Another Insane Devotion Read online

  My girlfriend D. had a dramatic personality. She wore her hair dyed platinum blonde and swept back from her forehead like a romantic composer’s. She played the keyboards at three in the morning. She would fix you with hypnotic stares of desire or grief, her pupils big as jelly beans, waiting for you to jump her or apologize for the terrible thing you’d done to her. When she smiled, her mouth was shaped exactly like an upside-down boomerang. The night we met, she watched me pour a bottle of wine down the kitchen sink; I think it was a Beaujolais nouveau. The first time we made love was also marked by ceremony. We’d put off the moment for a while. I’d never delayed gratification of any kind before, just had it delayed for, or do I mean from, me, dangled out of reach like a catnip toy, and I have to say that when you’re the one who does the dangling, it drives the other person crazy. It drives you crazy. Like the old ascetics of the desert, you’re intoxicated by your self-denial, not to mention your unexpected power over another person. Not that this was my reason for postponing sex. It had more to do with the new life that had begun only a day or two before I met D., one event following the other so closely that I thought of them as cause and effect. In my mind, D. was the reward for my new life, which in its early stages was marked mostly by what it required me to give up, as if I had joined a priesthood whose members dressed in mufti and chain-smoked. Those rooms murky with cigarette smoke. Even in mid-summer, you seemed to be huddling by a fire, trying to make out your comrades’ features through the gloom. “I want to wait,” I told D., and kissed her the way you kiss someone when that’s the only way you have of entering her. When we finally did it, it was the most powerful sex I’d had in my life up till that moment. In an old movie, it would have been symbolized by a shot of water crashing down the flume of a dam or steam surging through a pipe. (With the passing of heavy industry, we are losing an entire category of metaphors for the sexual act, metaphors of vast forces allowed only a single conduit through which to make themselves felt in the world. The turning of cogs and gears, the thrumming of turbines, the entranced pounding of pistons into cylinders: all gone. I suppose new metaphors will arise out of the new technologies, but how much fun can sex be without build or friction, only the whirr of boot-up or the chime of a new message materializing in your in-box?)

  With D., I wore my last Halloween costume, suffering miserably with one half of my face painted black and the other painted white. She wasn’t the first woman I ever apologized to, but she may have been the first to whom I apologized because I was wrong and felt bad about it rather than just because I wanted to end a fight. I couldn’t say what I was apologizing for. My moral proprioception was still coarse back then and could identify only the grosser transgressions: if I’d screwed somebody else, I would’ve known it was wrong. Still, I remember the remorse rising in me like nausea. Once, when we were fighting in the car while caught in traffic, I made a violent turn that brought one half of the Tercel lurching over the curb for a second before dropping back with a tooth-rattling thud, and D. accused me of trying to kill her; maybe I was. Once she told me to go and fuck my way around the world if that was what I wanted. On at least two occasions, she told me that she loved me more than air. One of these was at a birthday party, before an audience of aww-ing friends. Even now I remember how my face burned with pleasure and embarrassment. The pleasure was pleasure at being loved, of course, but it was also indicative of my own taste for drama, which in years past had led me to many sad feats of clownish vainglory. The embarrassment suggests that my appetite for drama wasn’t what it had been. When you’re a little kid, grown-ups warn you that your eyes are bigger than your stomach, but there comes a time when that’s no longer true, not because your stomach has gotten bigger but because your eyes have gotten smaller.

  “I love you more than air,” D. said. I said, “I love you,” and immediately felt at a disadvantage, as if I’d followed her inside straight with a pair of eights. Everybody knows that the thing to do then is fold. I did, but it took me several more months. I’m not sure why. One morning I woke up and was no longer in love with her. Then she was gone, and I was left wondering what had happened to everything I’d felt for her, where I’d lost it.

  I often think that my relationship with Bitey might have been much different if not for something that happened in the first year I had her. I was alone in the house. It was an early evening in winter; there was a sting in the air. I was suddenly overcome with tiredness—I hadn’t been sleeping much since I’d broken up with D.—and lay down on the couch in the dining room, resting my head on a padded arm. Bitey jumped up and settled on my chest. At first she sat gazing down at my face. Then she lay down on top of me and stretched her forelimbs so that she was almost clasping me around the neck and began to purr. We stayed like this for a long time. I could feel her breath on my face. Abruptly, the phone rang, and I started up to answer it, jostling my cat from her place of rest and spilling her onto the floor. She wasn’t hurt; she was a cat, and cats routinely fall from much higher up without injury. But she never lay down on me like that again or clasped my neck in what I always insist was an embrace. I’m probably reading too much into that moment. I was lonely, and Bitey may just have been stretching.

