Ever by My Side (23 page)

The Renaissance man’s guide to familial integration suggests one should be prepared for hostility, standoffs, icy stares, tantrums, and
the line all men fear hearing from a child who is part of the package deal in a relationship—“You can’t tell me what to do because you’re not my
real
dad.” Fortunately Whitney demonstrated none of these traits. On the contrary, I could not have wished for a more welcoming, cheerful, and affectionate soul. Instead, my anticipated confrontation, and battle against indifference, centered on the prickly feline in my new arrangement.

Unlike Whitney, Reggie could not be won over by bedtime renditions of “The Very Quiet Cricket” or hours of playing dollhouse. From across the room he would regard me with a look I interpreted as “You’re pathetic,” occasionally training his green eyes on Whitney as if to say, “Quit selling out on me.” Every time I would go up to him, clucking, cooing, calling his name, my voice ridiculously singsong and high-pitched, he would freeze, wait until I closed in, and then leap away at the last minute. It was similar to one of those cheesy horror movies where the audience knows Damien is really the son of Satan while his parents misinterpret all his demonic antics as the spirited high jinks of an angel. Reggie was sweetness and light around Kathy and Whitney, affectionate, malleable, and calm. Alone with me he would practically whisper, “I don’t have to pretend around you” as he hissed or flashed me the middle claw before dancing off to the barn, with just enough of a flourish in his tail to let me know he was actually enjoying himself.

Some of Reggie’s standoffish personality may have stemmed from unknown traumas in his early life. Kathy had gotten him as a stray about five years earlier, picked up by a Good Samaritan who found an emaciated but handsome male short-haired tabby cat wandering the streets in search of food. Nobody knew his age, except to say he was an adult with a mouth full of permanent teeth in fine working order. His head was broad and his skin felt thick and
durable, suggestive of an animal neutered later in life, his body lapping up all the available testosterone before it was stolen, and he had all his claws. Judging by the healed rips and holes in his ears, he had been in some fights and knew how to defend himself. In short, he was a “slumcat.” But it was precisely the bad boy in him, this cheeky, indifferent ’tude that made him all the more irresistible. He was simply too cool and I realized I was trying too hard.

I decided to go with a different approach, a little subterfuge. I forced myself to act indifferent, hoping this tactic might spark his curiosity. If Reggie was ever going to warm to me it would be on his terms and so, for a while, I stepped back and simply observed how he lived his life.

Kathy owned a small horse farm in the middle of nowhere, truly the perfect feline environment. With no busy roads nearby, acres of woodlands, and a barn to call his own, Reggie had the best of both worlds—the perfect indoor/outdoor combo. He would sleep in the main house, oftentimes with Whitney, happy to utilize her head as a convenient pillow. He would rise early and stroll down to the kitchen, where he would expect breakfast to be ready and waiting—dry cat food, not wet. From here he would amble over to the front door and did not like to be kept waiting too long. Having to cry out in order to be let out might necessitate significant retribution, but more of that later. Once he was outside, the day’s work would begin, starting with a clearly defined excursion around the property. He always took the same route, adopting the same even pace before dropping off my radar. What happened during the rest of the day I might catch in glimpses. He was a natural and talented predator, patient and methodical, rarely unsuccessful. He had no problem with trees. Whatever happened in his former life, whether he stayed close to his mother and learned some valuable tricks or was simply smart enough to work it out, Reggie knew how to back down from
high up in a tree. This was not a cat afraid of heights or in need of a fireman’s ladder.

Reggie regularly frequented the horse barn, creating his own haven, a venue akin to a gentlemen-only bar in an exclusive country club. Here he could hang out, high up on his favorite shelf among the fleece leg wraps, surveying his domain and ridiculing the horses imprisoned in their cold stalls. If and when he felt like it, he might engage in a little sport, catch a mouse or two, happy to leave the kill out for everyone to see, preferably close to a bag of feed, ensuring praise and treats on his return to the house.

