Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  “You didn’t let me start.”

  “Just helping out,” I replied. “A pertinent example sometimes makes it easier.”

  “In bed,” she muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I did it in bed, Thomas! The first time. I don’t need an example.”

  I nodded. “In bed. Unique.”

  “You bet it is,” said Mrs. Kooshof, “and I don’t see why you can’t just shut up and listen. The world doesn’t revolve around Abe Chippering.”

  “That is not my name. And I must request that you—”

  “My own bed. Twice. With my third boyfriend.”

  “I see.”

  “It was fun! He had brown hair!”

  Mrs. Kooshof’s voice had skittered up to a pitch that endangered my fragile hearing. She trembled, sat down, and quickly consumed her drink.

  “Brown hair,” I said. “Is there more?”

  Mrs. Kooshof did not respond.

  More than a full minute passed by—I gave her ample opportunity.

  “In that case,” I said, “perhaps you’d be interested in how things turned out with Lorna Sue? As I mentioned, the where matters.”

  The wait for Saturday night still ranks among the major tribulations of my eventful sojourn on this planet. Exciting, yes, but so much tension I could barely function. I skipped two days of school; homework was out of the question. Each evening, I practiced in my room, imagining how Lorna Sue and I would comport ourselves in the backseat of my father’s Pontiac. Details consumed me. I borrowed a blanket from my mother’s linen closet, dosed it with Old Spice, and stashed it the trunk.

  By Saturday evening I had reached a state of premature exhaustion. If not for all the labor, I would have canceled, and it required the last of my willpower to shave* and get dressed.

  At seven o’clock sharp I rang the Zylstra doorbell.

  Ned and Velva stood waiting in the hallway, flanked by Earleen and a half-dozen aunts and uncles. The family had arranged itself in two rows along the hallway, like an honor guard, and as Lorna Sue approached they stood grinning and gaping at me. Ned flicked his eyebrows. Earleen shot me a sly, flirtatious wink from her wheelchair.

  Lorna Sue, I must say, looked delightful that evening, though perhaps a speck sacrificial: white skirt, white blouse, white stockings, white shoes. Her hair had been freshly braided, each long plait decorated with such items as tie tacks, feathers, and what appeared to be Cracker Jack prizes.

  Altogether, in any event, I had the impression that our appointment with destiny was no secret.

  Outside, I glared at her.

  “You blabbed,” I said. “You told everything.”

  “Not exactly. They sort of guessed.”

  “Guessed? It’s not something you guess.” Instantly, a sequence of hard truths struck me. “What about Herbie? I suppose he guessed too?”

  “Maybe. He didn’t look happy.”

  I slid into the Pontiac, started the engine, glanced up at the yellow house. “How could they just guess?”

  “I’m a girl,” she said briskly. “I needed advice.”

  The drive down to the movie theater was stiff with acrimony. Apparently Lorna Sue had confided in her mother, which was like confiding in the Pony Express, and for several days the entire family had been preparing for this night. Ludicrous, I thought. The whole idea had been to escape Herbie, to give our relationship a boost of intimacy and solitude. Now I faced the specter of disembowelment. Herbie Zylstra was not someone you wanted to upset. Under any circumstances. Ever. Standing in line at the movie theater, I kept my eyes open for sudden movement. “This advice,” I said, “you could’ve asked me. I’m good with advice.”

  “Not this kind,” said Lorna Sue.

  “Like what?”

  “Stuff. Female stuff.”

  At which point I nearly marched off into the night. (Certainly my life would have taken a far different trajectory.) Instead I shook my head. “What about the honor guard—where does that fit in? Most families, they’d get out the shotguns and start—”

  “We’re Zylstras,” Lorna Sue said primly. “We’re not most families.”

  For the next ninety-eight minutes we sat in the back row of the Rock Cornish Theater, Lorna Sue’s eyes pinned to the screen, my own scanning the crowd. The film, I believe, was a Western, though I remember very little about it—periodic gunfire, people falling off horses. When it ended, we exited by a side door, circled around to the Pontiac, took a discreet route out to Highway 16.

