Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  Robin rose, said, “I’m not listening to this shit one second longer,” and disappeared into the bedroom.

  Shortly before dawn I began to hear voices, whispers from across the dark sea, then suddenly a startling and joyous, “Whoooeeee, you asshole!” What the hell was going on? Was that directed at me? My first inclination was of course to check the vodka bottle, where I discovered that since Robin had in rancor slammed an unopened bottle on the TV tray I’d barely consumed an inch of it and hence couldn’t lay the voices to auditory hallucinations. As the sky gradually lightened, the voices grew more numerous and murmurous, there was excitement in them, and laughter, a sense of heightened anticipation, an unbridled joy, and though I didn’t again hear anything as distinct as that startling imprecation, I caught isolated scraps, “Howzit, bruh?” and so forth. Just before sunup, at that moment the sky was a lazy, stunning ocher gray, I found that I was standing, drink in hand, leaning into the concrete parapet and straining mightily to see the sea’s horizon, now here and there catching glimpses of ships with stubby movable outriggers clawing at the distant dawn. The entire horizon seemed taken over by these odd mechanical craft and, for whatever reason, I called back that Nazi in his Normandy bunker on D-Day watching the English Channel filling up, one ship after another, forming the greatest armada the world had ever seen, the Nazi sitting there at first too benumbed by the evidence of his eyes to pick up the phone and sound the alarm that the Allies not only were coming, they were coming in a force hitherto inconceivable to man. And now the sun jumped and exploded over the horizon, I heard the first waves lapping at the previously undisturbed beach and saw—incredibly—what was happening.

  The surf was up on Waikiki and the horizon was full of those golden Hawaiian girls and boys lying belly down on their surfboards, paddling with their hands and arms to maintain their positions, laughing, chatting, waiting for the first great wave to take them up and up and up and riding into Waikiki. Throughout the velvet night radio stations carried bulletins on where the surf was, Waikiki was of course on the leeward side of Oahu, and it was damn near miraculous for the winds to be such—one could almost hear the announcer croaking, “The surf is up on Waikiki!”—that the kids would find themselves surfing for the swank hotel guests on an Easter Sunday morning. I can’t say how many Saturday nights I’d told Hannibal that the following morning I was going to the windward side of the islands and watch these kids, along with the Aussies the best in the world, but I’d never followed through and now, when I was about ready to leave Oahu, and perhaps forever, I was at last, and finally, going to see them.

  In her alligator bag Robin always carried a first aid kit, for what I don’t know unless she was, sooner or later, planning on getting me into a little S and M, and after finding a Band-Aid and the iodine I pulled the grilling fork from my chest, doctored my wound, and gave Robin, who in her wedding gown was sleeping facedown on her as yet virginal wedding bed, a hearty smart swat on her sculptor’s-dream behind, shouting, “The surf is up on Waikiki!”

  Robin, in Grandma’s wedding gown still, I in a pair of khaki shorts and a blue golf shirt with a Giants helmet where the alligator should have been, went down to the beach, I agape and without the art or the surfer’s lexicon to describe what I was seeing, settling for such meager words as, “God, this is terrific, I mean, this is incredible,” until Robin, exasperated with my triteness, said, “These guys aren’t that good. Some of the best surfers on the island aren’t even here today. I’m better than most of these creeps.”

  Despite my solemn vow to my bride, made in the witching hours of that very special night, never again to disparage or to hold up to ridicule her fantasies, however excessive, I turned to give Robin what I hoped would be a moderately peeved look only to discover she was greeting a big handsome kanaka dude, wet red bandana tied about his forehead, who’d just ridden his board into the beach. “Hey, John-john, howzit, bruh? Leave me duh board, huh?” “Hey, Robin, howzit, howzit? Whoooeeee! What you do? Marry dis tubby haole! Whoooeeee!” Tubby haole! Jesus, the arrogance of these Ohana kanaka dudes—and the worst part of it was that though they always appeared flabbier than swine there was, I’d heard often enough, something inherent in their Polynesian racial characteristics that lent them a deceptive, often savage power and strength. Before I could protest the kanaka’s rudeness, Robin had snatched John-john’s board, had slipped from her satin silver slippers, laid her veil atop them, and, still begowned, had charged into the sea, slammed belly down on her board into the surf, like a child onto his snow sled on the shimmering winter hills of home, and stroking over a huge wave, dropped quickly off, disappeared momentarily, came back into view, then with long fluid powerful strokes was seen making her way to the horizon, the while John-john crying, “Geevum, Robin, geevum” until the other surfers, who obviously also knew who Robin was, got caught up in the chant of “Geevum, Robin, geevum.”

