Another Insane Devotion (26 page)

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To be honest, this is only an approximation of my original letter, which I didn't keep. At the time, I figured that either it would achieve its purpose or it wouldn't, and if it didn't, I would just keep stonewalling until the Polizia Autostradale got tired of dunning me. Maybe it was naive to assume they wouldn't hit on the expedient of putting a lien on my bank account, but then again, if they could do that, Italy wouldn't be going bankrupt, would it? The Italian of the original was almost certainly worse, since I dashed it off in a rage, and I doubt it included the word
parabrezzo
, “windshield.” Still, I was pleased with myself for having pulled off a letter of this kind in a foreign language, and I would have shown it to F. if I hadn't been afraid of reminding her of Gattino. By then he was gone and, I'm pretty sure, dead.

I
DON'T REMEMBER CHECKING A BAG—I DON'T KNOW why I would have checked one for a short trip—but I know I was in baggage claim when I played back Bruno's message. I have a clear memory of standing by a brushed-steel conveyer belt with my phone wedged against my ear and hearing his voice for the first time in almost a week; it sounded hesitant and apologetic. I thought it would be more bad news. He said something about Biscuit, but the next words were obscured by a thudding cascade of luggage that might have been the commotion of my heart. Is that what Ruskin meant by the pathetic fallacy? I had to play back the message to hear Bruno say he'd spotted Biscuit in the yard and almost succeeded in putting her back inside. He'd picked her up (only later would I appreciate the screwing up of will that must have demanded of him), but she'd scratched him (I could hear his incredulity and hurt) and gotten away. He was sorry. When had this happened? I kept playing the message back, but he never said. At the moment it
didn't matter; I was too happy. I called him; it went straight to voicemail. For once, I wasn't irritated. I spoke in the praising tones one uses with very young children. How great was it that he'd seen Biscuit! He probably shouldn't have tried picking her up, but his intention had been good, and at least we knew she was still alive and near the house, right? That was really great. Could he tell me just when this had happened? Oh, and I was in New York; I'd just landed. I'd probably be up there in a couple hours. No need for him to wait up for me, but if he didn't mind, could he leave the light in the driveway on?

By the time I got home from Milan, F. had installed Gattino in a spare room on the side of the house. It had its own entrance, so the other cats didn't yet seem to be aware of his presence. But Gattino knew we were somewhere without him. In the morning he raced to greet us at the door, and even if F. or I spent most of the day in the room with him, he was always crestfallen when we left, or so it seemed to me from the way he'd try to leave with us and, when nudged back, would sit down heavily and look up at us with his one eye. He'd gotten used to sleeping with us.

Maybe this was what F. meant when she said that love—the human kind—is too big and complex a feeling for a cat. It may also be too perverse, since it involves treating a self-sufficient adult animal as an infant,
our
infant, and in turn encourages the animal to behave as if it were one. Like every other creature, a cat in the wild will know the discomfort of wanting and not getting. It will know cold and hunger: kittens are supposed
to have separate cries for each. A domesticated cat will be held against its will (witness the indignant squeak Biscuit would make when you picked her up); it will be shooed off dining tables and kitchen counters, though not F's and mine, and have alluring objects like electrical cords snatched away from it. But in its natural state, a cat is mostly a solitary being. Its couplings are brief and scored to a soundtrack of screeches. Males are known to kill their young. It is a stranger to the pain of being separated from what it loves because it's a stranger to love, or love is strange to it. Now we had introduced a cat to that foreign thing, that xenograft, and maybe to a new kind of pain. It was too early to tell.

That summer was one of the last times Wilfredo stayed with us. It was a bad visit, which was probably more our fault than his. We were in the middle of packing, and so everything we did with him, we did only dutifully. I'm sure he picked up on that; it may explain why he regressed. One morning in the kitchen, he told F. he wanted her to feed him his cereal. He opened his mouth expectantly, importunately, like a baby bird. We could see the remnants of his last few bites caked between his teeth. He was almost as tall as I was and had heavy breasts that embarrassed him so much he refused to take off his T-shirt when we took him swimming. F. told him not to be gross, though really, how could you expect an eleven-year-old boy not to be gross? It would be expecting him to forego the highest expression of who he was, or, really,
what
he was, the apotheosis of his boy's smeary, spewing, burping, farting nature.

That was the summer he threatened to cut off my nuts. To put it in context, he made the threat after he'd learned we were
planning to have Gattino neutered and immediately after he'd learned what neutering involved. I wouldn't be surprised if he unconsciously equated the cat with himself: they were two young males with Latino names and some physical habits that F. and I considered repulsive. We knew it was time to have Gattino neutered because when excited, he'd begun to give off a rank smell, a jet of pure male horniness and aggression.

Every year before this, we'd taken Wilfredo home on the train, but this time we decided to drive to the city. I'm not sure why. F. was in a terrible mood. She was relieved Wilfredo was leaving, but she felt guilty about it. And for the first time, she admitted to being disappointed in him. She'd dreamed that through us he'd learn to Rollerblade and ride a bike and act in plays and write a book report he could get a passing grade on, and none of that had happened. Or rather, he'd learned to do some of those things, but as soon as he did, he lost interest in them, as if all along they'd only been items on a list that had to be checked off to get us off his back. In that way, he was as perfunctory as we were. With F.'s tutoring, he wrote an excellent report on
The Call of the Wild.
But I wasn't terribly surprised later when I learned that he never handed it in. He'd written it: what more did we want?

