by Tim O'Brien
“Don’t ask me to leave,” she said. “You’re mine, Thomas.”
“This isn’t the occasion for—”
“It is the occasion. I belong here.” She regarded me with a calm directness I had never experienced before, a steadiness that Lorna Sue would never have attempted, certainly not equaled. “New world, Thomas. Understand me?”
“I do. Thank you.”
She nodded. “So where is our little firebomber?”
I raised my hands in a display of ignorance. Velva’s sobs had ebbed to a garbled moan, and a restful few moments passed before the woman was able to replenish her lungs.
“My little girl!” she screeched. “My house!”
(Which, to me, made not the slightest sense.)
Mrs. Kooshof assisted Velva to the sofa, depositing her beside Lorna Sue’s insensate tycoon. He, too, was weeping. Occasional nuggets of delirium issued from his debauched, wife-purloining lips.* I smiled and folded my arms. A curious peace passed over me at watching the DNA of this family come unknit before my very eyes.
Perhaps another minute went by, each lengthy second chockfull of blather, and then Herbie came into the room. Exactly how, or from where, I did not notice—he had snatched my arm even before I saw or heard him. (Like Mrs. Kooshof, he was dressed more or less for slumber: boxer undershorts, a T-shirt, bare feet.) He hissed something at me, made a meaningless gesture at the ceiling, then tugged me toward an open doorway at the far end of the room.
Mrs. Kooshof intervened.
“Slow down,” she said briskly. “What’s happening here?”
“The attic,” Herbie said. “Lorna Sue, she has those fucking bombs up there—Tom’s bombs—and we have to …” His voice snagged; he was having trouble, like the rest of the clan, pinning language to thought. He blinked at Mrs. Kooshof, plaintively tugged at me again. His face was layered with a shiny coat of sweat.
“Where Thomas goes, I go,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “Attic or no attic.”
“You can’t,” Herbie said.
“No cans, no can’ts. I am.”
“Yes, but listen, you don’t really … I mean, it’s dangerous.”
He was on the edge of panic, his voice ragged, yet even then my newly adhesive fiancée refused to budge.
“It’s settled,” she said. “I tag along.”
Behind us, Velva emitted another lungful of incoherence. Herbie glanced at her, then up at the ceiling, then at Mrs. Kooshof. “I can’t explain it now,” he said, “but you’re part of what’s going on here. What set her off, I mean.”
Mrs. Kooshof laughed. “She’s jealous?”
“Not exactly, but she thinks … she thinks you’ve corrupted Tommy. Subverted things.”
There was a rubbery silence before Mrs. Kooshof laughed again.
“Jealous!” she said.
Then Mrs. Kooshof looked at me. For all her showy courage, I could see she was frightened—of Lorna Sue, of me, of whatever remained between us.
“I’m still going,” she said. “I need to be in on this. Please.”
Herbie shrugged.
Without a word, he turned and led us up to the second floor, then down a corridor to the attic staircase. He motioned for Mrs. Kooshof to stop there; together, my old pal and I climbed twelve creaky steps into the loft.
I edged forward, one hand against Herbie’s back, the other reaching out for eternity.
The only illumination was supplied by a swath of moonlight streaming in from an open window to my left—the same window, in fact, from which Herbie had once gone rat-fishing with a terrified cat.
Directly ahead, in the dark, I heard a short giggle: the giggle of a seven-year-old.
I stopped and squinted. For a second I felt myself sliding off a psychic edge, tumbling backward. Here, in this musty old loft, Herbie and I had first broached the subject of a plywood cross, all the possibilities. (“It’ll be neat,” Herbie had said, and Lorna Sue had looked up from her dolls and smiled at me. We were in love. Puppy love, one might say, but it was full and genuine—as real as love can ever be. “Well, I guess so,” she had said, and then giggled.)
Now she giggled again.
I took another step forward, but in the next instant a great white star flared up directly in front of me.
I dropped flat to my stomach, thinking the crisp, elegant thoughts of a dead man. There was a sharp crackling nearby, another girlish giggle. “Easy now,” Herbie was saying, yet even then I had to will my eyelids open.
