An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  So instead I walked across the big room and approached Leznicki and Ganooch and Tony and Cherry and Roberts and O’Brien and even a few others, detectives and lawyers, and stopped near Cherry. I had a good look at her now and she was older than I had expected, she was not eighteen or twenty-one as I had thought on the street but twenty-seven perhaps or twenty-eight, and there were pale green circles of chronic exhaustion beneath her eyes. But I still thought her very nice. She had an elusive silvery air as if once there had been a huge disappointment and now a delicate gaiety had formed to cover the pain. She looked a little like a child who has been anointed by the wing of a magical bird. And she also looked wretched just now.

  “Tony, can’t you do something about that beating?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Stay out of it, huh?”

  Roberts spoke to her. “The boy they got in there tried to beat an old man to death tonight.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but that’s not why they’re beating on him.”

  “What do you want?” said Roberts, looking at me.

  “Roberts, I think she’s right. I think you ought to call off that detective.”

  “Planning to talk about it on your program?” asked Leznicki.

  “May I invite you when I do?”

  “It’s better to stop these things,” said Uncle Ganooch. “There’s too much friction in the world today.”

  “Hey, Red,” Leznicki shouted to the back room, “he’s drunk. Stick him in a cell for the night.”

  “He tried to bite me,” Red yelled back.

  “Stick him in a cell.”

  “Now,” said Uncle Ganooch, “can we finish our business? I’m a very sick man.”

  “It’s simple,” smiled Leznicki, “we just need some assurance you’ll show up to honor your subpoena.”

  “We’re going over the old ground,” said Ganooch’s lawyer, “I will stand manifest for him.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?” asked Leznicki.

  “Let’s go back,” said Roberts, looking at me. “I want to talk to you.”

  I nodded. And then moved next to the girl. Her friend Tony was standing on her other side and he gave me a look which had power to quiver in my skin. It was a look which said, “Don’t talk to this girl or somebody will break your arm.”

  But I was thinking that I might as well take that girl for a sign—she was the only one in sight. So I said to her, and my voice was easy, “I’d like to come and hear you sing.”

  “Well, I’d like you to,” she said.

  “Where is your place?”

  “Down in the Village. Just a little place. Just opened up.” She looked at Tony, and hesitated, and then gave me the address in a clear voice. Out of the side of my eye I could see the Negro being led out of the big room.

  “Let’s go, Rojack,” said Roberts. “We have something new to talk about.”

  It must have been three in the morning, but he still looked neat. Once we sat down, he smiled. “There’s no use in asking you for a confession, is there?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then. We’re going to let you go.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it all over?”

  “Oh, no. No. It’s not over for you till the coroner brings in a report of suicide.”

  “When is that?”

  He shrugged. “A day, a week. Don’t leave town till the coroner is heard from.”

  “I’m still under suspicion?”

  “Oh, come on. We know you did it.”

  “But you can’t hold me?”

  “Yeah, we could hold you as a material witness. And we could work on you for seventy-two hours, and you would crack. But you’re in luck, you’re in great luck. We have to stick with Ganucci this week. We don’t have time for you.”

  “You also have no evidence.”

  “The girl talked. We know you’ve been with her.”

  “Means nothing.”

  “We have some other evidence, but I don’t want to get into it now. We’ll see you in a day or two. Stay away from your wife’s apartment. And stay away from the maid. You wouldn’t want to tamper with a potential witness.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “By the way, no hard feelings.”

  “Oh, none.”

  “I mean it. You hold up all right. You’re not bad.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This may interest you. We got the autopsy report. There’s evidence your wife did have cancer. They’re going to make some slides to verify it, but it does look good for you.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s why we’re letting you go.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t relax too much. The autopsy also showed that your wife’s large intestine was in an interesting state.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ll get your chance to worry later this week.” He stood up. “Good night, pal.” Then he stopped. “Oh, yes. Forgot to ask you to sign the autopsy papers. Would you sign them now?”

  “Your autopsy was illegal?”

  “I’d say it was irregular.”

  “I don’t know if I want to sign the papers.”

