The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms

by J. P. Donleavy

  It was shortly thereafter that she vacated her terribly anonymous apartment with its sunless living room and two bedrooms, and moved to somewhere slightly brighter and slightly more quaint, and that she would also find less lonely, and it wasn’t. Hoping it would give her children incentive to visit. But they didn’t. And who now seemed entirely ungrateful for the financial presents she’d bestowed on each. Instead sending her a formal thank you note. She felt the distance growing from both, especially Ida, her daughter who was at college farther away in West Virginia and who was being feted by beaus in half a dozen cities.

  Her son, Hugh, with a year left to graduate from Yale and a member of Skull and Bones had even become slightly conspicuous in protesting against the admission of women, which she took as another slight directed against her. And he’d cited how women were wont to behave, particularly one young lady who had previously been releasing gossip of their secret rituals she’d learned from a disenchanted Skull and Bones boy friend and as Hugh publicly objected, it was making him appreciably more conspicuous.

  As she was now getting more solitary than she had ever been in her life, she found herself more than a few times feeling incarcerated as was the girl in handcuffs in the window. Even itching one evening to call the boy gardener to take her to the Town Tavern in Bronxville for that beer he’d suggested. Her greatest pain came as her children’s college weekends and vacations now silently went by even without phone calls as they went to stay with their father who was, thank you very much, described as having a ball with his new bimbo and announcing their engagement to be married. As a pair they were even mentioned as being ‘out on the town’ in a most recent gossip column along with the brand new news that the bimbo before she hit the New York scene, was instead of being a Phi Beta Kappa southern belle, had worked in the dead letter department of a New Jersey post office.

  But it had to be admitted that all her ex husband had now was his big salary, which might not be big enough having moved from his less expensive love nest on West Sixty-Seventh Street to a costly apartment on Park Avenue with a big rent to pay. Plus now with an aspiring actress in tow who was an obvious grasping gold digger slowly sinking her teeth into both Steve and her acting career. He’d also made it clear to the children that it was he who was paying through the nose for their expensive college educations, and although he’d refused giving them American Express cards as he did to his bimbo, he was however letting each have one hundred and forty five dollars a week pocket money to spend.

  But holy cow, now she was, as well as rent, also paying enormous storage charges on the furniture from the house in Scarsdale. It could end up soon to have been cheaper to auction it or give it away. And she was also without her own big lawn upon which she had many a summertime evening, with citronella patted on her backside and when the mosquitoes weren’t too thick, enjoyed the freedom of a fresh air pee and also doing as her grandmother said, not to waste nitrogen down a toilet bowl. And was once picked out in the flashlight beam the handcuffed girl was shining out her window.

  Cutting down expense, her visits to her analyst were reduced to twice a month. Hoping now to stop herself descending into depressions in her smaller confines, she’d collected a library of self-help books and tried to do some of what they said. But she found, having forsaken martinis, that her most signal pleasure and ease was simply to take two glasses of a medium dry sherry with potato crisps and assorted nuts and with a long playing Elgar on her tape deck she imagined herself staring out across the terrace of an English country mansion where deer and cattle gently grazed and you didn’t hear the express of the New York Central roaring by.

  Alcohol remained significant in her life, but she never again wanted to be reminded of making a pitcher full of very dry dry martini and kept ready in the refrigerator, which she and Steve were in the habit of quaffing when he came home from work and which finally developed into using nearly a whole bottle of gin, and had her daughter accusing her.

  ‘Let’s face it, you and Daddyo for a long time on your cocktail before dinner kick, have slowly been becoming a real ole pair of swillbelly lushes. It’s going to make pop impotent and if that doesn’t matter to you then it’s going to ruin your complexion and give you a big fat ass.’

  It was the word swillbelly and an Australian term of getting a skin full, said with more than a trace of know it all superiority that she found so wounding and humiliating. However, now forsaken by her family and her habitation reduced in circumstances, she was still keeping her moral and spiritual head above water, and even in her most lonely loneliness she thought things could be worse. And indeed they got that way only too soon, like a sledge hammer landing on her big toe. With another toe to follow. Firstly, when she complained of the children not visiting, Steve then let go his own bombshell bolo to her solar plexus.

