An American Dream (2 page)

I was carried out later on a stretcher, an X-ray showed a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis. I was evacuated to a base hospital, then sent to New York where I was given a Distinguished Service Cross, not anything less, and was used for the last year to bring good public relations for the Army. Which I did, showing the trace of a distinguished limp. A hero in mid-’44, a hero for all of ’45, surviving even V-J Day, I had my pick of opportunities and used them. I went around for a time speaking with Mrs. Roosevelt at one honorable drive after another, and she liked me. She encouraged me to think of politics. Those became the years when the gears worked together, the contacts and the insights, the style and the manufacture of oneself. It all turned together very well, I was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm.

About the time the Party machine in New York County was sorting through its culls and giving me odd off-hand invitations to lunch with the Cardinal and the Bishop (“One question, son,” asked the first Eminence, “do you believe in God?” “Yes, your Eminence”) Mrs. Roosevelt was introducing me to Protestant gentry and Jewish gentry and, yes, it all began to fit and fit so well I came out, by the end, a candidate for Congress, and was then
elected. Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York.

Now, I could go into more detail about the precise sequence of steps which left me a young Congressman in 1946 at the age of twenty-six—the moves were not automatic after all, but that would merely describe the adventures of the part which I as a young actor was playing. There are any number of movie stars who capture the love of women they have never seen; the poor husbands of those women are in competition with a man they cannot meet. But I think of those particular few movie stars who are not only profiles for a great lover, but homosexual and private in their life. They must live with insanity on every breath. And something which could correspond to this was true for me. Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death. I could not forget the fourth soldier. His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side, and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero, death was everyone’s emptiness. But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. Thus I quit my place in politics almost as quickly as I gained it, for by ’48 I chose to bolt the Democratic Party and run for office on the Progressive ticket. Henry Wallace, Glen Taylor, and me. I had reasons for the choice, some honorable, some spurious, but one motive now seems clear—I wanted to depart from politics before I was separated from myself forever by the distance between my public appearance which had become vital on television, indeed nearly robust, and my secret frightened romance with the phases of the moon. About the month you decide not to make a speech because it is the week of the full lunar face you also know if still you are sane that politics is not for you and you are not for politics.

Now, that was a long time ago. Since then I had, as I say,
gone up, and I had certainly gone down, and I had gone up and down. I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation; I was a personality on television and an author of sorts: I had had one popular book published,
The Psychology of the Hangman
, a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets—an interesting book. I had also—as I indicated—become the husband of an heiress, and I had been most unsuccessful at that. In fact I had come to the end of a very long street. Call it an avenue. For I had come to decide I was finally a failure.

I had had a bad year this last year, and for a while it got very bad; I may as well admit that for the first time in my life I had come to understand there was suicide in me. (Murder I had known was there for a long time.) It was the worst of discoveries, this suicide. Murder, after all, has exhilaration within it. I do not mean it is a state to entertain; the tension which develops in your body makes you sicken over a period, and I had my fill of walking about with a chest full of hatred and a brain jammed to burst, but there is something manly about containing your rage, it is so difficult, it is like carrying a two-hundred-pound safe up a cast-iron hill. The exhilaration comes I suppose from possessing such strength. Besides, murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

But there is little which is sexual about suicide. It is a lonely landscape with the pale light of a dream and something is calling to you, a voice on the wind. Certain nights I would go leaden with dread because I could hear the chamber music tuning up, tuning up and near to pitch. (Yes, murder sounds like a symphony in your head, and suicide is a pure quartet.) I was approaching my forty-fourth year, but for the first time I knew why some of my friends,
and so many of the women I had thought I understood, could not bear to be alone at night.

