An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  “No.” She gave a laugh and whispered, “When I drink I go out to look for men who will beat me.”

  “Crazy,” I said, and got up.

  She could hear me putting on my clothes in the dark. The oppression had lifted on the moment I was free of her bed and my fingers were quick. They seemed to float onto each piece of clothing as I needed it.

  “When will you be back?”

  “Before morning.”

  “And you will tell your wife you took a walk and came back and woke me up to let you in?”

  “No, I will tell her I left the door unlocked.”

  “Don’t give all the good things to your wife. Save a present for me.”

  “Maybe I will bring back a diamond.”

  “I love you a little bit.”

  And I was thinking of that empty womb, of that graveyard which gambled a flower and lost.

  “I like you, Ruta.”

  “Come back, and you will see how much you are going to like me.”

  I had a thought then of what had been left in her. It was perishing in the kitchens of the Devil. Was its curse on me?

  “Der Teufel is so happy,” she said, and a perfect spitefulness of attention came to a focus in her eye. Small cheer that she could read my mind.

  Was that the cloud of oppression which had come to me in the dark? That the seed was expiring in the wrong field?

  “Next time,” said Ruta, “you must take care of little Ruta.”

  “Next time will be an event,” I said. I wanted to blow her a kiss but there was nothing in me to send her way. So I closed the door, and went back up the stairs, up the aisle of that padded jungle, and entered Deborah’s bedroom again with the expectation that somehow she would be gone. There was the body. It struck my sight like a shelf of rock on which a ship is about to smash. What was I going to do with her? I felt a mean rage in my feet. It was as if in killing her, the act had been too gentle, I had not plumbed the hatred where the real injustice was stored. She had spit on the future, my Deborah, she had spoiled my chance, and now her body was here. I had an impulse to go up to her and kick her ribs, grind my heel on her nose, drive the point of my shoe into her temple and kill her again, kill her good this time, kill her right. I stood there shuddering from the power of this desire, and comprehended that this was the first of the gifts I’d plucked from the alley, oh Jesus, and I sat down in a chair as if to master the new desires Ruta had sent my way.

  My breath was bad again. What in hell was I to do with Deborah? I had no solution. If the messenger was on his way, he gave no hint of being near. A first rat’s panic began to gnaw. “Keep cool, you swine,” said a contemptuous voice in me, all but an echo from Deborah.

  Let me tell you the worst. I had a little fantasy at this moment. It was beyond measure. I had a desire to take Deborah to the bathroom, put her in the tub. Then Ruta and I would sit down to eat. The two of us would sup on Deborah’s flesh, we would eat for days: the deepest poisons in us would be released from our cells. I would digest my wife’s curse before it could form. And this idea was thrilling to me. I felt like a doctor on the edge of a thunderous new medicine. The details fell into place: what we did not choose to devour we could grind away in the electric Disposall beneath the sink, all the impure organs and little bones. For the long bones, for the femur and the tibia, the fibula, the radius and the ulna, the humerus, I had another plan. I would bind them in a package and hurl them out the window, out across the East River Drive and into the water. No, four lanes of traffic and a pedestrian walk to clear, too long a throw, I would have instead to go out in the street and take a taxicab and then another and then another until I ended at last in the marshes of Canarsie or the stench flats near City Island; there I could fling them in a swamp. With luck those long horsewoman’s bones might disappear forever, or would I know for sure? Would I have instead to fill a box with plaster of Paris and imbed the bones, and her teeth as well? But no, the teeth must be disposed of separately, and not in any sewer or trash can, no, they must be buried securely, but where? Not Central Park, not by half, one tooth found, and I was dead: as in a movie I could see the police talking to Deborah’s dentist—and bones in plaster of Paris dropped at sea, that was not good either, for how was I to rent a boat in March without drawing attention? Heiress Is Missing! the tabloids would scream on the following day and people would remember my face, my heavy package, no, this wasn’t going to work: worst of all was Ruta in it with me, for she could yet cause trouble. Now the fantasy approached the vanishing point: I saw myself alone beside the tub with Ruta’s body in cadaver—there was a tonic humor at the thought which made me smile. No, this was done, this idea was done, and I lay back weakly in my chair as if a spasm of illness which should have discharged itself from my mouth had lifted instead to my brain. What gifts this girl had given me, what German spice!

