Harold’s destination was a pool hall. When a man there approached Harold about making some money, Harold had both ears turned on. There was a long preamble touching on old times and the last heavyweight fight. Then the man said, “You know this guy Georges? We’re thinking about hiring him for some work. Sort of checking references, you know.” This was the man’s first truthful remark. Certain rumors were on the street, rumors about an armored car job. And people who thought they owned these streets wanted to know who the hell this guy Georges was.
“Like what do I do?” Harold inquired.
“You keep us up-to-date.”
“What am I, some kind of rat?”
“Nahhh. You want to help him, right?”
“Sure I do.”
“So you help us get a good feel for him. We give him mucho work. He’s a good man, don’t you think?”
“Sure he is.”
“Yeah, but I got a boss, you know what it’s like, and I have to deal in solid info. Can’t just say this is a nice guy. Got to know what he does with himself, is he reliable? You know, it’s natural.”
Harold was miffed with Lawrence. Otherwise he wouldn’t have said, “What’s the big deal? You pay right, I’ll keep you up-to-date.”
Harold knew he could keep on top of this. There was no way he could hurt Lawrence. Maybe he could help him. But just entering the deal somehow squared them.
Lawrence Georges had calculated on these calculations.
Harold Morgan grimaced. “Between us, right?” he said to his new partner.
“Sure.”
This man all the time stroking Harold’s lapel, an intimate and seductive gesture, like they were all buddies but this guy is the bigger gun so we all know, right guys, who gets fucked here if anybody does.
Harold was part of this time playing pool and most of this time watching TV over the bar. There were a lot of programs he hated that he didn’t like to miss.
In the evening Harold had to go over the state line to pick up some hot goods. And collect some gambling debts. Harold was the guy they sent first, the nice guy, Harold always said. You don’t want to meet the guy they send next. He’ll pick you up with one hand and shake the money out and where he drops you is anybody’s guess. Be smart.
Harold had never placed a bet on anything. He thought it was stupid. “You want some excitement,” he told a crony, “steal something.”
“That’s good, Harold, that’s good.”
36
Rachel Smithers did not walk away from the affair with Mac Samson. She was carried off on a stretcher. Then she was put in a hospital and then on tranquilizers. And time had not done all the healing it might.
For one thing, Mac Samson had been a more interesting man than her husband and a better lover. For another thing, he had chased her relentlessly, seduced her, then dropped her, carelessly.
In all of this, Rachel Smithers had the sense that forces of nature had acted on her, a hurricane or a bolt of lightning. In a clever rearrangement of her moral values, she did not think that she had wronged her husband but that she had been hurt in an unfortunate accident that could happen to anyone. It was her husband’s role, obviously, to comfort her and care for her while she gained back her health.
When Dr. Smithers looked at his wife, he remembered what she had done and it hurt. And when Mrs. Smithers looked at her husband, she remembered what had happened to her and that she should have gotten more solicitous care and it hurt.
Others might say that Rachel Smithers was weak and small-minded or too small to play with the big boys, but her feelings were not suspect in her own eyes. She felt righteous with a touch of indignation. When she realized that her husband was having an affair himself, she did not once think, Now I know how he felt. She thought, I’m going to make him pay.
She didn’t imagine killing her husband with poison or a gun or a fall but with a knife. Sticking it in, when she imagined it, was always a sweet and tender feeling, a swooning sort of violence. And when she thought about doing it, she thought about the afternoons she spent in bed with Mac Samson. Somehow she got it into her theatrical head that she would be taking revenge against both of them.
Rachel was a spare, straight woman with no fuss about her. When she shopped, she looked for bargains and specials and when she drove, she made all the signals and never exceeded the speed limit. Her home was neat and she was aghast if anyone dropped paper on the street. Her children were well behaved, if partly because they had to raise themselves. There was nothing remarkable about Rachel Smithers except her face, which seemed to hum with an inner life, somehow not on the surface but certainly not deep. There was something seething, as when you are looking at a well-maintained lawn, pretty but also boring, and you see a ridge left by a mole and suddenly you have this vision of extensive subterranean life.
