On one of my stays in asylums I had had a post card from my brother, the military man. In its corrosive abruptness it was the kind of thing that only a career officer would have been capable of sending. It said simply. “What the f. is the matter with you?” In those days time was nothing to me but something to be got through, and when finally I sent him my answer I must have sent forty pages, all very rhetorical and highfalutin, and though I remember hardly anything of that letter I know that in substance I told him that what was the matter with me, as he so stringently put it, was that I was afraid, afraid of too much beauty and of too much ugliness, afraid of loving and of going unloved, afraid of living and afraid of dying, so afraid of the sun that I could not open my eyes to the morning, and so afraid of the darkness I could not close my eyes to sleep, afraid.
When at length he answered, on another post card and in the abrupt military way, he wrote, “When I was on leave in 1945 I saw you, as a 140-pound sophomore, back Watertown High School’s line. I do not accept your fears.” In his peculiar way of loving he then added what I supposed was even a military solution: “Get off the sauce!”
At the time, wallowing as I was in my fears, I’d found the card vastly amusing. But after that incident with Quinn, my brother’s words flew back to haunt me and I began to wonder if I ever had been man enough to tell Quinn to blow it out his ass and mind his own business and, sadly, began to suspect that once I had been man enough. Oh, I do not flatter myself that the best day I ever lived I would have come out of a scene with the heavyweight boxing champion of the Corps with anything less than two blackened eyes, a broken nose, and missing teeth, but that was beside the point. All that mattered was that I might once have been man enough to take my chances, and whether it was as simple as getting off the sauce or not I found myself once again thinking of the island, that world as seen through gauze, and those alienated youth on the hot bright streets beneath me. And so one day shortly thereafter I shook hands with and said goodbye to Markson and some guys I’d come to know and love at The Head, started the fluttering six cylinders on my beautiful Chevrolet Nova, and headed back to the island, to where I belonged.
On the way I took a detour. I drove north to the river first, bid adieu to the family, packed a big brown paper bag with sandwiches so I could make Palm Beach County in one haul, stopping only for gas and Cokes, then started south, for a brief time pulling the car over and parking across the street from Edmund Wilson’s stone house. I doubted he was in residence. No car stood on the lawns. The grass grew long in the yards. The house looked battened down and bleak; but it was a beautiful day in early autumn, the colors were splendid, the morning’s autumnal mists had lifted, the sky was high, an exhilarating, heady blue, and way off to the east one could see—as was not always the case—the finely defined purple outlines of the majestic Adirondacks.
As I sat there, wondering why I’d stopped, I suddenly remembered something else. One of the first, kindest and most intelligent letters I’d received about A Fan’s Notes was from a psychiatrist, doubly kind in that I’d spent no few pages deriding the psychiatric racket. He’d begun by telling me that he’d spent a number of years practicing in a state mental hospital and that my description of life there was the only thing he’d read that tells it “like it is.” He’d then unnerved me. He said that being an analyst he hoped I’d forgive him and indulge him if he ventured a few observations on my character. I had of course winced, thinking that at me he was going to throw all those portentous catchall words like paranoia, schizophrenia, manic depressive, ad infinitum. I almost hadn’t read on and at last had thought what the hell, the guy might give me a few chuckles.
Alas, I had not laughed. Not only didn’t the wise doctor throw the asinine words at me, he immediately sent me reeling with a truth about myself I had never before articulated when he told me he had never before encountered “a man so haunted by sense of place.” In this regard he cited my love for my hometown of Watertown, for the neighboring St. Lawrence and its idyllic green islands, for my mother’s lovely limestone farmhouse, for the room I had built for myself therein, a room, as it were, of my own, and for Edmund Wilson’s Talcottville stone house which even in those pages I had mentioned in passing. He wrote, and I can only paraphrase:
“Most advertising executives have their recurring dream of an antique shop in a red-painted barn in Litchfield, but with you this dream has been exalted to the grotesque proportions of a search for the Grail. You know of course that it is a dream. We live in a society mobile beyond our grandparents’ brutalest dreams, one in which even the fucking corporations”—and how my heart leapt at finding a psychiatrist who also chose to tell it “like it is”—”transfer their personnel every other year denying them any sense of place, home, heritage, allegiance to community, this done by corporate psychologists in one of the most insidious and repellent uses of our damnable profession to keep the employee off balance and unaware of any possible loyalties other than those to the corporation. No, in a world where the kind of permanence you seek is increasingly unknown, unsought, and undesired by the money people, you will never find your haven. Which is not to say you shouldn’t be looking.”
