An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  “Who was the man?”

  “He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Have it your way.”

  “It wasn’t a bullfighter.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was someone far better than a bullfighter, far greater.” Her face had turned plump with malice, and the red mottling had begun to fade. “As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.”

  “Who could it be?” I asked.

  “Don’t bother to hop on one foot and then the other like a three-year-old who’s got to go to the Lou. I’m not going to tell you.” She took a sip of her rum, and jiggled the tumbler not indelicately, as if the tender circles of the liquor might transmit a message to some distant force, or—better—receive one. “It’s going to be a bore not having you here once in a while.”

  “You want a divorce,” I said.

  “I think so.”

  “Like that.”

  “Not like that, darling. After all that.” She yawned prettily and looked for the moment like a fifteen-year-old Irish maid. “When you didn’t come by today to say goodbye to Deirdre …”

  “I didn’t know she was leaving.”

  “Of course you didn’t know. How could you know? You haven’t called in two weeks. You’ve been nuzzling and nipping with your little girls.” She did not know that at the moment I had no girl.

  “They’re not so little any more.” A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode. “Give us a bit of the rum,” I said.

  She handed over the bottle. “Well, they may not be so little any more, but I doubt that, pet. Besides I don’t care. Because I made a vow this afternoon. I said to myself that I would never …” and then she did not speak the rest of the sentence, but she was talking about something she had done with me and never with anyone else. “No,” said Deborah, “I thought: There’s no need for that any more. Never again. Not with Steve.”

  I had taught it to her, but she had developed a pronounced royal taste of her own for that little act. Likely it had become the first of her pleasures.

  “Not ever again?” I asked.

  “Never. The thought—at least in relation to you, dear sweet—makes me brush my gums with peroxide.”

  “Well, goodbye to all that. You don’t do it so famously if the truth be told.”

  “Not so famously as your little girls?”

  “Not nearly as well as five I could name.”

  The mottling came back to her neck and shoulders. A powerful odor of rot and musk and something much more violent came from her. It was like the scent of the carnivore in a zoo. This last odor was fearful—it had the breath of burning rubber.

  “Isn’t that odd?” asked Deborah. “I haven’t heard a word of complaint from any new beau.”

  From the day of our separation she had admitted to no lover. Not until this moment. A sharp sad pain, almost pleasurable, thrust into me. It was replaced immediately by a fine horror.

  “How many do you have?” I asked.

  “At the moment, pet, just three.”

  “And you …” But I couldn’t ask it.

  “Yes, darling. Every last little thing. I can’t tell you how shocked they were when I began. One of them said: ‘Where did you ever learn to root about like that? Didn’t know such things went on outside a Mexican whorehouse.’ ”

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” I said.

  “Lately I’ve had the most famous practice.”

  I struck her open-handed across the face. I had meant—some last calm intention of my mind had meant—to make it no more than a slap, but my body was speaking faster than my brain, and the blow caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed. She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged. Her head struck me in the stomach (setting off a flash in that forest of nerves) and then she drove one powerful knee at my groin (she fought like a prep-school bully) and missing that, she reached with both hands, tried to find my root and mangle me.

  That blew it out. I struck her a blow on the back of the neck, a dead cold chop which dropped her to a knee, and then hooked an arm about her head and put a pressure on her throat. She was strong, I had always known she was strong, but now her strength was huge. For a moment I did not know if I could hold her down, she had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air, which in that position is exceptional strength even for a wrestler. For ten or twenty seconds she strained in balance, and then her strength began to pass, it passed over to me, and I felt my arm tightening about her neck. My eyes were closed. I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort.