  “Suit yourself, pal. If you don’t, we can put you in a cell until the coroner brings back his report.”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “Not that good,” said Roberts. “Just a goof. Here, sign here.”

  Which I did.

  “Well,” said Roberts, “I’m going home. Can I drop you off?”

  “I’ll walk,” I said.

  I did walk. I walked for miles through the long drizzle of the early morning, and close to dawn I found myself in the Village outside the after-hours club where Cherry was singing. I had lived through a night, I had come into a morning. It was morning outside on the street; I could think of the sun coming up. But it would rise into a wintry smog, a wet wan morning gray with mist.

  The entrance to the joint was a battered metal door which opened at my knock. “I’m a friend of Tony’s,” I said to the man in the hall. He shrugged, and let me by. I walked down a corridor and went through another door. The room had once been the rear of a large basement loft but now it was decorated like a bar in Miami, an after-hours box of leatherette, flame-orange stuffing for the booths, the stools, the face of the bar, some dark burnished midnight of black carpet and purple wine ceiling. There was a man playing the piano, and Cherry was singing. She saw me come in and she smiled on the breath she took and made a little sign to indicate that yes she would have a drink with me as soon as her set was done. Well, if Deborah’s dying had given me a new life, I must be all of eight hours old by now.

  4 / Green Circles of Exhaustion

  IN FACT, I was so far into the fevers of fatigue that the bourbon revolved a majestic route down through my chest, the congestions of my lungs, the maze of my belly, those peppered links in my gut. The police were gone and would be back again tomorrow; the newspapers were already being dropped at the early morning stands; in a few hours the details of my daily life would erupt like a house gone mad with the electric dishwasher screaming at the delivery boy, the television studio would be on the phone, and I might have to be on the phone to the university, Deborah’s friends would call, there would be the funeral, God, the funeral, the funeral, and the first in a new thousand to twenty-two thousand lies. But I was like a wrecked mariner in the lull between two storms. Rather I was close to a strong old man dying now of his overwork, passing into death by way of going deeper to himself. Rich mahoganies of color move in to support his heart and there are tired angels to meet him after work, a tender heaven to approve of how he spent those hard bleak years. I think that shot of bourbon may have been the best single drink I ever had—relaxation came to me on the gift of wings and I swam through some happy mood deeper than air, more perfumed than water. As Cherry sang, I drank her in—my ear for a singer had never been so fine. Which is not to say that she was a gre
at singer: she was not. But I enjoyed her, I was resting on a point of balance kin to one of those little dots of light which used to dance above the printed words on a movie screen when the adults and children were invited to sing on Saturday. She had what was near to a conventional voice—she accepted teachings from others; styles had been borrowed and not quite made her own, but she had a lithe riding beat and odd details were striking. She was singing Love for sale, love that’s fresh and still unspoiled, love that’s only slightly … Then she did something tasty with soiled, something rueful as though to show that what had been lost was worse than the dirt. Yes, the voice was only a lift above ordinary, but the experience in the voice was not, and so it brought the people in this room a shift in mood together, and that was an achievement, for they were not near to lovers, not this crowd: an Italian judge with two tarts, a pair of detectives, one light-skinned plump young Negro with a mandarin’s goatee, some old woman with a set of diamond rings whose glow was stolen from the aurora borealis; those north lights were her motto; they moaned: I’m twice a widow and believe in God for that is what young men are—the young man with her was undeniably queer. Finally, at the bar, a party of five, two girls with three men who looked like friends of Tony, for the men were all wearing platinum-white silk ties, white silk shirts and dark blue suits. One of them was a former prizefighter, a very good retired welterweight I recognized on the instant, he had a very bad reputation in the ring. Add a few more and you had the size of the crowd, nothing very big for a wet dawn, but that little voice of hers was giving me pleasure (the singing voice being considerably smaller than the voice with which she spoke to me on the street), that little voice had something of a clean nerve.

  If you want the thrill of love, I’ve been through the mill of love,

  Old love, new love, every love but true love,

  Love for sale. Appetizing young love for sale.