  ‘Jocelyn, I’ll be frank. Everybody thinks you might be temporarily emotionally disturbed. And may need help.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean.’

  ‘Well while you were still in our house the police had to be called. Cutting the lawn at midnight. Shooting the T.V. with a shotgun. Yeah. I got a call from the T.V. repair man. Jocelyn, the simple fact of the matter is the kids love you and adore you but think you could be dangerous and could kill somebody by accident.’

  ‘All I was doing then and am still doing now for pity’s sake is hoping to keep intruders at bay while I am sitting alone listening to Elgar.’

  ‘Well maybe that’s the trouble too.’

  ‘Well that happens to be pleasure but I’m sure it must be clear even to you that no one, including burglars are impressed by violent death anymore.’

  As she digested her former husband’s news and advice over a few days, next came the other sledge hammer blow. She discovered that her capital from the sale of the house, put in the eager hands of a hot shot investment adviser and former acquaintance of Steve’s who said he would build for her a high yield centuries surviving cathedral of finance that even her children’s children would be lazing off. But boy, did that romantically awe inspiring notion, in now exactly eight months, go belly up.

  The dud investments included a chapter eleven declaration in both a computer firm and an oil exploration company, never mind the up front first come first to profit piece of the action in an absolute certainty of a Broadway laugh and dance show to which she was invited to see a rehearsal and to which on its opening, The New York Times said an immediate loud phooey in an easy to read headline

  SILLY SAD AND SINKING

  And all revealed just after midnight when she found herself standing in a large gloomy drawing room of a yellowing brick apartment edifice overlooking Central Park which had emptied in forty-five seconds after that review became news. So much for the enthralling and romantic excitement of the behind the scenes of the theatrical world. Into the void of which she’d dropped nearly two hundred thousand dollars.

  But the very worst belly up situation happened in backing an investment advisory service where at least a couple of dozen telephone lines were in action in rented space in the Empire State Building to which subscribers were supposed to flock to get confidential ultra red hot smart tips on the market. This operation was overseen by a former opera singer and his model girlfriend to whom the investment adviser took a shine and had been convinced that with their café society contacts and their knowledge of large money movements they could infallibly predict trends and could sell the advice to the smaller midwest players for big market kills. And if the name wasn’t so conspicuous the model and opera singer would have called themselves ‘Insiders Anonymous.’

  But there was more than just the opinion of phooey in this deal. Plus the players big and small for a start played alone. And then in the interests of setting up a mega bucks big situation plugged into the European bourses, the three of them went flying first class to Paris on an all expenses paid trip to stay at the Hotel Bristol to make contacts and get ideas and where also it would give the right impression to big deal
merchants which in dining in Paris’s most fabled restaurants did as well. And to attend assiduously upon the latter they’d brought a list as long as an arm and a leg to designate where each evening could be topped off with Chateau d’Yquem and fraises des bois.

  When she advised her adviser Theodore that she was thinking of suing him for indecent negligence and sneaky fraud and that instead of building her a centuries surviving cathedral of finance, he had in a mere eight months put together a cardboard shack of venture investment full of bullshit which in a blizzard of expensive dinners, trips and long distance phone calls, had wiped out the major part of her capital, her adviser broke into tears and nearly sobbed in the lobby shade of a palm plant in the Plaza Hotel while she had china tea with lemon and cake, and he had double whiskies and for all of which she paid the bill. He said he had two kids at college who might now have to leave and take menial jobs.

  ‘O, gee, Jocelyn I admit the whole scenario spiralled down into a loss trend caused by a continued lackluster sentiment, but still down the line I can see some sign of turnaround with an up-beat recovery potential and with right now the time to take advantage of the real low investment prices.’

