A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  It was only many weeks later that I gave thought to the way I had met Bunny Sue. Though I was given her name by a perfect stranger (a boy who was at college with her) in a bar, I had for many weeks just considered it a piece of my continuing, fortuitous, and incredible luck. I remember that the boy had struck me as a rather sophisticated, even effeminate Holden Caulfield. He had a gold cigarette case, a jet-black holder, and though he had talked rather knowledgeably, even rather wittily, about the sexual mores of coeds—”Good Lord, they’re scared to death of pregnancy. By the time they get married, half of them will have forgotten in which cavity conception occurs!”—I had taken him to be a blusterous kid, attempting to cover youth’s natural inadequacies. I was, in effect, amused; and he was having a good time amusing me. At one point he had dramatically slammed his palm on the bar (it was one of his many mannerisms) and exclaimed, “Dear chap! There is someone you absolutely must meet!” Here he rolled his eyes around teasingly. I suppose my silence told him I was not altogether uninterested; then he launched into a sexless, very limited (“Absolutely ravishing!”) description of Bunny Sue, explaining that she was on a certain day, by a certain train, coming from her home upstate to Chicago shopping, that he was supposed to meet her to arrange to have drinks, but that he couldn’t meet her, he was going to be “absolutely too busy.” He had written all the pertinent details on a paper, and he now shoved the paper into my hand. “You will meet her for me, won’t you?” I said that I didn’t know and asked for a more precise description. He teasingly rolled his eyes around again. “Ravishing blond hair! Ravishing green eyes!” I said, “I’ll meet her!” We both laughed, and rolled our eyes around playfully. I think his description was going to be a good deal more precise, and I wonder now if I didn’t interrupt him to prevent just that. Meeting her, I explained what the note he gave me said, invited her to coffee, and, oh, dear lordy, an hour later, having for the day forsaken my job, my repose, my dignity, I found myself at her heels stumbling through Marshall Field’s vast department store; I was that afraid I might lose her.

  It was one of those sweltering, near-equatorial June mornings. Hardly any shoppers had braved the heat (we had the great store almost to ourselves), and even those paltry few who had ventured out moved in slow motion, as if the heat were corporeal and staying their progress. Bunny’s motion was stayed not in the least. She bounced. She wore a blue and white, fine-checked cotton dress; at her neck she had a little white bow; her white pumps shattered the awful stillness of the store, and as she skipped up the empty aisles, the floorwalkers, the salesgirls, and those few slow-moving customers, all looked, then in benumbed admiration looked again. It was rather terrifying. Now those awful eyes would go to me—to see if I warranted such a prize. Some nodded approvingly, others not (the bastards! did they not see I knew I did not warrant it?). Whether they approved or not, the blood remained hot, furious, and constant in my face; and I found myself dropping a few paces behind her, in deference to her shocking comeliness. It was a comeliness I scarcely dared look upon, one that had me peeking at her out of the corner of my eyes. It was a furtiveness of which she was aware, and it aroused in her an imperious though tolerant smile. She bounced, I stumbled behind her, thinking the morning would never end.

  “We” tried on pastel cashmeres, Black Watch plaid skirts, blue ballerina slippers, and it all had the quality of a night mare that takes place under water. I wanted to get away (“I’ll wait for you in the coffee shop”); she wanted my opinion. I sat in a leather chair, chain-smoking and staring at the carpet. Disappearing into a closet, she had the dress off, the cashmere on, and in split seconds (just long enough to visualize those butterscotch thighs) she was parading her choices before me. Did I like it? “Fine. Fine,” was all I ever said. Running behind her, my ear lobes perspiring, I thundered up to one counter and stood stupid, aghast, mute, as, without batting an eyelash, she purchased seven pair of pale blue panties, a pair for every day of the week, with Monday, Tuesday, etc., embroidered at a place very close to the crotch. “Pretty corny, huh?” she said to nobody in particular; then to the salesgirl, “Is it all right if I wear Tuesday’s on Saturday?” Here she turned to me and winked, and a very sick smile quite froze upon my countenance. Both she and the salesgirl laughed, a mysterious woman’s laugh. That morning was the first day in my life when I recognized there were times when I needed a drink; I needed one then as badly, I expect, as I ever had or ever would again. By noon, exhausted, my nerves gone, my arms piled high with ornately wrapped cardboard boxes, I stumbled into the scalding street behind her, fell at her heels into a taxicab, and headed for Rush Street.

