An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  Frank merely looked at her.

  “Besides, Mr. Rojack doesn’t like my singing. It makes him want to puke.”

  We all laughed.

  “He likes it,” said Frankie. “He gave me the evil eye every time I rattled a glass.”

  “Mr. Rojack is indiscriminate in his use of the evil eye,” said Cherry, “whoops!” And the glass on which she was sipping flew out of her hand.

  “You’re really not going to sing, are you?” asked Frank, looking at the broken glass on the floor. When she shook her head, he walked away.

  “Thanks a lot, Cherry,” he said.

  “Well,” said Cherry, “that breaks one beautiful mood.” She struck a match and blew it out. Then looked in the ashtray for a divination. “Bad turns ahead.”

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “Oh, no.” She laughed happily. “You’re just spoiled.” We kissed again. It was within easy distance of the first kiss. Something might actually be waiting for us.

  “I think I’m crazy. My wife is dead. I’ve drawn a blank.”

  “Something wrong behind you and you don’t want to look?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ve been feeling that way for a week.”

  The accompanist, a Negro, went to the piano. As he went by Cherry, he shrugged. Then he picked out a moody chord, dropped onto two or three other moody chords, and went off into something fast and sulky.

  “Maybe you were in love with her,” said Cherry, “and that’s why you don’t get anything back. It’s the women who can hardly wait to be widows that scream at the funeral.”

  The phone was ringing. “Mr. Rojack, for you,” Frank called out, and nodded at a booth off the bar. As I passed, I noticed that Romeo Sam, Gary, the girls, all were gone.

  “Rojack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Roberts.”

  “You still up?”

  “Yes, buddy, I’m still up.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In Queens. I was just going to bed.” He paused with that righteous arrest of time which is common to authority.

  “Who’d you get a call from?”

  “Higher up.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Rojack, don’t give me any more of that upper-class zazz. I know where you were born.”

  “You do? I don’t know where you were born.”

  “You son of a bitch,” said Roberts, “you’re loaded.”

  “Well, so are you,” I said. “You’re boozing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you never drank.”

  “Once a year,” said Roberts.

  “I’m honored to be your occasion.”

  “You upper-class finks,” said Roberts.

  “We’re very bad,” I said.

  “Listen, get out of the place you’re in,” said Roberts. “You’re not one hundred percent safe.”

  “I may not be safe, but I’m certainly not suffering.”

  “That girl you’re with.”

  “Yes.”

  “Know who she is?”

  “Poison. Pure poison.”

  “Better believe it, buddy.”

  “Roberts, it takes all kinds to make a world.”

  “Ever hear of Bugsy Siegel?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of Bugsy Siegel. How can you be a self-respecting drinker if you haven’t heard of Bugsy Siegel?”

  “Well, Rojack, the little girl you’re with now could have opened a school for Bugsy Siegel.”

  “Then, why,” I asked, “is she singing in an after-hours joint and making one hundred fifty a week?”

  “I can’t say more,” said Roberts.

  Now I was angry. “I thought you had to give your attention to Eddie Ganucci.”

  “Your case is taking some turns.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t tell us everything about your wife.”

  “Everything?”

  “Either you know what I’m talking about or you don’t.”

  “Obviously I don’t.”

  “Let it go.”

  “This new information—is it good or bad?”

  “Come to the precinct at five-thirty this afternoon.”

  “That’s all you care to tell me?”

  “I hear your father-in-law is flying into town this morning.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “On the radio.” Roberts laughed. It was his first joke of the morning. “I heard it on the radio. Now, Rojack, give me the bartender. I want to talk to him.”

  When I got back to the table, Tony was there. He looked worried. He had the look of a man who has conflicting worries and is worrying over which one to worry first. He gave me a limp hand to shake and a flick of his eye. Hatred came off him like scent, dull and powerful, an essence of that taint I felt in Cherry the moment I came near to passing out. Standing near Tony, the full face of that hatred brought me close again to nausea; there was menace and such little precision in the menace (as if one were expiring inside a plastic sack) that I felt a quick panic to quit them both, and held on where I was out of some instinct that the worst moment of suffocation must always be the first. To Cherry I said with a smile, “Can you believe it? The police think I ought to leave.”

