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

“Excuse me. But you’re Max’s friend, aren’t you.”

On the back of his hand, Stephen O’Kelly’O wiping a tear from an eye and turning to this voice behind him. The blond-haired girl in the cloche hat who was standing like a statue. A sallow-faced, beauteous girl. A flash of memory of another voice. Which said, “Excuse me sir.”

“I’m Amy from Knoxville. You don’t know me but I know all about you. You’re Stephen. You were Max’s friend in the navy. I’d been speaking to Max every day in jail. Like you, I came to see him off on the train. I just didn’t feel he should be alone. And you must have felt about him as I did to have put that sailor hat on his coffin.”

Out of courtesy in this dismal dark darkness, I stepped down a step from the siding and she came closer into the light. And that perhaps I was not expected to speak but to wait until spoken to. I could see from her reddened eyes that she’d been weeping. We shook hands. And together climbed back up the stairs into the vast ticket hall and past the giant stone pillars holding up its ceiling which seemed like a massive brooding sky. The few travelers all looked smaller and lonelier. We walked up the wide stone steps which led out onto Seventh Avenue. Back in the busy world of the city again. Just across and up the street we went into the Hotel Pennsylvania where she was staying. The lights of the lobby too bright, we went into the darker bar. She insisted the drinks we had be put on her bill. Cocktail music from the piano. This wan blond-haired, blue-eyed girl whose skin seemed peach-soft like a child’s and whose thin wrists might be too weak to carry her hands. She seemed as if she might freeze or the wind might blow her away. Over her months in New York, she kept in touch with Max. And when we said good-bye, shaking hands, her hand was firm on mine and for a moment I thought she might not let go unless I did.

“Max so many times said that his life was going to be lived the way he would live it or he didn’t want to live. When he spoke of you, he always seemed so proud of knowing you and that you composed music.”

I had only soda water with a slice of lemon in the bar of the Hotel Pennsylvania. And apologized to Amy that I could not bring her to Max’s favorite place in New York, the “Men Only” bar of the Biltmore. She smiled and said she didn’t mind but that she’d be glad to take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry with me instead. I thought of her as I walked back to Pell Street where I had changed the lock and battered a new chain across the apartment door. Next day between efforts to compose, I lay somnambulant. Scavenging for bits of food. Sitting staring at my knees, thinking of the girl from Knoxville. Her kindly strange and so pale blue eyes. I needed courage to be in touch with her. With not even a telephone now to get another voice to come near to your ear and be a sympathetic friend as you sit in your dilemma. Knowing that even the smallest, mildest words voiced of affection, even as distant away as they might have to come, could be a life-saver. To stop you throwing in the towel. As Max must have done in his final moment of waning defiance. The more you have left of life to live, the more hopeless the vastness of survival ahead becomes. Three square meals a day served on round plates. For which everyone but Dru is looking. When all she needs is exotic oil massages and to be wrapped in seaweed. And then have her privacy to look for pricks. Be in the barrel with her screwing. We could have then been dead together, plunging over Niagara Falls after our last orgasm. Go to heaven together, morals all aglow, with her money and my music.

Resurrecting myself from dejection in the late afternoon I took the radio with me under an arm and unstrapping my watch from my wrist, pawned them both on Ninth Avenue. Collected a total of nine dollars and fifty cents. The watch alone cost sixty-one dollars, bought at a reduction in a naval commissary store. I walked off some of the misery and gloom going uptown and crosstown to the Biltmore. The blind musician who could see was not to be seen. Had a beer in the “Men Only” bar. Angelo the bartender said hello. Every tiny word of greeting comfort is hard earned in this city. Especially when it prevails against the cruel indifference of the infidel hordes. Then went to Grand Central, stood on the balcony looking out over this vast temple of travel. Where I try to distract my mind. And can’t. Away from pain. From all that would be death. And listen to life, the sound of voices as a pair of guys go by.

“So Christ, there she is. After all the goddamn hoopla, I finally meet her. Has a face looks like it came out of a truck transmission shop. Only she thinks she’s God’s gift to mankind.”

