by Gwen Cooper
Under more benign circumstances, I would have been deeply offended by the look of horror that broke over the burglar’s own face when he realized what it was.
Homer may have been alarmed at how rigid my body had become, or perhaps by the fact that I was awake, yet not speaking to him in my usual reassuring tones. His growl rose drastically in both volume and pitch.
Some cats growl and bristle as a way of avoiding a fight, slowly backing up while maintaining an intimidating posture in the hope their adversary will back down first. But Homer wasn’t backing up. With a slow precision I instantly recognized from all those failed attempts at stalking Scarlett, Homer was creeping forward, toward the intruder.
It’s going to sound foolish (keep in mind that, about five seconds earlier, I’d been deeply asleep), but for a split second I was worried for the burglar’s safety. It was simply my first, unthinking instinct when faced with an aggressive pet squaring off against somebody in my home. If anybody had asked me half an hour earlier, I would have told them that Homer would never attack anybody in my presence, that—even if for some impossible-to-imagine reason, Homer took it into his head to depart from his general friendliness toward everybody he met—the sound of my command “No!” would have stopped him instantly. Homer was a troublemaker and a daredevil, but he never disobeyed me outright. I knew this for an absolute, positive fact. It was one of the cornerstones of the relationship I had with him, one of the fundamental things, aside from his blindness, that set Homer apart from other cats.
In that moment, though, I knew—knew—that if Homer indeed decided to attack this man, I wouldn’t be able to stop him. The snarling, furious animal on my bed was a cat I’d never seen, didn’t know, had absolutely no control over. The only question was how clawed up and bloodied the burglar, or I, or both of us, would get in the process of my subduing him.
It had been only a matter of seconds since I’d first switched on the lamp, and now my next move seemed so painfully obvious, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already doing it.
I picked up the phone next to my bed to dial 911.
“Don’t do that,” the man said, speaking for the first time.
I hesitated for the briefest instant, and then I looked over at Homer. Do what he’s doing, a voice in my head urged. Act bigger than you really are.
“Fuck off,” I said to the man, and I made the call.
Then a lot of things happened at once. The 911 operator answered and I told her, “There’s somebody in my apartment!”
“There’s somebody in your apartment?” she repeated.
“Yes, there’s somebody in my apartment!”
Homer, meantime, had finally galvanized into action. He might not have understood relative size, he might not have realized how very much smaller he was than this man standing menacingly over the bed, but if there was one thing Homer did understand it was pinpointing a location based on sound.
The intruder, in speaking, had let Homer know precisely where he was.
With a loud hiss that bared his fangs (prior to this, I’d always thought of them as “teeth”), Homer thrust the whole weight of his body forward and brought his right front leg into the air, stretching it up and out so far that it looked, bizarrely, as if the bone connecting his leg to his shoulder had come out of its socket, held in place only by muscle and tendons. His claws extended even farther (good God—how long were those claws?). Glinting like scythes in the lamplight, they slashed viciously at the man’s face.
Homer missed by the merest fraction of an inch—and only because the man had reflexively snapped his head back.
“Okay, ma’am, I’m dispatching officers now,” the 911 operator said. “Stay on the phone …”
I never heard the rest of her instructions, however, because at that point the intruder turned and ran. Homer, his tail still bolt upright, leapt from the bed and raced after him.
“HOMER!” My shriek was unlike anything I’d ever heard coming out of my own mouth. It tore the inside of my throat till it felt bloody. “HOMER, NO!”
I threw down the phone and ran after them.
Like two competing runners panting toward a finish line, two separate and distinct fears vied for prominence in my head. The first was that Homer might actually catch up to the intruder. Who knew what that man would do if he saw Homer’s talons coming at him a second time?
I was also terrified that Homer might chase the burglar out the front door and into the long, labyrinthine corridors of my apartment complex—and, unable to see his way back home, be lost to me forever. As this picture played vividly in my imagination, I was shocked to realize how deep-seated it was, how a fear of Homer’s getting lost had always lain in the background of my thoughts, coiled and silent but ready to spring up and bite me at a moment’s notice.
