Last Notes from Home (30 page)

If you’d taught me nothing else, Alissa, you’d taught me the patience to know that in order to learn the extent of her fantasies and therefore her malaise I’d have to hear her out—hear Robin out if, in my case, for no other reason than not to offend her and thereby risk one of her haughty, regal-necked exits, sit there and listen dumbfounded, my yellow poplin golf shorts bulging with desire, offend her, and risk her leaving me with a week’s harbored and coddled lust. Robin was working on the assumption that I of course knew all about the child—but was she really, Alissa? You’ll have to answer that for me—and hence, taking a deep breath, I took a chance on gender (it was after all 50-50, better than roulette’s red or black at Vegas, which is 26-24) and said, “How is the boy anyway, Robin?”

“Oh, he’s fine, getting to be quite the little man. Still living with Denno’s sister in Waimea. The sister claims to have adopted him and young Denno bears her married name. It’ll be no time at all before Denno has him in Punahoe, thence it’ll be off to the mainland and Harvard, then either Harvard or Columbia Law, Denno thinks. He’ll be governor of the islands by the time he’s thirty, president I should say before he’s forty-five. And you know what’s the worst part of the shit Denno pulled on me, Frederick? Even after I agreed to have his child?—I mean, Denno knew fucking well no pure Buddha-head, American war hero’s son or not, could ever reach the White House unless he possessed a fine-looking strain of
haole
blood—the prick never came through on that Kahoolawe deal. And the only time I ever get to see young Denno—my own flesh and blood, Frederick!—is when Denno’s sister brings him to the hotel for a fucking haircut.”

Jesus H. Bygoddamn Kheeeriiiiist, Alissa, bear with me on this! Knowing your aversion to TV, I expect you’ve never seen
Hawaii 5-0,
the usual cops-and-robbers foolishness enhanced only by being set in the islands. In the show the boss, Steve McGarrett (played by Jack Lord), keeps addressing his sidekick, Dan Williams (played—poorly, I might add—by James MacArthur, the adopted son of playwright Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes and nephew to John D. MacArthur, the Florida billionaire now estimated, since the death of Hughes and Getty, to be the richest man in the world) as Dano. Pronounced here more nearly as Denno (“Book him, Denno, murder one” has become part of our TV mythology), it is the Hawaiian nickname or endearment for Daniel, and the only person Robin ever,
ever
refers to as Denno is none other than—guess?—Senator Daniel Inouye, the legislator you so much admired during the Nixon impeachment proceedings. Or did admire until he started fawning all over ex-CIA chief Richard Helms, congratulating him for his frank and forthright testimony, only for us later to hear that your ughs were right on target and that Helms had been bullshitting those senators all over the place. Not only that but, as you pointed out, Helms at one point reminded them that he’d “been around this town a long time,” which, you said, seemed to be Helms’s way of saying, “Listen, you little pissants, I’ve got a file on every one of your indiscretions thicker than Webster’s unabridged.”

Robin has met Inouye once, at most twice, and I would guess the total time he gave her was only a few minutes. Some months back a splinter group of Ohana called Protect Kahoolawe Ohana attempted to stop the U.S. naval bombing of Kahoolawe, a small (compared with the rest of the islands) pile of rock and shrubs, without water and hence with no commercial value, which on clear days can often be seen from White Manele Beach on Lanai. More than seen. From Lanai one can often hear the navy jets bombing Kahoolawe (it sounds like dynamiting at a distant construction site). Decreed by Presidential Executive Order 10436, the federal courts are not empowered to rescind it. Just as our mainland Indians claim an interstate highway is to be built through consecrated burial grounds, so the Ohana group claims this pile of volcanic rock is sacred acreage. In protest they took an ill-prepared group to Washington, were generally rebuffed by both Hawaii’s representatives and a capitol press corps that didn’t know what they were talking about, and especially were they ignored by Senator Inouye’s office. They returned to the islands furious—perhaps Robin had even persuaded them to shave and wash their Levi’s before leaving—vowing another Wounded Knee and that blood would flow in rivers. At that time, to console her comrades-in-arms, Robin told them that Inouye owed her a favor—I heard her say this on 1602’s phone!—and that she would damn well set things aright.

