Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “What about death?” she said.

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t think I could bear it. What can people do who are afraid to die? I saw my father die. It was slow and agonizing.”

  “This is one of the basic questions of our time,” he said. “If we knew how to make a good job of death, it wouldn’t be so frightful, would it? The famous prizefighter Joe Louis has been quoted as saying that everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. I’ve used that in many of my sermons. Laughter, ah, is a great catalyst. It eases tension and helps clear the atmosphere. I’m a great believer in the power of laughter. People think High Church is drab and humorless. This is nonsense.”

  “But what are we to do?” she said.

  “We must draw up a blueprint for dying.”

  “I think it’s all so stupid, this high-low business.”

  “Will I see you at evensong? And the boy?”

  “By all means.”

  “I must be going.”

  “Next time I want to hear about the Oxford Tracts.”

  “I have plenty of ammunition on that subject. I’ve just been reading up on the great Alonzo Potter; no relation incidentally, although I admit to you in confidence that I cherish the happy coincidence of our names, the serpent of vanity notwithstanding.”

  “You haven’t touched your cookies.”

  “I really must be going.”

  “And I want to hear more about death.”

  “I’ll be ready,” he said. “Now then, shall we stroll out through the garden?”

  “There is no garden.”

  “Ah.”

  “Say goodbye, David.”

  “Your mother is a smart little gal, young man. She was one of the great young beauties of Virginia. And her generosity to the church knows no bounds. You’re a very fortunate boy to be so tall and straight. He has your eyes, Ann. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A soldier,” I said.

  “He speaks out directly. I like that. Not a hint of equivocation in his voice. He’s a fine-looking boy.”

  “We share each other’s secrets,” she said.

  “Well done.”

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  “A soldier,” he said. “I like that. No nonsense about this boy. If I had not become a minister of Christ, I would have become a soldier myself. They’re not so very different, you know.”

  * * *

  At Leighton Gage College I wanted to be known as Kinch. This is Stephen Dedalus’ nickname in Ulysses, which I was reading at the time. But I soon learned that nobody at Leighton Gage had a nickname, except of the most disparaging kind. There were no athletic teams there either. There were no grades or formal examinations. There were no traditions. The faculty was good but somewhat lazy and I suppose the reverse could be said of the students.

  At the beginning I became friendly with a boy named Leonard Zajac, who was known to the wits in the poetry society as Young Man Carbuncular. We had several classes together and I was impressed by his nervous high-speed humor, his iconoclasm, the way he turned familiar ideas around and gave fresh meaning to them without necessarily believing his own version more than the original. Leonard was a fat and lonely boy with furious purple inflammations all over the back of his neck. People spoke to him only when necessary and even the faculty tried to ignore him. His obesity, his poor complexion, his heavy ghetto clothing seemed tragically out of place in the sleek setting of southern California. Leonard spent a good deal of time in the library. He and I got along well. With his help I felt I could develop my mind into a fine cutting instrument. Kinch. The knife-blade. Leonard was generous with his time and ideas. It wasn’t long before I began to imagine him as a brilliant satirist and social critic, a personage of Swiftian eminence, a post-Renaissance phenomenon, a bonfire around which we would all huddle for lessons and warmth. To me, at eighteen, there was a certain attraction to Leonard’s kind of life. Chronic boils and obesity eliminate all possible illusions; snuggle up to loneliness and make the library your womb-home and chapel. Then it all crumbled. Leonard told me he was in love with Page Talbot. She was a Kansas girl with long blond hair, the kind of woman who looks absolutely stunning at a distance of ten feet; within closer range, however, Page’s green eyes seemed washed out, her skin sallow, and the lack of expression on her face suggested lifelong bereavement over the death of a pet rabbit. But coming toward you or moving along in front with a barely manageable sway, in salt-bleached blue jeans and faded blue farmgirl shirt, Page could make you feel she was worth following, on foot, all the way back to Kansas City. In the library one day Leonard told me about his fantasies. He imagined making love to her underwater, on horseback, on top of professors’ desks, inside phone booths. Then he said he wanted to be like me; he would give anything, he said, to be like me, trim, good-looking, popular. His confession forced some strange shift in the sheer balances of my mind. That night I visited Page Talbot in her room. I wore tan chinos, the closest I could come to the fresh creased suntans of the United States Army. I stood in the doorway and thought of Burt Lancaster standing in the rain waiting for Deborah Kerr to open the door. My career as an intellectual was over.

  In junior year I met Ken Wild. I left my room one morning, late for class, and was going down the stairs, past the second floor, when I heard music, the deep bounce of a tenor saxophone. I stood there a moment, listening, then went down the corridor. The sound was coming from a record player turned up to what seemed full volume. A husky young man was sitting on the edge of the bed, forearms on knees, head faintly nodding. He was wearing red and black boxer’s trunks, an Everlast trademark across the elastic band. He looked up briefly, cracking open a big grin, and waved me to a chair. About ten minutes later the record ended and the tone arm swung back.

  “Coltrane,” he said.

