American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  “I had psoriasis once. I’ll never forget that.”

  Lawrence, slow to anger, slow to laugh, began to smile slowly. “Goddamn Higgins,” he said.

  21

  Soft-spoken, the wind as it moved along the streets of San Francisco, speaking softly with the few people it liked, moving steadily toward the river and the high bridge, moving on through the prickly masts of ships, one all the way from Singapore.

  The wind spread the gray-brown whiskers of Captain Witters, who was tired of the sea and sick of the land. He stood at the fantail railing, eyeing the harbor and the traffic of ships. If you had asked him, the Captain would have smiled with fine big teeth and jolly eyes and told you that life was beautiful, the sea a lovely mistress, and to see the flying fishes play in Rangoon harbor made everything worthwhile. When a handsome man expresses handsome thoughts, you have to listen. But inside he would have curled up like a burning leaf, consumed by polite lies.

  Witters thought he would make a permanent break with the sea, move to the mountains maybe. Rain the only water there, and a few puddles, a small stream. The sea, after all, was so much more interesting in memory than in fact when the fact was a vastness unimaginable and the long weeks required to get from one side to the other.

  What annoyed Witters most was that by the time he had gotten a grip on things, life was pretty well behind him. He was fifty-two, looked forty-two, and felt shy of seventy. All the ports he had laid over in, all the cities and countries he had traveled through, all the women, too, ran together like indistinguishable swells and one dazzling maritime sunset after another. He felt like the sea itself, wide and empty. Really, he thought, a marine biologist knows more about the sea than I do, all those fish down there killing each other. I don’t even like to swim, he thought.

  Witters put one polished black shoe on a rail and leaned his forearms on a higher railing. The wind slid softly along the hull.

  Witters was waiting for an importer, Roger Freeman Enterprises, who wanted to check a consignment. When he came on board a half-hour late, he brought with him a dark-haired woman who combined in a curious way a soft shyness with steady eyes. Her posture was elegantly perfect. Freeman did not introduce her. He moved directly to business. Witters managed to look at the woman several times, over the man’s shoulders, behind his back, and he had the damnedest impression of experiencing love at first sight. Cynical and tired as he was, he laughed it away with fair accuracy as the impact a glass of water has to have on a thirsty man. Still, why shouldn’t he have a right to drink as much as the next man?

  The importer throughout spoke confidentially to the woman, in asides as though explaining something.

  Roger, in fact, wanted Mrs. Sam Jones to understand his business, wanted to make her feel that they were in business together. There was also the little matter of showing his command.

  The three of them went back up on deck. Roger took the woman to the rail and pointed out landmarks on the skyline. The Captain stood well behind them. He became becalmed studying the sea-like swells of the woman’s body. She wore a dark knit suit, a respectable deception, for no matter how you turned her, there were the rises and falls of the sea. But in so far as Witters could plumb his foolish emotions, her face was primary, a mix of all the qualities that Witters admired and in the correct proportions, gentleness with strength, reserve with frankness, simplicity with ornate perspectives.

  No longer thinking rationally, Witters had a powerful sense that he must leap or be lost. He joined the couple at the railing, placing himself beside the woman, and began to ramble about the glories of the sea.

  Roger was clearly annoyed. The woman simply listened.

  “By the way, Mr. Freeman, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your partner? Or should I say …”

  And Captain Witters stood with an expression as open as the sea. The words that came next might decide how he would navigate for years to come.

  “Wife,” Roger snapped. The woman seemed surprised and Roger said, “This is Charlotte Jones, my partner in business and in life.”

  “Ah, Miss Jones,” Witters said, gambling with the Miss, “pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand and took hers in both of his.

  “No,” she said, “it’s not Miss. It’s Mrs. Sam Jones. My husband is deceased.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the Captain lied.

  Mrs. Sam Jones understood almost nothing of what was transpiring, while Roger understood almost everything, had from the moment he saw that the Captain was a fine figure of a man, thus a menace. What he did not understand was the expansiveness of Witters’ need.

