Americana

by Don DeLillo

  We went to my car and drove to the amusement park at Rye. There, in tuxedo and evening dress, we rode the dragon coaster four times and then returned to the country club. We danced for a while. I experienced a pleasant sense of self-awareness on behalf of both of us. We were being examined by the older couples, our parents’ generation, and it was clear from their glances and the tone of their whispered remarks that we were regarded as something special. Later we met each other’s parents and then her parents met my parents in one of those slapstick ballets of mistimed lunges, delayed handshakes and profound eye-averting silences. My mother ended the last of these silences by telling us about the dances she had attended in Virginia as a very young lady. We all smiled and looked over her shoulder, trying to spot the Rappahannock. I ladled out two glasses of punch and took Merry back out on the veranda. She told me about some of the places in which she had lived and about the unreal nature of life on a military base; it was life without a future tense, she said, and there was always the feeling that you would wake up one morning and find that everyone had left except the women and children. She was happy that her father was now assigned to a college and she hoped they would be able to stay in Old Holly for a few years at least. I was getting bored. In the past, she said, the closer they lived to military base the more difficult it had been for her mother to stop drinking. But things were better now and Merry was fond of Westchester. She said it had substance.

  I went back to school in southern California. After Christmas, Merry went to London for an extended visit. She stayed with a cousin, Edwina, and her husband, Charles, who was English. She loved London rain or shine; she loved the parks, the theater, the pubs, the policemen’s hats. Her letters were brisk and full of detail—names, numbers and historical dates. Americans cannot keep track of the centuries. Those were the days when I used to wonder who the Pre-Raphaelites were, when did Galileo live, was it Keats or Shelley who drowned. Meredith’s letters gave me a bearing on the English scene at least and I used to study them diligently, memorizing all the kings and their dates, all the hilarious battles, as if her next letter might include a tricky little quiz. Such study was one of the duties of earnest young love; besides, in an odd statistical way her letters were charming, not very different from the epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. My own letters were long, poetic and unpunctuated, well stocked with sexual imagery. I felt that the six-thousand-mile distance between us permitted me some license. I enjoyed printing the words AIR MAIL in bold block letters with my Venus 4B drawing pencil.

  The campus was at the edge of the desert. There was an artificial lake where I went swimming almost every evening, often in the company of Wendy Judd. In the morning I did push-ups before going to class. There weren’t many classes. Leighton Gage was a small, expensive and very modern liberal arts college. (We had theology of despair in a palm grove.) In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry. I thought about Meredith a lot, her flawless nose and perfect teeth. Using fellow students as actors, I made a thirty-minute film for my junior thesis. It was about a man who goes into the desert and buries himself in the sand up to his neck. A bunch of Mexicans come along and sit in a circle around his head. My film instructor, Simmons St. Jean, said it was the most pretentious movie he had ever seen, but that pretentiousness wasn’t necessarily bad.

  My mother died in April and that summer Merry and I were married in the Episcopal church in Old Holly. I tried to stop smoking. We went back to Leighton Gage together for my senior year. I wanted only to relax, to learn to read the mind and body of my mate, to keep away from Wendy Judd, who continued to hunger after my shadow, my image, the thrust and danger of my car. I wanted to free myself from that montage of speed, guns, torture, rape, orgy and consumer packaging which constitutes the vision of sex in America.

  Merry’s tight little body unclenched and I swam in and out with joy. Nights in the Sugar Bowl. Faint pale petal-scent of the Pasadena Rose Parade. We spent plenty of time together. During senior year at Leighton Gage it was necessary only to pay the tuition and register. You went to a few classes every week, if you wanted to, and the rest of the time was devoted to researching your major interest. Merry and I explored the desert and I did a lot of filming. I was using a Beaulieu 8mm camera then, the S2008 to be exact, with non-detachable pistol grip, automatic exposure control, an Angenieux zoom lens—all in all, a clever piece of optical mechanics that had set my father back almost seven hundred dollars. The possibilities of film seemed unlimited. Through the camera lens passed the light of a woman’s body. I felt I could do things never done before. A hawk glanced off the sun and I plucked it out of space and placed it in the new era, free of history and death. I made a forty-five-minute film about underwear. The college gave all student filmmakers in senior year the use of its sound equipment and this was my first talkie. Merry was in the film. She and five of my friends, male and female, sat around my room in their underwear and talked about the different kinds of underwear they had worn since childhood. Simmons St. Jean said it was refreshing but stupid.

  After I graduated we returned to Old Holly and moved in temporarily with my father. It occurred to me that I had fifty more years to live on the earth and not the slightest idea how I would spend them. My father took care of that. After a one-week period of grace, during which I was supposed to be resting up from my four study-crammed years at college, he began telephoning business associates. My father was an account supervisor in a large advertising agency. He was directly responsible for twenty-two million dollars in billings. It took him only till Wednesday. He came home and gave me a choice of three jobs, two in advertising agencies, where I would start either in the training program or as a sort of micro-assistant in the broadcasting department, and one at the network, where I would have to start in the mailroom. I took the network. I felt it was important to avoid following too closely in his footsteps. Merry agreed. Independence is everything, she said, especially when you’re just starting out in life.

