American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  While his mother stared at Morris and thought what a miserable pipsqueak he was, Morris stared at her and tried to picture the lover looking into her slightly popped eyes, kissing those rouged cheeks, humping that soft and boneless body.

  “I’ll defy you if I have to,” she said. “I certainly don’t want to. Why do you treat me like this?”

  Morris remembered when his father had explained sex to him. Afterward he was more attentive if he heard noises from the bedroom of his parents. Once he heard the bed shake good and proper, boom boom boom. He tried to imagine them. He couldn’t. He had been sixteen and everything had loomed up like orange clouds at sunset. Vague, forming, coming into whatever shape was to be. But nothing had arrived. Not what he saw with his eyes around him, certainly not what he could not actually see in his parents’ bedroom. The world was becoming, before his eyes, becoming something else, so it was never what it was. Morris had never understood what people meant when they talked about reality. People seemed so confident that there was such a thing. Reality to Morris was a unicorn. He had seen pictures in books, but most authorities agreed that it did not exist.

  Morris explained patiently to his mother that their disagreement upset him. Morris said he did not wish to go to court. His mother slapped him. Suddenly. In a whisper he said, “You bitch.”

  They stared at each other. Morris thought about his wife. Everyone probably said behind his back that he had married a woman just like his mother. All right, he had. But she took care of him. Mothered him, to be precise. Why didn’t people appreciate the subtleties? She played prima donna after her fashion and in return she was permitted to wait on him. Looking at his mother, Morris thought how fragile the arrangement was. If his wife made the mistake of treating him lightly, he would smack her silly. He saw that now, never before. His mother had made that mistake. He wanted to fight.

  “Uncle Hughie could well end up in the Presidential Suite of the Saint Louis Hilton, which would be a lot more than bus fare, Mother dear.”

  The woman pressed her lips tight. They became a horizontal line. “I swear to God, Bradford, you’re a pain in the ass.”

  6

  Style was the point. People should have it. When they did not, they were easy to dismiss.

  The last cowboy in Texas thought he had it.

  Carlyle thought style was a white hat as wide as the prairie and boots made from two baby alligators. Carlyle believed in the divine right of style. He believed that even his name had style, was style, and when he walked, the dust threw up sparks. In this manner he lifted himself above the crudeness of his neighbors, even if they were all of them Texans, which is a religion. What, Randol Carlyle often demanded, had more style than oil? Pumps humping the ground like tireless lovers. All his sons making sons in the night. Carlyle had a stylish smile you could trip and fall into. He liked to enter rooms like a grande dame: even coming back from the bathroom alone in the afternoon, he swept into this room and that room and then swept out onto his front porch and swept back like a stylish tide with history on its hands. It was Carlyle’s theory that a man’s style transfigures his environment. Birds sang differently for him. The birds were not of course the same birds that sing for you.

  And nothing was more stylish than profit. Calvin was on the bull’s eye. God elected you or he did not. And when he elected you, he gave you a look and a pocketbook so that none could miss seeing the assets of being elected. The unelected were not going to hell, they were already in hell, having no style and only one or two credit cards.

  If a shirt did not have a hundred tassles, it was no shirt at all. If a car did not take over the road, it was no car. And if a woman in the chair opposite did not make men smoke, she was no woman. When Carlyle went to Neiman Marcus, he ordered the top of the line, no matter whether he needed it or not. Sometimes he did not even ask what it was, only if it was the top of the line. Still it was the best they had and you can talk all you want about usefulness, knowing it was the best was the most useful emotion Carlyle had discovered.

  Carlyle speared a five dollar Havana into Higgins’ mouth. And blasted the tip with a three inch flame shot from the hip. Raphael Higgins blinked behind his sunglasses. He observed his man through a flaming corona and thought he might like to burn initials on this smiling cow with the wild, beaming, blue eyes.

