Another Insane Devotion Read online

  I still watch F. while we walk, and I still speculate about her inner life. But the content of those speculations has changed. I—I mean the mostly imaginary being F. may have an opinion of—have mostly vanished from them. It’s F. who interests me. She’s an observant person, maybe the most observant person I know, and so I spend a lot of time wondering what she sees as we follow Astor Road or one of the other routes we’ve adopted since we moved out of the village. Which of those trees is she looking at? This ash or that maple? That oak whose arthritically gnarled trunk is so thick it would take three grown men to span it with their arms? Does she see those branches that crosshatch the sky like brushstrokes of some maniacally ornate calligraphy? Does she notice the birds on the horizon or the sunlight falling on the rock? Does she see the hinges of that fallen gate, which rust has turned into a row of orange H’s that burn against the gray of the weathered posts, and would she say the H’s stand for “Heaven” or “Hell”? From time to time, one of us will be so struck by some feature of the landscape that he or she has to point it out to the other. Usually, I try to do this without speaking. Some of that is deference to F.’s customary silence, but it’s also a game, because along with wanting to know what F. sees, I want to know if she sees what I do. And so I point and wait for her to tell me.

  I think back to those nights I walked with Bitey from my lover’s house in Baltimore. (Strange that when I remember the woman I used to balk at calling my girlfriend, I now think of her as my lover.) I had lived with this creature for five years, longer than I’d lived with any human being since I was a child. I’d spent hours feeding her, petting her, playing with her. She had slept in my arms. I had seen her shitting; I had scooped her shit into a bag. And yet I had no idea what she thought—or, given our ignorance as to whether cats think at all, what transpired in her consciousness—as we walked the streets. The city’s dreadful night would have been less dark to her than it was to me, since a cat’s pupils can dilate much wider than a human’s, and its retinae have more rods. She would have been extraordinarily attuned to small movements, a chipmunk rubbing its paws together in that supplicating way they have, a nuthatch cocking its head. And yet much of what she saw would be blurred and lacking in detail. The same optical features that give a cat night vision give it a more limited depth of field. Bitey couldn’t tell red from green. Maybe she seemed so indifferent to those frogs because she couldn’t see them. I had no way of knowing.

  I’ve been reading some of the e-mails I wrote between the time I learned of Biscuit’s disappearance on September 29 and flew to New York on October 2. I keep looking for some indication of what I was thinking back then: not what I was feeling—I can remember that all too well, in all its clamminess—but what was going on in the portion of my brain that’s commonly portrayed as rational—what is that, the frontal lobe? That I cannot remember. I was half convinced that Biscuit was dead and half convinced that even if she was alive, she was unlikely to be anyplace where I could find her. I didn’t want to spend money I didn’t have traveling seven hundred miles to have my heart broken searching for a cat I wouldn’t find. And yet I did. I went. What was I thinking?

  “I don’t know if my being there will accomplish anything,” I wrote F. “By that time she’ll have been gone 5 or 6 days, since Bruno thinks the last time he saw her was Saturday morning. I could cut out his heart. But I don’t know what else to do. If she’s near enough to hear a human voice and sound enough to respond to it, it’ll be mine.”

  To other correspondents, I wrote,Like an idiot, I started bargaining with God the other night and announced that I’d be willing to lose everything else as long as I could have her back, or at least know she was safe and happy.

  And:I just know I won’t be able to rest until we find her or are convinced she’s dead, and I’d rather be up there doing something than sitting here brooding and cursing.

  And:If she’s alive and somewhere near the house, she’s more likely to respond to my voice than to Bruno’s. It’s stupid and sentimental, but she’s the one thing or creature I can’t bear to lose. Which may be a message that one must be prepared to lose everything.

  Even now, I cringe at the melodrama of the last one. But I was upset and had barely slept for two nights. In the end, I think I just had to go. I mean, I didn’t think. I had to go, as imperatively as I would have to pull my hand away from a hot stove, only more slowly and using a credit card. Otherwise, I couldn’t live with myself.

  Like just about everything else in the world, theories of love can be divided into two kinds. One view is that love requires knowledge, is predicated on it, and that you can only love—really love—somebody you know. The other view is that love and knowledge are inimical. Love requires mystery, uncertainty, indeterminacy, can exist only in the dim zone where two personalities cast their shadows. You can trace the first theory back to Plato, who has Diotima tell Socrates, “For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher: or lover of wisdom.” This is in the Symposium, a discourse on love framed by an account of a drinking party. Another guest at this party describes love as the mutual recognition of two maimed beings who once made up a whole but were sheared apart in the primordial past. Since that time, they have sought each other: “And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment.” This idea is preserved in the expression “my other half,” though of course we most often hear that expression used ironically, by nightclub comics holding forth on the wretchedness of marriage. The Vietnamese go Plato one better and call their spouses, whether husbands or wives, minh, “my self.” Not my other self, but the only one, to be cloven from which is not just to be diminished but destroyed.

