The cat was of no interest to me—I am not now and never was a cat lover. When cat lovers’ cats made their advances, I sat in frozen courtesy. But for reasons also of no interest, I had to spend four months with the cat and I determined, on principle, to make something interesting out of our enforced sojourn. I studied the features of catness that cat lovers go on about with such ardor: the rippling undulations of flesh and fur, the ingenious forays into high and low places, the fabled inscrutabilities. I was impressed. The cat lovers were right about all that. On the other hand, the cat was not aloof, as cat lovers had led me to expect, but affectionate: like an infant, he craved attention.
I studied catness in stages, and soon I felt I had thoroughly witnessed its famous mysteries. Which is not to say that I plumbed those mysteries or that they were not worth plumbing, only that I had had enough: they were familiar now, and they were finite.
I might have passed the remaining time indifferent to the cat, but there came upon me an unfamiliar sense of freedom and power in his presence. Alone with the cat in this singular situation—not quite solitary, not quite social—I was free to do anything at all. He would never tell. The cat would not reveal any bursts of temper, peculiar lapses, eccentric habits or rituals, vexing flaws. If by any chance it judged, it would keep those judgments to itself and soon forget, or so I assumed; it would not bring old grudges to the next encounter as a person might.
Alone, we know who we are. In company our certainty is blurred. Other presences, like surgical lasers, penetrate and work subtle changes and adjustments on our innards. Also, in the company of others, we hide our faults as best we can or, failing that, tinge them with a whimsical, quasi-charming light, often deluding ourselves in the process. There is no need to hide our failings with a cat: the cat will never tell. With the cat I was not accountable, or not to anyone but myself. How I behaved with the cat would be a uniquely accurate reflection of character. Rather than penetrating and altering me, the cat would serve as my mirror.
Being with a baby comes to mind. Babies cannot tell, either. But with a baby we are constrained to behave decently since, after all, it is a baby and, more often than not, our own; moreover, if we behave badly with the baby, we may suffer the ill effects later on. We need not bear the ill effects of our behavior with a cat: if it becomes unmanageable or neurotic as a result of mistreatment, we can give it away, which is not ordinarily the case with a baby. So with a cat we see ourselves not through a gloss of social behavior but face to face, mirrored: who we really are in relation to the Other, who we might be in a situation of impossible freedom.
Under the unexpected aspect of mirror, the cat became infinitely fascinating, and my stay with him became an exercise in self-scrutiny—part of my routine in any event, and now accomplished while I cared for the cat. Killing two birds with one stone, as they say, only nothing like killing was involved. I was kind to the cat, for the most part; I had little urge to be cruel, even when he was intrusive or irritating. That was a happy discovery. I was willing to stroke and give the affection he craved, even willing to play a bit. But only when I was in the mood. I was utterly free, with the cat, to indulge my moods, which were many and various, a freedom I had not felt with babies. You cannot ignore babies when you are not in the mood, or rather, you can but you will suffer guilt or worse. You can ignore cats without suffering guilt, or at least I could. Did I hold myself to a higher standard of behavior with babies because babies are the same species and thus compel allegiance? Or was it simply greater love for the babies? I do not think greater love, though it surely existed, is the answer. Great love has never held anyone to a high standard of behavior; quite the contrary. At any rate, I was kind to the cat when I felt like it and ignored him when I felt no kindness, and these alternations were arbitrary.
Maybe not totally arbitrary. The moods of moody people do have causes, knotty but not beyond unraveling, should we care to unravel. Mine, at this stage, had nothing to do with the cat. They were strangely arbitrary. And when the cat seemed puzzled or dismayed at my arbitrariness I didn’t care, as I would have with a baby; I would have cared what a baby thought of me, aside from caring for the baby itself. Faced with a baby’s dismay I would have mustered a show of congeniality. With the cat I rarely made such efforts.
At first I was playful with the cat, and it loved to play. After a while I noticed that while I didn’t mind having him curl up warm against my body, I no longer was inclined to play. I ought to play, I thought: the cat needed, or was entitled to, or at least would have enjoyed, play. But for various reasons, I no longer felt playful, and after some moral struggle, I decided I need not force myself to play with the cat as I surely would have done with a baby, who needs play for its civilized future.
