Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  “You prick! I thought that’s what you old farts did. You smug nothing antiquarians! Worship not only your gods but your family, your ancestors, your lofty notions of duty, honor, loyalty, crap, crap, crap, and more crap. All that shit that made your brother and his ilk send thousands of young boys to their deaths in Vietnam. How I loathe all of you. How much you make me want to puke. Yes, puke!”

  11

  An the three days of the Brigadier’s dying, Robin did not make a single trip to Tripler Army Hospital to see him. She did not know him, of course, but her main reason was that being a child of immediacy, youth, and health she could not “abide sick people.” For all that, she had an absolutely morbid fascination to be filled in on every blessed detail of my visits, how he looked, what was said, how much time I thought he had, and so forth, all of which she listened to with an intenseness I have never seen in her since. I went with my hosts, Wiley and his Hawaiian-born wife, Malia; my mother went with the Brigadier’s wife, with whom she was staying. Occasionally our visits overlapped, occasionally they did not. On the last night of the Brigadier’s life, Wiley and Malia and I remained longer than usual as the Brigadier seemed inordinately heavily sedated and drifting from irrationality to abrupt catnaps to infrequent periods of sense. During one of the latter periods he suddenly asked if someone would go to the soft drink machine at the end of the corridor and get him “a couple of cold cans of some-thin’,” preferably the noncarbonated orange drink.

  Wiley and Malia and I had already been severely admonished by the nurse, one of those smugly efficient dyke types the army seems to attract, not to comply with such a request should it arise. As we were lay slobs outside the esoterica of her calling, she didn’t deign to explain why but one didn’t have to be a Mayo Clinic internist to fathom the reason. The Brigadier’s cancer had become so pervasive that both his liver and kidneys had failed; indeed, they had placed a sheeted cage discreetly over his stomach to protect our virginal eyes from the severe distension of his abdomen, and it was apparent that any additional fluids would force the doctor the inconvenience of employing a catheter to draw off the excess urine. When we protested his request, the Brigadier’s smile was utterly devoid of bitterness, rue, regret, sorrow. Then the Brigadier threw his arms out from his sides in the most good-natured gesture of futility, as though to say, “C’mon, guys, is it going to make any fucking difference?” and Malia, still laughing, went and fetched the orange drinks, which the Brigadier drank in long, embarrassingly grateful gulps, followed by lengthily unavoidable, near-painful belches, after which, poor Malia, in guilt I suppose, and certainly in trepidation of that formidable nurse, ran the empty cans back up the corridor and put them in the disposal container next to the machine. Late the next afternoon, the Brigadier’s wife called Wiley’s house, asked for me, said, “It’s all over,” and hung up.

  For whatever reason, it was this story of the deathwatch that fascinated Robin above all the others and she had me repeating the story over and over again until she had every nuance of it down pat and kept saying, “Good for Malia! Good for Malia! And fuck the doctors! Fuck the doctors!” However, as the years passed, and she took to telling this story to her Hawaiian friends, she had somehow placed herself in the hospital room with us and as she told her version, her arm resting on the spine of the couch, her legs crossed in an arrogantly purposeful way, her left hand holding a lighted, mentholated More cigarillo with which she jabbed the air emphasizing her points, she began saying, “Yes, I’m glad we did it! Glad, glad, glad! And fuck the doctors!” Ultimately, of course, as even more time passed, and, I might add, she never blinked an eye telling the story in my presence, it hadn’t been Malia at all who had fetched the orange drinks, it had been Robin.

  “The Brigadier asked me for the soft drinks. And I goddamn well got them! What would you have done? Put yourself in my place. You’d better believe I fucking well got them! And I’m glad! Glad, glad, glad! And fuck the doctors!”

  What a strange, haunting, loony, and touching homage to the Brigadier she’d never met and the man who had “sent thousands of young boys to their deaths in Vietnam.”