  “Some police are intelligent people,” Tony said.

  “Still, they’re taking the best care of me. They were sufficiently worried to talk to your bartender after they spoke to me.”

  “We never have trouble in here,” Tony said. “Trouble comes in packages. Out on the street.” But he had another worried look on his face, as if he had five errands now and only three delivery boys.

  “It’s hard to trust anyone nowadays,” I said.

  “Friends,” he said.

  “Friends get tired.” This remark cost nothing.

  “All right, get up and do your set,” Tony said to Cherry.

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  “I’m not in the mood either. Don’t pull this on me.”

  She looked at my expression. “Do you have a funny story, Mr. Rojack?”

  “I have a poem,” I said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak.”

  “Is that the first line of your poem?” asked Cherry.

  “Yes. Want to hear the second?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the last line.”

  “Yes?”

  “Hula, hula, said the witches.”

  She pealed with mirth as if a silver witch and a black witch were beating their wings at one another. “Repeat it,” she said.

  “Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.”

  She made me say it again while she memorized it. At the expression on Tony’s face, she gave a creamy smile.

  “You going to sing a set?” he asked.

  “I’ll sing one song.”

  “What do you mean—one song?”

  “Mr. Rojack’s poem put me in the mood,” she said. “I’ll sing one song or I won’t sing anything.”

  “Go up,” he said.

  When she was on the stand, he turned and said to me, “She’ll do a whole set.”

  But Cherry was in consultation with the pianist. I could see him shake his head, and give the weak grin of a weak man. While they parleyed, his fingers were nervously tapping out a riff on the keys, What’s that hear my baby say? Funky-butt, funky-butt, take it away.

  Cherry smiled at the microphone. “Funky-butt, funky-butt, take it away,” she murmured, and seemed to catch some electronic thread in the microphone for her sound came out breathy and then the microphone squealed. She put her hand to it, smiled at the dozen customers still left in the bar. “Time for breakfast,” she said.

  A patter of applause.

  “I know we’re all afraid to go out and look at that sun.”

  “It’s raining,” the judge with the two tarts called out. A few pe
ople guffawed.

  “Yes, your Honory, but the sun is shining in court,” said Cherry, which brought a slow ripple. “Yes, we’re all scared of breakfast,” said Cherry, “but I’m going to sing one song. Then we all go home. Crash.”

  “She’s only kidding,” said Tony. His voice was carefully wrapped, but it had the suppressed clangor of a sewer cover being lifted from its hole and dropped to the asphalt. “She’s only kidding,” Tony repeated.

  “Yes,” said Cherry. “A round of applause?”

  She clapped her palm to give substance to the small bored skittering of palms which answered her. Then the pianist hit a few chords. Cherry was going to sing a hymn.

  Every day with Jesus, sang Cherry.

  Is sweeter than the day before.

  Every day with Jesus,

  I love him more and more.

  She stopped for her pause, looked at the audience and brought her hands together in devotion. She looked like she was ready to burst into a belly laugh.

  Jesus saves and keeps me.

  He’s the one I’m waiting for.

  Every day with Jesus

  Is sweeter than the day before.

  It was the best song she had sung all night, it had the most of her in it. A Southern Baptist congregation of small-town women came trooping into my mind, the light on the drinking glasses like the light off their eyeglasses, white lined faces with vertical wrinkles on the upper lip, passion scarred by righteousness, madness in the eye, that insane lust which whips over empty graves, devotion locked in arthritic joints.

