Last Notes from Home (22 page)

1

A don’t know if the following epistolary indulgence—my paranoia run amok?—will ever reach you. When I walked to the post office for the morning mail with Hannibal Cooke and he caught me trying to post a letter to the Maui County authorities, reached out, grabbed my left wrist, snapped it as though it were a parched twig, then relieved me of the letter and handed it over to O’Twoomey for his clangorous scrutiny and sinister caveats about any such future actions on my part, even then no one believed me and the explanation was given out that while drunk I’d fallen from bed. I doubt there is a resident of Lanai who didn’t accept that as readily as he knows he’d be jobless if pineapple were abruptly found to be a carcinogenic agent.

At the hospital, when Dr. Jim was X-raying the wrist, taping it, and capping the tape with a tautly drawn leather wrist band, I kept trying to signal him with what I imagined were foreboding winks. Then Hannibal, with that uncanny animal instinct of his, sensed nervous duplicity on my part and placed his six-feet-seven-inch, 275-pound, lean, and bemuscled frame directly behind Jim so I was unable to make a gesture Hannibal couldn’t see. Not that Jim picked up on anything. In distress he has a nervous habit of twitching his mustache and blinking his eyes. Perhaps he thought I was mocking him, perhaps he feels I suffer the same distracting tic and that we are brothers in affliction. Whatever, his ministrations completed, he gave me a hail-fellow jovial poke between my shoulder blades and assured me I’d be back on the golf course within two weeks.

God of Israel, Alissa, if I am forced to play another eighteen holes with O’Twoomey, Hannibal, and Toby, I shall go round the bend completely. My so-called oldest pal in the world, Wiley Hampson, about whom you’ve heard so much from me, says I’m that anyway—”the most mental,” he said, “I’ve ever seen you.” One night when he was drunk the infuriating bastard had the audacity, in oh-so-high-and-mighty and censoriously slurring tones, to tell O’Twoomey that if he were really my patron, as O’Twoomey claims to be, he’d have me institutionalized in some decorous asylum Wiley knows of on Oahu.

“Tut, tut,” said O’Twoomey. “My dear Frederick shall prevail. Yes, Frederick shall prevail.”

Wiley is so obsessively absorbed in building his new prefab house that he apparently doesn’t notice I can’t go to the can without Hannibal deciding his bladder needs relieving at the same time. On those infrequent occasions I’ve got Wiley alone for a few seconds and told him with menacing earnestness that I am literally O’Twoomey’s prisoner, he gives me a simperingly absurd smile, erratically twirls his index finger round and round at his temple, and repeats the same tired lines.

“You got it made, Ex. You got it made. The Counselor was right. Boy, was the Counselor ever right.”

The Counselor was a mutual friend, with whom we had gone to high school, and his cynically endearing description of me was: “Exley could go into a strange town and be fixing parking tickets for the natives within two weeks.” In other words, Alissa, my pal Wiley is not only insensitive to what’s happening and believes I’ve so exercised my alleged guile on O’Twoomey (who—you must believe me, Alissa—is the ultimate paranoid in this scenario) that I live in regal splendor on O’Twoomey’s largess and that I’m little more than a slob and an ingrate and ought in thanksgiving to be kissing O’Twoomey’s reeking scaling feet.

Two nights after Hannibal broke my wrist, Malia and Wiley had us over for mai-mai baked in some lovely way Malia does it with lemon, onion, garlic, and mayonnaise, accompanied by cauliflower, green corn, and those petite red-skinned boiled potatoes, a concession to the harp O’Twoomey of course. Save for an infrequent glass of Chablis, Malia doesn’t drink, Hannibal and Toby both use
pakalolo
(Hawaiian for “crazy smoke”), but before dinner O’Twoomey, Wiley, and I were putting away the Jameson’s in majestic style. Suddenly Wiley repaired to the John to take a leak. I leaped to my feet, followed him into the can, and moved him to one side of the bowl as though my urgency was such that, as we had as kids, we’d have to pee at the same time.

“Hannibal broke my wrist when he caught me trying to mail a letter to the Maui County police chief.”

“Jesus, Ex. You get off that nonsense before the men in the white jackets
really
do come after you. I mean, c’mon, pal,
get off it.
”

Hannibal burst through the door, stood hovering intimidatingly behind and above us. “Quick. Hannibal go too.” Which is the way Hannibal talks.

