Last Notes from Home (23 page)

At Christmas 1972, just prior to the Brigadier’s unhappy death in February 1973, I hadn’t the money to go south, you said why don’t you come to London and spend the holidays with Tony and me? I said if I couldn’t make it to Florida I could hardly be winging to Great Britain to share drumsticks and cranberry drippings with Tony.

“Who said anything about money? This is my treat.”

(Is this also part of the three grand you suddenly decided I owe you?)

So I finally went. And on the very first day Tony took us for lunch to the Hard Rock Cafe on Old Park Lane for cheeseburgers and steak fries (a disenchanted exile’s fare, for Christ’s sake?), thence to the Tower of London where to my utter astonishment he not only explained in meticulous detail the elaborate security system of Wakefield Tower, the fisc for the Crown Jewels, but even how to get around that system and get those gems out. On returning to the Wilton Mews town house that night, I scrupulously took down every word I could remember Tony’s telling me, I still have those notes among my papers, and if finally I can see no way from my imprisonment I fully intend to turn those notes over to O’Twoomey and Toby and buy my way out. What a mouthwatering field day those two lunatics will have pondering that delicious job. Knowing he can’t fence them, O’Twoomey would of course steal those baubles if for no other reason than to drop his pants before the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey and defecate on them, so irrationally certain he’d be that they were paid for with the blood of Irishmen. As indeed they probably were.

It wasn’t so much Tony’s Wakefield Tower esoterica that gave him away as something other than an expatriate claiming to have spent the past thirty years on what he says will be the most alarmingly recondite translation of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
ever rendered. On the day he took us, at my request, to Grosvenor Square, at least three young people said “Hi, Tony” to him, said it with that bouncy Iowa enthusiasm, more people than ever said hello to him in his own Belgravia neighborhood. Now even I, Alissa, who know nothing of London, know Grosvenor Square is overrun with employees from our embassy and to Londoners is known patronizingly as Little America. How those jubilant youth from America’s heartland—corn silk sprouted from their noses—would have a first-name familiarity with a man who turned his back on his homeland thirty years ago—is he a cult hero to them?—is not only laughably mystifying but unanswerable save by some other explanation. Whether Tony is CIA, Department of Defense, Army or Navy Intelligence is beside the point; unless I miss my guess Tony doesn’t know Zeus from Menelaus, Andromache from Leda, Achilles from Hector. On Christmas Day, moreover, after Mrs. Dobbins had served us that wonderful steak-and-kidney pie Tony had had the chef at Marcel make up the day before, he said something while drunk that so disarmed me I couldn’t finish eating and this, together with his boorishness on Boxing Day the following morning, left my holiday in ruins.

My main reason for initially declining your London invitation until the last possible moment was, as you know full well, Alissa, that that autumn had been my season of love for you, when I did not know from one anxious second to the next when I’d be utterly helpless to overcome my desire to ram, jam, stab, impale you with a prick and I confessed—sins monumental!—that it would drive me mad being under the watchful eyes of your father and denied the social license to stroll into the bathroom right at your heels, sit down on the lid, reach up, strip you from your panties, and maneuver your healthy thighs above my lap.

With the Giants leading by a point and five minutes remaining, I had that fall taken you at dusk’s end from the Dockside to the front seat of your Mercedes and fucked you in the pale glare of a streetlamp, only to return to the bar to find the Giants had not only lost—what else?—but that in those docked five minutes (twenty in real time) the Eagles had scored two touchdowns and a field goal, fate’s revenge for my walking out on my team. And there was that incredibly embarrassing day when I went to Syracuse for pizza supplies for Mike, almost made it out of the city without seeing you, but suddenly found Mike’s station wagon parked in the driveway of your home-office. Surprised to find a patient with you—do you really practice?—as well as another in the anteroom, I somewhat hysterically demanded to see you immediately (those patients took me for **very disturbed,” didn’t they?), you asked your patient to wait in the anteroom, and, slamming the door behind me, I fucked you on that rich tan leather couch on which, you tell me, no patient has ever lain. When you came to the Bay that evening and we were driving around the back roads you said with great disparagement, “Don’t ever,
ever
do anything like that to me again,” pensively adding, “all you want to do is fuck me.” “Shut up,” I said. “Is that
all
I want to do, fuck you? If that is so, at least you’re getting my total and undivided attention and I’m not wasting waking hours daydreaming of fucking someone else.
All I want to do?
Shut your mouth.” Whether in trepidation or in comforting gratitude, your right hand left the wooden wheel and came to rest on my thigh. And the Mercedes came to a stop at the side of the road.