  Carlyle had no time for new ideas. He was in a hurry. He knew what he needed to know and he knew the world was fifty miles wide and he stood astride it. People who got in his way were misinformed, took a wrong turn and should be man enough to admit a mistake. “Go back three hills and turn left and don’t let me see you on my property one more time,” he said smiling, and swept off through dust throwing sparks.

  “I’ll be goddamned if I like the way things are going in this country,” he said to Higgins, who wouldn’t smalltalk. “Goddamn, man, you come into my house, you talk for your dinner.”

  “I’m not staying,” Higgins said.

  Carlyle loomed up close, like a storm on your windshield. “I don’t believe I like you, boy.”

  “Maybe you’d care for some gin rummy. People do say I’m the best.”

  “The best?!! Weeelllll. Says who?”

  “This here 50 thousand,” Higgins with a gift for imitating accents said.

  “Weeeeelllllll.” Carlyle had a smile that stretched clear out to the Panhandle and an appraising squint that could see diamond in coal.

  The butler brought cards and Higgins and Carlyle played gin rummy Las Vagas rules for five hours and on luck and skill they were a match, but with bottom cuts and such Higgins cheated the Texan out of 32 thousand.

  “I’ve got a well a mile out back just pissed that much up while we were sitting here,” said Carlyle.

  “I’m mighty glad,” said Higgins.

  “You know what I think,” said Carlyle. “That you’re the most stylist cheater I’ve had the distinction of meeting. Which puts me in a divided frame of mind.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself none,” said Higgins.

  “See that Goddamned naked little Greek girl there,” Carlyle indicated the statue. “She has now cost me 82 thousand. They did say she was the best. He laughed as a coyote howls. “And now I sure do hope it.”

  “She is sure worth each and every penny.”

  “Is that a fact? I’m still not clear what to do about you.”

  “Could shake hands and say bye now.”

  Higgins had not had so much pleasure since playing soldier in Asia. The drizzle had stopped, sun was out. He thought he would pay 32 thousand for the delight of cheating this here particular cowboy out of 32 thousand. Higgins glanced fondly at his fingers, which Michaelangelo would envy, for who was the greater artist? Higgins basked in his own sunshine. It was like a door exploding open bodies scattering all right, but in exquisite slow delicious motion, all five hours sweetness and light.

  “I’ll cut you for the whole 32,” Higgins said, wishing to stay this high forever.

  “Boy, I like your style.” Carlyle almost danced up out of his elephant hide sofa. “Course, we’d be needing a new deck. Which you wouldn’t be needing to shuffle.” Carlyle belled for the butler.

  He was grinning and Higgins was grinning and they were both grinning like Uncle Hughie alone in Saint Louis, Carlyle thinking, shucks, I’ll just double up until I win, Higgins thinking maybe God did not dislike him after all.

  Weeellll, the butler spread the virgin cards in a fan. Higgins beat a nine with a jack. And he said, “I’ll cut you for the whole 64.”

  “Boy! I like your style.”

  The butler spread another deck. Higgins beat a three with a ten. He said, “I’ll cut you for the whole 128.”

  “Boy!” I do like your style.”

  The butler was sweating when he spread the next fan. Higgins turned over a ten, Carlyle, with a stylist flip, exposed a king.

  Carlyle smiled. Higgins smiled. The butler retreated.

  Randol Carlyle, with all his money and energy, could have b
een the Governor of Texas, if he were less of a show-off. People he wanted to charm were charmed; the rest were scandalized or frightened. Except Higgins, a fact bound to impress Carlyle.

  He decided Higgins must be the best of something, he wasn’t sure what. Still he had to buy it.

  The light faded in Higgins’ head. He was losing the mood. The money was nothing. He had loved the Texan and the time while he stole the money and he had loved them while he lost it back. Now it was life again. He wished he weren’t so Goddamned nuts. It was like an eclipse. Darkness filled his thoughts. The Texan’s smile made him feel sick. He wanted a woman. Except that he might hurt her.

