10
O’Twoomey had this idea that because of his illicit activities (whatever they are) he ought to maintain harmonious relations with the wogs, that he ought to become a bruh to the vanquished and downtrodden against the day he and Toby get busted, hoping, I expect, that the natives will raise such a hue and cry in protest that he and Toby will get off lightly. Hence he set Robin up in her own public relations firm, Lisdoonvarna Ltd., gave her unlimited funds, office space on the ground floor of the hotel, and has her greasing every extended palm in the islands, as well, no doubt, as lathering no few on-the-take wog lingams with K-Y jelly. Furnished by Antiques Pacifica, which also has commercial space in the hotel, the Lisdoonvarna Ltd. office is, save for the banal Gauguin prints on the walls, genuinely splendid, especially when Ms. Robin Glenn, seated at her great bare teakwood desk and seen easily from the lobby corridor through the floor-to-ceiling glass, is triumphantly barking orders into her gold leaf antique French desk phone. The goggle-eyed tourists are not in the least aware she is probably talking to one of her lovers.
Robin’s main outside account is a group called Ohana, which an authority on Hawaiian writing in The Advertiser said best translates as “an extension of the family,” that is, Alissa, if you’d spent some time here and were told by a Hawaiian that you had become ohana he would be paying you the ultimate compliment of saying you were now blood of his blood, all very nonsensically romantic and highfalutin’. With this group Robin has the unhappy—unhappy to a sane person—task of convincing them that to support their activities she is raising thousands of dollars from sympathizers around the islands at the same time they understand completely that the anonymous donors are Lord Lisdoonvarna period.
As a group they are much given to self-dramatization and remind me of our mainland Indians, wear faded Levi’s, Levi vests displaying their mahogany biceps, puka necklaces, gold pirate earrings, and Aunt Jemima bandanas on their heads. Their beards also come out in black splotchy patches, but to no avail I’ve asked Robin to try to persuade them to remain a businesslike clean shaven. Not to be outdone, Robin’s outfits of denim pants and jackets, made by O’Twoomey’s tailor, are something to behold, done as they are in guava, lemon, Natal plum red, honeydew, pineapple, avocado, plantain, pistachio, papaya, cantaloupe, and so forth, with bandanas dyed to match. Beneath the jackets Robin wears white silk shirts, invariably unbuttoned and revealing heartbreakingly ripe d6colletage. She also has her shirttails hauled up and knotted at her diaphragm. Because her pants are tailored to her hips, there is always on display a great triangle of golden brown flesh, comely with a whisper of down, and dotted in the lower middle with an erotically buried belly button. Beneath her breeches she wears white bikini panties, the appetizing outlines of which can more often than not be seen in the striking Hawaiian light. Up home, as you know, Al, the guys call this the VPL, for visible panty line, a Woody Allen mot. When she struts, statuesquely, about the hotel, her hair pulled tautly beneath her honeydew bandana, her long opihi shell earrings aglitter, all heads turn, and turn, and turn yet again. Believe it, Alissa, when I say I’ve heard audible gasps. So inviting as to be absurd, Robin is a torture to the blood. If only she’d been struck dumb at birth.
The other day Mr. Einhorn, the hotel manager, called during the Julia Child hour and asked Lord Lisdoonvarna if he might persuade Robin to wear her shirt tucked into her trousers, perhaps give the mainlanders a little less décolletage. There had, it seems, been an unfortunate incident. One Percival Applegate, a fifty-eight-year-old sugarcane broker from San Francisco who has been checking into the Royal Hawaiian twice a year for better than three decades, had in his lust for Robin gone berserk and been guilty of an indiscretion. Although Percival was an admitted alcoholic—he’d been dry for fifteen years—he’d got drunk and strangled the switchboard operator until she’d revealed Robin’s address at the marina in Hawaii Kai. He’d gone to the Cirrhosis of the River at 4 A.M., kicked in the door of the houseboat, and had been badly beaten up by one of Robin’s Ohana chums before the cops arrived and arrested him for aggravated assault, breaking and entering, drunkenness, and public lewdness. Apparently the poor drip—a grandfather to four spewing brats in Marin County—had burst through the door with his fly unzipped and his manhood all afluster.
