An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  The difficulty is that I have given an undue portrait of Deborah, and so reduce myself. She had, at her best, a winner’s force, and when she loved me (which may be averaged out somewhere between every other day to one day in three) her strength seemed then to pass to mine and I was live with wit, I had vitality, I could depend on stamina, I possessed my style. It was just that the gift was only up for loan. The instant she stopped loving me—which could be for a fault so severe as failing to open the door with a touch of éclat, thereby reminding her of all the swords, humors, and arbiters who had opened doors for her on better nights—why then my psyche was whisked from the stage and stuffed in a pit. A devil’s contract, and during all of this last year, not living with her and yet never separated, for though a week might go by or two weeks in which I hardly thought of her at all, I would nonetheless be dropped suddenly into an hour where all of my substance fell out of me and I had to see her. I had a physical need to see her as direct as an addict’s panic waiting for his drug—if too many more minutes must be endured, who knows what intolerable damage can be done?

  It was like this now. Walking the street just this cold night in March, the horrors were beginning. On these occasions when I had to see her, my instinct gave the warning that if I waited another half hour, even another ten minutes, I might lose her forever. It made no sense, I was almost always wrong in my anticipation of her mood, I was too rattled these months ever to divine what her mood might be, and yet I knew that the way I would probably lose her in the end was by waiting too long on some exceptional night when she might be hoping I would call. For once a certain moment was passed, once Deborah ever said to herself, “I am rid of him, I am rid of him now finally and forever,” then it would all be gone. She was nothing if not final, she took forever to form her mind, but come the moment and she would not look back.

  So I went into an outdoor booth, and shivering in the trapped cold air, I phoned her apartment. She was home—there were agonies on those nights I phoned and she was out—but she was home this night, and she was cordial. Which was a very bad sign.

  “Darling,” she said, “where have you been? You must rush over.” She was a handsome woman, Deborah, she was big. With high heels she stood at least an inch over me. She had a huge mass of black hair and striking green eyes sufficiently arrogant and upon occasion sufficiently amused to belong to a queen. She had a large Irish nose and a wide mouth which took many shapes, but her complexion was her claim to beauty, for the skin was cream-white and her cheeks were colored with a fine rose, centuries of Irish mist had produced that complexion. It was her voice however which seduced one first. Her face was large and all-but-honest; her voice was a masterwork of treachery. Clear as a bell, yet slithery with innuendo, it leaped like a deer, slipped like a snake. She could not utter a sentence for giving a tinkle of value to some innocent word. It may have been the voice of a woman you would not trust for an instant, but I did not know if I could forget it.

  “I’ll be right over,” I said.

  “Run. You must run.”

  When we separated, she was the one who had moved out. Our marriage had been a war, a good eighteenth-century war, fought by many rules, most of them broken if the prize to be gained was bright enough, but we had developed the cheerful respect of one enemy general for another. So I had been able to admire the strategic splendor of leaving me in our apartment. It stifled her, she explained to me, it was a source of much misery. If we were to separate, there was small logic for her to remain behind in an apartment she did not like, no, it was better for her to leave me there, I was fond of the apartment after all. I was not, I had never been, but I had pretended to be fond. Therefore I inherited her misery. Now the apartment, the empty stadium of our marriage, stifled me, but I had not the pluck, the time, nor the clean desperation to move. I used it as a place to drop my dirty shirts. Meanwhile, she hopped from one fine suite to another; there was always a friend leaving for Europe, and no one was ready to remind Deborah she was very behind on the rent. (What cowards were her friends!) I would get the bill finally, it would be a knockout, $2700 for three months rent—I would hold it, no question of paying. Part of the attrition on my military reserves had been the expenses. Deborah got four hundred dollars a week—it was senseless to give her less, she would merely run up her bills, and I had been scuffling and humping, taking three hundred dollars for a spot appearance on a television show, and seven hundred fifty for a spiced-up lecture to some Ladies Auxiliary in Long Island—“The Existential Approach to Sex.” Yes, debt was grinding me bad, I was something like $16,000 in the hole already and probably worse—I did not care to count.

  The apartment she had now was a small duplex suspended some hundred or more feet above the East River Drive, and every vertical surface within was covered with flock, which must have gone for twenty-five dollars a yard; a hot-house of flat velvet flowers, royal, sinister, cultivated in their twinings, breathed at one from all four walls, upstairs and down. It had the specific density of a jungle conceived by Rousseau, and Deborah liked it the best of her purloined pads. “I feel warm in here,” she would say, “nice and warm.”

  The maid let me in. “Madame is upstairs in the bedroom,” she said with a smile. She was a young German maid who must have had an interesting life in the ruins of Berlin from the age of five, for nothing missed her attention. She had taken lately to smiling at me with a droll mocking compassionate and very wound-up spite which promised portfolios of detail if I were ever rich enough to turn her tongue just once. I was sometimes tempted to start, to grab her in the hall and take her spiced mouth, lay my tongue on hers and rustle up with a stroke those overtones of malicious music she could sing. What Madame did with me she knew too well because I might still spend a night with Deborah from time to time, but what Madame did with others … that would have to be bought.

