Tomcat in Love (24 page)

I knitted my fingers together. “And what about you? Living here in Tampa? Following her around like a puppy dog? Do the fantasies suck?”

“Out of bounds.”

“Seriously,” I said. “Still dreaming sister dreams?”

He went rigid, his whole body coiling up, and it occurred to me that the sleek new Herbie, so controlled and polished, was still struggling to hold back an explosive eight-year-old still inside him.

He rose to his feet, tossed the ledger to me. (Which I fumbled. Same old problem: dead cats.) “Some things, man, you’ll never understand,” he said quietly. “No more pranks—stay away from us.”

“Us,” I said.

“I mean it, Tommy. Be careful. You’re way out of your league.”

I nodded and said, “No doubt,” but it gave me secret pleasure to imagine that Lorna Sue’s handsome tycoon was at that very moment examining a pair of pigskin leggings and a packet of cruise tickets.

“Happy honeymoon,” I said cheerfully.

Mrs. Robert Kooshof and I caught an early-evening flight back to the Twin Cities. It was not, of course, a full-scale reconciliation. Nor quarter-scale. The flight had been booked well in advance—both fares paid by none other than yours truly—and our joint journey was the doing not of Eros but of standard Dutch parsimony. My bewitching vixen, needless to say, sulked through much of the flight, at times staring out the window, at others browsing restlessly through my ledger.

Explanations were out of the question. Mrs. Kooshof was in no mood to pay heed, nor was I in condition to sketch out the intricate psychology at work. Even in the most banal circumstances, human love is a subtle and enigmatic phenomenon, almost beyond analysis, but in my own particular case, which was nothing if not unique, the ordinary complexities seemed to have been multiplied by a factor
verging on the infinite. On the one hand I had loved Lorna Sue completely and absolutely. On the other hand there was the reality of my ledger. Between these two poles lay the force field of my individuality, that ceaseless internal warfare we call “character.” (I was no simple Lothario; I was
complicated.
) I yearned for steadfast, eternal love, as represented by the lasting fidelity of one woman, but at the-same time I wanted to be
wanted
. Universally. Without exception—by one and all. I wanted my cake, to be sure, but I coveted the occasional cupcake too.

On this hazy principle, I had inaugurated my love ledger as a precocious twelve-year-old. (Faith Graffenteen, Linda Baumgard, Pam and Ruthie Bell, Corinne Vander Kellen, Beth Dean, Lorna Sue Zylstra—these budding, unseasoned kitty-cats were among my earliest entries.) By the time I reached high school, Lorna Sue had been firmly installed as the love of my life, yet I saw no harm in continuing to chart those minor flirtations that occur by the dozens in the flow of a typical school day: a shy smile in the cafeteria, a lingering bit of eye contact in biology lab. Who could fault me? Life is awash in such incidents, a confusing erotic flood, and to keep myself afloat I had no choice but to maintain an accurate running tally. It was a hobby of sorts, a benign and often amusing diversion that I pursued during four lonely years at the University of Minnesota, then through five years of restless bachelorhood, then with increasing regularity during my two decades of marriage to Lorna Sue. An ego booster, one might say.

All this and more I would have explained to Mrs. Robert Kooshof, but instead we sat in silence for most of the journey, attuned to the sound and sway of our aircraft. The tension was funereal—sad and final. At one point, after a drink or two, Mrs. Kooshof blotted a poetic tear from her cheek.

“You could’ve told me,” she said, no anger in her voice, only resignation. “We were starting fresh. You didn’t need to lie.”

“Pride,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure. But I thought we
had
something.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. “And now it’s too late?”

“Probably,” she said. “Yes.”

Then silence again. The jet’s engines had the effect of a dreary lullaby.

Had I been able to summon the energy, I would have pointed out to her the substantial difference between lying and withholding inessential elements of the truth. Granted, the ledger had been a primary cause of my final separation from Lorna Sue; granted, too, it had been unwise to stash the document beneath our mattress. Still, despite appearances, I had been absurdly faithful to my wife, enduring much along the way, and the ledger amounted to nothing more than a statistical daily diary, a record not of misdeed but of a tidy mind collating life’s random brushes with the rapacious, completely opposite sex. Are we not all entitled to our idiosyncrasies? Our harmless little crotchets and caprices? My only felony, after all, had been to organize the raw materials of experience into a coherent whole. The naughty young Toni, for example, had been duly registered as one of two hundred fifty-five brunettes with whom I had very innocently dallied. Much can be deduced from such data: hidden preferences, erotic probabilities, correlations of pigmentation and temperament. In point of fact, as Socrates himself admonished, I have come to know myself by way of my ledger, just as any corporation finds profit in its spreadsheets.

Such were my thoughts when Mrs. Robert Kooshof suddenly jerked upright and turned on me.

“Thomas, for God’s sake,” she said forcefully, out of feminine nowhere, “just this once I wish you’d stop
justifying
everything. Just one time in your wishy-washy life!”

Here was an alarming moment, obviously—it was as if the woman had read my mind.

“I mean, Jesus, you’re like some fickle, randy old alley cat,” Mrs. Kooshof was saying, loud enough to attract the attention of a buxom young businesswoman across the aisle. (Jade eyes. Toshiba computer. A come-hither upper carriage that had caught my eye back at the boarding gate in Tampa.) “I’m serious. You should be neutered—no morals at all. Can’t you at least apologize?”

“Of course I can,” I said, and blinked in wonder. “But for what?”

“
What
?”

“If you mean—”

“I mean your personality,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “And stop ogling Miss Milkshakes.”

