Another Insane Devotion

by Peter Trachtenberg

  This is not at odds with Ruskin’s prior experience of female bodies, which was probably limited to the idealized forms of classical statuary, or to the fact that at the age of forty he would fall in love with a ten-year-old girl.

  Ruskin admired Masaccio, especially his rendering of landscapes, but I find no reference in his writings to The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It would be interesting to know what he thought of the figure of Eve. Like other female images the critic was familiar with, Masaccio’s Eve has no pubic hair (one of Ruskin’s biographers speculates that it was this feature of Effie’s anatomy that caused him to drop her nightdress). Unlike them, she has the sexual characteristics of a mature woman. He might have viewed the painting as an allegory of his own wedding night: the man shielding his face in horror, the woman covering her swelling fields and winding cleft in shame. In this, he would have been hew-ing to the ancient scheme that classifies the genders as subject and object, viewer and viewed, knower and known.

  Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from The Garden of Eden (1426–1428), Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine. Courtesy of the Granger Collection.

  But in the story of the Fall, both Adam and Eve are active seekers of knowledge, Eve even more than Adam. Both are punished for knowing something they’re not supposed to know. It may be the narcotic sweetness of a fruit whose name has been lost to us; it may be the shudder of concupiscence; it may be good and evil, those words that meant nothing until suddenly they meant everything. Just for a moment, Genesis confers on the sexes an odd equality, which it then takes away when Adam is given dominion over his wife. At the same time, both Adam and Eve are objects of knowledge, members of the class of the known. It’s God who knows them, and it’s his gaze they try to hide from—at first so effectively that he calls out to them, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). That a being who is supposed to be all seeing and all knowing must call, “Where are you?” to his creations is one of the story’s most resistant mysteries, and one of its most poignant. To me, God’s call is very poignant. It’s like a parent’s call to missing children. That, of course, is how many Christians read it, saying of the first couple not that they fell but that they strayed.

  At once knower and known, the man and the woman are like people who look in a mirror for the first time and see themselves looking back. “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they [were] naked.” (Gen. 3:7). To understand the vast gulf between the Greek and Hebrew worldviews, consider that Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and Adam and Eve recoil from theirs. But, then, they don’t see themselves in a pond, but in each other’s eyes. The eyeball is convex, and a convex mirror gives a distorted reflection. Maybe the first forbidden knowledge was how weak and uncomely they were in their nakedness, he with his drooping finger of prick and she with her lopsided tits and goosefleshed bum. Their eyes were as merciless as teenagers’. And perhaps their nakedness was more than a condition of the body, and what they saw were the wens and stretch marks of each other’s characters. Up until this moment, they hadn’t even had characters, being only another species of animal; it’s well known that no animal has a character until it is claimed by a human being. But now they had them. How lacking those characters were, how stunted and deficient! The man was easygoing, slothful, weak willed. The woman was greedy and shrill. And, really, she wasn’t bright either. She’d believed what a snake had told her. He saw her and was disgusted with her person. She looked at him and thought, “He is not formed to excite passion.”

  I’d had the house painted before we moved in, so it looked cleaner. F.’s attic study was now trimmed in Mediterranean blue. But the closets were still filled with the landlord’s trash. The stove was broken and had a mouse nest inside it, and when we turned on the washing machine, it vomited gallons of hot water onto the floor of the barn. I got Rudy to buy a new stove and fix the washer, but by then F. had decided he was our enemy. The garbage might have been left as a taunt for her, as if Rudy had conferred with the vile old Broadway eminence who’d once accused her of dining on it. “Why don’t you say something to him?” she’d reproach me. It bothered her that I didn’t think he was our enemy. I’d remind her that I had said something; that was how we’d gotten the new stove. But whatever I’d said, I’d said mildly, making a joke out of what, even in the city, where landlords are permitted by law to seize your internal organs if you’re late paying the rent, would have been grounds for breaking the lease. I wanted Rudy to like me. Even now I’m embarrassed to admit it.

