Wrong Information Is Being Given Out at Princeton

by J. P. Donleavy

  Contents

  Title Page

  WRONG INFORMATION IS BEING GIVEN OUT AT PRINCETON

  Also by J. P. Donleavy

  Copyright

  WRONG INFORMATION IS BEING GIVEN OUT AT PRINCETON

  PEOPLE WERE ALREADY BEGINNING to forget we were veterans after the Second World War and that the government no longer owed us a living. Face-lifting, hair replacement, and breast enhancement hadn’t yet come into vogue and people still believed there were other kinds of contentment. Especially when television was just beginning to pleasantly paralyze the nation. The forces of commercialism and survival were hard at work doing a lot of us down, and I was at the time at a loose emotional end, as you might say, when she came into my life in the cold blue winter before Christmas. There’d been a couple of big snowfalls and icicles were hanging down from people’s windowsills.

  It was a Sunday afternoon and I was standing in a friend’s ramshackle West Thirty-fourth Street apartment in a gray and dingy Garment District around the corner from one of the city’s biggest hotels, the New Yorker, and not far from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel that went out westwards under the Hudson River, starting a highway all the way to California. I was always fond of knowing where I really was in New York, right down to the bedrock and subsoil. There wasn’t much heat in the building and the friend, whom I had got to know while we were on the same ship in the navy, had a log fire going in his fireplace and I was glad to be somewhere warm. Her name was Sylvia and her girlfriend called Ertha, and both arrived enclosed in a bunch of thick heavy sweaters. Sylvia’s top was in green and her friend in blue. Both were advocates of modern dance, and even with all the thick wool over them you could see they were athletically curvaceous.

  My friend Maximilian, who had after a brief marriage and divorce come back east from Chicago to make his fortune in New York, was already gaga over Ertha, having met her at a modern dance recital, and was now giving her his further line inviting her into his bedroom. To show her, he said, the rare fragile beauty of his seashells he’d collected on the Sagaponack beach out on Long Island. I took the opportunity to chat a little with Sylvia, who, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail, told me she was as an abandoned baby adopted by parents who were rich. She had attended fancy private schools and then a liberal girl’s college where the affluent students could indulge being radical. Growing up, she took an interest in music and classical ballet but finally, when she’d grown too tall, switched to modern dancing. When she found out during her last year at college that she was adopted, it was like a fuse on a bomb that had been lit as she went off delving into a mysterious obscurity, to search for her natural mother and father.

  Anyone who was rich in those days about five or six years after the Second World War, or had in any decent way a pot to piss in, was immediately embraced in friendship and given the most comfortable orange crate upon which to sit. When I pointed to the best crate, she suddenly swept around in a circle, singing and repeatedly said hi right at my face by way she said, of an Iroquois Indian greeting, and did I want to go with her and spend the sixteen hundred dollars she had right there in her purse. I felt she was being the way some people briefly get before the real big hammer blows of life fall. Having served in the navy, I calculated I was about five years older, and had been a petty officer second class gunner’s mate on a battleship letting off sixteen-inch guns inside a turret. And here she was already taking command of the situation.

  “Hey Sylvia, whew, give me a moment to think.”

  “Sure. Think. You got five seconds.”

  I moved back to lean against my friend’s new griller his mother had sent from Chicago for him to be able to cook steak and lamb chops in his apartment and in two seconds said to Sylvia, “That’s a lot of money.” Having removed two sweaters, she said, “Sure it’s a lot, but let’s spend it.” At the time I could have lived on sixteen hundred dollars for the next six months, but to achieve some rapport I pathetically tried to say, “I guess that’s what money’s for,” but she said it first. As indeed she’s said or tried to say everything first ever since.

