American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  GeorgiaAnne was never startled at her husband’s novel view of things but she was deep down touched that he would share them with her, as though they were equals.

  “Now you take this here Harry Benton, a dumb crooked peckerhead for sure. This guy is standing in the middle of gold, everywhere he looks is more gold. But you think a shitbrain like Benton wants gold? Shoot no. This guy wouldn’t walk in shit if he could lie down in it. So what’s that mean to you and me, sweetie? It means I got to paint up for him all the shit there is in Texas, special Texas sunbaked shit. I got to show him all the opportunities down there that are low-down and shitty. Why, I’ll tell him I can put him on the Enema Express, First Class, and you know old Harry is going to kiss my ass, saying, Thank you, Mr. Randol Sam H. Carlyle, thank you, thank you …”

  And Carlyle stomped the brake cornering left, shifted to second under a red light and all GA remembered about this conversation was the lively looks on people’s faces as they jumped for safety.

  30

  Bonnie was a cheerleader in high school and studied nursing for a year but gave that up to marry Joe Floyd. Her goals in life were the same ones all her friends had; she was sure she would reach them. Then, several years ago, her gynecologist said that she could not have children.

  Teeming with passions but acting on almost none of them, she presented a bland and pleasant exterior. She moved with a sort of soldierly precision and strong posture because she was afraid that otherwise she would betray herself. And restraint and decency became a mask inseparable from her face and Bonnie Floyd did not herself know there was a difference.

  Only once had she skipped her own leash, and that with a man she had thought she would never see again. That man, Lawrence Georges, was vague when she had asked about him and she had concluded that he wanted to convey that he could not be counted on. It was her sense of the man that he did something illegal and possibly dangerous, but that was not his appeal. It was his gravity, the quietness she thought was inside him. He had exactly taken her measure, knew her, dealt with the person she thought she was at her best. It was the manner of a tailor who holds up a sports jacket and with no hesitation says, “This is a 42 long,” not having to measure, just knowing. Bonnie was not good at explaining anything and could not explain to herself the gulf between this man’s manner and her husband’s manner, which was like a man sweeping up an armful of sports jackets and saying, “There must be a 42 long in here somewhere.”

  And yet there it was: she felt safer with her husband because he was less likely to see more than she told him. A man who sees a lot is usually no friend, is usually a spy who goes away and tells everyone your weaknesses.

  Now there was the mystery of her husband. Bonnie hated whatever was going on. She was lonely and frightened and she thought of Lawrence, remembered him fondly and thought she might contact him because he could be a good friend. But she knew a man would assume all the wrong things.

  There are sounds that only dogs can hear, sounds so high pitched they cannot be called a whine or a howl or a scream or a shriek, but there is a point where these unhearable sounds become audible. And the panic in Bonnie Floyd was like that. She would stop in mid-sentence, talking to people, certain they could hear this shrill cry from her heart. But they could not—they merely looked inquiringly—because the discipline of so many years perfectly camouflaged what she was experiencing, as it always had.

  She had blond hair of medium length and a simple ordinary face that, when made-up, was appealing but was really slightly too heavy in every feature to be genuinely pretty. Bonnie had inherited a few too many millimeters of nose and jaw and forehead and cheek, and this strong soldier of a face, well-drilled, betrayed no secrets without torture.

  Bonnie began screaming in a department store. There may have been a cause, bad service or a remark by another customer. She was momentarily beserk, not remembering herself that she had screamed. Then she cried and other women came to comfort her. It was over in a minute. The experience made her more determined not to crack, which meant that the next collapse was even more violent. Driving, she saw a billboard that pictured a smiling family on a Florida vacation. Smiling wife, smiling husband, smiling children … she started to cry. Then she steered her car into the base of the billboard. The family in Florida went on smiling. Bonnie Floyd passed out, her face on the wheel.

  Joe Floyd had to come to the police station to pick her up. He was most struck by her eyes, red and teary, and instead of comforting her, was driven the other way by this sign of weakness.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you,” he demanded.

  “Me? Me?!”

  He had never seen this vulnerability in his wife. A few months earlier he would have been scared, moved, possibly even transformed. Now he was watchful and combative and sexually excited. By the time they reached the house, Floyd was crazy with the desire to ravage his wife. Neglected so long, she was glad for anything. Not so much so after a few minutes. Like an animal is a cliche, nonetheless he was. His fingernails seemed to have become claws and he didn’t sigh or pant so much as he snarled in her ear. The encounter set a record for duration, noise, pain, pleasure, and number of different facial expressions, for this particular marriage at least.

  Bonnie thought that afterward he would become tender with her and in that tnederness they would put their marriage back together. She guessed she might come to enjoy this sort of wildness, even crave it. But Floyd wasn’t tender. He didn’t say anything. He took a shower, dressed, and left in the car to see some clients, he said.

  Bonnie was left lying in bed with a dozen bruises and aches to nurse. She couldn’t have been more surprised. Mentally she was calm. She didn’t want to scream. And yet the well of her loneliness was deeper.

