Tomcat in Love (20 page)

Part of me, I suppose, was still out on that balcony. Another part of me was void. No resolution, no clarity, and in a peculiar way Lorna Sue now struck me as a virtual stranger. Still beautiful, yes, but it was like looking at a mannequin. Expensive jewelry. Thick
black hair and brown eyes and summer skin. All I could feel, though, was a hollowed-out version of the old love. In the end, I thought, that’s what betrayal does. It sucks away the passion. The delight, too, and the hope, and the faith in your own future.

Hard to accept, but Lorna Sue had never been mine. Not wholly. And it was never love.

Again, the image of Mrs. Robert Kooshof took shape before me, so big and blond, so full of promise.

Interesting fact: I missed her.

After five minutes, when the tycoon sauntered in, I had come close to calling off the whole venture. My dreams of sabotage now had a sterile, antiseptic feel, and I had trouble summoning even the most listless curiosity as the tycoon approached Herbie and Lorna Sue. Not that I was disappointed. It all worked beautifully, in fact, and in any other frame of mind I would have chortled at the way my little trap snapped shut: first surprise, then confusion.

Hard to absorb it all.

Hard to care.

The tycoon made a slight jerking motion, as if tugged backward by invisible wires. A reddish flush slid across his face, followed by darkness. His jaw flexed. From the mezzanine, of course, I could not make out any words, but it was evident that he was having trouble wrapping his tongue around the English language. Like me, almost surely, the man had been plagued by unwholesome suspicions—Lorna Sue’s disappearances, her silences—and the hotel now added a touch of the illicit, an aura of sleaziness and secrecy. (There was also the message I had left with the tycoon’s secretary. A suggestion that he stop by the hotel. The word
incest.
)

He had come expecting the worst. He had found it.

Lorna Sue took him by the arm, settled him into a chair, spoke to him with sweaty animation. (Denials, of course. Declarations of innocence.) From experience, however, I knew how lame such excuses sounded, how empty language can be, how appearance is everything. I almost smiled. This was justice. Perhaps it was my own
imagination, or wishful thinking, but for a moment I could almost read the poor bastard’s lips:
Your own brother
.

I sighed and called over a bellhop.

Swiftly, almost sadly, I issued a few curt instructions and handed over a twenty-dollar tip.

The bellhop saluted.

He made his way down to the registration desk, picked up a pair of keys, then entered the restaurant to inform Herbie and Lorna Sue that their room was ready.

L
ost: that was the feeling. Or, more properly, a mix of many feelings.

It could be said, for instance, that I was lost without Mrs. Robert Kooshof. That I was at a loss. That I had lost her. That I had lost myself. It would be accurate, too, to say that I had been thrown for a loss, implying depression, distress, and exhaustion, or that I had lost a rare and magnificent opportunity for happiness, implying waste and forfeiture. Or that I was a lost soul. Or lost in space. Or lost in dreary, rainy Tampa—condemned, marooned, alone, helpless.

Twice that evening, with no luck, I called Mrs. Kooshof’s number in Owago. The ring of a telephone had never sounded so forlorn and far away.

Around nine o’clock, to occupy myself, I took a wet and very chilly stroll along the beach, under a leaky umbrella, then afterward, on a whim, stopped in for solace at the hotel bar. My pert young waitress from the cabana (whose name, I recalled, was Peg) happened to be on duty; I happened to sit at her table. And over the
course of the evening, which turned out to be a long one, we happened to fall into a double-edged conversation. Chitchat, at first. The rain was cutting into the girl’s tips. Her musician boyfriend—a drummer—had recently hit the road, as it were, without a word. (At this, I nodded. “Pity,” I purred. “No boyfriend.”)