Now this was only a year ago, and despite her bullshit about Inouye’s owing her a favor, Robin had never before met the man. I know because I rewrote her rambling, hysterical, unconsciously amusing, and lofty-minded letter to him, and in a few declarative sentences came directly to the point and asked for a few minutes of his time to discuss the bombing of Kahoolawe. Moreover, when Robin at last heard from him, he gave her that few minutes on a Saturday afternoon when he was back in the islands for a long weekend. Moreover still, because it was a Saturday Hannibal and I, for lack of something to do, accompanied her to Inouye’s Honolulu office and waited in the parking lot no more than ten or twelve minutes for her triumphant return. Assuming Inouye saw her right away, Robin could not have had more than seven or eight minutes with him. Dressed in her avocado Levi suit and bandana, displaying plenty of tanned tum-tum and ripe chest, she slammed the door of the Porsche, sighed contentedly and said, “Well, that’s taken care of, Mister Cynical Know-it-all Frederick Exley.”

“Eese goot,
eese goot,
‘obin.”

“Fat fucking chance.”

“But why are you always so negative, Frederick? Why, why,
why
?”

I simply wasn’t about to explain it to her again, Alissa. After December 7, 1941, in one of the more notoriously shameful episodes in our history, the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast had their properties confiscated, their asses thrown into peremptorily erected concentration camps, and haven’t to this day been formally apologized to by way of adequate federal compensation. In Hawaii an entirely different thing occurred. There the Hawaiian Japanese-Americans were allowed to enlist in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Sent to Europe, they were given, literally, some of the most abominable assignments of the European campaign, took staggering casualties (it was where Inouye lost his arm), and for Robin even to imagine she was going to flash a little skin at Inouye or anyone else in the power structure (men well into their fifties and sixties able to remember Pearl Harbor) and have him lift a finger to prevent our navy’s being prepared against any such future eventuality was the kind of lunatic fantasizing that permits hack lawyers to allow Indians to believe the government is going to give them a grand an acre for the entire Adirondack State Park or return the Black Hills of the Dakotas to them. Not only are the survivors of the 442nd (many of whom live on Lanai, where I’ve cautioned Robin against mouthing any Ohana nonsense on the veranda of the Lodge) among the most elitely proud, and rightfully so, private clubs in the world (besides these dudes, your chums at the Harvard Club don’t even know what snobbery means, Al) but there was no way that Protect Kahoolawe Ohana was going to elicit anything from them but a sardonic smile, rather as if you’d asked General Patton to stop his armored divisions in the face of .22 target pistols.

This historical digression aside, Robin had taken her lie to Ohana that Inouye owed her something, when in fact she’d never met the man, and fantasized his debt into her having agreed to give the senator a half-Caucasian son (no doubt Inouye was magnetically drawn to her Smith-Vassar-Sarah Lawrence background and all that tommyrot, don’t you know?) who’d soon be old enough to enter Punahoe, the islands’ leading
haole
prep school, which forgets all about race when recruiting football players, and thence it was off to your alma mammy, Al, and on to the governor’s mansion and the White House long before he even reached my enfeebled age.
Hi yoooohhhhh, Silver!
By now, I was seated on the edge of the bed, my golf shorts cramping my embarrassing lust, I had my legs crossed, one bare thigh resting atop the other cramping my ardor, and I was gently massaging Robin’s stomach through her silk shirt. One of my ex-wives, Alissa, had had an inordinate aversion to stretch marks, I had spent the latter months of her pregnancy nightly rubbing cocoa butter into her bulge (to no avail), and, because the moment still wasn’t right for Robin, I was using this finger rubbing motion I’d used in that long-ago, nearly obliterated time.

“How old would young Denno be now, Robin?” “Oh, Frederick,
Frederick,
he’s almost nine! Almost nine! On March 28 he’ll be nine!”

March 28 is, of course, my birthday, Alissa. But that is no matter, it was nearly time. This was no banal soap opera, this was opera on the epic perches. Robin’s arms were about my neck, she’d reverted to her savage sobbing (her tears against my cheek were as scalding as those of any other creature in pain), and as her tear flow began to subside, I removed my massaging fingers from her torso, took them to her breasts and continued gently rubbing there, through the silk shirt. When at length the tears stopped, and her arms dropped laxly to her sides, I rose, unbuttoned and unzipped her Natal plum hip huggers, ever so slowly and gently because they were so taut to her skin, removed them, then her white satin bikini panties, in one perfunctory motion dropped my yellow poplin golf and Jockey shorts to the carpeting, and without removing her shirt or mine mounted and penetrated her astonishing wetness; for, before Freud as god, Alissa, I swear Robin’s thunderingly deranged stories not only excite me beyond the bounds of anything resembling refinement, but so enrapture her that during her mad monologues she apparently discharges and her backside appears to be covered with a wet coat of shellac. I was, as I say, so agitated that it was strictly a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am. But then, Alissa, it had only just begun.

