Homer's Odyssey

22 • A Canticle for Vashowitz

May heaven grant you in all things your heart’s desire—husband, house, and a happy peaceful home; for there is nothing better in this world than that man and wife should be of one mind.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN MY OPINION THAT WHEN A COUPLE DECIDE TO move in together, they should find a new apartment rather than having one person move into the other’s home. I had developed this theory years earlier, around the time when I’d moved into—and subsequently moved out of—Jorge’s house. Humans, in my experience, can be as territorial as cats, and it’s best to head off any but I’ve always used this closet to store [fill in the blank] arguments before they crop up.

It was a fine principle, as such things go, but it failed to take into account that first commandment of Manhattan real estate: Thou shalt not relinquish a rent-controlled, three-bedroom/two-bathroom apartment with a balcony. Laurence paid less in rent than I did for my studio, and had more than twice the space. When we decided to move in together, it was never a question that my cats and I would move into his home.

Still, Laurence and I were a couple for a full year before I moved in. Shortly after my I’m in love with Laurence Lerman epiphany, I had begun writing a novel about South Beach. I couldn’t tell you why I had woken up one morning so completely convinced that what I truly wanted in life was to be a writer (although the four layoffs I’d endured in a two-year period had persuaded me of the glories of self-employment). Nor could I tell you why I persisted when everybody I knew in publishing told me that the only thing less likely than an unpublished writer’s landing a book deal was an unpublished writer’s landing a book deal for a novel.

But I’d learned from Homer long ago that the difference between “unlikely” and “impossible” was all the difference in the world. After many months and I don’t know how many rejection letters (I stopped counting when I reached twenty), I found an agent and the whole thing became an honest-to-God professional endeavor. Since I continued to work full-time, it took me just over a year to finish a first draft of the manuscript, and during that time—wherein Laurence patiently read, critiqued, and then reread every word I wrote—we agreed that it made sense for me to finish writing before I moved.

It would be misleading, however, if I were to suggest that my South Beach novel was the only thing keeping Laurence and me from cohabitated bliss. The truth was, Laurence was not thrilled at the prospect of living with three cats.

Laurence and I had innumerable quibbles during the first year we dated, but only one knock-down, drag-out fight—and that was over the cats. “Do there have to be three of them?” he asked one day, about six months into our new relationship—and he couldn’t have precisely worded a question more likely to turn me cold and unyielding as a lake that had frozen over. “I don’t know if I can live with three cats.”

“Well, there are three cats,” I replied. “There have always been three cats, and there will always be three cats. If you’re having any Sophie’s Choice delusions, I suggest you forget them.”

It was and remains the only moment when I was halfway convinced that Laurence and I, as a couple, were a failed experiment. It wasn’t learning that Laurence didn’t like cats—I’d always known Laurence didn’t like cats (although, Laurence indignantly insisted, it wasn’t that he “didn’t like” cats; it was just that he did like dogs). But I felt that nobody could truly love me—could profess to care about my happiness—and even consider subjecting me to the wholly unbearable pain of … what, exactly? Deciding which of my cats I loved least and sending him or her to live with strangers? Or to a shelter? While I could understand someone’s not wanting to live with three cats, it struck me as the kind of thing that—having known me well for three full years before we were a couple—Laurence should have thought about far earlier than this. Had I walked into Laurence’s apartment and found him in bed with another woman, I couldn’t have been more convinced that I had been completely—completely— miles wide of the mark in my assessment of his character.

Deep down, ever since the day I’d first considered adopting Homer, I’d been waiting for the moment when a promising relationship would fall through because the man in question was unwilling to live with three cats. I’d always known it would happen, and the only surprising thing was that it had taken so long.

Laurence and I fought for hours, until finally we arrived at the crux of what he really meant. “You always stay at my place,” he said. “You’ve never once let me into your apartment. Maybe there’s something so horrible about living with three cats, you don’t want me to see it. Or maybe you’re not ready to let me into your life.”

Well, he had me there. It was true that I’d never invited Laurence into my home. Before we were dating, there had been no imperative reason to do so. Now that we were a couple, I was too anxious about our relationship to make any mistakes—and I was terrified that if the four of them met and didn’t like each other, I might lose Laurence. But my clever plan of avoiding this scenario by keeping everybody separated had obviously backfired. I could understand why Laurence found it difficult to believe I was serious about spending the rest of my life with him, when I wouldn’t even let him spend the night with me in my own home.