With just enough money again jingling in my pocket, I telephoned Amy at the Pennsylvania Hotel but she was out. Left a message that I would telephone again. Walking down the slipway to the lower level, I stared into the Oyster Bar. Customers hunched over their martinis and shellfish, scoffing away. And here I am hungry but frightened to go in and spend any money. When the woman whose flesh I last touched could buy the whole world. Or at least a few dozen oyster bars. If only I could hear her sweet voice again. Instead of cold vowels. Her face, that of a goddess. Instead of coming out of a truck transmission shop, could only have come out of the most wonderful heavenly dream. But who in our brief romance had abruptly taken out and put on a pair of glasses I’d never seen her wear before. Changing her face and demeanor like a nightmare into the face and countenance of a schoolmarm staring at me. As if I’d committed every classroom misdemeanor in history. Her voice penetrating my ear as hard as her diamonds around her wrists and neck.

“Although if I ever care to, I’ll throw away all the money I want to throw away. But while I have what I have, I want to be charged the same price that everyone else is charged for the same thing.”

I thought, Holy cow honey, hell I’m not selling you anything you’re paying for. Or charging you. Therefore and wherefore please don’t look at me like that through those eyeglasses with those suddenly gimlet eyes. And I remembered leaving the restaurant where we had first dined and she had no money with her and wanted to tip a waiter and hatcheck girl and asked me if I had some change. And my wallet produced, her two fingers came like a flashing white shark in between the black leather folds and expertly tweezed out a searing sheaf of my last dollar bills. Made worse by the wallet being a present from my parents on graduation from prep school, which only my favorite sister attended and could conspicuously be heard clapping for me. Although I can’t afford to throw away an old shoelace I feel the same way you do, Dru, about price. Only worse. The vanishing little sheaf of dollars leaving a vast meteorite hole in my spirit as big as the hole rumored to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Right now I worry about what I might be charged in the garage for Max’s Bentley. The leviathan sitting there alone, waiting for him alive or his ghost. Its great engine ready to throbbingly burst into life. The brake unleashed and the accelerator slammed down. Would go again like a bat out of purgatory out into the city of New York, endangering lives on the streets. Or even in here in the middle vastness of this great room. Stars painted on the ceiling. Twinkling above. Which as I look up still make me wonder if Max was really in that box. Even attending as I had upon the incontrovertible fact. As was his secret girlfriend from Knoxville. But also remembering words he said of the law that I wondered if he could get around. And he said no. “Because, pal, it states that in all cases a decree awarding alimony is issued to the husband personally and failure constitutes contempt of court.” And here I am, possessed of his beloved Bentley. Even his driving gloves so neatly folded in the dashboard compartment. Yet hoping to be able to say, as I was saying it, that Max is still alive. I know where he is. On the high seas. Pulled out of Pier 52 on the Hudson. Dressing for dinner aboard a transatlantic liner. Going to hole up in a London hostelry while he’s fitted for suits and shotguns and getting his horse fit to hunt with the Quorn. And ole Max if he did throw a seven, at least did leave a legacy of laughter, which I found myself even enjoying in the bad doom hours of dawn. When the soul is reeling on the ropes. And I could recall his description of the day catching his wife in flagrante delicto and prodding his naked victim down that Houston suburban street where it went past one of the closer houses to the road in which lived a gentleman who sat almost all day drinking beer in the middle of a front room and endlessly reading detective stories out of magazines he kept piled up by his chair while his ex-beauty queen wife shopped for baubles and had facials on the proceeds her husband enjoyed from one of the biggest oil finds in Oklahoma. And as the man heard the singing approaching and the words “The eyes of Texas are upon you. All the live long day,” he thought he was somehow being serenaded and that it was his moment in the limelight as a Texas patriot and a devout believer in the biggest and the best. Whereupon he got up from his chair to go to his window and as the procession of the naked man at the business end of a shotgun came into sight and began to pass by his front lawn, he began to laugh until convulsed in mirth, grasping his stomach with both hands and teetering backwards he fell over a cocktail table, cracking his pelvis in a couple of places. Even on the ambulance stretcher as they took him to the hospital he still could not stop laughing. It turned out he knew all about the affair Max’s wife was having and had as a result, long ago assigned a detective to follow his own wife while he went on, otherwise undisturbed, reading his detective stories. But now I don’t even know why I’m here in Grand Central Station halfway across this vast floor, amid all the traffic of rush-hour people hurrying in all their directions. All seeming to head toward the information booth center floor, with its clock on top, asking about trains to anywhere or somewhere. And suddenly stop in my tracks. Standing rigid. As if an arrow had just plunged between my shoulder blades and deeply into my back. A strange foreboding enveloping. Something dreadful has happened. Making me immediately go into the subway and back to Pell Street. And I found the arrow. Stuck in my mailbox. A telegram. Addressed to Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O.