Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  “No fucking touchies!” Carla yelled. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “Yes, of course, but I assumed—”

  “Assumed! Just because I was nice to you. An old fart! And now I suppose you want to bite it, don’t you? I suppose you want to chew.”

  I was perplexed. I shook my head diagonally.

  “So what does that mean?” said Carla. “Yes or no?”

  I nodded.

  “No,” I said.

  “Come on, don’t be such a namby-pamby.” She arched her back, aimed the rose at me. “Make up your mind. Which is it?”

  Here, I realized, was a sweetmeat with difficulties.

  I had no inkling as to the proper response—yea or nay, or both, or neither. (What is it that women want? I will never know.) In this instance, alas, my dilemma was compounded by the proximity of the rose tattoo. Not to mention its anatomic location. Not to mention the import of the very word: rose.

  I took what seemed the wisest course. I remained silent. Mute as a coffin.

  Yet even this proved inadequate.

  “Creep!” cried Carla.

  The girl stood up and moved swiftly to the door—a blur of yellow hair and heavy metal.

  “Guys like you,” she snarled, “should be shot through the heart. Butchered like sheep. Someday, man, you’ll get yours. Maybe tonight.”

  She departed in haste.

  I will confess that sleep came hard that night. For the duration of the evening, and well into the gateway hours of the morrow, I remained vigilant, door chained and bolted, eyes wide open.

  The truth, I fear, is that young Carla—like such female forebears as Lorna Sue and the original apple-laden Eve—had presented to me a question that admitted of no appropriate response. Yes implied perversion. No implied absence of interest. Maybe implied weakness. Silence implied creephood.

  The game of life had been rigged.

  Stacked decks, shaved cards. Lorna Sue had it right: Poor unlucky Tommy.

  On my final night in Tampa, all but resigned to failure, I tailed Lorna Sue and her ridiculous buffoon-tycoon to a nearby shopping mall. After my experience with Carla, I was in something of a funk—restless, suicidal—as I waited in the mall’s parking lot for the happy couple to complete their shopping. More than an hour passed before they reappeared, each laden with packages. They were laughing, plainly charmed by themselves. As they approached the Mercedes, the tycoon passed over his keys to Lorna Sue, who opened the driver’s door and began to slip inside. Up to that point, nothing even remotely remarkable had occurred. But in the next instant, I knew with perfect certainty that the evening would turn interesting.

  It happened fast—too fast. I could barely get the binoculars focused.

  Lorna Sue dropped one of her bundles. She cursed. She bent down, made a short, jerky motion with her shoulders, seemed to hesitate, then reached under the seat and pulled out the purple panties.

  It was a pleasure, I must confess, to watch her lips form an oval.

  How do I describe my delight as she pressed the panties to her nose? As she inhaled? As the stench of treachery swept into her lungs?

  After a second Lorna Sue reached down again, retrieved the matching brassiere, and spread it out across the steering wheel as if to measure its potential occupants. (Unfortunately, even with the binoculars, I could not make out her expression. This was evening, remember, and shadows had fallen.) Perhaps she murmured something. Perhaps she closed her eyes. All I can report with any accuracy is the deliberation with which she draped the panties and bra over the rearview mirror, and how, with considerably more deliberation—at half speed, it seemed—she then pulled out the leg irons.

  The tycoon slumped down beside her.

  My view was oblique. Profiles, mostly. Nonetheless, I decided that here was a marriage in trouble.

  No smooching on the ride home.

  Always the reckless motorist, Lorna Sue now outperformed herself at the wheel, and after the first mile or so I lost her in traffic. Not that it mattered. An important event had finally gone well in my life, even better than well, and I was giddy with pride. (So elegant! So simple and satisfying! In times of grief why gobble chocolates and cry your eyes out? Consider the alternatives—maybe a ticket to Fiji.)

  For me, of course, it was only a start.

  If this modest, impromptu experiment could yield such results, what might be accomplished with proper planning?

