Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “I’d love to see them,” Binky said. “Well, I’ve got a lunch date with Jody Moore and she hates to be kept waiting.”

  She left, putting on her coat as she walked out, and Weede moved clear of the doorway as she made her exit. One touch, he seemed to fear, would reduce them both to a state of nervous collapse. I tried to close the doors. They would not close. He walked up to the desk, put both hands flat on the far edge and leaned toward me.

  “I want to ask you something,” he said. “It concerns a matter of some delicacy. I understand you’re tuned in to many of the undercurrents. What either of us says here mustn’t go any further than this office. Is Reeves Chubb a homosexual? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  “There have been rumors to that effect. Somebody wrote something to that effect on the wall in the thirty-seventh-floor men’s room.”

  “I’d like to take a look at that.”

  “It’s not there anymore,” I said. “This was last week. It was written with a red crayon above the urinals. It looked like Quincy Willet’s handwriting. Those two don’t exactly hit it off, you know.”

  “What precisely did it say? This may be important.”

  “I don’t think I care to repeat it, Weede.”

  “Was it rough?”

  “The roughest.”

  “We’re two mature people, Dave. I’ll tell you why I brought this up in the first place. I know I can trust you to keep any privileged material within the four walls of this room.”

  “Shall I close the door?” I said.

  “By all means. I should have thought of that myself.”

  As I swung the door shut Quincy passed my office and gave me a questioning glance. Weede went over to the sofa and I returned to the chair behind the desk.

  “As you know, Dave, we hire people on the basis of ability alone. This has always been the network’s policy. Personally I have no interest in a man’s private life. What a man does in his free time is no concern of mine, within reason.”

  “I can attest to that, Weede.”

  “But there’s another issue at stake here. The State Department doesn’t want any queers working on the China thing. Far be it from me to challenge the thinking of people whose most vital concern is our own national security. A meeting was held in a midtown hotel last week. For the most part it was inconclusive. Reeves is a married man, you know.”

  “Sometimes that happens,” I said.

  “Exactly, Dave. Those people at State are sharp. They tell some amazing stories. We spent a whole afternoon discussing it.”

  “It’s a shadow world. It’s a sickness. It can happen to anyone.”

  “Did you know that Reeves sleeps in his office two or three nights a week? Something like that makes you wonder. What does his wife think about something like that?”

  “There’s a rumor going around that Jones Perkins might be bisex. I don’t necessarily mean he goes both ways. It’s just that some of his secondary sexual characteristics are thought to be a bit suspicious. He might actually be both ways if you get the distinction. But it’s just a rumor at this point.”

  “I give no credence to stories like that.”

  “Only a fool would.”

  “Well, I just wanted to get your thinking on the subject, Dave. I hope it turns out to be nothing at all.”

  “Weede, one of the very best ways to arrive at some kind of conclusive determination in a situation like this with a man’s whole future at stake is simply to think back on it. Think back on Reeves. Think of small incidents, anecdotes he’s told, his reactions to certain words or phrases, the way he holds those little cigars of his, favorite expressions he uses, his sensibilities, his literary preferences, the amount of time he spends in the john, the kind of shoes he wears. It all has a bearing. Now then. Can I work on the Navaho thing on my own?”

  “Quincy giving you trouble?”

  “He has marital problems. His mind is preoccupied.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement, Dave.”

  “Thanks much.”

  “Let you know more when I get back from the Coast,” he said.

  “Maybe we can break bread.”

  All the doors were open. I felt I was going insane. The entire conversation seemed to be taking place in a dream and I truly could not believe what we were saying to each other. The headache had become a ringing numbness, like that caused by a shot of Novocain. I had ceased to exercise the slightest control over my remarks and I didn’t care anymore. It was neither a good nor a bad feeling. It was hardly a feeling at all. My head seemed to be a telephone delivering an endless busy signal.

  “Are you sure you can’t tell me what the red crayon said in the bathroom? It may be important.”

  “Reeves Chubb climbs palm trees to suck off sleeping apes.”

  I took the elevator down and walked the two blocks to the Grand Prix. I didn’t wear a coat. I never wore a coat when I went to lunch, no matter how cold it was. JFK.

