Another Insane Devotion Read online

  What that world was for her, it was for us, mostly. Several nights a week we’d walk down the quiet street past our neighbors’ houses, where TVs spilled their aquarium glow onto tidy mats of lawn. In the warm months, we’d head west onto Astor Road; we liked to bike there during the day. At night, the road rose and fell steeply amid groves of oaks and maples whose trunks shone a necrotic greenish-white beneath the moon. Between the trees, you could see the lighted windows of rich people’s houses, which might have been welcoming if they hadn’t been set so far back in the woods. Walking unseen through this dreaming landscape seemed to stimulate F. It amplified her sense of herself as an invisible outsider, and at the same time gave her a pretext for feeling like one, because of course anyone who walks out by night will be invisible to those who stay inside, which outside cities is almost everybody. As a teenager in a Midwestern suburb, F. used to creep out of the house after dark to spy on her family members. One time, she told me, she’d shinnied onto the roof and looked in on her father as he sat reading in his study. What she saw on these expeditions wasn’t radically different from what she saw in the house during the day. Nobody shot dope or beat off to porn or wept over old love letters. They were just themselves, though sometimes they weren’t. She remembered the thoughtful way her father had taken a nut from a can balanced on the arm of his chair and looked at it appraisingly before putting it in his mouth. She remembered moments when familiar faces went dead, so that the animated voices that issued from them seemed to be the voices of indwelling spirits or demons. F. half believes in demons.

  Walking by night frightened F. too—who can walk through the woods at night without being a little frightened?—but that was its own kind of stimulus. Every so often we’d see the headlights of an approaching car and crowd onto the shoulder. Once, as the glare licked up the asphalt toward us, F. stuck her arms out rigidly before her and rolled up her eyes. She’s a pretty woman, even a beautiful one, but she can make horrible faces; it may be her prettiness that makes them horrible. Her eyes pop, her white teeth flash with carniverous mirth. At that moment, she might have been the Platonic archetype of a zombie, minus the decay. I stuck my arms out too, and we shuffled along like that into the oncoming lights, wishing we could see the look on the driver’s face. Afterward I marveled that he hadn’t run us over.

  When it got colder, we took a different route and crossed the main street into an immigrant neighborhood of flimsy bungalows with two families sardined inside, or, more often, half a dozen lonely men. They’d come up to pick apples or berries or do construction at low wages and stayed on, indispensible and resented. One night we passed a tent where a party was going on, swooning accordions, the sweet bray of horns. It was late fall and chilly, but the celebrants stood outside, drinking from bottles of beer. They were small, stolid people who didn’t smile much, and then only shyly, baring the fugitive glint of gold teeth. Under their work coats, the men wore clean white shirts, the women, dresses in hot reds and greens. Their shyness passed to us. We said hello but little more. We didn’t ask them what they were celebrating. To me, it looked like a wedding, and I would have said, “Felizidad,” if I hadn’t been afraid it would sound condescending. They might just have been partying for the hell of it.

  The first time I realized I wanted to marry F., I shrank back in dismay. We’d only been seeing each other six months. What was six months? My therapist said it was half a year. I said that couldn’t be healthy. Well, what did I think was healthy? In the moment he uttered it, the word “healthy” became moronic: a brussels sprout was healthy. I said I didn’t know. Shouldn’t I get to know F. better? I don’t remember his answer. Being a therapist, and one who’d been analytically trained, he probably asked me another question. I was so afraid of being wrong; I’d been afraid most of my life. Whenever I’d broken up with someone, it was because I was scared I was making a mistake, and if I hadn’t actually fallen out of love with her, I could foresee a time when I would, like the dim halo that wavers in the darkness of a country road at night, obscured by a curve in the road, that in another moment brightens into the doom of oncoming headlights. And what happens then? my shrink may have asked, meaning, I suppose, what happens if you fall out of love with her? Thinking of F., I would have said, Then I’ll still be interested in her, because I already knew that to be true; she would hold my interest. But I’m still thinking of my metaphor, the one of headlights, because the answer that comes to me—not then, but now, at this moment—is, Then we crash.

