Sometimes the three of them would be lurching along a sidewalk late at night, Susanne in the middle, Morris and Felix on each side, arms over shoulders. They went to night clubs, discos, and bizarre places where all the people were perverts of some kind and Morris could lament that he would not be around to see the collapse of Western civilization, so sorry. Susanne loved the Morrises and she was awed by their kindness and brashness and intelligence. And then she would think, it’ll be all over in a month or so, and they’ll be gone and I’ll have to go on without them. She then would be really depressed.
Susanne told them about her fear that she was fated to die bloodily. They were charmed by that, too. Now Susanne decided, even if she didn’t say so, that she was going to die of simple old-fashioned sadness.
The three of them talked a lot about what she should do with her marriage and, in particular, with her husband. Should she take lovers? They offered themselves, but Susanne said she wasn’t ready for so many at once.
“Oh, come on,” they said.
They said Susanne could jump out of a plane with them, but she said she wasn’t ready for that, either.
“Oh, come on,” they said.
Susanne had spent her life nursing people. And her deepest impulse at any time was to help people. And everywhere she was frustrated. The Morrises were like people sailing off on a cruise. They were breaking bottles of champagne, glad to be going. They wanted nothing from her.
In all their wit and cheeriness and endless chatter, Susanne thought, or let herself hope, that she might find answers for herself. She did not.
She was pretty sure that this was to be the most memorable month of her life but that was about all she was sure of.
56
Carlyle had to come all the way up to New York to have a heart attack.
He had always felt as free as the wind that moves as it wants across the desert. Recently he did not. He felt cramped, constrained and constricted, as though surveyors had been measuring his salt flats with the don’t-that-beat-all intention of building little box houses everywhere he looked.
Carlyle wanted to see Higgins when he came to New York and he used his daughter as bait, not even knowing what powerful bait that was. But Higgins remained the hardest man to get along with he had ever known.
“That Goddamn Higgins,” he told his guests for dinner at Gallagher’s Steak House, “is the last of the wild men. He could string me out for a hundred thou. I know it and he knows it, but does he do it? He don’t and he won’t. Won’t even come to dinner with me. The ungrateful disrespectin’ sonofabitch.”
Carlyle ate and drank too much and raged too much. He was angry with Higgins, and he was angry with all the people that seemed to be double-crossing him wherever he looked. “That guy Benton, as crooked as ten miles of small intestines”—and damned if he didn’t push the wrong way on the Texas unions and damned if Carlyle hadn’t lost his fight with the other newspapers. He was so disgusted he just sold everything in that city. But what was money to Carlyle? How could a man be lively with money in the bank?
“What am I supposed to do,” Carlyle pleaded, “jerk off looking at all those zeroes?”
And Carlyle was angry with Daphne, that she wasn’t pissing her money away in Monte Carlo or shacking up with all the pipsqueak people he had always feared she would, Yankees and lawyers and Ivy Leaguers. The fool girl had turned as serious as ice on him and damned if she wasn’t more ice than he was desert.
“Study??????” Carlyle shouted, making heads turn. “Are you nuts? A Ph.D.?” Carlyle looked around blankly. “What the hell is that?”
And there then were the Morrises, a queer damned couple if Carlyle had ever had the mixed blessing of meeting one. But what made them so objectionable was not their being, well, eccentric, but being so damned cheerful about everything. Carlyle had somehow gotten the impression the last month or two, reading between the lies as he put it, that Morris his architect was suffering a breakdown or was stashed somewhere in an alky ward.
But no, here they were dressed up like a duke and dutchess as if they hadn’t got a care in the world. They were whispering all the time and giggling at each other and Carlyle thought that if one of them gave the other another little kiss under the ear, he was going to personally stand up in his chair and puke on the table.
Midway into the steaks, Carlyle idled up to this puzzlement. “I have to say,” he commented to the Morrises, “you’re the happiest people married nearly ten years I’ve ever seen.”
“What’s there to worry about?” Morris said, which Carlyle thought clearly the dumbest thing he had ever heard. Actually, Morris himself was surprised to find that what he had always heard but never believed turned out true: once you were dead, or thought of yourself that way, living was really much more pleasant.
Well, it was damned irritating for Carlyle, all of this good cheer, and he didn’t know whether to have another drink or to cry on GeorgiaAnne’s ample and amorous bosom.
Morris had planned, earlier in the day when he was still sober, to make a grand toast, thanking Carlyle for the Greek statue. The truth was, Morris shuddered to look at it, had in fact wrapped it in a bath towel and hidden it in his hall closet, adding guilt to his other feelings. Morris hated to think about the statue and didn’t once during the evening. From one vantage, he thought later, a terrible faux pas. On the other hand, what was fine 12-year-old bourbon for?
