I write of cats as a dog person. For most of my life, an extreme allergy fueled my aversion to cats in general, but the individuals I got to know didn’t help their cause. In college, thanks to a roommate who owned her, I lived with a cat named Sophie. I appreciated Sophie as an aesthetic object: the almond eye, the rounded paw. Her hair was snow-white and chestnut-brown and everywhere—coating the couches, matted deep into the carpeting in clumps, floating as aimless as motes from one piece of clothing to another. She was very elegant and very cunning. She knew I was avoiding her, and she mistook my physical allergy as a sign I didn’t like her, which, after she made several public displays of snubbing me, I didn’t. I don’t like domestic animals who give the high hat.
An air of mutual hostility descended on our house like a fog. Sophie’s response was to forgo her litter box and deposit cat-dainty turds in the toes of my house slippers. (She knew, from careful observation, that the first thing I did when I fell out of bed every day was slide into my slippers.) After three or four of these deposits I took evasive action: I hid my slippers. The next day I awoke to find Sophie at my bedroom door, looking nonplussed. With a blissful surge of self-congratulation, I got down my slippers and lumbered into the bathroom to take a shower, as was my morning habit. I removed the slippers and stepped into the tub. My toes sank into another one of Sophie’s deposits. She knew where I’d been heading and got there first.
My notion of cats was thus fixed for the next 30 years. Then, a few weeks ago, Blossom came to stay—for keeps, it appears, since she hasn’t touched off any violent allergic reactions, depriving me of the one excuse I could use to kick her out. It’s no advantage to Blossom that I can’t help but compare her to Buster, the dog she has replaced. Buster’s dead—dammit—but here in our house he hovers and obtrudes. Though no more than a foot high, he was, in life, a towering figure, setting an example of generosity and enthusiasm that Blossom has completely ignored.
Buster had no elegance; he was pure effusion. He loped and leaped, he panted and pawed, and when you walked in the door after a day at work he reacted as though creation itself had started afresh, opening boundless possibilities for pleasure. Blossom is pure elegance: cool, detached, above passion, proportioned in body and spirit according to some feline ideal. I come home from work and she shows herself, or allows herself to be seen, on her own schedule. If pets consumed tobacco, Buster would be a Swisher Sweets man. Blossom would smoke Nat Shermans through a diamond-studded cigarette holder, held at an angle, Tallulah Bankhead-style. If they thought of God, Buster would be a Pentecostal. Blossom is a Buddhist.
That air of Eastern mysticism disquiets me; it gives me the creeps. She shimmers about the house in utter silence. I never know where she is. I’ll be emptying the dishwasher, say, or plumping an untidy couch pillow, when without a whisper she is suddenly at my elbow. “And what’s that you’re doing?” she asks. “Not that I care.” Moving around the house on one errand or another, I might take a thoughtless step backward, only to bump against her and have to struggle to regain my balance, arms swinging wildly, while she floats away, mission accomplished. It is a typical encounter for us: I look clownish and risk sciatic injury and she escapes wearing her icy dignity like a tiara. Under the same circumstance, Buster would scarcely be able to contain his mortification.
Blossom shows no signs of wanting to escalate our differences into fully armed conflict, as Sophie did. My hunch is that she doesn’t think I’m worth the trouble—so far, anyway. To her rightful owner, a young woman with a generous character, she discloses aspects of herself that have so far been kept from me. I catch them playing, racing around, batting wads of paper back and forth, until Blossom pauses and turns to look at me: “Is there something I can help you with?” It may be that sooner or later we will reach an accommodation, so that friendship, or even something more, might take root and flourish. Until then I’m not taking any chances. I look twice when I draw back the shower curtain.
