Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  She wouldn’t under any circumstances lift a finger to bring Ms. Steinem and Mr. Exley together, but she would give the word to the rich and famous writer on his return from London. “I’ll bet he won’t call her either. He’ll just laugh. He’ll think the booze has finally destroyed your brain cells completely.” I then called two other writers I knew, Joe Flaherty and Jack Newfield, and a week later, at nine in the morning, I answered the phone and it was Gloria. She was nice. She apologized for the trouble she’d put me to and agreed to see me on one of her upcoming swings into Florida.

  Ms. Steinem and I did not get together on the occasion of her visit to Palm Beach. I had taken too long to make contact with her and by then her speaking engagement was already upon us and I was in no shape to meet her. My ribs were such that I could now breathe, my balls no longer looked as if I were suffering elephantiasis; but I was still on a bender and because it had become apparent to me that Ms. Steinem took herself as piously as the saint Dick Boeth suggested she might be, I thought I’d best sober up, reread the gurus of her movement, and everything I could find by and about her. On the phone Steinem had suggested she’d still like to know in some detail precisely what I had in mind and my last gesture before going on the wagon—because I was too drunk to put it in writing—was to talk my ideas onto a thirty-minute cassette tape and mail the tape off to her.

  I was so smashed I don’t vividly recall what I said into that recorder, but I remember enough so that even thinking of it in retrospect forces the blood to my face, causes some embarrassed aw-shucks gulping, and an incipient vertigo takes over. Steinem and Mailer were rumored to be friends.

  He claims it was she who planted the seeds of his political ambition by asking him to run for mayor of New York City (though how she could reconcile this with her whole philosophical outlook escapes me), and for that reason I thought I’d pull a Norman (which ill behooves me, which ill be hooves any of us!) and on the tape I came across almost as full of shit as he is. With great solemnity I began by setting forth my portfolio (it consisted after all of one fucking book!); I gravely related the difficulties I was experiencing with Pages from a Cold Island; and I then really went as batshit as Norman talking about the Proustian-Tolstoyan-Joycean novel he is one day, one day, one day going to lay at the public’s feet, leaving all his peers for dead, and told Steinem that the next time I came to Fun City people would be pointing me out and breathlessly exclaiming, “See that fat gray-haired guy down the end of the bar? He’s one of the best writers in America!”

  As it happened, the tape made no difference at all. Steinem was too busy to listen to it—she had one of her lackeys do so and report its contents to her—and at last we agreed to meet on a morning in early December at the Miami airport. In league with Ms. Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a black advocate of state-sponsored children’s day-care centers, she was the night before addressing the student body of some rinky-dink sounding college up in the redneck country of northern Florida. The following morning she was coming on to Miami for a fund-raising dinner in George McGovern’s behalf and she told me if I wanted to meet her plane she’d give me the time between her arrival and the moment she’d have to take a nap and primp herself for the night’s festivities. A Ms. Joanne Edgar—Steinem’s secretary, I gathered—assured me it’d be the longest interview Ms. Steinem had ever granted.

  I said, “Golly.”

  By that time the dingbats on Beach Court had got thoroughly caught up in my zealous yearning to engage Ms. Steinem. What little business I still had with the outside world was conducted over the phone on the back bar. These conversations were invariably overheard and known all over the Court by nightfall, and now that I was once again sober, swimming and taking the sun, and my demeanor had taken on a certain sad-eyed dopey earnestness, the gang, partly out of affection, partly out of lack of anything better to do, began planning the whole outing as though they were planning their prepubescent son’s first journey to dancing school.

  Because she was sure I’d wear what she called my “foul fucking Bermudas,” Big Daddy’s wife went through some cardboard boxes in my closet and found some white shirts, a pair of gray wool J. Press slacks and my black wing-tip Florsheims and had the shirts laundered, the slacks pressed and the shoes reshod. Diane Rent-A-Car (we called her that to distinguish her from Diane the day barmaid), one of the cocktail-hour regulars who managed an automobile rental service, had read in Levitt’s Esquire piece that Steinem owned all kinds of hang-ups as to what was and wasn’t seemly and in this regard cited Levitt’s saying that in order to receive some corny award or other at Harvard Gloria had refused to arrive there in anything less than a great long limousine (Gloria later denied this, as well as every other contention of Levitt’s), and for that reason Diane wouldn’t hear of my meeting her in my lime-white beautiful Nova. Because it would take “a fucking week to clean the fucking empty Bud cans” from the car’s interior and “the rusty fucking fenders” would doubtless fall off as I was suavely trying to tool Gloria from the air port’s parking lot, Diane put at my disposal a chauffeur-driven electric-blue Buick Electra!

