American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  “Honey,” GA said, “you’ve got balls like a horse.”

  “Brains, too.” And Carlyle issued forth a Godawful guffaw and smacked the table, bouncing cards in the air.

  Well, fuck a movie company and fuck a movie, he thought, but he had to stand by his word and by himself, never mind anybody else. If he was less a man, he’d be sending lawyers scooting over to Paragon, working a deal, but maybe he was right or maybe he could beat them, and two maybes like that were a betting proposition. So the lawyer bills would stay down, his blood pressure up, and damned if Hollywood wasn’t just an old whore’s smile.

  18

  What’s really independent? Even in the land of the free. The point is, everything connects into everything else. You can’t eat a string bean that you haven’t intersected with a stadium full of people who got it up out of the ground and onto your plate. The coins in your pocket carry fingerprints from twenty cities. And everybody owns something that was once owned by a dead person. And so forth.

  It’s fair to say that Sam T. Jones, a six-time loser in various political campaigns (probably the California record), died of independence. He left three children, two brothers, four cousins and a wife named Charlotte. Sam Jones fell headlong into San Francisco Bay, pushed there by his own two feet. He spiraled down a vastly greater perpendicular than he imagined, a mere 250 feet, but it took 45 years. Living them the first time was rough and he had hardly paid attention. Now he had to linger over the details. In the darkness Sam Jones was only a blur, but in Sam Jones there was no blur and he wished he had stayed in the car. Raping a woman so she would have to marry him, from shame. A partner he had cheated out of a linoleum business. The obnoxious part of this sentimental journey was that he felt the wife’s emotions, experienced the partner’s loss. If only he could fly on the wings of an angel back to the ledge, back home. There was nothing now more urgent than forgiveness. The only hope was a smooth entry into the waters of the bay. The angle was not right. His spine snapped in three places and the body his wife came to identify was filled with blood.

  Her face was soft, long suffering, the dignity of a Saharan culture accustomed to drought. Money wouldn’t be a problem. Yes, the children, she was sorry for them. They should have a father, any father, even Sam Jones. She was crying, not sure what for. The release probably, from being the wife of Sam Jones, from the past twenty-three years. She was a very sweet person and consequently a near-alcoholic during most of that time.

  Mrs. Sam Jones made a decision that she would set herself up in business, as soon as seemly, as a real estate agent. She liked people. She would sell them houses they would like.

  She soon had the pleasure of showing a house to an almost middle-aged man and an older woman. It was not clear whether they were married. They were an odd and unattractive couple. She preferred not to wonder why. This couple was Roger Freeman and Mrs. Adele Morris.

  The house was small but well crafted, full of luxuries and thus a find if there were no children. The man and woman went thoroughly over the rooms, chatting, the woman glowering.

  The man took the woman out to the car but came back. “I’d like you to call me Roger,” he said, smiling easily.

  “Very well, Roger.”

  “My sister,” he said with a finger toward the car. “I’d be so pleased if we could have dinner together, Charlotte. Settle the details on the house. Enjoy some good wine.”

  Mrs. Sam Jones looked into Roger’s eyes and felt an instinctive distrust. Her intellect, however, was gingerly preparing a brief for the defendant. Tall, clean, well mannered, groomed, dressed. Evidently a competent and efficient person. A twinkle in his dark eyes. And, of course, there was real estate business to complete.

  At dinner Roger was if possible more charming. He conveyed a diffidence that was reassuring. Mrs. Sam Jones did not care for aggressive men, not in the beginning anyway. Roger knew the secret of saying in a dozen ways, I love you, without seeming to come near the subject.

  Roger lied that their father had died recently, after a long illness, and that he and his sister had both become involved in the sorrow of the last months. They had not previously been close but the father’s illness changed that. As they were both unattached, they thought they would share a house for a year or two. And Roger said that the father’s illness and sad death had opened his eyes to his own mortality and awakened him to higher, more humanitarian feelings. “We are all of us dependent on one another,” Roger said, intently, as he looked earnestly into the softening eyes of Mrs. Sam Jones.

