Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  I never that I remember got around to giving Gloria this message. By then I was already into my opening sally. In my rather monastically disciplined preparation for Gloria I’d found myself, with a single reservation, stricken with admiration for her and wanting to put that exception behind me directly I now addressed myself to it.

  “Look, Gloria, let me say at the outset that I’m perfectly prepared to accept Dick Boeth’s verdict on your sainthood. If in my reading I’ve acquired any qualms, it’s that I gather you are, well, without humor about yourself or anything regarding The Movement.”

  “Oh?” Gloria seemed surprised.

  In his articles on the radical chic Tom Wolfe had written of a party for Cesar Chavez’s migrant laborers Gloria had organized and held out in Gatsby country on the lawns of an affluent Long Island estate. To raise money for Chavez, Gloria had invited some beautiful people to mingle there among the grape pickers and Wolfe had described the lovely women standing about in their Gucci shoes, the breezes whipping their Pucci dresses, imagining their well-pampered pussies being penetrated by the pricks of melon pickers and Gloria had blasted the piece as “destructive.” Now, thirteen hundred miles’ distance and no few months in time from this odd fete, I asked Gloria if she didn’t think the incongruity of the scene lent itself to a certain hilarity; if in fact Wolfe might not have straight-facedly described the scene and permitted the hilarity to take care of itself. Alas, Gloria most certainly did not think so. She had worked “damned hard” on that party and with no little chilliness now repeated, “It was destructive.”

  At this point I slid rather glumly down in the back seat of the car. If Gloria’s subtlety did not allow for incongruity in that ludicrous gathering I hadn’t a prayer of getting an appropriate response to my next question. I had meant to ask Gloria if she did not see the probability that when the revolution she was so tacitly promulgating came it would be she and her Gucci-Pucci pals who got lined up against the wall and had their well-coifed heads blown off first; ask if she didn’t see the reprehensible condescension in her friends with their checkbooks offering these chicanos a warmth, camaraderie and love that cost them nothing, nothing, nothing whatever—well, perhaps an afternoon of whiffing the sweat of laborers and the energy it takes to write a check. And if Gloria herself did not see the incendiary condescension inherent in such commingling, would she not allow the possibility that some of those young chicano turks had seen it and marked it well? Going further down in my seat, I did not of course bother to ask these things.

  Gloria’s name had been linked romantically with that of Henry Kissinger and in chagrin Gloria had summoned reporters, held a press conference and told the assembled newsmen that she wasn’t then and had never been a girl friend of Dr. Kissinger.

  “Look, when I read that I was perfectly prepared to ignore your name’s being linked with Dr. Strangelove. But other than it’s being a rather unlikely romance, I don’t understand the kind of gravity that would allow you to feel the need to make a public disavowal of this quote affair.”

  When I’d first read Gloria’s announcement I’d literally cringed in embarrassment for her. All I could envision was some chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking twenty-year veteran of the city room being sent by his boss to a press conference and having arrived there being met with Gloria’s earthshaking, “I am not now or ever have been a girl friend of Henry Kissinger.” What was his reaction? Incredulity? Hilarity? Fury? Stupefaction? Had Gloria been a man, she might have got out of the conference with her limbs intact, but I suspect that within days she’d have been removed from the scene in a strait jacket, drooling, and what I was now trying to suggest to Gloria was that I thought the missionary rigidity with which she approached matters left her hopelessly vulnerable.

  “One must fight fire with fire,” Gloria said.

  By the time we reached the Sonesta Beach Hotel I had of course long since given up hope of Gloria’s relaxing her right-on posture and had turned to the books I had so diligently reread. Because Gloria and Mailer were said to be friends, I was surprised to learn she hadn’t read his Prisoner of Sex.

  “He does some job on Sister Kate Millett.”

  “I’ve heard. Norman wouldn’t have if he’d known her. She’s really nice. I mean, Norman likes me and he’d never do anything like that to me.”

