Another Insane Devotion Read online

  “You didn’t hear me back there?” I asked.

  “Of course I heard you. You kept going, ‘Oh no!’” she said. Actually, what she said was, “Ooooh nooooo!” The despairing howl of a cartoon character falling down an elevator shaft. When she laughed, her nose wrinkled charmingly. Did she kiss me to take the sting out of it, or am I making that up? Maybe she hugged me. “Ooooh nooooo!”

  The thing is, I recognized myself. That’s what I sound like. That’s what I feel like. Ooooh nooooo. Often.

  An early description of the domestic cat is this one by one Bartholomew de Glanville, written in 1240:A beast of uncertain hair and color. For some cat is white, some red, and some black, some calico and speckled in the feet and in the ears. . . . And hath a great mouth and saw teeth and sharp and long tongue and pliant, thin, and subtle. And lappeth therewith when he drinketh. . . . And he is a full lecherous in youth, swift, pliant and merry, and leapeth and rusheth on everything that is before him and is led by a straw, and playeth therewith; and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy, and lieth slyly in wait for mice and is aware where they be more by smell than by sight, and hunteth and rusheth on them in privy places. And when he taketh a mouse, he playeth therewith, and eateth him after the play. In time of love is hard fighting for wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grieviously with biting and with claws. And he maketh a ruthful noise and ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with one another, and unneth is hurt when he is thrown from a high place.

  This was before cats were widely kept as pets. If they were valued at all, it was chiefly as mousers. And, also, as Bartholomew notes, for their pelts:And when he hath a fair skin, he is as it were proud thereof, and goeth fast about. And when his skin is burnt, then he bideth at home. And is oft for his fair skin taken of the skinner, and slain and flayed.

  One should remember that the Middle Ages were a terrible time for cats. At carnival, they were tortured for the amusement of the crowd, which may be the origin of the German katzenmusik, a carnival procession. What could that music be but howls? And in France, the feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24, was celebrated by stuffing cats into a sack and tossing it onto a bonfire. Two figures of speech of that period are “as patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out” and “as patient as a cat whose paws are being grilled.”

  You can’t speak of the relationship between cats and humans as you can of the one between humans and dogs: as a partnership. No painting or tapestry shows cats joining in the hunt. They can’t be trained to draw carts or sleds, or to herd sheep, or to sniff suitcases for contraband. A paradox of their domestication is that once they’re fed regularly, they lose much of their aptitude for pest control, or at least their enthusiasm. One morning, in the same loft I’ve written of, I was awakened by soft thumps and sat up to see Bitey and Ching, who then was only middle-aged and fat rather than old and gaunt, sitting a few feet away from each other and staring at something on the floor. It was a mouse, which they were batting back and forth between them. They did it economically, moving only their forepaws. Flick. Pause. Flick. Pause. Flick, flick. Pause. The tempo was the tempo of badminton rather than that of squash. I got up, meaning to put a stop to the cruelty, and the cats abandoned their prey and raced downstairs to be fed. They may not have recognized a mouse as something that could be eaten. I figured it would vanish down a crack somewhere while I fed them. However, a few minutes later, it appeared in the kitchen. The cats were sluggish from their meal; it might easily have gotten past them. This was what it started to do, moving with frictionless speed across the floor. But then, suddenly, suicidally, the rodent changed course and rushed toward the gray tom. Maybe it was so overwhelmed by fear that its brain was seized by a kind of dyslexia that made it scramble safety and danger. The same thing has happened to me. Seeing the mouse bearing down on him, Ching did something even more inexplicable: he flopped onto one side. There was something languishing about the way he did it. The mouse, which really must have had something wrong with it, started burrowing under the vast, soft stomach like a child trying to sneak under a circus big top. Ching looked up at me and mewed. “Oh, for crying out loud,” I said and picked up the rodent by the tail before it could smother down there. Then I took it out into the hallway to become somebody else’s vermin.