  The restaurant’s decor was automotive. My father was already there, sitting at a corner table. His stocky figure, in fine British tweeds, seemed to dominate that part of the room. He was shouting friendly abuse to someone at a nearby table. I watched for a moment. He ran his hand over his head, over the thinning hair, then toyed with the cutlery. He had a new pair of glasses, I noticed, black-rimmed and intimidating. His face did not have the strength of sharp definition, being fairly anonymous, but there was a blunt authority in his eyes which could not be ignored. We did not look at all alike.

  My father had just turned fifty-five, a fact which seemed to have transformed him, virtually overnight, into a role of elder statesman. Prior to our meeting in the restaurant I had seen him just once since his birthday. On that occasion, a drink after work, he had seemed very conscious of his elbows. When he spoke he would pivot on the barstool and lean toward me with both elbows flung out and up like delta wings. At other times, head hanging loosely over his drink, he would raise his right index finger and then use it to tap his left elbow, which lay bent on the bar. He did this only when making an important point and I wondered whether the significance of his remark might be fully uncovered only by opening up the elbow and picking with a delicate surgical instrument among its connective tissues. That evening he had made me think of John Foster Dulles and Casey Stengel, two elder statesmen who knew how to use their elbows.

  “Sorry I’m late, dad. Merry Christmas.”

  “I hear Stennis is in trouble,” he said. “I never liked that son of a bitch. How much does he make? Squatez-vous, kid. We can have only one drink. I’ve got a two o’clock client meeting.”

  “I didn’t know you knew Stennis.”

  “We’re agency-of-record for the mental illness series everybody’s talking about. Stennis told us the ten-second spots we’ve been running are in bad taste considering the subject matter of the program. He said the network has been getting complaints. You know what I’m talking about, the animated jingles. We’ll have two dry martinis on the rocks, waiter. Then wait ten minutes and bring us the boeuf Bourguignon. We won’t have time for dessert or coffee.”

  “What are your plans for Christmas day?” I said. “I thought I might drive up to the house.”

  “Fine, sport, do that. Bring a girl along. We’ll have a few drinks and drive up to the Admiral Benbow for some turkey. Your mother used to make a swell turkey. I should sell that house but I can’t. How’s Merry these days? I miss that girl. Damn sweet kid.”

  “She’s fine, dad.”

  “Listen, I don’t deny I’ve done some screwing around in my time. Man’s not worth much if he doesn’t get the urge now and then. But how can I marry some big-hipped peroxide bitch after all those years living with your mother? I married your mother when I was twenty-two years old. We lived in a cold-water flat on upper Broadway. When Mary was born I went out and got drunk. Forget the nostalgia. Those were rotten days, pally. Now I’ve reached the age when a man feels he has to make some kind of summing
up. But screw golf. It’s sure death for someone like me. Everybody wants me to go out and play golf with them. The last seven, eight years, since your mother’s death, all I hear is golf. I work all weekend, either home or in the office. Work is better than death. Look, I’ve got a little thing going with my secretary. What good does it do? Can I depend on something like her for the long haul? I said on the rocks, waiter.”

  “How old is she?” I said.

  “I don’t know, about twenty-four. When you get to be my age, they all look the same. If you want to go out with her, I’ll fix it up.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She goes down,” he whispered.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “You’re trying to find out if she’s suitable for me. That’s all right. I don’t mind. I respect your views, kid. But I’m the last of the old school in this business. I’ve got six account men and nine assistant account men working for me. Harvard Business School. I wouldn’t give them the sweat off my balls if they needed it to press their pants. And I’ll tell you something else. They respect me. And I’ll tell you why. They respect me because they know I can do their jobs better than they can. You need a little color in this business. All the account guys in our shop look like laboratory specimens soaking in formaldehyde. If you know your job you can afford to be yourself, up to a point. I learned that many years ago. They put four of those ugly gray padded chairs in my office. I threw them out the window into an alley. You know how word travels on the Avenue. Inside a week I had six new job offers. Client thinks I’m the greatest thing ever came down the pike. We have lunch every Tuesday at the Yale Club. Hell of a nice guy. Prince among men. Played football and lacrosse in college. I sent him to my tailor.”

