Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  Even so, I protested. I accused them of deserting me, leaving me to the mosquitoes, yet this outrage seemed not to register. “No sweat,” one of them said, a wiry little youth with the nickname Spider. “We had you totally covered, man. Like a blanket.”

  “Wet fuckin’ blanket,” someone else said, and the others laughed.

  The general mood, however, was mirthless.

  “What I recommend you do,” said Spider, “is consider yourself blessed. You once was lost, now you’re found. Let it go at that.”

  “Amen,” said Tulip.

  There was no point in pursuing the matter. Clearly, these six sadists had their own agenda, which did not include the care and feeding of orphans like myself, and I swiftly opted for a course of caution. I was alive, after all—freshly found—and my goal was to stay that way.

  Over the next several days, a predictable routine set in. I was assigned a cot, a footlocker, regular chores around the villa. By daylight, I spent most of my time on KP, preparing meals, cleaning up after the others, and then at night, most often with Spider, I pulled four or five hours of guard duty. None of this was pleasant, to be sure, but on the whole I preferred it to the jungle. I kept my mouth shut, my ears open, and gradually a few salient facts began to surface.

  The villa was part of an old French tea plantation, long abandoned, and for months my comrades had been using the place as a base of operations. They were all Special Forces—“Greenies,” in their own self-congratulatory parlance. When they spoke to me, which was not often, it was in a brusque, clandestine code, to which I had no key. Everything was hush-hush. Their voices, their style, even their mission. In the late afternoons, just before dusk, two or three of them would sometimes slip off into the rain forest, gliding away without a word, then returning a day or two later with the same oily stealth. Even their names were classified. They went by aliases and nothing else—Spider, Goof, Wildfire, Death Chant, Tulip, Bonnie Prince Charming. Not that I cared. My sole concern was staying found.

  So I followed orders, bided my time. A week went by, maybe two weeks. Sooner or later, I reasoned, we would be returning to the firebase, and until then it seemed prudent to get along with my six spooky compatriots.

  All in all, it was a ticklish period, obviously, but not without occasional delights. Sometimes, in the mellow hours of afternoon, it was easy to forget that we were in the heart of a war zone: drinks on the veranda, a quick dip in the pool, perhaps a leisurely stroll before dinner. Like a resort, I’d think. Very peaceful, no pressures. Twice a week, by some peculiar arrangement, a dozen or so Vietnamese civilians would appear out of the jungle—mostly female—and under a blazing white sun they would spend the day tending the villa’s lawn and gardens. When my own chores were finished, I sometimes looked on while they raked and hoed and trimmed. To my mind, at least, there was something decorous about it, something tranquil and reassuring. It was as if the villa had been snagged in a time warp, a dreamy regression to a more exotic era—the tropical heat, the languor, those mysterious, brown-skinned women toiling away in their straw hats and bare feet.

  Erotic, I thought. And I liked that too.

  One of these young laborers, in fact, had taken a fancy to me, and on occasion I would invite her up to the veranda for a glass of lemonade. Her age was hard to guess: maybe sixteen, maybe twenty. Slender and delicately boned, with bashful black eyes, the girl reminded me of a little gazelle, alert and tentative, ready to bolt. Her name, as she spelled it out for me, was Thuy Ninh, which to my Western ear sounded uncannily like “Take In.” Who would not be captivated? The very sound thrilled me, and with those two seductive syllables, so crisp and tantalizing, I imagined she was issuing an invitation of sorts, maybe even a promise.

  Sometimes we would hold hands. Sometimes she would give me a shy little smile.

  “You will love me?” she said.

  “You didn’t?” said Delbert from the adjoining stall.

  “I had to.”

  “Had to? She was just a kid, I thought.”

  “Advanced for her age. Insistent too. She virtually forced me.”

  Delbert issued a sharp sound of disapproval, which echoed through the tiled rest room, and the judgmental snap in his voice instantly brought to mind a certain childhood confrontation with Lorna Sue. The same moralistic piety. (“You kissed Faith Graffenteen’s face! You kissed her snotty nose!” To which I had responded as I was still responding: “She forced me.” Incredible, is it not, how our earth revolves in such precise, repetitive circles?)