  Hormonal issues were no longer paramount. I was suddenly terrified, full of doubts, weakened by a strange biological fuzziness. (Perform: the word loomed before me like a locked door.) Thus, as I turned up the gravel farm road, I took a deep swallow of pride and informed Lorna Sue that we were calling it off. “It’s just a bad time,” I said. “I’m not ready.”

  She tilted her head back and chuckled.

  “Too late, Tommy. Everybody knows. No matter what happens—either way—they’ll think we did it. Besides, you’re not getting the watch back.”

  “Keep it,” I said.

  “Oh, you know I will,” said Lorna Sue. “It’s mine. Whether we do anything or not.”

  Her voice had a mocking, singsong quality that compelled me to strike back. “All right,” I said. “You asked for it.”

  Immediately, I turned onto a tractor path, thence into the dense, crunchy folds of an autumn cornfield. I pulled the emergency brake, listened for a moment, then got out and retrieved the blanket from the trunk. When I returned, Lorna Sue had moved to the backseat and was busy unbuttoning her blouse. “You can’t just watch,” she said. “Close your eyes, wait till I’m ready.”

  I sat there with folded hands, rigid, more apprehensive than aroused. Events seemed to have conspired against my receiving the slightest pleasure from all this.

  “Look, I don’t want to force you,” I said. “We could always try later. Maybe after we’re married awhile.”

  Lorna Sue shrugged. “Just make it fast.”

  She seemed relaxed, not in the least fearful, and as she spread out the blanket I found myself wondering about her family’s reproductive history. Images of Herbie flashed through my thoughts. I peeked out the window, then turned back toward Lorna Sue. Bare to the waist, she was wearing mesh stockings hooked to a wire belt of some sort. Lower, at hip level, I discovered a number of wires and metallic flaps and what seemed to be a curtain of Christmas tree tinsel.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  Lorna Sue smiled. “Sexy, don’t you think? My mother made it.”

  “Velva?”

  “Mostly. Earleen helped with the tinsel.”

  I peered down with interest.

  “A special treat,” said Lorna Sue. Her eyes clouded. “You don’t like it?”

  Stupidly, I shrugged.

  “Then hop to it,” she said.

  An impossible assignment, of course, but for the next several minutes I did my best to remove the contraption. One needed the dexterity of a juggler and the eyesight of a jeweler, but more than anything I was troubled by an image of Earleen and Velva rigging up this unlikely garment.

  Eventually Lorna Sue sat up and lent a hand. She loosened a metal flap, lay back, and opened her arms to me.

  “There,” she sighed. “Do the rest yourself.”

  With no foreplay whatsoever, Lorna Sue yanked me down, clamped my head to her breasts, and began humming a soft, mostly indecipherable chant in my ear.

  “Amen!” she squealed at one point.

  Here, I reasoned, was a very complex young woman. I started to pull away, but then, to my relief, I felt an unmistakable hydraulic surge. I fumbled with my shoes and jeans and shirt, kicked off my underwear, and for the next few minutes succeeded in blocking out the world—prayers, bribery, blackmail, honor guards, Herbie, the whole dysfunctional Zylstra clan. I was powerful. I was the burglar at the door. Altogether, things went beautifully until the instant of entry, at which point Lorna
Sue tugged at my ears and cried, “Stop it! My hair, for God’s sake! There’s no room!”

  I kept lunging. “Plenty of room,” I assured her. “A good fit.”

  “I don’t mean there!”

  She squeezed her legs shut, gripped my shoulders, and muscled me down into the foot well. We were roped together by three feet of braided black hair.

  “It’s just too darn crowded,” said Lorna Sue. “I’ll get a cramp. I can’t even move.” Her tongue moved across her upper teeth as she pondered the mechanics. “We’ll have to go outside.”

  “Like where?”

  “Anywhere. Let’s go.”

  I glanced out at the windy cornfield. “You’re kidding. It’s almost winter.”

  “Hurry it up,” she said. “Take the blanket.”

  Which brought us at last—inevitably—to the icy hood of my father’s Pontiac.

  It often amazes me how little we retain of the critical events in our lives. A snapshot here. An echo there. The details of my first conquest were largely swept away by a frigid October wind. I remember the critical gaze of an Indian-head ornament. I remember frost on the hood, the car shaking, Lorna Sue crying, “It hurts!”

  Was there gratification in this? Delight? The most fleeting bliss?

