Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  —How does one do justice to things aesthetic? Her pouty lips? Those puppy-brown eyes flecked with orange and violet? The smooth, sloping transition from hip to waist? Physically, Lorna Sue was a marvel of anatomical engineering, expertly tooled, made for the long haul. (On the day she walked out on me, her hair remained a lustrous coal black, her figure trim and dangerous.) Throughout our years of marriage, she had taken justifiable pride in her body, carefully attending to its needs, sometimes addressing it in the regal second person. She ran six miles a day. She avoided fats. She chewed vitamins like candy. At dinner one evening, when I suggested that we begin thinking about children, Lorna Sue put down her fork and hurried to a hallway mirror. “Ruin this?” she said.

  —In strictly sexual terms, Lorna Sue’s most attractive feature, far and away, had to be that mysterious, purply-pink scar on the palm of her left hand. Call me macabre, or call me Catholic, but I found it arousing to moisten that awesome cicatrix with the tip of my tongue, to close my eyes and envision the instant of penetration—iron nail, pliant flesh—the sudden pain, the release from pain, the little cry rising from her throat. How could my tongue go elsewhere? For whatever reason that wrinkly red scar had a powerful, hypnotic effect on me, like a piece of pornography.

  Not so for Lorna Sue.

  “God, you’re such a sap,” she told me. “It’s just a worthless little scar. Nothing else.”

  She was a realist, not a sentimental bone in her body, yet at the same time something rang false in her voice. Too flat. Too pat. At times I suspected that her entire being, her sense of Lorna Sueness, was purely a function of that small jagged scar. She hated it and adored it. (As perhaps she hated and adored herself.)

  One evening I found her sitting on the lip of our bathtub, bleeding from the palm of her hand, using a nail file to gouge open the old wound.

  She was crying.

  She was a little girl again.

  “For Pete’s sake,” she said, “give me some goddamn privacy.”

  She was a mystery.

  —How can I overlook the virtue of fidelity? During my long, dangerous year in Vietnam, Lorna Sue never once stepped out on me. I know for a fact that she lived with her brother in Minneapolis. They shared a bedroom. She was chaperoned at all times.

  —Sometimes at night I liked to relax in front of a good crime drama on TV. To her credit, no doubt, Lorna Sue found this sort of escapist fare beneath her. “How can you watch such garbage?” she’d mutter, often marching out of the room, sulking until I finally switched to a program of her choice. Lorna Sue had taste. She discriminated. Her eyes positively glowed through the full sixty minutes of Melrose Place.*

  —Intelligent and well educated, with a bachelor’s degree in art history, Lorna Sue was determined from the start to make something of her life. “I need a real career,” she informed me on the eve of our wedding. “I mean, what if I divorce you or something? What if you get sick and die?” Thus, in our first year of marriage, she entered medical school at the University of Minnesota, then switched to law, then quickly back to medicine. In year two, she opened a dance studio in Saint Paul; in year three, in the wake of financial disaster, she received her calling as an actress, which led to a local television commercial featuring Lorna Sue’s exquisite calves and a pair of no-run panty hose. Although none of these career alternatives panned out, Lorna Sue doggedly pursued her dreams, traveling widely, exploring professional options in California and New Jersey, always faithful to her original pledge.

  She was no housewife. Indeed, she was barely a wife at all.†

  —She was a published author. Local church press. A cookbook. Her own kitchen-tested recipes. (This from a woman who only rarely set foot in a kitchen.) The pulses of our mother tongue, of course, were well beyond her, and in my role as ghostwriter I spent weeks translating the silly book into English, a chore for which I received the special thanks of a home-cooked dinner. (Noodles! Onion powder! Delicious!) She was tone deaf, to be sure, but determined to make the very best of herself.

  —Unclouded by sentiment, guided by the ethics of realpolitik, Lorna Sue made her decisions with clearheaded pragmatism. She willed our love dead. She shot it through the heart. She divorced me. She did not look back. She removed herself to a new life, a new city, a new bed. She remarried almost instantly—a tycoon to boot. No time wasted. No decent burial, no mourning period.