When I shied away from your London invitation because of my infantile inability to keep my hands from you and the terrifying trepidation of humiliating us both in the eyes of Tony, you said, “Tony? Are you talking about Tony, for Christ’s sake? I’m thirty-two, he knows you’ve been laying me on and off since I was seventeen, and though he certainly doesn’t know what you’ve been going through this fall—as I’m not sure I do either—we’ll be able to make it about anytime you choose. If you can handle it, though, I’d prefer you didn’t shove me against the preserves counter at Fortnum and Mason and remove my knickers on the spot. For propriety’s sake and in deference to Tony’s generation, 111 have my own room and have to be back there by morning so he can do his ritualistic waking of me. Since I was a kid, he’s always wakened me by ripping the covers to the floor and giving me a crack on my bare bum. Of course only a degenerate like you, Exley, would read anything sexual into it I don’t know what it is really. I think it reminds him of when I was a baby, when he was happy with Mum before he got caught up in that awful Hiss business and Mum died.” Mum committed suicide, Alissa, but I saw no need to say so or point out that many people other than degenerates would see in Tony’s method of waking you something very sexual indeed.

3

But you were wrong, as you often are, Alissa, about Tony’s sophistication. On Christmas Eve he made the applejack eggnogs too potent, he tactlessly wept when reminiscing about Mum. Because of the drinks we slept through the alarm and when he found your bed unused and without so much as a hem or a haw charged into my bedroom, pulled the covers from both of us, and,
swaaat,
did his thing on your bum, I heaved a great sigh of relief. However, when I arrived downstairs and found him voraciously wolfing the bloody Marys at ten
a.m.
—so very unlike Tony, don’t you know?—I knew he hadn’t taken our naked spent entwined limbs as sportingly as you’d led me to expect he would. All day long, and what an interminable Christmas it was despite Mrs. Dobbins’s never permitting our cut glass tumblers to be empty, Tony continued to ask those asininely rude questions a prospective father-in-law asks only in unreadable English and Boston novels. And to my own incredulity I found myself telling him about my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my parents, my two sisters and the means by which their husbands supported them, my niece and eight nephews and their parents’ hopes for them, even about my two ex-wives and my two daughters, one by each, and my earnest estimate—pure bullshit on my part, of course—of why my marriages had failed. They failed, Alissa, because I’m a drunk.

By then it was 4
p.m.,
we were all to the point of inebriation past having even a pleasant time, digging into the steak-and-kidney pie and sundry other goodies and I was waging my not-so-subtle war with the insufferably Chesterfieldian Mrs. Dobbins, a war of which Tony had become eye-archedly and ironically aware. Three times in the first two days of my visit, Mrs. Dobbins had had to lean down close to my ear, as though at table we had forty guests to be excluded from her tart remonstrances, and remind me that when she’d served me I should return the sterling forks and ladles to her dishes convex side up so the utensils wouldn’t slither into the food mucking up the handles for the next chap. Chalk it to my shanty Irishness, Alissa, but with that third reminder Dobbins had drawn the line in the dirt before me, intrepidly defying me to step across, and I not only returned the servers convex side down, giving them a slurpy little push as I did so, but began looking forward to the nice runny gooey tomatoeylike dishes, the only one on Christmas Day being that marvelously liquescent creamed corn, peas, and mushrooms concoction. “Please, Mrs. Dobbins,” Tony said, “if you don’t mind,’’ and an utterly enraged Old Dobbie snapped out the linen she had folded over her apron string and without taking her harried unforgiving little eyes from me wiped the handle as clean as if she had silver-polished it.

