Another Insane Devotion Read online

  I was fascinated by what was happening to our cat, and especially by the flagrancy of her vulva. It looked so much like a woman’s. That was part of the shock of it. Our Biscuit had turned into one of those mythical hybrids like a mermaid or a Minotaur: a little cat with a woman’s sex between her legs, her hind ones. My wife has a dark view of sex, or say, a tragic view, and I often imagined how that view might apply to Biscuit. She’d be touched to see our new pet growing up into an adult female who in the natural course of things would mate and bear kittens that she’d ferry proudly around in her mouth. And at the same time, F. would know how cruel the mating could be, the feline penis being barbed and its possessor securing his grip on the female with teeth and claws. And she would know how that cruelty pales beside the cruelty of sex among humans, who being born without barbs on their genitals have to fashion them, the males and the females both. Maybe I’m just speaking of my own view of sex, which is also pretty dark. But we were both relieved when Biscuit went out of heat and we could take her to be spayed.

  The first time I thought I might love F.—that is, thought of her as someone I might come to love—was at a tea shop in my old neighborhood in the city. I don’t like tea, but F. did, and I suppose the fact that I agreed to meet at a tea shop was a sign that I already wanted to please her. I drank coffee; it was bad. F. took her tea with milk and so much sugar, dumping in spoon after precariously heaped spoon of it, that I could smell the sweetness across the table. If you’d asked me a month before, I would’ve said that a tea shop would be the last place on earth you’d go to meet her. Her watchful, brittle cool seemed more suited to a dimly lit cocktail lounge with cunningly shaped glassware filled with liquor blue as antifreeze. Over tea, she told me that when she was nine or ten, her family had moved to a new town, where other kids immediately identified her as a goat. Girls made a show of ignoring her as she passed them in the school hallways. Boys called out taunts as she walked home. The worst oppressors were three or four popular girls in her class. They made F. wish she had magic powers. I asked her if she’d wanted them for revenge; I’m sure I sounded eager. She looked offended. “No, not revenge—I wasn’t that kind of kid. I wanted to conjure up Beatle dolls.” She saw my incomprehension. “To give the girls. Those girls were always talking about how they wanted Beatle dolls. Everybody wanted them back then; it was the year of Beatle dolls. And I thought how cool it would be if I had magic powers so I could come up to them and say”—she snapped her fingers—“‘Look, Beatle dolls!’”

  Her smile had a child’s guilelessness. Just so a child might offer you a bouquet of wildflowers she’d picked from the side of the road. I think I mooed, “Oh, that’s sweet!” I know I reached for her, meaning to stroke her cheek. She shrank from me. The cool that had receded a little dropped back down like a visor, with an almost audible click. I was too mortified to apologize. It would be like apologizing for farting. We left the tea shop and stood outside in the falling dusk, watching the pavement change color as the traffic light on the corner clicked from red to green. I was sure this was the last time I’d ever see her. “I’m sorry about what happened back there. I didn’t mean anything.” I waited for her to say, “It’s all right.”

  She said, “I just don’t like to be touched like that. I don’t know you.” Then she left.

  Afterward, it seemed to me that I’d been exposed to two completely different personalities. One was magnanimous; the other was grudging. One would repay ostracism with magic Beatle dolls; the other recoiled from a touch. One was deeply attuned to other people’s desires; the other was almost oblivious to them, or at least oblivious to the desire for forgiveness of someone who’d committed a minor social error (at least I thought it was minor; it wasn’t as if I’d done what a friend of mine, a singer, had once had done to her by a guy she met at one of her gigs. “I really like the way you sing,” he’d told her when she sat down with him during the break. “It came right from the clit.” And by way of illustration, he reached for it). The alternation between these personalities was so shocking that my automatic response was to label one as the real F. and the other a false self, a facade, a cutout. And for the rest of that night and many nights afterward, I occupied myself trying to figure out which was which. If the true self is the one that’s most readily evident to an observer, then the true F. was the watchful, defensive one, her gaze unblinking, her soft features impassive. If the true self is the one that’s kept tucked away like a hole card, the true F. was the one who beamed as she gave treasure to traducers.

