On our second drink at Cavallario’s Richard told me that their three relatively young children were with his parents in Pennsylvania (“With the lineman?” I almost injected, but decided against it). They had rented a motel room in the village, had stocked it with ice and whiskey and intended to have a few drinks, repair to the motel and make mad abandoned love, “do all sorts of nasty things.” Richard’s wife, whom I’d never before met, was tall, trim, elegantly and goldenly tanned, and startlingly handsome with long dark brown hair streaked with the most attractive streaks of gray. She said, “We love our kids, of course, but you can’t imagine how heavenly it is to be rid of them for a few days. And it’s so, you know, romantic and forbidden and all. Especially in a motel room!” Looking at her, I envied Richard greatly. I said that it all seemed deliciously romantic and almost added that neither of my wives had stayed with me long enough so that I’d seen either of my children (one by each wife) reach the “nuisance” or “coitus interruptus” age. But it seemed somehow a dreadful confession to make, and I held my peace. Richard then asked me the state of Pages from a Cold Island, about which I’d written him when he’d sent a copy of one of my reviews and asked what I was up to now. I lied and said the state was wonderful as could be and that if my agent so chose he’d be seeing a copy soon enough.
When it came out that I was going to The Workshop to teach, Richard said, “But whatever for?” And in truth, I had no ready answer, notwithstanding my dream of taking a sabbatical there in order that I might return to the manuscript refreshed and prepared to outflank it.
As some fucks and sucks and pricks had already been unself-consciously introduced into the conversation, as they invariably seem to be among “literary” people (from what I’ve read the words are said to be seeping into every segment of our society—including pre-teens!), and taking Jack McBride as my guru, I started talking off the top of my head. T said that at forty-three, with a full head of hair and all my teeth but one (perhaps still lying on the close-cropped lawns of the Sheraton British Colonial in Nassau!), my sojourn in the corn country was no doubt motivated by little other than having a final indulgence with young flesh. Like Walker Percy’s moviegoing Binx, I said, girls caused me real physical pain, explaining that when I was there in the spring for my reading I wasn’t actually sure I was going to survive two days of walking about the campus among all those “creamy-thighed hog farmers’ daughters,” as Tom Wolfe has so aptly called them. “In their faded Levis—so cramped one could see the breath-taking indentures of their hot little crotches!” I cried. “And those tank tops covering those braless chests—chests that don’t need bras! It was excruciating!” With both arms I formed a rood at my chest, doubled over in mock pain, and swooned. “Painful!”
Richard and his wife laughed. Richard said, “With all the manuscripts floating around Iowa City”—and he’d know!—”I think a published writer would have to do little more than snap his fingers. Out there it’ll be as though you’re one of those swinish, greasy-haired rock stars giving a concert to unchaperoned girls at Hollywood High School.”
“Oh, Richard,” I said, “spare me those literary groupies with all those guys they call Nah-buh-kov and Prowst. Like a buddy of mine in Florida, I want something essentially dim-witted. Say, the captain of the girls swim team from Ottumwa. Long legs, pulpous thighs, great hips and buttocks, marvelous shoulders—oh, simply acres and acres of her! Someone so dumb she’ll let her mouth droop open in vacuous awe at my ability to use a typewriter. Someone to train and then find oneself too old to handle. I’ll have to abdicate and turn her loose on her own generation! Can you imagine teaching something like that to suck? What my Florida chum calls the snake motion? Oh, my sweet Eros!” Here again I sheltered my heart, doubled tightly up and groaned in mock pain. “When I turn her loose she’ll go through whole dormitories of boys! Whole fraternity houses. The entire fucking football team! I’ll be responsible for cleaning up every male pimple in Iowa City!”
