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

“Hey you, don’t you look a bit like Rudolph Valentino. Buy me a drink why don’t yuh.”

There were no more twenty-dollar bills for taxis for a while, but taxis were less necessary as nobody seemed that anxious to commission music or make appointments with me anyway. We’d now been living since the marriage in a temporarily borrowed apartment belonging to one of Sylvia’s girlfriends on West Sixty-eighth Street, from where I strolled into the park each day, looking around the skyline of the city, which, if you didn’t stare at it too long, was an inspiration. It was also a ready reminder of, holy cow, look at all the competition there is lurking behind every window you could see. Where people living on trust funds and investments just like Sylvia’s parents were ensconced amid their priceless antiques, filing their fingernails, powdering their asses, or else giving themselves pleasant enemas. Although we were living modestly comfortably on Sylvia’s allowance, I was also looking hard for somewhere to rent cheaply, heading downtown beyond the Village to reconnoiter around Little Italy. Meanwhile, I was starting to express the idea I had already more than hinted at to Sylvia that when I met her father I might suggest a stipend in the way of substituting for some kind of fellowship or grant repayable in full, which could allow me to give full time to composing. She smiled as if she had my principles at her mercy and whispered, “Hey, handsome kiddo, let me put you in the mood for groveling. Drop your drawers and let me give you a couple more swats on the ass.”

Listening to these further snide, demeaning remarks, I now understood how wife beating could come about. And it was also significant enough to stir up the past terrors of beatings in one’s life and those done in my Catholic grade school by Sister Shirley Sadist, the most stern disciplinarian in America, who with yard-long rulers belted the shit out of us in ninth grade or whatever numerical it was that designated her attendance upon us. The stings and yowls to high heaven of these trembling figures lined up in front of a whole class, suppressing their screams of pain, still haunted me. Sylvia also could be a bit of a card when she wanted, and when I told her of the school beatings, she suggested she dress as a nun to give me my next swatting across the ass. The trouble was the other things she wanted to do and have. Her total, undivided independence, she said. And that women should be as promiscuous as men. I caught her up short once when I said sure, good-bye, see you in the reincarnation. She didn’t like that kind of adieu much and said she’d stick around and be temporarily satisfied with steady boring fucking. Meanwhile, I took up the appointment to go have a drink with her father. While she went to have a beer or two with an always groaningly salivating admirer who wanted to marry her after she divorced me and then give her a two-hundred-foot yacht, a grass-roofed palace in Mexico, and open accounts — which, as it happened, she already had — in the best, most famous fashion stores in New York.

“He’s an international banker. Has fingers in all sorts of pies. He loves me and would do anything for me. Don’t you understand. And you’re yet to be somebody.”

I was of a mind to tell Sylvia to tell her friend to take his finger out of one of his pies and shove it up his ass, or indeed her ass, as she frequently requested me to do. But I demurred as my appointment with her father loomed. His club was a massive gray stone outfit on Fifth Avenue, with its own driveway in and out on a crosstown side street. It even seemed to get more massive inside, with a room like a football field and a ceiling so high, it seemed outdoors. But even with the size, you could get the impression the echoes could make everybody be aware of the subject, if not actually hear your conversation. I was still fumingly angry at Sylvia for suggesting I was some kind of panhandler trying to blackmail somebody and that I’d be groveling. And as if to remind me of my status, she shouted after me as I left the apartment.

“It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, it’s the poor what gets the pain.”

This was a little European song I’d learned and had been foolish enough to sing for her. The remainder of the vocalization being, “It’s the same way the whole world over. Isn’t it a fucking shame.” Anyway, there was no shortage of further intimidation. The adoptive parents, I found, minus Sylvia, were listed amid a lot of other similar surnames in the Social Register. Well, I might not own much of it, but this was my country, too. I fought for it when other foreign ethnics were doing us down, my eardrums and brain getting concussed in a turret of sixteen-inch guns. But having spent an hour getting ready with the right clothes and avoiding anything too much resembling casual dress and in the only thing I owned remotely suitable for a funeral, I even thought for a second I might, in this somber club chamber, be going to be arrested for being Irish Catholic and once an altar boy who thought that Jesus Christ’s flesh and blood were being eaten in the white wafer they gave you at the altar rail for Communion. Although he wasn’t onto my secret religious thoughts, I could tell he knew more about me than he first let on. I was planning, so I could appear courteously knowledgeable and bullshit a little, to ask for an imported beer. Then I forgot every goddamn brand there was, and ordered tomato juice. He didn’t beat around the bush.

“Nice to see you again, Steve.”

“Good to see you too, sir.”

“I understand you want a handout.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I think you heard me, a handout.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, sir. I believe the expression is an honorarium or bestowment.”

“Well, who do you think you are, other than being married to Sylvia, to be so deserving.”

“I might not yet be a Wilhelm Richard Wagner perhaps, who was worthy of getting help from King Ludwig of Bavaria, to whom he accorded much heavenly rapture and ecstasy and whose Schloss residence — Neuschwanstein, to be specific — on the Rhine is the wonder of all of Europe. But I must admit I thought I’d be at least meriting some kind of sympathetic emolument in the form of a dowry in the manner of an appanage, as it were, to contribute to the continuation of my musical studies and be able to work variously on a symphony, a slow stately dance, waltz, a gavotte or minuet, and also of course to help keep Sylvia more in the manner to which she has been accustomed.”

“Hey, you’re not a pinko, are you.”

“What is that.”

“Hey, come on, you know what it is. We’ve got a prominent senator broadcasting every day about it. A Red, a Commie. An enemy of our free country.”

“I do not deny that I admire the principles of socialism, but I am not a Red or a Commie.”

“Well then, Steve, I guess you’ve got the gift of the gab, but I don’t have to remind you we’re not in Europe now, where these old customs, if not liberal niceties, may prevail, but you can take some consolation in the fact that your charm and sincerity rates one hundred percent.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And I’m also impressed by your compassion, especially for the continuation of Sylvia’s welfare and maintenance of her living standards.”

“My top priority, sir.”

“Well, that’s swell, because I just stopped her allowance.”

“You what.”

“You heard me, Steve.”

“Sir. I consider that very unfair.”

“How is it unfair, when you’re her husband and you just said supporting her is your top priority.”

“Well, priorities can have their way of being sequenrial, and stopping her allowance sir, does rather stultify the lifestyle we would wish to maintain.”