  We think of love, at least love in its ideal form, as a reciprocal condition, like a current that requires two poles to make one’s hair rise; without two poles, you can’t even speak of a current. Unreciprocated love may not be love at all, but a delusion, maybe a pathetic delusion, maybe a creepy one. Stalkers, too, think they’re in love. Well, if someone says, “I love you,” it’s nice to be able to say, “I love you,” back. This is more difficult than it sounds. In James Salter’s Light Years, a little girl is writing a picture story: Margot loved Juan very much, and Juan was mad about her. But Margot is an elephant, and Juan is a snail. In the classical myths, humans and gods love one-sidedly, a predicament the gods usually solve by means of rape. The poor humans just pine. Tristan and Iseult may be the poster children for requited love, but even they needed a love potion, and it’s significant, I think, that the love they came to embody, courtly love, has conditions so extreme as to be essentially unrealizable. It must be adulterous; it must be pure. The lovers must love equally. We have to speak of such love the way we speak of black holes. Who knows what happens to someone who enters a black hole? Is he crushed by its gravity, which is massive enough to crush stars? Do its attractive forces wrench him in two or draw him into a wire of infinite length and infinitesimal thinness and stretch him across all space and time? What message does that wire transmit, and who hears it?

  There was a moment when F. and I loved each other equally, when we looked at each other with eyes whose pupils were similarly dilated. F.’s pupils were easier to see because her eyes are blue. Mine are dark, and this makes the state of the pupils more elusive, a trait I found useful back when I was getting high.

  There are nights when I wake beside my wife as if beside a stranger. Her body is familiar to me; I know it almost as well as my own. Maybe I know it better, having looked at it and touched it with greater attention than I ever gave myself, because I wanted to know it. There’ve been few things in my life I’ve wanted to know so badly. But something’s gone wrong. Two years ago, she asked for a separation. A while later she changed her mind. I couldn’t tell you why. Or rather, I could tell you: Because of the children we didn’t have or the child we borrowed. Because of the kitten we rescued and then lost. Because of money, because of sex. Because I didn’t pay enough attention to her, because I paid too much. Because she got bored, and then got interested again. But any of those explanations would be wrong.

  Now it’s my turn. I don’t know what to do with F. I look at her the way you look at a house you are thinking of moving out of. It’s gotten too small for you. It needs a new furnace; the floor slants. Why do you stay? But how can you ever leave?

  “They lay in the dark like two victims,” Salter writes of a husband and wife, “They had nothing to give one another, they were boun
d by a pure, unexplicable love. . . . If they had been another couple she would have been attracted to them, she would have loved them, even—they were so miserable.”

  I remember when people still spoke of couples as being estranged. “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton are estranged.” The term has passed out of use—unfortunately, because it is so accurate and absent of blame, saying nothing about which party has become the stranger and leaving implicit the fact that when one falls out of love, as when one falls into it, one becomes a stranger to oneself. Proust describes that earlier estrangement well, when he has Swann realize, with an inward start, that he has fallen in love with Odette, whom only a little while before he found a little boring and her beauty a little worn:He was obliged to acknowledge that now, as he sat in that same carriage and drove to Prévost’s, he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone even—that a new person was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, whom he might have to treat with circumspection, like a master or an illness.

  I gaze down at my wife in the dark but see only the dim curve of her body lying on its side like a letter C, a face shuttered in sleep. I go into the bathroom and turn on the light above the sink. My face in the mirror is the face of a tramp rousted from a ditch. I lean closer and try to make out the size of my pupils, but of course the sudden brightness has made them pin. In mechanical terms, there’s something they don’t want to see. The door creaks; I turn in alarm, but it’s only our plush silver tabby Zuni, that fool for running water, shouldering her way inside. She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish.

  Is it that I don’t know F. any more or that I don’t know myself? Maybe it’s love that has become strange to me. I can’t recognize it in another person. I can’t find it in myself. It has become my lack. But this seems to be true of many people: of Salter’s glamorously wretched married couple; of Swann, trembling at the loss of his faithless mistress, whom he will marry only when he has fallen out of love with her; of all the seekers who crawl and flounder after this one thing, turning over wives, husbands, lovers, mistresses, like rocks in a garden, under one of which, long ago, they buried a treasure. Or maybe just a dream of treasure.

  What is this treasure?

  It took me about twenty-two hours to travel the 1,400 miles from the town where I was teaching to the mid–Hudson Valley and back. That’s one of the drawbacks of flying on a discount carrier. To Biscuit, the distance would be as incomprehensible as that between Earth and the sun, whose warmth she loved to bask in when it poured through the living room window on winter afternoons. Though, come to think of it, you hear stories of cats traveling long distances all the time. Usually, they’re trying to return to a former home or be reunited with a missing owner. To me, why Biscuit wandered off and where she went are, if not incomprehensible, unknowable. Still, I can recount just about every step of my search for her and many of the key incidents of our relationship before then.

