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A Man and His Cat

ByTIM KREIDER

August 1, 2014 6:33 pmAugust 4, 2014 6:41 pmNYT

I LIVED with the same cat for 19 yearsby far the longest relationship of my adultlife. Under common law, this cat was my wife. I fell asleep at night with the warm,

pleasant weight of the cat on my chest. The first thing I saw on most mornings was theforeshortened paw of the cat retreating slowly from my face and her baleful crescentglare informing me that it was Cat Food Time. As I often told her, in a mellow,resonant, Barry White voice: There is no luuve like the luuvethat exists betweena man and his cat.

Youre in lovewith that cat! my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair,she was a very attractive cat.

The cat was jealous of my attention; she liked to sit on whatever I was reading, walkedback and forth and back and forth in front of my laptops screen while I worked, and

unsubtly interpolated herself between me and any woman I may have had over. She andmy ex Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized eachother up as enemies. When I was physically intimate with a woman, the cat did notdiscreetly absent herself but sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, facing rather

pointedly away from the scene of debauch, quietly exuding disapproval, like yourgrandmothers ghost.

I realize that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and oftenpitiful or repulsive. They post photos of their pets online, tell little stories about them,speak to them in disturbing falsettos, dress them in elaborate costumes and carry themaround in handbags and BabyBjorns, have professional portraits taken of them andretouched to look like old master oil paintings. When people over the age of 10 inviteyou to a cat birthday party or a funeral for a dog, you need to execute a very deftetiquette maneuver, the equivalent of an Immelmann turn or triple axel, in order todecline without acknowledging that they are, in this area, insane.

This is especially true of childless people, like me, who tend to become emotionallyoverinvested in their animals and to dote on them in a way that gives onlookers the

creeps. Often the pet seems to be a surrogate child, a desperate focus or joint project fora relationship thats lost any other raison dtre, like becoming insufferable foodies orgetting heavily into cosplay. When such couples finally have a child their cats or dogsare often bewildered to find themselves unceremoniously demoted to the status of pet;instead of licking the dinner plates clean and piling into bed with Mommy and Daddy,theyre given bowls of actual dog food and tied to a metal stake in a circle of dirt.

I looked up how much Americans spend on pets annually and have concluded that youdo not want to know. I could tell you what I spent on my own cats special kidneyhealth cat food and kidney and thyroid medication, and periodic blood tests that cost$300 and always came back normal, but I never calculated my own annual spending,

lest I be forced to confront some uncomfortable facts about me. What our massspending on products to pamper animals who seem happiest while rolling in feces or

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eating the guts out of rodentswho dont, in fact, seem significantly less happy if theylose half their limbstells us about ourselves as a nation is probably also somethingwe dont want to know. But it occurs to me that it may be symptomatic of the samechronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romance novels and porn.

Ive speculated that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need toexpress, and in the absence of any more appropriate object a child or a lover, a parentor a friendthey will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel,even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like amonitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. Konrad Lorenz confirms this suspicion inhis book On Aggression, in which he describes how, in the absence of the appropriatetriggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is graduallylowered; for instance, a male dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiatemating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth or any vaguely bird-shaped object, and,eventually, with an empty corner of its cage.

Although I can clearly see this syndrome as pathological in others, I was its medicaltextbook illustration, the Elephant Man of the condition. I did not post photographs ofmy cat online or talk about her to people who couldnt be expected to care, but at home,

alone with the cat, I behaved like some sort of deranged arch-fop. I made up dozens ofnonsensical names for the cat over the yearsThe Quetzal, Quetzal Marie, Mrs.Quetzal Marie the Cat, The Inquetzulous Qang Marie. There was a litany I recited

aloud to her every morning, a sort of daily exhortation that began, Who knows, Miss

Cat, what fantastical adventures the two of us will have today? I had a song I sang toher when I was about to vacuum, a brassy Vegas showstopper called That Thing YouHate (Is Happening Again). We collaborated on my foot-pedal pump organ to produceThe Hideous Cat Music, in which she walked back and forth at her discretion on thekeyboard while I worked the pedals. The Hideous Cat Music resembled the work of theHungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, with aleatory passages and unnervingly sustainedtone clusters.

Biologists call cats exploitive captives, an evocative phrase that might be used todescribe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies.

I never meant to become this person. My own cat turned up as a stray at my cabin onthe Chesapeake Bay when I was sitting out on the deck eating leftover crabs. She wasonly a couple of months old then, small enough that my friend Kevin could fit her

whole head in his mouth. She appeared from underneath the porch, piteously mewling,and I gave her some cold white crab meat. I did not know then that feeding a stray cat iseffectively adopting that cat.

