An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  Cherry had her keys out and opened the door after turning the tumbler in two separate locks, but the bolts flew up with a clanking sound, surprisingly sepulchral for two cylinders so small, and I could feel the ears which connected to all those eyes bright as marmosets watching us.

  “I run that gauntlet every time,” she said. “I’ve come here at three in the morning and one in the afternoon, and they’re always looking out the door.” She took off her coat, lit a cigarette, put it out, lit the gas heater, and went to a cupboard where she got two glasses and a bottle to pour us each a drink. The refrigerator was an old beat-up double-door box and the dirty smell of river ice came off the lead-gray cubes she chiseled free from the tray. I had been about to help but she did the job with one quick thump from the heel of her hand on an ice pick, and went on talking easily as she washed the rocks in the water from the sink, the pipes growling like some old dogs chased in their sleep.

  “My sister used to live here,” Cherry said. “She wanted to study painting. So I staked her a little bit. Just a bit. It’s her furniture.”

  “And she moved out?”

  After a pause, “Yes, it’s my place now. Sometimes I feel guilty,” she said, “that I keep it and hardly use it when all these families are here jammed into one another. But it was my younger sister’s place. I don’t want to give it up.”

  There was only the one room in which we stood, a living-room dining-room kitchen and bedroom twelve feet by twenty-five. The plaster walls were white and very cracked and the colors of the furniture were innocent—tomato orange, reds, green, the sort of colors full of appetite a young girl who knew nothing of fashion might pick for her first year in New York. There was a double bed on legs with no headboard, a couch with one broken leg, a bridge table, two metal folding chairs, a movie director’s canvas seat and an easel. On the wall were a number of paintings hung unframed but for a quarter-inch width of pine stripping, and at the far end of the apartment two windows had the luck to present a long view. There, beyond the back of the tenement, was a cemetery, one of the few left on Manhattan Island.

  “Are these your sister’s paintings?” I asked. I did not wish to ask the question but I could feel her waiting.

  “Yes.”

  “Let me look.”

  But I was irritable suddenly, a sign of fatigue, the only sign of fatigue I could feel: my adrenalin had lit a new fire for the new drink. Sometime in the next hours or the next day would come a moment when I would lie down, when I would sleep—when I would try to—and then the memories of this night gone through would rise like the mutilated corpses of a battlefield. Now the liquor still enclosed me, a golden carriage lined with red velvet: installed inside I could drive over the battlefield, stare back at the battered face of Deborah which rose from each corpse.

  I did not want to look at the paintings. I could see much too much, and there was much which was dull in Cherry’s sister, much which was mess, wads and drippings, a red maniacal edge altogether unstable.

  The paintings made a sad contrast to the tomato-orange and bright green of the furniture. She must have seemed an exuberant girl. I hesitated to go on. There was a tension in me like the taste of the bit in the jaws of a horse who wanted to gallop. Put it simply, I was the equal of a cigarette smoker who has been three days without a butt—underneath everything I wanted sex now, not for pleasure, not for love, but to work this tension: ignore the leaden, almost sensuous fatigue I felt in my heart as I climbed the stairs, I needed sex, I wanted it very much. I could not lie, however, I had some sense her sister’s paintings were more than a fence to be gone over as nicely as possible—no, they were the door to some private estate. If I went on, I could spoil it all. Yet the paintings made me irritable; they were piggish.

  But we could not begin with a lie between us. It was as if I had some desperate knowledge now, as if some message had come to me from the end of the world that I was close to the end of the world. If I was to make one last play, well, no carfare home, the money had to be put up now. I made a curious speech. “I can’t lie to you,” I said, “I’m not going to until I lie the first time.”

  “All right,” said Cherry.

  “Something happened to your sister, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “She crack up?”

  “She cracked up and then she died.” There was no emotion in her voice. Something flat and little had settled on the event.

  “How did she die?”