  7

  The grand tour of Europe was just the thing. She thought it would improve her mind. At least that’s what everybody said. Her maid knew it was unlikely. Still lightning had been known to wake up stone and make it dance. Daphne could already dance. That was a figure of speech.

  At fifty feet Daphne Carlyle could make a man ache. At twenty feet he thought that Truth and Beauty might yet prevail. Three feet was too close. You could see in Daphne’s eyes the futility of cattle, you could see all the way to El Paso. You could run out of time seeing so little. What then were her redeeming qualities, besides a physical exaltation designed by God to make angels horny? There was one. A wistfulness of soul. Unlike her friends, she did not assume that she stood on the goal line at the Super Bowl. She believed progress might be possible in herself. Her friends laughed, knowing they were born there.

  Daphne did not masturbate, nor did she know lewd thoughts or actions. Her education in the company of race horses, sports cars, politicians, swimming pools, expensive resorts and show biz celebrities did not encourage her to look closely at anything. She spent the day on the high swell of an unexplored passion for which she had no names and no proper introduction.

  It was perhaps unfortunate that Raphael Higgins, while cheating at gin rummy, noticed her photograph.

  There was blue in her eyes and red on her lips and light in her hair. There was the regality of plants. She brought flatness to a triumphant conclusion, like a Rembrandt. She was a lottery ticket, orderly, nothing in herself, tinged from a distance with wealth and luck. You suspected her esophagus must be gold plated and her nipples platinum. Higgins decided she was designed by computer, the next century come early, the future made flesh. She would do for a god. He did not wish to see her, less to touch her. Worship was more important. He took her away in the locket of his heart. Now he would have a new North Star and a true magnetic north. Now he would have someone to love. He could look forward. In his sweet moods he would attend her and in violent moods sacrifice her to other gods.

  Theoreticians of love have all agreed, it is best to avoid intimacy. Transcontinental love is strongest. Telephone love is truest. Postal love is most passionate of all. And between people who have not met exists the love most pure.

  Daphne liked oranges sliced in two, the sections already cut loose. She liked grape juice, with its own sunny sugar. She liked hard boiled eggs knived thin and peppered and salted and squished among the tines of a silver fork. Daphne liked hot baths invisible beneath mounds of bubbles. Daphne liked the empty blue sky that was like a brother.

  Daphne’s father wished she might have been a tad plainer.

  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Daphne thought these were beautiful words. She wondered if she had any of the three.

  Daphne’s dog cutely named Huggings may have been an omen.

  Within the white eggshell of her unexamined life what sort of bird was squirming?

  8

  Heel toe, heel toe, the new steps were too much work. He thought a beer was more fun. The point of dancing was to put your hands on somebody you hardly knew. That was what it used to be anyway.

  Lawrence Georges watched several couples dance and he grew listless, then restless. Something had to happen soon. It was like waiting for the offensive near Chosan. An officer said, “We know there’s a lot of them, we don’t know what’s taking them so long. Maybe they think they know something about the American psyche, that we don’t last.”

  It was no good living in the old days. War and hard muscles and an endless optimism that you would get on top of life and fuck it good. So it turned out peace and soft muscles, exactly the opposite. Georges thought he could walk out in the street and die as well as any man. But this getting old and slowly falling apart was for hunger. If the idea was to set up a school which would make people realize they didn’t know anything and couldn’t accomplish anything, life was a success. Georges lit another cigaret. He took the smoke back neat into his lungs.

  His eyes wandered into the juke box, infinitely retreating mirrors and lights. The bass too heavy, he could feel it in his arms. Georges sighed and his grasp of the universe turned tired. He was holding onto the ledge, thought he might as well let go. A waitress who knew him came by and put a hand on his shoulder. “Champ,” she called him, “Why you looking so happy?”

  “’Cause I got life by the balls,” he said and winked at her. What he had said and done might as well have been done by another man. There was no connection with himself.

  She leaned over so her breasts rested on his shoulder. “I wish I had something by the balls.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “You’re dirty.” She smiled delightedly.

