American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  Morris said, “I can’t take all this in.” He stared into her candid eyes. “Well, how do you feel?”

  “I can die like a trooper,” she said.

  “Really?” Morris was taken aback. In a crisis, it was his wife all the way.

  “The question is,” she said, “if I’ve only got a year, what do I want to do with it?” Her face was long, angular, by Modigliani.

  “Yes, of course.” He waited. “Well, what?”

  “If it was just to please myself, I’d have a baby.”

  “Dear God.”

  She came over to him and unbuttoned his shirt. “Maybe we should travel, or do you think you can handle having a dying wife on your hands?”

  Morris thought they must both be thinking the same thing, that toward the end he would have to wait on her for a change.

  She went on undressing him. “You know, if you can’t, I’m going to run away.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll just disappear.”

  “You would do that?”

  “Why not? I’d travel by myself and do as I pleased second by second, as I’m doing now, until I found a very pleasant place to die.”

  Felicia was stroking his body from his chest to his thighs. She grasped his genitals with sober deliberation. She leaned over so that she could lick his nipples. Morris had an epiphany: by containing him, by describing his geography, by holding his hand, by being the man in the family, his wife made him possible; he was going to be dead without her.

  Felicia took him to bed and did with him whatever was amusing to her. She sat astride him and looked down at his eyes with quiet amusement and let her breasts hang in his face. “Suck them,” she said.

  Morris thought he would like to build a building in the shape of his wife towering above him. Her hands rested on the bed beside his ears. She formed that ancient Egyptian pyramidal shape but hollowed. There would be a long under-building, his body, and the soaring slope of her back and descent of her arms. Every room would have windows tilted skyward on one side and groundward on the other. Morris thought the demented wild west show client might jump for it. A prick was tricky. If you were abstract, you were like a thousand other buildings. If you were realistic, you were going to be laughed at. But this design could be executed boldly and let them see what they dared. The shapes were elegant sonatas to Morris.

  Felicia swayed over him, humming and murmuring.

  This Morris understood something about his mother. He was too grateful to his wife to feel resentment, but his mother, he no longer needed her, so he saved for her the resentment aroused by both women. The mathematics was simple. To keep love for his wife, he simply doubled his hate for the Queen Maggot. But he also hated his wife, hated needing her, hated that he was a child with her, hated that without her he was going to be a very lost child.

  Now she was dying on him. He hated her for that even as he loved her more now that he would lose her.

  “Move, Goddamnit,” his wife said.

  13

  Nothing dwindles so fast as love. Ditto happiness, fame, skill, money and whatever time you’ve got left. Basically, nothing’s all that secure. Here today, gone by late afternoon. Sometimes you get one hour service.

  A few minutes each day Raphael Higgins meditated on the possibility of happiness. He didn’t think it was possible.

  Higgins stood in the rain outside of Decatur and thought that life was all a floating crap game. Or a sinking crap game. Anyway, it was very wet. Silver puddles like slime on the street, a Main Street nobody would miss.

  The rain came down like long lead wires, aslant as though holding aloft some elaborate circus rigging from which an aerialist would soon fall. Higgins tapped ashes from a Te Amo and reflected on Sonia’s nooks and crannies. Daphne loomed up as a last impossible hope. It was the impossibility, more than the hope, that appealed to him. He had so far dreamed up eight tender encounters but could never cry Cut quickly enough, when off they went into the sunset, clothes afire, dragged by horses, armies in pursuits, plague out of control, cosmic banana peels.

  Maybe there would be a Goddamned war. Then he would feel more at home. The Near East looked hopeful. He was bullish on Africa. Eastern Europe might have an outside chance. If only the Chinese weren’t so cautious, they’d give those demented Russkies some Yellow Peril. Higgins had mapped out the most likely scenarios. Russia and America wound one another and China. A dozen small wars erupt. The Germans spontaneously reunite, knowing deep in their schizophrenic souls it was their duty to make Europe tidy and bloody.

