Homer's Odyssey

18 • Cool For Cats

Strangers and foreigners are under Zeus’s protection, and will take what they can get and be thankful.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

MY MANHATTAN APARTMENT WAS A STUDIO—A LARGE ONE BY NEW YORK standards, at something like 750 square feet plus a tiny outdoor “terrace”—but a studio nonetheless. Studio-apartment living took some getting used to, although the transition proved easier for me than it did for my cats. Homer was particularly put out, unable to grasp the concept of a home that consisted of a single room. Scarlett and Vashti, much as they initially disliked their sudden space restriction, could plainly see that, indeed, their living area had contracted to the confines of four walls and a bathroom. But it took Homer weeks to settle down. He was more rambunctious than the other two, and suddenly found his play space unaccountably diminished. I think he believed there must be a door to another room somewhere, if only he could find it, and he would skim along the walls of the apartment, nose to the ground and ears high in the air as he tried to detect the slightest clue as to where the rooms that surely lay beyond were hidden. He would meow in a throaty, irritable sort of way, as if demanding, Why won’t anybody tell me where the rest of this place is?

Looking for an outlet for Homer’s energetic high spirits, I resorted to store-bought toys for the first time since Homer was a kitten. He was uninterested in most of them, naturally, except for one—a plastic wheel containing a plastic ball. There were slits along the top and sides of the wheel through which a cat could reach to push around the ball inside.

Homer was quickly obsessed. The ball made a satisfying whiz and rattle as it hurtled through the wheel, but Homer—unable to see how completely contained the ball was within the wheel—was convinced that he could figure out a way to liberate it. He would burrow under the wheel, turn it on its side, push it from one end of the room to the other, then sigh loudly in exasperation when the ball steadfastly refused to come out. Sometimes he would sneak up on it, crouching down and pouncing from clear across the room, as if hoping to surprise the wheel into relaxing its grip on the ball.

Scarlett and Vashti, who also found this toy intriguing, seemed perplexed at the sheer volume of hours that Homer could devote to this new pastime. Scarlett, especially, would observe him at work on the toy with a kind of amused disgust. Clearly, you can’t get the ball out of the wheel, she seemed to be thinking. There’s no point in being undignified about it. Sometimes, Homer would creep out of bed at three or four in the morning to try it again, filling our small apartment with the sounds of the ball whooshing and the wheel flipping over and over as Homer butted it around with his head. It kept me up many a night, but I felt guilty about taking the toy away from him. We only have the one room, I would think. Where else is he supposed to play?

I paid dearly for that studio, more than I felt comfortable claiming I could afford, but the location was unquestionably convenient. Not only was I within a block of my office, but living all the way down at the southernmost tip of the island as I did, just about every subway line in the city came right to my door. I could be all the way up on the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side—and any and all points in between—in less than twenty minutes, faster than people I knew who lived farther uptown and were, technically, closer to those locations than I was. And, no matter where I was in the city, I could always orient myself back home by looking for the World Trade Center. I’d been used to living in the city I had grown up in, a place that I knew so intuitively, I’d never had to consult a map in my life. Learning my way around Manhattan was a challenge, but I always had some sense of where I was in relation to where I lived simply by consulting the skyline. This was true even in maze-like neighborhoods like SoHo or the West Village, where the streets were named instead of numbered and would otherwise have been hopeless for a newcomer to make any sense out of.

I spent a great deal of time with Andrea and Steve, the boyfriend who was now officially her fiancé, and their circle of friends. I made one trip back to Miami, for Tony’s birthday, a month after I’d moved, and Andrea introduced me to her pet-sitter, Garrett. When I’d lived in Miami and traveled, my cats had always been cared for either by my parents or by some friend who Homer already knew, one who lived close enough to pop in and out once a day. But Manhattan was a place that made quick visits inconvenient and so, despite apprehensions about turning my cats and my home over to the care of a stranger, I decided to call in a professional.

