A Fan's Notes (48 page)

Nature and science, Nature had won and Patience had become, alas, pregnant. As an indirect result of this pregnancy, I
’
d soon be back at Avalon Valley; and though we were to see a good deal of them after my sons were born, on those occa
sions both Prudence and Bumpy would leave me to my own
devices to the point of outright ignoring me; and this, as the reader will see, proved to be fine with me. Oddly, though, and after so many years, I heard from Bumpy only recently.

Beginning his letter,
“
Ah, to be in Paris, now that spring is here!-!!
”
Bumpy went on to explain that, as he quite often had to get into Africa on business, he was now calling
“
good, gay, faggy old Paree
”
home and was, in fact, writing his note from

a sidewalk cafe he frequented in the Saint Germain des Pres. Apparently a lovely spring day, Bumpy wrote,
“
The birds is
singing, the bees is buzzing, the cats is mewing. Though one
cat sure ain
’
t,
”
he added ominously. On the route from his

apartment to the cafe a
“
black bastard
”
had made the fatal mistake of attempting to steal across Bumpy
’
s path, Bumpy had given him in the
“
arse
”
the full kicking force of his cyclist
’
s boot, and in the gutter he had left the
“
sneaky mudder fudder for dead!
”
Bumpy
’
s comment on the episode was:
“
Har! Har! Har!
”
Never having been good at languages and
“
all that horseshit,
”
he was yet to acquire a speaking knowl edge of French and thus hadn
’
t made any friends, finding Paris lonely, hostile, and inhabited by a
“
bunch of chiseling, anti-good-ol
’
-Americee, and muff-diving greaseballs! Utter swine,
”
he emphasized. Heavier than ever, he had been warned by his doctor that his blood pressure was such that he
’
d never reach forty. Having been ordered to diet and exer cise, Bumpy took long walks on weekends, browsing through the bookstalls on the Left Bank and to no avail asking after a book by
“
M. Frederick Exley.
”
“
Did that horny book of yours ever come out?
”
he asked.
“
How about sending me a copy? I
’
ll bet it
’
s hornier than horny, you
scurvy old cross-eyed degenerate you!
”
Bumpy told me that of course I had heard (and of course I hadn
’
t) about Prudence divorcing him; and whether it was true or not, I was most gratified to hear that
“
I just got plumb up to here one day, grabbed my toothbrush, and moved out on that la-di-da Vassarite bitch!
”
Prudence was now re married to a Pratt & Whitney engineer and with the children was living in a house fronting Lake Worth on Singer Island (
“
a swell fucking place to raise kids!
”
) at Riviera Beach, Flor ida; and Bumpy
“
gol dang sure
”
missed the three Sams and bet me that, as they had grown so big, I wouldn
’
t even recog nize
“
the cute little snot-noses.
”
The last time he visited them in Florida he had taken them to a drive-in movie (
“
we had a fucking brawl
”
) and afterward, because it was still early and a lovely, tropical evening, he and the Sams had sat on the dock in front of the house (
“
a real dump compared to what ol
’
Bumpy gave them!
”
) eating popcorn and throwing pebbles into the lake. The location reminded him of a hotel on the west coast of Africa where he often stopped when he was there on business; and now he couldn
’
t go to that hotel without remembering that
“
gol dang night with the three Sams and feeling all kind of sad and sick inside.
”
Speaking of Africa, he said that the one time he had got to the Congo he had hired a couple
“
spear-thrower guides
”
who recalled the incident and after much travail had found the place where his parents had been
“
slaughtered in the uprising of
‘
,
”
and parenthetically he added,
“
I must have told you before, didn
’
t I, how Mom and Dad were killed in the bush uprising of
‘
?
”
Finally attempting to get at his reason for writing, he said that he wanted to make amends for his never having visited me when I was back at Avalon Valley, explaining that it was Prudence who had forbidden him to come, telling me that she had in fact called my doctor (
“
a Doctor K., wasn
’
t it?
”
) and told him that Bumpy and I acted as unhappy catalysts on one another and that under no circumstances should the doctor allow Bumpy to take me from the hospital grounds.
“
Now that I think about it,
”
Bumpy added morosely,
“
I don
’
t suppose the doctor knew who the fuck she was or what she was trying to say.
”
After my sons were born and Patience and I had once again gone to Bumpy
’
s weekends, he couldn
’
t ask me to come along on his
“
drives
”
with him as Prudence had threatened to divorce him if he did so. He wanted me to know after all these years that his having to ignore me hurt him deeply and that he took full responsibility for doing so. He should have taken a stand right there, he said, and an unfortunate marriage would have terminated that much sooner.
“
I
’
m sorry,
”
he wrote.
“
You were the only real friend I ever had.
”
Getting dramatically maudlin in the way of B-class gangster movies, he added,
“
and, like the swine I am, I double-crossed you!
”
Then he became nostalgic.
“
Gol dang, though, we sure had a brawl, didn
’
t we? Mucking those tweedy bastards about, shooting the fucking cats, and all?
”
Summing up, Bumpy said he was over there trying to save the family
’
s oil interests in Africa, but that what with one different
“
nigger nation emerging every third day and nationalizing the refineries,
”
he hadn
’
t much hope of succeeding and ended his letter thus:
“
I left my capacity for hoping on the jet planes that led to the little emerging nations.
”
Signing it
“
Bumpy here!!!
”
he added this postscript:
“
Write me a nice long letter, you old muff-diver, and tell me some of those screwy things you know—about Plutarch and all.
”

