Last Notes from Home

  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 Ha’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.

  12

  For me to have imagined I could sit on the balcony with Robin and have a nice long earnest chat, and this on our first night together as husband and wife, in which I would subtly point out that this playing out her fantasies on her sleeve was tricky business in that the awesome stress of keeping one’s past straight in one’s mind must be very exhausting, to have imagined I could have convinced Robin I had the breadth of character to live with whoever she was and whoever she’d been up to this moment, this very night, and that I saw no way of our making a life together in London or anywhere else should she not make an attempt to come to terms with herself, as well as the slob I was, do this so that I might not be constantly draining myself trying to keep up with Robin’s ever-changing history of herself, to imagine that all this could be changed after a quietly reasoned talk with Robin was on my part an utterly demented notion.

  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.”

  As Robin didn’t want a steak, and as I seemed determined to sit on the balcony all night “swilling vodka” and inhaling the odor of simmering Delmonicos, Robin thought she’d take a shower and get ready for bed. To that I said that though I didn’t know what was in her balloon bag I wasn’t up to sex that night so she shouldn’t deck herself out in any honeymoon fantasy. Robin became angry, explaining that in the alligator bag was her Great-grandmother Glenn’s wedding gown, a marvel of gossamer, satin, and lace that had found its way down the family’s hearty stock lines. Her great-grandmother, Edna O’Brien, had married John Glenn in a whaler’s chapel on Nantucket. It had always been the family wish that Robin also be married in that discreet rustic place, and Robin hoped that on our return from London we might further sanctify our marriage by being rejoined in that Nantucket chapel.

  I sighed and said, “Speaking of your noble lineage, Robin, did you ever let your mom and dad know you were being married?”

  “No. But after we’re settled comfy into Leinster Terrace, our first order of business will be to hop over to Paris to my parents’ lie St.-Louis apartment so you can meet them. I was just afraid, you see, that knowing what you know about dad you might beat the shit out of him.”

  I sighed yet again, not daring to look at Robin. “Look, Robin, Tony Glenn is a retired plumber from Queens, your mother Evelyn a retired Con Ed secretary originally from the Prospect Park section of Brooklyn. You graduated, as valedictorian to be sure, from Bayside High School, spent two years at SUNY at New Paltz, then took a job as stewardess with American Airlines. And what, what, what, for Christ’s sake, is the matter with that? Isn’t just such a background what makes us so uniquely American, what lends the American his astonishing vitality? For the life of me, I’ve never understood those people, like you, who trace their ancestry to the Mayflower. Who’d want to be descended from those self-righteous, puritanical, malcontented quacks? Had they stayed in England they’d have been hung for the seditious rabble they were. And good riddance!”

  “That’s a lie,” Robin cried. “That’s a fucking lie!” It was then she hurled the grilling fork at me, lodging it firmly in the flabby pectoral muscles just above my left nipple. “Ouch.” To say that Robin hurled it is perhaps inaccurate. As she was seated but three feet from me, the fork no sooner left her hand and began its trajectory than it was into my chest, the blood exploded, immediately slowed to a rushing stream, then, as I started wiping it away with my chefs apron, a trickle. Of course Robin became hysterical, tried to pull the fork from my chest, but I swatted her hand and told her to take a shower and go to bed before I got really pissed and slapped the shit out of her. Robin rose and started to the bathroom. Then I heard her pause, and she was back on the balcony telling me she hoped I drank myself to death and slamming an unopened liter of Smirnoff red label on the folding TV dinner table before me. For a half hour or more, above the weighty rush of the shower, I heard Robin’s stricken sobs and when at length both sounds were stayed, I waited as long as I dared, so afraid I was of something Robin might do in her present condition—Lord, she was unpredictable enough in her rational moments—then cranked my head round and, sighing with relief, saw that Robin was naked on the king-size bed and preparing to dry her hair with her ivory-and-gold-leaf hand dryer.

  By then it was nearly 3 A.M. and I’d already decided that after I slept, if ever I got tired, I’d travel alone to Punchbowl and make my final farewells to the Brigadier, knowing that he would give me up to the living, knowing really that he’d long since wanted me to go back among the quick. Then I’d go to O’Twoomey’s tailor and have myself measured, after which, and whether Robin approved or not, I’d return to Lanai, drink for a day or two, maybe a week, perhaps a month, perhaps two, then I’d sober up, put these words down to you, Alissa, do a lot of golfing and swimming, and get ready for our new life in London, where I’d walk in Kensington Gardens during the week, weekends taking the Underground to walk in the bracken and gorse of Hampstead Heath. The grilling fork was still in my chest—some martyr, I!—and though the chefs apron was by now a bloody cerise mess, the blood had all but coagulated and the steaks were simmering so slowly I didn’t need the fork and occasionally reached over and turned them with my fingers.

