Ms. Steinem wore a long-sleeved black jersey turtleneck and big round raspberry aviatrix’s spectacles, and though the color on my TV was poor she appeared to have abandoned the bleached blond strands which habitually fell over and triangularly framed her high cool brow. I smiled. When I had complimented her on the loveliness of her hair and asked her if she tended it herself, instead of graciously accepting it for the harmless compliment it was, she had, to my uneasiness, used the occasion to ascend her platform. A woman named Rosemary—”Sister Rosie,” she’d called her—was her colorist, the best in Manhattan, but in a man’s game Sister Rosie didn’t get credit for so being. Looking at her now and smiling, I wondered if poor put-upon Rosemary, carried round the bend by the discriminatory practices of all those fag (were these the men to whom Ms. Steinem was referring?) hair stylists in New York City, hadn’t finally in a swoon of oppression gone off the deep end and taken a jolly leap from the heights of the Pan Am building.
“I love you, Gloria. I worship and adore you.”
Directly Ms. Steinem began debasing the language by saying something to the effect that she’d come to Washing ton—I had a movie idea: “Ms. Steinem Goes to Town”— to join hands with her “black brothers and sisters.” Again I smiled tentatively, sadly. Did Gloria really believe that keeping company with the black Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson—”Shit,” I thought, “half the women in America would do the same!”—gave her some privileged insight into the black soul, made her a Daughter of Islam? She doubtless did and seemed not in the least to understand that when the black revolution came it would be she above all who got that splendidly milky and columnar throat slit first. In the same way William Styron so acutely has Nat take a fence post and bash in the chestnut-haired head of the lovely, betaffeted Miss Margaret Whitehead (she who above all in her young, innocent and ignorant way had inti mated a comprehension of Nat’s plight), there was nothing the black loathed so much as the presumption (if we could give him nothing else, he demanded the right to the unique ness of his suffering) of an intimacy with his humiliation, abuse and degradation at the hands of a white America. Obviously referring to Governor Wallace and his ilk, Gloria said that all the pressures being brought to bear on the platform committee were erupting from the right and she’d come to the Capitol to rectify that. Failing to do so, she implied she would withhold her support from the Democratic Party.
Oh, my!
Her performance was restrained to the point of being coldly mannered, brittle, arrogant, slightly nasty, and not altogether fair. Her lovely head was incapable of admitting that in the primaries Governor Wallace had taken his views to the people (which she certainly hadn’t), had been nearly assassinated and rendered paraplegic in the process, and that in fairness to the delegates he’d picked up his views had every right to an airing. Nor could she admit the historical reality that in any close election, which if the Democrats won (and at the gut level I knew McGovern hadn’t a prayer) this was certain to be, no Democrat had ever won without a heavy Roman vote in the cities and that “an abortion on demand” clause was suicidal, not to mention that there is now and will always be a continuing philosophical and legal debate on whether or not the fetus has rights.
At the moment I could not isolate what it was— though unlike Ms. Steinem I wasn’t sure of anything and stood abjectly poised to admit it might be the obvious emasculatory fear—but as I had been when I’d last seen her I once again found myself afraid of as well as for her. Her posture was so vulnerably rigid that one suspected the slightest well-placed jab would cause the collapse of her entire spinal column and that behind that moisturelessly cool and beautiful mask there were harbored unspeakable grievances, mean furies and aborted passions, and I knew that if she represented the New Democrat, I could not in con science vote for McGovern. Since I’d last talked with her she’d apostrophized into her thinking a reverse sexism wherein she’d begun to elevate women to a plateau both beyond and quite apart from the concerns of men, she had equated women’s role in marriage with that of whores, and she appeared either to be seeking headlines (a very real possibility) or to have become tetched. And how unworthy, unmanly and self-indulgent she made me feel, with my wretchedly unbecoming grief at Edmund Wilson’s demise and my lunatic calls to Panacea. Her very presence was a stinging reprimand and summons to get off my ass, to cease from my unseemly jerking off, and to enlist myself in her and McGovern’s holy cause.