  McBride’s reaction was the most touching of all. He spent days staring at me over his twitching bandido mustache, shaking his head with heartfelt rue at my abhorrent sobriety, and when he at last came to believe that my mission was what I said it was and not, as he kept insisting, to show Gloria “the frightful hog,” he began stuffing my shirt pockets with twenty-dollar bills and telling me to buy Gloria a nice lunch poolside at the Sonesta Beach Hotel. McBride always summed up his notions of a nice lunch with the words:

  “Champagne, the whole mother-fucking smear!”

  The night before the long-awaited meeting I packed a little overnight bag, quite as solemnly as I’d done a little satchel when at eleven my father told me he’d had enough and to get ready as he was taking me to reform school. In it I put my cassette recorder, a half-dozen virginal tapes, the questions I’d neatly typed up on yellow lined paper, the various Bibles of the movement I’d reread in preparation for Gloria, and a handful of ball-point pens. I had decided that McBride’s champagne poolside lunch would take much too much of my time and in my refrigerator, wrapped snugly in cellophane against their morning’s packing, I had made two of my favorite sandwiches for Gloria and me, tuna fish, hard-boiled egg and chopped onion, all whipped lovingly up together with mayonnaise, a dab of mustard and salt and pepper. When I’d taken the ball-points from my desk I noticed that I still had Yogi’s .22 Magnum pistol and for a moment I thought of packing that. If my confrontation with Gloria turned into a nasty business (and I had no reason to suspect it might not), I thought I could remove it from the bag, level it at what Gloria herself calls her “old stone face,” tell her to disrobe and pull a Henry Miller on her—say, use her for a wheelbarrow by walking her naked body around the suite on her hands while I gripped those creamy-white thighs as the barrow’s handles.

  The last thing I did before retiring was go down to Zita the Zebra Woman’s suite. Zita was currently the featured stripper downstairs in the Islander Room. I’d known her intimately, as they say, for years, and I asked if before the show started she wouldn’t give me a little fuck to assure my getting a nice comfy sleep. Zita adamantly re fused, saying I had spoken nary a word to her in the week she’d been back at the hotel and she could not abide me if this is what I was like when sober. Without any ado whatever I reared back and with all my might gave Zita a resounding open-handed crack on her left cheek, and instantly we were sinking in the bedding and copulating like madmen.

  Zita had once tried to get me to tie her to the bedpost and flail her with wet towels while she hung her weeping head and lisped, “Hurt me, daddy, hurt me: Zita’s been bad, bad girl.”

  Although I refuse to go that far in the service of any one’s fetish I had come to see that the one piece of eloquence Zita understood was a fierce boot in the ass and right up until the time there came the knock on the door signifying fifteen minutes until show time Zita and I ha
d a most exemplary, exhausting and animal-like fuck.

  I was of course testing my balls. If Levitt’s implication that Gloria’s sexual inclinations ran to the rich, the famous and the powerful were true, I thought that by the time we got done with the heady business of Pages from a Cold Island she’d obviously be able to see that though I was totally un known now I’d one day be famous and that during the nappy-poo she told me she’d have to have in preparation for the night’s festivities she might be kind and invite me to lie with her, as they say in the Testaments. Who knows? Certainly my homemade sandwiches would show how domesticated I was and perhaps afterwards she’d want to take me back to her New York apartment to “make a nice home” for her, keep the place tidy, hand-wash her raspberry trousers, 1and when she came home from a hard day at the office have ready for her a nice hot dish of lasagne. Better still, one of the last things I’d done in preparation for Gloria was skim the inaugural issue of Ms. If nothing were going to come of Pages from a Cold Island, I thought she could add me to the editorial staff and I could sit around the office floor with the girls in their overalls as the weighty editorial decisions were made and play a sort of devil’s advocate, swigging warm beer from the bottle, belching, scratching and farting.

