the counter. He was going back to the park, he declared. It was spring, and a new batch of pigeons had come to the park to replace the old ones the cat had scared away. The old man sat on the bench for most of the day, feeding the pigeons and thinking of his ex-lover. When he came back that evening, he told the cat about how he had forgotten the pleasure there was to be gained from feeding crumbs to the birds. He went to the park quite often after that, though he did not stay nearly as long. The cat did not try to stop him. After all, the old man enjoyed it so, and who is a cat to interfere with the happiness of an old man?