A Fan's Notes (34 page)

In the autumn of , during the final weeks of my initial stay at Avalon Valley, the ones in which I had lived in such an apprehension of the future, and in which I had, save at the AA meetings, lost interest in Paddy the Duke, I had had, one Sun day, a visitor. Thinking it to be a member of my family, I had hung on my face a look of monumental aggrievance and had charged out the door prepared to attack—if only because they were outside and I in. It was standard operating procedure with patients, and expected, a protest that one was as sane as the Pope and that one
’
s incarceration was all a dreadful joke. In the parking lot I saw only an attractive girl with roan-colored hair, dressed in a camel
’
s-hair coat, leaning against a steel-gray Mercedes 0 SL convertible. If in the dismal world of Avalon Valley she did not look obscenely ostentatious, she looked singular indeed. Scanning the parking lot while mouthing my pleasant salutation—
”
When the hell yuh gonna get me outa here?
”
—it suddenly occurred to me, with an alarming and jolting tightening of the body, that
the girl
was my visitor, that I not only knew her but that I had once, in my half-assed and cursory manner, paid her a kind of court. Taking a deep breath, I turned, smiled embarrassedly, and said,
“
Hello.
”
My voice was somewhat hysterical, still containing that element of histrionic indignation with which I had planned to greet my relatives.

“
I hope you don
’
t mind my coming,
”
she said.

It was not an easy meeting. Leaning on the Mercedes next to her, so that she could not, without continually and obviously turning her head, study my ill-kempt appearance, I smoked her Parliaments and answered the questions she forced herself to ask with such rudeness that I was surprised she didn
’
t leave before she did.
“
How is the food here?
”
“
Swell.
”
We smoked two, three, four of her Parliaments apiece while I mumbled my answers and framed in my mind a perfectly hysterical epistle to my family, demanding to know what right they had telling anyone I was in the loony bin. By the time I had the letter completed, mentally scrawling a violent signature (very formal:
Frederick Earl Exley
) across the en tire bottom of the page—oh, my sense of outrage knew no bounds!—she was in the car, the motor was running, it occurred to me she was leaving, and, panicking, I stammered,
“
Look, come back some time, will yuh? I
’
m, I
’
m—it
’
s one of those days, yuh know?
”
She looked at me quizzically for a moment, as if she perhaps didn
’
t know; then, speaking in a voice that told me nothing, she said,
“
Maybe—if I can.
”
Watching the Mercedes till it was out of sight, I walked slowly back to the ward and with Snow White watched Ed Sullivan. Snow White had a running dialogue with Ed and all his performers. Ed said,
“
Good evening, ladies and gentle men
”
; Snow White replied,
“
Fuck you, Ed.
”

One Sunday went by, then another, and on the third Sun day she came. She brought me a carton of cigarettes. I thanked her so profusely that she came the following Sunday, and by then I had of course come utterly to rely on her visits —a dependence which, despite my attempts to act detached, she soon came to recognize. More than that, she was aware that in the act of visiting me initially she had instituted that dependence, and because she was a person of character— and I suspect that it was as much for this reason as out of any affection she felt for me—she continued to honor that obligation. She continued, and that fall became for me the one I will remember above all—the autumn I discovered the Hudson Valley.

I drove. With the top down on the Mercedes and the chillness of the season cutting our faces a fierce pink, we shot through the autumn-lemon hills of Putnam County, and across the snakelike mountain roads into that valley. Beyond the river, its waters flat blue and cold now, rose the mountains, rose just as Irving had said they did, now purple, now russet, now shrouded in mist. I especially liked the antiquated towns where the old limestone houses sat flush with the streets beneath the fall trees. Looking at them, one thought of cavernous hearths opening onto great, smoldering logs, of huge cop per kettles, of the odor of things baking, of family reunions, of rooted people with a sense of the past, warm, loyal, dignified people who endured in a kind of unending autumn—I could not, and cannot, imagine that valley save in autumn. We—the girl with the roan-colored hair and I—stood at outdoor stands inhaling the pungent odor of burning foliage, feasting on hot dogs piled high with sauerkraut, and watching the cars, whizzing by, tear up the leaves and send them scurrying, like little furry animals in flight, across the bonelike highway.

By two o
’
clock, and as likely as not before then (such was my anxiety), we were in one of those country taverns with spotless checkered tablecloths and no customers, as if the owners—an amiable, starchy, and aging Dutch couple—had been granted their existence to serve patrons that very day, that very hour, and then would be no more. We drank coffee, sometimes draft beer, and nibbled on potato chips and old cheese, making small talk about the wonder of our complexions. The moment the game started she fell silent, studying me, I
’
m certain, with that bemused curiosity with which a woman views a man
’
s enthusiasms, knowing, as she instinctively does, that for the most part a man
’
s preoccupations are trivial, even contemptible things.

“
No, no—not now!
”
I would exclaim, raising my hand with forbidding finality if I even suspected her on the verge of introducing some topic foreign to what was taking place on the television screen. I never looked at her when I did this, to gauge her response. I didn
’
t have to. I knew that she would be smiling, not exactly as if I were mad, simply as though I were
a man.

