Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  But I held out for two years, because I really intended to be faithful to Nat.

  Then there was an incident which scared me. I always wondered why it should have been the colonel’s wife that triggered it but now I see it was probably just because she was no doll. What I mean is, with the slim and enticing ones I was on my guard, putting up screens the moment I came near them but Mrs Lombroso, whose husband was in command of catering for the whole Middle West, was maybe forty, plump and none too gorgeous. Yeah, that was probably it. Probably, I just let down my guard.

  It happened at a cocktail party and, apart from Letty, whom I’d taken along in case I needed any shorthand, I doubt if there was a good-looking female in the place. They were all customers or business contacts. I’d heard that the way to Colonel Lombroso’s favour was through his wife—and not like that, wise guy! Just that he took her advice. So I spent half an hour soft-soaping Mrs Lombroso who was pleasant to talk to. Then we were easing down a crowded staircase that led from the exhibition hall to the main boozing room and conversing lightly about the fascination of Mexico. Mrs Lombroso was ahead of me and at some point she turned to offer me some titbit about the Aztecs and I got a glimpse of her breasts. She was wearing a low-cut dress and she was two steps down from me and I had visual access to practically all her bosom. Hell, Horace, it was like a body blow before you’ve tensed, the way they got Houdini. I quickly swung my glance up to her beaming face and held it there like a compass needle to a magnet. But I could still perceive the white blur of her breasts and the roar of the whirlpool of desire in my brain totally obliterated the words issuing from the lady’s mouth. Just for an instant, I thought I was going to sway dizzily forwards onto her and I had a vision of us thumping entwined into the midst of the crowd at the bottom of the stairs. Then my stomach heaved and I felt I was about to spew all over the heedless lady. I muttered:

  “Excuse me.”

  And I whirled and bolted up the stairs. I hastened to the john and there I leaned over the bowl for a couple of minutes, wretching feebly. But I didn’t actually puke so after a while I put down the seat and then sat down on the john, lit a cigarette, and had a long, sad think.

  It seemed I wasn’t going to make it. Hell, I’d suspected, even in my early courting days, that I wasn’t going to be one hundred per cent satisfied with one woman for the rest of my life. I’d had a powerful feeling that I’d always have a wandering eye and I’d even guiltily found myself speculating, even before Nat and I were formally hitched, if there might not be any chance of philandering a little afterwards. But I had never anticipated having to face anything as stupendous as this. It was like going for a sail on a windy day and finding yourself bucking a hurricane.

  I was sad, Horace, because I loved Nat with all my heart and I knew then I was going to hurt her. Personally, I had never seen much point in fidelity. I didn’t believe, as my ma and pa had, that God gets very uptight at promiscuous behaviour. It seemed to me, at the least, kind of trivial and demeaning for a deity, if there was any deity, to get worked up about that kind of thing. But Nat, unlike most of her generation of Englishmen, had pretty traditional views about marriage and so monogamy had been tacitly accepted as our way of life.

  That night, I said to Nat:

  “Hey, this is crazy. You know what happened today? Well, Letty was up on a ladder getting down some files and I happened to glance up and I made some kind of crack—”

  “What kind of crack?”

  “Oh, something like: I never knew you had showgirl’s legs—something like that. But you know what Letty did?”

  “What?”

  “I mean—hell—she’s always seemed to me—modest as a bum’s legacy—I mean, she comes from Hicksville some place and—sure, she’s a great secretary but I never thought of her as much more feminine than a—a typewriter. But when I made that crack, she turned on the ladder, posing like a burlesque queen, and hitched her skirt even higher. I mean—I could see her panties, for God’s sake!”

  “How nice for you.”

  “Well, I have to admit she’s pretty well stacked but all I felt was astonishment. She said something like: are they good enough for Broadway? Her legs, she meant. I pretended not to hear—just got on with my work. You know, I’ve noticed it before. Authority does that to some women. They just can’t resist authority. I could sure as hell see from the way Letty looked at me that—well—”

  “That what?”

  “That she wouldn’t have fought too hard—I mean, if I’d made a play—”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “Hell, no. You know that.”

