Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  I was saving one guy, Thomas Guinzburg, who seemed to me such an ideal mate for Queen Gloria, and about whom I’d heard many nice things, until last. Guinzburg owned one of the half-dozen most prestigious publish ing houses in America; he was wealthy; he was said to number among his friends and entertain at his town house dinner table the rich and the famous from the theater, the movies, the literati, and so forth; and above all, and for which one will forgive him, he had thought enough of Gloria to have allowed to be printed, under the Viking imprimatur, her Beach Book. I wanted to know what the problem with Guinzburg had been.

  On the morning that President Kennedy left on his trip to Dallas, Gloria had been in Sorensen’s White House office and from the window had watched the President walk across the lawn and board the helicopter that would take him to the airport to Air Force One and to his eventual des tiny. On learning of his assassination two days later in New York, Gloria apparently went into some kind of catatonic withdrawal, some epitome of grief beyond us lesser Americans, and that was the day she knew she and Guinzburg couldn’t hack it. Gloria thought Guinzburg took the assassination too cavalierly. Now Gloria raised her right eyebrow into an ironical arc above her raspberry aviatrix’s spectacles, smiled tolerantly, and with wry condescension said, ‘Tom Guinzburg should have been a sports reporter for the Daily News.”

  Ye fucking gads, dear reader, where could Gloria and I go from there? One must understand that the dream of my life—the dream of my fucking life!—was to be a sports reporter for the Daily News! I’d have a lovely and loving wife named Corinne; three sons named Mike, Toby and Scott; two boxers, Killer and Duchess, with bulging muscles under their fawn coats, and black ferocious masks, and like all boxers they’d be big whining slobbering babies who couldn’t even sleep when they were denied access to the boys’ beds. I’d have a split-level home somewhere on the north shore of the island, say, at Northport; and just at that moment I was up to here with Corinne, the boys, Killer and Duchess, my boss at the sports desk would telephone me and cry, “Hey, Ex, don’t forget you got to fly out to the coast and cover the Mets’ five-game stand with the Dodgers.” And off I’d wing, to stand in the press box, a paper cup of Coors beer in my hand, the klieg lights dissolving the faces of the crowd into one another, cheering like mad for Seaver and the guys; after which, renewed, I’d fly back to the loving Corinne, Mike, Toby and Scott, Killer and Duchess. A sports reporter for the Daily News? Had Gloria’s humble beginnings in that crummy Polack section of East Toledo been just a dream on her part, and had she sprung full-blown out of the mists, sitting in her present eminence as she sat before me now, imagining that with all that arm-raised, fist-clenched, “right-on” horseshit she was up to something infinitely grander and more noble than my dream of Corinne, Mike, etc.. etc? From that moment on, though words continued being spoken, the interview was over. At the end of our time together she accepted my as yet unasked questions, said she’d take them back to New York with her, work on them at her earliest convenience, and mail them off to me. We then had a distinctly uneasy parting.

  Early the next morning I telephoned to thank her for so graciously giving of her time. She was wonderfully kind and said she couldn’t recall having had such a stimulating day in ever so long. She also told me I’d left my jacket in her room. Having with the loonies on Beach Court got caught up in the spirit of shining for Gloria, I’d gone over —yes, actually left my island when I didn’t have to!—to J. M. Fields, a mammoth discount house in Lake Park, and bought a mustard-colored lightweight zipper jacket. It cost $5.95.

  “Keep it, Gloria. One day you’ll be trying to tell people I gave it to you and they’ll tell yuh you’re full of shit!”

  Gloria laughed. She reassured me I’d be getting her answers to my questions soon, and we again said goodbye. I hung up the phone on the back bar. In that spirit, and mindful that I still needed her cooperation, I called a florist connected with Western Union, sent her a bouquet of whatever it was the girl recommended, and to accompany the flora dictated a suitable sentiment. From Ms. Steinem I never got the answer to the rest of my questions.

