Sleeping with Cats (21 page)

Three months after we had come to Greece, we returned to Boston.
We were out of money. Robert was an extremely good poker player, and he managed to win enough on the trip back to tip everybody and pay what we had to—enough to get us home. Poker was one of his great useful gifts. Robert could do a great many things well. It enabled us to improvise when others had to plan. There was a streak of adventurer in him that meshed well with me.

We picked up Arofa immediately and were stunned. For the last month, she had refused to eat. She was skin over muscle and bone. Her eyes were glazed, but then fierce again. She recognized us immediately, and as soon as we got her to the apartment, she began to eat. She had gone on a hunger strike to bring us home. She was convinced it had worked. She was very happy.

My little carry-on baggage,

my howler monkey, my blue

eyed sleek beige passion,

you want a monogamous relationship

with me. Othella, if you were

big as me you'd have nipped

my head off in a fit.

Gourmet, winebibber, you fancy

a good Bordeaux as much

as schlag, but would rather

be petted than eat.

You play Ivan the Terrible

to guests, you hiss and slap

at them to go away. Only

an occasional lover gains

your tolerance if my smell

rubs off on him and he

lets you sleep in the bed.

When I travel you hurtle

about upending the rugs.

When I return you run from me.

Not till I climb into bed

are you content and crouch

between my breasts kneading,

a calliope of purrs.

When I got a kitten a decade

and a half ago, I didn't know

I was being acquired

by such a demanding lover,

such a passionate, jealous,

furry, fussy wife.

A
rofa was overjoyed
we were back, but her pleasure took the form of being increasingly demanding. I read books on feline behavior while trying to get back into the novel I was endlessly rewriting. It was always coming back with letters of almost-made-it but no cigar. The solution to Arofa's boredom seemed to be to give her a companion kitten.

In early August, we went down to the Animal Rescue League. I hate those shelters that kill unwanted animals for the general public. I give to no-kill shelters. I know they are a luxury, but when you go into them, the atmosphere is completely different. The cats in the disposal shelters know what faces them: they know it very well. A tiny fluffy black and white kitten reached out of its cage and grabbed Robert by the arm. He named her Cho-Cho—
butterfly
in Japanese. He had just begun the study of Japanese when Scotty was killed. Cho-Cho-san was Madame Butterfly in Puccini's opera.

It turned out that Cho-Cho was sick—she had distemper, and Arofa, even though she had shots, caught it. The vet said that both cats would die. I force-fed them baby food mixed with water every two hours during the day, and set the alarm for the night feedings. They could not keep much down, and this went on for a week. I was so exhausted I could barely speak or function, but on the eighth day, they both ate a little tuna
in water. I swore to them that if they would only live, every Saturday they would have tuna as a treat. To this day, long after Cho-Cho and Arofa have died, all my cats get tuna every Saturday morning. With five cats splitting a can, that isn't much, but they enjoy the ritual. I swear to you, although it defies logic, that at least one cat always knows when it's Saturday morning and she's entitled to tuna.

Cat and kitten slowly recovered. Cho-Cho may have been brain damaged by her early illness or she may just have been genetically predisposed to stupidity. Fortunately, she was beautiful. She grew into a longhaired tuxedo cat, probably a Maine coon to judge from the plume of her tail and her extraordinary ear and leg tufts and her gorgeous ruff. She was beautiful, vain and about as smart as a footstool. She was given to panics (thunder, loud noises, the vacuum cleaner) but at other times was placid in the face of things that should have alarmed her like strange dogs. She adopted Arofa as her mother, and Arofa tried to teach her manners and cat behavior. Her mew was a tiny high-pitched cry that only grew into a magnificent dramatic contralto when she was angry (and when she went into heat before we had her altered). Cho-Cho was far more attached to Arofa than Arofa to her, although they slept curled together. Cho-Cho was the cat visitors liked, because she circulated from person to person asking to be petted, and she was extremely pretty. Arofa developed a hostility toward visitors. She would bite guests if they tried to pet her, apparently believing any outsider might carry her off and imprison her for months. She had been a friendly kitten. Now she viewed every person who was not Robert or myself with intense suspicion.

Both cats were so photogenic that we took many photos. In the albums of those years, there are pictures of friends, some of each other or our travels, and many shots of Arofa and Cho-Cho playing on a ladder, watching the snow through the window, chasing toys or flies, curled up in a variety of positions. Cho-Cho slept on her back with her four paws in the air and her head flung back, as Malkah sometimes does but only when she is right next to me.

