Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  I lie awake nights, mulling things over.

  Surely the Catholics were involved.

  That’s another one—Catholic. I fall sick driving past churches. I see a priest, I think divorce.

  Catholic. I am full of hatred.

  And this too: yellow. Even color gets colored. Lemon drops taste like betrayal.

  “Die!” Herbie used to yell, then he’d bank into an imaginary bombing run toward his big yellow house.

  That house: big and spooky and broken down, three stories plus an attic, and even as a kid I knew things were not happy inside. Too much noise, too much clutter. Its sickly yellowness. The unmowed lawn. The screen windows patched up with newspapers and packing tape. In the hallways and living areas I detected the smell of mildew, a corrupt, musty stink, like the tombs of some abandoned old necropolis. On the walls—in virtually every room—were framed photographs of Herbie and Lorna Sue. In most cases they stood side by side, brother and sister, but in poses that suggested something vaguely beatific, almost saintly, like a pair of child martyrs: fingers interlocked, gazes elevated.

  This house—this mausoleum—was their place, foreign to me, and sinister.

  I hated it. I hated its theirness.

  Let me offer an instance. A night back in high school, junior year: Lorna Sue and I had parked in her driveway after a late movie. (Radio music, a gauzy half-moon, my father’s green Pontiac.) Lorna Sue had pulled off her shirt and bra, always an astonishing moment, and I was lost in all the plenitude. Breasts were new to me—I had not yet mastered my enthusiasm—and some time passed before I realized that Lorna Sue was crying. Not loud. A whimper. After a moment she seemed to shudder, then she pushed me away, hunched forward, and slipped her shirt on. I remember reaching out, half apologizing, but Lorna Sue twisted sideways in her seat. “Stop,” she said. “Just please stop.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “They’re watching.”

  Lorna Sue motioned at the house. A large bay window overlooked the driveway, perhaps ten feet away, and in the dark I could make out five or six white faces pressed up against the glass. The features were blurry. Like clouded moons: hazy, round, softly lighted. There was a noise, I remember, which must have been laughter, and then the faces began vanishing one by one, each flickering out in turn, like the candles on an altar being extinguished by some ghostly celebrant. After a few seconds only a single face remained, which even in the dark I knew had to be Herbie’s.

  I almost nodded.

  Unnatural, to say the least, and for whatever reasons it occurred to me that this entire family was in love with Lorna Sue, or obsessed by her, or caught up in some perverse form of idolatry. Those faces at the window. The scar on her hand. The evidence of intuition.

  In the driveway that night, Lorna Sue sat motionless for a time, cradling her chest.

  “That house,” she whispered. “God, that house.”

  The next day Herbie approached me after school.

  “Hey, Don Juan,” he said.

  He stared at me for longer than was comfortable, ice in his eyes, then he opened up a brown paper bag, reached inside, and passed over to me the Indian-head ornament off my father’s Pontiac. A cryptic moment. Frightening too. Herbie’s eyes—so full of love, so full of hatred.

  And years later, when Lorna Sue announced her plans for divorce, she would give me the same cold stare, as if I were an infidel, as if there were things I could never understand.

  We were married for two fascinating decades. She divorced me eight months ago.

  Why?

  The answer is convoluted. (Keep in mind your own tangled history, how your husband flew off to Fiji in the company of a redhead barely half his age. Confusing, yes? Loose ends? Numerous unknowns?) In my own case, I had hidden certain mildly incriminating documents beneath the mattress of our bed—Lorna Sue’s and mine. These materials were perfectly safe, I reasoned, for in our twenty years together I had yet to see Lorna Sue turn that mattress, or replace the box springs, or otherwise investigate the regions of our love.

  Mattress. The word chills me.

  How Herbie came to discover my private papers is difficult to imagine, and I lie sleepless at night, violated, envisioning his stealth.

  They’re watching, she had said. He’s watching.

  The documents themselves were unimportant. Evidence of minor deceit. What matters is how Herbie came to discover such intimate artifacts from my life. If he knew about the documents—their whereabouts, their implications—what else had he invaded? What else did he know?

  And by what means?

