is your cat anxious?

Camille Claudel, 1864–1943

First of all, before I sat­is­fy what is undoubt­ed­ly burn­ing curios­i­ty at the sub­ject of this post, I must say this about The Din­ner Par­ty. You remem­ber, the one at John’s boss’s house. I can­not post about it yet. I am allowed to write a draft, and then some Reuters offi­cial will read it for signs of insub­or­di­na­tion, replace half of it with gib­ber­ish like they used to do to too-reveal­ing let­ters dur­ing World War II. I am only part­ly kid­ding. John is hot to read what I write before I post it because so many sen­si­tive peo­ple are involved! It was quite the star-stud­ded guest list. Oops, was I allowed to say that? Seri­ous­ly, I’ll do my best, but prob­a­bly not until after Avery and I get back from Scot­land. We leave tomor­row night and get back Mon­day afternoon.

So about the cat. I’ve been sort of con­grat­u­lat­ing myself in a minor way on the unscathed con­di­tion in which we have all sur­vived our move. John’s set­tled in per­fect­ly at work, Avery is bliss­ful­ly hap­py at school, I have book­shelves and friends and a boil­er and so I’m hap­py. What did I for­get? Oh, yes, our feline friends. When they first arrived from the ken­nel and the air­port, all of them were cough­ing and sneez­ing. You know how every­one tells you not to try to diag­nose a phys­i­cal ail­ment by look­ing it up on the inter­net? Try googling “cat sneeze” and you’ll see the many dire things from which your cat can die, or be treat­ed in an extreme­ly inva­sive and expen­sive fash­ion. Also there was some­one who actu­al­ly record­ed his cat sneez­ing and set it to an Eminem song. I am not mak­ing that up. Any­way, after read­ing all this scary stuff, I took the only prac­ti­cal step I could: I decid­ed to ignore it. And guess what? They stopped doing it. Even­tu­al­ly. So I returned all four cats from whence they came, name­ly The Back Burn­er, and went on tak­ing care of all the press­ing affairs of busi­ness that could not be ignored. Until one day I looked down and Wim­sey, Lord Peter to you, had removed ful­ly half the white fur from his bel­ly. Com­plete­ly pink. And his ankles! And his hands! Some­thing told me this was odd, but I ignored it until he did the unmen­tion­able in my hand­bag. This, I felt, was a direct slap at me. I mean, my hand­bag. Eeew.

So today I took the prover­bial bull by the horns, packed him up in a cat car­ri­er, and took him the the Hyde Park Vet­eri­nary Clin­ic in Con­naught Street, a too-long (as it turned out) walk from Dun­raven Street, but we got there. Dr. Andrew looked him over and asked me a mil­lion ques­tions, while Wim­sey prowled around the exam room breath­ing loud­ly from his open mouth. “That cat is anx­ious,” said the doc­tor. “Your cat is suf­fer­ing from Gen­er­al­ized Anx­i­ety Dis­ease [or Syn­drome? Dis­or­der? I for­get]. Look, he is far too agi­tat­ed even now.” I looked. He did look anx­ious, pac­ing around and frown­ing. Final­ly he lay down in exhaus­tion on the floor and fold­ed his paws. “Now he is begin­ning to relax,” said the doc­tor. “How long has he been like this?” “I don’t know!” I wailed defen­sive­ly. “Until today I have to tell you that in the triage-ing of my issues, he’s been at the bot­tom of the pile!” At this, Wim­sey lum­bered up off the floor and start­ed pac­ing again. “That’s real­ly impres­sive,” said Dr. Andrew. “He’s lis­ten­ing to every word you say. He sens­es that he has not been a pri­or­i­ty,” he con­clud­ed dry­ly. So one blood test and a pre­dictably ruinous bill lat­er, I was in proud pos­ses­sion of two elec­tri­cal-sock­et plugs filled with a sub­stance called “Feli­way,” some pher­e­mone that when breathed in, con­vinces cats they are safe and hap­py. “I’m wait­ing for the human ver­sion,” the doc­tor said. But hon­est­ly, appar­ent­ly there is an oppo­site of the pher­e­mone that cats secrete when they sense dan­ger, and if they smell it, they get all calm and hap­py. Right now he’s secret­ing an over­load of the “some­body promise I nev­er have to fly British Air­ways again” hormone.

Whilst I was pay­ing, Wim­sey sit­ting on the floor pant­i­ng in his car­ri­er, in came two extreme­ly vol­u­ble West­ies who pro­ceed­ed to charge his car­ri­er and bark with feroc­i­ty. The poor cat came com­plete­ly unglued. I whisked him away in a cab and here we are, with invis­i­ble and slight­ly creepy-mak­ing pher­e­mones alleged­ly waft­ing through the air. I keep peek­ing to see if he looks dif­fer­ent. I do swear, he goes near the thing and his head bobs up and down. We can only hope.

