Tomcat in Love (21 page)

Afterward, I explored the remainder of the villa.

On the second level I found three bedrooms, each furnished
with cots and blankets and mosquito netting. Nothing fancy, but still miraculous. I selected one of the bedrooms, closed the curtains, stripped down, and soon fell into a deep and civilized sleep.

Patty laughed. “Like that old fairy tale, right? Goldilocks and the three bears?”

“Pandas!” said Peg.

Awkwardly, I tried to sit up, a feat that was made difficult by the bow ties secured to my wrists and ankles—also an apron snug around my knees—and by the fact that Patty was now tugging my shirt down around my elbows. I struggled briefly, then tipped onto my side.

My two mates lifted me by the hips.

“Upsa-daisy,” said Peg.

Patty slipped my trousers down; Peg bundled them tightly around my thighs.

“And when you woke up,” Patty was saying, “I bet those three nasty bears were there. Mama bear, papa bear, itty-bitty baby bear.”

Peg growled and unbuckled my belt. “Who’s sleeping in
my
bed?”

“Very funny,” I snapped. “Are we finished?”

“Not hardly,” said Patty.

Peg pulled off my belt and looped it around my neck like a dog collar. She winked and gave the belt a little jerk.

“Now,
please
,” I said, “I believe it’s time to—”

“What a lech,” said Peg.

“A sickie,” Patty said. “Tie him tight.”

I looked up helplessly as Peg folded a wet washcloth. Again, the thought crossed my mind that I was dealing with two very special young ladies, unique beyond measure. Their antics struck me as decidedly unfeminine, and after a moment, in austere tones, I informed them that these bondage antics had gone a step too far. Entirely inappropriate, I told them.

“You’re a pig,” said Peg.

“Nonsense,” said I, and blinked. “What did I
do
?”

Patty laughed. “It’s not what you did, man, it’s who you are. Your whole sleazy personality. How you talk, how you walk. How you put the scam on every poor woman who walked through here tonight. Us included. Talk about an ogler.”

“I was taught,” I said primly, “to look people in the eye.”

“You
don’t
look them in the eye. You look them in the tits.”

I nodded cagily. “That may sometimes be so. God forbid that a gentleman should happen to make eye contact with the weaker sex.”

“Weaker sex?” Peg growled. “That’s why you’re
in
this fix.”

I ignored the semantic smoke screen. “And, moreover,” I said firmly, “it was not I who stripped off his shirt this evening.”

“That was to make
a point
,” Patty said.

“Which you did. Four.”

Patty looked down at me with an expression that conveyed roughly equal measures of disgust and pity. “That comment sums it up—thanks for helping. Peg and me, we’ve had it up to here with ridiculous old fogies on the make.”

“On their behalf, I apologize,” said I. “But a fogy I am not. And what about my story?
Lost
—that was our subject.”

“We’re making up a new story,” Peg said.

“The lost lech,” said Patty.

“Open wide,” Peg said. “Say
ah
.”

I smiled uncertainly. “I know we’re having fun, but I’d very much appreciate—”

“Fun, my ass,” Patty said. “Be a good boy. Nice and wide.”

Peg bent down, pried me open, and stuffed in the washcloth. Patty tightened the belt.

“That should do it,” said Peg.

“I
hope
,” said Patty.

The lights went off. There was giggly laughter, then a shuffling sound, then more laughter. A moment later Patty knelt down beside me. I could not really see the wicked lass, just sense her.

“A word to the wise,” she said, very gently, almost compassionately. “Pick on women your own age. This is a brand-new world.”

She patted my shoulder.

Briefly, a door swung open, then swung shut again, and for the remainder of the night I lay trussed up in the humid Tampa dark. What was it in my nature, I wondered, that so attracted and so repelled the women of this world? No answer was forthcoming, only a flurry of interwoven questions: whom to trust, what to trust, when to trust, how to trust?

As dawn broke, I counted up my losses. A wife. A marriage. A mind. Mrs. Robert Kooshof.