“So you have a brother who’s a bird colonel in the 500th MIG,” Tony said in response to a meager recitation I’d given on the Brigadier, the last member of my family I’d chosen to discuss. “An interesting outfit, the 500th MIG. That would be headed by Colonel X.” My abrupt loss of appetite wasn’t so much the result, Alissa, of Tony’s using what was to me the unfamiliar army shorthand MIG, when I had used Military Intelligence Group, as that, thirty years a Homerian scholar in exile, Tony apparently still had some inexplicable need to know who was running our various intelligence agencies. And he did know,
Tony did know,
for on our returning to the Bay my first order of business was to write the Brigadier and ask him if Colonel X was the commandant of the 500th MIG—he was indeed the commandant—and when I suggested to you that this was wondrously idiosyncratic information for Tony to possess you said only, “Tony knows the goddamndest things.”

As dinner was breaking up Tony asked me, somewhat mystifyingly, if I’d mind meeting him in his study at ten the following, Boxing Day, morning. As drunk as I was that night I slept only sporadically with my door locked against you (no more scenes, thank you, Alissa), thinking the dotty bastard had summoned me there to ask how I intended supporting you, to explain how wealthy you were—as though I didn’t know!—and the responsibilities of money, to express the hope that I’d continue writing rather than devote my life exclusively to the enchantments of vodka. Imagine my surprise then, Alissa, when I arrived at the study to find this niddering popinjay Mr. Fowler, Tony’s tailor from Anderson and Shepard, 30 Savile Row, who, our hands having just separated from their limp introduction, began flitting around appraising me as though he were the casting director for an X-rated movie. Then suddenly he spread his tape measure across the unimposing breadth of my shoulders, dropped to a knee and with laughable British reserve measured my inseams not by flicking a ball aside and running down the inside but by coming down to the instep from a dimple in my haunch just below my ass.

“I didn’t believe you’d come to London, Fred, until I picked Alissa up at Heathrow and actually saw you there. Yesterday I was embarrassed having no gift for you and as I was being fitted for some spring clothes today, I hoped that by way of apology you’d accept a suit to take back with you.”

Tony did not of course ask me if I’d like a suit, least of all enquire what in the world I’d do with one in Alexandria Bay. Nor was it lost on me that Tony had had well over a week to get me some small gift and that seemingly he’d purposely chosen to present mine on Boxing Day, the day the gentry throw alms to their retainers who, for reasons quite unfathomable to an American, are rendered simperingly and absurdly appreciative. En route to the study I’d stopped by the kitchen for coffee and Mrs. Dobbins, profuse tears of gratitude in her eyes, had shown me her new blue leather gloves, her red knit scarf, and her GE electric Teflon fry pan you’d neglected, Alissa, winking at me as you did so, to declare at customs. After she’d poured my second cup of coffee, and knowing full well that, despite my promise to myself that morning to declare a truce, the war in all its majesty would begin anew, I said, “For all my kidding around, Mrs. Dobbins, your food is entirely too wonderful to cook in a piece of shit like that.” On the flight back to Montreal, you told me that Mrs. Dobbins had told Tony, spelling it out, s-h-i-t. I said, “Good.”

As for the gift of the suit, my humiliation, Alissa, had never been more complete, my face throbbing with embarrassment, my body stony with shame, and for reasons that will become apparent I found myself thinking of a legend my grandfather in his dotage had used to repeat over and over again, that of the Irish schoolmaster Wright, a teacher of languages sentenced to five hundred lashes for a seditious note written in French and found on his person. Although the evidence suggested, if not proved, that the note had been composed by one of Wright’s pupils, the infamous magistrate, Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald, himself dragged Wright to the whipping triangle where, after fifty lashes, Wright’s entrails stood exposed, only to have Fitzgerald demand yet another hundred strokes. Wright was then cast into the mud to die.

