Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  Could I descend any lower, incur greater shame, debase myself with any more artistry or élan?

  Certainly.

  It was Masha, I am quite positive, who suggested a midnight road trip, Fleurette who seconded the motion, sweet Sissy who provided the means of transport. The hour had grown late—well past my curfew—and to the best of my recollection we departed the Twin Cities just after two in the morning. Fleurette did the driving, Masha navigated, a very drowsy Sissy and I occupied the cramped backseat of her 1986 Chevrolet Nova. Our destination was Owago, one hundred eighty miles to the southwest, where I felt confident we would be welcomed with hugs and a hearty breakfast in the home of Mrs. Robert Kooshof. (This estimate, sadly enough, was to prove erroneous.)

  The long, dreamlike journey has now largely vanished from memory, snatched away like the fence posts and telephone poles that flashed by in the dark, and I recall very little beyond the odd sensation of barreling down a deserted highway in the company of three virtual strangers. At one point, curiously enough, I awoke from a short nap to find myself shaking with sorrow. The radio, the heater, the tires against the road—these variables had combined to create an atmosphere of almost inconceivable sadness. In part, I am sure, my mood was connected to the traumas of the day, but as I watched the dark, vacant prairie pass by, I was also struck by the appalling knowledge that I was returning home an emotional cripple. (Melodramatic, perhaps, but do not forget your own wee-hour pilgrimages into history. Fiji. Hilton.)

  Riding along, eyes swollen with fatigue, I caught random glimpses of my own childhood: Lorna Sue playing with her dollhouse, Herbie straddling a green plywood airplane, a turtle called Toby. But none of it cohered. Who was I back then? (Have I yet mentioned that my father died of heart failure in 1957?* That my mother passed away during my freshman year in college? That loss and abandonment were always my most faithful companions?)

  Bad memories, one could say. In the humming dark, Sissy’s head firm against my shoulder, I thumbed through my internal dictionary: Engine. Cat. Cross. Eighteen. Tycoon. Tampa. Cornfield. Pontiac. Angel. Church. Fire.*

  Later, a few miles outside Owago, I was struck by an almost tactile sense of foreboding. Like the first soft slip of an avalanche, like that puff of smoke from the doomed Challenger, events seemed to be approaching the point of cataclysm.

  Terrible things were about to happen.

  An hour before dawn, Mrs. Robert Kooshof opened her door to our weary party. Breakfast was not forthcoming. Almost immediately, in the midst of what can only be called chaos, I bade a hurried farewell to my trio of traveling companions. To Fleurette and Masha, who required professional recompense, I presented a pair of generous checks. (An expensive proposition, to be sure, yet the combined total still amounted to far less than Lorna Sue’s old hourly rate.) Young Sissy, too, rather brashly requested payment, but to her I offered only a swat on the rump and the advice that she stick with her secretarial strong suit.

  Instantly, I regretted the phrase.

  “Strong suit!” Sissy sprayed.

  The girl gave me a warm parting hug, as did Fleurette and Masha, and with the car’s engine running, we exchanged addresses and phone numbers. (I had little choice, obviously, but to hand over falsified data. My erotic calendar was full, and for once in my life, to my own wistful amazement, enough was finally too much.)

  Next came the problem of attending to Mrs. Robert Kooshof.

  Bruised feelings, et cetera.

  I trudged back into the house, paid a quick visit to the liquor cabinet, then sought out my sulking fiancée, whom I found locked away in her traditional refuge behind the bathroom door.

  Agitated in the extreme.

  “Three of them!” she snarled, as if the number itself were troublesome.

  I flopped down, closed my eyes, put my lips to the crack beneath the door. I need not offer a verbatim account of the ensuing conversation. Drearily predictable. The standard pejoratives: “inconsiderate,” “shallow,” “debauched,” “irresponsible,” “fickle,” “juvenile,” “untrustworthy,” “hopeless,” “unstable,” and “fucking crazy.”*

  I was stung, yes. Exhausted too.

  Merely to bob and weave proved difficult. The three young ladies, I explained, were but partners in transit. Nothing indecorous had occurred. Wearily, I outlined the horrors that had been visited upon me over the past twenty-four hours—my classroom abasement, Toni’s unfounded accusations, my resignation from the services of the university.

