Another Insane Devotion (3 page)

Now it's my turn. I don't know what to do with F. I look at her the way you look at a house you are thinking of moving out of. It's gotten too small for you. It needs a new furnace; the floor slants. Why do you stay? But how can you ever leave?

“They lay in the dark like two victims,” Salter writes of a husband and wife, “They had nothing to give one another, they were bound by a pure, unexplicable love. . . . If they had been another couple she would have been attracted to them, she would have loved them, even—they were so miserable.”

I remember when people still spoke of couples as being estranged. “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton are estranged.” The term has passed out of use—unfortunately, because it is so accurate and absent of blame, saying nothing about which party has become the stranger and leaving implicit the fact that when one falls out of love, as when one falls into it, one becomes a stranger to oneself. Proust describes that earlier estrangement well, when he has Swann realize, with an inward start, that he has fallen in love with Odette, whom only a little while before he found a little boring and her beauty a little worn:

I gaze down at my wife in the dark but see only the dim curve of her body lying on its side like a letter
C,
a face shuttered in sleep. I go into the bathroom and turn on the light above the sink. My face in the mirror is the face of a tramp rousted from a ditch. I lean closer and try to make out the size of my pupils, but of course the sudden brightness has made them pin. In mechanical terms, there's something they don't want to see. The door creaks; I turn in alarm, but it's only our plush silver tabby Zuni, that fool for running water, shouldering her way inside. She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish.

Is it that I don't know F. any more or that I don't know myself? Maybe it's love that has become strange to me. I can't recognize it in another person. I can't find it in myself. It has become my lack. But this seems to be true of many people: of Salter's glamorously wretched married couple; of Swann, trembling at the loss of his faithless mistress, whom he will marry only when he has fallen out of love with her; of all the seekers who crawl and flounder after this one thing, turning
over wives, husbands, lovers, mistresses, like rocks in a garden, under one of which, long ago, they buried a treasure. Or maybe just a dream of treasure.

What is this treasure?

 

It took me about twenty-two hours to travel the 1,400 miles from the town where I was teaching to the mid–Hudson Valley and back. That's one of the drawbacks of flying on a discount carrier. To Biscuit, the distance would be as incomprehensible as that between Earth and the sun, whose warmth she loved to bask in when it poured through the living room window on winter afternoons. Though, come to think of it, you hear stories of cats traveling long distances all the time. Usually, they're trying to return to a former home or be reunited with a missing owner. To me, why Biscuit wandered off and where she went are, if not incomprehensible, unknowable. Still, I can recount just about every step of my search for her and many of the key incidents of our relationship before then.

This is more than I can do for my relationship with F., which at the time Biscuit disappeared was beginning to change and, maybe, to draw to an end; it's still too early to say. I recall that relationship at least as vividly as I do the one with Biscuit, if not more vividly, but, as Freud showed us, there is such a thing as an excess of vividness. The most vivid memories, the ones most populous with detail and saturated with color, may be the least reliable. And my relationship with F. may also be too complex to be easily narrated. Both of us can talk, and that means we can contradict each other. (A cat can defy you, but it can't contradict you, its powers being confined
to the realm of action as opposed to the realm of descriptions of action, which belongs to humans.) I feel no obligation to relate F.'s version of the events I lay out here. Still, when her version contradicts mine, I feel haunted. My past seems to belong to someone else, a self I am only impersonating. Did I really do the things I remember doing, say the things I remember saying? And whom did I say them to?

About my cat and the self I am with her, I have fewer doubts.

 

I turn off the faucet. The silver tabby goes on lapping. I still hear her after I turn off the light, swabbing up the last drops of moisture. I feel my way in the dark to our marriage bed and climb under the blankets beside my wife. In the dark, I listen for the creak of floorboards and the sound of a small whisk broom briskly sweeping.

O
N SEPTEMBER 29, BRUNO HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE house for a little more than a week. That was long enough for me to understand that he didn't return phone calls with the promptness one values in a cat-sitter. I'd had to leave four or five messages just to get him to call me back and tell me wearily—he might've been talking to his mom—that the cats were fine. So when his name came up on my caller ID a few days later, before I'd even begun to pester him again, I felt a twinge of unease, and the moment I heard his voice, my whole being constricted like a muscle in spasm. He'd let Biscuit out as usual, he told me, and she hadn't come back. I said nothing. He'd thought she would, since it was raining. It had been raining almost nonstop. I felt ill. I should never have told him he could let her out. I should never have let her out at all, considering what had happened to Gattino a year before. I asked Bruno how long she'd been gone, and it was his turn to fall silent. “Was it Sunday?” I wanted to throttle him through
the phone. “Saturday, Saturday morning.” Two and a half days. Back when we'd lived in the village, she'd stayed away for as long as three, sustained by the generosity of our neighbors and an abundance of slow-moving mice and voles. I told him to go out and call her. “It's best if you say her name three times.” I showed him how F. and I did it; I used a falsetto. It's true that was the voice she most responded to, but I suspect I was also taking some mean pleasure in the thought of this big, preening kid being made to squawk, “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” in a mortified falsetto on the back porch of our house, within earshot of a women's college dorm. “Try it now,” I told him. “And call me if she comes. Call me if she doesn't come.”