  When after many calls over a period of days I at last got through to her she was profusely apologetic, explaining she’d been overwhelmed giving birth to Ms. Then abruptly she did a distressing thing. Invoking what she called one of my “Lion’s Head friends,” whom she never identified, she used that “friend’s” words to accuse me of drunkenness, ir responsibility and sloth, all of which I’d have happily pled guilty to had she asked, and she then went on to say that her lack of diligence in getting back to me had been motivated by my “friend’s” persuasiveness. Aware of how precious I’d been with my tape recorder, my neatly typed up questions, my homemade tunafish and chopped egg sandwiches, I said, “Was that your impression of me?” By way of an answer Gloria apologized again and said she’d finish the questions and get them to me by the end of the Christmas holidays. She never did, of course, which lends real credence to that mean cliché about things working out for the best. Had Gloria honored her bargain, I’m certain I’d have had her moving in auras I never saw her moving in.

  To say that Gloria and I had a “distinctly uneasy parting” from the Sonesta Beach Hotel requires exposition. Ms. Steinem and I had been talking the better part of four hours into the tape recorder, and as time was running out and Gloria had to take her nappy-poo and primp herself for the night’s festivities, I was quickly throwing the used questions onto the floor so as to be hurriedly prepared to ask the next one. When she could go on no longer, we rose and she kindly began helping me pick up my notes and get my gear together. We had as I say been talking and laughing a long time. The abrupt silence seemed embarrassingly charged, and to fill it I decided to relate something I’d been undergoing the past days.

  Toni had been rendered absolutely paranoid by the flurry of her sire’s affidavits (although I suspect he never intended to take her son from her) and in fear she took the boy and departed in the night for God only knows where. Around my pad Toni had been immediately re placed by an even odder companion I will here call Gabrielle. An astonishingly beautiful twenty-two-year-old, Gabrielle was a recent magna cum laude Stanford graduate and a lesbian who was being kept in one of the pads on the Court by a broad-shouldered bull dyke my age. As is the case with almost every homosexual I’ve known, Gabrielle was miserable and when the dyke was out working days had taken to hanging about my place keeping me company, typing the questions I was preparing for Gloria, hustling us cheeseburgers and coffee, and listening to my FM radio and playing my Brubeck collection on the stereo (though Gabrielle grew to love Brubeck I can’t describe how antiquated I felt when I learned that until then she’d never heard of him). Gabrielle came from a wealthy ranching family out in New Mexico or Idaho or Arizona or some such place, and her father’s brother, “good old Uncle Willie,” had introduced her to a prepubescent sex. having induced her to an oral stimulation of his penis and to the packing of that penis with cow manure (one for Krafft-Ebing!). For motives neither Gabrielle nor I understood—fear, I’d guess—good old Uncle Willie had stopped molesting her when her menstrual cycle began, and though she’d never had anything to do with a man since that time she found her present predicament every bit as oppressive and degrading as the one with good old Uncle Willie. What should she do?

  Without batting an eye I suggested she immediately move her gear into my closet and take one of the twin beds in my bedroom. I said as I was feeding her most of the day anyway I saw it as no extra hardship, and that at twenty-two she might do well to get her lovely ass in a bikini, lay on the beach for six months getting a tan, and determine what direction she wanted her life to take.

  “Christ,” I said. “Look at all the rinky-dinks your age all over the Court. Many of them are as bright and as educated as you. They’re just puffing a little of the evil weed, sucking up some apple wine, and waiting for some sign from this ludicrous world we’ve made for them to live in. You could make friends with them. It w
ouldn’t hurt you a bit to do the same thing for a year, two, three if you’re enjoying yourself. Shit, in that scurvy group you’d be Queen of the Court.”

  Gabrielle laughed. “I know. Every time I go next-door for breakfast some of those apes are drooling in my scram bled eggs.” She now eyed me warily and said, “If I did move in, what about sex?”

  To this I laughed, rather scornfully I’m afraid. “Cut the shit, Gabrielle. My bed is a foot and a half from yours; if you decide you want to try, all you have to do is hop over. But don’t let your hot little pussy get nervous worrying about my needs. Anytime I pick up a piece of ass I’ll let you know in advance, and you’ll have to take the couch out here. Anytime you want to grab Chick or one of his muscular lifeguards across the street, you let me know and I’ll bunk down in here. But look, if you’re genuinely serious I’ll be damned if I’ll relinquish my bed to a broad, so don’t ever bother to ask.”

