Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  “Let’s not get rude,” said Miss Wick, who nonetheless eyed me with a shy hint of admiration. (Sterling woman. Paunchy. Wart trouble.) “Anyway, we’re talking about four-year-olds.”

  “Indeed so,” I rallied. “All the more reason to set an example.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Faith. “Just change one tiny word.” She frowned. “Darn spot? Darn, stupid spot?”

  “Ha!” I said.

  “Ha yourself. This is a day care center, not some theater for foulmouths.”

  I smiled menacingly. “Profanity is hardly the issue. You don’t hear me suggesting ‘Out, cocksucking spot.’ ”

  The debate thus ebbed and flowed.

  Acrimony at times. Barbarism up against enlightenment, censorship versus tutorial liberty. In the end, however, we hammered out a covenant by which I agreed to locate less formidable texts for my students. The compromise, I admit, left a painful splinter in my soul—give away Shakespeare, you give away the crown jewels—yet I had managed to salvage, at least to a degree, the principle of academic self-determination. This alone seemed a victory worth celebrating, and as Faith and I exited Miss Wick’s office, I issued a cheerful invitation to seal our truce over a drink or two.

  Faith begged off.

  “Not in a million years,” she said, and drilled me with antipathy. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten how you sucked on my nose that day.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Oh, you did. Disgusting then, disgusting now. Just stay away from my Evelyn.”*

  Not a week later I debuted as Captain Nineteen.

  This was occasioned, as such things often are, by a series of complex and coincidental circumstances, one of those unpredictable chain reactions that, for want of inspiration, Thomas Jefferson once referred to—altogether feebly—as “the course of human events.” (Spades are spades. I do not kowtow to celebrity.) Fittingly enough, it began with the precocious young Evelyn. A day or so after my encounter with Faith, near the end of our morning rest period, the tot crawled up on my lap, tugged at my ear, and said, “He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” I said.

  “Captain Nineteen. And it makes me pretty sad.”

  The name did not ring a bell. I did my best, therefore, to redirect our conversation toward more elevated topics, but young Evelyn, being the independent woman-in-the-making that she was, refused to take the rein. “A spaceship wreck,” she said. “Captain Nineteen got squashed and he’s dead like a bug and I don’t like it. I almost cried once.” She eyed me. “Maybe I will now.”

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  “I feel like it.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I said. “I am pleading with you.” I rearranged her on my lap, pried her stubby, tenacious fingers from my ear. “Very well. Who is this unfortunate captain?”

  “Nineteen!” she said. “Captain Nineteen.”

  “Yes?”

  My bereft little tutee looked at me as if I had been born only yesterday. She had the knack, like most of her gender, for underscoring my inadequacies. (Where do women pick up these tactics? The genetic code? A secret pamphlet?)

  “He just is who he is,” Evelyn said brusquely. “His spaceship crashed. And he’s dead. And I want him back.”

  “Well, I’m very sure we all do,” I told her. “But if the man is no longer—”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  The tot’s posture stiffened.

  “Once in every century,” she intoned slowly, “there is born into this universe a special man. With the strength of Atlas. The wisdom of Solomon. The courage of a lion.” She eyed me, then saluted. “You are that man. You are Captain Nineteen. Today’s man of the future.”

  I could not help but marvel.

  The girl’s diction and tone of voice had taken on the properties of a movie preview.

  At the noon hour that day I happened to mention the incident to Miss Askold Wick, headmistress and chief administrator, who brought me up to date on the comings and goings of Captain Nineteen, alias Hans Hanson. The man had perished not in a spaceship but in a 1996 Lincoln Town Car: a head-on collision along Highway 16. For many years, Miss Wick informed me, the now defunct Mr. Hanson—a local jeweler by trade—had hosted an afternoon television program for children, a mishmash medley of cartoons and live talent and ancient Hopalong Cassidy films. The program was broadcast over Owago’s community access channel, number nineteen on the dial, hence the dead captain’s seemingly random moniker. “A tragedy,” said Miss Askold Wick. “Hans was a real … He was someone special.”

  I looked up with interest. “Handsome, was he?”

  “Maybe. I suppose.”

