Гвен Купер - Homer's Odyssey

“Are you guys trying to make my life harder?” I asked them in despair after Laurence had left the next morning. “Couldn’t you pull it together for one night?” Their only response was to descend upon me in a happy, purring heap. Thank God that guy’s gone .

Still, I think it worked out for the best—insofar as Laurence was now convinced that I must love these pain-in-the-neck creatures beyond all reason if I was willing to put up with them. His philosophy after that night was that he loved me, and I loved the cats, so therefore … well, he probably couldn’t love them, but he would try to tolerate them.

LAURENCE HADN’T LIVED with a pet of any kind since he’d graduated high school (his parents had had a dog). He had, however, occasionally taken care of Minou, his landlord’s cat, while his landlord was out of town. Minou was closing in on twenty years of age and, as Laurence’s landlord proudly insisted, had lived so long because he was too mean to die.

Minou was not a social cat. Sometimes, when staying with Laurence, he would jump onto the computer keyboard while Laurence was writing (I felt that my own novel was coauthored by Homer, so frequently was he perched on my left knee as I wrote it), but other than that Minou kept mostly to himself. Laurence would say that at times he forgot there was a cat in the apartment.

The chief difficulty in living with three cats, as Laurence was at frequent pains to explain to me once the four of us had moved in, was that there was always a cat there . I had come to take my cats’ omnipresence for granted—nor would I have wanted it any other way; why have pets if they weren’t around? It’s true, though, that despite how large Laurence’s apartment was—larger than any home the four of us had lived in together for quite some time—there was never a moment when Laurence and I were alone. At least one cat was always somewhere close by.

Nobody had an easy time adjusting at first, although Scarlett took the most straightforward approach. Scarlett had an idea that there were two types of living beings in the world. There was Mommy—who dispensed food, love, and occasional discipline—and then there were other cats. As far as Scarlett was concerned, she was the eldest cat in the household and her authority over the other cats was absolute. Laurence might be a bigger cat than most, but he was still just a cat, and since—Scarlett could only assume—it was he who had moved into our home, it fell upon her to clarify Laurence’s limits regarding everything from where he was permitted to sit, to how close to her he was permitted to walk. That he was not permitted to touch her, or approach her directly, went without saying.

Now Scarlett’s favorite method of enforcing discipline in the ranks had always been an angry swipe of her claw. If Laurence was walking down the hallway and got too close to her, she swiped at him with her claw. If she was lying in the hallway and Laurence attempted to step over her, she swiped at him with her claw. If she was sitting on the ledge of the couch behind my head and Laurence sat down next to me, inadvertently brushing against her, she swiped at him with her claw.

It would have been galling enough to Laurence that he was suddenly made to feel like an intruder in the home he’d occupied for two decades. But being slashed at by an aggressive pet is also viscerally upsetting. And it was downright scary to stumble down a pitch-black hallway in the middle of the night and feel invisible “talons,” as Laurence insisted on calling them, rake the skin of your leg. Knowing how much bigger you are than the pet means nothing when you also know—as Laurence did—that you’re unwilling to risk inflicting injury. What was he going to do, I’m sure he asked himself more than once, fight her?

I did my best to intercede, but cats are notoriously hard to discipline and Scarlett was no different. It wasn’t as if spanking her with a rolled-up newspaper would have any effect, the way it might with a dog. Such a course of action would only have made Scarlett more hostile and aggressive—even if I’d been willing to try it, which I wasn’t.

Laurence, having grown up with a dog who was spanked when she was “bad,” took this to mean that I wasn’t trying to remedy the situation at all. This wasn’t true, though. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make life with Scarlett bearable for Laurence—and if it took longer than I would have liked to arrive at a solution, it was only because I’d never been in this particular situation. I’d lived with Melissa and then with my parents during Scarlett’s pre-cuddling days, when she was content to hide if I wasn’t in the house by myself. Now Scarlett wanted to be with me all the time; she just wished everybody else would clear out and leave her alone while she did so.

The only place where Laurence could be sure of respite from Scarlett and her claws was in our bedroom; Laurence had insisted the bedroom remain “a cat-free zone.” He said he didn’t want cat fur on the bed, and I’m sure this was true (I, for one, had always been grateful that only Homer slept under the covers, meaning fur accumulated on top of the blankets but nowhere else), but I’m also sure that he didn’t relish the idea of fighting with three cats to claim a spot next to me at night. It was a fair compromise, yet the sudden banishment of the cats from my bed, each of whom had slept in bed with me for at least part of every night of their entire lives, caused more separation anxieties on all sides than I could have foreseen.

Scarlett resented her exclusion, and made her resentment known. She would sit at the bedroom door and meow loudly as soon as I went in at night and, when it wasn’t opened promptly, she would slip one paw beneath the door and rattle it almost angrily. Open this door! Open it NOW! I think the idea of a room with no other cats—where she could have me all to herself—was Scarlett’s idea of Nirvana. Here was an opportunity to relive the glorious days of her youth, when she’d been an only child, if only someone would hurry up and let her in! No matter how much I tried to shoo her away, or how often Laurence roared, “Enough already!” Scarlett refused to be deterred or consoled. Her incessant meows at the bedroom door were driving Laurence even crazier than her constant swipes at him.

The solution I finally devised solved both problems at once. Laurence usually stayed up several hours later than I did, and he began to feed the cats a small can of food late at night after I went to bed. In the first place, the food distracted Scarlett from crying at the bedroom door. By the time she finished eating she seemed to have forgotten that I had left her, and she would curl up on the living room rug or in one of the closets she liked, contentedly purring herself to sleep.

And once Laurence began feeding the cats, Scarlett seemed to understand that he was definitively not another cat, and was to be considered in the same general category that I was. In her own way, she came to respect him. I can’t quite say that they bonded, but her philosophy seemed to be, I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, but I will accept your food and leave you alone . She seemed to think Laurence should be grateful that she’d conceded this much and, as any cat owner will tell you, he really ought to have been.

Homer was, of course, as different from Scarlett as a cat could be, and had always been willing to make a friend of any new person. But for the first time in recorded history he was afraid of someone—and that someone was Laurence.

I think, in part, this was due to Laurence’s loud, powerful baritone. One of the things I loved most about Laurence was his voice, but it must have sounded like the booming voice of God to Homer, whose hearing was so much more sensitive than any of the rest of ours.