Americana

by Don DeLillo

  Minutes later we were in bed and there was the feeling of a strange conspiracy. There was gratitude between us then, communication, mutual willingness to honor our conspiracy. And at the end, the fevers of our breaths mingling, what I knew more than anything was the feeling of coming back to an old and affectionate house. It was the twenty-first time we had made love in the five years since our divorce.

  I carried in the portable TV and we watched a movie for half an hour or so. It was one of those old English films in which people are always promising to meet at Victoria Station the moment the war is over. She fell alseep then, on her belly, one leg draped over my thigh, her all-American ass classic and twinkling, campus-worthy as ever. My head went to one side and I was just beginning to go to black, in network parlance, when I heard footsteps in the hall below and the sound of crinkling paper. I knew that the journalist who shared the second floor with me was sneaking across the hall to put one of his garbage bags outside my door. Whenever he had just one bag for the janitor’s morning pickup he left it by his own door; more than one bag, I got the surplus. I imagined his thin dry figure, in Punch-and-Judy pajamas and brown peeling slippers, hunching its way along the wall, teeth clamped tight and face all knuckled up. There are things nobody understands. In the last analysis it is the unseen janitor who maintains power over us all.

  I slipped out from under her leg and turned off the TV. I went naked down the stairs, carrying my shoes and clothing. I wanted to wake up alone; it was a characteristic of mine, which many women learned to despise down through the years. My apartment welcomed me, dim and silent, the red-wine flavor of paintings and rugs, the fireplace and oak paneling, the black leather upholstery, old and comfortably cracked, the dull copper mugs on the mantelpiece and the burnished ale tone of the desk lamp—all warm and familiar and needing no acknowledgment, all reminding me that solitude asks no pledges of anyone. I took a shower and went to bed.

  4

  Weede Denney’s head, prematurely bald and freckle-brown, repeated the suave circular bareness of his coffee table. It was as though the office decorator had devised them both, head and table, in a triumphant demonstration of ideal harmony between an executive and his furnishings. He stood for a second, dipped his knees slightly—something my father always did when his underwear got stuck in some netherland crevice, instructing me, a mere boy, that this was the civilized alternative to manual extrication, that boorish hobby of the underprivileged and the insane—and then sat down again in the black and ivory barber chair, refreshed and jacketless, his steel-drum chest eliminating any slight pleat or wrinkle from the muted blue shirt he was wearing. It was nine sharp, time for the Friday review, and we were all there, with pencils and note pads: Richter Janes, Mars Tyler, Walter Faye, Jones Perkins, Grove Palmer, Paul Joyner, Quincy Willet, Ted Warburton, and Reeves Chubb, who was wearing the same shirt, tie and suit he had worn the day before. Weede’s secretary came in and took coffee requests, a process that consumed at least five minutes, most of them devoted to a mass clarification of Reeves Chubb’s order, which included a large coffee, black, one sugar cube; a cream puff but not the kind with chocolate frosting; a fruit cup without the cherries if that was possible; and a packet of mentholated plastic-tipped cigars. Weede’s face tightened somewhat during this scene and when it came my turn to order I graciously declined, saying I had already eaten my breakfast, and was rewarded for this lie by a rare Weedean pope-nod.

  “Let’s begin,” he said. “Grove, I think we’ll start with you. Ratings on the warcasts are way down.”

  “I’ve been in Tripoli,” Grove Palmer said.

  “Of course you have. No inference meant or intended. But the problem is there and we have to face it. Pressure is being exerted.”

  “I’m in favor of live satellite pickup. I’ve been in favor of live satellite pickup since my pre-Tripoli days.”

  “We’d never get permission,” Quincy said.

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “It’s ghoulish,” Warburton said.

  “As Weede says, the problem is there and we have to face it. They’re exerting pressure. I say let’s exert pressure in return. Hepworth bought the half-hour for impact frequency. I say let’s give it to him. I think we can get clearance for certain battle zones. Obviously you don’t want to use tight shots if you can help it. And in any kind of live situation you don’t want to use the kind of hard rock background we’ve been into. But in the brief time since my return from Tripoli, I’ve done some exploratory work and I think we can get clearance in zones where the tide is in our favor.”

  “It’s ghoulish beyond belief,” Warburton said.

  Warburton was the oldest man in the room and, as such, had assumed the position of tribal conscience. This was done with the unspoken approval of everyone. He was the eldest among us, the most informed, the tallest and grayest, the least feared in terms of power potential, idea smuggling and sheer treachery for its own sake, and, as everyone had undoubtedly heard in the twenty-some-odd hours since Jones Perkins passed the word to Reeves Chubb, the victim of a rare blood disease. Nobody ever paid the slightest attention to Warburton’s pleas on behalf of humanity and good taste but we all felt, I think, that he was indispensable. He elevated our petty issues to a cosmological level and by so doing made it easier for us to ignore the whole thing on the grounds that we weren’t qualified to deal with such high moral questions. It was nice to have Warburton around. He was so tall and gray and dignified. He rounded out the group photo we carried around in our calfskin heads. Without Warburton, we might have been a delegation of insurance salesmen at the annual get-together in Atlantic City—top men, of course, each a member of the million-dollar club, but still insurance agents; with Warburton (third row, center), we were the United States diplomatic mission to the Court of St. James’s. Weede Denney referred to him both privately and publicly as his secretary of state. This remark was always accompanied by one of Weede’s breathsucking chuckles, meant to indicate he was well aware that the joke was really on him. As the meeting began to melt away in my inner ear—drone-fests, I called these Friday affairs—I jotted down my version of the memo Weede would compose when poor Warburton died.

