Scarlett and Homer still clearly preferred the days when they’d lived with me alone, but Vashti had never been happier. I was so thrilled for her happiness, I think it made me love Laurence a little more.
“They really all have their own personalities, don’t they?” Laurence observed once. “I knew that dogs had different personalities, but I never attributed different personalities to cats. I think that’s why I never really liked them until now.”
I was the tiniest bit flabbergasted. It seemed incredible to me that anybody could be unaware that, of course, different cats would have different personalities. Like Laurence, I had grown up with dogs, but I’d always expected, when I brought each of my cats home, that none of them would be like any of the others.
But if this was the epiphany that got Laurence and the cats to warm up to each other, I was all for it.
It wasn’t long before Laurence came not only to recognize the differences among the cats, but even to form a grudging respect for them. “I can understand Scarlett,” he said one day. “Scarlett just wants to be left alone to do her own thing, and I get that.” As a man who had lived alone by choice for the better part of twenty years, of course he would.
And the first time he saw Homer catch a fly five feet in midair, he was beside himself with admiration. “Look at that cat go!” he exclaimed—and he was so impressed, he hurried into the kitchen for a bit of turkey to reward Homer with. “That’s a cat who knows how to move. Have you ever noticed that about him, how his walk is so much sleeker and more graceful than other cats’?”
Had I noticed? Was he kidding?
It was Laurence who went shopping for various types of netting and wire that might make our balcony safe enough for Homer to go out onto. He’d observed the way Homer would stand longingly at the sliding glass door when Laurence and I occasionally let Scarlett and Vashti out (a years-long source of angst for me; I hated to deprive Scarlett and Vashti of time outdoors, but felt miserable that Homer had to be excluded). Sadly, there was no getting around the fact that our balcony railing was well within Homer’s jumping range. “If only Homer couldn’t jump so high,” Laurence would say in a sympathetic tone that was, nevertheless, tinged with appreciation. “That cat can jump so high.”
But Vashti remained first and foremost in Laurence’s affections. “Hey, it’s the Vashti cat!” he would cry happily whenever she entered a room—running straight over to leap into his lap and rub her little cheek daintily against his.
His favorite nickname for her—one entirely of his own invention—was “Vashowitz.” She was almost always “the Vashowitz” when he referred to her—as in, “Do you think the Vashowitz would like this brand of catnip?” or “I think we need to get the Vashowitz a new scratching post. She’s clawed right through the old one.”
From the way he fussed and fawned over her, you would think no man had ever fallen in love with a cat before.
One day, about a year after the cats and I had moved in, Laurence brought home a bag of Pounce cat treats. He was looking for a way to make Vashti happy, I think, but all three cats got their fair share.
They must lace those Pounce treats with crack, because I had never seen anything like the three-ring circus in our apartment whenever the bag of Pounces came out. Even Scarlett sat up on her hind legs like a meerkat and begged. Scarlett begged! She still wouldn’t let Laurence touch her, flinching away if his hand sought her head, but she went so far as to purr and rub against his ankles when he came home at night.
Laurence also learned to lightly tap the ground with his fingernail next to the Pounces he dropped for Homer, so that Homer would know where they were. Homer was soon constantly crawling all over Laurence, nosing into his hands and pockets with friendly curiosity. Hey, buddy! Got any of those Pounce treats?
And Vashti … well, Vashti also loved the Pounces, but she had always loved Laurence for himself. That didn’t change much.
LAURENCE WAS THE kind of person who never simply handed anybody a birthday card. He always sent them by mail because, he said, it was infinitely more fun to find a birthday card unexpectedly in your mailbox than it was to see it in somebody’s hand.
The first birthday I celebrated nearly a year after moving in with Laurence, I got two birthday cards in the mail. One was from Laurence himself, and bore the return address of his office. The second had a return address and handwriting I didn’t recognize (I would later find out that Laurence had gotten a co-worker to address it). When I opened the envelope, I saw a card with three kittens—who looked a great deal like Scarlett had looked as a kitten—on the front. Inside the card, I read:
Happy birthday, Mommy! We love you, even though you make us live with that horrible man.
It was signed “Scarlett, Vashti, & Homer.” Scarlett’s “signature” was in red ink, naturally, while Vashti’s bore a small drawing of a paw print beside it. The “R” in Homer’s was backward and his whole name trailed halfway off the page. Laurence would later explain that, of course Homer’s signature wasn’t perfect—the cat was blind, for crying out loud.
Three weeks later, Laurence asked me to marry him. I said yes.
IT WOULD BE almost two years before Laurence and I were married. The novel I had written was sold for publication, and even though I was no longer working at my full-time job there were months of edits to be done, followed by even more months of promotion, interviews, and travel. Trying to plan a wedding in the middle of all that would have been too stressful to think about. So we waited a year, until after the book came out, before we began making arrangements. It was just short of another year from the time we started planning until the wedding day itself.
A few months before we were married, Laurence’s best man, Dave, came over for lunch. Dave had known Laurence since nursery school and had, naturally, spent a great deal of time in our apartment. But he was usually here with other people. Scarlett and Vashti were shy of any crowd larger than three or four, so the only one of the cats Dave had met was Homer.
Homer remembered Dave and greeted him in his usual friendly, high-energy fashion. Hi there! Wanna throw the stuffed worm for me? Scarlett was also out and, curiously, didn’t run away to hide. I was across the room when I saw that Dave was going to try to pet her. I yelled, “No—don’t!” but it was too late. Dave’s hand was already on her head.
I prepared myself for the worst, mentally assessing whether we had any Band-Aids left in the medicine chest, when I saw something I never thought I’d live to see. Scarlett was nuzzling her head affectionately against Dave’s hand. Laurence and I looked at each other, and then at Scarlett, as if she had broken out into a soliloquy from Hamlet.
Dave was unaware of our astonishment. He turned to Laurence and asked, “So which cat is the mean one?”
23 • Intimations of Immortality
No one was ever yet so fortunate as you have been, nor ever will be, for you have been adored by us all.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING, HOMER STOPPED EATING.
Within the past few months, I had taken the cats off dry food completely as it became clear that Vashti’s sensitive digestive system—which had only become more sensitive with age—could no longer handle it. All three cats had responded to their new moist-food-only regimen with enthusiasm—particularly Homer, who had always been fonder of “human-food” meats than the other two.