I picked up most of what happened when O’Twoomey called Robin back to tell her he wanted the charges dropped immediately and detailed how she might comport herself in a more pristine manner. Before he hung up he listened a moment, smiling impatiently, then said, “Oh, Frederick? Frederick is in his room working on the masterpiece.” He winked outrageously at me. “No, don’t worry, Robin. Frederick shall be none the wiser, my dear. Frederick shall be none the wiser.”
What a field day I was going to have with this, Alissa, having access to information Robin didn’t know I had and seeing what she could do with the facts as I understood them. I had no doubt Robin would have been raped repeatedly, and that had not the Ohana dude shown up at 4 A.M.—doubtless he’d be accounted for by saying he’d come to squire her to the windward side of the island to observe some mumbo-jumbo Ohana sunrise ritual over a pile of washed rocks—she’d unquestionably be dead, a lot of tears here, hard proclamations of her innocence and a good deal of wacky disjointed eloquence on the frightening burdens of walking about the dreary world as such a flabbergastingly handsome creature, an accident of birth for which the pitiable Robin could hardly be held responsible.
What always stuns me, Alissa, as a writer, I mean, and owning a natural vanity about my own imagination, is what a paltry thing it is beside Robin’s authentically demented one. When she strutted through the door of 1602 that Saturday morning, and Hannibal had locked it behind her, she dropped her alligator leather balloon bag containing her sexual accoutrements (more of that momentarily), flung herself onto the king-size bed, heaved a great sigh, and said, “I suppose you want to fuck me, Frederick. Everyone else does.” Robin’s white silk shirt was tucked into her hip huggers, buttoned to her regal throat, and a second Natal plum red bandana was being used as a Western necktie.
“Well, no, not if you don’t want me to, Robin.” She did not respond. She sighed theatrically again, eyes ceiling-ward, indicating that whatever was bugging her would have to be elicited, it was utterly too awful to be freely volunteered. “You somehow look different, Robin. Oh, I know what it is. You have on a necktie! And your blouse is tucked in!”
Robin began to sob, savagely. Were not people cruel beyond belief, Frederick? Cruel, cruel, cruel! A man—”a drunken fucking haole tourist” (naturally)—had come up to her in the lobby and told her how much more attractive she’d be if she wore her shirt in such a way that didn’t expose her stretch marks. Stretch marks? Now listen closely, Alissa, as I cry out to you as a trained analyst. It wasn’t so much that I knew Robin had never had a child, but that only the weekend before and before and before ad infinitum throughout my now endless incarceration my tongue had spent all kinds of time lapping about that astonishingly golden area so free of any marks whatever as to drive poor grandpappy Percival Applegate mad with lust. My first reaction was, of course, one of hopeless futility, which instantly turned into that frustrating fury you must have long ago learned to control, my impulse to leap up, charge to the bed, now grab her fiercely by the nape of the neck, bend her over double so that her eyes were two inches from that lovely tum-tum and cry, “Look, look, look! There are no fucking marks whatever, for Jesus Almighty’s sake!”
If you’d taught me nothing else, Alissa, you’d taught me the patience to know that in order to learn the extent of her fantasies and therefore her malaise I’d have to hear her out—hear Robin out if, in my case, for no other reason than not to offend her and thereby risk one of her haughty, regal-necked exits, sit there and listen dumbfounded, my yellow poplin golf shorts bulging with desire, offend her, and risk her leaving me with a week’s harbored and coddled lust. Robin was working on the assumption that I of course knew all about the child—but was she reall
y, Alissa? You’ll have to answer that for me—and hence, taking a deep breath, I took a chance on gender (it was after all 50-50, better than roulette’s red or black at Vegas, which is 26-24) and said, “How is the boy anyway, Robin?”
