The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

“But who is SHE?” blurted Johan, totally forgetting his place, stumbling in and out of his body.

“She? She? She? Who is she? The cat’s mother?” corrected Tiberius. The same tutor who had been run ragged in a literary discussion by Johan not three days before was now correcting the scholar’s usually impeccable manners.

She, it transpired, was an American living in Vienna, the widow of a diplomat who had found a watery grave with the Titanic the previous year, one of the unfortunates forced to listen to the band play.

She seemed to be in her late twenties perhaps early thirties, and possessed a hypnotic beauty that would take young Johan tens of years to absorb. The experienced coyness of her initial smile, the way her front teeth half bit into the side of her nether lip, her perfectly measured handshake, revealed everything Johan needed to see, but hid enough to make his deviant blood boil.

“Lorelei, please meet Johan Thoms. Johan, this is Lorelei Ribeiro, with the American embassy in Vienna.”

“Yes, errrm, it is, isn’t it?” Johan mumbled as he struggled for breath.

His member did, however, show signs of life.

He caught himself staring at her small chest. Lorelei Ribeiro caught him and smiled to herself. He felt like he had been struck. It was a vision of love, wearing boxing gloves! (This Venus’s grandfather, he would learn later, had been a renowned pugilist back in the States.)

“Ermmmm. Hello, Lorelei,” he managed.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Johan Thoms, I am sure. And who is your friend?” she added. He glanced down at his tentlike crotch before he realized she was referring to someone else.

“Oh yes, of course, this is William Cartwright,” who had appeared at Johan’s shoulder.

“Bill, this is . . . ermmm . . . Lorelei, Mrs. Ribeiro from the Vienna embassy . . . in America.”

Johan’s next fifteen minutes were a blur, and even if he had wanted to (and he had wanted to, he assured Ernest) he could not for the life of him recall the conversation, or even if he had been part of one, or whether he had been in a trance. All he could recall was taking a trip into the noirish eyes of the woman in front of him.

Later, when he asked her to remind him (or, more accurately, to inform him) of the content of their first discussion, Lorelei would giggle, and mercilessly tease him by telling him a completely different version of events every time, with that wicked glint in her eye.

He was aware he had been impaired by a couple of ales. And what does alcohol do, other than have the effect of a truth serum?

He noticed that Professor Tiberius Novac moved slightly to his right to leave these two to their own devices. He could be quite devious (what Bill would have described as “mauve”) at times, but he was fond of his protégé. Novac had been grabbed by some desperate old battle-ax from the British Consul, after a bit of Balkan rough in her bed. She clung to him like a barnacle to a tugboat, had eyebrows like a couple of baby raccoons in awkward repose, and danced like a giraffe with the staggers. This had made surveillance on Johan difficult. When his student pressed him afterward for details, he struggled to offer anything really substantial, for he, too, had swallowed some gin, as one had to in order to face the aging beast from London.

(“She had a face like a blind cobbler’s thumb,” he admitted to Johan later. “But, my boy, was she a cracker with the gaslight out!”)

* * *

By the time he came around, Johan had lost Lorelei.

He sought Novac, but the English vulturette was circling, craving her pound of flesh—or more, if her luck was in. Novac was inching backward, avoiding her cabbagey breath.

Cartwright staggered toward Johan from the crowd.

“Did you see her?” Johan whispered.

His spirit had been kidnapped.

“What are you talking about?” His eyes widened. “Please don’t tell me you have been hooked? I thought you were made of finer stuff, old bean!”

“I blew it.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!”

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,