American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  Donaldson hadn’t hit thirty yet but like many young bankers he had been fifty for a long time.

  At his bank, Empire Savings, Donaldson’s mind made the fertile crescent look dried up. He sat in his leather chair with a large desk before him, important papers stacked here and there, his clothes fairly gleaming with prosperity and authority. With his earnest, fleshy face that would not dream of taking one penny from your account, with the gray-brown and lovable eyes of a beagle. And he dreamed of assaulting his assistants, verbally, visually and otherwise. He wanted to deliciously disrobe tellers, roasting them on the slow rotisserie of his lust, and violate them all in correct accounting sequence.

  Sometimes minutes would elapse unfelt while he struggled with a phantom buttock, it like a white cloud engulfing him. Donaldson leaning back in his chair as if to escape the buttock, large now, more palpable, demanding his inspection, his reverent tactile attention. Donaldson shaking his head as if he could dispel with such a small gesture the ample ass so hungry for him. Wide awake, he felt as if he were dreaming with the Devil. Then he would assert his will and suffer knowing that people must have seen him reeling backward before this pale flesh of his own creation.

  Raphael Higgins, on his way to a teller, saw that face for four seconds. Higgins, who knew how to read faces, thought: now there’s a man with a story.

  If Donaldson were someone else, he would advise: ask for help. But as he was in fact himself and his thoughts unmentionable, he was too ashamed.

  Each day was a success because he committed no offense before God and man. In an age of casual desire, Donaldson was the last voluptuary.

  The irony was that, allowed to run wild according to his urges, he would be a most formidable and lusty machine. But he was so crushed by his coiled anguish that three young women believed him congenitally incapable.

  Toward the end of a run, he passed two women. The sight of their hindward silhouettes had blurred his brain. Drawing abreast of them, he wanted to curl his body sideways and kiss the arm from the elbow to the shoulder and inside the armhole of the dress. The second woman turned and saw his feverish eyes. She thought it was exhaustion and smiled, neighborly. He blinked away, reddening.

  When he returned to his apartment, he settled tired and sore in a hot tub and masturbated with shaving cream. And again. Finally he felt almost human. He prayed, last acolyte to absurd desire.

  The next day, Phillip Donaldson was with auditors. All of them men and no particular threat. Then a meeting with a new v-p, first name Lynn. Nobody had mentioned that Lynn was a woman. He walked into the office and his arm came up and his hand came out and then he stumbled in midpassage. “Ohhh,” he said. He went away from the meeting sure he would inevitably encounter the v-p in a quiet vault after hours and he would assault her thin body with rolls of silver dollars and on the new mint of his desire, taste the red and black elegance of her mind.

  In the evening he felt more out of control than in past weeks, the v-p on his mind. Walking home, he didn’t see left or right. Muggers look for people so self-absorbed. The young boy-man who followed Donaldson to the brownstone had waited the afternoon for that look. But when Donaldson, key in door, turned arond, the boy-man had the first small sensation that looks were deceiving; if only the mugger had discovered Donaldson coming back from his run. Donaldson just seemed to explode in front of the boy-man’s eyes. It was awesome. Donaldson seemed to grow three or four inches in height and his body swelled and his eyes became enlarged in his round face. His foot came up and the two small hands came forward at the same time. The boy-man started to parry and cut, but the foot was by then well up the inseam. The breath popped out of the boy-man. Then came the angry hands on his shirt sleeves, and Donaldson leaned the mugger sideways. They both hit shoulders against the door, stopping the fall. Donaldson steadied himself, kneed the mugger again and up came the left hand smacking the mugger’s ear. Donaldson held onto the ear and with that handle began arching the mugger’s head back and forth sideways against the glass of the door. All this ten seconds the knife was held between them, inactive but there. Now it fell. Donaldson continued to explode. It appeared now that he would not stop until he had hurt each limb and part of the boy-man who was slipping down now, only on his feet at all because Donaldson held him. The mugger was half-conscious and Donaldson kicked him on the way down and while he was quiet on the floor. When two people came to stop Donaldson, he attacked them alike. They retreated. The police who came had to handcuff Donaldson. Smoke was still coming out of him. The next day the New York Post reported, Brave Banker Foils Mugger, now in critical condition in Bellevue.

  In the afternoon Phillip Donaldson asked for a leave of absence, mentioning illness in the family. He saw now that if he was to outrun himself, he would have to run faster.

  16

  Her husband’s neglect was a kind of torture. She thought she would prefer straightforward abuse, a kind of love. What she liked most about her job was that for eight hours she could put aside thinking about her marriage, which more and more looked like fifteen years down the john.

  Susanne Sanborn had a preoccupation with blood, being a nurse. Or she was a nurse because of the preoccupation. She liked the former view. She liked to forget the age of ten when a severe cut seemed to her more lovely than frightening, or fourteen when the blood that tormented her friends excited in her ancient passions, possibly religious. She perceived people as their circulatory systems, the hodge-podge of red and white cells tumbling just out of sight in a self-contained universe of tubes. All day she was injecting chemicals into these tubes, taking poisons out of these tubes, manipulating the contents of these tubes.