  Yet classical mythology is full of stories about the blindness of love. Their protagonists fall for animals, for celestial objects, for their own watery reflections. How stupid they are. Love has made them stupid. (We should qualify this and note once more that love degrades only mortals in this fashion: the gods take whom they please, and if from time to time one of those unhappy objects eludes them by turning into an alder tree or, having been rashly endowed with the gift of immortality, shrivels to a feeble, mindless, undying husk, that’s not their problem. “My bad,” Apollo sighs, and strums a melancholy air on his lyre, in the Mixolydian mode.) Although Plato believes love can usher us toward wisdom, he knows that more often it tends the other way: “The irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred—that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love.”

  Augustine is even more skeptical. He comes by his skepticism honestly, having experienced relations with two women, whom the editor of my edition of the Confessions refers to as “concubines,” and an indeterminate number of prostitutes. All in all, it seems pretty mild, given his triple-X reputation. This is the saint who gives his name to the Augustine Fellowship, more widely known as Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. But as any addict can tell you, the measure of the disease isn’t how much you consume; it’s how much you suffer. Augustine suffered, never more than when he was trying to kick: “Fettered by the flesh’s morbid impulse and lethal sweetness, I dragged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it.”

  One could protest that he isn’t talking about love but lust. Elsewhere in the Confessions, he writes movingly about the love he feels for his mother and male friends. But even that love seems to him inferior to the love of God, at best only a coarse approximation, at worst a treacherous distraction, as if one were to try driving cross-country solely by looking in the mirrors. It was a mirror, a natural one, that destroyed Narcissus. H
e died for love of what he saw in it:Let these transient things be the ground on which my soul praises you (Ps. 145; 2), “God creator of all.” But let it not become stuck in them and glued to them with love through the physical senses. For these things pass along the path of things that lead to non-existence. They rend the soul with pestilential desires, for the soul loves to be in them and take its repose among the objects of its love. But in these things there is no point of rest; they lack permanence. They flee away and cannot be followed with the bodily senses.

  This alone I know: without you it is evil for me, not only in external things but within my own being, and all my abundance which is other than my God is mere indigence.

  Augustine has many reasons for being suspicious of the physical objects of love, from their sticky hold on the senses to the fact that they change and pass away. But his wariness is also epistemological. What can I know about this pear, this woman? What can I know about my friend? What can I know about my own being, that dark wood I stumble through with outstretched arms? One of the things God has going for him is that, unlike those other phenomena, he can be known, in the depths of the soul. Of course we can only know him imperfectly, but how else would an imperfect being know a perfect one?

  Unlike Augustine and Plato, Proust had no faith in invisible, unchanging essences. For him the visible is everything. Few writers have worked so hard to render it, down to the precise shades of hawthorn blossoms and asparagus. Never mind the way he unfolds successive views of Albertine as she and Marcel first kiss, as if his narrator were a spacecraft lowering itself toward the surface of a strange planet and recording each stage of the descent with a continual barrage of photographs, not just photos but X-rays and spectrographs, intent on capturing every wavelength of the object’s emanations. The description of that kiss goes on for pages. What necessitates its obsessive thoroughness, apart from Proust’s obsessive temperament, is the fact that the view of Albertine keeps changing. And this scene offers the reader, in compressed form, a vision of the entire In Search of Lost Time, in which an insatiable consciousness tries to retrieve the changeable, impermanent figures that once passed through its ambit before veering off into the cold vastness of age and death.

  What can you know about an object that’s always changing? Especially when it’s an object you love. Desire dilates the pupils (long before Photoshop, ad agencies were enlarging those of the models in photo spreads to create the illusion that they wanted you). But dilated pupils are good only for seeing in the dark. In ordinary light, they’re useless. Consider what it’s like to drive home from an eye exam, squinting against the brightness that crashes down from the sky. Proust understood that every lover is similarly blinded, blinded not by the obscurity of the love object but by the luminosity of his own feeling:Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world’s first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing a connection between one phenomenon and another and to whose eyes the spectacle of the world would appear as unstable as a dream.

  We were in F.’s bedroom. Sun, rose-lit skin, the roundness of arms and breasts. “I want to show you something.” I rolled out of bed and went over to where my shorts lay tangled and drew the jewel box from a pocket. The pants were covered with cat hair. No sooner had I kicked them off the night before than Suki, the older of her cats, had approached them, sniffed, and sat. She was still sitting on them when I woke. She was an undemonstrative creature, but she liked to claim pieces of my clothing, whether for my benefit or that of my cats, whose scent she must have smelled on me, I don’t know. I must have crawled back to the bed, because when I held out the box to F., I was sitting below her, or maybe kneeling, the way you’re supposed to, and it seems unlikely that I would have walked over and then lowered myself again. It would have been very awkward.

  On seeing the ring, she laughed. For all my efforts to husband my dignity, I must have looked ridiculous crawling naked across the floor and then kneeling before her, holding out a blue velvet box whose lid I’d snapped open to display the flashing thing inside. My expression was probably earnest and mortified. But F.’s laughter also had pleasure in it, and from this I took encouragement.

