Homer's Odyssey

24 • Reader, I Married Him

May you whom I leave behind me give happiness to your families; may heaven vouchsafe you every good grace, and may no evil thing come upon your people.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

LAURENCE AND I WERE MARRIED IN SEPTEMBER, IN THE PENTHOUSE OF a funky downtown office building. It commanded sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline at night, befitting a groom as much in love with New York as Laurence was, and reflecting all the best in my own life since moving to New York with my cats nearly eight years earlier.

We decided to dispense with many of the formalities associated with weddings. Our guest list was kept scrupulously small (although there was a rather large Swedish contingency). I wore a vintage, 1940s-era cocktail dress, wide in the shoulders and narrow at the waist, rather than a formal wedding gown. There was plenty of dancing but no seating arrangements, no five-course dinner, no flower-draped aisle or even, for that matter, any aisle at all. We opted for a cocktail party—with passed hors d’oeuvres and lots of liquor—that happened to have a wedding ceremony in the middle. When the evening was about halfway through, we gathered our friends and families together, popped up a chuppah (the canopy under which Jewish wedding ceremonies are held), called the rabbi forward, and were married. The ring I gave to Laurence was inscribed with a passage from the Song of Songs: Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, which means, I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. When we kissed for the first time as husband and wife at the ceremony’s conclusion, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” played. Andrea and Steve, who had introduced us to each other, introduced us to the crowd as Mr. and Mrs. Lerman. Then the music and dancing resumed once more.

Laurence and I liked to speculate before the wedding as to the roles we would have assigned to the cats, if it had been even remotely feasible to have the three of them in attendance. We could press Vashti, with all the glory of her natural bridal white, into service as a ring bearer. And surely we could find important jobs for Homer and Scarlett. It was pure silliness, naturally, but still … it felt odd to get married without the cats there. One way or another, they had influenced and participated in just about every momentous occasion in my life over the past fourteen years. If not for Homer, I might never have come to appreciate the value of a man like Laurence. I would have loved Laurence’s warmth, humor, and quick mind no matter what, but I might never have understood that when you find someone whose essential character is so strong as to leave no room for doubt, you’ve found a rock that you can build your life on.

It’s become trendy, in recent years, to talk about how much longer it takes people of my generation to grow up and think of ourselves as adults. But growing up doesn’t necessarily mean getting married, having children, or taking out a mortgage. Growing up means learning to be responsible for others—and embracing the great joys those responsibilities can bring. Homer taught me that building my life around someone other than myself, making myself responsible for someone else’s life, is one of the most rewarding differences between being a kid and being an adult.

Being the parent of a special-needs pet means living your life constantly poised on the edge of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you become a fierce defender of the ways in which your little one is perfectly ordinary—all the things he or she can do that are just like what everybody else does. No need for any extra attention here, thank you very much. And yet, you never lose sight of how absolutely extraordinary that very ordinariness is, how difficult, remarkable, and rewarding that fight to be “just like everybody else” has been.

Maybe Homer isn’t really any more extraordinary than other cats. But among the small circle of people whose lives he’s touched, this tiny cat who nobody wanted—who nobody, with the exception of one young and idealistic veterinarian, believed could ever go on to live a good life—has been a source of minor miracles, major joy, and a concrete example of that best of all possible truths:

Nobody can tell you what your potential is.

Back before I adopted Homer I had believed, with the certainty of a child, that the way my life was then was the way it would always be—that the career, the relationships, and the life that I wanted would always be somewhere beyond my reach. Yet here I was—a published author, a bride about to be married to the single greatest man I had ever met. The one thing I knew for sure about our future was that it could be anything we wanted it to be.

Despite having forgone so many of the traditional wedding trappings, Laurence and I opted for a strictly traditional ceremony. The ceremony is the thing, after all, and we liked the idea of saying the same words, and having the same words said over us, that had been said by and for our grandparents and great-grandparents, and other brides and grooms for thousands of generations before us.

This meant that we didn’t write our own vows. Instead, we toasted each other once the ceremony was over. I spoke of Laurence’s astonishing wit and intelligence, his strength that I never believed possible I would find in anybody. “I laugh every single day,” I said. “And it is miraculous to me every single day that the greatest man I’ve ever known loves me, too.”

“Let me tell you a little something about Mrs. Lerman,” Laurence said, when it was his turn to toast me. He went on to speak about brains and beauty, about passion and compassion. “Gwen is the most passionate person I’ve ever met, and also the most logical,” he said. “She’s passionate about being logical. I had no idea this was even possible.”

On the theme of combining passion and logic, I knew from years of event production that no matter how free flowing and spontaneous a party felt, it needed to have a strong logistical skeleton. So I carefully scripted everything out—lighting changes, the time for the ceremony, the schedule for toasts—in an Excel spreadsheet and sent it to all vendors and participants (including Andrea and Steve) several weeks ahead of time. I was mocked relentlessly for this, but I was firm in my belief that without a clear organizational flow, chaos would ensue.

Even though I had orchestrated everything down to the last detail, however, there was one surprise in store for me that night. After he concluded his toast, Laurence called forward Alex and Zachary, his eight- and five-year-old nephews, and Allison, the seven-year-old daughter of his first cousin. He retrieved three large, foam-core posters from some hidden corner I hadn’t noticed, and handed one to each of them. “I need some help for this part,” he told them. “Can you guys help me?”

They had obviously been prepped for this beforehand. Their faces nearly split beneath their wide grins of anticipation as they each eagerly took hold of one of the posters.

“There are three ‘people’ who couldn’t be here tonight,” Laurence said. “Technically, they weren’t invited. People who know me can’t believe I live with three cats. But I do, and it wouldn’t be a celebration of ours if they weren’t included. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you for the first time, in a very real and legally binding sense … Vashti Cooper-Lerman!”

Allison held up her poster, and it contained an enormous photo of Vashti in midstride, looking adoringly out into the crowd as, no doubt, she had looked adoringly at the man holding the camera.

“Three things you need to know about Vashti,” Laurence said. “Number one, Vashti is beautiful. Number two, Vashti knows she’s beautiful. Number three, Vashti knows that you know she’s beautiful.”

People laughed, although not nearly as hard as I did.

“Next,” Laurence continued, “for the first time ever—legally and officially … Scarlett Cooper-Lerman!”

Alex held up the poster of Scarlett. In her photo, Scarlett was lying on her side, her head raised as she gazed rather majestically into the middle distance.

“I’ve lived with this cat for three years,” Laurence said, “and last week she let me touch her for the first time.”

Poor Scarlett! Always fated to be misunderstood.

“And, last but not least, the star of the family, our Daredevil and truly the coolest cat in town … Homer Cooper-Lerman!”

Zachary held up a poster-sized photo of Homer sniffing inquisitively at the camera lens. “And he’s blind!” Zachary announced with great pride. “He’s blind but he can walk around and everything!”

The crowd chuckled appreciatively as they clapped and cheered. It was Homer’s first official standing ovation.

“This is a cat who knows how to live,” Laurence said. “He’s got this huge world in that little head, and you can tell just by looking at him that every second of every day of his life is an adventure. I only wish,” he concluded, “that I could see what that cat hears.”

It was the first time I had heard Homer described by somebody else, the first time that I wasn’t the one who explained him or answered questions about him. But if anybody had asked me that night, What do you mean he has no eyes? How does he get around? How can a cat live with no eyes? my answer would have been different, and infinitely simpler, than the stock answers I usually gave.

I am Homer’s eyes. And he is my heart. And finally, the two of us—Homer and I—had found another person whose own heart was big enough to carry us all.