The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. Ian Thornton

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      Professor Novac butted in between the two troublemakers and cringed.

      “I think you quoted some Shakespeare at her. I am so sorry.” He winked.

      Johan threw his hands over his face.

      “Oh, balls! What must she think of me?”

      “Do not worry, boy. I am sure it was the ‘Happy days seeking such happy nights’ line. Not a bad choice, even if I say so myself. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of defenseless honesty.”

      “Yes, but what good is that right now? She’s with some fool somewhere. And this is not the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.”

      “Johan! You cannot think like that, or you will drive yourself mad. Jealousy is the worst of traits. It may be based in love, but it is never less than ultimate destruction. Leave it at the door, with your cane and your hound. She is a beautiful woman, and attention is bound to come her way. It comes with the territory, my boy. What the hand possesses, the soul never pines for. If it is meant to happen, it will. It’s like looking for a fifty-forint note on the floor. Que sera, sera. And, my boy, the tone should always be set by Caesar!”

      Tiberius’s words of wisdom comforted Johan. He tried his best to believe him.

      “At least mine didn’t have a cleft palate and a lazy eye!” he said.

      Cartwright guffawed.

      * * *

      The party was thinning as Professor Novac bade his farewell, with his banshee-cum-gargoyle in tow.

      “Oh yes, and one more thing, Johan, that I recall.”

      “Yes?” said the young scholar.

      Tiberius leaned forward and said quietly into his student’s left ear, “I think I heard you mumble something to her which doubled me up. I should describe it as a guttural growl.”

      He leaned in a bit farther and whispered.

      Johan Thoms turned June-tuxedo white when he learned of the shocking desire he had expressed. He went to sit down, before he fell down.

      He had to stop drinking that stuff!

      * * *

      Tiberius Novac could be a brute sometimes. After his next tutorial, and perhaps to console Johan, Prof gave away a little more of his eavesdropping, and told the boy he had wonderfully, and with blind poise, stopped Lorelei from stepping on and killing a worm on the palace’s lawn.

      Lorelei had then quoted, word-perfectly, a poem by Dorothy Parker.

       “It costs me never a stab nor squirm

       To tread by chance upon a worm.

       “Aha, my little dear,” I say,

       “Your clan will pay me back one day!”*

      Lorelei and Dorothy Parker were great friends. It was Lorelei who made the introduction to Robert Benchley, who gave Parker her first column in Vanity Fair and her major break. Lorelei had also first shown Parker through the front door of the Algonquin Hotel, and the two ladies shared many an evening, as well as a wit, a beauty, and a style all of their own.

      With a confidence one can often only paradoxically achieve in a gutless trance, Johan Thoms had volleyed back with his own second verse, off a martini-stained cuff. He started with a steadying prefix.

      “Yes, but . . .”

      He straightened his collar, ran a hand through his handsome hair, and added his impromptu reply.

      “Yet should one escape by being cremated,

       One’s respite is just belated.

       Some clod will throw one’s ashes out.

       And frenzied worms shall scream and shout.”

      Touché!

      He had winked, taken a slug from his glass, and carried on in his trance. Gibbering wreck, to poet genius, back to gibbering wreck. Lorelei had been transfixed, and the deal was as good as done.

      * Although published much later, in 1927, the poem had been part of Dorothy’s repertoire for many years.

       Three

       Drago Thoms: Pythagoras, Madness, and an Indian Summer in Bed

       I shall confine myself neither to Horace’s rules nor to any man’s rules that has ever lived.

      —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

       June 9, 1913

      Four hours after Johan’s initial encounter with Lorelei and three hundred yards from the front gates of the palace, the heavens opened. It was as if God had turned on a pipe in the ceiling above a film set as Johan plowed on, unsteadily but with a steady determination. He was soaked to the bone, but he pictured Lorelei caught in the downpour, and smiled; when he stumbled ankle-deep into a puddle as he neared the Miljacka, he merely chuckled.

      It was almost daylight. Normal people were already rising to go to their work, and bakers had been hard at it for hours already. Soon everyone would be scuttling around in their raincoats, their hats, their umbrellas. It made him feel sad to the pit of his stomach. Their routine, their normality—this was not where he was heading in his life. He segued off into a long train of thought on his deep hatred for umbrellas. He had thoroughly despised them ever since during a force-seven mistral, he had witnessed a young couple kebabed by an errant beach parasol while they were harmlessly copulating. Was the loss of dozens of eyes every year really a price worth paying to avoid a few thousand head colds? What sort of selfish fool would risk others’ eyes with such abandon, just to stay dry? (He had recently read in a science journal that every year, on average, sixty-three eyes were lost to umbrella spikes, but by only sixty-two people. Was someone actually unfortunate enough to lose both? If so, was this in the same incident? Or, even more worrying, two separate ones?)

      “So little kindness in the world today,” he muttered. “So little thought for others.”

      Then he heard himself repeating, “Bastard umbrellas, bastard umbrellas,” and shook his head to clear it.

      He was almost at his dorm. He pulled out his key and slunk into the wonderful old building. The birds nesting in the ivy were tuning up for the day.

      Five minutes later, Johan Thoms was on his sheltered balcony, dried off, naked on his back, fast asleep.

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