  “She got hurt by a man she was going with. He was nothing but a pimp. He beat her up one night and she didn’t recover from that. She just crawled back here. She asked me to take care of her.” Cherry revolved her glass in a small circle, rattling the cubes, exorcising a curse. “Then a couple of days later,” Cherry said in a bright voice, “she waited till I went out and took thirty sleeping pills and cut her wrist. After which she got up from bed, and died at the window there. I think she was trying to jump. She wanted to be in the cemetery, I suppose.”

  “What happened to the pimp?” I asked at last.

  Cherry’s face took on the look of a rock-hard little jockey recollecting an ugly race. Something cruel and dedicated went by her mouth. “I had him taken care of,” she said.

  “Did you know the pimp?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  I had the clean eye of a district attorney who has missed a career in surgery. “You knew the pimp?”

  “I didn’t know him. She was only going with that pimp because she was half-crazy. She had been in love with somebody else. And she lost him. To me. I took her boy friend away.” Cherry shivered. “I never thought I’d do something like that, but I did.”

  “Was it Tony?”

  “Oh, Jesus, of course it wasn’t Tony. It was Shago Martin.”

  “The singer?”

  “No, honey, Shago Martin the explorer.”

  Now Cherry finished her drink and poured another. “You see, baby,” she said, “dig: my sister was just one of six girls Shago had waiting for him every time he passed through New York. And I decided she was too dedicated to him; she was just a kid. So I got together with her and Shago to shame him out of it, and crash! I became one of the six girls he had waiting for him in New York. I mean Shago’s a stud, Mr. Rojack.”

  The word went in like a blow to the soft part of my belly. There was something final in the verdict as if there were a sexual round robin where the big people played. All the big Negroes and the big Whites.

  “Bless me for taking your time,” I said.

  She laughed suddenly. “I don’t want to chase you clean out of your pants. It wasn’t so bad as that. I was in love with Shago. Then after a while he was in love with me. He couldn’t help it. A nice White Southern Girl like me. I suppose when a man’s in love, he’s no more of a stud than any other man who’s in love.” She smiled. She gave me a wry smile.

  “Well, I happen to feel like a stud right now,” I said. It was true. I was reacting from that blow to the belly and a mean edge was up again in me. I could see Deborah’s face staring in the morgue, the one green eye, but I felt no fear this time, I felt instead as if I owned the hatred in her eye.

  “I’m feeling pretty mean myself,” Cherry said.

  It was in that glow that we made ready to go to bed. She opened a screen about the kitchen sink and walked behind it to undress, while I picked off my clothes and got shivering between the sheets of her small double bed, the sheets expensive (she, not her sister, must have brought them in) and lay there shuddering with cold, for the iron ice of a tenement’s winter had settled on the cloth. I thought of graveyards and the cemetery outside and the Romanesque stone arch of Sever Hall at Harvard—I had not thought of Sever Hall in twenty years, perhaps it was twenty years since I felt such cold—but I knew at this instant I could have stood at the North Pole and pulled off my clothes, it was as if all the iron in me had gotten itself together for one good show against the winds.

  She slipped out from be
hind the sink. Wearing a wheat-colored wrapper, and the pained professional smile of a modesty which had been disregarded a hundred times, she slipped modestly into bed beside me.

  Her ass was indeed a prize—with my hands on her, life came back to me again across all the glaciers of my fatigue. But we did not meet as lovers, more like animals in a quiet mood, come across a track of the jungle to join in a clearing, we were equals. So we made love without preliminary—not thirty seconds had gone by before I slipped quietly into her. The separate cheats of her body and her life collected on one scale of justice to match the weight I could put on mine—her life up to this moment was the equal of my own, good to good, bad to bad, the submerged vision of my sex moved with a freedom from vanity or the haste to give pleasure. It was cool in mood, as if we were two professional dancers in a long slow study alone at night on a moonlit floor. I felt I could go on forever. Exhaustion had freed me. I was alive in some deep water below sex, some tunnel of the dream where effort was divorced at last from price. She was exquisite. She was exquisitely sensitive. Again, I had expected no less. Some cool blonde sense of violet shadow lived in the turn of her flesh. I had never moved so well. It was impossible to make a mistake.