So we arranged for an overnight visit, and it couldn’t have gone worse. Scarlett had sprained her leg that morning due to an overly enthusiastic leap, and limped away from the newcomer in an even surlier fashion than usual. He’ll think I’m running a halfway house for blind and lame cats, I thought. Vashti peed in Laurence’s overnight bag. Homer had gotten used to a life without doors—the only door in my apartment was to the bathroom, and I always kept that open. When Laurence went in to use the bathroom, closing the door behind him, Homer sat at the door and wailed, crouching down to slide one leg, all the way up to his shoulder, into the crack between the door and the floor. The visual of Homer’s disembodied leg and outstretched claw reaching for him beneath the bathroom door was, as Laurence reported, “terrifying.”

“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.

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!

I bought some twine that we used to tie Laurence’s closet doors closed (I didn’t really mind if Homer got into my own closets). We created complicated knots, which were ultimately effective in keeping Homer out. But if Laurence, say, wanted to quickly grab a magazine he’d written an article for back in 1992, he would fumble impatiently with the knots and press his lips together in a restrained silence that spoke volumes.

For all the new things he found to get into, Homer was, as he had ever been, a creature of habit. He still wanted to sit with me or on me at all times, and still insisted on sitting exclusively on my left side. If Laurence happened to sit to my left on the couch, Homer would wander around the apartment at loose ends, “complaining” at the top of his lungs. Like a blind person—who knows the difference between a can of peas and a can of soup because peas and soup are always kept in exactly the same spot—Homer’s life, curious and adventurous though he was, was manageable because certain things always happened in the exact same way. Homer knew where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do based on where I was and what I was doing. If I was sitting on the couch, then Homer was supposed to be sitting to my left, and if he couldn’t sit to my left then something was worrisomely out of sync in the world. But Laurence couldn’t understand why I would insist that we get up and switch positions, leaving my left side free. Surely, in a three-bedroom apartment, there was room for everybody to sit wherever the hell they wanted without anybody’s having to jump up and change spots because, seriously, what was that cat’s problem?

And as if all that weren’t enough, Scarlett was not alone in her nocturnal caterwaulings at the bedroom door. Homer had no more intention of being displaced from my bed by Laurence than Scarlett did, and Homer was more insistent than she was in demanding his rights. Homer also cried at the bedroom door at night but, unlike Scarlett, cried whenever I went into the bedroom—whether it was for an afternoon nap or a change of clothes or half an hour of undisturbed seclusion while I read a novel. As soon as I opened my eyes in the morning, I would hear the clip-clip-clip of Homer’s footsteps down the hall, and he was crying at the door within seconds.

What was remarkable about this was that I didn’t get up at the same time every morning, nor did I use an alarm clock (people as neurotic about punctuality as I am tend to awaken on time without the aid of an alarm). I might first wake up at five or six thirty AM on a weekday, or at nine AM on a weekend, or even later, but it was never Homer who woke me up. It wasn’t until I was aware of being awake for a minute or two that I would hear Homer’s footsteps approaching the bedroom—and I couldn’t tell you how it was that he knew. Perhaps the sound of my breathing changed? It seemed unlikely that even Homer, acute as his hearing was, could hear a change in my breathing when he was sound asleep down the hall. But there was no disputing the fact that he knew. Within only a few days, my habit of waking up briefly and then drifting back off for another hour was a thing of the past. It was one thing for Homer to cry piteously at the door at night while Laurence was still awake, and quite another for Laurence to be awakened at five AM by a wailing cat. So I’d grab a pillow and one of the extra blankets from the closet and head for the couch where Homer would cuddle with me—ecstatic with happiness—as I dozed until I was ready to start my day.

When I had first adopted Homer, I’d toyed briefly with the idea of naming him Oedipus and calling him “Eddie” for short. Homer the poet had been blind, but Oedipus the tragic hero had lost his eyes altogether. Melissa, however, had insisted that calling an eyeless kitten Oedipus was mean (this from the person who’d thought calling him “Socket” was a swell idea), and so the idea was discarded.

Nevertheless, I now found myself with a reverse Oedipus on my hands—he’d had his mother all to himself, and now out of nowhere was this father figure who was trying to take his mother away from him. I began to despair of ever bridging the gap between the two of them.

Amazingly, it was Vashti—Vashti who was never aggressive except when she was passive-aggressive, Vashti who never used her claws or raised her voice, Vashti who always gave in and never insisted on getting her own way—who saved the day and solved all my problems. She did so by the simplest means imaginable.