  “What? Can’t hear, there’s a tit in my ear.”

  “Ohh!” She wagged her ass as she slid away.

  Twenty years ago he would have burned for her. His balls would have gone up like skyrockets. The schemes he would have dreamed to get her alone for a few minutes. Now he didn’t care. He turned poetical, picturing Bonnie’s body and his wife’s face on one woman.

  When droopy Harold came in, he looked scared. He missed seeing Georges on the first scan, got more anxious, then came quickly to the table. “They killed Mac Samson,” he said. “That showboat! The police were there. What kind of racket is that,” he hissed across the table.

  “Don’t know. How’d it happen?”

  “Rifle. Just came down the street and blasted him away before dinner.”

  “Takes balls.”

  “A big picture window’s all over the place.”

  Harold noticed the waitress eyeing the table. “Hey, you banging her? She’s got a mother’s eye for you.”

  “You know what they say about breast fed?”

  Harold tried to laugh but it wasn’t in him. He was more serious than a psychiatrist. Harold was sure the world was cracked and he was cracked and everybody he knew was cracked, not crazy cracked, but flawed cracked, imperfect, marked down for quick sale, and when the last piece of damaged goods was sold, they’d close the doors and nobody would care. So what did it matter that nothing was what it was cracked up to be, ha-ha, and he was less? A stingy, humorless, ill-tailored, two baths a week malingerer. The only thing good about him was that Lawrence seemed to like him. If he never saw Lawrence again, he would lose all contact with whatever it was life was supposed to be like.

  Lawrence Georges knew that Harold would leap across the room for a fifty dollar bill. Georges was trying to decide what would make him leap, if he still had a leap in him. He thought of Bonnie’s flawless body. He may not have leaped but he stepped damned quickly. It would take a miracle, Georges reflected with pain—or the biggest score in history, or the most perfect. Well, biggest was out. Biggest was like Fort Knox. Maybe perfect was possible. A job so pretty he could live through it each day until he pissed his last and say, Thanks God, thanks for the memories.

  “So what do we do now?” Harold pried.

  “What’s to do? He’s dead. They’re happy.”

  “Maybe he’s got friends.” Harold seemed to hope so. His hypochondria needed the excitement.

  “Yeah, and maybe he’s got a lonely widow.”

  “You think?” Harold was good at looking salacious. Big fraud. He had never cared about women except to lie to, to trick, to cheat, to avoid. More exciteme
nt.

  “There’s nothing like a woman in black,” Georges said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Black what, you’re supposed to say.”

  “Black what?”

  “Black lace panties.”

  To Harold that was a woman who would be in no position to defend her worldly goods, which Harold would put in a box and carry out the back door in the period of her confusion.

  Georges believed that he had seen Mr. and Mrs. Mac Samson once, coming out of a movie theatre, maybe five years earlier. He tried to recall the woman’s appearance. Black hair! Yes, he believed that the lonely widow had black hair.

  Georges raised his hand and first-fingered the waitress over. “I’ve got something confidential to discuss,” he said, “lean over here.” To her ear he said, “I keep having this dream. I’m being smothered. No matter how I turn, I can’t get any air. I can’t see. I am dying.”

  The waitress was alarmed. Georges talked more softly. She leaned closer. His shoulder split her cleavage. Georges shook his shoulder a bit. Felt like five pounds. “Well,” she said.

  “It was awful,” Georges whispered. “Then you lifted up and I was all right except for a nipple in my nose.”

  “Ohhh!” She went up the scale in a try for righteous indignation but Georges had a friendly arm on her waist that moderated her emotions. “Oh,” she said again. “Let me go. You’re a devil.” She gave him a big old sloppy smile before turning away.

  Harold watched all this without seeing any criminal possibilities, so he didn’t have any reaction.

  “That woman’s making me so horny,” Georges said, his expression tired and alert and bemused.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Sit here until I’m pretty worked up, then go home and fuck Mary.”

  “What?”