Last Notes from Home (42 page)

Robin would be three weeks closing the public relations office. I suspected Robin had to give her various Ohana clients a few final fucks. Many articles were then appearing about herpes and I told the new demure virginal soon-to-be-betrothed Robin that if she ever infected me, I’d kill her. Robin of course became hysterically indignant, screaming, “You even have to wreck my marriage, my one and only marriage,
you prick
!”

I spent those days exhausting myself attempting to explain to O’Twoomey that I could not in any dilatory fashion take “lessons” to marry Robin in the Catholic Church, that for my own mental peace, or what was left of it, I had to go all the way to conversion. Finally, more from his own exhaustion than any eloquence on my part, Jimmy said it was okay to marry outside his and Robin’s church. He added the rider, however, that though he would out of courtesy attend the ceremony he would not give the bride away, as he had been scheduled to do.

“I’ll have no bleeding part in any such bleeding pagan rite.”

Jimmy then gave Toby a check for a thousand dollars, made payable to the Jehovah’s Witness minister on Lanai, told Robin about it, and Robin got the sizes of everyone in the wedding party, as Jimmy’s tailor would be making up the appropriate attire. She also told Toby to tell the minister she would be writing the ceremony—the creative Robin, Alissa!—and gave Toby a Saturday four weeks hence, the Saturday just prior to Easter, as the date we would be married at Hulapoe or White Manele Beach. The reverend’s only stipulation was that he would of course “baptize” both Robin and me in the blue Pacific (but I can hear you chuckling and already ghoulishly anticipating, Alissa!).

At some point Robin must have asked O’Twoomey about my state of mind, for I heard him say, “Frederick? He’s fine. I’ve never seen him more industrious.” I hadn’t as yet sobered up, Alissa, and was of course trying, to no avail, to write you these words while hung over.

As Robin knew I was “too frigging insensitive” to have picked up a wedding band, she handed me a small felt green ring case, making me swear not to lose it and suggesting that I give it to Wiley, my best man, as he would in any event be holding it during the ceremony. When I opened the case, I saw it was the same jade band bordered in gold—”the friendship ring”—with which she’d allowed O’Twoomey to simulate his making of thump on the plane on that long-ago day the three of us had met; and as Robin had already told me O’Twoomey had wanted to give us the honeymoon suite but she had insisted we take our usual room on the twelfth floor of the Towers—later I learned Robin took the price difference in cash!—I was being made to understand mat now that we were to be a responsible married couple a new penuriousness was being introduced into our relationship. Would Hannibal, I asked, sleep with us or take his usual adjoining room? “Hannibal is most certainly not going on our honeymoon.” Fat chance of that, I said. But as it happened Robin was right. Hannibal didn’t go on our honeymoon.

Fortunately for me I did at last agree to a marriage rehearsal at White Manele Beach on the Friday afternoon, Good Friday, before our marriage. Had I not agreed, I wouldn’t have made it through the ceremony. Whether Robin intended to send the details of the wedding to Tony, the retired plumber, and Evelyn Glenn, the retired Con Ed secretary, for publication in
The New York Times
I don’t know, but if that is what she had in mind, this is what the
Times’
society editor would have had to digest.

For Wiley, my best man, and me—because Robin knew that the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale, or whoever the Jehovah’s Witness guy was, intended dipping us in the ocean in the concluding baptismal exercise—Robin had had O’Twoomey’s tailor stitch the Lord Lisdoonvarna Boheena crest into two old-fashioned black tank suits with shoulder straps. Wiley—and I despised him for it—looked great in his but both my belly and my flabby pectoral muscles sagged droopily in mine and I was simply too tired and too bored to object. For Malia, the maid of honor, O’Twoomey’s tailor had made a beautiful tank suit of cranberry taffeta lined with a white lightweight waterproof material and for Robin he had outdone himself. Her tank suit was ivory, the panty section lined with a virginal white lace that protruded suggestively from the thigh’s suitline, rather like the lace underwear the tennis player Gussie Moran used to wear under her shorts to titillate dirty old men. Both Malia and Robin would wear ivory bathing caps topped with a halo of baby’s breath flowers—I called it “hog’s breath”—and minuet roses, Robin would carry a bouquet of white roses and Malia a bouquet of minuet roses.

As if all this weren’t grotesque enough, the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale would begin, in Robin’s words, by saying, “We all come together today in peace and love to witness this union of man, woman, and nature,” after which Robin would say, “Being born of woman, I have consented to give freely of myself to Frederick,” then, substituting Robin’s name for mine, I would repeat the line. Listen, Alissa, I kept a straight face at the rehearsal until we came to one of the lines Robin had written for the reverend.

“Do you agree to live together with Frederick as his woman, to meet his mind”—there’s no way I’m ever that drunk, Alissa!—”be not puffed out, not put him down, crowd his space, or be an oppressive person as long as you both shall love?” At one point I was expected to say to Robin—and I ask you, Alissa, how could I be expected to get through this sober?—”Come to me, Robin, be a part of my aura, live in peace and love, follow the seasons with me,” to which Robin says, “When the ground is cold,” and Frederick enjoins, “Lie with me and be warm.” And Robin says, “When strawberries ripen in spring,” and Frederick, “So, too, shall you, Robin, and bear me many sons.” On and on this lunatic rehearsal went, while Frederick, the seed bearer for these many sons, bit a hole in his lower lip in an attempt to stay both the mirth and the terror.