By midnight, the place was deserted except for Peg and the bartender and me. (The bartender’s name, I soon discovered, was Patty. Chestnut hair. Walnut eyes. Maple-red freckles trickling down into the lacy black bucket of her cleavage.) My mood was dismal, yet Peg and Patty did their best to pep up the evening.
^*
They danced for me. They treated me to tiny sausages on toothpicks. At one point, I remember, Peg inquired about my “lady friend,” who had also hit the road, to which I responded with a shudder and the word
lost
. Peg took my hand; Patty took both our hands. I felt like a Girl Scout. And then later, well after closing time, we huddled on the floor behind the bar, as at a campfire, eating sausages and exchanging stories about lostness, its forms and essences, its horrors.

“I lost my mother,” Patty said. “I mean, like, she died.
That’s
lost. But one time before that, I lost her in this department store. Looked all over the place, like eight floors or something, then finally I end up in the toy department. And I see this big stuffed panda bear. I mean, I’m eight years old, I lose my fucking
mother
, but this huge panda bear sits there smiling at me—a real goofy, happy smile—and I’m not lost anymore. I’m
found
. About a week later I got that stupid panda for Christmas. And then my mother dies. So at night I cuddle the panda bear, I pretend it’s my mother, I take it to school with me. I talk to it. I love it. But what happens? One day at school I lose the goddamn panda bear. Gone—just disappears. See?”

I did not. I nodded.

“Must’ve been a
male
panda bear,” Peg said. “I’ll bet the furry fucker walked on you.”

“Probably,” Patty said.

Peg sighed. “Guilt trip. Traded in your mother for some big-dick panda bear, then the creep walks out the door. Right?”

“Right,” Patty said.

“Who the heck can you
trust
?” Peg said.

“Not panda bears,” said Patty.

“Not men,” said Peg.

The time had come to nudge the conversation toward some sensible topic. I removed my necktie, my sports coat, my shoes. I rolled up my sleeves. “If you want lost,” I said, “I’ll
give
you lost. Try the mountains. Try Vietnam.”

Patty giggled and hooked my arm. “God bless you, I dig Vietnam types. I really do.”

“Studs,” said Peg.

“Stallions!” said Patty.

Lost, I told them. Lost as lost gets. Abandoned in those mountains, no compass, no north or south, just the dense green jungle blurring into deeper jungle, and for two days I followed a narrow dirt trail that led nowhere. Here was a place where even
lost
gets lost. Everything was a mirror to everything else. And none of it seemed real. A joke, maybe: My six comrades would not have left me to perish out here. Except the joke was now two days old and getting stale.

I spent the second night wrapped in my poncho along the trail, listening to ghosts out in the fog, then in the morning I saddled up and headed eastward. The fog became rain. The sun vanished. At times my little trail turned to ooze; other times it gave out entirely, blocked by the face of an implacable rain forest. Unreal, I kept thinking. It could not be happening. Not to me. I was civilized; I
believed
in civilization. There was a reason, after all, that mankind had invented indoor plumbing, chimneys, brass beds, cotton sheets. It was in man’s nature to defy nature. Why else the Industrial Revolution? Why else four-wheel drive and mosquito repellent? Why else language?

To name it is to tame it.

House
, I thought. And as I struggled through the rain, through the dripping underbrush, I murmured the word aloud—
house
—and then other such words.

I was an indoor person, caught now in an outdoor world, and my disorientation far exceeded the physical. I felt wronged and forsaken, double-crossed by my own comrades. At one point, during a rest break, I wondered if they might simply have forgotten about me.

The thought made me laugh. A moment later I was snarling. Betrayal—as usual.

“Real fascinating,” Peg said. “I had this crazy boyfriend once—a Vietnam type too. I go for that shit. Grunt groupie, that’s what he always called me. Turn-on, you know?”

“Danger,” Patty said.

“Death,” Peg said.

Patty giggled and said, “Same difference.” She pulled off her bartender’s apron, her bow tie, her blouse. “You mind?”

I shook my head. Here was something new.

“Me too,” Peg said. “Hot!”

“Hot!” said Patty.

