Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  Mrs. Kooshof seemed taken aback. “She called you Lucky Duckie.”

  “Perfectly explicable,” said I.

  “How?”

  I did not have the stamina to explain. I rose to my feet, moved away from the table, and spent the remainder of the evening in an injured sulk. The hurt was real. In virtually every detail, the evening’s incident had haunting antecedents in my defunct marriage, in my whole hideous history with Herbie and Lorna Sue: the rush to judgment, the maligning of character. Even the telephone.

  Late in the night, as Mrs. Kooshof slept, I found a screwdriver and proceeded into the den. A pity, I thought. Silver linings and so on. How quickly the fair bud of romance fades into trickery.

  I took apart the telephone, deactivated its ringer, snapped off the red wire that connects to my answering machine.

  A familiar routine. Through several tense years of marriage, the screwdriver had served as a first and final line of defense. (Have I yet mentioned my troubles with the telephone? How Lorna Sue kept asking why the damned thing never rang? How one afternoon she came home with a brand-new Southwestern Bell Freedom model? How I spent half the night prying off its plastic base plate, struggling to decipher its internal workings? A tense few hours, believe me. I have since invested only in the most unsophisticated telephones—rotary style, basic black, no gadgets.)

  With my engineering complete, I retired to bed, where I slept peacefully but alone. Mrs. Kooshof took her slumber behind the locked door of my bathroom.

  My apartment was far from spacious. A galley kitchen, a modest bath, two bedrooms (one of which I had converted to a den), and a living room that could be navigated in three or four untaxing strides. Cramped quarters, in other words, especially for two mature adults. Despite all her marvelous qualities, which were legion, Mrs. Robert Kooshof cannot be faithfully described as petite, and as a consequence our twelve days of cohabitation proved stressful at times. Agility was required. Patience, too, and geometrical compromise. We were quite literally stuck with each other. Moreover, though it’s depressing to admit, I had become accustomed to the bachelor’s life since Lorna Sue’s departure, setting my own hours, adhering to certain tidy routines, and it was only natural that I encountered a number of purely psychological difficulties in adjusting to Mrs. Kooshof’s overwhelming presence.

  The telephone represented one such problem. Basic courtesy another. The woman took keen interest in my personal affairs—a chronic snoop, in my opinion. A suspicious, shameless busybody. More than once I returned from class to find my underwear refolded, my checkbook updated, my social calendar stained with coffee and large Dutch fingerprints.

  Much as I enjoyed Mrs. Kooshof’s company, it soon became apparent that precautions were in order. Within a week I had my mail held for pickup. I disconnected the door buzzer. For truly vital communications, I passed out my unlisted phone number to certain favored students, among them the ebony-haired Toni.

  Not that I had anything to hide.

  Rather, after my experience with Lorna Sue, I lived in fear of even the slightest misapprehension. Mrs. Kooshof, for instance, might well have found cause for worry in those ten or twelve occasions when young Toni required after-hours assistance with her thesis. On my own part it was an open-and-shut case of professional responsibility. I had personally suggested the girl’s topic (a close textual study of Western matrimonial vows), and it therefore seemed reasonable that I should be on call for emergencies.

  Even so, I was careful. Toni and I rendezvoused at her dormitory, in a cozy sitting room to which she had the only key, and over many productive midafternoon hours the two of us pored through documents both modern and ancient. We put our heads together decoding the Latin, Gallic, and Germanic wedding vows; we rejoiced in our discovery that fidelity, in one form or another, stands as an unvarying multicultural pledge of nuptial union (i.e., “to love, honor, and obey”); we recited the Greek vows aloud, working on syntax and inflection; we stumbled across astounding parallels between the English admonition “to have and to hold,” et cetera—with its conspicuously carnal overtones—and the German analogue, “und ehren und ihn in Freud und Leid treu bleiben, bis der Tot euch scheidet …”

  Altogether, I must say, here was a genuinely refreshing academic experience. Rarely does joint scholarship generate such sparks, such red-hot fire, and in all respects my trim Toni positively blistered as a model student. Never tardy. Worshipful. Erotic. The girl dressed well, favoring silks and linens, and plainly appreciated my wit. On one occasion, I recall, the little marshmallow fell into convulsions at some clever barb of mine, her tender brown knee brushing my own, the tips of her fingers alighting on my arm.

  I could not help myself. I stiffened. (Affection is one thing, respect another.) I saw no reason to reject the poor girl, whose heart and soul were engaged; thus I settled on the tact of feigning nervousness, adjusting my tie, gently quoting a few lines from Shakespeare: “Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty/Youth’s a stuff will not endure.” The idea was to defuse things. To objectify our master-student paradigm.

  Toni misunderstood. She jerked her hand away and said, “The fuck does that mean?”

  Instantly, I recanted.

  The quotation, I insisted, was simply a case in point. No offense, no harm.

  Toni gave me an insolent stare. “I should turn you in,” she said fiercely. “Bring you up on charges or something. No joke, I should.”

  “Now, please,” I said. “I was merely citing—”

  “What a manipulator,” said Toni.

  Manipulator: another word that ices my soul. Turtle, engine, Pontiac, yellow, cornfield, rose, substance, mattress, manipulator. Lorna Sue used the term often, violently, with a sadist’s relish, knifing me with each cool syllable.

  My resolve hardened.

  “You’re in the presence of a war hero,” I said sternly, “so be careful. Let’s talk this out quietly. Like a pair of grown adults.”

  “Bullshit,” said Toni. “I’m not an adult.”

  I nodded and said, “Fine, then. We’ll start there.”

  It took a good portion of the afternoon, a greater portion of my spiritual resources, but in the end I succeeded in mollifying my hypersensitive young chippie. Flattery, I have learned, is the key. I extolled Toni’s intelligence, her work habits, the fact that she would be receiving a unique A-plus in “It’s Your Thick Tongue.” My dark maiden raised a questioning eyebrow. She sat down, crossed her long and shapely legs, brushed her hair back, lit a Virginia Slim without permission. Her expression was ripe with greed. Slowly at first, then rapidly, the girl’s anger ebbed as I discussed my wholehearted support for her honors thesis, my willingness to provide help in any way possible.

  “Yeah? Well, how so?” said Toni.

  I smiled and held up the palms of my hands. “Whatever strikes your fancy.”

  “Write it,” she said.

  “Write it?”

  “The thesis,” she said. “I want you to write it.”

  We parted on amiable terms. A close call, obviously, but wisdom won the day.

  That evening, after one of Mrs. Kooshof’s sumptuous suppers, I retired to my den and began composing the first chapter of a thesis that would later bear the title “To You, Betrothed.” In a number of ways I enjoyed the task. I am deft with language; I take pleasure in the wax and wane of ideas. Still, my attitude toward young Toni had been altered irretrievably for the worse, and as I typed well into the night, page after numbing page, I paused frequently to intone the word manipulator.*

  The two weeks prior to our departure for Tampa were among the most grueling of my life. On top of a full course load, with the usual crush of exams and papers, I was under pressure to sort through my wardrobe, purchase film and suntan lotion, prepare a game plan for revenge, attend to Mrs. Kooshof’s needs, and complete the final six chapters of Toni’s honors thesis. The girl proved a demanding taskmistress. Several times she sent me back to do rewrites, or to the library for additional resea
rch. She would scan my hard-won pages, frowning, chewing on a pencil, scrawling comments and suggestions in the margins. “Too dense,” she’d write. “Too stiff. Too wooden. Fix it!”

  All in all: a most nerve-racking experience. I felt dizzy at times. I snapped at assistant professors. At one point I temporarily misplaced my sex drive, which was always just short of rapacious.

  In the evenings, as I frantically composed on my old black Royal, Mrs. Kooshof would sit with me in the den, sometimes with a book in her lap, other times just scowling and watching the pages accumulate. Her displeasure was palpable.* On one late-night occasion she issued a huffy, exasperated sigh. “You never talk to me,” she said, completely out of the blue. “You never ask questions or anything.”

