Americana

  “Do you have to leave right away?” she said. There was no tragedy in her voice and no plea; she simply wanted to know, to confirm.

  “She’s been complaining about all the late nights. She thinks they’re working me too hard.”

  “Before I forget, next Tuesday is off, David. My sister is getting married and we have to rehearse. I go to Brooklyn for weddings and funerals. Is Wednesday all right?”

  “I guess so. I’ll have to let you know. I saw you on Park Avenue today.”

  “When?”

  “Lunchtime. We walked right by each other.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “You weren’t alone,” I said.

  “David, that was my future brother-in-law. And this is the third or fourth time you’ve mentioned something like this. You know I’m not seeing anyone.”

  I put out the light. Then I turned up the volume on the radio. Sound filled the room, huge noise, bass and drums booming out of the speaker, beating and scratching, then the sting of a fierce needling trumpet. In the darkness that trumpet had a deeper beauty, filling space, leaving time behind, a difficult sound departing and returning, and I did not feel I was in a room with four walls. A note hung at eye level, dim speck on the railroad horizon, then vanished into a long silence shaded by the revving bass. I went to the bed and sat there, still smoking, legs draped over her belly, crosswise, my back to the wall. A boyfriend for Jennifer. What a gift-wrapped piece of luck he would have been for me. Whatever guilt I felt was set around a picture of Jennifer, alone and wounded, and had nothing to do with my stock betrayal of Meredith. To Jennifer I remained unrevealed. I refused to give her any sense of myself and I can only guess the reason, that I needed every ego-scrap, that I feared my own disappearance. To say I took advantage of her love would be much too mild an indictment. What I did was worse. I did not take advantage of it; I did not even acknowledge its existence. I pretended to believe that I was just another season in her life, in no way exceptional; there had been others and there were surely more to come the moment I went my way. Then her body shifted beneath me, hunting a beat, and the four walls returned. I had an early meeting the next day.

  “It’s getting to be time,” I said.

  “David.”

  “It’s getting to be time to go. Time to wrap it up, folks. Be back tomorrow night on behalf of the Bell System—communications for home, industry, and four-fifths of the universe—with another installment of whatever it is we’ve been doing here, brought to you courtesy of the first family of telephones and electronics since time began and life crawled forth upon the land where it has remained ever since with an asterisk for the Ice Age. What time is it? It must be after two.”

  “Fascist,” she whispered, once, twice, again, a clear brilliant fury in her calm voice.

  I saw her alone one more time. I wanted to make perfect love to her. A final touch. But she would not even let me see her home. All she wanted was a book I had borrowed.

  There were several other women, girls, during my affair with Jennifer, and there were many afterward. It was simpler with them and at times I was even more the fascist but they let me get away with it, either because they had no choice or because they liked it that way. I was very fond of Jennifer. She is the only one who remains more than a memory of slide-out beds, indifferent dawn departures and that hellish feeling of having left something important behind me in one of those indistinguishable rooms.

  Meredith found out of course; they always find out. It brought us closer together. I came home late one night. She was in our yellow bed, sitting up like a daisy.

  “I’ve discussed it with mother,” she said. “I’m leaving you.”

  “Will you go back to Old Holly?”

  “Dad has been re-assigned. They’re going to Germany. For a while I thought I might go with them. But I’ve decided to stay in New York.”

  “Maybe I’ll go with them,” I said, a remark that was supposed to imply that I liked her parents, that I wanted to hide my shame in a foreign country, that I had not lost my sense of humor.

  “There’s some cold lamb in the fridge.”

  (What a game kid, I thought.)

  “No thanks. Quincy and I took a break around ten and had some dinner at Asia Minor, that place I told you about where Walter Faye punched the waiter. Walter Faye’s the one with the wife who’s from Brazil who invited us out to Greenwich that weekend we couldn’t go.”

