Sometimes I come to sit on the porch in front of the shop. There is a trellis overhead. I sip coffee softened with milk. I compose my thoughts. I consult my internal dictionary. Turtle, I sometimes think. Commitment. Substance. Roses. Pontiac. Cornfield. If. Lost. Sacred. Tycoon. Tampa. Occasionally, should inspiration strike, I will jot down a memory or two, or a telling footnote to this volume. But for the most part I watch the aqua bay.
At noon, when the shop closes for the standard island siesta, Mrs. Robert Kooshof and I cross the street for lunch at a favorite café. We eat expensively. She is well-off, remember, and there is no reason to shortchange ourselves. In the same breath, however, I must mention that the tropical life has rendered us newly health conscious—two or three glasses of wine, not a drop more, accompanied by a piece of grilled Creole grouper. To date I have dropped twelve unflattering pounds. I sport a Coppertone physique, a salt-and-pepper beard, a suite of hand-tailored seersucker suits. (In this same regard, I might add, Mrs. Kooshof has been urging that I try a mother-of-pearl earring. And who knows? On my deathbed I might very well comply.)
Over lunch we converse. Slowly but steadily, though not without moments of retrogression, I have begun to master the high art of listening, a development that in myriad ways has expanded my universe. I have learned, for instance, that my beloved’s divorce is but a week from becoming final; that her abusive, inattentive, altogether spiteful husband will be receiving a financial settlement far beyond fair; that his parole has been approved; that he hits the street next Thursday; that for all his good fortune, he remains unhappy with me; that he vows vengeance; that the tycoon’s leaden shoe has apparently been transferred to another foot. Our current exile, therefore, strikes me as foresighted.
Not that we plan to stay forever.
Another year. Three tops.
Mrs. Kooshof has quite prudently taken her house off the market, and it is a near certainty that sooner or later we shall return to live there, upon the prairie of my youth, in the Rock Cornish Hen Capital of the World.
And why not? As good as nowhere. Isolation, it appears, has become the dominant motif of our lives.
Which in the end is for the better.
It is not so much escape I seek, although escape has its own neck-saving virtues, but rather, more fundamentally, it is to remove myself from the hurly-burly, to pause and take stock, to reflect upon the man I was, the man I am, the man I may become. I have learned some things. A “flirt-bird,” yes—Lorna Sue’s creative slang has been duly registered in my dictionary. Slightly too forward at times. Presumptuous, perhaps. Such personal concessions, of course, still have a tendency to stick in this old flirt-bird’s craw, for I am not one to dwell on my deficits, yet it has become clear that I may have once or twice taken my love craving to an ungentlemanly extreme and that in the course of events I may have split a hair or two in justifying these appetites.
My love ledger, needless to say, is a thing of the past. Like the rest of the world—like you—I keep the records in my head.
I make progress with each languid hour.
In the heat of midday, after lunch, Mrs. Robert Kooshof and I will often take a short stroll down to the bay, where we wet our feet, after which I escort her back to the shop, put a kiss to her lips, bid her a profitable afternoon, and then make my solitary way westward toward the pristine topless beaches of Club Med.
So then.
Like an invalid on the mend, hour to hour, I gradually reclaim my life.
But let it be said, loud and clear, that even an old flirt-bird can be taught new tricks. In recent weeks I have taken up seaside hair braiding—an honorable trade in this warm clime. Eight American dollars a head. Tips excluded. Chitchat gratis. The chartered aircraft arrive like clockwork from New York and Paris and Naples, week after exhilarating week, and I have yet to experience a shortage of silky tresses upon the club’s immaculate and fertile beaches.
Do I miss academia?
I am a pig in heaven.
I specialize in corn rows. I envision a Rock Cornish Salon in my prairie future.
As of the moment, I must guiltily confess, Mrs. Robert Kooshof knows none of this. She sniffs at my skin. She wonders. In the evenings, as we sit beneath the stars in our hilltop garden, she will often ask how this memoir is coming along, to which I reply, “Slowly, slowly,” and then after a time she will sigh and say, “Thomas, you don’t touch them, do you?” And on those eerily clairvoyant occasions I will explain to her, with impeccable honesty, that my policy has always been (and always will be) strictly hands off.
True enough: the proud, brawny tomcat still struts within me. Untamed, thank the Lord, but learning how to love.