  Yet only the act was tender. Nothing was loving in her; no love in me; we paid our devotions in some church no larger than ourselves, we met in some depth beneath the lights and salts of one’s eyes and mind. Fatigue had left me all but dead—I had no brain left, no wit, no pride, no itch, no smart, it was as if the membrane of my past had collected like a dead skin to be skimmed away. From some great distance, as if I were an observer on the moon, I had some distant awareness that my breath could hardly be good and her lungs breathed back an air of ashes and the tomb, but this rot of liquor and nicotine we now passed back and forth had nothing to do with the part of me now alive. I traveled (eyes sealed) through some midnight of inner space, aware of nothing but my will, that casing of iron about my heart, and of her will anchored like a girdle of steel about her womb. We reached into some middle ground of a race, we were like bicycle riders caught in the move of lap after lap around a track, soon we would be nothing but a rhythm which was nothing but a rhythm which would pump on to a climax I knew now would never come, and in the center of this vortex she flattened her fingers on the back of my neck with a hard little gesture, as if to ask, “Do you want to now?” but from an instinct I did not question, I said, “No, I don’t want to … I can’t so long as you have that thing in you,” which I never said before, and she shifted, I was out, the shock comparable to banging one’s head on a low beam, and then I searched for that corporate rubbery obstruction I detested so much, found it with a finger, pulled it forth, flipped it away from the bed. Like diving on a cold winter day back to a warm pool, I was back in her, our wills now met, locked in a contest like an exchange of stares which goes on and on, wills which begin at last in the force of equality to water and to loose tears, to soften into some light which is shut away again by the will to force tears back, steel to steel, until steel shimmers in a mist of dew, is wiped, is wet again. I was passing through a grotto of curious lights, dark lights, like colored lanterns beneath the sea, a glimpse of that quiver of jeweled arrows, that heavenly city which had appeared as Deborah was expiring in the lock of my arm, and a voice like a child’s whisper on the breeze came up so faint I could hardly hear, “Do you want her?” it asked. “Do you really want her, do you want to know something about love at last?” and I desired something I had never known before, and answered; it was as if my voice had reached to its roots; and, “Yes,” I said, “of course I do, I want love,” but like an urbane old gentleman, a dry tart portion of my mind added, “Indeed, and what has one to lose?” and then the voice in a small terror, “Oh, you have more to lose than you have lost already, fail at love and you lose more than you can know.” “And if I do not fail?” I asked back. “Do not ask,” said the voice, “choose now!” and some continent of dread speared wide in me, rising like a dragon, as if I knew the choice were real, and in a lift of terror I opened my eyes and her face was beautiful beneath me in that rainy morning, her eyes were golden with light, and she said, “Ah, honey, sure,” and I said sure to the voice in me, and felt love fly in like some great winged bird, some beating of wings at my back, and felt her will dissolve into tears, and some great deep sorrow like roses drowned in the salt of the sea came flooding from her womb and washed into me like a sweet honey of balm for all the bitter sores of my soul and for the first time in my life without passing through fire or straining the stones of my will, I came up from my body rather than down from my mind, I could not stop, some shield broke in me, bliss, and the honey she had given me I could only give back, all sweets to her womb, all come in her cunt.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said, “so that’s what it’s all about.” And my mouth like a worn-out soldier fell on the heart of her breast.

  That was the way I fell asleep. And I fell asleep. I went sliding down a run, a bounce and tumble buffeted with pillows. Then my flesh gave out from the center of itself a sweet sigh of fatigue—I slipped into sleep like a boat garnering its dock on the last swell of momentum, motors stopped: there was a delicious instant when I knew that nothing would blow, no break would call me back from rest.

  Once years ago, in those years when our marriage first was fortified with the taste of cruelty more gamy than pleasure, I said to Deborah, on an evening when all went bad, “If we were in love, we would sleep with our arms around each other, and never want to move.”

  “Darling, I’m withering from fever,” Deborah answered.

