Tough Guys Don't Dance (15 page)
Read Tough Guys Don't Dance Online
Authors: Norman Mailer
I handed the letter back. I think we both made an effort not to look into each other's eyes, but they met nonetheless. Truth, they caromed off each other like magnets bearing the same pole. Homosexuality was sitting between Regency and me as palpably as the sweat you breathe when violence is next to two people.
“Â âVengeance is mine, saith the Lord,'Â ” said Regency. He put the letter back in his breast pocket and breathed heavily. “I'd like to kill those faggots,” he said. “Every last one of them.”
“Have another drink.”
“There is corruption in this letter,” he said, patting his breast, “that leaves a taste no drink is going to wash.”
“I'm not the one to give the speech,” I said, “but have you ever asked yourself whether you should be Chief of Police?”
“Why say that?” he asked. At once, all of him was on guard.
“You ought to know. You've been here. In summer,
this town has a huge homosexual contingent. As long as the Portuguese desire their money, you will have to accept their habits.”
“It may interest you to know I'm not the Acting Police Chief anymore.”
“As of when?”
“As of this afternoon. When I read that letter. Look, I'm just a country boy. Know what I know of Saigon Boulevard? Two whores a night for ten nights, that's all.”
“Come on.”
“I saw a lot of fine men get killed. I don't know any Green Berets with pink privates. It's good Pangborn is dead. I'd have done it myself.”
You could believe him. The air was this side of the gap from lightning.
“Did you resign formally?” I asked.
He put out his hands as if to hold off all questions. “I don't want to get into it. I was never supposed to become Chief of Police. The Portugee under me is actually running the job.”
“What are you saying? Your title is a cover?”
He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. As he did so, he wagged his head up and down. That was his way of telling me yes. What a hick. He had to be from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. I knew we could have a conversation. Let's have one soon. Get drunk and talk.”
“All right.”
“I want to serve God,” he said. “What people don't comprehend is that if you want to serve, you have to grow balls big enough to take on His attributes. That includes the heavy responsibility of exercising vengeance.”
“We'll talk,” I said.
“Good.” He stood up to leave. “Do you have a clue who this guy Wardley could be?”
“I assume it's an old lover. Some rich, uptight country squire.”
“I like your acumen. Ha, ha. Ha, ha. Say I heard that name somewhere. It's too unusual to forget. Somebody said the name Wardley just in passing. Could it have been your wife?”
“Ask her.”
“When I see her, I will ask her.” He took out his notebook and wrote down an item. “Where,” he said, “do you think this Jessica lady is?”
“Maybe she went back to California.”
“We're checking that now.”
He put his arm around my shoulder as if to console me for I knew not what, and we walked together through the living room to the door. Given my height, I never have to think of myself as a small man, but he was certainly larger.
Now at the door he turned and said, “I have a regards for you. It's from my wife.”
“Do I know your wife's name?”
“It's Madeleine.”
“Oh,” I said. “Madeleine Falco?”
“The same.”
What is the first maxim of the streets? If you
want to die with a slug in your back, fool around with a cop's wife. What did Regency know of her past?
“Yes,” I said, “once in a while she used to take a drink in a place where I did some bartending. Many years ago. But I do remember her. What a lovely girl she was, what a fine lady.”
“Thank you,” he said. “We have two lovely children.”
“That's a surprise,” I said. “I didn't know â¦Â you have children.” It was a near-miss. I had been about to say, “I didn't know Madeleine could have children.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, fishing out his wallet, “here's a picture of us.”
I looked at Regency and at Madeleineâit was certainly my Madeleine ten years older than the last time I saw herâand with two tow-headed boys who looked a little like him and not at all like her.
“Very nice,” I said. “Tell Madeleine hello.”
“Sayonara,” said Regency, and took off.
Now I could not begin to go to the Truro woods. I could not bring myself up to such concentration all over again. At this hour, I could not. My mind was yawing like a wind in the hills. I did not know whether to think about Lonnie Pangborn, Wardley, Jessica or Madeleine. Then sorrow came down on me. I had all the sorrow of thinking of a woman I had loved, and the love was gone, and it should never have been lost.
