Homer's Odyssey

by Gwen Cooper

  I’d always known Homer was stubborn, that he was a cat who knew his own mind, but this was the first time I’d seen that stubbornness turned full force against me. I had my agenda, and Homer had his, and the two were obviously not in sync.

  But I could be as stubborn as he was. One way or another, the two of us were getting to New York that day.

  By now, the plane had been boarding for several minutes and Tony, Felix, and I were the only ones left at the gate. “What should we do?” Tony asked uncertainly.

  I took a deep breath. Steady, I told myself. “He’ll have to fly without it, I guess.”

  The struggle over the pill had had the one benefit of quieting Homer’s crying. He wasn’t even rattling his carrier anymore as we boarded the plane. But as soon as I stowed him beneath the seat in front of me, and he felt the thrum of the plane’s engine through the floor, he started up again.

  “Would you like a cocktail before takeoff?” the resolutely cheerful flight attendant asked as I buried my face in my hands.

  “God, yes,” I replied. She brought me a vodka with cranberry juice, which I downed in a single gulp, hastily requesting another. Thank the Lord for first class.

  THE FLIGHT FROM Miami to Atlanta, where we would pick up our connecting flight to New York, was brief. Homer’s cries by now had deepened into a low, mournful tone I’d never heard from him before. His ears were so much more sensitive than other cats’ to begin with, and I could only imagine how painful the change in air pressure was for him as the plane ascended. As soon as the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign was turned off, I pulled Homer’s carrier out from under the seat in front of me and cradled it on my lap. I unzipped it just enough to reach a hand in, and Homer cuddled and nuzzled against it with a desperation that surpassed even the occasions he’d believed me to be angry with him. His cries took on the contrite yips he made when trying to make up with me. Please let me out. Please make it stop. I’ll be good! I promise I’ll be good!

  If I could have stuffed myself into his carrier, given him my seat, and borne his pain for him, I would have considered it a fair trade. How could he know, how could he possibly understand, why I was subjecting him to all this? “Good boy,” I murmured as I rubbed his aching ears. “Good boy, good boy, good boy …”

  Once I’d had my third drink and the plane leveled, a soothing sense of inevitability descended on me. We were on our way now. I continued to stroke Homer’s head, which calmed him a bit. I ignored the filthy looks a few of my fellow passengers shot us as Homer’s cries continued, softer, yet unceasing.

  The plane began its descent into Atlanta sooner than I would have liked. I tensed slightly; I had gone to college in Atlanta, and I knew how enormous the airport was. My hope was that our connecting flight wouldn’t be too far from where we arrived. To my horror, when the flight attendant announced the gates for connecting flights, I discovered that we were landing at an A gate and flying to New York from Concourse D. We had roughly fifteen minutes between flights—how could we possibly make it?

  My seat was closest to the front of the plane, and I waited impatiently, bouncing on the balls of my feet, for Tony and Felix to emerge. “We have to run, guys,” I told them. “Like, seriously, we have to run now!”

  Tony and Felix took off in one direction while I bolted in the other. “No!” I called to their retreating backs. “This way, this way!”

  The three of us tore through the airport, each with a bouncing carrier slung over one shoulder. “Here’s the train to Concourse D,” Tony shouted, slowing down at the empty track.

  “There’s no time to wait for it,” I said desperately. “We have to keep going. Hurry!”

  We sprinted as if all the devils of hell were chasing us, past slow walkers and cleaning staff, and occasionally bumping into a hapless bystander who popped unexpectedly into our path. Excuse me, excuse me, we muttered breathlessly, over and over again. Vashti and Scarlett didn’t budge inside their carriers, regarding the passing scenery through glazed, half-closed eyes. Homer, who had never been in his carrier for more than forty-five minutes at a stretch, and who had certainly never been bounced around so vigorously, wailed piteously. “Who schedules these things so far apart?” Felix wondered aloud, gasping painfully.

  “Some sadist who works for the airline,” I called over my shoulder.

