Sleeping with Cats (35 page)

D
inah and Oboe are old now.
I have had old cats before. Cho-Cho lived to be twenty-one. An old cat is a wonderful companion. They know the routines of the house. Things that sent them under the bed like the vacuum cleaner only rate a yawn. They know how to please you and how to ask for what they want, sometimes, like Dinah, at full volume and stridently. But mostly they are mellower and calmer than they were in their youth.

They are also a constant reminder of time, of aging, of their own mortality and yours. Whenever I touch Oboe, I feel his spine. Each knob is discrete. His fur is no longer the plush stuff that gave him his nickname, the Velvet Prince. His silver gray fur has a rusty cast in the sun. Wild leaps and tree climbing are beyond him. He scrambled up on the shed roof last week but could not get down. He still enjoys climbing the high fence around the Ram Garden and sauntering along the fence top, crying to me to come and pet him. Many cats enjoy making you reach up to them. It equalizes.

I massage him often these days, as it seems to help him and he likes the attention. I have never become completely accustomed—resigned or accepting—of his aged body. I touch him with affection and with pity. I do not mind being forced to think of dying. It's a good idea to be aware
of one's own mortality and the rapid gallop of time, its stone-clad hoof-beats striking on my skull. He cowers when he knows I am about to give him his medicine, which makes me sad, but afterward, he is cheerful again. He understands it makes him feel better.

Dinah still feels soft and her bones do not jut. Rather, age has affected her performance, roughened her voice to a sandpapery screech, made her a little forgetful. She will start to do something and then stop cold, puzzled. She knows she had something in mind, but she cannot remember what. She eats and then forgets she has eaten and badgers Woody for food, then seems astonished she does not really want it—of course, since she finished a meal half an hour before. She sleeps a great deal and very soundly, which worries me when she goes to sleep outside.

Dinah was the kitten who would not grow up, who hated motherhood, who turned her favorite offspring into her playmate. She still plays, with Efi usually. But in the middle of playing she will stop with that same puzzled look and gaze around her, trying to remember what she was up to. She stares at Woody or at me fixedly with her round green eyes. I think it is partly that her vision is poor in old age, but also she seems to be asking a question. These are not unimportant questions: what is happening to me? What will become of me? She is peremptory, as if aware she has only so much time left to run into the summer garden among the flowers, to roll on her back on the warm bricks, to chase feathers on a string, to play tag or king of the mountain with Efi, to eat her favorite foods, to demand to sleep on my pillow, to be petted, to be picked up and carried about as she was when a kitten.

Amazingly, yesterday the cat next door, who picks on Max and, when he can catch up to her, on Malkah, attacked Dinah while she was sleeping on the patio by the gazebo. I heard her crying out and his hostile bellowing. I ran out just in time to see her claw his nose and that cat, a great big longhaired and middle-aged orange tabby, take off with tiny Dinah on his tail pursuing him. She drove him off the land and then came back, not a hair out of place. I checked her over and she had not a scratch.

Oboe is more patient, unless it is a matter of being on the wrong side of a door, whether to go out, to come in, or to enter a room where we are
and he isn't. But then he has always insisted on his right to have doors opened that separated him from us. He is still top cat, even with his reduced strength. When Max steps out of line, Oboe cuffs him and Max lies down to receive discipline. Oboe still views Malkah and Efi and Dinah as his to protect and possess.

There is a sadness to living with old cats; also a comfort and pleasure, for you know each other thoroughly and the trust is almost absolute. The gray cats always sleep with me, but they also are with me when I read and when I meditate. It is a peaceful and intimate connection. The knowledge of how much I will miss them is always with me, but so is the sense of my own time flowing out, my life passing and the necessity to value it as I value them. Old cats are precious. I pity people who only like kittens.

A vet told me a story of a woman who came into his office with an old cat she wanted to put down. After examining the cat, the vet said he could not find anything wrong with it. It was healthy and he would not euthanize it. The woman insisted. As an argument the woman kept saying, “But he's old. He can't jump anymore. I want a kitten. It depresses me to look at him.” Perhaps the woman couldn't live with herself.

I see my future aging in the elderly cats too, but I do not have the worship of youth that characterizes our time. I cherish my old cats. Oboe sleeps through the night these days, pressed against my side under the covers. Of all the cats, he is my most intimate. We are beings who love and trust one another. That knowledge, that trust cannot be replaced. We have been part of each other.

Near the end of your life you regard

me with a gaze clear and lucid

saying simply,
I am, I will not be.

How foolish to imagine animals

don't comprehend death. Old

cats study it like a recalcitrant mouse.

You seek out warmth for your bones

close now to the sleek coat

that barely wraps them,

little knobs of spine, the jut

of hip bones, the skull

my fingers lightly caress.

Sometimes in the night you cry:

a deep piteous banner of gone

desire and current sorrow,

the fear that the night is long

and hungry and you pace

among its teeth feeling time

slipping through you cold and

slick. If I rise and fetch you back

to bed, you curl against me purring

able to grasp pleasure by the nape

even inside pain. Your austere

dying opens its rose of ash.

