An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

“I always thought Deborah was a Communist,” I said.

  “Divine lamb, that’s what I was going to tell you. I’m willing to bet she was some kind of double agent, you know, a spy within a spy. I have something I want to tell you about that.”

  I groaned. There was an awful possibility that some blighted hair of truth was still alive in all of this. I could feel mysteries revolving into mysteries like galaxies forming themselves, and knew with some sort of defeated woe that I would never learn a tenth of what had really happened, not ever.

  “Cheese it, the cops,” whispered Bettina. “Why, Blake,” she said loudly, “you angel ape of a stud, who do you think I’m talking to? It’s Marguerite Ames. She’s calling me from a phone booth. Hang on, Marguerite, Blake wants to talk to you. Oh, darling, get a nickel up fast, or call me back.… Damn, we lost her.”

  I hung up even as I could feel him reaching for the phone. My shirt was wet. I was like a man in a burning house who has three minutes to get the valuables together. I had just those three minutes to hold myself in line, and then the desire for a drink would sear the walls. I stripped off that wet shirt I had chosen with such care, scrubbed my back and under my arms with a dry towel, put on something else quick as I could find it, and stepped out the door. I didn’t realize until I reached the street that I had been holding my breath. My uneasiness was almost tangible now; I could feel some sullen air of calm, exactly that torporous calm which comes before a hurricane. It was nearly dark outside. I would be late, but I had to walk to the precinct, I had the conviction that if I entered a taxi there would be an accident. I turned abruptly and felt a flicker in the mood. There was some sense of a dull but intent intelligence nearby. Then I knew I was being followed. My eye picked out a man half a block back on the other side of the street who went on strolling. A detective, no doubt. That was almost pleasing. Had they been following me since I left the precinct last night?

  For this interview Roberts’ office was in the basement, a box of a room ten feet by twelve with a desk, a few wooden chairs, two file cabinets and a wall calendar. There was also an enlarged map of the precinct with red pins in it. I had been led here by a policeman on duty near the desk sergeant’s tribunal, and we had gone down a flight of iron stairs and down a long corridor which gave a view through one window of the cellblock, a row of steel doors and walls of yellow institutional tile. As we went by, I could hear somebody yelling—one of the drunks.

  Roberts did not get up to shake hands. “You’re late,” he said.

  “I needed a walk.”

  “Sweating out some booze?”

  “You look hung yourself.”

  He nodded. “I’m not used to living with the poison.” His blue eyes, alert last night and precise as a micrometer, now seemed larger and red-rimmed and somewhat boiled—the blue had gone pale. As he leaned forward, a waft of exertion came off him, sour with use, and also too sweet, as if he had borrowed some of O’Brien’s smell. Then he opened a file. “We have the autopsy now. Yes, we got it all here,” he said, and tapped the file slowly. “It doesn’t look so good for you.”

  “Care to give detail?”

  “I have enough here to lock you up.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Probably I will.”

  “Maybe the time has come for me to get a lawyer.” I put no emphasis on this. I still could not be certain whether he was serious or merely beginning a serious game.

  “I’d rather talk a while first.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re an intelligent man. I think you’re entitled to know how bad your situation is. I want your confession, this evening, right here.”

  The desire for a drink had passed. It was as if I’d been laboring these last few hours to get myself ready to meet him.

  “You know, of course,” he said, “that when a body has been dead for six hours, rigor mortis sets in.”

  “Yes. I know that.”

  “Well, there was no evidence of rigor mortis on your wife when we found her on the street.”

  “How could there be?”

  “There wasn’t. However, we know another way to measure the time of death. I don’t imagine you’re familiar with that.”

  Something in his posture told me not to answer.

  “Ever hear,” Roberts asked, “of dependent lividity?”

  “I’m not positive.”

  “Well, Rojack, when a death occurs, the body blood begins to coagulate at exactly those parts of the body which are touching the floor or leaning against a wall. That’s dependent lividity. Within an hour and a half you can begin to see black and blue areas with the naked eye. Now by the time the autopsy was made on your wife, her body was covered with dependent lividity front and back.”

  She had been lying on her face and then I had turned her over.

  “Your wife was lying on her back in the street. That could possibly account for the dependent lividity there, but it doesn’t explain why she had it on her cheek, her breasts, her ribs, her belly, her thighs, her kneecaps and the ends of her toes. Care to comment?”

  “Not yet.”

  “This evidence by itself is enough to get you the chair”—his eyes looked at me bleakly as if they saw nothing but stone—“but it is merely the first of three clearly defined pieces of evidence we have.”

  “I’m not guilty. So I assume there’s something wrong with your evidence.”

  “Point two: your wife’s hyoid bone was broken. That’s a direct sign of strangulation especially when it’s accompanied, as the autopsy shows, by massive hemorrhaging.”

  “There must be another reason.”

  “Care to offer it, Rojack?”

  “You’re convinced I did it. Why go on?”

  “Let me give you the alternatives: A: You talk your way out of here no worse than you came in. B: You give me a confession. C: You don’t say a thing, and I lock you up right in that cellblock over there. Tomorrow we’ll have you arraigned.”