  But now we are pinpointing Ms. Robin Glenn’s need to confess, albeit that her confessions were more often than not unadulterated lies. Whereas I was a child of the thirties, forties, and fifties, Robin was born in 1949, four years after we had dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for all practical purposes, and dates notwithstanding, with those bombings began what we have come to call the twentieth century, born to a time when, if nuclear arsenals had eliminated one’s need to ponder a possibly nonexistent future, they had also eliminated the need to encumber oneself with literature, history, art, music, all those things we lump together under the sweeping banner of culture. With the elimination of both past and future, Robin, together with her coevals, was a child of now and what she did not understand about us antediluvians and the absurd rituals, decorums, and loyalties with which we had been saddled was how much we—or at least I—envied the compulsions of Robin to sate thoroughly and irretrievably every passing whim, from seeing the latest “in” movie to an abrupt urge for “a cheeseburger with the works” within an hour after we’d finished a more than ample steak dinner, once even dragging me from the middle of a John Barth reading at the University of Hawaii’s Kuykendall Auditorium simply because she wanted to copulate.

  Robin’s confessions, as unlikely as it may seem, were born out of her love, however shabby that may have been—and probably still is—for me, her need to free herself from the narcissism and hedonism of her existence, and her desperate attempt to try to come together with me at that bourgeois—as opposed to the merely sexual—level where we both had histories replete with tipsy, wealthy, and slightly dotty aunts, mumses, lecherously incestuous fathers (in Robin’s case, in any event), prep schools, proper universities, and so forth. “I’m somebody, too, you know, Frederick?” Robin had cried at me; and each time those huge, gray, haunting eyes avoided mine and she began a new penitential soliloquy charged with sighs, lavender tears, outrage, indignation, absurdity, she was adding to a history that in some subconscious way she actually believed was bringing our ages, if not chronologically, at least tunelessly closer together in experience, no matter that the dimensions she was adding to her character were almost invariably pure fabrication. Dotty as it may seem, I’m positive Robin told me these stories because she loved me and prayed that the character she was creating in her image would provide those slings and arrows, the bruises, batterings, and hurts of time that would bring her ever nearer to me. Dottier still, on the day I told Robin I loved her I did.

  12

  Since puberty Robin had never been to a gynecologist who hadn’t attempted rape. When I tried to get the name of one of these cunt consultants in order to write nastily eloquent epistles to the American Medical Association, I was told that “no, no, no, you’d do something crazy. Go down and beat the shit out of him or something,” a most improbable Exley to the rescue on a white charger. Indeed, Ms. Glenn could not attend an afternoon movie without returning from that sparsely filled theater and in shaking horror telling me that though there were only a dozen people attending the matinee one ugly dwarf had settled himself smack down beside her and had there masturbated to his heart and cock’s content. As the seventies progressed, bringing with it what psychologist R. D. Rosen calls psychobabble, i.e., designating a moody person a “manic depressive,” saying ‘Td like to get into your head” for “I wish I understood you,” calling one “uptight” when in fact he might be in a state of severe clinical depression, when Robin went through her encounter group-primal scream-please touch-sensitivity training phase, found no relief there, and began hopping and skipping from one analyst to another, she did so because not a single one of these professionally trained analysts, male or female, had been able to keep his hands from her!

  Robin’s classic was delivered shortly after she returned from a two-week vacation to Italy, one of those free trips she was
entitled to as an airline employee. At a cocktail party in Rome she had met the legendary fashion designer Emilio Pucci, who had insisted on the spot that Robin become one of his stable of models. Robin had been exorbitantly thrilled. There’d be no more slinging hash—or trying to sling hash—at drunken slobs like me, no more waiting to be fed bones from the likes of her fiance To seal their verbal contract Emilio had taken her to dinner at a snazzy trattoria on the Via Veneto, where they had occupied a private alcove off the main dining room. As the superb food, the dago red, and the exuberant chatter had flowed in profuse deference to the born-again, soon-to-be-famous Ms. Robin Glenn, Emilio had abruptly reached over, cupped the nape of Ms. Robin Glenn’s regal neck in the palm of his strong hand, and furiously slammed her face into his lap, where to her eye-watering, nauseous disgust she’d discovered his fly unzipped. To Ms. Robin Glenn’s present indignation and chagrin, and though I was totally unable to prevent it, I laughed hysterically at this tale. In the highly unlikely event that a junketing airline stewardess would find herself in old Italia in the same room with Emilio Pucci, I knew his girls were invariably size six and Robin hadn’t seen that size since she was that age. With her Hawaiian tan and her marvelously full figure, Robin might have done just fine parading swim-suits around Malibu Beach for Mr. Jantzen and company but the closest she’d ever get to Vogue was subscribing to it. Ironically, Robin wasn’t so much ired at my explosively derisive laughter as at my neglecting to ask her what happened.

