Last Notes from Home (28 page)

I’ve insisted that because the Lodge is such a tinderbox I rent a safety deposit box for my manuscript. Late every Friday afternoon Hannibal and I stroll over to the Lanai branch of the Royal Hawaiian Bank, where I deposit six or seven pages of this letter, plus thirty or so pages of blank manuscript, all dated and sealed snugly with masking tape in a ten-by-twelve manila envelope. On my return I’m invariably met with O’Twoomey’s “all safe and cumfy, lurve?” I nod. “Good.” For emphasis Hannibal adds, “Eeese goot,
eeese goot.”

At a quarter to nine Hannibal fetches me back to the veranda for breakfast. While O’Twoomey swills his second or third bottle of room-temperature stout (vile enough stuff cold), the thick dark malted liquid spilling over his chin and chins, scalloping down from what actually might once have been a jawline and onto his custom-made (he’s outgrown double XL) white linen golf shirts with clusters of vivid green shamrocks stitched over the pockets, I have poached eggs on dry wheat toast, with a glass of skim milk, and try not to ruin my appetite by looking at O’Twoomey. Like Anthony Burgess’s Sikh, Katar Singh, O’Twoomey’s fatness has gone beyond obesity and become O’Twoomey himself, some majestic pinnacle or essence of corpulent drooping flesh. “Watching my weight,” he says and lovingly pats his immense belly. O’Twoomey does not eat breakfast but sits there stupidly smug, his morning flushed face as red as the rising sun, watching me fuel my “genius.”

Ironically, when I go next door to the medical center for my semimonthly blood pressure checks, O’Twoomey accompanies me, his blood pressure is invariably normal, and, despite my three different pills a day, I get tut-tutted by Dr. Jim because my diastolic hovers around ninety. Hannibal, who does not believe in medicines other than the ubiquitous liliaceous aloe plant he boils down in milk, refrigerates in gallon jars, and drinks a glass of daily (my unabridged claims it a purgative, Hannibal esteems it an immunizer against all disease), says, “Mr. O’s eese goot, very goot. Fred’s eese bad, very bad. I know. You ast me. I know.
Oooooh.”
In dismay Hannibal shakes his great weak noodle from side to side.

At two minutes to nine, the dining room having cleared of its half dozen farers, we stroll there and turn on O’Twoomey’s Advent TV, which throws its picture onto a movielike screen mounted above the mantel of the great brick fireplace. If Toby is in residence (and more often than not he is off in the Cessna “on business”), Hannibal drives him the eleven miles down to White Manele Beach, from which Toby jogs back. Even walking the steep twisting badly potted two-lane road from White Manele to the village, fourteen hundred feet above the sea, would send the average man in good shape to bed for ten hours’ sleep. Toby’s condition is truly miraculous, Alissa, I can see that even Hannibal fears him, and it is yet another daydream of mine that my jailers one day have it out and neutralize each other. Although Hannibal goes out of his way to please Toby, Toby refuses to acknowledge Hannibal’s humanity, simple and savage though it is, by saying a single word to him, considering him little more than a robot to watch me while Toby is off doing O’Twoomey’s bidding.

Having something to do with my chiding him for his abominable Irish taste in food, and in the hope that he can cultivate a more sophisticated palate, O’Twoomey and I daily watch
The French Chef,
which is hosted by an alien, or what would appear to be an alien, named Julia Child. I am using the one in ten dishes O’Twoomey favors, to assure that if the insane bastard doesn’t go with blood poisoning he’ll do so with a heart attack, massive, I expect. Ordinarily poor Julia no sooner forms the cooing Bostonian “O” of her flexible lips and announces,
“Soupe aux Moules,
today on
The French Chef
!”
than O’Twoomey shrivels up his nose in horrified mock distaste and with sublime disgust cries,
“Wrong-GOE
!
We’ll have no bleeding Frog dishes from the likes of you, you insufferable old faggot!” What other than Frog dishes O’Twoomey hopes to get from
The French Chef
is beyond me, and my unabridged allows no clue as to what an Irishman means when he calls a peculiar though likeable enough aging woman a faggot. More unbearable than anything, when Hannibal watches with us he repeats, throughout the half hour, everything O’Twoomey says, in a kind of Polynesian pidgin.
“
Wrong-GOE
!
No Fog shee-it, ‘sufferable old ‘aggot!” It is when the
wrong-GOEs
stop and O’Twoomey’s salivary glands start pumping passionately, wet thwap, thwap, thwaps, Pavlovian noises his swigs of stout are quite unable to stay, that I know Miss Julia has hit on a dish that strikes O’Twoomey’s fancy. You can be sure, too, Alissa, that it is a dish fit for swine. Or at least it is when Exley gets through with it. Three days ago, for example, Julia prepared a “Cassoulet for a Crowd,” dry white beans baked with goose, lamb, and sausage.