  “Dashing? Debonair?”

  “Well, he did have—”

  “Your lover, perhaps?”

  Miss Wick blushed. “The man was married!”

  “Ah,” I murmured, and seized her hand. “Unhappily, I am sure.”

  Privately, though, my thoughts had now locked upon Captain Nineteen. A kindred spirit, I realized instantly. Who on this earth might have guessed that my doppelgänger, my spiritual twin, would take the form of a small-town jeweler and weary space traveler? (A small world, obviously, for it was in Mr. Hanson’s downtown store that I had recently purchased an engagement ring that weighed as heavily upon my mind as on my depleted pocketbook.)

  After work that day, I made a point of switching on Mrs. Kooshof’s twenty-five-inch RCA, fluffing up a pillow, and sitting back to enjoy a rerun of The Captain Nineteen Show. Impressive. Very. The late Mr. Hanson, not unlike myself, was a man of conspicuous command presence, rugged and flinty, exceptionally well groomed, with a piercing military gaze that both disciplined and mesmerized his rowdy studio audience (aptly dubbed “the crew”—children of age six and under). The man had plainly seen much of the world; he ran a tight ship; he did not once abuse the word hopefully. On the downside, of course, the show’s production values fell far below network standard: an obsolete, altogether seedy spaceship set; a control panel in dire need of updating from analog to digital; a uniform that brought to mind the apparel of a refrigerator repairman, hardly that of a seasoned mariner to the stars.

  Still, this was community access television, and I gave credit where credit was due. Rarely boring. Riveting in spots.* During the first few seconds, in a pretaped introductory segment, I soon discovered the source of young Evelyn’s oddly portentous oration that morning. As Captain Nineteen gazed resolutely toward the outer galaxies, a beautifully modulated male voice (Hans himself, I assumed) intoned more or less the words that Evelyn had used with me: “Once in every century,” et cetera. Granted, the girl had botched the language in spots†—which is par from the ladies’ tee‡—but at the same time Evelyn had rather eerily captured the gist of it. I felt a chill, in fact, as the introductory footage rose to its climax: “You are that chosen individual. [Orchestral punctuation.] You are Captain Nineteen—today’s man of the future.”

  I felt called to duty.

  It struck me—forcefully, in fact—that Captain Nineteen was just the sort of person who could comprehend the military implications of vengeance, a man who might very well stash a bomb or two in his garage. I turned up the volume.

  A half hour later Mrs. Robert Kooshof trudged in with a crate of clay flowerpots. Much to my irritation, she ignored the televised proceedings, prattling on about her new business venture.

  Eventually I was compelled to wave a hand.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said sharply, “I’m assessing my own career prospects. I would very much appreciate your silent support.”

  Mrs. Kooshof glanced at the screen, upon which Captain Nineteen’s steely visage had only that moment reappeared.

  “Hans?” she said. “I don’t follow. He’s dead.”

  “Dead, indeed. Which is precisely the point. I have been asked to replace him.”

  “You?”

  “None other,” said I.

  “But I don’t … You mean somebody down at the stat
ion …?”

  “Not quite. The possibility was suggested by a member of his crew. The shaveling Evelyn.”

  Mrs. Kooshof’s laughter was loud and prolonged, a sequence of outrageous squeals that totally eclipsed Captain Nineteen’s brief interview with a member of his crew.

  “I see no humor in this,” I said acidly.

  “You? Captain Nineteen?”

  “Just an option,” I told her, although in truth I had already cooled on the idea. (The one thing Thomas Chippering cannot abide is ridicule.)

  Wistfully, I sighed and switched off the television set.

  Pity, I thought.

  Thus I dismissed the whole notion.

  Gave up, in other words.

  Over the next day or two I brushed aside Evelyn’s inquiries regarding my future as Captain Nineteen. Out of the question, I told her.

  In my heart, however, I felt like a dupe to orthodoxy. I trudged through my day care duties, limped home in midafternoon, collapsed on the sofa, lay watching Captain Nineteen reruns with dull eyes and dull spirit. Today’s man of the future, I would think, and then I would laugh aloud at my own cowardice.