And so remembering the good man’s words, I once again started the engines, pulled out into the “high road” of Alternate Route 12D and headed south to Utica and the New York State Thruway where one again comes together with what I’ve always chosen to call “the rest of the world.”
14
The temperature today, Christmas, on Singer Island is an unseasonable and stunning 90 degrees, the humidity an un comfortable 86 percent. Having canceled my final week of seminars at Iowa, I arrived “home” two weeks ago, a week earlier than I otherwise would have done. Although it has been only seven months since I left here for the St. Lawrence, everything—to my displeasure—has changed (as always it does in transient areas like Florida), and I now wish I’d accepted Jack Leggett’s invitation to remain and teach at The Workshop the spring semester.
Toni was of course gone even before I departed for the river, and everyone else seems to be gone or leaving. To begin with, Big Daddy is selling the Seaview to a man intent on refurbishing it into ostentatious, expensive units, and those two or three of us who remain will for financial reasons be forced to move. In order to “get in on the Disneyworld dough” Big Daddy is opening a restaurant and night club on property he owns in Orlando; and though he tells me I am welcome to go with him—Big Daddy says I can stand at the bar as “local color”—and though I know that he takes my “sex life” with him in the persons of the strippers, Orlando is “over there” inland among the weirdos who punch clocks, make payments and accumulate things, and without the bright beaches and the blue seas and the alienated kids on the hot shimmering streets beneath my window, Florida has never made any more sense to me than the rest of America.
Speaking of kids, Gabrielle has married a young attorney and is living across the inlet in Palm Beach. She has three times asked me over for dinner and I have made one excuse and another, usually: “You know how I feel about leaving the fucking island!” Upon graduating from Harvard Law School, her young man needed a few months to pre pare for the Florida bar. As nearly as I get the story from the kids around here, he slipped into a pair of shorn faded Levis, grew a beard, and studied the Florida law while lying on the beach where he met Gabby. When at length he was admitted to the bar, he and Gabby flew to the ranch in New Mexico or Arizona or wherever, and before God and Gabrielle’s astonished (it was the first boy they’d ever seen her with!) parents they were joined in marriage. They returned to Palm Beach where he took a job with a small but snooty law firm and he and Gabby now move among the “beautiful people” over on Worth Avenue.
Although he still lives on the island and I see him and his girl frequently. Jack McBride has left the Beer Barrel and is working as a machinist on the mainland. Bob Schneider, who owns the Barrel, has a bad ticker and is not expected to live. Unable to run the place himself, he appointed a ma
nager with whom Jack was unable to get along. The manager thought Jack “too casual.” Ha! My Christmas dinner with the McBrides today will be my last meal with them. Alex has taken his pension from Pratt & Whitney; in order to be near Peggie’s elderly mother they are moving to California on January I; and I don’t know whether Jack and his girl or I will miss the meals more. Although Jack tries to act nonchalant and philosophical about it, I keep saying, “Wait’ll you start living on those fucking Big Mac ham burgers!”