For a few weeks I was in denial about having a cat. My life at that time was notstructured to accommodate the responsibility of returning home once every 24 hours tofeed an animal. I posted fliers in the post office and grocery store with a drawing of thecat, hoping its owner would reclaim it. It seems significant in retrospect that I neverentertained the possibility of taking the cat to the pound.

When I left for a long weekend for a wedding in another state, my friend Gabe

explained to me that the cat clearly belonged to me now. I protested. This was a strictly

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temporary situation until I could locate a new home for the cat, I explained. I was notgoing to turn into some Cat Guy.

How would you feel, he asked me, if you were to get home from this weekend and

that cat was gone?

I moaned and writhed in the passenger seat.

Youre Cat Guy, he said in disgust.

Its amusing now to remember the strict limits Id originally intended to place on the

cat. One of the boundaries I meant to set was that the cat would not be allowed upstairs,where I slept. That edict was short-lived. It was not long before I became woundedwhen the cat declined to sleep with me.

Youre in lovewith that cat! my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair,

she was a very attractive cat. People would comment on it. My friend Ken described heras a supermodel cat, with green eyes dramatically outlined in what he called cat

mascara and bright pink nose leather. Her fur, even at age 19, was rich and soft and

pleasant to touch.

Biologists call cats exploitive captives, an evocative phrase that might be used todescribe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I made the mistake, early on,of feeding the cat first thing in the morning, forgetting that the cat could control when Iwoke upby meowing politely, sitting on my chest and staring at me, nudging meinsistently with her face, or placing a single claw on my lip. She refused to drink waterfrom a bowl, coveting what she believed was the superior-quality water I drank from aglass. I attempted to demonstrate to the cat that the water we drank was the very samewater by pouring it from my glass into her bowl right in front of her, but she was utterlyunmoved, like a birther being shown Obamas long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. Inthe end I gave in and began serving her water in a glass tumbler, which she had to stickher whole face into to drink from.

Sometimes it would strike me that an animal was living in my house, and it seemed assurreal as if I had a raccoon or a kinkajou running loose in my house. Yet that animaland I learned, on some level, to understand each other. Although I loved to bury mynose in her fur when she came in from a winter day and inhale deeply of the Coldcat

Smell, the cat did not like this one bit, and fled. For a while I would chase her aroundthe house, yelling, Gimme a little whiff! and she would hide behind the couch frommy hateful touch. Eventually I realized that this was wrong of me. I would instead lether in and pretend to have no interest whatsoever in smelling her, and, after not morethan a minute or so the cat would approach me and deign to be smelt. I should really beno less impressed by this accord than if Id successfully communicated with a Papuantribesman, or decoded a message from the stars.

WHENEVER I felt embarrassed about factoring a house pets desires into major life

decisions, some grown-up-sounding part of me told myself, its just a cat.Its generallybelieved that animals lack what we call consciousness, although we cant quite agree on

what exactly this is, and how we can pretend to any certainty about what goes on in ananimals head has never been made clear to me. To anyone who has spent time with an

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animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such anobdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspectthat some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people torationalize owning other people.

Another part of me, perhaps more sentimental but also more truthful, had toacknowledge that the cat was undeniably another being in the world, experiencing herone chance at being alive, as I was. It always amused me to hit or elongate the wordyou in speaking to the cat, as in, Yooouuwould probably likethat! because it wasfunnyand funny often means disquieting and true to remind myself that therereally was another ego in the room with me, with her own likes and dislikes andidiosyncrasies and exasperatingly wrongheaded notions about whose water is better. Itdid not seem to me like an insoluble epistemological mystery to divine what the catwould like when I woke up and saw her face two inches from mine and the TentativePaw slowly withdrawing from my lip.

I admit that loving a cat is a lot less complicated than loving a human being. Becauseanimals cant ruin our fantasies about them by talking, theyre even more helplessly

susceptible to our projections than other humans. Though of course theres a good deal

of naked projection and self-delusion involved in loving other human beings, too.

I once read in a book about feng shui that keeping a pet can maintain the chi of yourhouse or apartment when youre not there; the very presence of an animal enlivens and

charges the space. Although I suspect feng shui is high-end hooey, I learned when mycat was temporarily put up elsewhere that a house without a cat in it feels very differentfrom a house with one. It feels truly empty, dead. Those moments gave me someforeboding of how my life would feel after she was gone.

We dont know what goes on inside an animals head; we may doubt whether they haveanything wed call consciousness, and we cant know how much they understand or

what their emotions feel like. I will never know what, if anything, the cat thought of me.But I can tell you this: A man who is in a room with a cat whatever else we mightsay about that manis not alone.

A version of this article appears in print on 08/03/2014, on page SR1 of the NewYorkedition with the headline: A Man and His Cat.