Tomcat in Love (17 page)

There can be nothing more stunning, I thought, than angry eyes in perfect union with polished brown skin. I passed over the thesis, proud of a job well done.

“Hey, the
copies
,” she said. “What about the motherfucking copies?”

Forty-five minutes later I was back with six freshly minted Xeroxes. Apparently Toni had prior appointments, but she had left behind a note with precise delivery instructions. (The note, I must point out, was signed with a bold and highly suggestive X. Youth’s bawdy ways! My heart ticked fast!) I spent a buoyant three hours strolling from office to office, dropping off copies, and then in midafternoon, chores complete, I paused to celebrate at a nearby campus bar. The place had long been among my favorites. At all hours, without a single exception in my experience, one encountered a bounty of exquisite Nordic-blooded sweeties—a positive surfeit—not one of them beyond the prime age of twenty-two. It was here, as my marriage collapsed, that I first conversed with Little Red Rhonda, who was succeeded a month afterward by the luscious Signe. Both girls eased my days. Both would later perform superbly in my seminar on the etymology of gender. Both would graduate with full honors.

On this occasion, feeling carefree, I ordered a rare martini and joined a likely covey at the rear of the establishment, where until closing time a number of us drank and discussed spring fashions. Karen and Deborah escorted me home.

The hour was late. Mrs. Kooshof had already turned in, and when I tried to awaken her, she blearily declined my invitation to join us for a frisky game of Scrabble. It was somewhat later—close to daylight—when my Dutch consort finally made her appearance, in a pair of fuzzy pink slippers, black panties, and little else. “I
live
here,” she said, inaccurately. “I don’t
have
to be dressed. They do. Get them out of here.”

Karen was asleep, Deborah was not.

It took only a few minutes to clear the place, but it required the remainder of the day to calm Mrs. Robert Kooshof. I outlined for her the sociology at work. Modern mores, modern methods. I had to wing it, as my sophomores say, at several key transitions.

Mrs. Kooshof took a more combative approach. “You screwed them,” she said. “I’m in the next room, Thomas, and you’re out here making goo-goo. With kids. Babies.”

“They were plainly of age,” I told her. “And I screwed no one. Scrabble.”

“Oh, stop it! They barely had clothes on. What
was
it—strip Scrabble?”

I did not rise to this bait, though in truth Mrs. Kooshof was uncannily on the scent. (In my defense, I must point out that none of it had been my idea. Nor had I participated. Nor was it my place to enforce morality. I was a teacher, not a vice officer.)

“What a creep,” said Mrs. Kooshof.

She left the room. Not only that, but over the next several hours she came close to leaving altogether. Eventually, in the bedroom, I indulged her need for a tearful
mea culpa
. Too much drink, I said. Impaired judgment. Couldn’t live without her.

“Oh, face it,” she muttered. “You like girls.”

I blinked at this.

“True,” I said. “I like girls.”

“And I’m a woman.”

“You are, indeed.”

Mrs. Kooshof sat stiffly on the edge of the bed. We were both silent for a time, appraising each other. When Mrs. Kooshof spoke, her voice was much softer than I had anticipated, almost wistful.

“Thomas, listen,” she said. “I wish you’d level with me. Is that so hard? All this elaborate nonsense about checks and mattresses, it’s just a cover for the real problem.”

“Which would be precisely what?” I asked.

“You know.”

“I don’t. Tell me.”

She shook her head sadly. “It’s like you’re a rabbit or something—jumping from woman to woman. Can’t ever get enough. One more victim, aren’t I? A fresh scalp?”

“Mixed metaphor,” I said. “And you’re wrong.”

“Ami?”

“You are,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

I was operating on zero sleep and excessive ardent spirits, a combination that produced a peculiar melting sensation in my chest
and stomach. Something collapsed inside. I was not intending it, but after a second I heard myself rambling on about certain private items that I had always preferred to keep locked away. Certain insecurities. Misfit. Loner. How I sometimes felt empty inside. How I would do almost anything to fill up that hole inside me. A craving, I said—a love hunger. Always terrified of losing the few scraps that were thrown my way.

