by Gwen Cooper
He would wait until nobody was around, then use a single paw to slide open a closet door so he could pillage the boxes ruthlessly, pulling out all manner of papers and objects to chew up, bat around, or claw to shreds as his fancy dictated. I can’t tell you how many times Laurence and I would come home from having been out to find a ransacked apartment that looked like a crime scene—a cyclone of old college term papers and passed notes from high school days strewn across the living room floor, in the middle of which Homer crouched, turning an innocent face to our own accusatory ones as if to say, Hi, guys! Look what I found!
I bought some twine that we used to tie Laurence’s closet doors closed (I didn’t really mind if Homer got into my own closets). We created complicated knots, which were ultimately effective in keeping Homer out. But if Laurence, say, wanted to quickly grab a magazine he’d written an article for back in 1992, he would fumble impatiently with the knots and press his lips together in a restrained silence that spoke volumes.
For all the new things he found to get into, Homer was, as he had ever been, a creature of habit. He still wanted to sit with me or on me at all times, and still insisted on sitting exclusively on my left side. If Laurence happened to sit to my left on the couch, Homer would wander around the apartment at loose ends, “complaining” at the top of his lungs. Like a blind person—who knows the difference between a can of peas and a can of soup because peas and soup are always kept in exactly the same spot—Homer’s life, curious and adventurous though he was, was manageable because certain things always happened in the exact same way. Homer knew where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do based on where I was and what I was doing. If I was sitting on the couch, then Homer was supposed to be sitting to my left, and if he couldn’t sit to my left then something was worrisomely out of sync in the world. But Laurence couldn’t understand why I would insist that we get up and switch positions, leaving my left side free. Surely, in a three-bedroom apartment, there was room for everybody to sit wherever the hell they wanted without anybody’s having to jump up and change spots because, seriously, what was that cat’s problem?
And as if all that weren’t enough, Scarlett was not alone in her nocturnal caterwaulings at the bedroom door. Homer had no more intention of being displaced from my bed by Laurence than Scarlett did, and Homer was more insistent than she was in demanding his rights. Homer also cried at the bedroom door at night but, unlike Scarlett, cried whenever I went into the bedroom—whether it was for an afternoon nap or a change of clothes or half an hour of undisturbed seclusion while I read a novel. As soon as I opened my eyes in the morning, I would hear the clip-clip-clip of Homer’s footsteps down the hall, and he was crying at the door within seconds.
What was remarkable about this was that I didn’t get up at the same time every morning, nor did I use an alarm clock (people as neurotic about punctuality as I am tend to awaken on time without the aid of an alarm). I might first wake up at five or six thirty AM on a weekday, or at nine AM on a weekend, or even later, but it was never Homer who woke me up. It wasn’t until I was aware of being awake for a minute or two that I would hear Homer’s footsteps approaching the bedroom—and I couldn’t tell you how it was that he knew. Perhaps the sound of my breathing changed? It seemed unlikely that even Homer, acute as his hearing was, could hear a change in my breathing when he was sound asleep down the hall. But there was no disputing the fact that he knew. Within only a few days, my habit of waking up briefly and then drifting back off for another hour was a thing of the past. It was one thing for Homer to cry piteously at the door at night while Laurence was still awake, and quite another for Laurence to be awakened at five AM by a wailing cat. So I’d grab a pillow and one of the extra blankets from the closet and head for the couch where Homer would cuddle with me—ecstatic with happiness—as I dozed until I was ready to start my day.
When I had first adopted Homer, I’d toyed briefly with the idea of naming him Oedipus and calling him “Eddie” for short. Homer the poet had been blind, but Oedipus the tragic hero had lost his eyes altogether. Melissa, however, had insisted that calling an eyeless kitten Oedipus was mean (this from the person who’d thought calling him “Socket” was a swell idea), and so the idea was discarded.
Nevertheless, I now found myself with a reverse Oedipus on my hands—he’d had his mother all to himself, and now out of nowhere was this father figure who was trying to take his mother away from him. I began to despair of ever bridging the gap between the two of them.
