Robin opened her mouth to protest but instantly I doubled my fist and shook it violently under her veiled nose, thereby letting both Robin and the matrimonial assemblage know that though Robin was for the nonce in a state of connubial bliss, her fall from grace was going to come extremely early on—even before the marriage’s consummation!—in the form of a grand manly healthy husbandly Maguire thrashing if she didn’t toe the mark and stop waxing poetical. O’Twoomey, being the wonderful Irish lad that he is, broke up in raucous laughter and thereby enlisted the others in his hilarity. “Now, that’s a grand boyo, Frederick. Give her a solid crack on the noggin and let her know from the outset who the cock of the walk is!”
Although Robin and the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale only went into the water up to their shins, when he was lowering her face-up into the surf—Robin’s Catholicism erupting in the form of her repeatedly making the sign of the cross at forehead, chest, and shoulder—an incredible wave broke over them, knocking them violently straight up and into Wiley and me, with Robin’s head cracking my left eyebrow with such ferocious impact that I’d spend my honeymoon with a lump over my eye as big as an extra-large egg.
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale needn’t lower me, thank you. I simply laid down in the surf, face up, with my head toward Tahiti and my feet toward the marriage party. What I remember after that is scant. I remember Mr. Dimmesdale bending over me and mumbling his rites, and the laying on of the hands, with his right palm coming to my forehead, his left palm to my chest, then suddenly all was turbulent, breathless, terrifying, and painful blackness and I had what appeared to be a Great White’s jaws clasped to my ankle and rushing me out to sea to partake of his own wedding feast. How long it was before it occurred to me that I was caught in an undertow and that the Great White was a heartstricken Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale brutishly strangling my ankle, I don’t know; but the moment it did, with my right foot I laid a violent kick on the good reverend’s dome, the memory of which he’ll take to his heaven with him. For all that, he was luckier than I because in my own boundless fear I’d kicked him so fiercely I’d knocked him free of the undercurrent and, I later learned, he bobbed up no more than a hundred yards from the beach, an easy save for a swimmer as strong as Wiley.
Although I couldn’t have been in the undertow for more than thirty seconds, it did of course seem an eternity. In Watertown High School, Alissa, we had a game not unlike the present day “Gotcha,” where the kids shoot each other with water or cap pistols, though the Watertown jocks played the game with considerably more vigor and lunacy. The idea was to catch a teammate completely unawares, say, coming round a blind corner in the school halls, then with a doubled fist giving him the best shot one had right at the solar plexus or heart. One night at the Avon Theater, Bubba Fox, having seconds before me gone through the swinging doors discharging moviegoers into the lobby, caught me in the diaphragm as I came through those doors, the pain was excruciating, everything went black, and sensing myself going to my knees I gave myself utterly up to the darkness.
How odd it was that as the undercurrent continued to rush, bump, and surge me outward that that memory should flood back upon me and, remembering, I surrendered myself to the burning, chest-constricting darkness. Doubtless I wasn’t, as I say, under for more than a half minute, and when at last my head did bob up, I found myself treading in twenty-foot seas puking saltwater and booze bile, so bad I thought my stomach was turning inside out. Once as a wave broke I caught sight of White Manele, which seemed a mile away, only later to discover I’d been a mere quarter mile away. It says a good deal of Mrs. Exley’s lung power that into the face of a Kona wind I could yet hear her crying, “Oh, Frederick, my darling, my husband, I’m coming, I’m coming” and though I had of course often heard this, Alissa, in quite another context, it was not without its comfort to know that Robin had me in view. When at length she came over the crest of a huge wave and dropped rapidly down to me, as if in free fall, she instantly started giving me a lifeguard’s rote litany of primer rules, which may be the first complete sentences a kid from our neck of America—the St. Lawrence River-Lake Ontario region—learns to speak, pedantically ordering me to relax my body and heave to so she could cup me under the chin and sidestroke me back to paradise.
Actually, Alissa, and despite my continuing to gag up bile seawater, I could have easily made my own way back to the beach; but I’ve always been of the opinion that bad theater or vile poetry needs more than an urbanely verbal panning, often the playwright and actors need nothing less than rotten eggs, soggy tomatoes, and mildewed cabbages cast upon the stage, the pedestrian poet a good caning. Moreover, I had high hopes that were I to exhaust my rather too exuberant bride she might not that night demand my manly connubial services and, even more than that, she might for once in her life be too weary to talk. Why I didn’t just leave it at that, I don’t know; save the very real possibility that I am at heart a beast, so that when I at last turned my head and saw the kiave trees but a few yards aft and knew that momentarily the surf would be crashing Robin and me onto the concrete-hard beach, I spoke to a panting, ever-tiring Robin.
“You know what you’ve done with this zany marriage service of yours, don’t you, Robin? You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve just acted your way into a celibate honeymoon! I mean, listen here, Robin, you don’t even get to touch my bod the entire week we’re at the Pink Palace! I mean, you don’t even get to give me a hand job!”
Of course Robin got immediately hysterical, screaming she’d always known I’d find some diabolically vicious excuse, however paltry, to deprive her of her honeymoon, her one and only honeymoon. She then began sobbing mightily, never, I might add, breaking her powerful left-armed sidestroke, my chin still cupped and saddled firmly in her strong right palm. Despite what you might think, Alissa, even Frederick is a sucker for a broad’s sobs, as shamelessly crocodilian as they always are in Robin’s case, and hence he found himself saying, “Okay, Robin, quiet down. Quiet down. We’ll play the honeymoon by ear and if there are no more, none whatever, crass theatrics during it Frederick might—might, I repeat—let you give him a hand job.”