But, alas, I couldn’t.
From a young academic at Oberlin College I’d once been sent a note and a student’s term paper on A Fan’s Notes. The paper was brilliant, hilarious and totally derogatory. Taking as his vantage point the fact that my narrator had thrown away all of the Sunday Times save for the sports section, the student said that nobody could seriously approach a protagonist who wasn’t interested in “significant things like world events.” Proceeding from there, and in a wildly funny and sardonic way, the student had destroyed my narrator for what the student considered my narrator’s monumental self-indulgence. In his note the academic told me the boy was an electronics engineering student, had an IQ “off the charts,” and that though he wrote splendidly and the paper was obviously worth an A, how did one “teach” such people?
On my post card in reply I wrote, “One doesn’t.”
And the discomforting thing about Ms. Steinem, and all the Steinems of the world, was her similarity to this boy: her cocksure capacity to make one feel unworthy in the face of her concerns, this haughty need to make her concerns my concerns. She reminded me of those students who so diligently perused school issues of Time, boldly underlining everything, and got their A’s in what we used to call “current events” while I had dreamt of dry-fucking cheer leaders. There was a kind of rigidly terrifying single-mindedness about these people which I frankly considered uneducable and I knew that, were I to save my soul, I couldn’t under any circumstances permit them to make their obsessions mine.
Let Ms. Steinem go to Miami, run hand-wringing and weeping up and down the aisles of Convention Hall and imagine herself caught up in historical events of great pith and moment, I had my own “selfish” griefs to allay. I would go to Talcottville, talk with the few people who had known him, and find some way to help put the ghost of Edmund Wilson on its way. Yes, I thought, let history judge whether the wiser course was to have petitioned Elizabeth I to engage the Spanish Armada in the Channel or to have wept at the bier of Shakespeare. If one could draw any consolation from Steinem’s troubled performance it was that she was still embarked on her “temporary aberration” of proselytizing the women’s gospel. She had told me that speaking at universities and what she called her “whole public bag” was merely a temporary aberration (she had used that expression three times), that her real work was writing, and that when she felt she’d contributed everything she could to the movement, she would go back to that real work. At the time I hadn’t been unkind enough to say that she’d better hope her temporary aberration lasted forever, but watching her forbidding performance on TV I had, if for nothing else, to be thankful that she was still in this public limbo and that we were therefore being spared her prose.
In December I’d interviewed Ms. Steinem at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne in Florida. I’d gone to her a troubled, “wounded” man, my life a shambles. When in early September I at last accepted that Pages from a Cold Island, a book on which I’d been working for four years, was a bad book, I decided to go to Europe. With brown supermarket bags and heavy blond cord I tightly wrapped the four hundred and eighty pages of yellow second sheets that comprised the manuscript and deposited the excessively neat (with scissors I even trimmed the excess cord) package into the trunk of my gray-green Chevrolet Nova parked in the windswept sandy lot behind the hotel, where for three years it had sat in dumb anticipation, the relentless sun having baked its paint lime-white, the elements having rusted out its fenders from beneath. In stolid sadness I packed my bags, took a Shawnee Airlines dozen-passenger Beechcraft
to Nassau, a Bahamas International Airways flight to Luxembourg. Thence I flew to Rome. I’d never been to Europe before and wasn’t in fact in any shape to go anyplace—perhaps to the loony bin.
