by Tim O'Brien
* It will be recalled that earlier in this narrative I promised to elaborate upon the grief-laden word balcony. Here, then, is indisputable evidence—Lorna Sue’s complaints notwithstanding—that I am a man who goes out of his way to honor a pledge.
* See Chapter 20 for an inspired and rigorous analysis of that much abused word commitment.
* At that instant it occurred to me, as it must now be occurring to you, that my earlier muteness may not have been entirely volitional.
† All my life, for as far back as I could remember, I had been prefacing my thoughts with the words Lorna Sue. I would be taking a bubble bath, say, and out of nowhere I might think—or say aloud—Lorna Sue, I need a bar of soap or Lorna Sue, where are you? or Lorna Sue, how the hell could you ever do this to me? Second nature. Nature itself. And to substitute the name Donna—to address myself with such intimacy to another being—seemed a violation of something hallowed and divine.
On the second day of July, Herbie and Lorna Sue and her pretty-boy tycoon arrived in Owago for the holiday weekend. By chance—or more accurately, I believe, by a gift of fate—I was out for a stroll that afternoon, alone, and happened to see the big blue Mercedes pull up just before dusk: tycoon at the wheel, Herbie beside him, Lorna Sue hogging the commodious backseat.
I did not, of course, literally gasp.* But I must say that the word instantly popped to mind, as if my brain had somehow done the gasping for me. My heart raced. I immediately sat down on a neighbor’s ill-tended lawn. It was one of those moments when the world comes into stark focus, when all the emotional horrors of a lifetime are squeezed into a single amazing instant.
For weeks, of course, I had known they would be arriving, yet the prospect had always seemed an impossible fantasy, a pipe dream. Bear in mind, I had not laid eyes on these three blackguards since the day of my public spanking. The passage of time, however, had done nothing to eradicate that brutal incident from my memory. Night after night, hour upon hour, I had been picking at it like a scab: my bared haunches, the disgrace, the sting, the twinkle in Herbie’s eyes, the tycoon’s swiftly descending yardstick, Lorna Sue’s indifference, the whole multiplicity of injustices and fifth-column betrayals.
Now, at last, here they were. Delivered to me like cattle for slaughter.
I had been ordered to depart Owago that very evening, and it was therefore necessary to inform my balky host that I would be extending my stay by at least two full days.
On the surface, Mrs. Robert Kooshof did not take the news well. She strode in the direction of the telephone, threatening eviction, at which point I hastily rose up and unplugged the whole works. I looped the cord around my neck. I pulled it tight. “Two additional days,” I declared, “will harm no one.” (Strictly speaking, this was not the case. Immense harm, in fact, would surely be the lot of a certain triad of perfidious love villains. Last gasps, et cetera.)
“Two days,” I said, and winked. “I’m sure we can find ways to make the time fly.”
Mrs. Kooshof took the cord from my neck.
“All right, I can’t evict you,” she said. “But it won’t change anything. I really do want you to leave.” Then she paused and squinted. “What’s happening, Thomas? I can tell by that silly smirk of yours that something—”
“It is not a smirk,” I said crisply. “It is a Fourth of July twinkle.”
Well into the night, as Mrs. Robert Kooshof slept the sleep of the spent, I moved in stealth to the garage. Pulled out my seven mason jars. Topped them off with an inch or so of fresh gasoline.
Fuses, I reminded myself, remained a problem.
First thing in the morning, I would put my mind to the matter. A solution would be found.
For now: a bit of reconnaissance.
A trial run, if you will.
My plan, as hinted at earlier, was to issue a loud, fiery, unmistakable wake-up call—not to hurt but to scare, to vaporize that private bubble of theirs, to let them know I was a human being and not some game piece on the checkerboard of treachery. (Childish, you think? I think not. Keep in mind your impulsive, somewhat less than mature trip to Fiji: how you contemplated your own ferocious wake-up call. Except you backed off. You went chicken. And you regret it, don’t you?)
So, yes, a trial run, and it was with fluttery glee that I advanced in my ruined robe and corduroy slippers to the big yellow house on the corner.
