Last Notes from Home (18 page)

Toby Farquarson III was legendary in upstate New York, a victim of upstate, of the times, and of himself. About “himself’ I didn’t for a long time learn much more than everyone else knew. I’d heard about Toby for months, had even become friendly with him without realizing it was he because he was not at all what I’d envisioned and because, whereas he’d introduced himself to me as Toby, everyone else spoke of him, even when he spoke in whispers—and one always spoke of Toby in whispers, looking over his shoulder as he did so—as
Farr.
It was
Farr
this and
Farr
that and
Farr
the other thing, a recurringly whispered paranoid-hued din.

“Don’t you know Farr, Exley? Sure you do. I’ve seen you with the fucking guy!”

“I don’t know him.”

Farr’s story varied with the teller, it being agreed only that he hailed from the Adirondacks. It was said that Farr came from Old Forge or Tupper Lake or Lake Placid and was the most gifted athlete to come out of upstate in years. On scholarship he’d gone to Ohio State or Michigan or Notre Dame or Oklahoma and there he’d severely torn cartilage in a knee or suffered a concussion that had kept him unconscious for a week or had one of the worst shoulder separations in clinical history, this as a sophomore when he was already starting. Whatever the injury, Farr had promptly dropped out of college and entered his chosen “profession,” one not as unlikely as it seems.

In upstate, boys grow up with guns in their hands, learn early on a weapon’s awesome capacities; and I know, for example, there are more guns in the Bay than there are people, that is, more guns than the number of people who make up our permanent winter population. According to one story, Farr’s injury hadn’t dissuaded the New York Giants. In their leanest years a few years back, it is told that representatives of Jim Lee Howell, the Giants’ director of player personnel, made repeated trips to the mountains (how they ever unearthed Toby escapes me!) and pleaded with Farr to let their surgeons repair him. To shore up their amusing “defense” they were going to make him a corner-back. Reportedly Farr told them to buzz off, his athletic days were done, man,
done,
and he was “doing well in business.” If this were true, I could visualize Toby telling them between his clinch-toothed smile. When I got to know Toby as well as one can know him, I asked him about his athletic prowess, what college? what injury? what about the Giants? Toby answered with his typical live-for-the-moment evasiveness.

“Who the fuck cares? That shit is all in the past. I never even think about it anymore.”

People said Farr seduced any woman he wanted to seduce, though whenever his name came up in mixed company, girls gagged exaggeratedly and mimicked a furious throwing up, hyperbolic theatrics which always seemed to me so strung out as to suggest that whoever Farr was, he undoubtedly was oblivious to the particular girl doing her fierce feigned puking. People said if you crossed Farr he’d kill you fucking dead, if not with one of his sawed-off shotguns, with his hands.

“Lord awmighty, one night at the Edgewood I saw him go outside with the biggest sonofabitch you ever see—a fucking lumberjack, a baby fucking whale! Farr hit the poor slob a dozen times without the gorilla ever getting his hands up. We had to take the guy’s remains down to the candy-with-the-hole-in-it hospital. The patient didn’t leave his sickbed for ten fucking days!”

People said Farr made fools of the New York State Police. They said the troopers were weary unto death of it, up to here with it, the hand knifed and slicing enthusiastically at the Adam’s apple. Supposedly a top honcho investigator in the state’s BCI office in New York City had told local troopers if they knew for certain it was Farr fleeing a crime, there wouldn’t be any need extending him the courtesy (a few stout fellow winks here, one imagines) of inviting his surrender. The troopers were to “blow Farr’s pretty fucking head off!”

People said they wouldn’t mind Farr all that much if he didn’t push dope.

“What’s the diff? He doesn’t sell to kids. In fact, he doesn’t sell to anybody he doesn’t know. He’s too cute for that. The fuzz want him for so many other things, they’d love to bust him for pushing. He’d get the maximum, for fact. And who you shittin’? You get your grass and uppers from him, don’t yuh?”

“Gawd, what a
weirdo.
Nobody even knows where he lives. He’s supposed to have one place right in this rinky-dink town, and nobody even knows where that is. I mean,
reallyl
How can anyone disappear in the goddamn Bay?”

None of these Farrs was the Toby I’d known without realizing it was indeed Farr I knew.

