Another Insane Devotion (16 page)

Much of the anger I used to feel back when I was checking my mother into the hospital (for pleurisy, for pneumonia, for hepatitis, for herniated disks, for a spot on the lung that might be cancer but wasn't, though twenty-odd years later it would be) had been anger at being attached to her, yoked to her,
with her
, the last being the way you identify yourself as a teenager. At least I did when I was one.

“Are you with her?” pronounced “
huh
.”

“No, man, I'm not with
huh
. I'm with Fran.”

“He's with Carol and those Walden kids.”

“She's with those heads who hang out by the fountain.” That need to place yourself in a context, with a girlfriend or boyfriend, ideally, but failing that with a group or clique or, that word of wincing recollection, a
tribe.
Our egos were still unfinished—in places they were only dotted lines—and so we needed to borrow parts of each other's. But after spending an afternoon and evening, sometimes even a whole weekend, hanging out with my tribe, smoking hash and snorting crushed-up Dexamyl with the children of shrinks and advertising executives in an apartment overlooking Central Park, I went home to the apartment where I lived with my mother, and then I was with
huh.
In the hospital, it was worse. Our affiliation would be evident to anyone who might be passing through the waiting room. One of the few questions I didn't have to ask her was the names of her emergency contacts: the first was my grandfather; the second was me.

And now I was with F. I was happy to be with her, even proud, though, really, what else could I have done: waved bye-bye as the EMTs slid her into their ambulance, then gone
inside to make myself a late-night sandwich? I felt a small pang of disappointment when for emergency contact, she asked me to put down her mother. It wasn't until we got married two years later that she started putting me down instead. From a logical standpoint, there's no reason why I should have cared so much, beyond being the first, rather than the second, person to learn that something bad had happened to her or having the privilege of bringing F.'s medications and makeup to her in the hospital, along with the boxy terrycloth robe she likes to wear, the one with a picture of a sitting cat on the back. Still, it mattered to me. I wanted my name on her forms.

About a year before this, F. had taken
me
to the hospital. I'd developed a persistent headache, and although I've had so many headaches in the course of my life that I've become a connoisseur of them, the way people are of cheeses, this was a kind I'd never had before. It was localized on the right side of my head, and the pain seemed to originate in a spot on the surface, as if I'd been rapped there with a hammer. It hurt for days; Advil did nothing for it. And one night, as we were leaving a movie, F. asked me what was wrong, and I said wonderingly, “It's still there,” and she asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no. Then I said maybe. Then we were in the emergency room of St. Vincent's. Ten years before, this had been the charnel house of New York. Every day, dozens came here to die, not all at once but a few lurching steps at a time. They had boiling fevers, faces mottled with cancer, diseases that before this had been seen only in birds. The doctors hauled them back, stabilized them, and sent them home, but a few weeks later they returned, sicker. After a while, they died.

By the time I finally saw a doctor, I was starting to doubt that I was in as much pain as I'd thought I was. I was also bored and embarrassed at having dragged my girlfriend to a hospital on a Saturday night instead of a nice restaurant. We were in a yawning chamber sectioned like an orange by flimsy curtains, through which we glimpsed dim shapes of suffering humans attended by other humans dressed in white, green, and powder blue. My doctor was a young Israeli woman with lovely breasts that proclaimed their splendor beneath her open lab coat. It was all I could do not to stare at them as she bent over me. Later F. told me how funny I'd looked, following the beam of my caregiver's pencil light until my gaze intersected her boobs, at which point it froze raptly and then swerved. Maybe the doctor saw this too. I remember thinking she looked very amused considering she was examining somebody who might be having an aneurism.

She left for a while, cautioning me not to move too much. Throughout the examination, I'd been distantly aware of a continual sound, soft, feeble, monotonous as the hiss of a respirator. Only now did I recognize it as moaning. It was coming from the examining area to our right. The voice was a man's. “Help me, doctor,” it kept saying. “It hurts, it hurts bad.” It was awful, the awfulness coming from the voice's mechanical character and from the rupture between the mechanical and the human—the animal—truth of pain. Every animal understands pain, but as far as I know, no one has yet built a machine that does. “What's wrong with that guy?” I asked F. Because she was sitting rather than lying down, she could see him. “I don't know, he looks like he might be mentally ill.” The
moment she said it, I knew she was right. “Help me, doctor,” the voice said again. F. and I looked at each other.

I don't remember either of us saying anything—maybe we squeezed hands—but we both turned our attention to the droning sufferer behind the curtain. We—how do I put this?—we willed him better. No, we understood that our wills weren't that powerful. We sent him kindly thoughts. My kindly thought was, “You're okay, friend, you're okay.” I don't know exactly what F.'s was. When I think back to that night, I'm not sure how I knew we were thinking the same thing at the same time. Maybe I didn't know in the moment and just extrapolated from what she told me later. That's one of the epistemological problems of a long relationship. You're never sure what you actually know and what you reconstruct from your partner's reports after the fact. I'm not crazy about the word “partner”; it suggests the work of marriage but not the pleasure. But it's true that people in a relationship are partners in recording its history, like two scholars who join efforts to write a chronicle of a small, unimportant town where something out of the ordinary once happened. In a successful relationship, the partners' accounts more or less tally. They may differ in detail, but the overall narrative is consistent, and so is the tone. But then there are histories where nothing matches, so that in adjoining sentences the townspeople are good Catholics and devout Cathars, living harmoniously and in gnashing enmity.
But we used to be so happy. I was never happy. Never.

On the other side of the curtain, the voice underwent a change. It still sounded mechanical, but the machine was slowing. In time it would stop. It said, “Thank you, doctor.
Thank you.” Disregarding instructions, I sat up and peered through the curtain. Silhouetted behind it I saw a slouching, shirtless man with a soft, matronly stomach. F. and I grinned at each other. A moment later we started laughing. Laughing worsened the pain in my head, but it seemed worth it.

