An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  “What a pro you are.”

  “Better believe it.”

  “No, I’m impressed.”

  “I was just a dry leaf waiting to fall off the tree. But I had good luck. So I was able to get myself together. Then I began to break in with singing dates in Vegas—because of my previous associations I had cartel—and I had a couple of nice years. I only went with men I liked, and there were a few I spent some time with, a couple of Italians with class whom I just did manage to find. Hoods, but I liked them. Italians are all so treacherous I used to feel virtuous next to them.” Pause. “But then I knew it was time to get to New York.”

  “Why?”

  “Some day I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me now.”

  She pursed her mouth as though adding a bill. “I’d picked up power in Vegas I didn’t deserve. I didn’t know what to do with it. Nobody in the Mob knows how much anybody else knows. In fact nobody knows how much he knows himself. So considering the men I traveled with, other people I hardly knew were ready to do favors. They thought I was more important than I was, and that helped to make me just a bit important. It’s not exactly cool to brag on this, but I had the power to get people killed. It also occurred to me I could get killed myself, and this time I wouldn’t know what for or who. It didn’t put itself together. I may have been greedy, but I was full of scarcity—know what I mean? I grew up in a stingy town. When the food got too rich, I felt just like a skinny little Southern girl all over again.”

  She sighed. When she started out, she explained, she always felt as if she had a small angel accompanying her. All orphans did—that was part of the economy of nature. And for companion, the angel had a whore, because the two got along with each other. “I mean,” said Cherry, “the tart would have herself a fling and the angel would say, ‘That’s okay, honey, you’re entitled to a bit of fun after all that misery.’ ”

  But in Vegas, the angel became an asset, it kept drawing people in. “I’ve always been independent,” Cherry said, “or at least I like to think so. I believe there’s a side of me doesn’t want anything from anybody, and maybe that’s what those hoodlums liked. But then the other side of my character was swelling up like a frog—I was becoming as bad and evil as a colored madam. I was ready to make that angel hustle.” She looked wistful as she said this. “And then, too, I had to keep an eye on my killer. There was a crazy killer right inside.”

  “For certain?”

  “Honest-to-God killer.”

  “Maybe you borrowed him from your friends.”

  “I’ll never know,” she said. “The ugly fact, if I was to trace it out, is that one or two men in Vegas are probably dead because of me. They were at the other end of a string, but I was vindictive enough about them to have been the one who pulled the string. I started thinking of that small-town hatred I had always considered beneath me, that envy and spite, and it was now a part of me. I came to the conclusion I’d flip out so far I’d not come back if I stayed in Vegas too long. So I decided it was the year for New York.”

  “Did the angel bring you to Shago Martin?”

  “No,” she said, and then, “Yes,” she said. It was obvious we were thinking of her sister.

  “Well, look how nice you are now,” I said.

  “I’m a spirit now,” she said, and gave a tough sensuous grin full of her flesh.

  “I should have had you on my program.”

  “I could have set it straight. I would have told America some people got souls, and some are spirits.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “People with souls are the ones who make the world move,” she said in her Southern voice, the accent became as thin and precise as any little old Southern Baptist lady, “and if they fail, but honorably, why then, God, as a mercy, or as a compromise, may it be, takes their soul away and makes them a spirit. That’s a sad thing to be because you can’t live with other spirits—too sad. So you have to look for somebody with soul even if they’re mean and awful.”

  “Like Eddie Ganucci?”

  “He’s awful. He’s a sick old man who never had any class.”

  “But the ones who have class are afraid of him?”

  “Yes.” She nodded several times. “Maybe that’s another reason I left. It’s not good to be around men who stand up most of the time, but know there’s one thing they never stand up to.” She gave a radiant smile. “I was sure you were going to back off from Romeo last night.”

  “I was so far gone I didn’t care if he beat me to death.”

  “You were better than that.”

  “Did Shago teach you how to sing?” I asked.

  “He taught me a little bit. But I’m a lousy singer, I fear.” That ended conversation about Shago. She stretched her arms and yawned prettily. I was very relaxed. Somehow I had been prepared for something worse in her story. So the mood was settling in again. Soon we’d be ready to go back to bed.

  “Steve?” asked Cherry.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you kill your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You’re a cunning little cutie.”

  “No, baby, I knew you did it. Oh God.”

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “I saw a man once just after he came back from a killing. You looked like he did.”

  “How did he look?”

  “Like he’d been painted with a touch of magic.” Her face crumpled. “I was hoping I was wrong,” she said, “but I knew I wasn’t. Oh, I hope it’s not too late for us.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “I am a little myself.”

  “Do you have to be somewhere tonight?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Who is it you’re going to see?”

  “Deborah’s father.”

  “Barney Oswald Kelly?”

  “You know his name?”

  “I read the papers today.”

  But I could feel her receding from me. There had been something wrong with what she said.

