Last Notes from Home (45 page)

As Robin didn’t want a steak, and as I seemed determined to sit on the balcony all night “swilling vodka” and inhaling the odor of simmering Delmonicos, Robin thought she’d take a shower and get ready for bed. To that I said that though I didn’t know what was in her balloon bag I wasn’t up to sex that night so she shouldn’t deck herself out in any honeymoon fantasy. Robin became angry, explaining that in the alligator bag was her Great-grandmother Glenn’s wedding gown, a marvel of gossamer, satin, and lace that had found its way down the family’s hearty stock lines. Her great-grandmother, Edna O’Brien, had married John Glenn in a whaler’s chapel on Nantucket. It had always been the family wish that Robin also be married in that discreet rustic place, and Robin hoped that on our return from London we might further sanctify our marriage by being rejoined in that Nantucket chapel.

I sighed and said, “Speaking of your noble lineage, Robin, did you ever let your mom and dad know you were being married?”

“No. But after we’re settled comfy into Leinster Terrace, our first order of business will be to hop over to Paris to my parents’ lie St.-Louis apartment so you can meet them. I was just afraid, you see, that knowing what you know about dad you might beat the shit out of him.”

I sighed yet again, not daring to look at Robin. “Look, Robin, Tony Glenn is a retired plumber from Queens, your mother Evelyn a retired Con Ed secretary originally from the Prospect Park section of Brooklyn. You graduated, as valedictorian to be sure, from Bayside High School, spent two years at SUNY at New Paltz, then took a job as stewardess with American Airlines. And what, what,
what, for Christ’s sake,
is the matter with that? Isn’t just such a background what makes us so uniquely American, what lends the American his astonishing vitality? For the life of me, I’ve never understood those people, like you, who trace their ancestry to the Mayflower. Who’d want to be descended from those self-righteous, puritanical, malcontented quacks? Had they stayed in England they’d have been hung for the seditious rabble they were. And good riddance!”

“That’s a lie,” Robin cried. “That’s a fucking lie!” It was then she hurled the grilling fork at me, lodging it firmly in the flabby pectoral muscles just above my left nipple. “Ouch.” To say that Robin hurled it is perhaps inaccurate. As she was seated but three feet from me, the fork no sooner left her hand and began its trajectory than it was into my chest, the blood exploded, immediately slowed to a rushing stream, then, as I started wiping it away with my chefs apron, a trickle. Of course Robin became hysterical, tried to pull the fork from my chest, but I swatted her hand and told her to take a shower and go to bed before I got really pissed and slapped the shit out of her. Robin rose and started to the bathroom. Then I heard her pause, and she was back on the balcony telling me she hoped I drank myself to death and slamming an unopened liter of Smirnoff red label on the folding TV dinner table before me. For a half hour or more, above the weighty rush of the shower, I heard Robin’s stricken sobs and when at length both sounds were stayed, I waited as long as I dared, so afraid I was of something Robin might do in her present condition—Lord, she was unpredictable enough in her rational moments—then cranked my head round and, sighing with relief, saw that Robin was naked on the king-size bed and preparing to dry her hair with her ivory-and-gold-leaf hand dryer.

By then it was nearly 3
a.m.
and I’d already decided that after I slept, if ever I got tired, I’d travel alone to Punchbowl and make my final farewells to the Brigadier, knowing that he would give me up to the living, knowing really that he’d long since wanted me to go back among the quick. Then I’d go to O’Twoomey’s tailor and have myself measured, after which, and whether Robin approved or not, I’d return to Lanai, drink for a day or two, maybe a week, perhaps a month, perhaps two, then I’d sober up, put these words down to you, Alissa, do a lot of golfing and swimming, and get ready for our new life in London, where I’d walk in Kensington Gardens during the week, weekends taking the Underground to walk in the bracken and gorse of Hampstead Heath. The grilling fork was still in my chest—some martyr, I!—and though the chefs apron was by now a bloody cerise mess, the blood had all but coagulated and the steaks were simmering so slowly I didn’t need the fork and occasionally reached over and turned them with my fingers.

Abruptly I became aware that Robin had turned off the hair dryer. I was conscious of movement behind me, a whispering, some indistinct ruffling noises, and when at length Robin reappeared on the balcony she was dressed in her grandmother’s wedding gown—doubtless purchased at Liberty House—and, dropping to her knees, she grasped my bare thighs and begged me to please, please,
please
remove the grilling fork from my chest. Lifting Robin’s veil, I saw that her eyes were red and swollen from her tears; but even as close as I was, my eyes all but lying atop her bruised vacuous blue eyes, even then I couldn’t help remarking her astonishing handsomeness. Robin was truly a stunning, heart-stopping, head-turning young woman even in her present distraught condition. Even were she dressed in a nun’s habit, I thought, she would have been helpless to prevent the crude lust of vain swinish men. She ultimately had become nothing other than that brute American male fantasy of the cornbred princess and, in her awful fragility, she had devoted her life to living up to that fantasy, however unsought it had been on her part, only to have had it all turn to ashes in her mouth. God, she was America.