  Every day with Jesus, I love him more and more, sang Cherry, running up and down the pianist’s chords with a body’s joy in her throat, balm to the nettles these ladies must have left in her, and yet there was art in the song for she did not hate them altogether, they were witches too, hateful little old witches now, but they had had love for somebody, for a nephew or a brother or a young uncle long dead, they had kept somebody’s old letters tied about with ribbon, or helped one pregnant girl; in the icelocks of their rheumatism flowed a nerve of Christian vein, romance to remind them of one soft lover dead and life in the breath of their loss. “Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before. Everybody sing,” said Cherry, and as if I were a middle-aged prep-school type come to reunion after all those years of waiting, I got to my feet and sang the lines with her, moving my highball glass in great sweeps of my arm like a beer stein used as a pendulum. Sweeter than the day before.

  We were alone. The humors of this intoxication flowed from her to me and then flowed back again, while the pianist came into it now and then like an animated movie mouse prancing in time at a wedding of two great cats. But that was next to all of it. A drunk who had just come in bellowed the last word of every line, and the judge’s tarts started to sing in tender little falsettos only to be decapitated by a look from the judge. Others were silent. Tony was livid. As Cherry came off the stand, she said, “Okay, that’s it.”

  “You’re not quitting,” Tony said, “you’re fired. You’re crazy.”

  “I have an American flag, Tony, and I’m going to send it to you for Christmas. As a tablecloth.”

  “Sing in the bathtub, baby, that’s where you’re singing now. I’m going to bum-rep you at every joint in town.”

  “I’m going to change my clothes,” Cherry said to me.

  “I’ll wait for you,” I said.

  Tony and I were now alone. We avoided each other’s eyes and stood there side by side in a contest: his presence against my presence, two sea creatures buried deep in the ocean silt of a grotto, exuding the repellent communications of sea creatures. Tony’s oppression was muddy, a stench of wet concrete. I could feel him burying me beneath it. So I called on Deborah. How many times talking to Deborah had my hand gone to my throat—doubtless she had been drawing an imaginary razor down one ear and up the other. Small wonder she believed in miracles. Now I in turn put my hand in my pocket to feel my pocketknife and took it on a small mental trip into my palm where figuratively I opened it, reached across, and made a slash into Tony’s neck deep across the apple. “That’s the way,” said Deborah in my ear, “at last you’re learning. Put some salt in the wound.”

  “Where do I find salt?” I asked of her.

  “From the tears of anyone this man has been able to oppress. There’s your salt. Rub it in.”

  So I called for some distillate of sorrow, and so powerful was the impression returned that my fingertips felt a grit of white crystal with which they could travel to Tony’s neck, and there some part of my mind must have rubbed it in.

  I could feel his discomfort. He shifted his feet. Then he spoke. “It’s hot in here.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Too bad about your wife.”

  “Dreadful,” I said.

  It did not put him off. “I used to know her,” he said.

  “For fact?”

  “I had another joint uptown. She used to drop in with friends.”

  Cherry had come out of a back room. She was carrying a suitcase and wearing a street dress and a cloth overcoat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said to me, and without a backward look at Tony went for the door. I started to follow her, but the center of my back told me Tony was going to loose a knife and loose it good. “Yes,” said Tony, “your wife, Mr. Rojack, was a real swinger.” “You know,” I said to Tony, “it’s a pity about your uncle’s disease.”

  “He takes it well,” said Tony.

  On that echo, I left with her.

  We had breakfast in a coffee shop, eating a little pinched meal of English muffins and tea, each of us silent for much of the time. Once, as I brought the cup to my lips, I noticed my hand was trembling. So did she.

  “You’ve had a night,” she said.

  “It isn’t the night,” I said, “it’s the morning ahead.”

  “You’re afraid of the next few hours?”

  “I’m always afraid,” I said.

  She didn’t laugh, she nodded. “I went to a shrink,” she said.

  “Any good reason?”

  “I was feeling suicidal.”

  “Beautiful women do.”

  “Spookier than that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think there’s a moment when it’s right to commit suicide?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Like it’s your last chance?”

  “Explain that to me.”

  “You ever live with the dead?” She said this with her practical American face.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t really know.”

