Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  Surely I would have a tossed salad and some rolls? Most surely I would not. Did I want to spend my Hawaiian “vacation” in a sickbed? For most of my forty-plus years I’d been “an ambulatory, invalided outpatient” but had somehow managed to survive without this being readily detected. Assuredly there must be something she could do for me. Ms. Glenn not only had left herself wide open for my reply, she had all but invited it. Snapping my head angrily round to her, my eyes falling precisely at the level her tight American-flag-red skirt clung tautly to her fine full thighs and revealed a suggestion of her Venus mound, I hung on my face a demented, eye-crossed, and near-drooling lust, then snapped, “There is most absolutely something you can do for me!”

  To my extreme discomfort this did not appear to have the desired effect. Ms. Glenn’s firmly planted legs neither moved nor even twitched; and after what seemed an eternity, with my head all the while ballooning with burning vertigo, I looked up, my neck seeming literally to creak as it did so, and into Ms. Glenn’s huge gray eyes to see they’d misted over to a stunning violet, deep, deep lavender, the way I’d seen them do at the beginning of the flight when the drunken, sleeping Irishman next to me had been badgering her unmercifully. Before I could say that I was sorry, genuinely sorry, that though my trip was not in the least a pleasure outing I had no right whatever to lay the sadness of it on her, Ms. Glenn whispered violently at me, “You rotten SOB,” the SOB sizzling out like esss ohhhh beeee. When Ms. Glenn stormed away, I’d seen the last of her insofar as her attempting banter. She was to serve me two more drinks before the plane at last settled onto the runway of the Honolulu International Airport, but at these times she was grimly efficient and avoided my eyes as she set the plastic cups on my tray.

  This seems an inauspicious beginning for what was to follow. Ms. Glenn would not only make up a significant part of the canvas of the ensuing week’s deathwatch and burial but was to become a large part of my life during the next four years, at least those months of my life I spent in Hawaii. It ended—well, no, not really; it hasn’t ended yet—one sunny Easter Sunday when we were occupying a room in the Towers of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki’s legendary Pink Palace, and in some ultimate pique of passion Ms. Glenn hurled a double-pronged steak-grilling fork at me and it lodged in my chest (as I type I discover my fingers have unconsciously left the keys to rub tentatively at my sweatshirted chest where the two round BB-size purple scars still exist), yes, lodged in my chest to, I might add, a drunken and raucous laughter emitting from me. I expect it couldn’t have “ended” any other way. Unlike the narrator I call Exley, who can “lie” about anything unless it might significantly hurt or damage someone, Ms. Robin Glenn lied about everything and it wasn’t so much that she didn’t care what these tales might do to another as that she was totally oblivious to the irreparable damage her meretricious slanders were initiating. Her fantasies were boundless and in the matter of sex she was and always had been the femme fatale victim. Beside Robin’s sexual hysteria, that of Susan Brown-miller’s Against Our Will seems a quiet and brilliantly reasoned academic treatise.

  10

  At the fashionable prep school Robin had attended in New England, for example, an elderly, decrepit janitor had entered her room one witching hour when her bunkmate was confined to the infirmary with the flu and on muffling her strangled, painful cries had there had his way with her, taking her virginity in the process. At the time Robin was fourteen and out of fear of the humiliating repercussions hadn’t informed the authorities. Had it happened again? “Only twice.” This came from a demure and maidenly Robin, her large, haunting eyes avoiding mine as they always did in her confessional moods. I don’t think the evasion of eyes was so much that of a liar—though she was certainly that—but that with each telling her stories so ballooned, took on such different and ghastly implications, that she must have sensed those hauntingly unsparing eyes, had she riveted me in their relentless regard, would have so discountenanced me as to render me hideous, doing this at the same time that, even conceding the pitiable and thrillingly lovely Robin may have been doing nothing more than groping, in her loony way, for some glimpse of the truth, I yet arrived at that absurdly existential moment I couldn’t believe a word she said during these “confessions” and came not only to smile during these sob-ridden, body-contorting soliloquies but had to muster the Spartan regimentation of a marathon runner to prevent my laughing right in Ms. Robin Glenn’s tear-disfigured face.