“
Oh, Jesus, Frank! Do it, kid! Catch it, baby!
”
Now would come a breathless silence, followed by an incredulous,
“
He did it! He caught the goddam thing!
”
I would turn to her then.
“
Cha see that? Cha see that, for Christ
’
s sake?
”

Though she would smile and say that she had, I knew that she hadn
’
t, rinding my show—as she would that of an exhilarated child
’
s—much more interesting.

More often than not we had to speed back to the hospital to get me there on time; even when the Giants played at home, and the television blackout surrounding New York City was in effect, in order to see the game we would drive way north, at times nearly to Albany. It was on one of these trips back, when I was punishing the Mercedes, that she asked me a question which led to my making a strange reply. Only a woman

would have been capable of asking it. Another man would have simply thought him my favorite athlete.

“
What is this thing with you and Gifford—or whatever his name is?
”
she asked.

The question took me unawares, and I did not answer her for a long time. I had never before tried to articulate what the thing was, and I was fairly sure that whatever I said would come out badly and be taken all wrong. But I thought I would say something. The heavy hum of the wheels was beneath us, the darkness of the cab enshrouded us, the atmosphere seemed conducive to talk. I told her about my first year in New York, how I had had this awful dream of fame, but that, unlike Gifford—who had possessed the legs and the hands and the agility, the tools of his art—I had come to New York with none of the tools of mine, writing. I told her how I had tried to content myself with reverie, envisioning myself emblazoned across the back of dust jackets. I told her how I had gone each lonely Sunday to the Polo Grounds where Gifford, when I heard the city cheer him, came after a time to represent to me the possible, had sustained for me the illusion that I could escape the bleak anonymity of life. At the time of my
“
confession
”
Gifford was reaping the benefits of the Jim Thorpe Trophy, and, I told her, as a kind of ironic comment on the extent of my own failure, it seemed that every time I picked up a magazine in the hospital I was confronted with his picture. There was, I said, a particularly distressing advertisement that continued to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. A tartan cap tilted rakishly to one side of his head, a football tucked under his arm, a how-the-hell-did-I-get-here? expression on his face (exactly the kind of thing I might once have imagined for myself), he was showing the reader how splendidly handsome and virile he might look were he to wear a V-necked Jantzen pullover. That sweater, I said, seemed to make my state-issue cotton plaid shirt burn hot on my flesh, the hot humiliation of having hoped for too much.

She was silent for a very long time when I had finished. Then she said something which elicited a singular reply from me, a reply that kept us both in silence for the rest of the trip. Whether she ever grasped my meaning, I can
’
t say. I know I never completely did, though I suppose that in the act of revealing so much of myself to her I had begun to have this thing for her.

“
I should think you
’
d despise him,
”
she said.
“
Oh, maybe not despise him. Envy him to the point of disliking him immensely.
”

“
Despise him?
”
I said. I
’
m certain my voice reflected my great incredulity.
“
But you don
’
t understand at all. Not at all! He may be the only fame I
’
ll ever have!
”

Within not too many days of this revelation, within a few days of Paddy the Duke
’
s departure, I, too, left the hospital. Had I gone directly to the girl, I think I might have made it on the outside and thereby thwarted Paddy
’
s smug prophecy that I would one day return to Avalon Valley. Shaking hands first with Dr. K., I had the boys crowd round and say the things they say:
“
Don
’
t let the shits get yuh down!
”
and
“
Don
’
t let us see yuh back here, yuh heah?
”
I had laughed, and to the latter had proclaimed, much too vehemently,
“
Don
’
t worry about that!
”
and had sensed in the shrill falseness of that protest with what trepidation I was actually going out.

I had a right to my misgivings. Within three hours of leaving the hospital I was standing on the upper level of the Grand Central Terminal, debating whether in fact it might not be the wiser alternative to return to Avalon Valley. For a fleeting moment I thought then of going to her, but I immediately discarded the notion, thinking that at some later, happier moment I might go to her in an aura of more presentable splendor. Presently I also rejected the idea of returning to the nut house and found myself on the train moving to the upstate city where the Counselor was then practicing law. All the way there my mouth tasted of old leather, iodine, and blood, the way my mouth tastes when I have made some wrong and seemingly irremediable choice.

A thickset, balding, timid little man I had met at the AA meetings had asked me to telephone long distance to his sister in Rochester and ask her if she wouldn
’
t be willing to take him into her house until he was working and could set up for himself. He told me, his voice grave as doom, that his sister was his last chance, that though he had two brothers both had refused to take him. There was no rancor toward the brothers. Each of them, he said, had over the years sponsored untold
“
new lives
”
for him and in a way he felt rather relieved that they had finally spurned him, he was so afraid of disappointing them once again. For the first time he overcame his timidness and, popeyed, he looked directly at me.

“
Give she and the kids my love,
”
he said,
“
and impress on her, uh—you know—the urgency—
”