American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  While much of this was disconcerting, Georges had noticed something about himself that he liked. The more he got over his head, the more resourceful he seemed to become. All his life he had asked little of himself and had delivered that little with passable style. Now he was asking more and more, asking the absurd and the impossible, and he was delivering that passably, too. Sitting at his desk, actually not his desk so much as the desk of someone he was occasionally becoming, Georges worried over how easy he had been on himself and how much more he might have delivered if pushed. Georges had a fear that he had been born to be a great man but asked only little man deeds from himself and so had been wasted. The guy with ten talents who buries them in the ground, Georges felt contempt for himself. In the same second he considered that those ten talents were now invested in the market and fear crawled over his skin. Perhaps he had been growing toward this moment and it was wrong to think he could ever have done more before than precisely that which he did.

  Georges opened a drawer and took out a box and a mirror. He altered his appearance in a few details. He left to meet Eloise Samson for a drink. He wasn’t sure that she fit into the grand design. It was more that she needed him. And he, even if he chose not to say so, needed her. And as long as he didn’t see her more than once a week, maybe he could keep it just like that. He thought of her now in rather sad and exultant terms. Such a dear woman, deserved better, just wish I could do something for her, wonder what will become of her, I’m not the right man for her.…

  Georges went out into the city, the sky dark and brooding above him no bigger than his dreams. He whistled softly, a tune by the Beatles. His sentimentalizing of Eloise Samson pricked his emotions and his desires more than any perfect body could, but he kept a vise on himself. He did not intend to jeopardize his plans nor did he want to mar the poetic glow he had engendered about the woman. Feeling sweetly toward her was Christmas. And somehow the music that came from their interaction was the ideal accompaniment to his schemes.

  There was one other little factor. Eloise’s husband had in a manner of speaking got Georges started and seemed to be the patron saint of the enterprise. Georges had never known Mac Samson and wouldn’t want to, but the dead man was now an icon hung on the wall or carried about in a small wooden box. Georges was reluctant to do anything that might offend him, such as fooling around with his widow. Georges did not call this superstition, he called it respect.

  Still, there was the matter of the black lace panties. Georges had had to admit to himself that he was curious.

  33

  Obsessions are like freezing to death, you simply relax and a sort of warmth comes over you and you think you’re feeling fine and the next thing you know you’re as good as dead.

  No famed life was without an obsession. Neither is any really misspent life without one.

  Sam T. Jones’ obsession had been that he was loved or could be loved or should be loved, not by a person but by large groups of people. Sam Jones had run for city council and the assembly and the state senate. He once used the slogan, “You know in your bones you want Jones.” He was known in a few quarters as the Nixon of San Francisco County for his hunger and persistence. He even looked a little like Nixon, which alone may have cost him 20% of the vote in any election. But Nixon won many elections whereas Sam T. Jones lost them all. The last defeat made him crazy. He was overwhelmed by a severe case of cognitive dissonance: on the one hand he was sure that people loved him, on the other hand he had just lost another election. The two truths clashed and made fuses blow.

  He gave a short and bitter speech of concession. A half hour later he was in the waters of the Bay. Sam T. Jones was crying at his whole district: now you’ll be sorry.

  More than once, Mrs. Sam Jones thought sympathetically about her counterpart, who was for years down in San Clemente. Both women were wives, in a way, of political suicides. She suspected that they were equally alone, equally bereft, one husband dead, the other a sort of phantom in his own time.

  Charlotte Jones was not a taker, not a grabber, not a schemer, not interested in glory or cheers, not interested in living forever in history books, never duplicitous or hypocritical, rarely greedy about wealth or symbols thereof. She hadn’t therefore understood what made her husband or Nixon go. For their part, they would say it’s a tough world and she would never survive, that she was a victim and a loser, neither seeing the irony.

  After Sam T. Jones went, she remembered what was good about her husband and missed that much. He couldn’t have gotten a better memorial anywhere else.

  When Roger Freeman first saw her eyes, he knew that she was a thoroughly decent person and that she would be an easier job because of that. As for her being a victim, he didn’t like to call his victims by that word.

  When Captain Witters had seen those same eyes, he knew she was a thoroughly decent person and that was why he wanted to be with her.

  Without knowing that he was hopelessly old-fashioned, Witters was. His idea was that he would go on calling and he would signify his intentions and perhaps the widow Jones would have him. He supposed that his only obstacle would be any fine lady’s reluctance to accept such an unworthy man as himself. When the real obstacle was the lies Roger had told Mrs. Sam Jones about the Captain, lies about a wife and children abandoned in San Diego, about drinking and gambling.… Roger could go on.

  It was an odd sort of eternal triangle, Witters and Charlotte and what she thought she knew about him. She wouldn’t see him. She would not call back. She refused on three occasions to come to the phone. But Witters had the magic of the hopelessly out of fashion. He was steady and solemn and utterly proper. He sent cards and flowers. When he sailed again, he sent letters.

