Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  “Oh, I can see that,” I said comfortingly. “I’m sure the man was wonderful to work with. I trust that you and I will soon establish the same close relationship.”

  The girl squinted at me. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that I care.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “Far as I’m concerned, there’s only one Captain Nineteen. The uniform’s in the closet there. I’ll wait outside.”

  “Righto,” I said.

  The next several minutes were a struggle. Hans’s space trousers barely reached my ankles, the gold-braided jacket bunched up at the shoulders, and as Jessie and I marched back to the soundstage I felt rather like a can of moist and densely packed Spam.

  “Gorgeous,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “Those epaulets, I just love, love, love them.”

  I blushed.

  “My fly boy,” she cooed.

  There was a short delay as Jessie moved to a waiting room and led in our youthful crew, all ages six and under. (The extortionist Evelyn, I noted, was among them, and I went out of my way to give the girl a stern, behave-yourself salute as she was strapped into the special “crew module” at stage left.) Things then rapidly accelerated. Waivers were signed, two cameramen strolled in, lights went up to illuminate the familiar Captain Nineteen spaceship set—a flimsy, stopgap, depressingly out-of-date affair constructed entirely of plywood and painted cardboard. All this, I promised myself, would soon change. Modern electronics. Refitted control panel. Air bags for the children.

  “Thirty seconds!” cried one of the cameramen.

  Stiffly, with considerable back strain, I lowered myself into a seat beside Mrs. Robert Kooshof. The obese plumber had already moved to his mark in front of the control panel. “This,” I whispered to Mrs. Kooshof, “should prove fascinating. A sewage specialist, for God’s sake.”

  “He’s cute,” she said. “A big panda bear.”

  I snorted. The reference brought back a number of unhappy memories, in particular a long, trussed-up night in Tampa.*

  “Panda,” I muttered. “Perhaps so, but he’s hardly a corporal, much less a captain. I give him two minutes before he mangles the word hopefully.”

  The poor man’s performance, as it turned out, was substantially worse than predicted. In the interest of brevity, I need only summarize his blunders. (1) An utter absence of soldierly bearing. Horrid posture. Slothful gaze. (2) No command authority whatsoever. On his ship, the crew was in charge. He toadied; he pampered; he flattered and swooned. At one disgraceful point, which shocked even Jessie, the man virtually resigned his commission—allowing a vote, of all things, on the crucial issue of whether to “scope in” a Roy Rogers episode. (I had learned years earlier, in the classroom, that democracy has its wartime limits.) (3) To my astonishment, the man forfeited all pedagogic pretense. He juggled a set of plumber’s tools, bounced little Evelyn on his knee, guffawed like Santa Claus, and said—I quote verbatim—“Hopefully we’re all having a great space ride.” (4) Most alarmingly, by far, the egotistical bumbler was a thief. He exceeded his time limit by a full thirty-seven seconds.

  It was this final aggravation that compelled me to rise from my seat and stalk across the studio toward the trim-figured Jessie. “You are the stagehand here,” I hissed, “and I suggest you bring out the hook. Fair is fair. I will not be robbed.”

  “Stagehand?” said Jessie. “I’m the producer.”

  I shrugged and aimed a defiant finger at the loquacious, audition-hogging plumber. “Fine, then—producer—but this is no time for job descriptions. Right now, in case you haven’t noticed, that self-centered bozo is stealing my allotted—”

  “What a sexist,” she snarled. “Just because I happen to be a woman.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Believe me, I’ve taught whole courses on the subject. I can spot misogyny in a flash—the man is a plumber, after all.”

  “Not him. You.”

  The clock was ticking; I paid no attention. “A pig, indeed,” I said briskly, “but the issue now is thievery. I must insist that someone pull the plug.”

  “You!” she yelled.

  “Me? I’m not the stagehand.”

  I blinked at her. Behind us, in a control booth, some sensitive engineer called for quiet.

  “Just back off,” Jessie snapped. “Put a gag on and wait your turn like everybody else.”

  Fuming, I returned to my seat.