  Merry and I took the large apartment on Gramercy Park. My job paid very little and I had to borrow from my father. But I began to come along, getting out of the mailroom in only four months, which they told me was close to the record. We had a good time in New York that first year. We made quite a few friends and we were a popular couple. Merry got a secretarial job and we left for work together in the morning and then met in the lobby of her building every evening so that we could go home together. We told each other everything that had happened to us during the day, although there wasn’t much to tell. On Sunday afternoons some friends would come over and we would stir up a huge creamy bowl of the drink-dessert we had concocted, the Spontaneous Abortion—gin, vodka, scotch, rye, brandy and a half gallon of cherry vanilla ice cream. Merry clipped recipes from the ladies’ magazines and we would cook together in the evening; when we ended up with something charred and inedible, which was fairly often, we would go laughing around the corner for a hamburger and chocolate shake. In some deep shaft in my being a black machine began to tick. Merry bought some striking clothes with the help of an allowance her father gave her. She had the right figure for the kind of condensed clothing everybody was wearing then. We were always very conscious of what we wore and there were no rules to worry about. One way or another, everything we wore looked great. We saw all the new movies and went to a lot of parties. We seemed to believe that everything we did was the most wonderful thing that had ever been done. We wore certain clothes to certain movies. Grays for black and white. Boots, leather, chino, flag shirts and the like (our pre-acid gear) for Technicolor. Dressing, we matched each unmatching item with great care and spent several minutes assuring each other that we were ready for the waiting line at Cinema I. Each movie we saw was the greatest. Merry would talk about it constantly for two days and then forget it forever. There was no time for remembering things because something else was always coming along—another great movie, a great new pub or restaurant, a great new men’s shop, boutique, ski area, beach house or rock group. I took
an army physical and edged out a narrow escape thanks to my trick knee and a chronic cyst at the base of my spine. The action was really just beginning then and they were fairly selective about the young men they tapped for immortality.

  Soon I was no longer content merely to make love to my wife. I had to seduce her first. These seductions often took their inspiration from cinema. I liked to get rough with her. I liked to be silent for long periods. The movies were giving difficult meanings to some of the private moments of my life.

  Meredith was strongly influenced by British films of the period. She cultivated a sort of corporate unpredictability. Walking with me on the street she would suddenly release her hand from mine and skip away into some fantasy sequence. When we shopped together she stole things, one or two small useless items, hiding them in her sweater and making jokes about looking pregnant. At the Metropolitan Museum she told a guard I had tried to molest her in the Egyptian Tomb; this was the first of many such quaint harassments of people in minor positions of authority. Once we saw an old lady in Central Park selling flowers. Merry asked me to buy two dozen mums and then led me to the small bridge at the southeast end of the park. We stood on the bridge and dropped the flowers in the lake, one by one, as the ducks circled in the violet haze. It was all there but the soundtrack and I could imagine a series of cuts and slow dissolves working in Merry’s mind.

  At work I dressed in the establishment manner, which, granted, was not without a touch of color, the establishment having learned that every color is essentially gray as long as everyone is wearing it. So I did not hesitate to show up for work in an orange tie, but never more orange than the orange others wore.

  Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special elements of that tongue.

  In a curious way I liked my job—in the beginning, at least. It made me think and see as I had never done before. In those early days I visualized my mind as a dark room with many doors. I functioned best with several doors open. Sometimes I opened more doors, let in more light, risked the truth. If anyone seemed to perceive a distant threat in my remarks or actions, I closed all the doors but one. That was the safest position. But usually I kept three or four doors open. The image of this room was often with me. When I spoke at a meeting I could see the doors opening and closing in my mind and soon I arrived at the point where I could regulate the ebb and flow of light with absolute precision. I got a raise and then another. I became involved in the actual production of shows. Meanwhile, life with Merry went on the same way, a blend of jump-cuts and soft-focus tenderness. But something else edged in, a whisper of desperation. I’d come home late and find her sitting on the floor wearing a sombrero and trying to write a haiku. It pained me to learn that she did these things even when she was alone. She bought many funny hats during this period and wore them everywhere—sombreros, jockey caps, straw boaters, a wool seaman’s hat, a wide-brimmed mata-hari, a fez, a baseball cap. The black machine ticked.

  “Let’s do something mad tonight,” Merry would say.

  But there was nothing left to do. We tried to rediscover the spontaneous joy of that roller coaster ride. We even went back there once, a pair of veterans returning to the Normandy beaches, but it rained that night and we sat in the car in the parking lot and watched the high white lights go out. Feeling it was a time for final gestures, for the ultimate convolution, I made clumsy love to her in the front seat. The motor was running, wipers working, radio caught in a buzz between stations, and we bumped through all these sounds as through an interstellar pocket in deepest space.