  “Please, Charlotte, we must be going,” Roger said. “Thanks so much for your time, Captain.” And Roger took Mrs. Sam Jones handily down the gangplank.

  Captain Witters waved goodbye, entirely indifferent to the details of the departure as he was now confident he knew enough to find her, even if he had to call every Jones in the book.

  “Charming man,” Roger said about the Captain, “I could hardly believe the things I heard about him.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Sam Jones.

  Roger Freeman lied adroitly, a preemptive blitzkrieg to ensure that the other man never got close to the field of battle.

  22

  Joe Floyd now had certain knowledge that another man’s hands had been on his wife’s most perfect body. Bonnie had said so.

  The confusion in his mind was whether his rage should be aimed at his wife or at the man who had made his wife be treacherous. For some space of minutes Floyd would imagine revenge taken against his wife by leaving her for other women, by flaunting his infidelities, by elaborately tormenting her as he was now tormented. Alternately he turned to the idea of punishing the man.

  When Joe touched his wife’s perfect breasts, he was suddenly aware that another’s hand had also been there. He pulled back his hand. He became impotent. Bonnie couldn’t coax him out. She had never imagined that punishment could be so exhausting.

  Joe Floyd would lie awake at night, considering his wife. He had never observed her before for one second as he now observed her every second. For the first time in his life, he looked. At his surroundings, his earnest face, the lines around his eyes, the exact shade of brown of his irises, the pale hairs inside his nose, the whiteness of his teeth, the mole not noticed before along the right of his jaw bone. He stood shaving, transfixed by the man in the mirror. What sort of man was that? It was frightening, watching someone new being born inside someone old, especially when the someone old was yourself. For a week Joe Floyd felt like Siamese twins. When the new person became dominant, he felt merely schizophrenic.

  None of which got him any closer to answering the question, whom should be punished for his wife’s infidelity? The new person had to wrestle with the question.

  He phoned Mrs. Thelma Compton for further discussion of life insurance. Another seduction, but this time he participated (even while he pretended a certain amount of confusion) in that he noted the dimensions, shadows, hues and positions of the entanglement. Afterward he slapped her four times, made the richest red blood trickle outside her lip. He disliked Mrs. Compton for the changes she had injected into his life, but mostly he wanted to slap her for the hell of it, see her face turn red, see her astonishment.

  Bonnie remained the focus of this new fever. When the anger was not great, he would lust powerfully for her, fantasize that they were coupling in bizarre, athletic ways, on chairs, in doorways, atop fire escapes. But touching her made him dread going further. The energy blocked up fed on itself.

  Sometimes Joe Floyd thought he would like to seduce the seducer’s wife, and have his revenge that way.

  Joe Floyd began to conceive an impression of just how incredible life is. He marveled at legs and the expanding and contracting of rib cages. He could not believe the shape of an ear, a nose, the curve of a spine, the ass of anybody. What were all these millions of funny-looking creatures doing running around acting so strangely? When a man experiences am
nesia, his world can shrink. Floyd had the opposite sensation, that he had acquired a more extensive past and present, that the world had quadrupled. He began an affair with a secretary in his office. This also had a malevolent edge to it. It was not clear to Floyd what his pleasure chiefly was now, the jungle of sensory responses or the luxuriant sadism of his newly discovered emotions. Floyd had become a bull nicked by a bullet. He was nasty and impatient, ready to fight. He was selling more insurance.

  When he saw Mrs. Compton the next time, he insisted she come with him in the car and he took her into the woods. He pressed her bare thighs against the bark of a tree and threatened to destroy her clothes and leave her. He buried her naked body under pine needles. He laughed at her, then leaped on her.

  Mrs. Compton was astonished by all this. One second she thought she was in love. The next she concluded she had been too passive in exploiting life’s possibilities. Forming in her mind were more vigorous violations of her life’s dullness.

  Joe Floyd woke up one rainy morning and decided he wanted to see the man responsible for all this.

  There was still the question of whom to hurt.