The rafters glowed yellow-orange. I rolled sideways and sat up.
Near the window, six feet away, Lorna Sue crouched with her back to the wall, chuckling at my folly, a blazing Fourth of July sparkler held high overhead. In front of her stood my three remaining bombs. Eerie, yes, but what unsettled me was the flickering image of Lorna Sue herself: both middle-aged and impossibly young. How she managed this I do not pretend to know. An illusion of circumstance, perhaps, or my own misapprehension, or the way she giggled, or her little-girl posture, or the fierce, undulating light of the sparkler, or some mysterious inner spirit that came bubbling to the Tampa-tanned surface of her skin. I shielded my eyes and looked again, not quite believing, but there was still that ghostly double exposure, that sense of beholding the child inside the woman.
Herbie saw it too. I know he did: by the way he put his hand on my shoulder; by the inflection in his voice when he said, “Don’t worry. It happens sometimes.”
Lorna Sue carved a quick, brilliant loop with her sparkler.
“It happens!” she said gleefully.
“Come on, please,” Herbie said. “Let’s just—”
“It happens, though! It happens, Tommy!”
Her voice had a lilting, melodic sound, like some singsong children’s chant. She made a face at me, leaned forward, and passed the sparkler over one of my rigged mason jars.
“Boom!” she cried. “It happens!”
I rose awkwardly to my feet.
In the flaring light I could make out my Joker’s Wild firecrackers, their slender white fuses jutting up from the jar lids. And I could also see the contempt in her face. (This is not to suggest that she appeared deluded or deranged. She knew what she was doing; she always had known.) Her gaze was steady. She was in command—quite literally—not only of her emotions but of our very grip on the here and now.
Herbie moved back a step. “Put it down,” he said. “Tommy’s here.”
“Oh, gee! Tommy!”
“Right, baby—just like I promised.”
“Funny old liar-liar, flirt-bird Tommy?”
“That’s the one,” said Herbie. “Let’s go downstairs now. We can talk there.”
Lorna Sue shook her head and grinned at me. “Scared?” she whispered.
“So it seems,” I said.
“Well, you should be. You should be a whole lot scared.” She gave her sparkler a quick twirl. “Just a scared old flirt-bird.”
I bobbed my chin, more or less assenting. (If nothing else, Lorna Sue had a keen eye for my spiritual shortcomings.) I dared an oblique glance at Herbie, who had inched forward a step or two.
Lorna Sue also noticed. “Hey, Tepee Creeper,” she said. “I think you better stop right there.”
“Sure,” Herbie said.
“You better.”
“Fine, honey, I’ve stopped. Let’s just—”
“Then stay stopped,” she said, almost playfully, and made another threatening sweep with her sparkler.
Herbie squatted down.
“Listen to me, sweetheart. You don’t want to hurt anybody, do you? Not really.”
“Maybe I do want to.”
“You don’t.”
“Well, that’s for me to know,” she said. “Either way, you better stay right there.”
“I will, sweetheart. I am.”
“And Tommy too.”
“Don’t worry. He’s not budging.”
Herbie’s calm impressed me. He spoke in a lulling, liturgical monotone, his movemen
ts as slow and practiced as any altar boy’s.
Clearly, this was a situation he had encountered more than once. Herbie the suppliant, Lorna Sue the dispenser of grace. Briefly, then, a number of thoughts came streaming at me in disarray: the whole unnatural bond between them, which I now perceived as a terrible shackling, each of them chained to a single summer day in 1952. She was forever the maimed girl-goddess; Herbie was forever her guardian and caretaker. They were frozen in the great permafrost of history. Stunted. Trapped. Compulsively, like a pair of drug addicts, they could not stop replicating the horrid past—a rusty nail, a plywood cross.* True, there were mysteries I would never fathom, a silent center to it all, but at bottom this was not an erotic relationship; I had been in error on that count.
At the same time, though, as I watched Herbie’s frightened, tender face, I could not help thinking that Lorna Sue had always been far more his than mine.
Hard to admit, but I had married a child.
