Tomcat in Love by Tim O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

(What is it that women
want
? I will never know.) In this instance, alas, my dilemma was compounded by the proximity of the rose tattoo. Not to mention its anatomic location. Not to mention the import of the very word:
rose
.
    I took what seemed the wisest course. I remained silent. Mute as a coffin.
    Yet even this proved inadequate.
    “Creep!” cried Carla.
    The girl stood up and moved swiftly to the door—a blur of yellow hair and heavy metal.
    “Guys like you,” she snarled, “should be shot through the heart. Butchered like sheep. Someday, man, you’ll get
yours
. Maybe tonight.”
    She departed in haste.
    I will confess that sleep came hard that night. For the duration of the evening, and well into the gateway hours of the morrow, I remained vigilant, door chained and bolted, eyes wide open.
    The truth, I fear, is that young Carla—like such female forebears as Lorna Sue and the original apple-laden Eve—had presented to me a question that admitted of no appropriate response.
Yes
implied perversion.
No
implied absence of interest.
Maybe
implied weakness. Silence implied creephood.
    The game of life had been rigged.
    Stacked decks, shaved cards. Lorna Sue had it right: Poor unlucky Tommy.
    On my final night in Tampa, all but resigned to failure, I tailed Lorna Sue and her ridiculous buffoon-tycoon to a nearby shopping mall. After my experience with Carla, I was in something of a funk—restless, suicidal—as I waited in the mall’s parking lot for the happy couple to complete their shopping. More than an hour passed before they reappeared, each laden with packages. They were laughing, plainly charmed by themselves. As they approached the Mercedes, the tycoon passed over his keys to Lorna Sue, who opened the driver’s door and began to slip inside. Up to that point, nothing even remotely remarkable had occurred. But in the next instant, I knew with perfect certainty that the evening would turn interesting.
    It happened fast—too fast. I could barely get the binoculars focused.
    Lorna Sue dropped one of her bundles. She cursed. She bent down, made a short, jerky motion with her shoulders, seemed to hesitate, then reached under the seat and pulled out the purple panties.
    It was a pleasure, I must confess, to watch her lips form an oval.
    How do I describe my delight as she pressed the panties to her nose? As she inhaled? As the stench of treachery swept into her lungs?
    After a second Lorna Sue reached down again, retrieved the matching brassiere, and spread it out across the steering wheel as if to measure its potential occupants. (Unfortunately, even with the binoculars, I could not make out her expression. This was evening,remember, and shadows had fallen.) Perhaps she murmured something. Perhaps she closed her eyes. All I can report with any accuracy is the deliberation with which she draped the panties and bra over the rearview mirror, and how, with considerably more deliberation—at half speed, it seemed—she then pulled out the leg irons.
    The tycoon slumped down beside her.
    My view was oblique. Profiles, mostly. Nonetheless, I decided that here was a marriage in trouble.
    No smooching on the ride home.
    Always the reckless motorist, Lorna Sue now outperformed herself at the wheel, and after the first mile or so I lost her in traffic. Not that it mattered. An important event had finally gone well in my life, even better than well, and I was giddy with pride. (So elegant! So simple and satisfying! In times of grief why gobble chocolates and cry your eyes out? Consider the alternatives—maybe a ticket to Fiji.)
    For me, of course, it was only a start.
    If this modest, impromptu experiment could yield such results, what might be accomplished with proper planning?
    I drove slowly, enjoying the night air. The city of Tampa now seemed a more hospitable place. When I arrived at Lorna Sue’s handsome mock-Tudor residence, I was not at all surprised to find the Mercedes parked at an odd angle on the front