An American Dream (13 page)

Well, the set went on. There was a champagne light which made her look like Grace Kelly, and a pale green which gave her a little of Monroe. She looked at different instants like a dozen lovely blondes, and now and again a little like the little boy next door. A clean tough decent little American boy in her look: that gave charm to the base of her upturned nose tip-tilted (I was reminded again) at the racy angle of a speedboat skipping a wave, yes that nose gave character to the little muscle in her jaw and the touch of stubbornness of her mouth. She was attractive, yes. She had studied blondes, this Cherry, she was all of them, some blonde devil had escorted her through the styles. It was a marvel—sipping my bourbon—to watch such mercury at work. She could have been a nest of separate personalities if it had not been for the character of her bottom, that fine Southern piece. Occasionally she would turn, she would sing over her shoulder, and show that of course her butt had nothing to do with her face, no she drove it on its own rhythms, pleased with itself and her, practical, the heart of every Southern girl’s pie, marvelous, just a little too big and round for the waist, a money-counter, Southern-girl ass. “This bee-hind is for sale, boy,” said it to me, “but
you
ain’t got the price,
you
!” Her face, having nothing to do with all of that, smiled demurely at me for the first time.

I was floating on a zephyr of drunkenness, a magic riser. My brain had developed into a small manufactory of psychic particles, pellets, rockets the length of a pin, planets the size of your eye’s pupil when the iris closes down. I had even some artillery, a battery of bombs smaller than seeds of caviar but ready to be shot across the room.

Exhibit for some future court: The prizefighter said “Oil it” once again to Cherry, and I fired a battery of guns at him. His laughter stopped in the middle; he scowled as if four very bad eggs had been crushed on his head. His nostrils screwed down to the turn of disgust I expected would be in the smell. He looked about. He, in his turn, calculated, (he was no stranger to such attacks) located me as the probable source, and proceeded to kick an imaginary foot deep into my crotch. My shield went down to block it. Blocked! “Your foot hurts,” said my mind to him, and he looked depressed. After a while he started to rub the toe of that shoe against his calf.

Exhibit: The first tart with the judge giggled hysterically each time Cherry tried to hit the G below high C. Cherry’s voice was not particularly ready. One strand of her sound curled up to the pitch. The rest of her fell away. But the attempt was brave. So I called on one of those magic bullets I maintained in orbit swinging through the room above the solar center of my head. I instructed it, “Next time she giggles, take a fling through her head, ear to ear, score her good.” Which the pellet promptly did. Like a bullet going through a ten-inch plank, my pellet sizzled a new streak of emptiness through the core of that tart’s thoughts; her dear head quivered as the bullet went through; when she giggled again, the sound was hollow, the empty dopey giggle of a sweet-faced tart.

Exhibit: The judge turned his head as the planet chirruped by his ear. Then he looked about. He could not find me. I shot a mental flare to tickle the tip of his nose. “Come here, baby,” said my mind to the judge, “this is your radar.” He found me then. Anathema began in his chest, rolled off his shoulders, ground clouds of legal gas. I had not been prepared for that. The gas went up my nose, dullness, sanity, the immeasurable continuum of cigar smoke, boredom; I was deadened, but not so down that I could not blow a flame from my mouth to ignite his cloud and send it retreating back in counter-anathema upon his table. Now the judge slumped and stared ahead, his eyes open and blank. Like a flower gone to pollen,
out of spice, the ear curls on the other tart drooped suddenly to her neck, singed little bloom.

Exhibit: One of the detectives had a case of hiccups.

Exhibit: One of the Irish politicians wept.

Exhibit: The room had a field of silence. A bomb had gone off. Into this silence, Cherry was singing:
When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls
. On
sleepy garden walls
she struck five perfect notes, five, like the five bells of an angel come to the wake of a bomb, clear, a cluster of the loveliest consecutive sounds I ever heard. A rare moment of balm in this battered room to hear the song of a lovely woman’s body.

She did not like the moment. She tossed her head, beat her foot, and went off into
Here is the story of a most unfortunate Memphis man who got stranded down in old Hong Kong
.

“Another bourbon, waiter,” I cried out.