  I ascended the stairway, a padded perfumed aisle up a wall of flowers. Deborah was in bed. Her body was not only large but lazy and she hopped into bed whenever she did not know what else to do.

  “My God,” she said, “you look awful.” Her mouth turned fond at the corners. She never disliked me so much as when I came to see her looking my best. “You really are a contemptible-looking creature this evening.”

  Did she know about the balcony? Sometimes I was convinced I was mad, because it seemed not at all exceptional to me that Deborah had been in touch with the moon and now had the word. She had powers, my Deborah, she was psychic to the worst degree, and she had the power to lay a curse. Once after a fight with her, I had been given traffic tickets three times in fifteen minutes, once for going down a one-way street, once for jumping a red light, and once because the policeman in the last car did not like my eye and decided I was drunk. That had all been in the form of a warning from Deborah, I was certain of that. I could see her waiting alone in bed, waving her long fingers languidly to spark the obedient diabolisms and traffic officers at her command.

  “It was a bad party,” I said.

  “How is Philippe?”

  “Looking well.”

  “He’s a very attractive man. Don’t you think so?” said Deborah.

  “Everyone we know is attractive,” I said to annoy her.

  “Except you, pet. You look as if you’ve used up your liver for keeps this time.”

  “I’m not very happy,” I said.

  “Well, come here and live. There’s no reason why you can’t move back with me.”

  Her invitation was open. She wanted me to dispose of my apartment, sell our furniture, move in with her. After a month she would move out again, leaving me with the velvet flock.

  “If you’d come this afternoon,” she went on, “you could have seen Deirdre. Now she’s off to school. You are a swine not to have seen her.” Deirdre was her daughter, my step-daughter. Deborah’s first husband had been a French count. He had died of a lingering illness after a year of marriage, and Deirdre, so far as I knew, had been the child of that marriage, a delicate haunted girl
with eyes which contained a promise she would learn everything about you if she looked too long, and so chose not to look. I adored her, I had realized for years that being step-father to Deirdre was the most agreeable part of our marriage; for that reason I tried to see her as little as possible now.

  “Is she pleased at going back to school this trip?”

  “She would have been more pleased if you had come by.” Deborah’s complexion was mottling with red. When she became angry a red flush, raw as a rash, spotted her neck. “You pretended to love that child for so long, and now you give her no attention.”

  “It’s too painful,” I said.

  “God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you. It must have been quite a sight. You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.”

  Never had she gone quite so far before. “How do you tell that story these days?” Deborah went on.

  “I don’t tell it.”

  “Except when you’re too drunk to remember.”

  “I’m never too drunk to remember.”

  “I can’t get over the way you look,” Deborah exclaimed. “I mean you really look like some poor peddler from the Lower East Side.”

  “I’m descended from peddlers.”

  “Don’t I know it, honey-one,” said Deborah. “All those poor materialistic grabby little people.”

  “Well, they never hurt anyone particularly.” This was a reference to her father.

  “No, they didn’t, and they didn’t have the guts to do anything else either. Except to make your father brainy enough to make your mother and then make you.” She said this with such a stir of fury that I moved uneasily. Deborah was violent. I had a bad scar on my ear. People thought it came from the ring, but the truth was less presentable—Deborah had once bitten it half-through in a fight.

  “Go easy,” I said.

  “You’re fragile tonight, aren’t you?” She nodded, her face almost gentle, almost attentive, as if she were listening to the echo of an event. “I know something happened to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Which was in effect a counterattack. Deborah could not bear not to know.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Deborah. “Isn’t that funny. I was certain you were dead.”

  “Were you sorry?”

  “Oh, I felt a great woe.” She smiled. “I thought you were dead and you’d left a will that you wished to be cremated. I was going to keep your ashes in an urn. There—right by the window table. Each morning I was going to take a handful of your dust and drop it on the East River Drive. In time, who knows, you might have been strewn all over New York.”

  “I would have done my best to haunt you.”

  “Can’t, pet. Not when you’re cremated. That atomizes the soul. Didn’t you know?” Her green eyes had a particularly bad light. “Come here, darling, and give a kiss.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Tell me why not.”

  “Because I threw up a while ago and my breath is foul.”

  “Bad smells never bother me.”

  “Well, they bother me. And you’ve been drinking rum. You smell Godawful.” It was true. When she drank too much, a stench of sweet rot lifted from her. “The Irish were never meant to go near rum,” I said, “it brings out the odor of their fat.”

  “Do you talk this way to all your little girls?”

  She did not know what I did with the days and weeks I spent away from her. This was forever agitating her rage. Once, years ago, she uncovered an affair I had been keeping in a corner. It had been with a rather ordinary young lady who (for compensation, no doubt) had been a burning wizard in bed. Otherwise, the girl was undeniably plain. Somehow, Deborah learned about her. The subsequent details are vicious, private detectives, so forth, but the indigestible issue was that Deborah had gone with the private detective to a restaurant where the girl always had lunch and studied her through a meal, all through a long meal the poor girl ate by herself. What a scene followed!

