Another Insane Devotion Read Free

big screen.
    When Bitey chased a ball of crumpled cellophane, as Biscuit chased cloth balls stuffed with catnip, she may simply have been practicing the behaviors she’d need for hunting. But I think she was also engaged in something gratuitous and nonu-tilitarian that might be called fun. A 1954 study found that even “Kaspar Hauser” cats, cats “reared in social isolation and without opportunities for visual experience, let alone play behavior,” displayed normal predatory responses when presented with a “prey-like” moving dummy. (Leave aside the ethical implications of raising a young social animal in what amounts to solitary confinement and—judging by the experimenter’s offhand “without opportunities for visual experience”—total darkness.) From my own observation, I know that Bitey would go scrambling after a tossed projectile moments after she’d finished eating, often with such abandon that she vomited in mid-pursuit. Her vomiting was brisk and without fanfare. Suddenly she’d brake; her body would be seized by spasms that squeezed and stretched it like a concertina. These would be accompanied by gasps of esophageal exertion, though “gasps” leaves out the sound’s distinctive Elvis Presleyan glottal stop. It was purely functional, without the notes of outrage and self-loathing that characterize human retching, whose sound is always the sound of someone groaning, “Why? Why? Why?” in a filthy bathroom
at midnight. Bitey didn’t wonder why. What had gone into her was now making its way out. When it came, she looked at it blandly, then shook her head and walked away.
    My girlfriend D. had a dramatic personality. She wore her hair dyed platinum blonde and swept back from her forehead like a romantic composer’s. She played the keyboards at three in the morning. She would fix you with hypnotic stares of desire or grief, her pupils big as jelly beans, waiting for you to jump her or apologize for the terrible thing you’d done to her. When she smiled, her mouth was shaped exactly like an upside-down boomerang. The night we met, she watched me pour a bottle of wine down the kitchen sink; I think it was a Beaujolais nouveau. The first time we made love was also marked by ceremony. We’d put off the moment for a while. I’d never delayed gratification of any kind before, just had it delayed for, or do I mean from, me, dangled out of reach like a catnip toy, and I have to say that when you’re the one who does the dangling, it drives the other person crazy. It drives you crazy. Like the old ascetics of the desert, you’re intoxicated by your self-denial, not to mention your unexpected power over another person. Not that this was my reason for postponing sex. It had more to do with the new life that had begun only a day or two before I met D., one event following the other so closely that I thought of them as cause and effect. In my mind, D. was the reward for my new life, which in its early stages was marked mostly by what it required me to give up, as if I had joined a priesthood whose members dressed in mufti and chain-smoked. Those rooms murky with cigarette smoke. Even in mid-summer, you seemed to be huddling by a fire, trying to
make out your comrades’ features through the gloom. “I want to wait,” I told D., and kissed her the way you kiss someone when that’s the only way you have of entering her. When we finally did it, it was the most powerful sex I’d had in my life up till that moment. In an old movie, it would have been symbolized by a shot of water crashing down the flume of a dam or steam surging through a pipe. (With the passing of heavy industry, we are losing an entire category of metaphors for the sexual act, metaphors of vast forces allowed only a single conduit through which to make themselves felt in the world. The turning of cogs and gears, the thrumming of turbines, the