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Title Page
THE LADY WHO LIKED CLEAN REST ROOMS
Also by J.P. Donleavy
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THE LADY WHO LIKED CLEAN REST ROOMS
THE LADY WHO LIKED CLEAN REST ROOMS
WITH EVERYONE REACTING to and following trends and fashions you never know what’s going to happen next in and around New York and especially in suburban climes like Scarsdale. But what worried her more than anything was that she might sink down so deep into the doldrums that back up out of them she might never again get.
On the day she felt this most acutely it was her forty-third birthday. She got a bottle of Polish vodka, chilled it ice cold, frosting the glass of a decanter and while listening to Fauré’s Requiem, spent a couple of hours knocking it back with a sardine paste she made with garlic and cream cheese and spread on pumpernickel bread. But she got so drunk she found herself sitting at midnight with a loaded shotgun across her lap, after she thought she had heard funny noises outside around the house. Then watching a bunch of glad facing so called celebrities spout their bullshit on a T.V. talk show and remembering that once someone told her how, when having quaffed many a dram, they turned off T.V. sets in the remote highlands of Scotland, she clicked off the safety, aimed the Purdey at mid-screen and let off the no. 4 cartridges in both barrels. And she said to herself over and over again as the sparks and flames erupted from the smoke.
‘Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.’
Her analyst said everybody was blasting the shit out of their T.V. sets all over New York and described her new behaviour of following trends as good news. For in the wake of her divorce from her strong silent husband, who wasn’t so strong nor silent, but at least never beat her up, she had become a T.V. addict and virtual recluse. And as her bank balance declined, she let the grass grow long in summer and the leaves pile up in winter. But she kept herself in shape with an exercise bicycle and a lady’s set of weights and ate mostly salad and fruit. She felt she owed her spiritual survival so far to a twice monthly visit to antique auctions and the art galleries downtown and to watching the local squirrels romping all over the place and their clever antics in preserving food for the winter.
There was also the strange incarcerated girl who maybe had something wrong in the brain and lived next door and who through the tree branches appeared in varying stages of undress waving at her at least a couple of times a day from her bedroom window and she waved encouragingly back. But the joy of that doubtful human contact with this otherwise attractive creature with a macabre sense of humour didn’t last too long when one day the girl raised both her hands together and there were handcuffs on her wrists. When she went finally to knock on this neighbour’s door, whom she’d never met, the door it was hardly opened and then slammed shut with a voice growling.
‘Mind your own god damn business.’
The only thing she thought that was saving her from an overdose of sleeping tablets were her own unexpurgated cogitations going through her head, which she thought must surely be going through the minds of a hell of a lot of other people all over Scarsdale. Especially when she’d see some of them close up on the train station on the mornings of her gallery visiting days. When it seemed the game they were all playing was to appear important. But not to let people know what you were really thinking, that you were really a horse’s ass. Her analyst said when you did let people know you really were a horse’s ass, that was when you really were emotionally disturbed.
She was, as she told the analyst, Mayflowered and in fact half assed socially registered, since her mother who grew up on a southern plantation was, but whose marriage to a socially unacceptable father got her kicked out of the society books. But this remnant of superiority, wrest away before she was even born, she always felt had left her with a mind of her own and to also go and marry someone unacceptable. Which, in her presently deserted state, she was really regretting now with her two grown up and alienated children at college. And she was smitten when overhearing her son say to her daughter on their permanently last visit.
‘Pop at least got some fun going on now in his life.’
She shrunk away like a leper upon hearing this and cried herself despairingly to sleep. Her marriage had come to an end when her television executive husband, showing signs of getting bald and overweight, had invented a laugh-a-second game show and started to get ideas about a helicopter pad on the front lawn. However, he started landing somewhere else when he met a young associate producer who according to society column gossip was not only an ex college football cheer-leader from down Mississippi way but was also Phi Beta Kappa and who at twenty five years of age still sported firm tits, big bright teeth and an ass and legs to match.
After being away nearly two months of nights on a shoot as he called it, Steve merely waltzed in one evening and with too much to drink, had hit her between the eyes with the revelation that he had taken an apartment downtown on West Sixty Seventh Street and was in love and wanted a divorce. And she got down to brass tacks right away, making sure that along with her reasonableness she’d give him a bolo or two to the plexus.
‘Steve, don’t look all annoyed and hurt that you’re hurting me. You want some fresh young flesh. It’s normal. I’m not going to complain. Nor take you to the cleaners for everything you’ve got.’
‘Hey honey, gee whiz, you know anyway I ain’t got that much.’
‘You’ve already got the children eating out of your hand. Just pay all the bills till the end of this month and give me one hundred and sixty five thousand dollars in cash, and the house with the rest of the mortgage paid off, and except for your personal stuff, all the furniture in it. Of course the Edward Hicks’s and the objects d’art my grandmother gave me, and the silverware, were always mine. And you Steve can go have all the fresh flesh you want so long as you and she never show your faces at the country club while I remain a member and where I may want to go play bridge to live out my sag tit old age respectably. O but you can also have your tank full of piranha fish I’ve been feeding.’
