Another Insane Devotion

by Peter Trachtenberg

Here I mention that for a long time after her father’s death, F. would lay out a small plate for him at mealtimes, placing on it small portions of the foods he used to like: olives, nuts, cheese, a bite of meat or fish. Sometimes she’d set out a fancy gold-rimmed goblet in which she’d pour a single swallow of wine. She, or maybe her father, favored reds. And the last time I visited my mother’s grave, I brought along not the usual flowers but a box of chocolates, an expensive gift assortment. I waited till I was about to leave, then set the box down by her headstone. I may have said, “Here, this is for you.” I haven’t been back since, and maybe that’s because some part of me doesn’t want to know if the chocolates are still there.

  7

  THE ANNOUNCEMENTS THAT ECHOED THROUGH THE wide spaces of Myrtle Beach International Airport made me think of death. It was the way they alternated warning and invitation. “If you are carrying more than three ounces of any liquid, gel, or cream, please place it in a Ziploc bag and put it in a receptacle.” “All Gold Club members, passengers with special needs, or passengers with small children are welcome to board at this time.” “Do not accept any item given to you by a person unknown to you.” I had a picture—I was probably remembering it from a movie—of some antechamber of The Forever where angels sort out the new arrivals before herding them to their respective gates, Gold Club or Economy, praising the virtuous and hectoring the damned.

  I’ve never been especially scared of my plane crashing. What I’m scared of is the minute before: the unending, spiraling fall in which I’ll either be spun about the cabin or mashed into my seat with my face warped in an Iroquois mask of disbelieving terror, cheeks skinned back from my teeth. I’m scared I may scream. I’m scared I may piss myself, and be seen screaming and pissing myself. For years, I forestalled this potentiality by telling God that if it was between sending the plane down and killing me with a heart attack, he could give me the heart attack. The hope was he’d think I was making the offer out of concern for my fellow passengers. Sometimes I expressed it as a prayer, especially once during a lurching flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Vientiane in a Chinese-built prop plane that seemed to plunge 1,000 feet every time we passed over a gap in the mountains. Most of the other passengers were families with small children, and in my address I made a big deal about that, murmuring, “For the sake of these innocents,” in a ripe interior voice that would have sickened a Republican presidential candidate.

  On October 2, as the plane taxied down the runway, then flung itself into the air, I changed my prayer. Please get me home safely so I can find my little cat.

  The setting sun sent its fire through the windows. The hair on my arms was incandescent; the woman sitting beside me might have been made of brass. Looking down, I could see a path of light spreading across the ocean. I don’t believe in a god who responds to petitions. What is God, a mayor? The truth is, I never cared that much about the other passengers, not even those adorable Laotian kids.

  One of the things F. and I still agree about is that it started going bad after we moved from the house on Parsonage Street. Maybe it was just that our lives were simpler there, in the mechanical sense. Living in the village, we could walk or bike to shops and restaurants or, when Wilfredo was visiting, down to the little public park to feed the ducks that paddled up and down the slow-moving creek. We didn’t argue about who was using the car. We were content with simple entertainments, especially reading aloud, whole books straight through, none of this PoMo skipping over the boring parts. F. is an expressive reader, and her interpretation of certain characters approached genius. One night we were doing the scene in Oliver Twist in which Bumble the Beadle is putting the make on Mrs. Corny, the grasping workhouse matron. “Are you a weak creetur?” he asks her meaningfully. I may have put a hand on F.’s thigh. She looked over her shoulder at me in a way that was at once flirtatious and reproving, and she read the next line not like somebody pretending to be modest but like somebody who on reflection realizes that she actually is modest, who knew? She lowered her eyes. “We are all weak creeturs.”

  The cats were safe on Parsonage Street, if you discount one of them disappearing for a month, which was awful for us but for Bitey was probably an adventure. Because the street dead-ended, we could let Biscuit loll on the warm asphalt of the road beside the yard. Nobody minded slowing down or even coming to a stop if she didn’t care to get up. She’d lie there, turn her head to see what was making the noise behind her, then go back to licking her paw, and usually the driver would just back up and steer around her. Sometimes he’d give a short tap on the horn, as if to say, “Ta-ta.”

