A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Did I want to make this kind of an effort? Well, no, not really; but still, I wanted to be the master of it. It was more than that really: I was afraid—scared to death. I had waited too long for her, lived with the dream of her for always, and the thought of actually grasping it struck me, cruelly and ironically, impotent, in words to say, in motions to make, in every possible way.

  I drank a lot more for courage, an awful lot more. When I could avoid it no longer, I took her by the arm, and we walked, somnambulant, to the iridescent land on North Dear born Street. I say somnambulant, by which I mean that at least I was; even today I find it incredible to believe that she, Miss America, in the end, as Lolita did to poor, poor Humbert Humbert, seduced—or should I say tried to seduce? —me. At the apartment I broke one of the snifter glasses and we shared a drink from the remaining one. We did not finish it. Rising, we walked to the blue oval bed, and I sat down on the edge of it. She stood next to me, her arms lax at her sides like a child bride. When I asked what the matter was, she said, “Aren’t you going to undress me?” Undress her? In the end, she undressed me.

  That is my love story. Or what I thought was love. For in the end I discovered that I did not love Bunny, that indeed I had never loved her. We continued to write each other, continued to sit in Italian restaurants over uneaten pasta, clawing at each other beneath the table—a clawing which cruelly and ironically never failed to arouse my manhood. It was cruel and ironical for by the time of our arrival at the rainbow land I was invariably as manless as I had been on the first occasion: Doc Vah-nee turned out to be Doc No-Pah-nee. I tried—tried? oh, ferociously! I assumed the positions, my fanny directed at every nook and cranny of that multicolored empire.

  We tried. Together we read a book, The Frigid Male, by Dr. Lottie de Bauch, A.B., M.A., Ph.D. Lottie was a very modern woman. Upon exhausting the natural stimulants in the early chapters, she had a chapter on fetishism which seemed to offer the most hope. Perhaps I would like Bunny in a mink coat?

  It didn’t sound like a bad idea, but Bunny’s parents, though per missive, hadn’t apparently considered her ready for mink. We could have rented one, but we decided against that. Some men like to have their women degraded, and Lottie suggested that to oblige a girl paint herself heavily, wear the gaudy dresses, costume jewelry, and long-heeled crimson pumps of the tart and emit from the corner of her mouth, gangster-like, a tor rent of four-letter words to indicate that she was of the lower orders. This sounded fairly interesting, too; but the investment would have been heavy in both money and time: all Bunny had in the way of garments was Black Watch plaid kilts that exposed her dimpled, baby-fatted, and butterscotch knees, and I would have had to school her in the vocabulary of degenerates, which would probably have proved embarrassing.

  Lottie was very permissive, considering anything short of physical injury to one another as fair play in the pursuit of “the consummate orgasm.” We never got to the end of the chapter. We got to the point where I wasn’t sure whether Lottie considered physical injury as fair play or no. When she got to the proposition that some men need “to rape” (her quotes) to realize their manhood, I began to grow uneasy. In this latter particular she cited Gable’s Rhett Butler planting a ferocious and coma-inducing kiss on a velvet-clad Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, recalling for us how Vivien had passed out and Rhett had carried her limp body up the wide staircase of the Old Manse. Here, buried among some very imposing psychological terms, Lottie explained to us what had happened on their arrival at Vivien’s boudoir (I never read the book, so I don’t know if she knew from that, or if she just called Margaret Mitchell on the telephone and asked her): Rhett had obviously torn her clothes from her, slapping her around a bit in the process, and had then “symbolically deflowered” her, a defloration that apparently some men have to carry out at every copulation.

