An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  “Let’s hear your question.”

  “Rojack, are you CIA?”

  “I can’t tell you something like that.”

  “All right, take this for nothing. Maybe you know it already. We had Eddie Ganucci on a technicality. We weren’t sure we could hold him more than a couple of hours in any case. But there was a very funny pressure to let him go. And my feeling is it came from the same place yours did.”

  “Do you know for certain?”

  “I don’t. Pressure never has a name on it.”

  “You’re not stupid, are you, Roberts?”

  “I was a good FBI man once upon a time.” He rapped me on the back. “Keep your end up.”

  It had turned cold outside. I passed a bar and then another bar. I had no idea whether to celebrate or run for cover. At a corner telephone booth I stopped and made a call to my answer service. They had reached Mr. Kelly’s secretary and now had a message: Mr. Kelly would see me at midnight.

  “Call back, Gloria, and tell them I’ll try to be there,” I said.

  “I don’t know if we’re supposed to give this service as a regular thing, Mr. Rojack.”

  “Gloria, just for today,” I asked.

  In the cab, on the way downtown, it all came over me, wave after wave, dangerous waves as though pilings were riding through the water, and smashing the shore. The wind was up. Each time I closed the cab window the air from the heater was foul, a bad exhaust had seeped in. But with the glass rolled down, I could hear the wind too well, and it had the long ripping sound of a voracious wind at sea which tears off the water and snatches at the roots of the grass. There was some break in the heavens tonight: a siren was blowing, an attention was present, I could all but sniff the sour rot of clotting blood in the pits of this wind. And I lay back on my seat and felt something close to nausea because mystery revolved about me now, and I did not know if it was hard precise mystery with a detailed solution, or a mystery fathered by the collision of larger mysteries, something so hopeless to determine as the edge of a cloud, or could it be, was it a mystery even worse, something between the two, some hopeless no-man’s-land from which nothing could return but exhaustion? And I had a sudden hatred of mystery, a moment when I wanted to be in a cell, my life burned down to the bare lines of a legal defense. I did not want to see Barney Oswald Kelly later tonight, and yet I knew I must for that was part of the contract I had made on the morning air. I would not be permitted to flee the mystery. I was close to prayer then, I was very close, for what was prayer but a beseechment not to pursue the mystery, “God,” I wanted to pray, “let me love that girl, and become a father, and try to be a good man, and do some decent work. Yes, God,” I was close to begging, “do not make me go back and back again to the charnel house of the moon.” But like a soldier on six-hour leave to a canteen, I knew I would have to return. I had not escaped a whiff of the trenches, I could hear Deborah in rut, burning rubber and a wild boar, some voice almost slipped into me on the wind, that high wind—from whose summit did it derive?—and then the cab pulled up at Cherry’s street, and with a beating heart, I walked up all those sordid defeat-infested stairs, and knocked on her door, and knew in the instant I heard no sound of stirring that stronger than my fear was the other fear she might not be there. Then I heard her move, the door opened, we embraced.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, “Something is bad tonight.”

  We embraced again, and I led her to the bed. We sat down beside each other and touched fingertips. That made me feel good for the first time since I went out the door this afternoon. Relief came over me like a winner’s victorious sleep.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked.

  “In a while.”

  “I love you,” Cherry said.

  “Yes. I love you.”

  She had rested. The exhaustion was out of her face and she looked like a seventeen year old.

  “Were you ever a cheer leader?” I asked.

  “I think I was kind of funny-looking in high school.”

  “Even by your senior year?”

  “No, I was getting there then. The captain of the football team spent a whole year trying to take my dear name away from me.”

  “But you managed to keep it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Suddenly we laughed at each other. “How come no one ever ate you alive?” I said.

  “Oh, they tried, mister, they sure did try.” And she gave me a kiss like the kiss last night in the bar, but the iron was out of it, some of the iron, and I smelled the honeysuckle which had lived on the air one hot June night long ago in the back seat of a car. “Let’s go,” I said, “let’s go back to this morning.”