  A few weeks later, I went to the safety deposit at my bank and, after checking my box out of the vault, took it into one of the closets where people pore over their valuables, some gloatingly, some fretfully, the way my mother used to, muttering the names of her holdings to make sure every certificate was still there, some in despair at how little they have to their name, a few documents engraved with allegorical goddesses, jewelry nobody wants to wear, some old coins from a country that no longer exists. My box didn’t have much in it. I took out a smaller—a very small—box, covered in blue velvet, and opened it a crack, out of the exaggerated caution that sometimes comes over me as if to make up for the years I spent walking around with my money in my hands, looking for someone to give it to for nothing. I snapped the box shut, put it in my shoulder bag, and then transferred it to my trouser pocket, one of the front ones. By the time I was walking out of the bank, I’d begun to worry that the box was making a bulge, but I could hardly take it out in the middle of a street in lower Manhattan, which at the time was not yet so rich that there was nothing you could possibly take out of your pocket that anybody in the vicinity would want because everybody already had more of it than you did. Though I guess someone still might take it from you out of greed, for which there is always a more beyond more, or spite.

  Inside the box was my mother’s engagement ring, a modest but very clear diamond set between two sapphires. It had come to me when she died three years before. I’d decided to take the ring up to the country the next day and present it to F. at the right moment, trusting that the moment’s rightness would be revealed to me before it passed. It would be only the second time in my life that I’d proposed to someone, and the first time, seventeen years before, had been mostly out of guilt because she’d so plainly wanted to be proposed to and everything else I’d given her had been so shoddy and so quickly reneged on. That morning I laid out the jewel box beside my overnight bag along with some clothes and toiletries, then left the apartment to discharge my nervous energy working out. It was late summer; the pavements shimmered. When I came back from exercising, I was sweaty and sore, but I no longer felt like vomiting. I had an hour and a half before my train. That seemed like enough time. I showered and packed; I made myself a cup of coffee. I filled the cats’ bowls with two days’ worth of food and water and turned on a fan for them. Then I got ready to leave. All I had to do was put the box in my pocket. I’d decided that would be the safest place to keep it and had solved the bulge problem by putting on a pair of cargo shorts with pockets so deep I could have carried a .44 in one without anybody knowing. The pockets, moreover, snapped shut. But the ring wasn’t where I’d left it on the bed. I thought I might have moved it to the nightstand, but it wasn’t there either. It wasn’t in the drawer of the nightstand. Could I already have slipped it in a pocket and forgotten? I patted them down like a TSA agent and turned them inside out for good measure. They were empty. I hadn’t taken the ring into the bathroom when I showered—at least I didn’t see it on the counter or the sink or on top of the toilet tank, which would have been a really stupid place to put a diamond ring, considering how easily one of the cats might jump up and knock it into the bowl. I hadn’t taken it down to the kitchen when I’d made coffee; I looked there too. I looked inside the refrigerator.

  I was sweating now, worse than I had while skating along the Hudson; my armpits were sour and dank. Every breath held the threat of a sob. I revisited places I’d searched only minutes before; it was like some awful dream o
f loss. At one point, finding another drawer or cupboard empty, I bellowed and flung my coffee cup at the wall. An explosion of black liquid and white shards. The cats, who’d been following me closely, ran.

  In another minute, I’d either have to cancel my reservation or go to F. ringless. Looking back, I see that neither would have been a big deal. There were plenty of other trains, and she had no idea of what I was planning to offer her. At the time, though, it seemed that my whole fate was at stake, that if I didn’t give F. the ring now, I never would, and sooner or later we would pass out of each other’s lives forever. I fell to my knees at the foot of the bed and dropped my face into my hands. “Tell me what to do,” I said. Maybe it was just, “What do I do?” I don’t know what I said. I don’t know what I was speaking to. Nothing spoke back to me.