Cho-Cho never grew out of her kitten awkwardness. She was the only cat I have ever known who could run into a room and trip on the rug.
Arofa never broke anything unless she was angry. If we had gone off on a trip without her, often when we returned she would wait till she had our full attention, and then carefully knock a vase or a glass to the floor. Cho-Cho was always breaking things without meaning to, then looking astonished. She had such a sweet innocent face, it felt unfair to punish her for klutziness.

Some of my friends began to have children. Among the writers, mostly the men went on with their work while their wives cared for the offspring. Among my female friends, having a baby seemed to spell the end of whatever they had been doing previously. Robert did not want children, and neither did I. He wanted to be free to travel, and I wanted to be free to write. This further cut down on what I had in common with female friends—that and the fact that everyone seemed to come in couples, and few of the women besides Sophia were motivated to pursue female friendships that did not involve children or their husband's careers.

That year we went several times to Ann Arbor, where the VOICE chapter had been founded—the precursor to Students for a Democratic Society. The Port Huron Statement, that ode to participatory democracy, was our credo. I took the train to New York to see my agent and friends, to take part in an occasional demonstration against the war in Vietnam. I made new friends in Brooklyn, the writer Sol Yurick and his wife, Adrienne. Robert and Leslie Newman were living in a fancy apartment and trying to break into writing for the theater. Robert began to accompany me, as he found some of my new and old friends interesting. He was increasingly restless in Brookline.

Robert always said he worked best alone, but I did not over the years observe that to be true. When he worked alone, after a while he would begin to feel isolated and finally desperate. He seemed to work best not in a group, but with one other man. Around this time, he began working with a mathematician named Tole (pronounced to rhyme with Jolly) who lived in Philadelphia and was with a company based in New Jersey. Tole was a tall charismatic man with many interests. Born in Riga, Latvia, as a teenager he escaped from the Nazis. His mother got out ahead of him, to spend the war in Indonesia, where she learned Balinese dancing. He did
not see her for years. He had no accent, a great deal of intelligence and charm. He, his wife and his two daughters lived in a rambling turn-of-the-century house in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Their third daughter had been murdered. His wife had leukemia and grew sicker and sicker. After Robert began working with Tole, he was always going down to Philadelphia or Tole would come and stay with us. Robert and he would work, I would make dinner, we would socialize, Robert would go to bed and Tole and I would talk on for an hour or so. Tole was intelligent and read some literature and was knowledgeable about music, which made him more interesting than most of the people we dealt with socially. I was starved for communication. From college on, I wrote very long letters to friends, which I doubt they bothered to read. I was trying to fill in gaps in my life with friends located elsewhere.

Going to visit Tole in Philadelphia was bizarre and amusing. Around this time, he discovered the Beatles and began to proselytize everyone he knew. Taking their music seriously was a heretical view when they were considered teenage bubblegum music. At his house in Germantown, interesting music was always playing and interesting books lay around. His wife was now bedridden. His daughters, in grade school and middle school, took over the cooking. I especially remember breakfast oatmeal with half a jar of jam cooked into it.

I look back at myself then and in some ways I am the same person and in other ways, so different I have to work hard to cram myself back into my mind-set. I certainly loved and trusted Robert. Socially I was sometimes stimulated and sometimes bored, but my major frustration was being unable to break through with my writing. I felt that Robert was deeply committed to the marriage and I certainly was. It never occurred to me to regret I had not stayed in San Francisco. I was proud of our funky comfortable light apartment and proud of Robert and our life. But I could not ignore signs of his discontent. He had rarely been happy since Scotty's death followed by his father's. His company had not turned out the way he had imagined it. They took on more and more contracts for money rather than scientific interest, and an increasing number were for the military. Crisis followed crisis. Because of too many contracts,
they had hired people without experience or talent, and the workplace was no longer an exciting ongoing seminar. It was just a job and a hectic one with too many overdue deadlines.

Around this time, the company was acquired by Tole's larger company. The upshot was that Robert managed to get transferred to New York. In the spring of 1965, we packed up the cats and our household. We found an affordable apartment in Brooklyn near Prospect Park in the area properly known as Adelphi, but usually considered part of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

We moved into a recently renovated town house, one of three owned by brothers. The basements were connected, as it had been one large house owned by the Pirie family, for whom a department store in Chicago was named. Robert had become fanatical about storing wine and bought a gas refrigerator which the brothers agreed could be installed in the basement. It was to avoid vibration while keeping wine at forty degrees. When the row houses were one mansion, Teddy Roosevelt had shot billiards in the carriage house in back, now full of the garbage of the ages. Between
the rickety carriage house and the terrace of the ground-floor apartment was a small plot of land soon to become a battleground.

