American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  Now she seemed more permanently stuck with her husband than when he was living and yet there seemed less good reason than ever before for having married the man in the first place. Mac … Mac Samson … yes, I married him. We lived together twelve years, had two children. But I don’t know why. He liked to ride horses and I thought I did, too, but I don’t know why I thought that. I believe now that I hate horses. I always thought that I wanted to be a mother, don’t know why, but now I suspect I never did want to.

  It was as if she had become pulled loose from the shore and drifted in the white water of a fast-moving river, seeing only flux as she drifted downstream faster and faster, the scenery spinning, waves splashing in her eyes.

  Eloise Samson was downtown, shopping, when a man stood beside her. He wore sunglasses and he had a dark mustache and a loose-fitting leather car coat. She thought that he looked distinctive, although he was in fact disguised, and when she tried to sort out what she was sure she could remember without mistake, she could not.

  “I’m the man who called you,” he said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m the man who called you.”

  “I mean, what did you say when you called?”

  “That I thought we could help each other.”

  “Oh yes, and I said I couldn’t help you.”

  “I didn’t mean to alarm you. I hope I didn’t.”

  “Not too much. I didn’t see how you could hurt me any more than I am already.”

  “You know, the police will never do anything about the people who killed your husband.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know.”

  Eloise shrugged.

  “Aren’t you curious about what I want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I can locate some of the people. There might be something I can do.”

  They moved out of the mall along a crowded street, Eloise and Lawrence Georges. Since the age of eighteen he had lived by the fine art of burglary. So far he had spent only three years in prison, his point of greatest pride. Now the stakes were higher. “Let’s stand and look into this window,” he suggested. “People will think we’re talking about the furniture.”

  “Sounds all right to me.”

  “I’ve thought a lot about your husband. He must have been doing unusual things.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The woman’s vulnerability appealed to Lawrence Georges. This was a woman who needed to be protected. He was good at that. “I think your husband had clients from the so-called underworld.” He thought he had better not use the name Benton.

  “How would I know?” Eloise asked.

  “I think he was helping them with extortion, you know, threats of what will happen if a business doesn’t cooperate, and he learned how to do it and thought he could make money on his own.”

  She imagined her husband at breakfast in a bathrobe, or brushing his teeth. So full of energy, a sort of stark joy, at the same time determined to spite anybody who crossed him. What were his limits, she wondered, and knew she didn’t know.

  Mrs. Mac Samson had never known about her husband’s affair with the doctor’s wife. Probably she was the only one who did not. Her marriage might not have survived if she had insisted on looking closely at it.

  Lawrence Georges was unsure of himself but he thought that if he waited in the right way, he would come eventually to the spot where he wanted to be. This woman’s face had a curiously blank look, as if she knew something about waiting herself. He had watched Mrs. Samson from a distance on several occasions, part of what Higgins had taught him to call research, and he had become fond of her. When he finally approached her, it was not entirely business.

  “I’ve been thinking about your husband’s papers,” he said.

  “What about them?”

  “I would like to look at them.”

  “He was in a firm. The papers aren’t mine.”

  “If you say they are, they might be. For sentimental reasons.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Call up the senior partner,” he said. “Say you want all the personal stuff.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Can’t hurt.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “You didn’t say who you are.”

  Georges gave her the name of a friend who had been killed in prison. “Benny Luther,” he said.

  25

  Lounging in the back seat of a cab, headed uptown to home, Bradford Morris was conducting various architectural opera when a bicyclist, jumping a green, made a car, running a yellow-red, hit the brakes and swerve, so that Morris’ driver also braked hard, and the cab swung sideways 90 degrees, and took several minor hits, and a truck rammed the door beside Morris. He blinked at the huge grill trying to come into the back seat with him and at the granules of glass in his lap, and shaking all over but unhurt, he shouted, “This is the last straw!” over and over, unable for several moments to do anything else.

  It wasn’t until Morris emerged from the cab that he realized that the bicyclist was unconscious on the asphalt of Sixth Avenue near Radio City Music Hall and a crowd was gathering and traffic was backed up for a block.

  To the driver, Morris said with a frigid tone, “You ought to have your brakes aligned.”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  Morris decided to hike over to Madison Avenue for the rest of his trip home. All the way he said, “This is the last straw. Now the city’s trying to kill me.”

  Morris had begun to see his troubles in personal terms. It seemed now that his father had managed to get a heart attack in order to make life unpleasant for him, and his mother had turned ogre for his sake, and cancer, passing up millions of people who ought to be dead, had found his wife, the one person who could take proper care of him. Now the city of Manhattan was out to get him.

  Morris looked beset, like someone who owes the Mafia money. He seemed about to run into a doorway to hide. He was gaining weight. His face had lost color. The eyes, once piercing, now appeared dull and unseeing.