I brooded upon Madeleine. Perhaps an hour
later I went to the top floor, and in my study unlocked a file drawer. There, out of a pile of old manuscript, I found the pages I was looking for and read them again. They were written almost twelve years agoâwas I twenty-seven when I did them?âand done very much in the style of the cocky young man I tried to be then, but that was all right. If you are no longer one man, only a collection of fragments, each with its own manner, the act of looking back on writing done when one was full of identity (even phony identity) can put you together for a little while, and did while I was rereading these pages. As soon, however, as I concluded, I was bathed in an old woe. For I had made the mistake of showing the manuscript to Madeleine years ago, and it helped to break us up:
The best description of a pussy I ever came across was in a short piece by John Updike called “One's Neighbor's Wife”:
Each hair is precious and individual, serving a distinct rôle in the array: blonde to invisibility where the thigh and abdomen join, dark to opacity where the tender labia ask protection, hearty and ruddy as a forester's beard beneath the swell of belly, dark and sparse as the whiskers of a Machiavel where the perineum sneaks backward to the anus. My pussy alters by the time of day and according to the mesh of underpants. It has its satellites: the whimsical line of hairs that ascend
to my navel and into my tan, the kisses of fur on the inside of my thighs, the lambent fuzz that ornaments the cleavage of my fundament. Amber, ebony, auburn, bay, chestnut, cinnamon, hazel, fawn, snuff, henna, bronze, platinum, peach, ash, flame, and field mouse: these are but a few of the colors my pussy is
.
It is a beautiful description of a forest, and makes you ponder the mysteries of scale. Somebody once wrote that Cézanne shifted our perception of magnitude until a white towel on a table was like the blue-shadowed snows in the ravines of a mountain, and the treatment of a patch of skin became a desert valley. An interesting idea. I always saw more in Cézanne after that, just as I realized I had never looked at a pussy properly until I read Updike. For that alone, John would be one of my favorite writers.
They say Updike used to be a painter, and you can see it in his style. Nobody studies surfaces so closely as he does, and he uses adjectives with more discrimination than anybody who's writing in the English language today. Hemingway said not to use them, and Hemingway was right. The adjective is the author's opinion of what's going on, no more. If I write, “A strong man came into the room,” that only means he is strong in relation to me. Unless I've established myself for the reader, I might be the only fellow in the bar who is impressed by the guy who just came in. It is better to say:
“A man entered. He was holding a walking stick, and for some reason, he now broke it in two like a twig.” Of course, this takes more time to narrate. So adjectives bring on quick tell-you-how-to-live writing. Advertising thrives on it. “A superefficient, silent, sensuous five-speed shift.” Put twenty adjectives before the noun and no one will know you are describing a turd. The adjectives are the cruise.
Therefore, let me underline it. Updike is one of the few writers who can enhance his work with adjectives rather than abuse it. He has a rare talent. Yet he irks me. Even his description of a pussy. It could as easily be a tree. (The velveteen of moss in the ingathered crotch of my limbs, the investiture of algae on the terraces of my bark, etc.) Just once I would like to have him guide me through the inside of a cunt.
Right now, for instance, my mind is pondering the difference between Updike's description of a pussy and a real cunt, that is, the one I am thinking of at this instant. It belongs to Madeleine Falco, and since she is sitting next to me, I need only reach over with my right hand to feel the objective correlative on my fingertips. Still, I would rather remain in the simpler state of a writer in reverie. Being nothing if not competitiveâas which unheralded writer is not?âI am trying to put the manifest of her cunt into well-chosen words, and so implant a small standard of prose on the great beachhead of literature. Therefore, I will not dwell on her pussy hair. It is black, so black
against the cemetery-white of her skin that my bowels and balls resound against one another like cymbals whenever her bush is displayed. But then, she loves to display it. She has a little pink mouth within the larger one (like Governor Nelson Rockefeller) and it is a true flower that pants in the dew of her heats. When aroused, however, Madeleine's cunt seems to grow right out of her buttocks, and this little mouth always remains pink no matter how wide she spreads her thighs, whereas the outer meat of her vaginaâthe larger mouthâreveals a sullen grease-works, and the perineum (which we boys out on Long Island used to call the Taintâ'tain't vagina, 'tain't anus, ho, ho) is a gleaming plantation. You don't know whether to eat her, devour her, revere her or root about. I used to whisper, “Don't move, don't move, I'll kill you, I'm about to come.” How her cooze would pullulate in reply.
