Another Insane Devotion Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY PETER TRACHTENBERG

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ANOTHER INSANE DEVOTION

  PREFATORY NOTE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  The Animals in the Garden of Eden

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES

  PHOTO CREDITS

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY PETER TRACHTENBERG

  The Book of Calamities:

  Five Questions about Suffering and its Meaning

  7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh

  To my teachers

  ANOTHER INSANE DEVOTION

  This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich

  with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped

  on my arm and half hung on to the food and half

  hung on to my shirt and coat. I tore it apart

  and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him

  down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat

  with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted

  his bony head and felt him shiver. I have

  told this story over and over; some things

  root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening

  and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger

  drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries,

  the sudden invasion, but not only that, it was

  the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn’t

  run into an alley or into a cellar,

  he sat beside me, eating, and I didn’t run

  into a trattoria, say, shaking,

  with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing;

  but not only that, I had gone there to eat

  and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour

  before she would come and I was full of hope

  and excitement. I have resisted for years

  interpreting this, but now I think I was given

  a clue, or I was giving myself a clue,

  across the street from the glass sandwich shop.

  That was my last night with her, the next day

  I would leave on the train for Paris and she would

  meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago

  I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were

  dying together; we never met again

  although she was pregnant when I left her—I have

  a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren

  in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio.

  Every five years I think about her again

  and plan on looking her up. The last time

  I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey,

  and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton,

  if she was still married, or still alive, and tried

  calling. I went that far. We lived

  in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples

  and floated, naked, on the boards. I started

  to think of her again today. I still

  am horrified by the cat’s hunger. I still

  am puzzled by the connection. This is another

  insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although

  it isn’t just that, there is no pain, and the thought

  is fleeting and sweet. I think it’s my own dumb boyhood,

  walking around with Slavic cheeks and burning

  stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat

  half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think

  I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice.

  It was this I bought, the red coleus,

  the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade.

  Happiness. I watched him with pleasure.

  I bought memory. I could have lost it.

  How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning.

  The wind blowing through his hair. His jaws working.

  —Gerald Stern

  “Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

  They call them stupid. They understand what we say better

  than we understand them. She understands all she wants to.”

  —JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES

  “We know too little of the nature of love to be able to

  arrive at any definitive conclusions here.”

  —FREUD, “NOTES UPON A CASE OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS”

  PREFATORY NOTE

  THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION. THE CHARACTERS IN IT are based on real people; the events recounted in it actually took place. Still, the facts in this book vary in their density, some being corroborated by documents and interviews and others being drawn from my memory alone. I’ve tried to make clear which kind of fact is which. The book also contains an artifact, an incident or detail that originates solely in my imagination. I have included it both for aesthetic reasons and out of curiosity about the nature of nonfiction and its tolerance for admixture or adulteration. Nobody doubts that a novel that contains facts—War and Peace, for instance—remains a work of fiction. Is the reverse true of nonfiction, and if not, why not? The first reader who identifies the artifact correctly will receive a prize. Originally, I wanted this to be a kitten, but it raised too many questions as to how potential prizewinners would be vetted to weed out psychopaths and the incompetent. At this writing, I’m still looking for a satisfying replacement. Not many things are better than a kitten.

  Peter Trachtenberg

  1

  I FIRST SAW HER A WEEK OR TWO AFTER SOME FRIENDS had rescued her from the woods across from their house, a small, matted thing hunched miserably on a tree branch in the rain while their dogs milled and snapped below. She was very sick with a respiratory infection, and for a while they didn’t think she’d make it. By the time I came over to the barn where they were keeping her, she was stronger, but her face was still black with caked-on snot. I sat down on the floor beside her, and the little ginger cat rubbed against me and a moment later clasped my hand between her forepaws and began licking it. It wasn’t the grateful licking of a dog; it was proprietary and businesslike, the rasp of her tongue almost painful. She was claiming me.

  F. and I named her Biscuit after the color of her fur. She never completely got over the respiratory infection. Even in total darkness, you could tell she’d entered the room because of the snuffling, a sound like a small whisk broom briskly sweeping. Every few months she’d start sneezing with increasing viscid productivity until it got so gross we had to take her to the vet, which she didn’t mind—she’d stroll into her carrier as if it were the first-class compartment of an airliner—and put her on antibiotics, which she did. She hated being pilled and would buck and spit and slash until you got the message. You can see the scars she left on my forearm. Once, when we were still living in the village, Biscuit wandered into a neighbor’s garage and came back with half her muzzle and one forepaw white with paint. Three people had to hold her down while a fourth shaved off the painted-on fur so she wouldn’t be poisoned while trying to clean herself. It was the angriest I ever saw her. But only a few hours later, she slid into bed with us, snuffling and purring.