  I had gone through this day on the hope I would be able to get back to Cherry tonight. If at this exact instant Roberts had offered me twenty-four hours of freedom I think I would have signed his confession, for I had to see her again, simple as that. Some dim caution tried to argue not to say more without a lawyer, yet I could not stop here. “Roberts,” I said, “admit that if I were guilty I’d make a phone call right now to the best criminal lawyer in town.”

  “I recommend that you do.”

  “You want me to discuss it with you,” I said, “and yet you won’t agree I give away some advantage by disclosing a possible line of defense.”

  “What do you give away? You think we can’t think for ourselves.” He smashed his fist down on the desk. “You want to talk,” he said, “because you’re the kind of degenerate who chases every hundred-to-one shot. You want to be back on the Lower East Side with your new broad tonight. Don’t piss on me, buster. Just sit down and dictate a little confession and I’ll give you a night with her in a midtown hotel with a police guard outside the door.”

  And the guard would have their ear to the door. How much he wanted this confession. There was something wrong. He wanted my confession too quickly. I knew I should be silent, but I also knew that whatever strength I had, I certainly did not have the simple strength to sit in a cell. Talking to him, I could keep my strength; alone, something would begin to unravel in me, I would come apart, yes, I would come apart.

  “I’m waiting,” he said.

  “Roberts, you can always find one expert to contradict another. Deborah jumped out that window, that’s all I know. Your expert says she had to be dead before the fall. I could find an expert to explain that her dependent lividity was a direct result of the impact of striking the ground from ten stories up, and then being buffeted by the car which hit her, broke the hyoid bone in her neck, and caused a massive hemorrhaging.”

  “Dependent lividity doesn’t come from a body rolling over and over. It comes from resting in one place. When was she resting on he
r stomach?”

  “When they put her on the stretcher.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, I remember thinking how unusual that was, and then realized why. The back of her head was crushed, and you know.… You remember it was bad.… They didn’t want her head to lie on the stretcher.”

  “Well,” Roberts grinned, “you missed a promising legal career.” He sat back in his chair. “I have to admit your account could take care of a few details. Conceivably. One chance in ten. I won’t go into the technical evidence any further, but I suppose it’s possible you could find one unqualified expert to get up on your side for every ten professionals we could find. But skip that. The way we stand, as I follow you, is that you’re prepared to sign a statement she was alive when she jumped through the window.”

  “Yes, I’ll sign such a statement.”

  “Well, we could take the time to get a police stenographer down here and type it up, but that would just use the next half hour, and I don’t need it, I don’t require that kind of leverage on you. The fact of the matter, Rojack, is that you still haven’t heard Point Three.”

  “Point Three?”

  “Why should I disclose a piece of evidence we can use at the trial. I mean why should I offer it to you for nothing?”

  “For the same reason I’m ready to talk openly to you.”

  “Stop horsing around. You give me your confession and I’ll give you room to put in anything and everything on the line of Temporary Insanity. I’ll even give you a tip or two on the kind of material to include. But if you don’t throw in your hand, if you insist on trying to get away with this, so help me, Rojack, I’m going to make it a personal crusade to get you and get you right, get you so bad even the governor will hesitate to commute the electric chair to life.” He was breathing heavily.

  “That’s quite a speech,” I said.

  “Sit back and listen to Point Three. Your wife was alive when she went through the window. That you are ready to claim. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, you ignored her large intestine.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Believe it or not, these details are no more agreeable to me than to anyone else, but the autopsy does show a complete evacuation of her bowels before she jumped.”

  “I don’t see the significance,” I said.

  “Strangulation results in a total relaxation of the anal sphincter. Get it?”

  “While we were talking, Deborah went to the bathroom.”

  He gave me a look of disgust, as if I were a hired athlete trying to cheat the business office. “I assume,” he said, “that when she engaged in such activities she was not in the habit of leaving traces on her negligée.”

  “Those traces could have come from the fall, or been deposited afterward. Some actions continue after death.” We could have been talking about a stranger. I had a distant moment of woe as if some exorbitant price were eventually to be paid for disposing of Deborah’s privacy this way.

  Roberts gave a broad happy grin. “We gave a thorough examination to the apartment. Particularly to her bedroom. Rojack, the carpet was soiled sufficiently for us to establish a certain fact beyond dispute. The carpet provided a laboratory sample of the same precise foreign material we’re talking about. When you explain that to my satisfaction, you can walk out of this room.”

  I knew which story had to be told next, but I did not know if I could tell it. “Roberts, I’d like to keep something private about my wife.”

  “Try convincing a court with that sentiment.”

  “Deborah was unbalanced at the end.”

  “You hinting what I think you’re hinting at?”

  “I can’t go into it.” But of course I could. Some chamber of the brain had prepared this story, and I was now equipped to give it, detail upon detail, Deborah’s precise if imaginary speech, “Now that you’ve seen this, there’s not much left to see,” and her body quick to the window and out in three steps; yes, this imaginary account now had the vividness of the real. I knew if I ever stepped over into psychosis the story would accompany me in exchange. Roberts had a look of half-convinced attention, the expression he had had for a little while in Deborah’s room last night. But I could not go on. Let this story stick to Deborah, and the past would sink in like disease.