  I know this episode doesn’t say much about her. She likes tea, not coffee, or liked it then, with milk and lots of sugar. As a child, she experienced displacement and the cruelty of her peers and responded with generosity, at least in her imagination. (If it had been my imagination, I would’ve been wiping the floor with those boys and making the girls fall grovelingly in love with me so I could reject them.) She doesn’t like strangers touching her. It’s all I can say. There’s only so much you can say about a wife.

  Here a few punch lines suggest themselves:

  “I mean to her face.”

  “Unless she’s your wife.”

  “If you want to keep her.”

  Baddabing.

  Marriage accommodates all sorts of betrayals. It is, in a sense, betrayal’s dedicated environment, a hot air balloon whose skin is so easily punctured by the pointy accessories of its passengers, a high-heeled shoe, a tiepin, a toothpick. I may not know if I want to keep my wife, but I don’t want to betray her, or at least not her privacy, considering that her sense of privacy is essentially what caused her to flinch when I first tried to touch her face. A person is a laminated entity, and the body is only one of its layers. It may not be the most intimate one. There are beaches where people—not even very good-looking people— promenade on the dunes gaily displaying their genitals like designer purses. There are rooms where strangers proclaim their secrets to each other in voices choked with snot and tears: they pay money for this. The appeal of these practices is the appeal of divestiture, a word that comes from the Latin for “to take off clothing.” They’re supposed to make you feel lighter, though clothing doesn’t weigh very much and secrets weigh nothing at all. In an attempt to combine the two kinds of divestiture, F. and I once imagined a therapeutic retreat where people would strip naked and partner up, with one partner lying on her (or his) back with her (or his) feet clasped in the yoga position known as the “Happy Baby,” while the other peered studiously into the body cavities thus exposed with the aid of a flashlight and magnifying glass. “Intimacy,” the group leader would croon, “means ‘into-me-see.’”

  To me the definitive image of nakedness has always been Masaccio’s The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The Adam and Eve depicted in it don’t look light. Adam’s back is bowed. Eve is covering her breasts and sex. She doesn’t do this like someone shielding herself from a lustful gaze; she covers them the way one covers a wound. Curiously, Masaccio’s Adam doesn’t cover his parts but his face, as people do when they weep. Even children do this, from a very young age. I think of these two figures as personifying two kinds of violated privacy, the privacy of the body and the privacy of the soul.

  The soul is often thought of as residing in the eyes. “I looked into his eyes and saw his soul,” George W. Bush said after meeting the Russian premier. Proust is more long-winded, though his long-windedness is dictated by precision. He calls the eyes “those features in which the flesh becomes a mirror and gives us the illusion that it allows us, more often than through other parts of the body, to approach the soul.”

  Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from The Garden of Eden (1426–1428), Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine. Courtesy of the Granger Collection.

  F. and I went to see the Expulsion a few years ago in Florence. It was July, a terrible time to be there, so hot we had only to step out of the hotel to feel the air being sucked from our lungs, and verminous with tourists. We were par
t of that vermin. We walked for many hours, uncomplainingly, down narrow streets, past shops selling gold-stamped leather goods or old maps or ice cream. Every so often we’d enter a square where a crowd milled around a gigantic dome like an ant colony around a fallen sugar bun. The Expulsion was located in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. It was part of a sequence of frescoes Masaccio had painted in the Brancacci Chapel. A few feet away people were praying. My wife was surprised by that. She hadn’t been in many churches before, and not until she came to Italy had she been in one where the cults of God and art were worshipped side by side with no apparent friction between their adherents. The art viewers stood, talking in (mostly) low voices; the churchgoers sat in silence. We looked at the painting. The bowed figures seemed small, humble, two ordinary humans who, out of a momentary desire, a whim, had tripped the switch of the doomsday machine of sin and death. Adam’s body was the body of the laborer he would become, condemned to wrest his food from the earth and eat it salted with sweat and tears. Eve had the spreading hips and drooping breasts of someone who has already borne children. In Genesis this doesn’t happen until after the expulsion; the expulsion is the first punishment. But my guess is that Masaccio wanted viewers to see the full consequences of that first act of disobedience, and so he had shown Adam and Eve stumbling out of paradise, shamefaced and weeping, their flesh already marked with their sin.

