Tomcat in Love (5 page)

I
t is early May, let us imagine, and one glorious morning you stop to admire a red tulip along some garden path. You are conscious of the sky above, the earth below. And so for a few moments, perhaps, you pause to think thoughts about the circle of life, how growth goes to decay and then back again to growth. You recall other May mornings. (Your wedding day. How happy you were.) You review your past, envision your future. You think: Ah, such a tulip!

And me?

My stomach drops.

I glance over my shoulder.

I scan the shrubbery, listen for footsteps, peer up the garden path to where it curls away into the shadows of a forbidding green forest.

Tulips do it to me.

Even the word
tulip
.

Oh, yes, and the word
goof
. And the words
spider
and
wildfire
and
death chant
.

All of us, no doubt, have our demons. One way or another we are pursued by the ghosts of our own history, our lost loves, our blunders, our broken promises and grieving wives and missing children. And a single tulip is enough to remind us. In your own case, remember, it is a Hilton hotel along that busy freeway you take to work each morning. You try not to look. But you do. For it was there, in room 622, that your ex-husband spent his Tuesday afternoons with a tall, willowy redhead half his age. (You found those matches in his pocket.) And now he lives in Fiji, and you do not, and that Hilton will always be there in your rearview mirror.

So please, take this at face value: I am being chased.

I lock my doors at night. I avoid dark entryways, keep my eyes peeled even on bustling city streets.

There is much to be recorded here, much to be weighed and balanced, but in due course I shall elaborate. For the present, let it be understood that I have been ruthlessly pursued for many decades now, partly by a Tulip, partly by the word
tulip
. And do not for an instant try to tell me that words are not lethal.
^*

Tulip. Tampa. Tycoon
.

I
n summary, then, my circumstances were these. Something over forty-nine years of age. Recently divorced. Pursued. Prone to late-night weeping. Betrayed not once but threefold: by the girl of my dreams, by her Pilate of a brother, and by a Tampa real-estate tycoon whose name I have vowed never again to utter.

The popular wisdom dictates that in such situations we must “go forward” at all costs. (At one point or another, we have all chuckled aloud at the pertinent advisories in the pages of
Cosmopolitan
.) Move or die—so say the psychiatric sages. Learn to cope. Face reality. Stay busy. Exercise. Take up hobbies. Find a new partner.

For some, no doubt, this progressive counsel proves rock solid. Not so in my case. In the weeks following my divorce, I did in fact make a halfhearted effort at “coming to terms” with “new realities.” I packed up Lorna Sue’s belongings, purchased an Exercycle,
attended faithfully to my duties as occupant of the Rolvaag Chair in Modern American Lexicology at the University of Minnesota. And while it was traumatic, I also forced myself to spend considerable after-hours time in the company of several droll, well-sculpted enrollees in my seminar on the homographs of erotic slang.

None of this had the slightest curative effect. I cried like a baby in the arms of Sarah and Signe and the tiny, redheaded Rhonda; I gained six unfashionable pounds; I drank myself to sleep. Worse yet, on a professional level, my scholarship came to a complete and terrifying halt. My classroom lectures, once so justly famous, began to meander like the barroom soliloquies of some dull, downstate sophomore. The old academic pleasures no longer beckoned. During office hours, even as a chorus line of leggy young coeds awaited my attention in the hallway, I sometimes locked the door and lay immobile on the floor, driveshaft idle, my magnificent old sex engine backfiring on grief.

Modern methods, in short, had failed abysmally. Antiquity beckoned.

Thus revenge.

The word comes to us from the Latin,
vindicare
, to vindicate, and in its most primitive etymology is without pejorative shading of any sort. To vindicate is to triumph over suspicion or accusation or presumed guilt, and for the ancients, such triumph did not exclude the ferocious punishment of false accusers. (Hence
vindicta
. Hence vengeance.)

My resolve, therefore, was to resuscitate the old virtues.

Enough coping, I decided.

Time now to punish.

On three successive Thursdays, immediately after my final class of the week, I flew to Tampa with the purpose of scouting out the terrain. These were costly excursions, to be sure, not to mention excruciatingly lonely, but in no time at all I had acquired a working knowledge of the environs.

Tampa itself brought to mind a great pastel jellyfish beached up
along the sea, its flesh gnawed away by salt and sunlight, the remains loosely bound together by a skeleton of bridges and causeways and hotels and shopping malls and multilane freeways. The dominant fact was sunshine. The dominant color was turquoise. All very splendid, no doubt, but as a Minnesotan, a son of Swedes, I found the subtropical air far less than bracing, the tempo sluggish, the smells musty and flower-sweet. (I suffer from hay fever. I cannot tolerate excessive vegetation.)

Tampa: languid, lazy, listless. Nice place to visit, et cetera.