Homer had made it out the front door and about six feet into the hallway before I caught up with him. Looking around—to make sure neither of the other cats had gotten out as much as to confirm that the burglar was gone—I saw the emergency exit door at the far end of the corridor swinging closed.
I scooped Homer up in one hand. The staccato pounding of his heart alarmed me, although my own chest cavity felt molten, as if it were full of liquid fire. Homer resisted mightily, flailing out his front claws at random and catching the skin inside my forearm with his back claws, raising a trail of angry red welts. It wasn’t until I’d reentered the apartment, slamming the locks shut behind me and throwing Homer roughly to the ground, that he seemed to come back to himself.
“When I say no I mean no, god dammit!” I screamed. “You’re a bad cat, Homer! A bad, bad cat!”
Homer was panting heavily, his rib cage expanding and shrinking in rapid succession. I saw him take a deep breath, and he cocked his head slightly to one side.
One of the things about Homer that always clutched at my heart was the way it seemed like he really tried to understand me when I talked to him. Like right now, as he tilted his face up toward the sound of my voice, struggling to make sense of my yelling. On the one hand, every instinct in his body told him he had just done the exact right thing: There had been a threat, and he had defended his territory and chased the threat off. What could be wrong about that?
But here was Mommy, yelling at him as he’d never been yelled at before, obviously of the opinion that what he’d just done was very, very wrong. So which of us was right?
Homer didn’t creep toward me apologetically the way he usually did when I was angry. He just sat there on his haunches, his tail curled lightly around his front paws like ancient Egyptian statues I’d seen of the cats who guarded temples.
I found myself remembering a scene from the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. A ragged group of peasants had just done battle with Fascist soldiers in a Spanish Civil War skirmish, and had suffered grievous losses. Among the dead was the loyal horse of an elderly farmer who’d joined in the fight. Kneeling over the body of the fallen horse, the farmer whispered in his ear, “Eras mucho caballo,” which Hemingway had translated as: Thou wert plenty of horse.
It was a line that always stuck with me, because it was a single sentence that had seemed, to me, to contain multitudes. What the farmer was saying was that this horse had been a horse beyond all other horses, a horse who had fought like a man and died like a hero. For sheer valor, he was worth an entire herd of horses, so much horse that the body of a single horse had been barely sufficient to contain him.
Homer looked even smaller than usual as he sat there, his head still bent to one side as his fur sank quietly back into its normal patterns.
Such a little boy, I thought. He’s such a tiny boy!
“Oh, Homer,” I said, and my voice was ragged. I knelt down and rubbed him behind the ears. He purred softly in response. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m so sorry, little guy.”
There was a sharp rap at the door, followed by an extremely welcome: “Police!”
“I’m okay!” I called back. “I’m coming.”
&nbs
p; I picked Homer up again. Homer loved to cuddle, but he hated to be picked up and would squirm and wriggle in a desperate attempt to regain the ground. Now, though, he rested quietly in my arms. I buried my face in the fur of his neck.
“Eres mucho gato, Homer,” I whispered. Thou art plenty of cat.
I placed him gently back on his own legs.
15 • My Homer/ My Self
A second ago you were all in rags, and now you are like some god come down from heaven.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
LIGHT TRAVELS AT 186,000 MILES PER SECOND, BUT SLOWS TO ABOUT two-thirds of that speed when it hits the lens of your eye. If this didn’t happen we would be functionally blind, unable to distinguish more than shadows interspersed with vague patches of brightness. It’s this slowing down that allows our brains to interpret and relay back to us what light reveals. But our minds go even further, imposing logic and regularity, smoothing over distortions and filling in the occasional gaps that open in our visual field. It’s the reason why, for example, an object traveling almost too fast for our eyes to follow is seen as a blur. The object isn’t really a blur; the blur is simply our minds’ way of creating order where otherwise there would be confusion.