Whenever during the tourist season (Memorial through Labor days) I left my attic studio and the manuscript of
Pages from a Cold Island,
ten or fifteen bucks in my pocket, and strolled the crowded streets from bar to bar, drinking a couple beers here, a couple there, I was usually alone. Except for a year at one time, a year at another, spent teaching at local rural high schools—and I viewed these as only interim stints to stake my return to Florida—I really hadn’t lived at home for a quarter of a century, since I’d entered college in 1948. Hence I knew hardly anyone but older bar owners and fishing guides. Two or three times I observed Toby in Cavallario’s Steak House. I never saw him come in. I’d look up and he’d be standing at the far end of the bar from the end I favored. He was about thirty. I took him for a dentist or surgeon or rising young bank executive, the latter of which he was in a way. He always wore immaculately pressed basic-colored golf shirts with little alligators sewn on the pocket, extravagantly colored, neatly pressed, expensive-looking plaid golf slacks. He shod himself in equally expensive-looking Scotch-grained custom-made shoes.

Except for his very blond wavy hair parted in the middle and brushed lovingly back to the middle of his ears in the Prince Valiant pageboy style of the time, he looked astonishingly like a young Michael Caine, though, unlike

Caine’s thicker black rims, Toby favored the brown-speckled-with-yellow thin rims Ivy Leaguers wore in the fifties. There was in his countenance, for example, Caine’s sadness and irony, his cynical vulnerability, his innocent decadence, his sinister childlikeness, even his effeminacy. And yet one somehow knew, as with Caine, that he wasn’t that way and that the smug aloof bastard was doubtless devastating with women. Materializing at the far end of Cavallario’s bar, he would have a bottle of Heineken set before him without his asking, he would lift the bottle directly to his mouth, take a long cool draught as if he’d just come from doing twenty-seven holes, return the green bottle to the bar, sip slowly after that, and never drink more than two. Although from where I stood I never heard how people addressed him, everyone seemed to say hello. If he deigned to acknowledge these greetings at all, he did so with the most cursory of nods. It was as though he were returning salutations from bugs. Looking suddenly up, I’d discover he’d exited with the same silent stealth he’d entered.

To my surprise and uneasiness I one night saw him bent over in eager sibilant conversation with the bartender, Jimmy Tousant, and from that night on, to my embarrassment, he sipped at his Heineken and stared at me. Entering Cavallario’s on the July Fourth weekend, I found it so crowded I had to reach over a three-deep mass to get my Budweiser, after which I retreated and rested the small of my back against the frame of the picture window fronting on the street. Abruptly, and without again having seen him enter, not to mention fathoming how he’d got his Heineken so quickly, I sensed he was leaning against the wall right next to me. He did not turn to me.

“Somebody said you’re Exley.”

I said I was Exley.

Still looking straight ahead and with his left hand holding the bottle he even now sipped at, he proffered his right hand palm upward for me to shake.

“I’m Toby.”

Although in his handshake there was a definite warmth and firmness, Toby did it in such a way as to suggest he was offering it up, Pope-like, to be kissed.

“You been away from home a long time.”

“Yeah,
a long time
.”

“I’ve read
A Fan’s Note
s.
”

Unless one is a writer, it is difficult to comprehend with what passionate depths one comes to loathe one’s own creation. (I don’t mean to romanticize the writing racket. Most of us are simpering bohunk egomaniacal pricks just as in thrall to our advances, reviews, and royalty statements as the chairman of U.S. Steel is in thrall to the net earnings figure in his annual report.) For years I had not kept a single copy of that book within a country mile of me. Neither had I kept a single review nor letter in praise of it. Had I elected to keep a scrapbook at all, it would have been comprised of articles and letters damning the book out of hand. In the bathroom, framed and mounted on the wall next to the medicine cabinet, I did have artist James Spanfeller’s excellent dust jacket for the original Harper & Row edition. Regally seated on the throne mornings, I could stare at the purple and red psychedelic dust jacket and remind myself of how abysmally short of its conception the book had in fact fallen, pull up my Levi’s, flush my ugly wastes down the vortex, and return to my Smith Corona determined that this time out I’d consummate my vision.

