Another Insane Devotion (29 page)

That is from
Light Years.
A man's wife has just walked out of the house in which they spent their marriage, and in that moment he is parted not just from her but from everything that had been his life. “A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.”

The other cats seemed unaffected by Gattino's disappearance, almost oblivious to it. Maybe Biscuit was relieved not to have him pestering her any more. In the mornings, she ate with serene concentration, chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing, not stopping until her dish was empty. F. said that when she'd come home that afternoon to find all the cats but Gattino waiting by the back door, Biscuit had looked especially happy.

 

When I think back to the time F. and I got teary eyed listening to “Woodstock,” I realize I'm not sure if it was before or after we lost our cat. I remember that it was a warm day, but that could have been soon after we moved in or the following spring. You can see what a difference that makes.

A
FTER GATTINO WAS GONE, THE HOUSE, WHICH BEFORE had only irritated F., became hateful to her. We kept finding new things wrong with it. Ice and snow built up in a valley on the roof and, on melting, leaked into an interior wall so that the new paint ballooned in watery blisters like the marks of some loathsome skin disease. We discovered that the toilet was sinking into the bathroom floor—slowly, but with the threat that one day, when somebody sat down too heavily, it would plummet into the basement. I called Rudy to complain; he came over and made what repairs he could, but his presence made F. angrier. She'd stalk past him, tight-lipped, and lock herself in her room; then she'd be angry at me for talking to him. I'd be angry back.

“What do you want?” It seems to be the question I asked her more than any other. Only now does it occur to me what an odd question it is: F. and I had been together ten years, and you'd think that after all that time, I wouldn't have to ask. “Do
you want to move? We don't have the money to move.” It was half true: I didn't have the money. Perhaps I asked her if she wanted to leave, though it seems to me that given the ambiguity of the wording, I would have been afraid to.

“I don't like being here,” she'd say, and in my memory she'd be looking not at the house or at Avondale Road, with its heedless, gnashing traffic, but at me.

The well-known symbolism of houses:
The Professor's House, The House of the Seven Gables
,
Bleak House, A Doll's House,
which Nora had to leave, each a metonymy for the lives that hum and gutter inside them. Swann's house, where he lives with the deceitful Odette, whom he has made his wife now that he no longer loves her; the fashionable house of the Guermantes, where the duke humiliates the duchess in front of the dinner guests. The house of Charlus, who loves to be beaten; the house of the Verdurins, who love to climb; the house where Marcel imprisons Albertine, whom he thinks he loves. We speak of relationships, too, as contained spaces, sites of comfort or constriction.
I'm in a relationship. I want out of this marriage.
Really, I wasn't sure I wanted to stay in it either. We didn't even like the same kinds of food. Yet, at the same time, a small, shocked voice cried out inside me—
but you promised!
The cry of a child in a car racing past the Dairy Queen.

On some level, I understood that F.'s anger was part of her grief. It was anger at a world that had been emptied of the thing she loved. I belonged to that world. At least I was familiar and intermittently comforting, and I had some understanding
of what she was feeling. Other people had none. One evening we had dinner with a writer I'd met through friends. In the course of the meal, it emerged that he'd once considered buying our house, back when it was vacant. He asked F. if she liked living in it. Astonishingly, she said nothing about the sinking toilet or the garbage left in the closets. She said only that the house had been spoiled for her by a trauma. Then she told the writer how we'd lost Gattino. The whole time, he looked at her as if waiting for more. At last he asked, “So that was your trauma, was it?” He was English, and he may have had the English distaste for promiscuous displays of feeling, especially the false kind Americans are prone to. F. and I share that distaste, or used to share it. I could have vouched that her feelings were real, that I had them too, but it would have made both of us seem pathetic.

Anyway, the question he was really asking wasn't about authenticity but appropriateness, which varies not only from culture to culture but from person to person. The writer's wife was holding their small daughter. She was about a year old and charming as most children are at that age, looking about her with eyes full of light, grabbing things that her parents either deftly took away or let her hold as down payments on the world of objects that would one day be hers. At the time they were thinking of buying our house, did they know that a child had been killed crossing the road outside it? And if they had known, would they have bought it anyway?

The death of a child is said to be the most terrible of all losses. It's one of the few our culture still pays deference to.
Part of that has to do with biology, the fact that our children are a part of ourselves, the tendrils we cast forward into the future. And then, of course, a child is so small and helpless, eager, clumsy, so guileless or possessed of a guile so primitive that it fools no one, which is why we find it endearing. Once we carried our children in our arms; we washed their faces for them. When it was time to cross the street, we held their hands. Even parents whose children are long grown up remember doing that; I can remember doing it for my friends' children when they were small. I remember doing it for Wilfredo. Farther down the scale of grief is the loss of a wife or husband, a brother or sister, and after that the death of parents, which is taken almost for granted, since we're supposed to outlive them. What's the standard number of personal days companies give employees for the death of a parent? One, two days?