Ordinarily I would have enjoyed such sportive interplay, but given the solemnity of my topic, I felt abused and ignored, like a teacher whose classroom had collapsed into inexplicable chaos. Granted, the hour was late, and we had imbibed beyond the limits of prudence, yet I suspected that my two youthful pussycats were intentionally missing the point.

Somewhat irritably, I refilled our glasses.

“These six so-called comrades of mine,” I said, “they left me to rot. Walked away. Deserted me.”

“Like my panda bear,” said Patty.

“Except this was war.”

Peg nodded. She was playfully wrapping her black bow tie around my wrists. “So you greased them, right? Shot off their nuts?”

“Now, please,” I said.

“You had a gun, right?”

“A gun? Yes indeed.”

“Well, jeez,” Peg said. She cinched the bow tie, fashioned a snug knot at my wrists. Patty was busy securing my ankles. “Then you should’ve offed them. Like Rambo or somebody.”

“I was
lost
—that’s our
topic
—and I would very much like to continue.”

My tone of voice was a trifle brusque, and I rapidly backtracked with a smile. Bizarre creatures, I decided, yet undeniably fetching in their stripped-down slumber-party costumes.

Peg glanced at Patty, Patty at Peg.

“Go ahead, then,” Peg said. “But talk fast, Professor. Before we put the gag on.”

I did not “talk fast.” I will
never
talk fast. Lucidly, in well-measured paragraphs, I described for them the soul-killing dimension of true lostness. Or, more accurately, the utter absence of dimension. Without up, I asked, where is down? Without hereness, how does one locate thereness? And so on.

By my third day in the mountains, lost had become a state of mind. I was not myself. I was an infant—a lostling—part of the rain forest, part of the sky, and at times the very notion of singularity dissolved all around me. This fuzzed into that: one waterfall became every other waterfall, this tree became that tree. Eventually the rain let up, which made the march easier, but the mountains remained webbed in a great silver mist.

In midafternoon I descended into a deep, grassy valley, and for more than an hour I was able to hold a bearing straight eastward.

No problem, I told myself.

Sooner or later, no matter what, I would run dead-on into the South China Sea.

But then, abruptly, the valley began to rise again, and soon the jungle closed in tight, and within minutes I was more lost than ever—pure greenery, no trails at all. I blundered along, once on my
hands and knees, snagged up in vines and deep brush and hopelessness. I was no longer aiming at anything. Not even survival. Except for an occasional whimper, I had lost my capacity for language, the underlying grammar of human reason; I had lost the
me
of me—my name, its meaning—those particularities of spirit and personality that separate one from all, each from other. I was a grubworm among grubworms. One more fly in God’s inky ointment.

Near dusk, therefore, it came as no shock to look up and behold a mahogany billiard table before me.

Well, I thought.

After which I thought: Am I thinking?

The old billiard table stood on a stone patio. Adjoining the patio was a dilapidated stucco house—a villa, it seemed, or what I imagined a villa must be, with blue shutters and blue trim and a rolled tile roof. Beside the villa was a swimming pool, and beyond the swimming pool was a well-barbered lawn dotted with fountains and gardens. I remained still for a time, waiting for this mirage to vanish, then I ventured a slow breath and approached the mahogany billiard table. It seemed solid to the touch.

Twice, cautiously, I circled the villa. Maybe an old rubber plantation. More likely a product of my own imagination.

The front door stood ajar. I hesitated there, almost knocking, then stepped into a cool hallway. Instantly, the notion of civilization reasserted itself. At the end of the hallway, I came upon a large sitting room furnished with cane chairs and cane sofas. Gauzy white curtains fluttered in an open window. The room had a lived-in feel, no dust or dirt, things neatly in their places. I made my way through a teak-paneled dining room, down another hallway, thence into a sunny, well-equipped kitchen. There was a gas stove, a GE toaster, crates of C rations, a refrigerator stocked with beer and fresh vegetables and packets of frozen meat. Somewhere nearby, I realized, a generator had to be running, which meant the place was inhabited, but for the moment I put these thoughts aside and sat down to my first meal in days.