Another Insane Devotion Read online

  If someone asked me why I love Biscuit, I might cite her mildness, even though it may not have been mildness at all, judging by the many tiny corpses deposited on the porch, just forgetfulness. But I also loved Bitey, and there was nothing mild about her. Soon after F. and I moved in together, Bitey put her in the hospital. I was in the kitchen when I heard snarls at the foot of the stairs. Tina had gone down there, and my cat had cornered her in the front vestibule and was rearing above her in a gloating rage. I started at them, yelling. F. came out of her room and ran downstairs to break up the fight. I remember feeling tacitly reproached. The stairs were steep and covered in unctuous brown carpeting. As I watched from below, F.’s feet slid out from under her, she grabbed hold of the banister but continued to fall or slide, and her arm twisted grotesquely in its socket and went limp. She cried out. I raced up to her, shooing cats out of my way. F. was lying on her back. She was conscious but her face was white and shiny with sweat. She thought the arm was dislocated. I told her to lie still while I called 911, but she said she wanted to go to the bathroom; she was scared she was going to be sick. Cautiously, I half-carried her upstairs. I must have made a call then, though I have no memory of it, because a pair of EMTs showed up within minutes. Ambulances come quickly in the country, as long as it’s not a weekend night when drunken teens roar up and down the roads looking for trees to wrap themselves around. The stretcher was too wide to fit through the bathroom door horizontally, so F. had to be strapped to it and carried out at an angle. I walked beside it as the EMTs trundled her to the ambulance, holding her good hand. If Bitey had been anywhere in sight, I would have leapt on her and shaken her like a rag, but all the noise must have scared her into hiding, and I didn’t see her again till one or two in the morning, when I brought F. back from the hospital, her arm having popped back into its socket without any help from the admitting doctor, who sent her home with nothing but a crummy blue sling that was shortly covered in cat hair. Bitey was lying on the dining table on top of a heap of mail, and she barely glanced up when I called her an evil shit.

  Of course cats have no sense of good and evil. I doubt dogs do either, but we’re more inclined to think of them as moral creatures, or at least as ones susceptible to moral suasion, properly backed up with a rolled-up newspaper. “Bad dog!” you yell, and the dog hangs its head and looks at you the way a Gnostic believed its ancestor looked at God on the day we provoked him to invent death. The jury’s out as to whether that look signifies remorse or fear. “Bad cat!” accomplishes nothing, unless you really yell it, in which case the subject runs for cover. None of your expiatory displays of guilt or shame, it just books. Biscuit was in some ways a very human cat, by which I mean a cat who responds to human cues, answering your call at least some of the time and giving you a look of what seems like gratitude when you fill her saucer with milk, though maybe it’s really approval; you’ve figured out what she wanted from you. But I never saw her express anything that remotely resembled guilt. Like Bitey before her, she learned not to claw the stereo speakers or start knocking things off the dresser early in the morning, but her forbearance appeared to be entirely pragmatic, and at those times she forgot herself and stretched sensuously toward a speaker with outspread talons and I snapped, “Biscuit!” she paused and looked at me. Somebody else might have called her expression insouciant or defiant or even, because of how her whiskers bristled, belligerent, but to me it was just blank. I’d pressed the “Biscuit!” button, which made her come, but she was already here, and the tone was the tone of “no,” the button that made her stop. So what did I want?