She took one look at Laurence and fell deeply, hopelessly, irretrievably in love.

VASHTI HAD ALWAYS been more partial to men than to women (with the exception of me, of course). She loved to be petted and crooned to and told how pretty she was, and she liked these things especially when it was a man who was dispensing the attention. But all the men who had come into our life had had eyes only for Homer, and Vashti wasn’t one to push herself on anybody.

Now there was a man who, as Vashti shrewdly surmised, didn’t seem interested in Homer at all. It was true that he didn’t seem interested in any of the cats, but perhaps there was an opportunity here.

She didn’t leap upon Laurence all at once. But if she found a moment when the other two cats weren’t around—and, miraculously, now that we lived in such a large home, sometimes Vashti had us to herself—she would jump into my lap and insist, softly and sweetly, upon being petted. She didn’t try to get Laurence to pet her, but as I stroked her she would look at him with a kind of melting adoration in her eyes. It was exactly the sort of gaze that, I often thought, men must daydream about someday seeing in the eyes of a beautiful woman. See how much nicer I can be than those two? Vashti seemed to say. I like you sooooo much more than they ever will.

Vashti intrigued Laurence as well. Sometimes I caught him looking at her with an expression almost identical to her own. “She’s really beautiful, isn’t she?” Laurence would say. “She has a perfect little face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful cat.”

I don’t know the specifics of how things progressed from there, or who made the first move, but one evening I came home to find Vashti nestled in Laurence’s lap. He caressed her and said, “You’re a pretty girl, aren’t you? Aren’t you a pretty, pretty girl?” He stopped his crooning as soon as he saw me, but Vashti remained in his lap for nearly an hour. Another time, I came out of the shower to find Laurence seated at the breakfast table with Vashti at his feet while he sneaked her bits of food. “Laurence!” I said. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to train them not to beg at the table?”

Laurence looked shamefaced. “But she’s so pretty, and she likes me.”

Ah, well—Laurence wouldn’t be the first man undone by such a pretext as that.

As the months went by and Laurence became more attentive, Vashti seemed to blossom into a second kittenhood. She was full of playful high spirits in a way that she hadn’t been in many a year. She would charge around the apartment—never roughly, because Vashti was quite the lady—batting furiously at anything that dangled or bringing scraps of paper over to Laurence for him to throw for her. She hadn’t done that with me since she was only a few months old. She became conspicuously more fastidious in her grooming habits, unable to tolerate the teensiest speck of dirt in her long white coat. And she would squeak with outraged jealousy if she caught Laurence and me being affectionate with each other, running over to paw gently at his leg as if to say, Hey! Did you forget that I was here? Laurence got a huge kick out of this; he would often make an elaborate show of hugging and kissing me while Vashti was watching, in the hope that he could provoke a demonstration of her outrage.

“I can’t tell you how much I love it when you use me to make the cat jealous,” I would say.

Scarlett and Homer still clearly preferred the days when they’d lived with me alone, but Vashti had never been happier. I was so thrilled for her happiness, I think it made me love Laurence a little more.

“They really all have their own personalities, don’t they?” Laurence observed once. “I knew that dogs had different personalities, but I never attributed different personalities to cats. I think that’s why I never really liked them until now.”

I was the tiniest bit flabbergasted. It seemed incredible to me that anybody could be unaware that, of course, different cats would have different personalities. Like Laurence, I had grown up with dogs, but I’d always expected, when I brought each of my cats home, that none of them would be like any of the others.

But if this was the epiphany that got Laurence and the cats to warm up to each other, I was all for it.

It wasn’t long before Laurence came not only to recognize the differences among the cats, but even to form a grudging respect for them. “I can understand Scarlett,” he said one day. “Scarlett just wants to be left alone to do her own thing, and I get that.” As a man who had lived alone by choice for the better part of twenty years, of course he would.

And the first time he saw Homer catch a fly five feet in midair, he was beside himself with admiration. “Look at that cat go!” he exclaimed—and he was so impressed, he hurried into the kitchen for a bit of turkey to reward Homer with. “That’s a cat who knows how to move. Have you ever noticed that about him, how his walk is so much sleeker and more graceful than other cats’?”

Had I noticed? Was he kidding?

