Another Insane Devotion

EARLY ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 30, UNABLE TO sleep, I began researching airfares to New York. I had classes till Thursday, so I couldn’t leave before October 2, and of course flying on that short notice would cost more than I could afford. Really, anything would. Every month my salary from the university was instantly siphoned off by two rents and two sets of utility bills, along with payments to the banks I was into for some $60,000. When I wasn’t teaching, I cowered inside the house, afraid the last bills would fly from my pockets the moment I stepped outside. But what was I supposed to do? I thought of our poor Gattino, who’d vanished from the yard the year before and had probably died alone, thousands of miles from where he’d been born. I thought of Biscuit wandering through the lank fall undergrowth, hungry and dazed. I thought of college kids racing down the back roads in fast cars bought for them by enabling parents. I thought of coyotes. I don’t have any special powers where cats are concerned— where anything is concerned. But at least Biscuit usually came when I called her. Maybe she’d come for Sherri; she liked Sherri, or she liked the food Sherri poured into her dish almost as dependably as F. and I did, and I’m sure more dependably than Bruno, who couldn’t be trusted to return a phone call and, if you want to know the truth, seemed a little afraid of cats. And so I told myself that Biscuit would come when she heard Sherri’s voice. That is, if she heard it. She might not be able to.

After going through a bunch of travel websites, I opted for the discount airline that flew out of Myrtle Beach, an hour and a half away. A round-trip flight to La Guardia would cost me $302.50 plus $63 in fees. It was still too much. I let the cursor hover over the “Buy Now” button; I may have clicked on it a couple times and then canceled. I cursed Bruno and F. and even Biscuit and then prayed that God or whatever not take those curses seriously—I was just joking. Finally, I sent Bruno an e-mail telling him I’d be coming up on October 2 to look for Biscuit unless he or Sherri found her first. He should let me know by the end of the day. I hoped it didn’t read like an ultimatum, but of course that’s what it was.

On the frayed red modular sofa in the living room, beside the remote control I’d left there the night before. Stirring, she’d knock it to the floor, and the soft thump of its impact would wake her. She wouldn’t be startled. She’d only open her eyes, turn her head to see what the noise was, maybe going so far as to roll onto her back and let her head loll over the edge of the seat cushion until she saw the control lying on the rug. Then, satisfied—and to me her satisfaction suggests at least a rudimentary sense of causality, an intimation that the sound that roused her was somehow connected to the object that once had once been up here and was now down there—she’d go back to sleep.

On the floor of F.’s bedroom closet, in the corner between a heating duct and a hanging shoe bag. This was the most secluded of her sleeping spots, the one where she was least likely to be disturbed by a human or another cat. In it, she was concealed almost completely. Several times when looking for her, I’d open the door, glance around, and decide she wasn’t there until I saw her paw emerge from behind a hatbox like the hand of a sleeper groping for a ringing alarm clock. I suppose that’s what I was to her, a clock she didn’t set and didn’t know how to turn off but wasn’t especially bothered by since, unlike F. or me, she never had trouble going back to sleep—never.

In the back of the car, until the night I was driving to the station to pick up F. after she’d spent the day in the city and I felt something supple and alive graze my shoulder and nearly drove into the oncoming traffic before I swung the wheel the other way and nearly drove into a ditch instead. It was Biscuit, climbing onto the headrest. When I swerved, she dropped onto the front passenger seat and looked up at me, her ears tipped forward, her upturned muzzle soft and pale in the glow of the dash. The smartest thing would have been to turn around and deposit her back at the house, but I was already late. I drove on. During the next thirty minutes, she paced along the seatbacks, explored the junk in the cargo area, and, briefly, investigated the gas and brake pedals before I kicked her away—lightly, with no more violence than I’d kick her away from the front door if I were coming in with some heavy bags of groceries, just more urgency. At some point she returned to the seat beside me and stayed there for the rest of the drive. She was calm, except for a two- or three-mile stretch when she meowed repeatedly, maybe overwhelmed by the speed with which trees and cars and houses swept past in the dark or by the lights that shot at us from the northbound lanes, guttering in the rain. I’ve read that cats can’t process visual information that comes at them too quickly. She quieted when I stroked her. On reaching the station, I pulled her into my lap, afraid she might otherwise bound out when I opened the door for my wife. She wasn’t crazy about that. Still, she was pleased to see F. and was well behaved for most of the drive back. From then on, I always made sure to roll up the windows when I parked in the driveway.