  “You’ve heard of him before this?”

  A look came into her face. We had the longest pause. It went on so long I could hear a ringing in the air.

  “Stephen,” she said, “I used to know Kelly.”

  “You did?”

  “He was the man who took me to Vegas.”

  I had a repetition of that vision in Ruta’s bed, of that city in the desert with its lights burning in the dawn.

  “I don’t want to talk any more about it,” she said. And as if revelation had stripped her naked, the wheat-colored wrapper came slowly apart, it opened with a grave movement.

  “How the hell could you?” I broke out.

  “He’s an attractive man.”

  “He’s odious.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  And he wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t. It was different than that. I felt as if Kelly and I were running in the same blood. And that sensation of not belonging to myself, of being owned at my center by Deborah—that emotion which had come on me not five minutes before I killed her—now came back. I felt murder. It frightened me. The possibility that what I felt, when we made love, was a sensation which belonged to me alone, left me murderous. For how did one distinguish love from the art of the Devil?

  But then like a child, I said to myself, “The Devil has no wings.” Those roses which washed from the sea, that angel which went by the room … “Do you think we made a child this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no quiver in the air. If she were lying I was blind to the point of death, or she was a perfect invention of evil. Moments went by. A gentleness came back to me. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, mister,” she said, “it’s a boy or a girl.”

  But there were operations we must get through. I had a lover’s practical savagery. “Let’s go into all of it,” I said.

  “We did.”

 
“There’s more.”

  I saw her temper rising, a flash of that sun-tanned sensual pride with which she had sung her set last night. But something humble took her over. “All right,” she said.

  “You ever pregnant before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kelly?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to the child?”

  “I didn’t have it.”

  “Any other time?”

  She was silent.

  “Shago Martin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Afraid to have it?”

  “Shago was afraid to have it.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Three months.” She nodded. “Three months ago. And last week I broke up with him.”

  Once, in a rainstorm, I witnessed the creation of a rivulet. The water had come down, the stream had begun in a hollow of earth the size of a leaf. Then it filled and began to flow. The rivulet rolled down the hill between some stalks of grass and weed, it moved in spurts, down the fall of a ledge, down to a brook. It did not know it was not a river. That was how the tears went down Cherry’s face. They began in some tight knurled pit of grief, some bitter hollow, rose to her eyes, flowed down her face, dripped to her open breast, fell to her thigh, and collected in the grove—a teaspoon full of ten years’ sorrow. “You see,” she said, and now she began to weep, “I thought I could never have a child. The doctor Kelly sent me to hinted something was wrong, and I never tried to find out. I just never got pregnant all those years. And then with Shago I did. He turned on me. He said I was a white devil—after all the time we spent together.”

  “And you didn’t want to have it by yourself?”

  “I didn’t have the guts. You see, I had cheated on him.”

  “With Tony?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Habit, I guess.”

  “Habit, hell. Why with Tony? What does he have?”

  She shook her head. She seemed almost in pain “There’s something sweet in Tony, believe it.”

  “How can I?”

  “I was aching so. Shago can be evil.”

  That did it. She put her head on the table, and gave herself up to grief. I stroked her hair. It had been fine hair once, but hairdresser’s tint had roughened the silk. As she wept I heard an echo from the little silence of each pause she had made as she talked. “Lordy, Lordy,” she said at last, brought her head up and tried to smile. She had that look of naked relaxation which is shared by sex, grief, and the end of huge physical exertion. “Give me a cigarette,” she said.

  I lit it for her.

  “How about me?” I asked. I was not far from a child with my desire for an answer. “Do I manage to kiss the bruise? Is that what my sweet rep is?”

  “Don’t talk too much.”

  “I want to know.”

  “Something happened with you,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  She shook her head. “Why do you insist? It’s bad luck to go on. But you insist. So, listen, Stephen, you can have it, it happened with you. I had an orgasm with you. I was never able to before. Now, pick up on that.” But there was a delicate hint of gloom to her remark, as if it had happened with the wrong man at the wrong time.

  “What do you mean, never?” I asked—the need was to make her repeat it.

  “Never before. Every other way, yes. But never, Stephen, when a man was within me, when a man was right inside of me.”

  “All those years?”

  “Never.”

  “Christ almighty.”

  “I swear.”

  “Can I believe you?”

  “Yes, you can. Because I always had the feeling once it happened I would soon be dead. I know that’s special and doubtless very crazy of me, but that’s been my little fear.”

  “And now you don’t have it?”

  “I don’t know if I have it, or lost it, or what. All I know is I’m happy. Now, hush, stop trying to spoil it.”

  There was a sharp little rap on the door. The sentinels had not warned us after all. The rap beat out a tricky little rhythm, as weighted inside as a drummer’s tattoo on the rim of his snare. Cherry looked across the table at me with a face from which all expression was gone. “That’s Shago,” she said.

