Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  It has been two years now. If after our last meeting you can believe it, I miss you, Alissa. My menopause has run its course. My breasts sag doughily. The collops about my waist balloon. My genitalia shrivel. My semen diminishes. My cigarette consumption is consummate, my imprisonment complete. And the only fragile hope I have is O’Twoomey’s daily assurance that once his “business” is done I shall be free to go as I please, “with a nice lurverly bonus from me, dear Frederick, for the inconvenience, my dear.”

  Fat chance. If O’Twoomey and Toby are into something odious enough to quarantine me for something they think I know, I’m a goner, Al. Another time when I got Wiley alone long enough to plead my case, he laughed and said, “Well, Ex, at least you’re a prisoner in paradise.” So in the unlikely event this missive ever reaches you, and as I’ve spent so many hours boring you extolling the breathtaking loveliness of Lanai, do me the kindness—for you really are a plumed cocksucker, Alissa—of not issuing that throaty lyrical chuckle and saying, “Well, if nothing else, my pal, star, and least tractable patient met his Maker in paradise.”

  And about our last meeting, I’m sorry, dreadfully so. We sat at the bar of the Dockside, the fishing guides’ hangout, where you try with such syrupy urgency to be one of the guys but believe me, Alissa, as an island person you’ll never be accepted there, and all I said was that I was again returning to Hawaii, did not know for how long and wanted enough thirty-milligram Serax capsules to last me indefinitely.

  “Exley, I shall give you enough Serax to last you a lifetime. But only on one condition. That you never seek out another session with me. You are a psychopathic personality, incapable of telling the truth, and though with my training I ought to be sympathetic, I can’t be. I considered you my friend, at one time my dear old grizzly head. But how unbearable the pain is to lie in the night with a man who has never told you a solitary thing about himself, to continually take a stranger’s semen into yourself, to lie with all your orifices dripping the wetness of a man you, as a trained analyst, can find no way to recognize. Believe me, Ex, it is a far more degrading experience than that of those wan and pathetic souls who find ‘love’ in a singles’ bar. Yet each time I questioned one of your tales, and I questioned all your tales, for I always felt you were bouncing fiction off my head, to see how it would play, as it were, or tried to get you to submit to an amobarbital, you fluffed me off as though I were a semieducated bumpkin. There came the point I could no longer sleep with a stranger and believed that all our sessions together, including those endless nights lying together smoking Colombian and talking to the ceiling, were nothing more than con jobs to get more Serax. So awful did it become for me, and God forgive me for it, I actually came to wish you’d wash a whole bottle of Serax down with that quart of vodka you swill a day, never wake up, and put both you and me out of our misery. Incidentally, and now that I’m clearing the air, you owe me something over three thousand dollars, you’ve never offered me thirty dollars of it, huh, thirty cents of it, and yet you seem to come up with all the money you need to fly to Hawaii to see your precious Robin Glenn, who by your own admission is little more than a whore and who, for all I know, is just another figment of your diseased imagination.”

  Hence I struck back in rage, rage that brought you to those heartrending tears I gloried in, tears that exalted me, for every word you told me about myself save for Ms. Robin Glenn, my love for whom I have come to loathe in myself, and the fact that you’d throw a bill in my face when you begged to treat me as some kind of challenge to yourself. You have never once presented me with a statement, you have even purchased my unending supply of Serax, you have more money from your mother’s estate than you could spend in five lifetimes—spend? give away—yes, every word you told me about myself was the truth, and all our sessions together except for the aforementioned Robin and my name, rank, and serial number were unadulterated bullshit. But you must know why. Because I never liked you as a person. Oh, you were generous enough in bed, as you certainly were with your pocketbook, but what was past enduring was that urbane hubris that comes with wealth and being fourth-generation Harvard. What acrimony that aroused in the son of a man who climbed telephone poles. I couldn’t bare my soul to a woman who offers a stranger a forthright firm grip in handshake and says, “Hello there. I’m Doctor Alissa Tunstall-Phinn from Belgravia Island. I was out of Harvard Law at twenty-one, decided the law wasn’t for me, returned to Cambridge, and had my residency in psychiatry at twenty-five.”