I was watching her foot beat the rhythm. She was wearing sandals which exposed her toes, and she had painted her nails. I was taken with this vanity, I was absorbed with it, for like most attractive women, her toes were the ugliest part of her body. Not ugly exactly, not deformed, but certainly too large. Her big toe was round, round as a half dollar, and larger than a quarter—it was one round greedy self-satisfied digit, and the four little toes were not so little either, each of them round balls, each of them much larger in their pads than the size of the nail might justify, so that one had to peek at five sensuous, even piggish, but most complacent little melons of flesh surrounding five relatively tiny toenails, each broader than they were long, which depressed me. She had the short broad foot of that very practical kind of woman who has time to buy the groceries and time to jazz the neighbor next door, and I looked from there up to the delicate silvery cut of her face, that delicate boy-girl face beneath the toned blonde hair, and was struck with a vision of how drunk I was, as if drunkenness were a train which rocketed through the dark and I was sitting in a seat which gave out backward
on the view and so receded further and further from some fire on the horizon: thus came each instant nearer to the murmur one hears in the tunnel which leads to death. Women must murder us unless we possess them altogether (so said the luminous logic of this liquor in my hand) and I had a fear now of the singer on the stand, for her face, yes, perhaps I could possess that altogether, perhaps that face could love me. But her bee-hind! of course I could not possess that ass, no one ever had, maybe no one would, and so all the difficulty had gone down to her feet, yes the five painted toes talked of how bad this girl could be. So I saw her, that was the way I saw her: in a magic of spite, feeling as wicked as a titled child, I shot an arrow into her big toe, into the fat bullying certainty of that toe, and saw it twitch on the beat. I shot three more arrows into the same spot and saw the foot retreat beneath her long skirt. Then, as if a curse were on me (and so I must do the opposite of what I might intend) whatever, from a motive I did not know (I wished only to call back the move) I shot one needle of an arrow into the center of Cherry’s womb, I felt it go in. I felt some damage lodge itself there. She almost lost her song. One note broke, the tempo shuddered, and she went on, turned to look at me then, a sickness came off her, something broken and dead from the liver, stale, used-up, it drifted in a pestilence of mood toward my table, sickened me as it settled in. And there was a touch of regret in that exhalation from her, as if she had been saving such illness in the hope she might inflict it on no one, that her pride would be to keep her own ills to herself, rather than pass them on. I had shot that arrow and pierced her shield. Nausea was collecting in all my pipes.

I went in a rush from the table to the men’s room, and in the stall, locked the door, knelt, and retched again for the second time that night, feeling as humble as a saint, I knew now that a saint would set his head near such a throne expecting the cleanest air to lay like a halo on the edge of the fumes. Perhaps I caught a
hint of that air, for my burned-up lungs went clear—once again this night I was taking one of those fine new breaths I had not known in twenty years, so it seemed, and then I vomited with all the gusto of a horse on a gallop, cruds, violations, the rot and gas of compromise, the stink of old fears, mildew of discipline, all the biles of habit and the horrors of pretense—ah, here was the heart of the puke!—came thundering out with the fluid intent downrushing sounds of a stream tearing through the wood to recover its river, I felt like some gathering wind which drew sickness from the lungs and livers of others and passed them through me and up and out into the water. I was draining the poison from the wound I had inflicted in Cherry’s belly, and yes in confirmation her voice came rowdy-dah, rooty-toot, ringing through the men’s-room walls, loud and laughing and triumphant,
When the saints come marching in
, soaring like a golden bird free at last from the cage of her throat, laughing happily at the antique of the song, and I held to the bowl and shook with sickness, and thought that if the murderer were now loose in me, well, so too was a saint of sorts, a minor saint no doubt, but free at last to absorb the ills of others and regurgitate them forth, ah yes, this was communion and shuddering rings of nausea and Leznicki, oh here came Leznicki, up from the belly, up, up, and the presence of Roberts up and
splat!
Pea beans and shreddings of puke came up from the basement of my belly, the police were saying good-by to my body.