  Did he steal a key? Was he snooping even last winter, while Lorna Sue and I vacationed in Tampa? Outside Tampa, to be literal, at a resort called Seaside Dunes, where we played minigolf and browned ourselves in the sunlight, and where one afternoon Lorna Sue befriended a certain hairy gentleman whose name I have vowed never again to utter. (It is a promise, however, often broken in my thoughts. Kersten. Whom she calls Kerr. Whom I call shit. Preposterous name, oily personality.) At what precise instant, I wonder, did Lorna Sue fall in love with him? And out of love with me? When the gentleman sucked in his belly? When he approached our patch of sand without invitation? When he removed his shirt and puffed out his chest and introduced himself with those two vile syllables that rhyme with Thurston?

  I doubt it. Not then. The arms of conscious liaison probably opened later, several months after we had returned, on that humid evening when Herbie retrieved my secrets from beneath the mattress.

  I wonder, too, how long Herbie stalked me. Did he steal into my bedroom? Did he open cupboards, sniff my laundry, shake out books, finally take notice of our king-size mattress?

  Who knows?

  In truth, I must admit, I had been pushing my luck for many weeks, terrified of discovery, aware of the consequences. No doubt I should have relocated my incriminating cache. Or destroyed it. And yet, as so often happens, ordinary life conspired against common sense. (I am a teacher. I have stress syndrome. I married a woman with a hole in her hand.) The point is this: daily flux presents its own ample store of worries, even without betrayal, and in this instance I postponed an act of simple sanity and self-preservation. I delayed. I forgot.

  “There,” Herbie said.

  The documents lay on our brass bed like a losing hand of poker.

  “There,” said Herbie, “is your angel.”

  My transgression? A misdemeanor by any standard. After our return from Tampa, Lorna Sue had withdrawn inside herself, going quiet and preoccupied, and in a very real sense, I believe, she was still sitting on that sunny beach, still chatting with her handsome new friend, still giggling at the hairy bastard’s offensive little jokes. (I was there, for God’s sake. I feigned sleep. I listened to the frothy sounds of surf and seduction.) In any case, she had detached herself from me, and I felt her absence as surely as I had once felt her thereness, her everness, her absolute and indestructible love. (If a love dies, how can such love be love? By what linguistic contrivance?) And so I began to sound the vastness of Lorna Sue’s absence, or the stirrings of discontent, or whatever else it is that a man feels as his wife contemplates a furry, pompous, pre-embalmed, ridiculously well-tanned tycoon.

  The signs were everywhere. She was not merely absentminded; she was absent. She was seeking an excuse, I believe, and Herbie promptly provided her with a very tidy one.

  On that humid evening he rang the doorbell. He had the nerve to shake my hand. He kissed Lorna Sue. He marched directly to our bedroom, to our brass bed, and without emotion he raided my life. He dropped the documents on our handmade checkered quilt. “Angel,” he said.

  As mentioned, my crime was minor. Certainly pardonable by love.

  The documents were these: fourteen uncashed checks made out to one Dr. Ralph Constantine. A psychiatrist. A phony psychiatrist, actually, whose name I had invented. What was I trying to prove? My equilibrium, no doubt. That it was unfair of her to suggest that our troubles were caused by my own je
alousy and paranoia. And so I had concocted a counterfeit psychiatrist to solve a counterfeit problem—a sacred lie to save a marriage.

  Not so horrible, do you think?

  “Angel—your deceiving angel,” said Herbie, who then shrugged and strolled out of our bedroom and left me with a future no longer worth pursuing. (Do not forget: Herbie worshiped Lorna Sue. Adoration in the biblical sense. He wanted his sister back.)

  For months, especially after our return from Tampa, Lorna Sue had been insisting that I seek help. Her phrase: “Seek help.” And so like my father—like all of us at one time or another—I had issued a promise that could not be honored. I did not need a counselor. I wasn’t blind, I wasn’t sick. Nor was I crazy. Granted, I had taken to fervent noontide praying; I had begun talking in colors—that’s how Lorna Sue described it—at least in my sleep. But she had left me. She had absented herself, drifting away, dreaming of a tycoon, and none of this was the product of my imagination. Yet I loved her, so much, and still do, and always will, because that is love, the unending alwaysness, and I therefore wished only to please her, to reduce her absence, to pretend I was under the care of a fictitious shrink by the name of Dr. Ralph Constantine. All this in the hope of winning back the love I had felt dissolving on a beach outside Tampa.