  I wept a little.

  I dozed off.

  In late afternoon I sat up, rubbed my eyes, tapped on the bathroom door. “Say, listen,” I said cheerfully. “I’m famished. What would you say to a short stack of pancakes?”

  Mrs. Robert Kooshof snorted.

  “Pancakes?” she said viciously. “You’re nuts. What’s in it for me?”

  I sighed.

  “Well,” I said, and expelled the bitter breath of defeat. “An engagement ring?”

  The bathroom door swung open.

  I have discovered through trial and error that there are numerous routes to a woman’s heart—high roads, low roads, and roads in between—but that sooner or later, at the end of each well-beaten path, one inevitably encounters the blinding red lights of a tollbooth.

  The ring cost me $1,645.76, tax included.

  The tollbooth, in this case, took the form of a cash register at the rear of Hanson’s Fine Jewelry in downtown Owago; the tolltaker was embodied—ripely, wondrously—in the person of a young salesgirl by the name of Oriel.

  Strapped for cash, newly unemployed, I found myself scribbling out a promissory note to Mrs. Robert Kooshof, who in turn handed our juicy jeweler a platinum credit card to formalize the purchase. Inexplicably, both of them seemed to consider me a cheapskate. No matter that I was now committed to a seventy-two-month repayment plan. No matter that I had become co-owner, as the famous slogan suggests, of a very considerable piece of the rock.

  “It’s your engagement,” said our meddling salesgirl. “You shouldn’t be such a miser.”

  “To the contrary,” I replied, “I was merely remarking that glass has a long and very honorable history.”

  “Skinflint,” the saucy tart muttered. (Fresh out of Owago Community College. Business major. Eyes like an anaconda.) “See, here’s the deal,” she said, “you have to look at it as an investment. Diamonds are forever. Just like you two lovebirds—forever and ever and ever and ever and ever!”

  The luscious little busybody beamed a smile in my direction: a teasing, salacious, you-could-have-had-me-but-now-you’re-doomed-for-life grin.

  “Forever,” she repeated, and then winked to rub it in. “We’re talking about infinity. Like when you get married, right? It just goes on and on and on. And that’s exactly what diamonds do. They never, never stop. I mean, like, not ever!”

  I nodded briskly, requested a business card, and made a mental note to revisit the shop one day soon. With a dentist’s drill, perhaps. The cheeky scamp had much to learn about the meaning of forever.

  Mrs. Kooshof’s mood had brightened as we sat down for breakfast in the cramped, bustling quarters of Owago’s sparkling new Burger King. Immediately, in a touching little ceremony, she stripped off her tarnished wedding ring and replaced it with our heart-stoppingly expensive acquisition. The woman’s face had gone phosphorescent. To my alarm, in fact, the surface of her skin seemed to emit the garish, explosive fireworks of a digital scoreboard.

  She ate like a horse. She could not stop beaming at me, giddy and teary-eyed.

  I hated to dampen her day. Such unqualified joy is a rare phenomenon, especially in this cynical age of ours, but it seemed necessary to remind my well-lighted fiancée of the circumstances in which I now found myself: a career in wreckage, not a prospect in sight.

  Mrs. Kooshof scarcely listened. She gazed at her new ring with the calculating squint of an appraiser. “Well, nothing’s insoluble,” she said. “You can move in with me for a while,
find work here in Owago.”

  I laughed bitterly. “Impossible. I’m a scholar, not a J. C. Penney clerk.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “And I might add,” I said, “that this burg is hardly brimming with good memories. Think about it—I grew up here. Same house, same backyard. I’m a professor of linguistics, for God’s sake, a man of the world.”

  Mrs. Kooshof nodded. “But couldn’t you—I don’t know—couldn’t you find something temporary? Some odd job to tide you over?”

  “I cannot imagine what. Farm machinery is not my forte.”

  I sighed and leaned back.

