American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  Charlie Sanborn had two faces. Lounging back in his chair, nodding yes and no to other people’s careers, he was slow and soft and lazy looking. He had forever. He issued final decisions with a yawn and managed to exude a bit of senatorial diffidence. Outside his office, however, he was always on the run, kissing ass up and down the Great White Way, hungry for a nod. If he had reversed the two styles, he would have done better.

  When an aging blond came to see him, Charlie Sanborn was bored until he looked at her pictures.

  “Ohhh,” he sighed. “Look at your hair in this one. Why’d you change it?”

  “That was last year.”

  “Oh, change it back. It’s beautiful.”

  The actress put some extra wrinkles in her forehead. “You think it would help?”

  “Help?! I just love this look,” he said. Sanborn was careful not to be too precise about his fetish. “Get it back right and I think I can do something.”

  “All right.”

  “What’s your stage name?”

  “Chrissie Carlyle.”

  “Great. Oh, what a look.”

  Two days later Sanborn made sure she had a small part in his current production, Whose Legs. Which gave unfortunate support to the meretricious idea that between the people who make it and those who don’t there’s hardly a hair’s worth of difference.

  Switching from aloof authority to eager lackey all day, Sanborn hardly knew who he was when he came home. Mostly he was so worn out by the stress of switching that he ate in silence, watched some TV and passed out early from an overdose of Undecided Identity. His own story was that he worked very, very hard and because of that everything was coming together soon.

  Right at the end of prime time, his wife Susanne said, “We have to talk.”

  “Talk? About what?”

  “Us.”

  “Not now.”

  “Now!”

  “What?”

  “I need more of you than I’m getting.”

  “I’m working hard, come on.”

  “You’re working? Try a shift at a hospital some time.”

  “I know that. Let’s go to bed.”

  “You mean to sleep?”

  “To bed. To sleep. Yeah.”

  “We live in the same house. But what’s it mean? What is this place, a hotel? A train station?”

  “Come on, Susanne.”

  “You talk about work. Your work. What are you, Jesus Christ making miracles? We both work. So there we’re equals. Don’t you forget it. Look, I’ve thought about this, Charlie. I can’t go on this way. So you decide. Either you do more for this marriage or you won’t have one.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious. I’ll leave you if you make me.”

  “Make you? What, the children, too?”

  “You neglect them, too.”

  It seemed to Sanborn that there was a scene in his new play like this. God, he thought, Susanne’s much better than the lame bitch we’ve got there. But when he said, “You ought to try acting,” it came out sarcastic.

  He looked at his wife’s hair. The way it hung was all wrong. What the hell had she done with it?

  “You ought to try acting like a man,” she said.

  “Man?”

  This was too much. He got up and seized her wrists and pushed her on the sofa. “Screw you,” he shouted. “I’m the man here. And I say I’m doing what I have to do.”

  “If that was true, I wouldn’t have to work.”

  “Goddamn!”

  Susanne Sanborn remained sprawled on the sofa. She wanted to make her husband angry or passionate or crazy, anything but the neglect she had come to hate. She slid her dress halfway up and with one hand grabbed her own thigh, in the strong deliberate way a man might.

  “Maybe somebody else would like this,” she said.

  “Goddamn. Are you nuts?”

  She pressed her hand on her dress at the top of her thighs, playing with herself, again as a man might.

  Sanborn was aroused. He was also angry. Most of all, he was crazy. On top of everything, he was bored. “Stop that,” he ordered.

  For Susanne, all that she had said was playing with destinies, that dire one in an earlier life, the dull one with Charlie now. She seemed compelled to mingle them, to make this one bloody, too. Make Charlie think and act murder (or re-enact murder). But what was evolved in her wanted only to move dangerously close, toward a sort of mock killing, and in this way purge herself of her reincarnated curse.

  But her husband frustrated all her desires. He merely stared at her and his face raged and he did nothing. For one happy, dreadful instant she had thought he was going to kill her, that he would reach for the nearest ash tray and smash out her brains. And she had thought: do it, damnit, do it.

  Instead he said, harshly, “Do what the hell you want. Just don’t bother me.”

  And Charlie Sanborn went out of the room and to bed.

  Susanne didn’t believe it. All that and back where she started, neglected. But more so. Her spirit ached inside her. She couldn’t guess what to do next. Finding her hand between her legs, she went on pressing. It was one way to clear the mind. She was her own best friend, that much she knew now.

  Soon she was sighing from the pleasure, and intermittently she was laughing, from the desperation.

  39

  It was finally a matter of style, she thought. Randol had his and they had theirs. And they didn’t disagree on anything but that.

  GeorgiaAnne had had to play guitar more than she liked. Carlyle was on the run and moving too fast sometimes to take her. She had had, without thinking about it too much, a sureness of his invincibility. Now she was not so sure. It made her sad. She knew vaguely that he was losing something out on the Coast, control of something to do with a movie. She had her own hunches about it, that it was Texas bull versus California fruit and there were more of them, that was all.

  She sang some pretty songs on the front porch. Harris, the parrot, accompanied now and then.

  “Whatthefuck,” he said otherwise.