On my bed. When she was first living with us, Biscuit used to curl up on the pillow next to mine about an hour before I retired. It didn’t matter if that was at midnight or two in the morning; she might have been monitoring my melatonin levels. She never took my pillow, but she seemed to think of the other one as hers and, on nights F. slept with me, was disgruntled at having to give up her spot. Sometimes she swiped at F. when she shooed her off, for although she was a mostly good-natured cat, she could be testy. A few years ago, she started sleeping on my stomach or between my legs. I guess she liked the warmth, and being contained in the stockade of her owner’s limbs may have made her feel more secure. I obliged her by sleeping on my back and was careful not to disturb her if I had to get up to piss. It took some minor acrobatics, but I was grateful that she chose to be so close to me.

Did she choose? I think of choice as the trait that cats, maybe more than any other species, share with human beings. At least they seem to choose, often with every appearance of thought, though “thought” is probably the wrong word and will invite scorn from animal behaviorists. They circle a room with a connoisseurial air, considering the best place to sit. One of those places may be beside their owner, but it may not be. It depends. Before an open door, they waver, weighing the options of coming in or staying outside. “Jesus Christ!” you yell, especially in winter, when with every second of their indecision you visualize dollars roaring up the chimney. If you were yelling at a dog, it would slink in on the instant, its whole being weighed down by shame. Your cat is unmoved. It looks at you; its tail lashes. This may be a sign that the animal is of two minds or just annoyed. You say, “All right,” and close the door. A moment later there’s a scrape of claws. Your cat has chosen to come in.

The sleeping places listed above are located in different houses F. and I have lived in during our time together. The fireplace was in our old house on Parsonage Street, the first house we shared as a couple; it was one of the reasons we rented it, along with the pattern of blue and white diamonds painted on the living room floor. We had the sofa when we lived there; it was F.’s and predated me by eight or nine years. But when I picture Biscuit sleeping on it, it’s in the living room of the house on Avondale Road, with its sinking toilet and rippling floors that were too thin to be sanded; I had to settle for waxing them, and F. thought I was insane even to do that, since it wasn’t our house and she was pissed at the landlord. The basement was in the house on Parsonage Street, the one on Avondale Road being too small and filthy to store anything in, and prone to flooding besides. The Parsonage Street basement was dirty enough. It’s where we took Biscuit when she came back with paint on her muzzle, on the theory that there was nothing down there she could fuck up. We were wrong.

I don’t know why Biscuit slept with me rather than with F. We were introduced to her at the same time. But it was me she came up to first and my hand she began licking. In the same way, Zuni made a beeline for F. when we came to look at her at her breeder’s, who was giving her away because her kittens weren’t show quality. She was already full-grown, plush and tubby, a little matronly. We tried to play with her by rolling a ball back and forth between us, and the tabby followed it, but on seeing me she started in horror and scrambled underneath a cabinet. Maybe her early experience had imprinted her with a fear of men. The breeder’s husband hunted and practiced taxidermy, and the house was filled with the stuffed corpses of his victims, which stared down from the walls, rigid with shock and indignation. Even now, seven years after we got her, Zuni barely lets me pet her. She only sleeps with F., and if I happen to be sharing the bed that night, she marches over me on her way to my wife with about as much consideration as the Wehrmacht gave valiant little Holland as it rolled across Europe to the sea.

I’m not sure this preference is the same thing as love. Did Biscuit love the red sofa? Did she love the kitchen counter? Did she love the rise and fall of my stomach as she lay on it in the dark, waiting to be lulled to sleep? Does Zuni love F.? Did Bitey love the little boy, a refugee from a treeless city neighborhood where the nightly chimes of the ice cream truck were sometimes interrupted by gunfire, who spent three days with us one summer back when she was still alive, only to be carried away in tears?

