COU COU, LE MIGNON

Every time we leave the house for an extended period, I think something terrible will happen to the cats—yet life goes on.

When we arranged the home exchange with the French girl, I was convinced she would let them out into the backyard, never to be found again. She would only text me once they’d been gone for days, roaming the streets, moved in with some new couple, or run over by a car. Or perhaps she wouldn’t text me at all. I imagined getting home after a month away, opening the door, then looking under the sofa, in the closets, and even behind the oven before realizing her error, my error. This was what I worried about: not identity theft, not actual theft, not returning home to find a dead body in the bathtub. The cats.

She did not lose them; there was nothing to worry about. She kept them inside, petting and cooing at them. Cou cou, le mignon. C’est chou? Ce’st chou? Oo la la, le mignon. We know because she sent us videos of her slender hands stroking their furry little bodies. In Paris, we watched these over and over again before bed at night. It was not just that they quelled our fear. It was something else, too. (Jealousy? Desire?)

When we got back to the States, the cats turned their noses up at us. They were cosmopolitan now. What did we have to offer them except the same pâté as usual? Aware of their disdain, we did the only thing we could to win their affection back: let them outside. After they’d nibbled the tulips and daffodils, we tried to speak to them in French, too. Les chats, les chats! Où êtes-vous? Oo la la! Les chats!

THE FAVORITE

Our gray cat, Toby, likes to sit on laps. He’s not picky; anyone’s will do. The white cat, Gus, is more particular. The only chance we have is just before bed. He begins to circle the bed mewling, and we coax him, scratching at the blankets and patting our pillows like the desperate creatures we are.

He comes up and rubs his head against one of ours. His purr begins as a low rumble, then swells into a symphony of vibration and thunder, the perfect white noise. He puts his front paws on one of us, kneads. Then moves over to the other, doing the same. Sometimes, his mouth drops open in ecstasy. Sometimes, he begins to drool.

Most nights, this is all we receive. He sticks his tail up in the air and dismounts the bed with a squeaky meow. Then, he sleeps downstairs on an armchair.

But sometimes, we know, he’ll sit down. And then we will know which one of us is the favorite.

WHY PSYCHOANALYSTS LOVE CATS

My psychoanalyst has a cat. She’s badly behaved, I hear. She seems perfectly sweet until, out of nowhere, she lunges at you and scratches. That cat is pure id.

Is there a more transparent screen for our projections than our pets?

The two boys are very different. Gus is white; Toby is gray. Gus purrs; Toby howls. Gus is Rubenesque; Toby is compact. Gus walks with his tail up; Toby’s trails behind. Gus is a bunny; Toby is an otter. Gus plays with toys; Toby plays mind games with us.

Over time—now more than ever—the lore of these cats has evolved into something that rivals a fantasy novel. 

I adopted Gus in Providence. He is absolutely in love with the world, although the boundaries between him and it are porous. He nibbles on plants; he drools on pillows; he rubs himself on any available surface, frequently knocking things over. He purrs so loudly it reverberates throughout the whole house. An ingénue at eleven years old (past middle age in cat years), he loves Ariana Grande and the color pink. Can he see colors? We don’t know.

My partner met Toby in Atlanta, although he (Toby) is originally from Alabama. Missing a chunk of his ear, he’s a real tough guy. We imagine his taste in music: heavy metal. In movies: mafia flicks. We imitate him speaking in a Tony Soprano voice. His default attitude towards us is judgment. He thinks everything we do is stupid. We don’t know his birthday, but we know for sure he’s a Scorpio.

Why, then, does he spend so much time in front of our computer screens or sitting on our laps? How do we make sense of what guests think of sweetness? This is really an act of domination. You’re my pillow, bitch.

Of course, we think the cats are gay. Toby is more of a leather daddy; Gus a radical faerie.

It is not that we identify with them. It is that we want to be them, or the thems we have created. 

Why is this our fantasy?

MISERY

Sometimes, I feel like such an awful wretch, as though I have done everything wrong.

I do not have the success I want. I do not have the career I want. I do not look the way I want to. I have loved ones—so many close and dear friends, my lovely partner—but is loving and being loved supposed to fill up the heart only this much? Why do I still feel such misery?

But then I curl up on the bed, putting my head against Gus’s stomach. He allows this—the top of the head is his favorite part of the human body—and he begins to purr. Then, I feel like I cannot have done everything wrong. Neither I nor life can be so terrible if I have this cat.