  A cartoon was played, the Buick dealer took over, and for twenty agonizing minutes I sat glaring at a monitor. I need not detail the car sharpie’s errors. He stunk. He fouled his own nest. He maimed the word nuclear—“nu-cul-er,” he pronounced it—and systematically tortured the innocent little adjective real. (As in: “We got ourselves a real swell crew today.”) A travesty, in short. Unmitigated barbarism. Furthermore, I would not have purchased so much as a wheelbarrow from this transparent scam artist, much less the loaded Riviera he so brazenly pitched during his interview segment.

  I had had enough.

  During a commercial break, I hurried out to the car, opened the trunk, and carefully placed one of my bombs in a leather briefcase.

  My own audition, if I dare say so, went beautifully.

  Jessie beamed at me throughout. She blushed at points; she clawed at her skin.

  Immediately, with a vengeance, I seized control of the ship.* Call me Bligh, if you wish, but I restrapped my crew in their seats, delivered a two-minute lecture on comportment, canceled the Road Runner cartoon, and then ran my charges through a rigorous drill of their ABCs. I permitted no referenda. No back talk, no second-guessing. This was not, I informed the crew, a popularity contest. During the standard interview segment, as one example, I insisted upon strictly martial forms of discourse: “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and “No excuse, sir.” Not a syllable more.

  All in all, the crew responded well. There were teary-eyed complaints, of course, when I found it fitting to conduct a spelling bee in place of the usual Three Stooges tripe and when it became my duty to inform one inquisitive toddler that Mr. Ed had long ago been rendered into nine hundred pounds of extremely useful glue and fertilizer. (Telephones began jingling offstage. One weak-kneed youngster abandoned ship.) Still, despite these difficulties, all other hands soon shaped up. Certainly no more giggling. I now commanded a reduced crew of eleven very solemn space travelers.

  How could I not feel pride?

  From that point onward I could not have shanghaied a more compliant crew. It was a joy to serve with them.

  At the same time, however, something ominous was happening inside my space suit. Months of pain and sorrow came pressing down on me. Intense heat, intense pressure—that G-force sensation.

  During the storytelling segment, ordinarily devoted to beanstalks and ugly ducklings, I took a seat in the crew module and began recounting the much more realistic tale of my recent divorce. “Even Captain Nineteen,” I said weakly, “is defenseless in the face of treachery,” then, with a heavy sigh, I hoisted Evelyn onto my lap, gathered myself, and laid out the sobering details. (A dizzy feeling—I was out of control. I held back nothing.) Gritty material for youngsters, no question about it, and once again I heard the interruptive bleat of offstage telephones. Yet it was no easy matter for me either. I shuddered. I could barely bring myself to describe Lorna Sue’s final departure, how she gave me that flat, opaque, reptilian stare and said, “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old.”

  In retrospect, weighing the pros and cons, I might have toned down some of my coarser references to the tycoon’s villainy—“a maggot-munching vulture,” “a rabid, devil-souled shark,” “a love-killing, wife-stealing, spirit-sucking alien.” Perhaps too, I might have used a somewhat lighter touch in describing Herbie’s role in the collapse of my marriage; I could easily have avoided the word incest; I probably ought not to have referred to him over the airwaves as “a fallen Jesuit” or “a church-burning antichrist.” For all this, however, I will never regret a single ill-tempered syllable.

&n
bsp; “What you must understand,” I told my crew, “is that Lorna Sue was sacred to me. And I to her.” I shifted Evelyn in my lap. “You know what sacred is? Sacred is forever. Sacred is for better and for worse, in sickness and in health.” I swallowed and looked down at my empty-eyed Evelyn. “Can you comprehend any of this?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “What’s incest?”

  I glanced off-camera at Mrs. Kooshof, who studied the linoleum, then at Jessie, whose face had gone phosphorescent with hero worship.

  Inexplicably, then, the studio went upside down.

  An impossible thing to describe. It was as if something had broken loose inside me, a cracking-crumbling sensation. My knees buckled. How long this lasted I cannot be sure, perhaps only seconds, but it was as if the last several months of my life had suddenly given way under the pressure of time and gravity. A psychic avalanche. I felt buried. Claustrophobic darkness descended upon me, succeeded by boiling heat, succeeded by a sharp popping sensation at the top of my skull.

  A brain plug came loose.

  Slowly, in something of a haze, I moved off-camera, retrieved my briefcase, returned to the crew module.

