Americana (8 page)

“My name isn’t Jack, by the way. Not that I mind being called Jack. In a way I like it. It’s like some wonderful Far Eastern theology where all the minor deities have the same name as the big guy. You make me feel guilty because I drink. Where do you live, by the way?”

“I stay with Lee, Jemmy and Kit.”

I reached over and unzipped the jacket. My hand touched her cool breast. I was aware of a small movement behind the bar and I knew that one of Zack’s shotglass eyes had lifted from the newspaper. I edged in closer, wedging her knee between my legs. My hand went up from her breast to her
neck and face and when I kissed her there was a message returned from that humid mechanical mouth which let me know that whatever we did, here or later, was a matter of the vastest indifference. I did not bother drawing the jacket together and she did not bother noticing.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We’ll go to my place.”

“We have to take him home.”

“He’ll be all right. He gets like this all the time. I have almost a thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment.”

“When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.”

“Let’s go,” I said. “We’ll get some dinner if you like and then go to my place.”

“Can he come?”

“He can take care of himself.”

“We painted a circle in the middle of our room. We all sit in there when we smoke. It’s real great.”

“What else do you do?”

“Whatever we want,” she said.

“But what?”

“You can do whatever you want.”

“But can’t you be more exact? I want to know exactly what you’re talking about.”

“It’s simple. It’s so simple. You can come back with me if you want. We have some stuff. But first we have to take him home.”

I moved back away from her and finished my drink. Heaving slab of cougar-meat. Would I have to help undress him? Pluck off his weary socks with fastidious fingers and tuck him snoring into his army cot? Few things are more depressing than the sight of a drunken friend who happens to be twice your age; so many illusions are tested. He made a noise, then another, small dogs barking in his throat. His head rested on his left forearm. The hair at the back of his neck was light brown and gray. I put my arm over his shoulder.

“What color is the circle?” I said.

“It’s red. It’s a big red circle and we all sit inside it. You
can come if you want. Anybody can come who wants to. You and me and him. We can all go.”

I leaned across and zipped up the jacket. I liked her. I had no desire to trample her. She was delicate and trusting, beautiful in her blank way, and my words could not reach the spaces she felt between sounds. But these facts did not give me the right to trample her. Communications theorist and emperor of stereo. I gave her fifteen dollars—for food, I said.

“No, I can’t go,” I told her. “We’ll take him home and that’ll be it for the night.”

Then I smiled at her foolishly and she answered with the unembellished look of a feeble nun who has begged successfully for money and found no hand quite willing to touch her own.

* * *

You can tell something about a woman by listening to her footsteps on a flight of stairs. As she climbs toward your landing and takes the level walk past your door and then begins to climb again, you can say with some assurance whether she is shapely, impulsive, churlish, simpering, tired, witty or unloved. It is interesting to speculate on the curve of her ankles, how her apartment is furnished, whether or not she believes in a supreme being.

The footsteps I heard that night, that early morning, were those of my ex-wife, Meredith, who lived one floor above me and across the hall. As she went by my door I thought I detected a slight hesitation in her stride. I did not move from the chair nor lower the book I was reading. She climbed the next flight slowly, and in the absolute stillness of the building at that late hour the sound of her key in the lock was enough to break one mood and bring on another, and the soft closing of her door was not unlike that breath of sensuality heard between the silences of sleepless nights in rain falling, in voices on the street, in darkness vibrating to the resonance of every small sound. I waited fifteen minutes, then went upstairs. Meredith squinted out at me through the peephole,
then opened the door. She was wearing the parrot-colored housedress her parents had sent from Turkey, where her father was now stationed, tending an undisclosed number of tumescent missiles. She had a wonderful tan.

“How was Puerto Rico?”

“I had a marvelous time, David. You really should go down there for a week or two. Sit down. I’ll get you something.”

“I heard you go by my door. I was having trouble sleeping so I thought I’d come up for a minute or two.”

“I went out with the most awful man in the world tonight. All he could talk about was his eight-speaker stereo system and E-type Jaguar.”

