Another Insane Devotion (2 page)

A week or so later, after she'd gotten used to me, I had some friends over for dinner. She pranced fearlessly from one to the other, making warlike feints at their hands. My friend Charlie wagged his finger at her, and she nipped it. “Wow! That's a bitey cat you got there!” he said. Up until then I'd been calling her Bridget, but the new name fit her better.

 

At the time I got Bitey, I had recently entered a new phase of my life. I thought a cat would be part of it, a bolt on the door
I'd shut on all the misdealing and unhappiness that had gone before. A cat would force me to be regular in my habits. It would force me to consider desires other than my own, which up until then had been my main, maybe my exclusive, subject of interest.

I'd had other cats before this, but only in the sense that the singer of “Norwegian Wood” once had a girl. They were cats I found on the street or in apartment buildings and kept for a while, feeding them more or less regularly, cleaning their boxes, but then got tired of or, more to the point, overwhelmed by, and passed on to other caretakers. There was the one who began crying like a rooster at first light, which was only two or three hours after I'd gone to bed: she didn't last too long. There was the silent gray male who scratched my girlfriend T. while she slept. There was the orange female I named Jasmine, who once awakened me from a long nod with an ominous scraping (I thought someone was trying to break into my fourth-floor apartment) that turned out to be the sound of her empty food dish being pushed—butted, really—all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom. I'd liked those cats all right, until they got to be too irritating. I didn't think of them much afterward, except maybe for Jasmine, who one night while I was out pushed aside a window screen and then in all likelihood leaped to a neighboring rooftop, or maybe onto the towering ailanthus in the courtyard, whose branches reached almost to my floor and from there flowed to the ground and melted into the dark. Wherever she went, I hope she found an owner who paid more attention to her and fed her when he was supposed to.

From the very first, Bitey interested me in ways her predecessors hadn't. She was an entertaining presence. For one thing, she fetched, preferring the crumpled cellophane wrappers of cigarette packets to all the toys I used to buy her in the pet aisle of the supermarket. Maybe the crackling reminded her of small animals stirring in the brush. She could hear the sound anywhere in the house and would come trotting up to me whenever I opened a fresh pack, her tail twitching with eagerness. Unlike a dog, she wouldn't drop the cellophane in your lap or even at your feet, but always far enough away that you'd have to get up to retrieve it. I don't know if this was out of the same caution that makes a cat reluctant to eat from a human hand or because, having scrambled around the room in pursuit of her prize, swatting it from paw to paw, levering it with surgical dexterity from under a baseboard, lofting it into the air then showily leaping after it, caroming off walls and vaulting over the furniture or skidding under it like a tobogganist before finally seizing the ball in her mouth, she wanted me to get off my ass too.

Most intelligent animals seem to want to be entertained. This desire may be one of the constitutive features of embodied intelligence, a boundary that separates higher animals from lower ones and intelligent animals from intelligent machines. To date we've seen no evidence that computers get bored, not even the really big ones, designed to measure the expansion of the universe or track the firefly motion of leptons, that take up entire multistory buildings. By this standard, the crowning achievement of our species may not be writing or the pyramids or the cathedral at Chartres—all of which, face it, can be
boring—but
Grand Theft Auto.
I'm not sure if it would be possible to make a cat understand what writing is for. (Maybe if you could somehow demonstrate that it was our way of rubbing ourselves against the furniture or, alternatively, of spraying). But I can imagine a cat staring raptly at
Grand Theft Auto,
especially on a big screen.

When Bitey chased a ball of crumpled cellophane, as Biscuit chased cloth balls stuffed with catnip, she may simply have been practicing the behaviors she'd need for hunting. But I think she was also engaged in something gratuitous and nonu-tilitarian that might be called fun. A 1954 study found that even “Kaspar Hauser” cats, cats “reared in social isolation and without opportunities for visual experience, let alone play behavior,” displayed normal predatory responses when presented with a “prey-like” moving dummy. (Leave aside the ethical implications of raising a young social animal in what amounts to solitary confinement and—judging by the experimenter's offhand “without opportunities for visual experience”—total darkness.) From my own observation, I know that Bitey would go scrambling after a tossed projectile moments after she'd finished eating, often with such abandon that she vomited in mid-pursuit. Her vomiting was brisk and without fanfare. Suddenly she'd brake; her body would be seized by spasms that squeezed and stretched it like a concertina. These would be accompanied by gasps of esophageal exertion, though “gasps” leaves out the sound's distinctive Elvis Presleyan glottal stop. It was purely functional, without the notes of outrage and self-loathing that characterize human retching, whose sound is always the sound of someone groaning, “Why? Why? Why?” in a filthy bathroom
at midnight. Bitey didn't wonder why. What had gone into her was now making its way out. When it came, she looked at it blandly, then shook her head and walked away.