  “Did you want to?”

  “Definitely not—never. I mean—I am human. Maybe for a split second—what I mean is, it’s natural, isn’t it? It’s an instinctive reaction. You could practically say it was a conditioned reflex. You know that, honey. Men are so fixed that they respond to erotic signals from dames. Naturally, I didn’t want to feel anything but I guess maybe with the instinctual part of my nature I responded. That’s okay, isn’t it, honey? I guess you’d be pretty disappointed if you had a man who wasn’t a man—who didn’t respond like a man, right?”

  “Then you’re saying that—you wanted to seduce Letty?”

  “Just with the instinctual part of me. What I mean is, if everything had been equal—say if I’d have known that you wouldn’t have been mad—maybe then I would have done.”

  Nat was staring at me hard, Horace, and I felt slight anxiety. But then she smiled and I figured she understood. I put out my arm to draw her towards me and she punched me on the cheek. For an instant, I was bewildered. The blow hadn’t hurt me but it had been too fierce to mistake for a caress. Then why was she smiling? I urged:

  “Hey, take it easy—”

  And she punched me on the other cheek with the other fist. She screamed:

  “You rotten, faithless man—”

  And I realized that I’d mistaken the contraction of rage and hurt on her face for a smile. She was quivering with passion and I experienced a kind of awe at the intensity of it. I pleaded:

  “Nat! What the hell! I haven’t done anything.”

  But she again surprised me by making a tiny, uncontrolled lunge as if she was only just able to keep from pounding me with both hands. I hopped back, symbolically raising my hands to ward off the attack.

  “Honey, you couldn’t think seriously that I’d ever be unfaithful to you or even want to be?”

  But she’d expended the force of her rage and now sagged down into the mud of despair. She wept and sobbed. I comforted her for quarter of an hour—more—reiterating my utter, intact, unbreachable devotion, deriding scornfully the idea that any woman that lived could deflect my glance for one instant from my love, invoking our years of seamless happiness, lacing the whole with ardent compliments and tender protestations.

  The fact is, Horace, she’d scared me. Nat had put the fear of God into me. I’d suddenly realized that she was capable of maniacal jealousy in which she might do anything. Hell, I don’t mean I was scared she’d hurt me. I was scared she might hurt herself. Worse, I was scared she might hurt our marriage which was the most real and mellow thing in the world for me. So, all the time I drenched her in loving words, part of me was busy with panicky contingency plans. I was thinking: Christ, the mood she’s in, she’s capable of going to see Letty and then she’ll find out it never happened and—Christ!—she’ll despise me!

  More than in any tricky business deal, more than in any bar, brothel or casino play, it seemed to me vital that Nat never find out the truth, which was that I’d made the whole thing up, Letty and the goddamm ladder and her goddamm legs which I’d never seen higher than the goddamm knee.

  And I marvelled at how I could have made such a dumb move. I’d done it more or less on impulse when I’d suddenly recalled the incident with Mrs Lombroso and my feeling that I’d go crazy if I couldn’t get a little relief from monogamy. So I’d lightly spun that little yarn to test Nat and, in my smug
stupidity, I’d imagined Nat’s response would be to nod ruefully and admit that she’d noticed my slight restlessness. She’d then declare that she wanted me to be happy and, if I promised to be considerate about it, why I could take off with another chick now and then. And I’d protest:

  “Gee, honey, I couldn’t do that.”

  And she’d say:

  “Yes, you can, Tornado. With my blessings. I’m not saying it won’t hurt but I am saying that it won’t hurt too much. I can take it and it’ll be worth it to me.”

  “How do you mean, honey?”

  “I mean that when you’re with me at least I’ll have all of you. This way, there’s always a part of you elsewhere, helplessly trailing some woman.”

  And I’d grin sheepishly and reverently call her an angel and—yowee!—dive mentally into the muff of Rhoda, or Wanda or Gladys or—any one of the hundred other Chicago dazzlers who’d go plumb crazy with delight at the chance to slip down their panties for Tornado Pratt!

  Did I really believe that? Seems incredible. The only explanation is that I was so used to getting anything I just had a yen for that when I began to want something as badly as I wanted extramural pussy why I just couldn’t accept that it was streng verboten.