  La. Di. Da. Of course I was cruel, for I was doing nothing other than seeking your tears. Admittedly, you have too much class to append all that crap about your educational background, in fact, don’t even preface your name with Doctor, but you yet seem to have no idea how much “Hello, I’m Alissa Tunstall-Phinn from Belgravia Island” grates on us locals, we who have spent our lives mowing your lawns, cooking your food, building the docks and boathouses for your cruisers, serving your drinks, and in general running errands for and kissing the asses of your wealthy friends who flood in there from May to October and imagine those lovely islands are theirs. It is pathetic. By your own reckoning, Alissa, your impoverished forefathers arrived here from England in 1729, they made the American experience their own, prospered beyond measure, and no doubt now muck about wailing eerily in their tombs witnessing the obscene spectacle of you and your equally fraudulent father affecting the offhand gentility of the English aristocracy, witnessing the desecration of your denial of them by trying to reclaim an escutcheoned heritage that was never in fact yours. Tunstall-Phinn indeed! Your name is Phinn and most Americans spell it Finn, as in Huckleberry.

  And so on autumn Sundays, as only one example, you came to the Dockside to watch the last quarter of the Giants games with us, came in your ninety-dollar designer jeans mouthing your bubbly inanities: “Oh, my, are the Giants really, really ahead?” and “Which guys are we—the white or the blue?” and that most democratically memorable of all your banalities, “Hey guys! Hey guys! I bet that big black dude—what’s his name? Bad Joe Greene?—would give a girl a fuck that would have her throwing stones at clowns like you.” How that jammed barroom rocked with laughter, did so until I had you fiercely by the wrist and was blindly dragging you toward the door, the nape of my neck burning with humiliation because I knew that, mouths agape at my uncharacteristic violence, the guys’ trite reading of my response was as one of schoolboy jealousy. But you knew better, didn’t you, Alissa Tunstall-Phinn?

  Out into the fall downpour we went and back into the narrow alley between the Dockside and the Aragon, where the steep pitch of the roofs caused the autumn waters to cascade over us as if we were taking a shower massage together. Slamming your back into the barn-red clapboard, I fervently slapped your face once, then twice, then yet again. You spoke nary a word, those calflike gray-green eyes of yours more chameleon than I’d ever seen them, the waters matting your long lovely russet hair to your beautifully formed Brahmin head, turning the hair the most vivid auburn I’d ever seen it. Abruptly you reached up and put your arms about my neck, pulling my face down to your already swelling cheek where I could feel the hot tears mingling with the cool rains. Such a noble and forgiving gesture on your part, Alissa, as though you were saying, “You see, Ex, how badly you need my help?” knowing even as you continued this charade that only you and Exley knew, whether you read Jung and Fromm and Adler and the guys in Cambridge and he read them as a bum on a Florida beach, that in slapping you as terribly as he had he was crying out for you to stop committing these abominations against your person.

  I’m sorry I was too debilitated with anger to do what I intended, drag you by your clenched hair back into the bar and cry, “Listen, guys, listen to me. In mitigation of what you have just seen, Alissa here knows more about football than any guy in this room. Two years ago I invited her to a Giants game, she said she knew nothing about football, spent three hours in the public library, and by the time we reached the Meadowlands the following Sunday she was explaining
to me the circumstances under which a defensive secondary would be most apt to move in and out of zone and man-to-man coverages!” A slap is a slap is a slap, but the total humiliation of a fellow human being is something else again. Bad Joe Greene? And just as I’m sure you also knew would happen, the next day a couple guys said, “Jeeze, Ex, that was a mite unnecessary, wasn’t it? I mean, the Doc was only joshing. Everybody thought it was funny but you.” So I said, “I’m sorry,” allowing you to transfer your putrid guilt to myself. But it would all become clear in the library of London’s British Museum, wouldn’t it, Alissa Tunstall-Phinn? The transference completed itself and the lineman’s son became analyst, the Harvard magna cum laude damn near incurable patient.