How much time elapsed I cannot accurately estimate. Not long—probably only seconds—yet it seemed as if the three of us had been pressed together in that dark, stuffy attic for a lifetime.
When Lorna Sue’s sparkler came close to burning out, she used it to light another.
“Both of you,” she said, “you’re both to blame. And this whole smelly, rotten house. I should just blow it all up. Kaboom.”
“You shouldn’t,” Herbie said quietly.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t want that, princess. Because we all adore you.”
She flicked her eyes at me. “Even you, Tommy?”
“Even what?”
“Do you adore me?”
My gaze shifted to the three mason jars in front of her. “For the time being,” I said judiciously, “the issue seems neither here nor there.” I essayed a winning smile. “Those bombs of mine: how did you happen to …?”
“You spy, I spy, we all spy,” she said. “Answer my question. Do you adore me?”*
“Do I adore you?”
“Right.”
“That calls for a yes or no, I presume?”
“What the heck else?” she snapped.
And thus once again, my very existence now in the balance, I was dragged kicking and screaming into a familiar box canyon. The curious thing, however, was that the old, easy response did not leap to my lips. Not so long ago I would have screamed a defiant, ear-splitting Yes. Now I was not so sure. Moreover, to complicate matters, I could not help but be aware of Mrs. Robert Kooshof on the stairs behind me.
It was necessary to rely on instinct.
“Let’s put it this way,” I ventured, testing the elasticity of the past tense. “You were my one and only. You were the girl of my dreams.”
“Were?” she said alertly.
“Why quibble over—”
Lorna Sue cut me off with a caustic laugh. “Right there,” she said, “that’s why I should blow you to pieces. Always evading. Like when you sucked Faith Graffenteen’s nose, you couldn’t just admit it.”
“That was a lifetime ago,” I said irritably, “and I sucked no one’s nose. A buss upon the cheek. And she forced me.”
“Forced you?”
“Exactly,” I said, and sighed.
We had plowed this fallow ground before, and it struck me that nothing in our lives ever comes to absolute closure—not love, not betrayal, not the most inane episode of youth. We are surrounded by loose ends; we are awash in whys and maybes. An absence of faith, one might call it.
Lorna Sue instantly proved the point.
“I suppose all the rest of them forced you? The ones in your ledger?”
“I never—”
“What crap!”
(No faith: case closed.)
Her voice had gone hoarse and gummy, no longer that of a schoolgirl. “Anyway, don’t go blaming it on me,” she said, and moved her sparkler to within lethal range of the bombs. “I’m not the one who went after anything in a skirt. Or lied. Or kept a ledger under the mattress.” She lighted a fresh sparkler. “And now you’ve got some fresh new bimbo.”
“Bimbo,” I said, “would be incorrect.”
“It is correct. Get on your knees.”
“Pardon?”
“Your knees.”
“You aren’t serious?”
“Down,” she said.
I studied her for a moment—this woman I had never known—and then suddenly, to my own astonishment, I found myself smiling. Mrs. Kooshof was right: jealousy. Or close enough to offer a kind of consolation.
A door squeaked open inside me.
Did I love her? I did. Was she still sacred? She was not.
Lorna Sue looked at me hard.
One cannot be certain about such things, but perhaps she noted the shift inside me. A vein fluttered at her forehead. Slowly, she pushed up to her feet, moved back a step, and then transferred the hot end of the sparkler to the palm of her left hand.
I could smell the flesh cooking.
“I mean it, I’ll blow you up,” she said. “Everybody. Myself too. Don’t think I’m not serious.”
“You always were.”
“Down.”
I shook my head. Amazing, but I heard myself uttering that daring, difficult, conclusive word, No.*
Lorna Sue gaped at me.
“We’re not kids anymore,” I said. “No kneeling. No, thanks. Just no. No more games.”
“This isn’t a game!” she screamed. “God, are you blind? I’m burning myself.”
“Blind is what I was.”
I turned.
I made my way to the stairs.
Then I turned back again.
For a man who lives by words, a man whose very being amounts to little more than language, it came as the ultimate satisfaction—indeed, the only vengeance that could ever make a difference—to stop and square my shoulders and return to Lorna Sue the parting gift of a long, cold, reptilian stare.
