Another Insane Devotion Read online

  Thousands of years later, in “Jubilate Agno,” Christopher Smart would ascribe these habits to chivalry:For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.

  For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.

  But chivalry was only invented in the Middle Ages, most peoples up until then having commonsensically believed that there was no point in showing mercy to a helpless enemy unless you meant to make him a slave. And Smart wrote “Jubilate Agno” in the madhouse.

  Certainly, the cats must have had to modify their behavior. They learned not to snarl and strike out at the large creatures whose dens so abounded in game and not to shit in the dried grass seeds they liked to eat. In this way, they became the first animals to domesticate themselves. The adaptation probably took place through the same trial-and-error process by which Thorndike’s cats learned to escape traps, except it wasn’t just individuals that were adapting but an entire species, or the progenitors of one. Tests of mitochondrial DNA indicate that all of today’s house cats are descended from five female lineages, five feline Eves.

  It makes sense that cats and humans would learn to live together. Each had something the other needed. The mystery is when their relation evolved beyond convenience. Did one of the visitors grow so used to the great creatures that one day he forgot himself and brushed against one as he might brush against one of his own kind, except that instead of a flank he was making contact with an enormous leg? He may have meant nothing by it, just wanted to stamp the other creature as being, briefly, his. (Cats are possessive, but only on a short-term basis, judging by the way different individuals in a household will rub in turn against the same door frame in passing, as though punching a factory clock, with no cat appearing to take umbrage at later claimants.) Did the cat purr as it did this? And did the great creature, sensing its intent or just enjoying the supple, furry caress, reach down and stroke the little creature in return? Imagine how clumsy he must have been, his hand stiff as a paddle. Children always have to be taught how to stroke a cat rather than thump it like a dog. “Don’t pat her, pet her,” I remember telling Wilfredo. He looked at me narrowly, wondering what he was doing wrong and maybe, given things I learned later, if I was going to hit him. It’s possible that the first such exchange was between a cat and a human child. The difference in their sizes wouldn’t have been that great, and cats, like other mammals, seem able to recognize the young of other species, thanks to their large round heads and eyes and small mouths and noses, the same features that make kittens so appealing.

  Call this the simple friendliness that arises between individuals when they share an environment in a mutually beneficial way. You see it in offices. Such friendliness is pragmatic, acknowledging the services the parties render each other and building up a fund of good will against future conflicts, as for instance when one party defecates in the other’s food supply or thoughtlessly steps on the other’s tail. At those times I hurt Biscuit by accident, eliciting a pain shriek whose real duration may have been between one and two and a half seconds but that seemed to go on forever, I was always touched when, after an interval of brooding under a bed, she allowed me to pet her again. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I’d tell her and reach down to scratch her head, which astonishingly rose to meet my hand, and I marveled at the trust she showed for a creature that a little while before had caused her to scream in pain and that by sheer virtue of its size could easily kill her.

  Some 9,500 years ago, on the island of Cyprus, in a village called Shillourokambos, a man was buried beside a cat. A team of French archaeologists unearthed their bodies in 2001. Both sets of remains were well preserved, and although each had a separate grave, these were only sixteen inches apart and had been dug at the same time. Both man and cat lay with their heads facing west, the man with his arms crossed on his chest, the cat with its limbs tucked beneath it. The deceased man was about thirty and, judging by some shaped flints and a small green stone axe arrayed around him, a person of rank. The cat was only eight months old. It may have been killed to keep the man company in the grave or in whatever world the people of that time believed lay beyond it. While a nearby grave pit contained parts of several animals, the cat had been buried whole and intact in a way the scientists believed called attention to it as an individual. This creature and not another. With this man.

  What happened between the time humans began admitting Felis silvestris lybica into their granaries (though, really, how could they have kept them out?) and the time they first took Felis silvestris catus with them into the afterworld?

  Just before F. and I became lovers, I hung back. It was true I wanted her very much. She was the only person in any room in which I happened to find myself; whole cocktail parties were depopulated because of her. And I didn’t want to be in any room that didn’t have her in it. The trouble was that by then I also liked her. I hadn’t thought that would happen. How had the woman who’d looked at me like I was a turd turned into somebody I liked? We were in a room in the city, high above the street. The lights were dim. The walls were hung with photographs that seemed to be portraits, but it was hard to tell. Were those shadows the faces of men or women? Were they faces at all? The lights in the street below might have been stars, each with its radiant smeared corona. I had to force myself to look at F. It was as if I were about to tell her something terrible. “I want you,” was how I may have put it, “but I like having you as my friend. You’re so nice. I’m just scared that if we go any farther, it’ll fuck everything up.”

  I don’t remember her answer, only how she looked at me, somberly and with such prolonged stillness that when she blinked it seemed as deliberate as a hand clap. Then, suddenly, breathtakingly, she smiled. In every account I give of her, there is always some indeterminacy, like the one in Heisenberg’s theory, which tells us that we can know where a thing is but not where it came from or where it’s going. I can say how she looked but not what she said; I can call up her expression but not her words. Always something is veiled.