The lesson here, I suppose, is that what we think we see isn’t precisely the way things are in the objective reality that exists outside our own heads. Or, to put it more simply, things aren’t always what they appear.
I wandered around in a kind of shock for days after the break-in. (I could have died, I told myself repeatedly. I could have been raped and murdered and died!) Nothing looked or felt or sounded the way it should. Music was too jarring; sunlight grated on me like sandpaper with its too-brightness. But silence and darkness squeezed the breath out of me with the terrors they held. Familiar things offended me by pretending to be ordinary when nothing, clearly, could be taken for what it seemed. My home was not the safe haven a home was supposed to be, and unknown horrors skulked beneath the surface of everything.
Homer returned to his customary cheerfulness far more quickly than I did. By the next morning—as red-eyed a sunrise as I’d ever stayed up to witness—his attitude about the incident seemed to be, Boy, that was weird, huh? Let’s play fetch! It was as if the fierce defender he’d morphed into so breathtakingly and unexpectedly had been merely a trick of the eye. I found myself calling just about everyone I knew and telling them about what Homer did, not so much to brag about him (although bragging certainly seemed warranted) but because I felt the need to cement a memory that was hard to maintain in light of Homer’s unruffled complacency a mere five hours later.
Most of us with pets come to feel eventually that we know everything about them—that we can predict with near certainty what they’ll do or how they’ll react in any given situation. My father had famously walked some of our dogs without a leash on occasion because, “Tippi will always stop when I say no,” or, “Penny would never run away from my side.”
But my father, who understood pets better than anybody, was also always the first to say that a pet was an animal first and foremost, and that with animals—as with people—there was always room for the unpredictable.
I had thought that I knew Homer as well as my father knew our dogs. If Homer nosed around an empty tuna can—sniffing it, turning it upside down, digging inside it with his front paws in a frustrated manner—I would say to an observer, “He doesn’t understand how something can smell so strongly of tuna and not be tuna.”
I’ve already noted that Homer slept with me every night, falling asleep precisely when I did and sleeping for exactly as long as I slept. But it was more than that. When I ate, Homer trotted off to his food bowl. When I was in an especially good mood, Homer ran zanily around the apartment, his cartwheels and caperings the physical manifestation of what I was feeling. If I was sad, Homer curled in a tight little ball in my lap and couldn’t be persuaded out of his funk even when presented with a favorite toy or a fresh can of tuna. When I walked from room to room, Homer might charge in front of me or lope behind me or weave in and out of my legs. But the rhythms of our steps had so completely adjusted themselves to the other’s that neither of us ever missed a beat, never faltered, never tripped the other one up. I could walk down an unlit hallway with Homer darting around my feet and, without being able to see him, never come close to stumbling or falling over him.
But Homer was also clearly capable of things—courageous, extraordinary, heroic things—that none of us could have predicted when I’d first adopted him as a helpless blind kitten, or that even I could have predicted now, having spent three years with him. I was proud of him. How could I not be? I had always been the one to insist that Homer was just as “normal” as any other cat. But this was something else altogether. Regarding him as heroic rather than blind or even ordinary required a slight adjustment in my thinking.
A long-married friend, on the eve of my own wedding years later, would tell me, “Never forget—you’re still going to bed with a stranger every night.” By then, though, this was something I had known for a while. It was the second important lesson about adult relationships that Homer taught me.
They never did catch the man who broke into our apartment. A police report was filed and I went down to the Miami Beach Police Department to look through their big book of mug shots. I saw a couple of pictures that might have resembled my burglar, but I was afraid to identify anybody. Whenever I remembered that night, the only thing I saw in my mind’s eye was Homer; there was no way I would have sworn in court that anybody I picked out of a lineup or a mug-shot book was the right man.