“It’s Easter Sunday, Robin. Like Christ, I shall be resurrected by sunrise. Until then, I want to contemplate the—what is it you call it? Cosmos?—
cosmos
as fantasy. If, for example, Christ was into the fantasy—and I’m not saying he was—of being the son of God, does that negate the possibility that he was indeed the son of God? Moreover, who is the Jesus of Nazareth we fashion in our minds?—a secular, bearded, sweet-faced man—in Hollywood, ah, Hollywood, listen to this one, Robin, his armpits are hairless!—with a genius for metaphor, and doubtless the greatest gift for creating a personal mythology of anyone who ever walked the earth. And who are you and I, Robin, but a couple of unconscious worshipers who emulate Him with our every breath and gesture, you with your half-baked quackery about autumnal New England ancestors and Seven Sisters colleges and me with my own quackery of being a novelist—should I capitalize Novelist?—when I know that my grasp of the metaphor is at best a paltry, pedestrian thing—yes, Robin, just a couple pathetic bohunks striving in our separate ways to create personal mythologies we deem worthy of us.”

Robin had begun to weep again, quietly, and lifting her eyes to me she said, “Please don’t talk like this, Frederick. I hate it when you talk like this. If s sick, it’s insane.”

“I like your eyes when they’re tear-covered. They change from that startling paleness to a lovely violet. That blank paleness scares the shit out of me, Robin. In that state they have a disarming innocence, the scary spine-chilling frankness of the satanically fallen. Forsooth, you are the devil’s daughter and I’d know you anywhere. Ah, but the tears bring on a depth of tenderness and compassion.”

“Please,
please.”

“Give me this night to myself, Robin, and I make you this promise. I shall never, never again condemn nor reprimand you for babbling out your fantasies for all the world to hear. Ultimately my condemnation of you resides in my feeling that your waking, articulated dreams were never grand enough. Why an Emilio Pucci model? Why not the next Marilyn Monroe? But even now I am being unkind and unfair to you. Believe me when I say that you are nicer than Marilyn Monroe. In high school we used to play Eastwood of Syracuse, and Marilyn always reminded me, what with her wide low-slung ass and simpering kisser, of one of those Polack cheerleaders from Eastwood. And yet in death this broad who couldn’t walk, who couldn’t talk, who couldn’t act has become an icon who preoccupies more of the intellectual dodos’ time than ever Christ did. But you, Robin?—you have more regality in your little finger than Marilyn had in her entire presence, hyped presence at that, and had I not met your lovely parents on one of my flights over here I might have believed most of your stories, well, I might have believed some of them, well, one or two of them. And I am no better than you, Robin, save that my fantasies dwell within. In one of my books I have my narrator say something to the effect that he wanted nothing less than to stick his dirty fingers into posterity, my dreary fantasy, and if you allow me my august, presumptuous, and risible dream, I shall, I repeat, leave your fantasies—however troubling I find them—becalmed and unsullied by anything as garish as facts.”

Robin rose, said, “I’m not listening to this shit one second longer,” and disappeared into the bedroom.

Shortly before dawn I began to hear voices, whispers from across the dark sea, then suddenly a startling and joyous,
“Whoooeeee,
you asshole!” What the hell was going on? Was that directed at me? My first inclination was of course to check the vodka bottle, where I discovered that since Robin had in rancor slammed an unopened bottle on the TV tray I’d barely consumed an inch of it and hence couldn’t lay the voices to auditory hallucinations. As the sky gradually lightened, the voices grew more numerous and murmurous, there was excitement in them, and laughter, a sense of heightened anticipation, an unbridled joy, and though I didn’t again hear anything as distinct as that startling imprecation, I caught isolated scraps, “Howzit, bruh?” and so forth. Just before sunup, at that moment the sky was a lazy, stunning ocher gray, I found that I was standing, drink in hand, leaning into the concrete parapet and straining mightily to see the sea’s horizon, now here and there catching glimpses of ships with stubby movable outriggers clawing at the distant dawn. The entire horizon seemed taken over by these odd mechanical craft and, for whatever reason, I called back that Nazi in his Normandy bunker on D-Day watching the English Channel filling up, one ship after another, forming the greatest armada the world had ever seen, the Nazi sitting there at first too benumbed by the evidence of his eyes to pick up the phone and sound the alarm that the Allies not only were coming, they were coming in a force hitherto inconceivable to man. And now the sun jumped and exploded over the horizon, I heard the first waves lapping at the previously undisturbed beach and saw—incredibly—what was happening.

The surf was up on Waikiki and the horizon was full of those golden Hawaiian girls and boys lying belly down on their surfboards, paddling with their hands and arms to maintain their positions, laughing, chatting, waiting for the first great wave to take them up and up and up and riding into Waikiki. Throughout the velvet night radio stations carried bulletins on where the surf was, Waikiki was of course on the leeward side of Oahu, and it was damn near miraculous for the winds to be such—one could almost hear the announcer croaking, “The surf is up on Waikiki!”—that the kids would find themselves surfing for the swank hotel guests on an Easter Sunday morning. I can’t say how many Saturday nights I’d told Hannibal that the following morning I was going to the windward side of the islands and watch these kids, along with the Aussies the best in the world, but I’d never followed through and now, when I was about ready to leave Oahu, and perhaps forever, I was at last, and finally, going to see them.