  If you want to buy my wares, follow me and climb the stairs—

  Lu, uh, ove, love for sale.

  The spotlight was good for her, a pink pearly violet for hue, a good light on a pale blonde since it gave one edge of silver to the shadows in her face and deepened those pale green circles beneath her eyes to hollows of glamor. She did not look in the least like Marlene Dietrich, but the glamor was there, that curious hint of no-man’s-land where one cannot distinguish exhaustion from the shade of espionage. Then the demon, good or ill, of the telepathic powers vaulted with a leap onto her stage, and she began to sing “The Lady Is a Tramp,” but in a harsh groaning strained and curious flat version as if indeed Dietrich had touched a finger to her larynx. “Stop,” I thought to myself, “better to stop,” and Cherry burst into laughter, that false laughter of a singer who is a suspicion too drunk, and then she slapped her thigh, giving a new beat to the pianist (a vigorous muscular beat) while she closed her eyes and laughed merrily.

  “Oil it, honey,” cried the prizefighter. And she came back with another voice, belting the same song now, swaying her hips, tough and agreeable and very American as if she were an airline hostess or the television wife of a professional football star. There was another spot on her, an orange spot, Florida beaches, the red-orange tan of an athlete. Now the powder showed on her face and light reflected from it, little lights of perspiration bright as the sun on a wet snow. She was hard now, nightclub hard, an embodiment now of greed, green-eyed, brown-skinned flaming golden blonde—that was the orange spotlight. Life without care. I’m broke. It’s oke. Hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp, that’s why the lady is a tramp, but grinding the words as if they were part of some rich sausage her voice was ready to stuff.

  Well, the set went on. There was a champagne light which made her look like Grace Kelly, and a pale green which gave her a little of Monroe. She looked at different instants like a dozen lovely blondes, and now and again a little like the little boy next door. A clean tough decent little American boy in her look: that gave charm to the base of her upturned nose tip-tilted (I was reminded again) at the racy angle of a speedboat skipping a wave, yes that nose gave character to the little muscle in her jaw and the touch of stubbornness of her mouth. She was attractive, yes. She had studied blondes, this Cherry, she was all of them, some blonde devil had escorted her through the styles. It was a marvel—sipping my bourbon—to watch such mercury at work. She could have been a nest of separate personalities if it had not been for the character of her bottom, that fine Southern piece. Occasionally she would turn, she would sing over her shoulder, and show that of course her butt had nothing to do with her face, no she drove it on its own rhythms, pleased with itself and her, practical, the heart of every Southern girl’s pie, marvelous, just a little too big and round for the waist, a money-counter, Southern-girl ass. “This bee-hind is for sale, boy,” said it to me, “but you ain’t got the price, you!” Her face, having nothing to do with all of that, smiled demurely at me for the first time.

  I was floating on a zephyr of drunkenness, a magic riser. My brain had developed into a small manufactory of psychic particles, pellets, rockets the length of a pin, planets the size of your eye’s pupil when the iris closes down. I had even some artillery, a battery of bombs smaller than seeds of caviar but ready to be shot across the room.

  Exhibit for some future court: The prizefighter said “Oil it” once again to Cherry, and I fired a battery of guns at him. His laughter stopped in the middle; he scowled as if four very bad eggs had been crushed on his head. His nostrils screwed down to the turn of disgust I expected would be in the smell. He looked about. He, in his turn, calculated, (he was no stranger to such attacks) located me as the probable source, and proceeded to kick an imaginary foot deep into my crotch. My shield went down to block it. Blocked! “Your foot hurts,” said my mind to him, and he looked depressed. After a while he started to rub the toe of that shoe against his calf.

  Exhibit: The first tart with the judge giggled hysterically each time Cherry tried to hit the G below high C. Cherry’s voice was not particularly ready. One strand of her sound curled up to the pitch. The rest of her fell away. But the attempt was brave. So I called on one of those magic bullets I maintained in orbit swinging through the room above the solar center of my head. I instructed it, “Next time she giggles, take a fling through her head, ear to ear, score her good.” Which the pellet promptly did. Like a bullet going through a ten-inch plank, my pellet sizzled a new streak of emptiness through the core of that tart’s thoughts; her dear head quivered as the bullet went through; when she giggled again, the sound was hollow, the empty dopey giggle of a sweet-faced tart.