  I scrubbed silently for a time, working on a stubborn stain at the bottom of a commode. “It may be difficult to believe,” I said, “but there is something about me—my manner, my essential selfhood—that women seem to relish.”

  “Oh, yeah, like Peg and Patty?” said Delbert. The old man snorted. “So you took advantage of this little Vietnamese gal?”

  “Not in the least,” I said. “Romance. An affair of the heart.”

  What happened at the villa, I told him, could best be understood as an extension of my life history up to that point, one more chilling episode in a long pattern of sacrificing common sense to the exhausting demands of love.

  Even in a war, I could not shake the curse of romance. It was my destiny. The story of my life.

  From childhood on, I had been consumed by an insatiable appetite for affection, hunger without limit, a bottomless hole inside me. I would (and will) do virtually anything to acquire love, virtually anything to keep it. I would (and will) lie for love, cheat for love, beg for love, steal for love, ghostwrite for love, seek revenge for love, swim oceans for love, perhaps even kill for love.

  Am I alone in this?

  Certainly not.

  Each of us, I firmly believe, is propelled through life by a restless, inexhaustible need for affection. Why else do we trudge off to work every morning, or withhold farts, or decorate our bodies with precious gems, or attend church, or smile at strangers, or pluck out body hair, or send valentines, or glance into mirrors, or forgive, or try to forgive, or gnash our teeth at betrayal, or pray, or promise, or any of a trillion large and small behaviors that constitute the totality of the human trial on this planet?

  All for love.

  All to be loved.

  In my own case, obviously, this love drive went haywire at a very early stage. Like some horrid cancer, the need for affection multiplied into a voracious, desperate, lifelong craving. The benign became malignant. Desire became compulsion. Hence my hosts of female acquaintances; hence innumerable peccadilloes and compromises and heartaches and broken promises and embarrassments and outright humiliations. In my defense, however, I must quickly declare one other fundamental truth: the motive was never physical. Repeat: never! The motive was love. Only love. Thus, over the course of a spotty career, I have enjoyed carnal relations with a paltry four women. (Or three. Depending.) On the other hand, I can boldly credit to my account one hundred twenty-eight near misses, two hundred twelve love letters, fifteen boxes of chocolates, well over five hundred significant flirtations and alliances and dalliances. (I keep books. I do a rigorous monthly tally. The count counts.) And yet the quantities never proved sufficient. I had to keep fueling the furnace, refilling the hole, topping off my leaky love tank.

  ——

  Which brings us to Thuy Ninh.

  Nothing coy about it. “You will love me?” she said.

  And so we locked limbs on the billiard table, on my cot, in the swimming pool, in the dusty shade of the rain forest. For me, at least, it was an education, and my learning curve could be judged spectacular. Thuy Ninh would chant her name to me. (Take in!. Take in!) I would gamely oblige. Slim-hipped and girlish, with a libido built on box springs, my vigorous young beauty was plainly well tutored in the ways of joy. Her appetite was healthy, her standards were high. “Like this!” she would demand. Occasionally, I found myself wondering where she had acquired such skills, at once so technical and so bawdy, but in my naive way, blinded by romanc
e, I chalked it up to precociousness and the influence of the jungle.

  One afternoon, I recall, we lay entwined at the lip of a deep gorge behind the villa. (Cool and shaded, the place was among our favorite love venues. A narrow river descended from the mountains, passed through the gorge, then plummeted ten or fifteen feet in a magnificent little waterfall.) We had already made love twice that afternoon; we were now embarking on session three. In the speckled sunlight, Thuy Ninh’s eyes had become moon slices, the irises in high orbit, tiny slivers of black sailing sideways beneath her upper lids. The soles of her feet were thrust skyward. She did a squeezing trick with her thighs, rolled me onto my back, screamed at the sky.