We walked, still chuckling, to their car. With great envy and warm wishes I put Richard and his wife on the way to their motel and their simulation of abandoned, forbidden love, then returned to the bar for a beer. At the bar there were only two college guys dressed in dirty white deck shoes, hip-hugging faded Levis and yellow tank tops. No sooner had I ordered a beer than a girl such as the one I’d just described to Richard and his wife entered, rocked with haughty impatience on her long fleshy legs, and then demanded from the bartender Jimmy Tousant the whereabouts of a wealthy local man notorious as a roué. On hearing this request, and the college boys were obviously as cognizant of the man’s reputation as I, the three of us turned eagerly round on our barstools and stared lustfully at the girl. Told by Jimmy that the man hadn’t been seen for a week or more, the girl pivoted with furious purpose, threw her tanned and regal throat back into a crisp celery arc, and in her glove-fitting Levi shorts showed us her opulent behind moving irately away from us, a blond ponytail flopping angrily at the nape of her neck. Shaking our heads in great envy of that old womanizer, the three of us swung back to Jimmy where we sat for some time in charged and heavy silence. Finally one boy spoke to the other. His voice was compounded of self-assurance, melancholy, lust, envy.
“I’d eat her until I caved the top of her head in.”
I spat a mouthful of Schaefer all over the bar, coughed violently, then roared, enlisting Jimmy and those others in my laughter. For the autumn I’d found my goal— to cave heads in; and if not that, to have coeds shudder and faint in my arms. Accepting that long-ago Dong as my mentor, I wanted nothing less than to be forced to summon physicians to get pulse readings on the ecstatic lasses.
For the first three weeks in Iowa City I began to suspect that my dream of “corrupting” coeds was little more than a middle-aged impotent’s sexual fantasy, wishfully depraved thinking. Although I made no concerted effort to do so, made scarcely any effort at all, I began to feel like the proverbial wan soul who couldn’t get fucked in a bawdyhouse with the Hope Diamond. And how excruciating it was! All the blond hog farmers’ daughters had come to town sporting their splendid summer tans; the weather the first month was excessively hot and humid, forcing the girls to wears shorts and tank tops, exposing lavish amounts of young flesh; and I found myself swooning and clutching my heart, and felt as though I were the ultimate satyr con signed to his rightfully deserved damnation.
Then one late morning at my room, just as I was pre paring to go up the hill for a drink, I had an unannounced caller, a petite little golden blonde with the most innocent-looking cowlike gray-green eyes and a heart-shaped mouth that even unpainted was as red and as appetizing as cherry juice. She looked about fourteen, a veritable Lolita, and she carried under her arm a hardback edition of A Fan’s Notes she said she wanted inscribed. I’ll call her April and say that though she wasn’t from Ottumwa or Omaha or Oshkosh, or even an Okie from Muskogee, she might well have been. She was Miss Middle America to a heartbreaking fault. It was raining that day, I helped her out of her canvas knapsack in which the Iowa coed was carrying her books that fall, her brilliant yellow rain slicker, invited her to sit in a chair, inscribed her book in the manner she prescribed, and we talked.
As it happened, she wasn’t fourteen but twenty-one, a senior and a French literature major. She had read A Fan’s Notes two years before in a course at a junior college she’d attended prior to transferring to the university, and she said she’d admired it so much she’d ordered the hardback, which she invariably did with those books she particularly liked. Although I’d have felt jollier had she told me that A Fan’s Notes was one of a half-dozen volumes she’d acquired in this way, April said she now had upwards of three hundred books she’d gathered since first reading them in paperback. I thanked her in any event. Because she made no move to leave, I asked her if she’d like some vodka.
“Sure.”
Before going to Iowa I’d promised myself never, but never to drink in my room; that no matter the circum stances I’d f
orce myself, for every single drink I had, to walk to one of the campus saloons and pay for it over the bar. But I was so horny at the moment, breathing labored, a profound ache at the pit of my stomach, and so counting on the aphrodisiac properties of the alcohol, that I would of course have bartered my soul for a whiff of April.
A close friend had taken me to the plane in Syracuse.