  Susanne Sanborn examined herself in a mirror, saw the drying up, thought of her withered capillaries refusing to come to the surface.

  Susanne had few theories, living intimately instead with a select coterie of physical details. One theory she did have was that she had lived before, that her existence had been bloody in some way, as with a butcher or a surgeon, or with soldiers, or a murderer.

  The unshakeable impression was of redness, of liquid loose and running. The precise impression was of having been blood itself but such theories of reincarnation as she knew did not allow for that, so she assumed a human existence, man or woman, any country, somehow bloody. It was a struggle, like trying to remember a dream that has faded. How to find the larger picture? One faint actor in that earlier life was the eye or vision itself, as though the bloody spectacle and the seeing of it were indissoluble. Also there was leather, which could be an animal skin or as well clothing. She leaned toward a rough coat, possibly as a peaseant would wear, possibly more finely fashioned, as a wealthy man might have worn in Europe a hundred or two hundred years past.

  What stumped Susanne most of all was the point of such partial memories, the point of such earlier existences. To have them and not to know you had them seemed wasteful.

  Still, Susanne Sanborn believed that if she could take a deep breath and hold her life up to the light in just the right angle, she would see the past whole. And that the past would immediately connect somehow to the present. And in a small explosion inside her mind, she would understand why she had come to marry Charlie, a man who neglected her as he did. She was frightened, that in the earlier life she had been a murderer. And might be again.

  The man waiting, Bradford Morris, reminded her of her husband. He was compact emotionally but distracted. She watched his eyes move in a careful way about the hall, up and down the people passing, as methodically as dutiful bees from flower to flower.

  A doctor arrived and the two men talked. She watched them. The doctor was dressed in white, the other, she guessed, lived in white. She imagined the sterile environment of his intellect, admitting only mental cases and medical curiosities.

  Susanne thought of the white starchiness of her own uniform and how it hid her perversely silky underwear, all maroon, and as well her silky body that seemed to be all pulse. In her thoughts she had little
that was passionate. Her thoughts were practical, equidistant, a urine sample as worthy of attention as any other object in the universe. But her body went its own way, more so she thought as she got older: bleeding, rutting, throbbing, hungering, swelling, germinating, replenishing, all as separate from her as the drops of milk filling her breasts as a young girl. This body, as she called it without judgment or even much interest, was a sort of fellow passenger, a secret agent behind white and starch.

  The joke, if she wanted to see one, was that her face did not seem to belong to her body. There was smooth skin and a down, and responsible, hard-working features and a nose that neither advanced nor retreated nor tried any new ways of being a nose. But there was no pulse, no hungering, no clues.

  When the man finished his conversation with the doctor, he turned to leave, then paused, seeing the primordial remoteness of the nurse’s face. He abruptly focused on her.

  “My wife’s dying of cancer,” Morris said quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What would you think if your wife were dying of cancer?”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “All right, your husband?”

  “What would I think?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I would think he deserved it.” She had surprised herself. The man’s oddly level and conspiratorial tone had done it.

  The man smiled thinly. He looked more closely at her. He waited. He was handsome but in a disconcerting way.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t have said that,” the nurse went on.

  “I admire your detachment.”

  “I’m not detached.”

  “I meant objective. He has made you angry and you can acknowledge that. Isn’t that healthy?”

  She didn’t speak. They stood less than two feet apart. Morris was stunned by the opacity of her face.

  Something was rising up inside her mind. The leather was shoes. No, the leather was a bag, in which money was kept. Oh, God, it was her blood. She had been murdered. It was clear now, a victim then, she hadn’t wanted to see the connection, that she was a victim now. Her face darkened. Her body, with its tireless flowing, seemed so wise. She the person, the woman named Susanne Sanborn, was bottomlessly stupid. The eye. She had been stabbed in the eye. That last sight was of the knife on its way. The last act had not been a large physical one. The last act in that lost life was simply of seeing and then of blood.

  This realization seemed extraordinarily profound to Susanne, and entirely pointless. Confusion was her only sin.

  “I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing,” the man said.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I thought I upset you.”

  “No, I just remembered something. What did you ask me?”

  “What would you think if your husband were dying of cancer?”

  “I’ve told you. Now tell me what you think.”

  “Well, she’s very brave about it. And in contrast I’m a coward. A disgusting coward, I would have to say.”

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?” Susanne asked.

  “Probably not.”

  “It really doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

  “That and the rest.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “Everything!”

  “Well, if your wife weren’t dying of cancer, I wouldn’t have remembered that … what I forgot.”

  “I’m not sure that’ll comfort her. Or me either.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “Never mind. You seem a most interesting woman. Perhaps later, after a suitable period of mourning, we could talk more. Lunch or something.”

  “I’ll have to talk to my husband first.”

  Morris looked surprised.

  “Oh,” she smiled. “I mean we have to talk about what he’s going to do.”

  “I hope … for my sake.”

  The nurse shrugged vaguely. “There’s always a chance of remission.”

  “The doctor is sure. Six months.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s an authority.”

  “How would you feel if you had six months?”