  I had a couple of times in my life thought I was in love when I’d find I’d get a magnifying glass to examine every tiny scrawl of a girl’s handwriting in a letter to see if it would reveal some mystical character hidden deep in her soul. And on a couple of occasions in doing so, and just when I thought I had the girl under my thumb, in the next letter I found I was gently but nevertheless ignominiously being brushed off. And the denouement—hey, what the fuck did I do wrong—was always severely painful and depressing. Anyway, in growing up in a large family your need for emotional attachment to other nonkindred people isn’t too great. But now I was out of the blue trying to assess my prospects with this attractive girl who had the most wonderful tits I’d ever seen in a sweater. I then sat on the orange crate myself and promptly crashed my way through it ass-first onto the floor. She continued in circles around the room, only now she was bent over double holding her stomach, convulsed in laughter.

  “Forgive me my mirth, but the dumb way you just sat down was really funny.”

  I should have realized right there and then that I was getting involved with a deeply spoiled bitch. Albeit whose ever-ready attraction was her astonishingly attractive body further revealed in her ballet practice gear, and the animalistically sensuous way she chose to move or pose to stand. She had said she was only privileged by proxy. Because from the vague hints she heard of her real mother and father, she was probably from the wrong side of the biological tracks. And suddenly during these speculations, she would put her hands on her hips, flexing her left knee forward and with her right buttock expanded, ask,

  “Hey you don’t say much. Now why don’t you tell me all about you.”

  “Well, except that I am a composer, there’s not too much to tell.”

  In fact there was a goddamn massive lot. But to fit in a little bit with her own imagined underprivileged social estimations of herself, I invented a few romanticized ideas about how my own background had been deprived. Like I was disadvantaged growing up in the middle Bronx, and right from the cradle was denied any real opportunity to step choo choo choo on the big gravy train as it pulled out of the station, No Wheres Ville. But in fact our house in the Bronx was in Riverdale and isolated in the middle of a suburban contour of similar houses and was spacious enough with thirteen rooms with one of them housing a concert grand piano. And my first-ever composition as a composer came from tinkling the ancient Steinway. Outside it had a knoll of trees and outcroppings of rock and even a garter snake or two. I also had at least been to a couple of decent prep schools and after a couple of expulsions, finally graduated from one of the lesser-known ones in New Jersey. Plus, the rumor was that my own large very Irish family of seven children had been fairly prosperous bootleggers who still owned a couple of Bowery saloons as well as one in Hell’s Kitchen and a bit of city slum property. We even had a cook and a couple of maids. And it was when Sylvia saw me wipe the snow off the windshield of her car with the elbow of my jacket that she said it was a sure sign of being privileged.

  “And hey, not only that but you seem to go do exactly what you want.”

  And I guess that that was more than a little bit true because then, early after the war on the GI bill, I headed to Lawrence College out in Appleton, Wisconsin. I learned about dairy cattle and the chemistry of paper and a coed blew me out in the middle of a cornfield. And in the sylvan collegiate pleasures there, I got to thinking the world should have more dance and music. So after only a year I took off to attend the next two years at a music conservatory in Italy. Living in Europe and t
raveling a bit, I developed a social consciousness about the upgrading of the underprivileged. That they should enjoy the better things in life. That everybody, despite color, creed, or race, should be entitled to getting a square deal. But returning to America and arriving back in the land of the free and the home of the brave, I began to find that not all Americans were on my side in this conceptual concern. In fact I found that when I posted up a sign, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL, some of these bastard neighbors flying the Stars and Stripes on their front lawns shouted they were taxpayers and were shaking their goddamn fists at me and wanting to kill me. And then along with all this I was having more than a few of life’s blows fall. My favorite and so beautiful sister I dearly loved and with whom I often exchanged our concerns, one evening, anguished after discussing her unhappy marriage alone with me at the kitchen table, fled the house in her nightclothes and rushed out in front of a truck on the nearby highway.

