Speaking with Strangers

by Mary Cantwell

  Dr. Franklin, whom I had not seen for a long time, found an hour for me that afternoon. He had seen me cry till my tears wet my skirt when B left, and once again he was looking at me, bent over, trying to stanch my running nose.

  “Mary,” he said, for once breaking through the formality that had been our style for many years, “you have a tendency to fantasize.”

  “Did I fantastize those years? Those proposals? Last month?”

  “No. You fantasized the man.”

  Soon after I got home, the doorbell rang. Two friends, a man and his wife, had driven in from Long Island when they saw the paper. By now my eyes were slits and my face was swollen. I couldn’t cry enough. It was like the time many years ago when I had had food poisoning and vomited until I was heaving only air.

  “I don’t know why, but I keep remembering the afternoon my father died,” I said as they came in. “His bed was in the bay window of the living room so that he could watch people going by, and we were all standing beside it when his breathing got heavy and he went into a coma.

  “I said ‘Papa!’ and the nurse, a family friend, said, ‘Mary Lee, don’t. It makes it harder for them to leave if they hear somebody trying to call them back. Let him go.’

  “When his breathing got even heavier, she ordered us into the dining room, because he had told her he didn’t want any of us to see him die, not even my mother. We sat there until we heard the breathing stop.

  “You know what? He’s been dead so long now I can’t even remember his face. But I keep looking at the door,” and I pointed toward the hall, “because all I really want is for it to open and my father to walk in.”

  After they left, I splashed my face with cold water until it was scarlet and put cold tea bags on my eyes so that Snow White, who had been spending the Christmas holidays with us, and Rose Red wouldn’t see that I’d been crying when they came home from calling on their father. The tree was still up, and I sat next to it, breathing in the balsam. Minutes passed, and as they did, something funny started happening to my back. It was as if a pack were sliding from my shoulders, leaving me lighter by ten pounds. I have paid the penance for failing my husband, I told myself. I have been absolved. I felt as I did on the Saturday afternoons of my childhood when, my soul as clean as unmarked paper, I left the confessional and walked as if on zephyrs across Bristol Common toward home.

  Eight

  On my way to Australia five years earlier, I had stopped overnight in Honolulu. As I got off the plane, a fat woman in a muumuu draped a lei over my head and handed me a bottle of a local firm’s suntan lotion. The fashion editor, the photographer, the enormous box, always called “the coffin,” in which were packed the clothes to be photographed, and I were then driven to a hotel on a highway that might as well have been the New Jersey Turnpike. At sunset a series of drumbeats, on tape, was played over the lobby’s public address system while torches were lighted around the hotel swimming pool.

  I had a drink served in a coconut shell under the thatched hut that was the outdoor bar, and drove with the editor and the photographer, sans coffin, to a fern-thicketed restaurant, where we ate tinned shrimp in a gelatinous sauce over instant rice.

  The next morning I looked for the Pacific. Wearing a swimsuit and carrying the suntan lotion, I picked my way along the edges of countless swimming pools until I found a gritty track that led to a lagoon. It was not quite the Pacific; it was as tepid as a tub drawn and forgotten. But it was the best I could do.

  Now, a few years later, I was back in Hawaii, on an island called Lanai, just a hop and cheap ticket away from the small northern California town where I had been describing the life, times, and makeup mistakes of a group of young women who had written Mademoiselle asking to be “made over.”

  We—a beauty editor, a hairdresser, and a makeup expert—stayed in an old hotel outside of which was a plaque screwed to a rock celebrating the generous ladies who, during the Silver Rush, had made the days and (mostly) the nights bearable for prospectors and lumberjacks. The bar across the street had customers by seven in the morning, the sidewalks were wooden, and the air was pure as Eden’s. By day, while I took notes, the traveling troupe cut hair, brushed on blush, and introduced the novitiates to the miracle that was the eyelash curler. At night, we all dined together, so linked in comradeship and our sense of a superior esthetic—“Did you see the one with the purple eyeshadow and the awful shag?”—that we strangers seemed old friends and this town, our town, Once the job was over, however, we were over, too. Everyone went back to his or her real life, all but me, who was grateful for the hiatus that would delay the return to mine.

