Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  I was contemplating these and related matters as I entered my classroom, amazed at my own capacity for survival, and as a consequence I did not at first take notice of Herbie and the tycoon seated side by side in the third row.

  This oversight, I fear, was predictable. While on the job, I like to project a brisk, businesslike, even punctilious image; I eschew small talk; I rarely establish (and never sustain) unnecessary eye contact with my male students, who on the whole seem to be convalescing from the trials of a communal lobotomy—listless, insolent, prelingual. On this particular afternoon, as always, I thus lost myself in the critical minutiae of professorship, logging in absentees, adjusting the fickle lamp on my lectern, shuffling through my notes and papers. (Though “Methodologies of Misogyny” was billed as a seminar, I had little choice but to run the show in a straightforward lecture format. What can be served, after all, in trading opinions with troglodytes? Professors profess. Gum-chewers chew.) Without looking up, therefore, I sharply rapped the lectern and opened with a few broad remarks about the biological function of language in our rituals of courtship: how the sounds we utter carry meanings far beyond anything to be found in a dictionary. (The love cry of a coyote, the rut blare of a moose, the impassioned croak of a bullfrog.)

  At this point I glanced up. A remedial cliché seemed in order.

  “It is not always what we say,” I declared, “but how we say it.” I paused to let this sink in, gazing in the direction of a perplexed young lady in row one. It was gratifying, I must say, to see the girl slowly nod and scribble down a note or two. We exchanged bashful smiles—again, the how matters—then I took a moment to consult my seating chart and placed a tidy asterisk beside her name.

  “As an example,” I said, “let us consider the word Beverly.”

  I turned to the blackboard, preparing to jot down this tantalizingly improper proper noun, only to notice that I had been preempted by a heavy masculine scrawl. The entire blackboard, in fact, was littered with a host of creatively vulgar phrases, each misanthropic in the extreme.

  I took an instinctive step backward. I may well have blushed.

  There were giggles, I recall, but for the moment I could only gape at this vicious graffiti, some of which was merely abusive, most of which foretold my doom in graphic detail. I was threatened with implausible forms of injury and disfigurement; I was offered instruction in the transfer of body parts to preposterous locations.

  The words hockey stick, in particular, rang baleful bells.

  I turned swiftly, spotted Herbie and the tycoon, steadied myself against the lectern.

  Already they had risen from their seats. They gave the impression, I thought instantly, of a pair of midcareer Treasury agents. Herbie carried a leather briefcase; the tycoon carried what appeared to be a plastic yardstick.

  They proceeded briskly up the center aisle, flanked me left and right, gripped me by the arms. I was told to remain silent under penalty of fracture. (“Shut the fuck up,” said the tycoon, “or you’ll be shaking hands with your lips.”)

  At that instant, I am almost sure, Herbie grinned at me.

  His eyes twinkled.

  On the surface, at least, it was hard to believe that this was the Herbie of my youth, or even an adult version of my old backyard playmate, yet there was no mistaking that impish, dangerous, Ritalin grin.

  He was twinkling.

  I have reached the moral divide of my narrative: the jumped-off cliff, the burning bridge, the stark and sinister sine qua non. Here, if you will, we approach that fatal intersection at which my life took its turn toward chaos and desperation and what others (dimwits) might call madness.

  Such amateur diagnostics, of course, are patently foolish, yet I must concede that in the coming pages I may well be cast in a somewhat less than favorable light. The self-righteous will surely jeer and condemn. The squeamish may shudder. Bear in mind, however, that in times of emergency there are scant few of us, sane or otherwise, who cannot be pressed to an extremity of deed. And remember, too, that I have issued fair warning with respect to my capabilities. (I am a decorated war hero. Why do none but my prey take this seriously?)

  So, yes: we perch on the precarious fulcrum of this intriguing testament.

  A lovely springtime afternoon.

  Herbie on my left, the tycoon on my right.

