Another Insane Devotion (15 page)

She didn't laugh this time, but from her smile I was afraid she might start again at any moment. She looked like a Renoir nude, only smaller and more fit. She looked like Tinkerbelle. As a young woman, she had practiced martial arts; when we held each other, I could still feel the strength that had given her.

She smiled wider. Silently, I willed her not to laugh. Then she said, “Maybe.”

C
ONSIDERING HOW ANXIOUS I WAS ABOUT BISCUIT, it troubles me to realize I didn't leave for New York until October 2. How could I wait that long? The word that comes to mind is “cavalier.” When I look through my calendar, I'm reminded that I'd already missed a bunch of classes the month before, having taken off on two successive weeks to attend a panel and show Bruno around the house. So maybe I was scared to miss any more. This was my first full-time teaching gig after years on the job market, and I was grateful for it, probably abjectly grateful, in a lank, stooped, Bob Cratchity way. Everything else I'd wanted in life seemed to be slipping out of my grasp, and so I held on to my job as if I'd never heard the warnings about clinging to anything too tightly, though usually those warnings are tendered about things like riches or prestige and not, say, cats. Nobody warns you about clinging too tightly to a cat.

I drove to the airport in my landlords' car, which they'd thrown in with the house, a terrific deal, if you consider what I
was paying. It was a battleship gray Thunderbird dating from the late eighties or early nineties, with a hood as long as a bowling alley. The T-bird was ponderous on turns, and the door was so heavy that it tended to swing back shut before I could get out. By the end of the year, my right leg would be covered with bruises. Still, it would get me down to Myrtle Beach. Once you passed over the bridge, a gray-green steel vertical-lift bridge whose riveted joints rasped beneath the tires, the road was straight and didn't have too much traffic. The country was flat. Loblolly pines grew on the roadside. There were housing developments and trailer parks and a gentleman's club that projected a simultaneous air of invitation and supernatural menace, like if I stopped for a quick lap dance, I'd be rolled and have the shit beat out of me and miss my flight and then learn that Biscuit had been run over by a truck while she was trying to cross the road back to the house.

I should add that I've never had a lap dance in my life.

Biscuit would follow me when I left the house, but not for very long. Her attention faltered. Something stirred in the weeds on the side of the road, and she'd lunge at it; it might be a vole or a twist tie from yesterday's trash—one was as good as the other. When we were still living in the village, she could be distracted by any neighbor who happened to be digging in her garden. She'd storm right over to see what was in those holes. Often she was seized by a sudden, furious compulsion to groom herself. The suddenness was almost spasmodic; at times it looked like she was going to tip over. Yet, like all cats, she was also a
miracle of poise. Watching her, I marveled at the balletic rigor with which she held up a hind leg, the paw extended so that leg and paw formed the long side of a flawless 45-degree angle, while the rest of her remained heedlessly fixated on her butt. Sometimes I almost thought she might vanish into her butt, or maybe up it—as in that cartoon I loved when I was thirteen, whose caption reads, “Your problem is obvious.”

To me, this tension between abruptness and poise seems an essential part of feline nature. If you accept Descartes's view of animals as natural automata, machines made of meat and fur, you can visualize a cat as an automaton programmed to shuffle at random among a variety of subroutines. The shuffling can appear jerky and without purpose. Why abandon a nice walk with one's person to torment a piece of plastic? Why break off investigating the fascinating sounds and smells of a June morning to start fiercely licking one's back fur? (One possible answer is that domestication has robbed the machine of its original purpose, and it's simply discharging the energy that once would have been consecrated to hunting and killing.) At the same time, individual routines have to be carried out perfectly: the hind leg angled just so during grooming, the toes fanned apart so that you can see the smooth, eraser-pink clefts between them; the forepaws tucked beneath the breast before resting; the prey seized and reprieved so many times before it can finally be dispatched.

In general, Biscuit had a shorter attention span than Bitey did and a milder disposition. Bitey was the cat who'd skulk all day outside poor Tina's door, rehearsing the woe she had in store for her, whereas I once saw Biscuit sitting amicably beside
a field mouse in front of a bed of daffodils in the garden. They couldn't have been more than a foot apart. Even if cats have terrible depth of visual field, she must have been aware of the creature, and it of her, but they ignored each other like commuters on the subway gazing up with tender neutrality at the zitty, love-starved foreigners in the ads for Dr. Zizmor's dermatology practice. At length the mouse seemed to realize what it was sitting next to and began sidling toward the flower bed. Only then did Biscuit take notice of it or remember that it belonged to the category “prey.” The fur on the back of her neck rose. Her whole being quivered with interest
.
In another moment she would have pounced on it, if I hadn't picked her up and carried her, squirming and hissing, into the barn. She was really pissed at me.