Garrett came over to meet us before my trip, and I went through my customary introduction ritual with Homer, holding Garrett’s hand in mine and bringing the two hands together under Homer’s nose. I left him with lengthy and detailed instructions: The windows and balcony door were always to remain closed; food dish and water bowl had to be separated enough so that Homer couldn’t toss the contents of one into the other; et cetera. I couldn’t help it; my habit of worrying about Homer, of fretting irrationally over his safety far more than I did over Scarlett’s and Vashti’s, was too deeply ingrained. I tried not to be more skittish than Garrett’s typical clients—although I’m sure I was—but Garrett was an unusually patient man, and he and Homer seemed charmed with each other from the beginning. “We’re going to be buddies, aren’t we, Homer?” Garrett said, and Homer brought over his stuffed worm to drop it at Garrett’s feet—his highest stamp of approval.

I called Garrett each day that I was gone, and he left written notes on the kitchen counter every time he visited. They went something like this:

DAY 1: Changed food, water, litter. Gray guy hid under the bed, white guy seemed happy to see me, played worm fetch with Homer for half an hour.

DAY 2: Changed food, water, litter. Gray guy hid under the bed. White guy wouldn’t stop dipping paws in fresh water. Homer threw a can of tuna out of the kitchen cabinet so I fed it to them. Hope that was okay.

I preserved these notes for some weeks after I returned, hanging them on my refrigerator with magnets. I felt like a parent receiving her children’s first report cards, with detailed accounts of who had been a good sharer or who played well with others. Although I’d had plenty of corroboration over the years, it still felt good to realize that I wasn’t the only one who found Homer irresistible.

IT HAD BEEN January when I began interviewing for jobs in New York and February when I moved, and everybody—including the HR guy at the company that hired me—told me I was crazy to move from South Beach to New York, especially in the dead of winter. “But it’s warm in Miami all the time,” they would say, as if this simple and single fact rendered all other considerations moot.

With all the changes in our life and circumstances that moving to New York brought, I think it was the cold that was the hardest adjustment for the cats. Even the smell of the gas that powered the stoves and ovens in our building, which bothered the life out of Homer those first few weeks (every home we’d had in Miami had functioned solely on electrical power), wasn’t as much of a shock as the ubiquitous cold.

I remembered how, as a six-year-old child visiting New York at Thanksgiving with my parents for the first time, cold air—cold air outside—had been a revelation to me. I’d read books, of course, where characters lived in places like New York or Chicago or London and had to bundle up beneath coats and scarves when they went outdoors. But I’d had no physical sense of what that would feel like. Cold, in my own experience, was something that lived inside refrigerators, or that was pumped mechanically into your home through air-conditioning units. Going to Macy’s with my mother, the vastness of the floor that sold winter jackets and coats—with its overpowering smell of leather; I had never smelled so much leather in one place—reduced me almost to the point of awe. So many people must live in New York! And, naturally, all of them would need heavy coats. Because it was cold here. Cold outside.

Scarlett, Vashti, and Homer didn’t have even the theoretical knowledge of cold to prepare themselves with. The cold weather dried the air out, and their fur was always full of static electricity. Scarlett and Vashti took this in stride, but Homer found it terribly disconcerting. He would walk across the throw rug on the floor to jump into my lap, eagerly pressing his nose against mine, only to find that the contact produced a small electric shock. He would turn his face to me reproachfully, as if to say, Hey! What’d you do that for?

My apartment had a heater, but it was on the fritz and would periodically emit a sharp buzz followed by a resounding CLANK! CLONK CLANK! The heater soon became Homer’s sworn enemy. No matter how soundly asleep Homer was, he leapt to attention when he heard its racket. He had become very protective of me since the break-in and would jump to stand in front of me, his back fully arched, and growl in the heater’s direction. After a minute he would creep cautiously toward it, rake at it furiously with his claws a few times, and then—confident he’d shown that heater a thing or two—slink over to curl warily in my lap. But within an hour, the heater would clank and clonk once again.

My building super eventually replaced the heater with one that didn’t bang around quite as much but, even when it was operating at full force, my apartment was never what one might call balmy. My cats and I became very close that first winter in New York, huddling together for warmth. The smallness of my new apartment, which had caused so much initial consternation, soon came to feel like a blessing. Even Scarlett became a cuddler. This might have been good news for Homer—who, much as he disliked having less room to play in, was overjoyed that the four of us were together all the time—if only Scarlett had been gracious about sharing.

