An American Dream

  I got a taxi. The driver was smoking a cigar and talked about Harlem all the way up, his absolute refusal to enter it. Finally I shut his sound out and sat there grappling with a ravening desire for drink. I don’t know if I ever wanted one so much—I cried within like a just-cracked vase might shriek for cement (that second when I thought of Leznicki had separated me one half from the other) I sat up straight in the rear of the cab with a weak sick perspiration oozing my clothes—that much was I reduced by the effort not to tell the driver to stop each fifty yards we passed a bar. I remember pressing my jaws molar to molar, hanging on, knowing I was at a turn, knowing if I took a drink now—I, who loved to drink, I who could use whiskey for blood—that the corner would be turned, I’d be hooked, whiskey my opium. No, I had to get through the day, hold out, I had to hold out, not take a drink, not till I was back with Cherry—that was the first demand from my new contract, that moment in the morning when I had made a pact. And I thought of Ruta then, and the desire for drink added her to everything. Sick, wet, shivering with panic, I had nonetheless a quick thought of her up against these flowers of red-velvet flock, red pepper to the itch, Satan’s heaven at the thought of diving into a bar, and calling her.

  “Ruta, do you remember your friend the doctor, the crazy doctor who was no better than his patient?”

  A moment. “Ah. Yes. The Genius.”

  “The Genius sees you sitting in the lap of blue uniforms.”

  “The New York gendarmerie are handsome when the case is good.”

  “Could you consider leaving them?”

  “Only for the most thorough examination, geliebter Doktor.”

  “See me for a consultation.”

  “But you have moved your office.”

  “Merely to the Irish bar on First Avenue …”

  We would drink for hours, then disappear into some Germanic fleabag of a hotel, a bed fortified with the crazy molecules of a thousand fornications, one hundred sodomies, and the Devil’s tale of the tongues. We would tie one good one on, two days, three days, five empty bottles at the foot of the bed.

  My heart was racing up like a trapped bird once more. I was on the run. Like a petty criminal I had sold my jewels last night to the Devil, and promised them again this morning to some child’s whisper. I had a literal sense of seed out on separate voyages, into the sea of Cherry’s womb, into the rich extinctions of Ruta’s kitchen. That second time I made love to Ruta—where had I left it then? I could not remember, and this fact: yes to the Devil, yes to the Lord, now seemed rabid with importance, more important than Leznicki, Deborah, Deborah’s father—my heart bolted like a horse—more important even than my desire for a drink.

  Do you know psychosis? Have you explored its cave? I had gone out to the end of my string. It was stretching behind me—I could feel it ready to snap.

  “He hails me and I don’t even want to look at him. But there’s a cop at the intersection.…”

  My mind was going off to chase the million fish of its expired seed, my brain was lifting behind it, my brain had decided to float away.

  “And he gives me a hard time. The cops are chicken about niggers in this town.”

  “Stop here,” I said.

  “Well, to make a long story short …”

  “Take your fare.”

  The fresh air was keeping me alive. I passed a bar. Walked on. My feet led me past.

  The sweat no longer oozed—it had collected into rivers. I was weak but I was coming back to my separate parts: college professor, television performer, marginal socialite, author, police suspect, lecher, newly minted lover of a thrush named Cherry. I had roots, weed’s roots: Jewish father, immigrant stock; Protestant mother, New England banking family, second-drawer. Yes, now I was back with the living. I could pass the bars. They went by like milestones, satisfying my sense of distance traveled on away from a crossroads where an ambush had been waiting. Now I felt small as a business man with a load of worries equal near to bankruptcy.

  I bought several newspapers, took another cab, and went back to my apartment. On the ride I did my reading. There was no need to go too thoroughly through the news stories. They splashed the front page, spoke of the death as suicide, gave details about Deborah and details about me, half of them correct, half incorrect, gave promise in their excitement that the story was good for two days more and probably a feature for the weekend round-up, they hinted—but very lightly—that police were in the scene, they announced me as unavailable for comment, Barney Oswald Kelly as unavailable for comment, and the television studio and the university as willing to give no comment. An unidentified colleague at the university was quoted as saying, “They were a splendid couple.” Two of the papers had used the same picture of Deborah. It was a terrible picture and years old. “Beautiful Young Society Matron Takes Life in Plunge,” said the little headline over the photograph, and beneath was Deborah looking fat and ugly and somewhat idiotic for she was getting out of a limousine at a wedding and was caught with a frozen supercilious smile as if her mind had said to the news photographer, “Shall I look like this for the masses?”

  I turned to the society page. There was a column I always read: “The Social Reins”—Francis “Buck” Buchanan. He was a friend of Deborah’s, for all I knew he was a beau, and for the year of our separation I had sometimes been able to follow the turns of her feeling toward me since Buchanan printed what she desired to have put in print, and a nice remark meant I was in her favor once more; my exclusion from a party list of twenty names signified she was displeased still again.

  “Deborah Is No Longer With Us,” went Buchanan’s headline, and it ran from left to right across the top of the page.