  It had seemed possible up to this day to tell someone else what had been happening to her, supposing that someone had pried in just the right way. Now she didn’t see how this was possible. How could she tell anybody about her husband? She could hardly bear to think the extravagant obscenities he had yelled as he slammed into her.

  Bonnie Floyd could not walk without a little pain. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on back of the bathroom door. She could not remember how she had gotten some of the bruises and scratches. Yes, she thought, the body is perfect. She would not have been able to say that previously, but now she was detached from her body and she could examine it as though she were a picture in a magazine. Her body seemed as irrelevant to her as a picture in a magazine.

  She could not imagine how she could go on living like this. Nor could she imagine any way out of living like this.

  She remembered the night she had spent in the cabin with Lawrence Georges, remembered the night as though it had happened to another person. She was sure she must have been a different person then. She could see herself moving deadpan through what was supposedly a passionate and romantic weekend. She had been so careful with her responses, measuring out her emotions with a teaspoon.

  Now she looked again at herself in the mirror, looked closely at her face, and she saw that her face was not flat and expressionless, saw that as she had become incapable of talking about her dilemma, it had moved onto her face. She looked as though she had seen a snake, or woken from a bad dream.

  Bonnie blinked and shook all over and looked again. And there it was, a terrified and unnerved face, passions teeming on the surface.

  Now people will know, she thought, they’ll know everything, they’ll know how Joe screamed and how I screamed. I won’t have any secrets.

  And Bonnie began applying make-up to her bruises.

  31

  SCURRILOUS

  Scurrilous, the sea is scurrilous,

  Respecting nobody’s bones.

  Do you hear the songs, the scurrilous songs?

  The night air is black and blue with song.

  Those are scurrilous reports, the politician said.

  But are they true?

  The stars wink down at the sea. />
  Stars also are scurrilous.

  Smiles are especially scurrilous.

  God gave you a sack

  To keep your bones in.

  Good luck.

  When the minister’s wife read the poem, she wished she hadn’t. What had art come to? A sack to keep your bones in!

  Margaret Michaels shivered all over as she clapped the magazine shut. What was this thing? New Day was the title. Well, she should have known. More of the modern drivel. Whatever graciousness the human race had attained, she was certain, was minute by minute disintegrating. It must be only a matter of a few years before a new age of barbarism would come down on us all like a glacier from the Arctic Circle.

  Mrs. Michaels, slender and prim, sat in her dentist’s office waiting. Her face pale and birdlike, the eyes with a feverish light.

  No escaped convict felt more hunted than Mrs. Michaels. Even a trip to the grocery store was a time for ambush by trashy displays in windows, by vile magazines on newstands, by the indecent clothing of Cosmo girls.

  Mrs. Michaels was a Daughter of the American Revolution. She actually knew the names of all her grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great grandparents. Many of them were more real to her than people she met each day.

  When she had her turn in the dentist’s chair, she quickly complained of his reading matter. “I think it’s terrible,” she said. “Why not have poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?”

  The dentist was in no mood. He knew from previous conversations that she was cracked on more than a few subjects. She was also something of a mystery. What was this woman, maybe thirty-five? To listen to her, you’d think she was sixty-eight. Another truth was that he thought she was not bad. Scrawny, sure, but as shapely as a woman could be ten pounds underweight. And there was this intensity that he associated with fire in women, you know, they were all locked up but when the door opened, look out. As he drilled a six-year molar, he vaguely imagined what else he would like to do to her mouth. He was wrestling the drill, pushing his weight against her shoulder. His face flushed red when he realized he was getting an erection. “I’ll be right back,” he said hastily.

  Mrs. Michaels was left with a little tube hanging over her lip going swlerp, swlerp, swlerp.

  When she had finished at the dentist, she walked along the main street of Norton, Connecticut. People looked so pleased with themselves. She felt so useless. Here a civilization was tottering into decline and degradation and what was she doing? Sometimes she influenced her husband’s sermons, but a congregation no longer wanted to hear bad news or complaints. They wanted to be told that they were nice people becoming nicer. All in all, the work of the church was tame and paltry. What was needed were Carrie Nations and Cotton Mathers and a full-bodied crusade against the infidels among us. Mrs. Michaels knew, however, that she was not up to it. Stewing in her own juice was more her style.

  Several weeks later, art imitating life and life imitating art and the newspapers trying to keep up, Mrs. Michaels read in the paper about the New York dentist on trial for fondling a patient and other indecencies. Exactly what she had been talking about! Outrages on all sides! And it was like a false dawn, then more darkness, then a real dawn as the realization came to her mind why her dentist had left so abruptly. The signals from his radiating libido had been stored inside her and now were developed as film is developed. She saw his thoughts, saw the scene from the outside. As Mrs. Margaret Michaels had always been a long way toward being unable to function in society, she was now rudely transported about half the distance she had left.