  2

  But on that other, that day of terrible confrontation, it was of course when I got on to that hot-dog expatriate father of yours, one Anthony “Tony” Tunstall-Phinn, now a citizen of Her Majesty’s government residing in tastefully languorous splendor in his town house in Wilton Mews, Belgravia, that dear Alissa’s tears became profuse. Tony claims to have been Alger Hiss’s best chum at Harvard, to have entered the State Department with him, and that on Hiss’s conviction for perjury Tony left America and has never again set foot on our soil. In the first place, I have read every volume I could find pertaining to the Hiss-Chambers case and have never once come across Tony’s name. In the second place, I have three times written both the State Department and Alger Hiss asking them about the relationship and have never had the courtesy of an answer from either. Unless the question is totally meaningless to Hiss, why doesn’t he step forward to identify a man who cared enough about him to deny his country for what he considered a malignant miscarriage of justice? Hence I have never for one second believed that Tony is living in grandiose exile entirely on monies from the family’s patrimony.

  At Christmas 1972, just prior to the Brigadier’s unhappy death in February 1973, I hadn’t the money to go south, you said why don’t you come to London and spend the holidays with Tony and me? I said if I couldn’t make it to Florida I could hardly be winging to Great Britain to share drumsticks and cranberry drippings with Tony.

  “Who said anything about money? This is my treat.”

  (Is this also part of the three grand you suddenly decided I owe you?)

  So I finally went. And on the very first day Tony took us for lunch to the Hard Rock Cafe on Old Park Lane for cheeseburgers and steak fries (a disenchanted exile’s fare, for Christ’s sake?), thence to the Tower of London where to my utter astonishment he not only explained in meticulous detail the elaborate security system of Wakefield Tower, the fisc for the Crown Jewels, but even how to get around that system and get those gems out. On returning to the Wilton Mews town house that night, I scrupulously took down every word I could remember Tony’s telling me, I still have those notes among my papers, and if finally I can see no way from my imprisonment I fully intend to turn those notes over to O’Twoomey and Toby and buy my way out. What a mouthwatering field day those two lunatics will have pondering that delicious job. Knowing he can’t fence them, O’Twoomey would of course steal those baubles if for no other reason than to drop his pants before the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey and defecate on them, so irrationally certain he’d be that they were paid for with the blood of Irishmen. As indeed they probably were.

  It wasn’t so much Tony’s Wakefield Tower esoterica that gave him away as something other than an expatriate claiming to have spent the past thirty years on what he says will be the most alarmingly recondite translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey ever rendered. On the day he took us, at my request, to Grosvenor Square, at least three young people said “Hi, Tony” to him, said it with that bouncy Iowa enthusiasm, more people than ever said hello to him in his own Belgravia neighborhood. Now even I, Alissa, who know nothing of London, know Grosvenor Square is overrun with employees from our embassy and to Londoners is known patronizingly as Little America. How those jubilant youth from America’s heartland—corn silk sprouted from their noses—would have a first-name familiarity with a man who turned his back on his homeland thirty years ago—is he a cult hero to them?—is not only laughably mystifying but unanswerable save by some other explanation. Whether Tony is CIA, Department of Defense, Army or Navy Intelligence is beside the point; unless I miss my guess Tony doesn’t know Zeus from Menelaus, Andromache from Leda, Achilles from Hector. On Christmas Day, moreover, after Mrs. Dobbins had served us that wonderful steak-and-kidney pie Tony had had the chef at Marcel make up the day before, he said something while drunk that so disarmed me I couldn’t finish eating and this, together with his boorishness on Boxing Day the following morning, left my holiday in ruins.

  My main reason for initially declining your London invitation until the last possible moment was, as you know full well, Alissa, that that autumn had been my season of love for you, when I did not know from one anxious second to the next when I’d be utterly helpless to overcome my desire to ram, jam, stab, impale you with a prick and I confessed—sins monumental!—that it would drive me mad being under the watchful eyes of your father and denied the social license to stroll into the bathroom right at your heels, sit down on the lid, reach up, strip you from your panties, and maneuver your healthy thighs above my lap.