  In retrospect, I now realize, these were symptoms of a larger, more dangerous malaise. The events of recent months were clawing at me, compressing my heart with the relentless G-forces of sorrow. Late one night I found myself sitting in the garage, holding a lighted match, talking to my bombs as if they were living creatures. Lorna Sue’s face seemed to bob before me. “I loved you!” I yelled.

  Later I yelled, “Where are you?”

  I smiled and swallowed the match.

  In the end, it was one of those random, unexpected incidents of life that gusted up out of the blue to rescue me from the spiritual doldrums. One moment my ship was becalmed, the next I was unleashing the lifeboats.

  And if not for the sly, persistent Evelyn, a whole fascinating chapter of my life would have surely been stillborn. (I have discovered through trial and error, primarily the latter, that none of us stands at the helm of life’s great ocean liner; control is an illusion; destination itself is a pitiful chimera; we are at best mere passengers aboard a drifting vessel, some of us in steerage, some in first class, all at the whim of a ghostly crew and passing icebergs.)

  The initial circumstances were hardly extraordinary. As was her custom, the affectionate little Evelyn had crawled up on my lap at the beginning of rest period one Wednesday morning, squirming and tugging at my hair and otherwise misbehaving in the most outrageous ways. Eventually I was compelled to insist that she join her classmates on the floor. (Each student was required to have a bath towel on hand for just this daily ritual.) Young Evelyn, however, took poorly to discipline. Fists clenched, her tonsils suddenly in plain view, the little hellcat responded with what can only be called a classic temper tantrum. The decibels were astonishing.

  Through all this commotion, and much more, I stood my ground. Even with Evelyn adhering to me like a vicious she-crab, I pushed to my feet and managed to unroll her lavender bath towel.

  “I won’t do it!” she cried, and took a firm new grip on my hair. “I don’t like the floor!”

  “You will do it!” I roared back.

  And so on.

  Oddly, if only for a passing moment, I found myself revisiting two or three identical struggles with Lorna Sue, in particular those occasions when I had attempted to affirm my connubial rights and privileges. Lorna Sue, for better or worse, was never one for spontaneity. “I don’t like the floor!” et cetera.

  Call it post-traumatic stress syndrome: Something snapped inside me.

  I swatted young Evelyn.

  On the backside. Hard.

  Curiously, though, the girl neither yelped nor cried—nothing of the sort. She gazed at the center of my forehead as if shopping for a casket.

  “You hit me,” she finally said, her voice flat, betraying nothing.

  “ ‘Hit’ is incorrect,” I told her. “ ‘Hit’ is absolutely not the word.”

  “It was a hit.”

  “A tap,” I insisted.

  The girl looked at me steadily. “It felt like a real hit. And it hurt.” There was a pause as she allowed this information to work its way through my circuitry. “You’re not supposed to hit children.”

  “Well, true, but on the other hand—”

  “My mom won’t like it, I bet.”

  “No. Probably not.”

  There was little point, I realized, in debating the issue. After a moment Evelyn sighed and curled up on her bath towel.

  “Okay, I’ll lie down,” she said, “except you have to lie here with me.”

  “With you?” I said.

  “Beside me. On my towel.”

  I shook my head. “I doubt that’s a good idea. If you wish, I could sit for a moment.”

  “No, I want you to lie down,” Evelyn said. She appraised me with cunning blue eyes. “And you better do it. Or else I’ll tell my mom how you hit me. Don’t think I won’t tell her.”

  “Of course you will.”

  “So come on. Right now.”

  Slowly, with all the obvious reservations, I removed my navy-blue sports coat, loosened my tie, kicked off my shoes, and rather awkwardly began to arrange my large, gangly frame on Evelyn’s lavender towel. The word manipulator had come to mind, and as I lay back, I could not help but be reminded of Toni’s honors thesis, those late nights at the typewriter, a memory that then blurred into a thousand other such incidents of feminine blackmail.

  So, yes. Another jolt of déjà vu. But at the same time, as punishments go, this seemed a fairly modest one. (Evelyn was correct. It had, in fact, been a full-fledged “hit.”) I drew a few sleepy breaths and counted my blessings.

  Not so bad, I decided.