  Back then upon that cold blue winter day there was already enough said between Sylvia and me to reach a sort of understanding, especially that I was on the side of the underdog, and it had us both thinking that we were suddenly in love at first sight. We giggled holding hands down those dark ramshackle stairs of Max’s apartment, leaving him and Ertha examining the seashells in his bedroom. Jumping into her nifty but chilly convertible car which I helped push out of the snowdrift, we sped off up Eighth Avenue to get on the West Side Highway. Crossing the George Washington Bridge to the top of the majestic Palisades along by the Hudson, we had warm new questions about who we thought we were and where we came from. And I was telling her that you could so easily be that way in America. Invent yourself moment to moment. Because in Europe, if you were anybody, it was already carved on a building, printed in a book, or remembered by somebody somewhere all over the goddamn place.

  Sylvia said there was a lot of secrecy about her being adopted. And she didn’t, despite four years of searching, yet know who her real parents were but had nightmares that her father might have been a pimp and her mother a prostitute. Even growing up on a big estate with a farm and even learning how to milk a cow, she felt her life with her real parents would have been in a shack by the railway tracks. She often reminded me of being able to milk a cow, which I pretended to her was not a totally useless skill. Especially a few times later in our relationship when I found her exercise of the practice pleasurable. But her obsession with who her real mother and father were became bleaker and deeper. And she took to chanting a little song she wrote.

  Keep your muscles strong

  Around your asshole

  Keep your muscles strong around your brain

  That way too much shit doesn’t get out

  And stops you sounding insane

  Her adoptive parents had a property way up in New York State in the mid-Adirondacks, and in that direction is where we headed, driving north breaking the speed limit on the scenic highway. Stopping once along by the Hudson on a promontory, we looked back at the distant silvery thin skyscrapers sticking up out of Manhattan Island. Then farther north past all the passing wildernesses, where I had the fantasy of cheaply and healthfully living in a tent where I could with a piccolo compose and in order to eat, hunt with bow and arrow. It had just grown dark when we were finally driving through the tree-lined streets of Albany, and one took pleasure from the somber comfort of all its Edwardian and Victorian framehouses and their little lawns where nobody yet was standing shaking a fist at me. Then there were these small kind of hick towns she knew well. With names like Sabbath Day Point, Ticonderoga, Pottersville, and Sodom. And where she said folk talked in a twang and you knew if you asked them if they smoked, they’d say, “I ain’t never got that hot.”

  Her adopted parents also kept an apartment of sumptuous sprawling rooms full of Impressionist masterpieces back in the city at Sutton Place, overlooking the East River. But here up in the country she said we should stay well away from her adopters, whose too-close proximity put her under strain. Fast driver that she was, she sure had me under strain as we whizzed around and especially as we reconnoitered a few curving miles of the adoptive parents’ estate wall and fence. And finally, at my insistence, slowly driving past the big iron front gates that led into their thirty-two-room mansion with an indoor swimming pool, tennis and squash courts. And as Sylvia described, a dozen French doors opening onto that many different brick terraces screened in summer and glassed in in winter. From a high point on the road and through the trees, you could see in the distance the front gable and tops of four Doric columns holding up a porte cochere. We then had a whole week of hilarity racing around town to town visiting a few of her friends who rode horses and played lacrosse, and who also had estates, one with a polo field, and others with formal gardens and imported statuary, and all the ladies seemed able to heave a football farther than you could believe and make you feel you needed a Charles Atlas course.

  I didn’t want to be too nosy, but sometimes you really want to know where such nice things as her adoptive parents’ obviously lots of money came from. And where there could be so much at once that it never stopped coming. But she would never say where exactly, indeed if she even knew, but vaguely mentioned a couple of ranches out Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana way and utilities in one of the bigger midwestern cities, plus the land that a couple of midtown cross streets of New York City were built on. And reference to Palm Beach, Paris, and Rome were never far from her lips. However, as I was fairly broke, why worry about geographical details when she was paying the expenses as we stayed in a couple of pretty nice roadside inns. And dined plentifully on steak and knocked back some really nice dinner wines from around the Finger Lakes. But having to obey a sense of frugality in my life, I was tempted to complain about the size of the tips she made me leave. Her out-of-control extravagance making her sixteen hundred dollars disappear fast. And once she even grabbed a bunch of bills right out of my wallet when she said she needed some change. But again, aside from snatching a few bucks from me, what the hell, why intrude my parsimonious attitude, it was her money.