  This was our marriage bed, my wife’s and mine. In it, we had made love; we had quarreled; we had exchanged secrets the way children exchange trading cards. (When I was a kid, these were mostly of baseball players, but there are now cards for WWF Superstars, Star Wars characters, and the members of England’s royal wedding. Wilfredo, the boy who used to visit us in the summer, had decks
of Japanese anime figures.) We had sat up reading by lamplight while the world slept, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud to each other. During the early years of our marriage, the books we read included Charlotte’s Web, Oliver Twist, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, and the entire Lord of the Rings, which aged us like grief. We did the voices of all the characters: guileless, bumptious Wilbur; manly Oswald, bluff as a little Winston Churchill; Templeton rubbing his hands—or I guess his paws—together in anticipation of an all-you-can-eat buffet of purulent midway garbage; unctuous Fagin, his ill will barely concealed by a facade of mocking courtliness; hissing, sniveling Gollum.

  Lately we don’t read to each other much.

  On September 29, 2008, while I was away teaching at a college in North Carolina, I learned that Biscuit had gone missing from our house in upstate New York. F. was also away at the time, at an artists’ residency in Europe, so if anybody was going to look for our cat, it would have to be me. By rights, the kid we’d hired to take care of our pets should have gone looking for her, but he was useless—at least, he was useless as a cat-sitter. And so I booked a flight to New York and set off to find Biscuit, though I couldn’t afford the airfare and worried that by the time I arrived it would be too late. She’d already been gone three days, a piece of information Bruno the cat-sitter had held back until fairly late in our conversation, I don’t know whether from caginess or because it had just slipped his mind.

  It was early evening when he called; I was making dinner. I remember looking out the window into the garden of my rental house, which lay in the shadow of the live oak whose acorns, bigger and flatter than the ones I was used to seeing up north, littered the grass like woody bottle caps. It may have been the shade or an approaching storm that gave the dusk a greenish cast. It was like being at the bottom of a well.

  “What’s the name of your orange cat?” Bruno asked. I felt a surge of anger. He couldn’t remember the name of a creature that had been sharing his home—whose home he’d been sharing—for two weeks, a creature whose color was not orange but golden; F. sometimes called her “the golden kitty.” But I just told him, “Biscuit, her name’s Biscuit. Because she’s biscuit colored.” In much the same way, parents of missing children describe the clothes they were wearing, their birthmarks, the gaps between their teeth. I know that a child is a child and a cat is just a cat. I’m only trying to say I’m one of those people who greet bad news politely, as if by doing that I could turn it away.

  A little over a year before we got Biscuit, my cat Bitey had died. She was the first cat I’d ever owned or owned for more than a few months, a smoke-black domestic shorthair with an underbite that gave her a look of implacable, scheming malice, like Lawrence Olivier playing Richard III. When F. and I moved in together, back when we were still girlfriend and boyfriend, Bitey took an instant dislike to Tina, the younger and more timid of F.’s two cats. Scarcely had we let them out of their carriers than Bitey slipped out of the room where we’d stowed her and shot down the hall into the room where we were keeping Tina. She must have smelled her in passing. Shrieks rent the air. (If any shriek can be said to rend the air, it is a cat’s. The shrieks of all other creatures only perturb it a little.) We separated them; that is, we drove Bitey away from the bed under which Tina was cowering, but from then on she spent much of her time lurking outside what we came to call Tina’s room, waiting for the little orange cat to tiptoe out—and she really would tiptoe, lifting her paws very high and placing them down as if stepping onto the wrinkled surface of a barely frozen puddle—so she could menace her with her wicked Plantagenet jaw.

  Some of this aggressiveness had been apparent even when I adopted Bitey from the Baltimore ASPCA on a wet day in April twelve years before; I remember the statue of St. Francis in the shelter’s garden shining with rain. She was just a kitten, barely larger than my fist, and so black she seemed featureless except for her green eyes. My girlfriend held her to her breast as I drove home. D. had a cat of her own that she could handle like a slab of bread dough, but before we’d gone three miles the kitten had squirmed out of her grasp and was pacing along the backs of the seats, mewing. D. tried to pull her down, but she clambered on top of my head and sank her claws into my scalp. She meant no harm by it. Still, her claws were sharp, and I cried out in pain. The black kitten continued to cry out in whatever it was she was feeling: fear, probably, and misery at being shut up in a hurtling cage without her brothers and sisters in it, just two large humans rank with sex and tobacco, toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo, their mouths brutal with teeth, their nostrils like caves.