  23

  Daphne Carlyle, though trained to isolation, dimly suspected that she had relatives wherever she went. That she had known people before. Or was a confidante now. The heat, the energy, the electricity coming out of people beat on her like waves against a jetty. She was in their way. More unsettling, she felt their needs. She heard their soft cries in the night. Or thought she did. As she had no words for any of this, she was not sure and could not even think clearly whether she did or did not.

  In her great emptiness, even small lights could be seen across the state.

  Daphne would sometimes wake up in Texas and feel sure that her mother was ill in New York.

  Daphne’s mother, Mrs. Carlyle #2, drank too much and cheated at canasta. Once a showgirl and now not much of anything, she made keeping up appearances an occupation.

  Mrs. Carlyle #2, being born without enough sense to come in out of the Texas sunshine, had made a foolish mistake. How else explain a woman who caught Carlyle’s lively eye, succeeded to a Texas throne, and jeopardized all this for champagne and the bulging jeans of a ranch hand or the hot stare of an illiterate oil exec.

  She had been young and had thought that life would ascend continually toward something better. It was greed, a careless unthinking greed, something like the careless optimism of her whole country in mid-twentieth century. So much had been bestowed, why shouldn’t more be bestowed?

  Sometimes a person struck in the face reels backward, uncertain of the cause or the damage, but fearful there may be another strike. Daphne’s mother had been reeling backward in long sustained bafflement for fifteen years.

  Daphne’s larger plan was to travel to Europe, perhaps to India. Her immediate plan was to visit her mother, a surprise.

  It certainly was.

  Mrs. Carlyle #2 said she was sick. She had, in fact, been, drunk for two days, and the third day would have been the same if Daphne’s arrival at her door had not reminded her that appearances weren’t being kept that high up.

  The two women looked at each other with astonishment, Daphne because this woman had produced her, Mrs. Carlyle #2 because she had produced Daphne. There was some family resemblance, similar height and ash-blond hair and wide-spaced staring eyes. But Daphne had about her an odd sort of purity. Looking like a movie star, she had nonetheless the soul of a novitiate, while her mother wallowed in the so-called realities of life. Hers the limbo of an all-night poker parlor, soothing green felt, too much smoke, small clumps of words but no conversation, a bitchy and garrulous itch for the next hand that has to be better than the last one.

  “I’m going to Europe,” Daphne said. “I think.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Sometimes I worry about you.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “I’m sorry you’ve been sick.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.”

  It was agreed that they would go shopping, have lunch at the Four Seasons, on Daddy. “You certainly did grow up pretty,” Mrs. Carlyle #2 said, over dessert. “Why hasn’t Randol put you in the movies.?”

  “He said over his dead body.”

  “He would.”

  “There’s plenty of time.”

  “Does he know you’re here, seeing me?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “He’d probably say over his dead body about that, too.”

  Daphne studied the rippling waters in the Four Seasons pools.

  “I’m seeing an important producer this week,” Mrs. Carlyle #2 said. “I’m hoping to get back in the business.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “You never saw me act. I’m pretty good.”

  Daphne could not concentrate, having in her mind shimmering mirages that fooled her eyes. Mrs. Carlyle #2 could not concentrate, having in her mind vast clots of snot green stuff which had resisted becoming the pearly clouds of a heavenly life.

  Mother could see that men noticed her daughter. She was jealous, also proud. She remembered how life had been when men were an hourly nuisance. Wasn’t the same now. Few came around and they lacked lustre. Whatever it was they wanted was only so many grunts and sighs and another cigaret. Life had been so much more fun when she hadn’t known the first thing about it.

  Daphne felt the cold winds of Manhattan’s psyche but they did not trouble her. She carried in her a Texas sun. Her mother felt more cheerful by the end of lunch.

  On Fifth Avenue Daphne stared disbelieving at the buildings of Manhattan. Whereas Texas was an endless horizontal, New York was an endless vertical. Daphne felt she would have to lie down to see things right.

  The two ladies walked along Fifty-ninth Street, the south edge of Central Park. Horses stood waiting with carriages to transport tourist. The horses with brown-stained eyes, like Raphael Higgins, of whom Daphne knew nothing but of her he knew too much, carrying on, as he was, a baroque transcontinental affair with her photographic likeness.