No surprise to find the front door unlocked. Small town. Slovenly household.
Easy.
Down a hallway, up a flight of stairs. Little had changed: the scent of mildew and boiled cabbage. The same old clutter, the same icons and crucifixes and ceramic figurines of the Virgin Mary. I bit down on my lower lip, paused briefly in the second-floor corridor, then slipped into the first of three darkened bedrooms. Door number one: degenerate old Earleen asleep in her wheelchair, Ned and Velva in the moonlit bed beside her. Door number two: Herbie in his underwear. Door number three: imagine my grief.
Obsessed?
Time heals all wounds?
Look on the bright side?
Wish them well?
Get on with my puny little life?
Bygones be bygones?
You do not know what I know. You did not see what I saw. Lorna Sue slept with her left arm hooked around the tanned, narrow, naked waist of a male individual whose name I have vowed never again to utter, a faceless nonentity whom you have come to know (from afar) as “the tycoon.”
Face reality?
I certainly did.
I squatted down and inspected the vile tycoon from a distance of eight or nine inches. Handsome, yes. Yet hardly flawless. Even in the pale, curtain-filtered moonlight I could make out his graying nostril hairs, a vast crop of winter wheat swaying with each lucky breath. An incipient blackhead upon the nose. A bulbous, crunchy-looking Adam’s apple. Sadistic lips. The telltale stains of hair dye. A chipped incisor.
And beside him lay Lorna Sue—those dark eyelashes, that summer-brown skin.
My state of mind, like my heartbeat, was irregular.
Indeed, yes: I faced reality.
Much too real.
I looked away. Drew a breath. Looked back again. It was this odious conjugal scene that I had been envisioning for so many months, a slow torture of the imagination, but now the undeniable facts took on a much more banal, vulgar, and lasting substance.* The girl of my dreams—my Juliet, my eternal Magdalene, my Lorna Sue—lay aboard a mattress† with this hirsute, interloping primate. (Surely, in your own tortured daydreams, you must have pictured your ex-husband snoring in the arms of his cheap new redhead? And with sufficient courage, would you not do as I did? Creep into their little thatched hut by the sea? Crouch at bedside? Stare into the love grave? Pay heed to each pornographic detail?)
Live vicariously, then:
The house was far from silent. Echoes of history. Childhood voices. The incessant racket of my own thoughts.
I should have strangled the son of a bitch.
Obsessed?
What is love, for God’s sake, if not the most distilled obsession?
Yes, I should have plucked off his pistil, crushed his purply parts with the sleek volume of summer fiction splayed open on the nightstand. Instead, I sighed and stood up and moved to Lorna Sue’s side of the bed. Even in the humid dark I could not help shivering.
Tentatively, I reached down and placed the flat of my hand upon Lorna Sue’s bared left hip, holding it there to absorb her warmth. She did not stir. (How things change. In the old days the slightest touch would have awakened her.) She slept like an angel. No bad dreams, no second thoughts.
Reality?
Of course.
Yet none of it felt real. A breach of nature. Even the flesh at her hip had the texture of plastic, as if this were a facsimile of the real Lorna Sue, grotesque and artificial, and with a little shudder I yanked my hand away.
I may have moaned.
Again, there was some dead time. I noted the digital clock at bedside—3:33 A.M. La
ter it read 3:55. Then 4:18. Briefly, I drifted off. Memories. Visitations. (It was a product of my imagination, perhaps, but at one point Lorna Sue seemed to sit up and take me in her arms. She repented. She promised a happy ending.) Thus, in such singular ways, I found it calming to while away those wee hours in the presence of my beloved ex-wife and her tycoon, to breathe their air, to appropriate their heartbeats, to share with them the fluid movements of the unconscious.
At the first sign of dawn I slipped into the bed of Mrs. Robert Kooshof.
“You’ve been gone,” she said.
“Just a walk.”
“A walk where?”
“Nowhere.”
“Bad night, then?”
I shrugged and said, “Not terrible, not good. Go to sleep now.”
“Down the street, I’ll bet. Sweet memories. Sweet Lorna Sue.”