  Then it came simple as that, the simplest solution of all. The messenger had slipped into the tower. And I smiled in terror, for it was also the boldest choice. Was I brave enough? Something in me lingered back—I had a panicked minute of argument in which I tried to find some other way. Perhaps I could take Deborah to the elevator (my poor wife is drunk) or sneak her down the stairs, no, altogether impossible, and then I sighed: if I missed on this one, it was the electric chair for sure, I had a wistful sadness now I had not tried to cast a baby into Ruta—she might be the last woman for me—and then I stood up from my seat, went to look at Deborah, knelt beside her again, and put my hand under her hips. Her bowels had voided. Suddenly I felt like a child. I was ready to weep. There was a stingy fish-like scent in the air, not unreminiscent of Ruta. They were mistress and maid and put their musk in opposite pockets. I hesitated, and then since there was nothing to do but go on, I went to the bathroom, took some paper, and cleaned Deborah. It was a discipline to be thorough. Then I disposed of the waste, listening to the hound’s sigh of the closet water, and came back to look out the open window. No. Not yet. First I turned off the brightest lights. Then in a panic of strength, like the desperation to get out of a burning room, I lifted her up, at what a cost I lifted her up, for her body was almost too heavy (or I was that empty with fright) and balanced her feet on the ledge, it was harder than I thought, and with a fever that no one see me at the open window now, not this instant, no, I took a breath and thrust her out and fell back myself to the carpet as if she had shoved me back, and lying there, I counted to two, to three, how fast I do not know, feeling the weight of her flight like a thrill in my chest, and heard a sound come up from the pavement all ten stories below, a flat, surprisingly loud and hollow thump as car brakes screamed and metal went colliding into metal with that howl of a shape which is suddenly collapsed, and I stood up then and leaned out the window and looked and there was Deborah’s body half beneath the front of a car and a pile-up of three or four behind and traffic screaming to a stall on back, all the way half a mile back, and I howled then in a simulation of woe, but the woe was real—for the first time I knew she was gone—and it was an animal howl.

  One scalding wash of sorrow, and I felt clean. I went to the telephone, dialed O, asked, “What is the number of the police?” The operator said, “Just a minute, I’ll get it for you,” and I waited for eight long rings while my nerve teetered like a clown on a tightrope, and a cacophony of voices rose all ten stories up from the ground. I heard my voice giving my name and Deborah’s address to the mouthpiece, and that voice of mine then said, “Get over here right away, will you. I can hardly talk, there’s been a frightful accident.” I hung up, went to the door, and shouted down the stairs, “Ruta, get dressed, get dressed quick. Mrs. Rojack has killed herself.”

  3 / A Messenger from the Maniac

  BUT NOW it wasn’t possible to wait in Deborah’s room until the police arrived. An anxiety went off in me like the quiver of electricity when there is a short in the line. My body could have been on a subway, it felt as if it were the subway, bleak, grinding at high speed; I was jangled with adrenalin.


  I went out the door, down the steps, and came up against Ruta in the hall. She was standing there half-dressed, a black skirt, no stockings yet, no shoes, a white blouse not buttoned. Her breasts were bare, no brassiere yet either, and her dyed red hair now uncombed, still mangled by my fingers, stood up like a bush. Dyed, marcelled, lacquered and then worked over by me, her hair gave off the look of a girl just taken in a police raid. But even at this instant, something relaxed in me. For there was a tough slatternly tenderness in her face, and her prize—those bright little breasts—kept peeking at me through the open shirt. There was an instant between us, an echo of some other night (some other life) when we might have met in the corridor of an Italian whorehouse on an evening when the doors were closed, the party was private, and the girls were moving from bed to bed in one sweet stew.

  “I was dreaming,” she said, “and you called down the stairs.” Suddenly she closed the shirt over her breasts.

