Homer's Odyssey

by Gwen Cooper

  I nearly dropped the glasses I was carrying. “What the …?”

  “He came over to me,” my date explained. “Black cats are bad luck.”

  Most people made a point of being kind to Homer. A small few were indifferent and simply left him alone. But I had never witnessed anybody going out of his way to frighten a blind cat. The voice I heard in my head sounded a lot like my mother’s. What kind of a person does such a thing? Who raised this man?

  It may have been the one time in my life when I wished I were a man, because what I wanted more than anything in that moment was to haul off and belt that guy in the face. I had a delightful vision of smashing the glass I held, Sopranos-style, against the side of his skull. My hands clenched into fists around the ice-filled glasses until I thought frostbite would set in, but my voice was measured.

  “The cat lives here,” I said. “You do not. Please get the hell out of my apartment.”

  He was the first and last man, other than my male friends, who would be invited into my home for many a month. See what can happen? I would think. Even people you met through work or through friends could be scary in all kinds of ways you couldn’t possibly know about beforehand.

  One of the things I had looked forward to when I moved out of my parents’ house was dating. It wasn’t that I hadn’t gone out on dates when I’d been living with them; but, once you’re out of high school, the idea of sitting on your parents’ couch with a guy you like loses its appeal. Finding a serious boyfriend—one who I spent more days with than without—would have meant spending most of my time at his place, which would have required far more time away from my cats than I would have found acceptable. The whole situation had hampered me in ways that I expected to free up once I was living on my own.

  Things didn’t work out exactly as I’d envisioned as the months in my apartment passed. Sometimes it almost felt as if I’d had more of a social life when I lived with my parents. Now that I no longer had my parents’ presence to fall back on as a pretext for not bringing somebody back to my place, I seemed to be avoiding the my-place-or-yours discussion altogether by limiting my social activities to evenings out with groups of friends. Occasionally, these outings included a guy who I might or might not like, who might or might not like me back, but that was about it.

  My job—the job that enabled me to live in my own apartment—was very demanding. I worked long hours and told myself that my career was more important right now than “boys.”

  But that wasn’t the whole truth. I was a part of the Sex and the City generation. The entirety of popular culture—television, movies, magazines—was united in assuring me that a challenging career combined with a decadent love life was my birthright—practically an obligation for a girl my age.

  I liked men, and I liked getting to know better the men I found interesting. But I also enjoyed living on my own for the first time in my life. I wasn’t anxious to fall into a relationship and end up with somebody in my home four or five nights a week, or—an even worse scenario—discussing the possibility of moving in together.

  And I was fiercely protective of my cats, particularly Homer. I didn’t want to bear the scrutiny of somebody who might not like cats very much, or who might judge me as less desirable for having three of them. I wasn’t willing to form the slightest emotional attachment to anybody with whom I might have an it’s me or the cats conversation somewhere down the road. After my experience with Hissy the Wonderputz, I was reluctant to go out on a second date with anybody who so much as frowned when the word cat was mentioned.

  Most of my friends went out with men, brought them home impulsively, and figured out as things went along how mature, compatible, and commitment-oriented the man in question was. The whole point of relationships in your twenties was supposed to be about making mistakes, learning from them, and establishing the criteria that would eventually lead you to The One.

  But I had to be satisfied as to a certain basic level of responsibility and cat-friendliness before I even thought about bringing a man into my home. A visitor might decide to go out onto my balcony and forget to close the balcony door behind him. It was an easy enough mistake to make—but the rapidity with which such a mistake could blossom into full-blown tragedy, ending with Homer plummeting eleven stories, was unbearable to contemplate. Turning a back, even for a second, on an open front door while accepting a Chinese food delivery would allow Homer all the time he’d need to dart outside to “explore.” Another girl might wail in irritation over boyfriends who always left the toilet seat up or consistently cracked the bedroom window open too wide. My friends and I laughed about such minor lapses—the silly thoughtlessness that crops up in even the best relationships—but in my world, there was nothing funny or minor about the consequences a moment’s thoughtlessness could bring.

  “You’re a control freak,” my friend Tony frequently informed me. “You want to try to control everything, and you’re using Homer as an excuse.”

  He wasn’t entirely right. Homer did require more consideration than another cat would. The carefree irresponsibility I’d longed for when living with my parents, of being able to say I have no one to please but myself, was a moment in my life that had come and gone, if it had ever existed at all. I didn’t regret it; the rewards of living with Homer far outweighed the limitations. Nevertheless, the limitations remained.

  But Tony wasn’t entirely wrong, either. I could make a good argument for doing a better job than most of my friends did of vetting dates before I brought them home. But there was no argument I could make for refusing involvement altogether.

  During those weeks of insomnia after my apartment was broken into, I thought about my life and where it was going. I spent hours weighing and reviewing every major decision I’d made since leaving college, and innumerable trivial choices—a dress I’d loved but hadn’t bought; my decision not to visit the Louvre during my one day in Paris a decade ago, because I’d wanted to experience the city outside of museums—came under scrutiny. In the aftermath of what had felt like a near-death experience, it seemed important to be able to assure myself, If I had died that night, I wouldn’t have had any regrets about how I lived.