Yet it was here, in the land of Buccaneers, that my unfaithful Penelope and her two salacious suitors somehow managed to survive. In marital partnership with her tycoon, Lorna Sue was cohabitant of a huge, flagrantly ornate mock-Tudor dwelling in the southeastern suburbs of the city; Herbie lived in a handsome little bungalow a half block away. (Cozy arrangement. Wholly predictable.) Under a hot Tampa sun, roasted by sorrow, I spent those long, fuzzy days sitting in a rental car with a notebook and a pair of binoculars. I fumed. I drank and talked to myself. On one painful occasion, for an entire afternoon, I looked on as Lorna Sue planted a bed of red roses along her front doorstep. Here, in tight denim shorts, was the woman I had loved beyond loving, the woman who had eventually traded me in like a battered old Chevrolet. I could scarcely keep the binoculars on her. Barefoot and content, humming to herself, she seemed so casual about putting down roots in the bleached Florida soil. Roses, for Christ sake!
^*
There was not a hint of remorse in her posture, not a tremor of dissatisfaction, and I could only seethe at how thoroughly my revered Lorna Sue had adapted to life in the Sunshine State. Healthy and serene. Tanned skin. Hair held back by a checkered red bandanna. I will confess that it choked me up to study those untroubled brown eyes, those pouty lips that had once issued vows of eternal fidelity.

Roses!

I yearned for a hammer and nails.

Say what you will, but the Romans understood these matters. They coined the lingo.

I had no plan in mind, no agenda, but over the course of those three separate visits to Tampa, I trusted in fate and patiently collected intelligence from the safety of my rental car. I watched Herbie mow his lawn, watched the tycoon polish his snazzy blue Mercedes. In the late afternoons, almost without exception, I tailed Lorna Sue to a nearby supermarket—fresh vegetables, expensive cuts of meat. Cocktails were at six. Dinner was at seven sharp.

It was a stressful period, yes, but the notion of revenge kept me going on even the most trying occasions.

Such as:

—A Sunday picnic on the beach.

—Lorna Sue’s silhouette against the drawn bedroom curtains.

—An afternoon yard sale featuring artifacts from our years of marriage. (My coin collection. Lorna Sue’s homemade wedding gown.)

—Roses.

How, in such circumstances, could any sensitive human being avoid the occasional pinch of gloom? Call me crazy, if you wish, but do not forget your own double-crossing husband, that beloved Judas who disclaimed and repudiated you. Ask yourself this: Is not all human bleakness, all genuine tragedy, ultimately the product of a broken heart?

Late at night, in my ninth-floor hotel chamber, I began sketching out a strategy of reprisal. The least important of my targets was clearly the tycoon. Granted, I despised the usurping bastard, but in a way he seemed incidental to it all, someone to be dispensed with quickly and without fuss. The possibilities were infinite, and I soon found myself giggling as I jotted down some of the more intriguing methods—arson, food poisoning, transudative sailboats.

To look at me, perhaps, one might conclude that I am incapable
of violence, yet little could be more distant from the truth. I am a war hero. I have experience with napalm. No doubt my students would raise their Neanderthal eyebrows at this, even cackle in disbelief, for I cultivate the facade of a distant, rather ineffectual man of letters. Effete, some would say. Imperious.
^*
(Other possibilities: officious, prissy, insufferable.) At the same time, however, I must in good conscience point out that women find me attractive beyond words. And who on earth could blame them? I stand an impressive six feet six; my weight rarely exceeds one hundred eighty pounds. In the eyes of many, I resemble a clean-shaven version of our sixteenth President, gangly and benign, yet this is mere camouflage for the man within—a recipient of the Silver Star for valor.

In short, I am hazardous. I can kill with words, or otherwise.

And so, yes, first the tycoon.

Late one afternoon, on my third trip to Tampa, I visited a small, exclusive boutique in the hotel, where with the assistance of a personable young salesgirl—Carla, by name—I browsed through a selection of women’s undergarments. Quite graciously, I thought, and
very boldly, the girl agreed to model several items at the rear of the store, and in the end, after numerous changes of costume, I settled upon a pair of fluorescent purple panties and matching bra.

“For your wife?” Carla inquired.

“For her husband,” said I.

The girl glanced up with interest. (Fascinating creature. Spiked orange hair. Leather dog collar, also spiked. Iron bracelets. Iron anklets. Snake tattoo just below the navel.)

“So you’re divorced,” said this punkish, altogether immodest cupcake. “Fucked over and all that?”

“Sadly so,” I replied.

The girl nodded, then frowned. “So why the purple shit? I mean, like—you know—why all this expensive underwear for some cocksucker who stole your squeeze? Just yank his nuts off.”

I was enchanted.

And for the next few moments, with pleasure, I proceeded to outline my recent history, including (but not limited to) certain heartbreaking incidents of perfidy and faithlessness. The word
hairy
popped up. Also the following:
mattress, turtle, engine, tycoon, Pontiac
.

Carla studied me briefly and then sighed.

“Okay, I get the picture. Revenge. Sock it to the fuckers.” She stood there for a moment, grim-faced, plainly infatuated, still clad in phosphorescent violet. “Look, man, if you’re really serious, I got some pretty sick shit you might like.”

Swiftly, then, the girl escorted me into a dark, poorly ventilated back room. Instantly, I was reminded of Poe’s tales of the macabre. Arranged on the shelves were numerous devices of torture, among which I spotted such items as handcuffs, chains, padlocks, whips, gags, masks, leg irons, car batteries, neck clamps, pliers, assorted pins and needles.

“I keep this stuff for friends,” said the fetching (and plainly dangerous) young Carla. “Take your time, dude. Browse.”

“Intriguing,” I purred, “but I am not in the market.”

“You want
revenge
, right? Entrapment? What you do is, you just
plant some of this sick shit. They’ll be divorced like tomorrow.” The girl eyed me. “S and M. It’s my thing.”