This is how the dance begins: You’re starting life over, living in a small apartment not in the best neighborhood. Life is hard for many people around you in this place that you’re hoping is only temporary.
One day, coming home from work, you’re greeted by a cat—a huge orange tomcat of a tabby—who bounds from under the bush by your back steps, meows precisely once, and does a figure-eight walk around your ankles. He doesn’t follow you to the door but merely sits and stares from the sidewalk.
Day two: home from work. Cat bounds from bush, receives pat on head, then leaves.
Day three: You spy the cat under the bush as we pull in. “There’s our cat,” you say to your wife, a bit sarcastically as he runs up to greet you. “Yeah, right,” she says, knowing the last thing the tiny apartment needs is this large orange thing. You laugh and go inside, leaving the orange thing again sitting happily on the sidewalk.
Many cats roam the apartments, and some are ill cared-for or feral. Quite a few eat out of the communal dumpsters, which reek of rotting meat and unimaginable bacterial life forms. You notice the orange cat leaving the closest dumpster on a regular basis.
It’s around day fourteen that you and your wife buy a pack of cat treats for The Cat, who somehow has obtained capital letters. He accepts the treats, but gets a bit frantic when invited inside, which you take as a good sign. You’re just good friends. The Cat leaves, and you get a bit concerned when he doesn’t show up for several days.
You forget what day it is when The Cat is allowed inside for the night (so you won’t worry so much), but must sleep in the kitchen, then later can sleep in the living room (but is not allowed on the furniture). Afterward comes the trip to the vet, who informs us that The Cat is FIV positive, exhibiting the feline version of the AIDS virus. “Before you do the good Samaritan thing,” she says, “you need to know he may live for years or just months. Now’s the time to back out if you want to.”
You and the wife look at each other, each seeing the answer. You promise to give The Cat a comfortable life, no matter how short.
You eventually move to a nice, small brick house. The Cat, by now not only allowed on all the furniture but also sleeping with you and the wife, makes the journey and settles in to the good life, claiming the living room bay window for bird watching and everywhere else for sleeping, which he is quite good at. He has apparently never taken cat lessons, and, far from being aloof, wants to spend all waking moments as close to humans as possible.
By now you are doing the full cat dance, waltzing and spinning to each other’s daily rhythms: the gentle paw tap on your nose at 6 A.M., reminding you it’s time to get up and get the cat food; the lap-sitting while you read the morning paper; the small head looking patiently up at the back door window when you get home from work; the brief pretend battle between The Cat and The Hand Monster before going to sleep each night.
“Cats,” someone once said, “are nature’s way of reminding us that not everything in life has a purpose.” You don’t consider that a complaint. Life is packed with purpose, along with accomplishment and complexity and stress and a thousand other things that need offsetting. What, therefore, could be more exquisitely comforting than sharing space with a creature that can find joy in the tablespoon of milk left in your cereal bowl or in knocking a pencil off your table for ten minutes straight?
After several years of good health, The Cat becomes suddenly very ill. Within a week, the immune system crashes to the point where he can’t eat or even walk, so one awful morning you say your goodbyes and make the final trip to the vet. There, wrapped in the wife’s much-loved fuzzy jacket, he is gently put to sleep as you pet him one last time and watch the light in his big orange eyes go out.
You take the empty jacket home and begin storing food bowls, the litter box, and other reminders of this tiny living thing that spent more time in your house than you did. Weeks later, you’re still finding clues he was here: orange fur behind the couch, or paw prints on the headboard of your bed.
And this is how the dance ends: You write it all down, remembering how The Cat would always nose his way under your left arm as you typed, sometimes contributing a keystroke or two, and how this used to irritate you. Now, feeling a ghost cat moving gently under your arm as you type this, you would give anything to have him there again, and you would not be irritated, not at all.
