Another Insane Devotion Read online

  “Behold, he is to thee a covering of the eyes.” The speaker is King Abimelech of Gerar. He’s addressing Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Many commentators believe he’s scolding her, though, really, if he should be scolding anybody, it’s Abraham, who passed off Sarah as his sister, under which misimpression Abimelech “took her” (Gen. 20:2) as his wife. “Took”: the word is, to put it mildly, vexing. The Hebrew laqach is defined as “to take (in the widest applications),” which could include rape or the sort of nuptial kidnapping that was still being practiced symbolically by the lusty groomsmen of France at the close of the Middle Ages. This is one of two times in Genesis that Abraham pretends he and Sarah aren’t married. On both occasions, he’s afraid that some powerful figure—before Abimelech, it was the pharaoh of Egypt—will covet his ninety-year-old wife and have him killed in order to possess her. The subterfuge saves his skin, but at the cost of her chastity, or the near cost, depending on how you read “took.” Abimelech insists he never laid a finger on Sarah. Or, at least, that’s what he says when God appears to him in a dream and tells him he’s a dead man for taking liberties with her, and even if he’s lying, you can hardly blame him. I mean, who knew?

  Most biblical commentaries put forth the view that “a covering of the eyes” refers to the veil that was worn by married women in the ancient Middle East and is still worn there today, and not just by married women. The phrase is syntactically ambiguous. Whose eyes are being covered, the veiled woman’s or the lustful viewer’s? In either case, the purpose of the veil is the same, and when Abimelech tells Sarah, “He is to thee a covering of the eyes,” he’s defining a husband’s responsibility to his wife: to be her veil, the protector of her modesty. Not because that modesty is important to him (it doesn’t seem to be important to Abraham), but because it may matter to her. That the patriarchy values something doesn’t mean that women may not value it too, for reasons that have nothing to do with men’s claims on their bodies. Masaccio’s Eve shields her breasts and sex without any prompting from Adam, who, locked behind the visor of his grief, may not even notice that she’s naked. The patriarchs are often held up as models of marital conduct—this is especially so in fundamentalist Christian circles—but Adam seems awfully wishy-washy, and Abraham is even worse. The slights and betrayals. The fling with his wife’s handmaid, who flashes her pregnant belly like a big piece of bling—Look what your husband gave me—until the wife gets fed up and makes him cast her out into the desert, and the kid with her. The spineless way he hands Sarah off to any big shot who looks at her twice. Jews aren’t supposed to do that. Eskimos are supposed to do that.

  We think of modesty mostly in sexual terms, as a reaction—even an anticipatory reaction—to sexual excitement, an attempt to rein in its lunging surge. Eve covers her sexual parts, not her face. That Adam covers his face might support Freud’s belief that women are intrinsically more modest than men, but it also suggests that modesty can be construed more broadly. There is a modesty of the body and a modesty of the soul. Both can be outraged. And there is a social modesty that deters some people from calling attention to where they come from or who their parents were or how much money they have and causes other people to lie about those things; in the latter case, one speaks not of modesty but of shame. Beyond shielding his wife from the gaze and touch of other men, the husband’s task may be to help her navigate in social space, for it’s there that she is most likely to be shamed. The social realm is where shame lives.

  Once, early on in our marriage, I met F. for dinner at a restaurant with our friend Scott. I was late, and when I got there, they were already eating and a second man was sitting across from Scott, in the seat next to mine. I knew him, but not to speak to. He was an old guy who had once done something on Broadway; it made him one of our town’s celebrities. Arthur had a wide, loose-lipped mouth framed by the ponderous jowls of a cartoon bulldog. You could imagine them wobbling in outrage or exertion or, less often, from laughter. I had a sense of him as someone who was used to watching impassively as other people laughed at his jokes but would under no circumstances laugh at anybody else’s. Laughter was tribute, and he refused to pay it. Sitting diagonally across from him, F. looked particularly delicate, an impression heightened by the way she cut her food into small, precise bites that she placed in her mouth one by one with small flourishes of her fork while she held up the other hand before her like a paw. I don’t know why she eats this way, but to me it’s part of her charm.