I had to go. As I’ve said, except on those infrequent occasions when by friends I was “kidnapped” and driven across the causeway to the Riviera Theater on the main land, I never left the island, and even these outings were disastrous. At an interval of eighteen months I had on two Saturday nights been taken to The Godfather and The French Connection and sitting among full-house weekend crowds I had understood not a word of what was taking place on the screen. It was something more unsettling than the dialogue and the understated sound tracks with which the writers and the directors had attempted to catch the idiom of characters caught up in a society given over entirely to a sleazy verbal shorthand. What had proved so ignominious was that on both occasions I had found myself next to perfectly attuned young couples who had caught everything and had on cue roared and moaned and gone rigidly breathless throughout the films while I had sat in exasperation, tilting my head to the right and to the left, in suppliance leaning forward toward the screen, feeling as dense and unresponsive as lard and older than Methuselah; and to imagine that I, who couldn’t even understand a movie, was ready to leave the idyllic stillness of that room and hike jauntily on the Appian Way, stand in humbled awe before the Colosseum, or reverently explore San Pietro in Vaticano indicates the extent to which my book’s failure had deranged me. In fact, I understand in retrospect I’d never do anything like sightseeing in Rome. I suppose I thought if I came at last to lie retchingly drunk beneath tables of the sidewalk cafes on the Via Veneto, if I could create that ultimate torpor and sloth, those epiphanies might come. I could then flee back to Singer Island prepared to outflank the manuscript now imprisoned in the hot tomb of the Nova’s trunk, and thereupon deliver a “masterpiece.”
In Rome I was for ten days the guest of Ed, an American novelist my age. Like me, Ed had published one interesting novel which seemed destined to be his life’s output. Where Ed got his money I don’t know, nor did I ask, though he appeared to have plenty of it and worked all the angles besides, including having on retainer of twenty-five dollars a month a Roman overseas operator who between midnight and eight permitted him to make calls to the States. Each day at Ed’s apartment we were drunk on vodka by one p.m., at which time we enthusiastically endorsed the Roman custom fare la siesta and snored until five, then cleaned up and went to the Trattoria Maria on a lane off the Via Veneto and ate antipasto and spaghetti al burro or con salsa di vongoli, then went back onto the Via Veneto to Harry’s American Bar, got drunk again on Irish whiskey, and in English talked nostalgically with other Americans about professional football, which we all missed and all agreed made the autumn an execrable time to be in Italia. On returning to Ed’s apartment we drank espresso and grappa and talked about our “work in progress” until two in the morning—eight at night on the eastern seaboard at home—and then using Ed’s bribed operator we telephoned people we knew in the States. Nobody seemed surprised or awfully pleased to hear from us, and when I was asked, as I invariably was, what I was doing in Rome I always said either that I hadn’t the foggiest notion or that I’d come to see the Colosseum but that nobody’d tell me where it was. Ed and I were doing nothing we couldn’t as well have done from the bar of the Village’s Lion’s Head Ltd. had we been able to bribe a New York City operator.
At Harry’s I struck the acquaintance of a wealthy, Vandyked, Oxford-educated Maltese of thirty who owned apartment houses in London, Paris, Rome, the South of France, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Valletta, Malta, where he lived but was only able to get a few days a year. He hadn’t when I met him been home for nineteen months. He was having a torrid and, I suspect, sick affair with an American starlet who had come to Italy for the spaghetti Westerns. I can’t imagine what she was doing to him, but he was so enslaved he daren’t leave her for the few hours necessary to fly to Malta, and as he saw I wasn’t doing anything he suggested I go there, live in his apartment, and spy on his manager who he was sure was screwing him. He would give me a letter to the manager admitting me to the apartment— he described it as splendid with wrought-iron balconies overlooking the Grand Harbor—and said I was welcome to all the whiskey in his plentifully stocked cabinets. He said the matter of checking on his manager was easy. He drew me a map of his various properties, including alleys leading into the courtyards behind them, and told me all I had to do was wait until dark and check the lights coming from the various apartments. His manager claimed the buildings were running to only sixty percent occupancy, and if lights were coming from all the windows he was obviously not only going to need a new manager but the present one would be food for Mediterranean fish. For an Oxford man, he made the threat ring paradoxically and sinisterly true. Detecting my reluctance, he picked up the bar phone at Harry’s, charged the calls to a number in Rome, and in his Oxford accent made loudly impressive talk to both his grocer and liquor dealer in Valletta. He told them I was to be his guest in Malta and that they should give me any thing I needed and bill him for it.