  Roger Freeman took Mrs. Sam Jones home early, but called a week later and said how much he had enjoyed her company and he knew of such a delightful French restaurant he was sure she would enjoy sharing with him.

  Roger knew with women, patience and pussy go hand in hand. A month later he was holding her hand and two months later kissing her fervently good night. He was not sure why he wanted Mrs. Sam Jones. But he wanted her. Roger liked independent women. There was more challenge, more to them. Conning them was like conning a man, and somehow more an accomplishment.

  Roger was only in stride when with women. But of that group he did pick the toughest. To men he had hardly two words to say. It was also a fact, men generally disliked him.

  Roger’s current business, financed mostly by the woman he lived with, was mail order. Exotic gifts for the discriminating person, said the catalog. He thought he might welcome expansion into real estate, or maybe he and Mrs. Sam Jones could branch into insurance. Roger sometimes dreamed of being a stock broker, not with a common house like Merrill Lynch but some more stuffy house. The first step was to enthrall Mrs. Sam Jones. The very first step was to find her key. It was a matter of talking so fast she forgot to consult her soul.

  There was one little problem. Roger explained that his sister was old-fashioned and although he could correctly do as he pleased, he preferred not to offend her too dreadfully by staying out over night, unless he had concocted a proper story to the effect that he was out of town on such and such business. Mrs. Sam Jones appreciated his thoughtfulness. One solution was to rendezvous in the late afternoon for drinks and dinner and, finally, dilly-dalliance.

  Roger had a curious relationship with the physical side of things. He paid women the supreme compliment of being more interested in their minds than their bodies. It was, in fact, the minds he liked to fuck. How long after all can a man over forty go on fucking a body? Whereas, isn’t it obvious, you can fuck a mind twenty-four hours a day.

  Mrs. Sam Jones began to have a hollow look about the eyes, which some people sophisticatedly interpreted as indicating too much sex. They were close.

  19

  The highway, though straight, rose and fell so that the sun set three times. As they came up a rise, the red ball levitated before them, the murky red of dying empire but still huge and imperious and not to be trifled with. As they descended the sun set again. The light finally drained out of the day like wine tipped from a glass. Cars became shapeless, telephone poles disappeared, land receded. Only the hasty racing stripes inscribed by headlights broke through the darkening atmosphere. The weight seemed to come down on them from the top of the planet’s ozone.

  The undulating road made the driver think of the countryside around Rome, then of waves on Lake Michigan. He was tired and his mind wandered dreamily. Every half mile he shook his head violently.

  Then the first stars, immensely small points, in fact immensely vast, some of them whole galaxies so remote they appear as one small point.

  Harry Benton, slumped against the right door, didn’t know one star from another. He had names for few things, none of them stars. His mind was like the interior structure of a ship—bulkheads and watertight compartments separated by massive doors all navy gray and heavy metal. Leaving one compartment, the door clanging shut, he moved on to another small, manageable world. Think of the comfort of lead-walled thoughts, a center of gravity an inch off the floor so that nothing could be overturned. And everywhere the
safety of knowing that bullets would not penetrate, that human strength was futile.

  Benton changed his mind like a destroyer coming about in the water: a long painful turn but when he had come about, all his guns were pointing in the new direction and firing.

  The windows were down, because Benton liked them that way. Cool night air screamed through the car at 120 KPH. Benton’s thin hair flapped on his forehead like a dying bird. He shuddered awake, sat up, watched the highway sliding under them.

  “Stop when you can,” he said.

  The driver knew it would be fifteen miles. He put his arm outside the window and pressed his hand against the side of the car. The air pushed cool on his hand like thin water.

  Benton moved into the compartment where his wife was. He thought he would like to see her in a fancy nightgown, then bang her good. By the time he reached home, he would be too tired.