Wilfredo thought she loved him because she slept on his bed and not Cedric’s. Originally, F. and I were just going to have Cedric, but as we were getting ready to meet his bus, we got a call from a counselor who wanted to know if we could take in a second kid whose Friendlytown Family had backed out at the last minute. My wife stared at the phone; if it had had a cord, she would have been twisting it around her wrist. It had been her idea to have an eight-year-old from the city stay with us for two weeks, but now she was anxious. What would we feed Cedric? What if he got homesick? What if he hated us? How would we keep him entertained? I told her that taking the other kid would solve the last problem. “Kids don’t want to be with grown-ups,” I told her. With each passing minute, the enterprise was feeling more and more like an enterprise, or, as some of my relatives would have said, a production, something that required a script and stage managers and might still get lousy reviews. Still, there was no way out of it. It was our production, this thing we were doing together. “They want to be with other kids.”

When I look back, what astonishes me is not that I was so naive but that I was so forgetful of my own childhood, whose most traumatic episodes occurred when I was placed in a cage with other kids and told to have fun. Cedric was small and quick and lithe. Wilfredo was big and soft and slow moving, with a round, shaved head. There was something muffled about him, as if he’d been wrapped in dense cotton batting in order to protect him, but at the cost of an entranced, blinking passivity. What nobody had told us, least of all the charity that sent him to us, was that he was only six. When I put him on a bike, Wilfredo wobbled and capsized. It was just a child’s bike, purple with chopper handlebars, and I caught him before he hit the ground, but still he cried and Cedric taunted him. Taunting was Cedric’s operative mode. He taunted Wilfredo even after he’d learned to stay upright and more or less keep pace with us as we wheeled in and out of the shade of the maples on the neighborhood’s mercifully empty streets.

That was later, after dinner and a game of catch played with sofa cushions on the front lawn in the dusk while lightning bugs winked around us like tiny flashbulbs, and a bath that started out well—the boys wanted to take one together, which made us think they were finally starting to get along—but ended with Cedric bursting out of the bathroom, shaking off water and yelling that Wilfredo had peed in the tub. Wilfredo said he hadn’t peed. He’d followed Cedric into their bedroom. Unlike the older boy, he didn’t mind being wet. He stood with his towel drooping below his dimpled belly and a puddle of water gathering on the floor between his feet. His denial wasn’t convincing; it held a note of secret pride.

“Hey!” I barked. Where had I learned to bark like that? Wilfredo was taller than Cedric and probably outweighed him by thirty pounds, but there was no way of predicting how a fight between them might end. As I later learned, when I had to wrestle Cedric off the golf cart of a security guy who’d brought us home from the county fair after the kid had a tantrum outside the tent where the Jack Russell agility trials were supposed to happen, he had a grasping, clawing, elastic strength that was wholly out of proportion to his size.

For most of the day, the cats had avoided the boys, but now Bitey entered the room. She brushed against me and then approached the children, staying just out of reach. Most cats approach kids this way, and it’s easy to mistake it for teasing until you reflect that even a small child is ten times the size of a cat. Bitey didn’t look fearful. Her tail was up, and her underslung jaw gave her the air of something looking for a fight, or at least not shying away from one. “Don’t grab her,” F. warned. “Just put out your hand like this.” She demonstrated, holding hers at cat’s eye level, then scratching the upraised chin. “Hello, Bitus, you noble creature. Let her come to you.”