  The elderly decrepit janitor turned out to be twenty-year-old Dick Brophy, the junior quarterback at either Williams or Amherst or Colby or the University of Vermont or whatever college was located in the same town as Robin’s prep school (though Robin finally settled on the participants, the town, the prep school, and the college changed with each telling). As part of Dick Brophy’s athletic scholarship, he’d been guaranteed a job and, between the evening hours of nine and eleven, he’d swept and mopped the halls and lavatories of Robin’s particular prep school dormitory, this among his other, rather more strenuous and seemingly inexhaustible exertions. Nor apparently had there been any need for Robin’s roommate, Ms. Priscilla Saunders, to be confined to the infirmary during these assignations, which did not happen “only twice” but were nightly sport. Dick Brophy serviced both Ms. Robin Glenn and Ms. Priscilla Saunders. Although Robin reluctantly allowed that Dick Brophy had been “real cute,” even “superneat,” he was an awful coward for “a hoity-toity swaggering jock” and in some ways so disgusting as to be “ugh.” Even though he paid for them, Dick Brophy’s pusillanimity took the form of making the girls buy the condoms as in a small prep school-college town he didn’t feel it would be good for his “icky ail-American, golden-boy image” to be walking into drugstores and ordering Trojans.

  “Either you buy them,” Dick Brophy had menacingly told the girls, “or get your asses knocked up. And if that happens, I won’t know from nothin’. Nothin’, yuh heah me?”

  It goes without saying that Ms. Robin Glenn had been much too timid for such a sleazy mission. But, brother, should I have known that Ms. Priscilla Saunders! “Balls! Balls you wouldn’t believe!” Ms. Priscilla Saunders would don panty hose, pumps, a dress, a little makeup, strut into a drugstore as bold as a sumo wrestler into a fag bar and walk out with “Golden Trojans by the orange crate.” In the matter of Dick Brophy’s “ugh,” whenever one of the girls was menstruating, Dick Brophy forced her to—. Silence descended and Robin’s swimming and now stunningly violet eyes came to rest pleadingly on mine, forcing my own to erase their wry twinkle and my lips to desist from their randy smile. Now Robin pointed with histrionic poignance to her mouth.

  “Suck his cock?” I volunteered.

  “Jesus!” Robin cried. “Do you have to be so nauseatingly disgusting and cruel when I’m trying with all my heart—all my being!—to get you to understand me? Me! I’m somebody, too, you know, Frederick?”

  “Robin, let me remind you that not an hour ago I was lying topside getting some sun and reading the new Travis McGee when you came up and announced, ‘Come below. I want to suck your cock.’ That’s what you said. ‘I want to suck your cock.’ And that’s what you goddamn well did.”

  “That’s now! That’s now. This was when I was a goddamn fourteen-year-old kid. A goddamn baby!”

  “Let me remind you further, dear, dear Robin, that this tale has gone from an ‘elderly decrepit’ janitor’s twice raping you to a guy about fifty to forty to thirty to the twenty-year-old ‘real cute, superneat’ Dick Brophy, the Bowdoin quarterback or whoever the fuck he was. Still further, not only was there no rape involved but apparently you and Ms. Priscilla Saunders were such willing participants in these nightly ardors that the ballsy Ms. Saunders even purchased the cocksafes!”

  Ms. Robin Glenn was deathly silent for many moments, pondering. Her eyes again narrowed and became evasive. She spoke in a holy whisper.

  “None of this would have happened if Priscilla’s and my fathers hadn’t started us on sex the year b
efore, when we were only thirteen. I mean, honest, Frederick, once you get started on balling, it’s worse than all the drugs combined, you know that.”

  “Jesus Christ, Robin! Are you telling me that Mr. Anthony Glenn, the Exxon vice-president headquartered in Paris, started having sex with his daughter when she was thirteen and that at approximately the same time, someplace else in America, perhaps Dearborn, Michigan, let’s say, a Mr. Anthony Saunders, no doubt a General Motors vice-president, introduced his virginal daughter to lust and that’s why you girls had to have your nocturnal fucks from janitor-quarterback Dick Brophy? Is that what you’re telling me, for Jesus H. Kheeeriiist’s sake?”

  “You’re goddamn right that’s what I’m telling you! Both our mumses found out about it and herded us off to that Gestapo prep school, as though it was our fault! Jesus! Daddy’s the one who should have been put into solitary confinement! Should have been castrated!” Robin sighed. “That’s why I only spent a year at the Sorbonne.”