  When at last Robin reached the horizon she let one wave after another go by, her head continually turning over first her right shoulder, then her left, seeking as they do the perfect wave. Then I sensed her body tense, she was looking straight into Waikiki, now her arms were stroking mightily to bring her board to the wave’s crest, then as effortlessly as I’d ever seen it done she was atop her board and coming home. First she rode way across to her right and when abruptly she slalomed sharp left and rode down the backside of her own wave I saw, astonishingly, what she was up to—running a tunnel created by the monstrous wave immediately behind hers and now breaking over her head and spitting itself to pieces, a sound like the long hazy indulgent belching of the eternally smug and sated gods. She couldn’t have been in the tunnel but a few seconds, which seemed to me a few hours, and when to the grand cheers—“Geevum, Robin”—of the other surfers she rode the furious tunnel clear she was so high up on her board and so strainingly crouched over I thought she was going to topple over the board’s bow. She didn’t though. Recovering herself, she suddenly took another sharp left and was riding this dying but still raging wave right into me. For what seemed like the last hundred yards, I swore I could make out every nuance of her body, the way her beautiful soaked gown so clung to her I could see the outline of her marvelous tanned thighs, the embarrassingly suggestive lines of her white string bikini underpanties, her audacious, assertive breasts; and now in their wetness her blue eyes had assumed those violet depths and that depth registered a monumental hauteur as furious as the surf, as though Robin were saying, “Don’t you patronize me and question everything I say, you toady tubby—yes, tubby!—mealy-mouthed little wimp!” It was, literally, so scary I hadn’t any alternative but to laugh, thinking what an incredibly joyous and intricate business life indeed was. Yet I held the power over Robin, despite the way she was now riding down the seas as though to overwhelm and bury me in the warm white sands of Waikiki.

  Ah, yes, were I able to cultivate the willful awesome power of silence, perhaps I’d never ask Robin another question for as long as I lived. In that way I would in a very real sense deprive Robin of her very essence, her artistry, her need for melodrama, humbuggery, mendacity, elaboration, camp theater, pretense, hyperbole, dissembling, sophistry, improvisation, fantasy—is not one fantasist per family quite enough?—ad infinitum. And now as Robin’s board beached itself and she bounded off and leaped toward me in search of accolades I looked directly at her—oh, I was as steady and as steely-eyed as Lugosi—as though to say, tubby wimp or not, I shall in the end defeat you, Miss America, shall defeat you, learn to live with you, and make you mine.

  Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgments are made to the following, without whose kindness and encouragement this book would not have been finished: Mike Bresnahan, Jr.; Con-cetta and Frank CavaUario; Feliza and Jo Cole; Francis Costanzo; Ms. Pat Hall Dunton; George Hebert, Sr.; Audrey and Bill Horsefield; The National Institute of Arts and Letters; P.E.N.; Gordon Phillips; Robert Renzi, Esq.; Baba Riedel; Brenda Riedl; Vince and Frank Rose; H. W. Rouse, Jr.; Jack Scordo, Es
q.; Richard and Wally Tamashiro.

  About the Author

  FREDERICK EXLEY is the author of A Fan’s Notes and Pages from a Cold Island, and Last Notes from Home, the final volume of his trilogy.

  He has been nominated for a National Book Award, was the recipient of the William Faulkner Award, received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and won a Playboy silver medal for the best nonfiction piece of 1974.

  He has also received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Harper-Saxton Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.