On the drive to the city, F. sat beside me and talked about how worthless love was. How it arose out of the sensible needs of the organism but, at least in human organisms, so often morphed into something twisted and self-defeating. She wasn't even sure there was such a thing as love. Abruptly, something small and soft bounced off her head and landed on the seat between us. It was a stuffed animal that Wilfredo had tossed at
her from the backseat. He'd won it at the county fair the day before. “Here,” he said, in the helpful if slightly condescending tone of someone who's found something you've been going wild looking for. “What do you call that?”

 

In time, Biscuit and the other cats began to loiter outside the spare room and peer in at its windows. One morning I came out to find that Gattino had succeeded in pushing out a screen and was sitting on the wet grass, looking quizzically about him. A few yards away, Zuni watched him with moon eyes, trying to decide whether to approach or run for her life. Did he have any clue that he was 5,000 miles from the place where a human being had first lifted him off the ground? Did the grass smell different from the grass that had grown in his farmyard? Were there different bugs crawling in it? I scooped him up and put him back inside, feeling him buckle and squirm, all sinew and short, coarse fur. He was getting to be a strong little cat.

I don't remember if we introduced him to the others before the move. It would have been a bad idea, given the disorder of the house, the stacks of boxes and the stacks of books and dishes waiting to be boxed in their turn, the doors left open, the limitless, limitless opportunities for loss or breakage. But if you picture one of those wall calendars that are used to show the passage of time in old movies, each page of the calendar of that summer—and, really, of the preceding spring—would have the words “Bad Idea” scrawled across it, and when that page was torn away, underneath there would be another page that said the same thing: “Bad Idea.” It was a bad idea to have Wilfredo visit us before the move. It was a bad idea not to look
inside the oven in the empty house we were about to move into. It was a bad idea not to run the washing machine. It was a bad idea to take the landlord's word that heat would run $200 to $300 a month in winter and not ask to see some heating bills. It was a bad idea to trust him to remove the bags of old clothes and toiletries and ordinary garbage, though, thankfully not organic garbage—it didn't smell—that had been left in the closets. When F. asked about the garbage, I said of course Rudy would take it away; we'd been to his and his wife's Christmas parties. That was how F. had fallen in love with the house in the first place, though it was probably a bad idea to fall in love with a house she'd only seen lit by candles and Christmas tree lights, the same way it's inadvisable to fall in love with someone you've only seen in dimly lit restaurant booths or in the roseate glow of a hotel room's bedside lamp.

It was a bad idea not to ask F. if she wanted to think twice about moving to the new house. It was a bad idea to take her at her word when she said she didn't. It was probably ill-advised, when she expressed misgivings about things like the garbage in the closets, to ask (or, according to F., yell), “Well, what do you want to do then? You want to just cancel? Fine, then
you
find us a place to live.”

It was a bad idea to hire a mover who had only recently finished withdrawing from the drugs he'd gotten hooked on after injuring his back some months earlier, and when he told us he had a truck and trailer, it was foolish not to find out exactly what he meant by a truck and trailer: I was thinking of the fourteen-footer I'd rented eight years before. But the mover's truck turned out to be a pickup and his trailer one of those
lattice-sided ones, like a playpen on wheels, that you use to transport a ride mower, and F.'s and my possessions made up not one load, but more than a dozen, not counting the additional loads we stuffed into our car. The move ended up taking two whole days—three, if you count the cleanup.

Late the first night, at around the time we were bringing up items from the basement, I decided to bury the ashes of my old tomcat. They were in the pantry, inside the handsome wooden box in which the vet had returned them after I'd had the poor guy put down the year before, a dazed skeleton who crapped in the tub and screamed to be fed a dozen times a day. The box had been included in the price of a premium cremation. I half expected F. to argue. It was late; Ching had been my cat, not hers, and she'd resented him for the way he'd joined Bitey in tormenting poor Tina, like a big oaf of a kid who allies himself with the class bully. But she'd been kind to him during his long decline, often kinder than I was, and she didn't protest. It was too dark to bury him in the yard behind the house; that was where we'd interred Bitey's ashes and Suki's body, after she'd died three years before at the age of nineteen. By the light from the porch lamp, I started digging a hole beneath the maple on the front lawn, where he'd loved to lie. A proper grave for a cat, or for the ashes of one, would be about a foot square and three feet deep. It had been a dry summer, the earth was hard, and once I broke its surface, I encountered a web of roots that ran through the soil like rebar through concrete. I started one hole after another, moving farther and farther out until I was almost in the driveway, and every time I was thwarted by the same unyielding earth and roots that
twanged beneath the shovel blade. From the car, F. called, “What's wrong?” In my memory, it was “For God's sake, what's wrong?” and who could blame her, given that it was after eleven and I was cursing loudly across the street from houses where children slept? I told her to wait a minute. I said it again, and then several times more. I felt her impatience like the ticking of a bomb. But maybe what I was feeling was just the shame of fucking up another move, committing an entire household to a vehicle suitable for hauling sacks of horseshit. It was only by digging just at the foot of a tall, black hemlock like a tree in an Edward Gorey print that I was able to get down a foot, making what was less a hole in the ground than a notch. It was so dark here that F. had to come over and hold a flashlight so I could see where to pour the ashes. Even so, I ended up spilling a lot on the tree trunk and, I discovered later, on my jeans and work boots. “Good-bye, my sweet friend,” I told the old tom. “Be at peace.” But how could he be, when a portion of his substance was sprinkled on my clothing like the ash from a barbecue, to be rinsed off in the next wash?