  This is more than I can do for my relationship with F., which at the time Biscuit disappeared was beginning to change and, maybe, to draw to an end; it’s still too early to say. I recall that relationship at least as vividly as I do the one with Biscuit, if not more vividly, but, as Freud showed us, there is such a thing as an excess of vividness. The most vivid memories, the ones most populous with detail and saturated with color, may be the least reliable. And my relationship with F. may also be too complex to be easily narrated. Both of us can talk, and that means we can contradict each other. (A cat can defy you, but it can’t contradict you, its powers being confined to the realm of action as opposed to the realm of descriptions of action, which belongs to humans.) I feel no obligation to relate F.’s version of the events I lay out here. Still, when her version contradicts mine, I feel haunted. My past seems to belong to someone else, a self I am only impersonating. Did I really do the things I remember doing, say the things I remember saying? And whom did I say them to?

  About my cat and the self I am with her, I have fewer doubts.

  I turn off the faucet. The silver tabby goes on lapping. I still hear her after I turn off the light, swabbing up the last drops of moisture. I feel my way in the dark to our marriage bed and climb under the blankets beside my wife. In the dark, I listen for the creak of floorboards and the sound of a small whisk broom briskly sweeping.

  2

  ON SEPTEMBER 29, BRUNO HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE house for a little more than a week. That was long enough for me to understand that he didn’t return phone calls with the promptness one values in a cat-sitter. I’d had to leave four or five messages just to get him to call me back and tell me wearily—he might’ve been talking to his mom—that the cats were fine. So when his name came up on my caller ID a few days later, before I’d even begun to pester him again, I felt a twinge of unease, and the moment I heard his voice, my whole being constricted like a muscle in spasm. He’d let Biscuit out as usual, he told me, and she hadn’t come back. I said nothing. He’d thought she would, since it was raining. It had been raining almost nonstop. I felt ill. I should never have told him he could let her out. I should never have let her out at all, considering what had happened to Gattino a year before. I asked Bruno how long she’d been gone, and it was his turn to fall silent. “Was it Sunday?” I wanted to throttle him through the phone. “Saturday, Saturday morning.” Two and a half days. Back when we’d lived in the village, she’d stayed away for as long as three, sustained by the generosity of our neighbors and an abundance of slow-moving mice and voles. I told him to go out and call her. “It’s best if you say her name three times.” I showed him how F. and I did it; I used a falsetto. It’s true that was the voice she most responded to, but I suspect I was also taking some mean pleasure in the thought of this big, preening kid being made to squawk, “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” in a mortified falsetto on the back porch of our house, within earshot of a women’s college dorm. “Try it now,” I told him. “And call me if she comes. Call me if she doesn’t come.”

  We brought our new cat into the house the way they always tell you to, sequestering her behind closed doors for a few days so our other cats could get used to her scent and she to theirs, then bringing her out in a carrier, like a visiting dignitary in a covered litter, for a formal presentation. None of it was necessary. It helped that one of our cats was very old and arthritic, and another was old and senile, and Tina, the third, was almost as fearful as she’d been four years before. But most of the credit is Biscuit’s. She was so easygoing. When the other cats approached her carrier, she rubbed against the gate and purred. Nobody purred back, but nobody struck at her either, and within a week the new arrival was eating with the older residents and calmly touching noses with them when they met on the stairs.

  She had health problems, starting with the copious wet sneezing. A small raised bump on her neck became an open sore that made you wince with pity and disgust. Biscuit herself seemed oblivious to it, except for the two times a day when we daubed the wound with antibiotic ointment. Another cat would have gone into hiding whenever it saw its owners heading toward it with nonchalant expressions and a tube of Neosporin. This one stood her ground. She struggled, of course, rearing up on her hind legs and striking out with her claws, snorting with anger and congestion. But at some point she let herself be overpowered and tended to, all the while making it clear how so not crazy she was about it. Maybe it was because she was still young and hadn’t perfected the tactics that would make her so hard to medicate later on. I thought of this as being somehow indicative of her character, of its forthrightness and stalwartness. We don’t consider these feline qualities—if anything, you’d call them canine qualities—but intelligent animals often display traits that see
m alien to their species. Think of those aloof dogs that don’t even prick up an ear when a visitor makes an entrance. Think of horses that stay imperturbable in the midst of cannon fire. The more intelligent the animal, the more of its traits will seem uncharacteristic or anomalous, until it becomes hard to say if any of its traits are characteristic: this may be why we have so much trouble deciding what is truly human.

  Biscuit was still healing when she went into heat. She was so little that we’d figured she was younger. She’d pace about the house squalling, the soft furrow below her tail suddenly, shockingly distended. The transformation of her body seemed to puzzle her; her cries held a puzzled note. What’s happening to me? What do I want? Why do I want it so bad? Here, too, I’m projecting. There was nothing for her to be puzzled about. She had instinct, which is to organisms what gravity is to matter, and so on some level she knew what was going on. Still, the baffled-sounding appeals went on for days. We had to be watchful at the door to keep her from lunging out or a horny male from stealing in. The other cats looked at her strangely. Even our old tom Ching, who was gaunt with hyperthyroidism and addled with dementia and hadn’t been interested in sex even when he still had his balls, sniffed at her as she passed and opened his mouth in a Kabuki grin. F. would growl at him, urging him to remember what a tiger he was.