At war

“Orange kitty is using biological warfare against me!”

This is the sentence that comes out of the manfriend’s mouth as we are lying in bed being stalked by Jack, who is pacing warily around the bedroom, stopping occasionally to peer at us from the floor and then perch on the nightstand to watch us from above.

Biological weaponry, in the manfriend’s estimation, is the dander floating like fallout everywhere in my house — dander that makes his eyes tear up and his skin itch and his lungs push out sneeze after sneeze. My house, in my estimation, has for many weeks now been ground zero in a good old-fashioned battle for alpha male dominance. In this corner, you’ve got veteran Jack, with his marble orange eyes and his handsome gingery Tiger coat and a purr that sometimes gets so excited it sounds like he’s squealing. In this other corner, you’ve got sexy newcomer Manfred, with his ridiculously blue eyes and his sweet grin and his easy laugh, who’s no fan of cats due to how itchy/snotty they make him. They’ve been going rounds and rounds and rounds in psychological battle with one another and I have had to step in to referee them more than once.

When we are on the couch, Jack will saunter by — either on the floor or behind us on the back of the couch — and thwack the manfriend with his tail, always aiming for exposed flesh. Bonus points if he can aim for the face. The manfriend hisses and growls to mark his boundaries, and he retaliates sometimes by taunting Jack when he has successfully put the moves on me. “You see that? You see what I did to your girl?” Jack stares, eyes squinted, and blinks silently, more than likely imagining the earth scorching around us.

Sally, though, he likes. “Dark kitty does her own thing,” he tells me. “I respect that.” And for the most part, he’s right. She’s far more content to perch and watch from a distance than to mewl pathetically and then try to find a comfortable spot between or on us, like Jack does. But then one night he was in the house alone with her and she showed him just how persistent she can be when she’s in the mood for loving (I taught her well), and he decided she would be better served with “demon kitty” as a nickname. Sometimes I catch him hissing threats at them in Spanish. Sometimes when I’m at work and he’s alone with them, he will text me that he’s busy taunting them. I play referee as best I can, but the rivalries have to come to a head some day. Will I have to choose sides?

Tonight, when I got home, the manfriend was on the couch in a Benadryl haze. “Orange kitty was talking serious smack about you while you were away,” he said, to my incredulity. “Who are you going to believe, me or orange kitty?” I eyed him closely. “I would hook both of you up to a lie-detector,” I said.

What the manfriend does not know, perhaps, is that when he is sleeping or not here, I sneak moments with the cats. Big, indulgent cuddles where I rub my face in their fur and listen close for their purrs. Grand, dramatic moments when I speak to them in full sentences at a pitch I never invoke when others are observing. Loving, long belly rubs topped by nitpicky grooming. When he leaves in the morning, the bedroom door is cracked and it takes mere seconds for the front door to close and lock before I will see through sleepy half-eyes Jack’s head peeking over the edge of the bed, making sure the coast is clear so he can come snuggle with me like old times. Kind of like we’re fugitive lovers stealing embraces when the authorities look away.

But don’t feel bad for the kitties.

They now have two people to sucker into giving them sips of water from the kitchen faucet.