When I finished, Mrs. Kooshof looked at me gravely.

“Well, Thomas, I’m sorry,” she said. “But it doesn’t excuse last night. How can you hurt me like that?”

“Stupid,” I told her. “Not thinking.”

She got up and moved to a window. In the long silence I could hear my future clicking like the tumblers of a rusty lock.

“Well, listen,” she said. “If you really want that hole filled up, here I am. And not such a bad catch. Darn wonderful person.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m smart. I’m pretty.”

“You are.”

“I’m
nice
. Nice isn’t something you laugh at.”

“Right. I’m not laughing.”

Mrs. Kooshof stared out the window. It was a warm spring morning, flooded with sunshine, and her face struck me as uncommonly attractive. Not girlish by any means. Better, I thought.

“This business you have in Tampa,” she finally said. “I don’t understand it—revenge, I mean—but I was willing to tag along. I thought we’d have time together. Thought maybe you’d fall for me. Hard, I mean. I guess I’m still hoping.”

“Good,” I said. “Don’t stop.”

She turned toward me. “No more Scrabble?”

“Hate the game. Words.”

“And no girls?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “All I need is a smart, pretty woman. A nice one.”

Which was exactly the thing to say.

We left for Tampa on a rainy Monday evening.

I had canceled my classes for the week, rescheduled three committee meetings, and the only complication was a small party I had arranged to celebrate the acceptance of Toni’s honors thesis. The gathering took place in my office two hours before departure. I had invited five or six favorite coeds, all charming, and together we raised a number of toasts to Toni’s accomplishment. The reviews had been remarkable—highest honors the university could confer. (“A gifted if somewhat verbose student,” one of her committee members had commented. “An astonishing scholarly debut.”)

Toni was radiant.

Bubbly, in fact. She could not stop smiling. She wore high heels, a white blouse, a black skirt cut high over waxy brown legs. For me, the high point came when she called for quiet and delivered a short, heartwarming speech. She was thoroughly gracious, almost to the point of modesty, as she thanked her friends and family and me for our succor and encouragement. (Direct quote: “Succor and encouragement.” Imagine my joy! The blush at my cheeks!)

Near the end Toni got a bit tipsy. We were alone by then. The hour was late, the champagne low. She had arranged herself in a provocative pose on my desk. “Without you,” Toni said, “I probably couldn’t have done it.”

“Nonsense,” I said.

She shook her thick brunette tresses. “No, I mean it. You’re a total jerk, Tommy Boy—I can’t lie—but at least you came through on
one
count.”

Once more, I pooh-poohed the notion. I told her she had a first-rate academic career in front of her; I wished her well at Kansas State or wherever else she ended up.

“You think so?” she said.

“I certainly do. A born scholar.”

Toni toyed with the hem of her skirt. “Well, I guess we could do it
once.
”

“We could?”

“I guess.”

Several contradictory thoughts intersected in time and space. A
recent conversation with Mrs. Kooshof. A plane to catch. Toni’s firm, brown, muscular thighs.

I nearly wept.

Such opportunities do not present themselves every day. And it therefore seemed monstrously cruel, monstrously unfair, that only a day or two earlier I had so impetuously pledged my allegiance and my chastity to Mrs. Robert Kooshof. It was fate’s ugly face.

“Rain check?” I said.

“You’re saying no?”

“Well, no.”

Toni frowned. “No? Plain no? Or you’re
not
saying no?”

“One or the other,” I said.

I made my flight with six minutes to spare. There had been a delay, fortunately, due to heavy rains, and I found Mrs. Robert Kooshof seated in the back row of a Boeing 727. The weather had brought on one of her foul moods; she was not interested in my complaints about the city’s taxi service.

“You smell like a winery,” she said.

“I do?”

“And something else.”

I did not ask further questions. There was no need: I had requested a rain check, after all, and the irony of her accusation astounded me. Act honorably, one still absorbs the consequences. Why, in other words, should I stand convicted of a crime I had so painfully declined to commit? However tentatively, however provisionally, I had looked into Toni’s thighs and uttered the word
no
.