  Morris thought about Uncle Hughie, retarded in Saint Louis. Uncle Hughie had become the one fixed point at the center of Morris’ universe. That childish intelligence that could not count past ten nor use a dictionary seemed so lucid to Morris in being what it unmisconstruably was, his father’s brother who must be cared for. When Morris thought about the nation and the events in the newspapers and on TV and about the President himself, none of them had the same certain presence for Morris that his Uncle Hughie possessed.

  When Morris burst into his apartment, he said, “I’m losing my mind, Felix.” Felix was their short for Felicia. “I’m sure they’ll be able to bury us together. We never could have a simultaneous orgasm, but death I think we’ll be better at. Would you make me a drink? Can we take off our clothes and have a bath together?”

  Felix grabbed his paisley tie beneath the knot and pulled him steadily to her. She seemed to be playing Marlene Dietrich this afternoon or Bette Davis. “Well, pretty boy,” she responded, “it’s a fine thing for you I’m in a good mood. Otherwise, I’d slap the piss out of you and run off with the janitor.”

  Morris blinked, speechless. “Oh, Felix, please not you.”

  “Let’s don’t forget who’s dying around here, bright eyes.”

  “I know. I know. Listen, I was in this accident on Sixth Avenue. I had a truck in my lap. Look, I’m shaking. Look, glass in my shoes. Felix, please, don’t go acting crazy on me. I depend on you.”

  “How boring,” murmured Felix and went to the bar to mix a drink for her manic husband. When she handed it to him, she said, “Well, sweetums, if you think you can undress yourself, I’ll run some water.”

  After they had settled in the tub and Morris had most of his drink down, he said, “Really, Felix, I’m not going to make it. That’s clear now. Not going to.”

  “Bullshit, sweetheart
. You’ll last to ninety, whining the whole way.” Felix spoke to him in a rough, maternal way, the tone of a tired nanny.

  Morris kept floundering in his thoughts, unable to answer the one question everybody should be able to answer, what should I do now, if I could do anything, to make me happy? Morris’ mind had all the tidiness of a religious war in Pakistan. He kept reaching into the dusty confusion for something solid. Felicia had been solid; now she was fading. Hughie’s needs were solid and Morris was fighting for them—yes, fighting. But would he win? And then he would come back around to his mother fornicating in California, practically on the grave of her dead husband: how dare she try to break the will. Life would be simpler if he had more guts, then he would wring her neck. Not likely. Still, Morris could contemplate how pleased he would be if a Mack truck squashed her flat.

  Felix was being sexy, holding her breasts up out of the water with both hands.

  “I’m a carcinogenic substance,” she smiled. “Eat me.”

  26

  The eventual outcome is what people think they want to know. How it will all end, how they will end. When, actually, not knowing any of this is what makes life possible. Ultimately, there may be two kinds of people, the ones who think they are created by the future, and the ones who think they are creating the future.

  The Reverend Guy Michaels had the even more grandiose notion that we may be creating God as well: that as we elect to be good, God expands vigorously throughout the wavering vastness of the cosmos … as we do not, He contracts. Life was a grand enterprise indeed for the Reverend, and also a burden. Even his simplest decisions might directly affect God’s bulk.

  When he had been called to comfort the widow Jane Robertson and had returned more than was necessary, he thought that he could actually see God wavering fitfully across the expanse of the Milky Way. His rebuttal was that God must surely feed on love and that was what he felt for this woman.

  All of this he explained to her in letters to the Coast, playing down his enjoyment of the perfect tautness of her thighs.

  “Thinking about God makes me dizzy,” he wrote. Michaels was noted for his lovely and sometimes profound sermons. He knew he radiated a confident faith that he did not feel in his heart. He sometimes hated himself for a hypocrite. One thing he was sure of, God was subtle, “wickedly subtle,” he thought once and blushed. How could he tell his congregation that?

  Jane read his letters again and again. They became sacred relics in her exile. She had fled three thousand miles, for the love of God, so to speak, and liked to hear in her suffering that God was doing well.

  Separated by a country, they carried on dutifully. Hardly a day passed that one did not think of the other. The minister could not see the sun set without thinking it was three hours higher in California.

  The minister was relieved when his wife became more sickly. He chose to assume that she would welcome less physical contact. It had become difficult to make love to her without thinking that holding Jane’s hand and kissing her neck had been the most intense sexual experience of his life.

  The minister’s wife, beset on all sides by the gross details of life, could not have imagined her husband’s thoughts. Skin for her was either dirty or sweaty. That her husband relished the skin of a woman three thousand miles away could only sound absurd.

  Jane tried, logically and systematically, to put the minister behind her. Which was, although Roger Freeman would not like to hear it, the key to his success with her. Ditto the several men who followed him. Ditto Jane’s own success in business, and in bridge, which she had found to be a better anodyne than men.

