Tomcat in Love (16 page)

—On not a single occasion, so far as I know, did Lorna Sue feign orgasm. She was brutally honest in this regard and kept me well informed.

—Though by no means expert in the kitchen, she was more than willing to try her hand at preparing a random meal. I remember, in particular, a heap of noodles seasoned with onion powder.

—I will tell the simple truth: I was in awe of her. As a twelve-year-old, and as a thirty-year-old, I dreamed Lorna Sue dreams. I lived inside her name. I was terrified of losing her even before she was mine to lose.

—I proposed to her at a New Year’s Eve party, in a ballroom at the university’s faculty club. I was a green, gangly graduate student; she was Lorna Sue, and beautiful. But we were in love. And for both of us it was a hard, happy, electric love, full of the past, full of the future. I had not planned on proposing that night, nor was marriage a topic we had ever talked about in any depth, but something in that festive ballroom: the temperature, the voices, the New Year’s Eve nostalgia—
something
, I do not know what—something magical and terrifying and glorious, something radiant, seemed to wrap itself around us and lift us up and carry us off to another region of our universe. I looked at her. Lorna Sue looked at me. (How do I convey this without sounding like an eighteen-year-old?) I loved her so much, and she loved me, and I tried to speak, tried to say
Marry me
but could not—I said nothing, no words at all—and her face went bright and she said, “Yes, I will, yes.”

—From the start, Lorna Sue and I had trouble sleeping in the same bed, a problem for which I was entirely to blame. I talked in my sleep. I twitched and moaned, flailed at demons, shouted the most vile obscenities. (Vietnam was still a fresh memory.) With the aid of earplugs, Lorna Sue did her best to endure all this, but in the end, after two or three weeks, she began spending nights in the spare bedroom. To this, of course, I vocally objected. “We’re husband and wife,” I reminded her. “I’ll call a doctor. I’ll find a cure.”

Lorna Sue shook her head.

“Too expensive,” she said. “The spare bedroom will be fine.”

She was thrifty.

—In our fourth year of marriage, Lorna Sue and I attended a convention of the Modern Language Association in downtown Las
Vegas, where I delivered to no small acclaim a scholarly paper entitled “The Verbs of Erotica.” On our final evening, to cap a happy time, we indulged in some gaming at a blackjack table in the hotel’s noisy casino. All night I handed her twenty-dollar bills. I won, she lost. But then, near midnight, our luck abruptly changed—a complete reversal of fortune—and Lorna Sue’s stack of chips grew like a skyscraper, while mine dwindled to nothing. Without thinking, I reached over and helped myself to a handful of green chips, at which point Lorna Sue snatched my wrist and yelled, “They’re mine!”

She was
very
thrifty.

—I do not mean to mock her. She was my sweetheart, the love of my life, the girl of my dreams. And I have lost her forever. Who, then, can blame me for some periodic vitriol? Look into your
own
broken heart.
^*
—A devout Roman Catholic, Lorna Sue missed only a single Sunday Mass in our many years together. She believed in the blood of Christ, its real presence, and accepted without question the doctrines of corporeal resurrection and immaculate conception. Even in bed, making love, she radiated piety the way lesser spirits radiate passion or good cheer. Artificial birth control was forbidden. At the instant before climax, as I beat my biweekly retreat, Lorna Sue would reach down to make certain that our uncoupling was complete. “It’s sad,” she’d say, “how men are so … so
messy
.” Clean of
mind, clean of body, she would produce a wad of Kleenex. (Do I exaggerate? I do not. And I can guarantee that over the years, no unwholesome substances gained entry into the pristine, well-vacuumed chapel of her soul.)

—I have already discussed her long, black, braided hair. But I have not explained how her flesh—the tissue itself—smelled of chlorophyll and coconut oil. (Like the mountains of Vietnam, I thought.) She favored a bath gel called Youth, a perfume called Forever, expensive skin products from the laboratories of France and Switzerland. She made regular use of a sunlamp. Eternal vigilance and a set of tweezers had for the most part eliminated unsightly chin hair.

—We honeymooned in northern Minnesota, at a resort called Portage Pines, where we spent seven days in the company of Lorna Sue’s family. The whole clan was there—Earleen, Ned, Velva, aunts and uncles, a jovial priest from Duluth, two cousins, the ever watchful Herbie. En masse, honeymooning as a family unit, we played charades, watched the sunsets, slept in the same communal loft each night. Awkward, yes. At times frustrating. Yet how could anyone fail to applaud Lorna Sue’s devotion to kin, her filial piety? “I’m a Zylstra,” she said. “This is how we do things.”

—She had a way with words. Often pithy. Always eloquent. “Don’t be an eighteen-year-old,” she once said.

—She was independent. She took several vacations alone, several others with Herbie. There were times when she would vanish entirely, for days on end, without warning and without subsequent explanation. She had secrets. She knew how to keep them.

—How does one do justice to things aesthetic? Her pouty lips? Those puppy-brown eyes flecked with orange and violet? The smooth, sloping transition from hip to waist? Physically, Lorna Sue was a marvel of anatomical engineering, expertly tooled, made for
the long haul. (On the day she walked out on me, her hair remained a lustrous coal black, her figure trim and dangerous.) Throughout our years of marriage, she had taken justifiable pride in her body, carefully attending to its needs, sometimes addressing it in the regal second person. She ran six miles a day. She avoided fats. She chewed vitamins like candy. At dinner one evening, when I suggested that we begin thinking about children, Lorna Sue put down her fork and hurried to a hallway mirror. “Ruin
this
?” she said.