  It was at this point that I laid the volume down. Aside from the expense of replacing the lemon cashmere and the kilts, perhaps even a bra and panties (one knows how in substantial they are), aside from the unhappy prospect of sending Bunny back to the suburbs with a black eye (Lottie never explained whether one was supposed to pull one’s punches, as they do in the cinema, or really work them over: at this point I remember studying Lottie’s picture on the dust jacket and how pleased I was to detect that her eyes were scarless), I was afraid what she might propose should this rather interesting measure fail. There were about twenty pages left in the chapter, and I had visions of myself shopping around Chicago for a cat-o’-nine-tails (how would one ask for one of those?) or having to run upstairs to the penthouse to get my attorney-roommate to get me, as it were, “started,” a kind of “symbolic jealousy” no doubt.

  These things would never have done: Bunny, bless her, really did love me and threw herself at my impotence with a kind of terrifying and speechless abandon, which both frightened me and made me ashamed. I could scarcely look at her. There were times when I wanted to pound my chest and roaringly boast about my past mastery, tell her about the nights I had had, in order to get any sleep, to remove the phone from the hook. But the words would no sooner rise to my tongue than the tone to speak them in would elude me; and not uttering them I would fall into endless states of unspeaking depression, states in which, for the first time, I contemplated visiting a psychiatrist, states in which she clung to my naked body, weeping onto my chest. In all the books I had read, and especially in the American novels—those disgusting corroborations of our fantasies, books which at every turn were hailed as works of “genius”—the heroes were so unimpeachably virile (if they weren’t, they were hero-villains) that it not only didn’t occur to me at twenty-six, when one ought to be a little wise but almost never is in America, that such failures, though hardly common, and certainly symptomatic of something more markedly wrong, were not altogether unknown. O world, world, world, they were to me! So bad indeed did the stigma seem to me that it all but removed me from the race of men.

  Worse than anything, there came a point when Bunny had a kind of terrifyingly loose and constant moistness, the kind of totally loose submission one detects in a woman he has impregnated, the moist eyes, the warm moist hands, the loose moist breasts beneath the cotton blouse, that utter submission and adoration for the mate that the unborn child arouses in a woman. So overwhelming was it in Bunny’s case that I began to wonder if, in some miraculous way, she wasn’t indeed pregnant. More astounding still, she began to talk a good deal about an immediate marriage. Why I don’t know: Lottie had devoted a couple pages to a case history of a frigid male who had laid his wife for forty-odd years in her wedding gown, though she never told us whether the gown was ever replaced or whether the ever-aging bride was superbly gifted with a needle and white thread. In the end Bunny even insisted that I make the trip to the suburbs to face her parents. It was this meeting that ended everything.

  The Allorgees lived in a suburb of a suburb, their particular little suburb being Heritage Heights. It was a suburb that had apparently never caught on. The streets were all there, but there was only one house, Allorgees’ Acres, a great, white, one-storied, rambling ranch-type place in which everything from garage to game room to hot-water heater was found on the single story that shot out in all sorts of clapboard arms, like the spokes of a painted wagon wheel. “The Heights” was not on any height at all; this was the American Mid west at its most grotesque, treeless and cold-looking as far as the eye could see, so that it only seemed set on high ground.

  There was only one thing that broke the endless blue monotony of the heavens—a television aerial that rose so high that it dizzied one to look up at it, an aerial which, I was proudly informed, put the Allorgees on certain clear days in contact with all parts of the Republic. It was a touching monument to their isolation. In answer to my question about its astounding height, Chuck (or Poppy)—as the father was interchangeably designated—said only that he liked “good reception.”

  That was the only thing I remember Chuck, or Poppy, saying for the entire
weekend. The rest of his communication with me consisted of an outrageous wink, a wink that distressed me so much that after a time I began to wonder if I ought not to pop Chuckie, or chuck Poppy. I could not fathom that wink at all. At times it seemed friendly enough, one of those so-you’re-the-guy-who-stole-my-Princess? things. But at other times there seemed to be something downright lascivious about it, as though he were saying, “You gettin’ in, huh? Huh?” Lord, how that wink unnerved me!