I don’t remember if either boy was able to pet her. Bitey could be affectionate, but on her own terms. A year before, she’d disappeared for a month before showing up at a house on the other side of town. During that time, I did little but look for her, putting up flyers, riding my bike for miles in every direction while imploringly shouting her name to the winds, stopping every so often to rattle the container of dry food I kept in my knapsack. But when I came to be reunited with her at her rescuers’, my heart so swollen with love I might only have been its caddy, the flunky whose job it was to carry a heart around while it throbbed and felt, she barely gave me a glance and sauntered past me to inspect a flower in the yard. When I picked her up, she struggled. Maybe she’d forgotten whose cat she was, or maybe I was being reminded of the futility of the phrase “whose cat.” The woman who’d found her had grown attached to her, and I invited her to come by our house the next day. Stoically, I’d decided that if Bitey wasn’t happy with F. and me, maybe she’d be better off with her. I think the woman had the same idea. She showed up looking hopeful. But now, Bitey ignored her while coiling and coiling around my ankles, grinning so widely you could see the pale pink washboard of her palate and purring cynically.

I left the room while F. read to the boys from a book about a farting dog. When I came back, Bitey was lying at the foot of Wilfredo’s bed; it was really a folding cot we’d borrowed from someone. She lay facing away from him with her paws straight out before her, like a little sphinx, her eyes slitted. “What’s that cat’s name?” Wilfredo asked. F. told him, and he announced, “Bitey loves me.” His mother hadn’t packed pajamas for him (later we’d learn he didn’t own any); he was wearing underpants and some team’s T-shirt. I don’t think we knew yet that he was only six, but still it struck me that he was just a little boy who might be away from home for the first time in his life. The night yawning around the house was so much darker than the night he was used to, and alive with digestive chirps and gulps and stridulations. But the cat had come to him. F. told him it was because Bitey was a good judge of character. I beamed at her. We’d done good.

Back when I was teaching comp in grad school and despairing over the blandness of the suggested essay topics, I hit on having students write about their last girlfriend or boyfriend. They had to begin by telling how they’d met, what had attracted them to the other person, and the kinds of things they’d enjoyed doing together (I didn’t tell them that they couldn’t write about sex, but nobody ever did). In the concluding paragraphs, they had to draw on those examples to define what makes a good girlfriend or boyfriend. I still remember some of the kids’ responses:

No one in my recollection said anything about love. This may be due to the same reticence that kept the kids from writing about sex (unless that’s what the last author meant by “a good time”). Maybe they thought it was creepy of me to even be asking them about their girlfriends and boyfriends. But maybe they already knew that love has about as much to do with what makes someone a good girlfriend or boyfriend as it does with what makes someone a good wife or husband, which is not a whole lot. More, in the second case, but even there the relation is not so much necessary as contingent.

Love is a feeling, and girlfriend or boyfriend, like wife or husband, is a function, or maybe a job; you could think of a date as a job interview. My students were trying to define the qualifications for that job the way personnel directors might mull over the requisite skill set of a CEO or a die-punch operator. You could argue with some parts of this analogy: employees, for one thing, usually get paid. But you choose the people you go out with the same way you choose the ones who work for you, down to the guy with a van you hire for a couple hours to move a bookcase. That’s why you find notices for both on Craig’s List:

I’m hoping to find a man who is also educated, intelligent, healthy, a non-smoker, employed, enjoys travel, culture and trying new things and who too wants companionship, friendship and hopefully ultimately a LTR. I go to the gym 4 to 5 times a week and hope you are also fit and take care of yourself. If you are looking for a FWB, hook up, fling, or NSA relationship than I am definitely not the woman for you. So if you think you might be what I’m looking for, please say hello and tell me about yourself.

We all want the same thing. That person that will care for us, listen, comfort us, make us feel special, never hurt us, accept us for who we are, and basically love us unconditionally until the end of time. We want a friend, a lover, a companion because no one wants to grow old alone. We need that person who will nudge us when we’re sleeping and stop breathing so we don’t wake up dead (lol).