Yet the Victorians reckoned the loss of a husband as more dire than that of a child, at least judging by their dress codes. Widows were supposed to wear black crepe and full veil for two years. The first year, they wore the veil hanging over the face; the second, they were allowed to pin it back. Bereaved parents wore deep mourning for one year, after which they could transition to lighter fabrics in black, white, or gray. Widowers only had to mourn for a year. It pays to remember that Victorian women were completely dependent on their husbands, and the death of children was far more common that it is today. Hence the photographs of deceased children that were part of the decor of so many homes of the period. Often, the children are posed on the deathbed.

 

Copyright Museum of Mourning Photography and Memorial Practice, Oak Park, Illinois.

Where on the grief scale do you place a lost cat?

 

Considering what had happened to Gattino, it would have made sense to keep the other cats indoors. It was winter, so they didn't want to go out much. Still, once or twice a day Biscuit would plant herself by the back door and, if you didn't open it, start meowing and then tearing out her fur. Was it a spontaneous upwelling of frustration or Machiavellian blackmail, and if it was blackmail, how did she know it would work? It always did. I'd open the door; she'd step outside and turn to look back at me. I can't say if the look was one of triumph or uncertainty; she may have wanted to make sure I wasn't going to yank her
back inside. Some days she'd bound out into the snowy garden, raising a small white explosion with each leap. At other times she was deliberate. You could tell by her paw prints. She'd step with care between the drifts and around the brittle stalks of last year's flower beds. She'd pause to listen for the scrabbling of burrowing mice. She might inspect the perimeter of the groundhog burrow, but, wisely, she didn't go inside it. Sometimes she climbed the plastic children's slide that Rudy had bought for his son when he was little and took up a perch at its summit, from which she could look out at the white garden and the deer-eaten hedges that screened it from the road but would pose no obstacle to a cat that wanted to go out in pursuit of a scent or a flash of movement. Cats are cautious animals, but they are animals, and certain things summon them irresistibly. They don't even try to resist them. They just go.

Maybe F. and I were weak or lazy, unable to resist our cats any more than they could resist the sight of a rabbit hopping across the road. But when we talked about it, we agreed that going outside made them happy—not in the panting, theatrical manner of dogs but quietly, intently, with no need to proclaim their well-being to onlookers. Going out was how they fulfilled their nature, inasmuch as we have any sense of what that nature might be. Cats are the creatures that domesticated themselves. They chose to come to us, knowing that we were where the food was. Unlike dogs, they may never have understood they were doing us a service. We just didn't stop them from killing rats. Humans trained dogs to do what we wanted, though the argument can be made that they trained us. We allowed cats to do what they were already inclined to do. For a long time, people fed
them only intermittently, believing they could get by on vermin. (In 1837, a French writer cautioned that “the cat who is not given food is feeble and malingering; as soon as he has bitten into a mouse, he lies down to rest and sleep; while well fed, he is wide awake and satisfies his natural taste in chasing all that belongs to the rat family.”) And in contrast to the vigilance and rigor involved in house training a dog, a cat has only to be shown the litter box, though it falls to its owners to scoop out the turds. Our relationship with cats is about care and affection, but it is also in a very deep way about permission. We must let them be what they are. It's not as if we can stop them.

But one of our cats—the smallest and most vulnerable one, the one F. loved the most—had gone off and never come back. Maybe he'd gone off to fulfill his nature; maybe he'd died in one of the awful ways the psychics had laid out for us: convulsing from poison or broken in the jaws of a coyote or slowly freezing in the shadows of the wood. Before he died, he might have been hungry and afraid. He might have been lonely, a feeling he would never have known if humans hadn't taken him in and fed him on the bitter milk of their love. F. thought a cat would understand death, even a young cat like Gattino, and she pointed to the brisk way the cats she knew had dealt with one that was dying, sniffing it once, then turning away. But then she remembered her old gray tabby weeping on the night Bitey died: in memory, the liquid in her eyes had become tears.

 

To truly let the thing you love be what it is means surrendering it, perhaps even to death.

In the midst of this, I was going broke; it was one of the things we fought about. We fought more or less politely, without yelling, without even getting that angry, until one or the other of us left the room, ostensibly to do something. The other one didn't follow. That spring, I was offered a yearlong teaching job in North Carolina, and I took it. F. would stay up north with the cats; I'd send her money for rent and utilities. We'd visit each other when we could. When you factored in the second rent, I'd actually be losing money, but I couldn't afford not to go. I was losing money where I was, mired in my torpor, teaching one day a week and selling about one magazine article a year, and at least we'd have medical insurance. F. was afraid of being alone in the house. Briefly, she threatened to get a gun. I managed to talk her out of it. She's not good with tools or machines, and the likely outcome was that she'd shoot herself in the foot or plug Rudy
some morning when he came over to chip ice from the roof. I could see her telling the cops she'd thought he was a prowler.