  “Here we are,” I said. “Drink up. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Dave. God bless you.”

  My father collected reels of TV commercials. The basement of the house in Old Holly was full of these reels, carefully filed and cross-indexed as to length, type of product, audience recall, product identification and a number of other categories. The index cards filled two file cabinets and the reels themselves stood upright in hundreds of numbered slots in a series of floor-to-ceiling filmshelves which he had designed and built himself. The wine cellar, my mother used to call it. He had a screen and projector and he spent several nights a week viewing the commercials and making notes. He had been doing this for many years. He considered it part of his job. His purpose, he told the family, was to find the common threads and nuances of those commercials which had achieved high test ratings; to learn the relationship between certain kinds of commercials and their impact in the marketplace, as he called it. We spent many of our adolescent nights, Mary and Jane and I, sitting in that dark basement watching television commercials. We looked forward to seeing every new reel he brought home. While my mother wandered through the large old house, the rest of us slouched in the flickering basement and argued about which new commercial was best. My father used to arbitrate our bitter disputes. It doesn’t matter how funny or pretty a commercial is, he used to say; if it doesn’t move the merchandise off the shelves, it’s not doing the job; it has to move the merch. And now, as the waiter put our plates before us, I thought of him standing by the projector as the first new reel of the evening thrust its image through the dust-drizzling church-light toward the screen, an alphabet boy eating freckled soup perhaps, a man carving his Thanksgiving teeth, the tongues of seven naked housewives lapping at a bowl of dog food. I wished he were dead. It was the first honest thought which had entered my mind all day. My freedom depended on his death.

  “Why is it that all the advertising people I’ve ever known want to get out?” I said. “They all want to build their own schooners, plank by plank, and sail to the Tasman Sea. I know a copywriter at Creighton Insko Dale. At lunch one day he started to cry.”

  “I love the business,” my father said. “It’s dog eat dog. It’s a crap game in an alley for six million bucks. Where else can a man like me make the kind of money I make? I have the right brand image. You know that as well as I do. Wall Street would kick me out on my ass. But at my age I don’t worry about money anymore. I’ve been reading Tolstoy. Every man feels he has a novel in him. He feels he has a novel and a Eurasian mistress. Tolstoy makes me want to write a novel. Your mother was ill a good deal of the time but she had something these bitches today couldn’t touch. My secretary? Maxine? She has soap under her fingernails. Seven out of eight times I look at her fingernails I see little slivers of soap. Compare that with your mother. At my age you come to realize that you did everything wrong. No matter who you are, everything you did was wrong. Maybe I’ll turn Catholic.”

  “I didn’t know you were thinking along those lines.”

  “There’s something there,” he said to his elbow. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading. I was never much for religion but there’s something there. You know the Catholic church in Old Holly, Sacred Bones or whatever it’s called? I called up the head priest one night, the pastor, and we had an interesting talk. Hell of a nice guy. He knew who I was. He told me all about the human soul. The soul has a transcendental connection to the body. It informs the body. The soul becomes aware of its own essence after it separates from the body. Once you’re dead, your soul can be directly illuminated by God. I sent him a case of Johnnie Walker Red.”

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “Yeah, I have to get going. Listen, sport, see what you can find out about Stennis. Find out how much he makes.”

  It was snowing again and people moved head-down, clutching their hats, shouldering into the wind. I walked across the wide gray lobby. In a far corner there was an exhibit of prize-winning war photographs. One of them was an immense color blow-up, about ten feet high and twenty feet wide. In the center of the picture was a woman holding a dead child in her arms, and behind her and on either side were eight other children; some of them looked at the woman while others were smiling and waving, apparently at the camera. A young man was down on one knee in the middle of the lobby, photographing the photograph. I stood behind him for a moment and the effect was unforgettable. Time and distance were annihilated and it seemed that the children were smiling and waving at him. Such is the prestige of the camera, its almost religious authority, its hypnotic power to command reverence from subject and bystander alike, that I stood absolutely motionless until the young man snapped the picture. It was as though I feared that any small movement on my part might distract one of those bandaged children and possibly ruin the photograph.

