Americana

  “Why are you driving when you can fly?” she said. “Don’t you love to fly? I love it. It’s the sexiest thing there is.”

  “This is a religious journey,” I said. “Planes aren’t religious yet. Cars are religious. Maybe planes will be next.”

  “Planes are sexy.”

  “That’s right, the way cars used to be. But cars are religious now and this is a religious trip.”

  Something stirred.

  “He’s out there, you say, swishing his tail. I’ve always wanted to confront a cougar face to face without bars between us. Something might happen. We might feel some kind of flow between us. It’s hard for a layman like yourself to understand that. But getting up face to face with a gorgeous steaming beast like that. It’s a mystical thing, Jack. A mystical thing. The cougar. The mountain lion. The catamount. The puma. I first saw him in a zoo when I was no more than ten. Even then I felt a bond between us. I’d like to confront him face to face. No iron bars. Something might happen.”

  “We’ll go up into the Rockies,” I said.

  “I’d like to confront him before I die.”

  “We’ll go up into the Rockies. That’s where he is, crouched in the shadows, maybe waiting for an epiphany of his own. You get a battlefield commission. Sully said so. And you can map out our route.”

  “I have to do peeps,” the girl said.

  “The head’s back there.”

  We were silent until she returned; she punched him on the back when she sat down. Then Pike said to me:

  “What runs faster, a greyhound or a cheetah?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

  “Think about it. There’s no hurry. Take your time. Greyhound or cheetah?”

  “I’ll have to guess,” I said.

  “If that’s the best you can do.”

  “I say a greyhound runs faster.”

  He hit the table and gazed off into the wings, a look of ineffable disgust on his face.

  “Tell him, cootie.”

  “A cheetah,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Cheetah goes seventy miles per,” Pike said.

  “How do you know how fast a greyhound goes?”

  “No living thing, man or beast, can top seventy. Cheetah’s the only one. Cheetah goes like the wind.”

  “Have they ever been matched in a race?”

  “Greyhound’s never been clocked above thirty-six. Why, a gazelle could trounce a greyhound. I can name any number of animals prepared to demolish the famous greyhound. Gazelle. Pronghorn antelope. Jackrabbit. Any number. Damn but you’re stupid.”

  Pike was fascinated by animals. He liked to promote theoretical races, fights and tests of strength. His facts were often shaky but his convictions were deep and abiding. Nobody who tried to dispute the result of one of his epochal races or snarling culture-circled battles ever got very far. Pike would present a series of what he referred to as verifiable facts and documentations. His face would tense with rage and pain as he tried to demonstrate the obvious truth to his opponent. I don’t know what theme he had found in the animal world that moved him to such emotion, maybe just innocence, the child’s, the old man’s enchantment with an undefiled life and the purest of deaths. Pike was a living schizogram, as were Sullivan, and Bobby Brand, whom I have yet to introduce, and my father and departed mother, and perhaps myself. He was almost gone now. His voice was thick and seemed to overlap itself, words sticking to his tongue. He lit one cigarette while another still burned in the ashtray. Soon I would learn what I could about his teen queen, the abstract cartoon he had rescued from footsteps and rain.

  “Why is it you keep your hands under the table all the time?” I said. “You bring them up only to give Pike one of those tender clouts. Then down they go again. What’s under the table that’s so interesting?”

  “Dorothy Lamour and the squid people.”

  Pike snorted and softly collapsed. I went to the bar and ordered another drink for myself. Zack put down his newspaper and removed the thick spectacles he wore. He poured the drink, then lifted the wet five, sponged down the bar, gave me change and went to sit in a folding chair beneath an overexposed photo of a bridegroom and best man outside the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Scotch.”

  “It’s real neat to watch. The ice shines and there’s like things going off. Little explosions all over.”

  “Why do you want to live in a greenhouse?”

  “I want to live in a big wet greenhouse with hair growing in it. There’d be like doll’s hair and doggy hair growing in all the pots. That would be neat. And anybody who wanted to be there could be there. John and Paul and Mick and the Doors and the Airplane and Bobby and Buffy. We’d all smoke and there’d be lots of audio-visual hardware. Then we would all eat hot fudge sundaes. That would be the neatest thing in the whole world.”

  “How did you meet Pike?”

  “I was at Elephantiasis with a boy from NYU. The vibrations were bad. I was stoned on hash and I weighed about a zillion pounds. It was like being in the back of the blue bus. Then dada came over and bought this boy about a dozen drinks and he went to the toilet and never came out. Then dada took me to his room and we ate a whole Sara Lee chocolate cake and drank a big thing of milk. It was wild.”

  “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 trusti
ng, 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 t
roubles 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.