  Abruptly I became aware that Robin had turned off the hair dryer. I was conscious of movement behind me, a whispering, some indistinct ruffling noises, and when at length Robin reappeared on the balcony she was dressed in her grandmother’s wedding gown—doubtless purchased at Liberty House—and, dropping to her knees, she grasped my bare thighs and begged me to please, please, please remove the grilling fork from my chest. Lifting Robin’s veil, I saw that her eyes were red and swollen from her tears; but even as close as I was, my eyes all but lying atop her bruised vacuous blue eyes, even then I couldn’t help remarking her astonishing handsomeness. Robin was truly a stunning, heart-stopping, head-turning young woman even in her present distraught condition. Even were she dressed in a nun’s habit, I thought, she would have been helpless to prevent the crude lust of vain swinish men. She ultimately had become nothing other than that brute American male fantasy of the cornbred princess and, in her awful fragility, she had devoted her life to living up to that fantasy, however unsought it had been on her part, only to have had it all turn to ashes in her mouth. God, she was America.

  “It’s Easter Sunday, Robin. Like Christ, I shall be resurrected by sunrise. Until then, I want to contemplate the—what is it you call it? Cosmos?—cosmos as fantasy. If, for example, Christ was into the fantasy—and I’m not saying he was—of being the son of God, does that negate the possibility that he was indeed the son of God? Moreover, who is the Jesus of Nazareth we fashion in our minds?—a secular, bearded, sweet-faced man—in Hollywood, ah, Hollywood, listen to this one, Robin, his armpits are hairless!—with a genius for metaphor, and doubtless the greatest gift for creating a personal mythology of anyone who ever walked the earth. And who are you and I, Robin, but a couple of unconscious worshipers who emulate Him with our every breath and gesture, you with your half-baked quackery about autumnal New England ancestors and Seven Sisters colleges and me with my own quackery of being a novelist—should I capitalize Novelist?—when I know that my grasp of the metaphor is at best a paltry, pedestrian thing—yes, Robin, just a couple pathetic bohunks striving in our separate ways to create personal mythologies we deem worthy of us.”

  Robin had begun to weep again, quietly, and lifting her eyes to me she said, “Please don’t talk like this, Frederick. I hate it when you talk like this. If s sick, it’s insane.”

  “I like your eyes when they’re tear-covered. They change from that startling paleness to a lovely violet. That blank paleness scares the shit out of me, Robin. In that state they have a disarming innocence, the scary spine-chilling frankness of the satanically fallen. Forsooth, you are the devil’s daughter and I’d know you anywhere. Ah, but the tears bring on a depth of tenderness and compassion.”

  “Please, please.”

  “Give me this night to myself, Robin, and I make you this promise. I shall never, never again condemn nor reprimand you for babbling out your fantasies for all the world to hear. Ultimately my condemnation of you resides in my feeling that your waking, articulat
ed dreams were never grand enough. Why an Emilio Pucci model? Why not the next Marilyn Monroe? But even now I am being unkind and unfair to you. Believe me when I say that you are nicer than Marilyn Monroe. In high school we used to play Eastwood of Syracuse, and Marilyn always reminded me, what with her wide low-slung ass and simpering kisser, of one of those Polack cheerleaders from Eastwood. And yet in death this broad who couldn’t walk, who couldn’t talk, who couldn’t act has become an icon who preoccupies more of the intellectual dodos’ time than ever Christ did. But you, Robin?—you have more regality in your little finger than Marilyn had in her entire presence, hyped presence at that, and had I not met your lovely parents on one of my flights over here I might have believed most of your stories, well, I might have believed some of them, well, one or two of them. And I am no better than you, Robin, save that my fantasies dwell within. In one of my books I have my narrator say something to the effect that he wanted nothing less than to stick his dirty fingers into posterity, my dreary fantasy, and if you allow me my august, presumptuous, and risible dream, I shall, I repeat, leave your fantasies—however troubling I find them—becalmed and unsullied by anything as garish as facts.”