  “And then you both went back to work until half an hour ago. You and Quincy. All alone up there in that big shiny building. Remember how you used to tell me what a strange feeling it was to be there at two in the morning? The only one in the whole building. You said you felt like an astronaut ready to blast off. Why bother sticking to the story at this late date?”

  “It’s hard to admit things to you, Merry,” I said. “I don’t mean to sound condescending but it’s like explaining death to a child.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You look all scrubbed and fresh. You really do. Terrific.”

  “I think I’d like to go to sleep now.”

  “Can we still be friends?” I said.

  She went to Mexico for the divorce. I took her out to the airport and met her when she returned. I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two.

  * * *

  I stepped out of the shower. I could hear the weather report on TV, which made me think of a friend of mine, Warren Beasley, who used to be a weatherman. I dried myself, hitched the bath towel around my waist, went to the phone and could not remember who I wanted to call. I looked at the TV screen for a moment and then found myself in a chair about a foot away from the set, watching intently. I could not tell what was happening on the screen and it didn’t seem to matter. Sitting that close all I could perceive was that meshed effect, those stormy motes, but it drew me in and held me as if I were an integral part of the set, my molecules mating with those millions of dots. I sat that way for half an hour or so. Then a commercial came on, one I had seen and heard dozens of times, and I got up quickly and walked around the room, feeling numb and sleazy, the way an awakening man feels when he realizes he passed out drunk on his host’s sofa the night before. I went over to the coffee table and checked my mail. There were some bills and five or six Christmas cards. One was from a girl in Denver; she had written: WHEN YOU FEAR ENOUGH TO FEND THE FURRY BEAST. Another was from my sister Jane, who was living in Jacksonville with her husband, Big Bob Davidson, and their three children. It wasn’t a Christmas card in the usual sense; it was closer to a family newsletter, the kind Jane sent every year at this time. It was mimeographed on a standard piece of bond paper; there was a magazine cutout of a sprig of holly pasted to the top of the page.

  Merry Christmas from Florida,

  As I sit down to fill you in on another year in the Davidsons’ busy life, I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t all been shortchanged. There simply couldn’t have been 365 days to this year.

  To start with, we adore Florida. We try to take full advantage of the sun, the beach and the mild climate. This casual, informal living suits we Northerners just fine. With all the sunshine favoring our fair city, the little people (Vaughn, 6; Blair, 4; Sue Ann, 2) are free from colds and sore throats all year round.

  In April, we made a whirlwind trip to Big Bob’s beloved Philadelphia where we spent a zany day with the whole Davidson clan gathered to greet their wandering hero. What a memorable day that reunion was, particularly for Bob, who, I feel compelled to report, had more than his share of the ample liquid refreshment on hand. Then we scooted up to Old Holly, in Westchester County, where we visited with my Dad, who is still “knocking them dead” on Madison Avenue, and my dear “little” brother David. It was such a pleasant visit, but also sad, with the memory of Mother still lingering like notes from a far-off flute in that big old house. But David cheered us up with a gala day in the city, capped by a visit to his office in midtown Manhattan. We met many of his associates and even one or two TV ?
??celebs.” Bob was mighty impressed!

  Summer was a fun time in Jax, but also hectic. We had quite a few cookouts on our modest patio and I drove the “three musketeers” over to the beach almost every day. We had a hurricane in September with many killed. Then it was time for Vaughn to go into first grade. Our little “scholar” combed his hair and put on a brand new suit for the occasion. However, just last week Bob had to rush him to the hospital for surgery to correct some kind of congenital problem. I hope I will have good tidings on this subject next year at this time.

  Bob and the children join me in wishing everyone a joyous Christmas and a very prosperous New Year.

