Except for Mr. and Mrs. McBride, who retired early, we drank and talked through the darkness and the dawn until it was time for my seven a.m. flight to New York. Sure that in the off-season of early June, a seven a.m. flight would be practically passengerless, we had selected this one with a view to easing me gradually from the idyllic quiet of the island into the harsh clatter of the world.
With what furious vengeance the world imposes itself on apostate “monks”! On the flight every blessed seat was taken, and I found myself next to a garrulous, bejeweled and chain-smoking mom and her teenage son, a fat slob she was delivering from Palm Beach to Montreal for the summer holiday, to the custody of his father, her ex-husband. Fatso ate his thick, pielike, caramelly and pecaned sweet roll, then his mom’s; and when he eyed mine, I passed it to him and ordered a double vodka on the rocks. At that time of day the stewardess had no booze on her dumbwaiter and, looking pointedly at her watch, then at me, she went, the cheeks of her ass bouncing with chagrin, to the pantry and fetched me two miniature red-labeled bottles of eighty-proof Smirnoff. No matter that I feigned reading The New Yorker, that I was drunk and sad and tautly strung at my departure from the island, that I was already depressed surrounded by these “weirdos” on their inconceivably worldly errands, selling and seeking and visiting and journeying and fleeing and being summoned, Mom had aches to impart and her mouth fluttered like a whippoorwill’s ass all the way to New York, while I sat stunned, hot with wrath and grief, wanting to say:
“Oh, lady, give my a break. A few months ago I was in Rome and never saw the Colosseum! A quart a day I’ve been doing, my brain cells are so pickled I can’t even understand a movie. I’ve just come from months of sticking my prick into strippers with names like Zita the Zebra Woman, with a normal body temperature and an IQ of about sixty-two point five. The bartender next-door has to answer my mail for me, I shake so badly I can’t hold the letters! Gimme a break, I don’t wanna hear.”
I was going to hear. Although her husband had remarried, neither he nor the incumbent Mrs. (what sounded like) Bas-Thornton—after the family in the Hughes classic, “the third Mrs. Bas-Thornton, I might add” —were at all reliable, and at every summer and Christmas holiday since the divorce Mom had had to fly to Montreal, rent an efficiency apartment, and daily telephone Fatso— his name was Eugene—to assure her much-tried heart that he was being properly fed (properly fed!) and that his father wasn’t giving him bourbon, which, she said, Mr. Bas-Thornton drank from sunup to sundown.
“Ha!” she cried. “Sundown doesn’t tell the half of it! At sundown he’s only just getting started!”
The court had awarded her what seemed to me a pain fully generous three hundred dollars a week in child support and alimony, but for all the trouble it made her shuttling between Palm Beach and Montreal, she at one point had returned Mr. Bas-Thomton’s checks and gone to work as an interior decorator—with phony self-effacement: “My racket”—only to be told curtly by the court that whether or not she returned the money she still had to comply with the court’s order and deliver Fat Eugene to his father as the court had directed. Throughout this Eugene remained still and immobile as stone, in the awful embarrassment of Mom’s gratuitous revelations feigning a deep sleep in the tight economy-class seat between Mom and me, only occasionally bringing up his obese fingers to lap unctuously at the sweet buns’ sticky remains. In repose he looked a baby whale gargantuan enough to put a gleam in the eye of the late Mr. Barnum.
When the plane landed at La Guardia, I waited until the New York City passengers had disembarked and only those going on to Montreal remained, then took my yellow London Fog jacket from beneath my seat, rose, put it slowly on, with great deliberation zipped it up, and spoke the words I had in my mind been articulating for the past hour:
“Why don’t you get off here, return to Palm Beach, go back to work as an interior decorator, and let this pathetic outsized fellow go on to his father by himself? He’s reached an age when he ought to be having his first bourbon with his father. And if the kids in Palm Beach are anything like they are across the inlet on Singer Island, where I live, and I understand from a Palm Beach detective I know they’re more promiscuous, he ought at his age to be fucking himself cross-eyed.”