  “I don’t think I’ve been quite so marooned in all my beloved life,” Deborah had said. “I mean, figure-toi, pet, I had to keep up a conversation with the detective, a horrible man, and he was laughing at me. All that money spent on fees, and for what, a poor wet little mouse. She was even afraid of the waitresses, and this was a tea-room. What a big boy you must be to take up with a sparrow.”

  The real part of her fury was that no intrigue had ensued; if the affair had been with one of her friends, or with some other woman of parts, then Deborah could have gone to war and fought one of her grand campaigns, hook and eye, tooth and talon, a series of parties with exquisite confrontations; but I had merely been piddling and that was the unforgivable sin. Since that time Deborah spoke only of my little girls.

  “What do you say to them, pet?” asked Deborah now, “do you say, ‘Please stop drinking so much because you smell like a piece of fat,’ or do you say, ‘Oh God, darling, I love your stink?’ ”

  The mottling had spread in ugly smears and patches upon her neck, her shoulders, and what I could see of her breast. They radiated a detestation so palpable that my body began to race as if a foreign element, a poison altogether suffocating, were beginning to seep through me. Did you ever feel the malignity which rises from a swamp? It is real, I could swear it, and some whisper of ominous calm, that heavy air one breathes in the hours before a hurricane, now came to rest between us. I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me. There are killers one is ready to welcome, I suppose. They offer a clean death and free passage to one’s soul. The moon had spoken to me as just such an assassin. But Deborah promised bad burial. One would go down in one’s death, and muck would wash over the last of one’s wind. She did not wish to tear the body, she was out to spoil the light, and in an epidemic of fear, as if her face—that wide mouth, full-fleshed nose, and pointed green eyes, pointed as arrows—would be my first view of eternity, as if she were ministering angel (ministering devil) I knelt beside her and tried to take her hand. It was soft now as a jellyfish, and almost as repugnant—the touch shot my palm with a thousand needles which stung into my arm exactly as if I had been swimming at night and lashed onto a Portuguese man o’ war.

  “Your hand feels nice,” she said in a sudden turn of mood.

  There was a period when we held hands often. She had become pregnant after three years of marriage, a ticklish pregnancy to conserve, for there had been something malformed about her uterus—she was never explicit—and her ducts had suffered from a chronic inflammation since Deirdre had been born. But we had succeeded, we wanted a child, there was genius between us we believed, and we held hands for the first six months. Then we crashed. After a black night of drink and a quarrel beyond dimension, she lost the baby, it came brokenly to birth, in terror, I always thought, of the womb which was shaping it, came out and went back in again to death, tearing by this miscarriage the hope of any other child for Deborah. What it left behind was a heartland of revenge. Now, cohabiting with Deborah was like sitting to dinner in an empty castle with no more for host than a butler and his curse. Yes, I knelt in fear, and my skin lived on thin wire, this side of a profound shudder. All the while she stroked my hand.

  But compassion, the trapped bird of compassion, struggled up from my chest and flew to my throat. “Deborah, I love you,” I said. I did not know at that instant if I meant it truly, or was some monster of deception, hiding myself from myself. And having said it, knew the mistake. For all feeling departed from her hand, even that tingling so evil to my flesh, and left instead a cool empty touch. I could have been holding a tiny casket in my palm.

  “Do you love me, pet?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It must be awful. Because you know I don’t love you any more at all.”

  She said it so quietly, with such a nice finality, tha
t I thought again of the moon and the promise of extinction which had descended on me. I had opened a void—I was now without center. Can you understand? I did not belong to myself any longer. Deborah had occupied my center.

  “Yes, you’re looking awful again,” said Deborah. “You began to look all right for a little while, but now you look awful again.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  “Oh, not in the least.”

  “Do you know what it’s like to look at someone you love and see no love come back?”

  “It must be awful,” said Deborah.

  “It’s unendurable,” I said. Yes, the center was gone. In another minute I would begin to grovel.

  “It is unendurable,” she said.

  “You do know?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You have felt it?”

  “There was a man I loved very much,” she said, “and he didn’t love me.”

  “You never told me that before.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Before we married, she told me everything. She confessed every last lover—it had been her heritage from the convent: she had done more than tell me, she had gone to detail—we would giggle in the dark while she tapped my shoulder with one cultivated and very learned finger, giving me a sense of the roll and snap and lurch and grace (or lack of it) in each of her lovers, she had even given me a sense of what was good in the best of them, and I had loved her for it, painful as the news had sometimes been, for I had known at least what I was up against, and how many husbands could ever say that? It was the warrant of our love; whatever our marriage had been, that was our covenant, that had been her way of saying I was more valuable than the others.

  And now she was inside me, fused at my center, ready to blow the rails.

  “You don’t mean it,” I said.

  “I do. There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”