For a time Robin’s messages were conveyed to me by phone and received about six in the morning. It was midnight her time and invariably she was slightly in her cups. Three months after I met her standing statuesquely and hauntingly above me as I was seated in a 707 on a Chicago runway waiting to pick up some passengers from Toronto so we could proceed to Honolulu and the Brigadier’s death-watch, American Airlines discontinued its Hawaii flights, and as I understand it all personnel, save for some senior captains who would have to deadhead back to the mainland to connect with their flights, were forced either to return to the mainland city in which their flights originated or to resign. Robin resigned. From tidbits she’s dropped over the months, both when I’ve been there and during these drunken erratic calls, I gather her “fianc6” has given her the title to the lovely houseboat, ironically named Cirrhosis of the River, ironical in the sense that I doubt that there’s a river on Oahu wide enough for it to navigate upon or that he drinks enough to come up with a name like that. Robin, however, claims he can go through a quart of Tanqueray gin between six in the evening and midnight, which did not at all coincide with that three-beer virile construction boss I’d seen at Drysdale’s bar in Lahaina.
13
Robin still had the sun-yellow Porsche, a new one at that, the credit cards, and so forth and she would tell me she was working but the job varied with each telling. At one time she’d be managing one of those expensive boutiques where she used to charge hand-wrought leather belts, at another time she was the hostess at the Monarch Room of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, at still another she was lifeguard at the pool of the Kahala Hilton where she has become chums with Debbie Reynolds, Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball, Jack E. Leonard, and Joan Didion who, Robin gloatingly didn’t hesitate to tell me, “thinks you’re a lousy writer!” Whenever I was in Hawaii, and though I spent some of my time with Wiley and Malia who had moved to the island of Lanai, twenty-five air minutes from Honolulu, Robin always seemed to be on vacation from her job. From what I’d guessed and pieced together her fiance spent less and less time aboard the Cirrhosis of the River but his business acquaintances passed all kinds of time there for much more negotiable pieces of paper than credit cards. Robin has never admitted to me that she was hooking but at the gut level I knew that she was. There is a very nice restaurant and lounge fronting the marina and once when Robin and I were leaving there I distinctly heard this exchange between the bartender and a waitress: “I’d give a month’s salary for just about ten minutes with that.” The waitress replied, “It’d cost you more than a month’s salary for ten minutes with that.” When I got back aboard, I poured myself a triple vodka and grapefruit juice, drank it in one gulp, walked immediately to the head, and threw up.
Taking Robin’s calls at six in the morning was a distressing, humorous, frightening, crazy, somewhat terrifying experience. She was not only invariably tipsy, she was sobbing so heartrendingly that for the first three or four minutes I was unable to make out anything she said but what a no-good nothing slob of a tramp she was. I’d spend those minutes listening to this awesome self-flagellation, interrupting when I could to assure and reassure her what a lovely, loving, generous, sensitive, intelligent, and altogether stunning young woman she was. If this was so, why didn’t I come to Hawaii? Because I hadn’t any money. Robin had enough money for two. Within three days there would be a first class plane ticket in the mail. I didn’t like the idea of having to move out of the houseboat on the frequent nights her “fianc6” came over. Why didn’t I get a job like everyone else and then I’d be able to have my own place? I was never going to finish my book anyway. “Even if you do, it’ll be a bunch of shit like the other two.” This hurt. I held my peace. Did I love her? Would I say it? Yes.
Now then, this is the way it always ended. What am I doing now? I’m waiting for her to hang up so I can urinate, make a cup of tea, and do some scribbling on the shitty book I’m never going to finish. Do I ever think of her? Yes. In what way? In all kinds of ways. Am I alone? Yes. Will I do “that” to myself and think of her while I’m thus engaged? Robin will do the same thing and it’ll be as though we are together. Once she asked me to call her when I’d finished to see if it had “happened” at the same time. That was too expensive. All right, Robin would call me. “You cheap bastard!” I’d had just enough time to micturate and get the teakettle humming nicely when the phone rang. I laughed. “Jesus, that was quick.”
“You prick! You once accused me of being the horniest broad in the Western Hemisphere. But see how basically shy and retiring I am? How quickly I can bring it off when “I’m by myself? You really are a prick, you know that, don’t you Frederick?”