Knowing my trepidation of flying, he had given me a pint of red-label Smirnoff in a brown paper bag just before I had enplaned. He told me it was to nip on if the weather got tacky, and added, “I’m not even a boozer but I’d have to drink about a fucking quart before boarding anything with Ozark painted on its fuselage!” But the weather had been superb; the courtesy and the service a damned sight more amenable on Ozark than on the American Airlines lag between Syracuse and Chicago; I hadn’t even thought of breaking the seal on the bottle; and that is how I happened to have the pint, still in its brown paper bag, in my closet.
In the hall I got two cans of Squirt from the Coke ma chine and a styrofoam bucket of ice from the ice machine. Unable to appreciate the small and fragile Iowa House’s glasses wrapped in their antiseptic wax paper, I had at a campus novelty store bought two heavy outsized old-fashioned glasses imprinted with moronic maxims. Happiness Is A Warm Pussy in black script on one and horse piss in bold red letters on the other. On the utterly true psycho logical dictum that the mind is the most erotic organ of the body, I mixed April’s drink in Happiness Is A Warm Pussy. In the next three hours we finished the bottle, talked eagerly, and at length I decided to take the bull by the horns, pull a Portnoy, and ask April point-blank if she’d like to get eaten.
April smiled, tilted her head in the most coyly affected way imaginable, and said, “Why not?” Standing up from her chair, she said, “Okay if I take a shower first?”
As the water was roaring in the bathroom, and both my heart and my intestines were roaring in tempo, I stripped naked, got into bed, pulled the covers above me, and lay waiting, loony with desire.
When at length April came from the bathroom, her blond hair darkened from the water and clinging to her head, a white Iowa House towel clutched to the top of her breast and falling suggestively to a point just barely beneath her pelvis, she walked as bold as brass to a point between the twin beds. Instead of dropping the towel and climbing into the space I had so eagerly provided in mine, she seated herself on the opposite bed, asked me to light her a cigarette from the pack I had placed handily on the nightstand between the beds, lifted her right leg up and rested her foot on my bed, in the process allowing me a breathless glimpse of her pubic area, then said, “I’ll make you a deal.”
“A deal?”
“A bargain. I’ll make a bargain with you.”
“Okay,” I said, and might have added, ‘‘anything, anything, ANYTHING!”
Rolling over on my side to face her, so she wouldn’t be cognizant of the embarrassing rise beginning to lift the bedcovers into a miniature tent, I lighted us both cigarettes, lay my head back and in utter incredulity listened to this Lolita’s, this innocent’s, this Miss Middle America’s, this angel of the plains’s “deal.” April shared an apartment with three other coeds, two of whom had boyfriends who by agreement among the four girls came over afternoons, and afternoons only, “to fuck,” and April was weary unto death of trying to study in the outer room with the raucous moans and groans of sex emanating from the bedrooms; even wearier of waiting to get into the bathroom and, worse, on once getting there of finding dirty skivvies, both female and male, all over the bathroom floor, of vile rings in the bath tub, of great globs of toothpaste dried on the mirror of the medicine cabinet. Oh, there were days when April wanted to scream, or puke, or both! April paused pensively and wet her lips. Her gray-green eyes avoiding mine, she said, “I saw one of your cute signs—you know, those corny clippings of yours?—in a bar a few weeks ago and since then I’ve studied your habits.”
“You’ve what?” I cried.
April said that daily she knew I went late mornings to Joe’s Place at the top of the hill, drank there for a while, then walked round to Donnelly’s on Dubuque, drank some more, went then to The Vine on Clinton Street, and finally ended up next-door to The Vine at The Deadwood, the hangout for The Workshop students, where I drank with the Epstein brothers, the owners of the bookstore, until four or four-thirty, at which time I repaired to Iowa House and wasn’t seen again until late at night when I went back up the hill and made the same circle of bars until closing time.
“That’s every day except Tuesday and Wednesday,” April added. “On those days you go directly from The Deadwood to your four-thirty classes, and when they’re over you come back to The Deadwood and drink with your students.”
“Jesus, April, you’ve been following me! Do you know what that could do to a paranoic like me? Had I caught you I might have strangled you where you stood!”
