Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  “Time?”

  “We’ve barely—”

  Mrs. Kooshof emitted a scornful noise from the back of her throat. She glowered at the businesswoman across the aisle, leaned back heavily in her seat. In our many weeks together, I had yet to see my companion so exhausted, so thoroughly drained of spark and color.

  After a moment, in the tone of a physician delivering bad news, she sighed and said, “If it makes you feel better, I’ll take part of the blame. Maybe I wanted it too much. Went too fast. Thirty-six years old, biological clock buzzing like crazy, and it looked like my last chance for—you know—for real happiness. Romance. Whatever. So I planned this whole pretty future around you, a brand-new life, but then right away you started backpedaling. Ignored me. Almost pushed me off a balcony. And now this sophomoric black book of yours.”

  “It is neither black,” said I, “nor sophomoric. It is a professional’s daily log.”

  “More split hairs.”

  “Yet accurate. Not frizzy.”

  Mrs. Kooshof yelped in frustration. “If you ask my opinion, you’re a sick, dangerous, compulsive skirt chaser. And a sneak. And a liar.”

  “Fortunately,” I said, “I did not.”

  “Not?”

  “Ask.”

  I glanced sideways at the woman across the aisle. Clearly, she was intrigued. (Moistened lips. A becoming tilt to her head. It was my obligation to offer a wink of apology.)

  “Dangerous,” Mrs. Kooshof repeated. “And that’s the plain truth. You could hurt people, Thomas. Physically.”

  “You’re joking, yes?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I think you’re capable of … I don’t know. Almost anything. That day on the balcony, you could’ve killed me. I still don’t know what happened, exactly, but I’ll tell you this much: It scared me. Plus the whole revenge business. And the way you attack me—in bed, I mean. It’s too rough, like you’re working out some old grudge.”

  The businesswoman cleared her throat. (Was it my imagination that she squirmed? That she recrossed her legs, scratched her nose, twisted a ringlet of auburn hair around a trembling pinkie? The signs of estrus were evident.)

  “You love women,” Mrs. Kooshof concluded, “enough to hurt them any way you can.” She paged through the ledger. “Spankings: sixteen. The fuck does that mean?” I sat speechless. From across the aisle, however, came an audible groan. “And the thing is,” said Mrs. Kooshof, “you don’t act like I’m really important to you. I mean, you never even use my first name. Maybe you don’t know it—I’ll bet you don’t.”

  “Enough,” I said sternly.

  “Go ahead, then,” she said. “What is it?”

  “I will not be quizzed.”

  “My name! Say it!”

  The jet struck an air pocket. I was instantly (and luckily) overcome by nausea—a brackish taste in my throat—and it was with the greatest effort that I unbuckled my seat belt and retreated to a cramped lavatory at the rear of the plane.

  Remarkable, is it not? How words truly matter?

  Nouns. Names.

  For some time I sat racking my memory, amazed at the tidal influence of language in our lives, and when I returned to my seat a half hour later, still shaky, Mrs. Robert Kooshof was huddled in neighborly comradeship with my jade-eyed, top-heavy businesswoman. Together, they were feeding on my ledger like a pair of cornfield crows.

  “Donna?” I said.

  * Certainly you, if anyone, can understand this. After all, you devoted more than twenty years of your life to a man who now dwells with another woman in the tropical isles of Fiji. He had sworn to love you until death did you part. And you remember this, don’t you? Late at night, in particular, you lie thinking of your wedding day, in mid-July, an outdoor wedding beside a lake in a piney woods, and how the two of you stood side by side on an old wooden dock, and how it was there that he had solemnly murmured all those splendid pledges. You wore a white satin dress. The day was hot. You were happy—you believed. But now even the past is corrupt. You cannot think of that lake, or that dock, without also thinking of Fiji. Forever no longer means forever. Forever means for a while. Forever means until a pretty young redhead comes along. And so you cry yourself to sleep. You have been betrayed not only by a man but by your mother tongue.

  * I did not inquire as to why the ledger was still in Herbie’s possession. I already knew: to threaten me, to keep me at bay, to use against me in circumstances just like these.

  As in war, so, too, in romance.

