žys, I’ve been blown up twice.) Maybe I wasn’t in love, but I crackled with the desire to see him every day for about six months. We could talk and talk for hours — completely sober, too. I called him Karlsson-without-a-roof. One time I gathered up my courage and said, let’s go to the movies. You know what my state of mind had to be for me to ask some guy to go to the movies! For me, it’s the same as hanging upside down from a crane half-naked. And he said, “Two hours? With you? In the dark? … I can’t, because … um … I’m impotent?” I hadn’t been to the movies in a long time. I didn’t know that they checked everyone there now, for security reasons. I went by myself, to Sky. Plane. Girl. The movie was okay, a chick flick, but the lack of structure bothered me. Just like I missed a more tangible basis for the insanity in The Hours. But Renata Litvinova was wonderful. I really liked one of her lines in particular. Or more accurately, her intonation as she spoke it. She’s walking with her beloved journalist and asks, “What do you think, do I love you?” She asks it in exactly the same way a person might ask that of themselves in their thoughts. And now a year has gone by. What do you think … do I still love that guy who didn’t go to the movies with me?
Okay — on to what I should have started with. Just don’t jump to the conclusion that I’ve gone out of my mind on account of my sedentary way of life, like the Tyzenschnauzer tied to his doghouse. See, an American I know, who promised my kid a cat, sent along a book called Cool Cats: The 10 °Cat Breeds of the World, so she could pick one. On the cover there’s a picture of a Russian Blue, as graceful as a panther. That’s what I wanted, but Goda picked a Scottish Fold. If I hadn’t been so ignorant, I would have paid more attention to this sentence in the description of the breed: “The appeal of this shape [meaning those peculiar ears] is clearly that it gives the breed a more humanoid look.” Indeed, all of the breed’s recorded character traits are things you’d say of people as well as animals: “intelligent, sensible, sweet.” Well, that’s not surprising in itself. You too will have heard those crazy, love-starved women bragging a hundred times, “Our dog is so intelligent, so bright, it seems he understands everything! He’s a member of our family. The only difference is, he doesn’t talk!” At the cat show, the Scottish Fold looked normal. There were two other kittens in the same litter with upright ears. Apparently, you can’t breed two Scottish Folds together, because if two mutated genes end up in one cat, two other pathologies show up: feet overgrown with cartilage, which makes them lame, and an immobile tail that hasn’t separated from the spine. The Scottish Fold mutation was first found in a Scottish village in 1961, but the cats weren’t allowed into any shows in Great Britain until 1983, because they were considered degenerates instead of a breed to themselves. They let us take the kitten home from the kennel only after three weeks, when he was fully weaned. That was when I found out that he’d been born, like me, on March 12th. We’re both Pisces, so we got along perfectly from the start. For half a year he lapped warm milk, didn’t eat much, and played with balls of yarn at night without making any noise. I particularly liked it when he glanced to the side — the whites of his eyes became little triangles. But, soon enough, I started feeling uncomfortable around him.
I woke up at dawn, one day. I tend to wake up several times a night, because at night I tend to devote myself to thinking about all the ways I might live a more virtuous life. Potter the Cat was lying on his back, next to me, looking at the celling, his little front feet set on top of the blanket. Without moving, I looked up to see what he was looking at. There wasn’t anything there. No fly, no spider. I realized he was looking at the ceiling … just staring. He looked, and, as Victor Pelevin might say, saw something it was better not to understand.
Another time, I woke up early Sunday morning because the cat had stepped on the remote control and the television turned itself on. (I have no desire to write that the cat turned it on.) Turned itself on full blast. Do you know what was on? A children’s show, about animals. Potter lay down across my chest and watched that show for ten minutes — eight full-grown shorthaired Persians playing in some kennel. From the side it looked like Potter was smiling (but all cats look that way from the side), and his folded ears reminded me of tiny sealed envelopes with love letters inside. And then, a few months ago, M. came over for the weekend. By then we were already catastrophically pissed off at one another. I was unforgivably rude. When I think of it now, I’m appalled. I told him he was neither spiritual nor passionate, only sensitive, and all in all, I said, he shouldn’t go looking for God between some woman’s breasts (I suspect he already had someone back home, and just couldn’t yet make up his mind between us). He scowled, opened a can of beer, and turned on a soccer game. I went to sleep in the room farthest from him. I left the cat sitting on his lap. In the morning, M. found his shoe had been peed in (I hardly wept over this), but the cat hadn’t stopped there — in the middle of the night, Potter had raked my calf with his claws, drawing blood for the first and only time … It was only much later, when my memory began filing the details away, one after another, that I remembered who won that soccer game M. had been watching. Or, rather, who lost: the Scots. You remember, the Scottish team and their fans were rampaging around Vilnius, spending thousands of pound sterling, walking the streets polymorphously, with hairy legs and plaid kilts …
In bed now, in the evenings, I read the interminable John Updike. Potter sits on my chest of drawers, pushes the cover off of my Italian wood veneer jewelry box, and winds my mother’s florescent bead necklace around his leg. Holds his leg up and looks at those beads for a long, long time. Then he slowly puts down his leg and the necklace slides back into the same spot. Exactly where it was.
A month ago, Virga came to Vilnius to attend a course on public relations. She stayed at my place; I was in Kaunas with my kid at the time. After we’d both gone home, she called to tell me about her visit. She’d woken up in the night to see shining beads rising slowly from the chest. She said, I felt each hair on my head turning to wire and standing up on end, one at a time. Palms sweating, I reached under your pillow for my cell phone, to call the police, but then I remembered that your damn cat was there.
Thursday, without calling beforehand, a couple of “incorrigible” friends came by. It was past midnight before I walked them to a taxi. I went back inside and the lights were on all over the apartment (I was certain I’d only left them on in the hallway). Potter was shyly perched on the cutting board eating, in turn, either a cold potato or a pickle. Next to him there was a bottle of wine lying on its side. Not a drop left. You think he lapped it up? I suspect much worse. (He cleaned it out.)
I’ve started smiling without noticing it on my way home from work. I break into a grin turning into the gateway of my apartment building, and because of that I sometimes pleasantly surprise one of my neighbors, also divorced. The smile is involuntary. Born of fear. The way you smile at false authorities. (At the President.) Because I know that when I open the door, the cat will meet me with his eyes fixed on the damp doormat. Someday … I’ll smack him in the nose. With the door. On purpose.
His latest stunt came when he turned eight months old and started demanding a mate. In a word, there’s frequently a morning miracle at my house — an erection. At seven in the morning, while I’m drinking coffee, and the kid is still sleeping, do you know what the cat does? He climbs up on the zucchini Virga brought over and, straddling it with his powerful (Scots soccer player’s) hind legs, he makes … the “movements of love.” It wasn’t long before the zucchini was all ragged and worn out. Do you think I’m going to eat it? (Do you think I’ll ever eat another zucchini again?) Yes, the cat perches on it, purrs, and looks at me reproachfully. As if I was to blame for this, his … nature? Updike: “Sex part of nature before Christ.”