I had spent the last year parting company with my wife. We had been married most intimately and often most unhappily for eight years, and for the last five I had been trying to evacuate my expeditionary army, that force of hopes, all-out need, plain virile desire and commitment which I had spent on her. It was a losing war, and I wanted to withdraw, count my dead, and look for love in another land, but she was a great bitch, Deborah, a lioness of the species: unconditional surrender was her only raw meat. A Great Bitch has losses to calculate after all if the gent gets away. For ideally a Great Bitch delivers extermination to any bucko brave enough to take carnal knowledge of her. She somehow
fails in her role
(as psychoanalysts, those frustrated stage directors, might say) if the lover escapes without being maimed to the nines or nailed to the mast. And Deborah had gotten her hooks into me, eight years ago she had clinched the hooks and they had given birth to other hooks. Living with her I was murderous; attempting to separate, suicide came into me. Some psychic bombardment of the will to live had begun, a new particle of love’s mysterious atom had been discovered—the itch to jump. I had been on a balcony ten stories high talking to my host, the cocktail party was done, and we stood looking down on Sutton Place, not talking about Deborah—what else was there not to talk about this last long year?—and I was wondering, as indeed often I did, whether this old buddy, comfortably drunk with me, a pleasant-looking stud of forty-six, with a waist kept trim by squash at the New York A.C. and a rogue’s look in the eye kept alive by corners he cut making his little brokerage prosper (not to speak of the women he met for lunch—he had a flair, this buddy), well, wondering whether his concern was so true for me as the timbre of his voice, now sincere, now so place-your-bets sincere, or if he’d been banging my blessed Deborah five times a year, five times each of the last eight years,
forty glorious bangeroos upon the unconscious horror of my back (something so hot they could hardly contain themselves, and kept it down to five each twelve-month out of delicacy, out of a neatness which recognized that if ever they let themselves go, it would all go crash and boom) well, as I say, I stood there, not knowing if Old Buddy was in the Carnal Delights, or a true sword and friend, or even both—there was a wife or two after all with whom I had done the five times eight years bit, and sweet was the prize—no offering like a wife so determined to claw her man that months of hatred are converted to Instant Sweet for the passing stud in the hay, and I felt all the stirrings of real compassion talking to
her
husband next time out. So all was possible—either this guy before me now suffered conceivably a true concern for an old friend and his difficult wife, or was part of the difficulty, or indeed yes was both, both, precisely like me so many times, and before the straight-out complexity of this, the simple incalculable difficulty of ever knowing what is true with an interesting woman, I was lost. I tell you in shame that for those eight years I could point with certainty to only five bona-fide confessed infidelities by Deborah; she had indeed announced each of them to me, each an accent, a transition, a concrete step in the descent of our marriage, a curtain to each act in a five-act play: but beyond this, in the great unknown, were anywhere from two hundred to precisely no infidelities, for Deborah was an artist in that great dialectic of uncertainty where lies lead to truth, and truth begets the shimmering of lies—“Are you
mad
?” she would ask when I would disclose my suspicions of a particular gentleman or lad, “Why, he’s a boy,” or “Don’t you know he’s
repulsive
to me,” which she always said in her best London voice, five years of Catholic schooling in England contributing much to the patrician parts of her American tongue. Yes, before the uncertainty of this, feeling like a scientist of love whose instruments of detection were either wholly inaccurate or unverifiably acute, I stood up in the middle of my conversation with old friend rogue,
and simply heaved my cakes, all the gin-and-tonics, anchovy paste, pigs-in-blankets, shrimp cum cocktail sauce, and last six belts of bourbon zip over his balcony and down in a burning cascade of glob and glottle, a thundering herd of love’s poisoned hoofs.

“Oh, my God,” said the friend, out-rogued for once.

“Stow it,” I grunted.

“My God,” he repeated, “it’s dropped on the second floor.”

We had both expected as a matter of course—the seizure was so pure—that my paint would land on the doorman’s ears. Instead, some tenant would soon complain. The sheer mechanics of it had me next to laughter—how did one send an awning to the cleaners?

“I suppose I’ve got to tell them,” said the friend.