  Knee-deep in hell, amid the smoke and din, we lose our internal bearings. Terrors multiply. Options narrow. Like flotsam, we are caught up in the swirl, no right or wrong, ambiguities everywhere, each of us carried to a puny destiny by the great fateful flood. In times of moral complexity, events have a way of accelerating beyond the reach of human reason.

  I had little choice, in other words, but to propose marriage to Mrs. Robert Kooshof.

  Thus, over prunes and buttered toast on a cool late-April morning, two celibate days after returning from Tampa, I dropped to my knees and popped the imprisoning question. On the sexual weather front, to reach for a metaphor, it had been a rare and very frustrating dry spell, enough to make one dizzy with desire, and on that particular morning Mrs. Kooshof happened to be breaking fast in her midnight-blue negligee.

  “Will you?” I inquired.

  “Will I what?”

  “Oh, stop it—you know exactly what. Will you have me?”

  It was worth a try. Evidently, though, my soon-to-be betrothed had developed a wary, altogether distrustful attitude toward our capricious universe. She insisted on precision.

  “Have how, Thomas? What does have mean?”

  “The obvious,” I said.

  She gazed at me without mercy. “Then say it. The words. I want to hear the words.”

  My knees, I must remark, were chafed by the time we had completed our transaction. “Yes, yes,” my beloved new fiancée finally cooed, although by that point she had imposed a number of rather stern provisos: I would henceforth be keeping no books. I would shun the city of Tampa. I would renounce revenge. I would kick, cold turkey, my so-called girl habit. I would repair the telephone. I would be present at meals. I would address her by her Christian name.

  “Agreed,” I muttered wearily. “And perhaps a new wristwatch?”

  Mrs. Kooshof rolled her shoulders. “Just a ring,” she said.

  A most delicate negotiation, all in all, yet I had the foresight to drive my own hard bargains where necessary. Thanks in part to my work on young Toni’s thesis, I carefully wrapped our connubial contract in a profusion of syntactic bows and ribbons, inserting key paragraphs of small print, framing certain critical clauses in the obscure, hedging locutions of eighteenth-century diplomacy. I did not, for example, phrase my proposal as a formal question. Rather, I used the clear-cut imperative: “Marry me!”—a distinction, I believe, that would hold up in any court of law. Moreover, since Mrs. Kooshof was already a well-wedded woman, coupled to a felonious jailbird of a husband, I took the precaution of appending a deft bit of language stipulating that she be “free and unencumbered” prior to any final alliance.

  The objective, of course, was to buy time, to smooth Mrs. Robert Kooshof’s ruffled feathers while preserving room for maneuver.

  Loopholes, in short.

  Escape hatches. Swiss cheese.

  “So what you mean,” she said warily, “is that I’ll have to get divorced first? From Doc?”

  “Correct,” I said. “Brigham Young I am not.”

  “But that could take months.”

  “Perhaps so,” I nimbly replied. “Eyes on the prize and imagine the reward.”

  Mrs. Kooshof made a grinding motion with her jaw. “Okay, I guess you’re right, but you won’t back down afterward? You won’t leave me stranded?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “That’s an evasion,” she said. “Just answer me. Yes or no?”

  Disarmingly, I spread
out my hands, palms up. I had learned my lesson in Tampa; no power on planet earth would drag either of those poisonous syllables through my firmly sealed lips. “We have nothing,” I told her solemnly, “if not trust. All else is subordinate.”

  “That’s no?”

  “Trust,” I repeated.

  Mrs. Kooshof fell into a meditative silence. Clearly, I thought, my prospective partner-for-life had become skittish about matters of the heart, my own in particular, and now her fixed, cool, skeptical stare suggested that I had a great deal still to prove. She consumed her banana without once looking away.

  “Well, just don’t forget the ring,” she finally said. “And don’t think I’m stupid. You were boxed in—you had to propose.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  Mrs. Kooshof frowned and fidgeted, her defenses not yet fully breached. “And here’s a warning,” she said. “This is your last chance, Thomas. I’ll be watching like a hawk. No trips to Tampa.”

  “Banish the thought.”

  “And you’d better be there for me.”

  I flicked my eyes bedroomward. The banana she had just swallowed, in conjunction with her midnight-blue negligee, had already summoned moisture to a dry April morning.

