Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “Through a womb-door.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “And there are good wombs and bad wombs.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Are you hungry?” I said. “I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.”

  “I have rehearsals to get to.”

  “Do you have to leave right away?”

  “I’m afraid yes, David.”

  “We haven’t had much of a chance to talk since the night of the summerhouse.”

  “There’s less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn’t contagious.”

  “Pandemic is more like it. I wish you’d open your eyes.”

  “Is there anything to see?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Even the bibles are white,” she said. “We used to go over to the Gansevoort Street pier at sunset. Those humid evenings in that barren part of New York when I lived almost beyond living. And Roy said to me once now I know why New Jersey’s where it is and not next to Alabama where it probably belongs. So the sun can go down over it.”

  * * *

  Drotty wore black silk and pale green corduroy. He was a dagger of a man, a small jagged bad mood glinting in a corner. Yet he smoked his cigarette almost tenderly, every movement of his hand a soft and highly deliberate piece of orchestration. I hadn’t expected him to be so young. In fact I hadn’t expected him to show up at all. But he seemed perfectly willing to go along with what must have seemed to him an incomparably casual, if not barbaric, form of theater. This script was not bound; this hotel room was not soundproof; this director had little to say; this tape recorder was a sociological curse; this movie was doomed. Drotty mentioned none of these; he merely smoked and moved softly now about the room in black Spanish boots, a certain shrewish violence attaching to every step. His face, his small face, worked hard at being blank.

  “I guess Austin and Carol have told you they’ve been part of this thing since the beginning.”

  “I don’t mind if my people moonlight as long as it doesn’t interfere with their work at the theater.”

  “I hope it hasn’t.”

  “It hasn’t,” he said. “They seem intrigued by what you’re doing. Perhaps I should be jealous.”

  “They seem a lot more intrigued by what you’re doing. They talk about you all the time.”

  “They’re getting bored. The regional theater bores everybody in the end. People come out of a sense of duty. We try to shock them but they’ve been in a state of shock for years. Do you know something? In five years the entire American theater including what’s left of Broadway will be a government-subsidized semi-religious institution. Not unlike Yellowstone National Park. DO NOT LITTER signs will be everywhere.”

  “Cool boots,” I said.

  “These were given me by a lady professor of romance languages whose only copy of her seventh unproduced play was burned in my fireplace by an Afro-American who said his name was Abdul Murad Bey. I dreaded telling her about it but when the moment arrived she seemed relieved and it wasn’t too many weeks later that she presented me with these boots. Recently I heard that Abdul Murad Bey was partly responsible for the burning of Philadelphia, an unproduced play in its own right.”

  He finished this anecdote by tightening his features and going even more blank than before. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to laugh or not, so I merely sent some air down my nostrils, trying to make the sound a cheerful one. I realized that neither of us had yet called the other by name, first or last. This oversight haunted the beginning and end of every remark. Of course it wasn’t just an oversight.

  We discussed his lines. He placed the cigarette in an ashtray and walked slowly to the armchair and sat down. I had to put out the cigarette for him. Then we were ready to begin.

  “Film must leave an emotional residue. The retentive aspect is the one true criterion. What do I take away from a film and of that what do I keep? Something more than underwear, I would hope. I think that what you’ve got to do at this point is stretch your aesthetic. My task is to help the more serious of my students develop some sort of cinematic lifestyle. I do admit to finding a marginal interest in your movie. It appeals to the child in me. I like silliness. I like silly ideas. Many great movies are basically silly and the movie hero is almost always a dope. Brando for example has portrayed dope after dope. So has Belmondo, so has O’Toole, so has Toshiro Mifune. It’s all a question of levels. Preminger’s vulgarity is postcollegiate; yours is still matriculating. Since this is our last meeting, I think total candor is in order. I dislike you very much. I’ve always disliked you. You have evinced little or no respect for me. Time and again, in the presence of female students, you have attempted to undermine my position as teacher and human being. You want very much to know about my relations with a certain young lady of our mutual acquaintance. You crave bad news, defeat, punishment. Defeat is always glorious on film. The loser is ennobled by suffering and death. No camera can resist the man going down to defeat. He commands every mechanism and the attention of every mind. Perhaps you see yourself as a wide-screen hero. I’ve totally forgotten what I’m supposed to say next.”

  * * *

  Glenn Yost’s wife was a large friendly woman who probably started wearing a housecoat when she was three. She was a toucher and kidder, obviously well loved by the two Glenns, the kind of woman who excels at picnics—laughing and telling jokes, slapping men’s backs, pinching the kids, matching bosoms with the ladies, a vast warm-weather front moving across the plains. I didn’t like having her around.

  I introduced Sullivan to the family, and then Mrs. Yost, Laura, told us they had been waiting dessert until we got there, peach pie and vanilla ice cream, and we all sat down to talk and eat. The Yosts kept telling funny stories about each other. There was something extraordinary in their love, something laughable about it in the best sense; each seemed a legend to the others, a comic masterpiece of blunders, conceits and disastrous hobbies. Laura did most of the storytelling, moving from dining room to kitchen in her yellow housecoat, pouring coffee over the edges of our cups. I was there to finish an unreal job, to complete the worst part of the crossing, and the reality of all this unaffected warmth did me no good. Also my camera was not interested in oral tradition. I looked at Sullivan. She was bisecting crumbs of pie with her thumbnail.