  It seems to be the fashion to take love as it comes, to examine it rather minutely, and to dismiss it rather lightly, perhaps a little sadly, and move on to greater things. But I cannot do that; I know of no greater things. Oh, I wish I could re member that with Bunny I had been a square-jawed, tight-lipped, virile Frederick Henry who loved, lost, and walked back to his hotel in the rain. But I didn’t love in that way; and when I lost, I went quite off my head. At Rush Street the bar’s light was mute enough, the gin bucks strong enough, but nothing—even the constant chatter with which we sought to assure each other of the high-mindedness of our persons— dimmed the light she cast or stilled the beating of my heart. Maugham tells us how his painter-hero Strickland, like Gauguin, went to Tahiti and knew that he was home, tells how he had lived his life in an agony of exile until he had come to that place, which he had never seen before—home. And that is what I felt with Bunny—except that instead of place I had lived my life in the hope of person, and here she was in the flesh, so that I could, as I had done with that other only a few nights before, reach out and touch her. But I did not dare. I did not touch her then because for the first time I was certain that the city—the city I never did quite believe in— would betray me. Not only did I not touch her, but the only times I looked at her were during those not infrequent moments when she chose to marvel at herself (for she did not quite believe in herself either) in the mirror of the back bar, and at those moments my mind went quite beside itself with pious platitudes. I was “Doc Pah-nee” no longer, neither a seeker after truth, nor anyone save Freddy Exley from up in the cow country—PR Man! Rock Island!—and I saw myself tuxed and trembling, standing before the beneficent minister, a radiantly demure Bunny by my side, a white orchid in her prayer book, saying, “I do. I do. ‘Deed I do.”

  At five I had her back at the station, where for the first time that day, and by a truly enormous effort of the will, I looked directly into her green eyes.

  “Come tomorrow night,” I said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “My parents will think something’s—”

  “Funny?” I volunteered. “That we’re rushing it?”

  “Yes,” she said. For the first time that day her compo sure broke, her face flushed over, and she looked away from me. I touched her then, tentatively, on the shoulder. Then she was gone. Having picked up a timetable to see what time her train arrived in her home town, in about two hours’ time, I found that I had to get very drunk that night to prevent myself from calling her and proclaiming my love. The next day I was glad that I hadn’t; from her I received two letters, one telling

  me that she had, with her forefinger in the dust of a Milwaukee road’s passenger-car window, written the legend Mrs. F. E. Exley.

  That summer was my season of love, and though I only saw Bunny five or six more times, she was with me all the hot, sweltering days and all the air-conditioned evenings when, having forsaken all others, I sat alone in the bars on Rush Street drinking till long past midnight, trying to allay my riotous exhilaration. At the time I was sharing the penthouse—we called it, with irony, a penthouse because it was on the top floor—apartment of a Victorian mansion on North Dearborn Street. I did not even pay rent. My roommate, a young, moneymaking attorney, managed the apartments for a dowager in distant Florida; and each weekend, stripping to my undershorts and stepping out onto a sun roof, I
set the attorney’s typewriter on a ledge fronting Dearborn Street, and wrote Bunny letters of epic proportions, letters for which I had all the week been making notes. With the fake melancholy of youth I wrote, “I am a creature of the gray and the dismal, while you are of light and of radiance,” and though it was selfish of me, I told her, I was looking to that radiance to re deem me. I wrote all day long, and this confession, together with the sun’s rays, now turning my body brown, ennobled me. I felt something like grace.

  My roommate thought I was writing a novel. Often I heard him caution the pigs—suddenly all the boys had become to me no-good vermin—who lay about our apartment Saturdays watching baseball, guzzling beer, farting and scratching, to “keep it down,” that I was “working.” But this only increased their curiosity. Occasionally one of them would stick his head out the window and shout, “Put a lot of fucking in it, Ex—’twon’t sell otherwise!” Occasionally one would sneak up behind me, read over my shoulder, and exclaim, “Jesus, Ex, not another one of those morbidly sensitive fuckers! It won’t sell, daddy-O! Ho! Ho! Ho!”