Did I ever participate in this absurd ritualistic auto-erotic surrogate copulation with a partner five thousand miles away? Does it make any difference? In all the sad and illusory, the laughable and perspicacious, the unbearable and joyous days of my life, I was yet addressing myself to love.
PART TWO
Interment and
New Beginnings
1
Listen, Marshal Dillon, I suspect I’ve bent your ear quite enough, but please believe me when I say that I am in no way up to this ceremony and have neither the character, strength, nor will to get through this interment without your aid. I realize that my saying I was certain I’d like you as a man hardly gives me the right to demand you reciprocate my affection, so if you feel you’d like to prop your size-thirteen boots up on your desk, lean back in your chair, push that ten-gallon baby over your grizzled face and catch a little shut-eye, please feel free to do so. Ironically, the Brigadier’s fifteen-year-old son, Scott, is into his Rock period, as Picasso was into his Blue. His sun-bleached hair, worn in a ponytail, is down to the small of his back, and realizing how out of place he’d be in this oppressive milieu, he absolutely refused to attend. This of course infuriated me, as I’m sure it would have you, Matt, for I could only visualize him thirty years hence, stuck between flights at a bar in the San Antonio Airport, pensively sipping his drink and excoriating himself for not having gone to his father’s funeral. In other words, Jim, I didn’t want to see him set himself up for the kind of remorse none of us needs in middle age.
But now, staring across the Brigadier’s bier at the seven-man honor guard, their rifles at port rest, I understand Scott’s decision completely, as I’m sure his father would have, and know he did the right thing by staying away. Whether the guard is from the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division (James Jones’s outfit) or Fort Shafter, I don’t know, marshal, but from their vacant-eyed mute rigidity, I would suspect they had all spent one too many days in the line in Nam. As we are the only family represented, the old lady is standing between my sister-in-law, Judy, and me in the front row; in the row directly behind us I’ve spotted a couple of one-stars, the rest of the row being made up of guys holding the Brigadier’s rank of bird colonel and in the rows behind them, in the very stylized and hierarchical way of the military, light colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, warrant officers, sergeants, and so forth, respectively, entirely too much brass for the honor guard and for me.
Sweating under their field helmets, their necks encased in white silk scarfs worn like ascots, the honor guards stare so unseeingly I suspect that though laymen might view this as cushy duty, one or two of these guys—especially the one who, doubtless having sensed my own abundant discomfort, stares so eerily at me—would prefer being back in the line in Nam, killing Cong.
Robin is not here, the selfish bitch, having explained that she cannot “abide dead people.” In the week I’ve been here I’ve become terribly smitten with her, as smitten, Big Jim, as I guess I’ve ever been. And though in fairness to her she told me repeatedly she wouldn’t come, and in fact I never asked her to come and can in no way articulate any obligation on her part to do so, I yet had hoped she might. James Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey, accompanied by this monstrous Samoan dude, Hannibal I believe O’Twoomey called him, a guy O’Twoomey claims to use as a bodyguard when
he’s in the islands, is here. Astonishingly, my best friend from Alexandria Bay, Toby Farquarson III, is also here. When I decamped from the funeral limousine and was making my way across the beautifully cropped grass of Punchbowl toward the bier, I had a chance to speak briefly with both of them. O’Twoomey told me he’d read the Brigadier’s obituary in The Honolulu Advertiser, and as Exley wasn’t that common a name he’d made the association with me immediately and had decided to do me the courtesy—”don’t you know, lurve?”—of attending. Four days after I’d left the Bay with the old lady, Toby decided that as he’d never seen Hawaii, the Brigadier’s death, though he hadn’t known Bill, was as provoking an occasion as any for coming over. And of course my childhood friend, Wiley Hampson, and his wife, Malia, with whom I spent the past week’s deathwatch, are here, all standing awkwardly back there behind me in one place or another, like characters waiting to be introduced into a novel. Wiley, Big Jim, is so very much family that he and his wife could as well be standing up here in the front row with us, to help leaven the oppressiveness as it were. The Brigadier would, I know, have very much liked Wiley to be in the family place.