After dinner there was, to hear Carlyle talk about it, this damned fool play about legs that his dear dumb darling daughter had picked out of all the garbage in Gotham. Carlyle was straddled all evening over the question of whether to crawl up on the stage and find out whose legs for himself or to make rude sounds with his tongue stuck out. But then came the icing on the hand grenade, when after the show Daphne asked Carlyle if he remembered the woman under the yellow raincoat? He said he surely did, pretty fine legs, and Daphne ran her finger down the tiny names in Playbill until it got to Chrissie Carlyle. Carlyle stood on West 45th Street in front of the theater with his mouth hanging open.
“I thought you’d want to know she’s all right.”
“All right,” Carlyle shouted. “I know she’s all right. You couldn’t hurt that woman with a stick, Daphne!”
“She is my mother.”
“She’s not your mother, damnit. Your mother was that big stand of yucca out back. I just went crazy out there one night and next thing I knew I had this beautiful baby girl on the front porch.” Carlyle stopped and puffed out his cheeks. “Chrissie Carlyle! Don’t that beat the shit out of everything?”
Daphne put her arm in her father’s and kissed him on the cheek.
Higgins watched them from across the street. He had known the play and the time it would let out and he had played pool a block away at McGirr’s, all night savoring and dreading the moment when he actually saw her. From a distance she was blond and slender and cool. And he moved closer than he intended, crossed the street and joined the several hundred people in front of the theater. He had decided to leave the city in one more week, to go to Asia or Africa. Give Sonia her freedom, he put it sardonically. And now there was nothing he minded leaving but the memory of that photograph in Texas. And now that he had the chance to see the flesh all that he could think of was that he had to see the eyes. He loitered nearby until the five of them started walking east toward Broadway. Daphne moved away from her father and walked beside the Morrises. Higgins caught up and moved beside Daphne and he looked at her profile and then he pushed his wrist against her shoulder and she turned and peered into his sunglasses and Higgins knew that it was no good.
She was so pure.
“Sorry,” he said.
She smiled and went back to telling the Morrises what she intended to study. “At first, I thought it was going to be philosophy …”
Looking past her, Morris caught sight of Higgins and he was sure that he had seen that face somewhere before. The sunglasses …? But he didn’t remember the man on the plane.
The Morrises had said goodbye in the street outside only a few minutes earlier. They had already hailed a cab and were on their way to meet some people at a night club, one of whom was the wife of the man who had produced the play they had just seen. The Morrises thought this was wonderfully funny. Of course, they thought almost everything was wonderful and funny.
The Morrises never heard about Carlyle’s heart attack.
57
Harry Benton was a godfather of sorts, a leader. He was rich, respected, successful, feared. If anybody had told Harry Benton that he was capable of having a nervous breakdown, Harry Benton would have laughed that person flat on his ass.
Yet here the damned thing was, in the front yard and coming up the steps, pushing the door open, not knocking politely at all. Now it was in the living room and Benton, doing some fast figuring, knew it was his very own nervous breakdown.
Benton was startled but more ashamed. Obviously he could not tell his lawyer. He could not tell his doctor. He could not tell his wife. He could not tell his associates, peers or pissants. He could not tell his son. Maybe he could tell a priest, but he would feel like such a damned fool.
Benton had never known what it was to be lonely before. Now it came down on him like six floors of bad luck. He was a prisoner of metal.
Benton owned a large house and twenty acres out in the fields of Illinois. He had had this idea that he wanted to keep his family clean, wanted a haven. He wanted a home that was large, airy, and respectable. He wanted to keep his wife out of the way. When a one-engine plane flew over and an incendiary grenade fell on his garage, that was the last straw. There was a lot of damage. But this was beside the point. These people were serious, that was the point.
All his wife could remember was the low gray clouds that afternoon and the growing roar. She, and several guards, had rushed to windows but seen nothing. Then came the second, more sudden pass. “Mother of God,” she told Harry, “it was so loud. I thought they were landing on the roof. Then boom!—the garage is already burning.”
The two dozen postcards took longer to spin down on Benton’s green acres. They were all the same, a card you can buy at gift shops near the federal prison in Leaven-worth, Kansas. There was a picture of a cell and the caption, “Wish you were here.”
Wise guys, Benton thought, thinking how much he hated wise guys. They’re laughing at me, Benton realized and crumpled a little.
Benton became more nervous and broken down. He sat in his office and brooded. When the call finally came, there wasn’t more than a flicker of fight left in him. Two million dollars in used bills in a suitcase. If there was any problem with the delivery, the price would go up to 4 million and next time the house would be bombed.
“Two million dollars,” he said when he hung up. “That all?”
He had all his people hunting the streets for details about these people who were out to get him. There were ten rumors and no facts. He was too ashamed to tell his people the latest development.
Benton was given four days to collect the money. He was told he must deliver the money himself. He must be alone. He certainly was not afraid of being alone. Getting shot in the gut couldn’t be worse than this.