So, I’ve found a great house to buy. Now I just need a man to share it with. Man must:

1. Have a retirement plan.

2. Believe in aliens.

3. Be comfortable in most any social situation.

What’s striking about these ads is the way they combine specificity and generality, skepticism and idealism: only somebody very idealistic expects to find unconditional love in adulthood. Their specificity is the specificity of the educated consumer who knows what she wants or, more commonly, what she doesn’t want (e.g., a smoker, an FWB, or an NSA relationship). Even so, consumers may sometimes be overwhelmed by the abundance of choices available to them, and the variety, the latter suggested by such categories as Strictly Platonic, Men Seeking Women, Women Seeking Men, Men Seeking Men, Women Seeking Women, Casual Encounters, and Misc. Romance. This vertigo, the vertigo of the shopper staring dazedly into the ice cream freezer at the supermarket, may be the source of the posters’ vagueness. And, of course, much of the language they use has no agreed-on definition. Is a “casual encounter” the same thing as a one-night stand, and if not, how many encounters can you have before they stop being casual? Does “LTR” mean a lifetime relationship or just a long-term one, and how long is long-term? And is “lifetime relationship” an anachronism, as meaningless as the wish for someone who will love us to the end of time?

There were no personal ads in the Middle Ages. To the extent that people chose at all, they chose spouses from a narrow pool of neighbors or, more likely, had spouses chosen for them by their fathers or male guardians. (Doubtless, there were also casual encounters and misc. romances back then; that’s why we have the fabliaux.) It was the difference between shopping at the Whole Foods and at the local farmers’ market, your dad standing beside you at the produce stand, reaching over you to squeeze the plums. “He’ll take these.” What did those people want, our great-great-many-times-great grandparents, with their bad hygiene and their lives brief as a struck match? In the case of the upper classes, we know what their fathers wanted. It was they who drew up the marriage contracts:

I, Thibaut, count palatine of Champagne and Brie, make known to all, present and future, that my loyal and faithful Guy of Bayel and his wife Clementia have made a marriage contract in my presence with Jocelin of Lignol for the marriage of their son Herbert with Jocelin’s daughter Emeline. These are the clauses:

[1] Guy has given to his son whatever he had at Bayel, at the village called Les Mez, and at Bar-sur-Aube and within those village districts, including tenants, woods, lands, and all other things.

[2] Jocelin has given his daughter Emeline an annual rent of 5l. [from his property] that will be assigned by two other men, one to be named by Guy and the other by Jocelin. And Jocelin will give his daughter 100l. cash [as dowry], which is to be invested in income-producing property by the two appointed men within one year after the marriage.

[3] Peter Guin [of Bar-sur-Aube, chamberlain of Champagne and Jocelin’s father-in-law] and his son Guy affirmed in my presence that they gave whatever they had at Les Mez to Emeline or to Jocelin’s other daughter Lucy, whom Herbert earlier had engaged to marry.

[4] Herbert will hold the above mentioned 5l. rent, the property purchased with the 100l. cash, as well as the land at Les Mez, in fief and liege homage from Guy, son of my faithful chamberlain Peter Guin, save liegeance to me and save the liegeance contracted to anyone else before the marriage.

[5] Guy of Bayel and Clementia agreed that if Emeline dies before the marriage, they will have Herbert marry another of Jocelin’s daughters when she becomes nubile, under the same terms.

Beyond the exchange of property, there was some doubt as to what a marriage was or how it was delimited, especially in the early Middle Ages, when the church hadn’t yet elevated it to a sacrament. As late as the fifteenth century, a lawsuit arose in Troyes over whether a young couple could have their union performed by one of their friends, in the street, or whether they needed a public figure, a schoolmaster, to do it, or a real priest, or whether they could just as legitimately take the vows on their own, without anybody officiating. The vows might be short; for example: “I swear to thee, Marguerite, that I will love no other woman but thee to the day of my death.” “Paul, I pledge my word that I will have no other husband than you to the day of my death.” (In the French, Paul addresses his fi-ancée in the familiar second person, tu; Marguerite uses the formal vous.) Symbolic gifts would be exchanged. The couple would shake hands or kiss. Sometimes, the boy would seal his commitment by putting his tongue in his beloved’s mouth, announcing that he was doing it “in the name of marriage.”