  A key turned in one of the tumblers, then the other. The door came open. An elegant Negro with a skin dark as midnight was standing there. He looked at the robe I was wearing.

  “All right,” he said to me, “get dressed. Get your white ass out of here.”

  7 / A Votive Is Prepared

  I HAD SEEN Shago Martin in the final reel of a movie about some jazz musicians, and his photograph on slip jackets for his records—a handsome face, thin and arrogant, a mask. I had even gone on caravan once with Deborah to the Latin Quarter or the Copacabana, a rare excursion for the lady since there was nothing she found more unsettling than a large nightclub, but Martin was singing that evening and Deborah and her friends had come to watch. “He’s the most attractive man in America,” she told me when he went on.

  “What do you mean, ‘most attractive’?” I asked. I was doing my best to be a young Harvard banker in from Boston for the night.

  “Shago,” Deborah said, “comes from one of the worst gangs in Harlem. I think you see it in his walk. There’s something about him independent, something very fine.”

  “He sounds loud enough to me.”

  “Well,” said Deborah, “he may be loud at times, but there are people who can hear what he is saying.”

  There were few matters in which Deborah was bloody; music was one of them—she did not know bugger from beans—I had decided long ago that Shago was the most talented singer in America. Whereas Deborah and her friends had come to him lately. They had always repected him, too many experts said he was good, but they had never respected him thus famously; now the roulette of fashion came up double-zero: Shago was in. They were enchanted that he was oblivious to fashion; or at least oblivious to the shift in taste which made him fashionable this season in New York. He was singing only at the Copa and Latin Quarter these days—any other season this would have disqualified him forever—but now since it proved impossible to invite or attract him to the parties which made up the inner schedule of the season each week, everyone’s desire for such an evening took on the proportions of a frontier war. Deborah and I were present that night because Deborah had stalked him (by telephone) into the promise to give an interview after his eleven o’clock set: she was going to hog him to a contract to sing at a charity ball coming up in four weeks and three days. But Shago was not in his dressing room when the set was over; he had left a note with his valet: Sorry, lady, but I can’t go that milk and charity shoot. “Oh, dear,” said Deborah, “the poor man must be trying to spell shit.” She was, however, livid. The world was now more defined. In return for this raid on good feelings, Deborah got Shago good. I never knew how many phone calls it took, nor how many looks were dropped on how many marble floors: “Do you really like the man?” but in four weeks and three days, by the night of the charity ball, no hostess I knew was keening for Shago. That was that. There was a base to Deborah’s humor which smelled of old brass.

  I used thereafter to keep his records, and I would play them. Actually, I did not enjoy him altogether. His talent was too extreme. He was not often evocative of the smell of smoke in a fog or the mood which is near a young girl when she comes into a room, he did not suggest that the nicest affair of the year was about to start, he did not make me think, as other singers often did, of landscapes in Jamaica, of mangoes, honey, and a breast beneath a moon, of tropical love and candy which went from dark to dawn, no, Shago gave you that, he gave you some of that, but there were snakes in his tropical garden, and a wild pig was off in the wilderness with a rip in its flank from the teeth of a puma, he gave you a world of odd wild cries, and imprisoned it to something complex in his style, some irony, some sense of control, some sense of the way everything
is brought back at last under control. And he had a beat which went right through your ear into your body, it was cruel, it was perfect, it gave promise of teaching a paralytic to walk: he was always announced at places like the Copa as “The Big Beat in Show Biz,” and the worst was that some publicity man was right for once, his voice had a bounce as hard as a hard rubber ball off a stone floor, listening to him was cousin to the afternoon one played a match with a champion at squash—the ball went by with the nicest economy, picking up speed as it went, taking off as it blew by; so Shago Martin’s beat was always harder, faster, or a hesitation slower than the reflex of your ear, but you were glowing when he was done, the ear felt good, you had been dominated by a champion.

  The only difficulty was that his talent persisted in shifting. Deborah began to dance with spiritual delight at some of his later records. “You know, I despise that man,” she would say, “but his music is improving.” She was right. His voice had developed to the point where you could not always distinguish it from a trumpet or even on virtuoso occasions from a saxophone. Once off on a ride, his song seemed able to take a step between each step of the rapid elegant dance a jazzman’s fingers could pick across the keys. But of course he had become too special—no average nightclub audience could follow him. He was harsh. Some of his most experimental work sounded at first like a clash of hysterias. It was only later that one discovered his power of choice—he was like a mind racing between separate madnesses, like a car picking its route through the collision of other cars. It was harsh. The last I heard he was even singing at times in the kind of cabaret which closes on the fatal Thursday night when there is not enough in the cash register to pay the police their weekly protection. That was what delighted Deborah. That was what she heard finally in his music: he was no longer in danger of developing into a national figure.