My Cat Caught on Fire!

Let me explain! Truman was hungry. He was jockeying for position around my wife’s lunch, which she was eating at our kitchen counter. Our kitchen counter shares an island with a gas stove. The stove had my lunch on it, warming in a double boiler. Where was I at this critical moment? 

According to an informal survey I’ve been conducting for a few years now, the convention of “going #1” or “going #2” seems to be global: it translates to every language I’ve polled. So you’ll understand if I say I’d just excused myself to undertake a plural endeavor in the upstairs bathroom. 

What a splendid relaxed Sunday we’ve been enjoying, I thought, taking my seat.   

I heard a shout from downstairs: “Devin!”

Truman (top) & Rudy

So discordant was this note, I almost didn’t hear it. In the same way that it is said (I suspect apocryphally) that the first natives to set eyes on Columbus’s ships failed to see them (the ships’ manifestation being too otherly, too novel for the natives’ schemas to accommodate), the urgency and volume in my wife’s voice had no business whatsoever in the fathomless literary calm of a Sunday at Tallboy. 

First we read in bed. Then we read in the sun on the back porch. When it gets too hot we move to the shade of the front porch and read there. When it starts getting chilly or buggy we encamp to the couch, whereupon we read to the low-volume accompaniment of baseball games until it’s time to watch a movie.

(Childless, obviously.)

Yet it was real. My wife had shouted my name with alarm.  

Compromised is one word for my situation. 

“I’ll be right there!” I said. 

That she hadn’t repeated the alarm provided the only measure of calm available to me. Either the emergency had passed, was under control, could wait—or she was dead. My strong, healthy, 38-year old wife, abstemious of appetite, nibbler of rice cakes, the same weight to the pound she’s been since high school, smote down suddenly by a massive coronary. Or…does an aneurysm leave time to cry out?

Of all conceivable absurdities, I could think of none keener than to be just precisely where I was at that moment.

I rushed downstairs as soon as humanly possible. 

Truman is fluffy. Also arthritic. Grooming’s become an issue for him in his dotage. Last summer we went so far as to have him shaved. We took him to the office of a woman who has an old Volvo station wagon painted in cheetah spots. Her workplace is made to look larger than it is by being just one spacious room with nothing in it but a moderately sized desk smack in the middle. Framed pictures of shorn cats hung on every wall. I like to think that at the center of the desk she does her work on the smallest unit of all, which in our case was the 19-year old Norwegian Forest cat I’d adopted in 2005, who over the years had answered to (not really) Ook, Ook-Truman, Ook-Truman Noozlenitzenstein, Mr. Pants, Mr. Bologna Pants, Pantalones de Bologne, Troozles, Trumantina, Trumantula, Nelson Trumandela, Boneteen, Puffy Bus, The Administrator, and Leonard Part 6.

“Hair Snake”

“Leonard Part 6” was in fact the first name I auditioned during his kitten stage in the second W. Bush administration. For obvious reasons (pertaining to Bill Cosby) I’m relieved it didn’t take. No, I’d tell people, not after Capote, or Harry, or The…Show: Just Truman. It is his name. I found it.   

Once he was shorn, we located the nicknames 1 Piece and Hair Snake. 

He’d been losing weight precipitously for a while—from a peak of around 16 pounds to 7ish—but we were stunned nevertheless by the spare, scraggly, fur-colored tube the cat groomer revealed to us: a tube like an em-dash lodged between the exuberant sentence fragments of his head and tail.

We may do it again this year if only for the fact that in his denuded state he became a creature of laps; his body, like an old baseball glove with a heart in it, clinging to our warmth for still and purring hours. This tendency diminished as his fur grew back literally between us until he was, again, a calico Gossamer, contenting himself deep asleep in his little bed by the wood stove for about 23 hours of every day.

For all the time, that is, that he wasn’t hectoring us to feed him.

His tail wandered into the range and went up in flames. Floo! 

Arielle cried out: “Devin!” She stood and leaned over and blew him out and moved him to safety and turned off the range. She watched him for signs of distress, not knowing what else to do. By the time I came down he’d taken up position waiting patiently beside his food plate. She stood right behind him. Our entire house smelled awful. “Truman’s tail caught on fire!” she told me, eyes wide, pointing. 

It had a blackened chunk taken out of it, ashy at the fringe. He didn’t seem to be in any pain. She didn’t think flame had reached skin. Did he even notice? 

“Truman, what the hell?” I said. “Are you OK?”

He looked up at me: I mean, I’m hungry.

Rudy and I photobomb Truman’s selfie

One of my oldest friends of life texted me this week heartbroken over the death of his dog. I shared the words Zadie Smith shared with all of us that Julian Barnes shared with her that a correspondent friend and fellow griever had shared with him: It hurts just as much as it’s worth. A statement more concise and profound I’m not sure I’ve ever heard. We invest love into our animals and when they go that love is lost from the world, and the going hurts. My friend said that his house, which rambles vertically and horizontally and has children in it and cats, felt “empty. Cavernous.” 

We like to joke that Truman thinks of Arielle as his wife and me as his husband. His “brother” Lil’ Pal Rudy (aka LPR, Fat Pal, Hanser-Rudolph, Lima Beans…oh, you get it), a charcoal tabby circa 2011, is Truman’s third cat. One was struck by a car and killed while we were out of town. The other vanished. We’ve never had to negotiate the death of one of our little guys as adults. 

Both Truman and Rudy used to be inside/outside cats, but a steady diet of $600 veterinary bills and grueling cone-of-shame sessions put the kibosh on that. (Not to mention a late kindling sense of responsibility for our neighborhood birds.) Last year at one point I had the notion to let him out again. He was so old and sedate, I figured, he might just stick to the porch, like a dog. 

No soap. I followed him down the steps to the front yard, all around the lawn, watched pensively his tiny nose mingling in the blades of grass, his arthritic joints tense and lively, his wide, alert eyes, across the neighbor’s yard, down into the drainage ditch, beelining for that drainpipe that went under the intersection and OH GOD NO

I brought him back a squirmy bundle in my arms, set him down inside and closed the door. “Never mind!” 

Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not it constitutes animal abuse—to keep them inside all the time, I mean. Petkeeping and pethood makes for a peculiar institution, no doubt. But it is, in this house at least, one that exists purely to facilitate the manufacture of affection.

There’s a series of pictures we have from those inside/outside days I adore, of Truman asleep in our yard. We built Tallboy on that yard years later—the house we live in now. But that patch of grass is still grass, between our old house and new, shaded today by arborvitae and skip laurels. Someday soon he’ll rest there again. 

For now we feed him, put him out when he catches on fire, and our house is full.