—In strictly sexual terms, Lorna Sue’s most attractive feature, far and away, had to be that mysterious, purply-pink scar on the palm of her left hand. Call me macabre, or call me Catholic, but I found it arousing to moisten that awesome cicatrix with the tip of my tongue, to close my eyes and envision the instant of penetration—iron nail, pliant flesh—the sudden pain, the release from pain, the little cry rising from her throat. How could my tongue go elsewhere? For whatever reason that wrinkly red scar had a powerful, hypnotic effect on me, like a piece of pornography.

Not so for Lorna Sue.

“God, you’re such a sap,” she told me. “It’s just a worthless little scar. Nothing else.”

She was a realist, not a sentimental bone in her body, yet at the same time something rang false in her voice. Too flat. Too pat. At times I suspected that her entire being, her sense of Lorna Sueness, was purely a function of that small jagged scar. She hated it and adored it. (As perhaps she hated and adored herself.)

One evening I found her sitting on the lip of our bathtub, bleeding from the palm of her hand, using a nail file to gouge open the old wound.

She was crying.

She was a little girl again.

“For Pete’s sake,” she said, “give me some goddamn privacy.”

She was a mystery.

—How can I overlook the virtue of fidelity? During my long, dangerous year in Vietnam, Lorna Sue never once stepped out on
me. I know for a fact that she lived with her brother in Minneapolis. They shared a bedroom. She was chaperoned at all times.

—Sometimes at night I liked to relax in front of a good crime drama on TV. To her credit, no doubt, Lorna Sue found this sort of escapist fare beneath her. “How can you
watch
such garbage?” she’d mutter, often marching out of the room, sulking until I finally switched to a program of her choice. Lorna Sue had taste. She discriminated. Her eyes positively glowed through the full sixty minutes of
Melrose Place
.
^*

—Intelligent and well educated, with a bachelor’s degree in art history, Lorna Sue was determined from the start to make something of her life. “I need a real career,” she informed me on the eve of our wedding. “I mean, what if I divorce you or something? What if you get sick and die?” Thus, in our first year of marriage, she entered medical school at the University of Minnesota, then switched to law, then quickly back to medicine. In year two, she opened a dance studio in Saint Paul; in year three, in the wake of financial disaster, she received her calling as an actress, which led to a local television commercial featuring Lorna Sue’s exquisite calves and a pair of no-run panty hose. Although none of these career alternatives panned out, Lorna Sue doggedly pursued her dreams, traveling widely, exploring professional options in California and New Jersey, always faithful to her original pledge.

She was no housewife. Indeed, she was barely a wife at all.
^†

—She was a published author. Local church press. A cookbook. Her own kitchen-tested recipes. (This from a woman who only rarely set foot in a kitchen.) The pulses of our mother tongue, of course, were well beyond her, and in my role as ghostwriter I spent weeks translating the silly book into English, a chore for which I received the special thanks of a home-cooked dinner. (Noodles! Onion powder! Delicious!) She was tone deaf, to be sure, but determined to make the very best of herself.

—Unclouded by sentiment, guided by the ethics of realpolitik, Lorna Sue made her decisions with clearheaded pragmatism. She willed our love dead. She shot it through the heart. She divorced me. She did not look back. She removed herself to a new life, a new city, a new bed. She remarried almost instantly—a tycoon to boot. No time wasted. No decent burial, no mourning period.

I was never sacred to her.

—It would be instructive, finally, to explain how Lorna Sue came to lose her long black tresses. The place: my den. The time: a late evening midway through our marriage. The cause: a silly argument. (I was in the midst of rewriting her cookbook; Lorna Sue could not understand why all the “stupid commas” were necessary.) One thing led to another, and I made the mistake of suggesting that she find some other disciple to do her goddamn ghostwriting. It was the word
disciple
^*
of course, that set her off. (The
ghostwriting was no problem.) “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped, to which I responded with a churlish and very unfortunate remark about her “Jesus hair.” She paled. She backed away. Then without a word she spun around and rushed to the bathroom. By the time I caught up with her she had already succeeded in hacking off a good twenty-four inches of hair, at least a pound’s worth, and was in the process of plunging the scissors into the palm of her hand.

She did it twice. Hard.

The blood was copious—I nearly fainted—but Lorna Sue displayed not a sign of pain. She pulled out the scissors, held the bloody hand up to me.

“Jesus hair,” she said, not softly, not loudly either, just that flat, cold, neutral voice with which she would later tell me not to be an eighteen-year-old. “You don’t
know
me, Tom. Not at all. Comments like that one … I don’t think you ever will.”

She was a seer.

She could read the stars.

M
y literary endeavors demanded long hours, late nights, but I completed Toni’s thesis three days before departing for Tampa. She had given it her tentative approval on a Wednesday afternoon. (“A few tiny changes,” she’d said, “and you’re home free.”) By Friday morning I had finished the required thirty-eight pages of rewrites, plus footnotes and a bibliography, and at noon that day, only an hour behind schedule, I carried a hefty manuscript up the front steps of her dormitory. My raven beauty stood fidgeting in the sitting room. “You’re late,” she snapped, “and if I get docked for this, Tommy Boy, you’re in for a shitload of motherfucking shit.”