Гвен Купер - Homer's Odyssey

Laurence was also the first person to have spent significant time with Homer without going out of his way to make friends. Everybody wanted to be friends with the “poor little” blind cat. Laurence was the only person I’d ever brought into my life who was willing to accept the cats on whatever terms they offered, but who refused to offer any terms himself. By this I mean, for example, that Laurence didn’t crouch down on all fours to get to know Homer on his own level, didn’t try to create games the two of them could play together or request the formal “introduction” that Homer required before he felt comfortable letting a new person pet him. Laurence didn’t care whether he petted Homer or not. If Homer had wanted to be petted, Laurence would have been happy to do so, but if Homer wanted to be left alone, that was fine with Laurence, too.

This was actually a quality I appreciated in Laurence. He felt no need to prove to himself, or to me, or to anybody else, that he was a good person because he’d forged a “special” bond with my “special” cat. Laurence didn’t even really think of Homer as being blind; once he saw the ease and energy with which Homer got around, he accepted it as a given that Homer was essentially the same as any other cat. Laurence, in fact, was the first and only person who ever did the one thing I always claimed I wanted everybody to do—he treated Homer, automatically, as if he were normal.

Homer, however, was at a loss to account for the behavior of a person who didn’t go out of his way to befriend him. Homer thought people existed for the sole purpose of playing with him, and must have felt that a person who didn’t do so could only regard him with hostility. Consequently, those first few months, he fled in terror whenever Laurence approached. It cut me to the heart to see Homer—brave, irrepressible Homer—finally fearful of something after all these years.

Perhaps the only time Homer wasn’t afraid of Laurence was when Laurence was in the kitchen. Laurence and Homer shared a similar passion for sliced deli turkey, and whenever Homer heard Laurence open the refrigerator to pull out sandwich fixings, he’d race over from wherever he was in the apartment—his fear of Laurence momentarily dispelled. He would sink his claws into Laurence’s pant leg and climb it like a rope ladder up to the kitchen counter, where he would burrow his entire head into the waxed paper containing the turkey, trying desperately to snag himself a morsel.

Laurence was afraid to pry Homer off his leg, and equally afraid to lift Homer from the counter or push him off, which meant that Homer frequently ended up with more turkey than Laurence did. It got to the point that when Laurence wanted to make a sandwich, he would first run the faucet in the kitchen sink at full blast, using the sound to conceal the opening of the refrigerator, then sneak turkey and bread into his bathroom, close the bathroom door, and run the sink in there. It was an elaborate, and successful, way of keeping Homer out of the turkey, but it was hardly an enjoyable way to prepare a sandwich.

“This is no way to live,” Laurence said once.

No, it wasn’t. But Laurence was a grown man, and Homer knew the word no , and I saw no logical reason for all these shenanigans. “Homer is perfectly aware of what the word no means,” I told Laurence, “and you need to get used to saying it.” Then I added, “It’s just as frustrating for Homer as it is for you. He doesn’t understand why you’re not saying no , but also not giving him any turkey.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t know Homer was wrong. Of course Homer was wrong, and my not-to-be-argued-with “No! No, Homer!” brought him to heel on numerous occasions. But I couldn’t be there all the time. Laurence and the cats, to a certain extent, would have to work things out on their own.

Nevertheless, there were days when I felt so guilty about the whole thing that I didn’t know what to do. Nobody was happy—not the cats, not Laurence, and certainly not me, the cause of everybody’s unhappiness. “You and Laurence love each other,” Andrea would say when I called for advice. “Yeah, it sucks that it’s hard for him and the cats right now, but what are you going to do? They all just need a minute to get used to each other. Laurence would still rather live with you than without you.”

Maybe. Some days, I wasn’t so sure.

Alas, turkey was merely the tip of the adjustment iceberg. Homer was as “talkative” as ever—still far and away the most verbal of my cats—and, whenever he was awake, he was engaged in a running conversation with me. He still had his Let’s play! meows, his It sure has been a long time since I had any tuna meows, his Why aren’t you paying attention to me? meows. “What is with that cat?” Laurence would ask in exasperation, having rewound for the third time whatever movie he was watching because he’d missed several minutes of dialogue.

Homer’s silences, on the other hand, were nearly as troublesome. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Laurence would get up to use the bathroom, stumbling with his eyes half closed down a hallway he could have navigated blindfolded, so familiar was it. Yet now, I was almost always sure to hear the hard thud of Laurence’s shoulder hitting a wall, followed by a loud exclamation of “Dammit!” and the startled clip-clip-clip of Homer’s paws scuttling down the hallway. Homer liked to sleep in the hall, and it never occurred to him to alert Laurence to his presence by meowing. But Homer was invisible in the dark, and Laurence constantly tripped over him late at night. This disturbed Homer to no end. Homer didn’t know the difference between a hallway flooded with daylight and a hallway shadowed late at night. He only knew that sometimes Laurence tripped over him and sometimes he didn’t, for reasons that were mysterious and impossible to predict. Laurence’s “kicks” (of course he never meant to kick Homer) and yelling could only confirm what Homer already suspected—that Laurence didn’t like him. Laurence was convinced that Homer slept in the hallway, where he must have known Laurence was sure to trip over him, out of pure stubbornness. I bought a few night-lights for the hallway, which seemed to help, but the truce I effected in this way was wary at best.

Despite his shyness in Laurence’s presence, however, Homer was as mischievous as he’d ever been, and Laurence’s home provided him with endless adventure. Homer loved nothing more than creating chaos from order, and there was so much more for him to climb and explore here than there’d been in the studio apartment we’d lived in for so long. Laurence and I found it impossible to keep Homer from scaling bookcases or the entertainment center, throwing mounds of books and DVDs onto the floor from their original homes on neatly arranged shelves. He was especially merciless when it came to Laurence’s closets, whose boxes of newspapers, photographs, posters, matchboxes, letters from friends overseas, and the carefully preserved effluvia of forty years drew Homer like a siren song. Laurence had discarded a great deal of his … junk … to make room for me when I moved in. Still, a mind-boggling quantity of it remained. There was so much stuff to play with here! How had Homer ever lived a happy and complete life without having this much stuff!

He would wait until nobody was around, then use a single paw to slide open a closet door so he could pillage the boxes ruthlessly, pulling out all manner of papers and objects to chew up, bat around, or claw to shreds as his fancy dictated. I can’t tell you how many times Laurence and I would come home from having been out to find a ransacked apartment that looked like a crime scene—a cyclone of old college term papers and passed notes from high school days strewn across the living room floor, in the middle of which Homer crouched, turning an innocent face to our own accusatory ones as if to say, Hi, guys! Look what I found!