  All this was memorable in its own right. But adding to the frenzy was an impressive B-52 strike in the mountains to the west. The planes themselves were invisible. The consequences were not. Over Thuy Ninh’s bare shoulders, I could see the distant jungle take fire—bright orange, bright violet, bright black. An entire mountainside collapsed. Seconds later a heated wind swept down the gorge, soon followed by several rapid concussions. Thuy Ninh seemed not to notice. She arched her back and exploded. There were secondary explosions too, plus aftershocks, and then I closed my eyes and unloaded my own devastating tonnage.*

  Afterward, Thuy Ninh laughed. “Sergeant Superman,” she said.

  But it was not just sex.

  The girl had snagged my affections; she filled up that part of me that needed filling. For once, it seemed, I had found something unimpeachable and pure. Granted, the physical pleasures were wondrous, but so, too, were all the simple things. Curling around her at night. Holding hands—that perfect fit.

  On the veranda one evening, as my comrades looked on, I taught Thuy Ninh the waltz, humming in her ear, and for the moment we could have been actors in some silver-screen musical. At the finale, my six comrades offered tepid applause.

  “Heartwarming,” Death Chant said.

  “The cockles,” said Bonnie Prince Charming.

  Goof yawned. “This dude’s heart,” he said wearily, “is where his dick should be.”

  Not much later, the six of them trooped inside. When they were gone, Thuy Ninh and I sat alone on the veranda.

  “What was all that?” I said.

  “That?”

  “You heard them.”

  The girl looked at me for a moment, almost in tears. “Must go,” she said, then stood up, kissed me, and hurried off into the shadows of the rain forest.

  Something odd had just occurred—a secret commentary, a secret reproach—and although it was a mystery to me, I had trouble sleeping that night. The unease stayed with me over the next several days. At times I caught Thuy Ninh studying me with a kind of apprehension; other times I had the feeling that my comrades were enjoying a droll, slightly macabre insight into the world.

  “This tale,” said Delbert from the adjoining stall, “seems told by an idiot. Doesn’t signify jack-anything.”

  “It soon will,” I assured him.

  “Sound and fury?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  A strange, tense time, I told him.

  Late at night, invisible Phantoms and B-52s pounded the mountains to the west. One evening, jolted from sleep, I found Thuy Ninh crying in the dark. The girl pushed up against me, clamped her hands to her ears. “Bad,” she whimpered. “Shitty bad war.” There was nothing I could say. I held her until she fell asleep, then went to the window. Down below, on the veranda, my six comrades sat huddled around a large map, their faces lighted by a pair of candles. Their voices were indistinct, but after a moment I heard the squawk of a military radio—a buzzing sound, a pilot’s voice—and then it hit me that my six pals were busy orchestrating this whole nighttime extravaganza. Wildfire relayed grid coordinates over the radio; the others scanned the mountains through field glasses.

  There was no mystery now about their mission: search and scald.

  And they enjoyed it.

  Three or four of them had painted up their faces and torsos—bright colors, weird designs, like savages around a campfire. As I backed away from the window, Death Chant looked up and raised a hand to me.

  “Love bombs!” he cried. “Try a little tenderness!”

  These men, I realized, were beyond gone. They were lost the way lunatics are lost.

  For another hour I lay listening to mayhem—the thunderous bombing, the howls outside my window—and then I dozed off. When I awakened, Thuy Ninh was gone.

  Immediately, I got dressed, went downstairs, and slipped out a side door.

  The whole countryside was burning—everything—rocks and trees and earth. To the northwest, a mile-long silhouette of stone flared up in brilliant reds and violets. The sky was on fire, and the moon, too, and the nighttime clouds. A powdery white ash fluttered down like snow.

  I moved along the side of the villa, edged up close to the veranda, stopped there and stood watching as Spider and Wildfire coordinated another air strike over their radio. In the dark, at the far end of the veranda, the others seemed to be performing a dance of some sort. I could not make out much, just wriggling shapes here and there, the phosphorescent paint on their bodies.

  At one point an invisible jet passed low overhead—a shrill whining sound; a metallic hiss; a sequence of tremors rolling upward from the center of the earth; a brilliant orange flash to the east and then the faint, fleshy stench of napalm.

  How long I stood there I am not sure. At least a full minute.

