Pages from a Cold Island (16 page)

“
One must fight fire with fire,
”
Gloria said.

By the time we reached the Sonesta Beach Hotel I had of course long since given up hope of Gloria
’
s relaxing her right-on posture and had turned to the books I had so diligently reread. Because Gloria and Mailer were said to be friends, I was surprised to learn she hadn
’
t read his Prisoner of Sex.

“
He does some job on Sister Kate Millett.
”

“
I
’
ve heard. Norman wouldn
’
t have if he
’
d known her. She
’
s really nice. I mean, Norman likes me and he
’
d never do anything like that to me.
”

This remarkable piece of
naïveté
really set me back, and I was about to point out that if Mailer
’
s book was with
out merit otherwise he had brilliantly documented Millett
’
s embarrassing misreadings, her shoddy scholarship, her facility for lifting lines from context to score points they were never meant to score. I was going to say further that had Gloria written Sexual Politics not only did I doubt Mailer would have spared her but that friendship or no she wouldn
’
t have deserved sparing, when abruptly Gloria was laughing in a strangely unsettling and nerve-racking way.

“
That
’
s good! That
’
s really good!
”

Turning uneasily to her, I said,
“
What
’
s good?
”

“
The Prisoner of Sex
!
I mean, that title is so classically apt. I mean, Norman
really
is a prisoner of sex!
”

There was something so oddly childlike and gleeful in her tone that I did not know what to say. Bewildered, I said,
‘
Well, I guess we
’
re all a little of that.
”

“
But nobody,
”
Gloria assured me,
“
to the extent that Norman is.
”

By then we were at the hotel and from the electric-blue Buick Electra gathering our gear to go up to Gloria
’
s room for our
“
interview.
”
For the life of me I don
’
t know why I didn
’
t then and there profess illness, go back to my island, get drunk with Zita, and have a ball. I guess I stayed partly out of courtesy, partly because I can
’
t help being a creature of somewhat fr
ayed hopes, partly because I be
lieved my life style with women was a shambles and thought I might yet take something from Gloria to abet me on my farcical journey in search of my destiny or salvation or whatever preposterous thing I imagined myself in search of.

I of course held no brief for Mailer, but one could see that in
The Prisoner of Sex
his reference to Steinem had been made as one to a friend, and I felt that whereas I was under no constraints to give Norman a few happy verbal knocks on his pompous noggin, it didn
’
t become Gloria to do so and I wished her laughter in pointing out Norman
’
s
“
enslavement
”
to sex hadn
’
t been so—well, catty. Who the fuck wasn
’
t a prisoner of sex? And once again I found myself thinking of toppling Zita the Zebra Woman onto the ruined bed. Once again I remembered falling asleep to the heady dreams of
“
lying
”
with Gloria. And had I not, but a half-hour before, been told by no less than the angels that I ought to shove my tongue in Gloria
’
s appetizing mouth and loll around on her fillings for a while? Had my eager tongue got that far it wouldn
’
t have stayed itself in those acidic backwaters and certainly would have gone on to the more deliciously forbidden areas of that heavenly creature! Were Norman and I the only prisoners? If not certainly with the likes of me, did not Gloria move among other men with an appraising eye, thinking that that one might be okay, that this one was a real drool? Perhaps not, perhaps not, and by the time we got to the room and I
’
d solemnly set up my tape recorder I was feeling somewhat catty myself and spoke to her with a wooden jollity.

“
One of those articles said you had small boobs. You aren
’
t too grand in the fucking jug department, are you?
”

But I could not pursue this nastiness. Quite angry, Gloria tried to come back with The Movement
’
s
cliché
reply. She tried to say,
“
I wouldn
’
t ask you how big your prick is, would I?
”
but, oh Lord, gentle reader, she couldn
’
t bring it off, she stumbled on the word
prick
, delicately and stutteringly substituted
penis
, the blood rose becomingly in those lovely cheekbones, and I smiled apologetically and thought, and I was sincere,
I
like this girl. I really do like this girl.

I have the tapes, three hours of them, and I take this opportunity to tell any surly insatiable masturbator out there that if he sends me five hundred dollars in care of my publisher I
’
ll mail them off to him. To their erotic qualities I cannot attest, but my dopily unemotional voice can easily be erased from the tapes, and the dedicated joint whacker can use the wonderfully modulated tones of Ms. Gloria to help him, as the crooner says,
“
make it through the night.
”
Because Gloria and I never finished the
“
interview
”
I have never bothered to listen to them. Of course, as I say this, it occurs to me that I have shamelessly teased and provoked the lustful-souled reader into believing there would be a confrontation on The Epic Scale between Gloria Wonderful and Monsieur Frederick.

