Another Insane Devotion Read online

  This is why dogs stay close to people and travel at their side, following the example of their first ancestor. And this is why cats stay in the house, or nearby, in emulation of the one cat who dwells in Paradise, waiting for the people to return. On that day, he will greet the man and the woman at the gate and braid himself about their ankles, gazing up at them and purring. In the meantime, he keeps the mice down.

  3

  EARLY ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 30, UNABLE TO sleep, I began researching airfares to New York. I had classes till Thursday, so I couldn’t leave before October 2, and of course flying on that short notice would cost more than I could afford. Really, anything would. Every month my salary from the university was instantly siphoned off by two rents and two sets of utility bills, along with payments to the banks I was into for some $60,000. When I wasn’t teaching, I cowered inside the house, afraid the last bills would fly from my pockets the moment I stepped outside. But what was I supposed to do? I thought of our poor Gattino, who’d vanished from the yard the year before and had probably died alone, thousands of miles from where he’d been born. I thought of Biscuit wandering through the lank fall undergrowth, hungry and dazed. I thought of college kids racing down the back roads in fast cars bought for them by enabling parents. I thought of coyotes. I don’t have any special powers where cats are concerned— where anything is concerned. But at least Biscuit usually came when I called her. Maybe she’d come for Sherri; she liked Sherri, or she liked the food Sherri poured into her dish almost as dependably as F. and I did, and I’m sure more dependably than Bruno, who couldn’t be trusted to return a phone call and, if you want to know the truth, seemed a little afraid of cats. And so I told myself that Biscuit would come when she heard Sherri’s voice. That is, if she heard it. She might not be able to.

  After going through a bunch of travel websites, I opted for the discount airline that flew out of Myrtle Beach, an hour and a half away. A round-trip flight to La Guardia would cost me $302.50 plus $63 in fees. It was still too much. I let the cursor hover over the “Buy Now” button; I may have clicked on it a couple times and then canceled. I cursed Bruno and F. and even Biscuit and then prayed that God or whatever not take those curses seriously—I was just joking. Finally, I sent Bruno an e-mail telling him I’d be coming up on October 2 to look for Biscuit unless he or Sherri found her first. He should let me know by the end of the day. I hoped it didn’t read like an ultimatum, but of course that’s what it was.

  Here are some of the places I’ve seen her sleep:

  On the frayed red modular sofa in the living room, beside the remote control I’d left there the night before. Stirring, she’d knock it to the floor, and the soft thump of its impact would wake her. She wouldn’t be startled. She’d only open her eyes, turn her head to see what the noise was, maybe going so far as to roll onto her back and let her head loll over the edge of the seat cushion until she saw the control lying on the rug. Then, satisfied—and to me her satisfaction suggests at least a rudimentary sense of causality, an intimation that the sound that roused her was somehow connected to the object that once had once been up here and was now down there—she’d go back to sleep.

  On the chair that used to be the sofa’s center module but that we kept off to the side for guests.

  On the wooden radiator cover.

  Before the fireplace, on the polka-dot rug that we rolled up and took down to the basement after it got stained with massage oil.

  In the wedge of sunlight that fell onto the kitchen counter between noon and four in the afternoon. I know you’re not supposed to allow animals on surfaces where you prepare food, and if F. and I were running a restaurant, this would be enough to get us cited by the health department.

  On the floor of F.’s bedroom closet, in the corner between a heating duct and a hanging shoe bag. This was the most secluded of her sleeping spots, the one where she was least likely to be disturbed by a human or another cat. In it, she was concealed almost completely. Several times when looking for her, I’d open the door, glance around, and decide she wasn’t there until I saw her paw emerge from behind a hatbox like the hand of a sleeper groping for a ringing alarm clock. I suppose that’s what I was to her, a clock she didn’t set and didn’t know how to turn off but wasn’t especially bothered by since, unlike F. or me, she never had trouble going back to sleep—never.