  Lanai, which was tiny, produced pineapples but no palms, had a tall lava shelf but no cliffs, a string of sand but no sweep of beach. I’ve been twice to Hawaii, but since I’ve never seen any of its geographic wonders, never even been to a luau or watched a hula, one could say I’ve never been there at all.

  Running, of course. I ran to a man. I have done that more often than I have acknowledged to myself. But I do not see men as amalgams of muscles, penises, and hair in places in which I have none. Rather, they are enormous easy chairs in which I like to sit a while. Frederick Exley, though, was nobody’s idea of an easy chair. It was just that over the years during which he had visited Lanai, staying with his childhood friend Jo and Jo’s wife, Phyllis, once a nightclub singer in the Philippines, he had handed out invitations thick and fast, serene in the conviction that nobody was ever going to show up. I fooled him.

  Lanai was mostly flat, with a bony spine called the Ridge running through its center, and was notable mostly because it was not flat and was home to some rare insects. Seldom has a developer had less to work with, but the island has since become chic, thus fulfilling Fred’s worst fears. Money did it, of course, and Fred, while deriding the rich, would have liked a stab at being one of them. But not as much as he would have liked to walk down Fifth Avenue and hear people murmur, “That’s Frederick Exley, the famous novelist.”

  “Other men,” Fred wrote of himself, “might inherit from their fathers a head for figures, a gold pocket watch all encrusted with the oxidized green of age, or an eternally astonished expression; from mine I acquired this need to have my name whispered in reverential tones.” Because of that need, I have eschewed my customary discretion (memoirs, after all, are never the whole truth, only that portion their authors choose to discuss) and revealed his name. Were he still on this earth, he would have killed me if I hadn’t—not by the sword but by a torrent of speech, which, when Fred was in full form, could fell an ox.

  I treasured Fred’s first book, A Fan’s Notes, and never argued when he claimed his second, Pages from a Cold Island, was better. It is hard for a writer who longed, as he put it, to produce “a shelf” to admit that he may have done his best work on his first time out. The two novels that followed, and a few occasional pieces, were postscripts.

  A stocky, bearded man in his late forties, Exley had considerably more gut than when I first saw him, a few years previously. He wasn’t writing much on Lanai. He was “circling,” he said. In the evening, when he put on his seersucker pajamas (“Like my ‘jammies, Mary?”) and his big straw hat, slathered a plate with Pecan Dandy ice cream, climbed on the couch, arranged an afghan over his feet, slid his vokda bottle, which lacked only a nipple, within easy reach of his right hand, and talked back to the television set, he was our child. Jo and Phyllis’s children by their former marriages were grown and far away, and I am a mother before I am anything else, so we all needed a baby.

  Fred and I met when I went to upstate New York, to Alexandria Bay, where he had a small, pin-neat apartment in a gangling Victorian house. Mademoiselle, like every other magazine that year, was celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the Spirit of ’76, and I, who thought him the quintessential male American writer, wanted him in the issue. Fred, though, didn’t know or care why I’d flown upstate in a little plane that at one point seemed to brush the treetops. All he wanted wa
s his picture in the papers.

  We shook hands shyly and got into the car he’d borrowed from a “buddy”—all Fred’s friends were “buddies,” and I doubt he’d ever had enough money for a car of his own. Before I had settled myself in the seat, he said, “All I know about you is that you’re B’s ex-wife.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No. But when I finished my first novel somebody said I should have an agent. So I sent it to him. He kept it for what seemed a verry long time, and when I called him about it, he said he didn’t want to handle the book, then added some verry gra-too-i-tous ree-marks. When it won all those awards, I felt like calling him again and saying, ‘Fuck you, B.’”

  “Dear Lord,” I thought, “what a start for an interview.”

  I needn’t have worried. Fred liked to talk. It wasn’t long before he forgot my ex-wifehood, and only a little longer before he forgot my sex. He was describing how, when in college and penniless, he was persuaded by a friend to service a homosexual who paid well.

  “But, Cantwell, I just couldn’t do it. You know how it is when you’ve been swimming and you come out of the water and your prick is cold and limp?”

  “No,” I said.

  His ears blocked by the sound of his own voice, he didn’t even laugh.

