Pages from a Cold Island (12 page)

“
Whatever the fuck happened to you, I
’
m sure you de
served it!
”

Then on the same d
ay, lying abed with a pillow be
tween my thighs so I wouldn
’
t press them abruptly on my wounded nuts, I enthusiastically read three articles about Ms. Steinem: one a cover story in
Newsweek
, one in
Esquire
, and one in the Palm Beach
Time
s
.

Dick Boeth, whom I
’
d known in Chicago in the Fifties when he was a contributin
g editor for
Time
, did the
Newsweek
piece. Except for allowing that Steinem didn
’
t write as well as Updike, he had her dedication to the women
’
s movement so selfless as to be saintlike and even suggested the possibility of her one
day being our first woman presi
dent. Writing in
Esquire
, Leonard Levitt was not so kind.

He not only said she couldn
’
t write, and quoted her attempt ing to prove it (she wrote easily as well as he!), he implied that her present eminence was in no little part derived from association with the appropriate guys at the appropriate moments: with Thomas Guinzburg, president of Viking Press (publisher of Joyce, Steinbeck and Bellow!) when she had allowed to be printed one of those how-to-move-among
-
beautiful-people nonbooks called
The Beach Book
(with, for Jesus
’
sake, an introduction by John Kenneth Galbraith!); with President Kennedy
’
s amanuensis Theodore Sorensen when she
’
d become interested in politics and its tandem power; with black Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson when with a logic best understood by herself —and a logic that would certainly get her laughed and whinnied off the platform of any Harlem gathering—she
’
d begun to equate the plight of women with the plight of blacks.

When I later asked her about these ungentlemanly suggestions of Levitt
’
s, instead of answering me she at tacked Levitt by saying she
’
d heard that in order to get the
Esquire
assignment he
’
d told the magazine
’
s editors he was an ex-paramour
of hers; she understood that be
cause of the piece
’
s uncompromising nastiness Levitt
’
s wife had left him (To join the movement? I
’
d wondered, try
ing to keep a straight face); and that though the attorneys of New York magazine, for whom she wrote a political column, found the piece
“
definitely actionable
”
she
’
d de
cided against pursuing a suit.

Noblesse oblige
, I thought.

In that same political column Gloria had made Mrs. Richard Nixon, the first lady of the land, appear a sniveling, carpish, monumentally self-pitying shrew; that Gloria had even contemplated a suit against Levitt and
Esquire
made me uneasy and seemed to me, though I dared not say so,

X 81
“
frightfully feminine
”
and at utter variance with how re porters played the game. On the day I read these contradictory pieces in
Newsweek
and
Esquire
I also read in the Palm Beach
Time
s
that Ms. Steinem was coming to town to speak to a local women
’
s professional group. By then I had already determined I must meet her.

6

Pages from a Cold Island
didn
’
t work because it was so unrelievedly desolate that despite its humor I was sure the reader couldn
’
t turn back the final page (allowing he got that far) without wondering whence I
’
d mustered the will to put together its four hundred and eighty pages of type script. And in Ms. Steinem—and I
’
d all but leapt from the bed in exaltation when the possibility began to form itself in my mind—I
’
d seen the metaphor to lift the pages from the gloom in which they w
allowed. The book was a reminis
cence; and the
cold
of the title, applied to Singer Island where 8o-degree-plus temperatures are not uncommon, apostrophized my being, not the weather.

In those pages I
’
d put down one American
’
s journey through the Sixties and espe
cially his reaction to what his
torians call
“
the great events.
”
If I had entered the Sixties more given to dark derogation than to joyous celebration, I
’
d at least been an articulate, relatively hopeful creature. But I had crawled out of t
he period on my knees, a simper
ing, stuttering, drunken and mute mess. The obscene decade had begun with President John F. Kennedy
’
s
“
ask not what your country can do for you
”
and in the late summer and fall of 1969 had ended at Chappaquiddick. At that numbing moment following the ass
assinations of the brothers Ken
nedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., when I
’
d at last come to accept that there existed no desecration left capable of un manning me, Senator Edward M.
“
Teddy
”
Kennedy had fooled me and for nine hours had left the body of Miss Mary Jo Kopechne to float about the back seat of a car among the currents beneath the now-famous wooden span at Martha
’
s Vineyard. I
’
d then gone back to bed, had pulled the sheets above my head, now and again had sneaked out to drink vodka and to put down bleak words, and had come at last to lie there with swollen balls reading about Ms. Steinem in the glossy magazines.