  Polite Society and Night Society were reeling in the wee hours this morning from the shock of Deborah Kelly Rojack’s unforgettable and tragic demise. None of us could believe that the charming Deborah, oldest daughter of internationally respected king-maker Barney Oswald Kelly and Newport queen-mother Leonora Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, was no longer with us. The beautiful Deborah is dead. Never again will we hear the patrician tones of her merry laugh or see the wicked wit in her eye. “I want to dance till the last note is played,” was Deborah’s motto. “The salad years are not over, they’re just a little weary, poor glorious salad,” was Deborah’s private confession to friends. Too proud ever to tell a soul, she must last night have heard the last note. Those of us who knew her well know she brooded in secret over the failure of her marriage to former Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, and it is even reported as we go to press that Steve was in the room when Deborah took the step. Perhaps she wished him to hear the last note. Perhaps … Deborah’s end is shrouded in mystery. We cannot believe her dead. She was so alive. Poor Tootsie Haenniger. Tootsie loaned Deborah her bijou East Side duplex for the month she was in Europe. Now Tootsie must come back to echoes.

  It went on. On for a double column the length of the page and inches of overflow into a new column, a quick haul of anecdotes, it listed fifty people—her dearest friends—and then like a trumpet blowing taps to the mournful grandeur of a violent death, as if one virtue of violent death might be to open at last some secret gates for conscientious readers, Buchanan finished with a laid-out table of everything to which Deborah had at one time or another belonged: charities, leagues, cotillions, balls, foundations, sisters, societies, and such odd-name congeries as The Caveat Napoleon, the Lasters, the Bahama Rifles, the Clambs, the Quainger, the Croyden Heart, the Spring Oak Subscription, the Philadelphia Riding, the Kerrybombos.

  What a secret life had Deborah. I had not known a third of everything to which she enlisted. That endless stream of intimate woman’s lunches into which she disappeared every perfumed noon over the years—what princes must have been elected, what pretenders guillotined, what marriages turned in their course. With the insight of an ice pick the precise thought came to me that I had lost my own marriage without ever a chance to fight for it on an open field. What a garroting must have been given
my neck by the ladies of those lunches, those same ladies or their mothers who worked so neatly to make me a political career all eighteen years ago. It didn’t matter. At this instant the past was like a burned-out field after the blaze has gone through.

  I had a bad moment turning the key to the apartment. I was like a gambler who lives in fear of a card. It is the Queen of Spades, and each time it appears disaster has come up another step. So each time I felt the presence of Deborah, it was as if the card turned high. And she was everywhere in my apartment, there in the echo of all those nights I slept without her, fighting those early-morning wars when every one of my cells insisted I was losing her into still another depth of separation, and my pride swore I would not pick up the phone. Now in the apartment something had died—all memories of Deborah living. An odor of death in a trash pit rose from the wastebaskets with their stale cigarettes, the garbage can in the kitchen, the musk of stale memories in stale furniture, death lived like a beast in this air. Would one go scraping over the crusted lip of the incinerator into the sour end of sour ashes? Like a fever the desire for one stiff drink came over me again. I passed through the living room, that hateful living room of champagne-colored settees and champagne paper on the walls, another of Deborah’s flings with a decorator, silver-gray, pale green, cream, all the colors of face powder, the arbitrary palette of elegance: I had always felt like Deborah’s footman sitting in that room. My fist was clenched.

  The phone was ringing. It went four times, five times, the answer service picked it up, and I kept hearing an after-ring—the phone sounded like some spoiled child screaming in the attic of a house. There must be a hundred messages by now but I could not think of them. I did not know how long I could bear this apartment—dread worked up through my middle like the gray water in the machines of a midnight laundry. In the bathroom, I could have been buried to the waist in this grease water of dread: only the touch of the razor was alive—it drew something clean across my cheek like the smell of the ocean on a summer morning. My cheek felt like a window looking out on such a light while I remained prisoner in the closet. The phone was ringing still again. I rinsed my face, made a debate whether to dress first or first take care of messages, but the answer was simple: I had to be dressed so I could get out in a minute. I picked a summer gray suit with a quiet superimposed gray plaid, black shoes, a blue-gray shirt, a black knit tie, a handkerchief for the breast pocket, and dressed all the way, even brushed my shoes, breathing all the while with the anxiety of an asthmatic on the edge of an attack.

  Once again the phone was ringing. This time I answered. It was the producer of my television show. “Steve, oh boy, oh friend. How do you feel?”

  “Cold as ice, Arthur.”

  The answer service was also on the line. “Mr. Rojack, will you call us soon as you finish this call. We have to give you several messages.”

  “Yes, Gloria, thank you.”

  “Oh, Christ, boy, you’ve laid this studio in a panic. Will you take our commiserations?”

  “Yes. Thanks, Arthur.”

  “No, I mean, Steve, anxiety is loose here today. It hasn’t been so bad since Kennedy stood up to Khrushchev with the missiles. Poor Deborah. I only met her once, but she’s a great woman.”

  “Yes. Was.”

  “Steve, you must be in a state of shock.”

  “I’m a little rocky, kid.”

  “I’ll bet. I’ll bet. These dependencies we feel on women. When they go, it’s like losing mother.”