  In the back of the car, until the night I was driving to the station to pick up F. after she’d spent the day in the city and I felt something supple and alive graze my shoulder and nearly drove into the oncoming traffic before I swung the wheel the other way and nearly drove into a ditch instead. It was Biscuit, climbing onto the headrest. When I swerved, she dropped onto the front passenger seat and looked up at me, her ears tipped forward, her upturned muzzle soft and pale in the glow of the dash. The smartest thing would have been to turn around and deposit her back at the house, but I was already late. I drove on. During the next thirty minutes, she paced along the seatbacks, explored the junk in the cargo area, and, briefly, investigated the gas and brake pedals before I kicked her away—lightly, with no more violence than I’d kick her away from the front door if I were coming in with some heavy bags of groceries, just more urgency. At some point she returned to the seat beside me and stayed there for the rest of the drive. She was calm, except for a two- or three-mile stretch when she meowed repeatedly, maybe overwhelmed by the speed with which trees and cars and houses swept past in the dark or by the lights that shot at us from the northbound lanes, guttering in the rain. I’ve read that cats can’t process visual information that comes at them too quickly. She quieted when I stroked her. On reaching the station, I pulled her into my lap, afraid she might otherwise bound out when I opened the door for my wife. She wasn’t crazy about that. Still, she was pleased to see F. and was well behaved for most of the drive back. From then on, I always made sure to roll up the windows when I parked in the driveway.

  On my bed. When she was first living with us, Biscuit used to curl up on the pillow next to mine about an hour before I retired. It didn’t matter if that was at midnight or two in the morning; she might have been monitoring my melatonin levels. She never took my pillow, but she seemed to think of the other one as hers and, on nights F. slept with me, was disgruntled at having to give up her spot. Sometimes she swiped at F. when she shooed her off, for although she was a mostly good-natured cat, she could be testy. A few years ago, she started sleeping on my stomach or between my legs. I guess she liked the warmth, and being contained in the stockade of her owner’s limbs may have made her feel more secure. I obliged her by sleeping on my back and was careful not to disturb her if I had to get up to piss. It took some minor acrobatics, but I was grateful that she chose to be so close to me.

  Did she choose? I think of choice as the trait that cats, maybe more than any other species, share with human beings. At least they seem to choose, often with every appearance of thought, though “thought” is probably the wrong word and will invite scorn from animal behaviorists. They circle a room with a connoisseurial air, considering the best place to sit. One of those places may be beside their owner, but it may not be. It depends. Before an open door, they waver, weighing the options of coming in or staying outside. “Jesus Christ!” you yell, especially in winter, when with every second of their indecision you visualize dollars roaring up the chimney. If you were yelling at a dog, it would slink in on the instant, its whole being weighed down by shame. Your cat is unmoved. It looks at you; its tail lashes. This may be a sign that the animal is of two minds or just annoyed. You say, “All right,” and close the door. A moment later there’s a scrape of claws. Your cat has chosen to come in.

  The sleeping places listed above are located in different houses F. and I have lived in during our time together. The fireplace was in our old house on Parsonage Street, the first house we shared as a couple; it was one of the reasons we rented it, along with the pattern of blue and white diamonds painted on the living room floor. We had the s
ofa when we lived there; it was F.’s and predated me by eight or nine years. But when I picture Biscuit sleeping on it, it’s in the living room of the house on Avondale Road, with its sinking toilet and rippling floors that were too thin to be sanded; I had to settle for waxing them, and F. thought I was insane even to do that, since it wasn’t our house and she was pissed at the landlord. The basement was in the house on Parsonage Street, the one on Avondale Road being too small and filthy to store anything in, and prone to flooding besides. The Parsonage Street basement was dirty enough. It’s where we took Biscuit when she came back with paint on her muzzle, on the theory that there was nothing down there she could fuck up. We were wrong.

  I don’t know why Biscuit slept with me rather than with F. We were introduced to her at the same time. But it was me she came up to first and my hand she began licking. In the same way, Zuni made a beeline for F. when we came to look at her at her breeder’s, who was giving her away because her kittens weren’t show quality. She was already full-grown, plush and tubby, a little matronly. We tried to play with her by rolling a ball back and forth between us, and the tabby followed it, but on seeing me she started in horror and scrambled underneath a cabinet. Maybe her early experience had imprinted her with a fear of men. The breeder’s husband hunted and practiced taxidermy, and the house was filled with the stuffed corpses of his victims, which stared down from the walls, rigid with shock and indignation. Even now, seven years after we got her, Zuni barely lets me pet her. She only sleeps with F., and if I happen to be sharing the bed that night, she marches over me on her way to my wife with about as much consideration as the Wehrmacht gave valiant little Holland as it rolled across Europe to the sea.