  We arrived at our connecting flight just as they were closing the gate. “Wait, we’re here! We’re here!” I announced to the woman behind the counter. I bent over to catch my breath and rub a cramp in my side as I shoved our tickets and the cats’ health certificates at her. My brow was slick with sweat, and I inadvertently dampened the papers as I drew the back of my hand across my forehead, trying to keep the sweat from dripping into my eyes.

  “You really should try to arrive at the gate at least fifteen minutes before departure,” the woman at the counter informed me with cold asperity.

  I was positive that my restraint in not decking her guaranteed me a spot in heaven.

  This time, I was seated next to an older woman who was also traveling with a cat. “I see they put us together,” she said happily as I settled into my seat and stowed Homer in front of me, still fighting to catch my breath. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it was for us to get a seat on this flight! And I had to upgrade to first class! All the other spots for cats were already taken. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

  I mumbled something indistinct.

  “This is Otis,” she continued, indicating the dignified-looking ginger tabby who snoozed peacefully in the carrier at her feet. “He’s a good flier. We make this trip twice a year to visit my grandchildren.”

  “This is Homer,” I told her. Homer was once again struggling furiously within the confines of his carrier. He responded to the sound of his name with an agonized lowing that was so loud, we almost didn’t hear the announcement to fasten our seat belts. “Homer’s never flown before.”

  “Poor little thing,” the woman said. She lowered her head a bit to get a better look at him through the mesh of the carrier. “Don’t cry, Homer. It’ll be over sooner than you think.”

  We chatted comfortably as the plane began its climb. I told her all about Homer, about his usual bravery and how out of character all the fuss he was making was. “I’m so sorry he’s making all this noise,” I apologized.

  She laughed. “Wait till you’re traveling with a baby.” I suddenly realized, in a moment that had all the settling heaviness of a truth long known yet only now understood, that this wasn’t just a trip I was taking. I was flying into my future, a future so indistinct and shapeless as to be completely unrecognizable to me. I had lived nearly thirty years in the same city, and now, after only a few weeks’ thought and planning, I was grafting the entirety of my life onto a new and strange place. I had a vision of myself, sometime years and decades from now, traveling with a cat who wasn’t Homer to visit grandchildren of my own. I would pat the arm of some nervous young woman sitting next to me and tell her, Dahlink, this is nothing. You have no idea what the years will bring …

  Homer wailed again, jolting me from my reverie. “Can’t you shut that thing up?” demanded an irate man behind us.

  “Have some compassion, sir!” the woman next to me snapped. She turned to fix a stern eye on him. “The poor cat’s never flown before. What’s your excuse for bad manners?”

  My eyes filled with tears, and I impulsively seized her hand. “Thank you!” I said.

  She squeezed my hand back in a motherly fashion. “Some people act as if a cat didn’t deserve any sympathy at all.”

  The moment I saw the Statue of Liberty and the towers of the World Trade Center pass beneath my window was one of the happiest of my life. Even learning—after landing and waiting forty minutes at the baggage carousel—that our luggage hadn’t made the connecting flight, and wouldn’t arrive until sometime the next day, didn’t faze me.

  I felt as if I had spent the day being pummeled like a punching bag, but Felix and Tony were remarkabl
y fresh. Scarlett and Vashti had been no trouble at all, they told me. I thanked them profusely for having made the voyage with me, and then they disappeared into cabs bound for the friends and relatives they’d be visiting while in New York.

  I loaded my three cats into a cab of our own and directed it to our new apartment. I had purchased a litter box, litter, food, and bowls when I’d been in New York two weeks earlier to sign the lease, and had left everything with my building’s doorman. I had also ordered a new bed and sheets, and my friend Richard, who lived in the building and had helped me land the apartment, had supervised their delivery. The rest of my furniture wouldn’t arrive for a few days.