She took off her rings and threw them at him across the room. Steve sat like he had been electrocuted on the spot, and suddenly turned to look around at something that would remind him he was still alive, and he saw the silver framed pictures of the children on the piano flanking either side of their wedding photograph and Steve put his hands up to his face and broke sobbing into tears. Then as if seeking comfort he got up, crossed the carpet she was also going to keep, and as he bent over to kiss her, she let go with another bolo.
‘Keep your dirty filthy hands off me.’
She always thought that emotional high temperatures led to foolish assertions, which now started to come out of Steve’s, instead of her mouth. Making the accusation that her mother who never thought he was good enough for her and was trying to get her family reinstated in the Social Register. And that nobody from her side of the tracks liked hearing where he’d gone to college.
Of course to her who’d been at Bryn Mawr founded on that premise that intelligent women deserve an education as rigorous and stimulating as that offered to men, nothing could be so ridiculous. And who these days could give a flea’s fart about that long list of practically anonymous social register names even though they were registered at the U.S. Patent Office. As a child she looked through her mother’s old copy to find the tiny drawing of a yacht with smoke coming out the funnel which gave with the words ‘on board’ these people’s addresses. And it was that that made her realize that some people with more money than anybody else could have the world their own way. Which now for her would be forever in the fut
ure, impossible.
She toyed with the idea of going to live in a small town farther upstate New York or into Connecticut to a place with a volunteer fire department, a variety store and a couple of yokels at whose homespun naturalness she could marvel. But somehow for the time being, things being what they were and Steve having given her what she wanted, plus his sympathy, she thought matters at least couldn’t get worse if she didn’t stray too far away from the familiar.
In Scarsdale she still belonged to a more than slightly snooty country club where she could have a game of tennis or golf or dine with a friend or frequent with older acquaintances to play bridge. And all of which would help control her increasing eccentricities. Sitting alone in a big house as night fell produced moments teetering between choosing life and death and were rough rough indeed. Her only consoling thought being, so why worry about me, me, me while the whole world is poisoning itself with radiation levels rising and venereal plagues coming down the pike that make you shudder, shudder, shudder.
There were days, too, when she could cheer up and think that life overall hadn’t treated her that badly. At least the house she had lived in for nine years being built of brick and stone, the termites hadn’t eaten the place down. And now above all, from whence she could drive to the station, park and take a relaxed midmorning train heading downtown to visit the auction galleries and art museums. And all she had to do for her peace of mind was make sure she sat on the side which avoided going past the casket factory sign.
One guy who was selling real estate to whom she turned in sudden distress for an appraisal of her property had while walking through the butler’s pantry already tried to put his hand to take feel of her rear end and with her best weight lifting arm, she whammed him one with her left across the chops. She thought her reaction was a sign of the menopause coming on but her lady doctor said she was in enviable prime female condition. And could procreate another family if she liked. And with a smile she said.
‘I no like.’
Poor as she now was and getting each day poorer, she viewed with a bemused cynicism the fact that Scarsdale was often referred to as one of the richest communities in the United States, and plus had more than a smattering of social registrites and she wondered would they never dare as the Irish did on St Patrick’s Day, to all in their white tie and tails, top hats and ball gowns, march up Fifth Avenue in a parade.
But now in her long lonely attrition of feeling discarded she had at least learned ways of coping, especially giving herself an interest in art nouveau architecture and her current usual twice monthly whole day of contentment looking at her favourite paintings down in the city. And except for her distaste in not finding suitably clean rest rooms, these forays were saving her life, with culture providing the best self preservative and refuge.
She also started reading a few of the on the scene male novelists but felt they were merely a bunch of repressed homosexualists using their pricks as pens. And all they really had to offer were truly highly unimaginative dirty minds which she herself, practicing her masturbation every night going to sleep, thought up which were twice as dirty as a dirty old man’s thoughts. And was imagined whispered in her ear by a chef who once in Paris, and much to Steve’s chagrin, came out of his kitchen to say she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and if she got rid of her homme nul she was with, he would make her an omelette she would never forget.
There was no doubt that her involvement with the arts had immeasurably improved her contentment. And now that she was getting used to it, she minded less being alone when she was alone. And in fact now felt her isolation more when out in public with other people around. But with her walked the images she loved made by the great painters, their colours and forms colouring and framing her life.
She made an overall assessment of her assets. And estimated that, at least for the time being, she could comfortably coast along for a year or two or maybe three. What the hell, she could even add another few years to this with something entrepreneurial, she wasn’t that dumb. Besides, women owned more than half the United States which was proof, if proof were needed, that they were smarter than men. Or at least outlived them.