  We did. Somewhere in the middle, born out of fatigue and tension and the exhaustion of every lie I had told today, like a gift I did not deserve, that new life began again in me, sweet and perilous and so hard to follow, and I went up with it and leaped and flew over, vaulting down the fall to those washed-out roses washed by the tears of the sea, they washed out to me as my life went in, and I met one cornucopia of flesh and sorrow, scalding sorrow, those wings were in the room, clear and delicate as a noble intent, that sweet presence spoke of the meaning of love for those who had betrayed it, yes I understood the meaning and said, for I knew it now, “I think we have to be good,” by which I meant we would have to be brave.

  “I know,” she said. Then we were silent for a while. “I know,” she said again.

  “You sure?” I asked. I put my foot onto hers, “you really sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Don’t you know what Broadway says?”

  “What does Broadway say?”

  “Why, ‘Shit, señorita,’ says Broadway.”

  “Oh, Lordy. Oh, Lordy! You’re such fucking sugar,” she said, and bent over and kissed my toe.

  6 / A Vision in the Desert

  I LAY THERE, content to touch the tip of a finger to the tip of a breast, and had that knowledge which falls like rain, for now I understood that love was not a gift but a vow. Only the brave could live with it for more than a little while. So then I thought of Deborah and those nights years ago when I lay beside her with a love somewhat different, but I had had a hint of this before, had it with Deborah, had it with others, girls I had known for a night and never knew again—the trains were going in opposite directions. Sometimes with women I had seen for many a month I might have found it on one particular night at the bottom of a barrel of booze. It had always been the same, love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it, dear friend.

  Well, I went back to that embrace with Cherry. We were done, and yet we were not done, for we had a moment when we touched and met the way a bird might light on an evening sea, and we floated off with the tide, deep in each other as the long wash of memory late at night. I could not keep from holding her—had flesh ever promised to forgive me so? I put my hand on her waist: some offer rose from her breast and took my hand. I sat up in bed, bent forward to touch her foot. It was there for me to examine now, those toes I disliked so much, the short broad shape of the instep, the calluses, the sole. Her foot gave promise of traveling in its own direction, and yet I embraced it, I gripped her foot as if to say, “You’re coming with me.” That foot had a mind to hear my thought, it warmed my hand like a small dog with a stout heart. Then I looked up from those toes, across all the shades of her body up to the subtle hints of lavender and silver in the shadows of her face and smiled happily and said, “Do you think we’re allowed a drink?”

  She brought out the bottle, and we drank slowly, I do not suppose I had taken my liquor sip by sip since I could remember. It seemed enough to drop some ice into a tumbler, pour a quarter-inch of alcohol down a cube and watch the current as the whiskey gave up its gold to the water. Indeed, the objects in the room—the worn-out movie director’s chair, the brass handle at the top of the faucet on the kitchen sink, the
chewed tassels of the lampshade—seemed to stand about us like sentinels possessing some primitive property of radio, as if they would be the first to inform us of a visitor on the stair. I was telling her about my television show—it was now somehow a part of what we talked about when we met on the street, and so I went on about it, but in fact it was agreeable to hold off the moment when we came to talk about ourselves; therefore it was almost agreeable to think about the show. We had begun by being an avant-garde circus: interviews with bearded studs who had been smoking marijuana for twenty-two years, confessions by ex-criminals about homosexuality in the prisons, a lecture by myself on “Picasso and His Pistol” (a homemade study of Picasso as Master of Ceremonies to the cannibalistic urge of modern Europe—the most difficult lecture in the history of television), a chat with a call girl, with the leader of a motorcycle gang, with the leader of a gang in Harlem, with a housewife who lost one hundred and eighty pounds in a year, with an unfrocked priest, with a failed suicide (a girl, three scars on the wrist). I had had an idea in the beginning, I assured her, I wanted to clear a path through psychoanalysis and social welfare.

  “You’re just bright,” she said. And took a nip of skin from my ear in a bite so neat and small a toothpick could have pricked me. “Remember,” she said, putting a pearl of saliva on my ear for balm, “that review Mac N. Ryan wrote: ‘This is a carnival of bad taste which violates the canons of dignity television has achieved.’ ” She laughed at the sounds. “You know I went out on a date with Mac N. Ryan once.”