Wiley said, “Piss between Exley’s legs.”

Alissa, O’Twoomey is going to kill me and the irony is that I haven’t the foggiest idea why. Do you know the only thing that saved my ass when he read that aborted letter? Although to the authorities I stated in unequivocal terms that I was being held captive on Lanai, I did not mention who my abductors are and went on to say that it is all some grisly and ghastly joke. Before God, Alissa, I honestly do not know—
or most of all care
—what nefarious nonsense these guys are up to, which doesn’t negate that whatever it is involves staggering amounts of money—forget that innocuous crap I told you about sweepstakes tickets—and that at one awful moment they unjustly assumed I had overheard a conversation or come across some document relating to their enterprises.

It has been two years now. If after our last meeting you can believe it, I miss you, Alissa. My menopause has run its course. My breasts sag doughily. The collops about my waist balloon. My genitalia shrivel. My semen diminishes. My cigarette consumption is consummate, my imprisonment complete. And the only fragile hope I have is O’Twoomey’s daily assurance that once his “business” is done I shall be free to go as I please, “with a nice lurverly bonus from me, dear Frederick, for the inconvenience, my dear.”

Fat chance. If O’Twoomey and Toby are into something odious enough to quarantine me for something they think I know, I’m a goner, Al. Another time when I got Wiley alone long enough to plead my case, he laughed and said, “Well, Ex, at least you’re a prisoner in paradise.” So in the unlikely event this missive ever reaches you, and as I’ve spent so many hours boring you extolling the breathtaking loveliness of Lanai, do me the kindness—for you really are a plumed cocksucker, Alissa—of not issuing that throaty lyrical chuckle and saying, “Well, if nothing else, my pal, star, and least tractable patient met his Maker in paradise.”

And about our last meeting, I’m sorry, dreadfully so. We sat at the bar of the Dockside, the fishing guides’ hangout, where you try with such syrupy urgency to be one of the guys but believe me, Alissa, as an island person you’ll never be accepted there, and all I said was that I was again returning to Hawaii, did not know for how long and wanted enough thirty-milligram Serax capsules to last me indefinitely.

“Exley, I shall give you enough Serax to last you a lifetime. But only on one condition. That you never seek out another session with me. You are a psychopathic personality, incapable of telling the truth, and though with my training I ought to be sympathetic, I can’t be. I considered you my friend, at one time my dear old grizzly head. But how unbearable the pain is to lie in the night with a man who has never told you a solitary thing about himself, to continually take a stranger’s semen into yourself, to lie with all your orifices dripping the wetness of a man you, as a trained analyst, can find no way to recognize. Believe me, Ex, it is a far more degrading experience than that of those wan and pathetic souls who find ‘love’ in a singles’ bar. Yet each time I questioned one of your tales, and I questioned all your tales, for I always felt you were bouncing fiction off my head, to see how it would play, as it were, or tried to get you to submit to an amobarbital, you fluffed me off as though I were a semieducated bumpkin. There came the point I could no longer sleep with a stranger and believed that all our sessions together, including those endless nights lying together smoking Colombian and talking to the ceiling, were nothing more than con jobs to get more Serax. So awful did it become for me, and God forgive me for it, I actually came to wish you’d wash a whole bottle of Serax down with that quart of vodka you swill a day, never wake up, and put both you and me out of our misery. Incidentally, and now that I’m clearing the air, you owe me something over three thousand dollars, you’ve never offered me thirty dollars of it, huh, thirty cents of it, and yet you seem to come up with all the money you need to fly to Hawaii to see your precious Robin Glenn, who by your own admission is little more than a whore and who, for all I know, is just another figment of your diseased imagination.”

Hence I struck back in rage, rage that brought you to those heartrending tears I gloried in, tears that exalted me, for every word you told me about myself save for Ms. Robin Glenn, my love for whom I have come to loathe in myself, and the fact that you’d throw a bill in my face when you begged to treat me as some kind of challenge to yourself. You have never once presented me with a statement, you have even purchased my unending supply of Serax, you have more money from your mother’s estate than you could spend in five lifetimes—spend? give away—yes, every word you told me about myself was the truth, and all our sessions together except for the aforementioned Robin and my name, rank, and serial number were unadulterated bullshit.
But you must know why.
Because I never liked you as a person. Oh, you were generous enough in bed, as you certainly were with your pocketbook, but what was past enduring was that urbane hubris that comes with wealth and being fourth-generation Harvard. What acrimony that aroused in the son of a man who climbed telephone poles. I couldn’t bare my soul to a woman who offers a stranger a forthright firm grip in handshake and says, “Hello there. I’m Doctor Alissa Tunstall-Phinn from Belgravia Island. I was out of Harvard Law at twenty-one, decided the law wasn’t for me, returned to Cambridge, and had my residency in psychiatry at twenty-five.”