  “Do you know what this is?” I asked her. She laughed harder, which made me start laughing too. I told her to stop, I was serious. “Look,” I began, then forgot what I was about to say and finally settled for the short version.

  She didn’t laugh this time, but from her smile I was afraid she might start again at any moment. She looked like a Renoir nude, only smaller and more fit. She looked like Tinkerbelle. As a young woman, she had practiced martial arts; when we held each other, I could still feel the strength that had given her.

  She smiled wider. Silently, I willed her not to laugh. Then she said, “Maybe.”

  5

  CONSIDERING HOW ANXIOUS I WAS ABOUT BISCUIT, it troubles me to realize I didn’t leave for New York until October 2. How could I wait that long? The word that comes to mind is “cavalier.” When I look through my calendar, I’m reminded that I’d already missed a bunch of classes the month before, having taken off on two successive weeks to attend a panel and show Bruno around the house. So maybe I was scared to miss any more. This was my first full-time teaching gig after years on the job market, and I was grateful for it, probably abjectly grateful, in a lank, stooped, Bob Cratchity way. Everything else I’d wanted in life seemed to be slipping out of my grasp, and so I held on to my job as if I’d never heard the warnings about clinging to anything too tightly, though usually those warnings are tendered about things like riches or prestige and not, say, cats. Nobody warns you about clinging too tightly to a cat.

  I drove to the airport in my landlords’ car, which they’d thrown in with the house, a terrific deal, if you consider what I was paying. It was a battleship gray Thunderbird dating from the late eighties or early nineties, with a hood as long as a bowling alley. The T-bird was ponderous on turns, and the door was so heavy that it tended to swing back shut before I could get out. By the end of the year, my right leg would be covered with bruises. Still, it would get me down to Myrtle Beach. Once you passed over the bridge, a gray-green steel vertical-lift bridge whose riveted joints rasped beneath the tires, the road was straight and didn’t have too much traffic. The country was flat. Loblolly pines grew on the roadside. There were housing developments and trailer parks and a gentleman’s club that projected a simultaneous air of invitation and supernatural menace, like if I stopped for a quick lap dance, I’d be rolled and have the shit beat out of me and miss my flight and then learn that Biscuit had been run over by a truck while she was trying to cross the road back to the house.

  I should add that I’ve never had a lap dance in my life.

  Biscuit would follow me when I left the house, but not for very long. Her attention faltered. Something stirred in the weeds on the side of the road, and she’d lunge at it; it might be a vole or a twist tie from yesterday’s trash—one was as good as the other. When we were still living in the village, she could be distracted by any neighbor who happened to be digging in her garden. She’d storm right over to see what was in those holes. Often she was seized by a sudden, furious compulsion to groom herself. The suddenness was almost spasmodic; at times it looked like she was going to tip over. Yet, like all cats, she was also a miracle of poise. Watching her, I marveled at the balletic rigor with which she held up a hind leg, the paw extended so that leg and paw formed the long side of a flawless 45-degree angle, while the rest of her remained heedlessly fixated on her butt. Sometimes I almost thought she might vanish into her butt, or maybe up it—as in that cartoon I loved when I was thirteen, whose caption reads, “Your problem is obvious.”

  To me, this tension betwee
n abruptness and poise seems an essential part of feline nature. If you accept Descartes’s view of animals as natural automata, machines made of meat and fur, you can visualize a cat as an automaton programmed to shuffle at random among a variety of subroutines. The shuffling can appear jerky and without purpose. Why abandon a nice walk with one’s person to torment a piece of plastic? Why break off investigating the fascinating sounds and smells of a June morning to start fiercely licking one’s back fur? (One possible answer is that domestication has robbed the machine of its original purpose, and it’s simply discharging the energy that once would have been consecrated to hunting and killing.) At the same time, individual routines have to be carried out perfectly: the hind leg angled just so during grooming, the toes fanned apart so that you can see the smooth, eraser-pink clefts between them; the forepaws tucked beneath the breast before resting; the prey seized and reprieved so many times before it can finally be dispatched.

  In general, Biscuit had a shorter attention span than Bitey did and a milder disposition. Bitey was the cat who’d skulk all day outside poor Tina’s door, rehearsing the woe she had in store for her, whereas I once saw Biscuit sitting amicably beside a field mouse in front of a bed of daffodils in the garden. They couldn’t have been more than a foot apart. Even if cats have terrible depth of visual field, she must have been aware of the creature, and it of her, but they ignored each other like commuters on the subway gazing up with tender neutrality at the zitty, love-starved foreigners in the ads for Dr. Zizmor’s dermatology practice. At length the mouse seemed to realize what it was sitting next to and began sidling toward the flower bed. Only then did Biscuit take notice of it or remember that it belonged to the category “prey.” The fur on the back of her neck rose. Her whole being quivered with interest. In another moment she would have pounced on it, if I hadn’t picked her up and carried her, squirming and hissing, into the barn. She was really pissed at me.