A while afterward, the Israeli doctor came back and told me that what I had was a stress headache. “It's very common,” she reassured me. “Especially in men your age.” Mildly, I reminded her that I'd never had a headache like this before. It was bad enough having a doctor with breasts see me as middle-aged; I didn't want her seeing me as middle-aged and hypochondriacal. She shrugged. “Maybe you never had stress before.”

 

Cats are supposed to be solitary creatures, but when you live with multiples of them, you become aware of their social interactions. These are less boisterous than those of dogs, which usually involve running and panting, tails wagging and tongues flying like flags. What goes on among cats is more complex and mercurial, with small, unexpected shifts of power and moments when hostility abruptly gives way to solidarity, or vice versa. At mealtimes, each is conscious of what the others are getting. Biscuit would often look up from her bowl to glance at the cat nearest her, then give it a cuff—not a hard cuff but hard enough to make it back away—at which point she'd move over and help herself to its shreds or pellets or, my favorite stroke of the marketing people at Friskies, “classic paté,” which appeals at the same time to snobbery and squeamishness. She didn't seem to mind if the loser changed places with her. She might have forgotten that the protein it
was eating had once been hers. Or maybe she didn't care; it was just sloppy seconds. Considering the feline reputation for independence, their values are surprisingly conformist: a cat wants what other cats want. It wants it because they want it. It wants other cats to want what it has. F. once gave Suki a piece of cheese and noticed that instead of polishing it off right away, the crabby gray tabby held it between her paws until she saw Tina enter the room. Only then did she begin eating her prize in tearing mouthfuls, pausing from time to time to look intently at the other cat.

The gaze is important to them; they want to see and be seen. Biscuit was drawn to houses that had cats living in them and showed a preference for ones where the cats were kept indoors. There was one where she'd loiter for hours, clambering onto one of the downstairs windows (she was never a very good jumper) so she could peer inside and, I'm pretty sure, display herself to the inmates. Sitting broadside on the sill, she'd lick her paws in a way that put me in mind of someone buffing her nails. Behold, she might have been saying, here is a free creature who goes where she pleases and helps herself to the bounty of lawn and hedgerow!

They want you to look at them, too, but not too long, since that might indicate you're thinking of eating them. I no longer remember who first taught me that if you blink slowly at a cat two or three times, the cat will blink back, the same as it would at another of its kind. You're supposedly assuring it that you mean it no harm. Of course, I'd observed this for years among friends' cats without knowing its significance. It was just an example of their minimal style of relating. Once I learned
what blinking meant, I couldn't resist practicing it with Bitey. I must have spent hours blinking at her as we sat across from each other in my living room in Baltimore or, later, in apartments in New York, the sounds of the river of worldly glamor lapping through the windows. I'd look at her from the sofa. There she sat with her forepaws together and her tail coiled around them, her chin slightly tucked. I blinked and waited, blinked again. I was listening to Marvin Gaye or Robyn Hitchcock, love raw as the mark of an axe in a half-felled tree or sheathed in irony, though, really, what's so ironic about “I feel beautiful because you love me,” except maybe the marimbas? Again I blinked. Bitey blinked back. It never ceased to make me happy.

Although cats are the most popular pet in the United States, there are way more dog books than cat books—not just guides to their care and training but narratives, both fictional and true. Stories of heroic dogs, mischievous dogs, incorrigible dogs, loyal dogs, loveable dogs, life-transforming dogs. It's easier to write about a dog than a cat. With dogs, there's always something going on. They race to greet you at the door; they jump up and plant their paws on your chest; they muzzle your crotch; they bring you things they want you to throw to them or to try to pull from their mouths. They bark at you: all you have to do is say, “Speak!” They look at you with eyes brimming with meaning, and the wonderful thing about that meaning is you don't have to interpret it; it's obvious. Maybe it's the thousands of years they spent hunting beside us, learning to read us, learning to make themselves readable. A dog is a dictionary without definitions, just words that mean
nothing but themselves. Feed me! Play with me! Walk me! Love me! The object of these sentences is “me,” but their unvoiced subject is always “you.” Whose knee are they pawing if not yours? At whose feet have they dropped that frisbee, tooth-marked and sopping? Into whose eyes are they gazing? With dogs, it's all about you. No wonder they're easy to write about.

A cat may look at you, too, it's true, but it will look just as fixedly at a wall. No other creature displays such free-floating intentness. How to distinguish between the gaze that says something and the gaze that says nothing at all? If nobody had ever told me what a cat's blinking means, would I have figured it out on my own? The pleasure of dog ownership is having an animal that speaks your language, or a language that shares many terms with yours, like Swedish and Norwegian. A cat doesn't speak your language. But when I blinked at Bitey and she blinked back, I briefly had the illusion that I could speak hers.

The South Carolina border was marked by signs for a nearby fireworks emporium. Fireworks were legal in South Carolina, along with every type of firearm, including AK-47s and twelve-gauge tactical personal-defense shotguns designed for the homeowner who needed to drive off a bloodthirsty mob. Folks in North Carolina didn't know what they were missing. They might, though, if they lived close enough to the state line. The signs were that big. As I approached, I had another moment of temptation in which I wondered how many cherry bombs I could get for twenty bucks and whether they'd let me take them
on the plane as long as I checked my bag. The temptation passed quickly. It wasn't that strong to begin with. Given a choice between fireworks and a lap dance, I'd rather have a lap dance. I stopped at a light and, looking up, saw the head of an immense black cat snarling at me from the roadside with a mouth wide as the gate of hell. Its nose and tongue glowed as if red hot.