  The first girl was Jennifer Fine. I realize there is nothing more dull than another man’s chronicle of infidelity and in many ways that first affair of mine was a dullard’s dream; it differed from most only because I was not a commuter and did not have to adapt my orgasms to the disciplines of a train schedule. Yet a few words must be said here about Jennifer Fine if only to show what happens to people like myself when they are given something like love and asked for nothing in return but a recognition of the other’s need for some elemental form of gentleness. She was a dark girl with large brown eyes. She worked in the research department of the network. We had met there when I was a mailboy, and she had seemed lonely and interesting. Once I realized that Merry and I could not remember our lines, I looked up Jennifer’s extension in the network directory. She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliché.

  We met for a drink in one of those oxblood pubs on the East Side where the laughter and tinkling chatter seemed canned, subject to volume control. I established a format by showing up five minutes late, knowing that Jennifer would arrive precisely on time; that was the kind of girl she was. We ordered drinks and talked cheerfully for a few minutes, mostly about network people we both hated. Then we lapsed into a massive silence as if suddenly realizing that all possible communication between us had been exhausted in ten routine sentences. I knew I was going to like Jennifer. I liked the way she held to her silence. In that movie-set atmosphere she seemed a librarian-mystic. Her face was thin and not quite pretty (but at the same time almost beautiful) and it was partly concealed by her long hair; purposely, I thought, as if the face sought refuge from time to time. Her hands could not keep still and there was evidence of fingernail-biting. She looked into the empty ashtray. I put my hand beneath her chin and raised her head, soft eyes shifting, two spoonfuls of tea. It wasn’t long before I was discussing how important it was to take certain precautions. I was a married man, after all, and we might easily be seen by someone from the office. I outlined a series of procedural measures covering lunch, drinks, dinner, inter-office phone calls, office parties and so forth. I did this not because I really cared whether someone might find out but because intensity and suspense are fundamental to the maintenance of a successful affair.

  The following evening, once more arriving separately, we met for dinner in an Indian restaurant on West Forty-ninth Street. A spectacular woman wearing a sari took our order. Jennifer and I had a long talk. She was afraid of everything—subways, strangers, high buildings, the number nine, plastic, smoke, airplanes, snow, pigeons, insects, parties, cabdrivers, elevators, suburbs, Bergman films, Spanish cuisine, men in Gucci loafers. After dinner we walked through Central Park, emerging in the West Eighties, and headed toward her building, a summer evening, bald men sitting on orange crates with handkerchiefs on their heads. Two squad cars and an ambulance were parked halfway down the block. It was still light. Children played and a dog moved across the shadow of an old man’s cane. We came to her building and went upstairs, saying nothing, both feeling the tension generated by the sound of our footsteps on the dark staircase. It was a small neat apartment. The bathroom smelled of lemon and mint. When I came out she fled to the kitchen alcove to make drinks. I sat on the sofa bed and we talked across the room, balancing the celebrated dangers of the West Side against its lower rents. So this is the extramarital life, I thought.

  “I’m making you a gin and tonic. It’s too late to protest.�
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  “Nice apartment,” I said.

  “Do you think it’s too conventional?”

  “It’s so conventional it transcends convention. It’s like a premature artform. A room in a museum a hundred years from now. The American Wing.”

  “I really should get an air conditioner.”

  “They’re expensive, aren’t they? We had to pay a small fortune for ours.”

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Mind if I take off my jacket?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “There, that’s better. Maybe I can open that window a bit more.”

  “It’s stuck. It’s been stuck ever since I moved in.”

  “How long have you been living here, Jennifer?”

  “It’ll be two years in October.”

  “Is this a rent-controlled building?”

  “David, before you make love to me, promise you’ll call me again.”

  Girls like Jennifer carry with them through their lifetimes an empty cup into which a man must pour his willingness to be responsible. They ask only that, to be taken seriously. I left her apartment at two in the morning and returned three evenings later. After several months I began to realize how much I meant to her. Of course, like all filmgoers and dabblers in adultery, all students of the cliché, we had discussed the importance of keeping our relationship at a low emotional level. But all this time I had been trying, almost desperately, to make her fall in love with me. Once I was sure she had, I began my retreat. I saw her less often and when we were together I was moody and evasive. Jennifer knew what was happening and it hurt her deeply; she was not just another of those neurotic rag dolls, so indigenous to New York, who fed on rejection as if it were a nipple. In bed I was treacherous, playing private games, teasing along the edge of fetish and violence. One night, the next to last, I swung off her, got out of bed, turned on the radio, reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one quickly—all the things, it seemed, I had been looking forward to while we were making love. Then I put on my tapered shorts and sat in an armchair.