  I drove slowly, enjoying the night air. The city of Tampa now seemed a more hospitable place. When I arrived at Lorna Sue’s handsome mock-Tudor residence, I was not at all surprised to find the Mercedes parked at an odd angle on the front lawn, headlights blazing, doors ajar. For a few transcendent minutes I sat studying the house, imagining the scene that had to be unfolding within: allegations and rebuttals and disbelief. Lorna Sue’s reptile stare. Bewildered denials. Acrimony at every turn.

  And as I drove away, heading for the airport, it occurred to me that trust was at the center of every successful marriage, and that this particular relationship would require more than the ordinary dosage.

  * Rose: a word that will forever turn my stomach sour with treachery.

  * Imperious? What balderdash! Permit me, in this space, to offer an anecdote that goes far to explain how a man of my diaphanous abilities has come to be the recipient of such shameful invective. To wit: On seven separate occasions I had been a nominee for the university’s Hubert H. Humphrey Prize for teaching excellence. Seven straight years I went down to defeat. (Payola. Collegial jealousy.) On the morning of my seventh Waterloo, I happened to encounter that year’s prizewinner—a professor of biology whose insignificant Cornish name escapes me. This rendezvous occurred, it is crucial to note, in the faculty club men’s room, where we stood side by side at our respective urinals. Eventually, job complete, I turned away without a word, scrubbed up, toweled off, and began to depart, at which point the smug, victory-flushed Wellington zipped up and approached me with an outstretched hand. (A damp, unsanitary hand. This a biology teacher!) Did I refuse to shake? I did not. I bit the bullet, wrapped a paper towel around my fist, and vigorously pumped away. So then: Imperious? Or hygienic? I leave the verdict, as it were, in your hands.

  Words, I have discovered, are like embers. They smolder. They drop to the bottom of our souls, where for years they give off only a modest heat, and then out of nowhere a life-wind suddenly whips up and the words burst into red-hot, spirit-scorching flame.

  An example: confession.

  In 1957, the year my father died, the sanctuary of St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Owago was ravaged by a fire that very nearly consumed the entire structure. A case of arson, it was decided—almost certainly at the hands of a child—and within days the field of suspects had been more or less narrowed down to Herbie and me.

  (I was innocent. Play with the mathematics.)

  Herbie was an altar boy; I was not. He had a key to St. Paul’s; I did not. And most important, he had a motive—a religious bone to pick, so to speak—which I did not. How it transpired that I became a suspect, therefore, is beyond comprehension. Granted, St. Paul’s happened to be located across the street from my house; granted, too, I was seen playing combat games on church property the evening of the fire. But still, with Herbie’s history as a wielder of hammer and nails, and with his new religious zealotry, it seemed to me, even as a twelve-year-old, that the case was open-and-shut. After returning from his stay with the corrective Jesuits of Minneapolis, Herbie had displayed all the characteristics of a fanatic. Everything about him had been tightened, his skin and his lips and his slicked-down hair, and at some essential level he had obviously exchanged one extreme for another: exuberance for austerity, devilishness for a stern, self-flagellating religiosity.

  This was piety, in other words, beyond mere piety.

  In part, I am quite sure, these behaviors can be traced back to the summer of 1952, to a plywood cross and the rusty nail he had driven into Lorna Sue’s tiny brown hand.
/>   But there was also a family influence at work, something elusive and unnatural.

  For me, this hidden force was embodied in Herbie’s yellow house, its musty smell and tomblike corridors, all the religious relics, the anonymous old nuns and priests who came and went like fugitives in the night. Moreover, while neither Lorna Sue nor Herbie ever spoke much about it, there was neighborhood gossip to the effect that their father, Ned, had once been a seminarian, a would-be priest who had forsaken his calling in circumstances tainted by scandal. One story pointed to a previous, unacknowledged marriage; another involved Velva Zylstra, Lorna Sue and Herbie’s own mother, who herself may or may not have been wedded to Christ at one point, a woman of habits, so to speak. (Lorna Sue refused to discuss the matter. In our years of marriage, she invariably shunted aside my questions with an irritated sigh, as if I were inquiring about issues of gynecology. “That’s my business,” she would say, or words similar. “Being married doesn’t mean you get to cut open my head and poke around inside. I’m entitled to some basic secrets.”)

  Still, whatever the genesis—biblical or otherwise—the fact remains that the Zylstra household was infected by a virulent and very stubborn godly virus.