11
Were I a closet Michener reader like you, Alissa, albeit a troubled self-castigating one much given to playacting the flagellant penitent slut as the price of your atonement for ‘fessing up to your tastes in literature, I would stop reading at this bittersweet point and retain the jolly image of a graying paunchy middle-aged Exley kissing Robin by way of making it up and thereupon, though with an airy reluctance, allowing himself to be given a hand job, rather as if he and Robin were children of the fifties (as indeed Frederick was!) ingenuously indulging themselves at a drive-in movie. Of course even this ending might not be demure enough for Michener readers but having left him unread for so long I’m forced to leave it to you to stop reading whenever a pulp element commensurate with your depravity explodes to the surface.
Robin and I did not check into the Royal Hawaiian until II P.M. On our return from the beach to Lanai City for champagne and canapés, Dr. Jim checked my blood pressure and recommended an hour’s nap, which turned into a four-hour one, after which Toby flew us to Honolulu. When we entered the hotel, a number of employees kissed Robin and presented us with a neatly wrapped gift they had chipped in to buy. Before I’d taken my nap at the Lodge, Sissy had handed me a glass of her own home-brewed emetic—later I learned it was hot bacon grease stirred vigorously into cold grapefruit juice!—to bring up whatever seawater and bile I had left in me; and as Robin and I were ascending the Towers’ elevator I suddenly found myself wide awake and famished and suggested I go to the all-night delicatessen on Kalakaua and bring sandwiches back to the room.
Robin, however, pooh-poohed this by saying the half-size refrigerator in our room had been filled with Delmonico steaks—Toby’s present to us—and plastic containers of his herb salad, as well as Toby’s having placed a bottled gas hibachi on our balcony overlooking Waikiki. There would, of course, be all the ch
ampagne and vodka we could imbibe. When we walked into the room I tripped over Robin’s alligator balloon bag, which someone—one of her Ohana pals?—had placed just inside the door, and I hadn’t even to ask to know it contained the wedding gown of either Grandmother Glenn or Grandmother Flaherty. It was Robin’s night both to play the coy ingenuous scandalized virgin and further to elaborate on her privileged family tree, neither for which I was that night prepared.
Stripping to my jockey shorts, I mixed myself a hefty vodka and grapefruit juice, lighted the hibachi, and retrieved two Delmonicos from the refrigerator. After putting them on the ironwork, I seated myself, grilling fork in hand, on one of the two balcony deck chairs intent on lovingly tending Robin’s and my first supper together as husband and wife. Even after we’d become airborne in the Cessna over Lanai, I had been unable to accept that Hannibal was not with us—it made me exceedingly uncomfortable—and had half expected him to be waiting at the hotel, however much Robin insisted that not only was Hannibal’s job of watching me done but that O’Twoomey neither expected nor wanted us back on Lanai.
“With what I know!” I cried, lunging against my seat belt.
“Christ, Frederick, I wish you’d get that out of your head. They were never worried about you in that respect. And what do you really know? That O’Twoomey’s a filthy rich loony with all kinds of imagined contacts in the IRA and the intelligence services of half the countries of the world. It’s all in his head. He reads too many Le Carre novels. Half his phone calls are to his stockbroker in Dublin. You know, Frederick, I figured out months ago what he was really up to. He wants to be a character in your book, for Christ’s sake. That’s why he feels the need for all that mysterious glamour. The main thing he was worried about was your committing suicide before you committed him to paper. If he wanted to read your mail, it was only to assure himself that you hadn’t written some long, maudlin, self-pitying farewell to your elderly mother or someone else who cared for you.”
“I’ve never contemplated suicide. Never, never contemplated suicide!”
“And what the hell were you doing the night you were standing on the Pink Palace’s balcony railing? A liter or two of vodka in you? Twelve stories up, naked and blaspheming the heavens? Spitting poison at a harmless full moon. Baying, fucking baying?’
“I don’t remember any such night.”
“Well, I do. It was I who got Hannibal to pull you from the railing. And well you might not remember. The doctor kept you sedated for five days afterward and even brought in a psychiatrist to give you an electroshock treatment. O’Twoomey had to say he was your father and sign a release to get it done. It was during those five days that Jimmy decided you couldn’t be left alone and rented one whole side of the Lodge so he could watch you. I mean, listen, Frederick, you’ll never, never have a friend who cares for you more than O’Twoomey.”
“But why doesn’t he want us back on Lanai?”
“He says you’ve always wanted to live in London, much to his stupefied consternation, and he thinks you ought to go there for a couple years because the company of those wogs on Lanai is turning your brains to mush.”
“How the hell would he know I’ve ever dreamed of living in London?”
“He says the whole latter part of your new book is in the form of a letter from your narrator to an imagined psychiatrist—Alissa?—whom he takes to be modeled on me, and that in that letter your narrator expresses the desire to live in London with this Alissa, ergo, a wish to live in London with me.”
I hadn’t, of course, Alissa, any need to learn how O’Twoomey had got into my safety deposit box. Even as Robin spoke I was recalling that the box was in Hannibal’s name. What would later astonish me was in learning that no sooner would I deposit some pages to you than Hannibal would remove them and have them photocopied, after which O’Twoomey would send the copies to a Honolulu psychiatrist (apparently the same one who had administered the electroshock) for analysis. A Chinese-American named Dr. Ulysses Lee, his reports to O’Twoomey indicated that I suffered from a common and simple form of delusional paranoid schizophrenia and the last of his analyses had offered professionally reasoned doubt—thank God—that I was a danger to myself or to anyone else.
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.