  One of her hands fluttered up to my shoulder and tapped it gently. Like a gladiator admitting defeat. I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there, some quiver of jeweled cities shining in the glow of a tropical dusk, and I thrust against the door once more and hardly felt her hand leave my shoulder, I was driving now with force against that door: spasms began to open in me, and my mind cried out then, “Hold back! you’re going too far, hold back!” I could feel a series of orders whip like tracers of light from my head to my arm, I was ready to obey, I was trying to stop, but pulse packed behind pulse in a pressure up to thunderhead; some black-biled lust, some desire to go ahead not unlike the instant one comes in a woman against her cry that she is without protection came bursting with rage from out of me and my mind exploded in a fireworks of rockets, stars, and hurtling embers, the arm about her neck leaped against the whisper I could still feel murmuring in her throat, and crack I choked her harder, and crack I choked her again, and crack I gave her payment—never halt now—and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea, a bleak string of salts. I was floating. I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. To my closed eyes Deborah’s face seemed to float off from her body and stare at me in darkness. She gave one malevolent look which said: “There are dimensions to evil which reach beyond the light,” and then she smiled like a milkmaid and floated away and was gone. And in the midst of that Oriental splendor of landscape, I felt the lost touch of her finger on my shoulder, radiating some faint but ineradicable pulse of detestation into the new grace. I opened my eyes. I was weary with a most honorable fatigue, and my flesh seemed new. I had not felt so nice since I was twelve. It seemed inconceivable at this instant that anything in life could fail to please. But there was Deborah, dead beside me on the flowered carpet of the floor, and there was no question of that. She was dead, indeed she was dead.

  2 / A Runner from the Gaming Room

  ON THAT NIGHT sixteen years ago when I made love to Deborah in the back seat of my car, she looked up when we were done, smiling with a misty somewhat bewildered look, and said, “You’re not Catholic, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I was hoping perhaps you were Polish Catholic. Rojack, you know.”

  “I’m half Jewish.”

  “What is the other half?”

  “Protestant. Nothing really.”

  “Nothing really,” she said. “Come, take me home.” And she was depressed.

  It took eight years for me to find out why, seven years of living my own life and a first year of being married to her. It took all of that first year for me to understand that Deborah had prejudices which were as complex and attractive as passions. Her detestation of Jewish Protestants and Gentile Jews was complete. “They know nothing about grace,” she finally explained to me.

  Like any other exceptional Catholic, Debora
h was steeped in her idea of grace. Grace was a robber bridegroom, grace was the specter in our marriage bed. When things went badly, she would say sorrowfully, even remotely, “I used to be filled with grace, and now I’m not.” When she had been pregnant, grace had come to her again. “I don’t think God is so annoyed at me any more,” she said. And indeed a tenderness rose from her at moments like that, a warm full-bodied balm to my nerves but for the purity of it: Deborah’s grace always offered its intimation of the grave. I would be content she loved me, and yet at such moments my mind drifted out to the empty peak of a mountaintop or prepared to drop down the sheer gray face of a ten-foot wave in a storm at sea. That was love with Deborah and it was separate from making love to Deborah; no doubt she classified the two as Grace and Lust. When she felt love, she was formidable; making love she left you with no uncertain memory of having passed through a carnal transaction with a caged animal. It was not just her odor, that smell (with the white gloves off) of the wild boar full of rut, that hot odor from a gallery of the zoo, no, there was something other, her perfume perhaps, a hint of sanctity, something as calculating and full of guile as high finance, that was it—she smelled like a bank, Christ she would have been too much for any man, there was something so sly at the center of her, some snake, I used literally to conceive of a snake guarding the cave which opened to the treasure, the riches, the filthy-lucred wealth of all the world, and rare was the instant I could pay my dues without feeling a high pinch of pain as if fangs had sunk into me. The afterbreath, lying on her body, floated on a current of low heavy fire, a sullen poisonous fire, an oil on flame which went out of her and took me in. Invariably a groan came out of me like the clanking of chains, my mouth on hers, not sobbing but groping for air. I always felt as if I had torn free some promise of my soul and paid it over in ransom.

  “You’re wonderful,” she would say then.

