The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms

by J. P. Donleavy

  Out of a glowering grey sky white flakes descending blowing in whorls along the platform. The rails beginning to sing as the train came in, always seeming like a great throbbing monster roaring down the track. Climb aboard. A certain strange mix of people could change the atmosphere in the car. Could even be, some of them burglars with their overnight loot on their way back to the pawnshops on 125th Street or down Eighth Avenue beyond Hell’s Kitchen. At least I have a copy of The New York Times with its reassuring small legend left top of the front page. All the news that’s fit to print. To erase my own tabloid tidings with all my thoughts that are unfit to think. What would comprehending people do without this newspaper. To bring them in the morning some daily hope of better things. Delivered on their front steps or stuck in their door knobs. Moral arbiter. Champion of the oppressed and distressed. At least I fervently hope so.

  Train stops. More of corporate America get on at Bronxville. Idle ideas. Out the window across the platform the First Westchester National Bank. Their inviting windows less than a stone’s throw away. With my Smith and Wesson right now in my handbag could go in and menacingly request a stack of money. Hand over the swag. Dear me that doesn’t sound right. I’ll be a whore before I’m a bank robber. But this is the town where the old Gramatan Hotel once stood glacially like a castle redoubt atop its hill. It’s said it was a favoured place for Admirals, graduates of Annapolis to spend their retirement. They frequented a turret where they relived their commands at sea. Grandmother, her very few times in New York, instead of at the Waldorf, stayed there for the air. Taking tea on its verandas or a seat on the big sofa in its sprawling lobby.

  Train pulls out. Rolls along the valley under the bridges where the Bronx River slowly flows. Sitting on the right side I miss the casket factory sign but see the haunting sepulchres of graves and mausoleums pass on the hillside of Woodlawn cemetery. Surprised at its sylvan beauty when one day I went to visit Herman Melville’s grave. At least Clifford isn’t going to tell his trust fund wife, hey holy gee, honey, I couldn’t find a decent twat over there at that ole roadhouse so I went over to Jocelyn’s to try to fuck her and took out my big ole tool to show her how it twitched and that ole bitch Joy, who’d shoot a poor ole armadillo dead, tried to sure shoot the shit out of me.

  Maybe soon I really will go back down south. Where I remain in good standing a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. All such a waste of time north of the Mason-Dixon Line claiming to be anything anymore in life. Get away out of this uncivilized suburbia. So what if salamanders crawl up and down the curtains in the Carolinas and give Northerners the heebie jeebies, and bugs bite the shit out of one. But where men stand to respectful attention when a lady enters the room. And they really do try to click their heels. The Botanical Gardens. Another visit I must make. Maybe the Bronx isn’t all that bad. Where this local train is now stopped at this station. Fordham University. Own a seismograph. Earthquakes only remind again that one is so painfully painfully lonely. Needing so desperately to talk to someone free of charge instead of being left rejected. Instead of at the rate of one hundred and fifty dollars an hour which one no longer could afford. Battle ships once sailed up the Bronx River. Now nothing but a small muddy looking flow of water meandering through lonely cold little meadows. All the historical things about New York one has yet to learn. Her grandmother said nobody who was anybody in her time lived on Fifth Avenue north of Fifty-Ninth Street. And not that it mattered as New York was socially forbidden territory anyway.

  One always knows one is only ten or so minutes away from Grand Central when flashing past these grim ghetto windows. Washing drying on string strung across rooms. A gang of scattering kids running around a bonfire in a debris strewn street. The train descending into the blackness underground. The last fifty or so blocks through darkness. Dozens maybe hundreds of people living in the concrete rat infested interstices of these Stygian tunnels. The distant light bulbs dimly glowing across all the converging parallel tracks. Passengers stir, feel for their wallets, briefcases and handbags. She’d hurry out of the train. Avoid all the Scarsdale husbands. Take the Madison Avenue bus uptown. See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.