  I got up. The bed stretched below me like a landing strip, with the overnight bag at its center. Just beyond the bag, in its shadow, so to speak, was the small blue velvet box with my mother’s ring inside it. Trust me, I checked.

  I file e-mails compulsively, and the moment an airline sends me confirmation of a flight, I usually place it in a folder marked “Subscriptions.” But I can’t find a confirmation for the flight I booked on the night of September 30 and so don’t know for sure what time I finally made my reservation. At around 7:15, it appears, I changed my password, since the airline sent me a message to that effect. I must have forgotten my old one. Why anybody should need a password to book a trip on a fucking airplane is beyond me. I can all too clearly picture myself typing different combinations of letters and numbers in the designated space and having each one rejected, my anger mounting like the anger of a sucker in Vegas feeding quarters into an unresponsive slot machine, or maybe what the sucker really feels is dread. I picture myself cursing with unproductive monotony, quite possibly weeping—a strangled cry of “I can’t, I can’t!”—and at last clicking “Forgot your password?” which, no matter what the intention behind it, always seems like a taunt. There would have been a wait. The airline’s reply is time-stamped 7:17, and I must have followed up at once, fearing that if I didn’t, I might forget the new password too; I wouldn’t put it past myself. So let’s say I booked my flight between 7:18 and 8:00.

  Why is it so important for me to know? Maybe because the facts of my life seem less certain to me when I am alone, less facts than suppositions. Whatever the state of your feelings for each other, a spouse is a witness. She can tell you if you’re walking around with toothpaste on your shirt (usually, she will). She can tell you if you brought the dry cleaning home and what you had for dinner. A cat is also a witness, although a silent one. Even at those times when I’ve gone days without seeing another human being, I’ve always been conscious that my cats are nearby and that they are watching me. Every time I rise from my desk, one is looking up at me from its resting place by the printer. On entering the living room, I pass the chair where another one is sitting and feel its gaze on me. Late at night, when I wake with a gasp from a bad dream, it’s to find a cat peering at me, its eyes glowing faintly in the moonlight that streams through the shades. And because they are watching, my actions—and maybe even my thoughts—register on me in a way they otherwise might not. They have enough weight and gravity for me to remember them later.

  But at that time and place, I had no witness.

  What did I do the rest of that night? I wrote e-mails. I read, or tried to read, my undergraduates’ essays. One of them began with a description of a small object falling out of the sky and landing at the writer’s feet. Only when it was lying there did she recognize it as an injured hummingbird. A moment later, it died.

  It’s hard to get a cat to do tricks. The difficulty and the reluctance responsible for it are often cited in debates on feline intelligence, mostly by skeptics. In one study, in which subjects could get food by pressing a lever on a kind of vending machine, cats performed worse than pigeons. For a long time one of the least-used books in my library was Tricks Your Cat Can Do. Somebody gave it to me as a gift back when I first had Bitey, and I tried it out for a month or two before exiling it to a series of remote bookshelves, for I kept taking it with me when I moved, out of hope or habit, periodically bringing it out to gaze at its photos of cats jumping onto their owners’ shoulders or tapping the keys of a piano. Fifteen years and four moves later, I finally got rid of it in a yard sale.

  Still, there’s a trick I managed to teach Biscuit. She liked being petted and, in her eagerness for affection, would practically butt against my hand. If, while petting her, I lowered my face to her level, she’d rub against it, cheek against cheek. She’d do it over and over. At close range, her face was a tawny, shield-shaped blur, paler at the muzzle and cheeks. Her breath was musty but not unpleasant, smelling of the dry nuggets I poured into her bowl every morning, a scent of dried fish and, oddly, leather, as if from a saddlery. Her gold-green eyes, which usually had some discharge at their corners, were intent but not especially loving. I don’t know if you can see love in a cat’s eyes the way you can in a dog’s, and of course dogs turn their amorous gaze on everybody and everything, down to the half-eaten burger somebody dropped in the grass two nights ago that they regard as if it were an old, dear friend before snapping it up. Sometimes it occurs to me that what I saw as I rubbed faces with Biscuit wasn’t much different from what a mouse might see in the moment before she punched its little ticket. In my case, though, she was purring.

