Tough Guys Don't Dance

by Norman Mailer

  Now, I cannot say whether this was a recollection or a dream, for if it had all the clarity of the real event, the logic seemed to belong to that theater of sleep where only those impossible actions take place which are too incisive for the day. What I now recalled is that as we sat in my living room and drank, I began to sense the sachet in each of Lonnie’s moves. The deeper he got into drink, the less the Bar Association seemed able to shore up his masculine frontage, and I woke up in my chair on this, the third morning after they first disappeared, ready to swear on the stand that the other night, looking at her and at him in my living room, I developed a prodigious erection—one of those few we remember with excessive pride—and so peremptory was my understanding of this kind of bonus that I made a point of undoing my fly right into the warp and woof of a long, rich—I must say it—pregnant silence. Yes, I took it out and held it up for them, like a six-year-old or a happy lunatic, and said, “Which of you gets first licks?”—a cataclysmic remark, since the evening rather than my phallus could certainly have been blown, but if this memory is true, she got up from where she was sitting, knelt by me, put her blonde head in my lap and her red mouth on my cock and Lonnie gave vent to a sound that was half joy and half agony pure.

  Then, it seems, we were all in my Porsche again, and on a crazy trip to Wellfleet. Once I stopped the car in the woods just before we got to Harpo’s house, and made love to her on the front fender, yes, because on this morning, awakening in the third-floor-study chair, recalling it all, I could still feel the grasp of the walls of her vagina on my monster of an erection. How I had to fuck her! Down with Patty Lareine! It was as if Jessica and I had been designed in some heavenly shop, part for part, our privates were inseparable, and where was Lonnie but watching! He was crying, if I remember, and I never felt more of a brute. His misery was as good as blood to my erectile tissue. That was the state of my affections near to four weeks after being deserted by my wife.

  Then all three of us were talking again in the car. He said he had to be alone with the woman, he had to talk to her—would I let them talk? In the name of decency, would I let them talk?

  “Yes,” I said, “but we must have a séance afterward.” Why, I did not know. “I’ll bet you,” I said, “she’s still with me after you talk.” And I remember going up the stairs to Harpo, and the tattoo, yes, Harpo was humming as he put in the needles, and his good battered face had the expression of a seamstress, and then—no, I could not remember stopping in the Truro woods to show them my marijuana patch, but we must have—yes, now I could not see how I would have failed to do that.

  What had happened after? Had I left her alone with him? How little my balance on awakening this morning was for love, and how much for self-interest! I was now hoping I had left her with him, and that it was her head—so much for my fealty to great pussy on marijuana—yes, it was her head I wished to find in the burrow. For if she was there—and now I was convinced it had to be Jessica—why, then I could find other clues. If he had killed her in some motel room and brought her body (or was it only her head?) back to my patch, there ought to be tire marks still on the side of the sandy road. I could drive by his car, wherever it was now impounded, and check the tires, yes, I was thinking like a sleuth at last; and all of this, as I soon came to realize, was an exercise to drive my psyche up the high vertical wall of my fear until I felt strong enough, yes, psyched up enough once more to make the trip a second time in my mind in order to make it a first time in reality. So, waking up in the chair at eight in the morning, refreshed with all the carnal stimulations of Jessica, I converted the high hard adrenaline of each lustful thought into the will to lift myself out of my morass. And it took all of that day, all of the morning and afternoon. Even though I did not wish to return in the dark, I was obliged to. For long hours that day my will was silent, and I sat in my chair or I walked on the beach at low tide, and suffered as much as if I had to climb our Monument again. By evening, however, I had gotten myself back once more to the place I was when Regency knocked on my door almost twenty-four hours ago, and so I got into my Porsche, yes, once again, even thinking that Pangborn might, after disposing of Jessica, have come by my car and painted the front seat with the last of her blood—how would I ever prove that?—and drove out to the woods, parked, went up the trail, and with my heart pounding like a battering ram on a cathedral door, and the perspiration coming off my face like founts of eternal water, I drew in the mist of the night air in Truro, removed the rock, reached in with my arm and came out with nothing at all. I cannot tell you how I searched that burrow. I could have burned a hole in the earth with my flashlight, but when the footlocker was removed, all else was out. There was nothing there. The head was gone. Just the footlocker with its jars of marijuana remained. I fled those woods before the spirits now gathering could surround me.

  FIVE

  By the time I reached the highway, however, my panic was gone. If many a night of drinking had on many a bad morning brought me close to committing myself (so little could I remember of what I had done) it now seemed to me that since the evening at The Widow’s Walk I had not—despite my agitation—been cut off again from my memory. If this was true, then I did not remove that blonde head from the burrow. Someone else was involved with the deed. It was even likely that the murder had not been my act.

  Of course, how could I swear that I had stayed in bed each night? On the other hand, no one had ever accused me of walking in my sleep. Like the rustle along the beach that comes with the turning of the tide (if you have ears to hear it) so did a kind of confidence begin to return to me, a belief, if you could so call it, that I had not lost the last of my luck (just the sort of recovered faith that gets a man back to the crap tables).