  But today she’d splurge. Buy lunch at the counter in a drug store on Madison near 86th Street. A lettuce, egg and tomato sandwich, a piece of apple pie a la mode and a cup of coffee. Not cheap but nourishingly reasonable at the price. And the nice man the other side of the counter would say a pleasant there you go. O god if one could only concentrate, concentrate on just the very simplest of things there could be no end to the pleasures of life.

  Climbing these familiar steps which she always felt went halfway to heaven. The Met holding an exhibition of her favourite old American painters with several Edward Hicks. The afternoon flies. Her feet tiring until three o’clock. She thought for a fleeting moment that she saw the sad grey haired but handsome man who’d lost his family. And found herself running. And then he disappeared around a corridor. She’d so many times thought about him since. His quite pleasant voice so full of sadness. On their first date out for lunch at the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-Seventh, when she insisted they go dutch over their modest meal he smiled and said no he’d pay, that the gods of manna had been good to him and nothing would give him greater pleasure than to be allowed to compensate them back.

  There had been another suitor on the horizon briefly met through the introduction service. Nice as he was as well, he was just too preppy, shuffling forward in his loafers, his neck slightly craned forward as if walking like a duck. And she wondered what it was that looking so ridiculous and still young at forty-eight years old, how he could ever make any money. And yet looking so innocently stupid he made a lot. Drove a Lamborghini, and even professed love to her. And to finally get up her skirt even proposed marriage. All would have been fine. Except she discovered when his wife rang that he was already married with three children, two at college and a fourth on the way.

  Dare she now go to her new favourite place to pee. But she must. She needed now to go and pee. And then following have late late lunch. Strolling past this a station wagon pulling up to one side of this pink stone building. Serious minded faces of two men manoeuvring a black long bag onto a trolley to wheel up a path from the sidewalk into a side door. A body in death on its last journey. Collected out of a hospital or from anywhere where people are allowed to drop dead.

  As she continued around the corner to enter the front of this gracious and dignified sanctum, she hardly had enough money left for her own funeral. Through the lobby. Scent of burning incense. Never a shortage of names. Three reposing departed dead in their various suites. The ladies rest room just down the long hallway on the right. An ashtray and box of paper tissues on a polished table under the lamp. At least you know if you were brought dead to this place and your heirs could afford it, you’d be well looked after. But her own plans were increasingly serious to be buried back in South Carolina in the graveyard she so often visited there way out in the woods of her Grandmother’s estate. And be together with great grand uncles who died for the Confederacy and whose tombstones had carved upon them the Confederate flag and swords hanging in their scabbards.

  O god someone has come out of that back room and is coming heading directly at me up the hall. And when the sun comes shining even on this cool day, in my light green tweed suit. I’m not exactly dressed for a funeral. He’ll solicitously enquire of me I suppose if I need any help. Or comfort in my sorrow. For whom do you mourn ma’am. I mourn for me. And Stephen Foster our wonderful composer. Who celebrated our country. And died right in this city penniless and in obscurity.

  But this gentleman in his dark grey suit, white shirt and silk black tie, must see so many dead he won’t remember seeing me alive in here before. Which he has. And I stupidly careless haven’t got a name yet to say of a deceased. That I should have read first off on the notice board. One sounding Russian. Was it ending with an isky or something. O no. That’
s the name of a Washington strategic genius who tells us what’s going to happen to the world and is always proved right. The kind of advice I could use now.