J
ust after 8:00
A.M
. I was released by a kindhearted janitor by the name of Delbert, an elderly gentleman with white hair and glossy black skin. He seemed amused at my predicament. “It appears to me,” the man said, slyly and unnecessarily, “like you went and tied one on last night.” He chuckled at this. “
Tied
—get it?”

I scowled, worked the blood into my wrists, helped myself to the hotel’s whiskey—a double.

“Got it,” I said. “Quite clever.”

Delbert nodded. “Peg and Patty, I figure. Count yourself lucky they didn’t use handcuffs.” The janitor flicked his bushy white eyebrows at me. “And now you’re fit to be tied, so to speak.”

I looked up with mild curiosity.

Lingually, the old man was by no means sophisticated, hardly in my league, but it seemed apparent that we shared a common interest in the subtleties and textures of the English language. I also
noted a challenge in his eyes, one to which I could not help but respond.

“Tie the knot,” I said grimly.

“Tie-up,” said Delbert. “Like with traffic.”

“Tied down,” I said. “As in busy, occupied.”

“Railroad tie,” he said.

“Ties of marriage,” I said.

“Tie tack,” he said.

“Tycoon,” said I.

Delbert frowned. “No way, man. That one doesn’t count.”

“Spoilsport. Very well, then—tied score.”

“Tongue-tied,” he shot back. “Tie-dye. Tie into. Tie that binds. My hands are tied.”

I shrugged.

“Not bad,” I said, and poured the old gentleman a whiskey. One had to admire his competitive spirit. “If you’re interested, we could try the word
lost
. In fact, there’s an excellent story that goes with it.”

“A tie-in?” Delbert said.

“Right,” I said crossly. “A tie-in. But there’s nothing worse than a show-off.”

Thus, in swift narrative strokes, while Delbert mopped the floor, I brought him up-to-date on my current situation, abandoned by one and all, and how my plight had antecedents back during the war—deserted then, deserted now. I told him about the mountains, my six traitorous comrades, the old villa where eventually I found refuge. “There I was,” I said, “sound asleep on that cot, and what finally woke me up were these—”

“Voices,” said Delbert.

“Voices. Yes.”

“Your buddies,” the old man said. He leaned on his mop. “I figure it was your buddies, right? The ones that dumped you?”

I glared at him.

“Sorry, sir. Just trying to speed things up.”

“Speed,” I said curtly, “is irrelevant.”

The old man glanced at a clock behind the bar. “But it
was
your
buddies, right? And I figure they were using the place to hide out—like a base or something.”

I took time refilling my glass.

For a professional teacher—perhaps for all of us—there is little more irritating than to be cut short by incompetent guesswork.

“On the most simplistic level,” I said, “I suppose you’re right. My comrades, yes. A base of operations. But that’s hardly the point.” For a few seconds I rebuked him with silence. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d be happy to fill you in. The subject is
lost.
”

The old man fidgeted. “Well, sir, it sounds interesting, but I’ve got toilets to clean.”

“Fine. I’ll join you.”

“Sir, I don’t think—”

“Lead the way,” I said resolutely. “The labor may help you concentrate.”

Until that early Tampa morning, I had no idea how many public rest rooms the typical hotel contains. More than a score, in point of fact. At least two for each bar, each restaurant, each ballroom, each swimming pool, each sauna and fitness room and major corridor. Plus the lobby. Plus recreation and utility rooms. It was an arduous morning, in other words, both for myself and for my new friend, Delbert. (I was going on no sleep; Delbert was going on seventy-five years.) We divided up the labor, more or less—I handled the talking, Delbert the brush work—but I dare say that by noon both of us were approaching the end of our respective tethers.

My behavior, I must confess, had become a trifle erratic. Compulsively jabbering. Easily distracted.

In general, I do not respond well to physical fatigue, or to tension, but I now felt positively overwhelmed by the loose ends in my life—Lorna Sue and Herbie and the tycoon and Mrs. Robert Kooshof. On top of this, each hour seemed to bring still other distractions and complications: first Toni, then Peg and Patty, and now I found myself plodding dizzily from commode to commode in the company of a smart-ass old janitor.