  ‘I have no intention whatever of ever giving you another red cent of the pittance I’ve got left.’

  But it was her using the words indecent and sneaky that seemed to scare the shit out of Theodore. When she told the details to her lawyer, who as it happened, through her grandmother’s influence, was one of New York’s most prominent and who had a big office overlooking New York Harbour, a tear came into his right eye while the left eye remained dry. Although he was stooped behind his desk from a recent back injury playing tennis he kept struggling up from his swivel chair to take in a view of the harbour and a large liner leaving and spoke over his shoulder.

  ‘You know, Jocelyn, the sad thing about all this is that your adviser is in fact as decent and as honest a guy as anyone can afford to be these days. The only trouble being that with the best of intentions, and a heart as big as his imagination, he just didn’t know what the fuck, pardon my French, he was doing with someone else’s money and there is no point in trying to send him up the Hudson to Sing Sing.’

  ‘That is not my intention.’

  ‘Well, Jocelyn, that’s what might happen. Of course it could have been predicted that the computer business was over-crowded but the company he’d invested your money in was reputable enough. But the real big problem, Jocelyn, is the investment team of the opera singer and his model girlfriend. You see, they took Theodore for everything too and left him broke and his fairly nice house is in his wife’s name which means there are no assets to recompense you if your negligence case succeeds.’

  The financial debacle had now forced her to give up her new apartment, auction all her furniture in storage and sell at a bargain price her four point two litre Jaguar in racing green. Her lawyer’s advice not to sue cost her two thousand seven hundred and eighty-six dollars and eighty-seven cents. She moved at half the rent into a place less than half the size and in the rear of what was once a house owned by one of the richest men in the community putting her ironically occupying a chauffeur’s apartment over a garage.

  And now the real truth dawned, that none of her tried and true friends wanted to know her anymore. She was old hat, considerably poor and out of the action for good. From now on she swore she would apply a new theory to her life, instant instinct. And do exactly what she wanted. It was too late to postulate in her unexpurgated thoughts that you should never let anyone and especially your financial adviser bamboozle you. And then if he does, don’t go to a lawyer about it because in the most confidentially nicest way he’ll victimize you further. And O God there may be few laughs left in me but they’re not never ever going to come out unless there is a laugh left in somebody else somewhere and he laughs first.

  But there was even worse to think of. For the real prospect loomed, as to what might now become of her, shunned as she was and without a job. She could end up being a homeless person hanging around on a bench in the better air conditioned atriums of New York City. And plenty like her and just as dignified were already doing it. Her pair of Purdey guns had long ago gone to Sotheby’s and only reached their reserved price and anyway, she could no longer afford to blow her T.V. set to kingdom come.

  Her unexpurgated thoughts now had to be her favourite pastime except when she occasionally recalled moments of her young growing up days back in South Carolina an incident of which had been tragic too. At a high school prom she’d been invited to because she was one of the prettiest girls anywhere around and the boy who invited her, one of the most handsome, they’d gone expecting to be the beau and belle of the ball. And when no one all evening cut in on them in any of the dances to dance with her because she was such a knockout, she was crushed and the boy was desolate and she found him at the end of the night on the terrace his tears falling down into the magnolia blossoms. And she felt somehow it had all been her fault that she had not made flirting eyes or made herself seem glamorous enough and remained as she always tended to be, except for an odd occasion or two, faithful to her partner.

  Now she’d be grateful if someone, anyone would only say some tiny flattering word, even as banal as I like your shoes they’re cute. I would, I really would be pleased. But then after recalling such sad and sorrowful cerebrations she delighted in how ruthlessly vulgar her thoughts could get. She found herself thinking, you Scarsdale and Bronxville fuckers can go kiss my ass. Or better my socially superior twat. She felt, that in spite of her catastrophically reduced circumstances, she could still feel that in her taste in music and taste in art, she had something to be plenty superior about.