Struck with the parallels of our both having been Depression babies, having come from impoverished homes, having managed to get the semblance of an education, I was intrigued and baffled by what it was in her character that, having been shaped by the same events that had shaped me, had yet allowed her to come out of the putrid years so splendidly, refusing to lead a disappointed life. I wanted to know how she could ri
se mornings, erect, trim, coura
geous, unquestionably beautif
ul, not lacking a kind of nobil
ity, and with an unswervable commitment go forth to do her duty as she saw it, while I
’
d come out of the years badly whipped, cravenly, running to a quitter
’
s obesity and had come at last to lie on that bed at the Seaview Hotel at the hot bottom of the world on Singer Island, drinking myself to death, my balls ballooned with life
’
s hurt.

Two days before reading about Steinem I had almost, in fact, and for the second
time in my life, committed sui
cide. Next-door at the Beer Barrel I borrowed Yogi
’
s .22 Magnum pistol—on what pretext I don
’
t recall. Then I tele
phoned the poet Jim Dickey in South Carolina and told him I was
“
taking the deep six.
”
I apologized to Dickey because he had been instrumental in getting me ten thousand dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation and I thought I owed him the courtesy of knowing that neither he nor Mr. Rockefeller was going to see any manuscript for the moneys. I said goodbye, so did Jim.

Jim said,
“
I
’
ll be seein
’
yuh, boy, yuh heah?
”

Then I stepped into my closetlike shower and for perhaps an hour let scalding waters cascade over my aching body, as I slowly and painful
ly removed the tape still cling
ing to my rib cage. When I
’
d dried myself, I wet the towel thoroughly and swaddled my head tightly with a view to making as little mess as pos
sible. Then I picked up the Mag
num, stepped back into the shower, and closed the glass door behind me. Whether I stood there five minutes or five hours I can
’
t say. Like Charles Dickens who later in life could never recall how long he
’
d been in a blacking factory when at twelve he
’
d been put there to work, the experience was so traumatic I could not begin to estimate the time.

I do know what saved me. At some point I began to laugh, riotously. Suicide presupposes that something is being eliminated. With a silver-inlaid shotgun Hemingway blows away the back of his head, and when the world re covers it finds itself able to remark,
“
What a man!
”
But what precisely was being eliminated in my case? Certainly not a man. Whatever I was eliminating was so inconsequential as to make the
gesture one of trifling and con
temptible ease and I bega
n to think how much more felici
tous the act would be if I sobered up, as best I could healed my mind and body, then erased some bone and tissue that at least conspired to resemble the human. Only then, I thought, might the gesture take on a certain flair or style. When I returned to the outer room and seated myself on the white Naugahyde couch, I understood for the first time how close I
’
d come. Still laughing, I found my hands shaking so severely that I could not for a long time unswaddle the towel and for the next two days I suffered fits of trembling compounded by alternating flashes of extreme heat and cold. Then in stricken absorption I read about Ms. Gloria Steinem.

With Ms. Steinem
my overriding desire was to dis
cover who she was apart from her cause. If she consented to see me at all, I knew that in my approach I
’
d have to feign embracing a concern for the movement and I cared not a jot, an iota for Women
’
s Liberation. With Emerson I held that one speaks to public questions only as a result of a weary cowardice that has so debilitated his energies he is no longer able to do his own work or rest easy with the painful prospect of articulating his own demons. Over the years I
’
d read the Ms. Friedan, Millett and Greer and had agreed with almost every tenet they had put forth. Nonetheless, in his
Prisoner of Sex
Mailer had been right in taking Millett to task. Of all the women
’
s writings and manifestoes, hers had resounded with a nasty vindictiveness, and though in reading her I hadn
’
t known what had so distressed me until Mailer articulated my concern, he was right in implying the Millett mentality was incapable of understanding D. H. Lawrence, Genet, Mailer himself, and most of all Henry Miller with his joyous, hilarious, rowdy and utter adoration of the cunt.

What was disappointing in Mailer was that in bothering to dignify Millett with an answer he
’
d allowed himself—one always does!—to be lured into Milieu
’
s own brand of nit picking and pettiness. No intelligent person could read Mailer
’
s
An American Dream
without understanding that Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly was into analingus. Mailer was amused that Millett had confused analingus with sodomy, when in fact the former is embraced by the latter; and if Norman believes he could put his tongue up the bum of the University of Iowa
’
s Homecoming Queen, or vice versa, in the window of the Iowa Book and Supply Com pany in downtown Iowa City and get arrested for anything other than sodomy, it is Millett who should have been gloat ing. But gloating had begun to characterize the battle, with too many mindless points being scored, and the prospect of entering the arena bored me beyond comprehension. Least of all did I understand the women
’
s grandiose glee at the
“
discovery
”
that an arousal of the clitoris was essential to orgasm—understand what Ms. Germaine Greer has called
“
clitoromania.
”