  I used to complain about how dowdy our house was, but the dowdiness suited us. It curbed our (or maybe I should say my) grandiosity, reminding us (or me) that we lived in a house that had carpeting on its stairs and blue-and-white shepherds and shepherdesses minueting on the wallpaper: F. must have seen them minueting as she skidded past them down the stairs. For the same reason, it helped that only a small yard separated our house from our neighbors’. Day after day, we did more or less the same things in our yard as they did in theirs: we brought in bags of groceries and put out bags of trash; we planted flowers and vegetables and weeded the beds with the hoe we’d bought at The Phantom Gardener; we grilled salmon on a rusty Weber while playing music on the stereo. When we cooked, we listened to Garbage and Sonic Youth. The people behind us played a C&W station. The music was cheerful; those boing-ing pedal steels made me think of the Looney Tunes theme. But the male voices were thick with self-pity, and the words often seemed to be about dropping a bomb someplace or punching somebody in the mouth for questioning your right to do it. Well, I doubt the neighbors were any crazier about Kim Gordon. I used to imitate the husband ordering their small dog to “go peepee, go peepee!” F. and I argued about whether he could hear me. I always said he couldn’t, but for all I know, while Toby Keith was hollering, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way,” the neighbor was imitating us calling our cats in babyish voices. “Bitey! Ching! Tina! Biscuit!” What kind of dumbass is dumb enough to think a cat’s going to come if you call it?

  Almost the first thought that came to me when I learned Biscuit had gone missing was that this would never have happened if we’d stayed in our old home. I don’t mean just for practical reasons but for moral ones. We were being punished for wanting a bigger house with more land around it, for wanting not to have to listen to our neighbors’ music. We were being punished for wanting to live like gentry instead of tenants.

  I know F. felt something like that when we lost Gattino.

  At the time, it didn’t feel like we were getting above ourselves. We’d been on Parsonage Street for almost eight years. The house had gotten cluttered; the boxes we’d stored in the basement had grown coats of mold. One autumn the landlord got ambitious and had the red siding peeled off and replaced with the beige vinyl he used on his other houses. His workers strewed the yard with red aluminum shrapnel and tufts of bubblegum-colored insulation; all our flowers died. What had been wrong with our red aluminum? When we got an offer to rent a bigger place in the next town to the north, we jumped at it. The property had a barn and a big garden with lilac trees and peonies—beautiful peonies, as big and fluffy as cockatoos. The landlord was a friend of friends. At the time I was dumb enough to think of that as an asset.

  Maybe it was the prospect of moving that put me in an expansive mood. F. was going to a residency in Italy that summer, and we decided I’d meet her afterward so we could spend two weeks driving through the country between Tuscany and Rome. It would be our first vacation since our honeymoon and the first real trip we’d taken together to another country. I don’t count the time we’d gone to Russia two years before because that was for work and its picturesque high point, a midnight boat ride down the canals of St. Petersburg, ended with F. hitting her head on the underside of a low bridge and getting a concussion. There’s a photo I took of her just moments before the collision, which, mercifully, was slow and ver
y soft, a stone tap. In it, she gazes over the tops of her glasses at something just beyond the frame, her skin translucent, her hair spectrally pale. Her expression is at once intent and vague, the expression of someone peering through a mist with such concentration that she fails to see the solid object that’s about to rear out of its depths and smack her on the head.

