Cat Trouble
The vet told us we had to let her go through her first heat before he would spay her; otherwise, she wouldn’t be fully mature. We weren’t sure what fully mature meant for a house cat — at eight months, she still liked the tassels on the rug better than her food, and fell asleep with her tongue stuck between her front teeth. But she was our first cat, and we wanted to do the right thing.
It was late August. A cool day was 95°. The neighbors had a pumpkin vine in their front yard; that month, the orange fruit swelled obscenely, flattening the grass.
At first, the cat was more affectionate. She’d sidle up to us, pour herself across our laps. She developed a purr we’d never heard before — deep, low in the throat, sultry. Then she started rubbing herself against the ground.
We tried picking her up, putting her on the couch. We put away a rug she seemed to favor. She kept going. She seemed to be in pain. We called the vet, who assured us this was normal. He said it would pass in about a week. The cat began to moan and grind her bottom into the floor. We could hear her all night, even upstairs in our bedroom.
Sarah and I had been married then for about a year. We had met under strange circumstances. She was married at the time. I was in love with a woman at my office, who had two different-colored eyes and a long-term partner named Stella. Both of us were intensely unhappy. The first time we slept together, we cried afterwards, and not with joy. Since then, our life together had been focused on comforting one another — at first explicitly, and then, after a time, through little words and actions that established a routine. We loved each other, but ours was not a marriage based on desire.
It was the cat’s fourth night of moaning when Sarah told me she had slept with her ex-husband the month after our wedding.
I believed I was the kind of person to be deeply hurt by a statement like that, but instead I was filled with a hot and pulsing rage.
“Why?” I asked her, “Why would you do something like that?”
She shrank from me. “I don’t know.”
But I wouldn’t let it be. I pestered her. I threatened, I yelled. Around 2 a.m. I began to play on her insecurities. At 3 a.m. she hit me in the face.
In the morning, we came down the stairs exhausted. We were covered in bruises and bite marks. We didn’t know it then, but Sarah was pregnant. The cat was sleeping soundly on the couch, her tail flicking slightly in the sunlight.