  Abruptly, as if struck by a sledgehammer, I felt the full weight of the past twenty-four hours. A defeated sensation. In the course of one vertiginous spin around the earth’s axis, I had been stripped as if by a centrifuge of the last elements of my old identity, the man I once was, those few remaining sources of personal pride and self-esteem. Everything had come to nothing. Everything signified nothing. Even my grandiose plans for revenge, which had kept me going in the absence of all else, now seemed sterile and pitiful and forlorn. Yes, even a speck ridiculous. *

  There was nothing to hope for. And without hope, our chief bulwark against madness, the human spirit becomes unpredictable and sometimes dangerous.

  I was hurt.

  And I wanted to hurt back. No longer for revenge—just to hurt and keep hurting.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I told Mrs. Kooshof. “Find a job teaching gender studies. Wait for opportunity to strike.”

  * The details are irrelevant. He dropped dead in the gutter. He deserted me. At his funeral, I yelled, “Why a goddamn turtle?” No use. He was dead.

  * I did not set the famous 1957 fire that ravaged the sanctuary of St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Owago, or the more minor blaze that was extinguished in the church basement a year later. I did not scribble graffiti on the church steps; I did not cut to shreds any priestly vestments; I did not add the large, cartoonish breasts that were discovered on the statue of Christ in the nave of St. Paul’s. Why I was considered a suspect is beyond me.

  * What is it about Thomas Henry Chippering, I often wonder, that so chafes the female sensibility? My doggedness? My refusal to kowtow? I want the truth.

  * Ridiculous: Do not forget your own silly antics in the months after your husband departed for the shores of Fiji. You scolded him as if he were still in the room. You fingered his old sweaters, cuddled his tennis racket, composed long, convoluted letters full of venom and hurt. Ridiculous, obviously, but you could not stop yourself, could you?

  And you? Do you have a name?

  Better without. Unique as you are—and do not for a moment think otherwise—you also represent every brokenhearted lover on this planet, every stood-up date, every single mother, every bride left weeping at the altar, every widow, every orphan, every divorcée, every abandoned child, every slave sold down the river. You are the unmailed valentine. You are the forgotten birthday, the broken promise, the lapsed Catholic, the thirty pieces of silver, the abiding question of the ages: “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

  All this, yes.

  But you are also, admit it or not, Thomas H. Chippering. Granted, your ex-husband dwells in Fiji, and your heart aches, but like me, you are not entirely without blame. Because you, too, have had your secret love ledgers, your flights of fancy, your delusions, your checks under the mattress, your flirtations and unplugged telephones and petty betrayals of the flesh and spirit.

  You are forty-nine years old. (Or thirty-nine, or twenty-nine.) You live alone. You cook for one.

  But you have done your best, haven’t you?

  You drive to work each weekday morning. You pretend to be what you are not, chatting with your friends, attending dinner parties, visiting relatives. You’ve thrown away his tennis racket. Scrubbed his cigarette smoke from your carpets and upholstery. But still, at odd hours of the night, you find yourself paging through the memory books, just as I do. (Your lakeside wedding. Your white satin dress. How much you loved him—all that faith.)

  At times you second-guess yourself. Too dependent, you think. Took him for granted.

  But then later, like me, you feel the sorrow come crushing down again. You realize that it was he who quit, he who abandoned you, he who flew off to Fiji in the company of a statuesque redhead named Sandra. (The word Sandra: you hear it on the radio, you come across it in a book, and it slices through your ribs just as surely as any lance or bullet. You hate the name, don’t you? You loathe its harmonics, each bitter vowel and consonant.)

  And so, yes: One frantic afternoon you left work early, drove to the airport, dashed inside, and without batting an eye purchased a two-thousand-dollar ticket to Fiji.

  An impulse, wasn’t it?

  No reservations, not even a suitcase, and after seventeen sleepless hours you found yourself checking into a resort hotel only four or five miles from his cute little house by the sea. You dined alone, as always. You felt forlorn—a little crazy, a little lost. (I’m on the right track, am I not? I know you. And I know what betrayal is.) You had no real plan in mind, just a craving to witness a fragment of your husband’s new life, or to validate your own nightmares. And yet for a day or two you did not once leave the hotel. You sat by the pool. Ordered from room service. Hated yourself, hated him. Loved him. Cried. Hated him. Kept your eyes open for redheads.

