Cats

Cats recur as intimate tests of Lionel Essrog’s capacity for care. He likes them, but the repetitive behaviors associated with his Tourette syndrome can unsettle them; attention that he means as affection becomes difficult for an animal to predict or trust. His account of Hen, the cat he once owned, gives this conflict its painful history. In a later encounter with Kimmery and her cat, Lionel responds to that history by keeping his hands away, making restraint—not possession or touch—the clearest expression of his concern.

Cats in Lionel’s Domestic Life

For a time, Lionel lived in the apartment above the L&L storefront, keeping the upstairs space distinct from the business below through separate furnishings, habits, and rituals. He had a cat while living there, but the arrangement did not work out. His retrospective explanation gives that bare fact its weight: the difficulty was not an aversion to cats, but the effect his behaviors had on an animal sharing his home.

The cat was a slim gray female named Hen, a name inspired by her chirping and cooing and by the barnyard quality Lionel associated with the way she investigated his apartment. At first she welcomed his attentions, purring and pushing against his hand. Lionel tried to refine his touch into smooth strokes along her neck and rubs on her cheeks. Yet the tics he could not reliably control—head jerks, utterances, and barking—made Hen startle and investigate movements that had no clear purpose to her. She could not settle easily: even approaching his lap became a cautious process, liable to be interrupted by his sudden shrieks or swatting at a curtain.

Hen and the Cost of Compulsive Attention

The central difficulty was not simply that Lionel sometimes startled Hen. Her pleasure in being petted could itself become the focus of compulsive games. As she leaned into his hand, he might suddenly withdraw it; at other times, he followed her when she was trying to stay hidden or tested how much touch she would tolerate. His questions about stroking against the grain, tickling her cheeks, touching her tail, or cleaning her eyes describe a growing fixation on the limits of her consent. Hen sometimes accepted more handling than she seemed to welcome, but that willingness did not mean the attention had no cost.

Lionel recognizes the result as a transfer of his own tic-driven unpredictability onto a smaller, dependent animal. Hen became distrustful and skittish, prone to anticipating disturbance and lashing out. After six months, he found her another home with a Dominican family in the next building. She spent a cooling-off period hidden behind their stove, and the family was eventually able to settle her. The ending is concrete rather than sentimental: caring for Hen meant acknowledging that his affection was not enough to make his apartment a comfortable place for her.

Shelf and Kimmery

A contrasting encounter takes place with Kimmery’s cat, a black-and-white animal with a distinctive mustache-like marking. The cat walks into the room, plants its paws on Lionel’s outstretched thighs, and kneads his trousers with partly retracted claws, making a repeated pock-like sound. When it notices his face, it narrows its eyes at him. The cat is not merely a prop in the exchange: it moves, watches, and claims space on its own terms while Lionel and Kimmery talk around it.

Kimmery brings water and asks whether Lionel dislikes cats. He answers that he likes them, but keeps his hands away rather than risk becoming absorbed in the cat’s body or imitating its uneven purr. She later teases him about whether he is happy with the animal and asks whether it has a name. The cat is called Shelf, though Kimmery says she never uses that name. It settles heavily between Lionel’s thighs, purring unevenly, with small bubbles of drool at the corners of its mouth. When Kimmery pats its head, Shelf shifts its attention to her hand and presses into her palm. Lionel observes the gesture and admits to himself that he would have leaned toward her touch too.

Affection, Restraint, and Meaning

The contrast between Hen and Shelf is not that Lionel has stopped liking cats. Rather, his earlier experience has made the risks of his attention visible to him. With Hen, he repeatedly pursued contact and tested its limits; with Shelf, he notices the impulse to touch but does not act on it. The choice matters because his restraint answers a specific knowledge: an animal’s apparent tolerance does not erase the possibility that persistent, unpredictable handling will make it wary.

Cats also draw the novel’s concern with bodily repetition into ordinary domestic scenes. Hen’s careful approach, Shelf’s kneading, and the difference between a relaxed lean and a startled withdrawal give physical form to a problem Lionel cannot solve by wishing his tics away. These animals are not interchangeable emblems of his condition. Their responses—Hen’s mounting wariness and Shelf’s movement toward Kimmery’s hand—help register their separate preferences, while showing how much Lionel’s conduct can shape the atmosphere around them.

The cat scenes therefore complicate the idea that affection is measured by closeness. Lionel’s history with Hen ends with his decision to give her a home where she can recover; beside Shelf, affection takes the quieter form of not reaching out. Both episodes keep the animal’s comfort in view, and together they mark Lionel’s growing awareness that caring for another creature sometimes requires accepting the limits of what he can safely give.