Last Notes from Home (44 page)

From revving the engines to takeoff to sitdown to discharging passengers, the flight from Lanai to Honolulu takes no more than forty minutes, and I think, Alissa, you’ll find the fantasy that followed this exchange on the Cessna, and for the final twenty minutes of the flight, more than a little instructional. Whereas at one moment I’d no future before me but eighteen holes a day, nightly steaks and salad, and buckets of vodka, my slim margin of sanity maintained by scribbling on a letter to you I never, I can see now, had any intention of mailing, now suddenly I was living with my striking but loonily garrulous wife in a tastefully furnished flat (it was all deep mahogany and prints of guys riding to the hounds) on Leinster Terrace—Robin had already been in touch with an estate agent friend of O’Twoomey—London W2, but a few short steps from Kensington Gardens.

And who precisely was I supposed to be in this new incarnation? At forty-eight, I expect I was a writer with a dozen major novels behind me, for in my fantasy my Chesterfield and cashmere topcoats, my demurely pinstriped dark-blue-and-gray and obviously Savile Row-cut suits, my maroon Aston Martin sedan, all conspired to speak to the notion that “major talent” is occasionally rewarded. I am retiring, inward, not immodest, debt-paying, a good though occasionally philandering husband, I jog daily in Kensington Gardens with those many sons Robin has bore me, to assure Robin will be well taken care of I have a prodigious policy against my life, and so forth and so forth. What a farce, Alissa! I’ve never known a writer worth a tinker’s damn—and as you know I have a first-name familiarity with many of the best writers of our time—who wouldn’t sacrifice everything to pull off one major novel. Hence this slimy yearning of writers to be at one with the bourgeoisie is so patently fake as to be reprehensible.

There is a hateful, baleful, alienating darkness in all good writers that can never be disguised by a Brooks Brothers suit, and whenever I see a good writer so got up he always seems to me to exude the notion of soiled undergarments and foul socks. Moreover, and particularly in my case, as the son of a power company lineman I have all but missed my life in pursuit of what I assumed were my educated betters, when in fact it began occurring to me years ago that I was always turning those betters—including you, Alissa—on to books of which I was stunned and pained to discover they’d never even heard. At any one of those moments I could easily have said,
“All right, already, enough of reading
—
get a pencil and a piece of paper”

It wasn’t that this fantasy of a world-renowned writer wasn’t exceedingly satisfying. It was that all my material comforts were being realized without my having done anything to merit them, without sensing, as it were, the sweat of painful labors on my brow. For example, Robin had in her bag my long letter to you, which Hannibal had delivered over to her, as well as nearly four thousand dollars I’d had in my desk. As I had no clothes on Lanai but tattered shorts and T-shirts, there’d be no need, she said, to return for anything in the way of possessions. Moreover, Robin showed me what she said was our wedding present from O’Twoomey, a check for twenty thousand pounds drawn against Barclay’s Bank of London. As the check was made out to Frederick Exley period, I hardly saw it as “our present.” Further, and in huffy response to my suggestion that that amount wouldn’t last us eighteen months in London the way we lived, Robin said she’d managed to save sixty thousand dollars from her public relations job—public relations!—and though she was by inclination opposed to an able-bodied and talented man living off a woman, she had that very day and in a ceremony she herself had written been bound to me in a union of man, woman, and nature. As on her own oath she’d sworn to give freely of herself to Frederick, she assumed, however reluctantly, that this giving included her hard-won wages. Of course, Alissa, I was too kind to suggest that in the earning of those wages she must have occasionally experienced a little forbidden and delicious titillation, or that those monies were tax free and that the remainder of her “earnings” might as well have been lifted from O’Twoomey’s fat wallet when he slept.

And though our honeymoon (about which more presently) was an abominable joke lasting a mere two days, and though to appease Robin I visited O’Twoomey’s tailor and had myself measured for a London wardrobe before we returned to Lanai, for I had decided to forestall my London trip until I was damn good and ready, Robin was for once, for once, right in her claim that O’Twoomey hadn’t wanted me back on Lanai. He was furious, spittingly so. He would, he said, have nothing to do with me, stating that he had offered me a new life, that I had spurned that life, and that though Hannibal would continue to watch over me, he would not do so out of any affection O’Twoomey had for me—”It has ceased to exist, Frederick!”—but because O’Twoomey would not bear the guilt of my untimely death.