  It did not occur to Mrs. Sam Jones to doubt Roger, although she wondered if he might not have exaggerated, for the Captain seemed not all bad, even seeing him as she was through a slanderous haze. It certainly did not occur to Mrs. Sam Jones to confront the Captain with the truth about himself. It would not be polite.

  Roger Freeman had anticipated this matter with his own peculiar instincts, cutting the Captain off at the knees just in case. Then he was at Charlotte’s house when the Captain called and she said, “That man won’t leave me alone.” Suddenly, Roger saw two things with great clarity. One, he had been smarter than he knew, and two, if the Captain found out, he the Captain was likely to feed him Roger to the fish.

  Roger could not back up, admitting a lie, nor could he go forward, adding more lies. He waited two days, and as casually as buying a newspaper, he said, “Oh, Charlotte, that Captain that’s bothering you, if he keeps it up, let me know, there are people I can speak to.”

  Translation: I’ve got to keep up-to-date on this.

  It seemed to Roger that life would be much more pleasant if the world were populated entirely by women and himself. Men were always causing problems. He would have to waste time keeping this fool Captain at bay, and there was Morris, all the way from New York, threatening him. Morris with his obnoxious well-bred voice, tired and in decline, saying on the phone that his mother was out of her mind to be with a creep like you, his father was disgraced, the will couldn’t be broken, there would be a countersuit if it was necessary and no matter what, Uncle Hughie was living out his years in the comforts of Saint Louis.

  There, Roger thought, another male, a retarded one in Saint Louis. It wasn’t right.

  Roger was nervous. The sky was closing in on him. He had to make a move. Roger knew how to add up all the pluses and the minuses. The answer he got said: propose. The next afternoon he took Mrs. Sam Jones out in his car, a maroon Mercury. There was sunlight, a fine clean day. As he drove, he reviewed his addition. Once engaged, he would have the problem of phasing out Mrs. Morris, Adele. That would be messy, unpleasant, awkward. Roger hated to think how much so. Never mind. Once he had Charlotte in hand, Adele would have to go. Maybe just say he had to set up offices in another city, he could return only once a week, then send her a letter. Roger pref
erred saying unpleasant things in letters. He would be gone before she ever realized he was going. Yes, Roger decided, all of that could be done without ever leaving San Francisco. A dummy office in Seattle would do the trick.

  The first set-back came when Charlotte Jones said, “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “But darling, we love each other. We work together, we play together, we’re both settled. We have incomes. It’s really the perfect”—he was going to say answer but thought it didn’t sound quite right. “It’s really just perfect,” he finished.

  “My husband hasn’t been dead a year yet.”

  “Well, we can be engaged. And marry when you think it’s right. It’s the commitment that counts,” Roger declared. “I want us to be committed to each other. The rest is not very important.”

  “I’ll have to think about it, talk to my children.”

  Mrs. Sam Jones could not name a single thing that her husband and Roger Freeman had in common, especially physically, yet she could be looking at Roger and see the other man.

  Roger had stopped the car on a hill so that they would have a romantic view of the Bay. Not knowing the details of the suicide, he had not realized that Mrs. Sam Jones would be able to see the exact spot from which her husband jumped, and the spot where he landed. Charlotte found the view unsettling. And when she looked back at the man behind the steering wheel, he tended to metamorphose into the late husband. She stared out past the Bay, into the faint blues of the sky above the Pacific.

  And out at sea the Captain wondered. He couldn’t make sense out of what had happened. He saw this woman and liked her. It had happened a hundred times before. And he had always proceeded with the straightforwardness of a male pigeon. But this time was special and he had moved with the special care warranted. He had done the things a man was supposed to do. Doesn’t make any sense, Witters thought. She’s not in love with that Freeman. Saw that right off.

  Witters could hardly watch the sea without thinking of Mrs. Sam Jones. He was finding the sights much more charming than on the last trip. The sun stood on the horizon and shot orange artillery at him. He thought that he and the sun had a good deal in common, both being uncommonly steady, and damned if he intended to let Mrs. Sam Jones forget that he was circling her every day of their lives.

  34

  Donaldson ran a mile in 5:10 and then he lay down on a grassy hill in Central Park. He was panting and damp and he rolled over on his back so that he could watch the blue sky surround and surmount him. The blue was for him purity and even holiness. Raised Catholic, he was intimate with these concepts. “Sin” and “devil” and “damnation” were not merely words, they were like extra arms and legs he had sprouted and now he had to figure out how to live in the world with this grotesque body.

  His schooling had been entirely practical. Economics and politics in college. Then business administration for two years. And a job in banking. But he was not himself practical at all. He thought that all his desires and goals and all the scenery in his thoughts was whatever the opposite of practical is. Donaldson was aware of the irony and when he was relaxed from running, he could come very close to laughing at himself. Poor devil, he would think.

  Another irony was that he was not confident that he even believed in the fundamental assertions that had shaped him. He was a lapsed Catholic. The question, does God exist, was in the front of his thoughts. It had the daily urgency that the questions of will there be another Mideast War, will the market collapse, will the president run again, had for many of his friends. But his uncertainty about God did not diminish the reality of all the contingencies deduced by Medieval theologians. Only lapsed Catholics can understand this. His upbringing had been triumphant only in the peripheral details, while the one crucial belief at the center became vague and confused.