  In my case it was the bravado to believe I could return home, stay reasonably sober and fall asleep. Indeed, I did, which impressed me in the morning as a species of small wonder. Be it said, I had gone to bed with a purpose. It was to debate (in the deepest regions of sleep) whether I should try to see Madeleine or not. The readiness with which I took to my bed, and the force with which I slept, were testimony to that purpose.

  By morning, there was no question. On this, the Twenty-eighth Day of Patty’s departure, I would go to see Madeleine. All else could wait. I had breakfast and cleaned the dog’s dish, noting that his fear of me had now been replaced by a huge reserve. He had kept his distance this week. Yet before I would allow myself to ponder the withdrawal of his friendship and thereby risk my mood, I picked up the Cape Cod book and found Alvin Luther Regency’s number in the Town of Barnstable.

  It was nine o’clock, a good time to call. Regency had probably driven the fifty miles to Provincetown already, or failing that, was on the road.

  Nor was I wrong. It was Madeleine on the line. I knew she was alone.

  “Hello,” she said. Yes, she was alone. Her voice was clear. When another person was in the room with her, she always betrayed distraction.

  I waited, as if to prepare the occasion. Then I said, “I hear you send regards.”

  “Tim.”

  “Yes, it’s Tim.”

  “The man of my life,” she said. It was with an edge of mockery I had not heard for a long time. She could just as easily have said, “Aren’t you the fellow in the short chapter?” Yes, her voice had echoes.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, “but I don’t remember sending you regards.”

  “I have it on good authority you did.”

  “Yes, it’s Tim,” she said, “oh, my God!” as if now, the second time around, it was reaching her. Yes, Tim—on the phone—after all these years. “No, baby,” she said, “I didn’t send you regards.”

  “You’re married, I hear.”

  “Yes.”

  We had a silence. There was a moment when I could feel the impulse mount in her to hang up, and perspiration started on my neck. All hope for the day would be smashed if she put the receiver down, yet my instinct was not to s
peak.

  “Where are you living?” she asked at last.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Hey, friend,” she said, “is this Twenty Questions? I don’t know.”

  “Please, lady, don’t be harsh.”

  “Fuck off. I’m sitting here putting my head together”—that meant I had interrupted her first toke of the morning—“and you ring up like you’re the fellow from yesterday.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “you don’t know that I’m living in Provincetown?”

  “I don’t know anybody there. And from what I hear, I’m not sure that I want to.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Every time the clock chimes, your husband busts another one of your old dealer friends.”

  “How about that?” she said. “Isn’t it awful?”

  “How could you marry fuzz?”

  “Do you have another dime? Try calling collect.” She hung up.

  I got into my car.

  I had to see her. It was one thing to blow on the embers of an old romance, it was another to feel the promise of an answer. I had at that moment an insight into the root of obsession itself. No wonder we cannot bear questions whose answers are not available. They sit in the brain like the great holes that were dug for the foundations of buildings that never went up. Everything wet, rotten, and dead collects in them. Count the cavities in your teeth by the obsessions that send you back to drink. No question, therefore. I had to see her.

  How quickly I took myself through the landscape. It was the day for me. Just outside Provincetown, a wan November sun gave a pale light to the dunes and they looked like the hills of heaven. The wind blew sand until the ridges were obscured by an angelic haze of light, and on the other side of the highway, toward the bay, all the little white cabins for summer tourists were lined up as neatly as kennels on a pedigree-dog compound. Now, with their windows boarded, they had a mute, somewhat injured look, but then, the trees were bare as well and bore a hue as weathered as the hide of animals going through a long winter in a land without forage.

  I took my chances and drove at a rate that would have put me in jail if a State Trooper had caught my vehicle on radar. Yet I did not make such fine time, after all, since it occurred to me in the middle of this high speed that Barnstable was a small enough town to notice a man in a Porsche asking directions to Regency’s house, and I did not want a neighbor inquiring of Alvin Luther this evening who the friend might be who parked his sports car three hundred yards away from the door. In this part of the Cape, the winter people, mean and quick-sighted as birds, orderly as clerks, write down license numbers when they don’t recognize your car. They anticipate interlopers. So I parked in Hyannis and rented an anonymous dun-colored blubber-boat, a Galaxy, or was it a Cutlass?—I think a Cutlass, it didn’t matter, I was hyper enough to joke about the ubiquity of our American auto with the young airhead behind the Hertz counter. She must have thought I was on LSD. She certainly took a time checking my credit card and made me wait through one of those ten-minute ready-to-slay delay warps before she put down the phone and gave the card back. That gave me opportunity to brood a bit over my financial condition. Patty Lareine had emptied our checking account when she left, and had cut off my Visa, my MasterCard and my American Express cards, all of which I discovered in the first week. But husbands of my ilk have resources even wives like Patty Lareine cannot eradicate entirely, and so my old Diners Club, which I would renew but never use, had been overlooked by her. Now its viability was keeping me in food, drink, gas, this rented car, and—well, it was near to a month—sooner or later Patty Lareine was going to get a few bills from the outpost. Then, after she cut me off, lack of money might become my preoccupation. I didn’t care. I would sell off the furniture. Money was the game other people played that I tried to avoid by having just enough not to play it. No one ever trusts a man who makes such a claim, but do you know?—I believe myself.

