Last Notes from Home (29 page)

I’d be able to kill him a lot sooner if he didn’t take his “business calls” during Julia Child and was thereby able to listen to her prepare her Gratin of Potatoes
à
la Lyonnaise
or her desserts, caramel-topped pear poached in white wine and set in gooey chocolate tarts, perhaps her
Bombe aux Trois Chocolates,
dishes I’m sure he’d have wanted prepared. At one time O’Twoomey took his calls—it is 9
p.m.
in Ireland—on the wall phone of the veranda, but he talked so loudly, and the calls are often of such a sinisterly personal nature, that I suggested he have his own phone installed. He must have thought I meant installed near the TV so we wouldn’t miss Miss Julia, for that is where we found it when we came one afternoon from the golf course, a brilliant kelly green wall phone, with a long cord so Hannibal or I could hand it to him, mounted on the side of the fireplace. On the day—it was two days after Lord Mountbatten was blown up on his fishing boat.
Shadow V,
on Donegal Bay—that Julia did various pizzas, including an onion one that would have been great with Maui onions and on which I could have tripled the amount of provolone, O’Twoomey took one of his calls from Eire and talked so long I couldn’t get the go-ahead for six or eight of these. “Pizza? But that’s wog food, Frederick. You know I refuse to eat wog food.” O’Twoomey wouldn’t eat wog sausage, Alissa, until Toby and I ordered some in Honolulu and he decided to sample ours. The next thing we knew he was asking the proprietor where he got it, which led him to the butcher who now makes up twenty pounds a week for him and has it flown over, iced. It is these calls from Eire that make me certain O’Twoomey is with the provisional wing of the IRA and that, at the very least, whatever illicit monies—way too much to be realized from sweepstakes tickets—he and Toby are raking in hand over fist—are being channeled to those madmen, perhaps in the form of guns and explosives. But how, and why, from Hawaii, Alissa?

“Yes, poor, poor Mountbatten. A lurverly chap, they tell me. Educated at Osbourne and all that tommyrot, don’t you know? Liz and the family called him ‘Uncle Dickie’? That intimate, huh? Oh, but it’ll be a lurverly wake. Yes, yes, I know all about it. So they have McGirl and McMahon. They don’t know anything—stupid, stupid boyos. And the bleeding bastard fucking press. I told you it had to be spelled out for them. Who was supposed to paint a map of a partitioned India on the jetty? Every report I’ve seen thinks it’s just a senseless terrorist attack on a harmless senile old man because he’s royalty. I thought this was to be an act of war against the monster who partitioned India, then pulled out and left in his bleeding wake one of the great bleeding bloodbaths of fucking history. I thought it was supposed to be an illustration of what the bleeding Limeys might expect in Ireland—another India, that is—if they don’t soon get their troops out of there. Of course, they have twenty-two less troops now. Dear me, the shame of it all. I thought this was supposed to illustrate what the historical result of partition has always been. And always will be.”

On and on it went. Because I didn’t want to hear I twice tried to walk away, but O’Twoomey signaled Hannibal to sit me back down, then pointed impatiently at the TV screen to inform me I should mind my business and watch Julia make her onion pizzas. Afterward—and I must have been temporarily deranged by O’Twoomey’s insouciant smugness, Alissa, for ordinarily I pretend I hear nary a word—I said, “Anybody who’d do that to Lord Mountbatten, a seventy-nine-year-old man out for a little fishing, is nothing but a cowardly savage.”

O’Twoomey laughed raucously, cracked his fat hand against his fat thigh, and cried, “You may be right, lurve, you may just be right! But then, the Brit imperialists wrote the book on pusillanimity and savagery and assuredly it’s something they understand. In fact, lurve, it may be the only thing they understand!”