As though posing for a Bayer advertisement in their antiseptic white denim jackets, with their electrodes and massagers and vibrators and dildoes and surrogate partners, looking—not voyeuristically
, one is assured, but scientifi
cally—through their glass partitions at those desperately sappy yokels straining so mightily, touchingly and dementedly to pop each other
’
s gonads. Masters and Johnson could not be taken seriously by decent or civilized people and I didn
’
t in the least understand why women held it ominous for men that these quacks had unequivocally estab lished the clitoris as the f
emale orgasmic organ, a Lillipu
tian prick. I
’
d never believed anything else. To be sure, this was ignorance on my part (having out of boredom been unable to complete my reading of Freud, I hadn
’
t known he
’
d plumped for the vaginal orgasm), but up in the cowshed of Watertown we
’
d known forever about the
“
button
”
or the
“
man in the boat
”
and that a man bent on giving a woman pleasure must approach this cute little bugger with a certain worldly and heady enthusiasm. In fact, the first time I had anything resembling an affair I learned to my contrite humiliation that there need
be no clitoral stimulation what
ever and that a woman
’
s orgasm could result from nothing more than the willingness of her heart.

In the Forties, in Watertown, we
got our sexual educa
tions as corner boys standing in front of the Y.M.C.A and Whelan
’
s drugstore on the public square and listening, slack-jawed and bug-eyed, to the
“
older
”
guys. Especially do I remember Dong. At eigh
teen Dong stood six-one. A cham
pionship swimmer, he swaggeringly carried a lithe and muscular one hundred and eighty pounds. In an age when the brush cut was universal he wore his curly blond hair in something very like ambrosial locks. Dong dressed always in expensive shell cordovan shoes, finely pressed tan gabardine slacks, and spotless lightweight jackets on which he left the zippers at half-mast exposing his navy turtleneck sweaters. Like so many swimmers Dong had matured early on and at eighteen it was already said he
’
d seduced half the women of our fair northern and chaste city, not entirely excluding the possibility of one
’
s aunt, sister or—Lord forbid!—mother.

When we acolytes crowded round, Dong had a way of rocking pensively on his cordovan-shod feet, crossing his strong arms snugly at his massive swimmer
’
s chest, and among imparting his sexual wisdom nuggets to us expectorating little BB
’
s of spit between the small gap of his upper front teeth. Dong had an absolute passion for what he called the button or the man in the boat. Looking straight ahead but aware
of our vacuous breathless atten
tion, Dong told us if we really desired to drive women mad the thing to do was get the clitoris—Dong never of course called it anything as grand as that—between the front teeth and ever so tenderly roll it back and forth between the jaws. Letting his cowlike brown eyes fall dementedly cross-eyed to the bridge of his tanned nose, as one loonily hypnotized or demonically in thrall to the urgency of his art, Dong made his tenderly gnashing motion and in dumb hilarious imitation we all followed suit! Our sex educations! Then Dong spat between his teeth. He shook his head wearily. At eighteen, Dong was heavy with the responsibilities of life
’
s sexual lore. Then Dong spoke.

“
She
’
ll pass out on you and shit the sheets.
”
Dong pondered his own wisdom for a moment, then turned to me.

“
Do you know how to take a pulse, Exley?
”

“
Pardon, Dong?
”

“
You have to take their pulse all the time you
’
re doing it or you might lose them entirely.
”

Again Dong spat between the gap in his front teeth. Oblivious to the passers-by and to his splendidly pressed gaberdines, he now dropped spread-eagle on his knees to the foul pavement, again assumed his loonily four-eyed face, again made his tenderly gnashing motion, and as by implication he always did at such times he reached up now onto that grand envisioned bed and cupping his thumb, index and middle fingers
showed us how during the engage
ment to keep a constant check on the girl
’
s unquestionably explosive pulse. From his knees Dong now looked forbid dingly up at us.
“
Don
’
t forget,
”
he said menacingly,
“
if you lose her, she
’
ll shit the sheets on you and you know where that
’
ll end up!
”
Now Dong screamed.
Whhheeeeeeeeee
!!! He made a face of excruciating pain, shuddered violently, and with furious hands frantically brushed the imagined feces from his face. Now,
rather solemnly, we all spat be
tween our teeth. Those of us who had no gap in our front teeth spat right through them.