  I went to sleep with my arms around Cherry. Hours went by, four hours, five hours—I came up like a diver, resting at each level, my body waking as I emerged. When I finally opened my eyes (I must have been ready ten minutes before the desire arrived) I knew everything was all right inside the room. Outside everything was wrong. Knowledge arrived from outside—the way a Negro child might understand on one particular morning that he is black. There was no desire to take my pulse. I was a murderer. I was: murderer. No rush to do more than study her. She had a different set of features for each station of her dream. She was so sound asleep. Masks of greed and cruelty came into focus in her face, became intense, broke apart from their own force. A soft child’s face unfolded beneath. One was watching a film which gathered into a minute that metamorphosis of the weeks when the hard envelope of a bud cracks away, and the flower opens. Then, abruptly, the flower wilted. A new bud, hard, all horn at the point, came through the dying leaves, a vulgar egomania passed through the hardness of its spike, sensual features thrusting at me through sleep, pitiless calculation of a female with velvet to sell, she drew cupidity out of her limbs, whore’s lore, her expression steeped into a cream of past thieveries, swallowed on the edge of curdling, turned sour, a sour mask now of disappointments, bitcheries, mean self-pity, yes, the mask was harsh again, it came to its crust, cracked, and in her sleep a sweet blonde girl of seventeen smiled back at me, skin almost luminous, a golden child, pure Georgia peach, a cheer leader, sweet fruit, national creation. I touched the tip of her nose. Dumb little nose, the nostrils were all visible in the tilt of its tip, confident nostrils ready to breathe the air directly in front of them.

  I wanted to wake her up then. I had a need to talk a little, and I concentrated on the wish she awaken, concentrated so powerfully she began to stir, but then, as if the fatigues she must clear had flashed some panic at being unhonored, her face turned old, she looked middle-aged, a pinched concern drew worried lines about her nose, crimped her mouth, she groaned like an invalid crying out, “I sicken if I awake, my separate lives must come together while I sleep,” and I thought, “All right, then, sleep your sleep.” She relaxed, a smile, a little curl of amusement gave the scent of flesh to the open curl of her lip.

  There was a clock above my head. It was three past three in the afternoon. I was due to see Roberts at half-past five. So I got up then, separating myself like an artist, feeling
no desire to fleece her rest, and put on my clothes in the dry warm air. Her gas heater had been going, and the air was close but the exhaust was vented into the fireplace so there was no smell—I had a passing fancy that the way I felt was kin to a pie in a warming oven, yes that was how my skin felt. I got dressed and did not bother to look for a razor. I would shave at home. Before I left I stopped to write a note.

  Hey, you sleep deep. But what a sight!

  See you soon, beautiful, I hope.

  And then I wondered where she would be when I was ready to come back. Once again I came close to waking her. “Going to try to be here by tonight,” I put in parentheses at the foot of the page. “If you have to be out, leave a note where, when,” and came close to an instant of pure anguish. Would I ever get back to this place? The thought of Leznicki opened a grave in my stomach.

  Well, I closed her door behind me, gently, so the spring lock would not snap too loud, and went down the stairs, sensing the eyes of Puerto Ricans upon me, and on the street fresh air came into my lungs like an intricate message of alarm. I was back, the world, an auto horn struck my ear like a screamer on an unhappy New Year’s Eve, there was ambush everywhere. I was still drunk, I suppose. My head felt clear, too clear, I had a deep headache back of my eyes. But it was not painful so much as open to the promise it would last for more than a day. My body was drunk. Its nerves were alive, my flesh felt new—fact, it was almost a pleasure to walk, for I could feel the links which went into a step. And the air came into my nose with the history of its circuits—all the compromised souls of the dead up from the river and cobblestones permeated with the horse wagons of the last steep century, dogs around the corner, hot-dog grease from a griddle like the stale savory of the poor in rut, the blast of gas from a bus (that Egyptian mummy which lives beneath the rot) a moment of stiflings and suffocations like some childhood fight in which one is being extinguished by a bully (Deborah must have died with such smell in her lungs) and then I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. “Beware,” said the sound. “Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth.” What a rustling those first animals must have known.