The cats are innocents. The cats do not know about structural inequality or climate change. They do not care who is president. This is what we love about them.

Sometimes, though, we wish that they could do one human thing. One chore. Perhaps they could put laundry in the hamper—not even do the laundry! Just clear the floor of stray socks and underwear. Perhaps they could wear little towels on their feet and mop the floor. (I could do it, Toby tells us with his eyes. Send me out with a fanny pack and a twenty and I’ll bring you back a sandwich. Put me in, coach!)

But if they had one function in our lives other than this comfort, would it ruin everything?

BREAKUPS

The cats have been left before, as have we.

Before my partner and I were together, we were friends. I was dating a man and he was dating a woman. Those two people had previously dated each other, but she left him because he was in love with his ex. 

The woman dated my friend for eight months, then dumped him because his taste in film was too pretentious. Around the same time, I left her ex for the same reasons she had.

I called my friend and he consoled me—we consoled each other. We watched a French film. I met his cat. I realized that that was what I needed all along: a man who had a cat, too.

ARE YOU A TOBY OR A GUS?

When guests come over, we include them in our story.

After they leave, we discuss how the cats did, and how the guests did with the cats.

As I’ve said, Toby will sit in anyone’s lap. This makes him easy to like. Once, when we were in Thailand, a young couple stayed in the apartment for three weeks. The woman left in tears; she had fallen in love with him. For weeks after her departure, she’d text me to ask about Toby’s mood or to tell me she was worried about his allergies. I have it under control, I told her. It’s actually asthma. I crouched over his little body every day, shoving the plastic contraption with the inhaler into his face. She had never even had to use it, since he’d had his seasonal steroid shot just before her sojourn. What did she know?

Then, finally, she got her own cat. 

This is the way with Toby. Guests come over; he sits on them; they say, What a sweetie. Or they don’t. If they don’t, we later talk about how they’re the sick sort of people who don’t really like animals. 

Gus is different: elusive, but magical. All white, he also has one green eye and one blue. His long eyebrows shade them both. He certainly never sits on visitor’s laps. But it’s not that he doesn’t like people; it’s just that they don’t know what he likes. That is: to be picked up like a baby and thrown over one shoulder, supported from below and across. To be cooed at and bounced. Some have figured out this secret, and he rewards him by nuzzling their ears, imparting a wet and vibrating kiss. Others simply enjoy the thrill of the chase, Gus crouching away from their extended palms. What a beautiful cat, they say.

Some people never get to know him. He doesn’t care, and neither do I. Gus does not need their approval.

My partner says I am more like Toby. But who isn’t?

CATS IN QUARANTINE

Our friend says that the cats of our city are sick of being around people. They miss their alone time. They wish we would all go to work.

Our friend is a dog owner. She has a little Pomeranian, and she likes to say of him, “Chester is a cat.”

Dog people want everything; isn’t having “man’s best friend” enough?

Chester is, obviously, not a cat.

But she is right about one thing: the cats do seem sick of us. Maybe they were always this way—letting out guttural yowls in the middle of the day, running around in a state of what definitely appears to be existential distress. 

Maybe we didn’t notice before.

Or maybe we’re doing it to them.

SUPERLATIVES

I ask these questions again and again:

Who is a little fluffernutter?

Who is a sweetheart?

Who is a funky monkey?

Who is a perfect angel?

Who is a naughty angel?

Who is my baby?

Who is the love of my life? 

ARMS OR LEGS

It is obvious enough that what we walk on are legs. The cats walk on four limbs; is that four legs? Or are there arms? When Toby extends his paw onto my face in the morning, gradually extending his claws into my skin until I wake up, go downstairs, and feed him breakfast, it certainly seems like an arm.

Then he goes to the bowl of pâté and uses his paws to scoop it up into his mouth.

CEO OF MY HEART

The cats are good at what they do. Astonishingly good.

Toby is good at getting what he wants.

Gus, on the other hand, sits on any new object that enters the house—a tote, a cardboard box—and he does so with flair and verve. Sometimes, his arms are extended, his little face nestled between them. Sometimes, his belly is up, and all four paws in the air.

I get a new office chair and he sits in it. He is so adorable I can barely comprehend the sight. And now I have a whole new vocabulary to express my love for him: he is the “CEO of my heart.”