  On the editorial page under WHAT IS A MS.? I’d read: “In practice, Ms. is used only with a woman’s given name: Ms. Jane Jones, say, or Ms. Jane Wilson Jones. Obviously it doesn’t make sense to say Ms. John Jones: a woman identified only as her husband’s wife must remain a Mrs.”‘ As I laughingly read this and thought I could have prevented that kind of simplistic lunacy from slipping through, I skipped to the back of the magazine, came across a lengthy interview with a lesbian, and the first question and answer my eyes fell on were these:

  “When you first realized that you were possibly getting involved with a woman, were you afraid or upset? No. The strange thing is that the next morning, after I left, I felt a fantastic high. I was bouncing down the street and the sun was shining and I felt tremendously good. My mind was on a super high.”

  Certainly what was needed here was more than warm beer swigging, scratching and farting and in my role of scurvy advocate I now heard myself saying, “Now look, girls, let’s not get carried away—let’s not let this sneak through and make something of it it isn’t. These broads are popping each other’s nuts, pure and simple. You know what I mean, pure and simple? Look, let me illustrate by telling you the story of Zita the Zebra Woman and me.”

  It was while dozily daydreaming such heady dreams of glory, with the pungent odors of the Zebra Woman still upon me, that I fell asleep. Presently it was morning and, seated next to my chauffeur, a bespectacled bepimpled teenaged clod named Bill, I was in my electric-blue Buick Electra wheeling down the Sunshine State Parkway toward my ill-starred meeting with Ms. Gloria Steinem.

  7

  But listen: I fell totally, dizzyingly in love with Ms. Gloria Steinem almost immediately, when she had not been five minutes disembarked from the twin-engined Aztec which had brought her down from out of those heady blue skies of southern Florida, and by the time we reached Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, in Tricky Dicky Country, I’d settled down to the sad, graceless and pedestrian state of being once again severed from love.

  Gloria’s hair was coifed in its usual way, flowing black-sepia with those blond strands that fell over and triangularly framed her lovely cool brow. Here were her big round raspberry aviatrix’s spectacles resting on those great high cheekbones that seemed somehow so much more striking than other cheekbones; and when she offered her hand, said hello and smiled and I had a glimpse of those big even white teeth I was visited by angels who whispered to me that something quite like heaven would be to put my tongue in Gloria’s mouth and just loll around on her back fillings for about a half-hour before even moving up those marvelous ivory monuments up front. The gang’s having attired me in J. Press slacks and Florsheims proved an egregious error, for Gloria had on a pair of crumby-looking raspberry suede cyclist’s boots, raspberry corduroy breeches, and a short-sleeved navy blue cotton sportshirt that laced up the front in little x’s, Kit Carson style. She carried a floppy old canvas and leather grocery bag, ballooning with correspondence and manuscripts, and this together with a somewhat anemic pallor, a real tiredness about the eyes and a sagging untoned thinness reminded me again of how incredibly busy she must be.

  One of the articles pointed out that Ms. Steinem’s penchant for trimness bordered on the pathological in that her cupboards were forever bare and she seldom deigned to eat. As one given to a sloppy self-indulgence I’d forgiven her that on the theory that any kind of dedicated commitment, which Gloria certainly owned in abundance, must begin with a commitment to one’s own person; but looking at her now I saw her thinness lacked the toning of exercise. There was a kind of pinched droopiness about it; she looked as swayback as a weary but splendid race horse, so vulnerable my heart went immediately out to her and I could hardly wait to feed her one of my tuna fish, hard-boiled egg and chopped onion sandwiches (later I tried to feed her both of them but she politely and adamantly demurred, in her forceful way informing me she’d discovered the war against FAT was a war in which one had to be ever vigilant, pretty much I gathered like the one against chauvinists, and though it may have been my paranoia I thought at this point she gave my tumtum a rather ironical and scrupulous going over, and I sucked in like a madman). With some trepidation I volunteered to carry her grocery bag and Gloria graciously handed it over and smiled wisely, her way of saying that her commitment to liberation did not extend to eliminating the petty little gestures we pigs felt it necessary to make to maintain the lunatic tenor of our machismo.