She brought the drinks over to the sofa and sat next to me. Even though I saw her often during those years I was continually surprised by some of the changes in her outlook and personality since our divorce. She was much more the New York woman now, informed, purposeful, hard to impress. Gone were the cute enthusiasms of the teen-age bride, those sudden flings into space which seemed, so I thought, to be the outer extensions of a childhood marked by wandering. But with the new sophistication there was a concomitant nameless threat. Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women. She worked as a secretary to the art editor of a newsmagazine. It was a simple enough job, requiring typing and dictation skills, no more than rudimentary intelligence, and yet it prompted her to explore all the museums and art galleries of the city and to spend most of her vacations, and almost all her money, rummaging through the abbeys and chateaus of Europe, all those tourist bins patrolled by guards who look as though they have just deflowered their own daughters. One summer Merry and I had met by prearrangement in Florence, in some bell-swinging piazza, and sipped our orange drinks, so curiously reminiscent of an Eighth Avenue Nedick’s, as the tiny invertebrate cars raced by our table, each driver pursuing
his private Grand Prix. Meredith’s eyes blazed; her arm swept across that vista of stone warriors, philosophers, noblemen and extras. “What meaning!” she cried. “What stupendous meaning!”

“What do you hear from your folks? It’s hard to believe they spent four full years in Germany. It went by like that.”

“They’re both fine,” she said. “They want me to come over in the spring and if I can manage it I’d love to go. All those mosques.”

“Turkey is a blending of several cultures, I understand.”

“So mother says. Incidentally, I dreamed about you last night, David.”

“Did you? Did you really?”

“We were sitting in the living room of the house in London where I stayed with my cousin Edwina that time.”

“What were we talking about? Do you remember what I said?”

“I don’t think we were talking about anything.”

“I take it we were fully dressed. Or you would have mentioned something.”

“Yes.”

“What were we wearing?” I said.

“I don’t remember.”

“And we were sitting, not standing or walking around.”

“I’m sure we were sitting. I was near the window. I was looking out on Lennox Gardens. And you were on the other side of the room.”

“What was I doing?”

“You were just sitting there,” she said.

“We must have been doing something. We must have said something to each other.”

“I don’t remember, David.”

“Try to remember. It’s important.”

“Why?”

“Because there might be some kind of clue there. I mean it’s not as though I strayed into a labyrinth. It’s all part of
some design. You put me in your dream and it’s important for me to know what mission I was assigned. It’s a kind of reprieve to enter someone else’s sleep. The dream can tell you that you’re not guilty after all. It’s like a second chance. There’s some kind of valuable clue in there someplace. Now try to remember what we did besides just sit there. Try to remember what we said to each other. It’s important.”

“I’ve told you all there is. If there’s anything more I’m afraid I’ve lost it.”

“I guess I’m making too much of it,” I said. “Okay, let’s hear about Puerto Rico and all the fascinating men you met down there.”

She put the glass to her lips, looking at me over its rim. Then she decided to tell me.

“There was one. There on business. Extremely nice. You’d like him, David. Dry sense of humor. Very athletic. A photographer. There on assignment for
Venture.
He was born in Germany, which gave us something to talk about right away, my parents having been there and all. He lives in a converted farmhouse near Darien. Very married. Three sons. You’d just know that someone like Kurt would have all boys. That’s the type he is. Athletic. Outdoorsy. Tweed and leather. But very married. We enjoyed each other’s company. That was all. Nothing can possibly come of it.”