“Oh, he’s fine, getting to be quite the little man. Still living with Denno’s sister in Waimea. The sister claims to have adopted him and young Denno bears her married name. It’ll be no time at all before Denno has him in Punahoe, thence it’ll be off to the mainland and Harvard, then either Harvard or Columbia Law, Denno thinks. He’ll be governor of the islands by the time he’s thirty, president I should say before he’s forty-five. And you know what’s the worst part of the shit Denno pulled on me, Frederick? Even after I agreed to have his child?—I mean, Denno knew fucking well no pure Buddha-head, American war hero’s son or not, could ever reach the White House unless he possessed a fine-looking strain of haole blood—the prick never came through on that Kahoolawe deal. And the only time I ever get to see young Denno—my own flesh and blood, Frederick!—is when Denno’s sister brings him to the hotel for a fucking haircut.”
Jesus H. Bygoddamn Kheeeriiiiist, Alissa, bear with me on this! Knowing your aversion to TV, I expect you’ve never seen Hawaii 5-0, the usual cops-and-robbers foolishness enhanced only by being set in the islands. In the show the boss, Steve McGarrett (played by Jack Lord), keeps addressing his sidekick, Dan Williams (played—poorly, I might add—by James MacArthur, the adopted son of playwright Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes and nephew to John D. MacArthur, the Florida billionaire now estimated, since the death of Hughes and Getty, to be the richest man in the world) as Dano. Pronounced here more nearly as Denno (“Book him, Denno, murder one” has become part of our TV mythology), it is the Hawaiian nickname or endearment for Daniel, and the only person Robin ever, ever refers to as Denno is none other than—guess?—Senator Daniel Inouye, the legislator you so much admired during the Nixon impeachment proceedings. Or did admire until he started fawning all over ex-CIA chief Richard Helms, congratulating him for his frank and forthright testimony, only for us later to hear that your ughs were right on target and that Helms had been bullshitting those senators all over the place. Not only that but, as you pointed out, Helms at one point reminded them that he’d “been around this town a long time,” which, you said, seemed to be Helms’s way of saying, “Listen, you little pissants, I’ve got a file on every one of your indiscretions thicker than Webster’s unabridged.”
Robin has met Inouye once, at most twice, and I would guess the total time he gave her was only a few minutes. Some months back a splinter group of Ohana called Protect Kahoolawe Ohana attempted to stop the U.S. naval bombing of Kahoolawe, a small (compared with the rest of the islands) pile of rock and shrubs, without water and hence with no commercial value, which on clear days can often be seen from White Manele Beach on Lanai. More than seen. From Lanai one can often hear the navy jets bombing Kahoolawe (it sounds like dynamiting at a distant construction site). Decreed by Presidential Executive Order 10436, the federal courts are not empowered to rescind it. Just as our mainland Indians claim an interstate highway is to be built through consecrated burial grounds, so the Ohana group claims this pile of volcanic rock is sacred acreage. In protest they took an ill-prepared group to Washington, were generally rebuffed by both Hawaii’s representatives and a capitol press corps that didn’t know what they were talking about, and especially were they ignored by Senator Inouye’s office. They returned to the islands furious—perhaps Robin had even persuaded them to shave and wash their Levi’s before leaving—vowing another Wounded Knee and that blood would flow in rivers. At that time, to console her comrades-in-arms, Robin told them that Inouye owed her a favor—I heard her say this on 1602’s phone!—and that she would damn well set things aright.
Now this was only a year ago, and despite her bullshit about Inouye’s owing her a favor, Robin had never before met the man. I know because I rewrote her rambling, hysterical, unconsciously amusing, and lofty-minded letter to him, and in a few declarative sentences came directly to the point and asked for a few minutes of his time to discuss the bombing of Kahoolawe. Moreover, when Robin at last heard from him, he gave her that few minutes on a Saturday afternoon when he was back in the islands for a long weekend. Moreover still, because it was a Saturday Hannibal and I, for lack of something to do, accompanied her to Inouye’s Honolulu office and waited in the parking lot no more than ten or twelve minutes for her triumphant return. Assuming Inouye saw her right away, Robin could not have had more than seven or eight minutes with him. Dressed in her avocado Levi suit and bandana, displaying plenty of tanned tum-tum and ripe chest, she slammed the door of the Porsche, sighed contentedly and said, “Well, that’s taken care of, Mister Cynical Know-it-all Frederick Exley.”