  The doorman provided a luggage cart and helped me wrangle the cats and all their apparatus up to our apartment on the thirty-first floor. The second the door was closed behind me, I unzipped each of the cats’ carriers. Scarlett and Vashti were still groggy from the effects of the tranquilizer, and they ambled around in a befuddled way before falling in a heap together in front of the radiator.

  Homer appeared bewildered, but grateful to be out of his carrier and on solid ground once again. Every other time we’d moved, Homer had sprung from his carrier, eager to explore his new surroundings. This time, however, he was more cautious. Something felt very different about this move, and it wasn’t just the day he’d spent in his carrier or the grueling trip he’d endured.

  Once I’d set up food and litter, and carried Homer over to show him where they were, I tossed sheets and blankets onto the bed haphazardly and collapsed onto it face-first. We made it, I thought. We’re in New York.

  Homer was still creeping slowly about the room. The air was dry and cold, and his fur crackled with static electricity. From my purse I pulled Homer’s stuffed worm, which I’d wrapped up and carried with me. I hadn’t wanted it to get lost in a moving box; I thought Homer would feel better if there was something immediately familiar that he could reconnect with once we arrived.

  For once, though, Homer wasn’t overjoyed to greet his old friend. He gave the worm a perfunctory sniff and carefully dragged it next to his food bowl. Then he resumed his measured pace about the apartment.

  It had been thirteen hours since the moving van had arrived that morning to start my day, and the only thing I wanted was another thirteen hours, uninterrupted, in the warmth and comfort of my bed. Vashti, Scarlett, and I dozed, but Homer had no intention of resting. There was still something about this place that didn’t make sense, something that had to be figured out. He couldn’t stop until he knew what it was.

  He was a cat who hadn’t slept in the city that never sleeps. Homer was already a New Yorker.

  18 • Cool For Cats

  Strangers and foreigners are under Zeus’s protection, and will take what they can get and be thankful.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  MY MANHATTAN APARTMENT WAS A STUDIO—A LARGE ONE BY NEW YORK standards, at something like 750 square feet plus a tiny outdoor “terrace”—but a studio nonetheless. Studio-apartment living took some getting used to, although the transition proved easier for me than it did for my cats. Homer was particularly put out, unable to grasp the concept of a home that consisted of a single room. Scarlett and Vashti, much as they initially disliked their sudden space restriction, could plainly see that, indeed, their living area had contracted to the confines of four walls and a bathroom. But it took Homer weeks to settle down. He was more rambunctious than the other two, and suddenly found his play space unaccountably diminished. I think he believed there must be a door to another room somewhere, if only he could find it, and he would skim along the walls of the apartment, nose to the ground and ears high in the air as he tried to detect the slightest clue as to where the rooms that surely lay beyond were hidden. He would meow in a throaty, irritable sort of way, as if demanding, Why won’t anybody tell me where the rest of this place is?

  Looking for an outlet for Homer’s energetic high spirits, I resorted to store-bought toys for the first time since Homer was a kitten. He was uninterested in most of them, naturally, except for one—a plastic wheel containing a plastic ball. There were slits along the top and sides of the wheel through which a cat could reach to push around the ball inside.

  Homer was quickly obsessed. The ball made a satisfying whiz and rattle as it hurtled through the wheel, but Homer—unable to see how completely contained the ball was within the wheel—was convinced that he could figure out a way to liberate it. He would burrow under the wheel, turn it on its side, push it from one end of the room to the other, then sigh loudly in exasperation when the ball steadfastly refused to come out. Sometimes he would sneak up on it, crouching down and pouncing from clear across the room, as if hoping to surprise the wheel into relaxing its grip on the ball.

  Scarlett and Vashti, who also found this toy intriguing, seemed perplexed at the sheer volume of hours that Homer could devote to this new pastime. Scarlett, especially, would observe him at work on the toy with a kind of amused disgust. Clearly, you can’t get the ball out of the wheel, she seemed to be thinking. There’s no point in being undignified about it. Sometimes, Homer would creep out of bed at three or four in the morning to try it again, filling our small apartment with the sounds of the ball whooshing and the wheel flipping over and over as Homer butted it around with his head. It kept me up many a night, but I felt guilty about taking the toy away from him. We only have the one room, I would think. Where else is he supposed to play?

