This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Physical care aside, the cat was a burden as infants are burdens and not company, except with infants we bear the burden as an investment in expectation of future returns: a baby will grow to be company, a comfort, while a cat, though it ages and endures, never outgrows catness. Besides, we are responsible for raising the babies, not only for their future good but for our own, since if we do not raise them properly, they will continue to be a burden. Also, people will readily see we have not raised our babies properly. Would people censure a cat’s behavior and judge us to be poor cat raisers? I think not. The cat would be thought to have a bad nature. We would claim we had made every effort to raise it properly but its bad nature defeated our efforts. This excuse, rightly or wrongly, would not work with a child. The parents are held responsible. Nurture is more in vogue than nature.

  Once, as I tried to nudge the cat off my desk—for he had the habit of leaping up to sit on my spread-out papers, a habit that was cute once or twice but soon palled—he slipped and landed not on his feet, as I had heard cats always do, but on his back. He looked stunned and distressed. I was distressed too, not only because I had had no intention of hurting him, but also because if he were maimed for life, I might be suspected of cruelty or violence. True, the cat could not tell—even if he could, my nudge had been gentle, not violent—but the vet might harbor suspicion. Mistakenly. Luckily, after a tense moment the cat rose and sauntered away.

  On a few occasions I spoke harshly to the cat, but speaking harshly did not give the relief—often a false relief—that speaking harshly to a person might have given. In a moment of pique, I even smacked him lightly. And once, when the cat persisted in climbing on the kitchen counter, pawing and sniffing at food, knocking over containers, I screamed loudly, Get away. Get away! Twice, and louder than I had screamed at anyone or anything in years. My scream must have expressed a resentment stored up for some time, all the time I was learning the fabled mysteries of catness, a dormant resentment ready to spring awake and pounce. Maybe I had gained a measure of self-control since my screaming days, or maybe I grasped, even in my rage, that screaming would do no good: the cat could not understand a surge of bilious words as children would have done. Though now that I think of it, maybe they hadn’t understood either, back then. Anyhow, no satisfaction could be gotten from scolding the cat, not that there is ever much satisfaction in scolding anyone, and somehow the opaque catness of the cat, the way it slunk away as if ashamed not of itself but of me, made that very clear.

  I grasped that the presence of any living creature would be a burden to me, except maybe a plant. The least burdened state would be solitude, where I could indulge every arbitrary mood without the slightest thought for its effect on others. But solitude too has its burdens and demands. There is really no easy way to be conscious; that must be why I revere sleep.

  I was cool toward the cat after the kitchen counter incident. Not cruel, only cool, again indulging my nature with all its moods. The cat would never tell. The cat might even be seen as practice for indulging my moods in society, for not straining to offer more in the way of kindness or encouragement than I am inclined to give. Cat therapy. I was almost afraid to envision how I might behave with people, were I to master too well the lessons of being with the cat. I would rarely consider how others felt or what they needed, until I was abandoned by everyone, left all alone to indulge my arbitrary moods.

  After a day or so, I decided this coolness was unworthy of me. The cat was just a cat; it could not help climbing on the counter. (Or could it? Was it purposely provoking me? This is one of the unplumbed mysteries of catness.) It had no moral nature and apparently did not learn from experience; its feelings could be hurt, yes, but it was unwilling or unable to behave well in order to avoid having its feelings hurt. I had no illusion that cause and effect were operative, that shouting would deter him from pawing at food; I did not credit the cat with that much logic or self-control. Even babies do not have that much logic or self-control, though we tend to forget this when rearing them. Anyhow, the cat need not be prepared to get on in life. There were no crucial or obligatory lessons. Treating it well was in no way an investment in the future.

  Treating the cat well was a gratuitous act. Living with the cat was living in an eternal present—no history, no patient shaping of connection through accommodation, nor any call for anger or forgiveness. The cat was a cat. I might as well end my coolness and give him the affection he craved. But I felt constrained giving affection I didn’t feel, reasoned affection, so I waited a day or so until my annoyance dissipated and I could give affection in good faith, and we resumed our life in the eternal present.

  In the end, I liked the cat best when he sat quietly on my lap and consented to being stroked. But while seemingly contented, he would abruptly leap up to pursue his mysterious business, as arbitrary in his way as I was in mine. Maybe he didn’t like me at all, only used me as a provider of food and strokes. (Or as a mirror?) He must like me a bit, I thought. Probably he both liked me and used me, in very human fashion. We may love others, but they are useful all the same as providers, and it is wisest for both user and used not to measure comparative degrees of love and utility.

  I remembered I loved my infants with most ease when they too lay docile on my lap, showing no will and making no abrupt movements. They were safe. Passive receptacles for my affection. I was safe. As soon as they stirred, perhaps to demand of me something unknown, I would feel a faint irritation that only years later I recognized as the mask of panic. As soon as a creature shows itself distinct and self-willed, it begins to determine and shape the nature of the love it seeks. And in turn, the love you give becomes something not entirely of your own shaping and thus dangerous. Was I unable, then, to love anything that had its own being; could I love only an utterly passive creature? If so, my love was arbitrary and self-serving, not so much love of something distinct from me as love of my own act of loving, which is easy, natural and demands nothing. Self-love.

  The cat was becoming a fun-house mirror, alarming me with its unlovely distortions. I turned away. His usefulness was finished. Even so, when our sojourn was over, I missed the cat from the heart. I study photographs of him. In the photographs, there are no reflections of me. I see only the cat himself, large, orange and beautiful. At last, with him far away and requiring nothing, I can revel in his beauty.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The essays listed below appeared in the following publications, sometimes in slightly different form: “This Is Where We Came In,” “Wheelchair Yoga,” “Absence Makes the Heart,” “Stone Reader,” and “Carlos Saura’s Cria!” in The Threepenny Review; “‘I Wish I Could Say the Same,’” “You Gotta Have Heart,” and “The Piano” in Agni; “Meditations in Time of War” and “Reality Tour” in Witness; “Yes, New York, There Are Baby Pigeons” and “Street Food” in The New York Times; “Alone with the Cat” in The American Scholar and included in the collection Face to Face; “Listening to Anthony Powell” in Salmagundi and included in Face to Face; “Intimacy. Anger” in Narrative. “Ultimate Peek-a-boo” was included in the anthology Eye of My Heart, and “Heinrich Mann’s Man of Straw” in the anthology Rediscoveries.