Another Insane Devotion (9 page)

Inwardly, I'd vowed not to write Bruno another e-mail or leave another message on his voice mail until I heard from him, but I broke my promise later on September 30, when I sent him a “missing cat” flyer I'd made up when I was supposed to be reading students' manuscripts. I asked him to make copies of it and put them up around the college and, as long as he was up and about, on some phone poles, too, just the ones in the neighborhood.

I don't remember whether I consulted F. about the wording. She probably would have thought it was too much to mention Biscuit's sinus problem, and, really, I question why I did, since the photo would be enough to show anyone what she looked like. I may have wanted to explain the discharge under her eyes. I have few pictures of her that don't show some; it's embarrassing.

I left the reward unspecified because $100 seemed too cheap, and I didn't want to say $1,000 for fear it might incite scam artists or even a backwoods home invader. And anyway, I didn't have $1,000, though I guess I could have borrowed it.

The word “economy” comes from the Greek words
oikos,
“house,” and
nomos,
“manager”: hence, a household manager or steward. Traditionally, this was a man's job. The stewards in Jesus's parables are men, as is the Reeve, or steward, in
The Canterbury Tales.
Economics is a stereotypically male profession; witness the gender balance on the president's Council of Economic Advisors. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did home economics emerge as a field of study for young women. By the time F. and I were teenagers, it was a required subject in most public high schools, though only for girls. A few years later, in the purifying glare of the women's movement, it would vanish from many curricula. Maybe it would have been better if boys had had to take it too. Who isn't better off for knowing how to sew on a button? I don't know if home ec traditionally included learning how to pay bills. In many households, that was the wife's job, even if she did it with her husband's paycheck. F. and I have never worked out this aspect of our domestic economy. Both of us pay bills, grabbing the checkbook off each other's desks. Only I bother balancing the account. F. just writes down what she spent and waits for me to do the math.

 

The first time I thought that we might make a couple, I was living in a loft in a neighborhood that still went by the name of the industry that had vanished from it years before. The city's full of neighborhoods like that. With its high ceilings and ponderous, steel-sashed windows, the loft was a relic of that industrial past. The enormous radiator bolted to one wall was usually too hot to touch, but periodically it stopped working, and in no time the room would be cold, cold enough to make your breath steam.
After coming up several times in response to my heat complaints, the super took me aside and explained that the radiator needed to be bled from time to time and gave me a little, short-stemmed key so I could do it myself. He winked. “Just don't tell anybody where you got it from.”

The trick was to turn the valve just until water started trickling out and then shut it quickly. I did it so often I got good at it, and when the radiator went out one December morning while F. was staying with me, I was almost happy for the opportunity to do my impression of a mechanically competent person for her; we were so still so new to each other that she might believe that person was the real me. I addressed the radiator, fitted the tip of the valve into a matching slot in the key, and gave it a turn. Then I gave it another. Then I cried out as the valve shot into the air, narrowly missing my eye, and was followed by a jet of scalding water. I'm not sure “jet” is the right word. “Jet” connotes something of limited duration; this water kept coming and coming. Hotly, it gushed from the top of the radiator and arced several feet before splashing back down. It was like something in a national park that people stand around and take pictures of. I groped on the floor for the valve, but it had rolled out of sight, or else the water was already too deep for me to see it. There was a particular horror in seeing how quickly it spewed out, like blood from a wound. I cursed helplessly, monotonously. Sometimes I just moaned, “Oh no!” and was seized with shame at what F. would think if she heard me, a grown man, moaning over a leaking radiator.

She brought me a kitchen mitt. I could have kissed the hand that gave me that mitt. It wasn't enough to plug the flow,
but with the mitt on I could slow it a little, and at least I wouldn't get scalded any more. Of course, I had to stand there with my mittened thumb jammed into the spraying radiator, like the intrepid Dutch boy at the dyke, while the water mounted around my ankles. F. thought I ought to call the super. I didn't want to. Have I mentioned that I was in the loft illegally? Not long afterward, the super called me. F. held the phone up to my ear so I could hear his small, angry voice berating me. Trying very hard to sound calm, I reminded him that I'd only been doing what he told me to, and he stopped. Maybe he was scared I'd tell management about the key. Shortly, he came up with three porters and capped the spill with a replacement valve while his assistants baled out tepid water gritty with iron clinkers that rattled in their buckets.

When they left, the floors were wet, and the books on the lowest shelves of the bookcase were sodden; I had to throw a lot of them away. I was starting to shiver. The radiator was pushing out heat again, but the loft had been cold for a while, and my pajamas were soaked. F., though still in her pajamas, an oversized men's pair in robin's egg blue flannel, was dry, partly because she'd stayed away from the radiator and partly because at some point she'd put on a pair of rain boots. They were bright red and came almost to her knees. Back then, she was dying her hair red, a sort of candy-apple red, and I remember noting, as I watched her gamely mopping the floor, that she was color coordinated: red hair, red boots, and blue pj's. The pj's went with her eyes. How diligent she looked to me. Her diligence had nothing heavy about it, as diligence so often does, the heaviness of the five-hundred-pound barbells of virtue and of
the strongman deadlifting them with popping eyes. F.'s diligence was light and playful. She made mopping look like a game. Bitey seemed to think it was. She followed F. closely, darting as close to the mop head as she dared, then darting back, after throwing a punch or two at its dank tentacles. I doubt I consciously thought that being with F. would make domestic labor fun. Nothing makes it fun, except maybe amphetamines, and then only for some people. I had only an idea of lightness, lightness in the face of calamity, and I knew it had to do with her.