  As tricks go, it’s not very impressive. All I did was encourage Biscuit to do what she’d do anyway, rub against me when I petted her, just substituting my face for my hand. This is said to be the fundamental rule of training any animal: you can only get it to do what it wants to do—in essentialist terms, to act in accordance with its nature. If I were more ambitious, I could have trained her to respond to a verbal cue. The thing would be to start out by petting her, I guess, and then to say, “Give me some love,” or something equally gross and present my face for her to butt against. In the beginning I’d probably have had to say it over and over—“Gimme some love, gimme some love”—like a Barry White song. In time, she might have come to respond to the words alone. This would be a classic example of forward conditioning, in which a stimulus—here, the words “Gimme some love”—brings on a response (i.e., rubbing).

  My projections of success may be rosy, since Biscuit’s response to other words was hit-or-miss. She didn’t always come when we called her name, and barking “no!” wasn’t always enough to stop her from misbehaving. It wasn’t the time she brought in that chipmunk. The one cue that almost always worked was the call “meaty dinner!” But of course the conditioned, verbal stimulus was reinforced by other stimuli, both conditioned and unconditioned, since F. or I sang out the words at the same time of day, and when Biscuit raced into the house or pattered downstairs from one of her sleeping spots, an unconditioned stimulus in the form of a dish of canned food was waiting for her. This was the thing she wanted, the thing for which all other stimuli, temporal or verbal, were only signs, or perhaps, given the animal’s confusion of contingency and cause, means. The cry “meaty dinner!” and the fading light weren’t indications that food was ready. They were what made food happen. And it was food she loved.

  But then, why do cats do so badly in those learning experiments? If they love food, why can’t they figure out that pushing a particular lever will make it come rattling down into a dish? I can’t believe it’s because they’re stupid. The psychologist Edward Thorndike placed cats in specially designed boxes from which they could escape by performing simple actions—pulling a loop of cord or stepping on a platform or pushing a lever. The cats were kept hungry. Outside the box but in plain sight of the captives, the experimenter left some food. He found that certain cats, by trial and error, learned how to break out of their traps and get at the food. With repetition, they were able to do it in no time at all, having formed, as Thorndike put it, “a perfect association between the sense-impression of the interior of the box an
d the impulse leading to the successful movement.” Cats, in other words, are bad at getting food from a vending machine but excellent at getting out of a box in order to feed themselves. It may be that, after millions of years of feeding not on stationery nuts and seeds but on clever, fast-moving birds and rodents, cats are poorly adapted to the monotony of pressing a lever to secure a few pellets—the portions in the experiment are pretty chintzy—of dry food. It may be that in the hierarchy of feline skills, extraction ranks lower than escape.

  According to a study that sifted through DNA samples collected from 979 house cats and wildcats on three continents—the collecting can’t have been much fun—the domestic cat is descended from Felis silvestris lybica, the Near Eastern wildcat found in the deserts of Israel and the Arabian Peninsula. Some 12,000 years ago, this creature is thought to have taken up habitation in the early agricultural settlements of the Fertile Crescent. At first, the wildcats probably just darted in long enough to snatch a few rats from the granaries, but over time they began staying longer. The farmers must have welcomed the small, deft creatures that silently prowled their storehouses, stalking the vermin that ravaged the wheat and barley. It helped that the visitors were unobtrusive. They made no claim on their hosts. They wanted nothing but the pests they hunted with such artful dedication, lying in wait for them in the shadows, their sleek bodies flattened to the earth, their eyes full of light, their pupils like black suns. Their cruelty was marvelous. How they toyed with their prey, pinning it down only to let it wriggle free so they could pounce on it again; they’d do it over and over until their victim died of terror or exhaustion.