  To be stuck with the notion of sin and not to be stuck with God, he thought, is really to be stuck good.

  God was finally the problem, Donaldson knew, and if he could just get that part straight, yes or no, then all the rest would resolve itself. But God refused to cooperate.

  It seemed to Donaldson that the more you chased God, the more He ignored you. And yet if you turned your back, God would sneak up and touch your shoulder. It was coyness, that’s what it was, damned coyness and from God somehow Donaldson had always expected fairer play.

  Donaldson stared up into the blue vastness and begged: a sign, that’s all I want. A sign. Anything.

  That girl who asked him for the time, he had thought for a second there was a sign in her face. He had had the sensation of seeing far beyond the physical boundary, of being drawn into a mystery. And his soul had seemed to leap from him, eager to pursue the mystery.

  Sure, just some silly tourist with her mother, Donaldson thought now. But for a second he had thought she might be the sign. His response to her was what he would expect had she been a sign, that was the point. And then she had gone and he had felt foolish.

  Donaldson thought his time was running out. He should return to work, which he didn’t think he could manage. On the other hand, what kind of life was this, churning out twenty miles every day, running after something, running away from something, anyway running. The longer he went on like this, the more exiled he would become from practical things, his job and associates and the expectations of his parents and his expectations for himself. What would become of him?

  Donaldson hated the emptiness of the sky. His idea of a really good sign would be the word YES about a mile across, in gold letters.

  Well what then, he asked himself? Would he believe he had seen it? What would he think when he asked other people and they said, No, hadn’t seen a thing. He’d probably want another sign to make sure that the first sign was a real sign. And where would it all end?

  Donaldson rolled over and pressed his forehead into the damp grass. And everything that he saw was green and striated. One live ant inspected one dead one.

  Donaldson, like tens of thousands of people in New York, thought he was the loneliest person in New York.

  35

  The vaporizer sat in the middle of the room and made a disgusting sound, as though the room had a slow leak and after a time the walls would collapse on him. Speaking of a slow leak, he had to go to the bathroom and he expected that to be no fun. His prostate was prostrate. Also, his veins were varicose. He had a tooth that had to come out or it would just fall out in a mouthful of hamburger one day soon. His eyelids were red, his hemorrhoids itched, he had an ugly sore on his leg that he was afraid to have the doctor put a name on.

  I must be homesick for heaven, he would joke, because I’m dying to go there.

  Harold had a view of life that extended four, five or six feet in all directions. Everything beyond that was pretty well nonexistent. It wasn’t until he went out in the street that he remembered that it was there all along and other people lived on it, too.

  After he had pissed for two minutes, not accomplishing very much, he returned to his chair and the TV. One of his big pleasures was hating TV. The crap they show, he would say. If he were asked to check the number of hours he watched a week, he would have to check a number off the chart. How can anybody watch television more than eight hours a day? With careful planning.

  Harold did not have any sense in his life of having let anybody down (nobody had expected anything) or of not having fulfilled his potential (he never thought he had any) or of leaving any dreams unrealized (no dreams). So in a curious, colorless, chemical kind of way, he could say he was a happy man, and how many people can say that?

  Almost nothing had bothered Harold since the time they outlawed prayer in the schools. He was pro prayer. But now something was dimly on the horizon that might be bothersome and it had to do with Lawrence. Harold knew that he was spinning his wheels and Harold felt left out. All Harold wanted was crumbs. But Lawrence was always somewhere else on business. It made Harold bitter.

  When it was time to go out, he put on a jacket and a brown hat with a
narrow brim and a feather. He looked at himself in the mirror by the door. He was a sight to make eyes sore.

  Harold Morgan was his whole name, which had inspired his only creative outpouring, this couplet:

  Oh, my name it may be Morgan but it ain’t J.P.

  So give me all my change back, every last pen-ny.

  In 1967 Harold could be seen in all the larger post offices, wanted for burglary, grand larceny, interstate flight, armed and considered dangerous. Which was silly, Harold had never been dangerous to anybody but himself. He had done two years for that but what riled him was that he had never been able to get a copy of that damned poster.

  “You’re a star one day,” he told a crony, “and the next day nobody remembers.”

  “That’s good,” said the crony, “that’s good.”

  Harold walked toward downtown. He kept an eye cocked for dogs, children, cops. Harold liked proportion in all things. An overdose of normalcy in one spot with too much law and order was upsetting to him. A cop talking to some kids with a cute dog was enough to make Harold try the other side of the street.

  When he walked along a pleasant street, one where the buildings or homes were well cared for, Harold felt better knowing that in every one of those houses or offices people were cheating on their taxes or their wives or maybe at cards or just generally cheating. A world in which everyone behaved and nobody broke the law—well, Harold would rather contemplate puke.

  When some of the presidents had been exposed for the crooks that everyone else was, Harold had smiled. “They’re real inspirations to me,” he told a crony.