Although as a citizen of the Republic O’Twoomey isn’t allowed to take his seat in the House of Lords, he claims to be a peer of the realm, the Duke of Lisdoonvarna. His heraldic crest is a Boheena, a freshwater mermaid passionately clasping to her ample bosom—so her nipples will be hidden to the Irish clerics, I assume—a great cumbersome knightly sword, a veritable Excalibur. Of course O’Twoomey refuses to mock his lineage by personally displaying his crest (he leaves that to us!)—says he won’t do so until Ireland is reunited—but his tailor does have it stitched in red, green, gold, and black into the fly of his custom-made skivvies. Since 1921, when the Irish Free State declared its independence of England, Irish peers have not only been denied their seats in Parliament, they have, ironically, been refused the apostate gesture of disavowing their titles and, according to O’Twoomey, he is Lord Lisdoonvarna whether he chooses to be or not. Hence I expect his pee-stained heraldic crest is in a sense a tacit protest against what he appears to be attacking in a more devious and alarming way. As with everything else, O’Twoomey’s schizophrenia regarding his lineage is striking. Because the Dole field workers—O’Twoomey calls them rice-eyes—have Saturdays and Sundays off and take over the E. B. Cavendish Golf Course and White Manele Beach, O’Twoomey refuses to stay on Lanai and mingle with the wogs, and on Saturday mornings Toby flies us to Honolulu, where we check into the legendary Pink Palace, the Royal Hawaiian, invariably into the same rooms, a two-bedroom suite on the second floor of the main building for O’Twoomey and an armed Toby and adjoining rooms, 1600 and 1602, for Hannibal and me on the top floor of the relatively new Towers, overlooking the pool and Waikiki Beach. Except in our rooms or at the pool and beach, we are required at all times to wear the tailor-made kelly green linen jackets with O’Twoomey’s heraldic crest stitched on the pockets—we are, I gather, O’Twoomey’s royal entourage—over the heart, we all have kelly green bathing trunks with the crest on the right thigh, we even have it on our laundry bags. Doubtless we are the only group in history who ever checked into the Royal Hawaiian weekly, were taken to their rooms and immediately dialed room service to have a week or two weeks’ soiled linen picked up for twenty-four-hour service. If you can believe this, Alissa, whenever on these weekends we are in O’Twoomey’s presence we are required to address him as “your grace.” One late Saturday afternoon O’Twoomey, Toby, Hannibal, Robin, and I were seated at the outdoor Mai Tai bar debating where to go for dinner, O’Twoomey asked if I were ready for another vodka
(whatkah
in Hawaii, as in the Bahamas), without thinking I said, “No thanks, Seamus,” and the next thing I knew Toby was, as punishment for my indiscretion, flying Hannibal and me back to Lanai, only to drop us off at the airport and fly back to Oahu to complete his weekend guarding Lord Lisdoonvarna. For that reason, Al, in Honolulu I no longer address O’Twoomey by name at all, simply respond to his queries with a yes or no.

10

O’Twoomey had this idea that because of his illicit activities (whatever they are) he ought to maintain harmonious relations with the wogs, that he ought to become a
bruh
to the vanquished and downtrodden against the day he and Toby get busted, hoping, I expect, that the natives will raise such a hue and cry in protest that he and Toby will get off lightly. Hence he set Robin up in her own public relations firm, Lisdoonvarna Ltd., gave her unlimited funds, office space on the ground floor of the hotel, and has her greasing every extended palm in the islands, as well, no doubt, as lathering no few on-the-take wog
lingams
with K-Y jelly. Furnished by Antiques Pacifica, which also has commercial space in the hotel, the Lisdoonvarna Ltd. office is, save for the banal Gauguin prints on the walls, genuinely splendid, especially when Ms. Robin Glenn, seated at her great bare teakwood desk and seen easily from the lobby corridor through the floor-to-ceiling glass, is triumphantly barking orders into her gold leaf antique French desk phone. The goggle-eyed tourists are not in the least aware she is probably talking to one of her lovers.

Robin’s main outside account is a group called Ohana, which an authority on Hawaiian writing in
The Advertiser
said best translates as “an extension of the family,” that is, Alissa, if you’d spent some time here and were told by a Hawaiian that you had become
ohana
he would be paying you the ultimate compliment of saying you were now blood of his blood, all very nonsensically romantic and highfalutin’. With this group Robin has the unhappy—unhappy to a sane person—task of convincing them that to support their activities she is raising thousands of dollars from sympathizers around the islands at the same time they understand completely that the anonymous donors are Lord Lisdoonvarna period.

As a group they are much given to self-dramatization and remind me of our mainland Indians, wear faded Levi’s, Levi vests displaying their mahogany biceps, puka necklaces, gold pirate earrings, and Aunt Jemima bandanas on their heads. Their beards also come out in black splotchy patches, but to no avail I’ve asked Robin to try to persuade them to remain a businesslike clean shaven. Not to be outdone, Robin’s outfits of denim pants and jackets, made by O’Twoomey’s tailor, are something to behold, done as they are in guava, lemon, Natal plum red, honeydew, pineapple, avocado, plantain, pistachio, papaya, cantaloupe, and so forth, with bandanas dyed to match. Beneath the jackets Robin wears white silk shirts, invariably unbuttoned and revealing heartbreakingly ripe d6colletage. She also has her shirttails hauled up and knotted at her diaphragm. Because her pants are tailored to her hips, there is always on display a great triangle of golden brown flesh, comely with a whisper of down, and dotted in the lower middle with an erotically buried belly button. Beneath her breeches she wears white bikini panties, the appetizing outlines of which can more often than not be seen in the striking Hawaiian light. Up home, as you know, Al, the guys call this the VPL, for visible panty line, a Woody Allen
mot.
When she struts, statuesquely, about the hotel, her hair pulled tautly beneath her honeydew bandana, her long opihi shell earrings aglitter, all heads turn, and turn, and turn yet again. Believe it, Alissa, when I say I’ve heard audible gasps. So inviting as to be absurd, Robin is a torture to the blood. If only she’d been struck dumb at birth.