  “He violate any canons?”

  “Oh, he hated to leave me unloved, but did I have a disease? So I said to him, ‘Well, you know, honey, syphilis is on the up and up.’ That did his little thing in. I had to put him in a cab.”

  I laughed. Something dull in the bruise was gone. Poor Mac N. Ryan. With his honorable exception, the television critics had ignored the show. We were always losing sponsors and finding worse ones, the FCC was daily on the phone, the producer (you have met him) was on tranquilizers, and I was just not good enough. The guests became professional men, officials, professors, purveyors, we discussed books and current events—we dwindled into popularity.

  I told her a little of all that, and made some attempt to sketch the past (truly, I wanted her to know a little about me) I told her about my academic career, I was proud of that for once done with politics, I had gone to graduate school in the Midwest and in five years had picked up a doctorate, an assistant professorship, an associate professorship. And two years later, back in New York, I had made full professor (the Clark Reed Powell Lecture). It came out of course in no formal way, story here, anecdote there, our mood drifted with the indolence of boats on a harbor swell, lifting down the spine of each small wave.

  “Let’s eat,” she said at last, and got out of bed to cook us two small steaks, a bit of spaghetti, scrambled eggs. We ate—I fell on the food, I had lost all sense of how hungry I was—and when we were done, over the coffee and the new cigarettes, it seemed her turn to speak. Sitting at the table, her wheat-colored wrapper gathered about her (while I was offered a robe which must once have belonged to Shago Martin), I listened to Cherry talk about herself. She had been raised by her half-brother and half-sister. I remembered that. Her half-brother was eighteen the year her parents were killed in the automobile accident, her big sister was sixteen, she was four, her little sister was a year. Her older brother was admired by the neighbors because he worked at two jobs. He worked hard, he kept the family together.

  “There was just one tiny flaw,” said Cherry. “Brother was sticking it into sister every night.” She shook her head. “I used to hear my mother and father talking to me on the way from school. ‘Tell big brother to stop his silliness,’ they would say. And when I got to be eight and ten, I came to know that people in town were on to what was going on. But it didn’t seem to hurt our hard-ass little respectability. I used to play in the other girls’ backyards and once in a while they’d come to mine. And my brother was on the way to being a reasonable success in town. It wasn’t that he liked little sis and me. He sort of disliked us. But he knew what it could do to impress a town with six hundred churchgoers if he accepted his burden at eighteen. I mean he thought that way. Even before he was eighteen, he had big jaws, and a cigar stuck in them.”

  “What does he do now?”

  “Sheriff. Last I heard he was running for State Legislature. I was tempted to send him a photograph of Shago and me.” She looked away for a moment as if Shago had become real to her again. “Well,” Cherry said, “anyway, we pretended we had kept our family secret, and were as nice as anybody—I mean we all came from good Southern families, all six hundred of us. In a town that size, all you need to be good family is to have a rich great-uncle you’ve never seen and be rich enough yourself to bring the outhouse into the house, but”—she took a sip of her coffee—“big brother went off and got married, and that left big sis to take care. And she went potty. She used to be out each night with a different man—she was doing it for quarters and dimes—which left little sis and me disreputable. They still admired my brother—I guess all that incest taught him how to move politically—but my sisters and me were to be ostracized. I used to go to school by myself, come home by myself. Finally we had to leave town with big sis.” They went to live in Georgia, they went to live in northern Florida, the older sister got married, Cherry went through high school living in the home of a brother-in-law who was made progressively more nervous by her presence. Finally she had to leave her sister. She finished high school sleeping in a rooming house, working as a waitress. “And of course,” said Cherry, “I hung around the juke spots and cheap-hole nightclubs cause I had a bouncy little back-country voice and wanted to be a singer. That was the year I was so nice on that football star, but he decided to go away to college. I didn’t answer his letter. I used to feel about the way you feel in a dream once you start to wake up. I guess incest brings back the dead.” She said this with such a finality of tone, such a dry old lady certain of her tonics and recipes, that I had no notion if it were her own idea, or a piece of folklore the village idiot could talk over with the town’s first banker.