W
oody offered me a kind
of support through my mother's death I really had not expected of any man I was with. It moved me. He did not take to my father, and my father mostly pretended Woody did not exist. In a few months, my father sold the house and moved into a high-rise in the long-term-care retirement community. His glaucoma was getting steadily worse, without my mother to remind him four times a day to put in his eyedrops.

Boris had been living with us for a year and a half. I talked to the vet about him, saying he seemed to be gaining weight but wasn't eating that much. The vet made a joke about snacking and did no further examination (Boris was the last cat tended by that vet). When we returned from the city April 1, the day after my birthday, he was dragging his belly, frighteningly distended. We brought him in and he was diagnosed with incurable feline infectious peritonitis. He died on the operating table. We brought him home to bury him.

Jim Beam went crazy. For a month at night he insisted we open every cabinet door, every closet door. He searched for Boris, and he wailed, disconsolate. We did not have Boris long, but he was a lovable reprobate, grateful for a home, grateful for food, for attention, for kindness. We felt his loss and decided to get another cat. We attended cat shows to see what we wanted.

The shows were a world of their own. Unlike dog shows, there are no
professional trainers, owners show their animals, and we are not talking big bucks or often any money. While presenting their perfect cats, combed and catered to, the owners are not cowed by contemporary standards of thin beauty. They are often large people who eat gourmet takeout in front of their cages and are mostly interested in cats and one another, arranging matings and gossiping about other breeders and judges.

Woody fell in love with a Korat—cats from southeastern Asia, usually from Thailand, an ancient breed believed to have been developed by Buddhist monks hundreds of years ago. Unlike Siamese, they are cobby: not lean and long but stocky little cats, silver gray with intense green eyes, take-charge dispositions and infinite affection, the ultimate lap cats. They relate strongly to other cats but most passionately to people. The breeder told us they were a traditional wedding present. Intending to breed Korats, we selected a female kitten who took to us at once. We would come back for her when she was old enough to leave her mother.

We decided to marry. We fixed on June 2, 1982, because then our anniversary would be the same day as the anniversary of our first lovemaking, the night we had begun together. We were married by Rabbi Debra Hachen in the apartment in Cambridge we shared with Elise. We wrote part of our ceremony and were married under a chuppah made of a shawl I had given my mother. While we were being married, the turkey we had roasted was waiting in the kitchen. Afterward, when Woody went in to carve it, a gray tail was sticking out. Elise's kitten Gretta, daughter of a famous Russian Blue bar cat in Provincetown, had eaten her way into the turkey's cavity and collapsed, her little belly totally full. Imagine being inside the most sumptuous meal you can envision. We removed her, kept our mouths shut and served the turkey. It was a warm day, and we sat on the back porch with twenty guests, drinking champagne.

On June 19, we held a second ceremony on our land in Wellfleet. About eighty people came, from the Midwest, from New York or Boston, from the Cape. We had a local couple opening shellfish on the front terrace. We had roasted another turkey (minus cat this time). Friends brought entrées, salads and desserts. We provided wine and beer. Elise baked a double challah in the shape of a naked embracing couple. The day began
beautifully. We held the ceremony below in a clearing. Local artists Gloria Narden and Peter Watts lent us huge flags sewn with moons and cats and ships. It looked like a medieval fair, people everywhere among the gardens, children under the rhododendrons in full flower, pink, lavender, white, yellow and red, children playing house under the overarching weeping beech. After the ceremony, we had planned on dancing.

About three-thirty, it began to rain, so everybody crowded into the house. Strange pairings resulted. Our guests included novelists, poets, nature writers, my agent, academics; and local people, the bookstore owner, the librarian, painters and writers, fishermen, carpenters, an insurance salesman, paramedics. The dancing ended because eighty people were in a small house eating, drinking and trying to hear one another over the music. To move across the room took twenty minutes. It was the third time I had married, but the first time it had been done with ceremony and carried out in beauty and joy. We were making a commitment we meant and still mean.

That evening, we left Penny and Elise in charge and departed on our honeymoon to an unannounced destination. We had reservations at a motel four towns away, on a Sound beach where we walked for hours. In the morning, we came quietly home. I had told my father about the wedding, but he did not respond. He never learned Woody's name or acknowledged that we were married, although over the next few years, I had occasion to remind him frequently.

The next day we drove to Worcester and picked up our Korat kitten, Dinah. She ran to us, climbed into my arms and purred her way home. We were so excited, Woody was speeding when we were stopped by a state trooper. As he was taking the license and registration, Dinah climbed on the back of Woody's seat and rubbed against the trooper's hand. He did not give us a ticket. She was tiny but fearless—as she is to this day.

She was our wedding present to ourselves. At first both the brown cats arched their backs and hissed. They seemed insulted. She stood her ground. Probably because she was so tiny, Cho-Cho was not as hostile as she had been to the Burmese. But Dinah made little progress with Jim Beam or Colette, until Jim got into a fight. We could always tell from his posture when he returned home whether he had won or lost, in his opinion. This
time, he had won. However, he had a bitten paw that abscessed, blown up to the size of a tennis ball. He was grounded and bored: a perfect opportunity for seduction. Dinah did not stop until she had him curled up with her.