Whenever I was inside of Madeleine, the other girl she usually was, the dear brunette on my arm that I walked with down the street, ceased to exist. Her belly and her womb became all of herâall that fatty, saponaceous, sebaceous, unctional, unguinous quiver of lubricious worldly delights. Let me not claim I can do without adjectives when it comes to meditating on cunt. Fucking her, I would be afloat with all the belly dancers and dark-haired harlots of the worldâtheir lust, their greed, their purchase on the swarthier ambitions of the cosmos, all now in me. God knows through which designs of karma was my come pulled by her
belly. Her cunt was more real to me than her face.
After she read this much, Madeleine said, “How could you write such things about me?” and wept in a way I could not bear.
“It's only writing,” I said. “It's not what I feel about you. I'm not a good enough writer to say what I really feel.” I hated her, however, for making me disavow my writing. But then, we were in trouble in any event. She read those pages just a week before we decided to get into a wife-swapping sort of half-orgy (I know no quicker way to describe it) that I talked Madeleine into attending with me, and the use of the word “attend” must come from my Exeter French, since we had to drive all the way from New York to North Carolina to get there, and didn't know the people. All we had was an ad in
Screw
magazine with a post office box for an address:
Young but mature white couple, male a gynecologist, are seeking fun weekend. No water sports, golden showers, S&M or B&D. Send photograph and SASE. You must be married.
I answered the letter without telling Madeleine, and sent a photo of us nicely dressed and standing on the street. Their Polaroid came back. They were in bathing suits. The man was tall
and half bald with a long sad nose, knobby knees, a small potbelly and a sallow look.
Madeleine said, on looking at the picture, “He must have the longest prick in Christendom.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There's no other explanation for him.”
The wife was young and wearing a flouncy bathing suit. She looked saucy. Something about her spoke to me right out of the photograph. On an impulse I said, “Let's visit.”
Madeleine nodded. She had large dark eyes that were luminous and full of tragic knowledgeâher family were not without rank in the Mafia and had put a few curses on her head when she left home (which was Queens) for Manhattan. She wore those wounds of departure like a velvet cloak. She had gravity, and to counterbalance it, I would go through great pains to make her laugh, even trying to walk on my hands around our furnished room. A moment of merriment from her gave a bouquet to my mood that could last for hours. That was why I had fallen in love. She had a tender marrow within her depths that I found with no other woman.
But we were too close. She began to pall on me. How harsh and Irish I must have come to seem. After we'd been together for two years, we were in the season when one marries or one parts. We talked about dating other people. I cheated on her from time to time and she had all the night for choosing to do the same to me since I worked
the bar four times a week from five to five, and much love can be made in twelve hours.
Therefore, when she nodded her agreement to the trip down South, I needed no more confirmation to proceed. One of her gifts was to be able to convey it all by one wry humorous dip of the head. “Now tell me the bad news,” she said.
So we went to North Carolina. We assured each other that we would probably not like the other couple, and get out fast. Then we could enjoy an extra night or two on the drive back. “We'll stop in Chincoteague,” I said to her, “we'll try to sneak up on a Chincoteague pony,” and explained how they were the last wild horses, just about, east of the Mississippi.
“Chincoteague,” she said. “I would like that.” She had a rich husky voice, whose timbre would resonate in my chest, and she let me rock on every syllable in Chincoteague. Thereby, we laid salve on each other against the incision we had just made on the nature of our future flesh. And went.