  A few weeks after the divorce I paid a covert visit to Lorna Sue and her new husband. Watched from a distance as she squeezed the gentleman’s arm outside a real-estate office in downtown Tampa. He’s a high roller. Lorna Sue seems proud of that. She’s well dressed. Expensive jewelry, tanned skin, very beautiful. Herbie lives nearby. Watchful. I give the marriage two years.

  One last example. The word mice. Plural and ridiculous.

  When I was twelve, Lorna Sue got angry at me for kissing a girl named Faith Graffenteen. “I didn’t mean to,” I told her. “It was mostly an accident.”

  “You kissed her face,” Lorna Sue said. “You kissed her snotty nose.”

  “I didn’t mean that either,” I said, then waited a moment. “So did Faith like it?”

  “God, no,” said Lorna Sue. “She puked mice. And don’t ever try it with me, Tommy.”

  “Who wants to?” I said.

  “You.”

  We were walking down North Fourth Street. Past Mrs. Catchitt’s house. Past St. Paul’s Catholic Church. It was Christmas break, no school for two weeks.

  “It just makes me sick,” said Lorna Sue. “I mean, you kissed her snot. That’s what Faith said—you almost sucked out all her snot. And not just Faith either. You kissed Beth. You kissed Linda and Corinne and Ruthie and Pam and I don’t even know who else. And you wrote their names down. I found your stupid list.” She handed me a scrap of notebook paper. “It’s pretty sickening. You’re not even a teenager yet.”

  I tucked the list in my pocket. Lorna Sue had her brother’s temper, her brother’s sensitivity to injustice. We kept walking.

  “So why?” she finally said.

  “Faith made me,” I said. “Besides, I’ll bet you kissed almost everybody. That time with Dennis in the warming house. That time with Jerry Powell.”

  “They love me,” Lorna Sue said.

  “Not Dennis. Dennis doesn’t.”

  Lorna Sue frowned. “You want to kiss me?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t even dare. Herbie’ll kill you.”

  We stopped in front of her house. Lorna Sue slipped her bad hand into a parka pocket.

  “Do you love Faith?”

  “Probably,” I said. “She still forced me.”

  “For how long?”

  “Just the regular time. Barely a second—it wasn’t even real kissing.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Lorna Sue said. “I mean, how long will you love her?”

  “I don’t know. For a while.”

  “But God, she puked mice! Rabbit guts and mice.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll stop.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I guess so.”

  Lorna Sue laughed. “Herbie’ll kill you.”

  Does language contain history the way plywood contains flight? Are we bruised each day of our lives by syllabic collisions, our spirits slashed by combinations of vowel and consonant? At a cocktail party, say, or at a ball game, or at our daughter’s wedding, would you feel Death slide between your ribs if someone were to utter the name of your ex-husband? Can a color cause bad dreams? Can a cornfield make you cry? Do we irradiate language by the lives we lead? Angel, engine, cross, Indian, plywood, Pontiac, mattress, rabbit guts and mice … Is your ex still in the tropics? Is he happy? Should you have been there to stop him, or to help him, or to bear witness as he made his way to a new lover and a new life? If the opportunity arose, would revenge be an option? Against whom—a sick family, a jealous brother? Revenge how? Hammer and nails? A pithy sentence, a squeal of outrage? Would it occur to you that your very vows of troth, your wedding pledge, had been a betrayal from the start, that you had been doomed by a crazy lie, that you were never meant to have and to hold?

  Would a trip to Florida be in order? Maybe next month? Maybe the month after?

  Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?

  Turtle. Tampa.

  * My celebrated biweekly seminars, I might add, are almost always booked to the limit with attentive, worshipful, ardent young lollipops eager to widen their horizons.

  Numbers, like words, can become ghosts in our lives. Lorna Sue left me on a Tuesday afternoon, the ninth day of July. She said, “I’m moving to a new city.”

  She said, “There’s someone else—he’s innocent.”

  She said, “I don’t want a scene, Tom.”

