Another Insane Devotion

by Peter Trachtenberg

  And yet a part of me protests: What about my cat? What made me look for her but obligation? If not for that, she might have starved or frozen to death.

  Actually, I doubt it. When I came back north again that Christmas, I learned that Biscuit had made a second home in the dorm behind our house. That was probably where she’d disappeared to back in the fall. She’d go over and let the kids fuss over her and feed her canned tuna. F. once went looking for her and found her lying in a trance of pleasure on a girl’s bed. When she picked Biscuit up to take her home, the cat struggled bitterly. She was the same with me. I gave her first crack at the canned food, even locking Wolfie, the gluttonous new male, in the bathroom so she could eat unmolested, but she took the privilege for granted, and when I tried to pet her, she jerked away. Day after day I courted her. She’d eat the food I set before her, snorting with greed and congestion. She might deign to let me stroke her. Then she’d leap onto the kitchen counter and crouch there, surveying the room. Sometimes I’d see her take me in. At such moments her gaze might soften a bit. It wasn’t loving; at best you’d call it benign. And, really, it was no different from the gaze she turned on F. or the other cats (though in their case, her expression would also be a little gloating, since she was looking down at them) or the furniture, never for a moment doubting that all of it was hers.

  11

  BY THEN, F. HAD DECIDED SHE WANTED TO SEPARATE. It may be because she’d met somebody else. It may be because I’d run out of money and could barely pay my share of the bills, let alone the room tariff on a hotel in Rome. It may be because I’d yelled at her about leaving dirty dishes on the kitchen counter. It may be because I’d refused to take a stand against the landlord who’d left bags of garbage in the house we’d rented from him—not just refused but gone to the party his wife had thrown for his birthday the previous summer and, I believe, brought along a present, though not an expensive one. It may be because I’d threatened to stuff Wilfredo into the car and take him down to the city and drop him on his mother’s doorstep at two in the morning, and it may be because of the expression F. saw on my face as I said this. It was not formed to excite passion.

  “Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest,” Salter writes of his married couple. “From far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one.”

  My problem is that I can write only from inside the forest.

  F. came down to North Carolina to tell me. We took a walk along the beach. Winters in that part of the country start later than they do up north and they’re a lot milder, but it was cold enough, a day or two after Thanksgiving, that we walked with our shoulders hunched, our hands clenched in our pockets. When we faced into the wind, our eyes watered. I can’t reconstruct the conversation, except that at some point she asked me, “Do you want to know what I felt then?” and I said I didn’t want to know. It was probably the first time in all the years we’d been together that I didn’t want to know what she was feeling, or had felt. I didn’t want to look at her, and this too was new to me. I was angry but not in a way that can be assuaged by yelling, and so it seemed to me that my only recourse was to seal myself against her—and also to refrain from bursting out at her, to refrain especially from asking her not to leave. She could do what she wanted. The image that comes to mind is of a stone figure, eyeless, earless, noseless, mouthless, without any of the apertures that allow one human being to be penetrated by another, or rather by a sense impression of that other, as it may be made by the light reflecting off her person or by the molecules of air set in motion by her voice or the ones that bear the chemical signatures of her body. I suppose what I’m thinking of is one of the human beings who were petrified by the volcanic ash that spewed from Mt. Vesuvius when it erupted in AD 79, destroying the city of Pompeii. The date of that catastrophe is traditionally given as August 24, but archaeological studies suggest it really took place three months later, at the end of November.

  In view of our conversation, why did F. then invite me to come up for Christmas? Why did I agree to come? It was in many ways like other Christmases we’d spent together. We bought a tree and hung it with lights, tinsel, and ornaments her family had given her, including a ponderous angel made from an iron cowbell I half blamed for causing an earlier tree of ours to tip over. At the time I was in another room, so all I heard was a terrifying crash and F.’s even more terrifying shriek, and when I ran in, she was unhurt and laughing helplessly at the felled tree and scattered ornaments. Amazingly, only a few of them were broken. The cowbell, of course, was intact.

  We gave each other gifts. We went to some Christmas parties, where we behaved like any other couple, and at times even a loving one, though perhaps a couple who have something uncomfortable pending between them, as if they’d been fighting when they left the house and are wondering if they’ll start up again when they get home. On Christmas Eve, we flipped through the channels to see if any of them was showing A Christmas Carol, the old one with Alistair Sim as Scrooge. We couldn’t find it, only a bunch of newer Carols starring contemporary actors and shot in color that browbeat the eye. We’d done the same thing the Christmas before and the Christmas before that, and almost all the Christmases we’d spent together except for the one time we had the initiative to rent the movie, which you could only get on tape. We groused about a world that wouldn’t let you see Dickens’s characters in the somber black-and-white of Victorian mourning, on degraded footage whose tiny, writhing imperfections might be homunculi of the ghosts Marley shows Scrooge outside his window. We wanted to see the Scrooge of our childhood, and they wouldn’t give it to us, and it was cruddy.