This police-blotter description, meant to conceal the way she felt about him, had precisely the opposite effect; so precisely, in fact, that I wondered whether she had planned it that way. The stratagems of marriage sometimes seem refreshingly artless next to those of ex-marriage. She poured two more drinks and we talked further about Kurt. Meredith liked to confide in me. After some early hedging for form’s sake, she would tell me about each of her romances with what seemed to be complete honesty. I enjoyed these discussions. They seemed to generate a real warmth between us, a fine, old and mellow heat, brandy by a fireside. I gave her genuine sympathy and some good advice and when my turn came, as
it always did, to stand by that cheery fire and lift that grand old snifter and sing of my own true loves, I told nothing but lies. It was very entertaining. Soon I began to understand the attraction of pathological lying. To construct one’s own reality, then bend it to an implausible extreme, was an adventure even more thrilling than the linguistic free falls of the network. I think I went at it fairly well for a novice. I learned that in an atmosphere of seclusion, intimacy, motel-confessional, no lie is too gaudy, no cliché too familiar, no side-trip of the imagination too dramatically scenic. Beyond sheer entertainment value there were exactly ten reasons for lying to her. (1) The manic quality of these stories provided a nice balance to Merry’s conventional episodes of the heart and lower glands. (2) The night was swarming with serious young people telling their troubles to each other and I preferred to stand aside from all this empathy and slush. (3) The telling of needless lies to a loved one, or former loved one, stimulates in the liar a complex feeling of regret, guilt, superiority, pity, tenderness and power—a compound I would take downstairs with me and analyze like a vial of splendid chemicals. (4) The fabulist in me, lurking just below the water-line, welcomed the challenge of topping each new lie and looked forward to some distant nexus of perfection, the super-union of all lies into one radiant and transcendental fiction. (5) Related to (4). Man’s amoebic inching thrust toward godlike creativity. (6) Being beyond gravity, weightless, in a dream assembled by one’s own hands. (7) The sexual excitement aroused in both of us. (8) Boredom. (9) I put something of myself into some of those stories and hoped, in vain as it turned out, to arrive at a definition, one disguised of course by the surrounding absurdity—a definition of myself without the usual anguish such readings entail. (10) There was really nothing to tell her in the way of troubles, romantic or otherwise. The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person. This would have been hard to explain.

“The dream, David. I just thought of something. Maybe the clue is that we were just sitting there.”

“The way we’re sitting here.”

“Maybe that’s it. Maybe I was repressing something.”

“Maybe that’s it,” I said.

Then, right on cue, she went to the window like Olivia de Havilland, so gracefully ill.

“It’s still snowing,” she said.

Communication between us was extremely precise. For a moment I thought of all the old Burtian and Kirkesque characteristics, the clenched emphatic fist, majestic teeth, angry hand brushing the hair, the surprise of a colossal smile, a smile as rich and full as a field of sun-cut Kansas wheat, and then a touch of passionate sadness, low flame in the eyes. Kirk as Van Gogh. Burt as the Birdman of Alcatraz. It was a comfortable feeling to be back in the simpleminded past. I noticed two new prints on the wall. I couldn’t identify the artists but their subject was the same, expressionistic Germany, thick black plague and guilt, and I felt almost sure she had become interested in German painting because of her photographer friend, the man’s man of the great outdoors. I moved toward her and the moment my hand touched her hip, loose and soft and lazy inside the housedress, I thought of the girl I had said goodnight to only several hours before, and of the circle she would resume with her sisters or brotherly lovers, the circle I had been afraid to enter. Meredith nude by the window was a known quantity. I took off my shirt.

Minutes later we were in bed and there was the feeling of a strange conspiracy. There was gratitude between us then, communication, mutual willingness to honor our conspiracy. And at the end, the fevers of our breaths mingling, what I knew more than anything was the feeling of coming back to an old and affectionate house. It was the twenty-first time we had made love in the five years since our divorce.

I carried in the portable TV and we watched a movie for half an hour or so. It was one of those old English films in
which people are always promising to meet at Victoria Station the moment the war is over. She fell alseep then, on her belly, one leg draped over my thigh, her all-American ass classic and twinkling, campus-worthy as ever. My head went to one side and I was just beginning to go to black, in network parlance, when I heard footsteps in the hall below and the sound of crinkling paper. I knew that the journalist who shared the second floor with me was sneaking across the hall to put one of his garbage bags outside my door. Whenever he had just one bag for the janitor’s morning pickup he left it by his own door; more than one bag, I got the surplus. I imagined his thin dry figure, in Punch-and-Judy pajamas and brown peeling slippers, hunching its way along the wall, teeth clamped tight and face all knuckled up. There are things nobody understands. In the last analysis it is the unseen janitor who maintains power over us all.