  Much of what occurred over the next horrific minutes never registered, or has since been eradicated by that faithfully protective mechanism called pride. In another sense, however, the details remain fully alive in my memory, embossed there like a garish nightmare. I can still see that twinkle in Herbie’s eyes. I can see the tycoon’s dental fillings, the spittle at his lips, the whitish-silver beads of sweat on his forehead.

  The facts, I believe, speak for themselves.

  I was made to kneel before my lectern.

  I was made to remove my bow tie and jacket and shirt and trousers. (My jockey shorts, fortunately, were fresh. Pale blue. Floral pattern.)

  “Off,” said Herbie.

  Immediately, the tycoon struck me across the flank with his plastic ruler.

  “The underpants,” said Herbie. “Pull them down—just the back part. Right now.”

  Again: that murderous twinkle in his eyes. And thus—impossibly, monstrously—I was compelled to present my pale hindquarters to an assembly of thirty-eight enthralled undergraduates. (You have come to know me in these pages. I am a modest man; the disgrace was beyond words.)

  “What we have here,” Herbie announced, “is a horse’s ass.” He paused for effect. He tapped my chilly left haunch. “Repeat it for the class, Tommy. Horse’s ass.”

  “Repeat?”

  “Loud and clear. Say it. Horse’s ass.”

  There was no alternative. (Bear in mind, this malicious creature had burned down a church or two; he would have maimed me.) And therefore, in a half whisper, I uttered this vile bit of language.

  Herbie clucked his tongue.

  “Man, we can’t hear you,” he said. “Volume, Tommy. Turn it up. Wiggle that white ass.”

  “I certainly will not—”

  “Wiggle!”

  Again, viciously, the tycoon struck me with his plastic yardstick. I gasped, crabbed sideways, and found myself peering up into young Beverly’s vacant blue eyes. The girl seemed to nod in encouragement.

  Emboldened, I executed a subtle rearward sway. More a twitch than a wiggle.

  “So,” I said. “Are we finished?”

  “Not even started,” said Herbie.

  And indeed all this was but prologue. I was brutalized. I was slandered.

  Without hurry, taking turns, Herbie and the tycoon proceeded to deliver lectures of their own, meticulously cataloguing my alleged misdeeds of late—wife stalking, harassment, invasion of privacy, marital meddling. With each unjust charge, the tycoon used his plastic yardstick to administer what can be described only as a sadistic spanking.

  My students were spellbound. There was applause at one point.

  In all such situations, I suspect, the human mind tends to contract upon itself, focusing on the tiniest, most inconsequential details, and in my own case I am left with a collage of trite sensory data: a wad of moist tissue on the floor before me, the frayed hem on young Beverly’s plaid skirt. For some ten minutes I was quite literally on my hands and knees, abject and helpless, the object of public castigation and public ridicule. My students, I must report, took positive pleasure in this malignant sideshow. Dull-eyed coeds squealed in delight; farm boys rose from their seats for a better view; all of them urged the sternest possible measures.

  My mental processes eventually shut down.

  I remember my molars grating. I remember Herbie’s twinkling gray eyes, the tycoon’s swiftly descending yardstick, Beverly’s luscious, elongated tongue as she winced and moistened her lips.

  In hindsight, it was not so much a question of physical pain, but rather the dark certainty that my entire life, my very being, was undergoing a hideous and irre
versible mutation. The spanking itself, while it carried a sting, seemed almost irrelevant in comparison to the torment of disgrace.* Never again would I enter a classroom with my head high, my credentials beyond reproach.

  At one point I glanced up at Herbie, who smiled and winked at me—a mocking, lordly wink—and in that instant something froze in my heart. Here was the final straw: my bloody and rubescent Rubicon. The alliterative nickname Son of Sam sprang to mind. I now understood Sam’s chosen vocation, his special calling, and even with my buttocks bared and bruised I had begun thinking in strictly serial terms. No mercy. No remorse. No going back. I knew my own future.

  Curious, is it not, how the mind works? A wink—that simple—and all was decided.