  Yes, I had come to believe in grace and the lack of it, in the long finger of God and the swish of the Devil, I had come to give my scientific apprehension to the reality of witches. Deborah believed in demons. It was Celtic blood, she had once been ready to explain, the Celts were in tune with the spirits, made love with them, hunted with the spirits. And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06 Winchester), I suspect she finally lost her nerve. She hinted once that she had broken from an animal and the guide had been forced to take it. But that I didn’t know—she was not definite. I offered to go hunting with her, to Kodiak, to the Congo, I did not care where: in the first two years of our marriage I would have been willing to go to war with any expert, guide, or champion—she took pains to separate me from that romantic heart. “But darling, I could never go hunting with you,” she said. “Pamphli”—the almost unpronounceable nickname of her first husband—“was a superb hunter. It was the best thing we had together. You don’t think I want to spoil that memory by smashing about with you? That would do none of us any good. No, I’ll never hunt big ones again. Not unless I should fall in love with somebody who’s divine as a hunter.” Like most of her friends, she had an aristocratic indifference to the development of talent. One enjoyed what was in flower, one devoured it if it were good for one, but one left the planting to others.

  Finally she took me on a hunt—for moles and woodchucks. I was shown the distance of my place from her beloved Pamphli, but even on this hunt, a casual walk through the Vermont woods near a house we were renting for a season, I saw how good she was. She did not see a forest like others. No, out of the cool and the damp, the rent of forest odor aromatic and soft with rot, Deborah drew a mood—she knew the spirit which created attention in the grove, she told me once she could sense that spirit watching her, and when it was replaced by something else, also watching, well, there was an animal. And so there was. Some small thing would leap from concealment and Deborah would pot him with her .22. She could flush more small animals than any hunter I ever saw. Often as not she fired from the hip, as nicely as pointing a finger. And many of the creatures she allowed to escape. “You take him,” she would say, and sometimes I would miss. Which elicited a laugh of gentle contempt altogether sinister. “Buy a shotgun, darling,” she would whisper. We hunted only a few times but by the end I knew I would never go hunting again. Not with her. Because Deborah went for the most beautiful and the most ugly of the animals she flushed. She knocked down squirrels with exquisite faces, tender as a doe in their dying swoon, and she blasted the hindquarters off groundhogs whose grimace at death was as carved in stone as a gargoyle’s horn. No patch of forest was quite the same once she had hunted there. “You see,” she told me once at night, late, when the booze had left her in the rarest of moods, not violent, not vicious, not amorous, but simply reflective, an air circling in on itself, “I know that I am more good and more evil than anyone alive, but which was I born with, and what came into me?”

  “You shift allegiance from day to day.”

  “No. I just pretend to.” She smiled. “I’m evil if truth be told. But I despise it, truly I do. It’s just that evil has power.”

  Which was a way of saying goodness was imprisoned by evil. After nine years of marriage to her I did not have a clue myself. I had learned to speak in a world which believed in the New York Times: Experts Divided on Fluoridation, Diplomat Attacks Council Text, Self-Rule Near for Bantu Province, Chancellor Outlines Purpose of Talks, New Drive for Health Care for Aged. I had lost my faith in all of that by now: now I swam in the well of Deborah’s intuitions; they were nearer to my memory of the four Germans than anything encountered before or since. But what I did not know was which of us imprisoned the other, and how? It was horror this edge of madness to lie beside Deborah in a marriage bed and wonder who was responsible for the cloud of foul intent which lifted on the mingling of our breath. Yes, I had come to believe in spirits and demons, in devils, warlocks, omens, wizards and fiends, in incubi and succubi; more than once had I sat up in a strange woman’s bed feeling claws on my chest, a familiar bad odor above the liquor on my tongue and Deborah’s green eyes staring at me in the dark, an oppression close to strangling on my throat. She was evil, I would decide, and then think next that goodness could come on a visit to evil only in the disguise of evil: yes, evil would know that goodness had come only by the power of its force. I might be the one who was therefore evil, and Deborah was trapped with me. Or was I blind? For now I remembered that I was where I was and no place else and she was dead. It was odd. I had to remind my mind of that. It seemed as if she were not so much dead as no longer quite living.