The drop was always the trickiest part. Benton had been instructed to go in a taxi to a certain corner and wait by a phone. The phone rang; a voice said to walk to a parking lot where a car had been left for him. A letter in the glove compartment said to drive to another phone. There the caller said that the car had a transmitter in it and a bomb that could be detonated by remote control, no games. Benton was told to drive to another phone booth and wait. Each new instruction took him another five miles.
The reason for all this, Benton knew, was that he could not be followed by one of his own people.
“Screw it,” Benton said into the phone, “I’m alone, I’m completely fucking alone.”
Finally there was a mailbox with a letter in it. And the letter told him to drive three miles up a rarely used dirt road through thick trees. When he reached a small clearing he would see another note on a post. That note said to leave the two suitcases on the ground and to get back in the car. Don’t look back. Thanks very much.
Benton looked around. The woods were dense. He supposed there were men with rifles in there. A small part of him wanted to scream and stamp his feet, to charge the woods, defy them, fight them with every last gasp of strength. But the majority was tired and broken and voted no.
On the ride home Harry Benton felt sorry for himself and, wincing inside, cried a bit. It was as if God had come down and nailed him with a finger of lightning. Nobody but the whole Goddamned government, he thought, could have done this to me. They’re always the biggest crooks, he thought righteously. And how could he be sure they wouldn’t come back, even every year, like the IRS, the bastards?
“Dear God,” Benton wanted to know, “how could you do this to me?”
It was better to be shot, he thought, to go out clean and all at once, like Mac Samson. Suddenly Benton was envious of the lawyer. There that guy was in the ground, the rent paid forever, nothing to sweat, while he was up here crawling on all fours back to Chicago.
58
Phillip Donaldson saw the poster for the play Whose Legs on Sunday afternoon, saw it for two seconds. Then he looked away. Legs were among the last things he wanted to think about.
Donaldson had started in Central Park but it was too crowded. He sprinted down Seventh Avenue, racing cars off the light. When he hit the crowds in Times Square, he stopped and wandered. He drifted west on Forty-fifth Street, feeling separate from the humanity thick around him, saw the poster, felt separate from what it represented. Almost dazed he walked south on Eighth Avenue. Newspapers call this the Minnesota Strip because of all the teenage girls from the Midwest who end up there in satin hot pants, leaning in doorways. Young meat asked Donaldson, “You want a date?” He backed away, stumbling off the curb.
The Minnesota Strip was one of the few places where Higgins felt at home. The people there were more wrecked than he was. If it wasn’t wine, it was drugs; if not them, a vacated mind. In sunglasses and a leather jacket and tennis shoes Higgins was loitering in the sun when he saw Donaldson.
“I know you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Goddamnit,” Higgins shouted. “Don’t say I don’t. I do.” Higgins followed Donaldson a few steps. “In that bar! Goddamnit, stand still.”
Donaldson looked scared. “Leave me alone.”
“Remember that bar. I sat next to you.” Higgins studied the face. “The Goddammed bank! You work in a bank.” Now that Higgins had gotten through the mystery, he softened. They were, in a way, friends. “Empire Savings, you work there. Probably looking after my loot.”
“I used to.”
“What’d you do,” Higgins said hopefully, “embezzle?”
“No, no! Nothing like that.”
“Heh, calm down. You down here to get laid?”
“I’m running. Can’t you see I’m running?”
“You got cute little pants. Here that means anything. Well, there’s cheaper ways to get the clap.”
They crossed Forty-fourth and walked toward Forty-third, Donaldson trying to walk away from Higgins who wouldn’t be walked away from.
Donaldson heard singing ahead. He couldn’t guess what that could be. Higgins saw his
confusion. “Revival meeting,” Higgins offered. “You want to get saved? Interesting word, saved. Both financial and religious. That’s the American genius. What’d you study in school?”
“Business, finance.”
“No wonder you’re fucked up. You don’t know anything. I’m in art. How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Wow. When I was twenty-six, I was in Nam driving a tractor and killing Yellow Peril. No, maybe I was twenty-seven. When I was twenty-six I was in graduate school.”
“What?” Donaldson believed nothing of what he was hearing.
“Art, I told you. You want to know how Tintoretto mixed paints, you ask me.”
“Why were you driving a tractor in Vietnam?”
“Made two thousand a month. Only way I could get in the middle of it. I’d been thrown out of the Marines before the war got hot. So my buddies hear this and I got out on patrol. Things were loose over there, the best years of my life. I was smuggling art on top of it. Like they say, you can learn a career in the service.”
Donaldson was afraid to look at this man; he didn’t want to encourage him.
“Heh,” said Higgins, “you play pool? I’ll shoot you some games. Great place right on the other side of the street, McGirr’s. Hasn’t changed in fifty years. Still getting the better element, if you know what I mean. Heh, banker, loosen up. You’re heading for a stroke, you know that.”
“What are you headed for?”
“Well,” Higgins smiled, “after I knock off your bank, I’m going to Africa. People be killing each other over there for a long time to come. Always room for one more crazy. I’m Raphael Higgins, by the way.”
American Dreams Page 20