  I continued across the lobby. Three network people, a few yards ahead of me, stamped their feet as they walked, trying to get the snow off their shoes. Just then Weede Denney emerged from an elevator bank and headed toward us, hat in one hand, suitcase in the other, wearing his Japanese smile. I moved up closer to the other three men and also stamped my feet.

  “Gentlemen.”

  “Weede.”

  “Weede.”

  “Weede.”

  “Weede.”

  There were nine or ten people on the elevator. Nobody said anything. There was a Christmas carol coming over the Muzak. When we reached the twentieth floor I took the emergency telephone out of its small tinplate compartment. But I couldn’t think of anything funny to say and so I put it back. Binky wasn’t at her desk. I went into the office and dialed Tana Elkbridge’s extension. She was a secretary in the news division, married seven years. Our affair was a month old. It had begun at a party when she asked me if I would care to read some of her short pieces. I had no idea what she was talking about. Her short pieces turned out to be prose poems, the kind of thing student nurses write before they see their first amputation. Tana was dark and magnificently shaped and wore her hair in braids. Her boss answered the phone and I hung up immediately. I had done this at least a dozen times since joining the network. It is a debasing experience but when you are having an affair with a married woman, or when you yourself are mar
ried, it is better not to take chances. Her boss was a lean nervous man and I could imagine his irritation, the ungovernable mutiny of his starved features, as that inimical click went off in his ear. It gave me no pleasure. Quincy came in, closed the door behind him, walked slowly across the room and put one ample haunch on the corner of my desk, the upper part of his thigh flattening and spreading, and I thought of a science-fiction organism pulsating menacingly in some neglected corner of a laboratory.

  “Was that Weede in here just before lunch?”

  “No.”

  “That was Weede,” he said. “Listen, how come he’s going to the Coast? People don’t usually go on business trips just before Christmas. It must be something important. Did he say anything about it?”

  “Quincy, I’d tell you if I could. But it’s privileged material.”

  “Come on, Dave. How long have I known you? We’ve come up through this thing together. You’ve seen my wife naked how many times?”

  “I can’t say a word.”

  “Well, is he taking Kitty along with him at least? I can’t believe he’d let his wife stay behind over Christmas. It can’t be that important.”

  “They’re having marital problems,” I said.

  “A lot of things are happening around here. Just before lunch I picked up my phone and I could hear voices. The wires must have got crossed. It was Walter Faye talking to somebody I didn’t recognize. Walter was giving him the salaries of everybody in Weede’s unit. Reeves Chubb makes more than we do.”

  The door of Quincy’s office was orange and his sofa was dark gray. Some of us in Weede’s group had doors of the same color but sofas of a different color. Some had identical sofas but different doors. Weede himself was the only one who had a red sofa. Weede and Ted Warburton were the only ones with black doors. Warburton’s sofa was dark green and so was Mars Tyler’s door. But Mars Tyler’s sofa was ecru, a shade lighter than Grove Palmer’s door. I had all this down on paper. On slow afternoons I used to study it, trying to find a pattern. I thought there might be a subtle color scheme designed by management and based on a man’s salary, ability, and prospects for advancement or decline. Why did no two people have identical sofas and doors? Why was Ted Warburton allowed to have a black door when the only other black door belonged to Weede Denney? Why was Reeves Chubb the only one with a primrose sofa? Why was Paul Joyner’s perfectly good maroon sofa replaced by a royal blue one? Why was my sofa the same color as Weede’s door? There were others who felt as I did. When Paul Joyner walked in to find a new sofa in his office he immediately started a rumor that he was being fired. But this sofa incident had taken place two years prior to the current rumor, the origins of which were never disclosed. He had not been fired; it was not that easy to find the connection. The connection was tenuous but I was sure it was there. At least a dozen times I had taken that piece of paper out of my files and tried to correlate a man’s standing with the color of his door and sofa. There had to be a key. If only I could find it. What I would do when and if I found it was a question that did not disturb me. I would do something. I would change something. I would have protection. I would know the riddle.