Morris was cornering and thinking about Felix and it all came to him clearly as he was crossing the right skate over the left that Felix wouldn’t die a natural death, she would commit suicide before that could happen. Morris got the toe of one skate caught on the heel of the other, wobbled and pitched forward with the abandon that people are capable of only when ice skating. He landed on his hands and his stomach. Not much hurt, the wind knocked out, he got up and palmed water off his sweater and skated over to the rail.
Morris was shaken by his thoughts. He had thought he had many months, maybe six or ten if the doctor was off. What could he have been thinking, that she would just live all that time and then, puff, die? No, it was going to be bad at the end, very bad, and he realized now how Felix would deal with that. She wouldn’t wait, she wouldn’t let them hook her up to machines and shoot all kinds of radiation through her, she’d say: “Up yours, gentlemen; if you don’t pull the plug, I’m pulling it, unless you’ve got one that will follow me down the street. Tootleloo.”
It was all clear now, she’d go as long as she could go charmingly and jokingly, and then he’d come home and he wouldn’t have an invalid to nurse, he’d have a corpse to bury.
Which meant that he didn’t have nearly as long as he had thought. The doctor always talked in terms of how long she could live, not how long she would enjoy living. Oh Jesus, Morris thought, wiping sweat off his neck, this is terrible, she might be doing it right now.
Morris went to the phone booth near the ice. He couldn’t wait.
“Felix,” he said eagerly when she answered.
“What? What?” She was always playing parts with him. Now she spoke harshly and irritably, a sort of fishwife.
“Felix, listen. I just though of something. How do you feel? I mean, any pain?”
“Let’s say, I know it’s coming.”
“Listen, what did the doctor say about it? It’ll get bad?”
“Sure, sweetheart, it’ll get so bad I’ll wish I were dead. And I damned well intend to be.”
“No! No, Felix. That’s what was worrying me. Listen. Now you’re all right, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And if it hurts, he gave you pills.”
“YEAH.”
“But Felix, listen, what I mean, you have to take them as long as it’s possible. I mean, don’t do anything crazy just because it hurts a little.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Felix, I need you.”
“Is that so?”
“I love you.”
A pause. “All right. What’s a girl to do?”
“Don’t surprise me, Felix. That’s all I’m asking. I’ll do anything. Just don’t surprise me.”
“When you come home, I’m going to surprise you. Probably one little ball will fall off on the floor and just lie there.”
“Don’t joke. You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean. Come on home.”
Felix was touched. It was the first time her husband had said he loved her in a half-dozen years. The things a person had to do to get a little love these days, she thought.
Morris became obsessed with the possibility that Felix was lying to him. That she would surprise him. He would come home and she would be in the bathtub with slit wrists. Or on the bed, tranquilized. In the oven, gas. Or she might jump, definitely the worst. He would have to find her with neighbors standing around gawking. Just too terrible to think about.
Morris could not concentrate on his work. He had had to admit that he wouldn’t be able to complete the hotel in Dallas. The client, an excitable Texan, had phoned a dozen times to complain of delays and then to insist that Morris be kept on the project. The Texan had decided that he liked Morris, just about the only person Morris could think of who did, not counting Felix. The partners in the firm agreed to maintain the pretense of Morris’ involvement, to keep the client happy.
The Texan sent Morris, at the office, a huge box containing a smallish statue, with a note that read: “Keep on shooting, Partner—Randol.” The statue, several people said, looked expensive, a museum piece perhaps. But Morris could hardly look at it. A girl, disfigured, crumbling. What Morris saw was Felix, her condition made visible.
Morris spent more time on a hobby, translating The Book of the Sunrise, a collection of Mayan sacred writings. Morris could not read the language; he had an archeologist’s translation that he wanted to make literary. In so far as Morris believed anything, he half-believed that the writings contained messages addressed specifically to him. He could spend hours phrasing and rephrasing single lines. Time didn’t matter. Nobody else was interested in the results:
Self-important people are their own jailers.
Leave heaven alone and heaven will leave you alone.
Each night and each day has its debris.
Nobody is indispensable with the exception of everybody.
The Book of the Sunrise states that all things spin around other things, the moon around the earth, as well as the earth around the moon, a surprising example of early scientific understanding. No notice is given to the Greek idea of cause and effect, rather events are said to spiral around like eddies in smoke, first causing and then being caused by, as parents cause children to be what they are, and children cause parents to be what they are, and nobody can say that one statement is truer than the other.
The Book of the Sunrise has a four line dedication. It took five hours before Morris was satisfied with his translation …
To this giddy earth, mother of sins;
Impetuous seasons, partners of our griefs;
Terrible-faced time, robber of blooms;
And smiling death, teller of rich jokes.
PART IV
High above America, his heart
overflowed with hope and desire.