  Her signature, Jane Davidson, was at the bottom. At my father’s house in Old Holly, where they spent most of their visit, they never got out of their tennis sneakers and khaki shorts. This was a new Jane to me, this long-striding American man-woman. When we all lived together in Old Holly, I had never thought of either of my sisters—Mary was the other—as being anything less than feminine. Now here was Jane as co-captain of a roller derby team. They ate nothing but hamburgers, frankfurters and potato chips. Big Bob always seemed to be on the floor wrestling with the kids and their dog while Jane ran up and down the stairs like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, two steps at a time and a shitty diaper in her hand. My father, whose fantasy life (I suspected) was a curious blend of the dusty vast splendor of longhorn aristocracy and the faultless breeding of English dukedom, viewed this panorama with glacial disdain, one suede elbow resting on the mantelpiece, his stately manor stance, and a putrid cheroot in his mouth—Charles Bickford in a boundary war with some effete sheep rancher. But he managed to remain calm and an hour after they had left he confessed to a distant loneliness. He was a complicated man, often coarse in speech and manner, unintentionally comic at times, yet possessed of genuine insight—a good man, I think, beneath the snarl and brawl. Evidence of his fantasy life, manifested mainly by the clothing he wore and the books in his library, did not seem apparent to anyone but myself, and it may well be that I sought to dilute the force of his reality, the powerful effect on me of the very fact of his presence, by mixing some giddy daydreams into the jug. My father had served in the Pacific during World War II. He came back with some shrapnel in his chest and a lot of medals. He kept the medals hidden and never talked about the shrapnel but I knew that both were there. We had a long talk about sex and death and I drove back to the city even faster than usual.

  I remembered who I wanted to call. It was Pike. I told him I had something important to discuss and we decided to meet at Zack’s Bad News, a small bar in the East Village where he spent a lot of his time. I shaved, sprayed on some deodorant, ferreted some food particles out of my teeth with dental floss, then sandblasted with the electric toothbrush and gargled with mouthwash. I put on a pair of green chinos with slash pockets, my mandarin opium-shirt and Tobruk desert boots. Then I slipped into the stained leather Montana grizzly-hunting stud-coat I had just bought at Abercrombie’s. I decided to walk down to Zack’s. It was cold and the wind came around corners carrying the smell of snow and a faint intimation of evergreen from the Christmas tree stands. On Third Avenue the buses went by in packs, lit up like operating rooms, each window containing several moribund heads. A few yards in front of me was a man with a transistor radio. He held it to his ear and crossed the street with no regard for traffic. I walked behind him for five blocks and he didn’t lower the radio once. I moved alongside him. He was listening to a weather report and talking to himself, or talking back to the radio. He was much younger than I had expected, a boy of about fifteen, very round and blotchy in appearance, secret eyes peering out of the baby fat, and he had the slightly retarded look of incipient genius—that crowlike scratchy cunning of the city’s ragpickers and bottle-savers, those evolutionary masters of survival. The boy looked at me.

  “Snow bulletin,” he said.

  I never liked to get too close to such people. I crossed Third Avenue quickly. I had gone less than a block when I heard him shouting to me. He was standing on the other side of the avenue near a lightpost, hands cupped to his mouth and the radio tucked into his armpit, calling to me, his bulky figure vanishing and reappearing, a slide presentation, as the cars and buses passed between us.

  “It’s on the way,” he shouted. “They just announced it. It’s heading this way. We should get it any minute. Three inches by midnight. All motorists are warned to keep off emergency routes. The mayor says don’t drive unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’ll be here any minute. Three to four inches. Snow! Snow! Snow!”

  Zack’s was an unusual place. Only on rare occasions were any of the local anomalies present—Zoroastrians, Zen cowboys, soothsayers and the like, or lost children looking for Ames, Iowa—and they never seemed to stay very long. It didn’t draw any of the area’s ethnic or subculture groups and it certainly wasn’t vibrating with laughter and political talk, that graduate school atmosphere of elbowing jocularity. Zack’s was one of the quietest places in New York. Most of the regular customers appeared to be crazy. They just sat and drank, mumbling to themselves. Every so often one of them would sing a totally incoherent song, a private hash of lullaby and talking blues, the kind of song heard nowhere else except on a subway at three in the morning. The place scared me a little.