  A little after New Year’s, I flew back down south, with the expectation that the next time I came back up, it would be to pack my things and move to a new home. For a long time afterward, we had little contact. In April, F. wrote me saying she wanted to see if we could still be together. I read her letter in haste, then again slowly, with silent snorts of incredulity. It held no conventional expression of longing or regret; at times she seemed to be scolding me. On one level, I would have liked F. to say how wonderful I was and how awful she’d been, but I would have been suspicious if she had. I was suspicious anyway. Still it occurred to me that she was presenting herself to me the same way she had when we were sitting across from each other in a tea shop ten years before: bluntly, without apology, revealing herself and then withdrawing, inviting my compassion—maybe even my tenderness—but at any moment ready to repel it. She was letting me see her in the fullness of her being. In the end, I wrote back not because I wanted to be with her but because she had made me curious. Of course I know what they say about curiosity and cats. But I’m not a cat. I’ve only loved a few.

  In the months after I came back, we went to see a therapist who had only one eye. At our first session, she told us she’d lost the other one to cancer. My guess is she did that so that we wouldn’t be distracted by macabre curiosity as to why one lens of her glasses was completely opaque. She had us play with little toys, which was embarrassing but also kind of fun, though not enough fun for us to pay $75 an hour for it, which was why in the end we stopped seeing her.

  After an especially bitter fight over the Labor Day weekend, F.’s chest and back erupted in raised red marks. She thought they might be a spider bite. She’s deathly afraid of spiders, and although the marks weren’t especially painful, the unease they inspired in her kept mounting until, finally, while we were at the county fare watching the equestrian events, she said she wanted to go to the medical trailer. The trailer was manned by a male health aide who must have weighed four hundred pounds. His mass seemed to fill every inch of the cabin. It threatened to ooze out the windows like dough extruded from a malfunctioning bread mixer, not a home model but the commercial kind, with a drum a child could stand in. There was barely room for F. to step inside and show him her welts. The aide, who had probably been hired to care for fairgo
ers laid low by overeating or motion-sick from riding the Fireball, took a look at F.’s marks and said they were above his pay grade.

  We walked through the heat and dust to our car. Along with being worried about F., I felt nostalgic. Our first house had been next door to the fairground’s rear entrance, and at night we’d been buffeted by the clatter of the rides and the thump and twang of country and western bands that I referred to collectively as the Haylofters; F. laughed every time I said it. We drove to the emergency room of our local hospital, the same one she’d been taken to years before when Bitey had made her dislocate her arm. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t the same ER, since the hospital had been renovated. A bored triage nurse had F. pull up her shirt and fill out some insurance forms, then sent us back into the empty lobby. The procedure took no more than three minutes. After we’d been waiting another fifteen or twenty, we were joined by a family steering a young quadriplegic man in an enormous whirring black wheelchair. It seemed not only to be carrying him but assisting with his vital functions, perhaps even making his heart beat. Whatever was wrong with him was probably more serious than a spider bite, but he and his people were also made to wait, and about a half hour later, F. decided she wanted to go home. The next day she saw her dermatologist, who told her she had shingles. They’re often brought on by stress, and hers went away after a course of Acyclovir. A few months later, the hospital sent us a bill for $400.

  There were more fights. These weren’t so much ugly as petty. I don’t remember ever calling F. a name or her calling me one, but sometimes I imagined a cartoon in which I chased her around the dining table, kicking her in the butt. The kicks would be deeply embarrassing to her but not painful. Once, she told me, not in the cartoon but in real life, she fantasized about my being killed in a car wreck and telling friends she was too distraught to make funeral arrangements: they could bury me if they wanted. Once during a phone call, we both blurted out that we wanted to be done with the marriage, seemingly in the same breath and in the same words. I remember staring down at the receiver as if it had bitten me, or she had bitten me through it. Whose teeth had made those marks?

  Sometime during this period, I told F. I wanted to stay together. Looking back, I can say I based my decision on the tiny psychic adjustments that took place as we crouched on the shrink’s floor, arranging tiny dinosaurs and armored warriors. I made it because of what I’d felt when F. showed me the welts on her body, which looked like they’d been made by a red-hot wire: I mean a horror and pity so pressing that I instantly forgot what we’d been fighting about and for the next several hours thought of little more than making sure she was taken care of; we had plenty of time to fight some more once I knew she was all right. Maybe I just liked having a partner who laughed when I griped about the Haylofters.

  If only, on hearing me say I wanted her, F. had thrown herself in my arms and said she was so happy, she wanted me too. If only she’d wept with gratitude or relief. She didn’t. It’s probably not in her nature. But her response felt grudging to me; it still feels grudging, and so I am not content. She makes demands; she bitches at me and complains that I bitch at her. Sometimes I wish I’d kicked her out of that car in Rome. Va al diavolo! Sometimes I think that with improved employment opportunities and convenient packaged foods, men and women no longer need each other enough to stay together out of stoicism or habit. They have to choose, not just once, but again and again, a day, an hour, a minute at a time. When a choice has to be repeated so often, it falls subject to the same odds that govern the tossing of a coin. Sooner or later, the choice will be no. And sometimes I think that F. and I are like two plodding amateur dancers who take what they expect will be a short, heavy-footed leap—not even a leap but a jump—and discover that they are floating three feet above the ground. It’s only when they look down that they fall.