  It may be their inability to display remorse—really, their inability to comprehend what remorse might be—that caused cats so much trouble in the Middle Ages. Probably their stealth and night walking didn’t help either. People thought of them as the devil’s creatures and persecuted them accordingly. Those jolly, howling orgies of cat killing may in fact have been autos-da-fé, though knowing human nature, it’s more likely the mobs just wanted an excuse to visit suffering on something small and weak. At the same time they were torturing and burning cats, Europeans were also torturing and burning heretics, especially the Cathars of the Languedoc. (One imagines an English-accented voiceover on the History Channel: “Is it mere coincidence that ‘Cathar’ contains the word ‘cat’?” Well, actually, yes, according to my dictionary, which traces “Cathar” to the Greek katharoi, “the pure ones.”) The violence against Cathars was organized and genocidal and bore the imprimatur of a couple popes, who proclaimed the campaign against the heretics in Toulouse as much a crusade as the ones against the infidels in the Holy Land. By the mid-fourteenth century, some 500,000 Cathars had been slaughtered, along with an undetermined number of Catholics who had the misfortune to live in Cathar towns. (Asked how to tell one from the other, a commander of the crusaders said, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”—“Kill them all. God will recognize his own”—originating a slogan that seven hundred years later would be silk-screened on T-shirts you could buy at the county fair, usually with a skull in a black beret nearby. In the same bins, you could find shirts illustrated with a picture of a naked and seemingly headless man, though his head, on closer inspection, was wedged between his buttocks. The caption said, “Your problem is obvious.” Wilfredo was the right age to appreciate these shirts, but the last time we took him to our county fair, he was only interested in the stuffed animals they were giving as prizes at the sharpshooting booth.) There’s no telling how many cats were killed during this period—enough, according to some commentators, that in parts of Europe their numbers were greatly suppressed. In the absence of their natural predator, rats flourished, and when the Black Death arrived in 1347, inundating Christendom with sweat, pus, and black blood, it may in part have been because there were so many rats around to spread it. Some 100 million people died wretchedly. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

  A footnote: before it decided to exterminate the Cathars, the church tried to convert them. It delegated the task to one Diego de Guzman, whom it later canonized as St. Dominic. The order he founded, the Dominicans, became known as the “dogs of God” (domini + cani) for the enthusiasm with which its members sniffed out heresy. Once they’d wiped out the Cathars, they shifted their operations to Protestants and crypto-Jews.

  On the night Bitey dislocated F.’s arm, I sat beside her on one of the emergency room’s brittle bucket seats, filling out the admissions forms for her because she couldn’t use her right hand. How pale she was in that diagnostic light! I could see every vein in her eyelids. I had to keep asking her questions; I didn’t know her medical history, let alone her insurance provider, and shock made her vague and slow to anwer. I could remember snapping at my mother in similar circumstances as a teenager (“What do you mean you don’t know what medicines you’re taking?”) and was relieved I’d become at least a little more patient since then. Maybe it was because I knew that on some level the accident was my fault. In Texas, your neighbors can sue you if you let your cattle stray onto their land, and I imagine the damages are higher if somebody dislocates an arm because of it.

  Much of the anger I used to feel back when I was checking my mother into the hospital (for pleurisy, for pneumonia, for hepatitis, for herniated disks, for a spot on the lung that might be cancer but wasn’t, though twenty-odd years later it would be) had been anger at being attached to her, yoked to her, with her, the last being the way you identify yourself as a teenager. At least I did when I was one.

  “Are you with her?” pronounced “huh.”

  “No, man, I’m not with huh. I’m with Fran.”

  “He’s with Carol and those Walden kids.”

  “She’s with those heads who hang out by the fountain.” That need to place yourself in a context, with a girlfriend or boyfriend, ideally, but failing that with a group or clique or, that word of wincing recollection, a tribe. Our egos were still unfinished—in places they were only dotted lines—and so we needed to borrow parts of
each other’s. But after spending an afternoon and evening, sometimes even a whole weekend, hanging out with my tribe, smoking hash and snorting crushed-up Dexamyl with the children of shrinks and advertising executives in an apartment overlooking Central Park, I went home to the apartment where I lived with my mother, and then I was with huh. In the hospital, it was worse. Our affiliation would be evident to anyone who might be passing through the waiting room. One of the few questions I didn’t have to ask her was the names of her emergency contacts: the first was my grandfather; the second was me.

