There was a period, early on, when I believed the blanket was mine. I had bought it. It was on my chair. My name was, in a sense, on it, in the sense that my card had been.
I have since been corrected, gently, over about three years, by a cat who has never once raised her voice.
The settlement
Here is how the household is currently divided. I did not negotiate this. I was informed of it.
The blanket is hers. She will allow me to use the lower third, provided I do not move my feet, and provided I accept that “the lower third” is a figure that shrinks across the evening as she rearranges herself, as a sort of tide.
The book is mine. This is the one concession, and it is less a concession than a disinterest. She has no use for the book. She will occasionally sit on it, open, face down, at a point where I was in the middle of a sentence, and look at me as though the sentence had been the problem. But she doesn’t want it. She wants me to understand that she could have it.
The chair is mine while I am in it, and hers the moment I rise. I have tested this. I have stood up for the time it takes to fetch a glass of water, nine seconds, and returned to find her installed in the exact warm shape I left, eyes closed, already asleep in a way that would take a human twenty minutes, and I have sat on the footstool. I own the chair. I sit on the footstool.
The lamp is a shared resource. She sits directly under it, in the pool of light, where the pages would be. I move the lamp. She moves. We proceed in this way around the room over the course of an autumn.
Her reading habits
She does not read, but she is present for all of it, and I’ve come to think of her as a kind of critic. Thrillers: she sleeps, which I take as an insult to the genre’s pacing. Cozy mysteries: she sleeps, which is correct, as it’s what the books are for. Horror: she does not sleep. She sits upright, facing the door, and at the exact moment in the chapter when something in the house creaks, she turns her head toward the hallway.
I have decided this is a coincidence. I have decided this several times.
Why the system works
I used to think the goal of an evening in was solitude. It isn’t. The goal is to not be required. Nobody in this room needs anything from me that I can’t provide by sitting still. The cat requires the blanket, which she has. I require the book, which I have. The lamp is on. The door is shut. Nothing in the house is asking me a question.
That’s not solitude. That’s a treaty.
Out there, people are at the thing I was invited to. They’re standing up. They’re holding drinks at an angle. Someone is explaining a podcast. In here, the cat has the blanket and I have the book, and we have both, independently and without discussion, decided that this is the evening, and that it’s going well.
She just moved. I have the lower quarter now. The system works.