It was Laurence who went shopping for various types of netting and wire that might make our balcony safe enough for Homer to go out onto. He’d observed the way Homer would stand longingly at the sliding glass door when Laurence and I occasionally let Scarlett and Vashti out (a years-long source of angst for me; I hated to deprive Scarlett and Vashti of time outdoors, but felt miserable that Homer had to be excluded). Sadly, there was no getting around the fact that our balcony railing was well within Homer’s jumping range. “If only Homer couldn’t jump so high,” Laurence would say in a sympathetic tone that was, nevertheless, tinged with appreciation. “That cat can jump so high.”

But Vashti remained first and foremost in Laurence’s affections. “Hey, it’s the Vashti cat!” he would cry happily whenever she entered a room—running straight over to leap into his lap and rub her little cheek daintily against his.

His favorite nickname for her—one entirely of his own invention—was “Vashowitz.” She was almost always “the Vashowitz” when he referred to her—as in, “Do you think the Vashowitz would like this brand of catnip?” or “I think we need to get the Vashowitz a new scratching post. She’s clawed right through the old one.”

From the way he fussed and fawned over her, you would think no man had ever fallen in love with a cat before.

One day, about a year after the cats and I had moved in, Laurence brought home a bag of Pounce cat treats. He was looking for a way to make Vashti happy, I think, but all three cats got their fair share.

They must lace those Pounce treats with crack, because I had never seen anything like the three-ring circus in our apartment whenever the bag of Pounces came out. Even Scarlett sat up on her hind legs like a meerkat and begged. Scarlett begged! She still wouldn’t let Laurence touch her, flinching away if his hand sought her head, but she went so far as to purr and rub against his ankles when he came home at night.

Laurence also learned to lightly tap the ground with his fingernail next to the Pounces he dropped for Homer, so that Homer would know where they were. Homer was soon constantly crawling all over Laurence, nosing into his hands and pockets with friendly curiosity. Hey, buddy! Got any of those Pounce treats?

And Vashti … well, Vashti also loved the Pounces, but she had always loved Laurence for himself. That didn’t change much.

LAURENCE WAS THE kind of person who never simply handed anybody a birthday card. He always sent them by mail because, he said, it was infinitely more fun to find a birthday card unexpectedly in your mailbox than it was to see it in somebody’s hand.

The first birthday I celebrated nearly a year after moving in with Laurence, I got two birthday cards in the mail. One was from Laurence himself, and bore the return address of his office. The second had a return address and handwriting I didn’t recognize (I would later find out that Laurence had gotten a co-worker to address it). When I opened the envelope, I saw a card with three kittens—who looked a great deal like Scarlett had looked as a kitten—on the front. Inside the card, I read:

Happy birthday, Mommy! We love you, even though you make us live with that horrible man.

It was signed “Scarlett, Vashti, & Homer.” Scarlett’s “signature” was in red ink, naturally, while Vashti’s bore a small drawing of a paw print beside it. The “R” in Homer’s was backward and his whole name trailed halfway off the page. Laurence would later explain that, of course Homer’s signature wasn’t perfect—the cat was blind, for crying out loud.

Three weeks later, Laurence asked me to marry him. I said yes.

IT WOULD BE almost two years before Laurence and I were married. The novel I had written was sold for publication, and even though I was no longer working at my full-time job there were months of edits to be done, followed by even more months of promotion, interviews, and travel. Trying to plan a wedding in the middle of all that would have been too stressful to think about. So we waited a year, until after the book came out, before we began making arrangements. It was just short of another year from the time we started planning until the wedding day itself.

A few months before we were married, Laurence’s best man, Dave, came over for lunch. Dave had known Laurence since nursery school and had, naturally, spent a great deal of time in our apartment. But he was usually here with other people. Scarlett and Vashti were shy of any crowd larger than three or four, so the only one of the cats Dave had met was Homer.

Homer remembered Dave and greeted him in his usual friendly, high-energy fashion. Hi there! Wanna throw the stuffed worm for me? Scarlett was also out and, curiously, didn’t run away to hide. I was across the room when I saw that Dave was going to try to pet her. I yelled, “No—don’t!” but it was too late. Dave’s hand was already on her head.

I prepared myself for the worst, mentally assessing whether we had any Band-Aids left in the medicine chest, when I saw something I never thought I’d live to see. Scarlett was nuzzling her head affectionately against Dave’s hand. Laurence and I looked at each other, and then at Scarlett, as if she had broken out into a soliloquy from Hamlet.

Dave was unaware of our astonishment. He turned to Laurence and asked, “So which cat is the mean one?”