  At the time we made our travel plans, I had no job to speak of and was already in debt. Looking back, I wonder what I was thinking. Probably, I was thinking of being a lover again rather than a husband. The word “husband” means both a male spouse and, in its verb form, to use resources economically, to conserve. I bought a $700 plane ticket; I booked hotel rooms that cost €100 a night. This was not husbandry. It’s true I spent that money with the aim of making F. happy, but a wife’s happiness may not really be a husband’s business. His business is to take care of her, to ensure she has fuel to make a fire with and meat to cook on it and a roof to keep off the rain. It’s to protect her and their children from every danger that a malignant world might launch at them. It’s to be the guarantor of her modesty. Neither Adam nor Abraham tried to make their women happy—when Sarah laughed, she laughed out of incredulity and bitterness—and if you had suggested that they ought to, they, too, would have laughed, except they would have been laughing at you. Changes in the husband’s role seem to have been underway by early in the Christian era, for Paul says that a married man will care for the things of this world “that he may please his wife” (I Cor. 7:33). This is why he thought men ought to be celibate.

  Making a woman happy is the task of a lover. Considered purely as labor, this isn’t as hard as having to see to her well-being and safety, but it requires paying close attention to things that are unquantifiable, even invisible—to shades, nuances, emanations. Good lovers seem to have internal receptors that detect the most spectral traces of female longing and pleasure: I don’t mean just the sexual kind. One may think of those receptors as a counterpart to the vomeronasal organs cats deploy in flehmen, the open-mouthed sneer with which they take in interesting odors.

  A cat’s sensors are designed to assess scent signals from a variety of sources, but a lover focuses his powers on a single object or on the class of which that object is a member: a woman or women. From moment to moment, often quite unconsciously, he trains his attention on the object to determine what she wants from him: a back rub, some home-baked bread, lingerie, chocolate, poetry, a sympathetic ear, a comforting shoulder, a hard dick. Some men understand the value of these things; others snort, What bullshit! Isn’t it enough I change the fucking oil? It may be that marriage began its present slide at the point when husbands decided that they too needed to be lovers. Some will say that women first gave them the idea, but it was probably someone in magazine publishing or a florist or a manufacturer of toiletries who was looking for a way to make men buy cologne. And let’s not forget the makers of ribbed condoms.

  During the time F. was alone in Italy and I was waiting to join her, she took in a small kitten. She found it in the yard of a derelict farmhouse near the residency, where she was steered by one of the staff. “Do you like little cats?” this woman may have asked, in the manner of pimps everywhere. “I have some adorable ones to show you.” The kitten was very sick, its nose gummed with secretions, its belly hard and swollen with worms. When F. picked it up, which she could do because it was weaker than its littermates, she saw that it was blind in one eye. At first, she meant only to have it treated by a local vet before releasing it back in the farmyard to gambol gauntly with its brothers and sisters. But over the weeks in which she kept it in her rooms, dosing it with the medicines the vet had given her, she became attached to it. And the kitten, which early on had viewed her with a feral creature’s wary pragmatism, grew attached to her. She told me about it in phone calls. Yesterday the kitten had followed her about with its tail raised. Today while she was working, it had climbed into her lap and teethed on her fingers. Last night he had slept with her. I noted the change of pronoun. Then F. told me she wanted to bring him back to the States. She said she loved him. More important, the kitten loved her, seemingly in violation of his—its—nature. She had taught him love, or maybe infected him with it, and if she left him back at the farm, she was scared he’d be stuck with this feeling that was too big for him, that was too big for most humans, and he would suffer. My heart sank. It was so typical of F.’s love, which is so often called forth by an apprehension of the object’s doom. Why couldn’t she have fallen for a kitten that was healthy and saw out of both eyes, an American kitten? But then I suggested a name for him: Gattino. This is a stupid thing to do with a creature you don’t want to get attached to.

  I got to the residency late in the afternoon, after driving four hours from Milan in a rented Lancia on roads that wound around the hillsides like a long caress. I parked in front of a low stone tower and got out of the car. F. ran into my arms. She glowed as if suffused by the sun. Her hair and skin were golden. She smelled of rosemary. Gattino was waiting in her bedroom. On seeing me, he scrambled under a dresser, and I had to kneel down and talk to him soothingly before he would come out. He had long legs—he was going to be a big cat—and his veiled eye and big, blunt nose gave him a look of jaunty toughness, like one of those skinny Neapolitan kids who grows up to be a prizefighter or a gigolo. He prowled the table, sniffing my wallet and car keys, then lay down with us on the bed. That night, he slept on top of me, purring.