  “Well, I lived with my mommy and daddy all the while I was growing up, and they were dead. They died when I was four years and five months old. They smashed up in an automobile. So I lived with an older brother and older sis.”

  “Were they nice?”

  “Shit, no,” said Cherry, “they were half crazy.”

  She lit a cigarette. The circles beneath her eyes looked back with fatigue, the green going to purple at the edges of her lids and fading out along her cheek to a bruise-colored yellow. “When you live with the dead you come to see,” she said, “that there is a particular day in a particular year when they’re ready to welcome you. You have to take that day. Because if you don’t, you can die on a day when nobody is waiting for you and you just wander. That’s why, when it comes, the impulse pulls so hard. I know. There was a day for me. I didn’t take it. I went running to a shrink.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe you have to take a chance on dying that particular day. But if you take the chance and get through it, maybe you’re not as close to suicide the next time. Maybe, whatever it is, can’t draw on you as hard.”

  “You’re an optimist.” She touched my hand. “Still feeling scared?” she asked.

  “Not as much.” But I was lying. The dread had settled in on my last brave speech. To be not afraid of death, to be ready to engage it—sometimes I thought I had more of a horror of dying than anyone I knew. I was so unfit fo
r that moment. “It’s going to be full moon for how many days?” I asked.

  “Three days more,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You say you’re afraid,” she said, “do you mean of women?”

  “There comes a moment when I don’t believe I belong in them.”

  “You don’t?”

  I was close to telling her something I had not told anyone else. “I wouldn’t want to make too much of it,” I said.

  I did not go on to say that when I was in bed with a woman, I rarely felt as if I were making life, but rather as if I were a pirate sharpening up a raid on life, and so somewhere inside myself—yes, there was a large part of the fear—I had dread of the judgment which must rest behind the womb of a woman. A small perspiration came out along my back.

  “How about a drink?” I asked. “You serving drinks?”

  “We can’t go to my place,” Cherry said. “Tony will telephone every fifteen minutes. Then he’ll send somebody around to knock on the door.”

  “Well, we can’t go to my place. There’ll be nothing but reporters, friends, business associates, and—family.” Barney Oswald Kelly was coming to town. Or at least he was coming to town if Roberts was telling the truth, and why should he not? The thought of my father-in-law, whom I had not seen eight times in my married life, but knew well enough to fear profoundly, was a subject so vast, however, I put it away from me altogether, the way one can separate one’s mind from a contemplation of the land mass of Asia. “Yes,” I said, “let’s stay far away from my apartment.”

  “I don’t want to go to a hotel,” she said.

  “No.”

  She sighed. “I have a place. It’s a special place.”

  “I’ll treat it with respect.”

  “It’s too soon to go there,” she said.

  “We have no choice, princess.”

  “Oh, Stephen,” said Cherry, “Hula, hula.”

  5 / A Catenary of Manners

  WE TOOK a cab to the Lower East Side and there on this cold misty March morning with a gray in the sky to equal the breath of those wet city streets, we climbed the five flights of a tenement, up past the sweet bruised rotting wood odors of a warehouse cellar for cheap wine, on up the stairs, the dirty light bulbs at each landing covered by a wire cage with threaders of dust as thick and intricate as moss. The garbage was out on the landings, the high peppery smell of Puerto Rican cooking, that odor of garlic, pig’s viscera and incompatible condiments, a teeming misery. At the top of each flight, the door to the latrine was open, moisture seeped off the floor. The stench of slum plumbing gave a terror of old age—how ill is illness, how vile the suggestion of villainous old bowels. Going up those stairs I was no more a lover than a soldier crossing enemy land. “Fail here at love,” said the odor, “and you get closer to subsisting like me.” Some mambos were playing, a child was screaming in mortal terror, she sounded like she was being whacked to death, and at every landing the doors opened a split and brown eyes looked forth, five feet high, three feet high, eyes a foot from the floor—one-year-olds who had not yet learned to stand.