Homer's Odyssey

7 • Gwen Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Zeus does not bring all men’s plans to fulfillment.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

HOMER WAS JUST OVER FIVE MONTHS OLD WHEN MELISSA TOLD ME THE time had come for me to find a place of my own.

Melissa and I hadn’t been friends for very long—only a few months—when I’d broken up with Jorge and she’d invited me to move in with her. Our friendship was one that had sprung up very suddenly, and we’d come to feel so extraordinarily close within such a short period of time that we hadn’t actually been as comfortable with each other as we’d thought before we became roommates.

The reason on paper for my eviction was that Melissa had another friend who needed a place to stay for a while. Neither of us had expected, when I’d first moved in, that I would end up staying the nearly seven months I’d been there. Our mutual concern for Homer had smoothed over numerous small, day-to-day tensions, but undoubtedly, had it not been for Homer, I would have moved out long ago.

“Homer’s welcome to stay as long as you need him to,” Melissa rushed to assure me. “I’d be happy to keep him.”

My nonspecific life plan, up until I adopted Homer, had been to scrape by on my current nonprofit salary, living with roommates until some hazy, undetermined future date when I would either land a big enough promotion to be entirely self-sufficient or get married. Neither a big salary boost nor wedding bells seemed to be in my immediate future, however. Nor did I have any friends who were hunting for roommates. Under different circumstances, I might have scoured the classifieds for some up-and-coming professional girl of about my own age who would have been happy to split rent and share a home with my two relatively mellow cats.

I didn’t have two cats anymore, though. Now I had three.

Three cats were a lot to ask somebody else to live with—especially when one of them, Homer, was active enough for five. And I was still (and always) concerned enough about Homer’s safety that the restrictions I would impose on somebody else’s home life could be both unfair and unattractive. In addition to super-hearing and super-smell, Homer of late had developed super-speed. He was frantic to know what lay on the other side of the front door to Melissa’s house, through which people disappeared and didn’t come back for hours at a time. As soon as he heard keys jangling outside, Homer would race for the door at breathtaking speed—less cat than comet-like black blur—hurling himself through even the smallest crack between door and door frame and making it halfway down the driveway on a few occasions before Melissa or I could catch him.

The one thing that could never be permitted was for Homer to get lost outdoors. To thwart our little would-be Houdini, we were forced to enter the front door of the house sideways, keeping the door closed as far as possible while still allowing ourselves just enough space to squeeze through, one leg extended at Homer-level to block him from slipping past.

How could I ask a stranger to live that way? How could I ask somebody to childproof toilets or tie closed sliding closet doors (which Homer was a whiz at prying open) without sounding like a nut?

And even if I could ask somebody to do those things, and I found somebody who was willing, could I trust somebody else? Anybody I lived with would have to be someone I knew was 100 percent trustworthy, someone who would never slip up. Where would I find such a person?

These were questions without good answers. To keep Homer would mean that I had to have a place of my own. But I could no more afford a place of my own—in anything except Miami’s worst neighborhoods—than I could grow Homer’s eyes back for him.

When I reached this point in my calculations, I started giving serious thought to Melissa’s request. (And it was a request, not an offer—because Melissa loved Homer and wanted to keep him almost as much as I did.) I’d like to say that I never so much as considered her proposition, that I made some grand pronouncement along the lines of Whither I goeth, this kitten shall go too.

But I did consider it.

I even told myself it might be better for Homer in the long run. One of the biggest challenges for a blind cat was getting to know the space he lived in. A sudden move to a new home would be a big jolt for him. He knew Melissa’s home intimately, and she was likely to stay there for a while.

It took him all of forty-eight hours to figure out his way around Melissa’s house, I told myself. If you don’t want to take him with you, that’s one thing—but don’t pretend it’s because you think he’d be traumatized by a new place.

I spent the next few days hoping for some kind of epiphany, for a crystalline moment of insight and clarity that would show me what, precisely, was the right thing to do.

It was a moment that never came. Instead, I found myself more aware of small things—of the way, for example, I was the only one who could tell when Homer was deeply asleep, as opposed to half awake, by the slight tension of the muscles in his face that would have controlled his eyelids. A sudden gust of air would also cause those muscles to contract, closing eyelids that weren’t there to protect the eyes he didn’t have.

