Another Insane Devotion Read online

  Although cats are the most popular pet in the United States, there are way more dog books than cat books—not just guides to their care and training but narratives, both fictional and true. Stories of heroic dogs, mischievous dogs, incorrigible dogs, loyal dogs, loveable dogs, life-transforming dogs. It’s easier to write about a dog than a cat. With dogs, there’s always something going on. They race to greet you at the door; they jump up and plant their paws on your chest; they muzzle your crotch; they bring you things they want you to throw to them or to try to pull from their mouths. They bark at you: all you have to do is say, “Speak!” They look at you with eyes brimming with meaning, and the wonderful thing about that meaning is you don’t have to interpret it; it’s obvious. Maybe it’s the thousands of years they spent hunting beside us, learning to read us, learning to make themselves readable. A dog is a dictionary without definitions, just words that mean nothing but themselves. Feed me! Play with me! Walk me! Love me! The object of these sentences is “me,” but their unvoiced subject is always “you.” Whose knee are they pawing if not yours? At whose feet have they dropped that frisbee, tooth-marked and sopping? Into whose eyes are they gazing? With dogs, it’s all about you. No wonder they’re easy to write about.

  A cat may look at you, too, it’s true, but it will look just as fixedly at a wall. No other creature displays such free-floating intentness. How to distinguish between the gaze that says something and the gaze that says nothing at all? If nobody had ever told me what a cat’s blinking means, would I have figured it out on my own? The pleasure of dog ownership is having an animal that speaks your language, or a language that shares many terms with yours, like Swedish and Norwegian. A cat doesn’t speak your language. But when I blinked at Bitey and she blinked back, I briefly had the illusion that I could speak hers.

  The South Carolina border was marked by signs for a nearby fireworks emporium. Fireworks were legal in South Carolina, along with every type of firearm, including AK-47s and twelve-gauge tactical personal-defense shotguns designed for the homeowner who needed to drive off a bloodthirsty mob. Folks in North Carolina didn’t know what they were missing. They might, though, if they lived close enough to the state line. The signs were that big. As I approached, I had another moment of temptation in which I wondered how many cherry bombs I could get for twenty bucks and whether they’d let me take them on the plane as long as I checked my bag. The temptation passed quickly. It wasn’t that strong to begin with. Given a choice between fireworks and a lap dance, I’d rather have a lap dance. I stopped at a light and, looking up, saw the head of an immense black cat snarling at me from the roadside with a mouth wide as the gate of hell. Its nose and tongue glowed as if red hot.

  My God, who would want that as a pet?

  F. had men before she met me, some of whom she saw for a year or more, some of whom she loved. But she’s spent most of her adult life alone. I think I have never met anyone more lonely. Her solitude, along with her quiet and general eccentricity, has caused her social awkwardness. For a long time she didn’t drive, and she didn’t own a car until we bought one together; even in the country, she got around by walking and, because of that, was viewed with pity, condescension, and occasional unease. She was an affront to people’s sense of categories. Walking was an activity of the poor and the health-conscious elderly, and F. was youthful and well dressed. Sales clerks don’t know what to do with her. She doesn’t get small talk and when strangers try to make it with her, she looks at them with a clinical bafflement that’s easy to mistake for disdain. One of the first things she told me about herself was that she was often insulted at parties. At first I doubted her—why would anybody do that?—but as I started going to parties with her, I saw that it was true. Maybe it wasn’t actual insults, but people slighted her, seemingly for no reason. She assured me it happened less when I was with her. It was one of the things she liked about being together.

