Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  A few moments passed before Ned Zylstra was able to stitch together a coherent utterance.

  “All right, asshole, here’s the truth,” he said: “Lorna Sue don’t want you near her, not in a trillion miles. She told me so. Said you’d come crawling someday, trying to worm your way back. ‘Worm’—exact quote. And if you ever showed up here, she said, I was supposed to kick your ass to kingdom come. That’s where she wants you. Kingdom come.” The man sucked in a breath. (He was a smoker—Pall Malls.) “Beat it,” he said. “You and your floozy.”

  Mrs. Robert Kooshof looked up with keen interest.

  “Floozy?” she said.

  Earleen cackled from her wheelchair. “Floozy! Jesus Christ!”

  “Bingo,” said Ned.

  A little vein twitched at Mrs. Robert Kooshof’s temple. To her credit, though, my companion remained poised. “Well, listen, I’ve got my problems,” she said softly, “but I don’t suppose flooziness is one of them.”

  Ned began to rise, belly wobbling, but something in Mrs. Kooshof’s demeanor pressed him back into the sofa.

  “Floozy,” she murmured.

  At that instant our alliance was fully sealed.

  “Okay, then,” Ned said, “but if I was you, I’d be real extra careful. The professor here, he’s like your jailbird husband. One more sneaky, lying, womanizing cheat. I thought maybe you’d had your fill of that with Doc.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Womanizing?” said Mrs. Kooshof.

  “Hell, yes. He had the names written down. These long lists, like account books.”

  Mrs. Kooshof’s eyes slid, measuring me. She rose to her feet. “With the aid of a garbage truck,” she said quietly, “I believe we can find our own way out.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” she said, “that I feel filthy.”

  Outside, Mrs. Kooshof was livid. “You cheated on her, didn’t you?”

  “Cheated?”

  “The ex-wife, Abe.”

  “Please, that nickname,” I said. “It rubs me the wrong way.”

  Mrs. Kooshof’s glance grazed my forehead and ricocheted up the street. “A word of advice, Thomas. I won’t tolerate this lying-cheating stuff.”

  “I never cheated on her.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “A mattress was involved.”

  We strolled the half block to Mrs. Kooshof’s residence (formerly my own), stripped to the quick, ran water into her large blue bathtub, eased ourselves in, and began scrubbing off the Zylstra grime. My companion’s mood was uneasy, even sullen, but as so often happens in such liquid settings, one thing swiftly led to another. Cause and effect. Splashy. And as we locked limbs—face-to-face, more or less—I was surprised by odd stirrings of tenderness, even affection. For the moment, at least, Lorna Sue seemed an abstraction, more icon than human being. Mrs. Robert Kooshof, by way of contrast, offered the undeniable bounties of the here and now. Powerful Dutch thighs. Breasts to float a navy. Yet the surprise was not physical. The surprise was this: I was at peace. I was quietly and vastly content.

  Afterward, we lounged in the tub with twin glasses of Beaujolais. (Both of us, I must confide, were spent.) “Talk fast,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “Short and sweet. What happened with you and Lorna Sue?”

  I studied her from the far end of the tub. “The truth, you mean?”

  “No long-winded speeches.”

  “Well, fine,” I said, “but I’ll have to go back to the beginning.”

  “When?”

  “Nineteen fifty-two. It’ll sound ridiculous.”

  “What doesn’t?” She sighed.

  And thus I began as I must always begin, in June 1952, middle-century Minnesota, on that silvery-hot morning when Herbie Zylstra and I nailed two plywood boards together and called it—

  “You already told me that,” said Mrs. Kooshof.

  “I didn’t tell you about the cat.”

  * Given my paramour’s Dutch ancestry, one would have expected her to insist on sharing our expenses fifty-fifty. No dice. Penny-pinching silence.

  Let us pause over the word ridiculous.