  It was always my hypothesis, therefore, that the 1957 fire could be seen as a cruel but not unpredictable outcome of the pressures on Herbie’s spirit. A mix of rage and guilt, no doubt, had made him try to burn religion out of his life and perhaps out of the world as a whole. Nor did it stop there. Four days after the fire, a closetful of vestments and choir robes was found cut to shreds; sexual graffiti had been scrawled on the church’s front steps, a statue of Christ disfigured in a most outlandish way—lipstick and rouge, a pair of distinctly feminine breasts appended to the suffering son of God.

  In the end there was no solution to these crimes, no confession or conviction, and had I not been summoned to defend myself before Father Dern, the entire episode might well have vanished from my memory.

  But in fact I was summoned. And the injustice of that two-hour inquisition still torments me.

  A Saturday afternoon, I remember, and together Herbie and I sat on a pair of folding chairs in front of Father Dern’s big oak desk, squirming under a blitz of threats and accusations and medieval Catholic cajolery.

  An ordeal, to be sure. The purest humiliation. But what made the experience memorable, beyond the obvious terror and embarrassment, was the fact that Herbie and I endured it side by side, as a team. At one point during the interrogation I glanced over at him with the hope that he might acknowledge this union.

  But there was nothing. It was as if I were not present in the room, not even alive.

  He stared straight ahead at Father Dern, almost insolently. When he responded to the priest’s questions, it was in a monotone, just yes or no. (Like me, Herbie denied all involvement.) And yet his voice—his whole demeanor—seemed flat and inhuman. Rehearsed somehow. No indignation.

  On my own part, I could barely stop myself from screaming out protests of innocence, and as a consequence my denials must have seemed less than convincing.

  Father Dern’s gaze settled on a spot near the center of my forehead.

  Relentlessly, the old man grilled me regarding my whereabouts during the hours in question, a span of time for which I had no solid alibi—I simply could not remember.

  In the end, to protect myself, I lied. Stupid, reckless lies. I claimed, for instance, that I was bathing when the fire broke out.

  Father Dern’s eyelids fluttered.

  “Bathing?” he said. “At two in the morning?”

  I had overlooked this detail and responded with a woeful little shrug. A few seconds elapsed before Herbie made a noise in his throat.

  “Look, Tommy didn’t do it. I know that for a fact. He couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t?” said Father Dern.

  “He’s not the type. No guts.”

  The priest squinted at me. “Well, I don’t know. It still seems—”

  “Impossible,” Herbie said with crisp finality. “Tommy wouldn’t dare. A little baby.”

  Father Dern rolled his shoulders and pulled out a pair of blackened mason jars.

  “Look familiar?” he said.

  I glanced over at Herbie, whose expression remained neutral. (At that instant the issue of guilt was sealed. Herbie: no one else.)

  “No,” I said quietly—another lie.

  “You’re sure?”

  I shrugged and said, “Positive.”

  The priest gave me a long, watery-eyed stare. “We found these last night in the sanctuary. Exactly where the fire started.” He paused several seconds to let this message sink in. (The same annoying technique he applied so lavishly in his Sunday sermons.) “Go ahead, take a whiff. You can smell the gasoline.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Never saw them before.”

  Right then, though, I could have blurted out the whole incriminating truth. The summer of 1952: Herbie straddling our plywood plane, banking into a bombing run toward his yellow house, one hand gripping a mason jar filled with gasoline from my garage. “Die!” he always yelled, then afterward he would talk about black bones and fires in the attic.

  Now we were protecting each other.

  Protecting something.

  The bulk of our audience with Father Dern has long since receded from memory, leaving only its gray stain, and after more than three decades only one other detail remains with me. Near the end of our session, for reasons I will never understand, the old priest pushed to his feet, carried one of the mason jars to a spot just to the side of my chair, paused there, then let the jar drop to the floor.

  After a moment he dropped the second jar.

  “Consider that God’s blessing,” he said. “The police will never see those jars—so be it—but take my word that our Lord Jesus Christ did see them.” There was a short silence. “And he saw both of you. He knows.”

  He fixed his liquid eyes on me for a time. I could feel a prayer coming.