  “No,” and to my surprise, I gave a pure sob. It was an extraordinary sound. “Deborah killed herself. She jumped through the window.”

  Ruta let out a cry, a thin dirty little cry. Something nasty was being surrendered. Two tears flashed down her cheek. “She was an ingenious woman,” Ruta said, and began to weep. There was pain now in the sound, and such a truth in the grief that I knew she was crying not for Deborah, not even quite for herself, but rather for the unmitigatable fact that women who have discovered the power of sex are never far from suicide. And in that sudden burst of mourning, her face took on beauty. A nourishment came off Ruta’s limbs. I was in some far-gone state: no longer a person, a character, a man of habits, rather a ghost, a cloud of loose emotions which scattered on the wind. I felt as if much of me had gathered like a woman to mourn everything I had killed in my lover, that violent brutish tyrant who lived in Deborah. And I groped toward Ruta like a woman seeking another female. We came together, hugged each other. But her breast came out of the open shirt, and slipped into my hand, and that breast was looking for no woman’s touch, no, it made its quick pert way toward what was hard and certain in my hand. It was as if I had never felt a breast before (that gift of flesh) for Ruta was still weeping, the sobs were coming now with the fierce rhythm of a child, but her breast was independent of her. That little tit in my hand was nosing like a puppy for its reward, impertinent with its promise of the sly life it could give to me, and so keen to pull in a life for itself that I was taken with a hopeless lust Hopeless, because I should have been down on the street already, and yet there was no help for it, thirty seconds was all I wanted and thirty seconds I took, one high sniff of the alley coming from her as I took her still weeping right there in the hall, her back against those velvet flowers while I fired one hot fierce streak of fierce bright murder, fierce as the demon in the eyes of a bright golden child.

  Something in her leaped to catch that child, I felt some avarice shake its way through; she was beginning as I was done, pinching and squeezing at the back of my neck: she came in ten seconds behind. “Oh,” she said, “you are trying to woo me.” By which time I was cold as ice, and kissed her mockingly on the nose.

  “Now, listen,” I said, “take a shower.”

  “Why?” She shook her head, pretending a half-bewilderment. But those forty seconds had drawn us to focus with each other. I felt as fine and evil as a razor and just as content with myself. There was something further in her I’d needed, some bitter perfect salt, narrow and mean as the eye of a personnel director.

  “Because, my pet, the police will be here in five minutes.”

  “You called them?”

  “Of course.”

  “My God.”

  “They’ll be here in five minutes, and I’ve got to pretend to be overcome. Which of course I am.” And I smiled.

  She looked at me in wonder. Was I mad, asked her eyes, or deserving of respect.

  “But what,” she said like a German, “do you have to explain to them?”

  “That I didn’t kill Deborah.”

  “Who says you did?” She was trying to keep up with me, but this last had been a racing turn.

  “I didn’t like Deborah very much. She detested me. You know that.”

  “You were not very happy with each other.”

  “Not very.”

  “A woman doesn’t commit suicide for a man she detests.”

  “Listen, pet, I have something awful to tell you. She had a sniff of you on me. And then she jumped. Like that. Before my eyes.”

  “Mr. Rojack, you are hard as nails.”

  “Hard as nails.” I pinched her shoulder a little. “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s get out of this together. Then we have fun.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “When the police talk to you, tell them the truth. Except for one obvious detail. Obviously, there was nothing between us.”

  “Nothing between us.”

  “You let me in tonight. A couple of hours ago. You don’t know the time exactly, a couple of hours ago. Then you went to sleep. You heard nothing until I woke you up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t trust the police. If they say I said we were having an affair, deny it.”

  “Mr. Rojack, you never laid a hand on me.”

  “Right.” I took her chin between my thumb and forefinger, holding it as if precious. “Now, the second line of defense. If they bring me down to see you, or bring you up to see me, and you hear me say we went to bed tonight, then agree. But only if you hear me say it.”

  “Will you tell them?”

  “Not unless there’s evidence. In that case I’ll tell the police I wanted to protect our mutual reputation. It’ll still be all right.”