  When we started down to pick up Gloria’s suitcase at the baggage station, I stepped onto the escalator first, at tempting boldly to lead the way, stumbled rather badly, and when I at last managed to recover myself I turned to find Gloria standing ramrod straight on the step behind and above me, a queen descending to the nether regions to view her fallen subjects. To account for my stumbling, I said to that incredibly lovely face up there above me, and I was as precious as a cherub at confession, “I’m sorry about my awkwardness. It’s just—you know, you know—that I’m so intimidated, you know, being with you and all.”

  Then if possible I became even more nauseating. I smiled with a weakness verging on illness, batted my big baby brown eyes at her, and gave her a helplessly feeble shrug by way of eliciting her utmost in pity. Gloria looked straight down at me and with deadly serious and sympathetic earnestness said, “Don’t be.”And, oh Lord, I score that as the moment I fell head over heels in love with Ms. Gloria Steinem! What can I say of the simple eloquence of that “Don’t be”? It said that though she could see how queasy I’d been rendered in the face of her beauty, her regality, her nobility, her grandeur, that though she could certainly appreciate that I was one of life’s jerk-offs where women were concerned, she was reassuring me that she would do nothing immodest to set my blood aflame and send me back to the island, say, with the pimpled clod Bill tooling the electric-blue Buick Electra in the front seat and I doing a savage number on my weary and wounded genitalia in the back seat. For that assurance I gave her a shy smile of heartfelt thanks, then turned away from her and we descended into the nether regions in screaming silence. For some reason all I could think of was what Gloria would have made of my “becoming male timidity” had she seen me twelve hours earlier knocking Zita the Zebra Woman ass over tea kettle onto the bed, then mounting her among the ruined bedding.

  At the electric-blue Buick Electra Gloria wanted to be democratic and sit up front with my “friend” Bill, but with a flick of the wrist I wafted this suggestion off by pointing out that friend Bill was in fact “my driver.” When Gloria seemed to linger still, as though even the prospect of shar ing a seat with a chauffeur did not throw a stalwart liberal like herself off stride, I held my ground and insisted she get into the back seat. Although her present proximity to Bill couldn’t be avoided, I ha
dn’t wanted her within a country mile of him. Coming down in the car I’d asked him why he wasn’t in school. Bill said he’d dropped out earlier that fall; and when I asked him whatever for, Bill had snarled, “The fucking niggers, that’s what for.”

  That fall the Palm Beach County school system had gone to full-scale integration. In some of the most abandoned patterns of which I’d ever heard they were busing kids from one end of the county to the other. Every other day a racial incident at one school or another was reported in the newspapers, and all the way from my island to Miami I had sat in thrall to Bill’s haircurlingly hateful diatribe about the “fucking niggers” beating him up and taking his lunch money, and so forth, and so forth. Rendered downright timid by the extent of Bill’s in ordinate rage, and sad and sorry that a man so young—a boy, really—could be so consumed with loathing, I found myself studying him out of the corner of my eye and wondering if his problem had anything really to do with blacks.

  I don’t know what it was but Bill seemed to own that peculiar pimply surliness which so magnetically attracts the cruelty of his fellows (a cruelty that seems always to be abstracted from the literature, movies and TV shows about teenagers) and he reminded me of guys up home we had, as kids, pounded on just to work up a sweat. For all that, though, afterwards I found myself wishing we had sat up front and that for Gloria’s benefit I’d lured Bill into his quaint spiel on the “fucking niggers.” The trouble with Steinem and her pals changing the world from coffee klatsches in Fifth Avenue apartments, and all those fatuous Harvard sociologists drawing their impressive diagrams in the cubicles of the department of Health, Education & Welfare, was that they seemed touchingly oblivious that the Bills of this world, both white and black, even existed and seemed obsessed with the puerile notion that things were as simple as wishing them so (McGovern’s whole campaign was permeated with this youthfully demented naïveté): and if nothing else I made a mental note to have Gloria tell Frank Mankiewicz, whom she was meeting that evening for the fund-raising festivity, that the money they’d be raising to help McGovern in the Florida primaries might better be employed to courting the delegates of McGovern’s home state or flushed down the toilet bowl.