Tomcat in Love (32 page)

She ate like a horse. She could not stop beaming at me, giddy and teary-eyed.

I hated to dampen her day. Such unqualified joy is a rare phenomenon, especially in this cynical age of ours, but it seemed necessary to remind my well-lighted fiancée of the circumstances in which I now found myself: a career in wreckage, not a prospect in sight.

Mrs. Kooshof scarcely listened. She gazed at her new ring with the calculating squint of an appraiser. “Well, nothing’s insoluble,” she said. “You can move in with me for a while, find work here in Owago.”

I laughed bitterly. “Impossible. I’m a scholar, not a J. C. Penney clerk.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“And I might add,” I said, “that this burg is hardly brimming with good memories. Think about it—I grew up here. Same house, same backyard. I’m a professor of linguistics, for God’s sake, a man of the world.”

Mrs. Kooshof nodded. “But couldn’t you—I don’t know—couldn’t you find something temporary? Some odd job to tide you over?”

“I cannot imagine
what
. Farm machinery is not my forte.”

I sighed and leaned back.

Abruptly, as if struck by a sledgehammer, I felt the full weight of the past twenty-four hours. A defeated sensation. In the course of one vertiginous spin around the earth’s axis, I had been stripped as if by a centrifuge of the last elements of my old identity, the man I once was, those few remaining sources of personal pride and self-esteem. Everything had come to nothing. Everything signified nothing. Even my grandiose plans for revenge, which had kept me going
in the absence of all else, now seemed sterile and pitiful and forlorn. Yes, even a speck ridiculous.
^*

There was nothing to hope for. And without hope, our chief bulwark against madness, the human spirit becomes unpredictable and sometimes dangerous.

I was hurt.

And I wanted to hurt back. No longer for revenge—just to hurt and keep hurting.

“Maybe you’re right,” I told Mrs. Kooshof. “Find a job teaching gender studies. Wait for opportunity to strike.”

A
nd you? Do you have a name?

Better without. Unique as you are—and do not for a moment think otherwise—you also represent every brokenhearted lover on this planet, every stood-up date, every single mother, every bride left weeping at the altar, every widow, every orphan, every divorcée, every abandoned child, every slave sold down the river. You are the unmailed valentine. You are the forgotten birthday, the broken promise, the lapsed Catholic, the thirty pieces of silver, the abiding question of the ages: “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

All this, yes.

But you are also, admit it or not, Thomas H. Chippering. Granted, your ex-husband dwells in Fiji, and your heart aches, but like me, you are not entirely without blame. Because you, too, have had your secret love ledgers, your flights of fancy, your delusions, your checks under the mattress, your flirtations and unplugged telephones and petty betrayals of the flesh and spirit.

You are forty-nine years old. (Or thirty-nine, or twenty-nine.) You live alone. You cook for one.

But you have done your best, haven’t you?

You drive to work each weekday morning. You pretend to be what you are not, chatting with your friends, attending dinner parties, visiting relatives. You’ve thrown away his tennis racket. Scrubbed his cigarette smoke from your carpets and upholstery. But still, at odd hours of the night, you find yourself paging through the memory books, just as I do. (Your lakeside wedding. Your white satin dress. How much you loved him—all that faith.)

At times you second-guess yourself. Too dependent, you think. Took him for granted.

But then later, like me, you feel the sorrow come crushing down again. You realize that it was he who quit, he who abandoned you, he who flew off to Fiji in the company of a statuesque redhead named Sandra. (The word
Sandra:
you hear it on the radio, you come across it in a book, and it slices through your ribs just as surely as any lance or bullet. You hate the name, don’t you? You loathe its harmonics, each bitter vowel and consonant.)

And so, yes: One frantic afternoon you left work early, drove to the airport, dashed inside, and without batting an eye purchased a two-thousand-dollar ticket to Fiji.

An impulse, wasn’t it?

No reservations, not even a suitcase, and after seventeen sleepless hours you found yourself checking into a resort hotel only four or five miles from his cute little house by the sea. You dined alone, as always. You felt forlorn—a little crazy, a little lost. (I’m on the right track, am I not? I
know
you. And I know what betrayal is.) You had no real plan in mind, just a craving to witness a fragment of your husband’s new life, or to validate your own nightmares. And yet for a day or two you did not once leave the hotel. You sat by the pool. Ordered from room service. Hated yourself, hated him. Loved him. Cried. Hated him. Kept your eyes open for redheads.