  I was never sacred to her.

  —It would be instructive, finally, to explain how Lorna Sue came to lose her long black tresses. The place: my den. The time: a late evening midway through our marriage. The cause: a silly argument. (I was in the midst of rewriting her cookbook; Lorna Sue could not understand why all the “stupid commas” were necessary.) One thing led to another, and I made the mistake of suggesting that she find some other disciple to do her goddamn ghostwriting. It was the word disciple* of course, that set her off. (The ghostwriting was no problem.) “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped, to which I responded with a churlish and very unfortunate remark about her “Jesus hair.” She paled. She backed away. Then without a word she spun around and rushed to the bathroom. By the time I caught up with her she had already succeeded in hacking off a good twenty-four inches of hair, at least a pound’s worth, and was in the process of plunging the scissors into the palm of her hand.

  She did it twice. Hard.

  The blood was copious—I nearly fainted—but Lorna Sue displayed not a sign of pain. She pulled out the scissors, held the bloody hand up to me.

  “Jesus hair,” she said, not softly, not loudly either, just that flat, cold, neutral voice with which she would later tell me not to be an eighteen-year-old. “You don’t know me, Tom. Not at all. Comments like that one … I don’t think you ever will.”

  She was a seer.

  She could read the stars.

  * Over the past empty months, as your ex-husband combs the far-off beaches of Fiji, have you not felt exactly what I feel? A contradictory mix of despair and hope, longing and regret, ferocious hatred and barbaric love? Be truthful. Did you not conceive, if only briefly, your own plan of revenge? Did you not imagine hurting him just as he hurt you? Did you not picture him on his knees, begging forgiveness, and did you not covet that moment when you would shrug and turn your back and walk into the arms of a handsome young lover of your own?

  * An episodic American television program of the 1990s, the primary action of which, so far as I could tell, revolved around the premise that everyone betrays everyone else. In such cruelties Lorna Sue took unabashed delight. She squealed. She squirmed in her chair. She spoke aloud to the various characters, offering advice and encouragement, sagely egging them on.

  †Lorna Sue, of course, would furiously defend herself. To one and all, in that scolding, sanctimonious tone of hers, she would proclaim that she had done nothing but shower me with love; that our problems were entirely of my own manufacture; that she had endured for as long as possible my jealousies and suspicions and petty paranoia.

  * Alas, the awesome power of words. They start wars, they kill love. In my own case, I once paid dearly for using the term cooze at a black-tie faculty party. (It cost me, in point of fact, my fifth straight Hubert H. Humphrey Prize.) And over what? Two consonants, three vowels. What if the z and the c had been transposed? Would I have been blackballed for describing President Pillsbury’s wife as a “dumb zooce”?

  My literary endeavors demanded long hours, late nights, but I completed Toni’s thesis three days before departing for Tampa. She had given it her tentative approval on a Wednesday afternoon. (“A few tiny changes,” she’d said, “and you’re home free.”) By Friday morning I had finished the required thirty-eight pages of rewrites, plus footnotes and a bibliography, and at noon that day, only an hour behind schedule, I carried a hefty manuscript up the front steps of her dormitory. My raven beauty stood fidgeting in the sitting room. “You’re late,” she snapped, “and if I get docked for this, Tommy Boy, you’re in for a shitload of motherfu
cking shit.”

  There can be nothing more stunning, I thought, than angry eyes in perfect union with polished brown skin. I passed over the thesis, proud of a job well done.

  “Hey, the copies,” she said. “What about the motherfucking copies?”

  Forty-five minutes later I was back with six freshly minted Xeroxes. Apparently Toni had prior appointments, but she had left behind a note with precise delivery instructions. (The note, I must point out, was signed with a bold and highly suggestive X. Youth’s bawdy ways! My heart ticked fast!) I spent a buoyant three hours strolling from office to office, dropping off copies, and then in midafternoon, chores complete, I paused to celebrate at a nearby campus bar. The place had long been among my favorites. At all hours, without a single exception in my experience, one encountered a bounty of exquisite Nordic-blooded sweeties—a positive surfeit—not one of them beyond the prime age of twenty-two. It was here, as my marriage collapsed, that I first conversed with Little Red Rhonda, who was succeeded a month afterward by the luscious Signe. Both girls eased my days. Both would later perform superbly in my seminar on the etymology of gender. Both would graduate with full honors.