  But I really knew, Horace. That’s the truth, boy. We know everything. I sometimes think that. We mask off this or that part of our knowledge, just so we can act, so we can take another step through the morass of life, but later, if we comb out the mites of warning, screen out the particles of prediction from our memory, why—we knew it all along.

  Sure, some part of me knew that Nat would respond as she did. But if I knew, then it must follow that I wanted her to respond as she did or at least wanted what flowed from her response. And that was mess and misery. How can I have wanted that when I hated it? What you hate, booms Uncle Sigmund from the deep, you really love. Who does? The you that you don’t know. But that’s not really I! How can it be? I am tired, Horace, and I am old and I beg to be excused. I admit I was never a scholar but I was never dumb and since the day I contracted reading from a captain of marines many books have fluttered in my grasp. I have ranged the prairies and the hills of thought, Horace, and plunged into the loathsome depths of the inky pool to inspect the monsters that flap beneath consciousness and culture. But leave me be, now, boy. Don’t make me face the worst again—here, in Acapulco—is this Acapulco?—wherever the hell it is—when I’m about to flip the table and bounce out of the game. Because I’ve examined it before, Horace, so often, the “I”—my proud “I”, Horace—the grandeur of Tornado Pratt—the rock of my personality—perceived as a leaf in a storm, swooping and soaring, spiralling amongst trees and towers, then scooped up by a gust into a new frenzy in the sky. That is my mind, Horace, the utter me—not a boulder or pyramid—but a wisp in a whirlwind.

  Well, I have tried to harness that feather to the task of charting its own course and purpose—and failed. And that has generated anguish. And I’ve known that many times, Horace. Nor am I claiming anything unique in the perception. All good men, whose brains buzz high, range through all the puzzles and paradoxes of being. And, like me, when baffled beyond bearing, seek solace in a bottle. But now, Horace, it’s too late. Where can I get a drink? Here on the margins of the world there are no bars. So don’t pester me, boy, to confront the grimy truth again—not now!

  FLAGRANT INFIDELITY OF HYPOCRITE TYCOON

  For six months after the Letty incident, I minded my Ps and Qs. Whenever some doll at a party would start beaming her appeal at me, I’d switch off fast. Hell, I even had a sprinkler system going. Hint of tit or pussy, hip even, belly, knee—any sex-lure start flashing anywhere in my neighbourhood, doting thoughts of Nat would flood through my mind and sluice out the irritant. You see, Horace, I wouldn’t have jeopardized my marriage for anything. If I could, I’d have stayed out of mischief, which in this context means other women’s bodies, for the rest of my life to please Nat. But I couldn’t make it, boy, not in the lying world we’ve built. Because that’s what it is, boy.

  Suppose I’d gone to Nat one day and said:

  “Honey baby and most dear light and companion, I must say something disagreeable.”

  And then gone on to confess candidly and sadly that all my adoration for my wife could not obscure the innumerable candles burning beside her altar and that their flames plucked continually at my awareness. Why if I could have done that, we might have made sense of it in the end—perhaps even found a new way of life —purged of the lies, lies, lies that belch and gurgle through our culture, turning Eden into Disneyland and lovers into clowns. See what I mean?

  But then after six months, something irresistible cropped up. Now what the hell was it? That dame on the beach who called me over for a light and then ostentatiously stroked her—no—hell, that was years later and—sure!—in Chile. So, in that case—I keep getting a flash of Betty but hell that wasn’t even me—that was Austin and by that time—I got it! It was the reporter—the midget—only about four foot eleven, pretty as a doll. Yeah—she came to the office for an interview and—amazed me—because that tremulous, fragile thing—say, you wouldn’t have believed, Horace, that she could have taken on anything more robust than a choir boy. But she was one hundred per cent nympho because, just as she was going, she squeezed my hand—hard. So I searched in her eyes, puzzled, and she winked at me. Hell, boy, ten minutes later she was screeching beneath me on the thick pile carpet of my office and I recall that even as the waves of bliss began to pulse through me a spectral lawyer in my mind had already begun to wrestle with the problem of how to square Letty who might hear something.