  For the next several minutes I actually took satisfaction in each cruel stroke of the tycoon’s yardstick. Near the end I must have risen to a higher plane, utterly disengaged from the here and now, and when I blinked and looked up, it was no surprise to find Lorna Sue standing at my side.

  How it happened I cannot be sure; no doubt she had been hovering nearby all along. She was simply there. Icy, beautiful, pitiless.

  Incommoded, still on my hands and knees, I hailed my ex-wife with a smile.

  Her response was null.

  Stiff as concrete, dead silent, Lorna Sue studied me with the same nerveless stare she had summoned up on the day she strolled out of our marriage. “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old,” she had said, and now, with her eyes, she was saying it again: that I had behaved as a juvenile; that she had not been deceived by my pranks down in Tampa; that I was receiving precisely the punishment I deserved—the brisk, heartless paddling one gives a child. She was saying, too, I am quite certain, that this degrading encounter had been a setup from the start; that she had not for an instant planned on returning to me; that I should grow up; that I should accept reality and rise to my feet and square my shoulders and cease being an eighteen-year-old.

  (Ironically, here was the gist of my little lecture that day: how language flows not only off the tongue but from the entire human being—eyes, lungs, bones, stomach, heart.)

  Nothing was said. Nothing had to be said.

  Lorna Sue looped an arm around the tycoon’s waist. Quietly, she turned away, and this alone conveyed a simple, awesome truth: the girl of my dreams no longer cared.

  Yet I was a man of words. I had to ask.

  “Do you love me?” I yelled as Lorna Sue walked away with her hairy new husband, and as my students filed out, and as young Beverly bent down to hand me my trousers.

  “Yes or no?” I cried.

  The subsequent silence was its own answer.

  “Come on, man, be real,” said my blue-eyed Beverly, very tenderly. “She hates you.”

  * How could I—or anyone—recover? I had become the impeached Andrew Johnson, the caned Charles Sumner, the branded Hester Prynne, the disgraced Clifford Irving, the red-faced and far-fallen Richard M. Nixon.

  I am not ignorant. I know what correct is. Though out of touch in some respects, I am fully cognizant of the stern and strident politics that sweep through our modern epoch like the very winds of hell. And I realize, therefore, that there are those who will stand and cheer at my humbling comeuppance. Right now, for that matter, I can hear the feminist flies buzzing at my buttocks, those jackbooted squads of Amazon storm troopers denouncing my indefatigable masculinity. Oh, yes, I can see the sorry spectacle—thousands of ill-mannered, cement-headed, shrill-voiced, holier-than-thou guardians of ovarian rectitude, each squealing with delight at my public humiliation. They condemn my ardent (and nonpartisan) sensuality; they point accusing fingers at my lifelong parade of scrumptious young lovelies; they find fault in my bluntly animated terms of discourse (the word lovely, for instance, when used as a noun).

  Inevitable, I suppose.

  But to all such demagogues of gender I hereby respond with a phrase borrowed from my very first honors student, a gorgeous, quick-witted bonbon who went on to become Miss Saint Paul in a year of savagely competitive mudslinging.

  I quote from memory:

  Tough fucking noogies!

  (“You just don’t get it,” my feminist critics will carp, to whom I hotly reply, “I get plenty.”)

  It had been a day of trial, to be sure, yet also a day of decision, and I felt curiously cleansed—yes, invigorated—as I crossed campus for my final appointment of the afternoon. There was relief, I discovered, in hitting bottom. Where others might dissolve under the strain, I strode forward with a stiffened spine, a level and withering gaze. I was the newborn son of Son of Sam. I was Saint Nicholas gone to steel, making my list, checking it twice.*

  A few minutes ahead of schedule, I entered the plush outer offices of President Theodore Wilford Pillsbury, secure in the knowledge that I could fall no farther.

  Already, in fact, my ascent had begun.

  Upon announcing myself to a pleasantly lanky secretary—flat as Nebraska, limber as the Platte—I was led into a small waiting room, where the two of us engaged in amiable chitchat about that year’s Humphrey Award. The young lady’s eyes flashed with risqué delight as she presented me with a sheaf of paperwork and instructed me not to peek. (President Pillsbury himself, I deduced, wished to break the news.) Her smile was conspiratorial, her posture just short of idolatrous.