  Exhibit: The judge turned his head as the planet chirruped by his ear. Then he looked about. He could not find me. I shot a mental flare to tickle the tip of his nose. “Come here, baby,” said my mind to the judge, “this is your radar.” He found me then. Anathema began in his chest, rolled off his shoulders, ground clouds of legal gas. I had not been prepared for that. The gas went up my nose, dullness, sanity, the immeasurable continuum of cigar smoke, boredom; I was deadened, but not so down that I could not blow a flame from my mouth to ignite his cloud and send it retreating back in counter-anathema upon his table. Now the judge slumped and stared ahead, his eyes open and blank. Like a flower gone to pollen, out of spice, the ear curls on the other tart drooped suddenly to her neck, singed little bloom.

  Exhibit: One of the detectives had a case of hiccups.

  Exhibit: One of the Irish politicians wept.

  Exhibit: The room had a field of silence. A bomb had gone off. Into this silence, Cherry was singing: When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls. On sleepy garden walls she struck five perfect notes, five, like the five bells of an angel come to the wake of a bomb, clear, a cluster of the loveliest consecutive sounds I ever heard. A rare moment of balm in this battered room to hear the song of a lovely woman’s body.

  She did not like the moment. She tossed her head, beat her foot, and went off into Here is the story of a most unfortunate Memphis man who got stran
ded down in old Hong Kong.

  “Another bourbon, waiter,” I cried out.

  I was watching her foot beat the rhythm. She was wearing sandals which exposed her toes, and she had painted her nails. I was taken with this vanity, I was absorbed with it, for like most attractive women, her toes were the ugliest part of her body. Not ugly exactly, not deformed, but certainly too large. Her big toe was round, round as a half dollar, and larger than a quarter—it was one round greedy self-satisfied digit, and the four little toes were not so little either, each of them round balls, each of them much larger in their pads than the size of the nail might justify, so that one had to peek at five sensuous, even piggish, but most complacent little melons of flesh surrounding five relatively tiny toenails, each broader than they were long, which depressed me. She had the short broad foot of that very practical kind of woman who has time to buy the groceries and time to jazz the neighbor next door, and I looked from there up to the delicate silvery cut of her face, that delicate boy-girl face beneath the toned blonde hair, and was struck with a vision of how drunk I was, as if drunkenness were a train which rocketed through the dark and I was sitting in a seat which gave out backward on the view and so receded further and further from some fire on the horizon: thus came each instant nearer to the murmur one hears in the tunnel which leads to death. Women must murder us unless we possess them altogether (so said the luminous logic of this liquor in my hand) and I had a fear now of the singer on the stand, for her face, yes, perhaps I could possess that altogether, perhaps that face could love me. But her bee-hind! of course I could not possess that ass, no one ever had, maybe no one would, and so all the difficulty had gone down to her feet, yes the five painted toes talked of how bad this girl could be. So I saw her, that was the way I saw her: in a magic of spite, feeling as wicked as a titled child, I shot an arrow into her big toe, into the fat bullying certainty of that toe, and saw it twitch on the beat. I shot three more arrows into the same spot and saw the foot retreat beneath her long skirt. Then, as if a curse were on me (and so I must do the opposite of what I might intend) whatever, from a motive I did not know (I wished only to call back the move) I shot one needle of an arrow into the center of Cherry’s womb, I felt it go in. I felt some damage lodge itself there. She almost lost her song. One note broke, the tempo shuddered, and she went on, turned to look at me then, a sickness came off her, something broken and dead from the liver, stale, used-up, it drifted in a pestilence of mood toward my table, sickened me as it settled in. And there was a touch of regret in that exhalation from her, as if she had been saving such illness in the hope she might inflict it on no one, that her pride would be to keep her own ills to herself, rather than pass them on. I had shot that arrow and pierced her shield. Nausea was collecting in all my pipes.