What a world.

After takeoff, I ordered a bone-dry martini, which led to another, and I was soon pondering the subtleties of that innocent-seeming syllable—
no
. How incredibly perilous! How fragile! Its meanings and usages encompass such fundamental human phenomena as denial, impatience, disgust, disagreement, surprise, refusal, uncertainty, despair, and grief. (“No!” I wailed on the
afternoon Lorna Sue left me. “No!” I still scream in my sleep. “No,” I told Toni.) High over Tennessee, it occurred to me that the fluidity of
no
has its precise analogue in the fluidity of emotion itself. Denial leads to disgust. Refusal leads to uncertainty. “Do you love me?” a woman asks, to which you respond, “No.” But after losing her, after six months of celibacy, you might well be squealing, “No! No!” at the sight of her passing car.

It was raining, too, in Tampa. We checked into our hotel, unpacked in silence, showered, slipped into bed, then lay in the droning dark without touching. Barely a moment elapsed before I felt the strike of a terrible premonition. I jerked up, but Mrs. Robert Kooshof was already sighing. “Tom, do you love me?” she whispered. “Even a little?”

I am convinced it was not a coincidence. Fate again: the conjunction of weather and a misled life.

“Well,” I murmured, “it’s interesting you should ask,” then I went on to discuss the nature of love, the physics of infinity. I did everything in my power to avoid the word
no
.

“Yes or no?” she said.

And so, for the second time that day, I heard myself requesting a rain check.

“I guess that means no.”

“No,” I said. “Even
no
doesn’t mean no.”

“What on God’s earth are you
talking
about?”

I rolled onto my side and feigned sleep. The day had been a long one, full of almost intolerable strife, but exhaustion now translated into a flow of images that kept me awake for several hours. Lorna Sue drifted by. Then Herbie. Then Toni and Deborah and Karen and Carla and June and Little Red Rhonda and Mrs. Robert Kooshof.

“Well, if you don’t love me,” Mrs. Kooshof said near dawn, “I can’t see any point.”

I glared at Satan’s teasing face.

“All right,” I said. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Right.”

Her eyes dissolved into a pair of warm blue puddles.
^*
“You mean it?” she said. “I mean, does yes really
mean
yes?”

“Got me,” I said. “Let’s have breakfast.”

In the dining room downstairs, while I devoured my ham and eggs, Mrs. Robert Kooshof positively beamed at hers.

The word yes, unlike its antonym, apparently carries magical restorative qualities, for my companion’s face had shed a good ten years’ worth of romantic blight. I was reminded, curiously enough, of young Toni’s honors thesis, in one section of which she had compared the standard English and Germanic marital vows. Where in America we would dully intone the words “I do,” our German friends respond with the much more telling phrase “Ja,
und Gott helfe mir
.” Translated, it reads, “Yes, and God help me,” which approximated my own emotions on that early Tampa morning.

“Yes,” I’d said, but was this a promise?

Was this duplicity?

Mrs. Kooshof’s question, remember, had come in two parts. Did I love her? Even a little? My eventual response—which was pried out of me like a wisdom tooth—had addressed the interrogatory as a whole, not merely its unqualified first component. Yet I doubt Mrs. Kooshof took it that way. She was a woman; she was in love; she had forgotten her own botched utterance. And it
was
one question. Not two. Otherwise, I would have responded, “Yes, yes,” or, more probably, “No, yes,” or, possibly, “Yes, no.”

In any event, my malfeasance—if there was any—had to do with an understandable reluctance to remind her of this intricate linguistic sequence.

I purchased peace with the coin of silence.

I let well enough alone.

We spent the remainder of the morning, and most of the afternoon, enjoying the fruits of our confused and misapprehended truce. Mrs. Kooshof was shameless in her joy. She smiled during the act of love, then smiled in her sleep afterward. A lovely thing to witness, in part, but also frightening. For some time I lay very still, attuned to her breathing, and to the steady rain, and to the alternating buzz of yes and no.