“Are you into imagination, Frederick?” Robin once asked me. Now how about that for a rhetorical question, Alissa, I mean directed to the dude I call Exley who prides himself on an imagination he likes to think runs the gamut from the utterly morbid and diseased to the rarefied and heady heights of the generous and eloquent? And that is how it all began. We had taken a long swim on Waikiki, had washed the sand and sea salt from us at the pool shower, had repaired to 1602, and had no sooner entered the room when Robin threw that one at me.

“Well, I would most certainly hope so.”

“No, I mean, you know, Frederick, sexual imagination?”

On that day Robin had on a 1972 Olympic tank suit, blue with red, white, and blue stripes running vertically from her crotch to the V of her breasts, one of those featherweight garments that seem to weigh no more than stealthy fog moving among trees, and I had on His Grace’s kelly green trunks with the Boheena crest stitched to the right thigh. Apparently I was supposed to be the coach of the Olympic swim team, hilarious in itself because, though I had in youth been a gifted swimmer—having grown up on the river and Lake Ontario—Robin could now spot me fifty meters and beat me in the hundred-meter freestyle. And I was further, according to Robin, supposed to be screwing all the other girls on the team but poor, poor Robin and as we had now found ourselves alone in the locker room for the first time Robin insisted she needed to unwind from the excruciating rigors of training as badly as the other girls and, great tears of self-pity in her eyes, demanded to know what was so repugnant about her? Robin of course provided me with my own “rational” answer. It was because I found her so breathtaking, intelligent, and high-minded that I was utterly terrified of getting into it with her and finding myself without the ironfisted will to unshackle myself and hence find myself “hooked for life.”

Now Robin approached, rubbed her breasts against me, and coyly demanded to know what would be the matter with that, what, what,
what,
could I not, Frederick, envision a life together?
Mrs. Robin Exley
she again and again lolled about her salivating palate. To make a long story infinitely longer, dear old Al, Robin even made me lug the goddamn king-size mattress from the bed onto the carpeting, suggestive, I expect, of those locker room mats swimmers often rest upon. Because distaff swimmers seem to be getting younger every year (one famous coach was quoted as implying you had to get them before they got into guys, that once they started screwing their brains became scrambled and they wouldn’t win you doodly-squat, which must have gone down marvelously with Ms. Steinem and Billie Jean and the girls), Robin was only fourteen or fifteen, a virgin, natch, I had of course to go through some painstaking foreplay, be ever so delicate and gentle about penetration, but by the time it was over Robin was crying stuff like, “Oh, this is ever so much better than a blue ribbon! No, it’s better than a bronze! Better than a silver! God, God, God, Frederick, it’s better than a fucking gold!”

After we’d lain in each other’s arms for some time, we rose, removed our shirts, Robin picked up her alligator balloon bag, we went into the bathroom, took a shower together, lathering each other, toweled ourselves dry, and I returned to the bedroom, poured myself a stiff vodka and grapefruit juice and sat down to wait. I never knew, Alissa, what garments Robin had in her bag. What I did know was that we’d long ago exhausted her erotic repertoire, the games had become repetitious to the point—fun though at one time they’d been—of driving me round the bend; and I am now forced to point out to you, Alissa, that despite the incredible hurt we have over the years heaped on one another, in the good times, in the very good times, in the lovely, enchanted times, we never,
never
found the need to fuck anyone but each other, warts and all.

When Robin at last emerged from the bathroom she had her hair in pigtails, she wore a lemon-yellow short-sleeved cashmere sweater, a steel-gray pleated skirt with a slit running from hip to hem and a great outsized decorative gold safety pin joining the slit at the thigh, one of my generation’s garments, dark green cabled knee socks, and loafers with fucking pennies in them. Now listen closely, Al, and let me explain the way Robin had taken a perfectly truthful story I told her about an adolescent sexual experience and how she had transformed it; for, as you can well imagine, Robin would keep me up half the night beseeching, imploring, nay, fumingly entreating me to relate, in unsparing detail, every sexual experience I’d ever had, did so until I went quite mad with zany preposterousness and gave her some genuinely wondrous stuff straight from the top of my septic dome. Can you guess, for example, what I told her about you? Do you know those quarter-inch cubes bartenders are now packing into rock glasses? As any drunk knows, Al, and drunks know everything, with these cubes the sleazebags can have their pourers set at half an ounce, give you very little mix, so that whenever I’m in a place that uses these I insist on both a free pour into a shot glass, as well as a bottle of mix on the side, insisting I like to mix my own. Well, ma’am, I told Robin you liked to have your vagina plugged with these cubes before intercourse.

“What in the world does that do, Frederick?”

“Christ, Robin, what a sexual novice you are! A guy can keep a hard-on for about six hours that way!”