Last Notes from Home (36 page)

I wasn’t surprised. It was a postwar Lincoln coupe, precisely like Cookie’s save that it was a blindingly snow-trooper white and was, Cass squealed, “registered in my own name!” What did surprise me was that Fairley was at the house and that they were just preparing to eat, having been joined by a beautiful dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties, one of Cookie’s possible replacements I had no doubt. Knowing I’d already eaten, Fairley told me to join them anyway and asked Cass to get me a bottle of Genesee 12-Horse Ale. Howie said, “You stunk today, Exley.” “Howie!” Cass cried. “I told you before we went to the game Fred had a bad foot. God, you’re rude. Isn’t he rude, Uncle Fairley?” “What’s the matter with it?” “Fred doesn’t want to talk about it when we’re eating.” Howie was an insistent little bastard. “For cryin’ out loud, Ex,” Fairley said. “Take ‘im into the kitchen and show it to ‘im. Then maybe we can eat in peace. Maybe Howie’ll learn what football is all about.” When we returned to the table, Howie, not only a brat but a born ballbuster, said, “You ought to see it, Fairley. It’s got all this purple and red blood oozing out of it and all these pussy-looking scabs.” “Jesus Christ, Howie, would you
please
shut up!” Fairley slammed his fork onto the beautiful white linen tablecloth. And though by then I’d be long gone and moving lethargically about in a free-spinning disenchanting world, I should here append that whatever Howie saw that day, he accepted, learned to live with it, and years later I heard he’d captained both Watertown High School and the Colgate Red Raiders and had actually been given a fre,e-agent tryout as a defensive back with Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers. Howie was, I understood, the last player Lombardi, with the greatest reluctance, cut from his roster before the regular season began.

When Cass and Fairley’s friend came from doing the dishes, Cass told Fairley we were going to a movie. Having forgotten what a busy moviegoing night Thanksgiving was, we actually went, too, but stayed only ten minutes and ended at the Thompson Park Pavilion (it would be snowed under within days) overlooking the east end of the city, the Lincoln’s engine and heater running. And so began my endless season of the “blowjob,” though I’m not at all sure that in those days we used such a word. Many believe our century was dramatically and traumatically divided into two parts, the first half ending with our use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese in 1945. Certainly guys but a few years my senior were coming back from Europe, Asia, and the Pacific and bringing with them not only terrible memories of war but the language with which they had confronted the madness and it was only a matter of time before “fuck” and “suck” and “motherfucker” and “cocksucker” became such a part of our nature that over the years I’ve often found myself with lovely, intelligent women who would feel quite at ease at a Jackie Presser teamsters’ convention.

But to have someone as lovely and intelligent as Cass perform fellatio on me night after night, week after week, month after month, and to have her do so in what seemed such an enthusiastically unself-conscious way was a quantum leap into the second half of the century for which I wasn’t prepared. And the worst part was that among the antediluvians of my epoch there was absolutely no one I could tell, primarily because I was all but illiterate, hadn’t the language, had I even known who he was, to either comprehend or articulate the unabashedly crude joy of a Rabelais, and had further come to see that none of the guys would believe me in any event. Long since I’d come to see locker room talk for what it was, fantasy. And in retrospect I wish I could, having heard that So-and-so was a great fuck, enumerate the wasted hours I spent in pursuit of these fantasies, only in my case to get these wantons alone and get nothing whatever. In those days we had no roll-ons and I spent so much time rubbing my sister’s Mum salve—“Mum’s the word,” we said of someone with body odor—into my armpits that I developed something like exudating canker sores under my arms and had to carry them away from my body, as if continually poised for a wingless flight from the top of the six-story YMCA building.

But what tore me asunder, what ripped my intestines out and fed them back to me, was that on the one hand what Cass was doing seemed so unspeakably crass and damning, on the other hand there seemed to be something so spiritual and seraphic in the way this healer of men went about her ministrations that, despite my continuing to pester Cass demanding—often I bellowed and swatted her—to know where she’d learned these things and how many guys there had been other than the Brigadier with whom she’d indulged these “aberrations,” Cass would give me only a chilling,
“Haaaay,”
as though demanding her own airspace at the same time she was insisting that whatever the case there was presently no one but me. My paranoia was zooming toward ethereal heights, and if the thought of the Brigadier and Cass together made me damn near rabid, the image of Cass with anyone else made me smash and despoil things and I became one of those hooligans who break men’s room mirrors and purposely miss urinals so the piss goes all over the floor for the next poor bastard to step in.