KI wished, however, to drink myself to a slow sloppy death, he’d already told Hannibal that there would be no restrictions on the amounts I consumed or the hours I was free to consume them. Moreover, were I not interested in pursuing that new life—and I obviously wasn’t—O’Twoomey felt I might do the gentlemanly thing and return his twenty thousand pounds. Robin was naturally dumbstruck at this suggestion, and it was an anguished two minutes before, above those stricken gurgling noises rising up from her strong regal throat, as if she were choking on her own blood (she was in fact choking on twenty thousand pounds, something dearer than her blood), O’Twoomey and I were able to determine that Robin had deposited the check to the joint London account of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Exley (I didn’t remember endorsing it!), that O’Twoomey’s estate agent friend had been paid six months in advance on our Leinster Terrace deep mahogany and doggy flat, and that the only thing that was holding us up was O’Twoomey’s tailor preparing a suitable London wardrobe for me, mackintosh and all should I feel the need to play the spy who chose to stay out in the cold.

O’Twoomey, a churlish, stubborn, hard old fart when he chooses to be, Alissa, hasn’t let me play golf with him, or Robin and me join the picnic tables at the rear of the Lodge for supper. Since that initial conversation he hasn’t spoken a word to me in the two months since our return from our honeymoon, relaying whatever he wants me to know—his golf score, for example, with some
H
a’
s!
after it—through Hannibal. For the first month I did very well without his company. After having coffee and perusing the morning
Advertiser
—to please Hannibal I got back to arguing with the headlines—Hannibal and I would stroll to the golf course and play eighteen, walking, after which we’d take a shower and, together with Robin, drive to White Manele Beach, where Robin and Hannibal would swim for miles while I drank chilled Budweiser and watched the beach restore itself. After that month, though, I detected that I was persuading Hannibal to return to the Lodge after only playing nine so I could have three or four beers to get me through the back nine, and as another month passed I found that in lieu of beer I was into vodka at the midway of the match until, of course, I was on the vodka all day, every day, trying to write this letter to you, assuring the mad Robin—who was constantly reminding me that my wardrobe had been ready for weeks and that we were scheduled to fly to London the Wednesday after Memorial Day—that I’d dry out any moment now. Then abruptly it was two weeks before our scheduled departure, I detected that no one on the island was speaking to me but Hannibal and Robin, the others turning from me as though stunned by my dissolute appearance, and I sobered up and had what I imagined was a stroke. On the fourth day of my new, oh, my so sober and so earnest, regimen I waited on the veranda for three hours for Hannibal, then in alarm awakened Robin. Robin said that like characters in a bad novel O’Twoomey, Hannibal, and Toby had left under cover of night. “They said they were going to Australia. But who knows with those crazies?”

Robin and I leave for Honolulu tomorrow, where I will pick up my wardrobe, thence to London three days hence, where I will do God only knows what. Jog? Visit the museums and try to recover that archaic form that people used to call a gentleman? Spend my days in the library and become an authority on some minor Edwardian poet? Robin wants no reminders of what she calls “our shitty honeymoon,” so she has booked us into the Holiday Hotel at Kalakaua and Lewers Street, the hotel containing Shipwreck Kelly’s Lounge, which she recommended to me on that long-ago day I met her high above the azure Pacific. The Holiday is a block and a half from Waikiki Beach, it is a good deal cheaper than the Royal Hawaiian, and as we shall be paying for it, I suspect that the price also entered into Robin’s thinking. In fairness to Robin, our honeymoon did have rather a nightmarish quality.

Robin, stripping down to her underpants, had joined me on the balcony and demanded my chair next to the hibachi, as well as the grilling fork (a mistake, that!), explaining that now that she was my woman—and, I assume, meeting my mind!—it was her duty to prepare Frederick’s nuptial repast. Where Robin purchased her underwear, I don’t know; but she may as well have worn none at all, her present panties being little more than a pink silk waistband, a string bikini effect slashed between the mounds of her marvelous behind, and a skimpy silk flap that was drawn from behind between her legs, brought up and snapped with two metal fasteners in her lower loin area. When I asked her if by dropping this to wee-wee, the flap didn’t go into the water of the bowl, she said of course not, rose, unsnapped the eyes, then from behind reached between her thighs, clutched the flimsy pink material of the flap and brought it back to the coccyx at the base of her spine. By way of demonstration, Robin then squatted down on the deck chair in the pee-pee position and cast me a contemptuously derisive look, as though to say that men really were blissfully ignorant when it came to the esoteric ways of women. Of course I knew why Robin wore undergarments and expensive ones at that. Robin genuinely believed in coddling, nurturing, and pampering the erotic zones of her body, which, happily, in Robin’s case included every square centimeter. I say happily because had I not had her body to love I would have found myself in a quest for a mind so phantasmal as to be beyond the reach of any man, including, as he himself has told us, Dr. Sigmund Freud.