  Gabrielle grew very solemn. “I want it understood that I could never have sex with you.”

  Well, sir! I knew I had twenty years on Gabrielle, that I was getting gray, chubby and sloppy—but then, never is an awfully long time and I laughed and said, “C’mon, Gabrielle, it is you we’re worrying about! My frightful hog can take care of itself!”

  “But that’s what I mean,” Gabrielle emphasized. “I didn’t at all mean it the way it sounded. Seeing some of those girls or whatever they are you hang around with, I’d be afraid to do anything with you—afraid you’d give me some awful disease that’d make my eyebrows fall out.”

  This was on the evening before I was scheduled to meet Ms. Steinem. Gabrielle and I offered each other eager hands by way of agreement. I promised that the day follow ing my return from the interview I’d help her move her gear, and that if necessary I’d knock the dyke on her ass in the emotional scene that would almost certainly ensue. We shook hands again, Gabrielle left, and I went downstairs to woo Zita the Zebra Woman.

  Early the following morning I was hurriedly shaving —pimply Bill was already leaning on the horn of the electric-blue Buick Electra in the courtyard below—in preparation for meeting Steinem when Gabrielle came in, made me a quick cup of instant coffee, and said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to stay with Sappho.”

  “I’m sorry. What happened?”

  Gabrielle then pointed out to me (in the Newsweek cover story I’d given her to read!) that no less than the girl I was going to interview accepted lesbianism, that our society was reaching the civilized state where there wasn’t going to be any stigma attached to it, and Gabrielle felt she ought to acknowledge being what she was and learn to live with it.

  “That’s nothing but that New York City liberal horseshit! Every noble soul accepts cancer as a part of life until he himself contracts it.” In very measured tones I pointed out to Gabrielle that Steinem’s acceptance did not constitute endorsement, that as far as I knew Steinem herself was quite wonderfully and healthily heterosexual. “Look, Gabrielle, Steinem’s got it all together and that makes it easy for her to be tolerant. People who are happily straight just don’t worry about other people’s sex life. I mean, I don’t care if a guy wants to fuck the exhaust pipe on his Volkswagen, it’s nothing to me. And I don’t give a shit either if you want to continue in your life, but I don’t think you do or you wouldn’t have been laying it on me since the day we met. And incidentally you know, don’t you, that all men don’t force little girls to suck their cocks? I’d feel a hell of a lot better if you stuck to our agreement.”

  Gabrielle adamantly refused. We shook hands. Gabrielle asked if she could continue to hang around my pad and by my pal. I said sure. What the fuck else could I say? Apparently not all that pleased with her own decision, Gabrielle then wept quietly. Then she accompanied me down to the car.

  When Steinem and I were getting my gear together in the hotel and I was trying to tell her something of this—and as I told her I attempted to put it on a kidding level by accusing her of very possibly beating me out of a luscious piece of ass—I also pointed out she’d reached an eminence and influence where she ought to consider very carefully what she “accepts.”

  “But she’s a lesbian!”

  It was a good deal more unnerving than Steinem’s apparently being unable to “see” what I was saying. In her tone there was an overwhelmingly nasty irritation with me that quite honestly made me somewhat afraid, an accusation and a rebuke that I was not man enough to accept aberrations for what they were—I who had spent three years of my life in and out of state mental institutions and knew I’d come to see and tolerate more aberrations than Steinem’ll live to see!—and that under no circumstance did I own the sympathy or the necessary zeal either to comprehend or to be a part of her Holy Cause.