  I remember the drift of the conversation. F. was talking about her appetite, which is robust for somebody her size and used to be even more so. When she was younger, she likes to brag, she could put away a plate of fries and follow it with a milkshake and a piece of pie and never put on a pound. Maybe that’s what she said that evening. “That doesn’t surprise me,” Arthur said. It sounded like the windup to a joke, but in the next moment, his voice darkened. “I don’t doubt you’d eat anything.” The darkness was the darkness of contempt, of loathing. F. stared at him. Somebody else might have said, “Excuse me?” which would have given Arthur the opening to pretend he’d been joking. But F.’s quicker than that, and what she said back was quick and biting. It may have been, “I guess you’d know”; that would have been appropriate. She didn’t raise her voice, but her anger was unmistakable. Looking back, I think Arthur had counted on her to be too startled to defend herself. Maybe he was drunk; he had a reputation as a drunk. He told F., “I can just imagine the kinds of garbage you put in your mouth.”

  Inanely, I turned to look at him. He was leaning back in his chair. His jowls were inflamed. He might have been resting after a bout of gluttony. Scott called for the check. We tossed down bills and credit cards as if our money had become hateful to us and avoided each other’s eyes while we waited for our change. Arthur heaved himself back from the table and made for the men’s room. “Who is that pig?” F. asked me. Her eyes were bright with hatred. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  If I reconstruct the incident, which probably lasted no more than three minutes from start to finish, less than a short pop song in the days of AM radio, it took me several seconds to realize that the loathsome old hack had been insulting F. The rest of the time, I’d been floundering for a response. If Arthur had been younger, I might just have said, “Watch it, buddy!” which isn’t clever but gets a point across, but he was old, and I was raised to defer to old people. I said none of this to F. I knew better than to excuse myself. I only said I was sorry and for months afterward imagined an alternate version of the evening in which I grabbed Arthur’s wine glass and flung its contents in his face.

  I got my revenge a few years later, at another restaurant, where I was eating with Scott and his girlfriend. Arthur came up to our table on his way out. In the moment I saw him, my face was suffused with a terrible heat, not the heat of a blush but the heat that assails you when you open the door of a furnace. I half believed you could see it burning across the room. But Arthur seemed not to notice. He spoke with my friends, then turned to me with an outstretched hand. He’d lost weight since I’d last seen him, and this, together with a certain vagueness to his gaze, created an impression of diminishment. I looked at him steadily but kept my hand at my side. Then I looked away. It might have been satisfying if I hadn’t heard that in the time since that wretched dinner he’d had a stroke. He may not have recognized me; he may not have remembered insulting F. That whole portion of his memory may have been torn from his mind like a sheet of paper from a notebook and crumpled into a ball and tossed, coincidentally, into the garbage, which, in any event, is what it had become.

  F.’s recollection of the original fight—or say the ambush, since neither she nor I could be said to have fought back—is different from mine. After we parted ways with Scott and got into the car, she says I turned to her and snapped, “I really didn’t appreciate you embarrassing me in front of my friend.”

  During the hour-and-a-half drive from the college town to the airport, I passed throug
h the following localities:Belville

  Bolivia

  Supply

  Shallotte (pronounced Shal-lot)

  Carolina Shores, skipping a side trip to nearby Calabash

  Little River

  Myrtle Beach

  If I hadn’t been in a hurry, I might’ve stopped in Wampee.

  On reflection, my explanation for why I waited till October 2 feels like bullshit to me. I have to wonder whether the sleepless nights, the hysterical phone calls and e-mails (by now I’d deputed at least two of my friends to come by the house and call my cat at different times), weren’t just a front, a lot of thrashing, hand-wringing activity thrown up to disguise a vacuum. Maybe I was just lazy. Maybe I didn’t love my cat, or didn’t love her as much as I thought. I mean, it’s hard enough to know when you love a person.