After the rehearsal I kept telling everyone that we had been practicing the ceremony in the beginnings of a Kona wind and that I’d be damned if I’d allow myself to be baptized in the kind of majestic surf that always accompanies these winds. But everyone, including Wiley who should have known better, pooh-poohed this, told me I had premarriage jitters, told me I was just a pouty spoilsport, and even suggested that as I fancied myself the writer I was just jealous that Robin had written such a beautiful and sensitive ceremony. We were at the picnic tables behind the Lodge, having a prenuptial Eucharist of Delmonico steaks and Toby’s herb salad, and O’Twoomey, toasting Robin, said, ‘That was the most lovely and moving ceremony ever I did hear. Indeed it was, ma’am. I only wish my faith didn’t preclude my giving such a beautiful and brilliant woman to Frederick in holy matrimony. Indeed, that is my wish, Ms. Robin.” We were barely halfway through our steaks and salad when the Kona rains penetrated those dense towering pines that rose above the picnic tables, we scooped up the food and booze and fled to the screened-in veranda to complete the meal. When we had done so, I looked very evenly at Wiley and said, “Are you shitting me, Wiley?” Wiley laughed.

For your sake I did, however, sit through the movie version of
Hawaii
(and I ask you Alissa, is this love or isn’t it?). Of course, and even though you brought along an iced twelve-pack of Budweiser, you made sure we went to a drive-in ten miles out in the country so I couldn’t flee to the nearest saloon to wait for you. To this day I don’t know what the flick was about. But having read the book, and been further ennobled by the flick, you’ll recall Hollywood’s version of these winds. There comes the scene where the fat Wahini, who is married to her own brother, is dying. And her son says to the Yankee minister, Max von Sydow, who looked as bewildered by his lines as the rest of the cast, “She will die,” ominously adding, “And then the whistling winds will come.”

Those foreboding whistling winds, Alissa, are what are known in the islands as Kona winds. And ominous they are, believe me. Some months ago we had one that lasted a mere four days. When the weather broke clear and Hannibal and I went to White Manele Beach for a swim there was no beach, literally. Having come here from American Samoa when he was three and grown up in the islands, Hannibal wasn’t in the least surprised but I was agape with astonishment, so much so that Hannibal still does a passable imitation of my expression. At the picnic tables behind the Lodge O’Twoomey will say, “Do Frederick, Han, when he looked at the beach; do Frederick when he looked at the beach after the Kona storm.” Hannibal will thereupon let his long muscular arms and his long jaw go slack, his eyes will bulge out like those of Lugosi or Frankenstein in acute pain and everyone, me too, will laugh.

To say that I looked at the beach is inaccurate, for there was, I repeat, literally no beach. It was as though some contractor had run amok, had moved in overnight with ten thousand heavy equipment operators and as many bulldozers and just carted off a billion tons of sand. The surf had taken the entire beach right up to the line of the Kiave trees, under which sit the cinder block cooking grilles and the picnic tables, and at the precise point of the tree line the wet sand dropped away as sheer as a cliff for thirty feet until it met sharply the place where the beach had been, a mud-colored sand as hard and as flat as Daytona or concrete, with here and there broken shards of brown, orange, and bottle-green glass, coins of all denominations, and patches of white coral standing exposed. That, Alissa, is what a Kona wind and the surf that accompanies it will do. And it would be eight to ten weeks before a normal surf had restored the beach to its white shimmering beauty.

Ms. Robin Glenn was due to become Mrs. Frederick Exley at White Manele Beach at 5
p.m.,
a sunset observance. By 3
p.m.,
however, the Kona winds and rains were coming with such screaming whistling monotony that I’d long since put to rest the thought of anyone’s considering holding the ceremony on the beach, was smug in the knowledge that we hadn’t any alternative but to get hitched in the tan clapboard Church of Jesus Christ or in the Lodge, so smug indeed that though O’Twoomey wouldn’t allow me any vodka until after the rites he said I could drink a few cans of Budweiser and for the better part of the day I’d spartanly denied myself even these in the straitlaced hope that a sober Frederick would have at least a chance of getting through the marriage without collapsing in mirth.

At 3
p.m.
Hannibal and I were sitting at our table at the screened-in veranda discussing my attire for an indoor ceremony, having decided that my black Florsheims, my beige chinos, a tan silk shirt, and a red-and-gold dotted four-in-hand (Giuseppe of Milano: Made in Canada) I’d found in the hall of the Lodge would not be inappropriate for that climate. I’d even tried everything on and though the breeches were somewhat snug, my outfit, Hannibal indicated
(“Eese good, eese good
”
),
looked fine. At 2
p.m.,
over the day having had six or eight cups of black coffee and numerous glasses of ice water, I’d gone into the men’s room and along with the remains of the previous evening’s supper had thrown up the coffee and water.

Shortly thereafter the dry heaves that invariably accompany my going cold turkey began, coming at about twenty-minute intervals, and if anything at all came up it was only this sickly yellow bile. Experts on alcoholism state unequivocally that weaning yourself off a quart and a half of booze a day with a few cans of beer is only compounding the problem; but as an admitted alcoholic, Alissa, and therefore having wasted my life in the company of drunks discussing the ways and means, the pain and the intricacies of drying out, I can only say the experts are, as usual, wrong. Moreover, I knew that without three beers, the first of which I’d also throw up, I would in awful embarrassment have to claim a brief illness during the ceremony. At 3
p.m.,
then, having already thrown up the first of the Budweisers, I was nursing the second, knowing I was going to be just fine. Then abruptly Toby’s Jeep braked to a screeching rocking halt in front of the Lodge, out leaped Toby and Robin, now running frantically up the sidewalk toward us so as not to get soaked, and Ms. Robin Glenn was joyously shouting, “The sun is shining at White Manele! The sun is out at White Manele!”