  “Can we get right at it, Glenn?”

  “The pantry’s in there,” he said.

  “Maybe Bud and Sully and I can go in right now and get it done. Take only a few minutes.”

  “Won’t it be too dark?” Laura said.

  The pantry was just off the kitchen. Glenn turned on the light for me and got out of the way. Moving fast, I put one of the kitchen chairs against the far wall of the pantry. I instructed Sullivan to sit there. I watched her for a moment. Then I realized that Bud was standing next to me holding the camera. Quickly I took it from him, focused on Sullivan in the chair and began shooting. When this was done, five or six seconds later, I asked her to stand against the wall and I moved Bud into the pantry facing her, his back to the camera. Then I was standing in the doorway again. Glenn and Laura were right behind me. I had to get them out of there. They were just so much honey sticking to my fingers and it was vinegar I needed to taste, vinegar and the pant of hot steel on my tongue, if I was ever to get this done. I asked them to leave. I told them to get completely out of the kitchen. Then, with Sullivan and the boy standing, I shot twenty seconds more, my very own commercial, a life in the life. Then I cut again and asked her to get closer to him and to put her hands on his shoulders. He turned and stared at me, either because he did not understand why I had sent his parents away or because this was very different from basketball in a high-school gym and he needed a look from me, a word, something. Then I saw it was mom and dad his eyes were balancing in their bitter light; there was that in his face, the knifed look hanging tight over a brother’s small betrayal, not underst
anding what I had to do and yet not moving either, held there by the camera in my hands or by her, by her indeed, lean dank bird; of course; it would be impossible to slip one’s shoulders out from the cool shellac of those hands, to turn one’s back on such presence as this. The light in the pantry was bad. I was doing everything too quickly and I knew it would be nothing but blind luck if any of this found life at all, caught the silver crystal and began to grow. I could see it in foreflash, underexposed, their bodies incomplete, her face a nest of scattered dusk, tangled gray light at the edges of the screen, and then I wondered if I would ever watch it, this or any part of it, and I wondered why this mute soliloquy of woman and boy should mean anything more, even to me, than what it so clearly was, face of one and head of the other, and I wondered of this commercial whether it would sell the product. I focused again, her hands on his shoulders, a strange, a very strange expression, something like the curiosity that follows a man out of a room, a totally uncharacteristic look in her eyes. I felt no power doing it this way. The light was worse than bad and I hadn’t made the proper readings. I was going too quickly. I was not framing. I was ending the shots too soon. But I had to do it and be done with it and maybe this was the best way, to obliterate the memory by mocking it, no power at all, spilling seed into the uncaptured light. Then I began to shoot the last sequence and I found I could not stop. Through the viewfinder I saw them, motionless, supremely patient, steadfast, her long fingers knuckle to tip visible over his shoulders, her left eye looking past his ear and into the eye of the camera, and I kept shooting for two or three minutes, lost somewhere, bent back in twenty-five watts of brown light, listening for a sound behind me, and of all the things I wondered that evening the last was how much she knew.

  Laura was not in the dining room. Glenn sat at the table without looking up. I thanked him for everything. I told him it was regrettable but necessary that sometimes certain things had to be done that seemed excessively rash. Sullivan was waiting for me at the door. I told him that people under pressure sometimes say or do things which appear necessary at the time but which later are seen to be foolish and unforgivable. Bud was in the kitchen doorway and I thanked him and apologized. Then I went to the table and offered my hand. Glenn looked up, took it, smiled, pressed, and softly cursed me. It was sweetly done, a nice bit of Hollywood there, the vintage years, and it won a smile in return. We released and I backed off. Then the capillaries flared in his wild eye, the thin whispering streaks, hints of cold deacon fury, the kind of cold that burns, the cold that sticks to hands, that furious cold light damning my soul, those arctic streaks, those veins in the cube of ice inside his eye.

  * * *

  She stood on the sidewalk looking at me come down off the porch. It was unlike her to wait. I had expected her to be halfway up the street and then I thought of the way she had stared at me all through the last sequence, those two or three minutes when I was not sure where I was. Something soft drifted off her now. The streetlights were on. I had the camera on my right shoulder.

  “I’d like to take a bath,” she said. “We’ve been taking sponge baths in the camper. When it’s warm enough we go down to the river. At first it was only a nuisance. Now it’s a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.”

  “Have the others seen you without clothes?”

  “We use great tact, David. I assure you. Elaborate schedules have been worked out. Pike is a master at that sort of thing. A quartermaster in fact. He’s taken to posting all sorts of rosters, dockets and inventories. I assure you, it’s all very discreetly done.”

  “Let’s go to a motel,” I said. “We can get a cab to take us.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “I don’t think they care for men taking women up to their room at the hotel. They’re pretty, you know, stodgy.”

  “We’ll unstodge them.”