  “No,” I said, “you may as well lock me up.”

  His phone buzzed once.

  “Why not sign a confession?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Roberts picked up the phone. “No … no. He won’t give it. He needs seventy-two hours.… What? Son of a bitch, no.” He swore for the next twenty seconds, his eyes so full of blood I thought he was going to beat on the side of my head with the receiver. Then he put his hand to his jaw and held his chin in a grip which must have been equal to pressing a button in the machinery of himself for it served to return his control. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” He was not a big man, but he padded out like an overstuffed cat at the end of a chain.

  Roberts had left his file on the desk. I took a quick look. He did not have a report of the autopsy, he had notes on the autopsy, and while I did not understand much of the terminology, I could see he had not been telling me the truth: the medical report was qualified—so far as I could understand his notes, the suicide was in doubt, but so was any certainty that Deborah had been dead before the fall. Only the traces on the carpet stood out—someone had used red ink to underline.

  And there were tear sheets from an article by me which he had taken from a professional journal, the text of a Prize Lecture I had given at the university my first year there, the first year I had been married to Deborah. Now like an old maid’s faded flower in a Bible were the faded words of this lecture. Reading them in this room with the radiator hissing irritably at my back, looking at the walls, that dirty weathered color of a bleached cigar, I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity—it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one’s mind, Roberts’ red pins on the precinct map and a paragraph from the middle of the Clark Reed Powell Prize Lecture: On the Primitive View of Mystery.

  In contrast to the civilized view which elevates man above the animals, the primitive had an instinctive belief that he was subservient to the primal pact between the beasts of the jungle and the beast of mystery.

  To the savage, dread was the natural result of any invasion of the supernatural: if man wished to steal the secrets of the gods, it was only to be supposed that the gods would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close. By this logic, civilization is the successful if imperfect theft of some cluster of these secrets, and the price we have paid is to accelerate our private sense of some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us.

  It was a lecture which proved agreeable and had been reprinted in a monthly magazine—revised, enlarged, and in two parts—there had been I suppose something pleasantly meretricious in the sonority of the style. Now, reading it back to myself, it revolved into my ear with the force of a real idea and I had a sudden anxiety for Roberts to be back as if some determination to resist him might be lost if I remained alone too long in the stale air of this room. So, forcing myself to concentrate on the file, I saw it was almost by chance this lecture had been deposited here, for the portfolio held a scattering of a few of the things I had written, plus gossip columns in which my name appeared, even a criticism or two of the television show, a loose collection which Roberts must have looked over with half an eye. Then I could hear his step in the hall, and got back to my seat.

  He came in whistling. It was the cool controlled whistling of a man who has a boil on his neck. “Well, Rojack,” he said, showing his upper teeth in a smile, “you’re free of suspicion. Let’s go out and have a beer.” His eyes were a void. “I knew,” he said, “I knew there was something wrong with this one from the beginning.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “The
official medical report came in. Suicide. Yes.” He nodded. “You have a big brother somewhere.”

  I felt as if I had to begin asking questions, or I would give myself away. “Is that why you wanted my confession in such a hurry?” I asked.

  “I could just as soon have waited. It was Leznicki’s idea to put the screws to you.” With each breath Roberts was becoming more genial. It was as if we’d been wrestlers and Roberts had proceeded on the assumption it was his night to win. Then the referee had whispered in his ear—his turn to lose. So he bulled around the ring. Now we were back in the dressing room exchanging anecdotes, trading apologies.

  “But you got word last night to let me go?”

  “Let’s say we took a hint I was for letting you go anyway—I figured you’d be interesting to watch.”

  “And you were expecting pressure today?”

  “I’d give a lot, Rojack, to know how much you really know.”

  “I don’t know very much.”

  “Dad, you drive me to drink.”

  “Did you think if you got a confession from me you could stand up to the pressure?”

  He had never looked more like a cop. The dedication of his short straight nose hung above the confirmed grin of corruption at the corner of his mouth. Rectitude, cynicism, and greed threw off separate glints from his eyes. “Well, we didn’t know,” he said. “Maybe we could take the pressure, maybe we would have had to swap you off for something else. But a confession would have been interesting.” He gave the leathery smile of a baseball manager who has lost a rookie he might have developed or sent back to the minors on a trade. “Don’t worry about police politics,” he said. “We could talk about it all night and you wouldn’t know any more.”

  “I’d like to listen.”

  “What do you want, a winning ticket on a lottery? Settle for a beer.”

  I smiled. “I’m on the wagon for another hour.” I stood up. “It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Roberts.”

  He grinned again, “If you weren’t such a big man, I’d say, ‘Keep your nose clean.’ ”

  “I’m not a big man.”

  He looked worried, as if it might be a mistake to ask the next question. “Listen,” he said finally when I was at the door, “if you answer something for me, I think I could offer you something in return.”