  Perhaps I dozed off. Perhaps I was merely lost in fluid reverie. Either way, when I surfaced a few minutes later, young Evelyn lay curled up on my chest, appraising me with solemn blue eyes.

  “You know something else?” she said quietly.

  “What’s that?”

  The girl wagged her head with genuine compassion. “I don’t think my mom will like this either.”

  * I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.

  * Spot. Words, I’ve noticed, have a way of following us around like a nagging old melody. We try to stop humming the damned tune, we bite our tongues, but ten minutes later we are at it again: “In short, there’s simply not/a more congenial spot …”

  †“… for happy-ever-aftering/than here in Camelot.”

  ‡With women, I have learned, the fundamental function of language is rarely to impart intellectual content, or to share objective meaning; it is rather to give vent to some murky-headed sense of “emotion.” The delicious young Toni, for instance, could not have composed a precise, readable, well-crafted sentence if her very life were at stake. Upon her deathbed—beside which I fervently hope to kneel one gorgeous day—Toni will no doubt request that I ghostwrite her own last words. (Which, even in the afterworld, she will righteously claim as her own.)

  There was no room for maneuver. Evelyn made her demands, I bit the bullet, and by this circuitous route, paved with treachery, I found myself auditioning two days later for the role of Captain Nineteen. In part, of course, I felt gulled and used—at the noose end of my emotional rope—yet there was no denying the electric sizzle along my spine as I entered the studios of Channel Nineteen on a cloudy Friday afternoon. I was accompanied by Mrs. Robert Kooshof, whose smirking skepticism bothered me not at all.

  “He who hoots last,” I declared, which sent my good-humored fiancée into a spasm of inexplicable giggles.

  I ignored her.

  The arc of my life had bent to its natural end. You, I thought, are Captain Nineteen.

  After a short, nerve-racking wait, we were escorted onto the set by a pretty little stagehand named Jessie, short fo
r Jessica, short for mouth-watering. (Strawberry hair. Eyes of cinnamon. Assorted fruits, vegetables, and Virginia baked hams.) Even with Mrs. Kooshof at my side, this daring scamp went out of her way to flash me the whole appetizing menu. (If life is a banquet, I thought ruefully, it seemed fiendish that I should now be limited to a single course of Dutch gruel.) Bedazzled, still flirting with her eyes, the outrageous Jessie introduced me to my two outclassed competitors for the job: the first, our local Buick-Oldsmobile dealer—an unctuous, beady-eyed sharpie; the other, a plodding and decidedly heavyset plumbing contractor. Neither struck me as officer material.

  The three of us shook hands, wished one another well, then drew lots to establish the order in which we would perform our screen tests. (Plumber first, car dealer second, myself last.) The audition, Jessie explained, would be a straightforward affair. Twenty minutes each. No retakes. A “crew” of twelve children had been summoned to select the new Captain Nineteen.

  Lastly, much to my surprise, we were informed that the whole business would be broadcast live over the channel’s three-county cable network.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Live?” I said.

  “Well, sure,” said Jessie. “Ad lib and all that. With little kids you have to be on your toes.”

  I was taken aback. “In that case,” I said, “what about costuming?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The space suit. I’ll need a uniform.”

  Jessie shrugged. “Well, that’s a problem. We’ve only got the one—it was Hans’s.” She gazed up at me with fawning admiration. “Hans, he was sort of slender—not as tall as you. I guess you could give it a try.”

  I winked at Mrs. Kooshof, excused myself, and followed my adoring Jessie into a cramped and categorically sub-par dressing chamber. The room, I noted immediately, was aswirl with ghosts of the slain Captain Nineteen. Memorabilia of all sorts cluttered the walls. Primarily photographs: Hans Hanson tattooing his name to a young woman’s bared left scapula; Hans with an arm around the tiny, fluted waist of the 1991 Miss Minnesota; Hans sharing an ice cream cone with a youthful Eydie Gorme.

  Here, I recognized, was a man after my own heart. And Jessie, too, seemed spellbound by the photographs. She stood perfectly still for a time, as if at a funeral, then sighed and hugged herself. “Hans, he was something else,” she murmured. “Great with kids.”