  When she and Roger placed well down in the year’s major doubles tournament, she knew that Roger had lost his concentration. It had been a long and arduous weekend and they hadn’t much to show for it. Late on Sunday afternoon they went to a restaurant in Chinatown to review. Jane studied her partner and waited. He was tense, that was clear, and not sleeping enough, and he had lost some of that sheen that had derived from his flawless grooming, now a little rumpled.

  “I hope we can get back to playing bridge next month,” Jane said. “There’s the California Open.” She was not going to mention the older woman if Roger wasn’t.

  Roger shrugged with a hint of irritation. “You should have gone to six spades, never mind the two small diamonds.”

  “Look, if you don’t want to tell me what’s going on, just say so. But let’s don’t pretend it’s anything to do with my bridge game.”

  Roger started to object, instinctively. Then he started to explain but thought, what’s the use? It’s not that he was secretive. There was just too much to tell. Two women!—and neither one as appreciative as she should be. Roger had the distinct premonition that he may have overextended himself and he disliked the thought. Women, he thought, were simply beyond belief. The woman he lived with, you’d think she would be grateful. But she only wanted more and more. Roger was reluctant to get into bed at night. And it still wasn’t clear whether she was coming into the money he had planned for her. And just when he needed all his strength to nail down Charlotte Jones, who wasn’t as manageable as he had intended. He had come so far as to consider the plan of marrying Mrs. Adele Morris and then losing her in some accidental way. So he could have her money but not her. Life would be much more manageable. Really, he thought, the woman wants too much. It wasn’t clear to Roger who was doing the fucking here.

  “Is business bad?” Jane asked.

  “Business is great.”

  “How’s everything else?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  Jane shook her head resignedly. Roger’s eyes had begun to remind her of her boy the afternoon he surprised her and the minister. She thought of the minister’s sinewy hand, so tenderly on her thigh.

  27

  It was this yellow rain falling, a thin drizzle of words that filled up like bilge in the bottom of the heart. The anchorman had a large open face like a bag of groceries and his mouth moved as steadily as a rabbit chewing. Sometimes he flicked his eyes as though he had chewed something important.

  Higgins wondered why the news was always happening somewhere else, never where he was. His activities took him through improbable mathematical convolutions, New York Paris Boston Chicago Texas Amsterdam New Orleans, and always he could not reach the other side of the glass where the news was occurring. Perhaps it was part of his disorder that the news eluded him. Maybe the reporter was making it up.

  The President said. The Congress acted. Wall Street fluctuated. The Russians warned. Tokyo reiterated. The President warned and acted. Congress reiterated. Wall Street said and the Russians fluctuated. Tokyo acted. The President fluctuated and Congress warned. Wall Street warned Congress and the Russians who acted. What they said was reiterated. And warnings fluctuated. There were actions. Higgins, babbling this to himself, thought how much fun to blow up the station and commandeer the mike. Tonight, poor comrade shmucks, we will have some real news—

  It was revealed today that Darkness and Light are battling for your souls. Revelations is right, we are fast accelerating into Armageddon. What else can be worth reporting? Shake in your boots, poor divinely inspired jelly, for the coming of the end is the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Higgins was drunk, reflecting even less clearly than in the ordinary murkiness of his reflections. He was tired and sentimental and bitter and fuck-it-all. The only sweetness and light was that he could go to Daphne, find her wherever she was in the world, and petition her heart. He liked to think of Daphne drifting down into sleep and coming up out of sleep, starry and vague between sheets, even more—if it was possible—celestial.

  Higgins, with his encyclopedic memory of paintings, placed Daphne in this Titian and then in that Vermeer, now in this Renoir or that Whistler, trying to determine where she belonged, which was her native home. When he thought of a painting for himself, it was always Bosch on bad days—he was the stunted dwarf wide-eyed among freaks—and on good days he was a
Breughel—he the splash in the background where dim-brained Daedelus fell into the sea.

  Higgins thought that if the man next to him at the bar would say two words, they could get into a fight. And Higgins would put on a towering act of apemanship and cower the bastard in a corner. Higgins had once engaged in a sort of artistic skirmish in which each side upped the ante until Higgins and adversary, long past personal threats, were threatening the eyes of second and third cousins and describing the week-long dismantling of each stick of the other’s property.

  Higgins liked people who would not talk. It meant they had something to say. He nudged the man several times with his shoulder, to make him turn his way. He wouldn’t. An hour later Higgins asked, “Got the time?”

  Phillip Donaldson looked distantly at Higgins and vaguely pointed at the clock on the wall.

  Higgins said, “I know you.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Sure …”

  “No.”

  Higgins couldn’t figure it. He was good with faces, he was sure he had seen this one. It was well-fed and smug and remote. It was a State Department face. Higgins had seen too many such faces, whenever he encountered the powers that be in Vietnam. But this one was somehow pinched from inside, paled by hunger and doubt.

  But even if Higgins had remembered the bank, that would have been momentarily interesting but meaningless. They would not have discovered in an hour of conversation what was more remarkable, that their reveries dwelt on the same woman.