  Overall, I was pleased with the progress I’d made over the past couple of years. I was self-sufficient for the first time, and I was proud of myself for getting there. I had created what I felt was a reasonably happy life for myself and my feline brood.

  It was the little things, I realized, that had a way of getting away from you and never coming back—the afternoons in a city you might never visit again, or the nights when a group of friends, having been out later than anyone had intended, decided to stay up to watch the sun rise over the ocean, but you went home because it was late, after all, and there was work the next day. Adopting Homer had made me feel older than my age in many ways. But I wasn’t old, not really. And I wouldn’t be young forever.

  There were whole areas of my life that I was cutting myself off from. I didn’t necessarily subscribe to the notion that said, What is it all worth if you have no one to share it with? If you had work you enjoyed, a home you loved, and friends you could laugh with, you were already luckier than probably 90 percent of the world’s population.

  I knew this to be true. But I also, in a very basic and primal way, wanted to love someone. I wanted someone to love me.

  I wasn’t a risk taker by nature. Blind leaps into the unknown were Homer’s province, not mine. But risk was an inescapable fact of life. Sleeping alone in your own bed in your own home behind a locked door could be risky, as I’d learned. There was something to be said for being young and romantic, for bubbling up with breathless excitement when the phone rang and bemoaning your ill fortune—over a pint of ice cream and a stack of romantic comedies—when it didn’t.

  And so what if I wasn’t looking for somebody to spend the rest of my life with right now? Not everything had to be so goal-oriented. Look at Homer. He had no idea where he was climbing or running or jumping to half t
he time. Simply to be in motion was a joy undertaken for its own sake.

  I BEGAN TO approach dating with the resolute intention of finding a few brave souls who would pass what I came to think of as “the Homer test.” I didn’t have anything so formal as a written questionnaire (I was a touch neurotic when it came to Homer’s safety, but I wasn’t crazy), but I listened closely to anecdotes and asked probing questions. Was the man in question absent-minded? Was he forever fumbling around for keys or his wallet, or did he have a sharp memory for small details? Had he ever had a beloved pet, one who perhaps had required close attention and long-term care? Was he the kind of guy whose siblings entrusted him to take nieces and nephews to ball games or on camping trips, confident they would return in one piece? I figured someone who could remember that Johnny couldn’t so much as inhale a whiff of any food containing nuts, or that Sally couldn’t spend more than fifteen minutes in the sun without exploding into hives, was up to the task of remembering the very few rules I’d established in my own home to keep Homer safe without having to think about it constantly.

  Homer was as fascinated with these men as he was with every new person he met, and they were no less fascinated by him. Usually, they started out being skeptical about taking on a woman with three cats. It wasn’t that they disliked cats per se, but three seemed excessive, and one had to wonder about the owner of such a horde.

  After a few visits to my home, however, most of them became devoted members of the cult of Homer.

  Homer was certainly a very “boyish” little cat, and I think the men who met him were taken with how scrappy and rough-and-tumble he was. Homer still loved to wrestle around and play spirited games of tag or fetch as much as he had back when he’d stayed with Jorge and his friends. It’s said that most men prefer dogs to cats, and maybe that’s true, but Homer was about as puppyish as a cat could be when it came to instant affection and playful high spirits.

  Living with Homer, it was easy to forget the things about him that were so astonishing to others. The mere idea of meeting a cat without eyes struck most people as a once-in-a-lifetime novelty. I think they expected Homer to look gruesome or malformed, because most of them made a point of noting, with surprise evident in their voices, how normal Homer looked. “Like he just has his eyes closed,” they said. That Homer moved with such graceful self-assurance, that he was able to feed himself, groom himself, and navigate around the walls and furniture in my home, struck newcomers as nothing short of miraculous.

  Homer was uniformly friendly with nearly everybody, but the small band of men who were granted access to him were sure that they—and only they—had a gift, some extraordinary inner quality that drew this blind creature to them. People loved Homer as much for how he made them feel about themselves as for his love of mischief and play. To forge a bond of trust and friendship with this sightless little cat could only mean that one possessed a streak of goodness, a purity of spirit that might never have been detected before this, but that was obviously real. (Homer saw it, didn’t he?) In fact, I never had a single boyfriend who wasn’t convinced he had a unique and special relationship with Homer.

  “Homer’s my buddy!” they all claimed.

  “Homer’s everybody’s buddy,” I would reply fondly—not meaning to undercut them, but speaking from the pride I always felt at how engaged and outgoing my little guy had turned out to be.

  “Yeah, but it’s different with Homer and me,” they would say, with the kind of confidence that admitted no room for dispute or doubt. I never corrected them a second time; who was I to argue with anybody who loved Homer?