  I glanced up from my typewriter. “Questions? About what?”

  “Just me, Thomas. Who I am.”

  “Ah, yes,” said I. “In that case, you pique my curiosity. Who are you?”

  The woman assaulted me with a stare. “Don’t condescend. At least you could show a little interest in my life. Everything I’ve gone through.” She was thoughtful for a time, surveying her own history. “I mean, you could ask about Doc.”

  “Doc?”

  “Doc. My husband.”

  “Thought the man’s name was Robert.”

  Mrs. Kooshof snorted. “Right there, that’s condescension. You don’t give a hoot about anything except your egotistical, self-centered self. Come on, ask me something. Anything. I dare you.”

  I rolled a fresh sheet of paper into my Royal. The distraction was irritating, but I made a demonstration of putting my mind to the matter.

  “All right,” I said, and struck back with my own rigid, ravaging stare. “Where, exactly, did you first have sex?”

  “Where?”

  “The venue. Where?”

  “That’s juvenile,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “Ask something important. Ask why I don’t have children.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” I told her, “but take it or leave it. And I wouldn’t call the question ‘juvenile’ by any means. Where matters. Profoundly.”

  I removed a flask from my pocket, treated myself to a droplet of schnapps. It could not hurt, I reckoned, to take a brief break.

  “In my own case,” I informed her, “it was a cornfield. Just off Highway 16. Very memorable.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Kooshof, “I don’t know if I should tell you the whole—”

  “A cornfield in autumn. Chilly night. Windy. A light frost, actually.”

  “But I’m the one who—”

  “One moment,” I said. “I’m not finished.”

  Autumn, I told her.

  October of 1961.

  Lorna Sue and I were juniors in high school, inexperienced but very much in love,* and for months we had been debating the pros and cons of testing our romance against the high standards of sexuality. I took the affirmative, Lorna Sue the negative. Parked in her dark driveway, she sometimes allowed me access to her thighs and breasts, which I gratefully accepted, but the results were less than satisfying. In large part the problem was mechanical. To wit: Lorna Sue’s hair. Throughout high school and for a good part of our marriage, she wore her black tresses long—very, very long. Not only that, but this river of sinuous, gorgeous, Spanish-noir hair was most often arranged in two loosely flowing braids, each of which she decorated with whatever odds and ends struck her fancy: bells, bows, poinsettia leaves, Hershey’s Kisses. One can imagine, therefore, my troubles in the driveway. The gropings of an apprentice Don Juan are always clumsy enough, but my own difficulties were compounded by episodes of bondage and rope burn and entanglements of the most unlikely variety. (To this day, I confess, the word hair spooks me.)

  Beyond all that, and more tellingly, Lorna Sue used her hair as a transparent excuse to avoid the climactic moment. “You’re mussing me!” she’d yell. Or she’d yell: “I can’t move!” In point of fact, however, I am almost certain that Lorna Sue’s reluctance had to do with her brother, his ferocious jealousy, the eerie sensation that Herbie was always there with us. It was Herbie, in fact, who finally pushed us into that windy cornfield. We had tried the traditional make-out spots in Owago—Perkins Park, the Rock Cornish Drive-in Theater—but neither of us could shed that constant watched-over feeling. Headlights appeared at critical moments. Odd noises, too, and suspicious movements in the dark.

  Near the end of September, after some point-blank begging on my part, Lorna Sue more or less agreed to consummate things. Even then, however, she stipulated a number of conditions. Absolute privacy. A new wristwatch. No bragging.

  “Wristwatch?” I said.

  “A good one. No crummy Timex.”

  (Timex: still another word that signifies one thing to the world at large, something entirely different to me.)

  “Right,” I said judiciously. “A good one.”

  “With a gold band,” she said. “Real gold. Not fake. And it better be brand-new.”