In shock Mom’s face had begun to fall away, the way the face of an alcoholic coming off the wagon after many months can be seen with each drink to disintegrate before one’s eyes. Although Eugene’s right eye, the one hard by his mom, was yet riveted in his rigidly faked sleep, his left was now comically and orbitally bugged out in recognition and horrified incredulity.
“But take a look at what you’re doing to him. He’s so repressed he’s eating himself into oblivion. His features aren’t even distinguishable in his lardy face. In fact, his head looks like a bowling ball of soggy dough.”
Then I added, “Nice listenin’ to yuh.” Then I left.
At La Guardia I was dopey drunk, had hours to wait for my Allegheny Airlines connection to Watertown, and as I was up to no more of the world’s woe I decided to “hide” in the men’s room until I needed another drink. At a drug store I bought the Daily News, a blue plastic traveler’s razor good for a shave or two, an extra stiff green tooth brush in a plastic case holding a miniature tube of Pepsodent, a 39-cent pocket comb, a small jar of Squibb glycerine suppositories, and two large styrofoam containers of black coffee. Then I went to the lavatory and for a quarter checked into a stall. First I dropped my chinos to my knees, bent over and inserted two suppositories. Pulling my pants back up, I lifted the lid and started sticking my middle finger back past the uvula. The small of my back on the right side was throbbing, my liver was quaking with excitement, I knew I’d have no difficulty vomiting. I didn’t, puking up the remains of the previous evening’s farewell supper. Both the marinara sauce and the Chianti gave the vomit a nauseatingly rich pink, as though I were hemorrhaging. That done, I replaced the seat, again dropped my pants and sat, where I sipped the scalding coffee, read the Daily News and waited optimistically enthroned to pass whatever my system had digested.
As I always did, I laughed riotously at the newspaper’s editorials. Those who disagreed with President Nixon’s Vietnam war policies were called “die-hard doves,”“sniveling carpers,”“twittering defeatists,” and “puny peaceniks,” and as always I had an overwhelming urge to seek out the editorial writer and buy him a few drinks. So unrelentingly nasty was his tone that for years I’d been certain he didn’t believe a word he wrote—nobody bright enough to construct a grammatical sentence could believe it—and that he knew his loonily Olympian derision was doing more for peace than any march on the Pentagon. I had even fantasized a romantic image of him. Certainly nobody in the Daily News offices ever saw him. He was an inch over five feet, crabbed, wasted, and he chain-smoked nonfilter cigarettes that left nauseous stains on his fingers. Winter and summer he wore an Army-issue wool khaki greatcoat whose hem brushed his shoe tops, and on awakening each noon he gathered up his ball-points, his yellow lined tablet, his Thesaurus and the morning newspapers and went to The Lion’s Head on Christopher Street, took a spartan wooden table in the back room and ordered black coffee and two ounces of top-shelf brandy, Hennessey or Martel. After a half-hour of diligently perusing the newspapers, with the aid of his Thesaurus he wrote his editorials in fifteen minutes, sent them by messenger to the Daily News, and passed the rest of the day pacing himself on imported St. Pauli Girl beer and writing unpublishable poetry about the child hood he’d imagined he’d had in Crosby, S.D., remembering always the afternoon he’d had a single beer with Dylan Thomas in the White Horse Tavern.
Today’s editorials mentioned both Hanoi and Haiphong, and I was abruptly struck with how geographically knowledgeable the military had made my generation: El Alamein, Anzio, Bastogne, Iwo Jima. Pusan, Hué, ad infinitum, any of which could be instantly located on a globe. Aloud I pronounced Haiphong. Haiphong. For some reason the word had pharmaceutical sexual connotations for me and I never saw it without
thinking of a pessary.
“Insert your haiphong, darling, and let’s fuck.”
Within forty-five minutes I needed some more vodka to get me through to Watertown. At the sink in the outer room I gave myself a splotchy shave with liquid soap and my plastic razor, washed my booze-swollen face till it went from white to pink to red to white again, using all the tooth paste in the miniature tube scrubbed my teeth until my gums bled, as I did so swallowing mouthfuls of the diluted paste to allay what I was sure was a disgustingly abhorrent breath. Then soaking my head with water, I combed my hair, threw everything including the unused suppositories into the disposal and was, as they say, ready to meet the day.