I said nothing. For ten or fifteen minutes Mrs. Kooshof lay very still, her eyes fixed on a patch of pinkish light spreading out across the ceiling.
“Thomas?”
“Here.”
“Maybe I haven’t been totally clear. I do love you. Very much. All I can.”
“It’s clear.”
“But you still won’t …?”
The question dangled there—incomplete, unanswered—then she turned onto her side, facing away from me. Her crying was scarcely noticeable.
After an hour, when her breathing evened out, I curled up against her and shut my eyes, trying for sleep, but something in Mrs. Kooshof’s scent—her shampoo, I am almost certain—made me begin reviewing our months together. Simple things: meals, baths, bed. How she had taken me in, given me exactly what I needed. How loyal she was. How she never quit. Her vital data—all those manifest and uncommon virtues—filled nearly three pages in my ledger.
But what did I feel for her? What did I truly want? The human heart, I fear, is nothing if not ambiguous, and no definitive answers came to mind. It occurred to me, obviously, that the sensible thing would be to make amends as rapidly as possible: beg forgiveness, let the past be the past, marry her, fly off to Guadeloupe or Mexico City. For months now I had been living like a maniac, out of control, chasing my own diseased history, and in the marrow of my bones I knew that nothing good could ever come of it.
Even so, I was helpless—pulled along by the undertow of my own obsession, a need to finish things. Explosions in the attic. Windows cracking. Lorna Sue screaming the word sacred through eternity.
I could almost hear it.
“Sacred!” she’d wail—that pious, God-infected, betraying little sweetie pie. “Sacred!”
* I may have slightly misstated the above facts. My presence that evening was not altogether by chance. I had been on stakeout for three straight days—more or less around the clock. My feet were killing me.
*As the thread becomes the cloth, so do words weave themselves through the coarse, tattered fabric of our lives. Substance. See Chapter 6.
†Mattress. The horror!
Wednesday, July 3.
Summer hot, small-town quiet, but the entire day had a choppy, accelerating, out-of-control feel. After breakfast I checked on my seven bombs, bade adieu to Mrs. Robert Kooshof, then set off at a brisk pace for the Owago County Library to pursue some background reading on the subject of explosives. For all my military experience, I had little technical expertise in such arcana, and it was therefore with considerable gratitude that I was guided by my helpful young librarian (one Miss Laurel Swanson) to a dusty volume entitled Demolitions: A Handbook. The girl stood well within nose-shot as I perused the title’s index. (Her cologne, for the record, was generic Walgreen. Her toothpaste Gleem. Her mouthwash fruity—pineapples, I reckoned—but of indeterminate trademark. Other vitals: Viking-blue eyes, slim haunches, boarding-ramp pelvis, elfin ears, a bust of telescopic grandeur, all professionally fitted on six sleek feet of high-grade Swedish soapstone.) I was pleased, of course, to detect the usual seeds of infatuation in her eyes.
I snapped the book shut, squared my shoulders. “Just the ticket,” I told her. “I am in your debt, young lady, and can only hope to return the favor. Very soon, I trust.”
“No favor,” said Laurel. “I’m a Christian. A librarian too, so it’s my job.”
“Which you perform most exquisitely. A saint of the stacks.”
The girl shrugged, frowned, stepped back, squinted at the hefty volume in my hands. “Well, good luck,” she said. “I guess you’re making fireworks.”
“Fireworks?”
“Cherry bombs and stuff. That book there.”
“Ah, yes,” said I. “Fireworks.”
She bobbed her pretty Nordic head. “The Fourth of July, it’s my favorite almost, except for the holy days, Easter and Christmas. And don’t forget Lent—that’s probably the best of all. Sacrifice and everything.” Her voice was alarmingly nasal, her eyes aglow with a very tempting evangelism. She tilted toward me in a chummy, confidential pose. “I’m Church of Jehovah,” she said seductively. “What are you?”
“I?”
“Come on! Don’t be a shy goose. Your religious affiliation.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “Up for grabs.”
