Tomcat in Love (22 page)

So I followed orders, bided my time. A week went by, maybe two weeks. Sooner or later, I reasoned, we would be returning to the firebase, and until then it seemed prudent to get along with my six spooky compatriots.

All in all, it was a ticklish period, obviously, but not without occasional delights. Sometimes, in the mellow hours of afternoon, it was easy to forget that we were in the heart of a war zone: drinks on the veranda, a quick dip in the pool, perhaps a leisurely stroll before dinner. Like a resort, I’d think. Very peaceful, no pressures. Twice a week, by some peculiar arrangement, a dozen or so Vietnamese civilians would appear out of the jungle—mostly female—and under a blazing white sun they would spend the day tending the villa’s lawn and gardens. When my own chores were finished, I sometimes looked on while they raked and hoed and trimmed. To my mind, at least, there was something decorous about it, something tranquil and reassuring. It was as if the villa had been snagged in a time warp, a dreamy regression to a more exotic era—the tropical heat, the languor, those mysterious, brown-skinned women toiling away in their straw hats and bare feet.

Erotic, I thought. And I liked that too.

One of these young laborers, in fact, had taken a fancy to me, and on occasion I would invite her up to the veranda for a glass of lemonade. Her age was hard to guess: maybe sixteen, maybe twenty. Slender and delicately boned, with bashful black eyes, the girl reminded me of a little gazelle, alert and tentative, ready to bolt.
Her name, as she spelled it out for me, was Thuy Ninh, which to my Western ear sounded uncannily like “Take In.” Who would not be captivated? The very sound thrilled me, and with those two seductive syllables, so crisp and tantalizing, I imagined she was issuing an invitation of sorts, maybe even a promise.

Sometimes we would hold hands. Sometimes she would give me a shy little smile.

“You will love me?” she said.

“You didn’t?” said Delbert from the adjoining stall.

“I
had
to.”

“Had to? She was just a kid, I thought.”

“Advanced for her age. Insistent too. She virtually forced me.”

Delbert issued a sharp sound of disapproval, which echoed through the tiled rest room, and the judgmental snap in his voice instantly brought to mind a certain childhood confrontation with Lorna Sue. The same moralistic piety. (“You kissed Faith Graffenteen’s
face
! You kissed her snotty nose!” To which I had responded as I was still responding: “She forced me.” Incredible, is it not, how our earth revolves in such precise, repetitive circles?)

I scrubbed silently for a time, working on a stubborn stain at the bottom of a commode. “It may be difficult to believe,” I said, “but there is something about me—my manner, my essential selfhood—that women seem to relish.”

“Oh, yeah, like Peg and Patty?” said Delbert. The old man snorted. “So you took advantage of this little Vietnamese gal?”

“Not in the least,” I said. “Romance. An affair of the heart.”

What happened at the villa, I told him, could best be understood as an extension of my life history up to that point, one more chilling episode in a long pattern of sacrificing common sense to the exhausting demands of love.

Even in a war, I could not shake the curse of romance. It was my destiny. The story of my life.

From childhood on, I had been consumed by an insatiable appetite for affection, hunger without limit, a bottomless hole inside me. I would (and will) do virtually anything to acquire love, virtually anything to keep it. I would (and will) lie for love, cheat for love, beg for love, steal for love, ghostwrite for love, seek revenge for love, swim oceans for love, perhaps even kill for love.

Am I alone in this?

Certainly not.

Each of us, I firmly believe, is propelled through life by a restless, inexhaustible need for affection. Why else do we trudge off to work every morning, or withhold farts, or decorate our bodies with precious gems, or attend church, or smile at strangers, or pluck out body hair, or send valentines, or glance into mirrors, or forgive, or try to forgive, or gnash our teeth at betrayal, or pray, or promise, or any of a trillion large and small behaviors that constitute the totality of the human trial on this planet?

All for love.

All to
be
loved.

