The Beauty of Men Never Dies: An Autobiographical Novel

Men and Cats

67 Men and Cats Ihave learned a number of things about men in their treatment of cats. Not that I am one of the “cat people” or a “dog person.” Not at all. One of my lovers gave me a cat in the early 1970s. A kitten from his household. I called the cat Gideon. Soon after, I found another grown cat with a collar in the streets of Greenwich Village. I called the number on his collar tag and found he had belonged to a diner that had burned. The owners departed and left Pierre, as I called him, behind. My sister visited me at about that time and said, “I didn’t know you were that interested in pets.” I said, “I’m not. But now that I have them, I feel responsible for them.” “That’s how I feel about the children,” she replied. We are Michigan people. Not all that demonstrative and able to speak of it. Another lover in the next romantic wave told me that he had had a cat that jumped from a second-story porch when he lived in Toronto. And then after being absent for some time, wandered back. He was living there with his wife. Spare me your criticism. I knew him before he was married. I will sleep with a married man if he was a lover before he was married. I’m not that uptight about adultery if the adultery is the lover’s problem, not mine. This has been a recurring pattern in my life. Men who fall half in love with me, then marry a woman, then wander back in a kind of half-assed way. None have ever managed to reach any kind of epic-level relationship with me. Their own indecision, I suppose. 68 Men and Cats Anyway, this man told me that when the cat leaped off the porch a second time and then wandered back, his wife and he heard the cat crying at the front door and refused to open it. His wife was French. French-Canadian. I can just see her pursed-up little mouth saying, “Non, non, non.” And him obeying. The cat finally wandered away. To find a better home, I can only hope. Perhaps there are some kindhearted people in Toronto. More kindhearted than my dithering boyfriend, who sealed his fate with me when he told me this story. I could imagine myself crying for admittance at the doorway to his heart. If you can’t learn from a story like that, you’ll never learn, and you deserve all the unhappiness you will get with that person. Another friend, not a boyfriend, showed me a photo of himself playing with his cat when he lived in San Francisco. Then he told me he had taken the cat to the veterinarian and had him put down because he had been a feral kitten and attacked him around the house. I have chosen to believe that this was true. But I wonder if I would have found the cat’s attacks too much to handle. If you can turn your affection on and off like that, where does love fit into any of this? And now I have a new kitten in my already pet-congested home. When my sister and brother died, I inherited their pets. Two cats from her. A dog and a cat from my brother. I already had a dog and a cat: a dog that had been deposited on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach and left to find a home, and a cat that wandered out of a wheat field in France as a kitten. The new kitten had evidently had a home and was deposited on the street in front of a friend’s apartment building here in Miami Beach, complete with carrying case and food supply. I said, when my friend called, “You can’t go to heaven once you’ve done something like that.” So the kitten was put in my guest room (I was out of town), and instead of finding him a home on my return, I kept him. I call him Buster. His real name is Zebulon Pike. I think cats should have a real name that’s not used. I got that from E. E. Cummings. I know, I know. My dog Bibi’s real name is Vanessa. Go figure. We almost never say it. I am [18.221.165.246] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...