  In one of his later lectures, Jacques Derrida poses the question of why, if he walks naked into the bathroom and his cat follows him inside and looks at him, as a cat will, he feels ashamed. Derrida sees this shame as a measure of the boundary, which is to some extent an arbitrary one, drawn up by bribed surveyors, between the human and the animal. He connects his shame to the shame our ancestors felt when they ate the forbidden fruit and realized for the first time that they were naked. In this scenario, Derrida’s cat may stand in for God; its gaze stands in for the Creator’s gaze, being similarly unblinking and inscrutable. Really, all Western representations of God are deficient inasmuch as they give God the eyes of a human being rather than those of a cat.

  Is nakedness a condition unique to humans? Is naked something only a human can be? In French, a synonym for naked is à poil, “down to the hair,” the hair being that of a beast. A naked human, then, is a human stripped down to a bestial state, in which it is cold and fearful and ashamed. In contrast, an animal that has its hair has everything it needs, and most attempts at improving its condition only cause it discomfort. Witness the evident discomfort of a cat dressed in human clothing.

  The cat pictured above might be called an image of offended modesty.

  Right after the man and woman ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they began acting strangely, and the dog and cat in the garden watched them with perplexity. They were the same creatures they had been a moment before, mangy, sparse coated, moving clumsily about on their hind legs. But something about them was different. They shivered and cast anxious looks about them. They drew together but shrank from each other’s touch. Strangest of all, they plucked leaves from the tree and tried to cover themselves with them. Why were they doing that? Today we have forgotten the moment when our forebears first knew they were naked and were ashamed. But the cat and the dog remember, and that is why they look at us so intently, wondering what changed us.

  6

  JUST PAST LITTLE RIVER, I HAD TO TAKE A TURNOFF onto Route 9 and then merge onto Highway 31 South toward Myrtle Beach. The sign for the turnoff was smaller than the ones I was used to up north; I could easily have missed it. The ramp jogged gently—to my mind, sneakily—to the right, then swung back and climbed so that I found myself arcing over the continuation of the road I had just been on and an unpicturesque wetland where dead-looking trees rose out of brown water. No wonder the bastards were so mad to develop here. Who wanted to see that shit on the way to the beach? The traffic I’d been congratulating myself on missing was suddenly thick about me, blades of late sun glancing off its hoods and grilles. How clean those cars were.

  A few years before I’d been in a town in Florida where people drove their pickups on the beach, not twenty feet from the breaking surf, truck after truck in a slow, martial procession whose brutish throat-clearing drowned out the sound of waves. I was working with a famous monologist who was in the middle of a breakdown. A bunch of us had taken him to the beach as therapy, but when he got out of the car and saw those trucks, he staggered back in fear. A moment later he glanced upward and dropped into a crouch, shielding his face with his hands. He choked out a cry. “Shark!” And following his gaze, I saw that there really was a shark overhead, a great, swooping shark-shaped kite whose grinning mouth stretched to devour the world, and us with it. Two years later, the monologist killed himself by jumping off a ferryboat into the freezing water of New York Harbor.

  Now, caught in traffic on an overpass above another beach, I thought about poor Biscuit. I worried that she must be afraid in her exile, far from home, assailed by strange sounds and smells: the trembling hoot of night owls, the bloodthirsty mirth of coyotes closing in on their prey, the acrid scat of animals that feed on other animals. At the time, I thought nothing could be more terrible than such fear. Only looking back do I understand that whatever Biscuit encountered in the wild, it would be something that on some level she already knew, that she recognized by instinct. The wild was where she’d been born, after all, or at least found, and she’d had no way of knowing that the dogs baying up at her were people’s house pets. Nothing she encountered in the woods near our home would be as strange to her as the sight of trucks driving along the edge of the ocean or a Mylar shark wheeling and flapping in the sky. She might fear for her life, but she wouldn’t fear she was going mad. I doubt a cat has even the remotest sense of what that might mean. And I can’t imagine the circumstances under which Biscuit would dive into an endless expanse of dull gray water, water cold enough to stop the heart, wanting it to be stopped. Only a human would do that.