It is yet a couple hours until drinks and turkey, and I have time to walk two laps on the beach between the inlet and Nigger Head Rock (McBride, a liberal, wanted to change the name to Black Head Rock but we decided this sounded more repugnant), which is about all I’ve been doing since my return. Between the rock and the inlet it is exactly a mile and a half; every lap is therefore three miles; and I walk stolidly, the sweat like vaseline in my eyebrows, head down or with my eyes eastward toward the blue-green sea and the Gulf Stream which, when the visibility is right, appears to ride choppily white at the horizon about a yard above the sea. Never do I look inland. In the short time I’ve been gone two new high-rise condominiums have gone or are going up. Looking inland at them reminds me of the doctor’s words to the effect that money will not be stayed and that my days on this cold island are numbered. And as I walk I find myself thinking anxiously of the future, of other havens. I think, too, of these past three months in Iowa City.
On Labor Day a:40 a.m. I flew by American Air lines from Syracuse’s Hancock International Airport to Chicago’s O’Hare Field, thence connected with an Ozark (wow!) flight which, thank the fates, put me safely down in the corn country of Cedar Rapids at 1:02 p.m. Novelist Vance Bourjaily is senior member of The Workshop’s fiction staff, having been there fifteen years, and the day before I left I telephoned him at his home outside Iowa City, Red Bird Farm, to ask him to pick me up at the airport. A recording in the voice of his wife Tina answered the telephone. The recording, for which I was of course billed, told me that nobody was home, that I might take a chance and try another number in Iowa City, that I might call back later as the Bourjailys might be out walking somewhere on the grounds of the farm (a bucolic vision that! Squire Bourjaily. Tina and the dogs strolling about Red Bird Farm on a sunny September Sunday morning!), or that when the recording made a beep-beep noise I might talk back to it and make my wishes known. Unable to think of anything but “Fuck you, Vance,” I demurred and resolved that my first order of business at Iowa City was to get my ninety cents from Vance, a fine, fine writer, a good and gentle man, at which time I’d give him a few verbal pops on the sconce for that pastoral recording.
I then telephoned Tracy Kidder, a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard man, Workshop student and English instructor who on my spring visit had been sent to Cedar Rapids to fetch me. I was told by his beautiful Vassar wife Fran that he was in California working on a book for Doubleday (everyone in Iowa City is working on a book) about Juan Corona, who is alleged to have sexually hacked up twenty-odd migrant farm laborers and then buried their mutilated remains among orchard trees in the idyllic Feather River Valley. Fran said, however, that she would see that someone picked me up, probably Jon Jackson, a likable Montana intellectual who comes on like a lumberjack in his Levis, hard-used work shoes and faded red hunting shirts. A Workshop student, he is also an editor of Iowa Review, the university’s concession to the verbal arts. From my memory of Jackson, my guess was that we’d hit every bar between the airport and Iowa House, where I was to stay, and that what should have been a thirty-minute drive through the tall green stalks would end by taking four to five hours.
And that is what happened, save that it took twelve hours. With him Jackson had brought a dozen or so Daily Iowan tear sheets of an article detailing my arrival to teach at The Workshop, and as the night and the drunkenness progressed Jon and I took a ball-point and with great scrupulosity wrote on the clippings, “Mr. Exley is 43, unmarried, heterosexual, lonely, and living at Iowa House.” Then we tacked them to the walls of the various campus bistros. To my knowledge I had only one response to this drunken and optimistic bit of foolishness. But that one response proved more than enough.
When I had flown there months before to read from Pages from a Cold Island, I had been pre-registered at Iowa House, and while being driven there by Kidder had envisioned a white-columned, gabled, white-clapboarded fin de siècle inn—of the kind William Inge calls to mind—with old-fashioned, spacious and felicitously lighted rooms in which, on chain-flushing the toilet, the plumbing would make zonking, ominously gurgling noises. Instead it turned out to be a four-storied modern red-brick affair—the pedestrian creation of an architect obsessed with American-factory syndrome—with blue carpeting, green bedspreads, beige walls, functional maple-stained furniture and a nineteen-inch, black-and-white, metallic portable television set bolted firmly to the dresser. So eerily reminiscent was it of any middle-class motel in America that, on awakening, one could draw comfort from the hope that he opened his eyes to any place in America he yearned to be, Binghamton, Montgomery, Little Rock, Kansas City, Pueblo, Stockton—or in my case, Singer Island. To commend itself it offered a Coke and an ice machine on every floor, daily cleaning service, a twice-a-week change of sheets, a cafeteria on the ground floor in which the coffee was okay but the food didn’t work, an “art” theater in which they showed foreign or camp films (judging from the nightly queues in the lobby the biggest attraction this fall was something called Reefer Madness), and its walking distance to everything on cam pus, including The Workshop.