  I’m not sure this preference is the same thing as love. Did Biscuit love the red sofa? Did she love the kitchen counter? Did she love the rise and fall of my stomach as she lay on it in the dark, waiting to be lulled to sleep? Does Zuni love F.? Did Bitey love the little boy, a refugee from a treeless city neighborhood where the nightly chimes of the ice cream truck were sometimes interrupted by gunfire, who spent three days with us one summer back when she was still alive, only to be carried away in tears?

  Wilfredo thought she loved him because she slept on his bed and not Cedric’s. Originally, F. and I were just going to have Cedric, but as we were getting ready to meet his bus, we got a call from a counselor who wanted to know if we could take in a second kid whose Friendlytown Family had backed out at the last minute. My wife stared at the phone; if it had had a cord, she would have been twisting it around her wrist. It had been her idea to have an eight-year-old from the city stay with us for two weeks, but now she was anxious. What would we feed Cedric? What if he got homesick? What if he hated us? How would we keep him entertained? I told her that taking the other kid would solve the last problem. “Kids don’t want to be with grown-ups,” I told her. With each passing minute, the enterprise was feeling more and more like an enterprise, or, as some of my relatives would have said, a production, something that required a script and stage managers and might still get lousy reviews. Still, there was no way out of it. It was our production, this thing we were doing together. “They want to be with other kids.”

  When I look back, what astonishes me is not that I was so naive but that I was so forgetful of my own childhood, whose most traumatic episodes occurred when I was placed in a cage with other kids and told to have fun. Cedric was small and quick and lithe. Wilfredo was big and soft and slow moving, with a round, shaved head. There was something muffled about him, as if he’d been wrapped in dense cotton batting in order to protect him, but at the cost of an entranced, blinking passivity. What nobody had told us, least of all the charity that sent him to us, was that he was only six. When I put him on a bike, Wilfredo wobbled and capsized. It was just a child’s bike, purple with chopper handlebars, and I caught him before he hit the ground, but still he cried and Cedric taunted him. Taunting was Cedric’s operative mode. He taunted Wilfredo even after he’d learned to stay upright and more or less keep pace with us as we wheeled in and out of the shade of the maples on the neighborhood’s mercifully empty streets.

  “Man, what’s wrong with you? You can’t go no faster? You slowing us down.”

  “I can go fast,” Wilfredo muttered. “You just go too fast.”

  Right after that, he bumped Cedric’s rear wheel, or maybe Cedric bumped him. But it was Wilfredo who went down, and this time I wasn’t able to catch him. He skinned his knee. “He tripped me,” he cried, his voice thick with outrage. Cedric accused Wilfredo of trying to trip him.

  “Come on, nobody tried to trip anybody,” I said. “It was an accident. Wilfredo’s just learning.” But of course, in saying this, I was implying that the accident was Wilfredo’s fault. And I was showing my bias. Already, I preferred the mean, quick kid to the slow, gentle one. You could tell he was gentle even when he told Cedric he was going to fuck him up.

  That was later, after dinner and a game of catch played with sofa cushions on the front lawn in the dusk while lightning bugs winked around us like tiny flashbulbs, and a bath that started out well—the boys wanted to take one together, which made us think they were finally starting to get along—but ended with Cedric bursting out of the bathroom, shaking off water and yelling that Wilfredo had peed in the tub. Wilfredo said he hadn’t peed. He’d followed Cedric into their bedroom. Unlike the older boy, he didn’t mind being wet. He stood with his towel drooping below his dimpled belly and a puddle of water gathering on the floor between his feet. His denial wasn’t convincing; it held a note of secret pride.

  “Listen,” I told him. “You don’t pee in the tub, that’s just gross.”