  Re: Theodore Francis Warburton

  It is always a sad occasion to lose an old and trusted employee. Theodore Francis (Ted) Warburton was more than that. He was a valuable friend, an invaluable advisor, a staunch advocate of the basic decency of man. Such qualities are rare today. I, for one, consider his passing a great personal loss. It is not often that we come across a man who possesses Ted’s humanistic approach to the problems of our age. His untimely death diminishes all of us. I know everyone joins me in wishing his widow the very deepest of sympathies. No man is an island. We owe God a death. The torch has been passed. Ave atque vale.

  “Let me ask you this,” Mars Tyler said. “What’s wrong with Grace Tully?”

  “Old image,” Walter Faye said.

  “Exactly my point. Exactly what we need.”

  “Her appeal is vegetable. The vegetable kingdom cherishes her. She’s their vegetable queen. Look, they’re sitting there with twenty-two pounds of the Sunday Times spread all over the floor. The man is about forty-seven years old, wears glasses, never buys a paperback book that costs less than two and a quarter. He’s leafing through the special men’s wear section, having fantasies about a gold mohair dinner jacket. The woman is sitting there with the magazine section, wondering why the fuck somebody doesn’t call them up and invite them over for whisky sours because it’s so goddamn boring hanging around the house reading about ghettos and urban sprawl. That’s the vegetable kingdom.”

  “Apropos of nothing,” Paul Joyner said, “I understand Grace Tully makes it with anybody and everybody—man, woman or beast of the field.”

  “Let me ask you this,” Mars said. “One, how does the vegetable kingdom differ from any other segment of the audience? Two, I still don’t see why Grace Tully and her old image, as you call it, isn’t exactly what
we need for this particular sector as you yourself defined it. Three—we’ll come back to three.”

  “The vegetable kingdom sits and stares,” Walter said. “The animal kingdom just scratches. Basically it’s as simple as that.”

  “There’s something counter-productive about this discussion,” Quincy said.

  “Point well taken,” Weede said.

  “What was three?” Walter said. “You said there were three points.”

  “Let’s come back to this,” Weede said. “I want to generate a little heat on the Morgenthau thing.”

  “The Morgenthau thing is just absolutely fine,” Jones Perkins said.

  “What about Morgenthau himself?”

  “What about Morgenthau himself,” Jones said. “Well, he has just about made up his mind to do it and get it done and the hell with the haircream people.”

  “But has he definitely committed?”

  “I would say he has just about definitely committed.”

  “In other words we have rounded the buoy.”

  “Weede, I would go even further than that. I would say he has just about definitely committed.”

  “Would you say in your own mind that the haircream people do or do not enter into it?”

  “The haircream people definitely do not enter into it as far as I can see at this juncture, pending final word from Morgenthau himself when he returns from the islands.”

  “Which islands?”

  “Which islands,” Jones said. “I’ll get on that right away.”

  “Let’s move to World War III,” Weede said.

  “Apropos of Grace Tully,” Joyner said. “I have it on good authority that back in the old days she used to make it with some of the biggest names on the Coast. Both coasts in fact.”

  “Let’s get together,” Weede said. “What I want to know at this juncture is whether the World War III idea is any more viable than it was a week ago in the light of recent developments on the international scene.”

  “At this juncture,” Richter Janes said, “the World War III idea is about forty percent less viable than it was a week ago.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know.”

  “What I want to know,” Walter Faye said, “is why we can’t show the toilet bowl in the effects-of-solitude prison thing. We can show toilet bowls in prime time. Why not in the afternoon is what I want to know.”

  “Kids might be watching,” Weede said. “And I don’t think the subject is germane at this point. I can’t imagine any idea conceived by this unit which would necessitate the on-camera appearance of a toilet bowl. Besides, if we’re not going to show the thing in use, there’s no reason to show it at all. I believe it was one of the Sitwells who said if there’s a gun hanging over the mantelpiece in act one, it had better be fired by the final curtain. Or words to that effect.”

  “Why can’t we show the thing in use?” Walter Faye said. “Just once I’d like to see somebody on TV take a tremendous steaming piss. It could even have dramatic justification. We could think up some reason to make a pissing scene necessary. Maybe our protagonist has to get some poison out of his system; or, if it’s a documentary about some disease of the liver or bladder, we could actually evoke some sympathy for our guy by showing how painful it is for him to take a simple piss. I wouldn’t care where the camera was. We could stay on his face. The important thing is the sound. If we could just get that sound on the airwaves, just once, I honestly think we could take credit for expanding the consciousness of our nation to some small degree.”