In keeping the furniture and the house with six bedrooms, maid’s room, four and a half baths, a conservatory and chauffeur’s apartment over the garage, and even empty as the whole place was, she felt as a divorcee she retained at least some kind of status. She’d inherited from her grandmother early American folk art among which were two Edward Hicks of whom, Fernand Leger had said, was a more significant artist than Henri Rousseau.
In the evenings she provided herself with drawing room fires and listened to Boccherini and Haydn and to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Stephen Foster’s sad songs. She thought she at least would, with her one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollar settlement which Steve had to borrow from a bank and with her just burgeoning business ideas, be able to make enough to survive if not get rich and to afford going on living in the house, which admittedly she was finding, as her Steve used to say.
‘This god damn setup I’m telling you cost a god damn whole lot of money to run.’
And there was no doubt now, as the money seemed to disappear through her fingers, that what Steve said looked to seem how it was going to be. Especially when a brief boyfriend who with an oversized prick, cured her permanently of blind dating and gave her crabs, and also borrowed and disappeared with fifteen thousand dollars. Then quickly following, a leak in the plumbing and some slates slipping cost more than fifteen thousand dollars more.
And suddenly without warning the unthinkable but unmistakable calculation dawned. With her last bank statement staring her in the face over her breakfast coffee she agonizingly realized that she literally could not afford to stay where she thought she could and had now to soon make a final decision that this big roof with its many slates and new guttering over her head, and the lawns and shrubbery beds around it, which, even with a low priced half-assed boy gardener, were so costly to keep clipped and manured, were up for sale.
That she had tried to keep up the pretension of being lady of the manor now made her feel sadly foolish as she had on the day when the T.V. repairman came with a new television set and he nearly dropped it as he saw the old one and she remained mum when he expostulated.
‘Hey what the hell happened.’
But optimism was the feature of the day when a new surveyor called and advised that nothing needed upgrading. Indeed, the house situated elevated on a slight hill on two and a half sylvan acres with its imported handmade Welsh slate roof and stone facings, plus mullioned windows, and cathedral ceilings, made it a most desirable residence. And it was so described by the realtor who said selling was no problem and he would add the words ‘eye catching and charmingly English.’
To her the house really had two special features which no one else seemed to give a good god damn about, but she always did, and that was a genuine imported Adam chimney piece the previous owners had installed. And upon which she often lovingly feasted her eyes while day dreaming sitting in front of her evening blazing fires. There was also a laundry shoot adjoining the maid’s room which shot down to the basement washroom and which her kids had put everything else into except laundry, including baby chicks they were once got for Easter, and then garter snakes they caught to scare the shit out of Mary the Irish maid.
As she sadly analysed it now, it was clearly a house easier for her to sell, than it was for her, dribbling away her remaining capital, to afford to support. Even though her once socially registered mother had always said that the grandness of one’s house provided a certain degree of pedigree in the case of those having none. But with the prospect of the house going and perhaps soon to be gone, and her restorative routines in abeyance, loneliness again was the killer. Even attempts to lessen it seemed to lead only to more loneliness. She even banged cups and bowls with spoons and clapped her hands and kicked and slammed an occasional door to make noise. It was like a contaminati
ng disease, except of course she could eat garlic to her heart’s content.
And now one or two old girlfriends from Bryn Mawr with whom she’d laughed studied and cried in those gothic grey stone buildings and who could have been thought more than acquaintances were now cancelling at the last minute plans to come pay a visit. And she’d find out that instead they did something that was to her dumb and dangerous like taking their kids white river rafting down the Grand Canyon.
Haunting premonitions seemed to sound outside her bedroom window when an owl mournful hooted in the big old oak tree which survived in its grandeur since Indian days. But worse, much worse, were her foolish last ditch dream ideas to create some sort of European-style weekly salon to which young artists and writers might come. So terrible was her one attempt at this that she could not ever again bear to think of it even as an object lesson. But now she knew what it was like to be threatened to be raped. And what the hell her long abstinence may even have invited it. And once she shouted out.
‘Holy shit it would be a god damn relief to be raped.’
However all such local cultural plans, except her own, died without a whimper. As in the immediate vicinity of Scarsdale it seemed to be an intellectual desert and anyone who wasn’t already a bond salesman downtown in some big brokerage house was practicing carrying a black briefcase to become one. And foaming at the mouth to get richer.
Even the kid to whom she thought she paid a fortune to cut the lawn and whom she had brought into the house to push around some furniture and to whom she mentioned the provenance of an odd piece of object d’art, thought she was talking about the name of a new sports car when she mentioned Chagall. And she should have been warned as the previous time she had him in the house to take the sewing machine down from the attic while she was out cleaning up the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage, he drank all her vodka in the refrigerator and also by amusing mistake, took a powerful purgative concoction thinking it was a liquor.