April thrust the palm of her hand abruptly upwards, the traffic cop admonishing the eager motorist, and demanded my indulgence that she might finish. April wanted a key to my room. Mornings before starting out for classes she could pack her book bag with fresh panties, with her shampoo and her toothbrush, and while I was up the hill drinking she could come and make her toilet in my “cool bathroom” with its roaring shower, immaculate mirror, clean towels, and so forth, after which she’d study until I came down the hill at four-thirty at which time we could “fuck or whatever you want to do.” On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the days I held my seminars, she’d stay as long as she had to or until I called and told her I was tied up. We could work out a code so she’d know when to answer the telephone, say, I could ring twice, hang up, then immediately phone back. She promised she’d never be around the room nights in case I had other “guests.” Friday through Sunday was out of the question because on Friday afternoons April hitchhiked over to the state university at Ames and spent the weekend abed with her “sort of fiancé, a really groovy dude” who was as impoverished as she but who at least had his own pad where “we can fuck in privacy.”
April paused, pondered her words, then offered her hope that if she pleased me I could perhaps throw her “a couple bucks a day” so she could get something to eat in the downstairs cafeteria when she was leaving. April didn’t need much, a couple cheeseburgers, a Coke and a scoop of chocolate ice cream—butter pecan if they had it. Everyone who picked her up hitchhiking to and from Ames tried to fuck her and with the money saved on the food she could buy round-trip bus tickets. Too, April wanted to use my telephone to call her “sort of fiancé” one afternoon a week, Thursdays, to give him her arrival time in Ames of Friday and she promised—she raised her right hand as one swearing allegiance—that she’d talk only the allotted three minutes.
“Look, I know I look about eleven and a fucking half. You’d feel foolish being seen in public with me and I’d be embarrassed to be seen with you. But this way nobody’d even have to know we knew each other. And let’s level with each other: you have your—uh—needs and I have mine.”
The abrupt delicacy with which April delivered needs made it sound a word she’d picked up in a high school course in sex education, as indeed she probably had. At this point I began to roar, wildly, helplessly, unrestrainedly at the unabashedly shameless and calculating mercenariness of this whory angel of the prairie, this Miss Middle-America trollop, this harlot of the hog farms, and between wild howls I breathlessly shouted, “It’s a deal! It’s a fucking deal!” Whereupon I reached over, yanked the towel from her, pulled her into bed, and for the next two hours fucked her as though I were a depraved playboy who’d just presented a fifty-thousand-dollar pearl necklace to the most beautiful and sluttish courtesan-starlet in Hollywood and were extracting payment in kind, none of which bothered or unnerved my darling April in the least, and all of which she seemed not only adept at but to relish immensely.
From that day on April honored her bargain, and I honored mine, though from that very night when I picked up another girl in The Deadwood
on my late evening rounds a strange phenomenon began occurring. Whereas for three weeks it appeared I couldn’t have bought a fuck with that fantasized pearl necklace, after April I found myself smack in the middle of what the dopey sociologists call “the new permissiveness” and greedily relishing every moment of it. Girls seemed to be coming out the woodwork and there were days when, leaving April her two dollars, I’d write her a note to the effect that she’d have to be out of the room by four as I was expecting another “guest”—all of which, I must say, April took in great good stride, at least for a time.
A week before returning to the island, I was drinking at The Deadwood with Glenn and Harry Epstein and their aide-de-camp in the bookstore, Danny Farber, and without mentioning April by name I told them of my early sexual drought and how after April I couldn’t seem to handle what was there for the plucking. In that they read and knew the books on their shelves, as did Danny Farber, the Epsteins were among the most literate booksellers I’d ever met. To pay the rent they stocked Jacqueline Susann and Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins, but I could never, without giggling idiotically, hang around the store and watch them hawk such wares. For The Love Machine they’d accept their money with a straight enough face, but to the purchaser, and speaking around their cigars, they could never resist an observation.
“You’ve got yourself a helluva book there. Solid stuff, solid. You’re in for a real heavy read. Heavy, man, heavy.”
Pages from a Cold Island Page 24