  Lorna Sue’s requirements brought about a short postponement in our plans. I scouted out sites, did my bargain hunting, took a job bagging groceries after school. It was not until late October that I was able to present her with a new Lady Whitman. Lorna Sue examined it skeptically. She tried it on, held it to her ear, then sighed and said, “So where do we do it?”

  I had come up with four or five options—splendid ones, I thought—and we spent the afternoon cruising from venue to venue in my father’s green Pontiac. Nothing struck Lorna Sue as appropriate. She found the Owago municipal dump (my own first choice) far too dismal. The church pews too irreverent. The courthouse garage too public. The whole while she kept peering down at her new Lady Whitman, impatient and distracted, as if late for a much more pressing engagement—a habit that would drive me loony during our years of marriage—and I finally braked in the middle of Main Street and asked her to hand over the timepiece.

  “It’s mine,” Lorna Sue said.

  “Not for long. Make up your mind.”

  She frowned. “I need nature.”

  “You need nature?”

  “Stuff like … alive. Stuff that grows.”

  “Let’s have it,” I said. “The Whitman.”

  “Someplace green,” said Lorna Sue. Swiftly, and rather defensively, she tied one of her braids to the armrest. “I mean, Tommy, that shouldn’t be so hard. I thought you loved me.”

  I growled and drove straight north out of town.

  That part of southern Minnesota was farm country, flat and monotonous, almost entirely without trees. There was no nature.

  After seven miles, I pulled onto a gravel road and stopped the car. It was a cold, sullen afternoon, a brisk wind rattling up against the windows.

  We sat listening for a time.

  “Pretty natural,” I finally said. “Good enough?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lorna Sue. “It’s sort of … What if somebody drives by?”

  “They’ll think we’re part of nature.”

  “Don’t be a smart-aleck, Tommy. I can still say no.”

  “Well, sorry,” I said, “but it’s a farm road, no traffic at all.”

  Lorna Sue scanned the bleak horizon.

  Plainly, a moral tug-of-war was in progress. She glanced wistfully at her new wristwatch, at the endless prairie, then closed her eyes. “Okay, I suppose,” she said, “but it’s sure not what I wanted.”

  “Very healthful,” I said brightly.

  I turned up the heater and began taking off my shirt. Lorna Sue watched for a second with puzzled eyes.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Sex.”

  “It’s daylight.”

  “Daylight’s natural. Pure as all get-out.”

  Lorna Sue folded her arms stiffly. “No chance. Not that natural. I want bubbling brooks and stuff.”

  “Bubbling brooks?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, fine,” I told her. “Pass over the wristwatch. I’ll trade it in for a bubbling brook.”
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  “You’re being nasty.”

  Something tightened inside me. I reached out and seized her by the braids, one of which remained knotted to the armrest. “Listen, there aren’t any goddamn bubbling brooks. You’ve got corn. You’ve got soybeans. Take your pick.”

  Lorna Sue shook her head. “I need the dark. And a movie first. Next Saturday night, I promise.”

  “That’s almost a week.”

  “Six days,” she said. “And count your blessings. You aren’t getting the watch back.”

  Mrs. Robert Kooshof gazed at a spot in the vicinity of my coiled manhood. Her expression was menacing.

  “Problem?” I said.

  She tossed her shoulders. “Not at all, Thomas. I mean, honestly, it’s a relief to talk things out. Thanks for listening.”

  My companion pushed to her feet, left the den, and returned after five minutes with a glass of my best malt liquor. She had changed into a midnight-blue negligee that nicely set off her Dutch ancestry, all those nourishing cheeses. (I could not disguise my interest in her expansive, very bouncy décolletage. One evening back in Owago I had taken her to the tape: just over thirty-nine standard inches.) There were numerous occasions, not excluding this one, when she seemed positively ripe with estrogen, part starlet, part mother figure.

  She caught me looking.

  “Don’t even think it,” she said coldly. “I’m just curious. Where do you get the—I don’t know—the incredible stinking nerve? We were supposed to be talking about me.”

  I forced my eyes to the typewriter. “Well, of course, and we were almost there. You didn’t let me finish.”