  Homer may have had similarly unique relationships with each of these men, but the particular forms the relationships took were always different. One such boyfriend, a pillar of Miami’s international finance community who’d played guitar with a garage band back in high school, discovered Homer’s love of the rubber-band-wrapped tissue box and pulled his real guitar out of storage to “jam” with Homer. He even let Homer strum on the real guitar a few times, declaring him a prodigy. A chef at one of the local restaurants enjoyed preparing different recipes and watching Homer’s varying reactions depending upon what was cooking. Beef was mildly interesting to Homer, fish was very interesting, and anything with turkey made him absolutely frantic. Homer developed a wild attachment to a specific kind of fresh-roasted-deli-sliced turkey, and was able to distinguish it—while it was still wrapped in plastic and waxed paper—from lesser turkeys and deli meats. “He has the nose of a gourmet,” this man proclaimed, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Homer was equally passionate about the occasional can of Friskies that came his way. The boyfriend with fond memories of building pillow forts as a child delighted in bringing over boxes, large shopping bags, and anything else he and Homer could use to construct cat-sized caves, engaging in elaborate games of hide-and-seek that lasted for hours.

  I wish I could say that I thought these men were overacting their interest in Homer as a way of getting closer to me. Deep down, I suspected that, if anything, the opposite was the case. Many a crestfallen boyfriend over the years, upon being broken up with, would tremulously ask, “Does … does this mean I can’t see Homer anymore?”

  I REMEMBER ONE man I dated, a man who met Homer a few times and whom I became well and truly infatuated with. He was brilliant, handsome, wildly funny, and one of the greatest kissers I’d ever encountered. We went out on a few progressively intense dates, and had just reached the shy-confessions stage of our burgeoning relationship (You’re the most incredible woman I’ve met in years … that sort of thing) when he abruptly canceled three dates in a row at the last minute.

  Anybody who’s been there knows the thoughts that start crowding your head in a situation like this. You’re simultaneously angry at the lack of consideration, and hurt by the inevitable conclusion that you must have done something wrong—surely, you must have become less interesting, or been too obvious about your feelings, for things to change so rapidly.

  When I finally questioned this man about what was going on, he told me that his father had been an alcoholic, that the trauma of his childhood remained with him, and that while he liked me more than he could say, he needed me to understand that he was the kind of guy who had to take things slow—but there was no doubt in his mind that we could get through this and end up stronger as a couple, that having “shared” we could only know each other better than we had before this conversation.

  I told him never to call me again.

  I didn’t make that statement thinking, If he treats you this way now, early in the relationship, it’s not going to get any better. I didn’t tell myself, He couldn’t possibly like you as much as he says he does if he stands you up three times in a row. That was all probably true, but it wasn’t what I was thinking.

  What I felt was disgust. Following the logic of his argument, he was saying that it was okay to hurt me now (surely, he must have known that standing me up three times would hurt my feelings) because, some twenty-odd years ago, somebody else had hurt him. It was bad behavior masquerading as self-knowledge. He saw himself as a man who’d made a brave confession, who’d been honest—and honesty was an indisputable virtue. I saw someone who thought it was okay to transfer his own pain onto others because it was easier than handling it himself.

  It wasn’t that I thought it was wrong. It was worse than wrong. It was unmanly.

  Like any woman who’s spent enough years dating, I could fill a whole book with stories like these. But I come here neither to praise nor to bury the men I dated yet didn’t end up with. They had their admirable qualities, and if they made mistakes, well, so did I. We were only human, after all.

  Since adopting Homer, however, my standards had changed. You could argue that comparing men with a cat would be ridiculous, and I wouldn’t disagree. But Homer had, without thinking, thrown himself between me and a threat to my life. I didn’t expect many such scenarios where a boyfriend would be called upon to do the same thing. But I
admired Homer—I wished, almost every day, that I could be more like him. I wanted his strength, his courage, his reflexive loyalty. I wanted to be as cheerful as he was in the face of adversity. And I wanted a man with those same qualities. I realized that I couldn’t be with anybody long-term if I couldn’t admire and look up to him. Intelligence, attractiveness, a sense of humor—these were all important things.

  By themselves, though, they weren’t enough.

  Back when I first adopted Homer, that first time I saw him in my vet’s office, I was struck by something about him that had seemed stronger and braver than other cats, or even most people. Before that, my criteria—the criteria I never thought about specifically, but responded to unconsciously—for evaluating both pets and people had been roughly the same: cuteness, intelligence, personality, how entertaining I found them to be, and so on. I was also—as should surprise nobody who knows I began my career in the charity sector—a sucker for feeling that I was needed. Scarlett and Vashti had been adopted because they so clearly needed me, and loved after that simply because they were mine.

  It had been different with Homer. I had fallen in love with Homer because he was cheerful and brave, and not at all needy, despite the pain and loss of his earliest weeks of life. You can say that Homer was a cat and didn’t know any better, that it wasn’t as if he had said to himself, Well, now, there’s no point in being miserable over this disability that I can’t change anyway. And you’d be right. But I had worked with enough abused, injured, and traumatized animals to know that a great many of them never got over it and spent their lives cringing or snapping whenever anybody tried to get close. It was heart wrenching and certainly not something you blamed the animal for. They didn’t know any better. But Homer didn’t know any better, either. Homer’s courage and optimism were innate—things that could be reinforced, but never taught. Bravery was Homer’s reflex, just like catching flies or crouching down before he pounced on something.