  “But I have children. I can’t die.”

  “But you personally?”

  “I’d be all right.”

  “All right?”

  “Some people have much less.”

  “But they don’t usually know it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I want to die in my sleep,” said Bradford Morris, entirely sure about at least this one thing.

  17

  Desist stop you must stop and desist stop

  Not exactly a friendly or encouraging telegram. Well, fuck them. This only proved their weakness. There was still much room to maneuver. This trip to the Coast would take care of part of the problem. Some people would want a bigger piece. But stopping was out.

  The small sports car maneuvered along the curving highway south from Santa Barbara airport. Clouds like white boulders rolled down the sky. It was late in the afternoon for such a trip. It was late, period.

  GeorgiaAnne sat erectly, a movie star pose, and glanced seductively at the view. Her dress was up to her lap. Carlyle liked to have an eye on thigh. Anything nylon one millimeter out of sight. The very thought kept him lively. Carlyle wore a white and sporty hat, with a brim, and the hat jutted forward cleaving the blue air.

  “Goddamn, honeypot, I’m just about to run off this here road, your legs so pretty.”

  “Thank you, Randol.”

  “Maybe it’d be fun to run off. Find a haystack. And then STACK.” Carlyle hammered his clumsy workman’s hands on the chrome steering wheel.

  GA leaned big breasts over against Carlyle’s shoulder and dribbled words into his ear. “Maybe, Randol, sweetie, I could just rub your leg and kiss your sweet old ear and see what comes up.”

  “Weeellll.”

  It was implicit in the deal that GA should be always eager. In return she would be the envy of half the ladies of Texas. What separated GA from her predecessors and the competition was that she liked the part, was born to play it, having no other talent, skill or inclination so hugely pronounced. She might yet kill Carlyle but at least it would be from kindness.

  They reached signs of city life, billboards, neon, stop lights on either side of the expressway, and endless two-bedroom estates. The problem was with Paragon, claiming his movie infringed on their rights. Los Angeles is the byzantine city and Carlyle knew he had to adjust his brain waves if he was to beat this one. It was Texas to forge ahead on a picture that was stepping close to another’s copyright. But it was Hollywood to fight back the way they did, with loopy law suits, Rona Barrett rumors, heat on his actors, threats of union trouble. Carlyle thought he might win anything where he could see the other men but out here you might never see them.

  In the parking lot of his studio, Lone Star Productions, Carlyle thought he didn’t feel so lively just that second. Better maybe to write off this here company and count your tax gains. How could a grown man fight people in leisure suits and gold chains, Carlyle wanted to know.

  Carlyle was feeling down that his baby daughter Daphne was traveling out East, where she would surely learn non-Texas ways.

  “GA, sweetie,” said Carlyle, “you better stop that.”

  And on the tarmac Carlyle straightened his backbone, pumped piss and vinegar into all his joints and swept in to do battle.

  The trick here was the old horse dodge. You could sell sagging backs and broken shins with the right misdirection. Dazzle with malarkey, was how Carlyle had heard it put best.

  Feeling tired and tossing off lines from memory, Carlyle did his stylish second best. His heart was not in Hollywood. Having to be there was garbage heaped on his prairie soul. One man in the group rawed his wound. Looking into Carlyle’s blazing baby blues, he said, “Hollywood’s a tight town, Mr. Carlyle, the current might be going against us on this.”

  Carlyle said, “They’ve got something on pape
r. We’ve got something on film. And you’re going to need something in the way of a job. Now git.”

  That effort wore Carlyle out. He spent the rest of the evening catching his breath. On the top floor of the tallest hotel, Carlyle had a little terrace where he could stand wearing nothing but a glass of bourbon.

  “Piss on Hollywood,” he said, doing just that.

  Then in a living room large enough for a third party presidential convention, Carlyle and GA set down to some serious gin rummy, at ten dollars a point. Carlyle struggled three thousand down in the first hour.

  “What do you think of this here decor?” Carlyle asked.

  “Yankee fairy.”

  “Yeah, kind of makes your gonads shrivel up, don’t it?”

  “Well, honey lamb, this here is one pretty little third card gin.”

  “You as crooked as that Higgins fellow.”

  “What you got, honey?”

  “Oh, nothing much, pussy queen, maybe two kings, two queens, a ten, two eights, a seven, and two fives. Shucks, woman, can’t be more than three million points. Goddamn, what has got into you?” He gave her a good squinty smile. “I know I’d like to.”

  “Play cards, sucker.”

  Lord, Carlyle liked it when she got tough with him.

  They were both naked, not counting GA’s beauty mark on the left breast. When she felt the heat, she sprinkled Creme de Menthe on her shoulders and Carlyle tongued her off.

  “You’re the white lightning girl,” Carlyle exclaimed, “every square inch.”

  Carlyle hugged his woman, taking the juice right out of her into his unquenchable desert.

  GA went to fetch her inlaid guitar, with hips like her own, and fingered Carlyle a melody that made him forget what year he was in. He liked to picture up his first money hole, that blew out for twenty-five minutes, and everybody was black and gooey.