“Can you do that, lurve?”

“Nothing to it,” I said. “Of course TCI need a couple days for the
confit d
’
oie
and to soak the beans against intestinal motility.”

“Speak English.”

“You mean Irish?”

“Please, lurve,
do no
t push your bleeding fucking luck
.”

“Confit d
’
oie
is preserved goose, a simple matter of pan frying the goose, then storing it in its own fat. As your dear departed mother”—here I actually blessed myself, Alissa—”should have taught you, one has to soak the beans a couple days to prevent flatulence or farting, a condition you already suffer from to such a degree, Seamus, that should I neglect this step you’d doubtless blow yourself to pieces and expire in your own vile stench.”

Preserved goose and soaked beans, my ass, Al! For the goose I bought a dozen turkey legs and fried them in globs of lard, garlic, and heaps of pharmaceutical saltpeter. Then I cut a lamb shoulder into thick cubes, sliced some Italian sausage O’Twoomey has specially prepared by a Honolulu butcher, and braised this mixture in more lard, garlic, and saltpeter. Stripping the bone from the turkey, I broke this meat into edible pieces, then took the sausage and lamb, added it to the turkey, with its fatty skin, and stored it all overnight in the lard, garlic, and saltpeter drippings. The following day, having washed the beans and given them a twenty-minute boil so they’d at least be chewable, I prepared the casserole, a layer of beans here, then a layer of turkey, lamb, and El Wopo sausage in this marvelously glutinous, spreadable, and nauseous-looking fat, then another layer of beans and so forth. Before we went to the golf course yesterday, I put the casserole in the oven at 275 degrees Fahrenheit and let it go all the afternoon, telling Sissy, who ran the lodge, to check it every hour or so. If the top layer of beans appeared dry, I told her, throw two or three tablespoons of butter, together with a dash of saltpeter, on top of it. Last night O’Twoomey and Hannibal ate the whole thing, doused in ketchup.

Today on the golf course, on the 158-yard par three ninth hole, having bet me a thousand dollars he could put the ball from the tee onto the green with an eight iron, and do this straight into a Kona wind, O’Twoomey came slowly to the top of his backswing, paused ever so slightly, came ferociously forward, and at the impact of iron with ball evacuated.

It was beautiful, Alissa. All the way round the course I’d seen—I should say heard and smelled—it coming. It is O’Twoomey’s left or power leg which contains the pins. Unable to plant it, he is forced on every stroke to go to the very top of his backswing and come into the ball with all the force of his upper body and arms. It requires the kind of terrible strain, really, that one employs when sitting on the throne after three days without voiding. Hence on every swing that afternoon his flatulence had been such that even Rabelais would have been shy of detailing it, so bad that even in that fierce Kona wind one could hear its thunderous rumbles, occasionally even pick up its odor at thirty paces. But I do not own the poetry to do it justice. These noises were no warm-up arabesques. There was something symphonic about them, the darkly vibrating romanticism of Wagner, something so debilitating one knew the composition had exhausted the composer. One had no doubt O’Twoomey’s evacuation was complete.

As I dug a hole with my pitching wedge to bury O’Twoomey’s pants and underwear, Hannibal ran O’Twoomey’s electric golf cart (he makes us walk, “for the exercise, lurve”) back to the Lodge for fresh underwear, clean slacks, and a bucket of hot water, soap, and towels. While I dug, O’Twoomey stood hiding in the woods a few feet from me, his fat fishy face compressed tightly between a V limb, sneering hatefully.

“Are you sure you washed those beans with detergent?”

I laughed. “You don’t wash them in soap, Jimmy. You have to soak them. I did so for two days. So help me.” I raised my right hand and invoked the Almighty. I don’t know why I did that, Alissa. It was almost a dead giveaway that I was lying. And, save on those occasions I’m trying to wheedle a concession from the sinister bastard, I never, never call him Jimmy.