  If Deborah were not dead, but had merely run off to Europe with another man, Arthur would have said, “It’s like losing mother’s tit.”

  “Have you seen your analyst this morning?” I asked.

  “You bet on that, Steve. I was there at eight A.M. I caught the news on the midnight news last night.”

  “Yes.”

  His voice shifted for a moment, as if, suddenly, he was aware again of the fact. “Steve, are you really all right? Can you talk?”

  “Yes, I’m really all right.”

  “My analyst said I have to level with you. One of the great hang-ups on the program is that I’ve never been able to enter a relation with you. My anxieties tend to submit to social patterns rather than drive into personal focus. I guess I’ve been defeating myself before your sense of social superiority.”

  “Arthur, stop this slop, will you. I’m going to scream.”

  “I’ve tried to reach you six times today. I got myself up for it six times, and each time, Steve, I caught your fright-wig answer service. I’m raddled now, Steve, I’m hysterical. The pressure here this morning has been pressure cooker. The newspapers want a statement on the future of the show.”

  “I can’t think about that now.”

  “Baby, you got to. Look, I know I’ve always been deficient in the amenities, and think too much in terms of social response, status, public reaction …”

  “Check.”

  “… rather than trying to manifest some sort of false gentry’s grace for hideous moments like this.”

  “You damned beggar!” I shouted at him. “You shit-face.”

  “You’re bereaved.”

  I took the phone away from my ear. I could hear explications running into qualifications, then the considered tone of self-examination, the scar tissue at the top of his nose where the adenoids had been removed vibrating now with the complacency of an oboe reed. Then I heard him pause and shift—we had come to another body of the conversation.

  “It’s cancer gulch down here, admittedly, but a local station suffers from tensions the networks are not subject to. You know we’ve been embattled more with your program than anything else, and now you see we’ve got a couple of cathexis-loaded projects besides yours, a real collision load. You know we’re beginning the Shago Martin show next month, it’s our integration bit, the first time we’re going to have a Negro singer doing lowdown funky intime duets with a white canary.”

  “What’s her name,” I asked, “the canary.”

  “Rosalie … I think.”

  “Not Cherry?”

  “No, Cherry Melanie was up for it but got axed.”

  “How do you spell Melanie?”

  “M-e-l-a-n-i-e. Are you drunk?”

  “Why didn’t she get it?”

  “Because Rosalie does her libidinal bit with Número Uno.”

  “Dodds Mercer Merrill?”

  “Dodds, our boss Dodds, that roaring faggot, believe it or not. He makes the chick scene from time to time.” Arthur giggled. “You know what he said to me once, ‘It’s all friction.’ ”

  “And he’s putting his girl Rosalie in with Shago Martin?”

  “Dodds is gone on black men, boy. Don’t you dig these things?” He paused. “Stephen,” he went on in a level voice, “my analyst gave me a formal verbal directive not to get sloughed in talking to you. The point of this conversation has still not been engaged. We’re in difficulties, boy.”

  “Why don’t you just say the show will not be on the air for a short period.”

  “Steve?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember you once said Marx said, ‘Quantity changes quality’?”

  “I remember there were fifty letters complaining I quoted Marx favorably.”

  “This is one of those times. The quantity of publicity, and the contingent innuendo …”

  “That’s good, boy. That’s corporation lawyer.”

  “Steve, it’s not that anybody thinks you gave Deborah a shove. Christ, I don’t. I stood up to Dodds for five minutes today telling him you were essentially a sweet guy with a brilliant mind, a latent genius, and if you had a personal problem or two, well you weren’t the only man on television who was known to tipple a bit and chase hump. But that didn’t crack ice. I’ve never seen ice like the ice here this morning. A morgue. A polar morgue.”

  “A polar morgue.”

  “Dodds said the critical factor is this: no audience is going to trust a man whose wife takes a leap.”

>   “Check.”

  “See what I mean? No audience in the world.”

  “I see.”

  “I could cry, Steve.”

  “Check.”

  “It was a great program, Steve.”

  “Nice to be associated with you, Arthur.”

  “Bless you, baby, for saying that. I dig, now I dig the anxiety this conversation gave me in advance. It was a cancerous demand that was made on me to have to do this to you.”

  “Bless, Arthur, bless.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So long.”

  “Ciao.”

  The phone rang. It was the answer service. The messages were not as numerous as I had expected. There was a request from the head of the Psychology Department to call him, there were indeed five calls from Arthur, three calls from three different newspapers, several from good friends I wanted to talk to and did not care to talk to, and a request from Barney Oswald Kelly’s secretary to telephone Mr. Kelly at his suite in the Waldorf Towers. There were no calls from any of Deborah’s friends, nor were there any from the friends I had supposed we might have in common. I had never had much illusion that Deborah’s friends were ever the least divided in their loyalty, but the absolute silence at this moment seemed to deepen their silence in my apartment. “Gloria,” I said to the operator when she finished, “do me a favor. Call the Waldorf Towers and make an appointment with Mr. Kelly. Tell his secretary I’d like to see him at seven-thirty tonight. If the time isn’t good, call me back.”