  “Well, next I had a short stretch of young girl’s bliss—a Navy flier. We were going to get married. Only it turned out he was married already. Crash. Then I met Daddy Warbucks,” she said, and stopped. “Sure I should go on?”

  “Yes.” I wanted to know more.

  “Well, I lived with a rich man for a time. A rich older man. That’s the quick of it. He picked me out in a nightclub—he was a businessman passing through—and, well, there was something between us,” said Cherry. “He took me to the next town.”

  “Yes.”

  “I stayed for several years. He was considerably older than me, but …”

  “But what?”

  “It was kind of carnal, beloved.”

  We had a profit to spend. It was what we had gained from that last hour—so she would tell me the truth. If finally I could not bear to hear it, then, said her face, we had not deserved the profit.

  “Yes,” I said. “Carnal.”

  “The trouble is,” said Cherry, “I hardly saw him. He would install me in some pleasant apartment in some city or other, and then I might not see him for a week. I would get the impression he had been across the country back and forth three times.”

  “Didn’t you mind being alone?”

  “No, I’d find the best singing coach around. And I did a lot of reading. I’d just wait for Daddy Warbucks to come back. It was a delight to talk to him. So long as I thought he was just a rich intelligent man with a family somewhere, it was all right. But one day I saw his picture in a news magazine, and realized he had not even told me his real name. I was ready to leave him then. But he convinced me to come with him to Vegas. He said if I were willing to live there, we could be together in public. So then I dug. Because in Vegas I naturally came to meet a few of his friends, and—click—they were the big dogs of the Mafi
a.”

  “He was in the Mob?”

  “He was wealthy. A very respectable man. He liked to gamble. Sometimes I would believe we were in town just for that. Sometimes I would come to the conclusion he might own some of Las Vegas. Because now when he would leave me for a week or often enough a month—my telephone didn’t ring unless the call was from him. And that did not figure if he was simply a rich man who’d left his young lady behind. So I had to think I was either too unattractive to draw anybody near me, or Daddy was some special big dog. But very special. He was obviously not the type to be in the Mob, not in any way directly. You want some more coffee?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I guess I am too.” She had been stopping at odd times in her account. There had been several pauses when she told me about her brother, and now there was one again.

  “Of course, there’s always been an argument,” Cherry went on, “about ‘The Big Guy.’ Does he exist or doesn’t he? You could have two big-time hoods discussing this, brother peas in the pod right down to the same number of carats in the diamond on their tiepin, but one would say, ‘The Big Guy don’t exist, forget it,’ while the other would just about cross himself.”

  “What did you decide?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I used to think Daddy Warbucks could be The Big Guy, nothing less. Then I would decide that was too farfetched.”

  “What would you say today?”

  “I think he wasn’t Mob at all. But the Mob did very special jobs for him. Very large intricate jobs. Some of it was overseas. I had that impression.”

  Another of her pauses came here. “And then,” she said finally, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know too much. Because there came a time when I wanted to get free of this man, and I didn’t know how to do it. He wasn’t the kind who would threaten or any of that discord, but I knew I’d get mangled on the way out, and the question was how badly.” She came to a full stop. “Well, we parted as friends. We had a quiet little talk, and he passed me on to an acquaintance—with my consent. I figured this was the way to pay my dues. So I got the friend—the king of narcotics in L.A. I found out two days later. The friend had secret inclinations which could blast you to the moon. And he did threaten to kill me when I told him it wouldn’t go. I got my guts together for that one. I finally stood up to somebody, even to even. ‘Better not,’ I told the gentleman, ‘or I’ll make it a point to haunt you.’ These Mafiosos are superstitious as a witch. I had said the right thing. Only I didn’t know it then. I couldn’t sleep for the next two months waiting for the door to open. But at least I had the sense to stay where I was in town. One of the smartest men I knew once said, ‘Flee from a knife, but charge a gun,’ and this narcotics gent was strictly a pistol. If I’d tried to run to another city, I’d have gotten it in the back—which is a poor position from which to go out, for it makes the haunting less impressive.”