Another Insane Devotion Read online

  Humans, too, have mental slots in which they file experience, and some humans have very few of them. We’ve all known people who view phenomena solely in terms of whether they can be eaten, screwed, or watched on a screen. But humans also possess another kind of curiosity for which the filing metaphor is inadequate, unless you picture an accordion file that contains an infinite number of slots, some of which are bottomless. And it’s with this kind of curiosity that I imagine Biscuit watching me in the bathroom, wondering why I pull off my pelt and why that pelt changes from day to day, from rough to smooth or from slick to hairy, why sometimes it has a row of small hard nipples protruding from it, from which no milk comes, and why at other times the nipples are replaced by a sort of seam or scar that comes open with a soft, purring rasp.

  But who am I kidding? When she looked at me, Biscuit probably saw the same thing the cat in the famous Kliban cartoon sees when it looks at a wall, as indicated by the thought bubble above its head: a wall.

  In her case, it was a wall that moved and gave her food and love, though she might not know what love is. And I doubt it entered her mind that the wall told itself she loved it, too, educing as evidence the way she licked its hand in the morning and greeted it with an almost birdlike chirp when it came home from wherever it is a wall goes.

  F. thinks that love is a specifically human emotion. She doesn’t mean that only humans are capable of love but that only humans are really suited for it, and that when a domestic animal—a dog or a cat or one of the intelligent talking birds—learns to love, as it may from prolonged contact with a human being, it is almost always to its detriment. Sometimes that love is fatal to it.

  Not long after we became involved, I had to go away to South-east Asia for several weeks. The whole time I was gone, I missed F. as if she were the one who’d left and I were moping in the same dingy coffee shops I’d been moping in before I met her, for years. Nothing I saw overseas was exotic to me, not the rice paddies or the Buddhist temples shaped like enormous bells with young monks sitting on their steps in their orange robes, not the markets selling jackfruit big as fourth graders, not the crumpled shell of an American helicopter or the range where you could fire M-16s and AK-47s, depending on which set of combatants you felt like role-playing. It was just a landscape of subtraction. I came back diminished by a tropical infestation that wrung my guts like a washcloth. F. met me in my loft. She said I looked thin. We spent the day and evening in bed. Later we went to dinner. Because I was too weak to walk far, we chose a restaurant only a few blocks away. I don’t know if it was sickness or love that made it so hard for me to eat. I’d raise my fork and watch it idle before my mouth. What was a fork for? This question wouldn’t have occurred to a cat.

  F. too appeared to be in rapture. She smiled across the table with shining eyes. But as I watched, a change came over her face; it seemed to melt and then re-form. Her smile became a smile of hatred, as cruel as that of an empress sitting in an arena and gazing down at men who were about to be slaughtered for her.

  “Why are you looking at me that way?” I tried to keep the fear out of my voice, but a moment later I heard myself plead, “Don’t look at me that way. I don’t like it.” I’m no longer sure of how she answered me. Maybe she said, “I wonder if you’re really what you seem,” or “I hope you don’t turn out to be weak.” She may have said, “I can’t help myself. When I feel this way too long, I just want to bite.” One thing I’m sure of is that she didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. Between us lay the reality of that condemning smile. Both of us acknowledged it, though she may not have known the reason for it any more than I did.

  At the time, I thought the smile meant she’d fallen out of love with me and hated me for it. I understood that feeling. The night D. proclaimed she loved me more than air, I cringed inwardly the way some people cringe from a street beggar, and a while later I was angry at her, the way people are at beggars. Why doesn’t somebody do something about them? Years before, I’d felt the same anger at my girlfriend T., watching the meek curve of her shoulders as she sat before the TV in the apartment we shared in penury. I’m not sure if I was angry at her for tricking me into loving her or for letting me see her as she was, a bright, modestly pretty woman content with the modest pleasure of watching TV on a week night in a shitty apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen and burlap stapled to its rotten plaster walls. Falling out of love was so terrible that it had to be somebody else’s fault. Why should F. be any different?

  The Spanish verb querer means both “to love” and “to want.” Yo quiero may be the beginning of a cry of sexual longing or of an order at the butcher counter. The same duality occurs in other languages, just not as blatantly. It defines love as a condition of insufficiency, a lack that can be cured only by the recovery of a missing object. Love is lovesickness. The lover is an open wound calling to the knife. In the Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes speak of that primeval race of compound beings—barrel shaped, eight limbed, with a face on either side of their spherical heads—whom the gods split in two “like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair,” so that forever after their cloven descendants wander the earth like ghosts, mourning what was taken from them: “Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man,” Plato writes. What a terrible phrase that is, “the indenture of a man,” a man bitten down to a stub. How can you not hate someone who reminds you of your indenturedness, especially when he is sitting across from you, close enough for you to see the tooth marks? Who made those marks?