My girlfriend D. had a dramatic personality. She wore her hair dyed platinum blonde and swept back from her forehead like a romantic composer's. She played the keyboards at three in the morning. She would fix you with hypnotic stares of desire or grief, her pupils big as jelly beans, waiting for you to jump her or apologize for the terrible thing you'd done to her. When she smiled, her mouth was shaped exactly like an upside-down boomerang. The night we met, she watched me pour a bottle of wine down the kitchen sink; I think it was a Beaujolais nouveau. The first time we made love was also marked by ceremony. We'd put off the moment for a while. I'd never delayed gratification of any kind before, just had it delayed for, or do I mean from, me, dangled out of reach like a catnip toy, and I have to say that when you're the one who does the dangling, it drives the other person crazy. It drives
you
crazy. Like the old ascetics of the desert, you're intoxicated by your self-denial, not to mention your unexpected power over another person. Not that this was my reason for postponing sex. It had more to do with the new life that had begun only a day or two before I met D., one event following the other so closely that I thought of them as cause and effect. In my mind, D. was the reward for my new life, which in its early stages was marked mostly by what it required me to give up, as if I had joined a priesthood whose members dressed in mufti and chain-smoked. Those rooms murky with cigarette smoke. Even in mid-summer, you seemed to be huddling by a fire, trying to
make out your comrades' features through the gloom. “I want to wait,” I told D., and kissed her the way you kiss someone when that's the only way you have of entering her. When we finally did it, it was the most powerful sex I'd had in my life up till that moment. In an old movie, it would have been symbolized by a shot of water crashing down the flume of a dam or steam surging through a pipe. (With the passing of heavy industry, we are losing an entire category of metaphors for the sexual act, metaphors of vast forces allowed only a single conduit through which to make themselves felt in the world. The turning of cogs and gears, the thrumming of turbines, the entranced pounding of pistons into cylinders: all gone. I suppose new metaphors will arise out of the new technologies, but how much fun can sex be without build or friction, only the whirr of boot-up or the chime of a new message materializing in your in-box?)

With D., I wore my last Halloween costume, suffering miserably with one half of my face painted black and the other painted white. She wasn't the first woman I ever apologized to, but she may have been the first to whom I apologized because I was wrong and felt bad about it rather than just because I wanted to end a fight. I couldn't say what I was apologizing for. My moral proprioception was still coarse back then and could identify only the grosser transgressions: if I'd screwed somebody else, I would've known it was wrong. Still, I remember the remorse rising in me like nausea. Once, when we were fighting in the car while caught in traffic, I made a violent turn that brought one half of the Tercel lurching over the curb for a second before dropping back with a tooth-rattling thud, and
D. accused me of trying to kill her; maybe I was. Once she told me to go and fuck my way around the world if that was what I wanted. On at least two occasions, she told me that she loved me more than air. One of these was at a birthday party, before an audience of aww-ing friends. Even now I remember how my face burned with pleasure and embarrassment. The pleasure was pleasure at being loved, of course, but it was also indicative of my own taste for drama, which in years past had led me to many sad feats of clownish vainglory. The embarrassment suggests that my appetite for drama wasn't what it had been. When you're a little kid, grown-ups warn you that your eyes are bigger than your stomach, but there comes a time when that's no longer true, not because your stomach has gotten bigger but because your eyes have gotten smaller.

“I love you more than air,” D. said. I said, “I love you,” and immediately felt at a disadvantage, as if I'd followed her inside straight with a pair of eights. Everybody knows that the thing to do then is fold. I did, but it took me several more months. I'm not sure why. One morning I woke up and was no longer in love with her. Then she was gone, and I was left wondering what had happened to everything I'd felt for her, where I'd lost it.

 

I often think that my relationship with Bitey might have been much different if not for something that happened in the first year I had her. I was alone in the house. It was an early evening in winter; there was a sting in the air. I was suddenly overcome with tiredness—I hadn't been sleeping much since I'd broken up with D.—and lay down on the couch in the dining room, resting my head on a padded arm. Bitey jumped up and settled
on my chest. At first she sat gazing down at my face. Then she lay down on top of me and stretched her forelimbs so that she was almost clasping me around the neck and began to purr. We stayed like this for a long time. I could feel her breath on my face. Abruptly, the phone rang, and I started up to answer it, jostling my cat from her place of rest and spilling her onto the floor. She wasn't hurt; she was a cat, and cats routinely fall from much higher up without injury. But she never lay down on me like that again or clasped my neck in what I always insist was an embrace. I'm probably reading too much into that moment. I was lonely, and Bitey may just have been stretching.

 

We think of love, at least love in its ideal form, as a reciprocal condition, like a current that requires two poles to make one's hair rise; without two poles, you can't even speak of a current. Unreciprocated love may not be love at all, but a delusion, maybe a pathetic delusion, maybe a creepy one. Stalkers, too, think they're in love. Well, if someone says, “I love you,” it's nice to be able to say, “I love you,” back. This is more difficult than it sounds. In James Salter's
Light Years,
a little girl is writing a picture story:
Margot loved Juan very much, and Juan was mad about her.
But Margot is an elephant, and Juan is a snail. In the classical myths, humans and gods love one-sidedly, a predicament the gods usually solve by means of rape. The poor humans just pine. Tristan and Iseult may be the poster children for requited love, but even they needed a love potion, and it's significant, I think, that the love they came to embody, courtly love, has conditions so extreme as to be essentially unrealizable. It must be adulterous; it must be pure. The lovers
must love equally. We have to speak of such love the way we speak of black holes. Who knows what happens to someone who enters a black hole? Is he crushed by its gravity, which is massive enough to crush stars? Do its attractive forces wrench him in two or draw him into a wire of infinite length and infinitesimal thinness and stretch him across all space and time? What message does that wire transmit, and who hears it?

There was a moment when F. and I loved each other equally, when we looked at each other with eyes whose pupils were similarly dilated. F.'s pupils were easier to see because her eyes are blue. Mine are dark, and this makes the state of the pupils more elusive, a trait I found useful back when I was getting high.

There are nights when I wake beside my wife as if beside a stranger. Her body is familiar to me; I know it almost as well as my own. Maybe I know it better, having looked at it and touched it with greater attention than I ever gave myself, because I wanted to know it. There've been few things in my life I've wanted to know so badly. But something's gone wrong. Two years ago, she asked for a separation. A while later she
changed her mind. I couldn't tell you why. Or rather, I could tell you: Because of the children we didn't have or the child we borrowed. Because of the kitten we rescued and then lost. Because of money, because of sex. Because I didn't pay enough attention to her, because I paid too much. Because she got bored, and then got interested again. But any of those explanations would be wrong.