  But I paid them no mind and went my way, typing in Chicago’s sunshine, knowing that it would “sell.” Indeed I wrote so many weekends that some wild charlatan of a tour bus driver, pointing upward, began bringing the attention of his complement of sightseers to me. Unquestionably having been told that I was one of the “struggling artists” said to inhabit the area, these people invariably waved frantically at me from behind the glass dome of their bus, so happy were they to share this fragile moment with one who might one day be hailed a genius, so pleased that they could go back to Omaha and tell Cousin Lucy, “We saw one of them writer fellows—in his underwear!” I never waved back. I thought it might crumble their notions of the aloofness of the artists. Instead, to please them, I hung on my face a carefully cultivated, soulful, near-visionary look, one with which, by opening my eyes as wide as I could, in imitation of Bela Lugosi, I looked quite through their greetings. This made them giggle hysterically and pound each other self-consciously on the back, as though they had just interrupted me in an unseemly masturbation. On the bus’s shooting out of sight, I always grabbed onto my stomach and roared a fitful, lunatic laughter, once even tip ping my chair over and rolling all over the hot-tarred roof.

  At day’s end, at summer’s twilight, when the cool shadows began to bring goose-pimples to my hot flesh, when the couples began pouring from the apartment houses, to walk hand in hand beneath me on Dearborn Street (I envied none of them now!), I proofread the letters with a concentration my job never got. I crossed out that which might be misread, changed that which might be unseemly, added this afterthought by writing up and all around the margin, now turning over the page and filling it with a rampant, scarcely legible script. In variably—and here my drunken critics were apposite—the letters seemed much too doleful, and I tried to leaven them with postscripts I imagined to be marvelously sophisticated and witty, telling Bunny that when next we met at the station, I’d be the tremulous young man, poised as if for flight, with a white rose in either hand, one for her and one for me, “symbols of our chastity.”

  Finally came the day when we actually did meet. I was, lest I explode, slightly drunk and had in my arms not two but dozens of white roses, enough, I think, to bury a Chicago hood. I forced her—and she did not protest too vehemently— to walk with me up Michigan Boulevard: though she tried in her walk to retain the bouncy confidence of her youth, there was in it now a becoming timidity. All along the boulevard people stopped and stared at us, especially at me burdened down by a garden of roses—stared as though I were mad. How they despised what they viewed as a blatant, unmanly admission of love! What did I care for them or their pedestrian, tightly lived lives? I wanted to shout, “Love, you bastards! What’s it all about without this?” I think that Bunny thought I was going to shout: once or twice, giggling apprehensively, her voice gave utterance to the stares of the people, and she said, “You’re mad! You’re mad!” But then her hand, in thanks, would come out to rest upon my arm. The huge, ocher sun was falling behind the skyline to our left, bathing the seaside of the boulevard in rouge; from the blue water to our right a warm swift wind blew, lifting the roses, one by one, from my arms and sweeping them furiously along the wide walks to the gutter where they lay, a poor gift, humbly offered, to the city that gave one so much.

  At the Italian restaurant the minestrone went cold as gelatin, the lettuce in the tossed salad as limp as spinach, and the veal parmigiana, brought in so steaming and succulently soft, became as hard, cold, and withered as dried apples. The Italian waiter, haughty and temperamental, giving us furious looks, carted each uneaten dish back into the kitchen where we heard trays slam, a glass break, and violent, alien, and meaningless curses. All we could do was drink Chianti. We drank glass after glass in silence, fiercely and furtively seeking out each other’s hands beneath the checkered table. Finding them, we squeezed till we hurt each other; withdrawing we fell into agonizing lapses of heavy breathing silence, renewing ourselves for another assault on each other’s person. It was when I looked up from one of these respites that she said something I did not quite catch. She was weeping, with great beadlike tears running down her honey-flecked cheeks; between excruciating sobs that rived my heart in two, she said, “I’m not a surgeon.”

  “ ‘I’m not a’ what?” I said amazed.

  “A surgeon, a surgeon,” she said dumbly.