  On the day we were to begin living together, we found ourselves circling the Bronx in a fourteen-foot rental truck, searching for an alternate route to our new home after a cop herded us off the approach to the Taconic and told us the parkway is closed to commercial vehicles. Who knew our truck was a commercial vehicle? It wasn’t like we were doing this to make money. Aghast at what we’d have to pay in the city, we’d decided to rent a house in the small town where F. lived. The truck was cavernous, or had been before we’d packed it. Now it was stuffed with stuff, mostly towers of crated books. My old roommate said the books were intellectual trophies and advised me to just take pictures of them and hang them on the walls of the new place, the way humane hunters pin up photos of the lions they didn’t kill. He said it would make the move a lot easier. Of course, F. muttered afterward, he didn’t lift a finger to help us. We bumped and swayed alongside the river, whose steely glint on our left reassured us we were heading north. Then, suddenly we were crossing it. On a bridge! How had that happened? The bridge spilled us out in another state. “Where are we?” I asked F., but she couldn’t read the map. She still can’t read them. I knew we were supposed to be back on the other side of the river, but it was another half hour before I could turn around. And it was another two before we got to our new home, a two-story Dutch colonial covered in red aluminum siding that made it look like a toy caboose. Perched on its modest lawn, it seemed scarcely bigger than the truck we were about to offload into it.

  We carried things inside, two small people, already middle-aged. The dining table wouldn’t fit through the front door, and I couldn’t find the screw gun I needed to take the top off the trestle base, so we left it on the lawn, figuring you could do that in the country but not realizing that when you do, you get a reputation as trailer trash. By the time we got to F.’s house, the light was fading. She had fewer things than I did, but many of them were still unpacked. Clocks, pictures, sofa cushions went into the truck piecemeal. On seeing us approach with her carrier, Tina began racing wildly about the apartment, almost panting in fear. When we finally scooped her inside and locked the gate behind her, she bashed against it till her nose bled. “Oh God!” F. cried. It was the most upset she got that day. If she was inclined to blame me—I was the one who locked the gate—she was grateful to me for getting rid of the decaying mole corpse she found in her pantry, where the little orange cat must have
brought it in sometime before. It was my first experience with something far gone into putrefaction. I had to light a cigarette before I could bear to pick up the twist of blackened, half-liquefied matter with a paper towel. Having done this, I felt like a man. Which makes me wonder if there’s something intrinsically manly about disposing of rotting corpses, even very small corpses, or if it’s just about being able to do something that a woman can’t or won’t. Of course another woman might have disposed of those corpses perfectly well, even without a cigarette. But I’m not sure I could have fallen in love with her, or she with me.

  We were still carrying F.’s things into the truck when it began to rain; the sound on the roof was deafening. For a while we huddled in the back, watching it smash down. It grew late, and we finished the move figuratively on tiptoes, like reverse burglars. Then we collapsed half-clothed onto a bed. In the morning we looked out the window and saw that the big maple on the front lawn had gathered all the red in the world into its foliage. It would be our tree. Its leaves would whisper to us as we slept or made love or read to each other in bed, and every fall we would rake them off the lawn and stuff them into big black trash bags. The only peace Ching would know in his haunted old age would be lying in front of it, staring at nothing. If only we could have buried his ashes there. But the ground was hard.

  Looking down, I saw that the dining table was lying where we’d left it beside the door, its maple top spangled with rain.

  For poor Tina, as I said, the house turned out to be a place of torment. From the moment she first picked up her scent, Bitey never missed an opportunity to put the fear of Cat into her. (I can only imagine what Tina felt when she saw the black beast send her human skidding down the stairs, seemingly just by looking at her.) There were moments when I thought F. would tell me that it was either her or Bitey. I don’t know what I would have done then. You can give up a young cat for adoption, but who was going to adopt a middle-aged one that looked like Richard III and liked to bite the hand that petted her?

  And the thing is, I loved her. I loved her as much as I would if I didn’t have a girlfriend. I don’t understand how that happened. In the beginning, I was alone and she was new, not just a new creature but a new phenomenon in my life, like a star that appears in a quadrant of the sky where no stars shone before. I’d grown up in a house without animals. My parents were European refugees, and like many Jews of their time and origin, they saw animals as dirty and a little scary: I’m not just talking about dogs, which it makes sense to be scared of if you come from a place where they were used to herd terrified humans into abattoirs, but, in my mother’s case, cats. If one entered a room where she was sitting, she’d stiffen and grow pale. The cats I had when I was young were just ideas, probably inspired by a memory of a bleating pop song that used “two cats in the yard” as a metonymy of bohemian domestic bliss.

  At first Bitey was an idea too: a companion animal, quieter than a dog and less demanding, requiring little more than food and water in her bowl and fresh litter in her box. But having nothing much better to do in those days, I spent a lot of time looking at her, and she became real. And because she was an animal, graced with an animal’s self-absorption, she didn’t mind my watching. She stretched as if I weren’t there watching her. She stalked shadows and dust bunnies as if the world contained nothing but shadows, dust, and herself. She stared at walls. She hunkered in the cave of her being with slitted eyes, her forepaws tucked beneath her, her tail draped around her like an empress’s stole, perfectly indifferent to the weight of my gaze. Love begins with looking, Proust tells us. I looked.