  Benton moved into the compartment where the day’s work was. He thought of all the pissant people he had to command. The kids weren’t tough—deadly maybe, but not tough. He could never find enough muscle. He told a colleague, “You just can’t find enough good help these days,” the closest Benton came in ten years to a joke.

  He moved into the compartment where his son was. Goddamned boy believed in TV, believed in movies, newspapers, radio, magazines, advertising, books. Believed in everything but the way life was. Benton knew the way life was and knew the boy probably never would. He would have to take care of the boy. Benton had the problem of all self-made men: he had unmade his son and now didn’t know what to make of him.

  The long sustained whir of the car piercing the night grated on him, even though he didn’t know he had heard it. Too much like the sound of time rushing by.

  “Come on, Bobbie, I need a piss.”

  They stopped at a large Howard Johnsons, with rows of gas pumps in front. On the way back from the bathroom, Benton told the waitress, “Put two apple pies in a bag, two milks. You bored, you can come too.”

  When he leaned on the counter, Benton spread his arms out to the side and took up three places. He was a large slack man, nothing to make a nude statue of, but powerful looking in clothes. He had a vacant dyspeptic look and seemed to be banking his smiles for another day. He rarely blinked. The eyes were gun-metal gray. In his features was the memory of reptiles, saurian similarities that turned out almost handsome.

  In the parking lot beside the car Benton stretched his fists up to heaven and said, “Shit.”

  In a minute they were back on the highway, hoping to be home by midnight. They tunneled deeper into the night.

  Benton moved into the compartment where Mac Samson had been. Benton wondered how he had been wrong about Samson. Strengths and weaknesses Benton was a pro at; he knew when your nose would start to run. Visions he wasn’t good at, living in some small metal compartment his whole life and prospering not by planning ahead but by annexing any compartment handy and insufficiently defended. As far as Benton had been able to figure, Samson was a guy with big plans, a phrase Benton used contemptuously for visions. It troubled Benton, how a guy with so much going for him could muck up the works by getting big plans in his head. Samson could be lying up in bed with his not-bad-looking wife. Instead he had run up a big bill with the carpet cleaners.

  He made me do it, Benton thought, serene in his justice.

  They reached a larger cluster of signs, his cut-off.

  Benton stared past the glare of the headlights, seeing the night when he had met Samson, dressed like a kingpin, pushy. Benton had sat with a knotted-up chin and turned-down mouth that seemed to challenge, Show me, motherfucker, and Samson flashed a few veronicas that seemed to retort, I don’t have to show you anything, motherfucker. All right, they had found a compartment for smartass Mac Samson. Benton just couldn’t get it straight why Samson wouldn’t stay there.

  A guy wasting all that talent, Benton couldn’t understand a guy like that.

  They reached the last three miles of road, a straight tape of asphalt between white fences. The car roared through the silence.

  The headlights set afire the night.

  PART II

  Life had been so much more fun

  when she hadn’t known

  the first thing about it.

  20

  Half the trick of getting through in one piece is to ask for help, scream for help. But suppose someone won’t. Suppose someone is stubborn that way and wants to go it alone. Suppose someone wants to stand off against the universe and say I’m here, you’re there, and I can handle this by myself. Well, supposing all that, you just fall and fall and fall. You may put on something of a show for some time. But it’s just flashy falling, if maybe a noble human achievement.

  Raphael Higgins, being smarter than 99% of us, knew all of the above, knew each chapter, verse and worse, and went right on falling, falling so prettily he made women love him and men wince, made fireworks feel like failures.

  It was the only question he could not answer, why knowing all this he wanted to go on falling. You might as well ask a loser in Las Vegas why he’s there, Higgins thought. Ask a woman who weighs 250 pounds, why? Perhaps he possessed a gypsy gene that said freedom is all. Perhaps he hated his father and could, therefore, love nobody else. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps shit, was what Higgins said to too much talk when he was busy with the actual work of falling.