  Perhaps so. But I do not recall.

  Lorna Sue hogged the blanket. She made whining noises. She yelled at me. She issued stern commands. Slower, she insisted. Faster. Gentler. Rougher. More romantic. She snaked an arm around my neck, yanked me down. She bit my throat. At one key juncture, when I began to falter, she emboldened me with the palm of her hand, levered me in again, beat on my buttocks.

  All that I remember vividly. Along with the cold and the ferocious wind. We had left the engine running, with the idea it might warm us, but the elements that night were beyond the capabilities of my father’s Pontiac. In hindsight, I now marvel at my youthful performance. I was valiant. Inexpert, no doubt, and outright shoddy by later standards, but I remain convinced that under the circumstances even a polar bear would have called it a night.

  Afterward, there was no pillow talk.

  We dressed quickly and drove back to town. I dropped her off a block from her house.

  “Well, I hope you’re happy,” she said glumly. “I suppose now you’ll just dump me.”

  I smiled. The notion had not yet occurred to me.

  “All depends,” I said thoughtfully. “You’ll tell Herbie I backed off? Too much respect for his sister?”

  Lorna Sue’s eyes narrowed. “Anything else?”

  “The whole family,” I said. “Nobody hears a word.”

  “What else?”

  “Tomorrow night. Someplace warm. Cute new costume.”

  She rolled her eyes and waited a moment. She knew what was coming.

  “What else?”

  “An expensive one,” I said. “No crummy Timex.”

  Mrs. Kooshof was gone by the time I had finished telling my story, and the schnapps too.

  For a considerable time I sat motionless at my desk, trolling through memory, all the good things. Lorna Sue’s brown eyes. Her smell. Her laughter. How she purred and hummed and finally bared her teeth as we made love. How at the end she squealed, “I’m coming! I’m coming!” How the wind howled. How she wanted to do it again. How the word Pontiac would never again mean Pontiac.

  Granted, there were bad things too. But the bad wasn’t always so bad.

  “Fucking cornfield,” I murmured, but sweetly—a rare instance of Chippering profanity. Then I laughed, switched to cognac, and resumed my labors on young Toni’s thesis.

  Much later, in bed, Mrs. Kooshof said, “You actually married this crazy bitch? She married you?”

  “Of course.”

  “But why?”

  “A beautiful love,” I said. “Greatest ever.”

  * Where, one might legitimately ask, was Toni’s conscience? Did the girl lose even a wink of sleep over the fact that the fluid sentences and paragraphs of her thesis had been composed by a foreign hand? Apparently not. Several weeks later, when I probed for moral misgivings, the luscious little fraud giggled and said, “Well, heck, I don’t mind.”

  * My paramour was under the misapprehension that I was at work on a commissioned essay for the journal Critique, a firm deadline rapidly approaching. Still, being female, she felt neglected. (Every man in America will surely sympathize.)

  * At least on my own part. For Lorna Sue, I fear, the word love was as treacherous as the Mississippi in late April. A wiser man than I would have purchased flood insurance.

  * Not only my face but my chest and arms and portions of my upper thighs. I prefer the sleek look, and all my life, as part of my morning toilet, I have ridded myself of unnecessary body hair. Thomas H. Chippering, à la buff, is a sight not soon forgotten.

  It strikes me that by accident, or out of anger and pain, I may well have painted an unflattering portrait of my former wife. Such was never my intent. I loved Lorna Sue desperately, even obsessively, and more than anyone on this earth, including her brother Herbie, I can appreciate those glittering gems at the center of her soul. As a corrective, therefore, I offer this short sampler of Lorna Sue’s innumerable charms:

  —On not a single occasion, so far as I know, did Lorna Sue feign orgasm. She was brutally honest in this regard and kept me well informed.

  —Though by no means expert in the kitchen, she was more than willing to try her hand at preparing a random meal. I remember, in particular, a heap of noodles seasoned with onion powder.

  —I will tell the simple truth: I was in awe of her. As a twelve-year-old, and as a thirty-year-old, I dreamed Lorna Sue dreams. I lived inside her name. I was terrified of losing her even before she was mine to lose.