  This remarkable piece of naïveté really set me back, and I was about to point out that if Mailer’s book was without merit otherwise he had brilliantly documented Millett’s embarrassing misreadings, her shoddy scholarship, her facility for lifting lines from context to score points they were never meant to score. I was going to say further that had Gloria written Sexual Politics not only did I doubt Mailer would have spared her but that friendship or no she wouldn’t have deserved sparing, when abruptly Gloria was laughing in a strangely unsettling and nerve-racking way.

  “That’s good! That’s really good!”

  Turning uneasily to her, I said, “What’s good?”

  “The Prisoner of Sex! I mean, that title is so classically apt. I mean, Norman really is a prisoner of sex!”

  There was something so oddly childlike and gleeful in her tone that I did not know what to say. Bewildered, I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re all a little of that.”

  “But nobody,” Gloria assured me, “to the extent that Norman is.”

  By then we were at the hotel and from the electric-blue Buick Electra gathering our gear to go up to Gloria’s room for our “interview.” For the life of me I don’t know why I didn’t then and there profess illness, go back to my island, get drunk with Zita, and have a ball. I guess I stayed partly out of courtesy, partly because I can’t help being a creature of somewhat frayed hopes, partly because I believed my life style with women was a shambles and thought I might yet take something from Gloria to abet me on my farcical journey in search of my destiny or salvation or whatever preposterous thing I imagined myself in search of.

  I of course held no brief for Mailer, but one could see that in The Prisoner of Sex his reference to Steinem had been made as one to a friend, and I felt that whereas I was under no constraints to give Norman a few happy verbal knocks on his pompous noggin, it didn’t become Gloria to do so and I wished her laughter in pointing out Norman’s “enslavement” to sex hadn’t been so—well, catty. Who the fuck wasn’t a prisoner of sex? And once again I found myself thinking of toppling Zita the Zebra Woman onto the ruined bed. Once again I remembered falling asleep to the heady dreams of “lying” with Gloria. And had I not, but a half-hour before, been told by no less than the angels that I ought to shove my tongue in Gloria’s appetizing mouth and loll around on her fillings for a while? Had my eager tongue got that far it wouldn’t have stayed itself in those acidic backwaters and certainly would have gone on to the more deliciously forbidden areas of that heavenly creature! Were Norman and I the only prisoners? If not certainly with the likes of me, did not Gloria move among other men with an appraising eye, thinking that that one might be okay, that this one was a real drool? Perhaps not, perhaps not, and by the time we got to the room and I’d solemnly set up my tape recorder I was feeling somewhat catty myself and spoke to her with a wooden jollity.

  “One of those articles said you had small boobs. You aren’t too grand in the fucking jug department, are you?”

  But I could not pursue this nastiness. Quite angry, Gloria tried to come back with The Movement’s cliché reply. She tried to say, “I wouldn’t ask you how big your prick is, would I?” but, oh Lord, gentle reader, she couldn’t bring it off, she stumbled on the word prick, delicately and stutteringly substituted penis, the blood rose becomingly in those lovely cheekbones, and I smiled apologetically and thought, and I was sincere, I like this girl. I really do like this girl.

  I have the tapes, three hours of them, and I take this opportunity to tell any surly insatiable masturbator out there that if he sends me five hundred dollars in care of my publisher I’ll mail them off to him. To their erotic qualities I cannot attest, b
ut my dopily unemotional voice can easily be erased from the tapes, and the dedicated joint whacker can use the wonderfully modulated tones of Ms. Gloria to help him, as the crooner says, “make it through the night.” Because Gloria and I never finished the “interview” I have never bothered to listen to them. Of course, as I say this, it occurs to me that I have shamelessly teased and provoked the lustful-souled reader into believing there would be a confrontation on The Epic Scale between Gloria Wonderful and Monsieur Frederick.

  Such was not the case. Nor do I blame Gloria. She wasn’t much on her answers, but then I was a dreadful interviewer. Confronting each other over a narrow table, weary and enchanted eye to raspberry aviatrix’s spectacles, the intimidating hum of the tape recorder between us

  (something I later learned a trained reporter, realizing how much it discomfits his subject, would never use), Gloria and I were not a happy “mating”; and, in fairness to her, she had every right to expect I’d ask the moronic chauvinist’s questions like whether she scorned the new butter scotch, strawberry douches in favor of good old Ivory soap and hot water. But I’ve already said I cared not a mouse’s turd for this nit-picking and had been struck by the likeness of our backgrounds, how much she “cared” and how little I did. With all my heart I wanted to know why she did, and to understand that it was essential I discover who she was.