  It’s true that I’m more socially adroit than she is, more comfortable with the insincerities that ease open the stubborn cupboard drawers of small-town life. The Friday evenings at the restaurant whose bartender used to rake leaves off your front lawn when he was a little kid. The New Year’s Eve party held in the dreary strip mall near the entrance to the highway—not even a strip mall but a cluster of unfrequented small businesses anchored by a diner that’s had four or five different managements in the time you’ve lived here—one of whose storefronts now turns out to contain a dance club. Who knew, a dance club barely a quarter of a mile from the fencing-and-gazebo barn? In the semidarkness, middle-aged revelers perform the jogging steps of the middle-aged alongside teenage girls in shiny, skimpy dresses and their boyfriends. A bass grunts. Some people are wearing domino masks, which conjures up an image of the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut. And like that movie’s protagonist, who sees the familiar skin of the world peeled back to reveal its secret sensual anatomy, you realize that these partygoers are people you know. The man in the snappy black-and-white tuxedo shirt lifts weights beside you at the gym. The woman in the sequined pantsuit owns the dry cleaner’s. Her husband always calls you by F.’s last name. What you’re supposed to do is give the bartender a good tip and ask him how his mom is. You’re supposed to tease the orgiast from the gym: “So this is why you been doing all those flies? You wanted to look good for your New Year’s date?” F. wouldn’t do that; it wouldn’t occur to her to.

  After we got married, my actual presence at such events became less necessary, since she now wore a wedding band. “People notice that,” she’d say, flashing the ring, “and I can see the relief on their faces. They know how to place me.” She still says it, even now that what we are to each other is uncertain. There are women who find a wedding band demeaning, since it essentially serves as an emblem of possession, a function that was more evident when only women wore them. The ring signifies that the wearer belongs to a certain man and can’t be taken from him without consequence. In that sense, it’s also a warning device, like a car alarm. It’s unclear whether the warning is directed at other men or at the woman herself. But, along the same demeaning lines, you could also compare a wedding band to a pet’s ID tag; typically, dogs get a bone-shaped one and cats a silent little bell. Such tags also express ownership and, indeed, often proclaim it, being engraved with the name and phone number of the pet’s owner. But their purpose isn’t to prevent theft so much as to help find the pet if it gets lost. Pets get lost all the time. Drawn by an interesting smell—in cartoons it’s typically portrayed as a vaporous hand with a beckoning finger—they slip their leash or wander out of their yard and soon find themselves on a street they don’t recognize, gazing up at the legs of oblivious hurrying strangers. Sometimes they roam farther still, beyond the places where people are. A landscape of rustling underbrush and yellow eyes glinting in the shadows of the trees. A dark wood in which there is no straight path.

  There’s no archaeological record of when men and women began to marry. Given that some form of marriage exists among nomadic peoples like the Tuareg, Kham, and Warrungu, it’s likely that humans were marrying before they had much in the way of property. So much for Engels’s view of marriage as a bourgeois institution. Say in the beginning its chief purpose was the protection and rearing of small children and the formation of alliances among people who might otherwise be enemies. That rangy fellow with the dead eye and the necklace of dog’s teeth wasn’t so menacing when you discovered he was the husband of your wife’s sister, and you were grateful to be able to call on him when other nomads tried to drive you away from the watering hole. Marriage extended kinship beyond biology, connected you to people who didn’t share your blood. In all the early accounts of marriage, the idea of connection is paramount. When God gives Adam a mate, it’s not in the interest of his sexual fulfillment. It’s because it is not good that the man should be alone.

  This period of companionship lasted only a little while. Perhaps it ended with the Fall. Having seen each other turned inside out like flayed skins, could
the man and the woman stand to look at each other again? Could they stand to be looked at? In Masaccio’s painting, they walk side by side but don’t touch. Both of them are encysted in their shame, and one wouldn’t be surprised to learn that once they had wandered a distance out of Eden and begotten their unhappy sons, they parted ways and had nothing more to do with each other. It established a pattern. Men labored with men and went off to war with them; they feasted and got drunk together and sang the kinds of songs men have been singing since they discovered that they sounded better when they were drinking. The women served them, first the food, then the bowls of wine or beer. There was no pretense of fairness. Afterward, they went off by themselves and ate and drank the women’s portion and sang songs of their own. At a certain hour of the night, the men and women lay down together. Things went on in this manner, with variations, for the next 10,000 years.