  Proust was aware of this, as he was of so much else:The questing, anxious, exacting way we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternate if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and despair, all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry away a very clear impression of her. . . . The beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of it are always blurred.

  Could I have looked forward from that moment to this one? We live in the country now, and our bedrooms are on the ground floor of the house. At night, the lights of passing cars sweep across the windows and render their curtains briefly transparent, turning them into colored scrims on which there flash glimpses of leafy branches in summer, bare ones in winter, the shadows of the kids from the nearby college as they parade up and down our road, talking in the loud, important voices of the young. Sometimes we’re roused by drunken laughter. It drives F. crazy.

  Another thing she hates is how exposed the house is. It makes her feel that she’s an item in a display case, the case being located in a boutique for sex murderers. She has reasons for feeling this way; I imagine most women do. Our tall front windows look across a road onto an open field that rolls and dips past student dorms and parking lots to a gleaming performing arts space that from the outside might be a radio telescope canted at the stars. F. once had me go outside at night and walk partway across the field to see if she’d be visible to someone lurking there in the dark. I did as she asked. I skirted a small pond that glinted beneath the moon, climbed a rise, then picked my way down a shallow slope where some months later I would spot a small gray cat that I’d call to plaintively, futilely, the way you call out to a dead loved one in a dream, knowing he will not hear you. A little farther, I turned. The lights in the house were on, and I could see F. through the curtains, a small woman with silvery blonde hair looking out tensely
into the night. I hesitated before coming back in, not knowing what to tell her. If I said I’d seen her, it would confirm her fears and she’d want to move; she wanted to move already. If I lied, I might lull her into a false sense of security in which she’d fail to notice the approach of a psycho with a knife. Besides, I’d be lying to her, and at that time I could still say I’d never lied to her, except maybe about how much ice cream was left in the carton in the freezer or what I’d thought of when exchanging looks with the photographer of faded rock stars, and that was a lie of omission. Besides, she wouldn’t believe me.

  On reentering, I told F. that I could see her, but only indistinctly, because of the curtains. She was recognizable as a woman, no doubt about it, but it was impossible to really say what she looked like or even how old she was. She might, I told her, have been an old woman.

  F. said there were men who raped and murdered old women. She looked at me coldly. They specialized in them. How blue her eyes were!

  Back when I lived in Baltimore, Bitey and I used to take walks together. I felt safe letting her out, knowing she’d keep to the alley that ran behind my street, which was too narrow for cars to drive down except in the most moseying way. The alley accommodated an entire ecosystem of cats, dozens of them, and the uncounted small creatures they preyed on. Bitey and Ching used to spend most of the day out there, sunbathing and strolling and exchanging mostly friendly greetings with their peers, except for a small, round calico who launched herself at any cat that so much as stuck its head into her yard and once chased Bitey halfway down the alley, claws extended and every hair erect, so that seen from above my cat seemed to be fleeing a small orange-and-white cannonball hurtling lethally a half foot above the ground. It was one of the few times I saw her afraid of anything.

  Two or three nights a week, I’d visit a woman who lived a few blocks away. She wasn’t a girlfriend, at least I never called her that and I doubt she ever spoke of me as her boyfriend: she was just someone I was seeing. I’d walk over there around ten. On seeing me getting ready to leave, Bitey would spring down from the sofa, stretch with purpose, and trot over to the door, her tail upright and undulant. We’d leave the house together; together we’d walk down the street to my date. I use “together” loosely. Sometimes she’d walk at my side; at others, she’d quicken her pace and stride ahead, stopping from time to time to groom herself and, if you ask me, make sure I was still following her. The grooming always seemed pretextual, as it would if a person walking briskly down a city street were to stop without warning to ostentatiously comb her hair. My cat might have been one of the touts who throng the wharfs of steamy port cities—Tangier, Rio, Nha Trang, Surabaya—offering to steer sailors to a good time. Sometimes she’d cross to the other side of the street but still keep pace with me, her leggy black form lithe and alert. Her strides were longer than Biscuit’s, and her shoulders had a confident roll, as if she’d never run from a butterball of a calico. When I turned into my friend’s walkway, she’d keep going or loop back in the direction of our house.