  “Of course not,” I thought. “I’m the surgeon—Doc Pahnee.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Don’t laugh at me.” Then she started to weep again. At that moment I did understand, and when I did, the room started going round and round. I rose, dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and led her —or did she lead me?—from the room.

  We—Bunny, who was not a virgin, and I—went then to the darkest bar on Rush Street, went on my fierce insistence: Bunny, bless her heart, had other plans. I did not realize this at first. Setting her on a bar stool before me, I stood at her back, resting my chin on her head, and reaching around her shoulder for my drink. My first impression was that she had told me out of some sentimental remorse for not having waited, but I hadn’t got to my second drink when I knew that this flagrant naiveté on my part was not the answer: Bunny was a most insistent seducer. Refusing to let me avoid her eyes, she kept pulling her blond head from under my chin and bringing her green eyes round to mine; her eyes said, “Let’s go.”

  Now I had never doubted that this moment would come; I did, in fact, even know where. There were always in our apartment house one or two vacant apartments for which, due to my roommate’s capacity as landlord, I had the keys; and the day before a particularly suitable place had been vacated. As I often did in return for my free rent, I had gone there with the attorney to help him clean the place in anticipation of a future occupant; no sooner had I walked into its single room than my breath quite ran out of me. Who ever had had it, a commercial artist as I recall, had done the entire room in minuscule, multi-and brilliant-colored mosaics, had done the walls of the closet-like kitchenette, had done the petite round bar, had done the great coffee table before the candy-striped divan, and had even built, smack in the middle of the room, a fantastic, oval, and luxuriously mosaic bed. The place was preposterous, and though I had heard of it before (the other tenants called it “Fags’ Paradise”), I could not believe it: it was the iridescent, the peacock, the rainbow land! And I never worked so vigorously to get a place clean as

  I did that one. On finishing, and after my roommate had left, I blue-sheeted the oval bed, put two snifter glasses, a bottle of bourbon, and two of soda behind the bar, reconnected the refrigerator for ice cubes, sat down on a bar stool and practiced saying through pursed, sorrowful lips, “But surely, Bunny, you’ve got time for one more drink”—now measuring with my thumb and middle finger and smiling—”just one teensie-weensie one?” Then I was ready, or thought I was. What did delay me that night? Her crossing me up by rendering all
my elaborate plans unnecessary? Not really.

  To begin with, I was foolish enough to believe that the seduction was going to be mine (as if it ever is!). Where I had come from, seducing a “nice” girl was hard work. In the back seat of wintry cars one chewed on lower lips for longer periods of time than starlets cohabit with producers. One moved lower then, leaving a trail of perfumed saliva on ears and necks along the way, coming to plant already swollen lips on wool-sweatered nipples, inhaling there, as though trying to draw juice from ear-muffed oranges. One huffed and puffed, struggling out of fur-collared greatcoats, meeting convulsive, furious hands all the way. The back seat of the car now reeked of love’s odors, so that the entire car was like a Great Northern Womb, and if one was not too drunk or hadn’t developed “blue balls” (like a fierce hand squeezing the genitalia purple), one went miraculously on, touching a thigh and working up to the hot silken flimsiness of underthings where, more often than not, it ended with the beast—what admirable will power!—clamping her vice-like thighs about one’s hand and hysterically screaming, “I’ll tell my brother Ed!” Even if one did make it, if the thighs did not break one’s furtive hand, the girl felt duty-bound to pass out, so that confronting one in Trigonometry on Monday morning she could give him that sweetly virginal I-don’t-remember-nothin’ look. There was very little to remember. By the time of contact it was getting light, very cold, with that glacial, white world spread all about one on the lonely road; and one didn’t dare look down in fear of seeing a half-dressed, broken-bra’ed, bedraggled, pimply, snot-nosed, shivery-assed creature feigning her conscience-inducing sleep, trying not to moan, as if indeed a scarcely erect, zipper-scraped, partially raw instrument could induce even tremors, not to mention ecstatic moans (in all truth it occurs to me now that if one girl had, on her parents’ night at the Avon, taken me into her bedroom, taken off her clothes, and taken me into bed with her, I would have married her, got a job as a brakeman on the New York Central, raised eleven children, and lived happily ever after on pork chops and Genesee 12-Horse Ale).