  But she didn’t because—yeah, that was the bitch! I never had to square Letty. She’d gone out of the office for some reason and so I got clean away with it. Why was that the bitch? Think, boy! If I’d had a bad time with Letty it might have kept me straight, for some time anyhow. But having that joy-ride and no comeback, it made me greedy and reckless. So I pulled Wanda about a week later and screwed her in the back of the Caddy on the way home from the office. And Nat never suspected a thing. Nor the next time. Nor the next. I reckon it was about the twentieth or thirtieth time I came unstuck.

  Then Nat caught me out by careless words and pride. We were walking out on the lakeside in high summer. The breeze off the lake kept the air bearable but when it died the naked sun clawed at your skin. A bunch of black kids were diving bare-ass from a jetty, shouting:

  “Tasmania! Tasmania!”

  I had an impulse to join them. I was a porpoise in big surf but there was no surf here and orange peel and scum ringed each pile of the jetty. Although I knew the water was foul, I still felt an impulse to plunge with those imps into the tainted depths. I said:

  “They sure do love the water. There was one here last week—”

  Then I stopped because I realized that I’d blundered. The week before I’d strolled this same waterside with a Swedish girl called Ingrid. To camouflage the pause I glanced away as if I’d seen something enthralling. Then, deciding it was a minor and not very threatening slip, I resumed:

  “—yeah, there was a black boy couldn’t have been more than ten doing swallow dives and jack-knives from that pile.”

  “Really? But how did he get up it?”

  “Just walked up—remember how we saw them walk up coconut trees in Hawaii?”

  “Oh, wasn’t that amazing?”

  “He just walked up the pile the same way.”

  There was a little silence and then Nat said:

  “I didn’t know you were out here last week, Tug?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I grunted the affirmative absently, meanwhile conducting a lightning debate in my mind as to the relative merits, for purposes of deflection, of halting and eagerly pointing to something in the surrounding scene, squeeezing Nat’s hand as if overcome by an affectionate impulse or just strolling quietly on, which wouldn’t deflect but might lull. The consideration, however, went on a fraction of a second too lon
g for convincing implementation of either of the first two courses and I was just beginning to realize that I was stuck with the third when Nat asked:

  “But what day was that? You didn’t mention it.”

  “Sure I did—Thursday when I got home.”

  Now the options were dwindling. Nat was far too cute to be deflected by clichés like: well, it wasn’t important. Or: Hell, I don’t mention everything I do. We shared—or at least she still thought we shared—all things and if I’d left my office one day last week and driven thirty miles out of Chicago, I’d certainly have told her about it. I could already sense Nat glancing at me dubiously and the little vortex of her dawning disquiet. She protested:

  “Did you? I don’t remember. Thursday? But, Tug, Thursday you were at the board meeting all afternoon?”

  Now the lions were snarling close. Could I tell her I was here Thursday morning? To what end? What had the weather been like? Would the kids have been swimming? Anyhow, I hadn’t much alternative, so—and I felt the rush of blood heat my face at the blunder I’d been about to make. I’d phoned Nat Thursday morning. And if I’d been out here I’d certainly have mentioned it. So what was left? Could I switch to another day? Nat was now sifting her own memory.

  “It was Thursday, wasn’t it? The board meeting? Yes, it must have been because—”

  Suddenly, Horace, the solution homed. Oh, she was cute! Nat was cute—with a mind like a gardener. She knew just where everything was sprouting but—she didn’t know a hell of a lot about business. If I made out we often held board meetings outside Chicago, that we had a slap-up meal, liquor—told her that we’d booked a hotel suite out here for this occasion and—

  The torpedo that came hissing out of my psyche to sink this trim-looking craft, Horace, was pride. The hell with it, I thought. The hell with it! What have I done wrong, for Christ’s sake? So I screwed Ingrid? So we bounced together on the double bed that flowers in my conniving automobile? So what? What does that take from Nat? Why the hell do I have to cringe into hypocrisy? I frowned. I felt the swamp-water of anger beginning to rise in my heart. I growled: