Americana (2 page)

In a little while I would ask B.G. where she wanted to eat. She would suggest that I decide. We would go to a small French restaurant way over on the West Side, on the rim of no man’s land, where the wind blows cold off the river and the low bleak tenements breathe decay; and where, at this time of year, there is a sense of total emptiness, of a place that has been abandoned before the boots of war. No one could live there but torn cats and children with transparent bellies, and those distant lights, crackling over Times Square,
belong to another city in another age. B.G. would order the frogs’ legs. I would try to impress her by speaking French to the waiter with the warmth and intimacy of a hero of the Resistance greeting an old comrade-in-arms. The waiter would despise me and B.G. would see through my bluff. There would be nothing to do but finish the evening with one of those chain-smoking conversations about death, youth and anxiety. I remembered that I no longer smoked.

“Where would you like to eat?” I said.

But she didn’t hear me. She was talking to a man named Carter Hemmings. Although Carter was thirty years old, or two years older than myself, he was one of my subordinates at the network. I was always very conscious of the ages of men with whom I worked. What I feared most at the network were younger men who might advance to positions higher than mine. It was not enough to be the best; one had to be the youngest as well. My secretary, through some tidy espionage, had been able to learn the ages of all those men whose levels of responsibility were comparable to my own. When she told me that I was the youngest by a full year and three months, I took her to Lutèce for dinner and got her a fifteen-dollar raise. Carter Hemmings was afraid of me. For this reason, and also because it was a time for holiday compassion, for prison reprieves and military truces, I did not interrupt his conversation with B.G. Instead I got myself another drink. Only about a dozen people remained. Sullivan, in her gypsy trenchcoat, stood against a wall. It had been foolish of me to invite her; she looked tense. A Pakistani who worked at the UN was facing her. He held a drink in one hand and an ashtray in the other. Sullivan seemed content to flick her ashes to the floor. I stood directly behind him and tried to get her to laugh by making swinish faces. She slipped her right foot out of her shoe and then, with exquisite nonchalance, tucked her leg way up behind her against the wall so that it disappeared, storklike, behind the shroud of her trenchcoat. She remained that way, on one leg, a cryptic shoe moored beneath her.
Whether on purpose or not, Sullivan always made me feel totally inadequate. I was drawn to her, terribly.

“Because I am a Moslem,” the Pakistani was saying, “I do not drink. And yet I feel I must maintain a glass in my hand, or the others, perforce, will think me too solemn and undeviating an individual. We Moslems are very strict in the matter of alcohol, dress and the carnal relations. Perhaps you are tired of these people and would like to go to your flat. May I offer to accompany you? My Plymouth Fury is parked directly across the road. Where do you live?”

“In the hearts of men,” Sullivan said.

I moved in on them. The grandfather clock began to chime. I looked at the Pakistani and moved my lips, without speaking, to give the impression that my words were being drowned out by the clock. After eight sustained chimes it was silent and I picked from my thoughts, in mid-sentence, a meaningless travelogue of Switzerland, and continued it aloud. He looked at his glass and then at the ashtray, trying to decide which might be more safely placed on top of the other. He was in unknown territory and wanted to have at least one hand free. Then Quincy came over and began to talk about a new mega-drug he had taken the week before. And the whole scene dissolved before any of us could find out what it was all about.

I went out on the terrace. Automobiles were moving across Central Park, ticking red taillights trailing each other north and west toward the darkness and the river, headlights coming this way, soft orange, the whistling doormen. The park’s lamplights were dull cold steady silver. I was wasting my life.

Everybody called her by her last name. She was a sculptor, thirty-seven years old, unmarried, a tall woman who seemed by her manner or bearing or mere presence to change a room slightly, to make it self-conscious. Sullivan had the kind of face and body which inspire endless analogies and I will try to keep them to a minimum. At parties, appearing in a plain loose dress, flat heels, no makeup, hair long and lifeless and
uncombed, she was the woman who was invariably described within good-natured coveys of people as strange, different, curious, remarkable. At such parties, as Sullivan would stand listening to some desolate man describe the ritual terrors of his life, or sit alone patting the swept waist of a guitar, I would hear people speculate on her ancestry. Many seemed to think she might be an American Indian. Others thought her origins were Catalonian or Polynesian or Dead Sea. Once I heard an admiring woman describe Sullivan’s face as pre-Columbian. To me, she was simply homely. (One’s vengeance, of course, had its sour politics to play.) Her hands were long and grimly knuckled. Her dark eyes seemed trained to remain unamused by whatever passed before them. Her narrow nose, a fencer’s nose somehow, had a tendency to flare unexpectedly, sniffing disaster in someone’s commonplace remark. In all, she was a lean hard over-boned woman. Men were always telling her how very much they wanted to go to bed with her.

I went back inside. Quincy’s wife was sitting on the sofa now, stirring her drink with a toothbrush. Pru Morrison had apparently left. Quincy and two women were sprawled on the floor in front of the TV set. The two women were employed at the network, as was Quincy. One of the women made notes of what he said as he watched the program. I looked around for my date. Sullivan, still roosting on her left leg, was talking to a man who looked like a quonset hut. I began swinging my arms chimpanzee-style and executing heavy little hops. At the same time I inserted my tongue over my upper teeth and gums to create a bulge in the area between nose and upper lip. I hunched way over until my hands dangled below my knees. Sullivan gave me a brief look. Then the man took her glass and went into the kitchen. I straightened up and went over.

“What happened to your ashtray?”

“He had to get back to the office,” she said. “Sudden crisis on the subcontinent.”

“I should be at the office myself. Everybody’s bucking for
my job. It’s a contest to see who stays later. Guy named Reeves Chubb sleeps in his office about three nights a week. His desk is full of dirty shirts. We don’t go in there for a meeting unless his secretary sprays the place with air-freshener. But I’m holding my own. I may even take a vacation one of these days.”

“Skiing? All those nymphs in titty sweaters.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to do something more religious. Explore America in the screaming night. You know. Yin and yang in Kansas. That scene.”

“Maybe I’ll come with you,” Sullivan said.

“Seriously?”

“I’d like to do it, David. I really would.”

“I have to go out West anyway in a few months to do a documentary on the Navahos. I thought I’d take my vacation a couple of weeks before that and spend the time driving out there.”

“We can take Pike with us.”

“Sure,” I said. “He can get somebody to run things for a while.”

“We’ll let him map out our route. We’ll give him a battlefield commission. He’ll like that.”

I felt good. It was a good idea. The man came back with their drinks. We were introduced and then I went looking for B.G. Haines. The bathroom was empty. I went into the bedroom and examined the coats on the bed. Her coat wasn’t among them. I looked in the closet and it wasn’t there either. Then I went into the kitchen. It was empty too. I stood there awhile. Then I opened the refrigerator door and took an ice tray out of the freezer. There were four ice cubes left. I brought up phlegm from my throat and spat on each of the cubes, separately. Then I slid the tray back into the freezer and shut the refrigerator door.

I went back to the living room. Sullivan was still talking to the round gray man. I couldn’t take my eyes off that empty shoe.

I was an extremely handsome young man. The objectivity which time slowly fashions, and the self-restraint it demolishes, enabled me to make this statement without recourse to the usual modest disclaimers which give credit to one’s parents or grandparents in the manner of a sires-and-dams book. I suppose it’s true enough that I inherited my mother’s fine fair skin and my father’s athletic physique, but the family album gives no clue to the curiously Grecian perspective of my face. Physical identity meant a great deal to me when I was twenty-eight years old. I had almost the same kind of relationship with my mirror that many of my contemporaries had with their analysts. When I began to wonder who I was, I took the simple step of lathering my face and shaving. It all became so clear, so wonderful. I was blue-eyed David Bell. Obviously my life depended on this fact.

