Tomcat in Love (9 page)

Here, I recognized, was a Dutch beauty only marginally tarnished by the years. A woman with substance.

“Tax fraud?” I said casually.

She glanced up. “Don’t pry. It’s not something I talk about.”

“Certainly not, but if you should ever … Well, I’m in your debt. Friends already, are we not?”

Mrs. Kooshof shrugged her magnificent shoulders. “Let’s not jump the gun. Anyway, you’re the one bawling in the backyard.”

“True,” I sighed. “Human folly.”

“So you messed her over?”

“Messed?”

“The ex-wife,” said Mrs. Robert Kooshof. “I’ll bet the lady left you for pretty good reasons. It’s always something.”

“Not in this case,” I said stoutly, but then, in the next instant, I noted my error. The correct course, given her pitiless gaze, would be to temper self-defense with fragments of truth. “Perhaps one or two minor infractions. Petty nonsense.”

Mrs. Kooshof laughed—aloud, fizzy, uncorked laugh. She took a seat beside me at the table. “Infractions,” she muttered. “I can’t wait.”

“You’re sure?”

“The abridged version.”

And thus I sketched out the depressing parabola of my life: Herbie and Lorna Sue, the crucifixion episode, Herbie’s incredible jealousy. How for years he had plotted to undermine my marriage. And how with a single stroke he had driven my precious wife into the bed of a two-bit Tampa tycoon.

It was then—unexpectedly—that I choked up. No tears, thank God, but I was compelled to ask if there were spirits on hand.

“Bourbon?” said Mrs. Kooshof.

I would have preferred schnapps, yet even so I moved an encouraging hand to her thigh.

“Bourbon,” I said, “might be just the ticket.”

In short, what a glorious spring break! What a reprieve from despair and self-pity!

I had the run of the house. I had flannel sheets, pot roast, apple bread, chocolate chip cookies, and Mrs. Robert Kooshof. Very curious, is it not, how such detours pop up along life’s unfolding freeway? How at odd moments we find ourselves tapping the brakes, gearing down, bumping along past spectacular and untamed vistas? Even in times of mental anguish, or perhaps especially in such times, we are suddenly visited by the rare wine, the winning bingo card, the out-of-the-blue phone call from a forgotten old flame.

Diversions, to be sure. The detour ends. The freeway awaits us. My torment, in other words, did not vanish—I am hardly so fickle. Hour to hour, Lorna Sue lingered at the tip of my thoughts like some sour afterscent: Thursday’s head cold, last night’s cabbage.

The hurt remained, yes, but Mrs. Kooshof did much to file off its sharpest edges. We sported between flannel sheets, watched televised crime dramas, depleted her bourbon, recovered with long walks up and down North Fourth Street, past the United Methodist Church and Mrs. Catchitt’s house and the elementary school where Herbie and Lorna Sue and I had once endured our ABCs. Mostly, though, we commiserated. Held hands. Exchanged horror stories. Mrs. Kooshof’s husband, I came to learn, was a veterinarian by trade, now serving his five to seven in Stillwater. “At first it was tax fraud,” she said bitterly. “I mean, that was bad enough—feds everywhere—but the creep was stealing from
me
too. Spending it on women. No joke, he had the bitches tucked away like spare parts. Over in Sioux Falls. Windom, Jackson, Mountain Lake. Two up in Pipestone. And I didn’t have even the slightest inkling. Zero. Stupid me, but I never thought Doc was the type. I thought he was sort of—you know—I thought he was a veterinarian. What a nightmare.”

“Doc?” I said.

“Robert—my husband. And it’s a small town too. Everybody knows.”

I assumed my gravest classroom demeanor. “You have my sympathy,” I told her. “Hideous, I know, but if you don’t mind, may I take a moment to recommend the path of reprisal? Old-fashioned vengeance. In my own case, I must say, I’ve found it most gratifying.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No, indeed. Swift, stern, merciless punishment.”

