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Bitey wrestled him onto his back and began
roughly grooming him. (Felinologists call this behavior al-logrooming and identify it with dominance. You can spot the top cat in any colony by seeing which one most frequently grooms the others.) At one point it looked as if she was about to lick his genitals, but he pushed her away with his forepaws like someone trying to hold a door shut against the pounding of housebreakers. “Don’t stop her, you fool!” I yelled at him. “It’s your last chance!” It was no use; it might not have been even if he’d had an inkling of what I was yelling about.
    Well, he must have had an inkling. On an average, male cats roam some three times farther than females, and given that both genders need roughly the same amount of food, one assumes it’s because the males are looking for sex. This is borne out by a study by Olof Liberg, in which dominant—that is, breeding—male house cats were found to have an average roaming range of 350 to 380 hectares versus 80 for nonbreeding “subordinates.” You don’t have to travel very far if you’re only going out for carton of milk.
    Of course, those roaming cats were acting on the same imperative that made Biscuit stalk through the house presenting her swollen genitals for somebody to do something with: they were acting on instinct. What I’d like to know is how they experienced that instinct, whether it was just a blind hormonal goading or was accompanied by thought, or some version of thought. Did those dominant males have an internal schema of sex that summoned them out of their houses, made them cross yards and slink under hedges, skitter up trees, creep into culverts, dart across roads where cars shot past in sprays of dust and exhaust, avid, tireless, pausing only to sniff and twitch
their ears? Did they know what they were after? Not in words, I mean, but in pictures—say, the silhouette of a lordotic female—or as an archetypal scent they had been born knowing and whose corporeal traces they kept seeking in the fragrant air?
    I have in mind something like the sexual theories of young children, those murky ideas of sticking one part into another part that used to trouble me when I was six or seven, referring as they did to something I already wanted to do without being at all clear as to what it was. The indeterminacy is suggested by the first dirty joke I remember learning. John Wayne meets Marilyn Monroe and asks her, “You want to come to my house?” Marilyn Monroe says, “Sure.” They go to his house, and he asks her, “Can I go to bed with you?” and Marilyn Monroe says, “Okay, but don’t get any ideas.” So John Wayne gets into bed with Marilyn Monroe. “This is nice,” he says. “Don’t you think it’s nice?” Marilyn Monroe says, “It’s okay, I guess. But don’t get any ideas.” Then he asks her, “Can I feel your boobies?” She says, “Sure, but don’t get any ideas.” So Marilyn Monroe shows John Wayne her boobies, and he feels them with his hands. Then John Wayne says, “Hey, can I put my finger in your belly button?” And Marilyn Monroe says, “Oh, okay, but don’t get any ideas.” After a while, Marilyn Monroe says, “Hey, that’s not my belly button.” John Wayne says, “That’s okay. That’s not my finger.”
    I heard this joke in my first year of grade school, from the boy sitting at the desk next to mine. I don’t remember anything about him, but I can still remember the sweet voltage that tore
through me as I got his meaning. “That’s not my finger.” For a moment, I was almost too shocked to laugh. Then I did, out of the same shock that had struck me dumb a moment before. I can’t imagine how I kept it quiet, but I must have, or else Mrs. Mehrer would have been on top of me, wanting to know what was so