The last gesture suggests a popular attempt to resolve an old theological debate as to whether marriage was defined by a sexual act or a verbal one: by fucking or an oath. The first definition justified abducting and raping the young woman who caught your fancy, which explains those peasant ceremonies in which the groom and his friends pretended to kidnap the bride, who pretended to be upset about it. But it seemed like something was missing. In the twelfth century, Gratian formulated a two-part definition of marriage:

It must be understood that betrothal begins a marriage, sexual union completes it. Therefore between a betrothed man and a betrothed woman there is marriage, but begun; between those who have had intercourse, marriage is established.

It’s startling to see how matter-of-fact the medieval church could be about sex, down to earnest discussions of the morality of the female orgasm and whether a woman whose husband came before she did was allowed to fondle herself: fourteen out of seventeen theologians said she could. It was a practical application of Paul’s teaching: “The husband must give the wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give her husband his due” (1 Cor. 7, 1–3). The idea of the debt, or debitum, informed all of marriage, gave shape to it the way the skeleton gives shape to the human body. It was the simple counterpart to elaborate contracts like the one between Guy and Jocelin, made not between two fathers but between a wife and a husband and governing not the division of property but the sharing of duty and pleasure. The poor had no property, but they could have orgasms, and people took it for granted that wives as well as husbands were entitled to them. Just give me my propers when you get home. Both Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin sing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and both their versions are considered definitive.

It makes sense that the church would concern itself with the pleasure of the married couple. A marriage in which both spouses get their propers will be fecund and stable, producing children for the glory of God and the increase of Mother Church. Satisfied spouses are less likely to go splashing around in the concupiscent puddles of the flesh. The sex the church sanctioned wasn’t concupiscent. It was temperate, cheerful, orderly, the payment of a debitum. Who gets hot and bothered writing out the month’s checks? Marriage was chiefly an economic relationship. Its purpose was to increase the property of propertied families or to maximize the labor of two individuals—and more, when children came—by joining them in a common domestic enterprise. In medieval art, the common people are often depicted laboring, the men in the fields, the women in the house. There’s a painting I like in which three housewives stand proudly amid dozens of perfect cannonballs of dough they’ve rolled and patted into shape and are now feeding into a brick oven on an immense paddle. In their spotless dresses, they look as improbably put-together as June Cleaver vacuuming in her heels. Sometimes they work together, as in the images that show men and women picking cabbages (the man carries his in a basket balanced on his head) or harvesting olives.

The work wasn’t easy. Think of the strength and endurance it took to cut wheat with a sickle and bind it into sheaves and heap up the sheaves in stooks, all day long, day after day in harvest time, beneath a sun that filled the entire sky. Think of the labor of shaking the olives from every tree in the grove, the leaves hissing and flashing silver, the tedium of gathering the fallen fruit and pressing it into oil. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” God tells the first, fallen couple. “In toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.” These are the words that make Masaccio’s Adam cover his face and weep. Yet in most of the medieval images, the men and women look happy or, if not happy, content. This may be testimony to the value of the debitum, not just the sexual debitum but the entire system of mutual credit and debit, boon and obligation, that formed the economy of marriage. Beyond its harsh beginnings, the haggling and ritual rape (and sometimes real rape, too, which the victim was expected to forget once the rapist did right by her), the system was pretty fair. And there was probably added comfort in the simple fact that wife and husband worked together—sometimes side by side—and not alone.

The word “economy” comes from the Greek words oikos, “house,” and nomos, “manager”: hence, a household manager or steward. Traditionally, this was a man’s job. The stewards in Jesus’s parables are men, as is the Reeve, or steward, in The Canterbury Tales. Economics is a stereotypically male profession; witness the gender balance on the president’s Council of Economic Advisors. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did home economics emerge as a field of study for young women. By the time F. and I were teenagers, it was a required subject in most public high schools, though only for girls. A few years later, in the purifying glare of the women’s movement, it would vanish from many curricula. Maybe it would have been better if boys had had to take it too. Who isn’t better off for knowing how to sew on a button? I don’t know if home ec traditionally included learning how to pay bills. In many households, that was the wife’s job, even if she did it with her husband’s paycheck. F. and I have never worked out this aspect of our domestic economy. Both of us pay bills, grabbing the checkbook off each other’s desks. Only I bother balancing the account. F. just writes down what she spent and waits for me to do the math.