  Wild was from Chicago, an ex-marine. We spent the rest of the morning listening to his records. I felt this music had been in me all along, the smoky blue smell of it, mornings in Paris and cat intestines spilled on Lenox Avenue. I pleased myself by thinking, as white men will do, that some Afro-instinct burned in an early part of my being.

  Wild and I were friends from the beginning. We argued, kidded, sparred with open hands, and committed the usual collegiate blasphemies of word and deed, using as our text the gleeful God-baiting of Buck Mulligan in the first few pages of Ulysses. That was our sacred scroll and we regretted that there had been no gray Jesuits to darken our childhoods and none now to swoop down on us with deathmask and Summa.

  Both of us wrote poetry. I enjoyed strangling the words and trying to get them on paper still living but when I failed to finish what I had planned to do, or even to begin it, I was less than seriously troubled. After all I had my camera. But Wild went at it with total commitment, all or nothing, sending no envoys out to treaty with failure. We joined the school’s poetry society so that we could stay away from their meetings and have our memberships revoked and then found a rival society. But we never bothered.

  We used to go through anthologies, loving and hating all fierce gigantic talent. It was the loose image we picked out and petted, little boys in a lion kennel. Wild would go into a fine frenzy at these sessions, turning pages, jumping from book to book, shouting out the beatific phrases, and we would spin off into storms of laughter at the joy and wonder and misery of those lines. We tried to write with jazz and wine. But I guess I would have been better off in bed with Wendy Judd.

  People dream of money and love. It was Wendy’s ambition to be hired as an extra in a big-budget Technicolor movie. She had no illusions of stardom. Fragmentation, the settling of a myth into the realism of its component parts, had come to the West quite early, and Wendy was a native Californian. She would have been satisfied to get the back of her head in a movie, her revolutionary fist raised in a Bastille crowd scene. She spent a lot of time with Simmons St. Jean, who taught film theory and criticism at Leighton Gage. Simmons was only thirty or so but he tried to come on like
the post-accident Montgomery Clift, a hollow echoing man. He worked on his pallor the way the rest of us teased our suntans. At the same time he tried to let his male students know that for an old man he was doing all right with the girlies. Since I majored in film and since Simmons considered me the man to beat for stud honors, we had a certain wary interest in each other. Our discussions were full of small-arms fire. Wendy Judd and I had coffee with him one day.

  “I’m just fascinated by you kids,” Simmons said. “I was with one of my students the other night, the other evening I should say, girl named Pamela something, and I was virtually in awe of her unselfconsciousness and total lack of provincialism. Her quiet command of her own feelings. You kids are so wonderfully free and open. You have none of the hangups I had in college. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”

  “How come you look so tired and beat-up all the time?” Wendy said. “Not that it’s not attractive.”

  “I’d just as soon not talk about myself. I’ve exhausted all hope of defining who or what I am. Perhaps some time, Wendy, if Dave permits, I’ll tell you the story of my life. But for the time being I’d much rather listen to you two talk about yourselves. One of the many pleasures of teaching at a place like this is the uninhibited exchange between students and faculty. There’s really nothing like it anywhere in the country. Dave, what kind of thesis are you planning this year?”

  “I’m shooting it in the desert, Simmons. It’ll be almost pure imagery. A small shade of meaning for those who crave it.”

  “I thrive on imagery. It seems to have a laxative effect.”

  “David showed me the thing he made last year,” Wendy said. “Wasn’t it wild, Simmons—all those reflections and shadows?”

  “He didn’t like it,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say that, Dave. It had its moments.”

  “He said it was meekly derivative. He mentioned, I believe, the early Kurosawa.”

  “The prenatal Kurosawa would have been more like it,” Simmons said. “I’d dearly love to pursue this further but I’ve got a class in ten minutes. My freshmen tend to get anxious if I don’t show up on time. Father figure and all that.”

  “I’m going that way,” Wendy said.

  “I thought you and I might drive over to the lake,” I said. “Why don’t you come along, Simmons? We never see you at the lake. We look for you, Wendy and I, but we never see you.”

  “I’ve got a class to get to. Which way are you heading, Wendy?”

  “We’re going to the lake,” I said. “If you don’t have a bathing suit, Simmons, you can borrow one of mine.”

  “I’m sure you have enough swimwear for a brigade of lifeguards, Dave, but I’m afraid I’ll have to take a rain check on that.”

  “It’s not raining.”

  “You can use some sun,” Wendy said.

  “You have to get out there and cop those rays, Simmons. You’re spending too much time in the dark.”

  “I console myself with the thought that nothing very interesting happens in well-lighted places.”

  “Pow,” Wendy said.

  Having secured the more essential of victories, I did not dispute the loser’s right to get in the last word. Everybody knows how much solace the older generation takes in saving face.

  Although there were no athletic teams at Leighton Gage, we were probably more serious about sports than the average student body. But we played games of a different kind—non-team, swift, dangerous. One of the important things money buys is speed. Speed and a glimpse of death. We drove sports cars and motorcycles in informal competition, rode beach buggies over the desert, raced motorboats on the artificial lake near the campus. Several students owned planes and if you were friendly with one of them you could go up to L.A. for party weekends and on the return flight test your desire for an early poetic death. The force behind these activities was essentially spiritual. There were many injuries, several fatalities, and we reacted to these with professional dispassion. That’s something money can’t buy. But either you learn it or you go back to baseball.