  Biscuit was a much better hunter. No sooner did we start letting her out than she began leaving corpses by the door, mice, mostly, but also moles and the occasional chipmunk, laid out on their backs with their sad, brown incisors bared to the sky. Sometimes, through speed or stealth, she’d succeed in bringing prey inside the house. On those occasions, she gave out a characteristic cry, half meow and half moan. I suppose it was a victory cry, but to me it always sounded distressed, and it was a while before I stopped taking it as a sign she’d been hurt and anxiously opening the door for her. Maybe she was just meowing with her mouth full. I once had to spend most of a day trying to rescue a chipmunk she’d sneaked inside, after I’d gotten her to drop it by loudly clapping my hands at her. I kept flushing the poor creature from different hiding places—between the springs on the underside of the chaise longue, behind a radiator, even inside the head of the vacuum cleaner—but the moment it surfaced, Biscuit would try to pounce on it, I’d have to shoo her away, and when I turned again, the chipmunk would have skittered to a new hiding place. If Biscuit had been a dog, she might have helped me find it—by pointing, for instance. But she wasn’t a dog; she was a cat, and she wanted the chipmunk for herself, to eat or kill or just torture until she got tired of it—in any event, for her own pleasure. True, she might have left the dead chipmunk for me as an offering to a social superior, according to some theories, or because, as Paul Leyhausen puts it, I was filling the role of a “deputy kitten.” Still, I would be only the incidental beneficiary of her bloodlust, like the unobjectionable charity—the Red Cross, the United Way—that the bank uses as a catchment basin for the spillover of its extortionate profits, maybe to make those profits seem a fraction less extortionate or to make its customers feel fractionally better about being extorted from. She wouldn’t—and I know how petty this sounds—she wouldn’t have killed the chipmunk for me.

  Well, maybe it isn’t petty. Most definitions of love, following Aristotle, incorporate the notion that its objects are ends in themselves rather than means to other ends. You can’t love somebody because she’s great in bed or looks terrific in an Alexander McQueen or makes a perfect ragú Bolognese. Or, rather, you can, but what you feel then isn’t love. The preposition “because” indicates that the object is only an intermediate point in your pursuit of sex or beauty or good food, and as soon as her enthusiasm starts to flag or her arms get too hammocky for a strapless, you’ll start charting out a different route. But the true beloved always occupies a terminal position. She’s the last point on the map. A corollary is that in love, the beloved is the reason for doing something rather than that action’s afterword or appendix. And so I imagine a state of affairs in which Biscuit had no interest in chipmunks, was utterly indifferent to them, but on seeing one, had the thought, This is something he will like or use, and acted accordingly. That would be love.

  Bruno may have gotten the flyer, but I doubt he ever got around to posting it. At least, I never saw it when I came home, not on any of the phone poles along Avondale Road or on the doors or bulletin boards of the college buildings, not even of the dorm right behind our house that the kid could have walked to in his pajamas. And it’s not as if someone would have bothered taking down a flyer for a lost pet. Nobody ever takes anything off those bulletin boards, except maybe when the kids go home for the summer. Months after we lost him, I was still coming across the signs we’d put up for our Italian cat. Every time I saw one, my heart would stop for a moment. Then, as always, it went back to beating.

