April 9, 2015

Two Cats

          Bit and Holden sit in the unfiltered sunlight at the foot of the bed, sphinxes facing one another. 
          Their overlapping front paws form a hairy rectangle, half grey and white, half beige and brownstriped like a barber's pole.
          They know that I have carefully made the bed, and their Neoclassical posture mimics the embroidered figures in the fancy white spread.
          It's been ten summers since I heard the six-week-old kitten crying like a bird inside the tall Barberry hedge surrounding the school. I was within yet another rage of dieting and exercisingtrying to bend my forties violently back toward my thirtiesand I still had Rock Creek Park between myself and home.
          Kneeling down on the pavement below the August sun I fed it sushi from my backpack. No larger than my palm, it alternated between feeding and rubbing its head against my thigh.
          All the way through the park, the kitten gripping my T shirt, I tried to think of what agency or organization to call. I still don't know.
          From the beginning she was a subject for the camera, her saucer-large eyes and insouciant gaze so hypnotic. She remained essentially feral, never appearing before guests and—confined in a tiny powder room—deftly eluding the vet on home visits designed to accommodate her.
          Four summers later, again fleshy and resigned to my lost beauty, I heard Gary call nervously from the front of the house:
          You let Bit outside?!
          A clean young tabby—a taffy-colored Doppelgรคnger of my own—was boldly exploring the cement columns and painted floorboards of our front porch.
          And within six weeks Gary had a house cat of his own. Sitting on the bed talking one night, we came up with the name Holden because I read one of Alain de Botton's tweets that day: "William Holden is the working man's William Holden."
          It fit the new cat, who accomplished the transition from stray to pet without scruples or temerity: bawling into the dining room windows from the driveway like Stanley Kowalski, he possessed the lurid treble of Jagger (which we had first thought to call him). His gaze was urgently communicative and singular in its motivation. He possessed no complexity of intentions or second thoughts. He took the house, and us, as a rite of passageupholstered and stocked with food. 
          He was instantly, deeply affectionate.
          His gradual pairing with Bit (from Gary's moniker "the little bit") was boilerplate Tennessee Williams. He cleaned her head, her discomfited expression as his tongue pressed down on her ears like a woman in a crushed bonnet. At night we could hear their paws like horses' hooves sprinting through the upstairs rooms, and Bit screamed—to be certain, disproportionately to the pain—when Holden gave, occasionally, those little assertions of his control.
          When the new puppies came, they were exiled together, permanently, to the second floor. This came as no hardship to Bit, who continued to commune with me from the toilet seat as I sat in the tub, or posed providentially on the bureau top as I took scores of pictures of her before I went to sleep. 
          Her gift is waiting; her genius is contemplation, the motionless hours before a deft kill ... or a mere decision to relocate. All is empty, but gorgeously athletic, strategy. Visceral, impossibly elegant, her eyes are wary and reptilian, and she cannot be lifted or held. Each striped leg bears a shallow cotton glove of white fur at the paw, and, ladylike, on a long sunny afternoon she might extend them in front of her, delicately crossed.
          But Holden suffered in the restructuring.
          His treasured access to us, his daily requirement for physical intimacy, defined him. In the afternoons he cried from the other side of the doors, faced the dogs from behind gates, and once braved a leaping run to the top of the sofa, the dogs barking and nipping from below him. At night he dominated me, sprawling on my chest so close to my face he had to turn his head slightly to the side, covering me in kisses and chin rubs, and always threatening to inflict those little bites that were an inconvenient byproduct of his bottomless, proprietary affection.

          Before sleep, he positioned himself in the half circle of my arm and shoulder with a roaring purr, and with a single gesture he touched my face with the mere tip of his paw.
          But in the last few months his determination—his belief in his relationship with us—has flagged. I kept feeling him for lumps and staring at his coat for signs of dullness. I observed how he held his tail, and I gently stroked his back and sides, which seem to have softened and lost their tone and resistance. 
          His cries are infrequent and sometimes 'silent,' his mouth opening with intent but expressing only resignation.
          Last week we took him for a complete evaluation. The vet's palpation revealed nothing of importance, and a few days later his labs came back perfect.
          Last night Holden failed to appear on my bed at all. He seems to have found some place to hide in another bedroom, and often I cannot even locate him. Bit wakens me on and off during the night, her back and rump so firm and vibrating with initiative, but affection takes hold of her like a head cold—something to suffer briefly and to recover from, slightly embarrassing. I dispense a few pats and scratches and, thankfully, we are done.
          Sometimes during the day I find Holden on the bed, stretched out shapelessly as a coat thrown across a chair, and I speak to him. 
          Bit will be with me for years, outsmarting stink bugs, arranging herself artfully, until her sinewy shape simply evaporates as she regards a lamp shade intently. 
          But Holden's need is too great for this world, and he has not even his body to console him.