  Interviewing creates a spurious intimacy. If one is a good interviewer and the interviewee is a willing talker, the two of you become, for several hours, each other’s best friend. When the interview is over, so is the friendship.

  Fred was an exception. A lonely man, he was not comfortable face to face with most women—he preferred them groin to groin and gone before breakfast—so the phone became an intermediary. His vocabulary was that of the best man at a prenuptial smoker, and he never failed to make me laugh.

  “Cantwell,” he would growl over long distance, “there’s this cunt up here . . . oh, I forgot . . . you don’t like that word. There’s this douche bag up here who’s giving me trouble.”

  I would murmur a weak “Oh, Fred” (I felt I should), and he was off on one more long story of boats missed and islands lost and women left wailing on the dock.

  He called the office. Galleys were left unread, meetings postponed, secretaries stood waving in the doorway, while I, feet propped on an open desk drawer, listened, laughed, and tried to figure out what on earth he was talking about. He became a local legend, like the editor of my youth who thought her possibly forgotten cigarettes would incinerate us all, and would have her assistant scour her office for an hour after she herself had left for home, looking for insufficiently snuffed-out stubs. “Frederick Exley is on the phone,” my secretary would whisper to the supplicants, and my absences were forgiven.

  He called me at home, sometimes yanking me out of bed at three in the morning. He had seen an old girlfriend, a twenty-two-year-old with skin like satin and hair like corn-silk and legs like inverted bowling pins. They had had a contretemps. Did I understand it?

  “Fred,” I would answer, “I cannot spend the night dissecting the thought processes of ex-cheerleaders.”

  The doctor of one of his former wives had made a pass at her. What should he do?

  “Nothing,” I’d say. “It’s not your problem.”

  His publisher has done this; his agent has done that; and Alfred Kazin is a fuck. “Yes,” I say. An admirer of Kazin’s, I am lying. But lying is preferable to listening to an exegesis on Alfred Kazin’s fuckhood.

  Letters arrived, too, a folderful of letters, in one of which he told me that if I wanted to bring my daughters for a holiday to Alex Bay, he would vacate his pad and we could have it for free and we would love it. We would love it because the St. Lawrence River flows through his backyard, there is a cinder-block fireplace on which we can barbecue, as well as a picnic table and benches. I was about to dab my eyes, moved by this middle-American scenario, when I read the next sentence. He had caught yet one more dose of the clap in Florida, but the drip seemed to be drying. I put the handkerchief away and laughed helplessly. Fred was my bouncing baby boy, and I loved him.

  To listen to Fred was to go down the rabbit hole. His world, which was wholly bounded by his skull, was a world in which everything was tilted, and nothing was as it appeared, not even pain. Walk into it, and you looked at your life through windows that had the bubbles and distortions of eighteenth-century glass. I didn’t want to see my life plain. Clarity seemed a curse. Too, I was captivated by obscenity, because I never used it myself. (When, in the course of one day, Fred managed to anger his agent, his editor, and me, the agent, a woman, yelled, “Fuck you!” His editor shrieked, “Cocksucker!” I said, “That was damn rude, Fred.”)

  Fred’s language was in Technicolor. My own was in black and white. And he attracted friends for much the same reason a burning building attracts spectators. We were mesmerized by the flames and falling rafters and buckling walls, we who kept our houses under a thin film of ice. But Fred’s house was never totally consumed, and I, who was always frozen, had become used to warming my hands at its heat.

  When I stepped from the tiny plane in Lanai, he handed me a necklace, a plastic dolphin on a chain—“m lieu of a lei”—grumbled when he heard the airline had lost my luggage (“You would, Cantwell, you would”), led me to the portable bar that was the jeep, introduced me to Jo and Phyllis, and deposited me at the island’s one store. The airline had said I could charge up to $25.

  There were no nightgowns, so I bought a T-shirt, extra large, that said LANAI ’76. Toothpaste, but forgot to ask for a toothbrush. No makeup. They didn’t have any. Shampoo. Underpants of a style I had assumed was discontinued around 1958. The bill was $12.76, and Fred and Jo berated me for not having had the wit to expend the remaining $12.24 on a stack of sixpacks.