  I turned to point this out to F., but she’d left my side. I found her in one of the pews, sitting with her hands folded in her lap. “What are you doing?” I asked her. She said, “I’m praying.” Then she asked, “Do you want to pray with me?” I said yes. I did as well as I was able. The walls of the chapel were pale gray marble or granite; light seemed to dwell beneath their surface. I stole a glance at my wife. She was looking straight ahead, and in profile I could see that her eyes were deeply sunken. That always happens when she’s upset. I knew what she was praying for. She was praying for a cat.

  The first person I called after hanging up on Bruno was Sherri, who usually watched the cats for us when we went away. I felt sheepish, considering that I was asking her for help finding the cat the kid we’d hired in her place had lost. I might have explained that the only reason we’d done that was because at twenty bucks a visit we couldn’t afford to hire her for an entire month, but then she could have reminded me that you get what you pay for. However, she was gracious. She doubted Biscuit had gone very far. She was a bright animal who knew where her Friskies were dished out, and she was probably just wandering around the property, sheltering beneath the eaves of the barn when it got too wet. Sherri said she’d come over and help look for her. In the meantime, Bruno should be sure to call Biscuit from different locations on the property, not just from the porch but from the driveway and the front door and the toolshed out back, and leave out a bowl of food to remind her that home was where good things came from. I phoned Bruno to repeat these instructions, but he didn’t pick up. Maybe he was still outside, calling, “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” in the rain. Maybe he’d turned off his phone.

  I don’t remember whom else I phoned that evening, only that I mostly stayed in the kitchen, gazing out the window into the yard. Once or twice I stepped out onto the deck to pace until the rain—for it was raining where I was too—forced me back inside. I couldn’t stay still, but I didn’t want to go anywhere else in the house. It would mean losing sight of the big live oak and the beds of modest, garden-variety flowers and the lawn I clipped with a rickety mechanical push mower whose unamplified whirr was so much more pleasing than the engorged growl of the Sears Craftsman I used up north. I kept the deck lights on. I often saw cats sunning themselves in the yard, and maybe on some unconscious level, I thought that if I waited long enough, I would see Biscuit there too.

  I don’t remember Bitey going into heat, only bringing her back from the vet after she’d been spayed. She was so listless I had to scoop her out of the carrier. She rose unsteadily and looked about her, then drank a little water before stumbling off to the spot by the radiator where she liked to sleep. I watched her through the day. Did she always sleep this long? Did her stomach look swollen, or was that just because it was shaved? (The awful nakedness of a cat’s shaved stomach!) Shouldn’t she be drinking more? I was used to sick people. All through my teens my mother and grandfather took turns trooping in and out of the hospital like the allegorical figures in those clocks you see looming over town squares all over Germany. I once saw one whose automata included Death, gliding out in his black shroud, wielding his scythe with a jerk. But sick people can tell you what’s wrong with them, more or less, and what they want. Sick animals can’t. You have to read them. You lean over them as you would lean over a book, gauging the rise and fall of their breath, the luffing of a ribcage, a wheeze, a sigh, the twitch of a lip. Of course, Bitey wasn’t sick then, just postoperative, and a day later she was eating normally and chasing wads of cellophane around the living room.

  She seemed not to miss her uterus, no more than Ching, the stripy male I got to keep her company a year later, seemed to miss his balls after they were snipped off. The night before his procedure, Bitey wrestled him onto his back and began roughly grooming him. (Felinologists call this behavior al-logrooming and identify it with dominance. You can spot the top cat in any colony by seeing which one most frequently grooms the others.) At one point it looked as if she was about to lick his genitals, but he pushed her away with his forepaws like someone trying to hold a door shut against the pounding of housebreakers. “Don’t stop her, you fool!” I yelled at him. “It’s your last chance!” It was no use; it might not have been even if he’d had an inkling of what I was yelling about.