My Random House editor Bob Loomis was kind enough to say only good writers sneer at and derogate themselves. Loomis said when his hacks come to town he takes them to lunch at swank restaurants, hoping that the sumptuous food and wine will distract them but that, invariably, he has to sit stupefied for three hours listening to the
various levels of meaning
(oh, my!) on which the hack’s book
works.
Before he retires, Loomis swears he’s going to sit dopily (he claims these sessions cause constipation) through one of these endlessly dreary monologues, then solemnly remove the habitual cigar or pipe from his mouth and say, “Your book doesn’t work on any level whatever, which is not to say that Newhouse and Random House don’t hope it sells a hundred million copies.” My case wasn’t so much hate as love-hate. Years before, when I’d owned a copy, I’d found that on those nights I came home drunk I invariably picked up the book, opened it to any place it happened to open, and moaned or went
ahhhh.
It was a kind of did-I-ever-write-that-badly?-did-I-ever-write-that-well? thing. On the night it became a continuous moan I descended the stairs, went out the back door, opened the garbage can, stood over the banana peels and discarded potato salad, tore out the book’s 385 pages, and let them flutter into the pork gravy, salvaging only Spanfeller’s dust jacket.

“You must be one of the six guys who did read it,” I said.

Toby laughed, then remained silent for a long time. Finally he said, “You wanna get laid?”

“You and me?”

“No, not you and me, you asshole!”

Toby again laughed and for the first time looked at me.

“Okay, then.”

For the first time I found myself seated in the deep blue leather bucket seat of the Ass. At eighty miles an hour Toby drove the two-lane Route 12 upriver to Clayton and parked the car behind O’Brien’s Hotel, a watering hole for the younger crowd. When I opened the door and started to climb out, Toby said there was no need for my doing that. Inquiring if I shouldn’t go in, meet the girl he had in mind for me, and observe the amenities by at least buying her a single drink, Toby said there was booze at the camp where we were going and not to sweat about getting laid.

‘These cunts do what I tell ‘em to do.”

“Vivian’s yours.”

Toby told them to sit in back on the cramped blue leather jump seat. Both were quite pretty but neither particularly striking. What they had was youth, neither appearing to be much more than twenty, and youth always has its magnetizing effect on middle age. Toby drove to what he claimed was a “borrowed,” beautifully furnished camp at Millen’s Bay. As the night chill had come in off the St. Lawrence, Toby lighted the pilot light of a gas furnace in the living room, got both Vivian and me a bottle of Heineken from the kitchen refrigerator, and took Corrine immediately to a bedroom off the living room, closing the door behind him. Vivian and I drank two bottles of beer and talked. The ambiance was so throbbing with awkwardness—already pleasurable mating noises emanated from the bedroom—I remember very little of what I said. Vivian was attractive in a buxom, dark-eyed, and pouty-lipped way. She said she’d been a nurse at Watertown’s House of the Good Samaritan (“Good Sam”) for three years, which happily put her a few years past twenty. What she said next was not destined to make me happy. Vivian said her father had been a high school classmate of mine! She said he hadn’t liked
A Fan’s Notes
—”your book”—because he hadn’t liked the “bad language” and really hadn’t understood it but that he remembered me fondly as a jock.

“He said you played center on one of the great Water-town High School football teams. He said you were even better in basketball.”

I do recall what I then said.

“Pure nostalgia.” (Banal and sham modesty in my manly utterance.) “I’m unequivocally certain that the kids of your generation are bigger, faster, and more aggressive than we ever dreamed of being.” I was pensive for many moments, trying unsuccessfully to rebuke myself for my predicament. “I wish you hadn’t told me about your father. Not about his not liking the book. I don’t like it either. About being a classmate. It makes it rather—?”

“Crummy?”

“And sleazy and discomforting and sort of incestuous. Yeah, deed it do.
Deed it do sound crummy.”

“Don’t worry about it. If it makes any difference, I won’t tell you my last name. Not that you’d remember my jerk father anyway. Besides, he gave up—
ha, ha
—on me ages ago! As if there was anything special to give up on! In the age of the pill and the IUD! As if I was into anything all that monstrous, anything everyone else isn’t into.” Vivian did an
ugh.
“That drunken self-righteous slob!”