  With the Giants leading by a point and five minutes remaining, I had that fall taken you at dusk’s end from the Dockside to the front seat of your Mercedes and fucked you in the pale glare of a streetlamp, only to return to the bar to find the Giants had not only lost—what else?—but that in those docked five minutes (twenty in real time) the Eagles had scored two touchdowns and a field goal, fate’s revenge for my walking out on my team. And there was that incredibly embarrassing day when I went to Syracuse for pizza supplies for Mike, almost made it out of the city without seeing you, but suddenly found Mike’s station wagon parked in the driveway of your home-office. Surprised to find a patient with you—do you really practice?—as well as another in the anteroom, I somewhat hysterically demanded to see you immediately (those patients took me for **very disturbed,” didn’t they?), you asked your patient to wait in the anteroom, and, slamming the door behind me, I fucked you on that rich tan leather couch on which, you tell me, no patient has ever lain. When you came to the Bay that evening and we were driving around the back roads you said with great disparagement, “Don’t ever, ever do anything like that to me again,” pensively adding, “all you want to do is fuck me.” “Shut up,” I said. “Is that all I want to do, fuck you? If that is so, at least you’re getting my total and undivided attention and I’m not wasting waking hours daydreaming of fucking someone else. All I want to do? Shut your mouth.” Whether in trepidation or in comforting gratitude, your right hand left the wooden wheel and came to rest on my thigh. And the Mercedes came to a stop at the side of the road.

  When I shied away from your London invitation because of my infantile inability to keep my hands from you and the terrifying trepidation of humiliating us both in the eyes of Tony, you said, “Tony? Are you talking about Tony, for Christ’s sake? I’m thirty-two, he knows you’ve been laying me on and off since I was seventeen, and though he certainly doesn’t know what you’ve been going through this fall—as I’m not sure I do either—we’ll be able to make it about anytime you choose. If you can handle it, though, I’d prefer you didn’t shove me against the preserves counter at Fortnum and Mason and remove my knickers on the spot. For propriety’s sake and in deference to Tony’s generation, 111 have my own room and have to be back there by morning so he can do his ritualistic waking of me. Since I was a kid, he’s always wakened me by ripping the covers to the floor and giving me a crack on my bare bum. Of course only a degenerate like you, Exley, would read anything sexual into it I don’t know what it is really. I think it reminds him of when I was a baby, when he was happy with Mum before he got caught up in that awful Hiss business and Mum died.” Mum committed suicide, Alissa, but I saw no need to say so or point out that many people other than degenerates
would see in Tony’s method of waking you something very sexual indeed.

  3

  But you were wrong, as you often are, Alissa, about Tony’s sophistication. On Christmas Eve he made the applejack eggnogs too potent, he tactlessly wept when reminiscing about Mum. Because of the drinks we slept through the alarm and when he found your bed unused and without so much as a hem or a haw charged into my bedroom, pulled the covers from both of us, and, swaaat, did his thing on your bum, I heaved a great sigh of relief. However, when I arrived downstairs and found him voraciously wolfing the bloody Marys at ten A.M.—so very unlike Tony, don’t you know?—I knew he hadn’t taken our naked spent entwined limbs as sportingly as you’d led me to expect he would. All day long, and what an interminable Christmas it was despite Mrs. Dobbins’s never permitting our cut glass tumblers to be empty, Tony continued to ask those asininely rude questions a prospective father-in-law asks only in unreadable English and Boston novels. And to my own incredulity I found myself telling him about my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my parents, my two sisters and the means by which their husbands supported them, my niece and eight nephews and their parents’ hopes for them, even about my two ex-wives and my two daughters, one by each, and my earnest estimate—pure bullshit on my part, of course—of why my marriages had failed. They failed, Alissa, because I’m a drunk.