  Well, he must have had an inkling. On an average, male cats roam some three times farther than females, and given that both genders need roughly the same amount of food, one assumes it’s because the males are looking for sex. This is borne out by a study by Olof Liberg, in which dominant—that is, breeding—male house cats were found to have an average roaming range of 350 to 380 hectares versus 80 for nonbreeding “subordinates.” You don’t have to travel very far if you’re only going out for carton of milk.

  Of course, those roaming cats were acting on the same imperative that made Biscuit stalk through the house presenting her swollen genitals for somebody to do something with: they were acting on instinct. What I’d like to know is how they experienced that instinct, whether it was just a blind hormonal goading or was accompanied by thought, or some version of thought. Did those dominant males have an internal schema of sex that summoned them out of their houses, made them cross yards and slink under hedges, skitter up trees, creep into culverts, dart across roads where cars shot past in sprays of dust and exhaust, avid, tireless, pausing only to sniff and twitch their ears? Did they know what they were after? Not in words, I mean, but in pictures—say, the silhouette of a lordotic female—or as an archetypal scent they had been born knowing and whose corporeal traces they kept seeking in the fragrant air?

  I have in mind something like the sexual theories of young children, those murky ideas of sticking one part into another part that used to trouble me when I was six or seven, referring as they did to something I already wanted to do without being at all clear as to what it was. The indeterminacy is suggested by the first dirty joke I remember learning. John Wayne meets Marilyn Monroe and asks her, “You want to come to my house?” Marilyn Monroe says, “Sure.” They go to his house, and he asks her, “Can I go to bed with you?” and Marilyn Monroe says, “Okay, but don’t get any ideas.” So John Wayne gets into bed with Marilyn Monroe. “This is nice,” he says. “Don’t you think it’s nice?” Marilyn Monroe says, “It’s okay, I guess. But don’t get any ideas.” Then he asks her, “Can I feel your boobies?” She says, “Sure, but don’t get any ideas.” So Marilyn Monroe shows John Wayne her boobies, and he feels them with his hands. Then John Wayne says, “Hey, can I put my finger in your belly button?” And Marilyn Monroe says, “Oh, okay, but don’t get any ide
as.” After a while, Marilyn Monroe says, “Hey, that’s not my belly button.” John Wayne says, “That’s okay. That’s not my finger.”

  I heard this joke in my first year of grade school, from the boy sitting at the desk next to mine. I don’t remember anything about him, but I can still remember the sweet voltage that tore through me as I got his meaning. “That’s not my finger.” For a moment, I was almost too shocked to laugh. Then I did, out of the same shock that had struck me dumb a moment before. I can’t imagine how I kept it quiet, but I must have, or else Mrs. Mehrer would have been on top of me, wanting to know what was so funny and if I’d like to share it with the other children. This was what the entire world knew. Now I did too.

  In the months before F. and I got married, I was unexpectedly haunted by thoughts of the women I would never have sex with. I thought about women I knew and women I walked past on the street or sat across from in the subway, women I glimpsed in movie lines, women who bumped me with their shopping carts in the narrow aisles of the discount gourmet. I’d turn, readying my most ferocious glare, but the moment I saw their eyes burning back at me, it was all I could do not to swoon onto the cheese counter. I was like the teenaged St. Augustine, blinded by “the mists of passion that steamed up,” as one translation puts it, “out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh.” But I was in my forties. I pined for women I eavesdropped on in restaurants. How guilty I felt for listening to them! Their fragmentary conversations were so hot. Even their toughness was flirtatious. Their flirting was like a punch in the mouth. “He says, $850, take it or leave it. I say I’ll leave it.” “Uh oh, you’re getting the oysters. Does that mean I’m in trouble?” It drove me crazy. F. could have said the same things, and I would barely have noticed. She’s not coy that way, and she wouldn’t ask if she was in trouble unless she’d gotten a letter from the IRS.