“A piece of advice,” I said. (Imagine the thrill in my bones.) “Grow up. Don’t be a seven-year-old.”
In the end it was neither Herbie nor I who disarmed the former girl of my dreams. It was Mrs. Robert Kooshof. She walked across the attic floor, took the sparkler from Lorna Sue’s hand, extinguished it, then joined me at the top of the stairs.
Not a minute later we were on the sidewalk outside, heading home.
Which brings me, finally, to add a word in behalf of my steadfast companion, paramour, mistress, consort, and buxom bride-to-be.
To those tyrants of gender who would denigrate her, who would dare lift their noses and call Mrs. Robert Kooshof spineless or submissive or wishy-washy—to all such blind, bewhiskered, man-hating ideologues I belligerently submit that there is something to be said for essential goodness. There is something to be said for decency. There is something to be said for tolerance and endurance and faith and forgiveness and rugged hope and never, never giving up.
She tossed the sparkler into the street.
Later she prepared breakfast for two.
Weak? A doormat?
“Do the dishes,” she said, “then pack your bags. This is history, Thomas.”
* I was pleased to note that the man’s IQ had plummeted like the mercury on a deep-freeze thermometer. Handsome, yes, and tycoon rich, but at the moment he could not have passed first-grade finger painting. All of us, I believe, can take heart in the scene. Things come around. Now and then, given time and patience, the world does in fact dispense a kind of justice.
* A common phenomenon. Little Red Rhonda, for instance, once confided to me that she had been the victim of a sexually abusive father. “Even so, for some stupid reason,” she told me, “I keep chasing perverted old fruitcakes like you.” (A sad story. I comforted the girl as best I could.) It also occurs to me, by the way, that I cannot exclude myself from this redundant psychological paradigm. Again and again, over the course of a lifetime, I seem to have repeated certain fundamental mistakes. Witness the word mattress. Witness a
well-stocked love ledger. Witness my desperate, bumbling, ill-starred attempts to win a hand or two in the rigged poker game of romance.
* Adore. Check your Webster’s Third, sense number 1: “to worship with profound reverence: pay divine honors to: honor as a deity or divine: offer worship to.” (At this point I would suggest that you pause to ask yourself a simple binary question: In your heart of hearts, after all is said and done, do you still adore your faithless, unfaithful ex-husband? Does the word adore mean what it once meant? Is not language itself as pliable as the human heart? Yes or no?)
* Odd thing. The word was no—spoken quietly, barely a whisper—but it felt to me like a loud, liberating, sublimely heroic yes.
And so we reside for the present on a balmy, hospitable, out-of-the-way island somewhere southeast of Tampa, somewhere north of Venezuela, a spot on our planet whose precise latitude and longitude must for security reasons go undisclosed. Mrs. Robert Kooshof makes pottery. I prune the bougainvillea, cultivate vegetables, fine-tune this personal record. In the evenings we consume fresh fish, a drink or two, and very often each other.
We have dwelled here nearly six months. Tomorrow is Christmas.
A new life, one could say. And a very good life, all considered, at least for the time being. We live in the hills above a lovely aqua bay, in what our leasing agent calls a “Villa” but that in fact is little more than a small, pink-painted prefab, of which there are far too many in these parts. There is a kiln out back, a garden that requires much fertilizer. We have few neighbors. A quarter mile down the slope, where the hills flatten out into tourist country, there is a modest parish town—more a village, actually—whose quaint, Frankish name I am not at liberty to reveal.
Beyond the town, along the beach to the west, is a thriving Club Med.
On weekdays Mrs. Kooshof rises early. She walks down the gravel road that winds into town, thence to a tiny shop just off Rue du——, where she peddles her pottery under the somewhat fraudulent tag of “native ware.” But give her credit. It is her dream, after all, and the dream has come true. She owns a half interest in the shop. She seems content. She wears colorful pareus and shell jewelry and often a blossom in her hair. She is tropic brown. Her clients are mostly widows and librarians, perhaps a few pensive newlyweds, all fresh off the cruise ships that ride at anchor in our pretty aqua bay.