  “I don’t know what you mean. There’s more to the story? All right. What did happen? You take a little Guinea sausage into your mouth or what?”

  Robin had kept gagging until she finally threw up her linguine and red clam sauce all over the great Mr. Emilio Pucci’s seven-hundred-dollar suit.

  “That’s what fucking well happened!”

  That vomiting had ended Ms. Robin Glenn’s high fashion career right in its glorious incipience.

  Robin’s friend was not a kanaka but a haole and save in Robin’s mind he was certainly not a fiance He was a very wealthy, very handsome blond man my age whose seafaring Nantucket ancestor had sailed to the islands shortly after Captain James Cook’s arrival in 1778. That ancestor had jumped ship and had flourished, as all of his progeny had done since him. Robin’s friend was a partner in a corporation consisting of five stockholders, two from old-family haoles and three Japanese-Americans. They owned a dozen first class resort hotels spread out among the various islands. With an individually owned construction company he built condominiums and shopping plazas. He lived with his beautiful wife, whose family went back in the islands almost as far as his, and two adolescent sons in a $1,750,000 oceanfront complex on the southwest shore of Maui. I know his wife was beautiful because one lunchtime in Lahaina Wiley and Malia pointed the two of them out to me at the bar of a restaurant owned by the ex-Dodger pitcher, Don Drysdale.

  Although she wore no makeup and her long, naturally blond hair fell rather casually, even sloppily, over her shoulders, there was no mistaking the beauty of her facial structure or disguising the strikingly tanned figure beneath her elegantly custom-cut gray slacks and off-white blouse. Like so many people of old wealth she was devoid of ostentation and wore no jewelry save for a simple engagement ring and wedding band, both of white gold. She was drinking a John Collins. On the other hand, he wore loafers without socks, dusty khaki pants, and an equally dusty faded denim shirt completely unbuttoned. Sweat ran down his tanned, muscular chest and taut stomach past his beltline and into his trousers. Obviously he was building something around Lahaina and had just come from the construction site. In the manner of his laborers, he hurriedly drank three beers from the bottle. The sweat dried, he refused to have lunch with his lovely bride as—I think I heard him say—”we’re pouring piling” and, kissing her with genuine affection, he left her to order another John Collins and a roast beef sandwich. On his way out he called back to the bartender and told him to put everything on his tab, the company’s, not his personal one. He also told the guy to write himself in a five-buck tip. We did not look anything alike but, save for his build being muscular while mine ran to sedentary flab, we were both five-ten and weighed about 180 and I suddenly understood where all Robin’s gifts to me had come from, aloha shirts, V-necked yachting and tennis sweaters, khaki, denim and Bermuda slacks, socks, sandals, deck shoes. She had bought them for him and after banging her he’d departed without even remembering to take them with him. I don’t know that I’d have bothered either. After his departure I spent a lot of time staring at his wife. For all of me she could have been the biggest bitch in Christendom but she gave off class the way boxers give us the lilt in their walks.

  Over the years Robin has tried repeatedly to convince me, but mainly herself, that by fornicating on his houseboat we were not only in dire physical danger—”With his connections in these islands he’d probably have us both killed!”—but that she was jeopardizing her entire future right at that moment he was on the verge of divorcing his wife and marrying Robin. When he unexpectedly showed up on the houseboat, according to Robin, he demanded that she be there and if he ever caught her with another man—Robin leveled her joined index and middle fingers at me, made what she imagined were the reports of an army-issue .45-caliber sidearm but which sounded more like a sneezing fit, cahcheeew, cahcheeew, cahcheeew, then raised her two joined fingers up and feigned a gory slashing of her lovely throat. All this was manifestly ridiculous. If Robin were lucky, he came to the houseboat twice a month, more often than not only once, and on these occasions he telephoned her two or three days in advance to give her his anticipated arrival time. He knew his mistress all too well. Besides the houseboat and a Master Charge for groceries and whatever else she needed (that card, too, was in his company’s name), he had bought her a sun-yellow Porsche and had presented her with credit cards to Liberty House and two expensive boutiques along Kalakaua. On the consummation of our first violent copulation, which took place within twenty-four hours after she’d hissed at me her “rotten esss oooh beee” high above the imperially azure Pacific, violent in only the way the specter of the Brigadier’s imminent death could make it violent, Robin leaped instantly from the bed, pranced to the dresser, picked up a brush, and with furious jerkiness began brushing her hair, as she did so studying herself with incredible intentness in the dresser’s mirror. When I started to light a cigarette, she demanded I abandon it, rise, walk to her, stand behind her, put my arms around her waist, and by thrusting my chin over her right shoulder place my cheek against hers and study her image in the mirror with the very intentness she was studying herself.

