Homer's Odyssey

by Gwen Cooper

  Laurence and I had innumerable quibbles during the first year we dated, but only one knock-down, drag-out fight—and that was over the cats. “Do there have to be three of them?” he asked one day, about six months into our new relationship—and he couldn’t have precisely worded a question more likely to turn me cold and unyielding as a lake that had frozen over. “I don’t know if I can live with three cats.”

  “Well, there are three cats,” I replied. “There have always been three cats, and there will always be three cats. If you’re having any Sophie’s Choice delusions, I suggest you forget them.”

  It was and remains the only moment when I was halfway convinced that Laurence and I, as a couple, were a failed experiment. It wasn’t learning that Laurence didn’t like cats—I’d always known Laurence didn’t like cats (although, Laurence indignantly insisted, it wasn’t that he “didn’t like” cats; it was just that he did like dogs). But I felt that nobody could truly love me—could profess to care about my happiness—and even consider subjecting me to the wholly unbearable pain of … what, exactly? Deciding which of my cats I loved least and sending him or her to live with strangers? Or to a shelter? While I could understand someone’s not wanting to live with three cats, it struck me as the kind of thing that—having known me well for three full years before we were a couple—Laurence should have thought about far earlier than this. Had I walked into Laurence’s apartment and found him in bed with another woman, I couldn’t have been more convinced that I had been completely—completely— miles wide of the mark in my assessment of his character.

  Deep down, ever since the day I’d first considered adopting Homer, I’d been waiting for the moment when a promising relationship would fall through because the man in question was unwilling to live with three cats. I’d always known it would happen, and the only surprising thing was that it had taken so long.

  Laurence and I fought for hours, until finally we arrived at the crux of what he really meant. “You always stay at my place,” he said. “You’ve never once let me into your apartment. Maybe there’s something so horrible about living with three cats, you don’t want me to see it. Or maybe you’re not ready to let me into your life.”

  Well, he had me there. It was true that I’d never invited Laurence into my home. Before we were dating, there had been no imperative reason to do so. Now that we were a couple, I was too anxious about our relationship to make any mistakes—and I was terrified that if the four of them met and didn’t like each other, I might lose Laurence. But my clever plan of avoiding this scenario by keeping everybody separated had obviously backfired. I could understand why Laurence found it difficult to believe I was serious about spending the rest of my life with him, when I wouldn’t even let him spend the night with me in my own home.

  So we arranged for an overnight visit, and it couldn’t have gone worse. Scarlett had sprained her leg that morning due to an overly enthusiastic leap, and limped away from the newcomer in an even surlier fashion than usual. He’ll think I’m running a halfway house for blind and lame cats, I thought. Vashti peed in Laurence’s overnight bag. Homer had gotten used to a life without doors—the only door in my apartment was to the bathroom, and I always kept that open. When Laurence went in to use the bathroom, closing the door behind him, Homer sat at the door and wailed, crouching down to slide one leg, all the way up to his shoulder, into the crack between the door and the floor. The visual of Homer’s disembodied leg and outstretched claw reaching for him beneath the bathroom door was, as Laurence reported, “terrifying.”

  “Are you guys trying to make my life harder?” I asked them in despair after Laurence had left the next morning. “Couldn’t you pull it together for one night?” Their only response was to descend upon me in a happy, purring heap. Thank God that guy’s gone.

  Still, I think it worked out for the best—insofar as Laurence was now convinced that I must love these pain-in-the-neck creatures beyond all reason if I was willing to put up with them. His philosophy after that night was that he loved me, and I loved the cats, so therefore … well, he probably couldn’t love them, but he would try to tolerate them.

  LAURENCE HADN’T LIVED with a pet of any kind since he’d graduated high school (his parents had had a dog). He had, however, occasionally taken care of Minou, his landlord’s cat, while his landlord was out of town. Minou was closing in on twenty years of age and, as Laurence’s landlord proudly insisted, had lived so long because he was too mean to die.