Such was not the case. Nor do I blame Gloria. She wasn
’
t much on her answers, but then I was a dreadful interviewer. Confronting each other over a narrow table, weary and enchanted eye to raspberry aviatrix
’
s spectacles, the intimidating hum of the tape recorder between us

(something I later learned a trained reporter, realizing how much it discomfits his subject, would never use), Gloria and I were not a happy
“
mating
”
; and, in fairness to her, she had every right to expect I
’
d ask the moronic chauvinist
’
s questions like whether she scorned the new butter scotch, strawberry douches in favor of good old Ivory soap and hot water. But I
’
ve already said I cared not a mouse
’
s turd for this nit-picking and had been struck by the likeness of our backgrounds, how much she
“
cared
”
and how little I did. With all my heart I wanted to know why she did, and to understand that it was essential I discover
who
she was.

In reading about her one of the things that had hit me most jarringly was her remarking the similarity of her child
h
ood to that of Augie March. As it happened, and as I have elsewhere related in
A Fan’s Notes
,
Augie March
had at a certain time in my life been a Bible of mine, a volume I perused until the binding came off and the pages fell out, a novel I identified with to such a terrible and distressing degree that even now I remember everything about Augie
’
s tyrannical Grandma-
“
boarder
”
Lausch, sitting among her bric-a-brac, her fart-blowing pooch Winnie at her feet; Grandma Lausch lording it over all, with great cunning teaching Augie
’
s simple Mama the grave art of conning the charity institutions out of free spectacles, and so forth. And I remember Augie
’
s older brother Simon, even as a teen ager secretive, crafty, bal
lsy, funny, hard as nails, hand
some, and utterly in thral
l of, rhapsodized by, The Ameri
can Dream. And always there was the idiot brother Georgie who, on reaching his manhood, was on Grandma Lausch
’
s orders
“
institutionalized,
”
after which Grandma refused to exit from her bedroom to say goodbye to him, to come out and witness
“
what she had wrought.
”
At the Army-Navy store Augie bought a little Gladstone bag for Georgie and with the keys taught him how to lock and unlock it,
“
that he might be a master of a little of his own, as he went from place to place
”
(I quote from memory!). In damp snow Augie and Mama had taken Georgie to the idiot farm on streetcars, changing from car to car in the filthy and melting Chicago slush. At the institution, Georgie, seeing himself among his own kind for the first time,
“
wagging their weak noodles,
”
and realizing that Mama and Augie are leaving him, sets up this tremendous, this overwhelming, this heart-crippling wail until Mama
“
took the bristles of his special head between her hands
”
—I numbered that scene among the great scenes in American fiction!

Thus it was that on the publication of
Herzog
, when in order to make
“
hamper space
”
for his new
“
baby,
”
Bellow committed infanticide on
Augie
in an interview in the Sunday
Time
s
by implying the
book was a youthful and rhetori
cal indiscretion, I wrote him one of my
“
mad
”
letters, fu
rious in composition it was, which, happily (for I regard Bellow as one of our
genuine
Nobel candidates), I never mailed.

Years later I at last got to meet Bellow at a cocktail party at a chic apartment on Chicago
’
s north side. As I knew he was going to be there, I was ready for him and was going to do it to him good for that
“
unforgivable
” inter
view. But the apartment turned out to be on about the hundred and ninetieth floor, and it had floor-to-ceiling spot less glass walls making it seem as if one could take one petite step off the end of the rich wall-to-wall carpeting and come,
whoooosssssh
, face
to face with his Maker. An up
state yokel, and a raving paranoic into the bargain, I got instantly dizzy and fled immediately to a couch where I found myself seated next to Bellow
’
s date. By the time I had a couple vodkas and with them the courage to maneuver, other guests had begun
to crowd Bellow. He looked dis
traught and cornered, and when at length I got to him to do my
“
eloquent
”
number I found that all I had to con tribute was some idle and horseshit literary gossip.

Be that as it may, I asked Gloria to tell me about the similarity of her childhood to Augie
’
s. I don
’
t recall her answer specifically but I
’
ll try to suggest the substance of it by drawing an analogy. In my senior year at USC I was summoned to some phony-baloney
’
s office and told that as an English major I
’
d failed to fulfill the second semester of a sophomore survey course covering the Romantic poets through Auden and Dylan Thomas (the first semester had of course covered Beowulf to Pope). When I explained to the bureaucrat that as a senior I
’
d already had all the mate
rial on a considerably more complex and heady level, some of it in graduate-level courses, and that my taking the course would be an extreme waste of time and money, he said, as one always did in those long-dead, tyrannical and good-riddance days, that I either fulfill the university
’
s
“
re
quirements
”
or fail to graduate.