  By far the brightest, the most literate, the most articulate, the most tolerant (and the only one with a sense of humor) of these women is Ms. Germaine Greer. Reading the “Newsmakers” section of Newsweek, I laughed uproariously at her admission of having fallen quite hopelessly in love with a “very elegant” man “of some note” and her further admission that if at thirty-three she could make “a crass fool” of herself “over a tailor’s dummy” The Movement needed all the help it could get. As I read this all I could do was entertain suspicions of what Greer would have said had I told her the same thing I tried to tell Gloria and I found myself imagining, “But, my dear chap, you should have removed this Gabrielle’s bloomers, given her a superlative fuck, and had done with it.” And instead, and against any expectations whatever that it would turn out that way, I left the Sonesta Beach not only distraught at Steinem’s pipe-backed stridency but sorry, sad, afraid, hurt.

  Prior to seeing Steinem on television so loftily excoriating the Democrats’ platform and credentials commit tees, I’d seen her one other time on the tube. As it happened it was on a morning when Gabrielle and I were making love. For as it turned out Gabrielle did move in with me and we had a lovely, loving idyll for a time until, as I knew she would, she took up with those alienated youth on the hot bright streets beneath me, took up with people more appropriate to her age, her needs, and the destiny I so wanted for her. There came an urgent knocking on the door. I called and asked who it was, and was told by Big Daddy that on Channel 5 at that very moment I could see “that Women’s Lib gal you interviewed a few weeks back.” I dismounted, rose, flicked on the TV, and sure enough there was Steinem with Dinah Shore, she of the chiffon undies and whose boyfriend was Burt Reynolds, Cosmopolitan’s centerfold. Gloria proselytized Women’s Liberation, plugged Ms., tap-danced a little soft-shoe with Dinah, then stood about in a somewhat awkward sweat as Dinah whipped up a layered and sumptuous-looking ice-cream cake. Gloria was, I thought laughingly, right where she ought to be. In exasperation Gabrielle said, “Are you going to watch Steinem or are we going to finish what we started?” I laughed again, flicked off the tube, and we finished what we started.

  And as I now lay in my bed, in my mother’s house, at Alexandria Bay on the St. Lawrence, which I like to think of as the cold top of the world, I found myself saying to the television, “Oh, dear, dear Gloria, relax, do relax. They say your man McGovern is the most decent man in the Senate. I suspect he is, and yet every time you and those disaffected souls he’s surrounded himself with open your mouths you bury the poor slob that much deeper. We yokels don’t un derstand your smugness, your certitude, the militant, celery-like curves of your spines, and what we don’t understand makes us afraid, turns us off, and worse, will end with that benighted yo-yo Nixon’s getting into a position of power.” Then suddenly I thought, Look, Gloria, you want to do something meaningful with your life? Get Friedan and the rest of those meatballs, rent a bus, pack some picnic lunches, go to Wellfleet on the Cape, bow your heads at Edmund Wilson’s grave and pay homage to one of the century’s great men! Do anything but what you’re doing. What I’m imploring of you, dear, dear Gloria, is that you help me see your man McGovern as a man for whom I’d interrupt my love-making. You won’t do so until
you and his follow ers become a lot less brassily strident, until I detect in your demeanors at least a tacit admission that, like Ms. Germaine Greer, you too are becomingly vulnerable and might yet find yourselves the victims of love.

  8

  Kramer’s Pharmacy is at Boonville, New York, in the northernmost part of Oneida County. Across the street and but paces to the northeast sits the lovely, white-columned limestone Hulbert House, the hundred-and-sixty-year-old hotel I have in fantasies dreamed of buying, restoring to some kind of rustic splendor (fourposter beds, Boston rockers. Franklin stoves, and pine wash stands with wash basins of milk glass), settling comfy down (doubtless with, as McBride has said, my writing tablets and vodka bottles) at a great old pine harvest table near the mammoth limestone fireplace in the dining room, and thereupon letting the world go by. And the world would go by.

  South of Boonville the main highway, Route 12, veers to the east and goes round the village so that the traveler gets no glimpse of Boonville other than the backs of some houses and commercial buildings fronting the highway at what—because the village is so small it might all be deemed outlying—one hesitates to call “outskirts”; as much as we’d like to, we cannot dignify the village with “outskirts.” If, however, one bears west and enters the village proper and proceeds down Main Street and passes the Hulbert House, he can turn hard right into Schuyler Street and in a matter of moments he is out of Boonville and traveling north on Alternate Route