In the way of intuitive women Cass sensed that I was expanding, ballooning up with rage, and poised to burst; and though I didn’t know what she was up to, in late spring she began earnestly inquiring, over and over, what I intended to do on my graduation in June. What possessed me to lie, other than the desire to see where Cass was taking me, I don’t know; but in fact I’d already been told by the guidance instructor that my grades were an abomination, that I hadn’t enough credit hours to graduate and would have to return in the fall and take my diploma in January. To Cass I said, “Get a job, I guess, like everyone else.” Once Cass said, “When you’re eighteen, maybe Fairley’ll put you to work. He’s always bitching about no longer having the energy or any time to spend with Howie.” My heart leaped at the prospect Other than my mother’s raising holy hell, I didn’t see why not. In any event, Fairley was always handing Cass and me twenty-dollar bills the way other parents dispensed half-dollars and singles and I felt I may as well be doing something for the money.

Then one day, in the first week in June in the halls of the high school, Cass handed me a note written on lined notebook paper. It was scrupulously folded, had enough staples in it to secure a summer cottage for the winter, and I took it into a stall in the boys’ room to read. Its tone was pugnacious and defiant and said that if for one second I believed there was anyone else but me I could that night do Cass “in the normal way” and that I needn’t bring “one of those things”—obviously a prophylactic—as she knew from cleaning the house where Fairley kept his. Lord, Cass’s self-possession had so come to verge on contrariness that I was surprised she hadn’t used “rubber” or for that matter “cocksafe.”

For months now, Howie again having started to sleep soundly, Cass had abandoned nearly all pretense at demure-ness. As “I like to see what I’m doing,” she’d even begun to leave the lights on. After a minimum of petting, she’d assist me from my trousers, do what she had to do, after which she’d masturbate by rubbing herself back and forth on the length of my bare thigh, while I kissed a copper-colored throat that was the epitome of strength and grace. At the first sign of shuddering orgasm, however, Cass invariably wept chokingly and exclaimed, “Oh, Ex, I’m… I’m so embarrassed.” Although Cass never removed her panties, afterward my thigh was often so aqueously slick that on one occasion on donning my pants the corduroy stuck momentarily to my leg. It was a good thing, too, that Cass had access to Fairley’s condoms. It is not folklore that guys of my generation carried a condom so long in their wallets—boy, were we ready!—that smack in the middle of the imitation alligator leather there eventually rose a moldy lump the size of a silver dollar. In trepidation of my mother’s coming across mine (she doubtless already had), I’d flushed it down the toilet only to discover the hideous great circular lump never did vanish, a recurring reminder, if there ever was one, of the Christian admonition that thinking fornication is as grave as committing it.

What happened that night, as well as the repercussions therefrom, I would shut from my mind for years. I could not have functioned in the world otherwise. That I was later institutionalized proves I’d repressed what happened on only the most triflingly conscious level. Although Cass did not remove her blouse or skirt, beneath them she was braless and pantless, she lay on the carpet before the peach couch, placed an old orange-and-white candy-striped beach towel beneath her haunches, then unbuttoned her blouse and pulled up her skirts, exposing herself. If I have learned nothing else in attempting to write, it is that a description of the act is beyond the pale of any artist, however gifted, so that even a Nobel laureate as talented as Hemingway makes us laugh aloud when his fecund earth starts trembling and rumbling, rather as if it were a tum-tum deprived of sufficient gruel, beneath his noble interwined lovers. In retrospect there is no question that in my youthful feverish lust I brutalized Cass or that at some point, or points, she cried out—if I never heard her, how then could I presume to describe the act?—in pained hurtful anguish. I know this happened inasmuch as sometime later when, having donned another of Uncle Fairley’s condoms, I reentered Cass, I abruptly became aware of a shoe ardently poking my bare backside, heard someone say, “C’mon, Exley, get the hell up,” and turned to find two Watertown policemen, both of whom I knew, hovering over Cass and me.

As nearly as I could later determine, Howie had heard Cass’s heartfelt cries, had come unseen down the staircase to find Cass and me lying side by side, Cass in her virginal blood staining the beach towel and sobbingly clutching my neck. Howie had then gone upstairs, called the police and said “Fred Exley is hurting Sis bad.” Hesitant to heed a ten-year-old’s word and enter Fairley’s house unbidden, the police had in turn called Fairley, were told where the key was and ordered to enter the house immediately. Fairley would, he said, be there momentarily. After I’d put on my skivvies, pants, and loafers (when I at last undressed that night, the rubber was still in my underwear), Cass having fled upstairs, I was taken, a cop fiercely clutching each arm, out onto the sidewalk where the officers, Sid and Pat, threatened to charge me with everything from breaking and entering to first-degree assault to statutory and/or first-degree rape. If this weren’t sufficient, and if Fairley so wished, Sid and Pat promised they’d beat the shit out of me. What I have to say about those times, or that particular moment in those times, does not in any way exculpate the lies I told about Cass. Still, and whether it excuses me or not, I shall never cease shouting what a stifling, stultifying world the forties and fifties were, how there hovered over our every word, deed, and thought the trepidation of a fearful despotism wreaking its awful vengeance for any distressing act or thought, how we all in one way or another bartered our soul to the rigidly puritanical image the public held of itself, so that if, in terrible fear of those apes carrying out their threats I cowardly and cringingly laid it all at Cass’s feet, spitting out unforgivable things like, “She’s screwing everybody in town,” and so forth. If the times do not exonerate me, and they do not,
they do not,
nevertheless my spinelessness must be seen against a backdrop whereon all one’s thoughts and actions were suppressed so that this great abstract high-minded self-righteous lump that called itself America could sleep in blissful ignorance of not only the sleazy but what was, in the case of Cass and Exley, nothing less than love.