  Well, I came to myself then, and recognized I had been lying in a half sleep, resting beside Deborah’s body for a minute or two, or could it be ten or more? I still felt good. I felt very good but I had an intimation I must not think of Deborah now, certainly not now, and so I got up from the floor and went to the bathroom and washed my hands. Have you ever taken peyote?—the bathroom tile was quivering with a violet light, and at the edge of my vision was a rainbow curving out to the horizon of the tile. I had only to close my eyes and a fall of velvet rain red as the drapery in a carmine box ran back into my retina. My hands were tingling in the water. I had a recollection then of Deborah’s fingers on my shoulder and I stripped my shirt and washed my upper arm. As I put down the soap, its weight in my palm was alive; the soap made a low sticky sound as it settled back to the dish. I was ready to spend an hour contemplating that sound. But the towel was in my hand, and my hands could have been picking up the crisp powder of autumn leaves as they crumbled in my fingers. So it went with the shirt. Something was demonstrating to me that I had never understood the nature of a shirt. Each of its odors (those particular separate molecules) was scattered through the linen like a school of dead fish on the beach, their decay, the intimate whiff of their decay a thread of connection leading back to the hidden heart of the sea. Yes, I returned this shirt t
o my body with the devotion of a cardinal fixing his hat—then I fixed my tie. A simple black knit tie, but I might have been snugging a ship to the wharf; the tie felt huge, a run of one-inch Manila long enough to please the requirements of a difficult knot—my fingers ran in and out of the interstices of this Windsor double-hitch like mice through the rigging. Speak of a state of grace—I had never known such calm. Have you ever heard a silence in a room at night or a great silence alone in the middle of a wood? Listen: for beneath the silence is a world where each separate silence takes up its pitch. I stood in that bathroom, water off, and listened to the silence of the tile. Somewhere deep in the stories of this apartment building a fan turned on, a refrigerator clicked: they had started like beasts out of some quickened response to the silence which came from me. I looked into the mirror, searching once again into the riddle of my face; I had never seen a face more handsome. It was the truth. It was exactly the sort of truth one discovers by turning a corner and colliding with a stranger. My hair was alive and my eyes had the blue of a mirror held between the ocean and the sky—they were eyes to equal at last the eyes of the German who stood before me with a bayonet—one moment of fright flew like a comet across the harbor of my calm, and I looked deeper into the eyes in the mirror as if they were keyholes to a gate which gave on a palace, and asked myself, “Am I now good? Am I evil forever?”—it seemed a simple indispensable question to ask—but the lights went down suddenly in the bathroom, then flickered up. Someone had tipped a salute. And now the eyes in the mirror were merry and a touch blank. I could not believe I was studying them.

  I quit the bathroom then, and returned to look at Deborah. But she was lying on her stomach, her face to the rug. I did not want to turn her over just yet. The calm I contained seemed delicate. It was enough to stand near her body and look about the room. We had made little mess. The bedspread and the blankets had slipped to the floor, and one of the pillows was sprawling at her foot. An armchair had been pushed to the side; it had pulled a fold in the carpet. That was all. The rum was still standing in its bottles and its glasses, no lamps were overturned, no pictures were off the hook, nothing broken, no debris. A quiet scene—an empty field with a Civil War cannon: it has fired some minutes ago and a last curl of smoke issues like a snake from its barrel, is beheaded in the breeze. Quiet as that. I walked to the window and looked down ten flights to the East River Drive where traffic was going by at a good full clip. Should I jump? But the question had no force: there was a decision to be made inside the room. I could pick up the phone and call the police. Or I could wait. (I was taking a pleasure in each step which gave hint of the grace a ballerina might know in her feet.) Yes, I could go to prison, spend ten or twenty years, and if I were good enough I could try to write that huge work which had all but atrophied in my brain over the years of booze and Deborah’s games. That was the honorable course and yet I felt no more than a wistful muted impulse to show such honor; no, there was something other working at the base of my brain, a scheme, some desire—I was feeling good, as if my life had just begun. “Wait,” said my head very directly to me.