  She said, “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old.”

  I took off my jacket and tie and shirt and pants. I stood before her in my underwear. I did not cry, because this horror was so far beyond what crying is for, but I took her by the shoulders and led her to our brass bed and pushed myself up against her, as if sex could save me, knowing it could not, and I begged and made promises and said things about the purity and perfection of my love, but Lorna Sue would only stare at me with cold, crocodile eyes and say, “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old.” I told her she was sacred to me. I told her she was holy. I told her I had loved her before either of us had been born. I told her she was my everything—my sunlight, my heartbeat. But it meant nothing to her. She stared her flat, reptile stare and said, “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old”—which meant what?—and then she pushed to her feet and went to the door and picked up a blue suitcase and opened the door and left me forever and closed the door behind her—not softly, not loudly, just closed it. For a while I thought about following her down the sidewalk in my underwear, except such behavior was the province of eighteen-year-olds. I was not eighteen. I was ancient. I was a thousand years old. I was aging at the speed of light. I was a creaking, ruined, desiccated, hollow old man in his underwear, but I was no goddamn eighteen-year-old and never would be ever again.

  It is early May, let us imagine, and one glorious morning you stop to admire a red tulip along some garden path. You are conscious of the sky above, the earth below. And so for a few moments, perhaps, you pause to think thoughts about the circle of life, how growth goes to decay and then back again to growth. You recall other May mornings. (Your wedding day. How happy you were.) You review your past, envision your future. You think: Ah, such a tulip!

  And me?

  My stomach drops.

  I glance over my shoulder.

  I scan the shrubbery, listen for footsteps, peer up the garden path to where it curls away into the shadows of a forbidding green forest.

  Tulips do it to me.

  Even the word tulip.

  Oh, yes, and the word goof. And the words spider and wildfire and death chant.

  All of us, no doubt, have our demons. One way or another we are pursued by the ghosts of our own history, our lost loves, our blunders, our broken promises and grieving wives and missing children. And a sing
le tulip is enough to remind us. In your own case, remember, it is a Hilton hotel along that busy freeway you take to work each morning. You try not to look. But you do. For it was there, in room 622, that your ex-husband spent his Tuesday afternoons with a tall, willowy redhead half his age. (You found those matches in his pocket.) And now he lives in Fiji, and you do not, and that Hilton will always be there in your rearview mirror.

  So please, take this at face value: I am being chased.

  I lock my doors at night. I avoid dark entryways, keep my eyes peeled even on bustling city streets.

  There is much to be recorded here, much to be weighed and balanced, but in due course I shall elaborate. For the present, let it be understood that I have been ruthlessly pursued for many decades now, partly by a Tulip, partly by the word tulip. And do not for an instant try to tell me that words are not lethal.*

  Tulip. Tampa. Tycoon.

  * Exhibit A—a firing squad. The words: “Ready! Aim!” Who among us, if beneath the black hood, would not celebrate a sudden case of laryngitis? Exhibit B—I have been there. I know a thing or two about firing squads. (Again, more to follow.) Exhibit C—Hilton.

  In summary, then, my circumstances were these. Something over forty-nine years of age. Recently divorced. Pursued. Prone to late-night weeping. Betrayed not once but threefold: by the girl of my dreams, by her Pilate of a brother, and by a Tampa real-estate tycoon whose name I have vowed never again to utter.

  The popular wisdom dictates that in such situations we must “go forward” at all costs. (At one point or another, we have all chuckled aloud at the pertinent advisories in the pages of Cosmopolitan.) Move or die—so say the psychiatric sages. Learn to cope. Face reality. Stay busy. Exercise. Take up hobbies. Find a new partner.

  For some, no doubt, this progressive counsel proves rock solid. Not so in my case. In the weeks following my divorce, I did in fact make a halfhearted effort at “coming to terms” with “new realities.” I packed up Lorna Sue’s belongings, purchased an Exercycle, attended faithfully to my duties as occupant of the Rolvaag Chair in Modern American Lexicology at the University of Minnesota. And while it was traumatic, I also forced myself to spend considerable after-hours time in the company of several droll, well-sculpted enrollees in my seminar on the homographs of erotic slang.