  The trick with women, I have learned, is to keep upping the ante. Lose a hand, double the stakes. Lose another, redouble. To infinity. Like any gambling junkie, the female animal wants it all—your purse strings, your heart, your spirit, the very breath of your lungs.

  The jackpot forever beckons.

  Needless to say, Mrs. Robert Kooshof was wholly and full-figuratively a woman, plump with passion, engorged with greed, and our bedroom rampage that morning belongs to the ages. She was ferocious; she consumed me wholesale. Her self-absorption, I must say, was at once embarrassing and educational, at times bordering on the scandalous. (In deference to my beloved’s privacy, I will not detail modes and methods; at one point, however, I found myself smothered by what can only be described as a pair of astral earmuffs.)

  At the ultimate moment, as I alighted in paradise, Mrs. Robert Kooshof chuckled and stroked my forehead and whispered, “Commitment, Thomas. That’s all I ever wanted.”

  Afterward, with a little sigh, she got up and moved off to the bathroom, her stride languorous and proud. (Six feet even. Heroic frontal matter.) She grinned at me, took a seat on the toilet, relieved herself with the door wide open.

  Already the woman was reaping the matrimonial harvest.

  A chatterbox on top of it.

  “That was fine,” she was telling me, “but once we’re married, I can start to—you know—start to let go.” She paused. “Of course it won’t be easy. The divorce, I mean. Doc won’t take it lying down.”

  I looked up with interest. “How so?”

  “Nothing. Except he can get—what’s the word?—he can get nasty. I mean, he’s behind bars right now, which helps, but he knows people.”

  “People?” I said.

  Immodestly, Mrs. Kooshof cleansed herself, rose up, and turned on the shower. “Bone breakers,” she said, rather too casually. “He’ll make trouble, we can almost count on it, but this time I’m not knuckling under. No way, nohow. For once, I know what I want in life—you and me—and I won’t let anything stop us. Not in a million years. Never.”

  I drew a shallow breath.

  “Bone breakers?” I said. “Tell me more.”

  “Oh, he won’t be happy, that’s all. Things might get unpleasant.”

  “I thought the man was a veterinarian. A puppy doctor.”

  Mrs. Kooshof opened the shower curtain, beckoned me with a curled finger. “I’ll handle Doc,” she said. “You handle me. Come here now.”

  Reluctantly, I joined her. (Much as I adore a good shower, I have never comprehended the point of sharing lavation fluids. Where is the romance in imitating goldfish?) The tall, bulky Mrs. Kooshof completely dominated our limited space, not to mention the hot water, and for some time I stood there soapy and chilled to the core as she shampooed and conditioned her hair.

  My cozy bachelor world, I realized, had swiftly come undone.

  True enough, I did not want to lose her, hence my hasty proposal, but on the other hand I had been counting on a lengthy engagement—three to five years, minimum. (I was still attached to Lorna Sue; I still required the catharsis of revenge.) Plainly though, Mrs. Robert Kooshof was jumping the matrimonial gun. Humming to herself, eyes like sparklers, she was computing her unhatched chickens with the overconfident impudence of a newlywed.

  Stunning, I thought, how quickly the apple rots.

  For the present, however, the more urgent issue took the form of Mr. Robert Kooshof, alias Doc, and as we stepped out of the shower I went fishing for pertinent facts and figures. None of it was encouraging. According to my beaming bride-to-be, the man had always taken an aggressive approach to problem solving. Not your standard veterinarian, she explained. Ill-tempered and spiteful. A wrestling enthusiast. A prototype bully. “God knows why I married him,” she said sadly. “A cruel, cowardly, abusive rat. Sometimes I think he became a vet because he loved putting pets down. Lethal injections, you know? And a born cheat too—amazing he didn’t end up in jail years ago.”

  She finished drying herself, dropped her towel on the floor, sprinkled talcum powder over a pair of lithe (but unshaven) legs.

  I retrieved her towel, returned it to its proper peg on the wall.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” I muttered, “you might’ve mentioned all this a bit earlier.”

  “Well, God, I tried to,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “You never let me talk about myself. There’s a trillion things you don’t know.”

  “So talk,” I said.