  On this occasion, feeling carefree, I ordered a rare martini and joined a likely covey at the rear of the establishment, where until closing time a number of us drank and discussed spring fashions. Karen and Deborah escorted me home.

  The hour was late. Mrs. Kooshof had already turned in, and when I tried to awaken her, she blearily declined my invitation to join us for a frisky game of Scrabble. It was somewhat later—close to daylight—when my Dutch consort finally made her appearance, in a pair of fuzzy pink slippers, black panties, and little else. “I live here,” she said, inaccurately. “I don’t have to be dressed. They do. Get them out of here.”

  Karen was asleep, Deborah was not.

  It took only a few minutes to clear the place, but it required the remainder of the day to calm Mrs. Robert Kooshof. I outlined for her the sociology at work. Modern mores, modern methods. I had to wing it, as my sophomores say, at several key transitions.

  Mrs. Kooshof took a more combative approach. “You screwed them,” she said. “I’m in the next room, Thomas, and you’re out here making goo-goo. With kids. Babies.”

  “They were plainly of age,” I told her. “And I screwed no one. Scrabble.”

  “Oh, stop it! They barely had clothes on. What was it—strip Scrabble?”

  I did not rise to this bait, though in truth Mrs. Kooshof was uncannily on the scent. (In my defense, I must point out that none of it had been my idea. Nor had I participated. Nor was it my place to enforce morality. I was a teacher, not a vice officer.)

  “What a creep,” said Mrs. Kooshof.

  She left the room. Not only that, but over the next several hours she came close to leaving altogether. Eventually, in the bedroom, I indulged her need for a tearful mea culpa. Too much drink, I said. Impaired judgment. Couldn’t live without her.

  “Oh, face it,” she muttered. “You like girls.”

  I blinked at this.

  “True,” I said. “I like girls.”

  “And I’m a woman.”

  “You are, indeed.”

  Mrs. Kooshof sat stiffly on the edge of the bed. We were both silent for a time, appraising each other. When Mrs. Kooshof spoke, her voice was much softer than I had anticipated, almost wistful.

  “Thomas, listen,” she said. “I wish you’d level with me. Is that so hard? All this elaborate nonsense about checks and mattresses, it’s just a cover for the real problem.”

  “Which would be precisely what?” I asked.

  “You know.”

  “I don’t. Tell me.”

  She shook her head sadly. “It’s like you’re a rabbit or something—jumping from woman to woman. Can’t ever get enough. One more victim, aren’t I? A fresh scalp?”

  “Mixed metaphor,” I said. “And you’re wrong.”

  “Ami?”

  “You are,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

  I was operating on zero sleep and excessive ardent spirits, a combination that produced a peculiar melting sensation in my chest and stomach. Something collapsed inside. I was not intending it, but after a second I heard myself rambling on about certain private items that I had always preferred to keep locked away. Certain insecurities. Misfit. Loner. How I sometimes felt empty inside. How I would do almost anything to fill up that hole inside me. A craving, I said—a love hunger. Always terrified of losing the few scraps that were thrown my way.

  When I finished, Mrs. Kooshof looked at me gravely.

  “Well, Thomas, I’m sorry,” she said. “But it doesn’t excuse last night. How can you hurt me like that?”

  “Stupid,” I told her. “Not thinking.”

  She got up and moved to a window. In the long silence I could hear my future clicking like the tumblers of a rusty lock.

  “Well, listen,” she said. “If you really want that hole filled up, here I am. And not such a bad catch. Darn wonderful person.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m smart. I’m pretty.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m nice. Nice isn’t something you laugh at.”

  “Right. I’m not laughing.”

  Mrs. Kooshof stared out the window. It was a warm spring morning, flooded with sunshine, and her face struck me as uncommonly attractive. Not girlish by any means. Better, I thought.