  The next few moments are lost to me.

  I do not remember pulling out the bomb, or striking a match, or hoisting little Evelyn onto my lap.

  I was weeping—that I do remember.

  At one point I heard myself issuing a public appeal to Lorna Sue. I begged her to reconsider. I threatened suicide. “Please!” I screeched, and other such drivel, then surrendered to a surf of tears. One of the cameramen, I recall, was gracious enough to escort me off the set.

  What more need be said?

  If only once—if only for those few sparkling minutes—I was Captain Nineteen.

  The world will never know, I suppose, if the crew had been bought off, or if Jessie tampered with the ballot box, or if the final few moments of my audition somehow alienated a sponsor or two. My protests, in any event, went unheeded. The vote had been unanimous—even Evelyn deserted me—and as the inept, silver-tongued car sharpie accepted his commission as Captain Nineteen, Mrs. Kooshof seized my arm and swiftly hustled me out of the studio. Our engagement, it seemed, had been called off.

  I recall nothing of the ride home. In fact, to be wholly honest, only a few blurred snapshots remain of the next several days.

  I did not need to be hospitalized.

  I did not need the medications, or the snoopy nurses, or the idiotic, simpering, language-crushing pseudopsychiatrists. It was all Mrs. Kooshof’s doing—the revenge instinct—and I played along only because I had temporarily misplaced my capacity for speech.

  * To repeat: Language is an organism that evolves separately inside each of us. It kicks like a baby in the womb. It whispers secrets to our blood.

  * Lest we forget, I have military experience. I know a thing or two about the chain of command, and if required, I am perfectly capable of calling in napalm on my own position.

  In total, I squandered six perfectly useful days in the Owago Community Hospital, another six in Mrs. Robert Kooshof’s queen-size bed. Most of this time I devoted to slumber. Sluggish hours, sluggish dreams.*

  Granted, I needed the sleep, but in no way could my collapse be characterized as a “nervous breakdown,” as the purveyors of Prozac so quaintly phrased it. (I am unsympathetic to such mawkish, softheaded excuses for our minor setbacks in life.) The truth was mundane: I had overextended myself. The divorce alone had completely drained me. And then add to that the frenetic travel, the spying and scheming and marital sabotage, my troubles with Toni, the composition of a brilliant honors thesis, a public spanking, my recent career change, my day care duties, a television debut, my tumultuous, not to mention tenuous, engagement to Mrs. Robert Kooshof. For any other man, all this would have constituted a full life’s journey; for me, it had been compressed into less than a year.

  As a governing axiom, therefore, I must insist that my condition bore no similarity whatsoever to so-called mental dysfunction. I will concede that my muteness—my steadfast refusal to converse—may suggest certain psychological short circuits. Yet even this self-imposed silence was part and parcel of an overall need for repose. (I could have spoken; I was resting my larynx.)

  Mentally ill, in other words, I was not. Nor “clinically depressed.” Nor in the least “delusional.” Anyone who has enjoyed even a few luxurious moments in my presence would sneer at such shoddy diagnostics.

  Beyond that, I need not comment on my hospitalization, except to say that the food was abysmal, the medications were potent, and the nurses were far inferior to their collective carnal reputation. Rebecca, for example: forty-six if she was a day. (Forbidding as a lunar landscape, hippy as the Iron Curtain.) While the poor woman clearly entertained robust fantasies about me, she was devoid of those social graces that lead to productive intergender commerce. She mistook the most casual physicality for “freshness”; she appeared genuinely shocked that a brisk midmorning sponge bath might prove hydraulically bracing. A hopeless case, in short, of menopausal ill temper. (Whatever my shortcomings, I remain wholly sensitive to Woman’s fallow fate.) For my dear, dismal, out-to-pasture Rebecca, alas, the great romantic pageant was something abstract and mechanical, ultimately barren. I patted her thigh. I tried to assist. I failed.

  Be that as it may, those twelve days in hospital were no doubt good for me, a well-earned R&R, a chance if nothing else to rearm and regroup. I had the time, finally, to update my ledger;* I luxuriated in Mrs. Kooshof’s wary, somewhat begrudging solicitude; and most important, I began sketching out plans for the future—refined modes and methods of vengeance. Hospital or no hospital, there was still that loud, persistent tick in my heart. It kept me awake at night. Tick, in fact, is the wrong word: an endless siren, an air raid warning.