  Another thing I remember about Chuck was that one night he asked me out to the garage with him, and I thought, “Oh, Christ, here it comes.” But when we got outside all he wanted to show me was a miraculous device for opening and shutting the garage doors. Sitting in the driveway in the front seat of the Cadillac, he had a little electronic device, like a television station-changer, which, aimed gunlike at an electric eye near the doors, moved them up and down—apparently for no other reason than to save him getting in and out of the car. I watched the doors go up and down about twenty times, like a machine gone berserk. Then he let me try it. Very soberly, I aimed at that hideous eye, deftly flicked the button with my forefinger, watched the wide white doors run crazily up and disappear into the garage’s ceiling, enthusiastically remarked the wonder of it, and getting out of the car we, Freddy and Poppy, strode back into the house together. The rest of the weekend Poppy sat in the snug little breakfast nook in the kitchen. He was, I gathered, in the “insurance game.” A pencil on his ear, the insurance records spread out before him on the table, a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon at his right hand, his ear bent to a portable radio tuned to the Cubs’ baseball games, he sat in what was apparently his own little world. The Pabst came from a little red electric cooler next to the pink refrigerator; on the top of the cooler someone had stenciled in great ivory letters the legend “poppy,” and the only time I saw Poppy the rest of the weekend was on those not infrequent occasions when I went to the cooler for a beer of my own. At those times I got the distinct impression that he was keeping a count on the number of cans I was consuming, that he literally considered poppy’s cooler Poppy’s. Whenever I opened one, frightfully conscious of the noise of the opener against can, I always turned and smiled apologetically and was always met with that unnerving, enigmatical smile. To this day I don’t know if he was a dirty old man or a fool.

  If there was a certain ambivalence about Poppy, about the mother there was none at all: she was a perfect horror. Bunny had been born to her late, after a number of heart-breaking, unsuccessful pregnancies. She had, in fact, been born at great emotional and physical expense. Because Mums dropped still births from her womb as facilely as certain sturdy-loined creatures drop rosy twins, she had had, during the final months she carried Bunny, to lie abed with her thighs thrust upward, supported by some hammock contraption or other. She related this story to me one early morning in the kitchen, apart from Bunny and Poppy, and as she told it her tone was one of scarcely contained and monumental pride. When she told me this story, and I have no idea why, I couldn’t erase from my mind the vision of Bunny’s blond head—precisely as it was then, lovely beyond all other honey-dipped heads—popping fully formed out of this woman, cradled in her goddam hammock, and shouting, “Hi, gang!”

  Because of the unhappy time she had had in bringing Bunny forth, it was quite natural that she was solicitous of, even obtrusive in the fashioning of, Bunny’s destiny—a des tiny to which, because Mums was the usual garden-variety middle-class woman, I was certain I did not belong. I was certain that before my visit untold arguments about me had occurred, and that Mums had not yet quite given in. All Mums’s friends were attorneys or physicians and referred to in that way, “my friend Lawyer Brown” or “my dear, dear friend Dr. Wright,” it never having occurred to her that in the milieu about Heritage Heights the average professional man might be a doltish, incompetent ass. There was a lot of talk about clubs, the country club (I knew that she had had visions of Bunny married to an orthodontist and whacking golf balls at the local one), bridge clubs, and book clubs, the latter, I think, being thrown in to show me she was an intellectual (she “adored” The Caine Mutiny and “serious things like that”), trying, as it were, to find properly sober bases with her aspiring son-in-law. In the two days I spent there, she never took her hard, appraising little eyes from me (like all possessive mothers, and without in the least understanding it, she was trying to see herself in bed with me: “Brother,” I thought, “if she only knew!”), and though she obviously hated to make any concessions that indicated to me a surrender on her part, she made one or two, inquiring of me in the most blatantly stupid and innocent manner both my salary and my methods for communicating with God, inquired just as the horrible grotesques do in The Caine Mutiny and the other books she read. To my salary I suavely added an incredible three hundred dollars a month, to which she nodded soberly and approvingly (though I think she tried to restrain her surprise); as for my pipe line to God, I told her I communicated through the agency of the “high” Episcopal Church, to which she also nodded approvingly. I gave her, in effect, the kind of response her ludicrously asinine questions deserved. Like the average American Mums, there was really no end to the woman’s horridness.