After Hannibal completed the unhappy chore of scrubbing down and drying O’Twoomey’s monumental backside and got him into fresh linen and slacks, we made our way up the steep hill to the eighteenth green, which is so steep Hannibal often has to get behind O’Twoomey’s cart and assist the electric engine by pushing. The eighteenth green is, in fact, so elevated it is hidden from the tee, showing the driver only the top half of the pin and the flag. When we got to the top, alas, there was O’Twoomey’s ball three inches from the pin, a “gimme.”

O’Twoomey smirked. “Let me see. That’s thirty-five hundred dollars you owe me on the day. Uhmmm.” He wet his scorecard pencil with his tongue. “For a total of a hundred and four thousand dollars altogether. And if you don’t think this is coming out of your bonus, Frederick, you have another think coming, sir. Indeed you have, sir.”

I can’t imagine what my bonus is going to be, Alissa, but apparently it’s going to be a hefty one, “for the inconvenience, lurve.”

At one end of the picnic table was the ice chest full of cubes, O’Twoomey’s Boodles gin and postprandial J&B Scotch, the bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth that has gone unopened for two years, and my Smirnoff red label vodka, along with a pitcher of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. Besides her other staggering daily tip, Sissy gets an additional thirty dollars just for that pitcher of fresh juice. In front of that were seven inch-thick Delmonicos thawing on the morning
Advertiser,
three for Toby, who had returned from one of his nefarious errands, three for Hannibal, who is so in awe of Toby he does everything Toby does, even tries to dress like him, and one for me. Before the steaks lay a kettle of Toby’s special salad, one taught to him by one of his Chinese girls. As nearly as I can determine, mere are two kinds of lettuce, iceberg and romaine, cucumber, tomato, bamboo shoots, avocado, apple, and walnuts, topped by a delicious dressing whose ingredients Toby typically refuses to reveal. If it contains those prurience-inducing herbs, Alissa, I don’t appear to be getting any more man my customary infrequent hard-ons or having visions of sullying
Playboy
centerfolds (my blood pressure medication, don’t you know?). Next to the salad lay six Kona Gold joints, rolled so immaculately by Toby they honestly look like Camels. Hannibal is a mess after one, but because Toby smokes three during the course of an evening Hannibal smokes three also.

Walking to the outdoor wooden pantry, I unlocked it, opened a twelve-ounce can of Planters mixed nuts and one of cashews, then opened two cans of macadamia nuts, put the various nuts into three imitation cut glass ruby canapé dishes I picked up on sale at Liberty House at the Ala Moana Plaza, a set of four I bought as a present for O’Twoomey from his own money. “Aren’t you the thoughtful one, lurve?” He used to eat the fattening nuts directly from the cans, but in that way he could gauge how many he was eating and I wasn’t able to add more salt, as I do now, hidden behind the pantry. Nobody but O’Twoomey eats the nuts or the extra-sharp Monterey Jack cheddar cheese I cut up and put in the final canapé dish, along with four or five tablespoons of Plochman’s horseradish mustard. O’Twoomey hasn’t figured out why we forego the snacks. Like so many grossly obese people, O’Twoomey has affected a politesse of eating so grotesque as to be laughable. Until he gets a couple of those Boodles into him and goes for a fistful at a time, O’Twoomey airily picks up one or two nuts, with loving delicacy places them on his salivating tongue, chews elegantly, swallows, washes them down with a sip of Boodles, then in some shanty-Irish parody of fastidiousness extravagantly licks his fingers, thwap, thwap, thwap, all the while his eyes closed, moaning in orgasmic pleasure. Within three or four minutes every dish of nuts and a good deal of the cheese is covered, like heavy dew, with a nauseating film of his saliva.

O’Twoomey has no idea why he keeps balooning up “on snacks,” he lives in blissful ignorance of the calories in a single Queensland nut, and one night I saw him eat two cans of these, one each of the mixed and cashew nuts and better than two pounds of the cheese, topped off by three or four shrunken sausages and the blackened peppers and onions swimming in olive oil and sausage fat. If his weight, the booze, the fat, and the salt don’t get him soon, Alissa, I don’t know what will. O’Twoomey manifests all the symptoms of a walking time bomb, but I worry so much about ridding the world of him that I expect I’ll be in a wheelchair before him and my hope is that high blood pressure is in fact, as the cautionary advertisements proclaim, the hidden disease.