  “See what you did to me?” she demanded. “See what you did!” I did not see. “The color, the flush in my cheeks. You did that! Who needs makeup after a screw like that?”

  Assuming that was meant as a compliment, I summoned up an appropriate modesty and said, “Well, you helped, too, you know?”

  “No, you did it! You!”

  As it turned out, Ms. Robin Glenn never did anything to herself. People did things to her. Like a dozen other women I have known, Robin had this laughably preposterous need to convince her lovers that if they weren’t getting a virgin—as they most certainly weren’t—they were staking out unique claims to all sorts of firsts “inflicted” upon her body. No matter that Robin could wet her pants by just dancing solo around the living area of the houseboat listening to Andy Williams sing “Didn’t We?” on the stereo, I was the first man who ever made Robin “come” (Jesus, gang, it’s time to go pop a can of Genesee Light on that one). Although Robin had never been into oral intercourse since those unbearable, nightmarish days with Dick Brophy up at the University of New Hampshire, naturally my semen was the first she’d ever taken into herself and fed upon. On the first occasion I had anal intercourse with Robin, her comment on its consummation was that it was not only another “first” but that “I knew that you absolutely had to do that to me and get it out of your system,” no matter that Robin had brought
me to erection orally, then with all the aplomb of a diagnostician looking for rectal trouble and preparing to shove that ghastly looking proctoscope into one, had reached into the drawer of her bedstand, had brought out a tube of K-Y Jelly, as though she had no doubt that that universal balm of the gay world had reached such ubiquity that it was to be found in the nightstands of every bedroom in the republic, had lathered me up, and had directed me in.

  When I came from the shower the next morning, I found a bikini panty-clad Robin cooking her idea of breakfast, two hamburgers on toasted English muffins loaded with pickle relish, to be washed down with Cokes. Expecting affection or a show of warmth for our nightly labors, I found instead a Robin on the attack, eyes flashing.

  “Jesus, Frederick, if you ever have to do that disgusting thing to me again, you’ll have to use prophylactics.” I liked the delicacy of “prophylactics.” “When I walked naked into the galley this morning, ail your rotten icky muck plopped out of me right onto the goddamn floor. I almost puked cleaning it up. Why do you have to do such crummy things to me? Why, why, why?”

  Within two days, frantically searching for a pencil to do the Sunday crossword puzzle, I had occasion to look into Robin’s nightstand and discovered next to her tube of K-Y Jelly, if not an orange crate, enough condoms to have anal intercourse three times a day for the next six months. Apparently Robin had come a long way from the timid little girl who had let the ballsy Ms. Priscilla Saunders perform such sleazy pilgrimages to the drugstore. Men did things to Ms. Robin Glenn. On the Sunday she buried the steak-grilling fork in my chest, within an hour after she’d done so she’d convinced herself beyond all doubt that I’d also done that to myself simply to hurt and spite her. But that is enough of Robin for the moment. She is to occupy a much larger place in these notes than it makes me easy to contemplate. After my return to Alexandria Bay I would hear from her very often but never by mail. I made the mistake of telling her that tomorrow was spelled with one “m” and not “tommorrow” as she had spelled it in a letter. The last words she ever put on paper were on a postcard reading, “Go f. yourself! You snobbish so-called intellectual P k!” What they made of that card in our quaint and proper little village post office I don’t even like to imagine.