Mrs. Kooshof looked up at me with a pair of hot Dutch eyes. “Punishment how?”

“By whatever methods you might prefer,” I said, then went on to delineate my own personal program. “My plan,” I said bluntly, “is to remarry her.”

Mrs. Kooshof nodded. “That
would
hurt.”

“Break up her marriage. Win her back. And then dump her like a truckload of used diapers. Tell her not to be an eighteen-year-old.”

“You’re serious?”

“That I am.”

A short silence followed. We were entwined in bed, Mrs. Kooshof’s blond curls at my belly. (As mentioned, she was a large, healthy woman, hefty across the upper torso; my left arm had gone numb beneath her bulk.)

“So what about me?” she said.

“You? How so?”

“I
rescued
you, Thomas. Crying like a baby in my backyard. You were totally lost.”

“True,” I said, and slipped my arm free. “And I am prepared to offer a reward of sorts. Tampa. The two of us.” Winning smile. “Expenses to be shared, of course.”

Mrs. Kooshof regarded me with suspicion.

She sat up, lit a cigarette, dispatched three or four smoke rings toward the heavens.

“Tampa,” she said. “What’s in it for me?”

“Sun and sea.”

“Big deal. That’s it?”

“Manly companionship.”

“What else, Thomas?”

“Coppertone tan,” I said. “Payback lessons. I am, after all, an educator.”

H
ere I must digress—a tactical transgression, perhaps, but I urge forbearance. The shortest distance between two points may well be a straight line, but one must remember that efficiency is not the only narrative virtue. Texture is another. Accuracy still another. Our universe does not operate on purely linear principles.

Bear in mind, too, the story of your own botched life, its circularities and meanderings, how your thoughts sometimes slide back to that dismal afternoon when you introduced your husband to a lanky young redhead named Suzanne or Sandra or Sarah—let us settle on Sandra—and how you watched the two of them chat over coffee, and how at one point it occurred to you that they might be getting along rather too well—Sandra’s saucy eyes, your husband’s laughter—but how you said nothing, how you did nothing, and how as a consequence you now wake up screaming the word
Fiji
.

A well-placed digression, though interruptive, can often prove
progressive in its effects. We move forward by looping briefly backward.

Thus: the year 1969.

Thus: Vietnam.

I was always an inert young man, the reactive type, a tardy and somewhat petulant respondent to the world, almost never an initiator. Events dictated. I complied. By this process, the war sucked me in, and in January of 1969 I found myself filling sandbags at a forward firebase in the mountains of Quang Ngai Province. It was, by any measure, a stressful twelve months. Although my tour involved no formal combat, nothing dangerous, I admit to having had trouble appreciating the wholesome, outdoorsy rigors of warfare. There were no beds. No books. The food was called
chow
—a word that speaks volumes. The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under such conditions I shall never understand. Is not death sufficient?)

The year 1969, to put it politely, was not my happiest. I felt marooned; my health deteriorated.

Surrounded by bunkers and barbed wire, sealed off from the real war, I spent that year as an awards clerk in a battalion adjutant’s office, where my primary chore was to compose and process citations for gallantry in action—Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts, et cetera. In the beginning, I suppose, I rather enjoyed manufacturing these scenarios of human valor. I was good with machine gun nests. I imagined young lieutenants leaping upon land mines, shielding their charges, miraculously limping away with mild contusions to the extremities. (
Extremity
, in fact, was a favorite word. I milked it mercilessly.) Still, after a couple of months, I exhausted both my thesaurus and my creativity, and I soon viewed my agency as the purest hackwork.

Why, then, was I there? Certainly not out of moral conviction. Nor to seek adventure, nor to test my masculinity. (Never a
problem. I am amply hormonal, a fact upon which clever women often comment.) So why? The brief answer—the silly answer—is that I was conscripted. Yet I did nothing to avoid this fate. When the draft notice arrived, in my first year of graduate school, I chuckled and promptly returned to my books.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when our country’s claim upon my person turned out to be in earnest.