La. Di. Da. Of course I was cruel, for I was doing nothing other than seeking your tears. Admittedly, you have too much class to append all that crap about your educational background, in fact, don’t even preface your name with Doctor, but you yet seem to have no idea how much “Hello, I’m Alissa Tunstall-Phinn from Belgravia Island” grates on us locals, we who have spent our lives mowing your lawns, cooking your food, building the docks and boathouses for your cruisers, serving your drinks, and in general running errands for and kissing the asses of your wealthy friends who flood in there from May to October and imagine those lovely islands are theirs. It is pathetic. By your own reckoning, Alissa, your impoverished forefathers arrived here from England in 1729, they made the American experience their own, prospered beyond measure, and no doubt now muck about wailing eerily in their tombs witnessing the obscene spectacle of you and your equally fraudulent father affecting the offhand gentility of the English aristocracy, witnessing the desecration of your denial of them by trying to reclaim an escutcheoned heritage that was never in fact yours. Tunstall-Phinn indeed! Your name is Phinn and most Americans spell it Finn, as in Huckleberry.

And so on autumn Sundays, as only one example, you came to the Dockside to watch the last quarter of the Giants games with us, came in your ninety-dollar designer jeans mouthing your bubbly inanities: “Oh, my, are the Giants really,
really
ahead?” and “Which guys are we—the white or the blue?” and that most democratically memorable of all your banalities, “Hey guys! Hey guys! I bet that big black dude—what’s his name? Bad Joe Greene?—would give a girl a fuck that would have her throwing stones at clowns like you.” How that jammed barroom rocked with laughter, did so until I had you fiercely by the wrist and was blindly dragging you toward the door, the nape of my neck burning with humiliation because I knew that, mouths agape at my uncharacteristic violence, the guys’ trite reading of my response was as one of schoolboy jealousy. But you knew better, didn’t you, Alissa Tunstall-Phinn?

Out into the fall downpour we went and back into the narrow alley between the Dockside and the Aragon, where the steep pitch of the roofs caused the autumn waters to cascade over us as if we were taking a shower massage together. Slamming your back into the barn-red clapboard, I fervently slapped your face once, then twice, then yet again. You spoke nary a word, those calflike gray-green eyes of yours more chameleon than I’d ever seen them, the waters matting your long lovely russet hair to your beautifully formed Brahmin head, turning the hair the most vivid auburn I’d ever seen it. Abruptly you reached up and put your arms about my neck, pulling my face down to your already swelling cheek where I could feel the hot tears mingling with the cool rains. Such a noble and forgiving gesture on your part, Alissa, as though you were saying, “You see, Ex, how badly you need my help?” knowing even as you continued this charade that only you and Exley knew, whether you read Jung and Fromm and Adler and the guys in Cambridge and he read them as a bum on a Florida beach, that in slapping you as terribly as he had he was crying out for you to stop committing these abominations against your person.

I’m sorry I was too debilitated with anger to do what I intended, drag you by your clenched hair back into the bar and cry, “Listen, guys, listen to me. In mitigation of what you have just seen, Alissa here knows more about football than any guy in this room. Two years ago I invited her to a Giants game, she said she knew nothing about football, spent three hours in the public library, and by the time we reached the Meadowlands the following Sunday she was explaining to me the circumstances under which a defensive secondary would be most apt to move in and out of zone and man-to-man coverages!” A slap is a slap is a slap, but the total humiliation of a fellow human being is something else again. Bad Joe Greene? And just as I’m sure you also knew would happen, the next day a couple guys said, “Jeeze, Ex, that was a mite unnecessary, wasn’t it? I mean, the Doc was only joshing. Everybody thought it was funny but
you.
”
So I said, “I’m sorry,” allowing you to transfer your putrid guilt to myself. But it would all become clear in the library of London’s British Museum, wouldn’t it, Alissa Tunstall-Phinn? The transference completed itself and the lineman’s son became analyst, the Harvard magna cum laude damn near incurable patient.