  In reading about her one of the things that had hit me most jarringly was her remarking the similarity of her childhood to that of Augie March. As it happened, and as I have elsewhere related in A Fan’s Notes, Augie March had at a certain time in my life been a Bible of mine, a volume I perused until the binding came off and the pages fell out, a novel I identified with to such a terrible and distressing degree that even now I remember everything about Augie’s tyrannical Grandma-“boarder” Lausch, sitting among her bric-a-brac, her fart-blowing pooch Winnie at her feet; Grandma Lausch lording it over all, with great cunning teaching Augie’s simple Mama the grave art of conning the charity institutions out of free spectacles, and so forth. And I remember Augie’s older brother Simon, even as a teen ager secretive, crafty, ballsy, funny, hard as nails, handsome, and utterly in thrall of, rhapsodized by, The American Dream. And always there was the idiot brother Georgie who, on reaching his manhood, was on Grandma Lausch’s orders “institutionalized,” after which Grandma refused to exit from her bedroom to say goodbye to him, to come out and witness “what she had wrought.” At the Army-Navy store Augie bought a little Gladstone bag for Georgie and with the keys taught him how to lock and unlock it, “that he might be a master of a little of his own, as he went from place to place” (I quote from memory!). In damp snow Augie and Mama had taken Georgie to the idiot farm on streetcars, changing from car to car in the filthy and melting Chicago slush. At the institution, Georgie, seeing himself among his own kind for the first time, “wagging their weak noodles,” and realizing that Mama and Augie are leaving him, sets up this tremendous, this overwhelming, this heart-crippling wail until Mama “took the bristles of his special head between her hands”—I numbered that scene among the great scenes in American fiction!

  Thus it was that on the publication of Herzog, when in order to make “hamper space” for his new “baby,” Bellow committed infanticide on Augie in an interview in the Sunday Times by implying the book was a youthful and rhetorical indiscretion, I wrote him one of my “mad” letters, furious in composition it was, which, happily (for I regard Bellow as one of our genuine Nobel candidates), I never mailed.

  Years later I at last got to meet Bellow at a cocktail party at a chic apartment on Chicago’s north side. As I knew he was going to be there, I was ready for him and was going to do it to him good for that “unforgivable” interview. But the apartment turned out to be on about the hundred and ninetieth floor, and it had floor-to-ceiling spot less glass walls making it seem as if one could take one petite step off the end of the rich wall-to-wall carpeting and come, whoooosssssh, face to face with his Maker. An upstate yokel, and a raving paranoic into the bargain, I got instantly dizzy and fled immediately to a couch where I found myself seated next to Bellow’s date. By the time I had a couple vodkas and with them the courage to maneuver, other guests had begun to crowd Bellow. He looked distraught and cornered, and when at length I got to him to do my “eloquent” number I found that all I had to con tribute was some idle and horseshit literary gossip.

  Be that as it may, I asked Gloria to tell me about the similarity of her childhood to Augie’s. I don’t recall her answer specifically but I’ll try to suggest the substance of it by drawing an analogy. In my senior year at USC I was summoned to some phony-baloney’s office and told that as an English major I’d failed to fulfill the second semester of a sophomore survey course covering the Romantic poets through Auden and Dylan Thomas (the first semester had of course covered Beowulf to Pope). When I explained to the bureaucrat that as a senior I’d already had all the material on a considerably more complex and heady level, some of it in graduate-level courses, and that my taking the course would be an extreme waste of time and money, he said, as one always did in those long-dead, tyrannical and good-riddance days, that I either fulfill the university’s “requirements” or fail to graduate.