  At least the cats enjoyed the house. It had been built in the 1850s—by a black freedman, according to Rudy, who prided himself on knowing the history of the valley—and then expanded with additions at either end, but it still had a long central aisle that was perfect for cats to scramble noisily up and down, especially late at night. Biscuit quickly staked a claim to the kitchen island. And all the cats liked roaming in the garden, with its lilac and apple trees, its beds of hosta, peonies, and day lilies in whose foliage small creatures nested, waiting to be killed. Out back there was a burrow occupied by a groundhog that looked like it must weigh thirty pounds. Once I saw it running—could Biscuit have had the nerve to chase it?—and thought I could feel the earth shake. Of all the cats, it was Gattino who seemed to be having the best time. He’d scuttle fearlessly up the smooth trunk of the horse chestnut that grew in the front yard and out onto branches fifteen feet above the ground, from where he surveyed the garden with a seigneurial air. “Gat-tini!” F. would trill to him, and he’d streak back down, half climbing, half leaping, and let her take him in her arms. I’ve always thought that a test of a cat’s personality is whether it enjoys this and, if not, how long it will put up with it. Bitey resisted being picked up with every claw and fang. Biscuit protested at first but could be jollied into lying still for ten seconds or so. Gattino liked it. You could carry him around like a baby.

  For the most part, he got along with the other cats. It helped that he was still young. He and Biscuit used to wage mock battles, darting and rearing, he on his long legs and she on her short ones. But by now she was a full-grown cat, almost middle-aged. She lacked Gattino’s energy and appetite for play, and there were times you could see her wearying of being pounced on when she was trying to get a drink of water or having him dive at her food bowl, not to eat but to bat bits of kibble around the floor. She’d done the same when she was a kitten, but she had put away kittenish things and knew not to play with her food any more. If I were nearby, I’d clap my hands to make him leave her alone. Once I blocked him roughly with my foot and locked him in my bedroom until Biscuit could finish eating. When I let him out fifteen minutes later, his high spirits were intact and he appeared to bear me no ill will, but I find it significant that I didn’t tell F. about it.

  One moment from that autumn stays with me. I was in the living room, listening to a CD I’d put on the stereo, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon. I hadn’t listened to it in years and was a little surprised to realize I had it, or any of her albums, on CD. She seems so much an artist of vinyl; her voice, which you remember for its birdlike high notes but which has an unexpected deep end, needs physical grooves to rise out of, and only records have those. “Woodstock” came on, and suddenly my eyes were filled with tears. I walked into the kitchen. I didn’t want the song to stop, but I needed distance from it. “What’s wrong?” F. asked. I gestured helplessly at the speakers. “I don’t know. It’s beautiful, it’s sad.” And then, “I want to get back to the garden.” I meant to say it jokingly, but my voice broke. F. started crying. “I do too.” We held each other.

  Early that November, I spent a day working in the city. When I came back that night, Gattino was gone. F. had gone out to visit some friends; the cats had been in the garden. She’d considered calling him in, but she would only be away a little while, and it was still light. When she returned, the other cats were waiting by the back door. Gattino was nowhere in sight. That had been five hours ago. I told her it wa
s too early to worry. The cats often stayed out late. We went out into the yard and called his name under the moon. I thought the problem might be that he hadn’t heard F.—her voice is soft—and I half expected him to come running in response to my manly bellow, hungry, his eye alight. It would be another thing I fixed, like F.’s laptop or the furnace that stopped putting out heat until I pushed its red reset button, which I knew how to do because of the instructions printed underneath. Of course I was forgetting the time I’d tried bleeding the radiator in my old loft. “GATTINO!” I yelled. “GATTINO!” My voice hung in the chill air. He didn’t come.