2
On arriving in Honolulu, the old lady and I were met by the Brigadier’s wife, with whom my mother would stay, and by Wiley and his petitely stunning wife, Malia, whom I was taken aback to discover was part kanaka, part Chinese, part Filipino, part French, one of those veritable chefs salads of racial and ethnic genes so indigenous to the islands. Directly the old lady and I had scented leis about our necks, had received our mandatory pecks to the cheeks from Judy and Malia and the aromatic-ally funereal odor rising from the flowers seemed somehow appropriate and not nearly as frivolous a ritual as I’d so often envisioned it. Wiley exchanged phone numbers with Judy, told her he’d be in touch as soon as he had me settled in, kissed my mother again, and said he was looking forward to talking with her that evening at Tripler Hospital. On the expressway driving out to Hawaii Kai, Wiley pointed out “all the shit” that had, since his arrival fifteen years earlier, sprung up in the form of hotels, high rises, condominiums, and housing projects, not to mention “the fucking smog.” Wiley used kanaka names for most of the developments, which meant nothing to me, told me he’d fled Los Angeles fifteen years earlier for the very same things that were once again “crushing in my fucking skull,” interrupting himself again and again to address himself bitterly to the Brigadier’s plight.
“Forty-six years old! A bird colonel. Three fucking wars! Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts coming out his tuppy. Then the Big C starts eating away at his interior. How do you figure it, Ex? It isn’t fair, you know?”
When Wiley would turn to me, seated next to him in the MG, his upper lids and lashes would flutter furiously and for the first time I oddly understood his childhood cognomen of Twitch. When he took his wild eyes from the freeway and turned back to Malia, who was seated in the jump seat of the brilliant red sports car, he’d be poised and primed for new horizons.
“You know what I’m going to do, Malia? I’m goddamn well selling everything, the house, the pool hall, the fishing boats, the cars, every goddamn thing and moving to Kauai or Lanai. Yeah, Lanai. No Cadillacs, no smog, no concrete, no hotels, no nothin’! I don’t give a shit if I have to go into the field with the flips and pick pineapple! Mark my word, Malia. It all goes so quickly, you know? Unfair. Yeah, unfair.”
When I’d turn back to Malia, she’d wink at me, I at her, our way of agreeing that the Brigadier’s imminent death had sent Wiley round the bend and into some deranged region. At forty-three, Wiley and I had been born in the same year, the same month—though different astrological signs—and Malia and I were agreeing that Wiley had made his life and that there were now no islands left for him. In either of our lives, I doubt Malia and I would ever be more smugly in error.
At Wiley’s typically suburban three-bedroom two-bathroom house, Wiley went agape with pleasure at the old lady’s gifts of Heath cheese and Croghan bologna, and before I’d taken a sip of the Budweiser he’d given me he was preparing grilled cheese sandwiches with half-inch-thick slabs of Heath, cutting Malia great chunks of bologna, and off on a nonstop reminiscence of home. In droll exasperation, Malia at length interrupted by saying, “Lanai? Why don’t you go back to your precious St. Lawrence River?”
“Naw,” Wiley said. “I really don’t miss anything about that goddamn freeze-your-goodies-off place. Oh, maybe Ex here and a couple of other guys. Yeah, and one other thing—Guinea food. These chop-chop slant-eyes don’t even know what wop food is, Ex.” When I looked at Malia to study her reaction to “chop-chop slant-eyes,” she was laughing affectionately and I understood that Wiley’s chatter was the kind of rhetoric allowable between lovers. It was Wiley’s salivating memories of Italian food that sent us to the supermarket at the Coco Marina Plaza in search of ingredients for lasagne.
We’d go to the hospital that night, we decided, and before returning there the following afternoon I’d make Malia and Wiley the biggest pan of lasagne ever seen in Christendom or, I added, in Buddhadom, nodding in amused deference to Malia, so much that they’d have to cut it into portions, freeze it, and be eating it for the next eleven and a half years. At the supermarket, as I hadn’t any idea how long the Brigadier’s dying would take, and as Wiley had told me he’d neither fish nor bother going into his pool hall however long it took, I first bought six quarts of Jim Beam for Wiley, six quarts of Smirnoff red label vodka for me, and, though Malia protested she didn’t drink, I bought a gallon of good dry white Chablis for her.