Jim Beam fell in love with her. He groomed her. Whenever Jim entered the house, Dinah would run to him, fussing over him as a conquering hero. If she didn't appear, he would search for her. Her favorite way to sleep was in the center of a ring created by Jim's long brown body. He could completely surround her, for even when she was full grown, he was twice her size, twice her weight. However, do not imagine that he dominated her. She would take no guff from him. If he got smart with her, was rough or pushy, she would throw him across the room. He never fought back. When she was angry with him, he caved. Their love affair lasted the rest of his life.

Cho-Cho suffered a gradual decline in health. Her vision was going. She had cataracts. She went outside less, and I did not encourage it, as I felt she would have trouble defending herself. I arranged chairs so that she could get on the dining room table and onto my desk. She was diagnosed that year with an inoperable tumor, but it was not causing her pain. Colette and Jim Beam mostly ignored her. Dinah would curl up with her when neither of the brown cats was available. Colette had slowly accepted Dinah, but when she wanted to sit on my lap, she would simply dump Dinah on the floor. If she felt like sharing me, she would graciously do so; but if that didn't please her, she exercised her rights. She was a proud cat, very conscious of her prerogatives. She had a number of interesting habits. If we went away for longer than a week, Colette would punish us: when we came home, she would pluck a bird out of the air and kill it in front of us. She knew she was not supposed to kill birds, and normally did not. But on those occasions, she not only killed but did it as spectacularly and visibly as possible. Then she would run off and stay out the rest of the day.

She loved scents. She would walk along the herb garden, on a flagstone path between the main garden and the upper garden (named the Rosa Luxemburg but usually referred to as the Rosa) toward the wisteria and a stand of rosebushes. Herbs grow on both sides of the walk. She had her favorite scents—mint, lemon balm, thyme—but when she came to the hyssop she made a face and once or twice I heard her hiss at it. She
loved roses. Unlike Arofa, who would sniff a rose and then take a bite, she would simply bury her nose in the flower. She also liked daisies, which do not to me have a sweet scent. She is the only cat I ever had who liked perfume. She would pick her way with incredible care among my perfume bottles and gently rub against them. Sometimes when I would pick her up, she smelled of Chanel No. 5 or Femme.

She could be a complete klutz and knock things sideways and spill her food on the floor and push over the water dish. She could be graceful as a ballet dancer and pick her way through a maze of tiny bottles without upsetting any. I was always conscious of her walking on her toes on her long long legs, which Burmese are not supposed to have. Both Burmese had strong powerful tails. You could grip them by the tail without bothering them. It was a way to get Jim's attention. If they hit you with their tail, you felt it. Whomp! Colette would use her tail as an instrument of punishment on Dinah, when she was too obstreperous. When Dinah was little, I carried her around in my blouse, buttoned into it. From the
beginning, Dinah was possessive of Woody. It is that way to this day.

Woody and I had a bumpy time at the beginning of our marriage. Working off Cape meant a lot of commuting. He had never had a garden, and the first year, everything went to weeds and rot. However, he missed the wonderful fresh tomatoes. That inspired him to pay attention to growing vegetables. He also wanted to be able to use the outside as space for summer entertaining. Everything outside the house tended to occur in the woods behind it—where we held our ceremony. The house was set into the hill, at the crown. We had made a clearing in a flat place about halfway down to the marsh, where there was a natural circle of pines. As an outdoor room, it had two disadvantages. It was within auditory range of the next house. It was too near the marsh, so on mosquitoey years, that clearing swarmed with them. We began to move recreational space to the south side of the house. Just removing the accumulated junk took a week. Then we began to make plans, developing the gardens gradually over the next ten years. The last addition was a screened-in octagonal gazebo, the brick terrace in front of it, and the cut flower gardens between it and the ram garden.

Two writers living together is considered difficult, but we have both found it better than being with people who don't understand. I have been intimate with people who resented my writing, were jealous of it, were offended by it, tried to ignore it. Woody is a harsh critic of my work, and sometimes when he is particularly cutting, it creates considerable tension. But in the long run I find his criticism invaluable. He understands what I need. One of the first things he did after our wedding was to redo my office, building a large sturdy new desk ten feet long, insisting I pick out a very good chair, and encouraging me to invest in personal computers.

It isn't always easy living together. In fact, often it is damned hard. We are both volatile, both strong willed. Sometimes we each see the other as imposing his or her will. We are both sensitive and used to rejection and may perceive it where it doesn't exist. But we remain truly committed. We are lovers now as much as we were in 1976 when we began. We still find each other interesting companions. Woody, raised in the suburban middle class, is more socially skilled and polite and respecting of social glue. I am more abrasive, more political. The opinions of others mean far more to
him than they ever can to me. I don't worry much socially. If there's a silence at a dinner party, it doesn't bother me. Someone will speak up eventually, I'm sure; he isn't. He finds me more arrogant than he likes; I find him moodier. But we are a pair. I never have to watch my back when he's in the room. He's on my side with the same conviction and loyalty as I am on his. I never take that for granted. Nor do I take for granted being loved or being desired: I tried too long for a good central relationship.