The first time I thought that we might make a couple, I was living in a loft in a neighborhood that still went by the name of the industry that had vanished from it years before. The city’s full of neighborhoods like that. With its high ceilings and ponderous, steel-sashed windows, the loft was a relic of that industrial past. The enormous radiator bolted to one wall was usually too hot to touch, but periodically it stopped working, and in no time the room would be cold, cold enough to make your breath steam. After coming up several times in response to my heat complaints, the super took me aside and explained that the radiator needed to be bled from time to time and gave me a little, short-stemmed key so I could do it myself. He winked. “Just don’t tell anybody where you got it from.”

The trick was to turn the valve just until water started trickling out and then shut it quickly. I did it so often I got good at it, and when the radiator went out one December morning while F. was staying with me, I was almost happy for the opportunity to do my impression of a mechanically competent person for her; we were so still so new to each other that she might believe that person was the real me. I addressed the radiator, fitted the tip of the valve into a matching slot in the key, and gave it a turn. Then I gave it another. Then I cried out as the valve shot into the air, narrowly missing my eye, and was followed by a jet of scalding water. I’m not sure “jet” is the right word. “Jet” connotes something of limited duration; this water kept coming and coming. Hotly, it gushed from the top of the radiator and arced several feet before splashing back down. It was like something in a national park that people stand around and take pictures of. I groped on the floor for the valve, but it had rolled out of sight, or else the water was already too deep for me to see it. There was a particular horror in seeing how quickly it spewed out, like blood from a wound. I cursed helplessly, monotonously. Sometimes I just moaned, “Oh no!” and was seized with shame at what F. would think if she heard me, a grown man, moaning over a leaking radiator.

She brought me a kitchen mitt. I could have kissed the hand that gave me that mitt. It wasn’t enough to plug the flow, but with the mitt on I could slow it a little, and at least I wouldn’t get scalded any more. Of course, I had to stand there with my mittened thumb jammed into the spraying radiator, like the intrepid Dutch boy at the dyke, while the water mounted around my ankles. F. thought I ought to call the super. I didn’t want to. Have I mentioned that I was in the loft illegally? Not long afterward, the super called me. F. held the phone up to my ear so I could hear his small, angry voice berating me. Trying very hard to sound calm, I reminded him that I’d only been doing what he told me to, and he stopped. Maybe he was scared I’d tell management about the key. Shortly, he came up with three porters and capped the spill with a replacement valve while his assistants baled out tepid water gritty with iron clinkers that rattled in their buckets.

When they left, the floors were wet, and the books on the lowest shelves of the bookcase were sodden; I had to throw a lot of them away. I was starting to shiver. The radiator was pushing out heat again, but the loft had been cold for a while, and my pajamas were soaked. F., though still in her pajamas, an oversized men’s pair in robin’s egg blue flannel, was dry, partly because she’d stayed away from the radiator and partly because at some point she’d put on a pair of rain boots. They were bright red and came almost to her knees. Back then, she was dying her hair red, a sort of candy-apple red, and I remember noting, as I watched her gamely mopping the floor, that she was color coordinated: red hair, red boots, and blue pj’s. The pj’s went with her eyes. How diligent she looked to me. Her diligence had nothing heavy about it, as diligence so often does, the heaviness of the five-hundred-pound barbells of virtue and of the strongman deadlifting them with popping eyes. F.’s diligence was light and playful. She made mopping look like a game. Bitey seemed to think it was. She followed F. closely, darting as close to the mop head as she dared, then darting back, after throwing a punch or two at its dank tentacles. I doubt I consciously thought that being with F. would make domestic labor fun. Nothing makes it fun, except maybe amphetamines, and then only for some people. I had only an idea of lightness, lightness in the face of calamity, and I knew it had to do with her.

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.

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.

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.