My entire life, it seemed, had become a great looping digression.

Nonetheless, though groggy and exhausted, I was determined to complete my tale. “To be honest,” I told Delbert, “you were pretty much on target. My so-called buddies, it seems they were Green Beret types. Using the old villa to stage all kinds of nasty business. Covert, of course.”

“Covert?” the old man said.

“You know. Secret.”

Delbert leaned over a toilet bowl and gave it a vigorous workout with his scrub brush. “I know what
covert
is. But what’s the point?”

“Betrayal,” I told him. “Betrayal and loss.”

He looked up with moderate interest. “Famous old tag team,” he said. “Betrayal and loss. But if you ask me, sir, you should get yourself some sleep.”

“Soon,” I said. “First the story.”

The old man handed me his brush. “All right, I’ll listen,” he said wearily. “Finish up that toilet for me. Those other ones too.”

“You don’t mean …?”

“Good and sterile.”

Delbert lit up a pipe and took a seat in the adjoining stall. Fleetingly, though not for the first time, I felt the squeeze of dislocation—that blurred, random sensation.

I sighed and rolled up my sleeves. Sanitation was not my cup of tea and never would be, yet there comes a time when one must pay a price for human sympathy.

I dipped in with my brush.

“You awake?” I said.

“Absolutely,” said Delbert. “Nasty business. Covert.”

My six comrades—if “comrades” is the proper term—did not seem in the least surprised to see me. On the contrary, they scarcely looked up when I marched down the stairs that morning. There were no apologies, no explanations.

The old villa, as it turned out, was situated barely a half mile from our original ambush site, and over the past several days I had been wandering mostly in circles, recrossing my own path several times. Apparently, too, my comrades had been keeping tabs on me the whole while, watching me traipse along—no doubt snickering at my ineptitude—and in at least one important sense, it could be said that I had never been lost at all. (A curious bit of relativism.
Lost
can be viewed as both a state of mind and a state of being, and the two conditions are not always in harmony. One can
feel
lost without being lost. One can
be
lost without
feeling
lost. Very tricky.)

Even so, I protested. I accused them of deserting me, leaving me to the mosquitoes, yet this outrage seemed not to register. “No sweat,” one of them said, a wiry little youth with the nickname Spider. “We had you totally covered, man. Like a blanket.”

“
Wet
fuckin’ blanket,” someone else said, and the others laughed.

The general mood, however, was mirthless.

“What I recommend you do,” said Spider, “is consider yourself blessed. You once was lost, now you’re found. Let it go at that.”

“Amen,” said Tulip.

There was no point in pursuing the matter. Clearly, these six sadists had their own agenda, which did not include the care and feeding of orphans like myself, and I swiftly opted for a course of caution. I was alive, after all—freshly found—and my goal was to stay that way.

Over the next several days, a predictable routine set in. I was assigned a cot, a footlocker, regular chores around the villa. By daylight, I spent most of my time on KP, preparing meals, cleaning up after the others, and then at night, most often with Spider, I pulled four or five hours of guard duty. None of this was pleasant, to be sure, but on the whole I preferred it to the jungle. I kept my mouth shut, my ears open, and gradually a few salient facts began to surface.

The villa was part of an old French tea plantation, long abandoned, and for months my comrades had been using the place as a
base of operations. They were all Special Forces—“Greenies,” in their own self-congratulatory parlance. When they spoke to me, which was not often, it was in a brusque, clandestine code, to which I had no key. Everything was hush-hush. Their voices, their style, even their mission. In the late afternoons, just before dusk, two or three of them would sometimes slip off into the rain forest, gliding away without a word, then returning a day or two later with the same oily stealth. Even their names were classified. They went by aliases and nothing else—Spider, Goof, Wildfire, Death Chant, Tulip, Bonnie Prince Charming. Not that I cared. My sole concern was staying found.