Amazingly, it was Vashti—Vashti who was never aggressive except when she was passive-aggressive, Vashti who never used her claws or raised her voice, Vashti who always gave in and never insisted on getting her own way—who saved the day and solved all my problems. She did so by the simplest means imaginable.
She took one look at Laurence and fell deeply, hopelessly, irretrievably in love.
VASHTI HAD ALWAYS been more partial to men than to women (with the exception of me, of course). She loved to be petted and crooned to and told how pretty she was, and she liked these things especially when it was a man who was dispensing the attention. But all the men who had come into our life had had eyes only for Homer, and Vashti wasn’t one to push herself on anybody.
Now there was a man who, as Vashti shrewdly surmised, didn’t seem interested in Homer at all. It was true that he didn’t seem interested in any of the cats, but perhaps there was an opportunity here.
She didn’t leap upon Laurence all at once. But if she found a moment when the other two cats weren’t around—and, miraculously, now that we lived in such a large home, sometimes Vashti had us to herself—she would jump into my lap and insist, softly and sweetly, upon being petted. She didn’t try to get Laurence to pet her, but as I stroked her she would look at him with a kind of melting adoration in her eyes. It was exactly the sort of gaze that, I often thought, men must daydream about someday seeing in the eyes of a beautiful woman. See how much nicer I can be than those two? Vashti seemed to say. I like you sooooo much more than they ever will.
Vashti intrigued Laurence as well. Sometimes I caught him looking at her with an expression almost identical to her own. “She’s really beautiful, isn’t she?” Laurence would say. “She has a perfect little face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful cat.”
I don’t know the specifics of how things progressed from there, or who made the first move, but one evening I came home to find Vashti nestled in Laurence’s lap. He caressed her and said, “You’re a pretty girl, aren’t you? Aren’t you a pretty, pretty girl?” He stopped his crooning as soon as he saw me, but Vashti remained in his lap for nearly an hour. Another time, I came out of the shower to find Laurence seated at the breakfast table with Vashti at his feet while he sneaked her bits of food. “Laurence!” I said. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to train them not to beg at the table?”
Laurence looked shamefaced. “But she’s so pretty, and she likes me.”
Ah, well—Laurence wouldn’t be the first man undone by such a pretext as that.
As the months went by and Laurence became more attentive, Vashti seemed to blossom into a second kittenhood. She was full of playful high spirits in a way that she hadn’t been in many a year. She would charge around the apartment—never roughly, because Vashti was quite the lady—batting furiously at anything that dangled or bringing scraps of paper over to Laurence for him to throw for her. She hadn’t done that with me since she was only a few months old. She became conspicuously more fastidious in her grooming habits, unable to tolerate the teensiest speck of dirt in her long white coat. And she would squeak with outraged jealousy if she caught Laurence and me being affectionate with each other, running over to paw gently at his leg as if to say, Hey! Did you forget that I was here? Laurence got a huge kick out of this; he would often make an elaborate show of hugging and kissing me while Vashti was watching, in the hope that he could provoke a demonstration of her outrage.
“I can’t tell you how
much I love it when you use me to make the cat jealous,” I would say.
Scarlett and Homer still clearly preferred the days when they’d lived with me alone, but Vashti had never been happier. I was so thrilled for her happiness, I think it made me love Laurence a little more.
“They really all have their own personalities, don’t they?” Laurence observed once. “I knew that dogs had different personalities, but I never attributed different personalities to cats. I think that’s why I never really liked them until now.”
I was the tiniest bit flabbergasted. It seemed incredible to me that anybody could be unaware that, of course, different cats would have different personalities. Like Laurence, I had grown up with dogs, but I’d always expected, when I brought each of my cats home, that none of them would be like any of the others.
But if this was the epiphany that got Laurence and the cats to warm up to each other, I was all for it.