  “Maybe now I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, you do,” I purred, and over the next half hour, trolling the troubled Kooshof marital waters, I netted the following facts:

  They had been college sweethearts at the University of South Dakota. Married sixteen years. Twice separated. Moved to Owago in the late 1980s. Far as I could gather, Mr. Doc Kooshof’s tax difficulties had their source in wild, grandiose avarice—hidden income, inflated deductions, altered records, an impressive array of mathematical errors. “That’s the kind of person he is,” said my rosy-bottomed, well-scrubbed fiancée. “Miserly and arrogant. Mean as a pit bull. You won’t believe this, but he actually claimed exemptions for a couple of children. Nonexistent, obviously.” She studied her hands for a moment. “Children. My big dream.”

  “And not his?”

  “Of course not. Drain on the economy. And he didn’t want the mess. The anal type.”

  I made an appropriate tsking noise. (Lorna Sue popped to mind—another rabidly antichild spouse.) By that point we were seated at my walnut dining table, sharing a pot of coffee, and I could not help making a quick survey of my once spick-and-span kitchenette, now strewn with smudged glassware and blackened pots and pans. (Not to mention a refrigerator piled with leftovers, wads of soggy blond hair clogging the bathtub drain, bedroom closets that had come to resemble a Laura Ashley fire sale.)

  I slipped a coaster under Mrs. Kooshof’s coffee cup.

  “Anal,” I murmured. “Imagine that.”

  She bobbed her head. “Drove me nuts. And the thing is, he’d get violent about it—scary violent. Sometimes I’d have to lock myself in the bathroom just to feel safe. I guess maybe it’s a habit now.”

  “Perhaps so,” I said.

  “Well, now you know where it came from. We’re talking about a weird, frightening guy.” She looked across the table at me, her eyes slick with moisture. “If anything happens … I mean, you’d fight for me, wouldn’t you? If he got out on parole or something?”

  “Parole?” I said.

  “Possibly.”

  “How possibly?”

  “Pretty possibly. In seven or eight months. But that’s not the point. Would you fight for me?”

  I considered the alternatives, none of them appealing, then shrugged and sat back.
When in doubt, redouble.

  “Tooth and nail,” I said soothingly.

  “Honest?”

  “No quarter. Lethal injections.”

  She gave me a relieved grin. Bad as things were, I still had the knack.

  When it rains, it pours.

  Now came the torrent.

  On that same April morning, as I recuperated from life’s latest onslaught, the delicious young Toni put in a long-overdue appearance during my weekly office hours. She was wearing, I happily noted, a pair of yellow bicycling shorts, a copper necklace, no shoes, no underwear, a pink sorority T-shirt that had been neatly snipped off just below glandular level. Without preliminaries, Toni locked the door and perched cross-legged on my desk, facing me straight on—ostentatious female to clear-cut male.

  “We got ourselves a problem,” she announced. “A real piss-ass motherfucker.”

  (Teacup kneecaps. Thighs of iron. Foul mouth. Coarse, sable hair suspended in a festive ponytail.)

  I lowered the Venetian blinds and said, “Delighted.”

  Toni scowled. “Didn’t you hear? You and me, Tommy Boy, we’re up against it. My roommate’s turning us in.”

  “One step at a time,” I chirped merrily. “First the welcome wagon.”

  I withdrew a decanter of port from my file cabinet, poured each of us a ritual two and a half inches. Here, I rapidly deduced, was a case of adolescent love fever, pure and obsessive. All else was pretext.

  Toni consumed her beverage in three indelicate gulps.

  “You don’t get it,” she snarled. “My roommate, she knows about the thesis, all the succor and encouragement you gave me. How you pitched in and helped.”

  Toni’s way with the language, I thought, was unquestionably inventive, though to my taste a speck egotistical. The words succor and encouragement seemed especially euphemistic, and it occurred to me that the girl would make a splendid squid should her academic career ever falter—a rare ability to squirt ink upon everything but paper. I stretched back in my chair.

  “Oh, succor, succor,” I said, and waved a dismissive hand. “A token. The least I could do.”

  Toni nodded savagely. “Well, I know that, you know that, but it won’t stop Megan. That’s her name—my little fuck-pig roomie. She plans to squeal on us.”