In my own case, obviously, this love drive went haywire at a very early stage. Like some horrid cancer, the need for affection multiplied into a voracious, desperate, lifelong craving. The benign became malignant. Desire became compulsion. Hence my hosts of female acquaintances; hence innumerable peccadilloes and compromises and heartaches and broken promises and embarrassments and outright humiliations. In my defense, however, I must quickly declare one other fundamental truth: the motive was never physical. Repeat:
never
! The motive was love. Only love. Thus, over the course of a spotty career, I have enjoyed carnal relations with a paltry four women. (Or three. Depending.) On the other hand, I can boldly credit to my account one hundred twenty-eight near misses, two hundred twelve love letters, fifteen boxes of chocolates, well over five hundred significant flirtations and alliances and dalliances. (I keep books. I do a rigorous monthly tally. The count
counts.
) And yet the quantities never proved sufficient. I had to keep fueling the furnace, refilling the hole, topping off my leaky love tank.

——

Which brings us to Thuy Ninh.

Nothing coy about it. “You will love me?” she said.

And so we locked limbs on the billiard table, on my cot, in the swimming pool, in the dusty shade of the rain forest. For me, at least, it was an education, and my learning curve could be judged spectacular. Thuy Ninh would chant her name to me. (
Take in!. Take in!
) I would gamely oblige. Slim-hipped and girlish, with a libido built on box springs, my vigorous young beauty was plainly well tutored in the ways of joy. Her appetite was healthy, her standards were high. “Like
this
!” she would demand. Occasionally, I found myself wondering where she had acquired such skills, at once so technical and so bawdy, but in my naive way, blinded by romance, I chalked it up to precociousness and the influence of the jungle.

One afternoon, I recall, we lay entwined at the lip of a deep gorge behind the villa. (Cool and shaded, the place was among our favorite love venues. A narrow river descended from the mountains, passed through the gorge, then plummeted ten or fifteen feet in a magnificent little waterfall.) We had already made love twice that afternoon; we were now embarking on session three. In the speckled sunlight, Thuy Ninh’s eyes had become moon slices, the irises in high orbit, tiny slivers of black sailing sideways beneath her upper lids. The soles of her feet were thrust skyward. She did a squeezing trick with her thighs, rolled me onto my back, screamed at the sky.

All this was memorable in its own right. But adding to the frenzy was an impressive B-52 strike in the mountains to the west. The planes themselves were invisible. The consequences were not. Over Thuy Ninh’s bare shoulders, I could see the distant jungle take fire—bright orange, bright violet, bright black. An entire mountainside collapsed. Seconds later a heated wind swept down the gorge, soon followed by several rapid concussions. Thuy Ninh seemed not to notice. She arched her back and exploded. There were secondary
explosions too, plus aftershocks, and then I closed my eyes and unloaded my own devastating tonnage.
^*

Afterward, Thuy Ninh laughed. “Sergeant Superman,” she said.

But it was not just sex.

The girl had snagged my affections; she filled up that part of me that needed filling. For once, it seemed, I had found something unimpeachable and pure. Granted, the physical pleasures were wondrous, but so, too, were all the simple things. Curling around her at night. Holding hands—that perfect fit.

On the veranda one evening, as my comrades looked on, I taught Thuy Ninh the waltz, humming in her ear, and for the moment we could have been actors in some silver-screen musical. At the finale, my six comrades offered tepid applause.

“Heartwarming,” Death Chant said.

“The cockles,” said Bonnie Prince Charming.

Goof yawned. “This dude’s heart,” he said wearily, “is where his dick should be.”

Not much later, the six of them trooped inside. When they were gone, Thuy Ninh and I sat alone on the veranda.

“What was all that?” I said.

“That?”

“You heard them.”

The girl looked at me for a moment, almost in tears. “Must go,” she said, then stood up, kissed me, and hurried off into the shadows of the rain forest.

Something odd had just occurred—a secret commentary, a
secret reproach—and although it was a mystery to me, I had trouble sleeping that night. The unease stayed with me over the next several days. At times I caught Thuy Ninh studying me with a kind of apprehension; other times I had the feeling that my comrades were enjoying a droll, slightly macabre insight into the world.