  The nights got freezing cold and all the places we stayed were practically empty of other guests. Nor were the managements killing themselves making an effort to send heat up into the radiators of the bedrooms. In one place, the coldest, as well as the architecturally grandest, we danced alone on a dance floor where, with no other customers, the guy playing the piano at midnight, after dinner, suddenly stopped and was closing his piano and taking a bow. Then coming out onto the tiny stage from a side door, a guy looking like a Mafia don threatened to fire him if he didn’t get back strumming the keys. It was embarrassing, as then we had to go on dancing, and the guy looked so downtrodden glum as he went on playing in the empty room. Sylvia, obviously recognized as local gentry, said it served him right, but since I caught a snatch of marvelous Berlioz he played out of the Symphonie Fantasique while we were eating dinner, I thought this was cruelty to one’s talented fellowman and that the guy, if he already didn’t belong, should go pronto to join the musicians’ union.

  “Sylvia, let’s go upstairs, and let the poor guy go home, and if he’s got any, to his wife and kids.”

  “Sure. Your behavior is what I’d expect from someone full of warmth, understanding, and sympathy for his fellowman.”

  As it was a cold night, I let the remark pass and instead felt her ass as she climbed in front of me up the stairs. And even though we were freezing in the bedroom, she divested of her woolly warm covering. With her nipples as hard as little acorns, she gyrated, cavorted, spun, and whirled through a half a dozen dances. A boogaloo and bolero, a bunny hop, a frug, and a Charleston. Then ending with a minuet. My God, she knew how to send me into a delirium even in the ice-cold bed and even when she got in between the sheets in a nearly frostbitten condition. The full moon seen out through the frosty window spun like a fast Ferris wheel and the stars exploded. Wham, bam, boom. Even as an atheist, I was wondering why does God do things like that to us. Impose enslavement. Putting one fatall
y in the grip of carnality.

  “Stephen, I have a few other things I’d like to do, too, you know.”

  “Honey baby, you just go ahead and tell me. I’m ready.”

  “I want you to whip me with your belt.”

  Holy cow, what’s new next. And although she didn’t specify, I got the impression that she’d seen her adoptive parents at this antic. A few nights in bed later, in, thank God, a somewhat warmer bedroom, she said she was also a little bit of a sadist and would I mind being a masochist for a while. She said with my straight black hair combed back flat, I resembled Rudolph Valentino, only that I was a paler shade. And when she asked for it, I gave her my belt. As if to make it more supple, she pulled it back and forth in her hand. Then in nearly a frenzy, before I could stop her, she whipped the living hell out of me. The lashing was excruciating and her glee alarming. Like a scalded cat, I jumped up out of the bed. She was with the belt still raised over her shoulder, in midlash.

  “Hey Jesus Christ honey, I’m only human flesh. Take it easy will you.”

  “Hey, gee, I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away putting welts on that beautiful beatific pink ass you’ve got and I guess I just like drawing blood and inflicting pain.”

  “Well, what do you say, honey, if we just skip this next round while my wounds mend.”

  The blows hurt more higher up on the back, but the welts left all over my rear end made it nearly impossible and painful to sit down. I especially was concerned and didn’t like the grin that seemed to stay on her face. I thought any second her whitely beautiful canine teeth were going to enlarge into yellow fangs and sink into my neck. At least it was a lesson learned not to agree to everything she suggested. But what she suggested next happened back in the city and nearly before I knew it.

  “That’s right, I want to get hitched up. And you make an honest girl out of me.”