  The night had gone to bedlam.

  “Love bombs!” someone squealed, and someone else screamed, “Love, love, love!”

  There was a rushing noise, another jet, another orange flash, and in the flowery glow I spotted Thuy Ninh at the end of the veranda.

  I took a single step forward. I took no more.

  It was not the act of sex—not yet, not quite. Thuy Ninh stood swaying in the night, rapt and lovely, unclothed, painted up in blues and greens, presenting herself like a peacock to my dancing comrades. Instantly, I understood the source of her expertise in the art of love. She was slick with treason.

  I am not an incapable man. (My IQ has tested out at well over 175.) But I am also human. I have psychological limits: That balcony sensation. That clock-stopped silence in my soul.

  At first light I packed my rucksack.

  I went out to the veranda, unfolded the map, switched on the radio, quietly called in my coordinates. I requested the whole tasty menu. Yes, I did—high explosives, napalm—and then I walked across the lawn and out into the rain forest.

  And I felt not the slightest guilt.

  Anything for love.

  I did not wait to measure the results. There was no need. I could see it in my head. The object, of course, was not to kill, merely to terrify, and to this end I took satisfaction in the vision of my six betraying comrades cringing under a rain of Chippering wrath.*

  So, yes, I simply walked away. East through the mountains. Across two muddy rivers.

  By nightfall I was back at the firebase, at my desk in the adjutant’s office, where I popped open a Coca-Cola, smiled to myself, flexed my new moral muscle, rolled the appropriate form into my typewriter, and awarded myself the Silver Star for valor.

  “I’m a war hero,” I told Delbert.

  I am Fury.

  Do not fuck with me.

  * Where in my affections, one might reasonably ask, was my beloved Lorna Sue during all this? The short answer: She was in Minneapolis. It is true, I suppose, that in this one instance I was unfaithful to her. Yet no marital vows had been uttered, no promises made. It was wartime, et cetera. Moreover, consider this: What if the girl of your dreams—your one and only, the woman you were meant for—happens to be on permanent holiday in La-La Land?

  * Even at the time, I realized full well that there would be a penalty to pay. They would be displeased. They would come looking for me. Still, for once in my life, I felt the sweet glow of vindication.

  I was in sad shape when Delbert escorte
d me to my room that afternoon.

  Agitated and weepy, confused as to my emotional whereabouts, I allowed the old janitor to tuck me in and draw the shades and leave me to a well-earned rest.

  I slept for eighteen hours. Alone, as usual. Where, in time of distress, were Peg and Patty? Where was Toni? Where was my beloved Mrs. Robert Kooshof? Even in deep slumber I missed her. Once, in the middle of the night, I jerked awake and dialed her number in Owago, with no results, and then for a long while afterward I lay paralyzed by the suspicion that my tempestuous companion was no longer fully committed to our relationship. (Commitment—surely among the most suspect words in our language. After an act of betrayal, can one truthfully say, in the past tense, “Well, I was committed,” and if so, what fuzzy function does the word serve in our intricate, ongoing web of promises and expectations? If commitment comes undone, was such commitment ever commitment? By what slippery standard? What small print? What fickle sliding scale? The betrayal of love, in other words, seems also to entail a fundamental betrayal of language and logic and human reason, a subversion of meaning, a practical joke directed against the very meaning of meaning.*

  My mood, in any case, was far from peppy. The next morning, even after the refreshment of sleep, it was all I could do to lumber through the motions of shaving and showering and getting on with the chores at hand. My heart was not fully engaged. It was a labor, as they say, without love, but at this point there was no going back.

  I spent a final day in Tampa, wrapping things up, spreading a last coat of icing on my poisonous cake. By telephone, I sent flowers to various parties, under various names, with various messages. In late morning, after a cocktail or two, I visited a travel agent near the hotel, spent a studious half hour browsing through several colorful brochures, then booked Lorna Sue and Herbie on a seven-night honeymooners’ cruise through the Gulf of Mexico. (At no additional charge, the travel agent very graciously agreed to hand-deliver the tickets to a certain real-estate office in downtown Tampa.)