  From Bunny I had learned that, though Poppy made a good deal of money, he was just this side of bankruptcy, the mother having convinced him that he could make boodles of money by buying, landscaping, and paving the morosely vacant area called Heritage Heights. But the local inhabitants had steadfastly refused to recognize the comeliness of The Heights, had kept perversely away, and there was no doubt in my mind that Mums—whether Poppy made twenty thousand dollars a year or not—had laid the venture’s failure squarely on Chuck’s sour business acumen. Moreover, by that remarkable viciousness of which the American Mums’s mind is capable, it also became apparent that she had laid her own physical shortcomings as a woman squarely on the guy’s penis. As a result, there were that weekend all kinds of hushed conversations from which Poppy was excluded, an exclusion invariably instigated by Mums, and to which I was now—being of that charmed circle at whose heart Bunny lay—permitted. These conversations were more often than not concerned with moneys to satisfy Bunny’s apparently near-insatiable needs—a half-dozen more sweaters, a new car in the spring, a raccoon coat (at this point Bunny had suggested that if they were going to go into fur, they might as well get mink, and to Mums’s outrage she had turned to me and winked), ad infinitum. Whether it was for my benefit, an indication of what I might expect as the supplier of Bunny’s material whims, I don’t know; but-Mums always, with the briefest show of irritation, promised that the moneys would be made available somehow. Then she would put her finger to her mouth and say, “Shish. Don’t tell Poppy—he won’t understand,” saying it in such a way as to indicate that the man was all but moronic and would be no more capable of understanding the noble destiny that between them—it was presumably between us now—they had projected for Bunny than he would be of understanding Relativity. At the time, as I say, I thought I had felt rather sorry for him, but I can see now that I hadn’t. I had despised him for so docilely permitting his own emasculation; and what I had really wanted—incredibly!—was for him to come charging through the door, Pabst beer can in hand, to punch them both about a bit, and then to kick both their asses right out the door into Mums’s dim-witted dream of Heritage Heights!

  The weekend proved a dismal enlightenment. At some point in it I fell into an unspeaking depression, and Bunny asked me repeatedly, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Is it something about my parents?” “No! No!” I protested. “It’s just that I’m sick—something I ate, I guess.” Indeed I was sick, though the poisoning had nothing to do with the Allorgees’ rather bland table fare. That weekend I had been browsing through an unread issue of The New Yorker and had come across a very funny George Price cartoon showing a whole boodle of his hatchet-faced low-lifes sprawled about the living room before the television set, guzzling beer, and all (grandma, too!) got up in Dodger baseball
uniforms. I was chuckling like a madman, but suddenly the chuckle became very like sobs —because I had made an awful, a horrifying transposition. Substituting for the Dodger uniform a New York Giant tuque I had seen pictures of the players wearing while working out in frigid weather, I suddenly saw myself consigned to the breakfast nook with Poppy, our Giant tuques pulled down about our ears, our tongues lapping at the Pabst cans, our ears glued to the radio, now and again raising our eyes to look self-consciously at one another and to make not very funny jokes about the women folk in the other room, jokes that, sadly, admitted our helplessness before the jewel they carried between their legs. Yes, I saw myself sitting out there in Heritage Heights with Poppy, whose “reception” was so good and who had a marvelous gadget for opening the garage doors, and, oh lord, the thought that this might indeed be my heritage, my fate, struck me all the more impotent, quite unable to even satisfy Bunny, something which I had till that night always taken a kind of melancholy pride in doing—one way or another.