For a long time I had suffered myself the illusion that Robin might have lesbian tendencies, so derisive she was of her sisters and especially hateful when she detected anything about a sister that suggested a lack of demureness or femininity. In all the years I’d known her I’d never heard Robin mention having had a single girlfriend save for her prep school roommate, Ms. Priscilla Saunders, who was of course nonexistent, but even in her nonexistence poor Priscilla had been the recipient of Robin’s lofty scorn for having gone to the drugstore and committed the indelicacy of purchasing condoms so that quarterback Dick Brophy, also nonexistent, could nightly service Priscilla and Robin in their dormitory room. Regarding any immediate indelicacy, Robin would grow so rancorous she’d be all but transmogrified into a disruptive lunatic.

Once when Robin, Hannibal, and I were sunning ourselves at the Royal Hawaiian pool, Robin, abruptly charged with bile, suddenly poked me from my slumber and sneered, “Look at that stupid
haole.”
The Royal Hawaiian doesn’t cater to anyone but
haoles
and as almost everyone at the pool had the pallor of mainlanders, I hadn’t the foggiest notion where to look. What Robin, with a genuinely heartfelt disgust, was pointing out to me was a statuesque, even beautiful, woman whose bikini was so skimpy pubic hairs were cascading out the hem and onto the inside of her thighs. “Gross,” Robin said.
“Gross”
Even later in the room, she was still spittingly furious. When I suggested that allowing herself to be so upset by a woman’s exposing pubic hairs was an overreaction that left her own sex suspect, she countered with something I’d told her about my last stay on Singer Island, Florida.

All the young bucks had taken to wearing satin bikini swimsuits so taut their genitals were prominently exposed. From a bartender I’d heard that many of the guys actually stuffed cotton into their suits, and I spent so much time staring queasily at these erotic mounds, and because of my ongoing self-analysis, I’d begun to wonder if I didn’t after all have fag tendencies. “Do you think I’m a fag, Robin?’’ And now Robin was shouting, “And what did I say, Frederick? What did I say?” In fairness, Robin had said that anyone might stare at an idiot with cotton stuffed into his swimsuit, in the same way a person, unable to help himself, would stare at a grotesque who had been ravaged by some horrible disease. This hardly made me a fag, any more than being repulsed by poolside pubic hairs made her a dyke. The woman looked, Robin said, like the kind of
haole
tourist who would pee in the pool.

When I pointed out that on a dozen occasions I’d heard Robin say, ‘“I’m going to have a swim and make pee-pee,” Robin laughed and said, “It’s okay in my case. Mine tastes like champagne, as you ought to know. Besides, I’ve got equity in the islands.” For all that, like so many beautiful women Robin absolutely loathed her sisters, with the single exception of Malia who was teaching her how to cook in a wok—her strip steak and mixed vegetables was going to be the hit of London society—and to iron her man’s shirts. What fascinated me even more than the fact that all delicacy, propriety, and nicety was abandoned at Robin’s bedroom door, and where she wouldn’t, had she the Houdini contortions to manage it, have hesitated to massage a guy’s prostate gland with her mouth, she’d be transmogrified to an incensed maniac on hearing a woman say “Shit” in the Royal Hawaiian’s dining room.

When Robin leaned over to turn up the gas heat on the hibachi, I asked her not to, explaining that I wasn’t as hungry as I’d imagined and as I was wide awake I very much wanted the steaks to simmer slowly so that I might savor their odor. Moreover, I said, had I a small skillet, some bell peppers, some olive oil, and some garlic powder I’d soon be into O’Twoomey’s ambrosial heaven. “You know,” I said, “I’m really going to miss that crazy bastard.”