  Ah, for bombs bursting in air, civilization tottering, dead people piling up in city streets. Higgins figured that he would survive longer than most. That would be satisfaction, guarding the last fox hole when the script ran out.

  He leaned back in a doorway, mist on his sunglasses. To one side he saw the menu of a coffee shop. He was hungry.

  He mused on Carlyle’s offer. He had examined it, like a scholar, from sixteen perspectives. He still did not understand. None of his perspectives included the possibility that Carlyle was simply lonely. God, having made heaven and earth and a million kinds of animals, was lonely still. So He made us for company. Never lonely himself even if always alone, Higgins understood neither God nor Carlyle. He understood the Welsh salmon that spends seven years finding the river of its birth, where it is usually caught one half-hour before consummation by a wealthy sportsman from Philadelphia. Higgins admired the dedication and ingenuity of the salmon. What were seven years when you had a magnificent quest in your heart? What was being eaten for dinner when you had been true?

  He had told Carlyle, “I don’t work for anybody. I work for myself.”

  Carlyle had said, “Weelll, we’ll be partners.”

  Higgins had said, “I’m always the boss.”

  Carlyle had said, “You’re not being reasonable, boy.”

  “Reasonable I’m not,” Higgins had said.

  Now daylight was dwindling, evening coming fast beneath a mile of gray clouds.

  This time it was diamonds. He would take them to New York, he had a contact there. Higgins examined his watch. Lawrence was late. There were interesting possibilities—he had been caught, he had confessed, already police were tightening their blockade. All unlikely. Higgins enjoyed making melodrama. How would he fight his way out? He would not. He would be aloof. What are you talking about? Making police crazy was its own reward.

  Lawrence Georges arrived in the departing day, nodded, his face as tired and flat and expressionless as a battered garbage can. They went into the coffee shop. They sat across from each other and ordered breakfast, fried eggs and bacon and English muffins. While they talked, Lawrence handed Higgins a package under the table.

  “I might need your help on something,” Lawrence said.

  “Sure. If I’m around.”

  “No rush.”

  “Big?”

  Lawrence nodded.

  “Say some more.”

  “I’m still thinking.”

  “And?”

  “You know anything about Harry Benton?”

  “Sure.”

  “What?”

  “He’s in the papers,” Higgins said impatiently. “Mexican pipeline, right? Docks. Unions. He’s in the Fortune 500.”

  “I meant anything personal.”

  “I can tell you what he has for lunch.”

  “What’s that?”

  Higgins smiled in a pained way, as though smiling were against his religion. “Two state senators sunnyside up, that’s what. And a side order of cops. I know a guy, knew him to say hello to, that Benton had planted in ten feet of Lake Michigan. Or so I heard.” Higgins looked perplexed. “Harry Benton? What the hell do you care?”

  “I’m not sure I do. I said I’m thinking.”

  “He do anything to you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Hey, waste my time some other time.”

  “Sorry.”

  “How’s the lady of the house?
”

  “Fifteen pounds overweight.”

  “I see your point.”

  “What you got?”

  “Nothing I’m all that excited about.”

  “Isn’t it a bitch?”

  They were quiet for a minute. Lawrence Georges said, “I always figured you for crazy but honest.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Am I close?”

  “B-plus.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not always anything.”

  “You mean, I think I can count on you, I might be wrong?”

  “Might be.”

  “Give me the bottom line.”

  “That’s my problem. Don’t have one.”

  “More crazy than honest?”

  “Yeah, probably so.”

  “You know, I always liked working with people. But I’m the only guy I can depend on. It’s a pattern, over the years.”

  “Maybe you should learn something.”

  “Shit. Would I be here?”

  Raphael Higgins laughed. He liked the other man. Respected him. Also, he knew the other man better than the other way around. Lawrence Georges wasn’t the kind of man who can know people. He was too much what he was.

  “You ever have the feeling time is running out?” Lawrence asked.

  “Yeah, but I don’t care.”

