Read Last Notes from Home Online
Authors: Frederick Exley
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 “their 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!”
“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.