Pippi rolls around when she’s happy. She’s a tuxedo with extra toes. Depending on who I’m talking to, I refer to her as a polydactyl or a Hemingway cat. I tell the science-minded folks she’s a polydactyl, and they say, “Oh, a Hemingway cat.” They want me to know that they know these five-toed cats gained fame when the mid-century novelist known for his sparse dialogue, his minimalist prose, took a liking to felines with extra digits.
I tell my literary friends she’s a Hemingway cat, and they reply, “A polydactyl.” They want to show off their vocabulary.
Pippi rolls and mews when I return home from work. Also, when the heat of the midday sun beats through the glass windowpanes making rectangles of warmth on the hardwood floors. I can’t help but squat down to pet her when she flips from one side to the other and lets out a clipped mee-yha. Hemingway would be proud. No extra vocalizations. Just enough to tell me she wants attention.
Usually, I sense when the feel of the sun and my hand on her fur teeter from good excess to bad excess. From satiation to overstimulation. But today, I miscalculate. She clinches her jaw around my hand and bites me for the first time in the three-plus years she’s lived with me. The moment her teeth prick my skin, she releases her jaw and jumps up. She’s startled by the still-wild snap that squashed her domesticity, if only for a moment. I know to stop petting and stand up too.
***
Once, when S and I were having sex, I pushed myself off him and flopped down on the wrinkled sheets just as the window of orgasm cracked open.
“What happened?” S asked.
“It’s just… It just feels too good.”
“What are you, a Calvinist?”
My attempt to retain control was thwarted by his reaction. How could I not lose my sound judgment over a guy who referenced Calvin during the intermission of our afternoon sex?
With the physical bliss came a tablespoon of hate. Because if S could make me feel so good, he could also take this feeling away. Like Pippi and her primal drive to bite, I’d hoisted myself off S when pleasure tilted towards disarray.
In the summer, S visits me. We take the backroads to the Amish farms, where we buy tomatoes and onions, pickled sauerkraut with sweet red peppers. Driving back, we stop at a creek we scouted on the way. We strip down to our suits and let the rushing water carry us downstream. Every now and then, the song of the creek and the birds is drowned out by the mournful bray of a train whistle and the whir of the wheels speeding down the track. We walk back upstream, and I stop to pick up a rock and turn it over so I can show S the tiny tubes and pyramids where river creatures hide. My fly-fisher friend uncovered this hidden world the week before as I waded in another creek. I wanted to share my new knowledge with S, to show off a little. I was still trying to impress him then. I was in my late 40s, and S was in his early 50s, but we could have been two teens out for a summer swim in the creek.
***
The two “Es” in excess are short. The soft “c” so faint that the first and second syllables are almost identical. Ex. Ess.
Would it be fair to refer to S as my ex?
When S and I reconnect after thirty or so years, I tell friends, “I’m seeing a guy I dated in high school.” But after saying this a couple of times, I realize it’s not accurate. Now I say, “I’m seeing a guy I used to have sex with in the woods one summer when I was in high school.”
S is not my ex. Even so, when it ended, it was a bit of a mess. Sometimes, I fear it will be again, though what concerns me more, or maybe as much, is how being with S turns me into an ex.
Bella DePaulo, the pioneer of Singles Studies, writes, Single people are defined negatively, in terms of what they do not have—a serious partner. They are labeled as ‘unmarried.’ But it is singlehood that comes first and is undone—if it is undone—by marriage. So why aren’t married people called unsingle?
I wasn’t worried about marriage detonating my single status—I had no plans to wed—but I did feel that being with S required me to slough off unpartnered life. It’s not that I wanted the possibility of sex with more people or that I was looking to meet another, better S. No, my reluctance came from the thought of what it meant to relinquish the golden pith of singleness and the polished stone solo living.
For years, I’d been spared the choice of time with friends or time with a partner. An afternoon spent typing away on my laptop or walking the canal with a partner. I didn’t simmer with anger while sweeping the kitchen floor because the coffee grinds and breadcrumbs sprinkled on the linoleum tiles were mine alone. I hung wall art without worrying about anyone else’s taste, kept the thermostat at a temperature that suited my body, watched bad TV in ill-fitting clothes with no thought of how it might diminish my desirability. It’s no small shift to transition to an ex-single.
***
After several days at S’s place in Philly, it’s time to drive back to Central PA. Pippi spies my packed bags and knows a car ride is in her future. I load my duffle bag and running shoes in the trunk and return for cat and carrier. I find her hiding under the bed, scoot down on my stomach, stretch out my arms, hold her small body between both hands. But her extra toes provide her with the advantage. Every inch that I move her, she regains her purchase in the carpet. S comes in and lifts the bed. Now, I can pinch the scruff of her neck with one hand and push her claws out of the carpet with the other. I scoop her up and lower her into the soft-sided carrier.
Pippi would rather be home where she can stretch her body across the wide windowsills and move from room to room without encountering S’s cat, Clementine. Even so, she resists when it’s time to leave. But we’ve stayed long enough. Once we’re home, Pippi will relax into the familiarness of the space. She’ll flop down in the sunny spot and dream of catching birds between her boxer’s paws.