  One doesn’t wear shoes in Hawaiian houses, and the floors were chilly, so Fred gave me his socks. The nights are cool, so he gave me his basketball jacket. Walking through the small living room, seeing me ensconced on his couch with a wineglass in my hand and my eyes on a televised basketball game, he shouted, “Fifteen fuckin’ minutes in this fuckin’ house and you’ve absconded with my fuckin’ whole damn wardrobe.”

  I think he was glad to see me.

  The house was on a dirt road lined with others like it: close together, backyard vegetable gardens, the sounds of cocks crowing and hens clucking and of television sets in every living room. Sometimes, before dinner, I took a walk, afraid to wander too far, because there were no streetlights and night came thick and fast. Even the stars, stars I had never seen so close and dense, couldn’t penetrate the darkness.

  Imagine us at dinner, at the kitchen table, which we seldom left before bedtime. “Fred,” Phyllis says, “tell Mary about the time the telephone company detective came to your house.” Fred, tapdance for the lady.

  “Well, I was off the booze and out jogging, trying to get some of this fuckin’ fat off. I came home and was standing in the kitchen in my little sweatsuit pouring some fuckin’ Seven-Up in a fuckin’ clean glass when the doorbell rings and this guy in a blue suit and wingtips tells me he’s a detective and would like to ask a few questions.

  “The FBI was always doing employment checks on my former students, so I let him in and poured him some fuckin Seven-Up in a fuckin’ clean glass. I even gave him some fuckin’ ice cubes.

  “He says, ‘We’ve had some complaints about your making obscene phone calls, Mr. Exley.’

  “I was scared shitless. I’ve done some time on the funny farm, y’know, and I thought, ‘Jeezus! I’ve flipped out again and I don’t even know if I’ve been calling old ladies’“—he crossed his eyes and dangled his tongue—’”and going huh-huh-huh into the phone.’ Then I remember my mother’s asleep in the next room and she’s going to come out, rubbing her eyes, just in time to see her son, Fat Freddie E, being led off in a straitjacket.

  “I finally get the balls to say, ‘But I haven’t been making any obscene phone calls,’ and he says, ‘But the girls have reported . . .’

&
nbsp; “‘Wait a minute. Who do you work for?’

  “‘The telephone company.’”

  “‘The phone company? You mean the operators . . . those dumb bunnies?’ All the time I thought he was the FBI! And here I’d given him my fuckin’ Seven-Up. In a fuckin’ clean glass. With fuckin’ ice cubes! My Seven-Up!

  “The way I see it, Cantwell, the operators are there to work. But what the hell do they do? I was trying to call the mainland last week and the operator said”—he lifted his voice a few notes—’"Sir, that number can be dialed direct.’ And I said, ‘Please, ma’am. I’ve got this paralyzed right arm and I can’t . . .’ And she said, ‘Sir, that number can be dialed direct.’

  “‘My left arm is paralyzed, too.’ ‘Sir, I told you, that number can be dialed direct.’ ‘Lady,’ I say, ‘the truth is I’m paralyzed from head to foot and I’ve been sitting here five minutes trying to get an erection so I can dial.’”

  Fred’s words fly, like ascending columns of birds, up, up, up, until finally they are out the window and into space, where we can’t follow them. “Disagree with him, Mary,” Phyllis nudges me, as still another diatribe against the armed forces, the entertainment industry, the communications industry, the fuckin’ New York literati, takes flight and whizzes past us.

  “I can’t,” I answer. “I never disagree with Fred.”

  Sometimes, though, I am frightened for him when I realize how slippery is the edge on which he lives. One time I am sad for him, when, in the midst of a harangue about women and the way they drive—they force men to violence—he says, “If only I could love somebody,” and I see the terrible roots of misogyny.

  Still, he is a lover, even of women, provided he can forget their sex. He is loyal to his buddies and as generous as a fool, and he has arranged for me to stay in the local doctor’s guesthouse, where I read all day and dispense beer and dry-roasted peanuts to him and Jo and Phyllis and the doctor and his pregnant wife from four o’clock on. Once I try to provide dinner, but when I go to the island store, I find nothing, but for a pig’s head staring at me from the freezer, that I recognize.