  And now I was with F. I was happy to be with her, even proud, though, really, what else could I have done: waved bye-bye as the EMTs slid her into their ambulance, then gone inside to make myself a late-night sandwich? I felt a small pang of disappointment when for emergency contact, she asked me to put down her mother. It wasn’t until we got married two years later that she started putting me down instead. From a logical standpoint, there’s no reason why I should have cared so much, beyond being the first, rather than the second, person to learn that something bad had happened to her or having the privilege of bringing F.’s medications and makeup to her in the hospital, along with the boxy terrycloth robe she likes to wear, the one with a picture of a sitting cat on the back. Still, it mattered to me. I wanted my name on her forms.

  About a year before this, F. had taken me to the hospital. I’d developed a persistent headache, and although I’ve had so many headaches in the course of my life that I’ve become a connoisseur of them, the way people are of cheeses, this was a kind I’d never had before. It was localized on the right side of my head, and the pain seemed to originate in a spot on the surface, as if I’d been rapped there with a hammer. It hurt for days; Advil did nothing for it. And one night, as we were leaving a movie, F. asked me what was wrong, and I said wonderingly, “It’s still there,” and she asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no. Then I said maybe. Then we were in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s. Ten years before, this had been the charnel house of New York. Every day, dozens came here to die, not all at once but a few lurching steps at a time. They had boiling fevers, faces mottled with cancer, diseases that before this had been seen only in birds. The doctors hauled them back, stabilized them, and sent them home, but a few weeks later they returned, sicker. After a while, they died.

  By the time I finally saw a doctor, I was starting to doubt that I was in as much pain as I’d thought I was. I was also bored and embarrassed at having dragged my girlfriend to a hospital on a Saturday night instead of a nice restaurant. We were in a yawning chamber sectioned like an orange by flimsy curtains, through which we glimpsed dim shapes of suffering humans attended by other humans dressed in white, green, and powder blue. My doctor was a young Israeli woman with lovely breasts that proclaimed their splendor beneath her open lab coat. It was all I could do not to stare at them as she bent over me. Later F. told me how funny I’d looked, following the beam of my caregiver’s pencil light until my gaze intersected her boobs, at which point it froze raptly and then swerved. Maybe the doctor saw this too. I remember thinking she looked very amused considering she was examining somebody who might be having an aneurism.

  She left for a while, cautioning me not to move too much. Throughout the examination, I’d been distantly aware of a continual sound, soft, feeble, monotonous as the hiss of a respirator. Only now did I recognize it as moaning. It was coming from the examining area to our right. The voice was a man’s. “Help me, doctor,” it kept saying. “It hurts, it hurts bad.” It was awful, the awfulness coming from the voice’s mechanical character and from the rupture between the mechanical and the human—the animal—truth of pain. Every animal understands pain, but as far as I know, no one has yet built a machine that does. “What’s wrong with that guy?” I asked F. Because she was sitting rather than lying down, she could see him. “I don’t know, he looks like he might be mentally ill.” The moment she said it, I knew she was right. “Help me, doctor,” the voice said again. F. and I looked at each other.

  I don’t remember either of us saying anything—maybe we squeezed hands—but we both turned our attention to the droning sufferer behind the curtain. We—how do I put this?—we willed him better. No, we understood that our wills weren’t that powerful. We sent him kindly thoughts. My kindly thought was, “You’re okay, friend, you’re okay.” I don’t know exactly what F.’s was. When I think back to that night, I’m not sure how I knew we were thinking the same thing at the same time. Maybe I didn’t know in the moment and just extrapolated from what she told me later. That’s one of the epistemological problems of a long relationship. You’re never sure what you actually know and what you reconstruct from your partner’s reports after the fact. I’m not crazy about the word “partner”; it suggests the work of marriage but not the pleasure. But it’s true that people in a relationship are partners in recording its history, like two scholars who join efforts to write a chronicle of a small, unimportant town where something out of the ordinary once happened. In a successful relationship, the partners’ accounts more or less tally. They may differ in detail, but the overall narrative is consistent, and so is the tone. But then there are histories where nothing matches, so that in adjoining sentences the townspeople are good Catholics and devout Cathars, living harmoniously and in gnashing enmity. But we used to be so happy. I was never happy. Never.