  Minou was not a social cat. Sometimes, when staying with Laurence, he would jump onto the computer keyboard while Laurence was writing (I felt that my own novel was coauthored by Homer, so frequently was he perched on my left knee as I wrote it), but other than that Minou kept mostly to himself. Laurence would say that at times he forgot there was a cat in the apartment.

  The chief difficulty in living with three cats, as Laurence was at frequent pains to explain to me once the four of us had moved in, was that there was always a cat there. I had come to take my cats’ omnipresence for granted—nor would I have wanted it any other way; why have pets if they weren’t around? It’s true, though, that despite how large Laurence’s apartment was—larger than any home the four of us had lived in together for quite some time—there was never a moment when Laurence and I were alone. At least one cat was always somewhere close by.

  Nobody had an easy time adjusting at first, although Scarlett took the most straightforward approach. Scarlett had an idea that there were two types of living beings in the world. There was Mommy—who dispensed food, love, and occasional discipline—and then there were other cats. As far as Scarlett was concerned, she was the eldest cat in the household and her authority over the other cats was absolute. Laurence might be a bigger cat than most, but he was still just a cat, and since—Scarlett could only assume—it was he who had moved into our home, it fell upon her to clarify Laurence’s limits regarding everything from where he was permitted to sit, to how close to her he was permitted to walk. That he was not permitted to touch her, or approach her directly, went without saying.

  Now Scarlett’s favorite method of enforcing discipline in the ranks had always been an angry swipe of her claw. If Laurence was walking down the hallway and got too close to her, she swiped at him with her claw. If she was lying in the hallway and Laurence attempted to step over her, she swiped at him with her claw. If she was sitting on the ledge of the couch behind my head and Laurence sat down next to me, inadvertently brushing against her, she swiped at him with her claw.

  It would have been galling enough to Laurence that he was suddenly made to feel like an intruder in the home he’d occupied for two decades. But being slashed at by an aggressive pet is also viscerally upsetting. And it was downright scary to stumble down a pitch-black hallway in the middle of the night and feel invisible “talons,” as Laurence insisted on calling them, rake the skin of your leg. Knowing how much bigger you are than the pet means nothing when you also know—as Laurence did—that you’re unwilling to risk inflicting injury. What was he going to do, I’m sure he asked himself more than once, fight her?

  I did my best to intercede, but cats are notoriously hard to discipline and Scarlett was no different. It wasn’t as if spanking her with a rolled-up newspaper would have any effect, the way it might with a dog. Such a course of action would only have made Scarlett more hostile and aggressive—even if I’d been willing to try it, which I wasn’t.

  Laurence, having grown up with a dog who was spanked when she was “bad,” took this to mean that I wasn’t trying to remedy the situation at all. This wasn’t true, though. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make life with Scarlett bearable for Laurence—and if it took longer than I would have liked to arrive at a solution, it was only because I’d never been in this particular situation. I’d lived with Melissa and then with my parents during Scarlett’s pre-cuddling days, when she was content to hide if I wasn’t in the house by myself. Now Scarlett wanted to be with me all the time; she just
wished everybody else would clear out and leave her alone while she did so.

  The only place where Laurence could be sure of respite from Scarlett and her claws was in our bedroom; Laurence had insisted the bedroom remain “a cat-free zone.” He said he didn’t want cat fur on the bed, and I’m sure this was true (I, for one, had always been grateful that only Homer slept under the covers, meaning fur accumulated on top of the blankets but nowhere else), but I’m also sure that he didn’t relish the idea of fighting with three cats to claim a spot next to me at night. It was a fair compromise, yet the sudden banishment of the cats from my bed, each of whom had slept in bed with me for at least part of every night of their entire lives, caused more separation anxieties on all sides than I could have foreseen.