Despite my rhetorical and bombastic folderol directed against my Irishness, the Maguire in me had never been more salient than it was at that moment, and each time Mr. Fowler pinched, poked, prodded me with his tape measure, my body screamed and reeled with an agony nearly as excruciating as that of Wright’s feeling the cat. Yes, for the first time, Alissa, I truly understood empathy and the whole bloody and shameless history of England’s genocide of the Irish ran before me as in a nightmare. Had I not suddenly recalled that Wright had lived—yes, Alissa, Wright endured—I doubt I ever would have found the courage to break my clench-toothed silence. With a nonchalant shrug, which implied that my words had been inspired by the bookishness of Tony’s study, I said, ‘Tony, do you know Washington’s comment on the Irish Brigade who volunteered their services in the cause of
our
—should I say
the American?
—revolution? No? General Washington said that if defeated on all other fronts it was among these Irish troops that he’d take his final stand for freedom.”

Tony arched that eyebrow, smiled, and said, “Oh” as though my words were completely lost on him. And then you backed him
100
percent that afternoon when we were, at my instigation, on our way to the library of the British Museum to see where Marx had done his research for and a good deal of the writing of
Das Kapital,
the polemics of which could hardly have found a more amenable milieu in which to be honed than among the most insufferably class-conscious boobs in the world.

“Oh, oh, oh!” you screamed at me in the tube, and in case you hadn’t noticed it, Alissa, since the day you arrived in London the subway had become the tube, the TV the telly, the toilet the loo, panties had become knickers, a sausage a banger, a can of soup a tin of soup, and my all-time favorite, for which you damn near got a kick in the ass, a party became a rave-up. “That’s what I’d have said, too! Oh, oh, oh! You’re being measured for a suit that might be a gesture of generosity on Tony’s part because he likes you—likes? I think he’s afraid of you. What a joke!—and your sickening paranoia turns it into some attempt to humiliate you on Boxing Day. Hence you come up with a totally asinine piece of pedantry about George Washington and actually expect my poor father to make a connection between something as manifestly simple as Mr. Fowler’s fitting you for a suit and that cabalistic piece of Americana. Oh, oh, oh! You’re goddamn right that’s how I’d have responded. Under the circumstances what sane person would express anything other than the bewilderment Tony did? Oh, oh, oh!”

“Shut up, Alissa. Did you just get As at Harvard or did you maybe once or twice draw analogies among what all them mugs were saying in all them fat books at Widener?”

We neither of us spoke or touched for perhaps an hour. Like an obedient and tentative little girl at my heels, sensing my enthralldom shrouded in fury, you followed me about the maze of the library. Then to rest we sat at that librarylike table in that alcove and you placed your leather-gloved hand on my inner thigh. “No.” “Please, Ex, don’t turn away from me now and stomp off in your churlish and childish anger. Which has, be honest, been the story of your life.” So in the most explosively erotic scene to which I’ve ever been a party, your russet hair came down spreading like a silken web over my lap, I gently stroked the back of your head, and then, at last and finally, I came. And though we would make love a few more times before I went to Hawaii to bury the Brigadier and there met Robin, it was never quite the same because you had to turn the heart-wrenching spontaneity of that moment away from love and make it yet another noble gesture whereby, in an almost clinical way, you were simply abating my psychotic hostility.

Yes, it had been at that moment, more than at any other in our unending relationship as adversaries, when I saw not obscenity, as that laughably startled Limey who strolled by had, but love coupled with groveling penance, supplication, and heartfelt apologies for Tony’s unforgivable behavior to me, that moment when, as I have said, you became patient—and what so-called civilized person would not have viewed your sucking my cock in the British Museum library as an act of the most appalling dementia?—and I the vessel of your most repressed desires. Indeed, so much are you able to take things as they were and reconstrue them to your liking that I learned at our last unhappy meeting two years ago that in lieu of my taking up with Robin you had stopped spreading your legs for me because I was a psychopath. But this is nitpicking. When I said above that I didn’t like you as a person, and therefore was unable to tell you about myself, I also neglected to say that I’ve loved you since you were a child. Let me then attempt to put aside my contempt, Alissa, and try to make a new beginning by telling you about the time I shot my sister.