Snapshots
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Patrick Allington
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Patrick Allington's biography and other articles by this writer
Ben Baxter arrived mid-afternoon in the city that his guidebook called an "exotic and teeming tropical metropolis". After a long stopover at Changi Airport, followed by a turbulent three-hour flight, followed by a debilitating drive in an airless mini-van to a three-star hotel, he stood under a cold shower and sculled a can of mini-bar Heineken.
A towel wrapped around his waist, Ben opened the musty curtains and stepped on to the narrow balcony. Boulevard Central ran below. Directly ahead stood St Majestic's, the iconic sandstone church where, fifty years earlier, revolutionaries had met to plot and pray. Ben sniffed deeply, delighting in the mix of smells: ripe mangoes, perspiration, freshly ground coffee, chicken and ginger frying in peanut oil, pigeon shit, the smoke from a million Marlboros, the river.
The Golden Arch Hotel, home of the Red Flamingo Bar, was a ten-minute walk along Boulevard Central. Ben dressed in a white linen suit, bought in honour of P.T. Wiley. The suit came out of his backpack terribly creased, but Ben thought he looked the part: suave yet decrepit. He ripped a map from the guidebook – he refused to be one of those tourists who needed someone else to tell him when to be enthralled – and slung his camera over his shoulder.
He descended to the lobby accompanied by an elegant young woman in a sundress.
"I love an elevator with mirrors," he said. "No matter where I look I can see you."
The woman emitted a strangled noise.
"Apparently the breakfast buffet here is magnificent. Perhaps I'll see you there," he said.
"Perhaps."
The woman put on her sunglasses. Ben looked at his feet so that she wouldn't think that he was ogling her.
While Ben holidayed, his wife, Mary, was packing her belongings and leaving their home. She drove him to the airport, squeezed his hand and said: "I think it's terrific that we can do this without any agro."
What Mary actually meant, Ben knew, was that she could call him a cardboard cut-out of a man and he would merely shrug. It perplexed Ben that this pleased her. Did she want him to show signs of life or not? What if he dumped her entire wardrobe in the driveway and set it alight? Would such a demonstration of passion, of agro, disappoint her or rekindle her love for him?
P.T. WILEY WAS A GARRULOUS, BLACK-BEARDED, horny American writer and ex-soldier who forged a formidable literary reputation in the 1950s. He and his second wife, Marilyn – who he cheated on and occasionally beat up – lived for nearly a decade in Room 256 of the Golden Arch Hotel. Throughout the war, when American officials acted as "advisers" to the anti-communist government (by 1954 there were 20,000 advisers), P.T. Wiley's frontline dispatches spread across the Western world.
When the war shifted to the mountains in the north-west and petered out, Wiley and Marilyn stayed on. On a Remington typewriter at his favourite table in the Red Flamingo Bar, Wiley wrote his long history of the war – My Cold War Bible, he called it – and two influential novels. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and non-fiction, Wiley endured a backlash. Critics questioned the politics and occasionally even the artfulness of his prose. But his supporters fought back. "He is no saint," one friend wrote. "He is not gentle and generous. But so what? He writes sparse and distressing but beautiful and patriotic prose. He writes the bloody truth. Anybody who criticises him cannot handle the real world."
A couple of decades later, while drunk, P.T. Wiley drove himself and his fourth family off a cliff in Ethiopia. The deaths were accidental – no rumour of murder-suicide could overcome the fact that Wiley had passed out and missed a turn in the road. He was survived by two adult children from his first marriage and a magnificent half-finished novel, the plot and tone of which bore an uncanny resemblance to an unpublished short story written by his second wife, Marilyn.
Ben followed a narrow alley – past vendors selling t-shirts and pirated CDs and paw-paw drinks, past closed doorways that blocked his view of the real city, past a crawling beggar with a bloated leg – and emerged at the river. After joining a queue, he stood where P.T. Wiley had once dived into the river in pursuit of a coin and nearly drowned.
A well-groomed youth with cropped hair and Elvis sideburns sidled up to Ben and said: "Hello, mister, you go Lady Market? Come on, why not?"
"No, thank you," Ben said.
"You want to buy roll of film? Top quality."
"I have plenty of film."
"Drugs? You want me to happy you?"
"No, I'm already ecstatic. Really."
"Oh, yes, yes, I can get you some ecstatic. You come back later."
Back on Boulevard Central, Ben passed a fake Golden Arch Hotel with elephant tusks painted around the doorway. Amused, he stepped inside and peered through the gloom. Tables and plastic palm trees were scattered about. There was a single group of drinkers sitting near the jukebox, from which Cyndi Lauper wailed "Money ... changes ev-ree-thing". In the far corner, on a stage, a sour-faced woman gyrated in a bikini bottom. "Hey, mister, you buy me gin with tonic," she called. Ben backed out of the bar.
P.T. RILEY WROTE HIS DIARIES FOR POSTERITY. Published posthumously, they were self-serving, yet even his harshest critics admitted that he had stripped himself at least half-naked. In volume three – The Dank Years – he recounted his bullying of his wife, Marilyn, his battle with bourbon and the creation of his finest writing.
On the cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Dank Years is a reproduction of a painting of the Golden Arch Hotel. Wiley wrote this in his diary:
Woke at dawn. Terrible headache. Marilyn's pen scratching on paper: excruciating. Yelled at her to shut up. Lit cigar. Marilyn dumped cigar in water, complaining about asthma. Do you have it or do I? I asked. She stormed out.
Read Marilyn's short story: riveting. Slept. Marilyn came back at midday with a painting of the Golden Arch Hotel, still wet. Bought it from a street vendor for a dollar, she said, all pleased. Waste of goddamned money, I said. Dressed in new suit. Went downstairs to the Red Flamingo, drank a bottle of Californian Cabernet, ate an elephant steak, wrote till midnight. Walked. Visited Bettie-Anne – she swears that's her name and who am I to argue, she's sweet and cheap. Got home after two o'clock. Marilyn asleep: no stamina, that woman. God-awful painting pinned to wall above bed. Too tired to pull it down. Slept.