  I’m sorry to admit I didn’t really like Wilfredo—the belly, the threats, the crying, the peeing. F. liked him—judging by the softness with which she looked at him that first night, she
may already have loved him—but she felt she couldn’t protect him from Cedric, and Cedric was the kid we’d made a commitment to; we’d promised his mother we’d take care of him. He kept calling Wilfredo “fat” and “bighead,” and Wilfredo kept threatening to fuck him up, and we had to keep taking them off separately and watching them like hawks at mealtimes, and it got tiring. And so on the third day after his arrival, a Friendlytown Lady came over, tall, slouching, with the indolent sexual sneer of a Bianca Jagger, and, in the tone of someone announcing an unexpected—really, an unmerited—treat, told Wilfredo he was going away to stay with another family that had a swimming pool. But Wilfredo didn’t want a swimming pool. He wanted to stay with F. and me in the house of the four cats. That’s what he kept calling it. “I want to stay in the house of the four cats!” The cry might have been translated from another language; its foreignness made it more plaintive. By then, the Friendlytown Lady had stopped pretending to be jolly. I’d like to make her the villain of this story, and it’s true she was insensitive and officious. She might never have met a child in her life. But it was F. and I who’d decided Wilfredo had to leave, and I was the one who pried him off the banister that he clutched with both hands like a sailor holding onto a mast in a gale, his body stretched almost horizontal, wailing at the top of his lungs. F. was crying, too, silently. It was only the second or third time I’d seen her cry. At one point, even the Friendlytown Lady looked like she might cry. Only Cedric seemed pleased. “Ha ha, you go away!” he sang in Wilfredo’s ear. His delicate features writhed with malice. But then he blocked the stairs with his outspread arms to keep me from carrying the other boy away. I pushed past him, holding Wilfredo against my chest. He sobbed and thrashed, he was as heavy as sack concrete, as heavy as the weights they lash to the sinners in hell, but he didn’t hit me, though it would have been the most natural thing for him to do, and when I put him down in the backseat of the Friendlytown Lady’s van, he clasped his arms around my neck and wouldn’t let go. A few days later, he was sent home to his mother, and if part of me was sick with guilt and pity, the greater part was relieved.

  During the entire showdown on the stairs, I don’t recall seeing a single cat, not even Bitey, who was pretty much fearless. They were all hiding.

  This wasn’t the end of our relationship with Wilfredo. Six years later, at the top of those same stairs, he’d announce that he was gonna cut off my nuts, and I’d tell him that if he kept that up, I was gonna stuff him in the fucking car and drive him down to Brooklyn and drop him off on his mother’s doorstep, I didn’t care if it was two in the goddamn morning, I’m sure she’d be happy to see him. Wilfredo was joking about cutting my nuts off, but I was serious about taking him back to his mother’s. My voice was raw, my face red and sweaty. He didn’t keep it up, and we got through the rest of the summer without incident. Though, come to think of it, it was the last summer he spent with us.

  Still, I sometimes think of the earlier moment, the moment we sent him away, as the beginning of F.’s and my rupture. Not the act—we were in that together—but the feelings afterward.

  4

  BY THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 30, BRUNO STILL hadn’t called or e-mailed. I returned to the discount airline’s website and selected a Thursday flight to La Guardia. How irritating that they wouldn’t let the traveler type in dates but forced him to click boxes on a calendar! Was the airline trying to attract illiterate flyers? Did I want to fly on such an airline? Once more, I hesitated. I checked the balances in my bank accounts; they were no higher than they’d been that morning. I’d have to put it on credit. I tried Skyping F. at her residency, and again no one picked up. I wondered if she was avoiding me. She’d been distant lately. Biscuit had now been gone three days. By the time I arrived in New York, it’d be five. What were the chances that she’d still be hanging around the house after all that time? And if she hadn’t come back to a place that she associated with food and warmth, how likely was she to come back just because she heard me calling her? Where a cat is concerned, you can’t really speak of its master’s voice. My friend Jo Ann, who knows more about animals than I do, thought Biscuit might have gone out to look for me, the human who’d cared for her and then gone away. That seemed especially terrible. It was as if I’d lured her from safety, to what might easily be her death. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that she was dead. Why fly seven hundred miles to look for something you know is dead?

  Later, I got an e-mail from F. She reminded me that Biscuit was a very smart, experienced cat who’d lived in our house for over a year, not a sick little kitten who’d been there only a couple of months. The last part of the sentence held a note of reproach—what was I getting my drawers in a twist for? Still, overall, it was as close as F. ever comes to optimism. Her optimism seemed a little heartless to me, but in the past, I knew, there’d been times when my optimism had seemed heartless to her, and so I accepted it. Sometimes all you want is for someone to tell you it will be all right, even if you know better.