Even at eleven a.m. the first bar I looked into was jammed, and I sought another. Travelers all have stories and I could not bear to hear another. Too, I owned the cunning of the boozer, I knew my speech was impaired, talk would reveal that drunkenness, and I’d thereby run the risk of being cut off. The next bar was also crowded save for a single space against a far wall, and I made a direct line for that space, thinking that if anyone started talking with me I could turn my back on him and address myself to the blank wall. What could be ruder than that? With a painfully jaunty articulation, as though it were the most natural thing in the world at that time of day, I ordered a double vodka on the rocks with “just a splash of tonic—no fruit.”
“Hello, hello, hello,” a voice said, loudly, not so much as if I were deaf as if I shouldn’t be dumb enough to try to avoid what it was he had to share with me.
I moaned.
“You’re from Florida!” the voice exclaimed. “Me too! Just missed my flight to Tampa, gotta wait for another!” I took a large swallow from my drink. I did not look in his direction.
Explaining that as soon as I’d walked in the door and he’d detected my tan, my canary yellow jacket, my beige chinos, my pastel blue and plaid-banded porkpie hat, and my torn and dirty white deck shoes worn without socks, which he’d noticed when I lifted my foot onto the bar rail, he’d known I was “a beach rat with sand in my shoes” and with an awesome abruptness he’d suffered the worst pangs of homesickness he’d ever undergone. To myself I moaned again, and felt somewhat dizzy; he was going to tell me everything! To gain entree to my heart he bought me a drink, then he talked.
In Florida, where he’d been since the end of World War II, he owned and leased to contractors all sorts of heavy equipment. He’d married there, raised children, and made himself a lovely home. Over the years he’d tried to observe the familial decencies with his brothers and sisters on Long Island, but he’d long ago “buried the folks,” he no longer recognized Babylon as that quaint village in which he’d grown up in the Thirties, his trips back to the island (on which out of boredom his wife had long since ceased to accompany him) had grown increasingly less frequent, and on this particular visit he’d found his brothers and sisters so caught up in their own lives that he felt a stranger among them and had cut his visit short.
“When you walked through the door,” he said, “it hit me like a shovel full of shit in the face that Florida was my home and has been for a quarter of a fucking century!”
He sighed. To keep returning to Babylon, he said, and a past that had ceased to exist the day he’d left it in 1946 was sheer fatuousness and for the first time he could hardly wait to board the plane “home” to Florida.
“When I saw you, it hit me like that,” he repeated. For emphasis he snapped his fingers, startlingly.
Well, now! I turned to him. When I looked into his large dark eyes they were lambent and moist with the appeal that I share with him this long overdue revelation. He was a tall, trim and very muscular-looking guy with a full head of straight, well-barbered black hair; almost disarmingly exquisite of feature, one was sure that in youth he had been pretty but time and sun had done their work giving him a striking masculinity. He was definitely Latin. Although he wore clean and oiled work shoes, finely pressed khaki trousers, lightweight blue zipper jacket, and appeared poised to mount the throne of a diesel-powered bulldozer and move mountains of earth, there was something so inflexibly correct about his dress, there was in his exquisitely manicured nails and a kind of atrophy in what had obviously once been very powerful hands, a suggestion that it’d been a long time since he’d done anything but lease his equipment. An exemplary guy, he bought me another double and for a long time we talked about the nontourist Florida from May through October. We agreed that one learns to live with the dazzling sun and the oppressive heat, remarked how little one needs in the way of clothing and never feels imprisoned in the cumbersome attire of northerners, said that if one’s palate were up to it he could live forever, sans funds, on dolphin, pompano, snapper, snook, and crawfish; delighted in the memory of the first long chilling draught of beer following an afternoon of fishing or swimming; and most of all, with something like fluttering hearts, recalled the easy lethargic pace of the native Floridian.
“A pace,” he said, wagging his head in wonder, “a guy can live with.” He was silent a moment. Abruptly he wafted his blue-jacketed arm to include the customers of the entire bar. “Look at these jokers!” he cried. “Eleven o’clock in the morning! You call this living?”