  On the other side of the curtain, the voice underwent a change. It still sounded mechanical, but the machine was slowing. In time it would stop. It said, “Thank you, doctor. Thank you.” Disregarding instructions, I sat up and peered through the curtain. Silhouetted behind it I saw a slouching, shirtless man with a soft, matronly stomach. F. and I grinned at each other. A moment later we started laughing. Laughing worsened the pain in my head, but it seemed worth it.

  A while afterward, the Israeli doctor came back and told me that what I had was a stress headache. “It’s very common,” she reassured me. “Especially in men your age.” Mildly, I reminded her that I’d never had a headache like this before. It was bad enough having a doctor with breasts see me as middle-aged; I didn’t want her seeing me as middle-aged and hypochondriacal. She shrugged. “Maybe you never had stress before.”

  Cats are supposed to be solitary creatures, but when you live with multiples of them, you become aware of their social interactions. These are less boisterous than those of dogs, which usually involve running and panting, tails wagging and tongues flying like flags. What goes on among cats is more complex and mercurial, with small, unexpected shifts of power and moments when hostility abruptly gives way to solidarity, or vice versa. At mealtimes, each is conscious of what the others are getting. Biscuit would often look up from her bowl to glance at the cat nearest her, then give it a cuff—not a hard cuff but hard enough to make it back away—at which point she’d move over and help herself to its shreds or pellets or, my favorite stroke of the marketing people at Friskies, “classic paté,” which appeals at the same time to snobbery and squeamishness. She didn’t seem to mind if the loser changed places with her. She might have forgotten that the protein it was eating had once been hers. Or maybe she didn’t care; it was just sloppy seconds. Considering the feline reputation for independence, their values are surprisingly conformist: a cat wants what other cats want. It wants it because they want it. It wants other cats to want what it has. F. once gave Suki a piece of cheese and noticed that instead of polishing it off right away, the crabby gray tabby held it between her paws until she saw Tina enter the room. Only then did she begin eating her prize in tearing mouthfuls, pausing from time to time to look intently at the other cat.

  The gaze is important to them; they want to see and be seen. Biscuit was drawn to houses that had cats living in them and showed a preference for ones where the cats were kept indoors. There was one where she’d loiter for hours, clambering onto one of the downstairs windows (she was never a very good jumper) so she could peer inside and, I’m pretty sure, display herself to the inma
tes. Sitting broadside on the sill, she’d lick her paws in a way that put me in mind of someone buffing her nails. Behold, she might have been saying, here is a free creature who goes where she pleases and helps herself to the bounty of lawn and hedgerow!

  They want you to look at them, too, but not too long, since that might indicate you’re thinking of eating them. I no longer remember who first taught me that if you blink slowly at a cat two or three times, the cat will blink back, the same as it would at another of its kind. You’re supposedly assuring it that you mean it no harm. Of course, I’d observed this for years among friends’ cats without knowing its significance. It was just an example of their minimal style of relating. Once I learned what blinking meant, I couldn’t resist practicing it with Bitey. I must have spent hours blinking at her as we sat across from each other in my living room in Baltimore or, later, in apartments in New York, the sounds of the river of worldly glamor lapping through the windows. I’d look at her from the sofa. There she sat with her forepaws together and her tail coiled around them, her chin slightly tucked. I blinked and waited, blinked again. I was listening to Marvin Gaye or Robyn Hitchcock, love raw as the mark of an axe in a half-felled tree or sheathed in irony, though, really, what’s so ironic about “I feel beautiful because you love me,” except maybe the marimbas? Again I blinked. Bitey blinked back. It never ceased to make me happy.