Still, it was weeks before I could sleep. But where my fear and outrage stayed with me, those feelings on Homer’s part had clearly been the work of a night. Homer slept like a baby next to me on those long, sleepless nights, while my eyes popped open at every wisp of sound.
I had always envisioned myself as being the one who would make the world intelligible for Homer. I would be the eyes he didn’t have, the one who would soothe his fears in the dark. But Homer was far more comfortable in darkness, in the world of random sound, than I was. I’ll admit that, in the aftermath of the break-in, it was I who felt safer knowing Homer was sleeping next to me.
It occurred to me as I lay there, battling my newfound insomnia, that what I had always taken to be Homer’s fearlessness despite his blindness was perhaps the opposite. Homer had known there were things to fear in the dark; he wouldn’t have reacted so aggressively if he hadn’t known there was cause to be afraid. But what could you do with that fear? You had to live your life, didn’t you? Where another cat might have spent his life hiding and hissing, forever anticipating dangers that might or might not be there, Homer simply went about his business, confident on some instinctive level that he could deal with threats if and when they arose.
I didn’t tell my parents about the break-in. There was nothing they could do after the fact, I reasoned, other than worry—and if I was having trouble sleeping, who knew how long it would be before my mother was able to close her eyes again? But Homer was made much of in the following days by our friends. “No way!” they said. “No. Freaking. Way!” They, too, looked at Homer as if they’d never seen him before. He was our Daredevil, our real-life superhero, although he probably never connected his bravery of that night with the endless cans of tuna, pounds of sliced turkey, and tubs of inexpensive caviar (which he chewed so thoughtfully—intrigued by its fishy smell but unfamiliar with its texture) that he received. Scarlett and Vashti, who were given their share of this bounty, also seemed to accept it unquestioningly, content to enjoy the goods the gods had seen fit to provide.
I think the thing that drove me craziest was wondering why? Why me, why my apartment? The most maddening thing to accept is that there usually isn’t a why. Or there probably is—because effects have causes—but you’ll never know what it was. Not knowing makes it impossible to avoid having the exact same thing happen again. But it’s also liberating. The world could be dang
erous and bad things sometimes happened, but there was nothing you could do except live your life. And it would be foolish if, in the process of living it, you didn’t also enjoy it.
Homer, in his own way, had known this all along.
In the end, after the shock and the fear and the anger had subsided—when Homer was once again an ordinary cat who loved rubber bands and organized daring raids on bookcases and pantry shelves—I was left with two things. I realized I had succeeded in “raising” Homer as I had long ago resolved to. Homer was, indeed, brave and independent, uncrippled by self-doubt. I had been emphatic in insisting that Homer could take care of himself—just like any other cat. And so he could. He had proven that, under the right circumstances, he could take care of me as well.
And I was also left with a gratitude so profound and solid that it was like a third living presence in whatever room Homer and I were in together. In the dark hours of four or five AM, when even a town like South Beach had quieted down for the night, thoughts of how that other night could have ended rose like a wave to drag me under. My eyes would well with tears, and I would pull Homer closer to me, murmuring, “Thank God for you. Thank God for you, little cat!”
Homer may have surprised me, but there was no denying this new, deeper symmetry between us. Once upon a time, I had saved Homer’s life. And now, years later, he had saved mine.
16 • Cats and the Single Girl
The sons of all the chief men among you are pestering my mother to marry you against her will.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
PRIOR TO THE BREAK-IN, I HAD BEEN ON EXACTLY ONE DATE WHERE THE man in question made it past the front door of my apartment and into the apartment itself. He’d arrived on a Thursday evening to pick me up, and I’d invited him inside for a drink before we set out. I went into the kitchen to mix us some cocktails. When I came back into the living room, I found Homer trapped in a corner by my date, who was standing in front of Homer and hissing loudly at him. There was a wild, terrified look on Homer’s face as his ears turned rapidly back and forth, as if he was trying to hear his way into an escape route.