  It is worth noting—would you not agree?—that our lives are often sculpted by the absurd, the unlikely, the purely fortuitous. Love, for instance. Pay heed to your own pitiful history: that afternoon when you bumped into a certain young man on a sidewalk in downtown Minneapolis, or Sioux City, or Chicago. The time, let us say, was 4:14 P.M. Not twelve seconds earlier, not thirty seconds later. A horn blared. You were startled—you glanced sideways—and in that instant the fateful collision occurred. Your purse dropped to the pavement. Your diaphragm spilled out. The young man smiled. A year later you were married. Five years after that, or twelve, or twenty, the love of your life deserted you and moved to Fiji with a cheap harlot named Sandra.

  We marry accidents.

  We are betrayed by improbabilities.

  The truth, I submit, is that we must always begin with the ridiculous, and therefore I said to Mrs. Robert Kooshof: “You recall Earleen’s cat?”

  “That ugly gray thing?”

  “Exactly.” I stretched back in the tub, tested my wine, studied the majestic woman opposite me. (Astonishing, really. Her ample physique, my own good fortune. How it turned out that the two of us had arrived at this singular junction in time and space—this house, this warm and intoxicating bubble bath—represented its own telling parable about the role of fate in human affairs. Incredible, yes? A tad ridiculous?)

  “Now, of course, it wasn’t that cat,” I told her. “An ancestor, I assume. Perhaps the great-grandmother, perhaps the great-great-grandmother. I am not up-to-date on my feline generations. In any event, the cat of which I speak—actually a very elderly cat—looked very much like the hideous gray creature you saw today. Identical markings, same stupid face.”

  Mrs. Robert Kooshof nodded impatiently. “Cats? Divorce? I don’t follow.”

  “Pay attention,” I said, and arranged the flats of my feet against her chest.

  Mrs. Kooshof’s intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.) Ordinarily I am baffled and distressed by this syndrome, yet in the case of Mrs. Robert Kooshof I found it almost endearing. She was falling in love. Tumbling, in fact. (Hence her need to plumb my troubles with Lorna Sue. Hence impatience.) To a woman in love, or on the precipice of love, the semantic road between cat and mattress can seem arduous indeed.

  I did my best to reassure her. Charitably, I ran my feet along the slope of her breasts, down to the brownish, outsized, distinctly leathern nipples, which I compressed between my toes.

  “Certain detours,” I said firmly, “can prove rewarding. You have to understand that as children both Herbie and Lorna Sue were fond of animals.”

  “Animals? What sort?”

  “Oh, all sorts.”

  I sketched the scene for her: a house filled with wildlife. Ferrets, flies, goldfish, hamsters, pigeons, spiders, earthworms, geese. Most prominently, however, Herbie and Lorna Sue were the proud owners of a snake named Sebastian—a baby python, to be precise—which they housed in a glass cage up in the attic. This serpent, I said, was hardly the most playful pet in the world, and my strongest recollection was of a creature that never moved. (“He’s not dead,” Lorna Sue used to yell. “He’s tired!”)

  The only fun with Sebastian, I told Mrs. Kooshof, occurred at feeding time. Once a week the python required sustenance, which took the form of a live rat, and on Saturday mornings the three of us would troop down to Nell’s Pet Shoppe just off Diagonal Road. A compelling experience. To this day, in fact, I could still see Lorna Sue standing before the rat cages, deciding which of the many inhabitants might make the most succulent meal—the plumpest, the juiciest, the most digestible. “That one,” she�
�d finally say. “That one looks delicious.”

  Then we’d march home with Sebastian’s dinner, which had been placed inside a little pet box with air holes and cotton lining. On the lid of each box was imprinted a poignant epitaph: I’VE FINALLY FOUND A HOME.

  “Excuse me,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “Get to the point.”

  She made a threatening gesture at the far end of the tub, a hurry-up-or-die motion, her formidable Dutch torso shifting dangerously amid the suds.

  I would not be hurried.

  “Digressions are digressions,” I declared, “only to the faint of heart. This next part you will find hypnotic.”

  Mrs. Robert Kooshof gazed at me.

  “You know something?” she said. “You’re a sick human being, Thomas. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. And besides, you’re stalling. Snakes and rats—how does it tie in with lying and cheating and divorce?”

  “I never cheated,” I said sharply.

  “So you told me. Everything except the facts—the plain truth.”