The other day Mr. Einhorn, the hotel manager, called during the Julia Child hour and asked Lord Lisdoonvarna if he might persuade Robin to wear her shirt tucked into her trousers, perhaps give the mainlanders a little less décolletage. There had, it seems, been an unfortunate incident. One Percival Applegate, a fifty-eight-year-old sugarcane broker from San Francisco who has been checking into the Royal Hawaiian twice a year for better than three decades, had in his lust for Robin gone berserk and been guilty of an indiscretion. Although Percival was an admitted alcoholic—he’d been dry for fifteen years—he’d got drunk and strangled the switchboard operator until she’d revealed Robin’s address at the marina in Hawaii Kai. He’d gone to the
Cirrhosis of the River
at 4
a.m.,
kicked in the door of the houseboat, and had been badly beaten up by one of Robin’s Ohana chums before the cops arrived and arrested him for aggravated assault, breaking and entering, drunkenness, and public lewdness. Apparently the poor drip—a grandfather to four spewing brats in Marin County—had burst through the door with his fly unzipped and his manhood all afluster.

I picked up most of what happened when O’Twoomey called Robin back to tell her he wanted the charges dropped immediately and detailed how she might comport herself in a more pristine manner. Before he hung up he listened a moment, smiling impatiently, then said, “Oh, Frederick? Frederick is in his room working on the masterpiece.” He winked outrageously at me. “No, don’t worry, Robin. Frederick shall be none the wiser, my dear. Frederick shall be none the wiser.”

What a field day I was going to have with this, Alissa, having access to information Robin didn’t know I had and seeing what she could do with the facts as I understood them. I had no doubt Robin would have been raped repeatedly, and that had not the Ohana dude shown up at 4
a.m.
—doubtless he’d be accounted for by saying he’d come to squire her to the windward side of the island to observe some mumbo-jumbo Ohana sunrise ritual over a pile of washed rocks—she’d unquestionably be dead, a lot of tears here, hard proclamations of her innocence and a good deal of wacky disjointed eloquence on the frightening burdens of walking about the dreary world as such a flabbergastingly handsome creature, an accident of birth for which the pitiable Robin could hardly be held responsible.

What always stuns me, Alissa, as a writer, I mean, and owning a natural vanity about my own imagination, is what a paltry thing it is beside Robin’s authentically demented one. When she strutted through the door of 1602 that Saturday morning, and Hannibal had locked it behind her, she dropped her alligator leather balloon bag containing her sexual accoutrements (more of that momentarily), flung herself onto the king-size bed, heaved a great sigh, and said, “I suppose you want to fuck me, Frederick. Everyone else does.” Robin’s white silk shirt was tucked into her hip huggers, buttoned to her regal throat, and a second Natal plum red bandana was being used as a Western necktie.

“Well, no, not if you don’t want me to, Robin.” She did not respond. She sighed theatrically again, eyes ceiling-ward, indicating that whatever was bugging her would have to be elicited, it was utterly too awful to be freely volunteered. “You somehow look different, Robin. Oh, I know what it is. You have on a necktie! And your blouse is tucked in!”

Robin began to sob, savagely. Were not people cruel beyond belief, Frederick? Cruel, cruel,
cruel!
A man—”a drunken fucking
haole
tourist” (naturally)—had come up to her in the lobby and told her how much more attractive she’d be if she wore her shirt in such a way that didn’t expose her stretch marks. Stretch marks? Now listen closely, Alissa, as I cry out to you as a trained analyst. It wasn’t so much that I knew Robin had never had a child, but that only the weekend before and before and before ad infinitum throughout my now endless incarceration my tongue had spent all kinds of time lapping about that astonishingly golden area so free of any marks whatever as to drive poor grandpappy Percival Applegate mad with lust. My first reaction was, of course, one of hopeless futility, which instantly turned into that frustrating fury you must have long ago learned to control, my impulse to leap up, charge to the bed, now grab her fiercely by the nape of the neck, bend her over double so that her eyes were two inches from that lovely tum-tum and cry, “Look, look, look! There are no fucking marks whatever, for Jesus Almighty’s sake!”