  Then finally, half terrified, half blind with anguish, you rented a car and drove south along the coast toward Suva. The road was narrow and treacherous—remember? It turned to gravel, then to dirt. Hot day. Flower smells. (You were drenched in Fiji.) Eventually you found his new house, but like some lovelorn teenager you circled and drove by again, then again, several times, both hoping and not hoping that you might catch sight of him.

  What was it you wanted here? Confrontation? Apology? Reparations? Face it: like me, you did not have the slightest idea. You heard yourself cursing at one point—foul, goatish, God-hating language—words you never knew you knew. You told him off good, didn’t you? Yes, you did. But then you collapsed against the steering wheel. You bawled at the sky, just as I had, for this was Fiji—lush and horrid—and nothing you could say or see or do would ever change anything. (What hurt most, I am sure, was the sudden certainty that romance would never again be romance, that you had nothing left to believe in, that the word Fiji would forever call to mind this golden, shimmering, love-forsaken paradise.)

  You drove straight to the airport. (Left behind that new sundress you had put on hold.)

  On the flight eastward you watched a movie with a happy ending, one that would not be yours. You drank martinis. You skimmed an advice column in Cosmo. (“We cannot commit to the future,” wrote this well-meaning nitwit, “unless we come to terms with the past.” Nice symmetry, nice sentiment. But you now understand, as I do, that the phrase “come to terms with” means “to assent” or “to agree.” And you do not agree. The terms are intolerable—you reject them—in particular the term Fiji.)

  But realize this: Fiji is not Fiji.

  Fiji is Pittsburgh. Fiji is Boston or London or Santa Fe or wherever else your faith has gone.

  So close your eyes, my sweet, those lovely blue-green eyes, and remember standing on a dock upon a lake in a piney woods, in your white satin dress. Let me hear you take your vows again, alone this time, or with me beside you, two eccentrics, two lost and foolish souls. We know what sacred is, don’t we?*

  * So there. I have a sensitive side.

  I did not descend to teaching gender studies. I did, however, accept a part-time appointment as an instructor at the Owago Community Day Care Center. Frying pan to fire? Perhaps so. The remuneration was abysmal, the pedagogic chores beneath my station, yet in virtually every regard my twelve attentive students proved far superior to those I had shepherded through our state university system. They were obedient in the main, open to new ideas, far less interruptive of my home life. Two or three of my toddling charges, in fact, showed
clear signs of lingual promise, or at the very least had not yet developed the bone-chilling habit of misusing the word hopefully in every other goddamned sentence. (Pay attention, America! Do not say: “Hopefully she will sleep with me.” She isn’t hoping. You are. Do say: “I ogled her hopefully.”)

  So, yes, the part-time job was fine.

  But at this point I must come clean: I was on very shaky spiritual ground. Public humiliation. A lost wife, a lost career.

  My return to Owago, to put it bluntly, was fueled by a single thermonuclear motive, namely to strike back at the Zylstra clan with every kilowatt of energy I could muster. I was seething. Day and night, night and day, I had that Son of Sam tick in my heart. How could one forget, or forgive, the sting of a public spanking? How could one overlook the unspeakable facts of cuckoldry and conjugal treason and perverse brotherly love?

  It was all too much for me. I could feel the walls cracking in my soul, the seams splitting.

  No more silly pranks.

  Late one afternoon, after completing my day care duties, I was drawn by a sort of horizontal gravity into a hardware store off Main Street, where (in what can only be described as a sleepwalker’s silver haze) I purchased a large, bright-red, ten-gallon gasoline container. Ten minutes later I arrived at the local Texaco station. I do not recall how I made my way home—I remember only the pungent smell of high octane—but within the hour I found myself in Mrs. Kooshof’s garage, chuckling to myself, stashing the gasoline behind a pile of hoses and garden implements.

  That same night, as Mrs. Kooshof slept, I raided her pantry—seven big mason jars.

  I crept out to the garage in my pajamas.

  Bombs, I was thinking, except the thinking was not thinking. Wild pictures in my head: Herbie straddling our plywood airplane; Herbie yelling “Die!” as he banked into a make-believe bombing run toward his yellow house.