  The fact is, Higgins thought, there’s just no way of knowing why anybody does anything, me especially.

  Higgins sat at a sidewalk table, with Lawrence’s wife Mary. They talked the smallest kind of talk and eyed one another with the largest kind of suspicions. Mary’s chief passion was mahjong. Once called cuddly, she was now called plump. Her hair was tinted an arresting mix of steel blues and silvery grays. She wore glasses with rhinestones on the rims. Her nose was fleshy. She loved her husband desperately but with a fatalistic despair, that turns out to be justified.

  “At least I’m not spending money shopping,” she said.

  “That’s something.”

  “Lawrence said you were in Europe.”

  “Only a few days.”

  “How is it?”

  “Like here.”

  “No, really.”

  Higgins shrugged. “The women wear dresses. Kids go to school.”

  “And the men?”

  “The same assholes everywhere.”

  “What’s your favorite city?”

  “You’ve seen one,” Higgins said.

  “Come on.”

  “Everybody says Paris is beautiful. I guess they’re right. Sometimes I get the urge for it. Usually I forget about it.”

  Mary looked at her watch. “I don’t know where Lawrence can be.”

  Higgins shrugged.

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Five years.”

  “He doesn’t tell me much about his work.”

  Higgins shrugged. He thought if this conversation went on much longer he would start heaving plates and glasses into the street.

  “Were you in the Army? I thought Lawrence said that.”

  “Not really.”

  Mary Georges, with ample figure and distracted expression, was prematurely matronly. Better dressed, a few hours in a beauty parlor, she could have served on any Republican Committee. Life was interesting for her because she never focused cleanly on anything and enjoyed the impression of constant change. Even the street near them was a kaleidoscope of people, cars, shapes, colors. She lived, Higgins decided, in the jumble of inferior impressionist paintings sold in Montmartre, Paris. With power or money, Mary would be dangerous. She would execute decisions in a hurly-burly of misimpressions. She would hire people she had meant to dislike and vice versa, rent hotels she thought were in other cities. She would launch vast initiatives only to find they were the wrong ones. Fortunately she had neither power nor money and had settled contentedly for the steady battle of keeping a husband. That he was eminently worth keeping she had no doubt.
r />   “Lawrence seems very busy recently,” she said.

  Higgins shrugged.

  She realized with a start that Higgins had dumped his fruit on the table and was sorting it with a knife. He signaled a waitress over. Now he was pushing the pieces off the table one at a time. “I’m looking for the fresh fruit,” Higgins muttered. “The menu says fresh fruit cup.”

  The waitress took a very deep breath. “Sometimes it is.”

  “But not today.”

  “Not today.”

  “Well,” he shouted at her, “don’t you think the Goddamned menu should fucking well tell the truth?”

  She nodded that it should. A half-dozen people stared furtively at Higgins, who lounged back in his chair carefully edging the last of the fruit off the table. The waitress finally left.

  “You have to keep people on their toes,” he said to Mary.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I guess.”

  Higgins shrugged. “Goddamned canned fruit. That girl should have called the manager over. I’d tell him what he could do with his canned fruit. I’d do it for him.”

  Higgins was becoming more restless by the second. He would take any excuse for action, but his posture was indolent, slumped down in his seat as if he might fall asleep. If only somebody would say Grab your guns, moving out.

  Lawrence Georges arrived twenty minutes late. He wore a ratty corduroy coat and looked more like a professor without tenure than what he was. “I went to see some people. Went good. Heh, why doesn’t somebody clean up this table?”

  “Why doesn’t somebody?” Higgins agreed.

  Lawrence waved for the waitress. “Come on, can’t we get this place cleaned up? I’m going to eat.”

  Higgins shot the waitress a big wink. When he had her eye, Higgins said, “You like wild men?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’d never forget me.”