“Eese goot, eese goot, ‘obin.”
“Fat fucking chance.”
“But why are you always so negative, Frederick? Why, why, why?”
I simply wasn’t about to explain it to her again, Alissa. After December 7, 1941, in one of the more notoriously shameful episodes in our history, the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast had their properties confiscated, their asses thrown into peremptorily erected concentration camps, and haven’t to this day been formally apologized to by way of adequate federal compensation. In Hawaii an entirely different thing occurred. There the Hawaiian Japanese-Americans were allowed to enlist in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Sent to Europe, they were given, literally, some of the most abominable assignments of the European campaign, took staggering casualties (it was where Inouye lost his arm), and for Robin even to imagine she was going to flash a little skin at Inouye or anyone else in the power structure (men well into their fifties and sixties able to remember Pearl Harbor) and have him lift a finger to prevent our navy’s being prepared against any such future eventuality was the kind of lunatic fantasizing that permits hack lawyers to allow Indians to believe the government is going to give them a grand an acre for the entire Adirondack State Park or return the Black Hills of the Dakotas to them. Not only are the survivors of the 442nd (many of whom live on Lanai, where I’ve cautioned Robin against mouthing any Ohana nonsense on the veranda of the Lodge) among the most elitely proud, and rightfully so, private clubs in the world (besides these dudes, your chums at the Harvard Club don’t even know what snobbery means, Al) but there was no way that Protect Kahoolawe Ohana was going to elicit anything from them but a sardonic smile, rather as if you’d asked General Patton to stop his armored divisions in the face of .22 target pistols.
This historical digression aside, Robin had taken her lie to Ohana that Inouye owed her something, when in fact she’d never met the man, and fantasized his debt into her having agreed to give the senator a half-Caucasian son (no doubt Inouye was magnetically drawn to her Smith-Vassar-Sarah Lawrence background and all that tommyrot, don’t you know?) who’d soon be old enough to enter Punahoe, the islands’ leading haole prep school, which forgets all about race when recruiting football players, and thence it was off to your alma mammy, Al, and on to the governor’s mansion and the White House long before he even reached my enfeebled age. Hi yoooohhhhh, Silver! By now, I was seated on the edge of the bed, my golf shorts cramping my embarrassing lust, I had my legs crossed, one bare thigh resting atop the other cramping my ardor, and I was gently massaging Robin’s stomach through her silk shirt. One of my ex-wives, Alissa, had had an inordinate aversion to stretch marks, I had spent the latter months of her pregnancy nightly rubbing cocoa butter into her bulge (to no avail), and, because the moment still wasn’t right for Robin, I was using this finger rubbing motion I’d used in that long-ago, nearly obliterated time.
“How old would young Denno be now, Robin?” “Oh, Frederick, Frederick, he’s almost nine! Almost nine! On March 28 he’ll be nine!”
March 28 is, of course, my birthday, Alissa. But that is no matter, it was nearly time. This was no banal soap opera, this was opera on the epic perches. Robin’s arms were about my neck, she?
??d reverted to her savage sobbing (her tears against my cheek were as scalding as those of any other creature in pain), and as her tear flow began to subside, I removed my massaging fingers from her torso, took them to her breasts and continued gently rubbing there, through the silk shirt. When at length the tears stopped, and her arms dropped laxly to her sides, I rose, unbuttoned and unzipped her Natal plum hip huggers, ever so slowly and gently because they were so taut to her skin, removed them, then her white satin bikini panties, in one perfunctory motion dropped my yellow poplin golf and Jockey shorts to the carpeting, and without removing her shirt or mine mounted and penetrated her astonishing wetness; for, before Freud as god, Alissa, I swear Robin’s thunderingly deranged stories not only excite me beyond the bounds of anything resembling refinement, but so enrapture her that during her mad monologues she apparently discharges and her backside appears to be covered with a wet coat of shellac. I was, as I say, so agitated that it was strictly a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am. But then, Alissa, it had only just begun.