Then finally, half terrified, half blind with anguish, you rented a car and drove south along the coast toward Suva. The road was narrow and treacherous—remember? It turned to gravel, then to dirt.
Hot day. Flower smells. (You were drenched in Fiji.) Eventually you found his new house, but like some lovelorn teenager you circled and drove by again, then again, several times, both hoping and not hoping that you might catch sight of him.

What was it you wanted here? Confrontation? Apology? Reparations? Face it: like me, you did not have the slightest idea. You heard yourself cursing at one point—foul, goatish, God-hating language—words you never knew you knew. You told him off good, didn’t you? Yes, you did. But then you collapsed against the steering wheel. You bawled at the sky, just as I had, for this was Fiji—lush and horrid—and nothing you could say or see or do would ever change anything. (What hurt most, I am sure, was the sudden certainty that romance would never again be romance, that you had nothing left to believe in, that the word
Fiji
would forever call to mind this golden, shimmering, love-forsaken paradise.)

You drove straight to the airport. (Left behind that new sundress you had put on hold.)

On the flight eastward you watched a movie with a happy ending, one that would not be yours. You drank martinis. You skimmed an advice column in
Cosmo
. (“We cannot commit to the future,” wrote this well-meaning nitwit, “unless we come to terms with the past.” Nice symmetry, nice sentiment. But you now understand, as I do, that the phrase “come to terms with” means “to assent” or “to agree.” And you do not agree. The terms are intolerable—you reject them—in particular the term
Fiji.
)

But realize this: Fiji is not Fiji.

Fiji is Pittsburgh. Fiji is Boston or London or Santa Fe or wherever else your faith has gone.

So close your eyes, my sweet, those lovely blue-green eyes, and remember standing on a dock upon a lake in a piney woods, in your white satin dress. Let me hear you take your vows again, alone this time, or with me beside you, two eccentrics, two lost and foolish souls. We know what sacred is, don’t we?
^*

I
did not descend to teaching gender studies. I did, however, accept a part-time appointment as an instructor at the Owago Community Day Care Center. Frying pan to fire? Perhaps so. The remuneration was abysmal, the pedagogic chores beneath my station, yet in virtually every regard my twelve attentive students proved far superior to those I had shepherded through our state university system. They were obedient in the main, open to new ideas, far less interruptive of my home life. Two or three of my toddling charges, in fact, showed clear signs of lingual promise, or at the very least had not yet developed the bone-chilling habit of misusing the word
hopefully
in every other goddamned sentence. (Pay attention, America! Do not say: “Hopefully she will sleep with me.”
She
isn’t hoping.
You
are. Do say: “I ogled her hopefully.”)

So, yes, the part-time job was fine.

But at this point I must come clean: I was on very shaky spiritual ground. Public humiliation. A lost wife, a lost career.

My return to Owago, to put it bluntly, was fueled by a single thermonuclear motive, namely to strike back at the Zylstra clan with every kilowatt of energy I could muster. I was seething. Day and night, night and day, I had that Son of Sam tick in my heart. How could one forget, or forgive, the sting of a public spanking? How could one overlook the unspeakable facts of cuckoldry and conjugal treason and perverse brotherly love?

It was all too much for me. I could feel the walls cracking in my soul, the seams splitting.

No more silly pranks.

Late one afternoon, after completing my day care duties, I was drawn by a sort of horizontal gravity into a hardware store off Main Street, where (in what can only be described as a sleepwalker’s silver haze) I purchased a large, bright-red, ten-gallon gasoline container. Ten minutes later I arrived at the local Texaco station. I do not recall how I made my way home—I remember only the pungent smell of high octane—but within the hour I found myself in Mrs. Kooshof’s garage, chuckling to myself, stashing the gasoline behind a pile of hoses and garden implements.

That same night, as Mrs. Kooshof slept, I raided her pantry—seven big mason jars.

I crept out to the garage in my pajamas.

Bombs, I was thinking, except the thinking was not thinking. Wild pictures in my head: Herbie straddling our plywood airplane; Herbie yelling “Die!” as he banked into a make-believe bombing run toward his yellow house.

I filled the seven mason jars.

Rag fuses.

And then for some time I squatted there in the chilly dark, rocking on my heels, full of rage, full of hurt, quite literally beside myself. There were two Thomas Chipperings. A lonely seven-year-old and a man of shipwrecked, terrified middle age.

My teeth chattered. Something was happening to me.