If someone asked me why I love Biscuit, I might cite her mildness, even though it may not have been mildness at all, judging by the many tiny corpses deposited on the porch, just forgetfulness. But I also loved Bitey, and there was nothing mild about her. Soon after F. and I moved in together, Bitey put her in the hospital. I was in the kitchen when I heard snarls at the foot of the stairs. Tina had gone down there, and my cat had cornered her in the front vestibule and was rearing above her in a gloating rage. I started at them, yelling. F. came out of her room and ran downstairs to break up the fight. I remember feeling tacitly reproached. The stairs were steep and covered in unctuous brown carpeting. As I watched from below, F.'s feet slid out from under her, she grabbed hold of the banister but continued to fall or slide, and her arm twisted grotesquely in its socket and went limp. She cried out. I raced up to her, shooing
cats out of my way. F. was lying on her back. She was conscious but her face was white and shiny with sweat. She thought the arm was dislocated. I told her to lie still while I called 911, but she said she wanted to go to the bathroom; she was scared she was going to be sick. Cautiously, I half-carried her upstairs. I must have made a call then, though I have no memory of it, because a pair of EMTs showed up within minutes. Ambulances come quickly in the country, as long as it's not a weekend night when drunken teens roar up and down the roads looking for trees to wrap themselves around. The stretcher was too wide to fit through the bathroom door horizontally, so F. had to be strapped to it and carried out at an angle. I walked beside it as the EMTs trundled her to the ambulance, holding her good hand. If Bitey had been anywhere in sight, I would have leapt on her and shaken her like a rag, but all the noise must have scared her into hiding, and I didn't see her again till one or two in the morning, when I brought F. back from the hospital, her arm having popped back into its socket without any help from the admitting doctor, who sent her home with nothing but a crummy blue sling that was shortly covered in cat hair. Bitey was lying on the dining table on top of a heap of mail, and she barely glanced up when I called her an evil shit.

 

Of course cats have no sense of good and evil. I doubt dogs do either, but we're more inclined to think of them as moral creatures, or at least as ones susceptible to moral suasion, properly backed up with a rolled-up newspaper. “Bad dog!” you yell, and the dog hangs its head and looks at you the way a Gnostic believed its ancestor looked at God on the day we provoked
him to invent death. The jury's out as to whether that look signifies remorse or fear. “Bad cat!” accomplishes nothing, unless you really yell it, in which case the subject runs for cover. None of your expiatory displays of guilt or shame, it just books. Biscuit was in some ways a very human cat, by which I mean a cat who responds to human cues, answering your call at least some of the time and giving you a look of what seems like gratitude when you fill her saucer with milk, though maybe it's really
approval
; you've figured out what she wanted from you. But I never saw her express anything that remotely resembled guilt. Like Bitey before her, she learned not to claw the stereo speakers or start knocking things off the dresser early in the morning, but her forbearance appeared to be entirely pragmatic, and at those times she forgot herself and stretched sensuously toward a speaker with outspread talons and I snapped, “Biscuit!” she paused and looked at me. Somebody else might have called her expression insouciant or defiant or even, because of how her whiskers bristled, belligerent, but to me it was just blank. I'd pressed the “Biscuit!” button, which made her come, but she was already here, and the tone was the tone of “no,” the button that made her stop. So what did I want?

It may be their inability to display remorse—really, their inability to comprehend what remorse might be—that caused cats so much trouble in the Middle Ages. Probably their stealth and night walking didn't help either. People thought of them as the devil's creatures and persecuted them accordingly. Those jolly, howling orgies of cat killing may in fact have been autos-da-fé, though knowing human nature, it's more likely the mobs just wanted an excuse to visit suffering on something
small and weak. At the same time they were torturing and burning cats, Europeans were also torturing and burning heretics, especially the Cathars of the Languedoc. (One imagines an English-accented voiceover on the History Channel: “Is it mere coincidence that ‘Cathar' contains the word ‘cat'?” Well, actually, yes, according to my dictionary, which traces “Cathar” to the Greek
katharoi
, “the pure ones.”) The violence against Cathars was organized and genocidal and bore the imprimatur of a couple popes, who proclaimed the campaign against the heretics in Toulouse as much a crusade as the ones against the infidels in the Holy Land. By the mid-fourteenth century, some 500,000 Cathars had been slaughtered, along with an undetermined number of Catholics who had the misfortune to live in Cathar towns. (Asked how to tell one from the other, a commander of the crusaders said, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”—“Kill them all. God will recognize his own”—originating a slogan that seven hundred years later would be silk-screened on T-shirts you could buy at the county fair, usually with a skull in a black beret nearby. In the same bins, you could find shirts illustrated with a picture of a naked and seemingly headless man, though his head, on closer inspection, was wedged between his buttocks. The caption said, “Your problem is obvious.” Wilfredo was the right age to appreciate these shirts, but the last time we took him to our county fair, he was only interested in the stuffed animals they were giving as prizes at the sharpshooting booth.) There's no telling how many cats were killed during this period—enough, according to some commentators, that in parts of Europe their numbers were greatly suppressed. In the absence
of their natural predator, rats flourished, and when the Black Death arrived in 1347, inundating Christendom with sweat, pus, and black blood, it may in part have been because there were so many rats around to spread it. Some 100 million people died wretchedly. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

A footnote: before it decided to exterminate the Cathars, the church tried to convert them. It delegated the task to one Diego de Guzman, whom it later canonized as St. Dominic. The order he founded, the Dominicans, became known as the “dogs of God” (
domini
+
cani
) for the enthusiasm with which its members sniffed out heresy. Once they'd wiped out the Cathars, they shifted their operations to Protestants and crypto-Jews.

 

On the night Bitey dislocated F.'s arm, I sat beside her on one of the emergency room's brittle bucket seats, filling out the admissions forms for her because she couldn't use her right hand. How pale she was in that diagnostic light! I could see every vein in her eyelids. I had to keep asking her questions; I didn't know her medical history, let alone her insurance provider, and shock made her vague and slow to anwer. I could remember snapping at my mother in similar circumstances as a teenager (“What do you mean you don't know what medicines you're taking?”) and was relieved I'd become at least a little more patient since then. Maybe it was because I knew that on some level the accident was my fault. In Texas, your neighbors can sue you if you let your cattle stray onto their land, and I imagine the damages are higher if somebody dislocates an arm because of it.