  Sullivan spent close to an hour in the bath. I sat looking at the partly open bathroom door, trying to think of nothing. Then I stood in the doorway. She lifted one leg out of the water, as I knew she would, and moved her hands along her calf and looked back at me over her shoulder. A word arrived then from the eye of the deacon Yost. Abomination. I went back to the bed and sat down. She had looked at me to see if I was pleased. I sat waiting. Then I turned on the lamp by the armchair and switched off the overhead light. She got out of the tub. I went in quickly and watched her dry off with a large white monogrammed towel. Then I moved closer and moved my hands over the towel over her body slowly. We said nothing. I was following her toward the bed, following a sense of unimaginable pleasure, knowing this was old Yankee guilt, salt and peter. The walls were black and white and she was at the bed. Abomination.

  She was covered now, even her breasts, and lying rigid, a message that this was the end of a stanza, that now she would wait for the turn of my turn. How much she knew about that moment, and taught me, in her absurd concealment; that the true and best lewdness, that is to say the ugliest, is nothing more than modesty so fanatic it cannot bear to move for fear it might touch itself. I undressed standing by the bed as I had done that night in Maine, darkness then, wondering whether she could see me, lewd virgin Maine, a different kind of room.

  She watched me standing above her and I tried to think of nothing. She was absolutely still, watching me, not a grass-blade of motion, opening new rooms by the systematic locking of doors. Knowing this, she did not reach out nor move toward nor away from me when I lay down on the bed. I stretched out on top of the sheets. I have always been proud of my body.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I don’t know yet. Let’s just stay like this for a moment. Do you remember the night we spent in Maine in that old house? You told me a bedtime story.”

  “Don’t be afraid, David.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You were in terror back there.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You mustn’t be afraid. I’ll help you. I’ll do anything you want me to do.”

  “First, before anything else, I want you to tell me a story. Like in Maine. Like the story you told that night before I went to sleep.”

  (So ready, so lewd and willing was Sullivan, so skilled the artist immersed in her craft that she did not even pause at this request, much less break into waves of saving laughter.)

  “And a deep sleep it was,” she said.

  “A story. A bedtime story.”

  “I have just the thing. It’s about an evil old uncle of mine and the incredible experience we shared in a small boat on a fog-shrouded day in Somes Sound.”

  “Are you going to make it up?”

  “It’s real,” she said. “You made me think of it when you mentioned Maine.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “I had a hated and feared and bloody Ulsterman of an uncle,” Sullivan said. “At the age of eighteen he left Dublin for Belfast, renouncing church, state, family and the adulterous shade of Parnell. My father’s brother he was, the blackest of ex-Catholics, a blasphemer of the militant and dour type, not at all merry and joshing and ribald like the likes of my dead dad. Years later he came to this country and settled eventually in Maine, in a small town not far from Bar Harbor. And I went to visit him once, seeking to redress an old family grievance. It was a quiet simple town, a fit and proper place for Uncle Malcolm. He came to the door and I had almost forgotten how wild and ominous a man he looked—bald, firm, compact, real as a keg of stout. His eyes were dark, two pilot lights burning, and he looked at me as though I were the Pope’s most favored concubine. He hated Catholics. He hated my father like plague, like incense. Brothers they were, stem and stern, Shem and Shaun, tight Dublin and tighter Belfast. In my letter I had given no hint of the purpose of my visit. We sat on the porch. It was a moonlit night. Statues of patriots stood on the green. No barding lads or songsters rolled out of the pubs and not a dark hop of Guinness in sight. There were no pubs; there were statues. I sculpt, as you know, and th
ose statues, David, chilled me. Such Christianity. Such Christlessness. They looked like buggered schoolmasters pretending it was only the corner of a desk behind them. There is some grace to war; certainly there was to our revolution. But it would take a blind man with very stubby fingers to think some grace into those stones. Nothing demonic, no swirl of tunic, no hunt, no bad dreams, no courage. Upright, upstanding and up the ass. (Lord forgive me.) Christianity anyway. The ages of Omdurman and Chillianwalla. Perversion of Christ. Infant of Prague on the plastic dashboard blessing the box of Kleenex over the back seat. Priests with stale breath clamoring after my soul in the stark black wilderness of a confessional, pursuing the curve of regenerative grace with their sleepy fingers. Uncle Malcolm and I were sitting on rockers. We were rocking in fact in step. He did not ask why I had come. He merely looked out at the statues in the dim light as if thinking that patriotic stone brings nothing to our grasp of history unless it rests beneath language; to be silent in the stone’s silence is the beginning of a union with the past. But maybe he was thinking only of his boat. Because that’s what he mentioned next. He owned a sloop, he said, a Hinckley sou-wester, and she was moored in a cove around the bend from Bar Harbor, which meant only twenty minutes by car from that very porch.”

  “This is getting boring,” I said.

  “You must permit me at least a fraction of the self-indulgence you reserve for your own tired ends. Not that I mean to sound harsh. But I’ve cooperated with you up to now and I’m willing to continue to whatever point you choose to take us. And you’ve asked for a bedtime story.”