  “But I didn’t pee, man!”

  “I’m not saying you did pee. But you don’t do it.” I saw the illogic of this. “You cannot pee in the tub.”

  “You pee, Wilfredo,” Cedric insisted. His disgust, if it had been real to begin with, had given way to triumph. “I saw you pee, man. You nasty! You a nasty, ugly bighead.”

  That was when Wilfredo threatened to fuck him up.

  “Hey!” I barked. Where had I learned to bark like that? Wilfredo was taller than Cedric and probably outweighed him by thirty pounds, but there was no way of predicting how a fight between them might end. As I later learned, when I had to wrestle Cedric off the golf cart of a security guy who’d brought us home from the county fair after the kid had a tantrum outside the tent where the Jack Russell agility trials were supposed to happen, he had a grasping, clawing, elastic strength that was wholly out of proportion to his size.

  For most of the day, the cats had avoided the boys, but now Bitey entered the room. She brushed against me and then approached the children, staying just out of reach. Most cats approach kids this way, and it’s easy to mistake it for teasing until you reflect that even a small child is ten times the size of a cat. Bitey didn’t look fearful. Her tail was up, and her underslung jaw gave her the air of something looking for a fight, or at least not shying away from one. “Don’t grab her,” F. warned. “Just put out your hand like this.” She demonstrated, holding hers at cat’s eye level, then scratching the upraised chin. “Hello, Bitus, you noble creature. Let her come to you.”

  I don’t remember if either boy was able to pet her. Bitey could be affectionate, but on her own terms. A year before, she’d disappeared for a month before showing up at a house on the other side of town. During that time, I did little but look for her, putting up flyers, riding my bike for miles in every direction while imploringly shouting her name to the winds, stopping every so often to rattle the container of dry food I kept in my knapsack. But when I came to be reunited with her at her rescuers’, my heart so swollen with love I might only have been its caddy, the flunky whose job it was to carry a heart around while it throbbed and felt, she barely gave me a glance and sauntered past me to inspect a flower in the yard. When I picked her up, she struggled. Maybe she’d forgotten whose cat she was, or maybe I was being reminded of the futility of the
phrase “whose cat.” The woman who’d found her had grown attached to her, and I invited her to come by our house the next day. Stoically, I’d decided that if Bitey wasn’t happy with F. and me, maybe she’d be better off with her. I think the woman had the same idea. She showed up looking hopeful. But now, Bitey ignored her while coiling and coiling around my ankles, grinning so widely you could see the pale pink washboard of her palate and purring cynically.

  I left the room while F. read to the boys from a book about a farting dog. When I came back, Bitey was lying at the foot of Wilfredo’s bed; it was really a folding cot we’d borrowed from someone. She lay facing away from him with her paws straight out before her, like a little sphinx, her eyes slitted. “What’s that cat’s name?” Wilfredo asked. F. told him, and he announced, “Bitey loves me.” His mother hadn’t packed pajamas for him (later we’d learn he didn’t own any); he was wearing underpants and some team’s T-shirt. I don’t think we knew yet that he was only six, but still it struck me that he was just a little boy who might be away from home for the first time in his life. The night yawning around the house was so much darker than the night he was used to, and alive with digestive chirps and gulps and stridulations. But the cat had come to him. F. told him it was because Bitey was a good judge of character. I beamed at her. We’d done good.

  Of course, this was usually my bedroom, so Bitey was used to sleeping in it, and if she lay down on Wilfredo’s cot instead of on the bed with Cedric, it may have been because she was drawn to the younger boy’s particular smell of hot dogs, ketchup, bug spray, and bath soap, with a faint, interesting undernote of piss.

  Back when I was teaching comp in grad school and despairing over the blandness of the suggested essay topics, I hit on having students write about their last girlfriend or boyfriend. They had to begin by telling how they’d met, what had attracted them to the other person, and the kinds of things they’d enjoyed doing together (I didn’t tell them that they couldn’t write about sex, but nobody ever did). In the concluding paragraphs, they had to draw on those examples to define what makes a good girlfriend or boyfriend. I still remember some of the kids’ responses: