by Tim Kreider
II. One way to resolve this contradiction is through “optimal similarity,” finding a mate in the Goldilocks zone: similar enough to feel safe, but different enough to be interesting. Which is one reason why, in much of the world, people marry distant cousins.
III. K. M. Kendrick, E. B. Keverne, B. A. Baldwin, “Intracerebroventricular Oxytocin Stimulates Maternal Behaviour in the Sheep.” Neuroendocrinology 46, no. 1 (June 1987): 56–61.
IV. John C. Wingfield, “Androgens and Mating Systems: Testosterone-Induced Polygyny in Normally Monogamous Birds.” Auk 101, no. 4 (Oct. 1984): 665–71.
V. I don’t want to descend to cheap men-versus-women generalizations here, but I will say that I don’t often hear men talk about how much fun hitting on women can be but how tedious it is getting bogged down in all that fucking.
VI. Irwin Hirsch, PhD, “Imperfect Love, Imperfect Lives: Making Love, Making Sex, Making Moral Judgments.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 8, no. 4 (2007): 355–71.
A Man and His Cat
“That cat makes no positive contribution to this household!”
—Dad, denouncing our family cat, Mow
I have lived with the same cat for the last nineteen years—by far the longest relationship of my adult life. Under common law, this cat is my wife. I fall asleep at night with the warm pleasant weight of the cat on my chest. The first thing I see on most mornings is the foreshortened paw of the cat retreating slowly from my face and her baleful crescent glare informing me that it is Cat Food Time. As I often tell her, in a mellow, resonant Barry White voice: “There is no luuve . . . like the luuve that exists . . . between a man . . . and his cat.”
The cat is jealous of my attentions; she likes to sit on whatever I am reading, walk back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in front of my laptop’s screen while I’m working, and unsubtly interpolate herself between me and any woman I may happen to have over. She and my ex-girlfriend Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized each other up as enemies, a couple of rival females after the same eligible bachelor. (I remember Kati Jo saying, with rueful respect, after the cat had successfully feigned affection as a ruse to get her claws into Kati’s cashmere sweater: “You win, you bitch.”) When I am physically intimate with a woman, the cat does not discreetly absent herself but sits on the edge of the bed facing rather pointedly away from the scene of the debauch, quietly exuding disapproval like your grandmother’s ghost.
I realize that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and often pitiful or repulsive. They post photos of their pets online, speak to them in disturbing falsettos, dress them in elaborate costumes, carry them around in handbags and BabyBjörns, and have professional photographs of them retouched to look like old master oil portraits. When people over the age of ten invite you to a cat birthday party or a funeral for a dog, you need to execute a very deft maneuver, the etiquette equivalent of an Immelmann turn, to decline without acknowledging that they are, at least in this one area, insane.
This is especially true of childless people like myself, who tend to become emotionally overinvested in their animals and dote upon them in a way that gives onlookers the willies. Often the pet seems to be a focus or joint project for a relationship that’s lost any other raison d’être, like rehabbing a house or becoming insufferable foodies or getting heavily into cosplay. Or having children. When such couples finally have a human child, their cats or dogs must be bewildered to find themselves unceremoniously demoted to the status of Pet; instead of licking the dinner plates clean and piling into bed with Mommy and Daddy, they’re given bowls of actual dog food and tied to a metal stake in a circle of dirt.
I looked up how much Americans spend on pets annually and have concluded that you do not want to know. I suppose I could tell you what I spend on my own cat’s special kidney-health cat food and kidney and thyroid medications, plus periodic blood tests that always cost $300 and come back normal, but I have never even calculated what this amounts to per year, lest I be forced to confront some uncomfortable facts about me. The implication of our mass national spending on luxury products to pamper animals who seem happiest while rolling in feces or eating the guts out of rodents—who don’t, in fact, seem significantly less happy if they lose half their limbs—is probably also something we don’t want to think about. Something so obvious it hardly needs pointing out about the epidemic loneliness of a society in which people live across the country from their families, don’t know their neighbors, fuck strangers, and see their friends mostly online.
I suspect that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need to express, and in the absence of any more appropriate object—a child or a lover, a parent or a friend—they will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel, even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like a monitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. As usual, someone else turns out to have preempted this insight a couple of thousand years before I was born; in his essay “How the Soul Vents Its Emotions on False Objects When True Ones Are Lacking,” Montaigne cites Plutarch as speculating, in regard to those who form attachments to monkeys and small dogs, that “the affectionate part of us, in this way, for lack of a legitimate object, fashions a false and frivolous one rather than remain useless.” Konrad Lorenz corroborates this theory in On Aggression, describing how, in the absence of the appropriate triggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is gradually lowered: a male ring dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiate mating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth, any vaguely bird-shaped object—eventually even with an empty corner of its cage.
You don’t need to turn to the animal world for an illustration of this principle; this city around me, supposedly teeming with erotic possibility, is full of people alone in their apartments stimulating themselves to orgasm to 300dpi-resolution images of human beings copulating on screens. Our obscene spending on pets may be symptomatic of the same chronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romcoms and porn. Someone who taught ESL once told me that her foreign students were bewildered by Americans’ sentimental attachment to their pets. She thought it must have something to do with unconditional love; my own belief is that Americans are so starved for any kind of connection that they would fall in love with a bug if it’s all they could afford. This is the country that invented the Pet Rock.
Although I can see this syndrome as pathological in others, I myself am its textbook illustration, the Elephant Man of the condition. I do not post photographs of my cat online and try not to talk about her to people who couldn’t be expected to care, but at home, alone with the cat, I behave like some sort of deranged arch-fop. I have made up dozens of nonsensical names for the cat over the years—the Quetzal, Quetzal Marie, Mrs. Quetzal Marie the Cat, the Inquetzulous Q’ang Marie—even though as far as I can tell the only word in her listening vocabulary is cat. There is a litany I recite aloud to her every morning, a sort of daily exhortation that begins: “Who knows, Miss Cat, what fantastickal adventures the two of us will have to-day?” I have a song I sing to her when I’m about to vacuum, a big, brassy Vegas showstopper called “That Thing You Hate (Is Happening Again).” We have been kicked off a train together and marooned in Wilmington, Delaware. We collaborate on compositions on my foot-pedal pump organ, like the Hideous Cat Music, in which she walks back and forth at her discretion on the keyboard while I work the pedals. The Hideous Cat Music resembles the work of Hungarian composer György Ligeti, with extended aleatory passages and unnervingly sustained tone clusters. I have as many little routines and peeves, in-jokes and stories with this animal as I’ve had in years-long relationships.
I never meant to become this person. The cat turned up as a stray at my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay when I was sitting out on the deck eating leftover crabs. She was only a couple of months old then, small enough that my friend Kevin could fit her whole head in his
mouth. She appeared from underneath the porch, piteously mewling, and I gave her some cold white leftover crabmeat. I did not know then that feeding a stray cat is effectively adopting that cat. For a few weeks I was in denial about having a cat. My life at that time was not structured to accommodate the responsibility of returning home once every twenty-four hours to feed an animal. I posted flyers in the post office and grocery store with a drawing of the cat, hoping its owner would reclaim it. It seems significant in retrospect that I never entertained the possibility of taking the cat to the pound. When I left for a long weekend to go to a wedding in another state, my friend Gabe explained to me that the cat clearly belonged to me now. I protested: this was a strictly temporary situation until I could locate a new home for the cat, I explained; I was not going to turn into some Cat Guy.
“How would you feel,” he asked me, “if you were to get home from this weekend and that cat was gone?”
I moaned and writhed in the passenger seat.
“You’re Cat Guy,” he said.
It’s amusing now to remember the strict limits I originally intended to place on the cat. I was not going to be one of those indulgent, doting Cat Guys who lets a pet control his life. Not I. One of the boundaries I meant to set was that the cat would not be allowed upstairs, where I slept. Now I am wounded when the cat declines to sleep with me and wonder why she is being so standoffish.
“You’re in love with that cat!” my ex-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she is a very attractive cat. I’ve told the cat that people talk about it. One friend described her as a “supermodel cat,” with green eyes dramatically outlined in what he called “cat mascara” and bright pink nose leather (a phrase I learned at a cat show, describing the finely pebbled texture of the skin on a cat’s nose). Her fur, even at age nineteen, when a lot of cats’ hair gets matted and dull, is still soft and pleasant to touch. It is just about impossible, when I see her curled up asleep on the couch with her head upside down, not to bury my whole face directly in the center of the warm plush cat ball and say O mu mu mu mu mu.
An artist I dated drew a cartoon pamphlet called The Bachelor Cat, illustrating a specific type she’d repeatedly encountered. This isn’t an easy thing to come out of the closet about; there is a certain stigma attached to Cat Bachelorhood. A friend once wrote a ribald and libelous poem about my cat and me, whose first line was Tim is a catfucker. When I was looking for a rideshare for my cat and myself on Craigslist, one respondent slipped it matter-of-factly into the middle of a paragraph about logistics that he’d be willing to take care of gas and tolls in exchange for “a little road head once we hit the turnpike.” When I politely declined, he wrote back: “What’s the problem? You’re a single dude with a cat. Am I missing something?” For a brief weird period of my life a TV production company expressed an interest in creating a reality show about my cat and me for Animal Planet.I My friend T.J. proposed the obvious title for this show: Pussywhipped!
It might be relevant to mention here that I have never so much as cohabited with a human female. It has to be admitted that loving a cat is a lot less complicated than loving a human being, if only because animals can’t ruin our fantasies about them by talking. (I should note that most of my little routines and in-jokes with the cat, except for the hideous cat music, are one-sided.) Although of course there’s a good deal of willful ignorance, projection, and self-delusion involved in loving other human beings, too. Even though we can talk to each other, argue, and explain ourselves, we can’t know each other from the inside. It requires an effort of empathy and imagination to catch some glimpse of the human being in front of us through the interference of our own desires: distorted reflections of our own families, exes, girls we had crushes on in grade school, and dumb ideas gleaned from movies and pop songs. In Carson McCullers’s short story “A Tree • A Rock • A Cloud,” a drifter in a café explains to a boy that he has made a study, a discipline, of love and is working his way up toward being able to love another person by first learning to love little things—a goldfish, or a face in a crowd. Loving a woman, he says, is “the most dangerous and sacred experience in God’s earth,” the thing we should train all our lives for instead of blundering into it as clueless boys.
But then who’s to say what is or isn’t an “appropriate” object of affection? The desire to connect is fundamentally healthy, even if its expression is misdirected. Devotion is no less heartfelt when its object is absurdly incommensurate to it. I’m not going to validate social conservatives’ slippery-slope warnings by making a plea for legalized man-cat marriage here, but I will maintain that my relationship with this animal is not wholly unilateral or imaginary; there is some reciprocity to it. It is not like keeping the TV on all day or being best friends with Jesus; someone else is there. That cat doesn’t know my name, couldn’t even understand the concept of names, but in some ways she knows me better than some women I’ve dated. In the ’60s it was speculated that cats might possess some sort of extrasensory perception, and although I’m officially a skeptic on the subject of cat ESP, I can understand how people could entertain the idea, so uncanny is my own cat’s ability to interpret and anticipate my behavior. She dreads being confined to the hated travel box and has come to associate any major housecleaning with an imminent move, so that now, when she notices me getting serious about tidying up, she instantly makes herself unavailable, hiding under the bed or behind the couch in a way that I feel demeans us both.
The cat has also efficiently conditioned my behavior. Biologists call cats “exploitive captives,” an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I made the mistake, early on, of feeding the cat first thing in the morning, forgetting that the cat could control when I woke up—by meowing politely, sitting on my chest and staring at me, nudging me insistently with her face, or placing a single claw on my lip. She refuses to drink water from a bowl, coveting what she believes is the higher-quality water I drink from a glass. I have attempted to demonstrate to the cat that the water we drink is the very same water by pouring it from my glass into her bowl right in front of her, but the cat was utterly unmoved, like a Birther being shown Obama’s long-form birth certificate. In the end I gave in and now serve her water in a glass tumbler, which she has to stick her whole face into to drink from. What the cat would like best would be for me to sit without moving with her on my lap forever, and I have often pled inability to come to the phone or make dinner because the cat is asleep on my lap and there is nothing to be done. She registers her protest at my extended absences by pissing on my things, leaving neat little cat turds on my bed like ominously terse notes from your spouse, or, most recently, by starting to die whenever I try to leave town.
Last year she was diagnosed with kidney failure, an affliction common to aging cats, and given only a year or two to live. Recently I left the cat in the care of my mother while I went on a cross-country trip for the holidays. When I called to check in, my mother told me that the cat had stopped eating. Mom, a former nurse, described her as “febrile.” A vet prescribed an antibiotic and an appetite stimulant. I called home daily for the cat report. For a while the cat seemed to rally, but then Mom told me she’d stopped eating again and said she “couldn’t vouch for the cat’s condition” on my return. I weighed the insanity of flying home early against the lifelong remorse of letting the cat die while I was on vacation, and in the end I spent an appalling amount of money on a last-minute, first-class transcontinental ticket the day before Christmas Eve.II
To spare you the suspense I suffered, I’ll just skip to the dénouement: fucking cat fine. So now I am effectively held hostage by a cat, unable to travel for any lengthy period lest she expire to punish me. I know from growing up on a farm that cats prefer to die by themselves, and have heard that house cats often die while their owners are away. So I’m trying to tell myself that if the cat does die on me while I’m out of town, it won’t be because she pined tragically away for
me or died to spite me but because my absence gave her a window of opportunity to die in peace, unmolested by my love.
Whenever I feel guilty about abandoning the cat with a friend for a few days or weeks, or dragging her from sublet to sublet like Céline carrying the long-suffering Bébert through the entire Second World War, or keeping her locked in a New York City apartment all winter like some cruel Bluebeard imprisoning his bride in a turret—whenever, in other words, I feel embarrassed about factoring a house pet’s desires into major life decisions—some grown-up-sounding part of me tells myself: It’s just a cat. Legally, the cat is my possession, even if she acts more like a high-maintenance girlfriend. Some vestige of the Cartesian belief in animals as objects persists in our society—mostly, I suspect, because it’s convenient, since we still need to use them as experimental subjects or clothing and really like how some of them taste. (I discussed all this with a friend of mine while dining on the muscles ventral to the lumbar vertebrae of a pig, an animal far more intelligent than my cat, in a honey-Dijon glaze.) It’s assumed that animals lack what we call consciousness, although no one can define what exactly this is, and how we can pretend to any certainty about an animal’s subjective mental experience has never been made clear to me. To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of these same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people. Anyone in the antebellum South who’d considered wrecking his own livelihood out of some crackpot notion of equality might have been accused of anthropomorphizing.