  I nodded crisply.

  “Fine, then, no peeking,” I said. “But if I may venture an opinion, I earned this years ago. Decades, in fact.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said my rangy hostess.

  The wait proved mercifully short.

  I was midway into a delicious cup of Nescafe when a pager sounded at the girl’s waist. Promptly, with a flirtatious little arch of the eyebrows, my doting Hermes rose to her feet and escorted me into the inner chambers of President Pillsbury. (Agricultural history. No relation.) My nerves were understandably ragged, my pulse was quick, and these borderline medical conditions were in no way relieved by the sight of Miss Megan Rooney seated in a chair alongside the president’s large walnut desk.

  To Megan’s immediate right, also comfortably seated, was the ebony-haired, shamefaced, teary-eyed Toni.

  Instantly, with not a word spoken, I understood that once again this was not to be my year for the Humphrey Prize.

  I need not elaborate on the defamatory motives behind the presence of these two long-clawed kittens. A sad and ancient story—perfidy of the highest order—and for the sake of concision I shall recount only the highlights of the ensuing half hour.

  They squealed.

  They betrayed both my confidence and my far too philanthropic friendship.*

  Over the next several minutes I gathered that it was the diminutive Megan who first spilled the beans, leaving Toni no choice but to save her skin by transferring all fault to me. (Apparently the two girls had squabbled again over Gopher mating rights; Megan had sought advice from an assistant professor in the Gender Studies department—a blackguard feminist who for years had had me locked in her sights. Within hours the whole spicy story had fallen into the lap of President Pillsbury.)

  The writing, in any case, was on the wall—guileful but no less apocalyptic.

  With a perfunctory, altogether frosty nod, President Pillsbury suggested that I take a seat, an offer I gingerly accepted, after which the plump little bureaucrat cleared his throat and informed me of the “serious nature of the occasion.” (The Doughboy’s insipid wording, clearly not my own.)

  Neither girl met my gaze. In her shrill rusted gate of a voice, Megan summarized the ups and downs of my professional relationship with Toni, placing special emphasis on the deadly issue of a certain suspect honors thesis. I was additionally (and falsely) charged with a variety of killjoy offenses that could be roughly subsumed under the catchall phrase “sexual harassment”: e.g., consorting with students, the use of explicit gender-related language, uninvited romantic overtures, classroom leering, closed office doors, after-hours dormitory visits, et cetera, ad nauseam. “The guy’s famous for this
shit,” the wretched leprechaunette squeaked. “Somebody had to blow the whistle.”

  I blushed and began to defend myself, but at that instant Toni herself entered the conversation. The verb manipulate echoed like a jackhammer; the noun predator reared its monstrous head. Here was a flamboyant performance in all respects, an outrageous blend of indictment and tearful confession: the big lie gone berserk. I sat blank and dumbfounded.

  Predator?

  Manipulator?

  What a nightmare! What a joke!

  Toni exaggerated without shame, perjured herself, snipped quotations out of context. (At the same time, of course, the pathological little racketeer looked nothing short of spectacular. Black suede skirt, black pumps, bulging black sweater.)

  President Pillsbury also took notice. The man rubbed his nose, massaged his paunch.

  And, yes, if one did not know better, it would have been the most natural thing on earth to open one’s heart and soul to the deceitful tart. Halfway into her spiel, in fact, I was nearly sold on my own guilt.

  Yet her allegations were not so.

  Nor did Toni mention her own acts of extortion and outright blackmail.

  Instead the gorgeous fraud claimed that I had “butted in” by offering “stupid suggestions” regarding her thesis. With a perfectly straight face, she asserted that the research was entirely her own, that I had done little more than “pick lint” off a piece of accomplished scholarship, that I had “gummed it up with a bunch of words,” that my overall contribution could at best be deemed “no big deal.”