I noticed how Homer was never content merely to lie next to me. If he wanted to sleep beside me, he would press his face against the top of the outside of my thigh, then turn his head slightly and slide all the way down to my knee, the rest of his body following behind so that, by the time he had settled into his sleeping position, he was wedged as tightly against me—with as many points of contact between us—as he could possibly achieve. If Homer was sleeping on his own, he would curl himself up into the tightest ball he could manage, his tail coiled around his nose and his front paws wrapped around his face. Melissa and I laughed at what looked like somebody who was determined not to allow even the slightest hint of light to disturb his slumber; Homer, of course, wouldn’t have been able to detect any light on his face.

But I knew it was because, no matter how reckless he was when he played, Homer always felt vulnerable in sleep. It was only when he was sleeping on or next to me that the tension went out of his sleeping posture, that he might lie on his side with his paws still curled beneath him but not hugged defensively around his body.

I had important decisions to make, but there is no logic in some things. Watching Homer sleep with his paws clutched protectively over what should have been his eyes, my heart would break. Too late, too late! I would think, with a degree of pity that seemed unwarranted when he was in one of his more boisterous waking moods. He trusted me, more than he trusted anybody else. Hadn’t I committed, not so long ago, to being strong enough to build my life around Homer’s goodness? Things would have to be far worse than they were for me to decide that either of us would be better off without the other.

So I was once again back to my impossible situation. I needed a place of my own, but I couldn’t afford it. I could afford to live with somebody else, but I couldn’t live with somebody else and also live with Homer. I couldn’t leave Homer because …

Because I simply couldn’t leave him.

And this is where the moment of epiphany did, finally, kick in.

If I couldn’t afford to support myself and Homer given my current career path, then I would simply have to find a more lucrative career. There were skills and interests I’d developed during my nonprofit stint that, surely, would prove valuable in the private sector. I wrote newsletters and press releases and coordinated networking events and volunteer projects and fund-raisers, and I wrangled television and newspaper reporters to cover all of these things. I managed budgets and served as the public face of my organization on many occasions, and I was outgoing and did a pretty good job of interacting with the public in general.

This sounded a lot like the jobs of the friends I had who worked in public relations and event marketing. Even the ones who were still young enough that they earned what was considered an entry-level salary topped my own salary by a good 50 percent.

But I also knew that people hadn’t simply walked into those jobs. They’d had marketing or communications majors in college (my own major had been creative writing), and they’d spent summers interning and months freelancing for the kinds of firms they eventually went to work for.

If starting over was what I needed to do, and if interning and taking freelance jobs was what it would take to make that happen, I was willing to do all those things. I was even willing to pick up side jobs bartending or waiting tables at night so that my days would be available to work cheap-to-free until I gained experience and found something permanent.

But that put me right back where I started—because doing all of that, even if I was willing, would put me no closer to being able to afford my own apartment in the short term. This was a plan that could pay off in a year or two, that could make Homer’s and my life more stable in the long run, but I needed a new home for us now. And that was when I had my second epiphany.

I called my parents.

It cost me something to make that phone call. It cost me a lot, actually. Moving back in with my parents was the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario I hadn’t even wanted to consider. Nothing could have felt more like a regression in life. If there’s anything that says, I’m not really a grown-up and I can’t really take care of myself, it’s moving back in with your parents.

“Of course you can move back in,” my mother said. “And of course you can bring the cats.”

I knew this had cost her something, as well. Not only did my parents dislike cats on general principle, they also had two dogs who’d been with my family since I was in high school. Adjustments would have to be made by everybody to make this situation feasible—and by “everybody,” I didn’t just mean the cats and dogs.

“Are you sure this is okay?” I asked my mother. “I know you guys don’t really like cats.”

“We love you,” my mother replied, “and you love the cats.” Then she laughed and said, “Besides, if you think living with cats is the biggest sacrifice your father and I have made as parents, you don’t know what being a parent means.”

Maybe not. But I was starting to get an inkling.