It wasn’t long before Laurence came not only to recognize the differences among the cats, but even to form a grudging respect for them. “I can understand Scarlett,” he said one day. “Scarlett just wants to be left alone to do her own thing, and I get that.” As a man who had lived alone by choice for the better part of twenty years, of course he would.
And the first time he saw Homer catch a fly five feet in midair, he was beside himself with admiration. “Look at that cat go!” he exclaimed—and he was so impressed, he hurried into the kitchen for a bit of turkey to reward Homer with. “That’s a cat who knows how to move. Have you ever noticed that about him, how his walk is so much sleeker and more graceful than other cats’?”
Had I noticed? Was he kidding?
It was Laurence who went shopping for various types of netting and wire that might make our balcony safe enough for Homer to go out onto. He’d observed the way Homer would stand longingly at the sliding glass door when Laurence and I occasionally let Scarlett and Vashti out (a years-long source of angst for me; I hated to deprive Scarlett and Vashti of time outdoors, but felt miserable that Homer had to be excluded). Sadly, there was no getting around the fact that our balcony railing was well within Homer’s jumping range. “If only Homer couldn’t jump so high,” Laurence would say in a sympathetic tone that was, nevertheless, tinged with appreciation. “That cat can jump so high.”
But Vashti remained first and foremost in Laurence’s affections. “Hey, it’s the Vashti cat!” he would cry happily whenever she entered a room—running straight over to leap into his lap and rub her little cheek daintily against his.
His favorite nickname for her—one entirely of his own invention—was “Vashowitz.” She was almost always “the Vashowitz” when he referred to her—as in, “Do you think the Vashowitz would like this brand of catnip?” or “I think we need to get the Vashowitz a new scratching post. She’s clawed right through the old one.”
From the way he fussed and fawned over her, you would think no man had ever fallen in love with a cat before.
One day, about a year after the cats and I had moved in, Laurence brought home a bag of Pounce cat treats. He was looking for a way to make Vashti happy, I think, but all three cats got their fair share.
They must lace those Pounce treats with crack, because I had never seen anything like the three-ring circus in our apartment whenever the bag of Pounces came out. Even Scarlett sat up on her hind legs like a meerkat and begged. Scarlett begged! She still wouldn’t let Laurence touch her, flinching away if his hand sought her head, but she went so far as to purr and rub against his ankles when he came home at night.
Laurence also learned to lightly tap the ground with his fingernail next to the Pounces he dropped for Homer, so that Homer would know where they were. Homer was soon constantly crawling all over Laurence, nosing into his hands and pockets with friendly curiosity. Hey, buddy! Got any of those Pounce treats?
And Vashti … well, Vashti also loved the Pounces, but she had always loved Laurence for himself. That didn’t change much.
LAURENCE WAS THE kind of person who never simply handed anybody a birthday card. He always sent them by mail because, he said, it was infinitely more fun to find a birthday card unexpectedly in your mailbox than it was to see it in somebody’s hand.
The first birthday I celebrated nearly a year after moving in with Laurence, I got two birthday cards in the mail. One was from Laurence himself, and bore the return address of his office. The second had a return address and handwriting I didn’t recognize (I would later find out that Laurence had gotten a co-worker to address it). When I opened the envelope, I saw a card with three kittens—who looked a great deal like Scarlett had looked as a kitten—on the front. Inside the card, I read:
Happy birthday, Mommy! We love you, even though you make us live with that horrible man.
It was signed “Scarlett, Vashti, & Homer.” Scarlett’s “signature” was in red ink, naturally, while Vashti’s bore a small drawing of a paw print beside it. The “R” in Homer’s was backward and his whole name trailed halfway off the page. Laurence would later explain that, of course Homer’s signature wasn’t perfect—the cat was blind, for crying out loud.
Three weeks later, Laurence asked me to marry him. I said yes.