This morn­ing, as an exam­ple of my extreme­ly var­ied life that com­bines Feli­way with art his­to­ry, I had a real­ly fruit­ful and enjoy­able meet­ing with a painter called Melanie Essex and one of her col­lec­tors, Sarah Tre­co, who along with my new friend Susan are help­ing to orga­nize a lot of events hon­or­ing women artists in 2007. The Nation­al Muse­um of Women in the Arts in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., is involved, and of course it turns that half the peo­ple work­ing on the project were either in grad­u­ate school with me or had some­thing to do with the pub­li­ca­tion of my book, or some­thing. Melanie Essex is actu­al­ly quite close friends with one of my most trea­sured artists, Aman­da Guest, whose solo show at my gallery was such a suc­cess. Anoth­er SW (Small World) encounter.

So I’ve been dep­u­tized to, among oth­er things, give a lec­ture at the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Art on Camille Claudel, next fall! Isn’t her pic­ture love­ly, up above in this post? I’m actu­al­ly quite excit­ed. I missed my usu­al Octo­ber lec­ture on the top­ic at Christie’s, for rea­sons relat­ed to the auc­tion house­’s ques­tion­able han­dling of a knot­ty intern prob­lem I had at the gallery (is that dis­creet enough? many of you know the scary par­tic­u­lars). I would real­ly enjoy­ing work­ing on Claudel again, and the Rodin exhib­it for which the lec­ture would be a spe­cial event sounds like a win­ner. So I’m back in the sad­dle, to some extent, in the art his­to­ry world. Sarah is also a mem­ber of a fic­tion-writ­ing course that sounds very excit­ing. We dis­cussed (in gen­er­al, non-iden­ti­fy­ing terms, of course!) the dilem­ma of writ­ing about, dare I say it, real peo­ple. How to dis­guise them, if to dis­guise them, do you ask their per­mis­sion, do you bend the truth to make a bet­ter sto­ry, etc. Melanie said that one of her col­lege room­mates had writ­ten her into a nov­el, in less than glow­ing terms, or rather engaged in one of her less-than-shin­ing moments as an under­grad­u­ate at Har­vard. She admit­ted that it changed their friend­ship. And Susan point­ed me to two books writ­ten by sib­lings, Susan and George Minot, whose dif­fer­ing (and thin­ly dis­guised) accounts of their trou­bled child­hood have caused huge rup­tures in their fam­i­ly. I have been get­ting some con­cerned com­ments from read­ers of this blog who would rather not see me sued for defama­tion of char­ac­ter, or my knees bro­ken by the less con­trolled peo­ple I’ve insult­ed. I tru­ly hope I have not insult­ed any­one! It’s tricky. Life is so inter­est­ing just as it hap­pens, and peo­ple so fas­ci­nat­ing with­out resort­ing to fic­tion­al­iz­ing, that I’m hard-pressed to edit out a lot, or gloss over, or make nice. A dilem­ma that appar­ent­ly a lot of writ­ers face. The impor­tant thing is that I would nev­er include any­one in the blog who I was not fond enough to be spend­ing time with, but I can still see peo­ple being sen­si­tive. An ongo­ing thing to be aware of. If I knew any oth­er blog­gers, I would see what they say, but I’m so busy writ­ing this one that I don’t have time to read any!

In prepa­ra­tion for our Scot­tish odyssey tomor­row evening, I bought a Bar­bour waxed-cot­ton coat for Avery, and tried to get Wellies but every­one is out of her size. Sure­ly a shop in Edin­burgh will have one? She claims to have packed every­thing she needs, and I hate to sec­ond-guess her, but I think I’ll go through the bag to make sure she includ­ed uncom­pelling items like under­wear, in among the doubt­less hun­dreds of books. I myself am tak­ing along Rosamund Pilcher’s “Sep­tem­ber,” a tru­ly love­ly and relax­ing nov­el set in north­ern Scot­land, and sev­er­al in M.C. Beat­on’s hilar­i­ous detec­tive series about Hamish Mac­beth, like “Death of a Cad.” I imag­ine we’ll find books in Scot­land that we can’t find here, and that will be part of the fun. Plus I want a real­ly top-notch High­land Scotch, some­thing that does­n’t grace the shelves of Sel­f­ridges liquor sec­tion. I came up with the per­fect dish: spicy Grand Duke’s Chick­en with Peanuts and Red Pep­pers. You basi­cal­ly cut the chick­en and pep­pers into the size pieces you like, and get an equal quan­ti­ty of raw peanuts (any raw nut you like will do). Then, one by one saute those three ingre­di­ents sep­a­rate­ly in peanut oil with gar­lic and gin­ger, then make a sauce of soy sauce, an egg, Japan­ese mirin cook­ing wine, chopped scal­lions, and sesame oil (with a lit­tle flour whisked in if you like it thick­er. Then you throw every­thing back in the wok and pour over the sauce, and cook as hot as you can for five min­utes. On brown rice it’s deli­cious. Makes take­away Chi­nese (except for my beloved Hong Kong in Indi­anapo­lis) some­thing you nev­er want to have again.

OK, I’m off to try not to get lost col­lect­ing Avery from her play­date with Stephanie, in St. John’s Wood. I’ve looked at the map a hun­dred times. This morn­ing when we left for school, I ran back for my A to Z to get to break­fast with­out mishap. “Come on, Mum­my, we’re going to be late! Leave the map!” I was indig­nant. “Sure, when after a few days peo­ple real­ize they haven’t seen me, you’ll have to admit that you were will­ing to lose your moth­er for­ev­er, in order to get to school on time.” She did­n’t deny it.