That was what had attracted Mac Samson. He saw the latent energy hovering discretely out of sight and he had had to pursue a long and difficult seduction to find out that he had misread the signals. There was not much passion there the way he had guessed, or hoped. There was energy, all right, and intensity and rage and vanity and a gnawing sense of unfulfilment, but none of these went anywhere, didn’t lead as he had thought to more and more feverish embraces.
More than anything, Rachel was a female who had been raised to be a nice little girl and her parents had succeeded. And there she stopped, never mind the getting older. And this thing she had been made into, a nice little girl, was neither her nor not her, it was just something she had been made into. Nobody had ever said to Rachel, what do you think, what do you want? And, reasonably enough, she had never tried to answer either question.
So that when an occasion arose when she did consider those questions, there was a lot of accumulated answer, which totaled up to: I want to make him pay.
She suspected that her husband was having an affair because he became less interested in having sex with her. And he was less interested in another way, not asking how she had passed the day or how was she liking the weather. These things made her alert. Then in her husband’s address book, she had found the initials TC in too many places. Her husband used initials frequently to designate other doctors and meetings and hospitals. But TC occurred too many times. And the fact that he wrote it small, or in the margin of the day’s events, was suspicious. She brooded about it, weeks before she had confirmation. This came in a simple way. She had told James she was going to a PTA meeting. She came home early, said, “I’m home,” but got no answer. She went along the hall and heard him talking on the phone in their bedroom. The door was ajar and she could hear enough to convince her she wanted to hear more. She went to the den, closed the door and slowly lifted the phone. She was careful to make no sound and she was on guard in case one of her children came to the room.
“Well, maybe in two days,” her husband said.
“That would be wonderful,” a woman’s voice replied.
“I miss you, too. You know I do. I had to call.”
“I’m glad,” said the woman, Thelma Compton.
“I charged it to the office phone.”
“Oh.”
“Rachel will be back soon.”
“Mine’s here somewhere. But he wouldn’t notice.”
For every person there’s a provocation that would make him commit murder. For Rachel Smithers it was the line: I had to call.
Rachel’s first and only plan was to go to her husband’s office in the day, complaining of a pain, and stab him with the nearest scalpel. Say it was a freak accident. She dared any jury to convict a mother with two children. After all, so far as anybody in town knew, she had no motive. Most likely, the case would never go to court.
When she had tried to do it, she found that practice would have helped. While the doctor was turned away, she picked up a scalpel and raised it. And that was her position when the doctor turned back around. He looked at the scalpel and then at her. She looked at him, not moving the scalpel for five seconds. Then, ins
tead of murdering her husband she did something more extraordinary. She became angry.
“I know,” she shouted. “I know it all. You can’t keep it from me. The hussy. Bitch. You snake. Who do you think you are? Oh, big doctor. What is she, some little slut who came in here to have her tits examined? Hah.”
The doctor might as well have been stabbed, he was that startled.
What Dr. James Smithers had been doing seemed to his mind to have some dignity. Yes, it was adultery. But he was no rash young man. He had reflected carefully on what he was doing. But the dignity was wilting before the heat of his wife’s spewed rage. Nothing in his married life nor his medical practice had prepared him for this. All he could think of was that he hated to hear Thelma called a slut and a whore. This woman was to his mind a magnificent example of what humanity could be.
Then the nurse rushed in, blushed, retreated.
Finally the doctor said: “Now you know how I felt.”
Rachel screamed: “Don’t give me that shit.”
37
Although it was Felix who was dying, it was Morris who looked it.
Every time he came home from the office he seemed to have sunk another few millimeters into the grave, whereas Felix seemed to be standing up cockier. She had taken to wearing flashy pinstripe suits and a gray Stetson. She smoked small Mexican cigars with orange bands, and in her expression was the steeliness that Cagney used to throw at people.