“Let the rain wash away what the moonlight fails to bless,” said I, in a tone I had come to abhor, a sort of boozed Connecticut gentry in the voice, putting together poetic phrases which were unpoetic, part of the product of living with Deborah’s near-English lilts and lecturing too many classes over too many unfulfilled hours. “In fact, old buddy, leave me. If you can bear it.”

So I stood on the balcony by myself and stared at the moon which was full and very low. I had a moment then. For the moon spoke back to me. By which I do not mean that I heard voices, or Luna and I indulged in the whimsy of a dialogue, no, truly it was worse than that. Something in the deep of that full moon, some tender and not so innocent radiance traveled fast as the thought of lightning across our night sky, out from the depths of the dead in those caverns of the moon, out and a leap through space and into me. And suddenly I understood the moon. Believe it if you will. The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another and I was nothing but open raw depths at that instant alone on the balcony, looking down on Sutton Place, the spirits of the food and drink I had ingested wrenched out of my belly and upper gut, leaving me in raw
Being, there were clefts and rents which cut like geological faults right through all the lead and concrete and kapok and leather of my ego, that mutilated piece of insulation, I could feel my Being, ridiculous enough, what! I could feel lights shifting inside myself, drifting like vapors over the broken rocks of my ego while a forest of small nerves jumped up, foul in their odor, smelling for all the world like the rotten, carious shudder of a decayed tooth. Half-drunk, half-sick, half on the balcony, half off, for I had put my leg over the balustrade as if I were able better to breathe with one toe pointing at the moon, I looked into my Being, all that lovely light and rotting nerve, and proceeded to listen. Which is to say, I looked out deep into that shimmer of past death and new madness, that platinum lady with her silver light, and she was in my ear, I could hear her music: “Come to me,” she was saying, “Come now. Now!” and I could feel my other foot go over the balustrade, and I was standing on the wrong side of the railing, only my fingers (since my thumbs were up and pointing like horns at the moon), only my eight fingers to hold me from the plunge. But it was worse than that. Because I knew I would fly. My body would drop like a sack, down with it, bag of clothes, bones, and all, but I would rise, the part of me which spoke and thought and had its glimpses of the landscape of my Being, would soar, would rise, would leap the miles of darkness to that moon. Like a lion would I join the legions of the past and share their power. “Come now,” said the moon, “now is your moment. What joy in the flight.” And I actually let one hand go. It was my left. Instinct was telling me to die.

Which instinct and where? The right hand tightened in its grip, and I whipped half-around to the balcony, almost banging into the rail with my breast, my back now to the street and the sky. Only if I turned my head could I see the Lady.

“Drop,” she said one more time, but the moment had gone. Now if I dropped, all of me passed down. There would be no trip.

“You can’t die yet,” said the formal part of my brain, “you haven’t done your work.”

“Yes,” said the moon, “you haven’t done your work, but you’ve lived your life, and you are dead with it.”

“Let me be not all dead,” I cried to myself, and slipped back over the rail, and dropped into a chair. I was sick. I assure you I was sick in a way I had never been sick before. Deep in a fever, or bumping through the rapids of a bad nausea, one’s soul could always speak to one, “Look what this illness is doing to us, you coward,” that voice might say and one would shake or twist in the fever, but that at least was a nightmare. This illness now, huddling in the deck chair, was an extinction. I could feel what was good in me going away, going away perhaps forever, rising after all to the moon, my courage, my wit, ambition and hope. Nothing but sickness and dung remained in the sack of my torso. And the moon looked back, baleful in her radiance now. Will you understand me if I say that at that moment I felt the other illness come to me, that I knew then if it took twenty years or forty for my death, that if I died from a revolt of the cells, a growth against the design of my organs, that this was the moment it all began, this was the hour when the cells took their leap? Never have I known such a sickening—the retaliation of the moon was complete. What an utter suffocation of my faculties, as if I had disappointed a lady and now must eat the cold tapeworm of her displeasure. Nothing noble seemed to remain of me.