  We began letting Biscuit out of the house a month or two after we had her spayed. At first it was just for a little while, and we kept checking on her to make sure she didn’t wander off. “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” one or the other of us would yell from the doorstep, always three times, as in a fairy tale, and watch with pleasure as she scampered over to us. Some of that pleasure was relief that she was still there, and some of it was inspired by her compliance (she became less compliant as she got older). And it was pleasing to see that Biscuit already recognized her name. I doubt she recognized it in the sense that Augustine remembers recognizing, as a young child, that particular sounds, which he did not yet understand to be words, stood for particular things: “When people gave a name to an object and when, following the sound, they moved their body toward that object, I would see and retain the fact that that object received from them this sound, which they pronounced when they intended to draw attention to it.” More likely she recognized it as a vocalization of the same kind as the ones she’d learned earlier from her mother, or perhaps had been born knowing. John Bradshaw and Charlotte Cameron-Beaumont identify some of these below:

  One is struck by how many of these sounds are related to aggression.

  Augustine’s famous account of how he learned language treats words as signs that refer to objects in the real world, that is, the mute world of things that we think of as the real one. In this account, a word’s chief function is to point beyond itself, like a finger that directs your gaze to the horizon, where some trees are standing. Another word for this pointing operation is meaning. To ask what a word means is to ask what it points to. It may point narrowly, designating one tree and not another, this ash, not that maple. We call this denotation. The word may point more broadly, at the entire forest. Maybe the pointing hand opens to take in the sinking sun, the lengthening shadows of trunks and branches, which farther in thicken into a second wood, a wood within the wood, or beneath it, made up not of matter but of shadow. That is connotation. In the middle of the passage of our life, I found myself in a dark wood. But try pointing out something to a cat sometime. It won’t look where you’re pointing. It will look at your finger; it may rub against it. The cat represents a limit case of semiotics. The sounds it makes don’t point to anything. Inasmuch as they serve mainly to express feeling or elicit behavior from the hearer, those sounds might be said to press buttons. A cat meows to be fed, to be let in from the cold or out into it. It yowls to give vent to its rage and intimidate another cat or any animal that’s susceptible to being intimidated. I’ve seen a video of a cat yowling at a bear, and then chasing it as it flees. To Biscuit, “Biscuit,” didn’t “stand for” anything. It summoned her, as a bell might, and probably a lot of its effectiveness had to do with the way we said “Biscuit,” or sang it, in a high voice that rose on the first syllable and dropped on the second, the combination of rising and falling tones being almost the same as that in a meow. To Biscuit, “Biscuit” wasn’t a noun;
it was a verb, one that took only the imperative mood, and at those increasingly frequent times she didn’t come when we called her, one could say that the verb had become meaningless.

  This isn’t to say she was unresponsive. She was anything but. In no time she was famous for her friendliness. In the morning she’d make the rounds of the houses on the block, bustling from one to the next in her short-legged, bowlegged way, her tail erect. People would call to her from their gardens. She’d lie in wait on the front lawn for our neighbor Kathy’s old beagle, whom she liked to taunt by stretching languorously on her side until the dog came straining toward her—his blunt, hoary muzzle twitching—then springing away at the last second. She might stroll over to the riding stable at the end of the street to visit the horses. A woman who worked there told me that she once saw Biscuit grab a horse’s tail in both paws and swing from it like Tarzan. It was a miracle she didn’t get her brains kicked out. F. and I were outsiders in the town, what the locals call “citiots,” except we lived there full-time, and lacking children or a house of our own, we were cut off from the calm, self-important hum of town life. Biscuit was our emissary. She was what we talked with our neighbors about.

  “Your cat was over,” someone would greet us when we came home.

  “She give you any trouble?”

  “No, no, she couldn’t have been sweeter. She’s welcome any time.”

  We were happy then, and while it’s stupid to make an animal the emblem of your happiness, I thought of Biscuit that way. Well, she was a happy cat. Even her busy, scissoring stride conveyed happiness, the purposeful happiness of someone going off to do something she loves. Watching her from the doorway, F. would sing bouncily in time with her gait: “Na-na-na-na-na-na-NAH, na-na-na-nah-nah-NAH!” She was going out into the world to be happy, and the world would oblige her, offering her its mice and birds, protecting her from speeding cars (we lived on a cul de sac) and villainous dogs (the town had a leash law).