47
Although Carlyle understood a lot of things about Harry Benton, he didn’t understand the main thing. Benton had no capacity for vision. So that when Carlyle spent a half-hour depicting the golden possibilities that resided in special Texas sun-baked shit, all that Benton got out of the conversation was that the guy talking to him needed help, which meant weakness, which meant Benton might be able to shake some easy bucks off him, maybe muscle some of Carlyle’s operations and try to annex them.
In his circles, Benton had gained a lot of respect because he never said anything stupid. He never said anything at all if he could avoid it. Benton liked to sit with his feet on his desk, lost in a heavy metallic silence.
“The boss is thinking,” the boys would say and they too went about in silence.
For many of the people who got close to Benton, it was a terrifying silence. You didn’t assume he would jump up and smash you, so it wasn’t the terror of barely suppressed violence. No, you assumed he would pick up the phone and send a man to kill you outside your favorite restaurant or in your own house. You thought this might happen because his silence was malevolent and tidy and you were sure that Benton would realize that there was nothing tidier and more malevolent he could do than get rid of you.
It was interesting that Lawrence Georges, who had never met Harry Benton face-to-face, who had never had to understand people and didn’t all that well, understood Harry Benton right down to his gray metal heart, understood that the worst thing that could happen to Harry Benton was that he might have to confront not a hostile person but a hostile vision.
When a friendly detective came to Benton and said the police had uncovered evidence that he was involved in the smuggling of diamonds and there seemed to be a Swiss bank account, so he was in trouble with the Feds in several ways, Benton glared at him with the blackest kind of silence.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Benton wanted to know.
“Company named Lasalle Exchange on Boush.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Yeah? Well, cops raided Lasalle, the way I get it, and found your name.”
“My name?”
“Well, t
ell your lawyer anyway,”
“What for?”
“Maybe a grand jury.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Benton’s voice was loud and hard. He grimaced and ground his jaw. “I don’t pay you to bring me shit like this.”
Benton liked to play golf at least one afternoon a week. He had read that Bob Hope and Dean Martin played golf and most of the presidents and the guys who ran the big legit operations. When he was on the links, he could think he was in their shoes. But this afternoon it wasn’t much fun, even though there were no clouds in the blue sky and the greens were well-watered and trimmed flat and stretched before him like velvet. On the fourth hole Benton had worked himself into such a fury that he missed his tee-off and began clubbing the tee, the ball, and the green with such force that he broke the head off the club.
“Diamonds,” he shouted at his associates. “I gave one to my wife thirty years ago. That’s what I know about diamonds.”
He calmed down for a minute. Then took another club and addressed another ball. He sliced it into the trees, a hundred and fifty yards out.
“Somebody’s jerking me off,” he said. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to them. Their kids, too, the wives.” But every time Benton tried to get an overview of the situation he couldn’t. And the strain to get this overview was like vertigo. His face flushed and he became taut all over. When he got into the trees and found his ball and was handed an iron, he began swinging it at a tree, knocking little chips of bark off.
Benton was wearing lime pants and a pink shirt and hundred dollar shoes with tassles. His caddy, aka his bodyguard, was too scared to say anything. Benton’s shirt was dark with sweat across his shoulders.
Benton kicked the ball onto the fairway. As he followed it, he said, “I’ll put dynamite up his ass. A fifty foot fuse. I want to watch his eyes.”
The thought soothed him. He was able to finish the game. Then the group went to the bar of the Rolling Hills Country Club twenty miles out of Chicago and Benton had a lot to drink.
Still, he could not get out of this one compartment. He began to forget that there were others. He was feeling crazily claustrophobic and the impulse rose up in him to pound on the gray metal walls, as though somebody might chance by and hear him and let him out.
What kept coming into his mind as he drank Martinis at Rolling Hills was that this was just the sort of crap Mac Samson would pull, something weird and off the books. I swear to God, he kept thinking, if I didn’t know he was dead with my own eyes …
Benton had in fact gone to the funeral home to see the deceased, because he was tidy that way. Samson had been lovingly made up and looked like a villain in the old-time theater but with a hardened choir boy air. Now Benton had to remind himself that he had looked directly at the body. He remembered every detail. “Serves you right, fucker,” was what Benton had said under his breath. Now Benton wished that the troublesome Samson was not dead, then he would know who to kill first.
Harry Benton was Catholic. In some small and remote compartment of his mind he believed in whatever it was the Catholic Church said was true. In that small compartment he had to consider the claim that Samson or his soul was up there, out there, somewhere. Benton had heard of limbo, knew that some souls did not go immediately to heaven or hell, that they hung around in limbo. Well, he thought, sullen in his country club, why can’t the bastard be there, in this limbo? With the utmost creativity his mind was capable of, Benton saw this misty, more or less angelic figure up near the ceiling, Mac Samson with wings and this obnoxious fucking smile.
It wasn’t right, Benton thought, you kill somebody, they’re dead. It wasn’t fair if they could come back and just hang around.
The conversation at Benton’s table was scant. The boss’ glowering silence was like acid on the vocal chords.