At first, in her usual peremptory fashion, she tried to keep Vashti and Homer from getting too close to me. Scarlett may have discovered the joys of near-constant snuggling with Mommy, but she always hated more physical contact with the other two cats than was strictly necessary. She would bat angrily at Homer’s and Vashti’s heads if she was in my lap and one of them tried to curl up beside me. Homer, who was always somewhere close to me and who had clearly come to regard himself as mature enough not to have to submit to Scarlett’s thralldom anymore, would slap right back at her. You’re not the boss of me! Occasionally, they got into downright fights that I had to break up by physically separating them. But eventually Scarlett learned to respect Homer’s space, albeit grudgingly. Homer was nearly five years old now and wedded enough to his habits, more so than even the most habit-centered cat, that he wasn’t about to be displaced just because Scarlett had had a come-to-Jesus moment in her philosophy of physical affection.

Vashti, however—who was neither as aggressive as Scarlett nor as persistent as Homer—found herself crowded out. I had to make a concerted point of ensuring that she got her fair share of lap-time. Still, Vashti wasn’t as happy as she’d been in Miami, and I felt guilty at times, worried that she was becoming the classic neglected middle child.

It was the first snowfall that brought Vashti around. Scarlett was captivated as it blew against the windows. She threw her upper body at the glass and did everything she could to catch the white stuff in her paws through the panes. She didn’t know what snow was—she didn’t realize that snow was cold. All she knew was that little flakes of things danced tantalizingly in front of her from the other side of the window glass, begging to be caught and played with.

But Vashti had been bred for snow—with her long white fur, her luxurious plume of a tail like that of an arctic fox, and her miniature snowshoes in the form of the little tufts of white fur that grew lush between the pads of her feet. She seemed to have an inborn memory of what snow was and what it would feel like. Perhaps that was why she’d always been so fascinated with water. As the snow piled up on our balcony, Vashti stood before the balcony door and pleaded mutely with her eyes for me to let her out into it. I did a few times, and she hurled herself into the middle of the deepest drifts. Her pupils were wide and wild and the only sign of darkness in the white-on-white landscape she created as she gamboled around and all but buried herself. It was only when a large gust of wind would come along that I could coax her back inside. Vashti may have loved snow, but wind terrified her and always drove her indoors.

It was around the time of the first snowfall that Homer discovered the magical world of under-the-covers. In Miami, he’d been content to cuddle with me on top of the blankets. But he was smaller than Scarlett and Vashti, and lying with me on top of the covers didn’t keep him nearly warm enough now. He would burrow as far beneath the covers as he could, purring from between my feet and generating as much warmth as a tiny space heater. Scarlett and Vashti, not always realizing he was under there, would jump up to join me and frequently landed directly on his head. Homer hadn’t landed inadvertently on another cat since he was a kitten. It was now his turn to wonder why the other two cats couldn’t tell where he was—how come everybody knew where he was most of the time, but sometimes it was like they didn’t know he was there at all? Homer would leap to his feet indignantly beneath the blankets, squawking a complaint.

I don’t know if he couldn’t tell when I wasn’t lying beneath blankets, or if he simply refused to accept that they weren’t there, but if I happened to be lying on the couch without a blanket over me, Homer would claw in frustration at my clothes. If I wore a baggy-enough sweatshirt, he would worm his way beneath it, poking his head out of the neck of my shirt and resting it on my shoulder, the rest of his body purring with loud contentment against my chest. I’d read aloud to him from whatever book I was in the middle of, and he would nuzzle happily against my neck until he fell into such a deep sleep that even his purring stopped. All that was left was the sound of his breath whistling past my ear, and the sound of the snow falling against the windows.

Spring came eventually, as spring is apt to do, and if there’s anything more gorgeous than Manhattan in springtime, I’ve never seen it. I had grown up in a city of flowers (Florida is actually Spanish for land of flowers), but the blooms that sprang riotously from trees and bushes and flower beds in New York City dazzled me, seeming to tumble unexpectedly in the profusion of a single day. The air grew less dry, Homer’s coat lost its static electricity, and Scarlett, almost cheerfully, made room for him beside me on the couch. Only Vashti sat longingly before the windows, her eyes scanning the horizon and the clear, sundrenched view of the streets below.

What? she seemed to ask. No more snow?