IT WOULD BE almost two years before Laurence and I were married. The novel I had written was sold for publication, and even though I was no longer working at my full-time job there were months of edits to be done, followed by even more months of promotion, interviews, and travel. Trying to plan a wedding in the middle of all that would have been too stressful to think about. So we waited a year, until after the book came out, before we began making arrangements. It was just short of another year from the time we started planning until the wedding day itself.
A few months before we were married, Laurence’s best man, Dave, came over for lunch. Dave had known Laurence since nursery school and had, naturally, spent a great deal of time in our apartment. But he was usually here with other people. Scarlett and Vashti were shy of any crowd larger than three or four, so the only one of the cats Dave had met was Homer.
Homer remembered Dave and greeted him in his usual friendly, high-energy fashion. Hi there! Wanna throw the stuffed worm for me? Scarlett was also out and, curiously, didn’t run away to hide. I was across the room when I saw that Dave was going to try to pet her. I yelled, “No—don’t!” but it was too late. Dave’s hand was already on her head.
I prepared myself for the worst, mentally assessing whether we had any Band-Aids left in the medicine chest, when I saw something I never thought I’d live to see. Scarlett was nuzzling her head affectionately against Dave’s hand. Laurence and I looked at each other, and then at Scarlett, as if she had broken out into a soliloquy from Hamlet.
Dave was unaware of our astonishment. He turned to Laurence and asked, “So which cat is the mean one?”
23 • Intimations of Immortality
No one was ever yet so fortunate as you have been, nor ever will be, for you have been adored by us all.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING, HOMER STOPPED EATING.
Within the past few months, I had taken the cats off dry food completely as it became clear that Vashti’s sensitive digestive system—which had only become more sensitive with age—could no longer handle it. All three cats had responded to their new moist-food-only regimen with enthusiasm—particularly Homer, who had always been fonder of “human-food” meats than the other two.
I wasn’t initially alarmed that first morning when Homer, rather than muscling past the other cats to get to his food bowl the way he usually did, approached the bowl halfheartedly and sniffed at it a few times before ambling off. It wasn’t his typical behavior, but more than a decade of being a “cat mom” had taught me not to be an alarmist about such things. It might be that he was tired of that specific flavor. While Homer had never been a finicky cat, he was getting on in years (it was so hard to believe he was eleven already!), and I knew it wasn’t unheard of for a cat
to become finickier as he grew older. Or maybe he simply wasn’t hungry. Where was the law that said a cat had to eat the exact same amount of the exact same food at the exact same time every day? I made a mental note to put down a different flavor in a few hours when I gave them their midday feeding, then went about reviewing proposals and price quotes from lighting designers for the wedding.
When I put down food again a little after one o’clock, this time making sure I selected a different variety from what I had given them that morning, Homer once again refused to eat. He walked into the room somewhat sluggishly, sniffed the food as he had that morning, and made digging motions around the bowl, the way he did when burying something in the litter box.
I wondered if there might be something wrong with the food. Not too long ago, there had been a major scare among pet owners when a substance toxic to cats and dogs made its way into several popular brands. It hadn’t affected us directly—Vashti’s allergies and colitis having long since required me to buy specialty brands—but who was to say that this batch of food hadn’t been tainted with salmonella or E. coli? Homer’s sense of smell was so much more acute than the other two’s, and the way he was acting seemed to indicate that something didn’t smell right to him. Perhaps he’d detected a hazard that wasn’t apparent to Scarlett and Vashti.
I took all three ceramic bowls away (over Vashti’s ardent squeaks of protest), emptied them out, scrubbed them vigorously, and ran them through the dishwasher twice. While they were cleaning, I dashed out to the pet store two blocks away and selected several cans of Newman’s Own organic cat food. It was pricier than I would have liked (Hey, it’s for charity! I told myself), but I couldn’t remember any negative stories or health scares associated with the Newman’s Own line.
The food was new and the bowls were as sterile as they were ever going to be. To be completely safe, however, I pulled out three small dishes from the set Laurence and I used ourselves, arranged the Newman’s Own food on them, and put everything down for the cats.