I eyed the girl’s twin telescopes, imagining the rewards and punishments of a quick look-see. (Yes/No. No/Yes.) A sad thing to admit, but I could not resist sinking my teeth into this tempting Swedish apple. A noon luncheon appointment was proposed; Miss Laurel Swanson greedily accepted. (Again, the world pays little heed to linearity; our lives wander to and fro, sometimes along scenic Scandinavian byways. A “tomcat,” Mrs. Kooshof called me—who would not take secret pride?—and even now, at the bitter end, I remained true to my essential self.)
Miss Swanson and I settled on a venue—the Rock Cornish Café—smiled our farewells, then parted ways with the mutual expectation that our noon hour would prove well and deliciously spent. (Cherry bombs, indeed!)
Thus booked, I retired to a quiet reading room and devoted the next hour to a study of detonators and primers and related technical topics. Fascinating material, to be sure, yet I found it hard to concentrate. A fuzzy feeling. No cohesion to the world. Even my immediate plans were less than fully formed: the problem of fuses still stumped me.
In midmorning, on a whim, I left the library, crossed the street to the Ben Franklin store, and once again inquired about the availability of firecrackers.
Same snippy salesgirl, same response. “I already told you,” she said, “they’re illegal. You can hear, can’t you? Try the playgrounds.”
I nodded dismally.
Odd thing: Not a single retaliatory barb popped to mind—in fact, no language at all—and as I turned away it struck me that my mental dexterity was rapidly deteriorating.
For the remainder of the morning, at times drifting outside myself, I wandered from park to park, with not a whit of luck. Blank faces. No explosives. The internal brain winds blew violent, chaotic snapshots here and there. A plywood airplane went pinwheeling by, then a turtle named Toby, then Herbie and the tycoon and Lorna Sue. At one point, in Perkins Park, a young tyke aboard a teeter-totter stared at me for several long seconds, his eyes fluent with pity.
“Firecrackers?” he said quietly. “Shit, man. You’re a grown-up, aren’t you?”
At noon, now thoroughly depressed, I arrived on schedule at the Rock Cornish Café. I waited in a back booth for thirty-eight minutes before Miss Laurel Swanson called to beg off. A sick colleague, she said. Couldn’t break away. Would it be satisfactory if she stopped by my home that evening?
As I put the phone down, a number of related thoughts swept in all at once.
First: Why had I not uttered the word No?
Second: What on earth was happening to me?
Third: Would Mrs. Robert Kooshof be willing to throw together a coffee cake?
——
The rest of the day is largely lost to me. More brain winds. Fuzziness at the moral periphery of things.
I do remember sitting on the brick steps of
St. Paul’s, where I had a vantage on both Lorna Sue’s house and my own.
I watched Herbie mow the lawn.
Watched the tycoon supervise.
Watched Lorna Sue bring out two bottles of beer. (She laughed at something. She swatted the tycoon’s rear end. She had no appreciation for the word sacred.)
My reaction to this, whatever it was, has now faded. Wistful memories, I suppose—good things and bad.
How much I had loved her.
How much I had lost.
Later in the afternoon, around four or five, I was surprised to discover myself standing at an ironing board in Mrs. Kooshof’s living room, pressing the wrinkles out of my old military uniform.
My erstwhile fiancée watched from the sofa.
“Tom, please,” she finally said.
“Please what?”
“Please tell me. What are you doing?”
I grinned. I held the uniform up. I showed her my twinkling Silver Star with its V-device for valor.
“A war hero,” I said. “Have I told you about it?”
The doorbell rang at 7:24 P.M. I had completely overlooked my invitation of hours earlier, and it was necessary to feign surprise as I escorted young Laurel into the living room.
“A guest!” I cried. “And what a delight!”
Even with Doomsday around the corner—my head crackling with short circuits—I could not shed the trappings of civility. I made the introductions, offered Laurel a seat on the sofa beside Mrs. Kooshof, selected for myself an upholstered easy chair directly opposite my two north-country beauties. (Scenic vista, safe distance.) It goes without saying that both of these succulent, high-spirited creatures were initially ill at ease; thus I took it as my first duty to assure them that this was purely a social visit, not a mating competition.