  Societies that observe this arrangement are described as homosocial, with men and women inhabiting separate spheres that only narrowly coincide.

  In some times and places, the sexes dined together.

  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (London, c. 1607), National Gallery, London. Courtesy of Art Resource.

  Sometimes they came together for worship or to attend public entertainments.

  But for much of history, the chief area of coincidence was marriage, especially the marriage ceremony, in which a man and woman stood together before their families, under the eye of that God who decreed it wasn’t good for man to be alone. From then on, they were one, or at least they were treated as one by their society, that one being, implicitly, male. The paradox was that once the man and the woman had publicly sealed their union, they largely returned to their separate social realms. One can visualize marriage as a smaller version of the compound giant pictured on the original frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan.

  Abraham Bosse, frontispiece of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). Courtesy of the Granger Collection.

  Instead of being made up of thousands of men, the leviathan of marriage contains a single man and woman. The face it wears in public is a male face; it resembles the husband’s face, but it has just one unvarying expression, sober, contented, a little dull. The leviathan appears in public only on rare, mostly ceremonial occasions. The rest of the time, it breaks up into its constituent male and female homunculi, and these spend much of their time with others of their kind. Or this was the practice until well into the last century.

  However, even when engaged in her own pursuits, the woman is now identified as belonging to—as being of—the leviathan or, for all practical purposes, her husband. It’s as if instead of wearing a ring, she were carrying a little mask (I imagine it as being made of gold) with her husband’s face on it, and on certain occasions she must hold the face in front of hers and speak from behind it, as if in keeping with Genesis 20:16: “Behold, he is to thee a covering of the eyes.” Depending on the husband’s status, this can be advantageous. Witness the courtesies accorded the wives of the baron, the mayor, and the pastor in former times, the wives of celebrities and corporate CEOs today. The prie-dieu embroidered with the family coronet. The personal shopping assistant at Barney’s. Of course, it’s oppressive for a woman to have to go through the world pretending to be her husband, but the masquerade doesn’t just carry privilege: it carries protection. In a man’s world, an unmarried woman is up for grabs. She may be raped. She may be robbed. She may be tortured and murdered, even burned alive before crowds that one variously imagines as raucous or dumbstruck by the spectacle of suffering unfolding before them. This was what was done to witches. (Some witches, of course, were married women. In a man’s world, finally, any woman is up for grabs, and a husband’s protection is about the same as that provided by a fig leaf.)

  There were no great witch hunts in Europe until late in the fourteenth century. During what is called the Dark Ages, the church denounced the belief in witchcraft as superstition, and in AD 794 the Council of Frankfurt made the burning of witches punishable by death. I wonder whether the resurgence of the practice owed anything to the extinction of the Cathar heresy a hundred years before. I don’t mean a Halliburton-like conspiracy on the part of the Inquisition, which, having done away with the Cathars, needed another threat to justify its continued operations. By 1480, it already had Protestants for that. But people like to believe in the hidden enemy, the worm in the fruit. Protestants weren’t hidden; they nailed proclamations to cathedral doors. The Cathars were hidden, at least some of the time. And what could be more hidden than the woman who lives in your village, maybe even next door to you, distinguished from her sisters only by the fact that she is alone, with no man to vouch for her? For company, she may keep an animal, which is actually a disguised demon. At their esbats or sabbats, witches were said to fornicate with goats, but in the popular imagination, as enshrined in the Halloween displays at Target and CVS, the witch’s familiar is usually a cat, a black one.