Passively, inert to the end, I capitulated with scarcely a snarl. I watched myself plod through the humiliations of a physical examination, then basic training, then clerk’s school at a dismal installation in rural Kentucky. (My sole fond memory from this period is of a rubbery little Appalachian number by the name of June. Acrobatic tongue. Tooth decay. Illiterate in everything but love.)

Then off to war.

Vietnam itself came as a relatively minor insult to prior injury, almost entirely uneventful. Only a single episode deserves attention, yet this incident goes far to explain the human being I have since become.

To wit: Near the end of my tour, not a month before rotating back to the States, I was called upon to join six compatriots
^*
in manning a listening post several kilometers outside the firebase. Our orders were to move by foot into the mountains, position ourselves along a designated trail, dig in deep, then spend the next four days (and nights) lying low, listening for enemy movement.

None of this was my cup of tea.

Though it is awkward to acknowledge personal inadequacies, I must concede that I was not cut out for the grim business of soldiering. I am a tall, somewhat gawky man. Athletically disinclined. A distinctive stride—pelvis forward, elbows sideward—an intellectual’s abstract tilt to the jaw.

So, yes, with all this, the new assignment came as a shock.

I received my orders at noon. Thirty minutes later I was reporting to a young, dull-faced captain at the front gate, who issued me a military radio, rations, ammunition for my thoroughly rusted M-16. “Won’t be too bad,” the captain said, and gestured at the mountains. “Like Cub Scouts. Pretend it’s a weenie roast.”

My comrades waited outside the gate: six tough, tired, soiled faces. They spoke not a word to me, just exchanged glances and moved out single file toward the mountains.

For more than five hours we plodded straight west, then briefly northward, then began climbing through deep, dripping rain forest. The greenery was massive. Triple canopy, foliage stacked upon foliage. This was machete country. Snake country, too, and creatures I dared not imagine. Although I had ridded myself of unessential burdens—a
Webster’s Collegiate
, a complete Chaucer—I soon passed into a state far beyond exhaustion. I could smell death in my bones.

At last, in late afternoon, we halted at a trail junction overlooking a wide river below. Immediately, I collapsed beneath a tree. The universe had gone limp along its margins—no definition, therefore no meaning—and it was all I could do to watch the others set up a perimeter and clear fields of fire. Even then, my six ghostly comrades spoke not a word. Soberly, as dusk came on, they ate their rations and rolled out their ponchos for the night. I was aware, of course, that field discipline was critical, yet the muteness of these sour gentlemen seemed extreme.

When dark threatened, I saw no alternative but to approach one of these savage mutes. I chose the smallest, a wiry kid with bad breath and bad posture. Politely, even sheepishly, I tapped his arm and requested information regarding the evening’s activities.

The boy stared over my shoulder. Hard to be certain, for his lips did not move, but I believe he eventually murmured the word
shit
.

“My own thought,” said I. (Here was progress.) “So look, if you don’t mind, I’m new at this. What do I
do
?”

“Do?”

“You know. Do.”

There was a pause that lasted half the night. The boy spat,
closed his eyes, chewed thoughtfully on a wad of gum, then repeated his almost inaudible ventriloquist’s act. “The usual,” he seemed to whisper.

I nodded vigorously. “The usual. Very good.”

“Same-same.”

“Got it,” I said. “Same-same. Many thanks.”

I began to edge away, but with a silky little motion the boy reached out and caught me by an ear.

“Listen!” he hissed.

“Hey, I’m
trying
.”

“Fuckin’ idiot.”

“That stings,” I said, “and I very much wish—”

He gave my ear a twist. “Fuckin’ listening post. So fuckin’
listen
.”

I spent the remainder of the night alone in a clump of bushes. I did not sleep. I listened. And the nighttime sounds were nothing if not compelling: monkeys, tigers, sappers, parrots, fish, Herbie, Lorna Sue, my whole sad history. I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology. At one appalling point, near dawn, I detected what seemed to be the sound of a nail entering human flesh.