A week later somebody took a shot at Benton’s Cadillac almost in the center of Jolliet. The bullet came through the roof of the car and hit the floor in front of Benton’s feet. The driver sped up but not in time to make a difference if the somebody had tried a second shot. Two blocks away Benton ordered the car pulled over. They examined the two holes, roof and floor, and drove back along the street.
“There,” said the driver. “Had to be the Kresge Building.”
Benton was not afraid of dying. Being shot at was not a threat or a danger, it was an insult. It was spit in his face. It was intolerable.
The Cadillac pulled back into traffic.
Benton was shaking with anger. “First,” he promised, “I’m going to shoot off both his balls.”
A few days later, further confused rumors of war reached Benton, that there were people in the government out to get him, probably the federal government, nobody was sure, people who were enraged that a hoodlum like Benton had beat twenty felonies and the IRS, and had never spent a day in jail.
“What the fuck is this?” Harry Benton screamed, blood vessels large on his forehead.
“Somebody’s calling reporters,” an underling tried to explain, “and telling them things to ask the police about.”
“Somebody? Oh, Jesus.”
“It’s on the streets, Boss.”
On the street! Like ghosts. Like the no-news crap still out there about this Georges punk planning a Brinks, flouting Benton’s control. Even the stoolie they set up, a rat with droppings for brains, hadn’t come up with info on Georges, had lost sight of his old pal. Just one more aggravation in a sea of them. For Benton, the steel gray bulkheads groaned and buckled.
“Don’t talk to me about the streets. I own the fucking streets! Names! Get me names. Somebody? Somebody who?! Get out of here.”
Then Benton slumped back in his large swivel chair, sweat on his forehead, eyes wild with rage and despair.
48
All right, he thought, this would be like taking a fort by seige. He had been polite and considerate, he had been gentlemanly, and what had it gotten him? Now it was time to be tactless and provocative. Captain Witters had pondered the matter in his old-fashioned manner, and all he could decide was that it was time to haul up bigger guns.
He was not impatient. The last week at sea went calmly, the sea swelling in vast dull curves. The Captain observed the clouds in his literal way, seeing mostly animals. Sunsets came down in complex orange and black melodramas. A sudden squall on the last day out pleased him and he knew that it would not have the month before. The tapping and rustling of rain along the side of his ship sounded to him like a flourish of flutes and violins, accompaniment for what he felt in his fine figure of a heart.
Witters knew that all strategists agreed that surprise was important, so he did not call. He went ashore, hailed a cab, and said, “Take me to the Sam Jones Real Estate Agency.” He arrived on the steps with the rays of the setting sun to brighten his braid.
The secretary said that Mrs. Jones would not see him. It might have been safer saying she wasn’t there but only in the short run as Witters intended to camp out in the office.
“I don’t accept that,” Witters said, his hat under his arm.
The secretary was surprised. “Mrs. Jones is in conference.”
“You tell Mrs. Jones that I’m not leaving until I’ve spoken with her. Now take these flowers to her.”
The secretary was in the middle and pleasantly agitated, unlike the agitation that Roger Freeman was experiencing. He was in Mrs. Jones’ office, sharing the customary late afternoon drink.
“That man,” he said to Charlotte, “isn’t he a pest? You’d think he’d be ashamed.”
“Tell him,” Mrs. Jones said to the secretary, “that he is to leave or I will call the police.”
“I really must talk to the shipping company,” Roger said.
Roger had been keeping Mrs. Adele Morris at bay for a week and in the process making her unpleasant to be with. Roger wanted more and more to team up with Mrs. Sam Jones, marriage, business, three children and all. He was sure that they would make more money together than he
could with Adele, never mind the inheritance, and there was much more to talk about with Charlotte.
Captain Witters said to the secretary, “Look me in the eye.” He leaned across the counter and focused on a spot one half-inch behind her corneas. “What is Mrs. Jones doing at this time?”
“She’s having a drink. With someone.”
“With whom?” Captain Witters pushed.
“I’m not supposed to tell you that.”
Actually, this was the most interesting thing to happen at a painfully dull job in six months and the secretary wished she and the Captain could go around like this for the rest of the week.
With elaborate enunciation, Witters asked: “WITH WHOM?”
“Mr.… Freeman.”
“Roger Freeman of Roger Freeman Enterprises?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Didn’t Mrs. Jones instruct you to call the police?”
“Yes! She certainly did.”
“Go right ahead,” Witters said, starting around the counter.
“What are you doing?”
“Joining Mrs. Jones and Mr. Freeman.”
The secretary was very near paralyzed, albeit excited. She buzzed Mrs. Jones and said, “He’s coming in! Do I call the police?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Jones, as cool a commander as the Captain.
Witters walked in as though he had been invited. “Ah, Charlotte, how nice to see you. And Roger Freeman, how are you?” He extended his hand. Roger shook it quickly.
American Dreams Page 17