  “Let us pray.”

  When it was over, I caught up with Herbie outside the church. I was partly grateful, I suppose, but mostly I was angry. “You could’ve just admitted everything,” I told him. “I’m innocent—you know that.”

  Even then, Herbie refused to look at me. “I tried to help,” he said quietly, and kept walking.

  “But you’re the one who did it all. What a faker.”

  Herbie stopped.

  He closed his eyes briefly, then looked at me for the first time that day. “Just forget it,” he said, his voice sharp, almost bitter. “You’re clean and clear. It’s different for me. I have to get messy sometimes.”

  “Messy?”

  “Right,” he said. “I do what it takes.”

  I laughed. “Set fires? Put boobs on Jesus?”

  “Whatever.”

  He turned and crossed the street, moving toward his big yellow house, but after a second I followed him into the front yard. Apparently Lorna Sue had been waiting for him, because she was already starting in our direction. Her face had a dark, strained look.

  “So?” she said.

  “Went fine,” Herbie said.

  I reached out and grabbed him.

  “What about me?” I yelled. “They think … I mean, they think I’m the one. If you’re so hot on confession, why not just confess?”

  “Because he’s not a liar,” said Lorna Sue.

  She took her brother’s hand and stood staring at me. Her eyes, I thought, contained a pure, distilled defiance, absolute certainty mixed with absolute disdain. In later years, especially as our marriage disintegrated, I would come to know this expression in its numerous forms and applications. Near the end, in fact, it would become the primary standard by which I measured the erosion of her love.

  “At least Herbie tries to do the right thing,” she said. “He’s not a coward or anything.”

  I was astonished.

  “Coward?” I said.

  “Well, he wouldn’t be afraid to
admit it, Tommy. Not if he really had to—if there wasn’t any other choice. That’s the difference between you two.” For emphasis, consciously or not, Lorna Sue squeezed her brother’s hand. “Isn’t that right? You’re not afraid, are you?”

  Herbie looked down at the ground. His gaze fastened on something too large or too small for the human eye.

  “Get inside,” he said. “The subject’s closed.”

  Lorna Sue pushed up on her toes, kissed him lightly on the cheek, gave me an I-told-you-so stare, then bounced up the steps and into the house. Even at age twelve, she had the moves of a pro.

  “What the heck was all that?” I said.

  Herbie shrugged. “Just stay out of it, Tommy.”

  I started to walk away, but Herbie stepped in front of me.

  “I mean it,” he said. “You’re not part of this—not anymore. Leave us alone.”

  “Us?”

  “Us,” he said.

  I nodded. But right then I knew it was more than a brother-sister thing. It was a plywood cross. It was God.

  Imagine any object, any person, any human event. Ponder the word substance.

  As an example I might pluck some random snapshot from memory. A backyard, let us say. Midcentury Minnesota, the summer of 1952, and I am watching my father perform sleight-of-hand for Lorna Sue and Herbie and me. I see him now as he was then, athletic and graceful, utterly adult, standing near the birdbath in that silvery backyard. Sunlight surrounds him. He sparkles with the ferocity of here and now. Proud, but also a little nervous, I watch as my father shakes out a cigarette—a Lucky Strike—lights it with a match, slides it into the opening of his right ear, blinks at the pain, then smiles at me and retrieves the cigarette from his mouth.

  All this is like concrete. It has a dense, solid, ongoing durability. Granted, my father died in 1957, of heart failure, yet he has substance even without substance. He lives in the chemistry of thought, an inhabitant of the mind, his flesh reconstituted into those organic compounds we so lamely call memory. I do not mean this in a figurative sense; I mean it literally: my father has substance. Hit a switch in my head, fire up the chemistry, and there he is again, in the backyard, wincing as he inserts a Lucky Strike into his right ear. Herbie’s mouth drops open. Lorna Sue squeals with delight. And I am there too, seven years old, snagged in Lorna Sue’s brown eyes, her black hair and summer skin—I loved her even then, obsessively. It is indelible. I see the white birdbath before me, the bubbles-appearing at Herbie’s lips as he demands that my father do the trick once more. “Come on!” he screams.