  Mrs. Kooshof sniffed and gave me a belligerent stare. Her churlishness, I instantly understood, was mere camouflage for an immense vulnerability within. The woman had been severely wounded of late: a felon for a husband, a marriage gone stale. Her libido, like her spouse, had been locked away behind steel bars, and I dare say that in different ways, to different degrees, we shared a common hurt.

  “Give it a chance,” I said quietly. “The snake connects to the rats, the rats connect to the mattress.”

  “Rats?”

  “Of course.”

  Mrs. Kooshof sighed. “Well, for Pete’s sake. I thought you said cat.”

  “And so I did. I was just about to—”

  “Christ help me,” said Mrs. Kooshof.

  What happened, I told her, was that on a sunny morning in 1952—in June, to be exact, barely a week before Herbie and I constructed our plywood airplane—an event occurred that created a chain reaction leading to marital cataclysm half a lifetime later. Innocently enough, this disastrous sequence began with our usual feeding program: the purchase of a fresh rat, the hike back to Herbie’s house, the climb up to the attic. All perfectly routine, I explained. Herbie went through his standard pre-feeding ritual, dangling the rat by its tail over Sebastian’s cage, chanting “Dinner, dinner,” partly teasing, partly whetting Sebastian’s appetite. On this occasion, however, the rodent was a particularly lively specimen, large and black and brawny, and with a great squeak it suddenly jerked free and dropped to the windowsill behind Sebastian’s cage. Instantly, it darted outside and scrambled down to a narrow ledge four or five feet below the window. It crouched there, just out of reach.

  Herbie’s face creased up. The rat had cost him seventy-five cents—a fortune back then.

  Anyone but Herbie, I believe, would have given up. The ledge was at most ten inches wide—thirty or forty feet above a cement driveway—but after a second he made a decisive grunting sound and said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared down the attic stairs, returning after a few minutes with a length of rope and a large gray cat.

  He grinned and flicked his eyebrows and marched over to the open window. Almost immediately, I recognized the logic at work.

  Herbie secured one end of his rope to the cat’s hind paws, lifted the animal to the sill, grasped the rope, and began lowering the cat head down toward the half-crazed, half-paralyzed rat. Here, I thought, was genius. Insensitive, yes, but Herbie Zylstra had a firm understanding of the laws of nature: Ours is essentially a cat-eat-rat world.

  Mrs. Kooshof blanched. “You mean …?”

  “I do, indeed. A fishing expedition. Live bait.”

  “You’re both sick.”

  I leaned back in the tub, polished off my wine, rearranged my feet against their fleshy cushions.

  “Sickness,” I said gravely, “is beside the point.”

  “There isn’t any point!” she snapped. “And get those feet off me.”

  I responded as a gentleman, with a tolerant, forgiving, wholly benevolent smile. My feet, however, remained in place.

  “All in good time,” I said briskly, then reviewed the circumstances for her: how Herbie had tied the cat to a rope—a fairly large cat, I added—and began lowering it toward the trembling rat. (This dizzying operation, I will admit, soon nauseated me.) And the cat, too, seemed out of sorts—eyes glazed, hissing, pawing at the air with its front legs. “Hey, be careful,” Lorna Sue murmured, “you’ll hurt my cat,” but Herbie shook his head and told her it was like a carnival ride, lots of fun.

  Lorna Sue frowned. “Well, it doesn’t look like fun,” she said. “Topsy-turvy and upside down and everything.”

  Herbie paid no attention.

  Carefully, muttering to himself, he kept inching his baited rope down toward the cornered rat. The idea, of course, was for the cat to seize the rat in its mouth, at which point Herbie would instantly yank both creatures back into the attic. An elegant concept, but one complicated by issues of geometry and discomfort. Three stories high, suspended by its hind paws, the terror-crazed feline had no stomach for lunch. “Fetch!” Herbie cried, and swung the animal like a pendulum, working the rope with quick, encouraging jerks. “Come on, girl, come on!” he chanted. “Yummy!”

  Lorna Sue and I leaned out the window for a better view. I remember our arms touching, a shiver running up my shoulder blades. (Even then, as a child, my passions were high.) I remember, too, the tension in her face, how her tongue curled seductively against her upper front teeth. “Listen, I don’t think this is working,” she said. “You’re almost hanging her.”