“You guys,” Malia said in mock and humorous disgust.
In the months ahead Malia would say “you guys” very often.
“It’s the Irish way, Malia. At a wake one drinks himself into a stupor, sings songs about his mom, and no one ever dies.”
Trying to find the lasagne ingredients from the long detailed list I’d made up, I’d been in the supermarket twenty-five minutes when I bumped, in the literal sense, smack into Ms. Robin Glenn. Like comics in a high hedge-rowed maze, I came from the paper towel-toilet tissue-baby diaper-Kleenex alley, Ms. Robin Glenn from the canned tomatoes-tomato puree-pasta-condiments alley, we turned directly into each other, and our carts met head-on. At first I did not recognize her. Her tobacco-sepia hair was down and brushed so lovingly and lengthily below her shoulders I was amazed to think she’d ever got all that tucked up beneath her petite American-flag-red-white-and-blue attendant’s cap. She had scrubbed every trace of makeup from her face and she had on a pair of great round black shell-rimmed prescription glasses, a man’s chocolate-brown full-sleeved velour shirt too big for her, and a pair of torn faded Levi’s. She was barefooted. Behind those huge spectacles those equally huge gray haunting and vacuous eyes came to mine, told me nothing and to my “Excuse me” she spoke nary a word or even nodded, apparently still angry from my treatment of her on the flight. Abruptly she withdrew her cart three steps, started around us, stopped joltingly, turned to me, and said, “These must be your Hawaiian friends?”
“Malia and Wiley Hampson, Ms. Robin Glenn, the flight attendant I was lucky enough to draw on my way over.”
So it ends and so it begins. Bird colonels don’t die from the shrapnel in their legs and back but are eaten up by a carcinoma of the soul. Old friends don’t miss much of home but Guinea food, and the last Watertown Exley male bumps his silly wired grocery cart into that of perhaps one of two women he’d ever love.
By the next day at noon, Wiley had gone from the simple ravings of the disaffected to the kind of hysterical monologue that under its own momentum achieves after a time its own inner logic, and though, behind Wiley’s back, Malia and I continued to twirl our index fingers at our temples, our smiles grew increasingly forced and implied we’d begun to understand that, at forty-three, Wiley intended doing everything he damn well said he’d do. Wiley’s life, as I knew better than anyone, had been the pursuit of some last island and I could see and hear in his endless ranting some need
to exalt his life from merely pretty achievement to a plateau in the realms of art.
A month after the old lady and I returned to the Bay, she asked again if I’d sent Malia a thank-you note. I said no but I’d do so that day. I did so and ten days later the letter was returned stamped GONE, LEFT NO FORWARDING ADDRESS. Two days after that, Wiley called, exuberant. He and Malia were on Lanai, living in a rented plantation house, he was working in the pineapple fields with the flips, he’d sold his pool hall, his commercial fishing boats were on the market, and Ms. Robin Glenn was house-sitting his three-bedroom home in Hawaii Kai, trying to find him an appropriate renter, the monies from which would take care of the house’s mortgage. “When are you coming over, Ex? It’s paradise, fucking paradise.”
If Wiley had been hyper driving from the airport to Hawaii Kai, he was, as I say, demented the next morning after having seen my brother the night before at Tripler. Wiley hadn’t, I suspect, seen the Brigadier since Bill had entered the service in 1944, a very tall, very handsome, very slender young man of seventeen; and what Wiley’d seen the night before was a young man old at forty-six, his close-cropped hair having gone gray, his limbs wasted—he weighed only 120 pounds over a six-two frame—and that sheeted cage over his distended stomach. Malia had invited Robin over for brunch, and Malia and I were enchanted with both Robin’s beauty and the history (we did not then know how much of it was pathological bullshit) she revealed at Malia’s and my eager solicitations. Wiley was not impressed. Eyeing us over his bloody Marys and his uneaten scrambled eggs and bacon, he brooded on the Brigadier and his own dream of some final island, once actually sneering at me when he thought I’d laughed too effusively at one of Robin’s tales, as though he were telling me that he found my gushing attempt to strip Ms. Robin Glenn of her panties nothing short of despicable at such a time.
Last Notes from Home Page 10