I was exactly six feet two inches tall. My weight varied between 185 and 189. Despite my fair skin I tanned unusually well. My hair was more blond than it is now, thicker and richer; my waistline was thirty-two; my heartbeat was normal. I had a trick knee but my nose had never been broken, my
feet were not ugly and I had better than average teeth. My complexion was excellent.

My secretary told me once that she had overheard Strobe Botway, one of my superiors at the network, refer to me as being “conventionally” handsome. We had a good laugh over that. Strobe was a small, barely humanoid creature who had the habit, when smoking, of slowly rotating the cigarette with his thumb, index and middle fingers, as Bogart did in an early film of his. Strobe hated me because I was taller and younger than he was, and somewhat less extraterrestrial. He talked often of the Bogart mystique, using Germanic philosophical terms which nobody understood, and he subverted many parties by quoting long stretches of dialogue from obscure Bogart films. He also had his favorite character actors, men whose names nobody could ever connect with a face, men who played prison wardens for seven consecutive movies, who were always attacking Japanese machine-gun nests with a grenade in each hand, who were drunkards, psychotic killers, crooked lawyers, or test pilots who had lost their nerve. Strobe seemed to admire the physical imperfections of people, their lisps, scar tissue, chipped teeth; in his view these added up to character, to a certain seedy magnetism. His world was not mine. I admired Humphrey Bogart but he made me nervous. His forehead bothered me; it was the forehead of a man who owes money. My own instincts led me to Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. These were the American pyramids and they needed no underground to spread their fame. They were monumental. Their faces slashed across the screen. When they laughed or cried it was without restraint. Their chromium smiles were never ambiguous. And they rarely had time to sit down and trade cynical quips with some classy society dame or dumb flatfoot. They were men of action, running, leaping, loving with abandon. When I was a teenager I saw Burt in
From Here to Eternity.
He stood above Deborah Kerr on that Hawaiian beach and for the first time in my life I felt the true power of the image. Burt was like a city in which we are all
living. He was that big. Within the conflux of shadow and time, there was room for all of us and I knew I must extend myself until the molecules parted and I was spliced into the image. Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it. Burt lives! I carry that image to this day, and so, I believe, do millions of others, men and women, for their separate reasons. Burt in the moonlight. It was a concept; it was the icon of a new religion. That night, after the movie, driving my father’s car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.

Strobe died in the middle of a meeting. He had a heart attack at his desk. He is conventionally dead. But he would have been happy to know that his reaction to my physical traits was shared by others at the network. Hidden energies filled the air, small secret currents, as happens in every business which thrives in the heat of the image. There was a cult of the unattractive and the clever. There were points scored for ruthlessness. There were vendettas against the good-looking. One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a. nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a homosexual by the lunatic fringe of the unattractive, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to keep low. I moved quietly close to walls and up and down the stairwells. A small incident confirmed the value of these tactics. It happened one day, after lunch, when I found myself crossing Madison Avenue stride for stride with Tom Maples, a young man who had joined the network at roughly the same time I had. We exchanged the usual cautious pleasantries. When we reached the sidewalk, a lovely teen-age girl wearing pink eyelashes asked me for my autograph. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, “but I’m sure you must be somebody.”
Her smile was rather winning, and blithely I signed her fold-out map of the subway system, thinking Maples might be amused. He avoided me for the next six months. After that I did my best to be exceedingly humble and withdrawing. I felt it was essential to the well-being of others.

It’s time now to run the film again. I mean that quite literally, for I still have in my possession a movie made in those years, and many tapes as well. There isn’t much to do on an island this remote and I can kill (or rather redistribute) a fair amount of time by listening to the soundtrack and taking yet another look at some of the footage.

* * *

I went down the corridor to my office. My secretary was at her desk eating a jelly donut and writing a letter. Her name was Binky Lister. She was a cheerful girl, a few pounds overweight in a pleasant way. She was having an affair with my immediate superior, Weede Denney, but continued to be a trustworthy secretary, which means she lied on my behalf and defended me on all counts against charges made by the secretaries of men who feared and hated me. She followed me into the office.