Another Insane Devotion Read Online Free
Author: Peter Trachtenberg
letter C, a face shuttered in sleep. I go into the bathroom and turn on the light above the sink. My face in the mirror is the face of a tramp rousted from a ditch. I lean closer and try to make out the size of my pupils, but of course the sudden brightness has made them pin. In mechanical terms, thereâs something they donât want to see. The door creaks; I turn in alarm, but itâs only our plush silver tabby Zuni, that fool for running water, shouldering her way inside. She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish.
Is it that I donât know F. any more or that I donât know myself? Maybe itâs love that has become strange to me. I canât recognize it in another person. I canât find it in myself. It has become my lack. But this seems to be true of many people: of Salterâs glamorously wretched married couple; of Swann, trembling at the loss of his faithless mistress, whom he will marry only when he has fallen out of love with her; of all the seekers who crawl and flounder after this one thing, turning
over wives, husbands, lovers, mistresses, like rocks in a garden, under one of which, long ago, they buried a treasure. Or maybe just a dream of treasure.
What is this treasure?
Â
It took me about twenty-two hours to travel the 1,400 miles from the town where I was teaching to the midâHudson Valley and back. Thatâs one of the drawbacks of flying on a discount carrier. To Biscuit, the distance would be as incomprehensible as that between Earth and the sun, whose warmth she loved to bask in when it poured through the living room window on winter afternoons. Though, come to think of it, you hear stories of cats traveling long distances all the time. Usually, theyâre trying to return to a former home or be reunited with a missing owner. To me, why Biscuit wandered off and where she went are, if not incomprehensible, unknowable. Still, I can recount just about every step of my search for her and many of the key incidents of our relationship before then.
This is more than I can do for my relationship with F., which at the time Biscuit disappeared was beginning to change and, maybe, to draw to an end; itâs still too early to say. I recall that relationship at least as vividly as I do the one with Biscuit, if not more vividly, but, as Freud showed us, there is such a thing as an excess of vividness. The most vivid memories, the ones most populous with detail and saturated with color, may be the least reliable. And my relationship with F. may also be too complex to be easily narrated. Both of us can talk, and that means we can contradict each other. (A cat can defy you, but it canât contradict you, its powers being confined
to the realm of action as opposed to the realm of descriptions of action, which belongs to humans.) I feel no obligation to relate F.âs version of the events I lay out here. Still, when her version contradicts mine, I feel haunted. My past seems to belong to someone else, a self I am only impersonating. Did I really do the things I remember doing, say the things I remember saying? And whom did I say them to?
About my cat and the self I am with her, I have fewer doubts.
Â
I turn off the faucet. The silver tabby goes on lapping. I still hear her after I turn off the light, swabbing up the last drops of moisture. I feel my way in the dark to our marriage bed and climb under the blankets beside my wife. In the dark, I listen for the creak of floorboards and the sound of a small whisk broom briskly sweeping.
2
O N SEPTEMBER 29, BRUNO HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE house for a little more than a week. That was long enough for me to understand that he
Is it that I donât know F. any more or that I donât know myself? Maybe itâs love that has become strange to me. I canât recognize it in another person. I canât find it in myself. It has become my lack. But this seems to be true of many people: of Salterâs glamorously wretched married couple; of Swann, trembling at the loss of his faithless mistress, whom he will marry only when he has fallen out of love with her; of all the seekers who crawl and flounder after this one thing, turning
over wives, husbands, lovers, mistresses, like rocks in a garden, under one of which, long ago, they buried a treasure. Or maybe just a dream of treasure.
What is this treasure?
Â
It took me about twenty-two hours to travel the 1,400 miles from the town where I was teaching to the midâHudson Valley and back. Thatâs one of the drawbacks of flying on a discount carrier. To Biscuit, the distance would be as incomprehensible as that between Earth and the sun, whose warmth she loved to bask in when it poured through the living room window on winter afternoons. Though, come to think of it, you hear stories of cats traveling long distances all the time. Usually, theyâre trying to return to a former home or be reunited with a missing owner. To me, why Biscuit wandered off and where she went are, if not incomprehensible, unknowable. Still, I can recount just about every step of my search for her and many of the key incidents of our relationship before then.
This is more than I can do for my relationship with F., which at the time Biscuit disappeared was beginning to change and, maybe, to draw to an end; itâs still too early to say. I recall that relationship at least as vividly as I do the one with Biscuit, if not more vividly, but, as Freud showed us, there is such a thing as an excess of vividness. The most vivid memories, the ones most populous with detail and saturated with color, may be the least reliable. And my relationship with F. may also be too complex to be easily narrated. Both of us can talk, and that means we can contradict each other. (A cat can defy you, but it canât contradict you, its powers being confined
to the realm of action as opposed to the realm of descriptions of action, which belongs to humans.) I feel no obligation to relate F.âs version of the events I lay out here. Still, when her version contradicts mine, I feel haunted. My past seems to belong to someone else, a self I am only impersonating. Did I really do the things I remember doing, say the things I remember saying? And whom did I say them to?
About my cat and the self I am with her, I have fewer doubts.
Â
I turn off the faucet. The silver tabby goes on lapping. I still hear her after I turn off the light, swabbing up the last drops of moisture. I feel my way in the dark to our marriage bed and climb under the blankets beside my wife. In the dark, I listen for the creak of floorboards and the sound of a small whisk broom briskly sweeping.
2
O N SEPTEMBER 29, BRUNO HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE house for a little more than a week. That was long enough for me to understand that he
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