From his opening and inadvertent paraphrase of Browning to his concluding travesty of Fitzgerald, I had thought— almost able to hear him boast of his felinicidal mania, watching him so trouble himself with notions of sinister
“
niggers
”
and
“
emerging nations,
”
thinking of him sitting so fat-bellied and so bebooted at a cafe table in, of all places, the Saint Germain des Pres and while writing his letter perhaps being taken for a famous author, envisioning him charging up to startled Parisian book panderers and demanding the horny works of
“
M. Frederick Exley,
”
trying at once to envision all these singular and wonderful twists of life—from beginning to end I thought I had read the letter in a state of wild hilarity. But an odd thing happened. When I went back to reread it, attempting gluttonously to re-experience that gaiety at Bumpy
’
s expense, I found that I could barely discern the words from where the dampness had run the ink, found that after so many years, and as Felix Krull had done for his father, I had finally reciprocated Bumpy
’
s love by paying him
“
the abundant tribute of my tears.
”

By the time I finished my first sentence and believed myself ready to undertake my epic tale of
“
pity,
”
in Patience
’
s fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, I began experiencing sudden and excruciating pains in my chest and decided that in my father
’
s image I was dying of lung cancer. Hence I took to a drinking which even by my standards was torrential, characterized, as it was, by an unutterable hopelessness. It is obvious to me now (and of course no psychiatrist enlightened me) that as I watched Patience
’
s body blossom forth, as almost day to day I witnessed the growth of what was to be a responsibility I neither wanted nor could accept, in all its perverse wonder my mind succeeded in bringing me totally and intransigently back to myself, even at the debilitating expense of living intimately, like a doomed and illicit lover unable to help himself, with the thought of my own death. Not that death itself engrossed me. Owning dim memories of that to which my father had been reduced (a man, I knew, more suited by temperament to pain than I), I was sure I couldn
’
t see the disease through to the end; and during the next few weeks all my waking hours were given over to mapping strategies for aborting the malaise
’
s hideous course. Late mornings at Sam
’
s Bar on Gedney Way in White Plains, I ordered the first of my twenty to twenty-five daily Vodka Presbyterians, struck up conversations with strangers, and with only a rudimentary discretion worked the conversation round to suicide. I asked timid clerks and burly beer-truck drivers whether an overdose of sleeping pills caused painful hemorrhaging, what they thought of the theory that a man leaping from the Empire State Building would lapse into merciful unconsciousness before splattering the pavement, if there were any possibility that a twenty-two pistol (I had one of Bumpy
’
s in mind) placed properly against the temple could fail to do the job. Like me, these strangers were daylight drinkers eluding their own phantasma; and yet I found it oddly edifying that none of them found the subject bedeviling; none exclaimed,
“
Let
’
s leave off this morbidity!
”
Such was the clinical and speculative enthusiasm for the subject—
”
Now, if I was gonna knock myself off …
”
—that I came to see suicide occupying a greater piece of the American consciousness than I had theretofore imagined. And this gave me comfort. Thinking that so many men were ready to make jubilant jumps into oblivion, or to put tidy little holes in their heads, with me, I was unable to view my own self-destruction as anything but a trifling and dreary item.