In her alligator bag Robin always carried a first aid kit, for what I don’t know unless she was, sooner or later, planning on getting me into a little S and M, and after finding a Band-Aid and the iodine I pulled the grilling fork from my chest, doctored my wound, and gave Robin, who in her wedding gown was sleeping facedown on her as yet virginal wedding bed, a hearty smart swat on her sculptor’s-dream behind, shouting, “The surf is up on Waikiki!”

Robin, in Grandma’s wedding gown still, I in a pair of khaki shorts and a blue golf shirt with a Giants helmet where the alligator should have been, went down to the beach, I agape and without the art or the surfer’s lexicon to describe what I was seeing, settling for such meager words as, “God, this is terrific, I mean, this is incredible,” until Robin, exasperated with my triteness, said, “These guys aren’t that good. Some of the best surfers on the island aren’t even here today. I’m better than most of these creeps.”

Despite my solemn vow to my bride, made in the witching hours of that very special night, never again to disparage or to hold up to ridicule her fantasies, however excessive, I turned to give Robin what I hoped would be a moderately peeved look only to discover she was greeting a big handsome kanaka dude, wet red bandana tied about his forehead, who’d just ridden his board into the beach. “Hey, John-john, howzit,
bruh
? Leave me duh board, huh?” “Hey, Robin, howzit,
howzit?
Whoooeeee! What you do? Marry dis tubby
haole
!
Whoooeeee
!”
Tubby
haole
!
Jesus, the arrogance of these Ohana kanaka dudes—and the worst part of it was that though they always appeared flabbier than swine there was, I’d heard often enough, something inherent in their Polynesian racial characteristics that lent them a deceptive, often savage power and strength. Before I could protest the kanaka’s rudeness, Robin had snatched John-john’s board, had slipped from her satin silver slippers, laid her veil atop them, and, still begowned, had charged into the sea, slammed belly down on her board into the surf, like a child onto his snow sled on the shimmering winter hills of home, and stroking over a huge wave, dropped quickly off, disappeared momentarily, came back into view, then with long fluid powerful strokes was seen making her way to the horizon, the while John-john crying, “Geevum, Robin,
geevum”
until the other surfers, who obviously also knew who Robin was, got caught up in the chant of “Geevum, Robin, geevum.”

When at last Robin reached the horizon she let one wave after another go by, her head continually turning over first her right shoulder, then her left, seeking as they do the perfect wave. Then I sensed her body tense, she was looking straight into Waikiki, now her arms were stroking mightily to bring her board to the wave’s crest, then as effortlessly as I’d ever seen it done she was atop her board and coming home. First she rode way across to her right and when abruptly she slalomed sharp left and rode down the backside of her own wave I saw, astonishingly, what she was up to—running a tunnel created by the monstrous wave immediately behind hers and now breaking over her head and spitting itself to pieces, a sound like the long hazy indulgent belching of the eternally smug and sated gods. She couldn’t have been in the tunnel but a few seconds, which seemed to me a few hours, and when to the grand cheers—
“Geevum, Robin”
—of the other surfers she rode the furious tunnel clear she was so high up on her board and so strainingly crouched over I thought she was going to topple over the board’s bow. She didn’t though. Recovering herself, she suddenly took another sharp left and was riding this dying but still raging wave right into me. For what seemed like the last hundred yards, I swore I could make out every nuance of her body, the way her beautiful soaked gown so clung to her I could see the outline of her marvelous tanned thighs, the embarrassingly suggestive lines of her white string bikini underpanties, her audacious, assertive breasts; and now in their wetness her blue eyes had assumed those violet depths and that depth registered a monumental hauteur as furious as the surf, as though Robin were saying, “Don’t you patronize me and question everything I say, you toady tubby—yes, tubby!—mealy-mouthed little wimp!” It was, literally, so scary I hadn’t any alternative but to laugh, thinking what an incredibly joyous and intricate business life indeed was. Yet I held the power over Robin, despite the way she was now riding down the seas as though to overwhelm and bury me in the warm white sands of Waikiki.

Ah, yes, were I able to cultivate the willful awesome power of silence, perhaps I’d never ask Robin another question for as long as I lived. In that way I would in a very real sense deprive Robin of her very essence, her artistry, her need for melodrama, humbuggery, mendacity, elaboration, camp theater, pretense, hyperbole, dissembling, sophistry, improvisation, fantasy—is not one fantasist per family quite enough?—ad infinitum. And now as Robin’s board beached itself and she bounded off and leaped toward me in search of accolades I looked directly at her—oh, I was as steady and as steely-eyed as Lugosi—as though to say, tubby wimp or not, I shall in the end defeat you, Miss America, shall defeat you, learn to live with you, and make you mine.