An American Dream (17 page)

I wanted to wake her up then. I had a need to talk a little, and I concentrated on the wish she awaken, concentrated so powerfully she began to stir, but then, as if the fatigues she must clear had flashed some panic at being unhonored, her face turned old, she looked middle-aged, a pinched concern drew worried lines about her nose, crimped her mouth, she groaned like an invalid crying out, “I sicken if I awake, my separate lives must come together while I sleep,” and I thought, “All right, then, sleep your sleep.” She relaxed, a smile, a little curl of amusement gave the scent of flesh to the open curl of her lip.

There was a clock above my head. It was three past three in the afternoon. I was due to see Roberts at half-past five. So I got up then, separating myself like an artist, feeling no desire to fleece her rest, and put on my clothes in the dry warm air. Her gas heater had been going, and the air was close but the exhaust was vented into the fireplace so there was no smell—I had a passing fancy that the way I felt was kin to a pie in a warming oven, yes that was how my skin felt. I got dressed and did not bother to look for a razor. I would shave at home. Before I left I stopped to write a note.

And then I wondered where she would be when I was ready to come back. Once again I came close to waking her. “Going to try to be here by tonight,” I put in parentheses at the foot of the page. “If you have to be out, leave a note where, when,” and came close to an instant of pure anguish. Would I ever get back to this place? The thought of Leznicki opened a grave in my stomach.

Well, I closed her door behind me, gently, so the spring lock
would not snap too loud, and went down the stairs, sensing the eyes of Puerto Ricans upon me, and on the street fresh air came into my lungs like an intricate message of alarm. I was back, the world, an auto horn struck my ear like a screamer on an unhappy New Year’s Eve, there was ambush everywhere. I was still drunk, I suppose. My head felt clear, too clear, I had a deep headache back of my eyes. But it was not painful so much as open to the promise it would last for more than a day. My body was drunk. Its nerves were alive, my flesh felt new—fact, it was almost a pleasure to walk, for I could feel the links which went into a step. And the air came into my nose with the history of its circuits—all the compromised souls of the dead up from the river and cobblestones permeated with the horse wagons of the last steep century, dogs around the corner, hot-dog grease from a griddle like the stale savory of the poor in rut, the blast of gas from a bus (that Egyptian mummy which lives beneath the rot) a moment of stiflings and suffocations like some childhood fight in which one is being extinguished by a bully (Deborah must have died with such smell in her lungs) and then I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. “Beware,” said the sound. “Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth.” What a rustling those first animals must have known.

I got a taxi. The driver was smoking a cigar and talked about Harlem all the way up, his absolute refusal to enter it. Finally I shut his sound out and sat there grappling with a ravening desire for drink. I don’t know if I ever wanted one so much—I cried within like a just-cracked vase might shriek for cement (that second when I thought of Leznicki had separated me one half from the other)
I sat up straight in the rear of the cab with a weak sick perspiration oozing my clothes—that much was I reduced by the effort not to tell the driver to stop each fifty yards we passed a bar. I remember pressing my jaws molar to molar, hanging on, knowing I was at a turn, knowing if I took a drink now—I, who loved to drink, I who could use whiskey for blood—that the corner would be turned, I’d be hooked, whiskey my opium. No, I had to get through the day, hold out, I had to hold out, not take a drink, not till I was back with Cherry—that was the first demand from my new contract, that moment in the morning when I had made a pact. And I thought of Ruta then, and the desire for drink added her to everything. Sick, wet, shivering with panic, I had nonetheless a quick thought of her up against these flowers of red-velvet flock, red pepper to the itch, Satan’s heaven at the thought of diving into a bar, and calling her.

“Ruta, do you remember your friend the doctor, the crazy doctor who was no better than his patient?”

A moment. “Ah. Yes. The Genius.”

“The Genius sees you sitting in the lap of blue uniforms.”

“The New York
gendarmerie
are handsome when the case is good.”

“Could you consider leaving them?”

“Only for the most thorough examination,
geliebter Doktor
.”

“See me for a consultation.”

“But you have moved your office.”

“Merely to the Irish bar on First Avenue …”

We would drink for hours, then disappear into some Germanic fleabag of a hotel, a bed fortified with the crazy molecules of a thousand fornications, one hundred sodomies, and the Devil’s tale of the tongues. We would tie one good one on, two days, three days, five empty bottles at the foot of the bed.

My heart was racing up like a trapped bird once more. I was on the run. Like a petty criminal I had sold my jewels last night to the Devil, and promised them again this morning to some child’s
whisper. I had a literal sense of seed out on separate voyages, into the sea of Cherry’s womb, into the rich extinctions of Ruta’s kitchen. That second time I made love to Ruta—where had I left it then? I could not remember, and this fact: yes to the Devil, yes to the Lord, now seemed rabid with importance, more important than Leznicki, Deborah, Deborah’s father—my heart bolted like a horse—more important even than my desire for a drink.

Do you know psychosis? Have you explored its cave? I had gone out to the end of my string. It was stretching behind me—I could feel it ready to snap.

“He hails me and I don’t even want to look at him. But there’s a cop at the intersection.…”

My mind was going off to chase the million fish of its expired seed, my brain was lifting behind it, my brain had decided to float away.

“And he gives me a hard time. The cops are chicken about niggers in this town.”

“Stop here,” I said.