  A week or so later, after she’d gotten used to me, I had some friends over for dinner. She pranced fearlessly from one to the other, making warlike feints at their hands. My friend Charlie wagged his finger at her, and she nipped it. “Wow! That’s a bitey cat you got there!” he said. Up until then I’d been calling her Bridget, but the new name fit her better.

  At the time I got Bitey, I had recently entered a new phase of my life. I thought a cat would be part of it, a bolt on the door I’d shut on all the misdealing and unhappiness that had gone before. A cat would force me to be regular in my habits. It would force me to consider desires other than my own, which up until then had been my main, maybe my exclusive, subject of interest.

  I’d had other cats before this, but only in the sense that the singer of “Norwegian Wood” once had a girl. They were cats I found on the street or in apartment buildings and kept for a while, feeding them more or less regularly, cleaning their boxes, but then got tired of or, more to the point, overwhelmed by, and passed on to other caretakers. There was the one who began crying like a rooster at first light, which was only two or three hours after I’d gone to bed: she didn’t last too long. There was the silent gray male who scratched my girlfriend T. while she slept. There was the orange female I named Jasmine, who once awakened me from a long nod with an ominous scraping (I thought someone was trying to break into my fourth-floor apartment) that turned out to be the sound of her empty food dish being pushed—butted, really—all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom. I’d liked those cats all right, until they got to be too irritating. I didn’t think of them much afterward, except maybe for Jasmine, who one night while I was out pushed aside a window screen and then in all likelihood leaped to a neighboring rooftop, or maybe onto the towering ailanthus in the courtyard, whose branches reached almost to my floor and from there flowed to the ground and melted into the dark. Wherever she went, I hope she found an owner who paid more attention to her and fed her when he was supposed to.

  From the very first, Bitey interested me in ways her predecessors hadn’t. She was an entertaining presence. For one thing, she fetched, preferring the crumpled cellophane wrappers of cigarette packets to all the toys I used to buy her in the pet aisle of the supermarket. Maybe the crackling reminded her of small animals stirring in the brush. She could hear the sound anywhere in the house and would come trotting up to me whenever I opened a fresh pack, her tail twitching with eagerness. Unlike a dog, she wouldn’t drop the cellophane in your lap or even at your feet, but always far enough away that you’d have to get up to retrieve it. I don’t know if this was out of the same caution that makes a cat reluctant to eat from a human hand or because, having scrambled around the room in pursuit of her prize, swatting it from paw to paw, levering it with surgical dexterity from under a baseboard, lofting it into the air then showily leaping after it, caroming off walls and vaulting over the furniture or skidding under it like a tobogganist before finally seizing the ball in her mouth, she wanted me to get off my ass too.

  Most intelligent animals seem to want to be entertained. This desire may be one of the constitutive features of embodied intelligence, a boundary that separates higher animals from lower ones and intelligent animals from intelligent machines. To date we’ve seen no evidence that computers get bored, not even the really big ones, designed to measure the expansion of the universe or track the firefly motion of leptons, that t
ake up entire multistory buildings. By this standard, the crowning achievement of our species may not be writing or the pyramids or the cathedral at Chartres—all of which, face it, can be boring—but Grand Theft Auto. I’m not sure if it would be possible to make a cat understand what writing is for. (Maybe if you could somehow demonstrate that it was our way of rubbing ourselves against the furniture or, alternatively, of spraying). But I can imagine a cat staring raptly at Grand Theft Auto, especially on a big screen.

  When Bitey chased a ball of crumpled cellophane, as Biscuit chased cloth balls stuffed with catnip, she may simply have been practicing the behaviors she’d need for hunting. But I think she was also engaged in something gratuitous and nonu-tilitarian that might be called fun. A 1954 study found that even “Kaspar Hauser” cats, cats “reared in social isolation and without opportunities for visual experience, let alone play behavior,” displayed normal predatory responses when presented with a “prey-like” moving dummy. (Leave aside the ethical implications of raising a young social animal in what amounts to solitary confinement and—judging by the experimenter’s offhand “without opportunities for visual experience”—total darkness.) From my own observation, I know that Bitey would go scrambling after a tossed projectile moments after she’d finished eating, often with such abandon that she vomited in mid-pursuit. Her vomiting was brisk and without fanfare. Suddenly she’d brake; her body would be seized by spasms that squeezed and stretched it like a concertina. These would be accompanied by gasps of esophageal exertion, though “gasps” leaves out the sound’s distinctive Elvis Presleyan glottal stop. It was purely functional, without the notes of outrage and self-loathing that characterize human retching, whose sound is always the sound of someone groaning, “Why? Why? Why?” in a filthy bathroom at midnight. Bitey didn’t wonder why. What had gone into her was now making its way out. When it came, she looked at it blandly, then shook her head and walked away.