  Page Talbot’s father bought her a fiberglass runabout for her birthday and had it sent out to the anti-lake about a mile north of the campus. She painted it lilac and yellow and planned to install a bedroom canopy until somebody talked her out of it. The first time she asked me to go sailing, as she called it, the outboard fell off and while we waited for someone to tow us in we sat there drinking beer, drifting in small circles, relatively content, pretending we were on an Arab dhow lazing through the papyrus slogs of the Sudanese Nile.

  “I made it with Ken Wild last night,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you knew each other.”

  “We didn’t.”

  “Well I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “He’s nice really.”

  “Did I tell you I’m thinking of getting married? I met this girl back home last summer and we’ve been corresponding. She’s in London now touring the epitaphs. I’ve been thinking of popping the old question.”

  “Frankly I don’t know why anybody our age would want to get married,” Page said. “Frankly it sounds to me like the end of the road.”

  “Don’t you have an urge to play house?”

  “If it’s a triplex on Montego Bay.”

  “Tell me about Wild,” I said. “Is he good in bed? Is he better than I am? I don’t have to know any details. Just say yes or no. It’s important.”

  The Young Man Carbuncular vanished from the campus three months before graduation. Nobody knew where he went. I thought his disappearance might arouse some guilt in those who had ignored and ridiculed him. Instead it became a joke. People said he had gone to Tibet to find a holy man who might cure his boils; or was wandering in the desert, delirious, singing hit songs of the late forties; or had barricaded himself in the men’s room of the library with a submachine gun, several hundred rounds of ammo and a can of spray-on deodorant. I went to Leonard’s room one night hoping to find some indication of his whereabouts, a passage underlined in a book, a road map, a letter from his parents. All I found was a piece of paper on which was written:

  Something tells me

  that I shall dream tonight of newspapers

  wrapped in fish

  Leonard Zajac had been four years with us, a man for all his waddling pity, and the mystery of his flight, perhaps in overwhelming dread, was met with nothing more than mild relief. He returned the day after commencement. Some of us were still on campus, loading up cars, completing plans for vacations in the Andes, on the Balearic Islands, aboard schooners bound for the East Indies. In three months we would all have to start earning a living and there was a pitch of hysteria to the dialogue of that last day. Merry and I, who would be starting east in an hour or so, were talking with some friends on the quadrangle when Leonard touched me on the shoulder to whisper hello and goodbye. He said he had come to pick up his books. He had been living with the Havasupai Indians in Arizona, he said, and he planned to return immediately and to remain forever. When he asked me what my own plans were, I could only shrug. His inflammations were gone. He appeared to have lost about forty pounds. I did not introduce him to the others because, for the moment, I had forgotten his name.

  Everything begins in California. It is like the hip lexicon of the ghetto; as soon as Madison Avenue breaks the code, Harlem devises a new one. So with California and New York. When surfing and nudity moved east, California got all decked out in flowing madras and went indoors to discover the commune. I liked it out there and might have stayed. But my father was back east, living alone in the music-box house, insistent on remaining. We all have something we are trying to forget. If we’re smart we take off for parts unknown. But my father could not leave the house and I didn’t have enough sense to remain at the shallow end of the continent. So I began to swim.

  * * *

  Big Bob Davidson first showed up in Old Holly when I was eighteen; that would make Jane twenty-one. Bob was working in New York at the time and h
e came out one weekend to meet the family. I was home for the summer, working on my golf and tennis, doing a bit of sailing. Jane suggested I might spend a few hours with Bob. Play some tennis and have a few beers. Make him feel welcome. So he and I drove over to the club, trying not to be too polite with each other, sparring easily, probing for sensibilities. Bob seemed a nice enough guy. He was tall and heavy. His face was an odd wet pink color, as if a dog had been licking it, and his blond hair was very straight. He wore his sport shirt outside his pants, a faded checked shirt with a pencil clipped to the breast pocket. As it turned out, Bob always had a pencil clipped to the breast pocket of his shirt or suit jacket and whenever I saw him I had the feeling he was going to take out an invoice pad and start writing an order for three dozen lawn mowers.

  We changed and began playing. My game was better than ever and I thought I’d take it easy at the outset and see what kind of pace Bob had in mind. It soon became clear that he was out to destroy me. He ranged all over the court, grim and dusty, playing in a low cloud of clay, tersely announcing the score before every serve. The harder he tried, the worse he got. His serve was erratic and he had no backhand to speak of. I was just beginning to get bored when I saw my father sitting on one of the benches that lined the courts. After the first set he called me over.

  “I just got here,” he said. “Who’s winning?”

  “I took the first set.”

  “What to what?”

  “I think it was six-one. Bob’s keeping score. Tell you the truth, I’m not very involved in this particular match.”

  “Well, get involved,” he said. “I want you to whip his ass. I want you to beat him in straight sets. I want to walk into that house later and tell them it was no contest. Straight sets. That’s what I want to say. The kid beat him in straight sets.”