  Higgins flew to New York that night, made his connection, added eight thousand dollars to an account there at Empire Savings. His answering service said a Mr. Carlyle had called, saying he was passing through town. Said he would call again on the next sweep.

  14

  Next to you on the train, or on a plane, in line for a movie, next to you in a restaurant, next to you at a corner waiting for the light to change, there are always people next to you, and any one of them could move in a second from remote anonymity to a large and unignorable force in your life. Sometimes you are in a sporting mood, or lonely, and you wish somebody, anybody, would crash the barriers you have constructed so carefully about your terrain. But more often you are not feeling sporty at all. And you don’t want any surprises.

  When “Roy” Compton went into his den and his statue of a Greek girl was not there, he stood motionless for a minute. Shook his head, stepped backward, looked again, looked around to see if he was, in fact, in the den. The pedestal was there. There was nothing on top. He might as well have looked in the mirror and not seen his head on his shoulders.

  “You never know what’s going to happen next,” his wife said in a way that infuriated him. He hated surprises.

  They went methodically through the house and nothing was missing but the statue. Not only nothing else missing but nothing disturbed, nothing moved, nothing left that might be evidence. A real pro, the detective said.

  “It’s like a kidnapping,” Compton said. “Somebody comes in the night and takes away your child.”

  Compton was fiercely bored by Thelma his wife, almost as much so by his children and his vocation. He had turned for solace to art, arcane scholarship, antiques, afternoons in museums, airy musings on the artifacts of time. It was not precisely true to say that Compton collected art so much as to say that he lived inside of art. The beauty of an early Chinese vase was contemporaneous and contiguous with 18th century French landscapes, merely different rooms in a vast mansion. Compton had found it possible to spend the bulk of each day pacing the halls of this mansion.

  The empty pedestal yanked him back. Death by turpentine repeatedly inhaled would be too gentle, Compton thought, for the scoundrel who had come into his house and taken the Greek girl.

  Now, while pacing the halls, he couldn’t concentrate on the paintings and vases. He found himself making lists of names, all the people who knew that the statue was, in fact, on a pedestal in his den.

  His wife could see that Compton was likely to become as obsessive about the theft as he had been about the statue. Thus, doubly tedious.

  The amount of patience she had with her husband’s interests couldn’t cover a small pine tree in a late Cezanne.

  Thelma had married a pleasantly vacuous stock broker and he should have stayed that way. There was not one sentence in an hour of her husband’s conversation that disrupted her private thoughts. And she had known what would happen next. Her husband would become a sort of hurricane of boredom at every party they attended, talking in that fatuous way about the irreparable and unforgivable damage done.

  Mrs. Thelma Compton’s mind wasn’t exactly an original. If her husband had paid the least attention to her, she would have become merely an ordinary nag and shrew. His aloof smugness shielded him from this fate. Instead, she took to screwing plumbers and TV repairmen, not to mention meter readers, Fuller brush men, telephone installers, air conditioner mechanics, delivery men, Western Union personnel, carpenters, painters, insurance salesmen and one very surprised newspaper boy.

  And the more that her husband Roy talked on and on about that Greek statue, which was just crumbling clay in the first place, the more Thelma redoubled her seductive efforts. It was only fair, she reasoned.

  Thelma’s style was consummate, friendly, pleasant, calm, how are you, want some lemonade, a beer, take your time, I’m sorry I’m in this plain old robe but some people won’t let you off the phone, can you explain that to me, just a minute, my you’re certainly a good looking man, mmmmm, couldn’t resist that, go ahead, give me a proper kiss, why you’re quite a man, would you like to see more, what a nice chest, hurry up, take off your pants, I’m not doing everything, at which she would laugh because she damned nearly did do everything, and these guys were in and out on the street, wilting through the rest of the day, before they knew what had befallen them. The most difficult part, for them, was whether to say, thank you, and whether to mention a next time.