“Well, to make a long story short …”

“Take your fare.”

The fresh air was keeping me alive. I passed a bar. Walked on. My feet led me past.

The sweat no longer oozed—it had collected into rivers. I was weak but I was coming back to my separate parts: college professor, television performer, marginal socialite, author, police suspect, lecher, newly minted lover of a thrush named Cherry. I had roots, weed’s roots: Jewish father, immigrant stock; Protestant mother, New England banking family, second-drawer. Yes, now I was back with the living. I could pass the bars. They went by like milestones, satisfying my sense of distance traveled on away from a crossroads where an ambush had been waiting. Now I felt small as a business man with a load of worries equal near to bankruptcy.

I bought several newspapers, took another cab, and went back
to my apartment. On the ride I did my reading. There was no need to go too thoroughly through the news stories. They splashed the front page, spoke of the death as suicide, gave details about Deborah and details about me, half of them correct, half incorrect, gave promise in their excitement that the story was good for two days more and probably a feature for the weekend round-up, they hinted—but very lightly—that police were in the scene, they announced me as unavailable for comment, Barney Oswald Kelly as unavailable for comment, and the television studio and the university as willing to give no comment. An unidentified colleague at the university was quoted as saying, “They were a splendid couple.” Two of the papers had used the same picture of Deborah. It was a terrible picture and years old. “Beautiful Young Society Matron Takes Life in Plunge,” said the little headline over the photograph, and beneath was Deborah looking fat and ugly and somewhat idiotic for she was getting out of a limousine at a wedding and was caught with a frozen supercilious smile as if her mind had said to the news photographer, “Shall I look like this for the masses?”

I turned to the society page. There was a column I always read: “The Social Reins”—Francis “Buck” Buchanan. He was a friend of Deborah’s, for all I knew he was a beau, and for the year of our separation I had sometimes been able to follow the turns of her feeling toward me since Buchanan printed what she desired to have put in print, and a nice remark meant I was in her favor once more; my exclusion from a party list of twenty names signified she was displeased still again.

“Deborah Is No Longer With Us,” went Buchanan’s headline, and it ran from left to right across the top of the page.

It went on. On for a double column the length of the page and inches of overflow into a new column, a quick haul of anecdotes, it listed fifty people—her dearest friends—and then like a trumpet blowing taps to the mournful grandeur of a violent death, as if one virtue of violent death might be to open at last some secret gates for conscientious readers, Buchanan finished with a laid-out table of everything to which Deborah had at one time or another belonged: charities, leagues, cotillions, balls, foundations, sisters, societies, and such odd-name congeries as The Caveat Napoleon, the Lasters, the Bahama Rifles, the Clambs, the Quainger, the Croyden Heart, the Spring Oak Subscription, the Philadelphia Riding, the Kerrybombos.

What a secret life had Deborah. I had not known a third of everything to which she enlisted. That endless stream of intimate woman’s lunches into which she disappeared every perfumed noon over the years—what princes must have been elected, what pretenders guillotined, what marriages turned in their course. With the insight of an ice pick the precise thought came to me that I had lost my own marriage without ever a chance to fight for it on an
open field. What a garroting must have been given my neck by the ladies of those lunches, those same ladies or their mothers who worked so neatly to make me a political career all eighteen years ago. It didn’t matter. At this instant the past was like a burned-out field after the blaze has gone through.

I had a bad moment turning the key to the apartment. I was like a gambler who lives in fear of a card. It is the Queen of Spades, and each time it appears disaster has come up another step. So each time I felt the presence of Deborah, it was as if the card turned high. And she was everywhere in my apartment, there in the echo of all those nights I slept without her, fighting those early-morning wars when every one of my cells insisted I was losing her into still another depth of separation, and my pride swore I would not pick up the phone. Now in the apartment something had died—all memories of Deborah living. An odor of death in a trash pit rose from the wastebaskets with their stale cigarettes, the garbage can in the kitchen, the musk of stale memories in stale furniture, death lived like a beast in this air. Would one go scraping over the crusted lip of the incinerator into the sour end of sour ashes? Like a fever the desire for one stiff drink came over me again. I passed through the living room, that hateful living room of champagne-colored settees and champagne paper on the walls, another of Deborah’s flings with a decorator, silver-gray, pale green, cream, all the colors of face powder, the arbitrary palette of elegance: I had always felt like Deborah’s footman sitting in that room. My fist was clenched.

The phone was ringing. It went four times, five times, the answer service picked it up, and I kept hearing an after-ring—the phone sounded like some spoiled child screaming in the attic of a house. There must be a hundred messages by now but I could not think of them. I did not know how long I could bear this apartment—dread worked up through my middle like the gray water in the machines of a midnight laundry. In the bathroom, I could
have been buried to the waist in this grease water of dread: only the touch of the razor was alive—it drew something clean across my cheek like the smell of the ocean on a summer morning. My cheek felt like a window looking out on such a light while I remained prisoner in the closet. The phone was ringing still again. I rinsed my face, made a debate whether to dress first or first take care of messages, but the answer was simple: I had to be dressed so I could get out in a minute. I picked a summer gray suit with a quiet superimposed gray plaid, black shoes, a blue-gray shirt, a black knit tie, a handkerchief for the breast pocket, and dressed all the way, even brushed my shoes, breathing all the while with the anxiety of an asthmatic on the edge of an attack.