  In the months to come, we’ll move to yet another house, a very nice one, overlooking a pond where muskrats swim tirelessly back and forth and a blue heron sometimes skims across the water looking, in elongated profile, like a hieroglyph come to life. The cats watch, fascinated, from a distance. They like to prowl the reeds in search of things to kill, but they know they’re not the equal of a blue heron.

  You’d think we could find peace in a place this beautiful, but we cannot. Both of us are waiting for something to happen.

  Today we fought again, I forget what about. Needing to get away from F., I stepped onto the front porch, leaving the door half-open behind me. It’s spring, the days are lengthening, and although it was closing on evening, the sky was still bright. Light fell slanting onto the grass. At the foot of the porch steps, Biscuit was crouching, her neck craned forward, her shoulders hunched. Every cell of her being was straining toward something. It took me a while to see what it was. About fifty feet away, beside the tool shed, were two rabbits. They stood some ten feet apart on their hind legs, their soft plump muzzles working as they nibbled. Rabbits always seem to be nibbling something—carrots, cabbages, clover. I had no idea what these rabbits were chowing down on, but everything about them, down to the angle of their ears, seemed to express the tension between appetite and caution. Even as they ate, they kept watch about them with their depthless black eyes.

  They must have seen Biscuit, just as she plainly saw them. And although I’m always conscious that my judgments about what a cat is thinking or feeling aren’t really judgments but projections, at that moment I was pretty confident about what Biscuit was thinking. She was trying to decide which rabbit to go for. She knew she couldn’t get them both. And the rabbits were waiting to see which of them she’d go for, though I suspect they also knew she couldn’t get either of them: they were too far from her, and if they’d seen Biscuit in action, they’d know she isn’t the fastest cat. Her poor legs are too short. Biscuit was watching the rabbits. The rabbits were watching Biscuit. I was watching them all. I was the fourth element in this constellation of viewers, the biggest and slowest moving, and the only one, to our knowledge, possessed of powers of self-reflection. Of the four beings that had come together in this space, I was the one that watched itself watching the others, in effect adding a fifth element to the arrangement, an ethereal spectatorial self that floated above the porch, insatiable in its watchfulness. This trait may be what makes me a less effective predator than Biscuit. I’m pretty confident that if I were shrunk down to their size, I’d be a less successful prey animal than the rabbits.

  I stood like this for what felt like a very long time, savoring the perfection of the moment, for as moments go, it was perfect. Then, very slowly, I sidled to the door and leaned inside. F. was sitting at the dining table. She looked exactly like herself, that woman and no other. I motioned to her; she came to me. Keeping my voice low, I told her, “Come and see,” and I pointed out the door to where the cat crouched watching the rabbits and the rabbits stood watching the cat.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK HAD FOUR EARLY READERS, WHO WERE GENEROUS enough to look at its chapters virtually as I wrote them and tell me what they thought: Rebecca Chace, Erin Clermont, Sheila Keenan, and Corinne Manning. If not for them, I might have abandoned this project. I also thank Jo Ann Beard, Annie Bellerose, Clyde Edgerton, Mark Irwin, Tracy O’Neill, and Carmen Rodriguez, Michael White, and Marci Vogel for reading portions of the work at different times. My gratitude to Renee Sedliar, my editor at Da Capo, and my agent Gillian Mackenzie and her assistant Adriann Ranta for their faith and well-placed doubts. Thanks also to Cisca Schreefel, Jennifer Kelland, Linda Mark, and Jonathan Sainsbury for turning the manuscript into a book, and to Lissa Warren and Sean Maher for publicizing it. Special acknowledgments go to Chris Noland of the Black Cat Fireworks Company, Christina Campbell, and the magnificent Martha Ciattei for furnishing photographs and artwork. Extraordinary thanks to Jesse McCloskey for his original drawings. You can see his paintings at the Claire Oliver Gallery.

  Jeanne-Marie Laskas, Donald Bialostosky, and my new colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh
offered me an intellectual and professional home after many years of nomadism. I’m also grateful to my teaching cohorts at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Bard College, the City College of New York, St. Mary’s College of California, the Iowa Summer Writers’ Festival, and Ashland University, especially Marilyn Abildskov, Karen Bender, Sladja Blazan, David Buuck, Peter Campion, Stephen Cope, Philip Gerard, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Kythe Heller, Rebecca Lee, Joe Mackall, Amy Margolis, Miranda Melis, Marie Regan, Joan Retallack, Robert Siegel, Eleni Stecopoulos, Frederic Tuten, Michael White, and David Wolach.

  My gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund for their support, as well as to the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bellagio Center.

  I thank the people who at different times cared for my cats: Jo Ann Beard and Scott Spencer, Heather Dini, Carolina Gonzalez Hutton, Litia Perta, Sheri Sceroler, and the doctors and staff of Rhinebeck Animal Hospital.

  My final thanks go to Ellen Trachtenberg and Mary Gaitskill, for reasons they know.

  Peter Trachtenberg

  May 22, 2012