  This seemed a valid point.

  Three feet below, the cat was quite literally at the end of its rope, thrashing in raw cat-terror. Somehow its neck had gotten tangled in a large loop, which tightened each time Herbie tugged. Asphyxiation seemed imminent, and with a loud, desperate hiss—a screech, actually—the cat made a sudden corkscrew motion, twisting violently.

  Herbie lost his grip on the rope.

  The cat dropped to the ledge below, landed heavily, and then peered up at us.

  “Okay, smartie, so now what?” said Lorna Sue. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

  Herbie’s jaw made an audible pop.

  “Well, piss,” he said, and climbed out the window.

  Herbie Zylstra was not the sort of person to call it quits, not ever. He grasped the sill, turned his back to us, and lowered himself down toward the ledge. For a few seconds he dangled there. (Like a circus act, I thought, except no net.) He stared straight at me, almost defiantly, then let go and dropped the final few inches.

  A miracle, really.

  He wobbled briefly and then found his balance. “Moron crappy idiot fuckhead cat,” he said.

  Quickly, then, Herbie grabbed the cat by the scruff of its neck, gave it a scolding shake, and passed it up to me.

  Next he retrieved the rat.

  And right then—in what would prove a pivotal intersection in my life—the unwinding reel of our universe clicked into a kind of jerky slow motion. A set of snapshots, in fact.

  I remember Herbie uttering the word “Catch.”

  I remember how he gripped the rat like a baseball. How he turned and tossed it up to me.

  I remember reaching out with my left hand.

  I remember the rat’s glittery left eye, a high squealing sound, Lorna Sue’s gusty breath against my shoulder.

  Two unfortunate variables were at work. Number one, I was still cradling the cat—Vanilla, by name. Number two, I had never been blessed with athletic prowess.

  The rat bounced off my fingertips.

  I also dropped Vanilla. (More accurately, I juggled the cat for a split second, almost recaptured her, then watched her plummet like a furry rock to the cement driveway.) Contrary to cat mythology, Vanilla did not alight nimbly on her feet. She landed like a heavy foot stepping into a puddle.

  “Killer!” Lorna Sue screamed.

  Killer? Not only was
the charge inaccurate; it was also grossly inconsistent—the purest double standard. Bear in mind that just minutes earlier Lorna Sue had been happily feeding a live, innocent, utterly defenseless rat to her fucking python.

  “Killer!” she screamed—absurdly—and I defended myself as best I could. I took the wise course. I sucked up my courage and lied.

  “Your stupid cat!” I yelled back. “It bit me.”

  Lorna Sue hesitated. I could see the uncertainty in her eyes, those microscopic droplets of remorse and guilt that accompany a convincing piece of deception.

  “Bit you?” she said. “Does it hurt?”

  “Like crazy,” I said. “I need a rabies shot.”

  And then effortlessly, out of the blue, I summoned the evidence of tears. Real tears, real anguish. (One could argue, perhaps, that I am a born liar. But one could also argue that I had no alternative. I was in love with Lorna Sue Zylstra—madly in love, heroically in love—and simply could not bear the burden of her ill will.)

  It was an instructive moment. In matters of the heart, with love on the line, what can be the harm of an innocent lie or two?

  “Rabies,” I repeated.

  I winced and grabbed my thumb, removing it from view, but already Lorna Sue had performed a rapid medical survey. The concern in her eyes turned to skepticism, then faded into something for which there is no adequate piece of language—something sad and weary and resigned and knowledgeable. A child, yes. But she looked at me with exactly the same expression I would encounter four decades later, on a Tuesday afternoon, the ninth day of July, when she turned her back and walked out on me forever.

  As an adult, she said: “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old.”

  As a child, in the attic that day, she said: “You’re a liar, Tommy.”

  Mrs. Robert Kooshof removed my feet from her breasts, stepped out of the tub, and began drying herself with a large monogrammed towel.

  “What a jerk,” she muttered. “I was totally patient with you—I sat there like some idiot psychiatrist—and what’s the upshot? You told her a dumb fib. So what? I mean, you could’ve explained that in ten seconds.”