  Pike was sitting at his unofficially reserved table with a young girl I had never seen before. Pike was close to sixty. His full name was Jack Wilson Pike and he called everybody Jack. He had fine blue eyes, a disappearing chest and the leisurely belly customary in a man his age. I had met him through Sullivan, who once said that he was as American as a slice of apple pie with a fly defecating on it. She also said he had saved her life once, though she didn’t state the circumstances. The girl wore an old chapped leather windbreaker which I recognized as Pike’s, his aviator raiment.

  “How do you like my waif?” he said.

  The girl hit him on the shoulder.

  “He says I’m his waif. He’s an Air Force colonel and I’m the waif he like rescued from a burning building. The one his own planes bombed. We haven’t come to the part of why he was hanging around in the streets while his own planes were dropping bombs.”

  “I was a spy,” Pike said. “I was an advance man. I parachuted in at dawn so I could set up the bombing coordinates. They dropped me in with nothing but a shortwave set and a bowie knife. No guns, they told me. A single shot and the whole countryside would be alive with troops. If you have to kill, they told me, use the knife. It’s quick and it’s quiet.”

  She gave him a backhand to the ribs. Pike asked me what I wanted to drink. He seemed drunk himself, or well on the way, and in an hour or so his head would tumble to his chest, and his entire upper body, with the sad and ponderous majesty of a dynamited mountainside, would pitch toward the table. He returned from the bar with two drinks.

  “I have news,” I said.

  “The lady told me.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Drop me off at Miami Beach.”

  “Due west, Pike. Into the great white maw.”

  “The great white maw and her sister Katy. A man can get killed out there at this time of year. Ask Gash here. She hails from Wyoming, the equality suffrage state. Tell him about the elk herds, booboo. How it gets too cold for even an elk to tolerate. That’s where I draw the line, at fur-bearing animals. When it’s too cold for them, count me out.”

  “I’d like to live in a big wet greenhouse,” the girl said.

  “Blizzards,” Pike said.

  “They want blizzards,” I said. “The network wants blizzards. We want to show how much progress the Navahos have been making and if we can get a blizzard at the same time the show’ll be that much more interesting. Airlifts by helicopter. Makeshift hospitals.”

  “You’ll garner the industry’s choicest awards. But count me out.”

  “Look, that part of it is beside the point. We’ll just drive out there, that’s all, just for the hell of it. We won’t be goi
ng for a few months so the weather’s bound to be a lot better than it is now, even out there. I think we can pick up a camp trailer in Maine. And we’ll just go. You can map out the route. It won’t cost us much. Food and gas. And I’ll spring for the gas.”

  “Ask Jack if he’s ever driven cross-country before. Ask him if he knows how boring it can be in the deepest contiguous sense of that word. I’ve done it a number of times, windshield wipers beating in my brain.”

  “Look, my last two years in college I took my T-Bird out and back. It was terrific. I stopped only to sleep and eat. This time we’ll go slower. We’ll stay off the superhighways. We’ll discover all the lost roads of America. I’m bringing my movie camera. We’ll get it all on film. Your spiritual father, Pike. You’ve always talked about meeting a cougar. Well, he’s out there, crouched on some big brown rock, swishing his tail.”

  The girl wasn’t drinking. I couldn’t figure out the connection between them. She was about one-third his age and seemed very attached to him but in a way I could not quite define. Her blankness intrigued me. She looked almost alluring in Pike’s windbreaker, small and dumb and tentative. I felt a need to know more about her, to fill out that incomplete image. Only completed could it begin to tell me whether I had a further need to demand from it some small recognition of my galvanic potentials as a man. I remembered the attractive couple in the restaurant during lunch that same afternoon, legs touching beneath the table. Pike was beginning to fade.