  Her husband noticed a change. Friends noticed. She was quieter, for one thing, less on the rampage against this or that decadence. It works like this. People retreat deeper inside themselves, as if down into the center of their own private earth. The environment down there is different. They are not seeing what the other people in the room are seeing. When they are talking to you, it’s from a much greater distance than you suppose. When you talk to them, you are shouting down a tunnel. Sometimes no words reach their destination. All of this can be called by many scientific names, schizophrenia, psychosis, autism, and you can say it’s tragic and terrible, but the people in the center of their own earth would not automatically agree. The environment there is custom-made and doesn’t change. It was the world she had always wanted. A Victorian sitting room where genteel people came and went and nothing indelicate ever intruded.

  So common opinion had it that the minister’s wife was nuttier than ever. Her opinion was that she was happier than ever.

  The minister was not left with many options. He didn’t have any children, which he had wanted. And now he hardly had a wife, which he thought he should have.

  The minister was a smooth-faced man, long-limbed and bony. Although he had no ancestors worth recalling, he looked like an ancestor himself, an Ohioan perhaps when the frontier hadn’t pushed any further westward.

  He began to daydream about his wife when he had first seen her, age twenty-two and really very pretty and refined and intense in a way he thought he had loved. These memories mingled with his memories of Jane Robertson and he began to have this overwhelming sense of loss, as though at some remote time he had inhabited his own private Garden of Eden with his own very flawless Eve. Everything that was right seemed to belong to a period of five or ten or fifteen years ago, anyway a long time ago. The women and the actualities blurred in his mind. What was clear was that life had been prettier then and now was not.

  So when they sat down to dinner each evening, neither of them was there. He temporally removed. She spatially removed. And the two figures conversing were like personna in a Greek drama, a male mask and a female mask, each reciting their lines as well as they could remember them.

  32

  When the men were called together, they had no idea what to expect. Some of them had not seen each other in years. There was a man from Seattle, his specialty was surveillance, a man from Florida, his was explosives. These were quiet, well-behaved people who confined their illegalities to little bursts between long boring stretches of respectability.

  Georges had known them for some time. This meeting bothered him because he did not want any of these people damaged, but he was going to lie to them. He was going to ask them to be part of something that did not exist. He wanted word to be out.

  They talked for several hours in the late afternoon. Six-packs were set up and drunk down. Whiskey was available and ice. Details were discussed. In all his life, which was mostly a dishonest one, Georges had never felt so dishonest. At the same time there was a new sensation for him, one of exaltation, of rising above and of transcending himself.

  So this is what I’ve come to, he thought with disgust, a Goddamned executive.

  The faces there were as comfortable as familiar walls and favorite rooms. These were men that Georges admired for their dedication. Their faces almost shouted out the bad tracks they had to run on. If faces counted, crime did not pay. The lines on these faces were emphatic, like rivers on a map.

  One man from New York seemed always to be walking out of a dark room into a bright one, blinking, surprised, focusing on you for the first time even after hours. It was a habit of his, to treat terrain as always new so that he didn’t miss anything. But because nothing could be looked at long before it had to be reexamined as something new, he never had a good look at anything. He was in a doorway, moving into a bright room, always blinking and always checking your outline for danger but never quite catching your name or the color of your shirt.

  Georges told them about an armored truck and the route and the banks involved. He talked about the money and the risks and the planning required and the duties. Specific here, vague there, he painted a picture for the boys at the table.

  “Now you know each other,” he said, “you don’t have to know any more for a while. I have to have your o.k. Then I’m going to work more on the details and little by little I’ll bring you back in.”

  There was a l
ot of money involved and they were professionals and the meeting went as smoothly as when the directors of a bank meet.

  Afterward Lawrence Georges went back to his new company, Lasalle Exchange, dealers in foreign currencies and gems. He had rented a small office in the center of the city. Georges had been reading about the CIA for years and part of his idea now was to create so much “disinformation” that nobody, Harry Benton in particular, would ever be able to figure out what had happened. That was the thing that impressed him most about the hit on Kennedy, that Oswald had been given several identities, in several places, and Lawrence was sure that whole sections of the CIA did not yet know what was true about Oswald and what was not. Reality that should have been as solid as moth balls had simply vanished.

  Lawrence was putting himself under deep cover here and even deeper cover there. In the process he was having the unanticipated and unpleasant feeling of disappearing himself. The real Lawrence Georges was becoming more vaporous in his mind, being replaced by other people he had never heard of a few months earlier. He had read about a form of mental illness that results when all your friends treat you in a way that you can’t accept. Your image of yourself keeps coming up against the image held by other people. Now Georges was inflicting this on himself. He did not like it. Still, he believed it was a good sign, that he had really disrupted his own knowledge of himself. It was intoxicating, he thought, the way reality could shimmer and disappear.

  For one thing he knew little about gems and foreign currencies and yet there were already people who thought he was expert. People had been in his office and discussed transactions; he had pretended he was an actor playing the part of such a person, he thus placed himself at two steps removed from the reality, and the meeting had gone well. Now there were friends who thought that they and he were going to rob an armored truck when he was not. But that illusion already had a reality of its own and the reality was picking up more life all the time, even as the men went away into the night.