  Scarlett resented her exclusion, and made her resentment known. She would sit at the bedroom door and meow loudly as soon as I went in at night and, when it wasn’t opened promptly, she would slip one paw beneath the door and rattle it almost angrily. Open this door! Open it NOW! I think the idea of a room with no other cats—where she could have me all to herself—was Scarlett’s idea of Nirvana. Here was an opportunity to relive the glorious days of her youth, when she’d been an only child, if only someone would hurry up and let her in! No matter how much I tried to shoo her away, or how often Laurence roared, “Enough already!” Scarlett refused to be deterred or consoled. Her incessant meows at the bedroom door were driving Laurence even crazier than her constant swipes at him.

  The solution I finally devised solved both problems at once. Laurence usually stayed up several hours later than I did, and he began to feed the cats a small can of food late at night after I went to bed. In the first place, the food distracted Scarlett from crying at the bedroom door. By the time she finished eating she seemed to have forgotten that I had left her, and she would curl up on the living room rug or in one of the closets she liked, contentedly purring herself to sleep.

  And once Laurence began feeding the cats, Scarlett seemed to understand that he was definitively not another cat, and was to be considered in the same general category that I was. In her own way, she came to respect him. I can’t quite say that they bonded, but her philosophy seemed to be, I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, but I will accept your food and leave you alone. She seemed to think Laurence should be grateful that she’d conceded this much and, as any cat owner will tell you, he really ought to have been.

  Homer was, of course, as different from Scarlett as a cat could be, and had always been willing to make a friend of any new person. But for the first time in recorded history he was afraid of someone—and that someone was Laurence.

  I think, in part, this was due to Laurence’s loud, powerful baritone. One of the things I loved most about Laurence was his voice, but it must have sounded like the booming voice of God to Homer, whose hearing was so much more sensitive than any of the rest of ours.

  Laurence was also the first person to have spent significant time with Homer without going out of his way to make friends. Everybody wanted to be friends with the “poor little” blind cat. Laurence was the only person I’d ever brought into my life who was willing to accept the cats on whatever terms they offered, but who refused to offer any terms himself. By this I mean, for example, that Laurence didn’t crouch down on all fours to get to know Homer on his own level, didn’t try to create games the two of them could play together or request the formal “introduction” that Homer required before he felt comfortable letting a new person pet him. Laurence didn’t care whether he petted Homer or not. If Homer had wanted to be petted, Laurence would have been happy to do so, but if Homer wanted to be left alone, that was fine with Laurence, too.

  This was actually a quality I appreciated in Laurence. He felt no need to prove to himself, or to me, or to anybody else, that he was a good person because he’d forged a “special” bond with my “special” cat. Laurence didn’t even really think of Homer as being blind; once he saw the ease and energy with which Homer got around, he accepted it as a given that Homer was essentially the same as any other cat. Laurence, in fact, was the first and only person who ever did the one thing I always claimed I wanted everybody to do—he treated Homer, automatically, as if he were normal.

  Homer, however, was at a loss to account for the behavior of a person who didn’t go out of his way to befriend him. Homer thought people existed for the sole purpose of playing with him, and must have felt that a person who didn’t do so could only regard him with hostility. Consequently, those first few months, he fled in terror whenever Laurence approached. It cut me to the heart to see Homer—brave, irrepressible Homer—finally fearful of something after all these years.

  Perhaps the only time Homer wasn’t afraid of Laurence was when Laurence was in the kitchen. Laurence and Homer shared a similar passion for sliced deli turkey, and whenever Homer heard Laurence open the refrigerator to pull out sandwich fixings, he’d race over from wherever he was in the apartment—his fear of Laurence momentarily dispelled. He would sink his claws into Laurence’s pant leg and climb it like a rope ladder up to the kitchen counter, where he would burrow his entire head into the waxed paper containing the turkey, trying desperately to snag himself a morsel.