“Sure don’t.”
With the drinks he was growing heavy and inward with nostalgia. When from his wallet he suddenly showed colored Polaroid prints of his snow-white stucco ranch house, his flagstone-patioed blue pool overlooking the green sea of the Gulf, and his thirty-foot, teak-decked Chris-Craft moored at a wooden dock on a canal which ran just north of his well-manicured yard, I said, “The heavy equipment business must be booming.”
This disarmed him. “Huh. You know, I hadn’t thought about it but it wasn’t the way it looks from these pictures. I bought the property in ‘46 for nothin’. Then I built—well, just a house; then additions as the kids came; then the pool when they were big enough not to drown; then when I’d educated them and could afford it, I bought the Chris-Craft. I built the house, the pool and the docks myself. Yeah, I hadn’t thought of it but I suppose the joint is worth a shitload on today’s market.” He sighed. He studied the prints. “I love it, fuck if I don’t. Though there’s way too much room now that the kids are gone. You keep the rooms thinkin’ there’ll be big reunions and stuff like that at the holidays. And there are for a year, two. Then they go.”
Now he produced prints of his progeny and with a tortured fondness studied these, shuffling and reshuffling them like a deck of cards. His oldest son was an engineer in Vancouver, his youngest an ensign in the Gulf of Tonkin, and his “baby” daughter Lucia was studying for a master’s in language arts in Florence, Italy. “I send her to Syracuse University and she ends up in Florence. ‘Why Florence?’ I cry, already thinking how much dough it’s gonna cost me. She knows the old man is mush in her hands, she turns on the charm, she says, ‘Cause, Daddy,’“—he imitates her affected lisp for me—’“Florence is part of Syracuse University.’ Cha ever hear such bullshit?”
“I think she’s telling the truth,” I said. “I don’t know how tenuous the connection is, but I come from near Syracuse and I know I’ve heard before there’s some connection between the university and some school in Florence, some exchange program or other.”
“Connection, smonnection!” he cried. What he deemed his foolish generosity as a father was causing him proud pain. “She’s probably over there banging some greaser, will come home eight months with bambino, and expect me to set the Guinea up in a pizza palace.”
Certain he was Italian, I was as always nonplused that ethnic groups could so comically demean themselves and yet wouldn’t allow it from outsiders.
“I don’t mean to be impertinent but I took you for Italian.”
“Of course I’m a wop! Venetian. My grandfather was a custodian at the medical university at Padua. It was either the same thing for my father, or America. He chose America. I’m first-generation, my kids second, and I haven’t worked since the day I was discharged in ‘46 so
some stupid broad of a daughter can bring home some ginzo and start all over again. Why can’t she marry a guy named—” He paused. He was working himself into a state. He said, “Come si chiama?”
I laughed. “Exley, Fred.”
He was knocking himself out, this guy was. “Why can’t she marry a guy named Exley?” For my amusement and edification he sorrowfully pursed his lips and theatrically brought himself to the brink of feigned tears, woefully shaking his head.
“If she married this guy named Exley, it’d cost you more than a pizzeria. That’s how spoiled americani are. I’d want a joint called Casa Lucia sitting among eucalyptus trees on a bluff overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, with nothing but imported Chiantis and a penthouse apartment above the restaurant. If she brings home her greaser, as you call him, he can sleep on an army cot in the pizzeria—you can tell him he’s guarding the ovens—and he’ll still think he’s got it knocked up. Wait’ll he and Lucia present you with a couple of grandsons, take him deep-sea fishing in the Gulf, and give him a little help falling overboard. When he cries for help you can stand in the bows playing the thick-skulled Calabrese—you won’t be Venetian after all—saying, ‘Scusa, scusa, non capisco italiano. Non capisco.’”
Abruptly I was standing there in the bows, leadened and stricken with a heavy stupidity, shaking my head no and over and over again repeating non capisco, and as that luckless and fantazised son-in-law—and poor maligned Lucia! if she was banging anyone, for all we knew she was banging an Oxford man named Winston—went down for the third time I gave him a tentative, limp-wristed wave of farewell.
Pages from a Cold Island Page 5