  Out of her more than three quarters of a million dollars and after religiously imposing a budget accounting for every penny, she now had exactly thirteen thousand four hundred dollars and eighty-two cents left in the bank to support her for the rest of her life. Her only extravagance remaining, and modestly poor enough, were her trips down to New York to see the paintings in the museums. But in her small isolated apartment and as the loneliness deepened around her life she briefly but seriously toyed with the idea of going lesbian and bought a book on the subject. At least it could be long term companionship without the horny unpredictability of a guy who could fall for a grasping conspiring bimbo.

  But in becoming homosexual she couldn’t figure out what role she might feel like playing. She sure as hell didn’t want to end up doing all the washing, cooking and vacuuming, with the other girl wearing suits and a sombrero and heading off to her office with a briefcase. Nor did she want to be the bread winner up at six a.m., to be at the station at seven and then at a desk on Madison Avenue at eight. And especially after she saw what she looked like dressed up in front of the bedroom mirror in one of her discarded husband Steve’s suits.

  ‘O my god I look like I’d just stepped out of a faded picture from nineteen twenties pre-war Berlin.’

  But there was also the thought of the menopause down the road and getting fatter and fatter around the hips heading towards the age of forty-five. And she’d now seen a rented porno film of two big bull dykes bumping their naked skins together which filled her with considerable apprehension not to say a shudder of the flesh. Instead, while she had thirteen thousand dollars left she thought she would do community charity work, but after learning how high on the hog some of these charity cases were living, she realized it was she who needed the charity, or better, and fast as she could, a job.

  But now came the bombshell. She may not even be able to find work. Her answer to such questions as what has been your salary history. My salary history has been zero. We’re sorry. And they were. But at last she landed a temporary job as an assistant in a gift shop, in Yonkers. To her one of the strangest conurbations of all time. As you could never tell if you were in Yonkers or not. And when she asked.

  ‘Excuse me, am I in Yonkers.’

  ‘Gee, Ma’am, I don’t know what does the map say th
at you got there.’

  ‘It says Crestwood but I think I’m in Yonkers.’

  ‘Well, Ma’am, if you believe that sincerely keep it like that. All around here is Yonkers. But a lot of people wish it wasn’t.’

  Although invariably sweet and polite, and good at gift wrapping, she got gently redundant when she and the owner both agreed that maybe some of the customers were intimidated by her elegance or maybe to see her there was embarrassing for too many customers from Scarsdale and some who knew her as a member of their country club, who gasped.

  ‘Is that Jocelyn Jones from Winnapoopoo Road.’

  But the owner was pleasantly understanding and with a large bonus under her belt she searched further and finally took up a stint of waitressing plenty of miles away from Scarsdale and Yonkers, getting there and back in an ancient third hand Volvo station wagon. And boy was this a quick way of waking up and starting to learn about life and about those serving and those being served. Rapidly finding she had no stomach for feeding the endless mouths, or watching those eat who were fat enough to go without a morsel for a month.

  While trying to be good at her job, she felt so looked down upon, and that it was aging her rapidly. Her tits unmatching were already a little cross eyed but her left was now conspicuously sagging more than the right. Then finally on an overworked busy Friday night after she’d got several orders wrong and a complaining customer said she’d brought the wrong wine saying it was crap and it was a splendid vintage of Gevrey Chambertin, which she had herself already tasted, she held the bottle over his head and slowly poured out the contents as he sat stunned long enough for her to find herself announcing.

  ‘I’ve been at Bryn Mawr you regrettable oaf and you’re probably from the Bronx.’

  She of course didn’t give a damn that she’d been at Bryn Mawr but her little exhibition of snobbery delighted her. However she knew this would be additional evidence of her emotional disturbance should Steve or her analyst whom she could now no longer afford, ever hear of it. And after being fired and the restaurant settling a suit for damages, she now more than ever began to think she should get way the hell out of this Yonkers no man’s land area of Westchester and try her luck elsewhere. But elsewhere was upon any examination becoming a quick and lonely nowhere. Except perhaps New Hampshire where the people had a reputation for higher ethical principles.