  Laurence was afraid to pry Homer off his leg, and equally afraid to lift Homer from the counter or push him off, which meant that Homer frequently ended up with more turkey than Laurence did. It got to the point that when Laurence wanted to make a sandwich, he would first run the faucet in the kitchen sink at full blast, using the sound to conceal the opening of the refrigerator, then sneak turkey and bread into his bathroom, close the bathroom door, and run the sink in there. It was an elaborate, and successful, way of keeping Homer out of the turkey, but it was hardly an enjoyable way to prepare a sandwich.

  “This is no way to live,” Laurence said once.

  No, it wasn’t. But Laurence was a grown man, and Homer knew the word no, and I saw no logical reason for all these shenanigans. “Homer is perfectly aware of what the word no means,” I told Laurence, “and you need to get used to saying it.” Then I added, “It’s just as frustrating for Homer as it is for you. He doesn’t understand why you’re not saying no, but also not giving him any turkey.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t know Homer was wrong. Of course Homer was wrong, and my not-to-be-argued-with “No! No, Homer!” brought him to heel on numerous occasions. But I couldn’t be there all the time. Laurence and the cats, to a certain extent, would have to work things out on their own.

  Nevertheless, there were days when I felt so guilty about the whole thing that I didn’t know what to do. Nobody was happy—not the cats, not Laurence, and certainly not me, the cause of everybody’s unhappiness. “You and Laurence love each other,” Andrea would say when I called for advice. “Yeah, it sucks that it’s hard for him and the cats right now, but what are you going to do? They all just need a minute to get used to each other. Laurence would still rather live with you than without you.”

  Maybe. Some days, I wasn’t so sure.

  Alas, turkey was merely the tip of the adjustment iceberg. Homer was as “talkative” as ever—still far and away the most verbal of my cats—and, whenever he was awake, he was engaged in a running conversation with me. He still had his Let’s play! meows, his It sure has been a long time since I had any tuna meows, his Why aren’t you paying attention to me? meows. “What is with that cat?” Laurence would ask in exasperation, having rewound for the third time whatever movie he was watching because he’d missed several minutes of dialogue.

  Homer’s silences, on the other hand, were nearly as troublesome. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Laurence would get up to use the bathroom, stumbling with his eyes half closed down a hallway he could have navigated blindfolded, so familiar was it. Yet now, I was almost always sure to hear the hard thud of Laurence’s shoulder hitting a wall, followed by a loud exclamation of “Dammit!” and the startled clip-clip-clip of Homer’s paws scuttling down the hallway. Homer liked t
o sleep in the hall, and it never occurred to him to alert Laurence to his presence by meowing. But Homer was invisible in the dark, and Laurence constantly tripped over him late at night. This disturbed Homer to no end. Homer didn’t know the difference between a hallway flooded with daylight and a hallway shadowed late at night. He only knew that sometimes Laurence tripped over him and sometimes he didn’t, for reasons that were mysterious and impossible to predict. Laurence’s “kicks” (of course he never meant to kick Homer) and yelling could only confirm what Homer already suspected—that Laurence didn’t like him. Laurence was convinced that Homer slept in the hallway, where he must have known Laurence was sure to trip over him, out of pure stubbornness. I bought a few night-lights for the hallway, which seemed to help, but the truce I effected in this way was wary at best.

  Despite his shyness in Laurence’s presence, however, Homer was as mischievous as he’d ever been, and Laurence’s home provided him with endless adventure. Homer loved nothing more than creating chaos from order, and there was so much more for him to climb and explore here than there’d been in the studio apartment we’d lived in for so long. Laurence and I found it impossible to keep Homer from scaling bookcases or the entertainment center, throwing mounds of books and DVDs onto the floor from their original homes on neatly arranged shelves. He was especially merciless when it came to Laurence’s closets, whose boxes of newspapers, photographs, posters, matchboxes, letters from friends overseas, and the carefully preserved effluvia of forty years drew Homer like a siren song. Laurence had discarded a great deal of his … junk … to make room for me when I moved in. Still, a mind-boggling quantity of it remained. There was so much stuff to play with here! How had Homer ever lived a happy and complete life without having this much stuff!