  But when I left three or four hours later, she was waiting for me. Usually, she’d be lying in a bed of pachysandra, almost invisible except for the topaz flares of her eyes. “Well, hi there,” I’d say. She’d walk up to me and sit, then raise her head to be petted. Only when I had done this would she rise and accompany me back to the house. In contrast to her earlier zigzag progress, she now kept to my side. It was as if she were chaperoning me. Maybe Bitey, too, saw me as a deputy kitten. Like Biscuit, she liked to groom me, but after a while of this her pupils would widen abruptly. Her claws would come out and pin the hand she’d been licking. If I tried pulling away, she’d sink her fangs into the fleshy part, glaring up at me like Richard III contemplating Clarence and wondering how he’d fit in a butt of Malmsey. The only way to dislodge her was to give her a tap on the nose—the same thing you’re supposed to do to an attacking pit bull, only more forcefully—or let the hand remain limp until she was persuaded it was dead. None of that wildness was on view during our predawn walks. The streets were empty. The city’s crime lights, which did nothing to prevent crime, turned the sky a velvety mauve. In the shadows of the trees, frogs were peeping; a rat poked its head out of a storm drain. Bitey registered them disinterestedly, the way a human might, as if they were phenomena of a nature to which she wasn’t completely subject, for isn’t that how humans think of nature? Once upon a time we were figures in its landscape, but now we have stepped out and look back at it with a proprietary eye, thinking, How lovely! or, Somebody ought to clear those pines.

  I didn’t show F. the ring till late the next morning. We were in her bedroom. A shaft of sunlight fell through the window, highlighting the rose tint of her skin, the roundness of her arms and breasts. “I want to show you something.” I rolled out of bed and went over to where my shorts lay tangled and drew the jewel box from an enormous pocket. Looking back, I’m startled to think I left a thing of such value in a pair of shorts I’d torn off like some hated bondage and left overnight on the floor, where a cat had sat on them, leaving some of its hair. I must have crawled back to the bed, because when I held out the box to F. I was sitting below her, or maybe kneeling, the way you’re supposed to, and it seems unlikely that I would have walked over and then lowered myself. It would have been very awkward.

  When I showed her the box, she seemed embarrassed. For a moment, I was afraid she was embarrassed for me. I might have put the box back in my pants if there’d been a graceful way to do it, I mean both physically—I couldn’t turn and crawl back the way I’d come without displaying my ass—and emotionally. To get both of us off the hook, I said, “I’d like to marry you, but I’m not sure I want to live together.” I meant it too. It had been twelve years since I’d last lived with a woman, and I was used to being by myself.

  She may have been hurt. She may have been relieved. I remember her smiling broadly, hugely. It had been more than twenty years since she’d lived with a man. Both of us liked sex and were prone to brief, free-falling infatuations we then spent months feeling shitty about, years. The fools we’d made of ourselves, to say nothing of others. When did it become standard practice to pretend you didn’t really want the person you were ready to cut out your heart for? The Greeks knew nothing of this.

  She may have asked me if I was proposing, wanting clarification.

  I said I was. I was proposing to her. Would she marry me?

  After a while, she said yes.

  For hundreds of years before the invention of dating, taking a walk was one of the few things a young man could acceptably ask a girl he liked to do with him.

  Would you like to go out walking with me, Miss Alice? Walking allowed the young people to spend time together free from the surveillance of the girl’s family, though someone—a vigilant little brother—might be delegated to follow at a distance to keep an eye on things. Walking gave the boy and girl something to do apart from exchange gasped politenesses in the parlor. It gave them topics of conversation. The wheat’s coming up high this year. Isn’t that a splendid cloud! Are you fond of birdsong, Mr. Lane? It much depends on the bird. Of course. What do you think of the lark? I should say the lark has a most melodious song. A drawback of stationary, indoor courtship was that it required the actors to look at each other without staring, which would be rude, or make too great a show of not staring, which would be just as rude and appear shifty besides. When walking, however, they had perforce to pay attention to the road before them, since otherwise they might tumble into a ditch, and this gave them some respite from the labor of unceasing mutual scrutiny. They inspected each other in sidelong glances. What they saw was mostly profile.

  When I recall the walks I took with F.—still take, at rarer and rarer intervals—that is how I see her. Below the smooth arc of her high forehead, which seems to glow with intelligence and purpose, is the smaller arc of one blue eye, the sharp angle of her nose with its inquisitive pointed tip, the tiny, beveled notch, like the mark of a chise
l, where her lips meet. With a little exaggeration, her profile might be the kind you used to see on matchbooks advertising correspondence schools of art.

  We take walks in the city, of course, but it’s in the country that I envision her, maybe because there’s less there to distract me from her presence, which I am so aware of even when I’m not looking at her, as one is aware, even in pitch darkness, of the nearness of a body of water. Early in our relationship, walking with F. always made me a little anxious. She was so quiet, and I worried that I was talking too much or, if I didn’t talk, which I could do if I put my mind to it, that she’d think I was just slavishly imitating her silence. I may or may not have looked at her too much, but I’m sure the way I looked at her was questing, anxious, exacting. As lovely as it was to me, I wasn’t content to contemplate F.’s surface: I wanted to see beneath that surface. Back then, the main thing I wanted to see was what she thought of me, so I suppose my curiosity was like a bat’s echolocation, that is, a way of finding out where I stood. Proust again:When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than in its outward journey because we do not recognize it as having originated in ourselves.