We became very close to Sol and Adrienne Yurick, who had just had a baby girl, and joined their circle of friends. Sol was a brilliant charismatic man with a dark beard, dark intense eyes, smoking incessantly and given to bodybuilding. When I had first met him, he had been unpublished except for a couple of stories—much like me. In the meantime, we had gone through all the excitement and disappointments with him of editors' flirtations and ultimate rejections. Robert and I read his novels in their various drafts and gave criticism, and he had read my work. Then
The Warriors
was accepted and there was even movie interest, although nothing came of it till years later. Then
Fertig
sold. Coover too was beginning to break through. I felt like the only failure in our small group. However, now I had regular contact with other writers and as much stimulation as I could reasonably endure. I felt if I could only find some way of opposing the war I would have all my ducks in a row.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was nearby. Many afternoons we walked there with the Yuricks, Adrienne pushing a carriage and then a stroller. We ambled under the allées of cherries in blossom drifting down, later the rose garden trellises arching over, blessing us with a litter of fragrant petals. The Japanese garden reminded me of the one in San Francisco where Sophia and I had spent hours. The Botanic Garden was a necessary relief to crowded dirty streets of brownstones where fires broke out every night and fights spilled into the streets.

Just as important as the Yuricks, on the ground floor were a couple, Felice and James. Felice and I were inseparable. We were both attracted to the burgeoning youth culture and began to dance together. We made friends with a Puerto Rican folksinger and her circle. She was bisexual and flirted with all of us. Felice and I wanted to oppose the war. We went to a demonstration sponsored by SDS in Washington and right afterward, we both joined. Although it was primarily a student organization, it seemed more compatible than anything else we could find. We launched what we called MDS—Movement for a Democratic Society, an adult chapter in Brooklyn. Our MDS became notorious because we
started our meetings by eating together. Student meetings never started with food, but with grim speeches in cold church basements.

Felice and I were the same height, both of a body type much admired then. Now we would be urged to diet. We had womanly bodies, with busts and hips, well-defined waists, good muscular legs. We liked the same music—the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Motown, lots of R and B. We loved to dance. We needed something bigger and more political to connect to. Felice was far more seductive and flirtatious than I was—or am—and we were enchanted with each other. She was, I think, already growing bored with her marriage to a tall bearded man who worked in nonprofit radio and reviewed equipment and discs for high-fidelity magazines—as popular then as computer zines now. He had been born in Austria and had what I can only describe as a European sensibility: more formal, more restrained, cooler, with a knowledge of and appreciation for culture other than pop. In some ways, he reminded me of Michel, but he had a deeper understanding of the arts.

The rooms were small and narrow, but I had a study. Robert turned his into a darkroom, as he had become fascinated with photography. He had an office on Thirty-fourth and Seventh Avenue in a big old building where his company had taken a floor. This apartment was perhaps half the size of the Brookline apartment, darker and far noisier, markedly so in the summer. In my study, there was a fan that fit into the window. However, the fan swiveled. Cho-Cho figured out how to turn it, slip out and go down the fire escape. There were two problems with these nocturnal forays. First, she got into fights with neighborhood cats and had to have an abscess treated; second, the Indian couple who lived on the floor between us and James and Felice hated cats and threatened to kill her. She miscounted the floors—most cats can count up to five or so, but not Cho-Cho—and sometimes slipped back into their apartment instead of ours. We had to replace the fan with an air conditioner so that she could no longer sneak out.

The tiny yard was disputed space. A couple in the next building took to barbecuing in the yard, which filled all our apartments with noxious charcoal smoke as well as loud banal cocktail party chatter. To preempt the space, Felice and I started a garden, a few tomato plants, bush beans,
marigolds, herbs. It was my first adult garden, the casual beginning of an obsession. We grew moonflowers on the fence, whose rich scent came out only at night. I spent far more time than Felice fiddling around in it, bringing the cats down with me. By now, Felice and I did our laundry together. One or the other cooked, and we all ate up or downstairs. They acquired a stray, a big brown tabby of amiable disposition who got on very well with our cats. Even Arofa cuddled with Sebastian and played with him up and down the narrow rooms and over the furniture. He was the size of both our cats put together, but he never dominated them, deferring to Arofa, who ruled the house.