He is an artist at the peak of his craft.

Will we ever be as skilled at our endeavors? If not, is it because we’re trying too hard, or not trying hard enough?

JUDGMENTS

Working from home, we imagine the questions the cats are asking us.

Why are you still looking at that screen?

What’s wrong with you?

Do you guys still have jobs?

Are we poor?

Are we going to starve?

FIGHTS

In the spring, I tried to grow seedlings. It went well until they grew nearly strong enough to stand up to the elements: thick stems, respectable leaves. By then, they were too tall for the seedling tray, and it was time to bring them out into the open air by the bedroom window.

At this point, the massacre began. In one fell swoop, Gus leapt on the shelf and chewed up the okra and cucumbers. As he dismounted, he knocked over half the seedlings and an orchid, its pot shattering on the floor of my office. Soil and bark flew everywhere.

I never get mad at Gus.

Toby is a different matter. Our fights are personal. He stands in front of my computer screen for hours at a time, gradually knocking off any object he can find: a pair of headphones, a pad of sticky notes, a pen. (I told you: he has a will to dominate.) I go down and check his bowl, and, of course, there is food in it. I bring it up to the office, and he eats with his paws again, getting meat all over the floor. Then, he resumes his position in front of the screen, beginning to yowl. I am close to madness.

My partner and I fight too. Of course we fight. What is partnership but a version of this: knocking something off the other person’s desk forever and ever? We fight and I cry and I throw myself on the floor, down to the level of the cats, but they do not like to be around me in that state. 

“Why can’t we just be happy?” I beg of him.

“Humans aren’t made to be happy,” he tells me. “That’s why we have cats.”

SEX WITH CATS

Jacques Derrida asks, “who am I at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time, overcoming my embarrassment?”

We humans are always ashamed. We are self-divided, alienated. Are we embarrassed because we think the cats are, too, or because we think that they aren’t? 

The cats are naked in front of us all the time—or, from another perspective, always clothed. Either way, they don’t seem capable of shame, only judgement.

Gus flees at the first sign of nudity. The whole world excites him, except for us.

Toby’s passions, on the other hand, extend beyond laps. Really, any body part is game: my wrists extended over the keyboard, my legs draped over my partner’s legs, or my chest when I lie on my back in my bed.

As you can imagine, this causes problems.

Is it bestiality to masturbate with a cat on your chest?

Is it bestiality to have sex with the cat on the bed?

No. It can’t be. This is Toby, after all. He lives to manipulate, not to give or receive pleasure. He doesn’t care about sex. If anything, his kink might be making us uncomfortable.

And besides, there’s no getting him off the bed. If we wanted to have sex without cats—their warm bodies on the bed, their wails from behind the door—we would have to let them outside without supervision. Like I feared the French girl would. Like I fear I will someday do by accident.

And the shame of losing a cat would be worse than any other shame.

THE THIRD CAT

It is true: we once had a third cat. 

We met him as a kitten mewing in our backyard three cities ago. We fed him. We watched him hunting through the windows, and he began to sleep on our garbage can. We tried to bring him in, and, right away, he bit my partner, necessitating two weeks of kitty quarantine at the local vet and a trip to the human doctor for antibiotics. We should have known then that it was a mistake, that he was a problem child. But instead, we tried to raise him together. A month later, he was peeing blood. This was remedied at great cost and with many tears. It required a catheter and a special food.

As life went on, we moved twice, and he never adjusted to any environment. Gus would play with him, sure, but Toby wanted to kill him, and as he grew, he took his revenge. One Christmas Eve, he sliced Toby from armpit to elbow (if the front limbs are indeed arms). Then, he had to go upstate (to my parents’ house). He lives there still. Really, he may have a better life than our cats. He hunts chipmunks by the dozen, and he can eat as many plants as he wants.

Despite this failed experiment, we talk about adopting a kitten.

We wish Toby and Gus could have kittens together.

But we have learned our lesson: We can’t have everything we want. We have to preserve what we’ve got.

TIL DEATH DO US PART

Sometimes, I beg the cats to get me to forty.

Other times, I say that I want to follow them into the earth when they go. I know this is in poor taste. But when I think of their death, that is the level of despair I feel.

I would never say this about my partner. Perhaps, most of all, it is because I fear that without them, there would be no us. ■

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