Margot

Margot’s story in “Cat Person” turns on the distance between a relationship imagined through witty messages and the uncomfortable reality of being with Robert. A casual exchange at the snack counter becomes a flirtation Margot keeps alive through effort, then a date and sexual encounter she finds increasingly hard to stop; afterward, she struggles to end their contact until Tamara sends the message for her.

Identity and Introduction

Margot meets Robert on a Wednesday evening near the end of her first semester, while working at the snack counter of a downtown art-house cinema. He orders a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines, a choice she finds unusual enough to tease him about. Her remark draws on a habit formed during her former job as a bartender, where flirting with customers encouraged tips. The cinema offers no tips, but flirting helps relieve the boredom, and Robert strikes her as attractive enough to imagine, if not someone she would confidently approach at a party.

Her attraction is qualified from the beginning. Robert is tall, which she likes, and a tattoo shows beneath his rolled-up sleeve; he is also somewhat overweight, bearded, and slightly stooped, as if protecting something. Margot guesses that he has finished university and is at least twenty-five. That combination of interest and reservation sets the tone for her early impressions: she notices specific appealing details while keeping Robert at a remove, turning him into someone she can fantasize about more easily than someone she knows.

The Message Exchange and First Meeting Away from Work

The Red Vines joke soon grew into an elaborate text-message routine, its running references changing so quickly that Margot sometimes struggled to keep pace. Robert was clever, and she felt she had to work to impress him. Their exchange also acquired a quiet imbalance: he usually answered quickly, but when she took more than a few hours to reply, his next message tended to be brief and contain no questions, leaving her to revive the conversation. When she lost track of it for a day, she would find another joke or an image online that fit their thread and set it going again. The effort brought its own exhilaration; after two or three good jokes, messaging felt to her almost like dancing. Yet the two rarely spoke about personal matters, so the lively intimacy of their banter existed alongside how little she knew about him.

During exam week, Margot complained that the dining halls were closed and that her roommate had eaten the food she had kept in her room. Robert offered to buy her Red Vines. She first deflected the offer with another joke, since she needed to study, but he insisted that she stop joking and come meet him. Margot put a jacket over her pajamas and went to the 7-Eleven at about eleven that night. They greeted each other briskly, as though meeting were already routine. The store had no Red Vines, so Robert bought her a Cherry Coke Slurpee, a bag of Doritos, and a frog-shaped lighter with a cigarette in its mouth. This small errand gave their exchange an in-person counterpart, but it did not replace their joking with personal disclosure: the connection still depended on the playful rhythm that Margot had been working to sustain.

The Date and Sexual Encounter

When Margot returned to campus after the break, she was eager to see Robert, but he proved hard to reach, saying work had made his week hectic. She felt the balance between them had shifted against her, and accepted as soon as he eventually asked her to a movie. Though the film was showing at the cinema where she worked, Margot suggested a multiplex outside town, which students seldom visited because it required a car. Robert picked her up in a mud-spattered white Civic, candy wrappers overflowing from its cup holders. He was quieter than she expected and barely looked at her. Within minutes, as they joined the highway, Margot imagined that he might take her somewhere, rape her, and kill her: she knew almost nothing about him. Robert then told her not to worry, that he would not kill her. Margot wondered if her own tension had created the discomfort between them, and answered with a joke that he could kill her if he liked. He laughed and tapped her knee, but remained unnervingly silent. Her buoyant attempts at conversation went nowhere, and a Red Vines joke she made to the snack-counter cashier at the theater fell flat, embarrassing everyone, especially Margot.

At Robert’s home, the ordinary living room briefly seemed to Margot as if it might be a trap concealing empty rooms, corpses, kidnapped girls, or chains. The fear passed into the immediate momentum of his kissing her, dropping their bags and coats on the couch, and guiding her toward the bedroom while touching her. The bedroom was spare: Robert had a mattress and box spring instead of a bed. He took a swig from a whisky bottle, passed it to Margot, and opened his laptop to put on music. As he undressed, bending awkwardly to unlace his shoes with his trousers around his ankles, Margot felt a sudden, decisive reluctance. She thought less about whether Robert might force her than about the effort of stopping what she had set in motion: she feared seeming spoiled or capricious, like someone sending back a meal after ordering it.

Margot tried to overcome that reluctance with a drink, but Robert’s large, wet kisses and mechanically moving hand made her breath catch; she began to feel she might not be able to continue. Moving out from under his weight and straddling him helped, as did closing her eyes and recalling the kiss he had given her on the forehead at the 7-Eleven. Encouraged by that memory, she took off her shirt. When Robert touched her breast awkwardly, she leaned into his hand because it was unpleasant, and he took the movement as encouragement. Unable to undo her bra, he ordered her to take it off, and she obeyed. The scene’s tension comes from the gap between Margot’s outward cooperation and her growing internal resistance: the earlier imagined intimacy of their messages and the remembered gentleness of the convenience-store encounter serve as supports for a sexual encounter she is struggling to endure.

Aftermath and Ending

As Margot leaves, Robert stops her to pull her into one last embrace and kiss. In her mind, she asks an imaginary friend when it will end; there is no answer. She says good night, gets into the car, and escapes. By the time she reaches her room, Robert has sent a string of hearts and heart-eyed faces, along with a dolphin. The affectionate symbols arrive in sharp contrast to her relief at getting away.

Margot sleeps for twelve hours, eats waffles in the dining hall, and watches a marathon of crime shows on Netflix while hoping Robert will simply disappear from her life without requiring her to act. When his next message arrives after dinner, it is another harmless Red Vines joke. She deletes it immediately, overcome by a physical disgust that seems disproportionate to what she believes he has actually done. She tells herself that vanishing without explanation would be unfair, childish, and cruel, but also worries that ignoring him might not make him stop contacting her.

She tries to write a breakup message, thanking him for the evening and saying she is not interested in a relationship. Each apology and qualification makes the message longer, as she imagines Robert seizing on any opening to propose something casual instead. Meanwhile, his texts keep coming, growing more serious without saying anything relevant. Margot pictures him composing them carefully on the mattress at his home. She also remembers that he spoke at length about his cats, though she saw no cats there, and wonders whether he invented them. Her occasional wistfulness, she realizes, is for the Robert she imagined during their vacation-long messages, not the person she encountered in reality.

When Margot tells Tamara that she and Robert had sex, she calls him a good guy, though she is unsure whether she believes it. Tamara suddenly takes Margot’s phone and sends Robert a blunt message telling him that Margot is not interested and that he should stop texting her. Margot struggles to breathe when she sees it. Tamara insists that the message is true, but the exchange leaves Margot’s difficulty plain: even after deciding she wants the contact to end, she has been unable to state that decision without cushioning it against Robert’s possible response.