Peace. And peace. Nausea faded like the echo of a locomotive in the gloom of that toilet stall, and I was lighting matches to search for specks and the hint of spatterings on my jacket, as if a more simple search in the light by the sink outside would be less devoted and so less effective. I washed my face in cold water, but carefully, once again carefully, as if I were washing a new face. And in the mirror my eyes were bright, bright and merry as the eyes of a yachtsman catching the sun off the water—was the mirror my sanity or helping to drive me mad? Still I used it to comb my hair and
reset my tie. The collar of my shirt was surprisingly fresh—I remembered the devotion with which I had put it on just after washing (the corpse of Deborah lying of course flat on the floor in the other room) and I wondered if the freshness it still maintained could be a small gift of life from the devotion I had given to the material then. Hierarchies of soul and spirit turned in my brain—drink, or a visitation from Deborah, had me insane as the Celts: I was trying to calculate how a shirt might have a spirit which laundries smashed and tender fingers restored. Still, there was the evidence of the shirt. Ripped off to make love to Ruta, whipped on again, subjected to a grilling from the drilled eye of the police, and a walk in the rain, a psychic artillery battle in the bar, a round of heaves here, and still keeping its front!—my shirt must be as fortified as a superior ego. I had one wistful passing sadness that my mind would have the liberty to adventure no longer for would I be dead in three days?—I seemed somehow to think this quite likely—or incarcerated? or just deadened with the anxiety that questions and more intolerable questions were to be answered. And at this moment far from mourning Deborah, I hated her guts. “Yes,” I thought, “you’re bitching me still.”

But Cherry was finishing her set. Or that was the way the music felt as it came through the walls. Looking in the mirror I tipped my left hand to my left eye in a mock salute and the lights dimmed for an instant again as they had in the other bathroom, dimming now either in fact or in the center of my imagination, and I said to myself, “Yes, you certainly will be dead in three days.” Then I walked out and sat down at my table, just as she was finishing the last few bars of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Which was just a little too late, for as she walked past me to the bar, a professional half smile on her face, her eye chose almost not to see me.

“Let’s have a drink,” I said to her.

“I’m having a drink with some friends,” she said, “but come over
and join us.” And she gave a smile which was somewhat better, and walked over to the three men and two women I had decided earlier were Tony’s friends. She did not know the women, she went through some measured greeting with them, radar to radar, shaking hands finally with each of those two girls, and then she kissed two of the three men in a big wet friendly fashion like a smacking handshake and being introduced to the third man, the former prizefighter, Ike Romalozzo, Ike “Romeo” Romalozzo was his name I remembered now, she hesitated, then said, “What the hell,” in a very loud very broad Southern accent and kissed Romeo for greeting to him as well.

“You could charge five bucks for those kisses,” Romeo said.

“Honey, it feels better to give them away.”

“This girl’s a swinger, Sam,” said Romeo to one of the two other men, a short man, perhaps fifty-five, with gray hair, a leathery gray skin, and a wide thin mouth. This man now touched the head of the stone in the stickpin of his white tie as if to give warning. “She’s the friend of a friend,” said Sam.

“Give us another kiss, sweetheart,” said Romeo.

“I’m still,” said Cherry, “recovering from the last one.”

“Gary, where does her friend hide?” Romeo asked.

“Don’t ask,” said Gary. He was a tall heavy man about thirty-eight with a long nose, a puffy face, and nostrils which cut the air with such an edge that his intelligence seemed to be concentrated there.

Sam whispered in Romeo’s ear. Romeo was silent. Now they all were silent. Sitting where I was, not fifteen feet from the bar, I had come to the conclusion that if I were to be dead in three days, Romeo was the man who was likely to do the job. I had no idea if this thought came from what was most true in my instinct, or if my mind was simply sodden with idiocies. Nonetheless, something now decided I must go up to Romeo in the next few minutes. “You’ll never get past the police,” said my mind to me, “unless you take
the girl home from this bar.” And on the echo of this thought, I noticed the detectives were gone. I felt the anxiety of a man hearing he must undergo a dangerous operation.

“They’re going to make a movie of my life,” Romeo said to Cherry.

“What are they going to call it?” asked Gary, “Punchdrunk and Paunchy?”

“They’re going to call it the story of an American boy,” said Romeo.