  The next day I called his name up and down the road that ran behind our house. It belonged to the college next door and filed past dormitories, woods, and a theater before emptying at length into a parking lot. Once, back in the summer, when I was clearing ailanthus from the garden, I’d looked up and seen a young woman walking down that road, bare breasted and martially erect, then turn and vanish into the dorm behind us. I imagine she was doing it on a dare. The few cars that passed now were traveling slowly, and I was reassured by the thought that if Gattino had wandered off this way, he was probably safe. I don’t remember if it was that night or the next that F. looked across Avondale Road, which ran past our front door, and realized, with a start of sick fear, that neither of us had thought of searching in that direction. In the few months Gattino had been going out, we’d always shooed him back from Avondale because there was so much traffic there and it moved so fast. Many years before, not a hundred feet from the house, a car had struck and killed a little girl who was crossing on her way to nursery school. The school was now named after her.

  We searched farther and farther from the house, along back roads and footpaths, in people’s yards and in a sinister abandoned barn that was always ten degrees colder than it was outside, like a morgue. We put up posters. We stuffed flyers in mailboxes and taped them to the doors of the college dorms:

  At night we set traps and in the morning released the irate strays we found inside, each crouched beside an empty can of Friskies like a dragon guarding its hoard. Sometimes we speculated about how long it must take the captives to get over their initial panic and start eating. It was F. who organized us. Her earlier vagueness might have been a disguise that she had now cast off. But, really, she’d gone through most of her life alone and unaided, with her head down, applying herself to the business of survival. I’d just forgotten that. She had us call every animal shelter within fifty miles. She posted Gattino’s picture on animal-finder websites. She consulted psychics. At first only F. did this, since she believes in psychics, or half believes in them, but when one of them told her that she was sensing Gattino near a body of moving water, it was me who burned rubber to the creek a half mile away to pace its banks with an open container of cat food. I came back day after day. It didn’t matter what I believed. Once, I called a psychic myself, though she described herself—kind of sniffily—as an “animal communicator.” She told me that Gattino was dead, which I reported to F. She told me something else that I did not report: that he was a reincarnation of F.’s father, who had come back to show her how to “let go.” I still think it was a good idea to keep this to myself.

  Most of the psychics told us our cat was dead. It was this that made me trust them. Somebody who wanted to rip us off would have told us that Gattino was alive and could be coaxed back if we burned some candles and left $500 in a shopping bag at the door of St. Sylvia’s. I might have done that if somebody had told me to; I might have rolled in a pile of shit on our front lawn. The one time I drew the line was when a half-literate stranger e-mailed F., having gotten her address from a shelter’s website, and told her that his friend Samuel had found Gattino and taken a fancy to him and brought him back with him to Cameroon. All we had to do was wire him the price of a plane ticket, and he’d send him home. I don’t remember whether we were supposed to pay for tickets for Samuel and Gattino or just Gattino, but “Cameroon” set off an alarm bell—so might “Belarus” or “Moldova” have done—and my misgivings were confirmed when we pasted it, along with the terms “Samuel” and “cat” into Google and found the outraged testimonies of people who had sent off the money and never seen their pets again.

  In winter, we were still searching. Late at night we’d get a call from a security guard at the college who’d seen a one-eyed cat scrabbling in a dumpster. We’d throw coats on over our pajamas, drive fishtailing on the icy roads, and end up in a parking lot where a man in a down jacket shone his flashlight onto the snow. “He was just here.” We’d stand there stricken. The guard would go back to his rounds, and we’d put out a can of cat food—we spent a fortune on cat food that year—and sit in the car with the lights off, hoping that if we waited long enough, Gattino, if it was Gattino, might return. One night I caught a glimpse of a small, thin creature slinking under a parked car. It might have been a cat; it might have been a fox or a stoat. At any other time, I would have been thrilled to spot a wild animal near college dorms where kids from the city were smoking dope and reading Heidegger. But all I wanted to see was our cat. I wanted to bring him to F. like a treasure. I opened the door and stepped out slowly into the cold. I barely broke the membrane between stillness and motion. Many, many minutes later, I reached the car where the creature had hidden. I shone my light beneath it, then dropped into a crouch to see better. My knees hurt. How had I gotten so old? There was no sign of a cat.