We brought our new cat into the house the way they always tell you to, sequestering her behind closed doors for a few days so our other cats could get used to her scent and she to theirs, then bringing her out in a carrier, like a visiting dignitary in a covered litter, for a formal presentation. None of it was necessary. It helped that one of our cats was very old and arthritic, and another was old and senile, and Tina, the third, was almost as fearful as she'd been four years before. But most of the credit is Biscuit's. She was so easygoing. When the other cats approached her carrier, she rubbed against the gate and purred. Nobody purred back, but nobody struck at her either, and within a week the new arrival was eating with the older residents and calmly touching noses with them when they met on the stairs.

She had health problems, starting with the copious wet sneezing. A small raised bump on her neck became an open
sore that made you wince with pity and disgust. Biscuit herself seemed oblivious to it, except for the two times a day when we daubed the wound with antibiotic ointment. Another cat would have gone into hiding whenever it saw its owners heading toward it with nonchalant expressions and a tube of Neosporin. This one stood her ground. She struggled, of course, rearing up on her hind legs and striking out with her claws, snorting with anger and congestion. But at some point she let herself be overpowered and tended to, all the while making it clear how so not crazy she was about it. Maybe it was because she was still young and hadn't perfected the tactics that would make her so hard to medicate later on. I thought of this as being somehow indicative of her character, of its forthrightness and stalwartness. We don't consider these feline qualities—if anything, you'd call them canine qualities—but intelligent animals often display traits that seem alien to their species. Think of those aloof dogs that don't even prick up an ear when a visitor makes an entrance. Think of horses that stay imperturbable in the midst of cannon fire. The more intelligent the animal, the more of its traits will seem uncharacteristic or anomalous, until it becomes hard to say if any of its traits are characteristic: this may be why we have so much trouble deciding what is truly human.

Biscuit was still healing when she went into heat. She was so little that we'd figured she was younger. She'd pace about the house squalling, the soft furrow below her tail suddenly, shockingly distended. The transformation of her body seemed to puzzle her; her cries held a puzzled note. What's happening to me? What do I want? Why do I want it so bad? Here, too, I'm projecting. There was nothing for her to be puzzled about.
She had instinct, which is to organisms what gravity is to matter, and so on some level she knew what was going on. Still, the baffled-sounding appeals went on for days. We had to be watchful at the door to keep her from lunging out or a horny male from stealing in. The other cats looked at her strangely. Even our old tom Ching, who was gaunt with hyperthyroidism and addled with dementia and hadn't been interested in sex even when he still had his balls, sniffed at her as she passed and opened his mouth in a Kabuki grin. F. would growl at him, urging him to remember what a tiger he was.

I was fascinated by what was happening to our cat, and especially by the flagrancy of her vulva. It looked so much like a woman's. That was part of the shock of it. Our Biscuit had turned into one of those mythical hybrids like a mermaid or a Minotaur: a little cat with a woman's sex between her legs, her hind ones. My wife has a dark view of sex, or say, a tragic view, and I often imagined how that view might apply to Biscuit. She'd be touched to see our new pet growing up into an adult female who in the natural course of things would mate and bear kittens that she'd ferry proudly around in her mouth. And at the same time, F. would know how cruel the mating could be, the feline penis being barbed and its possessor securing his grip on the female with teeth and claws. And she would know how that cruelty pales beside the cruelty of sex among humans, who being born without barbs on their genitals have to fashion them, the males and the females both. Maybe I'm just speaking of my own view of sex, which is also pretty dark. But we were both relieved when Biscuit went out of heat and we could take her to be spayed.

 

The first time I thought I might love F.—that is, thought of her as someone I might come to love—was at a tea shop in my old neighborhood in the city. I don't like tea, but F. did, and I suppose the fact that I agreed to meet at a tea shop was a sign that I already wanted to please her. I drank coffee; it was bad. F. took her tea with milk and so much sugar, dumping in spoon after precariously heaped spoon of it, that I could smell the sweetness across the table. If you'd asked me a month before, I would've said that a tea shop would be the last place on earth you'd go to meet her. Her watchful, brittle cool seemed more suited to a dimly lit cocktail lounge with cunningly shaped glassware filled with liquor blue as antifreeze. Over tea, she told me that when she was nine or ten, her family had moved to a new town, where other kids immediately identified her as a goat. Girls made a show of ignoring her as she passed them in the school hallways. Boys called out taunts as she walked home. The worst oppressors were three or four popular girls in her class. They made F. wish she had magic powers. I asked her if she'd wanted them for revenge; I'm sure I sounded eager. She looked offended. “No, not
revenge
—I wasn't that kind of kid. I wanted to conjure up Beatle dolls.” She saw my incomprehension. “To give the girls. Those girls were always talking about how they wanted Beatle dolls. Everybody wanted them back then; it was the year of Beatle dolls. And I thought how cool it would be if I had magic powers so I could come up to them and say”—she snapped her fingers—“‘Look, Beatle dolls!'”

Her smile had a child's guilelessness. Just so a child might offer you a bouquet of wildflowers she'd picked from the side
of the road. I think I mooed, “Oh, that's sweet!” I know I reached for her, meaning to stroke her cheek. She shrank from me. The cool that had receded a little dropped back down like a visor, with an almost audible click. I was too mortified to apologize. It would be like apologizing for farting. We left the tea shop and stood outside in the falling dusk, watching the pavement change color as the traffic light on the corner clicked from red to green. I was sure this was the last time I'd ever see her. “I'm sorry about what happened back there. I didn't mean anything.” I waited for her to say, “It's all right.”