Toward the end of the day he would stroll home, choosing to enter the house through a sliding door in the back, as though only by using this entrance had he completed the official duties of his security detail. Once inside he would take his supper and then relax—sofa, fireplace, or linen closet, whichever took his fancy. When the lights went out and everyone went off to bed he might pad around a bit, but for the most part he would slip in with Whitney, there after she fell asleep, gone before she woke up.

“What’s with that meowing, crotch-licking thing I’ve caught him doing?” I asked Kathy one day.

I was referring to this weird posture Reggie would adopt from time to time, hitching one of his back legs over his shoulder like the opening move in some disturbing contortionist routine, followed by a rant as he appeared to inspect his manhood.

“Didn’t I mention he had a PU? The little man’s keeping his surgical site clean.”

PU stands for perineal urethrostomy, a urinary diversion surgery employed in male cats who suffer from recurrent urinary tract blockage due to the accumulation of crystalline grit and sand. To my surprise, tough guy Reggie did not have a penis!

“Is that why he’s cranky with me? Still mad somebody stole his unit? Wants me to be next?”

It was Kathy’s turn to give me a withering stare, as if Reggie put her up to it.

“And what was with the precious gift I received this morning when I stepped out of the shower?” I asked.

Since I was first up in the morning, I took it upon myself to feed Reggie, hoping to work my way into his good graces by being identified as the purveyor of his breakfast. After delivering coffee to Kathy I would shower. No one ever thinks twice about stepping out and onto a cotton bathroom rug to towel off. However, on this occasion, the rug had been pulled back and folded inward from its corners in the manner of an oversized crab Rangoon, only there wasn’t a heap of succulent crab meat lumped into its center. Instead, when I made to unfold the rug, my big toe brushed up against a sizable feline turd.

“He must have been mad at you,” said Kathy.

“Why?” I asked. “I’m the one serving him breakfast. I had hoped he was starting to thaw out, finally getting used to me. Instead he’s leaving a crap in my path.”

“He’s telling you to let him out before you go veg out in the shower for twenty minutes.” And with that she swept him up and into her arms in a way I could never imagine doing without losing a cornea or contracting cat scratch fever. Was it me? Was I destined to be hopeless around cats because I had been denied their company as a kid? Did they sense, in a way I was sure the horses sensed, that I didn’t get them, didn’t understand them, didn’t speak their language?

I took some comfort from knowing I wasn’t the only one who found Reggie to be intimidating. Like I said, Reggie always chose to return home at the end of another exhausting day torturing wildlife and berating horses by following the exact same route—around the deck in the back of the house, up the stairs, patiently waiting to be let in through the sliding door at the rear. Only on one
particular occasion an enormous female harlequin Great Dane belonging to a friend of Kathy’s was chained up outside this door, blocking his path. The Dane spotted Reggie on approach and lunged at him, caught up in a relentless barking frenzy, stretching his metal chain to the point of breaking, desperate for a piece of cat chow. Most animals, undergunned and undersized by comparison to this canine leviathan, would have backed off and avoided the confrontation, opting for common sense over deluded valor. Reggie saw things differently. He saw a mouthy lug of a dog blocking his route home, messing with tradition, stomping on his turf, compromising the civilized routine he savored. So Reggie kept coming, his rhythm steady, limbs loose and fluid, eyes focused on the growling beast towering way up and over his head. He drifted closer to the danger zone with no hesitation, no second thoughts, picking up the pace, moving in and up, and suddenly Reggie was on him, a big poly-dactyl paw swiping across the Dane’s cheek, the ultimate bitch-slap. The Dane was dumbstruck, speechless as he backed off. And what did Reggie do? What else would he do? He sauntered past, problem solved, one hundred and fifty pounds of dog turned into Jell-O, and, without a second look, he stood politely in his usual spot at the back door, waiting to be let in.