  I then went to the professor, an elderly woman who by the students was rumored to have got her Ph.D by counting the thous and thees in Shakespeare, and asked her if I could, under the circumstances, circumvent the three-cut per-semester rule and come to her class for examinations only. She said no. So it was that I spent an entire term, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, at eight o’ fucking clock in the morning, listening, dopily and dreamily, to this wan soul talk in ritualistic phrases about material I’d already had presented to me. The one thing that made the semester memorable was falling madly, utterly, hopelessly in love with an absolutely stunning ash blonde who sat to my immediate left. Miss Diane Disney, the daughter of none other than the genius Walt! When I discovered this fact, I found it utterly precluded the son of a lineman approaching her “romantically”; but when a couple of years later I read in the society pages of the New York newspapers that she had married a USC tight end, I smiled sadly and decided that “the poor little rich girl” had no doubt been more accessible than I and about a hundred other “haunted” guys at USC had imagined. In any event, I wish now to tell her. across all these years, how much I worshiped her from “afar,” notwithstanding that in our close-cramped seats our elbows and toes brushed each other three gloomy mornings a week.

  Prior to discovering who Diane was, I had detected that the professor pandered shamelessly to her—And what does Diane think of this? And what does Diane think of that?—and one day, when we were discussing Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, I recall the exchange as something like this: That summer Diane had done her “grand tour” of Europe, the fact of which the professor was somehow aware, and she now asked Diane if she’d seen the castle at Chillon on which Byron had based descriptive aspects of his poem. Indeed Diane had. The professor then said that in his poem Byron had given either a very scant or a very elaborate description (I always thought Byron an old fraud and hence don’t remember the poem) of the castle and asked Diane to give us her reminiscence of that structure as compared with Byron’s. It was a stupid question, unfair to my adored Diane, assuming as it did that a stunning nineteen-year-old coed would run around Europe taking notes to check against the works of famous poets! Diane red-facedly pondered the question for many moments, try ing to call back the castle at Chillon, then offered the line that has endeared her to me forever:

  “Oh, it was a real castle all right!”

  Lord, dear reader, how I chuckled over and brooded on that line for days afterwards, thinking that in fairness to my lovely Diane, and compared with those castles created by her genius papa, wherein Snow White, Prince Charming, Grumpy, Dopey and all the other guys mucked about, the castle at Chillon had indeed been a real castle! And though, as I say, I don’t precisely remember Steinem’s response to my suggestion tha
t she parallel her life to Augie’s, and though I would continue to prompt her and learn that in the Steinem household there had been embarrassing “boxes of stuff” piled in the hallways or someplace, and that the Steinems had once had a welfare tenant upstairs or downstairs or someplace in their house, a guy who with charming regularity used to get smashed and beat the bejesus out of his bride, for whatever reason I vividly recall that Gloria’s initial response to my query summoned up the long-ago Diane and it was as though Gloria had said:

  “Oh, I had a real childhood all right!”

  Although we continued to talk and to laugh, to go through the motions, I guess that for me the interview ended with something Gloria said a few moments later. The break-ups of both my marriages had been dreadful affairs (none of those cool, suave, lightly ironical, New Yorker magazine partings for Exley); and though I get along jolly well with one of my exes now, the situation with the other is still and always will be horrendous—ghastly, man, ghastly —and probably a lot closer to my reader’s predicament than that sophisticated drivel novelists contrive. In reading about Gloria I had sensed that no matter how much she “had it together” in most respects, like me she had had difficulties sustaining relationships with the opposite sex. Having been asked in interviews about some of her past partners, she had not been altogether kind. About the famous and brilliant director Mike Nichols she’d been quoted as saying she’d mistaken his “head for a heart,” and she now admitted that she had indeed said that but that she and Mike were still “close” and that he had in fact called her up to sympathize with her over the “cruelty” of that particular piece (not likely, not at all likely, I later learned from a man who knew Nichols well enough to have spent days on Nichols’ sets watching him make his movies). I then went through the names of all the other “famous” men with whom Gloria had been “linked,” as Louella used to say. There was old “Ken” Galbraith, and “Teddy” Sorensen, and the great alto sax Paul Desmond, and Herb Sargent, and Rafer Johnson, and—well, to Gloria they had all been merely “friends,” which, it goes without saying, had me gritting my teeth, biting my tongue and repressing a terribly naughty-boy urge to ask Gloria if she fucked her friends.