  God, undertakers are so naturally so god damn nice. But better I avoid this one. Ah. Deliverance. At least I can go in this door for the moment. Clearly left open for somebody. And get out of his way. As I’m nearly sure he’s seen me come in to have a pee before and might not be so god damn nice seeing me do so again and again. In here everything is certainly resting in peace. And not emotionally overcrowded. My god what beautiful choral music. Sounds liturgical and Russian. And O my god a casket. Someone is in it. I’ll have to get out if mourners come in. The deceased, a man. Light flashing on the glass of his pince-nez. Undertaker is peeking in. Better to look like I’m doing something. Sign the visitors book. Invent a name and an address. O god someone could ask. How are you related to the demised whom the Lord calleth home. I don’t even know the poor bastard. Accuse me of necrophilia. Or maybe just mild necromancy. Leering over bodies. Seeking news from the dead. How is it on the other side of the divide. Peek out in the hall. He’s still there fixing flowers. As a left hander, scribble in the condolence book with my right hand. Then I can say that’s not me. Laura sounds good. Laura Claridge Lancaster after my two favourite hotels sounds even better. Ponfield Road, Bronxville at least gives a modestly good address and make it a number in the early forties in honour of my age. The early bird catches the first worm. The first name to be written. But then I’m impersonating someone. They could ask for my driver’s licence. A lady never impersonates.

  The man’s still outside in the hall. I know he must know me from past visits to pee and is merely waiting for me to come out to tell me this is not a public urinal. Sit and take a load off my legs. At least I can keep vigil as no one else is over this dead man. Rouge disguising his ghostly pallor. Old worldy with a silk shirt, and diamond pin stuck in his black cravat. Has an intellectual face, a big nose. A twirled waxed moustache. O god what utterly serene beautiful music. A green glow of light behind the coffin. His condolence card says composed by Bortniansky, Cherubic Song Number Seven, sung by the Russian Republican Academic Choir. Voices sound as if they are waves in a great emotional sea. A low threnody in the trough. Rising triumphant at the crest. Clutching at the heart. A shiver going through one’s being. A great ghost has come. Picks me up to fly out to the last and lost outer regions of space. But at this moment in this empty room one thing is for sure. Recognized or not. I’ve now desperately got to go and pee. And you in that coffin look just as lonely for friends as I am. You poor son of a bitch. But not as poor as I am. Which is such now that if I don’t become a whore I’ll have to become a nun. Seek solitude, simplicity, frugality and life without haste. But at least now that I know your taste in music it deserves my real name and address. Which I’ll write beneath my phony one with my left hand. And I’ll go kneel now and say an atheistic prayer.

  Ah, at last, down the hall the coast is clear. And Mrs Jocelyn Jones in her light green tweed suit and purple scarf can stand up in the semi-darkness, and brushing down her skirt and braving the brighter light of the hall can. No I can’t. O god the man in the dark suit is still standing there. O god. He bows with just a trace of a sympathetic smile. Now that’s good southern behaviour. Which being a funeral director may require be dispensed to interlopers. Maybe that’s my solution. Go to mortician school. There must be female embalmers and undertakers. And if there aren’t, some feminist group is soon going to sue that there should be. Braving the sadness everyday. Sweeping around in long black gowns and black rubber gloves. And working hard. But perhaps too much like a domestic slave. Which who knows what that could lead to. When first married, Steve said watching me do household chores like cleaning or washing a floor, especially if it required scrubbing and bending over, that it made him horny. And he was right, he used to try to stick it up me from behind with the biggest hard ons I’d ever felt, which made me turn around to look and it was at least an inch longer than normal and he finally had me wearing leopard skin lingerie trimmed with black lace to wash the dishes. Until one day, his eyes closed in anticipated ecstasy reaching for me with his jumbo hard on he pushed through the cellar door near where I was standing and fell headlong down the stairs.

  As one tip toes across and down this hall a stocking is laddering. No one yet could have sat on this toilet seat today. One’s thoughts have got so bizarre as one enjoys the marvellous relief to pee. Do they remove the piss as well as the blood out of the dead. Peer long and leisurely in the mirror at my deteriorating complexion. Powder the blemishes away on my cheeks and nose. And even now I get horny doing housework, and the more menial the hornier. Leave the ladies rest room before I start scrubbing this floor. And thinking that Steve is going to come barging in. So much for his emigrant peasant background where his female ancestors were beasts of burden and were still probably digging potatoes up with shovels and must have got so horny they were fucking each other on the dirt mounds left behind. Yet another smile from the dark suited man. Pass the door of the still empty reposing suite. The Russian voices still sounding the strains of Bortniansky’s Cherubic Song.