  “I thought you went to Vassar.”

  “Smith. Smith! But I did my freshman year at the Sorbonne. That’s where I really wanted to graduate. Both Mums and I thought when I came back to Paris as a young lady Daddy would leave me alone. But of course he didn’t, the scum. That’s when Mums shipped me back to Northampton.”

  “Well, of course. Why not? Anything you say. I understand everything now.”

  Robin’s father, Anthony “Tony” Glenn, lived in Queens, where he had been born. Her “mums,” Evelyn Glenn (n6e Flaherty), had been born and raised in the Prospect Park section of Brooklyn. They had been married thirty years. Robin was their only child. Tony was a plumber retired from George Meany’s old local; also retired, Evelyn had been an executive secretary for Con Edison. Robin’s secondary education had all taken place in the public schools of Queens. She had been an A student. She had then completed two years at the State University of New York at New Paltz where, before getting an “itch to see the world,” she had enrolled with a view to becoming a secondary school English teacher, Lord forbid. Moreover, when on one of my later trips to Hawaii I found myself, incredibly, seated next to Tony and Evelyn Glenn in the coach section of a United Airlines 747,1 wasn’t half an hour into the conversation (I never mentioned knowing Robin and such was their pride in her they expressed no surprise at my curiosity about Robin or themselves) without being unequivocally certain that Tony Glenn had never touched his daughter save in the utmost paternalistically loving fashion, such parental adoration there was in their voices when they spoke of Robin and her “wealthy fianc6” who was, according to Tony, paying for “me and Evy’s thirtieth wedding anniversary trip” and putting them up at the Holiday Inn “right on the beach, big swimming pool, the whole shebang!” I waited years to confront Robin with the “truth” of her heritage. I simply became so bored with her stories that I grew angry with weariness. That was the Easter Sunday I got the steak-grilling fork hurled into my chest.

  I am trying to understand. At the time of our initial madly desperate coupling, I was forty-three, Robin twenty-three. As I write I am forty-eight and Robin is twenty-four, by her own incomprehensible geometric progression having added only one year in that period I have added five. Robin’s persistently repetitive insistence on her age has me moronically counting those years over and over again on the tips of my fingers. Whenever I laugh at her age claim, Robin angrily swears she possesses a State of Hawaii driver’s license to prove it. On the occasion I laughed too heartily, Robin tore the houseboat apart, oh, frantic she was, dumping the contents of her purse and wallet onto the galley floor, emptying the dresser drawers onto the beige carpeting of what she calls “the fucking master suite,” even hurling the contents of the galley drawers and cupboards, knives, forks, spoons, spatulas, corkscrews, cans of Comet, Lemon Pledge, the whole caboodle all over the place. On finishing, Robin had the place looking like typhoonland. She then dropped in a histrionic faintlike dreamlike motion to the floor, laid herself out spread eagle among the waxy rags, carving knives, boxes of Supreme Steel Wool, plastic jars of Lestoil and Johnson’s Future Floor Wax, closed her eyes, with her arms formed a folded rood across her chest as though she were doing her mortuary bit, sobbed of course, and hissed at me. “I know that goddamn fucking driver’s license is around here someplace!”

  “Don’t worry about it. I can never find mine either.” This is patently untrue. Having just removed my wallet from the back pocket of my Levi’s, I discover four items therein: a valid New York State driver’s license, expiration date 3/31/82, free of traffic violations and markless save for an X preceding CORRECTIVE LENSES; a colored snapshot of my beautiful ten-year-old daughter by my last—oh, most emphatically and hopefully my last—wife; the phone number of some broad I must have found a good deal more than amusing in bed. In a drunken scrawl I have written, “Don’t forget the nasty Irishperson! Wow, pal, she showed you stuff never dreamed of in”—I think it says—“Oriental erotica.” This is followed by a seven-digit phone number from which, alas, I can decipher only four digits, the first, fourth, fifth, and seventh. As we have a fishing guide in the village, the Duke, who is a mathematical genius, I asked him the odds against putting the illegible numbers together in proper sequence and after a quick mental calculation he told me 1,752,647 to 1. Hence I spend a whole helluva lot of my waking hours summoning up names. Fallon? No. O’Brien? No. Duffy? No. O’Halloran? Last there is a recently dated prescription for a hundred thirty-milligram capsules of Serax, one of which has the potency equivalent of a blue bomber. My doctor, a very lovely, very bright, very attractive analyst, long ago threw her arms up in outraged dismay and despair at our sessions together, telling me I was too hopelessly imaginative to treat, too much of a tease and a con, and adamantly and menacingly advised that I not drift far from people who know I am bonkers.