When the Morrises went out together, people saw a stark and imperious woman with a disheveled, distraught man. If they weren’t on their way to be in a movie, you figured he was her patient.
Morris felt that he was trapped in a foul Gothic castle with mildew thriving in every corner and vampires in secret passageways. He couldn’t see a ray of light anywhere.
What particularly depressed Morris was that Felix seemed to be taking an even-handed, even promiscuous delight in her situation. She was becoming a wit while he was becoming a drunk. They sat at the best restaurants and Felix conducted herself like the season’s celebrity while Morris looked like an actor who hadn’t had a part in four years.
“Waiter,” Felix sang out, snapping her fingers, “bring this gentleman a little refreshment.” Meaning bourbon.
And when pretty people walked by, Felix would detain them with compliments and a wink and then inquire, “Which one of us would you like?” She would whisper obscene possibilities in their ears. If they walked off or eagerly sat down, it seemed all the same to Felix.
Morris watched his wife with baleful eyes and drank heavily, sitting lower in his chair.
People assumed that Morris and his wife were Southerners, because they are the only ones who can be grotesque in a stylish way.
Morris brooded, idly fingering a knife. He knew his work was in decline. All that was left was the pretense. He cringed over the way his partners had tactfully suggested a vacation. And the way he had indignantly declined.
He knew that he was aging a year each month. He would pretty soon be his father’s age if Felix didn’t hurry up and die.
What he couldn’t figure out was what he was supposed to do, what was left in his control? He ordered more bourbon.
It was after three in the morning and Morris could barely stand up when he had a flash. “Come on,” he nudged Felix, “we’re getting a cab.
“Shouldn’t we take somebody?”
Morris wanted to indulge his wife’s every last whim, as they were her last. But her polymorphous perversity was not something he could approve of. He knew that when she said, “take somebody,” she meant any man, woman or child who would go. He didn’t want to contemplate the implications. He said, “Of course.”
Morris was sober enough to bring along a full glass and to hail a Checker cab, which had a lot of room in back for Morris and Felix and a waitress, who was getting off with nothing planned, between them. Felix had handed her a hundred dollar bill and said, “Now you’ve got nothing to lose. Let’s go.”
Felix spent a half-hour twirling the waitress’ spit curls. Morris sipped his drink. The driver was silent through endless dark streets of Queens.
“Where are we going, anyway?” Felix asked.
“California.”
“Oh, how wonderful,” said Felix.
“California!” exclaimed the waitress. “Are you crazy?”
“I, my dear, am dying.”
The first plane going anywhere west from Kennedy Airport took off at dawn’s early light for Chicago, then Denver, then San Francisco. A mere ten hours. Felix made a nuisance of herself propositioning stewardesses and businessmen with equal aplomb. Not exactly propositioning. It was hard to say what she wanted to do. Just being friendly, she put it. The waitress was soon as drunk as Morris, if more incoherent. All of them joined the Mile High Club. Other than that it was your routine stupid adventure. Still, it was a decisive action and Morris had been dying for lack of that very thing. The three of them reached Morris’ mother’s house in time to surprise her in the act of watching quiz shows on TV in the fine little house that Mrs. Sam T. Jones had sold her and Roger Freeman.
Felix knocked. Mrs. Morris opened the door. “Felicia,” she gasped, astonished.
“Mother,” exclaimed Felix and embraced her, pushing into the house, the other two coming next. It was an afternoon that Mrs. Morris would never forget. She was a gray-haired lady with a blue steel interior. When she had recovered from her surprise, or tried to pretend she had, she put her hands on her hips and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing, Bradford,” that being Morris’ first name. “Look at you. You’re a mess.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Felix, who still looked as fresh and cavalier as fifteen hours earlier, when the evening had begun.
“Not you. My dear dumb son. And this … this …” Mrs. Morris waved with a shudder at the young woman in a shirt unbuttoned three buttons down, then looking for a place to throw up.