  Her love for Randol amazed even GeorgiaAnne. When he had first swept over to her, anybody could see this was a rich old coyote laying horny paws on a silky young thing. But she had not cared about the rich so much as her own hunch. And if Carlyle was the empty, shifty desert, GeorgiaAnne was vast domes of crushed vegetation miles down, the silent remainder of dinosaur ages and a proud, dumb wisdom.

  She had dinner served to her on the front porch. She enjoyed seeing the sun set. And the sky light up red and orange in long tumbling waves of clouds. And the stars came out in infinite numbers. She knew the major constellations, having had an older brother who taught her when she was only nine.

  She made up songs about the night sky. She could pick and strum and managed intricate barre chords on the guitar. She was the corniest person in Texas that night, missing her man and singing about it.

  40

  What kept coming into her head was the certainty she remembered feeling in high school that you pass through certain stages, graduation, some college, marriage and children, and then life settles down. You reach predictable plateaus. You’re able to see the outlines of your life, the full arc of it all the way to the sunset years, happily retired as in some insurance commercial. Life becomes defined. There is permanence and things you can count on.

  All crap, she thought bitterly.

  For several weeks Bonnie Floyd had held to the belief that her husband would wake up and be his old self; she focused on the wild look in his eyes and the way he had raged at her, proof of a lapse into madness, but only a lapse, she hoped. Then she realized that what had happened was as fundamental as death: her husband was a different man now, as good as dead so far as he did her any good. She was on her own. She had to start over. As surely as logic led her each time to this same conclusion, she just as surely hated it.

  Bonnie spent the afternoon in a bar quietly drinking. She remembered all the magazines she had seen over t
he years, each depicting new “life styles,” and she had thought the phrase was stupid and the idea was stupid, because after all she had a life and couldn’t understand why so many people were so frantic in search of a life or a style or whatever it was. Now she thought that she needed one, any one, but when she tried to think of a good one, her mind was as empty as mid-ocean.

  “Another pina colada,” she told the bartender. The only thing she was sure of so far was that this white stuff made out of coconuts and rum, wasn’t it, was the best damned way she had found to get drunk.

  Even with three of them down, she had an orderly mind. She went through the possibilities—career woman born again Christian cocaine addict swinging single committed individual New York energy freak California crazy—as methodically as a computer. And each time the machine came up: not for you, sweetheart. And she finally thought: I don’t have a home. I don’t have a kid. What have I got? If I hit the checking account, I’ve got some money. But I don’t want his money. So I don’t have any money. I don’t have a job. What have I got?

  “I don’t have a pot to piss in,” she told the bartender.

  “Can’t be that bad,” he said.

  “Worse.”

  “Can you dance?” he asked.

  “In high school.”

  “The boss has a place down the street. You could make some money. You don’t need anything to dance there. No clothes, I mean.”

  Two hours later, still drunk but elaborately made up, she went on. The place was noisy and there were flashing lights, and smoke in layers where she stood. The men looked up at her perfect body and whistled. She was prudish enough to think it was the most disgusting job imaginable. All the same, she found herself thrilled. The men looked at her, she looked at them, neither seeing the other. She was there but not there. There was nothing left of her but her perfect body, which was enough. All the rest, the burnt-out life and the hopelessness, were gone. She could concentrate on the beat of the music and she could invent new steps, new struts, new wiggles, and that’s all there was.

  It should have seemed like a defeat. It seemed like victory.

  When the music was hot and the mood right, she thought she could see the outlines of her life, all the way into the sunset years.

  PART III

  To this giddy earth, mother of sins;

  Impetutous seasons, partners of our griefs;

  Terrible-faced time, robber of blooms;

  And smiling death, teller of rich jokes.

  dedication for The Book of the Sunrise

  translation by Bradford Morris

  41

  Sonia sat up in bed slightly and in the darkened room she looked at the man beside her, Higgins. His body was wiry, not big. He moved jerkily, she thought, as though pulled about by strings. Even when he was asleep, a brooding fixity stayed on his face. Now and then he twitched. She assumed that he dreamed a lot. Sometimes he would wake up screaming or gibbering. But he would say, “I wasn’t dreaming, I never dream.”

  Sonia wondered what it said about her that she was with a man who was not good to her, who would never be good for her, who was himself no good, who could come to no good. She thought it damned depressing. The men who worked at the office, who had jobs and cars and normal expressions, they were the men she should be with. Didn’t she want to be married? Exactly. And they were the men who would marry her. If she wasn’t too easy. But here she was. With Higgins. Unable to sleep. She slid down next to him and put her hand gently on his shoulder and snuggled closer to him. Grunting a little as though far away, he turned away.

  The men at the office were just so boring, she thought. She started to cry. And none of them said they needed her, like Higgins did.

  She went to sleep. And when she woke up before eight, Higgins was gone.

  Higgins was walking down Broadway, biting off the morning light and feeling like the San Andreas Fault, ready to quake, eager to swallow up cities. Sonia was on him. What was it with women, you tell them you’re no good and they can’t count on you for subway fare and two months later they’re dropping hints? And it made him mad thinking about Lawrence Georges. A cat burglar, something to be proud of, but still a small-time guy. Now what was he doing? Getting in over his head and trying to take the old Professor down with him. Higgins just knew it.

