J. Donleavy - Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton

“Hiya kid, old buddy. Remember me. It’s your old friend Maximilian. I was best man at your wedding. Gee, I almost hung up, thinking it was a wrong number. You sound suspicious.”

“Hello, good friend.”

“Gee, that’s better. Sorry to hear about Sylvia but she gave me the number. Ran into her in, of all places, the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. You know, where a guest can still arrive in his private railway car. Hey, and I guess you heard all about me and Ertha.”

I had heard. But not the whole story. Old Max divorced by his first wife because he was broke without prospects, she then didn’t waste time trying to take him for all he was worth, which Max pleaded was nothing at the time except for a vintage Bentley. And then he became instantly more considerably rich as he immediately had married Sylvia’s pal Ertha after a whirlwind romance. The newlyweds then moved southwest to enjoy a dalliance in a severely affluent suburban clime located in Houston, Texas, where Ertha’s father was an oil magnate who readily assisted his very affably charming new son-in-law in making his way around in the corporate jungle of petroleum. And buying them a wedding present of a spacious house with coffered cathedral ceilings in a fancy district with two acres, four-car garage, five and half bathrooms, swimming pool and a cook and maid in attendance.

“Gee pal and old buddy boy, all went fine and swell for a while out on the old cocktail terrace until a comedy of unpremeditated imbroglios ensued, the unbelievable happenstance of which you could not ever in your wildest fears conceive.”

It transpired that old Max who, it had to be admitted, couldn’t control his sexual appetite and would, as the opportunity presented, jump in the nicest possible way on anything that moved and even a few that didn’t, had screwed someone else’s wife after a football game in a kiosk adjoining someone’s tennis court. The event of this alleged intercourse hit the local headlines when a robber, trying to rob the house next door with the owners away, got ripped apart and killed by two Doberman pinschers. Old Max and the beauteous lady, a multimillionaire’s spouse, discovered present on the other side of the fence, were called as material witnesses. And Max’s quote—“Hey gee, we were playing backgammon when we heard all this barking and then screams. We thought it was someone kibitzing about and having fun.” Nobody believed, including the judge, that they were merely playing backgammon. But the judge at least said they weren’t on trial. However, Houston society decided they were, and the scandal suddenly found Max out of a job, minus his twenty-four suits and three cars and, after a divorce, out of a marriage and without a roof over his head which literally happened overnight, for, added to his woes, the cuckholded husband put out a contract on his life, effective if he wasn’t out of Houston by sundown.

“That’s right old pal, pronto I beat it back to New York. But I wasn’t the one who first cheated. All that happened old pal after another story. Anyway, I drove the whole way back east in my old Bentley, the top down, the wind blowing through my hair. Later I find out old Ertha is all the time fucking an old flame. A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker on a professional football team, who gave her a venereal infection she gave to me, is how I first suspected what was going on. But wait till we meet and I tell you the rest of the story.”

Old Max, who himself came from Evanston, Illinois, on Lake Michigan and a fairly affluent family and was fond of reminding me in the navy that Evanston had the highest percentage of college graduates of any big town in the United States. He had old-fashioned ideas of behavior and etiquette amounting nearly to prudishness, not surprising, as Evanston was also the national headquarters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of which his mother was an important member. He said he was disgusted by the kind of betrayal involving Ertha’s past lover. Which embarrassed hell out of him having to go back home to visit his family doctor and milk down his prick just as they did at a short-arm inspection in the navy when some medic was examining suspected cases of a contagious inflammatory disease of the genitourinary tract. Max in his own act of unfaithfulness, maintaining that he was only just yielding to a brief temptation, led on by a woman in heat, whom it would have been grossly ungentlemanly to rebuff. Sure, he could get his own back on Ertha, but what the hell, life was too short. He wasn’t going to yield to any low-down retaliatory behavior, no matter how much he was provoked. And even as he was at the moment monstrously provoked by the monstrous amount of alimony he was sentenced to pay. Having now that he was back east, got himself a slot downtown in a brokerage house at better than a decent salary, a membership in a fancy athletic club, and had taken over the lease on Ertha’s old rented apartment on Waverly Place in the Village, from which Ertha was presently trying to evict him, and which he had now filled with his collection of seashells and plants.

“Well old buddy boy, I guess I’m truly back in this town with its ten thousand major attractions. Gee, come and see me, old pal. I could do with a real friend. After Ertha and I divorced, I thought, Gee, she’s already rich and doesn’t need any money and suddenly now I have lawyers breathing down my neck for accumulated maintenance, with threats that they will end me up in alimony jail. I admit I had it kind of good out there in Texas, and her family was the reason. But now I feel I’m being taken unfair advantage of. You soon find out what a woman’s really like when they get lawyers and get you into court. And it takes the poor bastard for everything he’s got. And if you can find any other better way to make him suffer, do that too. Sort of brings on a paranoia. You begin thinking that no one on this goddamn earth can be trusted. You even find you’re looking for an excuse to hate people. That’s why it’ll be so goddamn good to see you pal. I’m taking the afternoon off. Why don’t you on Friday come to afternoon tea. Scones at teatime and all that goes with them. You know these nice old customs they got in old England help to keep you sane in a city like this. And maybe it’s a good thing I don’t live far from the Women’s House of Detention to remind me of the foibles of the female. Gee pal, it will be great to see you.”

Meanwhile another naval pal I knew who knew Max said it seemed old Max had in addition to his vintage Bentley, taken to wearing tweeds and become very English in both his accent and attitude, including flying the Atlantic several times to check up on having a pair of shotguns made by a famed London gunsmith. Also he’d headed to Georgia for numerous quail shoots, that is when he wasn’t making himself familiar with certain factions of the British landed gentry with whom he took up while indulging brief bouts of foxhunting. And I recalled his fastidiousness and complaints in the navy about the constant vulgar language. And then to find him uncharacteristically wearing nearly skintight tailor-made bell-bottoms which he said sent the girls nuts when he went back home on leave. And was just like a West Virginian we both knew aboard ship, who also on leave, was so mobbed by waiting women when he got off the train that they tore off his uniform and left him on the platform in his skivvies, until the strongest girl rescued him and took him home to screw him insane as he said, but left him just sane enough to fuck again.

Friday dawned sunny. With winter over, a mild breeze blowing up grit and dust in the eyes. And taking a bus north and forgetting to get off at the stop for Waverly Place, I had to walk back downtown again. And as would happen, past the Women’s House of Detention, a grim edifice seeming to stand like an island of feminine horror at the crossroads of Greenwich and Sixth avenues. There, high up at the windows, were wild jeering faces screaming out between the bars, voices raucous and vulgar shouting down into the street.