“This tale,” said Delbert from the adjoining stall, “seems told by an idiot. Doesn’t signify jack-anything.”

“It soon will,” I assured him.

“Sound and fury?”

“You bet,” I said.

A strange, tense time, I told him.

Late at night, invisible Phantoms and B-52s pounded the mountains to the west. One evening, jolted from sleep, I found Thuy Ninh crying in the dark. The girl pushed up against me, clamped her hands to her ears. “Bad,” she whimpered. “Shitty bad war.” There was nothing I could say. I held her until she fell asleep, then went to the window. Down below, on the veranda, my six comrades sat huddled around a large map, their faces lighted by a pair of candles. Their voices were indistinct, but after a moment I heard the squawk of a military radio—a buzzing sound, a pilot’s voice—and then it hit me that my six pals were busy orchestrating this whole nighttime extravaganza. Wildfire relayed grid coordinates over the radio; the others scanned the mountains through field glasses.

There was no mystery now about their mission: search and scald.

And they enjoyed it.

Three or four of them had painted up their faces and torsos—bright colors, weird designs, like savages around a campfire. As I backed away from the window, Death Chant looked up and raised a hand to me.

“Love bombs!” he cried. “Try a little tenderness!”

These men, I realized, were beyond gone. They were lost the way lunatics are lost.

For another hour I lay listening to mayhem—the thunderous bombing, the howls outside my window—and then I dozed off. When I awakened, Thuy Ninh was gone.

Immediately, I got dressed, went downstairs, and slipped out a side door.

The whole countryside was burning—everything—rocks and trees and earth. To the northwest, a mile-long silhouette of stone flared up in brilliant reds and violets. The sky was on fire, and the moon, too, and the nighttime clouds. A powdery white ash fluttered down like snow.

I moved along the side of the villa, edged up close to the veranda, stopped there and stood watching as Spider and Wildfire coordinated another air strike over their radio. In the dark, at the far end of the veranda, the others seemed to be performing a dance of some sort. I could not make out much, just wriggling shapes here and there, the phosphorescent paint on their bodies.

At one point an invisible jet passed low overhead—a shrill whining sound; a metallic hiss; a sequence of tremors rolling upward from the center of the earth; a brilliant orange flash to the east and then the faint, fleshy stench of napalm.

How long I stood there I am not sure. At least a full minute.

The night had gone to bedlam.

“Love bombs!” someone squealed, and someone else screamed, “Love, love, love!”

There was a rushing noise, another jet, another orange flash, and in the flowery glow I spotted Thuy Ninh at the end of the veranda.

I took a single step forward. I took no more.

It was not the act of sex—not yet, not quite. Thuy Ninh stood swaying in the night, rapt and lovely, unclothed, painted up in blues and greens, presenting herself like a peacock to my dancing comrades. Instantly, I understood the source of her expertise in the art of love. She was slick with treason.

I am not an incapable man. (My IQ has tested out at well over 175.) But I am also human. I have psychological limits: That balcony sensation. That clock-stopped silence in my soul.

At first light I packed my rucksack.

I went out to the veranda, unfolded the map, switched on the radio, quietly called in my coordinates. I requested the whole tasty menu. Yes, I
did
—high explosives, napalm—and then I walked across the lawn and out into the rain forest.

And I felt not the slightest guilt.

Anything for love.

I did not wait to measure the results. There was no need. I could see it in my head. The object, of course, was not to kill, merely to terrify, and to this end I took satisfaction in the vision of my six betraying comrades cringing under a rain of Chippering wrath.
^*

So, yes, I simply walked away. East through the mountains. Across two muddy rivers.

By nightfall I was back at the firebase, at my desk in the adjutant’s office, where I popped open a Coca-Cola, smiled to myself, flexed my new moral muscle, rolled the appropriate form into my typewriter, and awarded myself the Silver Star for valor.

“I’m a war hero,” I told Delbert.

I am Fury.

Do not fuck with me.