Fairley seemed as unflappable as ever, rather as if he were going over the nightly figures at one of his gambling emporiums. He told one of the cops, Sid, to take me up onto the porch, then went into a lengthy mumbled huddle with Pat, interrupted once by Fairley and Pat’s going to the back seat of the police car to examine what appeared to be—oh, my Lord!—the orange-and-white beach towel. The only sign of Fan-ley’s ire was his frequently poking Pat severely on the chest with his index finger, as if admonishing him that Fairley did not ever,
ever
expect to hear a word of this again. When the police finally went, smiling and making weak jokes with Fairley as they pulled away from the curb, I bolted from the porch and started across the lawn. I never made it. Moving swiftly, Fairley intercepted me, grabbed me by the arm, swirled me around, and with doubled fist smashed me furiously in the face, knocking me to the ground. When I tried to get up, Fairley knocked me down again and this time the blood was gushing from my nose.

From the Brigadier I’d learned many things about Fairley, precisely the kind of detail that would have held the Brigadier in thrall. Fairley was, for example, a Mangione on his mother’s side but I’d never until that moment seen the Sicilian in him. The Brigadier had told me that all Fairle/s business was conducted with “the guys in Utica.” It was from Utica that the weekly football pools came, and it was to someone in Utica that Fairley laid off his bets; that is, if Fairley had too much Notre Dame money on the USC-Notre Dame game, the guys in Utica were honor-bound to help him cover his bets. It turned out, too, that Fairley, for all his notions of Sicilian honor, cared little about Cass’s virginity. What had infuriated Fairley was my insisting to the cops, for Pat had apparently told him, that I was only one of regiments of guys who were screwing Cass.

Still sitting on the wet grass, afraid to rise again, I began weeping. Fairley said, “For Christ’s sake, Ex, if Cass was fucking everyone, what the hell was that on the towel? Iodine? What do you want? To have Cass sent back to that fucking Home?” Furious saliva was coming from Fairley’s twisted mouth. “I ought to have your legs broken, Ex. I just wish your dad was alive. He’d break them for me. You’d better damn well know your brother Bill is going to hear about this anyway.” When he was going up the lawn toward the house, he turned abruptly back, pointed the finger with which he’d poked Pat on his chest, and very evenly said, “If you ever come around here again, Ex, your legs will get broken.”

If my work has frequently evidenced a hatred for women, it is not women I hate but a woman, Cass—for Cass copped out, as assuredly as if she’d made that exhilarating leap from the Golden Gate Bridge, copped out with all the loops untied, with all the fences unmended, without giving me the chance to grovel in apology at her feet, without allowing Cass and me the time to grow into that happy maturity which would have permitted us to laugh heartily in the knowledge that we hadn’t—or at least Cass hadn’t—done anything at all, copped out and left me with a grief and guilt so burdensome it is something of a marvel that I survived. Oh, they have a fancy name for it today, anorexia nervosa, and every alternate month the women’s magazines have a piece on it, written in that ghoulish chitchat style, rather as if halitosis or feminine hygiene was under discussion. Of course I doubt any Watertown physician in the late forties had diagnosed Cass as anorectic-bulimic and it wasn’t until many years later, when I did my own researches into anxiety-related ejaculation, that I also unearthed what had happened to Cass.

When she hadn’t shown up for the first two weeks of the fall semester, in alarm I sought out Shirl Carpenter, the babysitter from the Home whom Cass and I had used when we went out, and asked her where Cass was. Shirl told me Cass was “awful sick, Fred. She won’t eat, and even if she does, she sticks her finger down her throat and throws it all up again. All she does is sleep. She thinks she’s too fat. Imagine, Fred! Cass? Fat? God, Fred, there isn’t a girl in this school who wouldn’t give her eyeteeth to have Cass’s figure!”