  I think back to the way cats clean their dirty parts, I mean, hunching forward while holding a leg up in the air, presumably to give them fuller access to the area in need of cleaning. What distinguished Biscuit’s approach to hygiene, as I said, is the combination of precision and abandon, the geometric line of the suspended leg and the shapeless slouch of the rest of her, which created the impression—at least it did in me—of a creature burrowing into herself as if trying to disappear, so intent on disappearing that she’d forgotten about one part of herself, her raised hind leg. And it’s this hind leg that I imagine remaining poised in the air after the rest of Biscuit made her impossible exit, like the needle of an invisible compass quivering toward an invisible north.

  Of course, Biscuit wouldn’t be the first cat to vanish and leave a part of itself behind. Lewis Carroll’s grinning Cheshire Cat vanishes repeatedly, at first with such abruptness that Alice complains it makes her dizzy.

  Sir John Tenniel, “The Cheshire Cat,” illustration from the first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Courtesy of the Granger Collection.

  “‘All right,’ said the Cat, and this time,” Carroll tells us, “it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.”

  Carroll may have been inspired by a Cheshire cheese that was made in a mold shaped like a smiling cat. The cheese was cut from the tail end, which would make the grinning head the last part to be eaten. But it’s also true that beings seldom vanish all at once. Mostly they do it slowly, almost imperceptibly, until one day you look at the space they occupied and see it’s empty. Or almost empty, since it’s also the case that most beings leave some trace of themselves behind. A smile lingering above the branch of a tree. The scent on a blouse. A leg pointing at nothing.

  We went to events in the city, of course, especially in our early years together, when I still had the loft, and these were more comfortable for F. because she knew most of the people at them. Some of them were her friends, and others were fellow travelers in the worlds she moved through, the worlds of readings and art openings and awards dinners where the small, exquisite portions usually went half eaten, not because the food was bad but because people were too excited or too anxious or worried about spilling something on the Armani or being photographed with their mouths gaping to admit a forkful of some other thing, I don’t know what, duck confit. I used to take great pleasure in imitating what someone might look like in such a photo, my head tilted to one side, my eyes popping with greed, my teeth—which were still very bad back then, back before the dental work I’ll be paying off for the rest of my life—bared. It always made F. laugh. In fairness to her, she may have been the first of us to do the imitation.

  F. didn’t like all the people she knew at these events; really, she disliked many of them, much more than I did. Well, she knew them. And she understood what drove them, the slow- or quick-fused ambition, the d
esire for money or fame or beauty and glamour, beauty and glamour especially, always paired, as if one couldn’t exist without the other. F. also wanted those things. “If only I had legs like hers,” she’d sigh, gazing with forlorn admiration at a woman across the room. “My whole life would’ve been different.” But she made no effort to disguise her appetite; she’d tell a stranger about it. She hated the people who pretended to have no appetite and viewed any display of hunger with pitying amusement, even as they peered over your shoulder to see what you had on your plate.

  To me, beauty and glamour seemed so unattainable that I could only respond to them with cowed sullenness. F. sensed my discomfort long before I told her about it, which in the beginning I couldn’t, and for a long time she’d stay close to me when we went to events where beauty and glamour were likely to be present. The way she did it didn’t feel protective so much as proprietary. I was hers, and she wanted to be seen with me. I was always grateful for this. I liked it even better if she went off to talk with somebody she knew for a while, leaving me free to wander around the room or stand in a corner, hoping that I looked mysterious rather than just awkward as I surveyed the space’s other occupants. Few of them, to be honest, were truly beautiful or glamorous, except for the occasional fashion model slipping past like a gazelle that had been imported into a barnyard in the mistaken belief that it could be mated with the livestock. I guess what I liked about F.’s absences was the evidence that she trusted me not to fall apart or try to mount one of the gazelles or get in a fight with a strange bull while she was gone. And I loved to watch her making her way back across the room toward me. When she spotted me, I could see the questing look in her eyes give way to pleasure; I was what she’d been looking for. Sometimes, though, she’d manage to sneak up behind me and grab me around the waist. She’s proud of her stealth, and she got a kick out of the little start I gave, though the truth is I often started on purpose.