  Outside the airport it was cold, and the city’s garish carnival night was full of moving lights. Already I’d forgotten what it was like to be someplace that stayed bright after nightfall, apart from a two-block commercial strip where people went looking for action. No need to look for action here; it was everywhere, as in the interior of a spark chamber restlessly populated with subatomic fauna. Instead, you would have to look for stillness. You might not find it.

  A bus took me downtown; a second one brought me across town to the railway station. I felt hopeful and eager. The feelings dimmed a little when I learned the next train wouldn’t be leaving for more than an hour. I had the impulse to call F. to tell her not to come pick me up. While waiting, I sat in a deli staring at the immense orange faces of two politicians, a man and a woman, who were debating on TV. Never had I seen teeth so huge or eyes so lambent. The volume was turned down and I was sitting too far away to read the captioning, so I focused on the debaters’ facial expressions. I might have been watching the actors in a silent movie, each holding up one or two big feelings for the audience to identify, approve of, and feel in turn. The man looked angry and, briefly, tearful. The woman, who for a pol was uncharacteristically attractive, even sexy, smiled and winked. The gesture—is a wink a gesture?—was so unexpected that I wondered if I was imagining it.

  Who was she winking at? And was it a wink of flirtation or a signal that whatever she told her opponent shouldn’t be taken too seriously, she was just gaming Mr. Man, and we, the audience, were in on it? Was that why we should vote for her?

  During those months we were looking for Gattino, our lives continued in some distant version. We both worked or tried to work. I screwed up a proofreading job so grotesquely that I offered to reorganize the client’s filing system for free, not because I hoped she’d rehire me—she would have had to be insane to do that—but because I wanted to feel less guilty. F. spent a lot of the time on the phone. She spoke with friends. She spoke with her sister, who she believed had psychic powers. She spoke with Wilfredo. She spoke with psychics. Sometimes she’d relay what the psychics had told her: Gattino had drunk some poisonous substance and died in agony. He’d died quietly, curling up into himself as if going to sleep. Once in a while, somebody told her that he was still alive.

  These possibilities seemed equally valid to me. I switched from one to the other with barely a cognitive jolt, and at times I seemed to hold them all in mind at once. Looking back, I’m reminded of the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat. The experiment is meant to illustrate the un
predictable and fundamentally unknowable behavior of particles on the quantum level. Any attempt to measure that behavior inevitably influences it. Until you look at the meter, you can’t know if a deflected electron has veered to the right or the left. Before then, you might as well speak of two ghostly electrons streaking in opposite directions or maybe a ghostly hybrid particle that moves in both directions at once. It’s only when you do the measurement that one of those phantoms evaporates and the other solidifies into a “real” particle occupying an identifiable point in space.

  The physicist Erwin Schrödinger translated this paradox to the macro level. He proposed a scenario in which a cat is placed inside a steel chamber that also contains a tiny bit of a radioactive substance hooked up to a Geiger counter and a vial of cyanide. In the course of an hour, there’s a 50 percent probability that an atom of the isotope will decay. If it does, it sets off the Geiger counter, which releases a hammer that shatters the vial of cyanide and kills kitty. If the particle doesn’t decay, the cat remains alive. Schrödinger explained that one could visualize the system as “having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”

  As the diagram above suggests, the cat remains in this smeared, blurred state, equally alive and equally dead, until such time as an observer peers inside the chamber. The observer’s eye is what breaks the spell of indeterminacy. Perhaps our cat had become such a ghostly hybrid, not in a sealed box but in the wide world. Only when someone observed him would he solidify into life or death. For the observation to be reliable, however, it would have to be performed by someone who recognized Gattino, not as a generic cat searching for food in the cold and dark but as himself: this cat and no other. I suppose that means he would have to be observed by someone who loved him.