Another Insane Devotion Read Online Free Page B

becomes hard to say if any of its traits are characteristic: this may be why we have so much trouble deciding what is truly human.
    Biscuit was still healing when she went into heat. She was so little that we’d figured she was younger. She’d pace about the house squalling, the soft furrow below her tail suddenly, shockingly distended. The transformation of her body seemed to puzzle her; her cries held a puzzled note. What’s happening to me? What do I want? Why do I want it so bad? Here, too, I’m projecting. There was nothing for her to be puzzled about.
She had instinct, which is to organisms what gravity is to matter, and so on some level she knew what was going on. Still, the baffled-sounding appeals went on for days. We had to be watchful at the door to keep her from lunging out or a horny male from stealing in. The other cats looked at her strangely. Even our old tom Ching, who was gaunt with hyperthyroidism and addled with dementia and hadn’t been interested in sex even when he still had his balls, sniffed at her as she passed and opened his mouth in a Kabuki grin. F. would growl at him, urging him to remember what a tiger he was.
    I was fascinated by what was happening to our cat, and especially by the flagrancy of her vulva. It looked so much like a woman’s. That was part of the shock of it. Our Biscuit had turned into one of those mythical hybrids like a mermaid or a Minotaur: a little cat with a woman’s sex between her legs, her hind ones. My wife has a dark view of sex, or say, a tragic view, and I often imagined how that view might apply to Biscuit. She’d be touched to see our new pet growing up into an adult female who in the natural course of things would mate and bear kittens that she’d ferry proudly around in her mouth. And at the same time, F. would know how cruel the mating could be, the feline penis being barbed and its possessor securing his grip on the female with teeth and claws. And she would know how that cruelty pales beside the cruelty of sex among humans, who being born without barbs on their genitals have to fashion them, the males and the females both. Maybe I’m just speaking of my own view of sex, which is also pretty dark. But we were both relieved when Biscuit went out of heat and we could take her to be spayed.

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    The first time I thought I might love F.—that is, thought of her as someone I might come to love—was at a tea shop in my old neighborhood in the city. I don’t like tea, but F. did, and I suppose the fact that I agreed to meet at a tea shop was a sign that I already wanted to please her. I drank coffee; it was bad. F. took her tea with milk and so much sugar, dumping in spoon after precariously heaped spoon of it, that I could smell the sweetness across the table. If you’d asked me a month before, I would’ve said that a tea shop would be the last place on earth you’d go to meet her. Her watchful, brittle cool seemed more suited to a dimly lit cocktail lounge with cunningly shaped glassware filled with liquor blue as antifreeze. Over tea, she told me that when she was nine or ten, her family had moved to a new town, where other kids immediately identified her as a goat. Girls made a show of ignoring her as she passed them in the school hallways. Boys called out taunts as she walked home. The worst oppressors were three or four popular girls in her class. They made F. wish she had magic powers. I asked her if she’d wanted them for revenge; I’m sure I sounded eager. She looked offended. “No, not revenge —I wasn’t that kind of kid. I wanted to conjure up Beatle dolls.” She saw my incomprehension. “To give the girls. Those girls were always talking about how they wanted Beatle dolls. Everybody wanted them back then; it was the year of Beatle dolls. And I thought how cool it would be if I had magic powers so I could come up to them and say”—she snapped her