  “Shouldn’t we admit it from the start?”

  “More natural to conceal the fact.” I smiled. “Now, wash yourself. Quickly. If there’s time, get dressed. And look—”

  “Yes.”

  “Make yourself plain. Comb out your hair for God’s sake.”

  With that, I quit the apartment. The elevator would take too long, but I rang anyway, five piercing rings to manifest impatience and then took the stairs. For the second time that night I was on my way down ten flights of stairs, but this time on the run. When I reached the lobby, it was empty, the doorman was doubtless ascending, a bit of good luck or bad luck (I could not keep up with the possibilities any longer) and then I was on the street and running a few steps to the Drive. There was one instant when the open air reached my nose and gave me a perfect fleeting sense of adventure on the wind, of some adventure long gone—a memory: I was eighteen, playing House Football for Harvard; it was a kickoff and the ball was coming to me, I had it, and was running. Off the river came a light breeze with the hint of turf to it. There was a fence lining the East River Drive, but it had no barbed wire on top, I was able to climb up and get over without ripping my pants, and come down the other side. There was now a jump of eight feet further down to a strip of curb, but I dropped—I hated jumping—but I dropped, jarred my ankle, hurt something minor in my groin, some little muscle, and made my way along the southbound traffic whose drivers were crawling by at five miles an hour in the unobstructed lane. Deborah was a hundred feet down the road. I had a glimpse of four or five cars collided into one another, and a gathering of forty or fifty people. A magnesium flare had been lit and it gave off the white intent glare which surrounds workingmen doing serious work at night. Two police cars flanked the scene, their red lights revolving like beacons. In the distance, I could hear the siren of an ambulance, and in the center was that numb mute circle of silence which surrounds a coffin in the center of a room. I could hear a woman weeping hysterically in one of the automobiles which had collided. There were the short, rapt, irritable tones of three big men talking to one another, a professional conversation, two police and a detective, I realized, and farther on an elderly man with dirty gray hair, a large nose, an unhealthy skin, and a pair of pink-tinted glasses was sitt
ing in his car, the door open, holding his temple, and groaning in a whining gurgling sound which betrayed the shoddy state of his internal plumbing.

  But I had broken through the crowd and was about to kneel at Deborah’s body. An arm in a blue serge sleeve held me back.

  “Officer, that’s my wife.”

  The arm went down suddenly. “You better not look, mister.”

  There was nothing agreeable to see. She must first have struck the pavement, and the nearest car had been almost at a halt before it hit her. Perhaps it pushed the body a few feet. Now her limbs had the used-up look of rope washed limp in the sea, and her head was wedged beneath a tire. There was a man taking photographs, his strobe light going off each time with a mean crackling hiss, and as I knelt, he stepped back and turned to someone else, a doctor with a satchel in his hand, and said, “She’s yours.”

  “All right, move the car back,” the doctor said. Two policemen near me pushed on the automobile and retired the front wheels a foot before the car bumped gently into the car behind it. I knelt ahead of the medical examiner and looked at her face. It was filthy with the scrape of asphalt and tire marks. Just half of her was recognizable, for the side of her face which caught the tire was swollen. She looked like a fat young girl. But the back of her head, like a fruit gone rotten and lying in its juices, was the center of a pond of coagulated blood near to a foot in diameter. I stayed between the police photographer who was getting ready to take more pictures and the medical examiner who was opening his satchel, and still on my knees, touched my face to hers, being careful to catch some of the blood on my hands, and even (as I nuzzled her hair with my nose) a streak or two more on my cheeks. “Oh, baby,” I said aloud. It might have been good to weep, but nothing of that sort was even near. No, shock and stupor would be the best I could muster. “Deborah,” I said, and like an echo from the worst of one’s past came a clear sense of doing this before, of making love to some woman who was not attractive to me, of something unpleasant in her scent or dead in her skin, and me saying “Oh, darling, oh, baby,” in that rape of one’s private existence which manners demand. So, now, the “Oh, darling” came out full of timbre, full of loss. “Oh, Christ, Christ,” I repeated dully.