One stepped out the front door of Iowa House, crossed the street, bore right and southwest on a sidewalk to the left of which was a huge well-cropped green and to the right of which, between sloping green banks, the Iowa River flowed, serpentine, sluggish, lovely; now one walked through a concrete pedestrian subway (defaced with moronic and “revolutionary” graffiti) beneath a Rock Island Lines spur which farther to the right spanned the river, then stepped abruptly out into daylight again and was immediately confronted by EPB (the English-Philosophy Building) where The Work shop was located on the fourth floor.
It was on that twice-weekly confrontation with EPB that I began to fidget, and by the time I stepped into the elevator that ascended to the fourth floor, that floor of dreamers, madmen, cranks and ne’er-do-wells, the lonely, the lofty and the mean, I had begun to perspire. The truth was, I had so little to give the student and really had no understanding of what either he or I was doing there. For a time I justified my existence in Iowa City by telling anyone who asked that I had come on a sexual lark, a “last fling with young flesh.”
A few days before leaving for Iowa I had received a call at my mother’s house from a top editor in a prestigious New York publishing house. He was vacationing in Alexandria Bay with his wife, and they invited me to join them at Cavallario’s Steak House for a drink. I had known him for twenty years, since June of 1953 when he had just come down from Yale and I had just graduated from USC (in America one “comes down” from Ivy League schools and the rest of us merely “graduate”). That incredibly hot summer twenty years ago our paths had crossed in various New York City placement agencies when he was seeking a job in publishing as a “reader” and I one in public relations or advertising. Although in those days he was so oppressively Ivy League from the tip of his close-cropped head to the toe of his Scotch-grained loafers, from his snug-shouldered J. Press seersucker suit to his shell-rimmed glasses to his scrupulously cultivated accent, and I was therefore disposed to view him with ironic distaste, we took to meeting for coffee to kill the endless and wearying hours among our various interviews. One day, to my astonishment, I learned that, as mine had been, his father was a lineman for a public utilities power company, in his case in Pennsylvania, and that he—I’ll call him Richard—had got to Yale on an extremely generous academic scholarship and had besides worked for his meals and room.
“Well, look, Richard: at least with me, cut the fuckin’ accent, will
yuh?”
Richard had laughed, and had honored my request.
Richard had got his job with Harper & Row (Harper Brothers in those days) before I’d got mine; I’d bumped into him only a half-dozen times over the years, and I’d calculated the flourishing of his career as, at these rare and unexpected meetings, he’d tell me of moving from publisher to publisher and lay on me his title of the moment: reader, assistant editor, associate editor, editor. The last time I’d seen him I gathered he’d reached that exalted level whereon he could, on his own say-so, place any book he wanted on his firm’s trade list, that is fiction or nonfiction as opposed to textbooks. His only problem arose with known writers whose agents were beginning to demand astronomical advances, at which time he’d have “to kiss the asses of the money boys” in the firm. On completing A Fan’s Notes, and because, like every writer of a first book, I’d have published for the advance of a sawbuck, I’d first sent the manuscript to Richard as the only man in publishing I knew. He’d rejected it with “great reluctance.” Although he’d never expressed sorrow for doing so, when the reviews began appearing later, Richard started sending me xeroxed copies of them with ironic notes to the effect that “you must be blowing this reviewer” or that this one must have cost my publisher a fortune as it “read like a paid advertisement written by one of those depressingly jolly young virgins two weeks out of Smith.”
Pages from a Cold Island Page 23