  A group of mourners entering the front door as Jocelyn Jones left the funeral home. Together perhaps heading for the suite where the gentleman with the pince-nez was reposing. Walking east to turn down Madison Avenue. The scarfs, shoes, dresses. Past all the old emporiums. Where once one so carefree shopped. The darkness falling on the red and green lights. Feeling so sad, so sad. The pretzel seller on the street corner. And as I did in college days stop and buy one. At Fifty-Seventh Street cut over to Fifth Avenue. A leisurely stroll down the geographical spine of wealth in this city. All the way back to the great gloom of Grand Central Station where strangers in their endless great numbers pass. Tiffany’s and Cartier on the way. Go past a brand new store, a so very English Asprey’s, selling anything from platinum toothpicks to gold life-sized eagles. The homeless hiding from the angry black blind man selling pencils because they were invading his pitch. Buy a pretzel from the pushcart man. Chew through the salty crust. College, marriage and family gone. Along with her standards and principles. Even her footsteps sounding solitary. Panhandlers begging everywhere. Be one of them soon. Tears well in my eyes. Rolling down my cheeks. After this. Another strange lonely day, the terrible sadness of which I know I’ll never forget.

  Because when first she arrived today at the Met she stood on the spacious sunny steps in the warm sunshine. And watching a performing mime on the lower steps. Then her eye caught sight of a terribly young stalwart couple. Of medium and equal height. He blond and she of brown hair. Their soft flowing locks so beautifully groomed against common fashion that they seemed ageless and imperishable against all ravages of life. Reminding of the elegance of her own two estranged children whose silver framed portraits on her bedside dresser still painfully recalled her rejection. And now to see this so young couple, arm in arm, both so handsome and exquisitely in love with one another. She watched them slowly stroll back and forth along the steps. The girl in her tweed suit, he in his tweed jacket and grey flannels. They so appeared to come from another world. For hers had so changed. Then the young couple seemed to disappear. She so wanted to watch them again. But just as she was turning to ascend the two more top steps to enter the Met she felt a gentle touch on the arm and they were suddenly standing on a step lower and directly in front of her. The young man with a gentle smile politely asked if she were Lady Elizabeth Fitzdare whom they were to meet quite near to where she was standing. And she said no but that she wished she were. And the boy with his shining white teeth smiled and said, and so do we wish you were. And it was that that made her weep as she went down Fifth Avenue. Because she might never be again anyone ever again who anyone like that romantic young couple would want to meet.

  In getting that day finally to pee in the funeral home she realized that after so much recognition she could never go back there again. But not that far away there was at leas
t a decent hotel to substitute, catering exclusively for females. Christmas was soon coming. She deliberated for days to call the unlisted number of the sad man with the white hair to ask him to drive up the Bronx River Parkway to dinner at her humble apartment and make him a present of a tie. He did say he was shy of the telephone but for her to telephone. And he even said it with a smile, and a please. But with more than half the numerals dialled she lost her nerve again and again. Always at the last moment hanging up the phone. She knew that he did go to a small office and have a secretary. She also somehow knew he had disguised to some degree that he was rich, and she guessed that he might even be extremely rich, added to which was an enormous settlement from the air crash and loss of his family. He occupied a large apartment with seven bedrooms and live-in maid at the East River end of Fifty-Seventh Street and had a view of the tug boats going by. And even putting aside that fact, she knew too that he was a highly ranked Court Tennis playing member of the Racquet and Tennis Club where she’d found herself once up a weekend in New York from Bryn Mawr, having to wait off the lobby in the small ladies waiting room. And it had annoyed her a little as a female to be kept safely out of the club’s further inner sanctums. Unless allowed as she was this day to go witness a Real Tennis match which a handful of martini drinking spectators were invited to watch from a little cage at the end of the court.