  “Yes,” Weede Denney said. “It would be almost as good as Ruby shooting Oswald.”

  The room relaxed, appreciating the jagged wit of this remark, and we all painted one more kill on Weede’s already impressive fuselage. He lowered his barber chair two hydraulic notches and reached for the pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. Mrs. Kling, his secretary, came in then with a large breakfast tray and began distributing the coffee. I watched the construction workers in the building across the street. Richter Janes was sitting next to me, waiting for the coffee to reach him.

  “Most of the high-steel men in this city are Mohawks,” he said. “They all live out in Brooklyn someplace. There’s a whole colony out there. They specialize in the high dangerous stuff. Any building more than thirty stories, you know those are Mohawks you see up there.”

  “It must have something to do with their inherent catlike agility and superb sense of balance,” I said.

  We were whispering for some reason.

  “There was an Indian in my fraternity back at school. Nicest, quietest guy you’d ever want to meet.”

  “What was his time for the hundred?”

  “Let’s break bread some time,” Richter said. “I’d like to pick your brain on a project of mine. I’ve been hearing good things about you.”

  “From whom?” I said.

  “Word gets around,” he whispered mysteriously.

  Mrs. Kling left and the meeting resumed. At the network, people were always telling other people they had heard good things about them. It was part of the company’s unofficial program of relentless cordiality. And since our business by its nature was committed to the very flexible logic of trends, there always came the time when the bearer of glad tidings became the recipient. Each of us, sooner or later, became a trend in himself; each had his week-long cycle of glory. Richter Janes’ remark suggested that this might be the beginning of the David Bell trend. Richter himself had been a trend only a few months before; during his trend, which lasted a week or so, people popped into my office or sidled up to me in the corridor on a number of occasions to comment on what a good job Richter Janes was doing, how many good things they had heard about him, and how they had told him, just that morning, about some of the good things they had heard. I was never able to figure out how these trends started, who started them, or how the word spread. They seemed spontaneous enough and I found it hard to believe that top management would devise the whole thing, designate a trend-man of the month, someone whose morale needed boosting, and then instruct paid trendsetters to make spot remarks and chance comments concerning the good things they had heard about him. Up to that point I had never been a trend and had never felt any particular need to be one. Almost everyone sitting in Weede’s office at that moment had been a trend at some time or another, but never, as far as I knew, more than once. In a given year there were usually nine or ten trend people. The trends ended as they had begun, with mystifying suddenness, and the person who had just been trendexed seemed a bit forlorn when it was all over, the gloss and neon gone, the numbers filed away, all the screens snowing and the airwaves bent with static.

  “Quincy and Dave,” Weede said. “Ball’s in your court.”

  There was fatherly amusement in his voice. Apparently the destruction of Walter Faye had put him in good spirits. I had no idea what I was going to say since I had accomplished absolutely nothing all week. I thought I might simply paraphrase my remarks of the previous meeting, hedging and improvising as I went along, but there wasn’t much chance of making that kind of escape. It had been tried hundreds of times and everyone was familiar with the clawprints and scent.

  “Quincy, why don’t you start the ball rolling?” I said.

  “The Navaho project.”

  “The Navaho project,” I said.

  “There are long- and short-range problems,” Quincy said. “Who’s going out there, for how long, and will the Indians cooperate? I’ve been in touch with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

  “We both have.”

  “They’d like to know more before they commit.”

  “The Indians don’t want pity,” I said. “They want dignity.”

  “I got the same impression. We must have talked to some of the same people.”

  “They don’t want pity in any shape or form. They want dignity. I think Richter can tell us more about that. Richter actually knows an Indian. Old fraternity brother.”

  “We’re not actually in
touch anymore. It’s been more than fifteen years since college and I didn’t really know the gentleman all that well. He was a nice quiet boy. I definitely remember that much about him. He was five-ten or eleven, weighed about one-sixty, lean as a whip, not an ounce of fat on him. He wasn’t actually copper-colored if I remember correctly. If I remember correctly he was actually only three-eighths Indian. Three-eighths or four-eighths Indian. Crow I think he was. Crow or Blackfoot. But he was definitely one of the nicest, quietest fellas you’d ever want to meet. That much I’m sure about. It’s absolutely vivid in my mind.”

  “Would you say this man wanted pity or dignity?”

  “Dignity, Dave. There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind. It was definitely dignity.”

  “Go, Quincy,” I said.

  “The thing of it is: Who’s going out there, when, and for how long? If we want blizzards we want to get cracking. We want to get this thing nailed to the mast before any more grass grows under our feet.”

  “I’ve been in almost constant touch with the weather bureau,” I said. “I’m trying to pin them down on some kind of long-range forecast for that sector of the country.”

  “What sector?” Jones Perkins said.