  —I proposed to her at a New Year’s Eve party, in a ballroom at the university’s faculty club. I was a green, gangly graduate student; she was Lorna Sue, and beautiful. But we were in love. And for both of us it was a hard, happy, electric love, full of the past, full of the future. I had not planned on proposing that night, nor was marriage a topic we had ever talked about in any depth, but something in that festive ballroom: the temperature, the voices, the New Year’s Eve nostalgia—something, I do not know what—something magical and terrifying and glorious, something radiant, seemed to wrap itself around us and lift us up and carry us off to another region of our universe. I looked at her. Lorna Sue looked at me. (How do I convey this without sounding like an eighteen-year-old?) I loved her so much, and she loved me, and I tried to speak, tried to say Marry me but could not—I said nothing, no words at all—and her face went bright and she said, “Yes, I will, yes.”

  —From the start, Lorna Sue and I had trouble sleeping in the same bed, a problem for which I was entirely to blame. I talked in my sleep. I twitched and moaned, flailed at demons, shouted the most vile obscenities. (Vietnam was still a fresh memory.) With the aid of earplugs, Lorna Sue did her best to endure all this, but in the end, after two or three weeks, she began spending nights in the spare bedroom. To this, of course, I vocally objected. “We’re husband and wife,” I reminded her. “I’ll call a doctor. I’ll find a cure.”

  Lorna Sue shook her head.

  “Too expensive,” she said. “The spare bedroom will be fine.”

  She was thrifty.

  —In our fourth year of marriage, Lorna Sue and I attended a convention of the Modern Language Association in downtown Las Vegas, where I delivered to no small acclaim a scholarly paper entitled “The Verbs of Erotica.” On our final evening, to cap a happy time, we indulged in some gaming at a blackjack table in the hotel’s noisy casino. All night I handed her twenty-dollar bills. I won, she lost. But then, near midnight, our luck abruptly changed—a complete reversal of fortune—and Lorna Sue’s stack of chips grew like a skyscraper, while mine dwindled to nothing. Without thinking, I reached over and helped myself to a handful of green chips, at which point Lorna Sue snatched my wrist and yelled, “They’re mine!”

  S
he was very thrifty.

  —I do not mean to mock her. She was my sweetheart, the love of my life, the girl of my dreams. And I have lost her forever. Who, then, can blame me for some periodic vitriol? Look into your own broken heart.*—A devout Roman Catholic, Lorna Sue missed only a single Sunday Mass in our many years together. She believed in the blood of Christ, its real presence, and accepted without question the doctrines of corporeal resurrection and immaculate conception. Even in bed, making love, she radiated piety the way lesser spirits radiate passion or good cheer. Artificial birth control was forbidden. At the instant before climax, as I beat my biweekly retreat, Lorna Sue would reach down to make certain that our uncoupling was complete. “It’s sad,” she’d say, “how men are so … so messy.” Clean of mind, clean of body, she would produce a wad of Kleenex. (Do I exaggerate? I do not. And I can guarantee that over the years, no unwholesome substances gained entry into the pristine, well-vacuumed chapel of her soul.)

  —I have already discussed her long, black, braided hair. But I have not explained how her flesh—the tissue itself—smelled of chlorophyll and coconut oil. (Like the mountains of Vietnam, I thought.) She favored a bath gel called Youth, a perfume called Forever, expensive skin products from the laboratories of France and Switzerland. She made regular use of a sunlamp. Eternal vigilance and a set of tweezers had for the most part eliminated unsightly chin hair.

  —We honeymooned in northern Minnesota, at a resort called Portage Pines, where we spent seven days in the company of Lorna Sue’s family. The whole clan was there—Earleen, Ned, Velva, aunts and uncles, a jovial priest from Duluth, two cousins, the ever watchful Herbie. En masse, honeymooning as a family unit, we played charades, watched the sunsets, slept in the same communal loft each night. Awkward, yes. At times frustrating. Yet how could anyone fail to applaud Lorna Sue’s devotion to kin, her filial piety? “I’m a Zylstra,” she said. “This is how we do things.”

  —She had a way with words. Often pithy. Always eloquent. “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old,” she once said.

  —She was independent. She took several vacations alone, several others with Herbie. There were times when she would vanish entirely, for days on end, without warning and without subsequent explanation. She had secrets. She knew how to keep them.