So this cat would have to do without much play. He would be an infrequently played-with cat, and if his mood became somber in consequence, like mine, so be it. Failure to play was not mistreatment. Anyway, the cat would never tell.
If I was not obliged to play with him, I was even less obliged to sleep with him. Yet when he took to sleeping in my bed at night I liked feeling his ripply warmth nearby. I could even imagine myself a great-hearted cat lover, which I knew I was not. When he walked up my back and pawed at my face, though, I had no qualms about pushing him away. Qualms arose when he settled in the precise place at the end of the bed where I wanted to move my feet. The cat could not be faulted, yet my feet longed for that very spot. Why not just shove him over? The cat was sleeping. I have a keen reverence for sleepers; they seem so trusting and vulnerable, so touchingly benign in a near-sacred way, that I hate to disturb them. Still, it seemed overly scrupulous to sacrifice the comfort of my feet merely to avoid disturbing a cat, especially when in all likelihood he would promptly fall back asleep. On the other hand, who was I in the hierarchy of creatures, and of what importance were my feet, that this minuscule comfort should take precedence over the cat’s sacred sleep? Wakeful and distracted, I pondered whether the need to move my feet might be born of a perverse, unconscious urge to cross the cat. No, I thought not. At last, overcome by the absurdity of self-denial, I would nudge him over. He looked innocently aggrieved and sometimes went away altogether. I wished I could explain and persuade him to return, only not to that precise spot. And his catty inability to grasp this explanation was frustrating and came between us.
Cat lovers say cats are a comfort, but I rarely found this to be so. Though his warmth at my side was pleasant, like a living pillow, the cat did not relieve loneliness or grief or frustration. Nor was he company; his cat silence, his very inability to tell, which conferred such freedom, was a drawback when it came to being company. The cat was more a burden than a comfort. As cat lovers are always saying, cats require little in the way of physical care, far less than infants. The burden was not physical care. The burden of the cat was its presence. It was there, inexorably, and as such demanded a response, whether attention or indifference. Even ignoring a fellow creature requires effort, and for the conscientious and scrupulous, possibly more effort than attention. But I made this effort. Now and then I regretted my inattentiveness and tried to make amends, treating the cat as I treat people, following the moral imperative that the needs of others have some claim on us, as we strive to believe. But only now and then, in an arbitrary way.
Physical care aside, the cat was a burden as infants are burdens and not company, except with infants we bear the burden as an investment in expectation of future returns: a baby will grow to be company, a comfort, while a cat, though it ages and endures, never outgrows catness. Besides, we are responsible for raising the babies, not only for their future good but for our own, since if we do not raise them properly, they will continue to be a burden. Also, people will readily see we have not raised our babies properly. Would people censure a cat’s behavior and judge us to be poor cat raisers? I think not. The cat would be thought to have a bad nature. We would claim we had made every effort to raise it properly but its bad nature defeated our efforts. This excuse, rightly or wrongly, would not work with a child. The parents are held responsible. Nurture is more in vogue than nature.
Once, as I tried to nudge the cat off my desk—for he had the habit of leaping up to sit on my spread-out papers, a habit that was cute once or twice but soon palled—he slipped and landed not on his feet, as I had heard cats always do, but on his back. He looked stunned and distressed. I was distressed too, not only because I had had no intention of hurting him, but also because if he were maimed for life, I might be suspected of cruelty or violence. True, the cat could not tell—even if he could, my nudge had been gentle, not violent—but the vet might harbor suspicion. Mistakenly. Luckily, after a tense moment the cat rose and sauntered away.