“I am definitely not ogling,” said I. “Plainly not.”

“You are so! Right
now—
this instant!” She sucked in oxygen. “My God, you’re
still
doing it!”

Mortified, I raised an eyebrow at the woman across the aisle, who flashed me a conspiratorial frown before turning away. (It takes two, I believe, to tango. She preened, I took notice.) Both of us, in any event, were no doubt yearning for parachutes as Mrs. Kooshof went on to list my character deficits in a voice that competed successfully with the jet’s twin engines. She was reminding me, in particular, that I had recently uttered the word
yes
in response to certain inquiries regarding my amatory frame of mind. “I don’t care what you say,” she growled. “Yes
means
yes. I took you at your word. I thought we were in love.”

“Well,” I said, “time will tell.”

“Time?”

“We’ve barely—”

Mrs. Kooshof emitted a scornful noise from the back of her throat. She glowered at the businesswoman across the aisle, leaned back heavily in her seat. In our many weeks together, I had yet to see my companion so exhausted, so thoroughly drained of spark and color.

After a moment, in the tone of a physician delivering bad news, she sighed and said, “If it makes you feel better, I’ll take part of the blame. Maybe I wanted it too much. Went too fast. Thirty-six years old, biological clock buzzing like crazy, and it looked like my last chance for—you know—for real happiness. Romance. Whatever. So I planned this whole pretty future around you, a brand-new life, but then right away you started backpedaling. Ignored me. Almost pushed me off a balcony. And now this sophomoric black book of yours.”

“It is neither black,” said I, “nor sophomoric. It is a professional’s daily log.”

“More split hairs.”

“Yet accurate. Not frizzy.”

Mrs. Kooshof yelped in frustration. “If you ask my opinion, you’re a sick, dangerous, compulsive skirt chaser. And a sneak. And a liar.”

“Fortunately,” I said, “I did not.”

“Not?”

“Ask.”

I glanced sideways at the woman across the aisle. Clearly, she was intrigued. (Moistened lips. A becoming tilt to her head. It was my obligation to offer a wink of apology.)

“Dangerous,” Mrs. Kooshof repeated. “And that’s the plain truth. You could hurt people, Thomas. Physically.”

“You’re joking, yes?”

“I’m not,” she said. “I think you’re capable of … I don’t know. Almost anything. That day on the balcony, you could’ve killed me. I still don’t know what happened, exactly, but I’ll tell you this much: It scared me. Plus the whole revenge business. And the way you attack me—in bed, I mean. It’s too rough, like you’re working out some old grudge.”

The businesswoman cleared her throat. (Was it my imagination that she squirmed? That she recrossed her legs, scratched her nose, twisted a ringlet of auburn hair around a trembling pinkie? The signs of estrus were evident.)

“You love women,” Mrs. Kooshof concluded, “enough to hurt them any way you can.” She paged through the ledger. “Spankings: sixteen. The fuck does
that
mean?” I sat speechless. From across the aisle, however, came an audible groan. “And the thing is,” said Mrs. Kooshof, “you don’t act like I’m really important to you. I mean, you never even use my first name. Maybe you don’t
know
it—I’ll bet you
don’t
.”

“Enough,” I said sternly.

“Go ahead, then,” she said. “What is it?”

“I will not be quizzed.”

“
My name
! Say it!”

The jet struck an air pocket. I was instantly (and luckily) overcome by nausea—a brackish taste in my throat—and it was with the greatest effort that I unbuckled my seat belt and retreated to a cramped lavatory at the rear of the plane.

Remarkable, is it not? How words truly matter?

Nouns. Names.

For some time I sat racking my memory, amazed at the tidal influence of language in our lives, and when I returned to my seat a half hour later, still shaky, Mrs. Robert Kooshof was huddled in neighborly comradeship with my jade-eyed, top-heavy businesswoman. Together, they were feeding on my ledger like a pair of cornfield crows.

“Donna?” I said.

A
s in war, so, too, in romance.

Knee-deep in hell, amid the smoke and din, we lose our internal bearings. Terrors multiply. Options narrow. Like flotsam, we are caught up in the swirl, no right or wrong, ambiguities everywhere, each of us carried to a puny destiny by the great fateful flood. In times of moral complexity, events have a way of accelerating beyond the reach of human reason.

I had little choice, in other words, but to propose marriage to Mrs. Robert Kooshof.

Thus, over prunes and buttered toast on a cool late-April morning, two celibate days after returning from Tampa, I dropped to my knees and popped the imprisoning question. On the sexual weather front, to reach for a metaphor, it had been a rare and very frustrating dry spell, enough to make one dizzy with desire, and on that particular morning Mrs. Kooshof happened to be breaking fast in her midnight-blue negligee.

“Will you?” I inquired.

“Will I
what
?”

“Oh, stop it—you know exactly what. Will you have me?”

It was worth a try. Evidently, though, my soon-to-be betrothed had developed a wary, altogether distrustful attitude toward our capricious universe. She insisted on precision.

“Have how, Thomas? What does
have
mean?”

“The obvious,” I said.

She gazed at me without mercy. “Then say it. The words. I want to hear the
words.
”

My knees, I must remark, were chafed by the time we had completed our transaction. “Yes, yes,” my beloved new fiancée finally cooed, although by that point she had imposed a number of rather stern provisos: I would henceforth be keeping no books. I would shun the city of Tampa. I would renounce revenge. I would kick, cold turkey, my so-called girl habit. I would repair the telephone. I would be present at meals. I would address her by her Christian name.