“You are set, dear Frederick. What do you say, chap?”
I went. I stayed for eight days, had all my clothes cleaned and laundered, repacked my bags against what I was sure was going to be instant flight, and checked on nobody, not to mention the manager. Each day I sat from sunup to sundown in my jockey shorts on the wrought-iron balcony, watched the yachts and the naval ships maneuver in the Grand Harbor, and drank vodka and Schweppes quinine water. The only volume in my host’s library not dealing with money or sex (the same thing, in a way) was History of the Wars of the French Revolution, a ten-pound tome I laid at my feet on the balcony and read cover to cover, hunched over with my drink and turning pages with the big toe of my right foot. When I completed it, and I cannot now remember a single notion put forth by its authors, I thought about going to India to the Vindhya Hills north of the Narbada River to seek out a holy man about whom I’d read, but as I had no idea how to get there I flew instead to Barcelona and for a week walked all day and well into the night looking for a shaded park or avenida of which I’d once seen a photo. Hemingway was said to have sat on a bench beneath its trees and thought long thoughts. When the calles of Barcelona all became familiar and began to repeat themselves in my mind and I still hadn’t found the park or avenida—or if I had, hadn’t recognized it—I flew back to Luxembourg and used the other half of my ticket to return to Nassau.
In Nassau I stayed four days, and on my last night there got the worst beating of my life. At the piano bar of the Anchorage Hotel up the street from where I was staying at the Sheraton British Colonial, I’d met a Bahamian charter boat captain and his stunning girl friend, a wealthy American of nineteen from Medford, Oregon. The captain was a Conch. In the parlance of south Florida and the Bahamas a Conch or Conchy Joe is an interbred person, mostly white, who for reasons known only to himself hates blacks with a near-deranged passion, and he and his family, as they have done for generations, make their livings from the sea. Conchs are stoic, formidable, uncommunicative, terrifying in anger. The captain had the same name as a family I knew on Singer Island, and since I knew them to be originally from the large Long Island in the south Bahamas I asked him if he was from there.
When he said that he was, I said, “I know some of your cousins stateside.”
“Got nothin’ but cousins, mon.”
That was almost the extent of the conversation, his odd American paramour being even less communicative than he. Thus the next day proved an unsettling surprise. While the Conch was “fishing a party” from St. Louis, she came to my hotel in her eighteen-foot custom-built Donzi with twin 427 Holman Moody engines and at a hair-raising seventy miles an hour took me to a small out island to water-ski. We water-skied for an hour, dropped anchor in a cove, waded ashore, and lay down face up on a blanket, whereupon, as abruptly as a belch, she took down my bath ing suit and with her mouth engaged me. Sh
e did this all day long, and did the same for the next three days. She’d absorb the load, lay back, leaving her hand on my exposed genitalia, then after a time begin all over again. She wanted to do nothing else. Whenever out of the most rudimentary considerations of politeness I’d query her about her past, she’d hatefully sneer, “Medford, Oregon—what’s to know?” And though I suppose that she was, I’m not much given to the literal use of “insane.” If I confronted the malaise with a quart a day I had to concede her her right to confront that same malaise in her own way and admit the simple possibility that she was, as the kids say, “doing her own thing.” Daily she had me back at the Sheraton British Colonial by four, I’d shower, shave and dress, then go to the hotel’s Whaler sidewalk cafe fronting on Nassau’s lovely harbor and drink V.O. until dark, whereupon I’d retire in anticipation of the next day’s ogreish pleasures.
On the fourth evening I decided to see the town, and after inquiring of a cab driver ended at Tommy’s night club. Between strident calypso sets of the steel band, I talked with Tommy, the owner. As an American married to a Bahamian he was under the black government allowed to own a business. When he pointed out his wife manning the cash register at the far end of the bar, without thinking I said, “She’s a Conch, isn’t she?” to which he shook his head in wondrous admiration and said, “You better believe a Conch. You cross her she’d cut out your gizzard and feed it to you.”
Pages from a Cold Island Page 7