“You didn't hear me back there?” I asked.

“Of course I heard you. You kept going, ‘Oh no!'” she said. Actually, what she said was, “Ooooh nooooo!” The despairing howl of a cartoon character falling down an elevator shaft. When she laughed, her nose wrinkled charmingly. Did she kiss me to take the sting out of it, or am I making that up? Maybe she hugged me. “Ooooh nooooo!”

The thing is, I recognized myself. That's what I sound like. That's what I feel like. Ooooh nooooo. Often.

 

An early description of the domestic cat is this one by one Bartholomew de Glanville, written in 1240:

This was before cats were widely kept as pets. If they were valued at all, it was chiefly as mousers. And, also, as Bartholomew notes, for their pelts:

One should remember that the Middle Ages were a terrible time for cats. At carnival, they were tortured for the amusement of the crowd, which may be the origin of the German
katzenmusik,
a carnival procession
.
What could that music be but howls? And in France, the feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24, was celebrated by stuffing cats into a sack and tossing it onto a bonfire. Two figures of speech of that period are “as
patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out” and “as patient as a cat whose paws are being grilled.”

 

You can't speak of the relationship between cats and humans as you can of the one between humans and dogs: as a partnership. No painting or tapestry shows cats joining in the hunt. They can't be trained to draw carts or sleds, or to herd sheep, or to sniff suitcases for contraband. A paradox of their domestication is that once they're fed regularly, they lose much of their aptitude for pest control, or at least their enthusiasm. One morning, in the same loft I've written of, I was awakened by soft thumps and sat up to see Bitey and Ching, who then was only middle-aged and fat rather than old and gaunt, sitting a few feet away from each other and staring at something on the floor. It was a mouse, which they were batting back and forth between them. They did it economically, moving only their forepaws. Flick. Pause. Flick. Pause. Flick, flick. Pause. The tempo was the tempo of badminton rather than that of squash. I got up, meaning to put a stop to the cruelty, and the cats abandoned their prey and raced downstairs to be fed. They may not have recognized a mouse as something that could be eaten. I figured it would vanish down a crack somewhere while I fed them. However, a few minutes later, it appeared in the kitchen. The cats were sluggish from their meal; it might easily have gotten past them. This was what it started to do, moving with frictionless speed across the floor. But then, suddenly, suicidally, the rodent changed course and rushed
toward
the gray tom. Maybe it was so overwhelmed by fear that its brain was seized by a kind of dyslexia that made it scramble safety and danger. The same
thing has happened to me. Seeing the mouse bearing down on him, Ching did something even more inexplicable: he flopped onto one side. There was something languishing about the way he did it. The mouse, which really must have had something wrong with it, started burrowing under the vast, soft stomach like a child trying to sneak under a circus big top. Ching looked up at me and mewed. “Oh, for crying out loud,” I said and picked up the rodent by the tail before it could smother down there. Then I took it out into the hallway to become somebody else's vermin.

Biscuit was a much better hunter. No sooner did we start letting her out than she began leaving corpses by the door, mice, mostly, but also moles and the occasional chipmunk, laid out on their backs with their sad, brown incisors bared to the sky. Sometimes, through speed or stealth, she'd succeed in bringing prey inside the house. On those occasions, she gave out a characteristic cry, half meow and half moan. I suppose it was a victory cry, but to me it always sounded distressed, and it was a while before I stopped taking it as a sign she'd been hurt and anxiously opening the door for her. Maybe she was just meowing with her mouth full. I once had to spend most of a day trying to rescue a chipmunk she'd sneaked inside, after I'd gotten her to drop it by loudly clapping my hands at her. I kept flushing the poor creature from different hiding places—between the springs on the underside of the chaise longue, behind a radiator, even inside the head of the vacuum cleaner—but the moment it surfaced, Biscuit would try to pounce on it, I'd have to shoo her away, and when I turned again, the chipmunk would have skittered to a new hiding place. If Biscuit had been
a dog, she might have helped me find it—by pointing, for instance. But she wasn't a dog; she was a cat, and she wanted the chipmunk for herself, to eat or kill or just torture until she got tired of it—in any event, for her own pleasure. True, she might have left the dead chipmunk for me as an offering to a social superior, according to some theories, or because, as Paul Leyhausen puts it, I was filling the role of a “deputy kitten.” Still, I would be only the incidental beneficiary of her bloodlust, like the unobjectionable charity—the Red Cross, the United Way—that the bank uses as a catchment basin for the spillover of its extortionate profits, maybe to make those profits seem a fraction less extortionate or to make its customers feel fractionally better about being extorted from. She wouldn't—and I know how petty this sounds—she wouldn't have killed the chipmunk
for me
.