  All this is making an excursion from the point, except that the nearer I came to Barnstable, the more my mind was afraid to contemplate what I would do if Madeleine did not let me in. Such uneasiness was, however, soon replaced by the need to concentrate on getting there. That was no automatic deed in these parts. The environs of Barnstable had in the last decade become little more than freshly paved roads and newly erected developments slashed through the flat scrub pine that covered most of the land here. Even old-timers had often not heard of new streets two miles from where they lived. So I took the precaution of stopping at a real estate office in Hyannis where they had a large up-to-date map of the county, and finally located Alvin Luther’s little lane. As I had suspected, it looked, by the map, to be not more than a hundred yards long, one of six similar and parallel mini-streets all depending from a trunk road like six teats on a sow, or, would it be kinder to say, like one of six cylinders on an in-line engine designed for the kind of car I was now driving? Dependably, the short road to his house ended in a nipple the size of an asphalt turnaround. Around that dead-end circle were set out five identical highly modified Cape Cod—type wooden houses, each with a planted pine tree on the lawn, a set of plastic rain gutters, asbestos shingles, differently painted mailboxes, trash-can bins, tricycles on the grass—I parked just short of the circle.

  It would certainly attract attention to be seen walking fifty needless steps to her door. I could hardly go up, ring her bell and later make it back to my car without being observed. Yet it would be worse to leave the car in front of another house and in consequence agitate the owner. What a loneliness hung over this enclave in the sorry scrub-pine woods! I thought of old Indian graves that once must have sat on these low brush-filled lands. Of course, Madeleine would accept a situation whose gloom matched her own worst moods—from that she could rise. But to live in a house like Patty’s, where one could plummet below the cheerfulness of the colors—well, not much, for Madeleine, could be worse.

  I pressed the doorbell.

  It wasn’t until I heard her step that I dared to be certain she was in. She began to tremble as soon as she saw me. The intensity of her disturbance went through me as clearly as if she had spoken. She was delighted, she was furious, but she was not startled. She had put her make-up on, and thereby I knew (for usually she did not do anything to her face until evening) that she was expecting a visitor. Doubtless, it was me.

  I received no great greeting, however. “You’re a clod,” she said. “I’d expect you to do something like this.”

  “Madeleine, if you didn’t want me to come, you should not have hung up.”

  “I called you back. There was no answer.”

  “You discovered my name in the book?”

  “I discovered her name.” She looked me over. “Being kept doesn’t agree with you,” she told me at the end of this examination.

  Madeleine had worked as a hostess for years in a good New York bar and restaurant and she did not like to have her poise nicked. Her trembling had most certainly stopped, but her voice was not where she would have placed it.

  “Let me lay the facts of life on you,” she said. “You can stay in my house about five minutes before the neighbors will start phoning each other to find out who you are.” She glanced out the window. “Did you walk here?”

  “My car is down the road.”

  “Brilliant. I think you better go right away. You’re just asking directions, right?”

  “Who are your neighbors that they inspire such respect?”

  “There’s a State Trooper’s family to the left, and a retired couple to the right, Mr. and Mrs. Snoop.”

  “I thought maybe they were old friends from the Mafia.”

  “Well, Madden,” she said, “ten years have gone by, but you still show no class.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Let’s find a hotel room in Boston,” she said. It was her good way of telling me to go peddle a few papers.

  “I’m still in love with you,” I said.

  She began to cry. “You�
�re such a bad guy,” she said. “You really are rotten.”

  I wanted to embrace her. I wanted, if the truth be told, to go right back to bed with her, but it was not the hour. That much I had learned in ten years.

  Her hand made a little gesture. “Come on in,” she said.

  The living room went with the house. It had a cathedral ceiling, factory-prepared paneling, a rug of some synthetic material, and a lot of furniture that must have come from the shopping mall in Hyannis. There was nothing of herself. No surprise. She paid great attention to her body, her clothing, her make-up, her voice and the expressions on her heart-shaped face. She could register with the subtlest turn of her fine mouth every shade of the sardonic, the contemptuous, the mysterious, the tender and the cognizant that she might need to express. She was her own work of brunette art. She presented herself as such. But her surroundings were another matter. When I first met Madeleine she was living in an apartment totally drab. I need only describe Nissen’s place again. That was cool. I had a queen who was independent of her habitat. I can tell you that was one good reason I tired of her over a couple of years. An Italian queen was no easier to live with than a Jewish princess.

  Now I said, “Alvin bought all this?”

  “Is that your name for him? Alvin?”

  “What do you call him?”

  “Maybe I call him the winner,” she said.

  “It was the winner who told me that you send regards.”

  She was hardly quick enough to conceal the news. “I never spoke your name to him,” she said.

  I was thinking that could be true. When I knew her she never talked about anyone before me.

  “Well,” I said, “how did your husband find out I knew you?”

  “Keep trying. You’ll come up with the answer.”