The first hint that Reggie was starting to thaw toward me came shortly after a hard frost in late fall. The house had cathedral ceilings and was a devil to heat, dependent on a wood-burning stove in the living room. For the first time since my days as a Boy Scout, I found myself trekking outside in the morning darkness, chipping away at a frozen cord of wood, and gathering fuel for a fire.

After finding that chocolate fortune cookie in the bath rug I was timely about letting Reggie outside for his morning constitutional, but on this occasion, as I pried the cut logs apart and loaded them into my carrier bag, Reggie appeared, rubbing up against my legs,
sliding in with a firm body slam as he nudged me with his right flank and then his left.

“What’s up, little man?”

He stared up for a second and trotted back to the house, breaking his routine to wait at the closed front door.

I imagined he must have been surprised at how cold it was that morning and preferred to let the day warm up before heading out on patrol, encouraging me to get a move on in building a decent fire while he waited.

I thought no more about it, but that evening, for the first time, he jumped up on the sofa next to me, something he normally avoided, walking over my legs as though they didn’t exist before settling down within stroking distance. I dared to lay a hand on his head and began to work backward down his neck. Kathy and Whitney were watching, holding their collective breath, waiting to see his response, and to their delight and mine, Reggie closed his eyes and offered up a deep, soulful purr.

Of course I blew it by being lazy. My arm tired of reaching to pet him so I decided to pick him up and place him on my lap. Reggie was having none of it and leapt off the couch and out of the room.

“He’s getting there,” said Kathy. “You just have to work on his timetable.”

And I knew she was right. Reggie was simply a cat you had to get to know over time. You couldn’t force the relationship. It had to unfold naturally. He didn’t do speed dating and he wasn’t easily won over by grand gestures or excessive familiarity. Reggie understood how to do new relationships right—to have meaning, depth, and longevity, they will either naturally evolve on their own, or they won’t.

“Of course,” said Kathy, “you’ve still got two more tests to pass before you get his complete stamp of approval.”

“And what are they?” I asked.

She turned to Whitney.

“What does Reggie do when he loves you?”

Whitney beamed, knowing the answer to this one.

“He falls asleep in your lap and drools on you.”

“And?”

“He licks your hand clean.”

Slowly, over the next month, I ticked them off, one by one. Reggie waking up on my lap, acting all surprised, like a passenger on an airplane with a saliva string stuck to his chin. And then, from nowhere, a bizarre rasping sensation from a barbed pink muscle attending to the back of my hand, working methodically, unhurried and seemingly happy to oblige. It felt as though it had taken forever, but looking down at the tabby street urchin busy and content to make me presentable, I had an overwhelming sensation of finally feeling accepted as part of his family.

For my first Christmas in the States, Mum and Dad came to visit—first passports, first time on an airplane—ostensibly for an opportunity to meet Kathy.

“Ah, she’s a grand lass,” said Dad with his best Yorkshire inflection as he and I stood outside on a smoky, snow-swept wooden deck, beers in hand, working the grill.

I smiled appreciatively, but I sensed there was more to come.

“You’re sure this is what you want?” he asked.

When I registered the question, I was about to take another pull on the bottle, but it stopped me mid-sip. I had already discussed my intention of getting married and both my parents seemed to be thrilled by the idea. Had I been wrong? Then I zeroed in on another
interpretation of what he was really asking. This wasn’t about planting a seed of matrimonial doubt or quietly venting unspoken disapproval, this was about my commitment to a life in America. By choosing this new life did he think I was betraying the old, ensuring I would stay far from home, far from my parents?

There was no plea in his eyes, in fact, he seemed to light up, relieved, when I answered with an unequivocal “definitely,” but with hindsight and the wisdom of too many intervening years, I imagine he must have felt as though a door had been shut tight between us, a door he had tried to leave unlocked and slightly ajar, in the hopes that someday I might find my way back through, back home.