  The prescription even contains Alissa’s—her handle, and what else could she be but an analyst with a moniker like that?—BNDD number so that I will have no trouble filling it if I get caught someplace among strangers. Alissa doesn’t believe me housebroken enough to move among civilized people without being heavily sedated. These paltry items, then, are the accumulated remnants of a mismanaged life. When good buddy—as the CBers sign off—Alissa finally gets around to reading these pages—she’s heavily into fiber diets and a group thing called Beta—I know she’ll write me a five-page, single-spaced, typewritten letter telling me what the skimpy contents of my wallet signify.

  Please don’t, Alissa. I beseech you.

  Yes, I am trying to understand. But it is unequivocally not Robin’s lying I am trying to understand. I do in fact find this aspect of Robin’s character rather endearing. In it there is—as there is in her lovemaking—something wild and intelligent and abandoned and imaginative and rather terrible as opposed to the awful sincerity of so many women. How drearily cumbersome I find both a sincere woman and her lovemaking. How creepy-crawly tentative and tippy-toey calf-eyed and poignantly pouty-lipped she comes to one who, unbeknownst to her and the virginal aura in which she has swaddled herself, is dying of boredom and yearning to snap, “Hey, listen here, what is this? Are we gonna fuck? Or do you want the cameras dollied in so we can consecrate this scene for the big screen? Say, like Jane Fonda?” At least Robin could walk through a screw without getting dust on her handsome shoulders. No, I am trying to understand her morbid, nearly self-flagellating need to confess. Perhaps it is because I am—I find my nose shriveling in very real self-mockery and distaste at the thought of even saying it—”a writer.” Only three people in my life, other than Robin, have ever called me Frederick—my friends dubbing me Ex, Dopey Dildocks, Nutsy Fagin, Goofy Gumdrops, or whatever moves them—and these three have all filed and, don’t ask me how, have had approved the most preposterously irrelevant, ponderous, and hilariously verbose master’s theses, anchored by pages and pages of bibliography listing an awesome wasteland of portentously academic and psychological tomes with which they actually believed they were explaining “th
eir Frederick.”

  Calling me Frederick, then, suggested that Ms. Robin Glenn saw me as a writer first, perhaps as just another screw second, and possibly even as a fellow human being third. Thus I suspect Robin believed she would show up “enshrined” among the pages of this book. Any number of times I tried to dissuade her from that absurd hope.

  “Robin, if you’re telling me all this stuff thinking I’m taking mental notes for putting you into words, get that right out of your head. I mean, get it out of your head but now! There’s no way I’d ever admit to having fallen for a loony like you, least of all attempting to guide you into typeface so you’ll be right out there where God and Mums—as you call her—could see it!”

  “What an incredible prick of an egomaniac you are! Who’d want to be in one of your books? They’re so dull and morbid and—and, yes, goddamnit, pornographic. Filthy! Fallen for me? That’s the best line you’ve ever come up with. You don’t even come to Hawaii to see me. You travel five thousand miles to put all those expensive flowers and leis on your brother’s grave at Punchbowl, then come back to the houseboat, stay sloppy drunk on vodka for three days, and keep mooning and mourning about continuing to say goodbye to another generation. Fallen for me? Bullshit! You’ve never once—not once!—even told me you love me.”

  I said it then. I said, “I love you, Robin. I love you much more than I can ever tell you.”

  I wished I had left it at that and hadn’t felt the need to qualify it.

  “If those flowers and leis were expensive, you’re the one who picked them out and damn near had me evacuating my bowels when one of those cute little Buddha worshipers laid the price on me. Not only that, you’ve recorded my every pilgrimage to Punchbowl with the six-zillion-dollar Nikon your fiance or whatever he is gave you. Once, for Christ’s sake, you even tried to get me to bow my head at the grave site. Ho, ho, ho! Exley in a posture of supplication. Recorded for posterity, no doubt!”