  On those mornings when I came into the bathroom naked and Biscuit looked up at me from the radiator, where she’d settled sometime after slipping off the bed during the night, I don’t think that what I felt was shame. I don’t think I was even especially conscious of being naked. I might become conscious of it on those occasions when I petted my cat, which she seemed to have invited me to do by rolling over and stretching, displaying her luxuriously soft (and, because of where she’d been lying, luxuriously warm) stomach, and she seized my hand and began to lick it while lightly raking it with her extended claws. (I’m pretty sure she wasn’t doing this to hurt me but to keep my hand from getting away.) At that moment I’d be suddenly aware of the temptation my genitals might present to a creature programmed by instinct to strike at dangling objects, and I’d retract my groin as far as I could while letting her go on grooming my unresisting hand. To me, this is not shame; it’s awareness of my vulnerability, though maybe what I’m really talking about is fear. Maybe when Derrida speaks of shame he really means fear. Maybe he was ashamed to admit he was afraid of his cat.

  What might Biscuit have made of my nakedness? She must have recognized it as being different from the state in which she usually saw me, covered in soft, warm fabrics that were so pleasant to sit on—she especially sought out my lap when I was wearing my flannel bathrobe—and that bore my scent along with the odors of coffee, garlic and olive oil, tea tree oil chewing sticks, motor oil and grass cuttings, laundry detergent, and household cleaners. She knew most of those smells from the house and its environs, and when she detected them on me, she must have had an idea of where I’d been and what I’d been doing: preparing the bitter black water I drank every morning, with a shameful waste of the rich, sweet milk that ought to go in her dish; pushing the growling thing that chewed up the grass in strips; going out to fetch the paper bags from which I took the things F. and I ate and then left out for her to climb into so that no one could see her. Sometimes I’d come into the house smelling of things that had no counterpart in her experience: the subway, on days I’d been working in the city. What would she make of that, a canned stew of humans shrieking through the darkness beneath the earth? Some other cat might think it was a kind of pound, a pound for humans. But Biscuit had never been in a pound.

  And what went on in her mind when she watched me undress, before I took a shower, for instance? To undress is to cross the threshold from clothed to naked, and judging by the intentness with which she studied me, the procedure interested her. Did she see my discarded clothing as a foreign layer that I’d managed to slough off, as she migh
t manage to disentangle herself from one of the shopping bags she nested in? Or did she see it as part of me, like a skin or, really, like fur, which was part of her but could also be shed: if only it weren’t shed so easily! Sometimes when we kept Biscuit from going out, she’d get so frustrated she’d sit by the door and pull out her fur in mouthfuls, seizing up thatch after thatch of it with irate twists of her head. It looked agonizing. Coming back home was like walking into a barbershop, all this tawny hair strewn on the floor where she’d been sitting, like the pattern of iron filings that shows where a magnet was.

  I understand that I’m ascribing to my cat the most human of human behaviors, the ascription of meaning. I’m imagining that the tilt of her head, the fixity of her gaze when she looked at me, signaled curiosity, or a particular disinterested variety of curiosity that might be called speculation. But can a cat speculate? Nobody questions that they’re curious, but most evidence suggests that this curiosity is basically utilitarian, that when a cat stares at something, or sniffs it, or nudges it with a paw, climbs onto it or inside it, it’s trying to fit the object of its curiosity into one of a limited number of conceptual slots, like the slots in an accordion file. Is this thing dangerous? That is, does it belong to the category of threats that may include other animals and, for some cats, human beings except for their owners (sometimes the owners too), along with moving cars, lawn mowers, and vacuum cleaners? Is this something I can eat? Is it something I can stalk and kill? Is it a female I can mount? (This asked by males.) Can I play with it? Is it something I can climb or hide in? The previously mentioned study of Kaspar Hauser cats indicates that some of these slots are present at birth, waiting to be filled by things their isolate, light-deprived owners may not even guess at.