  I paid dearly for that studio, more than I felt comfortable claiming I could afford, but the location was unquestionably convenient. Not only was I within a block of my office, but living all the way down at the southernmost tip of the island as I did, just about every subway line in the city came right to my door. I could be all the way up on the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side—and any and all points in between—in less than twenty minutes, faster than people I knew who lived farther uptown and were, technically, closer to those locations than I was. And, no matter where I was in the city, I could always orient myself back home by looking for the World Trade Center. I’d been used to living in the city I had grown up in, a place that I knew so intuitively, I’d never had to consult a map in my life. Learning my way around Manhattan was a challenge, but I always had some sense of where I was in relation to where I lived simply by consulting the skyline. This was true even in maze-like neighborhoods like SoHo or the West Village, where the streets were named instead of numbered and would otherwise have been hopeless for a newcomer to make any sense out of.

  I spent a great deal of time with Andrea and Steve, the boyfriend who was now officially her fiancé, and their circle of friends. I made one trip back to Miami, for Tony’s birthday, a month after I’d moved, and Andrea introduced me to her pet-sitter, Garrett. When I’d lived in Miami and traveled, my cats had always been cared for either by my parents or by some friend who Homer already knew, one who lived close enough to pop in and out once a day. But Manhattan was a place that made quick visits inconvenient and so, despite apprehensions about turning my cats and my home over to the care of a stranger, I decided to call in a professional.

  Garrett came over to meet us before my trip, and I went through my customary introduction ritual with Homer, holding Garrett’s hand in mine and bringing the two hands together under Homer’s nose. I left him with lengthy and detailed instructions: The windows and balcony door were always to remain closed; food dish and water bowl had to be separated enough so that Homer couldn’t toss the contents of one into the other; et cetera. I couldn’t help it; my habit of worrying about Homer, of fretting irrationally over his safety far more than I did over Scarlett’s and Vashti’s, was too deeply ingrained. I tried not to be more skittish than Garrett’s typical clients—although I’m sure I was—but Garrett was an unusually patient man, and he and Homer seemed charmed with each other from the beginning. “We’re going to be buddies, aren’t we, Homer?” Garrett said, and Homer brought over his stuffed worm to drop it at Garrett’s feet—his highest
stamp of approval.

  I called Garrett each day that I was gone, and he left written notes on the kitchen counter every time he visited. They went something like this:

  DAY 1: Changed food, water, litter. Gray guy hid under the bed, white guy seemed happy to see me, played worm fetch with Homer for half an hour.

  DAY 2: Changed food, water, litter. Gray guy hid under the bed. White guy wouldn’t stop dipping paws in fresh water. Homer threw a can of tuna out of the kitchen cabinet so I fed it to them. Hope that was okay.

  I preserved these notes for some weeks after I returned, hanging them on my refrigerator with magnets. I felt like a parent receiving her children’s first report cards, with detailed accounts of who had been a good sharer or who played well with others. Although I’d had plenty of corroboration over the years, it still felt good to realize that I wasn’t the only one who found Homer irresistible.

  IT HAD BEEN January when I began interviewing for jobs in New York and February when I moved, and everybody—including the HR guy at the company that hired me—told me I was crazy to move from South Beach to New York, especially in the dead of winter. “But it’s warm in Miami all the time,” they would say, as if this simple and single fact rendered all other considerations moot.

  With all the changes in our life and circumstances that moving to New York brought, I think it was the cold that was the hardest adjustment for the cats. Even the smell of the gas that powered the stoves and ovens in our building, which bothered the life out of Homer those first few weeks (every home we’d had in Miami had functioned solely on electrical power), wasn’t as much of a shock as the ubiquitous cold.