  Surprisingly—shockingly—I found myself looking forward to my daily sessions with the hospital’s in-house psychiatrist, one Dr. Harold Schultz, a man of smallish stature, neurotic eyes, and long, dark, inscrutable silences that very nearly rivaled my own. The man had been trained to sit speechless; for me, it was a matter of choice. For fifty engrossing minutes each day, we mutely appraised each other from opposite sides of a small conference table, stone silent, locked like two stags in a ferocious contest of wills. Neither of us yielded a hiccup. (Had my health insurance not been adequate, I would have sued this unabashed quack for both mal- and nonpractice.)

  Disconcerting, to say the least. Yet how could I not take up the challenge?

  A typical session began with an exchange of pleasantries—handshakes and smiles, nothing verbal—after which Schultz would pick up his yellow notepad, jot down a key word or two, then pass the pad over to me. The man’s tactics were transparent: fighting silence with silence. Third-grade Freud. On my part, immune to such gimmicks, I would respond in kind, scribbling out my own crisp one- or two-word missive, at which point we would lean back and study each other for five, or ten, or fifteen dueling minutes.

  To illustrate:

  In our very first session Schultz passed me the words Captain Nineteen, followed by a large blue question mark. I furrowed my brow, considered the possibilities, then jotted down the words C’est moi.

  A cruel Germanic smile appeared at the doctor’s lips. Fantasies, he wrote.

  May I help? I responded.

  There ensued seven minutes of silence, each of us shrewdly examining the other for signs of tensile failure. I offered the man nothing—not a syllable. It was apparent, after all, that Schultz had already jumped to certain half-baked conclusions: that I had lost contact with the here and now, that I was somehow less than mentally airworthy.

  Eventually the grim Nazi glanced at his wristwatch. With a sigh, and with a worrisomely shaky hand, he scrawled something on his yellow notepad and passed it across to me.

  Death Chant? he had written.

  Chased!. I scribbled.

  Lorna Sue? he wrote.

  Judas, I wrote.

  Tycoon? he wrote.


  Hairy, I wrote.

  Suicide? he wrote.

  Avoid, I wrote.

  Which broke him. He tossed the notepad aside and leaned menacingly across the table. “Don’t get smart with me,” he snapped. “I saw the audition tape—making threats, gasoline bombs. You were dead serious, my friend.”

  I retrieved the pad.

  Theatrics, I wrote.

  “Nonsense,” said Schultz. His animosity—his undiluted hatred—had now bobbed to the psychotic surface. “You’ve got problems, Chippering—big problems—so try communicating like a normal fucking adult. Am I understood?”

  I reached for the notepad, but Schultz selfishly clasped it to his belly.

  “Forget it,” he said stiffly. “Talk to me. I refuse, starting right now, to read another word.”

  I raised my eyebrows at this.

  “I mean it,” yelled Schultz. “Try me!”

  From my pocket, therefore, I withdrew a scrap of paper—some long-forgotten damsel’s phone number—upon which I composed my reply. I folded the communiqué once and placed it on the table between us. Schultz shrugged. For some time, then, we remained at an impasse, a classic psychiatric standoff, both of us occasionally eyeing the scrap of paper.

  It was a question of self-discipline. I had it. Schultz did not.

  A twitch came to the corner of his lips. He folded his arms, refolded them, glanced down at my missive, then again stared at me with undisguised hatred. (God knows why, but I have discovered that the male fraction of our species responds poorly to my persona. Distrust at best. Raw loathing at worst. It should be noted, for instance, that I have no “buddies.” No chums or pals—at least not of the masculine variety. Except for the case of Herbie, and then only in childhood, I have been the lifelong victim of the most ferocious male jealousies and insecurities, a state of affairs with which I can wholly sympathize but that nonetheless remains a source of bitter regret. Only women, alas, seem to appreciate my quirky virtues. Thank heavens for the gentler sex. Politics and physique aside, I could cochair a NOW convention or take my seat at any midafternoon kaffeeklatsch.)