  “This business you have in Tampa,” she finally said. “I don’t understand it—revenge, I mean—but I was willing to tag along. I thought we’d have time together. Thought maybe you’d fall for me. Hard, I mean. I guess I’m still hoping.”

  “Good,” I said. “Don’t stop.”

  She turned toward me. “No more Scrabble?”

  “Hate the game. Words.”

  “And no girls?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “All I need is a smart, pretty woman. A nice one.”

  Which was exactly the thing to say.

  We left for Tampa on a rainy Monday evening.

  I had canceled my classes for the week, rescheduled three committee meetings, and the only complication was a small party I had arranged to celebrate the acceptance of Toni’s honors thesis. The gathering took place in my office two hours before departure. I had invited five or six favorite coeds, all charming, and together we raised a number of toasts to Toni’s accomplishment. The reviews had been remarkable—highest honors the university could confer. (“A gifted if somewhat verbose student,” one of her committee members had commented. “An astonishing scholarly debut.”)

  Toni was radiant.

  Bubbly, in fact. She could not stop smiling. She wore high heels, a white blouse, a black skirt cut high over waxy brown legs. For me, the high point came when she called for quiet and delivered a short, heartwarming speech. She was thoroughly gracious, almost to the point of modesty, as she thanked her friends and family and me for our succor and encouragement. (Direct quote: “Succor and encouragement.” Imagine my joy! The blush at my cheeks!)

  Near the end Toni got a bit tipsy. We were alone by then. The hour was late, the champagne low. She had arranged herself in a provocative pose on my desk. “Without you,” Toni said, “I probably couldn’t have done it.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  She shook her thick brunette tresses. “No, I mean it. You’re a total jerk, Tommy Boy—I can’t lie—but at least you came through on one count.”

  Once more, I pooh-poohed the notion. I told her she had a first-rate academic career in front of her; I wished her well at Kansas State or wherever else she ended up.

  “You think so?” she said.

  “I certainly do. A born scholar.”

  Toni toyed with the hem of her skirt. “Well, I guess we could do it once.”

  “We could?”

  “I guess.”

  Several contradictory thoughts intersected in time and space. A recent conversation with Mrs. Kooshof. A plane to catch. Toni’s firm,
brown, muscular thighs.

  I nearly wept.

  Such opportunities do not present themselves every day. And it therefore seemed monstrously cruel, monstrously unfair, that only a day or two earlier I had so impetuously pledged my allegiance and my chastity to Mrs. Robert Kooshof. It was fate’s ugly face.

  “Rain check?” I said.

  “You’re saying no?”

  “Well, no.”

  Toni frowned. “No? Plain no? Or you’re not saying no?”

  “One or the other,” I said.

  I made my flight with six minutes to spare. There had been a delay, fortunately, due to heavy rains, and I found Mrs. Robert Kooshof seated in the back row of a Boeing 727. The weather had brought on one of her foul moods; she was not interested in my complaints about the city’s taxi service.

  “You smell like a winery,” she said.

  “I do?”

  “And something else.”

  I did not ask further questions. There was no need: I had requested a rain check, after all, and the irony of her accusation astounded me. Act honorably, one still absorbs the consequences. Why, in other words, should I stand convicted of a crime I had so painfully declined to commit? However tentatively, however provisionally, I had looked into Toni’s thighs and uttered the word no.

  What a world.

  After takeoff, I ordered a bone-dry martini, which led to another, and I was soon pondering the subtleties of that innocent-seeming syllable—no. How incredibly perilous! How fragile! Its meanings and usages encompass such fundamental human phenomena as denial, impatience, disgust, disagreement, surprise, refusal, uncertainty, despair, and grief. (“No!” I wailed on the afternoon Lorna Sue left me. “No!” I still scream in my sleep. “No,” I told Toni.) High over Tennessee, it occurred to me that the fluidity of no has its precise analogue in the fluidity of emotion itself. Denial leads to disgust. Refusal leads to uncertainty. “Do you love me?” a woman asks, to which you respond, “No.” But after losing her, after six months of celibacy, you might well be squealing, “No! No!” at the sight of her passing car.