  There was no question of taking him with us while we traveled, and for a while I worried that F. would want to call off the trip. She was afraid to leave Gattino at the vet’s. She was afraid he wouldn’t be cleared for immigration or importation, I’m not sure what to call it. I know he needed to be given a clean bill of health, and there was some doubt he’d get one. He was still frail, and there was that eye. The clinic was crowded, filled with the acridness of caged animals and their outcries of fear, hunger, and anger. An attendant placed Gattino in a cage next to one holding a large dog, bristling with muscle, that barked and slavered. Gattino cried. F. began crying too. I’d seen her cry only once or twice since her father’s death, maybe over Wilfredo. But who wouldn’t cry, seeing a kitten placed in a cage beside an immense dog that wanted nothing more than to eat his small heart? Even here, though, you could see his spirit. Instead of cowering, our cat (already I was thinking of him as ours) peered out at his tormentor with an intrepid forward tilt of his ears. His tail was lowered, but it wasn’t tucked between his legs. It was out behind him, and this made him look as if he were about to launch himself forward like an arrow at a target. At the very least, he would hold his ground.

  For the next two weeks, I was F.’s lover again. We drove as fast as you can drive in a little car without scaring yourself into incompetence; out of the corner of my eye, I could see my wife’s bare feet propped on the dashboard, and the casualness of her posture reassured me that I wasn’t about to get us killed. We walked hand in hand through the cobbled defiles of hillside towns, up stone steps whose sheerness put us in an allegorical frame of mind. There was usually a cathedral at their summit, and above its spires the same blue sky where Signorelli saw angels swooping. We stood on battlements, looking out at wheat fields and grape vineyards that had provisioned the Borgias while the shadows of clouds lengthened over them, turning the rows of grain a dull bronze. We sat in restaurants whose white linen glowed in the candlelight; surely all those restaurants can’t have been candlelit, but in retrospect it seems that way. Each dish was fundamental. It tasted of the elements that had produced it, tomatoes of earth and sun, a roasted dorado of fire and the sea. The waiters masqueraded as layabouts. All evening they looked at the pretty girls on the next terrace or an especially slick motor scooter or a platoon of German tourists uniformly burned the color of raw salmon—at anything but you until the moment you wanted something, at which point they appeared at your side and said, “Mi dica.” We hung out beside fountains that might have been the originals for the fountains w
here I hung out as a teenager, out past curfew, looking for a girl to be with, and now at last, thirty-five years later, here I was, with her.

  Most of the pictures I took in those places are pictures of her.

  Among literary forms, the lyric is the lover’s mode, for that’s how a lover experiences the world, as a series of isolated moments bright with feeling, like stills from a movie whose intervening frames have been excised. The world starts with the love object, and it ends with her. Whatever else it contains—sun, moon, stars, a blue flower, a blanket crumpled on the grass, a dark wood—exists only to reflect the loved one or otherwise call attention to her, or to what she evokes in the lover. The sun and moon are the bodies whose light he sees her by; the stars are the jewels he would give her if only he could climb into the sky to quarry them; the blue flower is what he gives her in their place. The blanket is where he lies with her on the grass on a summer evening, the first fireflies bursting silently in the still air. He sees them out of the corner of his eye. The rest of the time he is looking at her.

  The lyric is beset with paradox. The moment it evokes may be brief as a heartbeat, yet it seems to go on forever, an eternity in which Sappho can raptly take account of everything that is happening inside her:. . . if I meet

  you suddenly, I can’t

  speak—my tongue is broken;

  a thin flame runs under

  my skin; seeing nothing,

  hearing only my own ears

  drumming, I drip with sweat;

  trembling shakes my body

  and I turn paler than

  dry grass.

  In Gerald Stern’s “Another Insane Devotion,” the narrator’s sudden, shattering encounter with one of Rome’s ravenous street cats frames an entire history of lost love:. . . I have