  When the Comptons married, they had seemed perfectly suited, the marriage most likely to succeed. Then they had found separate hobbies and perfectly diverged. He became a hound to culture and she became a slattern. What they continued to have in common was a selfless dedication to their pursuits.

  One set of Thelma’s grandparents were Latvian and she did have that sturdy, pleasant look that “Russian” brings to mind. She would have been at her best in a seige, or in scorching the earth before an invading army, maybe commanding a brigade in a last, futile resistance. Suffering and deprivation were nothing she feared. In the right time and place, Thelma Compton might have emerged a hero. But nobody needed any of her strengths, not just at the moment anyway.

  So she made things lively for men she encountered, preferably blue collar men, fellow soldiers, you might say. In fairness, Thelma did have a lot of life in her but it was aimless and far-flung, like fire smouldering in sawdust.

  One of Thelma’s toughest conquests was an insurance salesman named Floyd. He actually put up quite a fight. He said he didn’t want to. Actually, he said, he wanted to but he shouldn’t, couldn’t. It was a sin and he was faithful to his wife Bonnie. But Thelma wore down his defenses and swarmed over his ramparts.

  As long as Floyd continued to talk about low premiums and his company’s agreeable fine print, it did not seem so horrendous to him that he was entangled on a stair with a woman he hardly knew wearing hardly anything. Interrupted as he often was by having parts of the customer’s body in his mouth, it took over an hour to complete the spiel. He was exhausted, and as he departed on the run out the front door, the guilt came down on him like snake bite.

  Joe Floyd had always tried to be a good son, good husband, good salesman, good Kiwanian. He kept his temper under control because he wanted people to call him “a good guy” and “a straight arrow.”

  He wrestled with his remorse for two days. Then he told his wife, seeking forgiveness. She with her flawless form that he had seen only through a moral veil darkly.

  “I didn’t mean to, Bonnie. It was so stupid. I was crazy, she was crazy. I mean, I feel terrible.”

  So far so good. But Bonnie Floyd made the mistake of forgiving him too rap
idly. A man with that much guilt wants to scrape his knees on the stairs leading to the altar, and then be forgiven. Abruptly he had to contend with the possibility that she did not share his ominous morality. She was slow. Slow to catch the spin of his mind, the danger ahead, slow to cover herself, slow, slow, slow. When he said, “You haven’t done anything like that, have you,” the question seemed to Bonnie to demand the sort of honesty he had shown, and he would forgive her as she had forgiven him. So she told him about this one mistake, one night. “Tell me about it,” he said. She wanted full forgiveness, so she thought she must make a full disclosure. It was nothing, she lied, one night in a cabin, when you were at a convention.

  He became a changed man, Bonnie’s husband, on his feet, red-faced, talking about divorce, all because of a Greek girl who hadn’t even drawn a breath in 26 centuries, or at least because of her brothers and sisters in Roy Compton’s artful mansion.

  15

  Domineering other people wasn’t much. Himself was something else. People thought that when he ran and worked out, he was showing discipline. This was a deception. The physical exhaustion he achieved was merely one weapon against his chaotic and evil energies. He ran along a straight line so he didn’t stand in one spot and blow up. Phillip Donaldson, bank vice president, understood the need for flagellating the body; the body must be sacrificed to save the spirit, his spirit that was not soaring up to heaven but was a mangy black bird cowering in a small metal cage.

  Once, when he had felt the desire to touch a girl of eight he did not know, he had been ready to cut off his hand, as though the desire would go with the hand.

  Donaldson often ran along a grassy path on the edge of Central Park. He could see people playing baseball. Actually, he could see small morsels of color moving and rearranging themselves in a manner that his brain decided must be baseball. His t-shirt was wet over short articulate muscles. His gums ached. He resolved to push on another damned and glorious mile until he couldn’t stand up, until no evil thoughts clawed for his attention. Donaldson ascended toward emptyheadedness. He was becoming his fondest wish, to be merely an ingenious machine for moving a set of gym clothes.