At Sam
’
s they served sandwiches jammed with a thinly sliced, mouth-melting roast beef; and during the course of the day I consumed three or four of these, with lettuce, salt and pepper, and mayonnaise. Having set cancer
’
s
“
sudden loss of weight
”
symptom, which I knew to be a relatively late one, as my clarion to tell Nature to go screw and put the pistol to my sideburns, I ate hoping to defer that clarion as long as possible. Hence I became the first man in clinical history to put on twenty pounds while
“
wasting away
”
of cancer. Cozy with vodka and held in thrall by the ways and means of suicide, I went for hours without pain. But the moment I became hap pily conscious of its absence, it struck. Furiously, mercilessly, it struck, causing me to grab breathlessly at my chest and, for a distracting pang, to hurl myself into the bar
’
s blunt edge, against which I pressed the humerus of my arm with all the weight and strength in my body. So real was the pain that I strangled for breath, tears of anguish formed in my eyes, and invariably I cursed the arbitrariness of Thanatos, whispering,
“
I
’
ll fix you—you obscene, unspeakable shit!
”

Following a day when the pain had been particularly acute, and wanting her relaxed when I told her, I sat a pregnant Patience in a chair; and with what in my drunkenness I thought a certain manly aplomb, I related to her the results of my imagined X-rays and the fictional prognosis of the in vented lung surgeon. Twenty-five hundred dollars, I matter-of-factly explained, was needed for immediate lung surgery. Poor Patience, I never loved her as I loved her enduring the pain I gave her at that moment, never felt gratitude like the gratitude I felt at her generous reaction. Of course I could have the money! To whom should she make the check? Oh, God! Who was the doctor? She had to speak to him right away! For when was the surgery scheduled? Where? That I so underestimated her intelligence is the most eloquent statement of how aberrant I had become. Calmly (though somewhat sepulchrally) explaining that my survival chances were the statistical one in twenty, I told Patience I had decided to undergo the ordeal alone, that one had hope (not much, my doleful eyes seemed to imply), and that if things worked out swimmingly, I
’
d return to her and the yet-unborn child.
“
You can
’
t go through pregnancy and my dying at the same time,
”
I magnanimously suggested. Having made plans to steal Bumpy
’
s pistol, I was going to take the money and flee to Manitou Springs, Colorado. On my bartender
’
s day off, I had used to drive there, sit shirt-sleeved on a concrete-and-wooden bench before a tidy green tri angular park, and stare at snowcapped Pike
’
s Peak rising into the heady blue of a Colorado sky, wondering even then if my life were over and bolting up frequently to walk across the bonelike street to a rustic bar where I drank enough bourbon to dream myself back into life. That was the way, and where, I had decided to spend my final days; and I wanted to have enough money to do so in style, even planning to leave the matronly motel keeper a few extra dollars to clean my brains from her aqua walls. Unfortunately, with an unidentified surgeon operating on a nonexistent lung lesion in a fantasized amphitheater, it abruptly developed that the fees might be hard to come by, that they might, in fact, be impossible.
“
You could get the money from Bumpy!
”
I cried. Patience began to weep, terribly, her pregnant body racked with sobs, her nostrils dilating with moisture.
“
Of course I could,
”
she said.
“
Or from Prudence. Or from any number of people. But you
’
ve got to let us help you!
”
What saved me at this point of the drunken nightmare I don
’
t know—Patience
’
s tears, the sub
conscious thought of what it was she carried in her, vague memories of the man I might have been. Whatever it was, I
never mentioned my
“
illness
”
again; and though I did nothing to make it easier for Patience, drinking day and night, I left her alone to come to whatever peace her resources could bring her.