  Bitey also went missing in September, late in the month, and I was terrified that she’d been snatched by a backwoods Satanist who was going to sacrifice her for Halloween. I don’t know if we had real Satanists where we lived, but we had surly, thick-witted teenagers in Slipknot T-shirts who’d tell themselves they were Satanists as a pretext for setting an innocent house cat on fire, the same way earlier generations of surly thick-wits had told themselves they were Christians. How many miles I rode my bike in search of her, summoning her with the racket of IAMS “Adult Original with Chicken.” “Bitey!” I called over and over. How many times in years to come F. and I would go about crying cats’ names in loud, forlorn voices. People pretended not to stare at us from their porches, and we pretended not to see them staring.

  A few weeks after we got her back, Bitey developed a sudden, terrible thirst. All night long she lapped from her bowl, frenetic and pop-eyed, then stumbled away like a drunk. When I took her to the vet the next morning, he thought it was diabetes. In the course of the day, the diagnosis kept changing. She had diabetes, but somehow it involved her liver. Then it wasn’t diabetes. It might be cancer, but an X-ray showed no tumors. That evening F. and I came to see her and found her lying on her side on a steel table, emaciated—it had only been a day!—her eyes glazed. It was the first time I ever cried in front of F. She held me. Once I’d imagined that having someone to hold you when you were sad would be one of the benefits of marriage. But in the moment, it only felt embarrassing, and it didn’t take away the fact that my cat was dying.

  Actually, she wasn’t dying, but it would be another week and $3,000 before I knew that. No one could ever say definitively what she’d had, what she still had when she came home with us, only that treating it involved feedings of a revolting prescription cat food that had to be blended with water into a grayish-brown slurry and then squirted into Bitey’s mouth with a syringe, plus daily doses of a feline-strength formulary of the enzyme SAME, popular in Europe as an antidepressant, and daily administrations of subcutaneous fluids and antibiotics. The treatment was supposed to take a couple months. F. was away on a job, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to do it all myself. But Bitey was still weak and docile. All I had to do was sit down beside her on the bed, pet her a little to get her in the mood, then reach for the bag of fluid I’d hung from a ceiling hook, put a clean point on the line, and slip the point into the loose skin at her scruff. The worst part was the little pop of the incoming needle. I think it was that, rather than pain (cats don’t have a lot of nerves back there), that sometimes made her start. For the next five minutes, I’d sit with her, scratching her ears as I watched a hundred milliliters of fluid drip from the bag and travel under her skin in a mouse-sized bulge before it was absorbed. About halfway through the procedure, I’d inject the antibiotic into a Y-port in the line. How astonishing that a doctor—even an animal doctor—had sold me a box of twenty-gauge syringes and that I was using those syringes on my cat and not myself. Bitey took it stoically. Only toward the end would she start growling. “Almost done,” I’d tell her and give her a treat to keep her quiet a while longer.

  Did she understand that this was for her own good? As long as we’re talking about the threshold between human and animal, we might consider that humans are the only beings that seem to recognize that some kinds of painful and degrading treatment—injections, catheterizations, Hickman lines, CAT scans and MRIs, the shaving of head and pubic hair, enemas, colonoscopies, the splitting of thorax or abdomen and the plucking out of internal organs, which sometimes are not put back—that these ordeals, which any sentient creature might be expected to fly from howling, are beneficial to them. That the stickers and splitters have friendly intentions.

  Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), Mauritshuis Museum, Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.

  Children have to be taught this; it can take years. And even grown-ups sometimes forget. A friend of mine, coming to after a surgical procedure, began clawing at the lines in his hands, wanting to know why he was being tortured. Later he said he must have gone out of his mind for a while. But you might as well say he’d momentarily come into his right one. In his delirium, he’d broken free of the decades of indoctrination that teach us to accept pain and humiliation as long as they’re inflicted by strangers in lab coats.

  F.’s father had also broken fre
e of his indoctrination; I don’t know that it did him any good. He hadn’t been to a doctor since one had diagnosed him with chronic leukemia years before. He didn’t speak of people going to the hospital; he spoke of them going to the slaughterhouse. “The bastards tell you they’re taking you to the slaughterhouse for some tests, and that’s the last anybody hears of you.”

  We visited him the Christmas before we were married. He and F.’s mother had divorced late, and he still hadn’t gotten over it. The dark condo with its brown carpeting unraveling like a laddered stocking. The yellowing cards of Christmases past arrayed on shelves and coffee table. The cheap cookware that had never held anything but canned soup. They were the marks of someone who either couldn’t live by himself or had chosen not to, preferring to stage the last years of his life as a reproach: to his faithless wife, to the children who didn’t visit him enough, to an entire world that knew nothing of his grief. The resemblance between father and daughter was eerie, down to the domed forehead and rabbit-like twitch of the nose. F. had done her best to create a festive atmosphere. She’d gone to the shopping center and come back with a spiral-cut ham whose slices fanned open like the pages of a book. “Isn’t it nice, Daddy?” She presented him with a heaped plate that he barely glanced at. “I suppose.” He said the ham wasn’t as good as it used to be.