  “I was born here, you know,” said Mrs. Carlyle #2.

  “I remember. Daddy met you here.”

  “Oh, he was something. Swept me off my feet.”

  Wanting to know the time, it was like Daphne to ask the first face, this one sweaty and earnest. She fixed him in his tracks with her depthless eyes.

  Huffing deep breaths, the man stared dumbly, his fists up in running position even though he was no longer running. This tired runner, Phillip Donaldson, said, “Uh … uh … uh.”

  Mrs. Carlyle #2 looked him over sulkily. People who tired themselves at exercise were surely nuts, when the goal of life, she knew, was to sit placidly in smoke-lit rooms while your body seasonally softened and quietly reunited with whatever it came from.

  “Time,” Daphne said.

  Donaldson could not speak, nor could he look away. The usual cinema of things he should not think rolled in his brain, but this time the things were soft, as became this girl. Donaldson felt almost saintly in his sin.

  Mrs. Carlyle #2 peered now with cross eyes.

  Daphne thought it must be like a long romantic waltz when time moves hardly at all. Behind the violins she heard the voice of someone lost. Of someone looking for a sign.

  Donaldson thought this could be a person worth becoming normal for.

  Mrs. Carlyle #2 took her daughter’s arm and said, “There’s got to be a better way to find the time.”

  They walked on along Fifty-ninth street.

  Mrs. Carlyle #2 was thinking that she and her daughter might make a team, after all.

  24

  Eloise Samson had always been attractive in a boyish, efficient way, due partly to the bangs on her forehead. Other women always thought she should be Den Mother. Even now, people seemed to regard her as sensible and in control. Eloise Samson couldn’t think of one single thing she was in control of.

  There was not enough money.

  She was n
o longer young.

  She had a feeling of urgency.

  She couldn’t even enjoy breakfast.

  The day had already started to elude her even before the day had properly begun.

  She read in the papers that a retired man over seventy-five had decided to learn Chinese. He said that he wanted to travel there but first he must know the language. She couldn’t understand this man. She could barely muster enthusiasm for shopping, for preparing meals, for taking care of each day’s business.

  Eloise Samson wondered if she had any skills that anyone would pay for. There was a job to be gotten. Or a new husband. Or just somebody.

  Her doctor prescribed valium. She now took three a day. This was like staying indoors. She told herself that she wasn’t ready yet to face the weather. Tranquilized, she coasted through each day with faint indifference but without the raw panic that would otherwise surface.

  She looked at other people who had ordinary lives without large holes in them and she was amazed and envious. They seemed to be from another world. She knew that people looked at her curiously, probably gossiping about her, her notorious husband, why did it all happen? When someone attracts tragedy, people feel sorry. At the same time, they try to find out what sin was committed.

  Eloise had not shed one tear the night her husband Mac was shot. This did not mean she was not devastated. If you are traveling south in a train and suddenly you are in a plane flying north, it’s goodby to everything you were accustomed to, but there does not have to be sadness.

  She lay back in her bathtub, the water covered over by suds, and she stared at the white tiles. Beneath the water she ran her hands over her body, fondling herself, confirming it was she who was touching and being touched, she in the bathtub in a bathroom in a house on Gleneagle Street in the city of Suffolk in the State of Illinois.

  Then came two phone calls, one day apart, the first from a mysterious man who said that she must speak to no one about her husband’s work and the second from a mysterious man who inquired about her husband’s work. This messiness of things dismayed her. She had believed that death, being irrevocable, at least offered a certain cleanliness of design. Now Eloise Samson was not so sure. She began to think of Mac as a ghost, hovering over her as she moved through a day. Other people at least thought he still mattered, so he must. She became bitter thinking about him, how he refused to vanish politely and completely. Bits and pieces of the past began to surface, like debris after a ship sinks. She remembered the early years of her marriage, high school, the birth of her two children, the encounters with in-laws, a trip to Europe, but nothing came back whole. She couldn’t make out clearly why she had married him. Why had they come to live in Suffolk? Why that house? Why anything?