  Lawrence had told him a big heist was being set up, it would be easy. Yeah, and since when was Lawrence knocking off Brinks?

  His loyalties were divided. Saving Lawrence from himself was worth some effort. And so was getting a front row seat any time there was to be a big blow-out. You watch and you get your jollies and you go home, thinking, boy, I’m glad I’m not such a jerk.

  Still, nothing was clear. Only that Higgins was jumpy. When a man suddenly begins operating out of his arena, other people naturally got nervous. Lawrence was angling for some big score. That is, pushing. It was always like that, Higgins thought, with the Greek tragic guys, won’t stay in their place, reach too far, then.… POW, the gods take them right out, a lightning bolt disguised as fate.

  Higgins would never know that Lawrence had lied to him, about the armored car and a lot else, that Lawrence had decided that Higgins, like everyone else, could not be trusted. Knowing this would have wounded Higgins, hurt him down to his quicksilver heart. But he would have had to admit that Lawrence was right, A-plus right.

  Higgins reached Columbus Circle, just another face at rush hour.

  He couldn’t plan work thinking he ought to go to the Metropolitan Museum for a new show there. Then he couldn’t stand the thought of all those high, solemn walls, art nailed up there like crucifixes, people bowing to them. Higgins was afraid he would smash a few Grecian urns. The worst was those Faberge egg shells, the desire almost uncontrollable to toss one thirty yards to see if a guard could catch it.

  Higgins perceived life in felt physical terms and the tension he lived with was like a man coming up to him in the street and grappling with him, twisting back his arms, trying to get him into a half nelson, trying to trip him and throw him down for the pin. Higgins had tics and flinches that were his involuntary responses to this man who was trying to grapple with him.

  When he crossed 57th Street he was ready for the cab that plowed six feet into the pedestrian walkway and touched his pants, he was ready with a high jumper’s roll right onto the cab’s hood. The driver must have seen broken bones and a law suit that would dog him for years. But Higgins came off on his feet, outside the driver’s window.

  “Sonofabitch a mother fucker, think you own the road, all alike, goddamn, watch where you’re going, you see THAT LIGHT, it says WALK, you ASSHOLE, you want make something of it, now BACK THAT THING UP.”

  Not being crazy himself, the driver pretended there was nobody there.

  Higgins slammed his open hand on the windshield. PLAP PLAP.

  “They’re all alike,” Higgins said to everyone. He knew they thought he was nuts, also knew they were on his side. He pointed his finger at the driver’s nose and shouted, “ASSHOLE.”

  Higgins knew he was cracking even as he put one foot in front of the other down Broadway; he had dreamed twice about Lucy. He called her a dwarf figuratively, as she was almost five feet tall. But rotund and robust and busty and with an earthy smile that Higgins had picked out twenty rows back in Art History 102. All right, really there was nothing so wrong with her. But to his mind she was a freak, at least his desire for her was a freakish desire. Higgins knew that the best sign of people going under is that they start reaching for freakish things, knew that normal happy people with their crummy happy lives never want freakish things, that was why you never heard about them, they could be happy with a newspaper and a glass of milk, but when a man is going under, sinking right through the pages of history, when he’s in the very act of exploding like a balloon explodes, this fucking guy shits on the newspaper and eats the Goddamned glass.

  Higgins had dreamed of Lucy’s Reubens flesh and her huge cloud-like bazooms covering his face. He
had dreamed of fucking the planet’s whole archeology and anthropology, because Lucy was it. And Higgins knew that he did not feel merely a freak’s lust for Lucy but also a freak’s love. Love for a million years of female juices that were in her. Love for the good earth she manifestly was, when he was only the burn-off of waste gases you see at a refinery, high and dramatic and useless.

  And that Carlyle, Higgins thought among the theaters of the Great White Way, he won’t leave me the fuck alone. I know the bastard now. I could go down there and take away a half million and he’d laugh the whole time. Now what fun is that?

  Higgins remembered the night they played cards, how utterly determined Carlyle was to win, even against inevitable defeat. That was what Higgins loved, the spirit of the man and grinding it down hand after hand.

  What he thought he knew about Carlyle he knew from six phone calls. But Higgins did not know that he was being followed. The people were good. But that was not the reason they got away with it. Higgins operated at a level where nothing was too subtle. People confronted each other. There were battles. If the police wanted him, they would arrest him. If some other bad guys had business, they would say so. Higgins was too busy with present, private business to care about the sidewalk thirty yards back.

  It seemed to Higgins that the city was becoming unshapen and misshapen around him. The buildings leaned and turned as though screwed into the ground. It was the pressure on him and in him, he thought, distorting his eyeballs, like the extra gravity on a spaceman, 3 G’s, 6 G’s, the flesh on the face is rippled back, the eyes bulge, you get the astigmatism of the rocket age. So, it was an El Greco he was in, after all. Higgins liked that. El Greco had a lot of class, even if he couldn’t see straight.