I lost a wife, I gained back a friend. Herbie has come to visit twice. He will return, I hope, one day soon. On his last stopover he reported that Lorna Sue and her tycoon are doing well. No fires of late. Her spells come and go. Basically she is happy. There is not a great deal of passion to the marriage, I am sad to learn, but the tycoon worships her and offers the everyday sacrifice of selfhood.
On his own part, Herbie says, he is contemplating a move northward. Toronto, he thinks. He wept a little when he told me this, for to renounce his vows as Lorna Sue’s caretaker will amount to its own kind of divorce, a betrayal and forswearing, a breach of faith, an end to something both numinous and profane.
Later, though, he laughed.
“Toronto,” he said, and hugged me. We stood in the waiting area of our tiny island airport; his return flight was already boarding. “So, Tom, what do you think? Maybe the priesthood? Or maybe one of those long-legged ice skaters? Which will it be?”
“Maybe both,” said I.
When it occurs to me, which is primarily near the nocturnal hour of retirement, I have taken to addressing my bewitching companion by her Christian, semi-Moorish name. The word Donna remains unwieldy on my tongue, like a donkey’s awkward load, but given that next June we will become man and wife, and given the conventions of our modern epoch, I often relent under threat of withheld physical favors. She is insistent on this point. “Mrs. Robert Kooshof” will no longer do. (Decorum is out, familiarity is in, but my secret plan, if I can summon the stamina, is to Donna her to death. Sentence after sentence, phrase after windy phrase, I will simply hammer the wayward woman—Donna, pass the salt, Donna, have a heart—until that glorious day when civility returns to fashion.)
Meanwhile, we make wedding plans.
June, as I say. Garden ceremony. Pastel garb. Steel band. Herbie has agreed to serve as best man.
I look forward, as one can imagine, to dispatching a special invitation to Lorna Sue, who for an instant may contemplate her loss. Even more than that, however, I anticipate with a nostalgic tremble the arrival of old acquaintances from such remote locales as Naples and New York.
It will be a joyous day.
I am at work amending the standard vows.
A step forward, a half step back. An appropriate pace in this sun-drenched zone.
As promised, I see a psychiatrist. I am diligent. I write no phony checks. Each Thursday, at 2:00 P.M. sharp, I plod into the ramshackle office of our island’s single shrink, a jolly young lady of African descent and considerable insight. We sit out back sometimes, where chickens peck at the dust, and together, in calypso cadences, explore the intricate curlicues of my psyche. The gal speaks little English; I command the island patois not at all. “Turtle,” I may intone, shaping the creature with my hands, even sketching an example in the dust, which will cause my sleek soul-guide to squeal with unabashed delight.
“Like you, mon!” she will exclaim. “Big shell! Very slow! But live long forever!”
(She cannot contain the feminine flash in her eyes.)
She gives me a small, noxious pouch to wear near my heart, walks me to the road, judiciously banks my check the same afternoon.
Live long forever.
I hope so. But I am being chased, as you are, toward some dim day of judgment.
O
n the beach this morning I spotted Death Chant.
Tonight I will braid Mrs. Robert Kooshof’s hair. Confess all. Begin again.
And you.
It has been years now.
He is in Fiji, with another woman, and will not soon be returning.
But believe this: He loved you. He still does. He knows his transgression and feels it like a loosened tooth in his mouth on the morning of your anniversary, and on your autumn birthday, and when the snow does not come to Fiji on Christmas Eve. Believe too, that in those soft Pacific breezes, late at night, he wakes to think of you, hoping you are well, and that the image with which he finally finds reprieve is of someday returning to your door and knocking on it and begging admittance. A matter of faith. And if you can believe this, which is not beyond believing, imagine how your beauty would fill that doorway. Imagine staring that powerful new stare of yours, the one you have been practicing in your dreams. Imagine how you might chuckle, or shake your head, or just quietly say goodbye and close the door. And imagine, finally, how he would then comprehend—feel as you have felt, know as you have known—the meaning of the word Fiji.
Take heart.
Fiji, my lost princess, is but a state of mind. Embolden yourself. Brave the belief.
Bless you.
Tim O’Brien won the National Book Award in Fiction for Going After Cacciato. His novel The Things They Carried received France’s prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent novel, In the Lake of the Woods, was a national bestseller, received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians, and was selected as the best novel of 1994 by Time magazine.
Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love
(Series: # )
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