On a few occasions I spoke harshly to the cat, but speaking harshly did not give the relief—often a false relief—that speaking harshly to a person might have given. In a moment of pique, I even smacked him lightly. And once, when the cat persisted in climbing on the kitchen counter, pawing and sniffing at food, knocking over containers, I screamed loudly, Get away. Get away! Twice, and louder than I had screamed at anyone or anything in years. My scream must have expressed a resentment stored up for some time, all the time I was learning the fabled mysteries of catness, a dormant resentment ready to spring awake and pounce. Maybe I had gained a measure of self-control since my screaming days, or maybe I grasped, even in my rage, that screaming would do no good: the cat could not understand a surge of bilious words as children would have done. Though now that I think of it, maybe they hadn’t understood either, back then. Anyhow, no satisfaction could be gotten from scolding the cat, not that there is ever much satisfaction in scolding anyone, and somehow the opaque catness of the cat, the way it slunk away as if ashamed not of itself but of me, made that very clear.
I grasped that the presence of any living creature would be a burden to me, except maybe a plant. The least burdened state would be solitude, where I could indulge every arbitrary mood without the slightest thought for its effect on others. But solitude too has its burdens and demands. There is really no easy way to be conscious; that must be why I revere sleep.
I was cool toward the cat after the kitchen counter incident. Not cruel, only cool, again indulging my nature with all its moods. The cat would never tell. The cat might even be seen as practice for indulging my moods in society, for not straining to offer more in the way of kindness or encouragement than I am inclined to give. Cat therapy. I was almost afraid to envision how I might behave with people, were I to master too well the lessons of being with the cat. I would rarely consider how others felt or what they needed, until I was abandoned by everyone, left all alone to indulge my arbitrary moods.
After a day or so, I decided this coolness was unworthy of me. The cat was just a cat; it could not help climbing on the counter. (Or could it? Was it purposely provoking me? This is one of the unplumbed mysteries of catness.) It had no moral nature and apparently did not learn from experience; its feelings could be hurt, yes, but it was unwilling or unable to behave well in order to avoid having its feelings hurt. I had no illusion that cause and effect were operative, that shouting would deter him from pawing at food; I did not credit the cat with that much logic or self-control. Even babies do not have that much logic or self-control, though we tend to forget this when rearing them. Anyhow, the cat need not be prepared to get on in life. There were no crucial or obligatory lessons. Treating it well was in no way an investment in the future.
Treating the cat well was a gratuitous act. Living with the cat was living in an eternal present—no history, no patient shaping of connection through accommodation, nor any call for anger or forgiveness. The cat was a cat. I might as well end my coolness and give him the affection he craved. But I felt constrained giving affection I didn’t feel, reasoned affection, so I waited a day or so until my annoyance dissipated and I could give affection in good faith, and we resumed our life in the eternal present.
In the end, I liked the cat best when he sat quietly on my lap and consented to being stroked. But while seemingly contented, he would abruptly leap up to pursue his mysterious business, as arbitrary in his way as I was in mine. Maybe he didn’t like me at all, only used me as a provider of food and strokes. (Or as a mirror?) He must like me a bit, I thought. Probably he both liked me and used me, in very human fashion. We may love others, but they are useful all the same as providers, and it is wisest for both user and used not to measure comparative degrees of love and utility.
I remembered I loved my infants with most ease when they too lay docile on my lap, showing no will and making no abrupt movements. They were safe. Passive receptacles for my affection. I was safe. As soon as they stirred, perhaps to demand of me something unknown, I would feel a faint irritation that only years later I recognized as the mask of panic. As soon as a creature shows itself distinct and self-willed, it begins to determine and shape the nature of the love it seeks. And in turn, the love you give becomes something not entirely of your own shaping and thus dangerous. Was I unable, then, to love anything that had its own being; could I love only an utterly passive creature? If so, my love was arbitrary and self-serving, not so much love of something distinct from me as love of my own act of loving, which is easy, natural and demands nothing. Self-love.
The cat was becoming a fun-house mirror, alarming me with its unlovely distortions. I turned away. His usefulness was finished. Even so, when our sojourn was over, I missed the cat from the heart. I study photographs of him. In the photographs, there are no reflections of me. I see only the cat himself, large, orange and beautiful. At last, with him far away and requiring nothing, I can revel in his beauty.