“Fuck you,” yelped Morris the son, and orated a list of demands he had on his mind. “And call that guy up. I want him here, too.” In reaching for the phone, Morris tripped and fell on the rug.
“I have to pee,” said Felix. “I mean piss. I mean whiz. You mark my words,” she announced majestically, “you’ll never have equality of the sexes until women whiz!”
Finally, in self-defense Mrs. Morris called Roger. He did not want to come, tried to think up something, but he did. And with his amazing instincts, he decided to treat all the people there as though they were crazy, with the exception of the waitress.
He ushered her into the kitchen, to wash off her face. He put his arm around her shoulder in a brotherly way and said, “Isn’t this just terrible? These people are nuts. I really apologize. You from … New York? Great place. I’m there on business a lot.”
The waitress was blond and cute and if you told her that eating twigs was the latest fashion, she’d want some. On her underwear was the name of a famous designer, the last place in the world he’d personally want to be.
Felix found them and shouted, “Hands off, little lizard, she’s mine.”
Roger went instinctively into some bit of patter or another. “Oh, eat shit,” said Felix. And she squared off in a playful but pugilistic way and punched Roger in the nose.
The word flabbergasted should be used only on special occasions, such as the day, in his own kitchen, Roger Freeman was punched by a woman in a pinstripe suit still wearing her Stetson, a small cigar in the corner of her mouth.
Felix looked bored as she said to the waitress, “I did it for my husband. A little gift. He’s having a birthday, next week. Maybe you’d like to jump out of a cake for him. With me, I mean. I’ll sketch some blue prints on you. He’ll love it.”
“As for you, creep,” meaning Roger, “blow!”
Felix didn’t mean it, of course, she just loved to say the tough lines.
Felix looked again at Roger. She sawed her first fingers against one another, looking incredulous. “You really doing it to her, the old
lady I mean?”
Without waiting for an answer, Felix put her arm around the waitress and took her back to the living room. Mother Morris was smouldering quietly in one chair. Son Morris was smouldering quietly in another. Anyone could see the strong family resemblance.
Felix gave a hard squint at Mrs. Morris. “I found the creep trying to put the make on her.” She sounded like Bogart in The Big Sleep.
That Felix seemed to be having such a good time ruined a good deal of unpleasantness for everyone.
After a while, nobody knew what to say.
Spiking a morning orange juice with a tablespoon of Jack Daniels, Felix raised a glass, “Let’s drink to cancer. May it have a long and happy life.”
38
Hair was what he liked most. Tits and the rest other men could talk about all they wanted. What he noted first in a woman was the sheen of her hair, the flow and fall of hair, the way hair framed a face. It was impossible for his mind to get too far down into the gutter, since it was always concentrated on hair. Years after he met a woman, he would recall-how she did her hair, and not much else. Although, if he particularly enjoyed the hair, he would tend to remember more because everything about the woman seemed more striking if the hair was.
When he sat with a woman in a restaurant he preferred to sit beside her. Then he could lean close to her and talk past her hair. And when she tilted her head to take a forkful of spinach, her hair would swing forward, which he liked to see.
If a woman he knew changed her hair unpredictably, this was a treachery. He wanted to be consulted, or at least warned.
Charlie Sanborn wore shirts made of shiny fabrics and was as handsome as a man with a very large nose can be. He liked to think of himself as the Aristotle Onassis of Broadway. The words on his door were Play Productions, Inc. Sanborn’s largest triumph was When Desire Calls, that ran for three months despite what the New York Times had to say. His was not a glamorous business. He spent most of his time smiling optimistically at people with money. It was hard work. Producing was a respectable form of gambling, like all of show biz and the arts generally. No matter what you came up with, the odds were against you 50 to 1. Nobody but a fool would try it. A gambler was more scorned only because the producer was at least subtle. In the same way that investing in the stock market is more highly esteemed than betting on horses.
American Dreams Page 14