Another Insane Devotion (10 page)

Well, maybe it isn't petty. Most definitions of love, following Aristotle, incorporate the notion that its objects are ends in themselves rather than means to other ends. You can't love somebody because she's great in bed or looks terrific in an Alexander McQueen or makes a perfect ragú Bolognese. Or, rather, you can, but what you feel then isn't love. The preposition “because” indicates that the object is only an intermediate point in your pursuit of sex or beauty or good food, and as soon as her enthusiasm starts to flag or her arms get too hammocky for a strapless, you'll start charting out a different route. But the true beloved always occupies a terminal position. She's the last point on the map. A corollary is that in love, the beloved is the reason for doing something rather than that action's afterword or appendix. And so I imagine a state of affairs in which Biscuit
had no interest in chipmunks, was utterly indifferent to them, but on seeing one, had the thought, This is something he will like or use, and acted accordingly. That would be love.

Bruno may have gotten the flyer, but I doubt he ever got around to posting it. At least, I never saw it when I came home, not on any of the phone poles along Avondale Road or on the doors or bulletin boards of the college buildings, not even of the dorm right behind our house that the kid could have walked to in his pajamas. And it's not as if someone would have bothered taking down a flyer for a lost pet. Nobody ever takes anything off those bulletin boards, except maybe when the kids go home for the summer. Months after we lost him, I was still coming across the signs we'd put up for our Italian cat. Every time I saw one, my heart would stop for a moment. Then, as always, it went back to beating.

I'm sorry to admit I didn't really like Wilfredo—the belly, the threats, the crying, the peeing. F. liked him—judging by the softness with which she looked at him that first night, she may already have loved him—but she felt she couldn't protect him from Cedric, and Cedric was the kid we'd made a commitment to; we'd promised his mother we'd take care of him. He kept calling Wilfredo “fat” and “bighead,” and Wilfredo kept threatening to fuck him up, and we had to keep taking them off separately and watching them like hawks at mealtimes, and it got tiring. And so on the third day after his arrival, a Friendlytown
Lady came over, tall, slouching, with the indolent sexual sneer of a Bianca Jagger, and, in the tone of someone announcing an unexpected—really, an unmerited—treat, told Wilfredo he was going away to stay with another family that had a swimming pool. But Wilfredo didn't want a swimming pool. He wanted to stay with F. and me in the house of the four cats. That's what he kept calling it. “I want to stay in the house of the four cats!” The cry might have been translated from another language; its foreignness made it more plaintive. By then, the Friendlytown Lady had stopped pretending to be jolly. I'd like to make her the villain of this story, and it's true she was insensitive and officious. She might never have met a child in her life. But it was F. and I who'd decided Wilfredo had to leave, and I was the one who pried him off the banister that he clutched with both hands like a sailor holding onto a mast in a gale, his body stretched almost horizontal, wailing at the top of his lungs. F. was crying, too, silently. It was only the second or third time I'd seen her cry. At one point, even the Friendlytown Lady looked like she might cry. Only Cedric seemed pleased. “Ha ha, you go away!” he sang in Wilfredo's ear. His delicate features writhed with malice. But then he blocked the stairs with his outspread arms to keep me from carrying the other boy away. I pushed past him, holding Wilfredo against my chest. He sobbed and thrashed, he was as heavy as sack concrete, as heavy as the weights they lash to the sinners in hell, but he didn't hit me, though it would have been the most natural thing for him to do, and when I put him down in the backseat of the Friendlytown Lady's van, he clasped his arms around my neck and wouldn't let go. A few days later, he was
sent home to his mother, and if part of me was sick with guilt and pity, the greater part was relieved.

During the entire showdown on the stairs, I don't recall seeing a single cat, not even Bitey, who was pretty much fearless. They were all hiding.

 

This wasn't the end of our relationship with Wilfredo. Six years later, at the top of those same stairs, he'd announce that he was gonna cut off my nuts, and I'd tell him that if he kept that up, I was gonna stuff him in the fucking car and drive him down to Brooklyn and drop him off on his mother's doorstep, I didn't care if it was two in the goddamn morning, I'm sure she'd be happy to see him. Wilfredo was joking about cutting my nuts off, but I was serious about taking him back to his mother's. My voice was raw, my face red and sweaty. He didn't keep it up, and we got through the rest of the summer without incident. Though, come to think of it, it was the last summer he spent with us.

Still, I sometimes think of the earlier moment, the moment we sent him away, as the beginning of F.'s and my rupture. Not the act—we were in that together—but the feelings afterward.

B
Y THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 30, BRUNO STILL hadn't called or e-mailed. I returned to the discount airline's website and selected a Thursday flight to La Guardia. How irritating that they wouldn't let the traveler type in dates but forced him to click boxes on a calendar! Was the airline trying to attract illiterate flyers? Did I want to fly on such an airline? Once more, I hesitated. I checked the balances in my bank accounts; they were no higher than they'd been that morning. I'd have to put it on credit. I tried Skyping F. at her residency, and again no one picked up. I wondered if she was avoiding me. She'd been distant lately. Biscuit had now been gone three days. By the time I arrived in New York, it'd be five. What were the chances that she'd still be hanging around the house after all that time? And if she hadn't come back to a place that she associated with food and warmth, how likely was she to come back just because she heard me calling her? Where a cat is concerned, you can't really speak of its master's
voice. My friend Jo Ann, who knows more about animals than I do, thought Biscuit might have gone out to look for me, the human who'd cared for her and then gone away. That seemed especially terrible. It was as if I'd lured her from safety, to what might easily be her death. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that she was dead. Why fly seven hundred miles to look for something you know is dead?

Later, I got an e-mail from F. She reminded me that Biscuit was a very smart, experienced cat who'd lived in our house for over a year, not a sick little kitten who'd been there only a couple of months. The last part of the sentence held a note of reproach—what was I getting my drawers in a twist for? Still, overall, it was as close as F. ever comes to optimism. Her optimism seemed a little heartless to me, but in the past, I knew, there'd been times when my optimism had seemed heartless to her, and so I accepted it. Sometimes all you want is for someone to tell you it will be all right, even if you know better.

We began letting Biscuit out of the house a month or two after we had her spayed. At first it was just for a little while, and we kept checking on her to make sure she didn't wander off. “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” one or the other of us would yell from the doorstep, always three times, as in a fairy tale, and watch with pleasure as she scampered over to us. Some of that pleasure was relief that she was still there, and some of it was inspired by her compliance (she became less compliant as she got older). And it was pleasing to see that Biscuit already
recognized her name. I doubt she recognized it in the sense that Augustine remembers recognizing, as a young child, that particular sounds, which he did not yet understand to be words, stood for particular things: “When people gave a name to an object and when, following the sound, they moved their body toward that object, I would see and retain the fact that that object received from them this sound, which they pronounced when they intended to draw attention to it.” More likely she recognized it as a vocalization of the same kind as the ones she'd learned earlier from her mother, or perhaps had been born knowing. John Bradshaw and Charlotte Cameron-Beaumont identify some of these below:

One is struck by how many of these sounds are related to aggression.

 

Augustine's famous account of how he learned language treats words as signs that refer to objects in the real world, that is, the mute world of things that we think of as the real one. In this account, a word's chief function is to point beyond itself, like a finger that directs your gaze to the horizon, where some trees are standing. Another word for this pointing operation is meaning. To ask what a word means is to ask what it points to. It may point narrowly, designating one tree and not another, this ash, not that maple. We call this denotation. The word may point more broadly, at the entire forest. Maybe the pointing hand opens to take in the sinking sun, the lengthening shadows of trunks and branches, which farther in thicken into a second wood, a wood within the wood, or beneath it, made up not of matter but of shadow. That is connotation. In the middle of the passage of our life, I found myself in a dark wood. But try pointing out something to a cat sometime. It won't look where you're pointing. It will look at your finger; it may rub against it. The cat represents a limit case of semiotics. The sounds it makes don't point to anything. Inasmuch as they serve mainly to express feeling or elicit behavior from the hearer, those sounds might be said to press buttons. A cat meows to be fed, to be let in from the cold or out into it. It yowls to give vent to its rage and intimidate another cat or any animal that's susceptible to being intimidated. I've seen a video of a cat yowling at a bear, and then chasing it as it flees. To Biscuit, “Biscuit,” didn't “stand for” anything. It summoned her, as a bell might,
and probably a lot of its effectiveness had to do with the way we said “Biscuit,” or sang it, in a high voice that rose on the first syllable and dropped on the second, the combination of rising and falling tones being almost the same as that in a meow. To Biscuit, “Biscuit” wasn't a noun; it was a verb, one that took only the imperative mood, and at those increasingly frequent times she didn't come when we called her, one could say that the verb had become meaningless.