American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  “You sure I don’t know you?”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “What’s wrong, you don’t want to talk to me?”

  “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “Shows taste,” Higgins said, feeling better about the evening.

  Higgins vacated the premises, walking to an electronic den in Penn Station. There were more than fifty kinds of pinball machines and video games. At 25¢ and 50¢ a time, Higgins could effortlessly drop $20 in this place diverting himself. He particularly liked games where submarines sunk ships or tanks blasted foxholes. In another he seemed to sit in a helicopter and direct rockets at oil refineries and airports. Higgins, with no patience but with hair-trigger reflexes, excelled at these games and left high scores on one after another. There was a game called Night Driver that had you steering a car over a hilly road at speeds up to 175. Higgins put the switch on Pro Track and jammed the lever to fourth gear in five seconds and slammed the car down that dark road like Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road. He especially enjoyed finding a talented kid and saying, “Nice game, kid,” and then beating the shit out of his score. Higgins for the kid was like some space man, with his sunglasses and the smouldering silence and the abnormal skills an adult shouldn’t have.

  Higgins’ edge, beside the genetic gifts, was that he felt comfortable with anything electronic. He felt the machine as an extension of himself, that they were both wired, alien, and dangerous. Sometimes, trying to sum up his fate, he would say, “I’m programmed that way.” The images in his mind shifted constantly, of course, but one was that he was a robot and also the controller of the robot so he was in his control and out of control at the same time. This confusion carried over to his pride at being electronically efficient at the same time that he prided himself on his frontier independence and on being the last of the red hot humans.

  It was late. Time to call Sonia. Part of the pleasure was to find out what she would put up with.

  Higgins imagined her as a pinball machine, lighting up underneath him, as with cunning flippers and deft corner-bumps he lit up all her Bonus Lights and won one free ball after another.

  28

  Conroy Compton was taciturn, reclusive, living inside himself. He wore a sleek and friendly, almost foolish face, as became a stockbroker, and in this manner he slipped right through people’s grasp altogether. They rarely remembered that he hadn’t said anything beyond a pleasantry or two. They remembered that he was warm, not overbearing, and seemed to be knowledgeable as could be about the stock market. In fact, Compton was cold, supercilious, and knew little about the market.

  If Compton had thought that his life had the least redeeming social value, he could not have been so unhinged by the theft of his statue. But in the drafty hallways of his artful mansion, there was nothing much else to think about. The statue, or the spot where it had been, monopolized the full octave of his emotions.

  His obsession with the loss of the statue profoundly bored his wife. The statue had for her the same enduring significance as a used lover.

  When was Compton’s question, when had he told anybody about this prize? That his wife might have been indiscreet did not enter his calculations, no more than she entered his thoughts generally, and that she might have entangled an unwary heating mechanic right under the eyes of the Greek girl was not considered. He was responsible, and he was impatient to rectify his mistake. He goaded the police. He toyed with hiring a private detective. He might post a reward.

  While Carlyle who had the statue may have bounced his lively gaze off the statue every few days, Compton who did not have the statue thought about it every third minute. It might be argued that Compton was getting far more use out of the statue not having it than Carlyne was having it.

  While legal minds would want the statue returned, shrewd minds might predict Compton’s collapse if that happened. Everybody’s life should have meaning and Compton’s had finally acquired some.

  Now there was Mr. Compton spinning hard in one spot like a top and Mrs. Compton spinning out of control like a carousel loose from its axis, she having passed several recent afternoons in a hotel with two gentlemen from Peoria not discussing art. Their marriage had achieved this odd sort of symmetry. Maybe they could go on spinning like this until old age rusted up their rotations.

  What happened was that Thelma Compton got syphillis. A minor setback, she thought. She drove a half hour to another town for treatment. She opened a phone book to Physicians and with her eyes closed picked a name randomly with her finger: Dr. James Smithers. When she saw him, she knew that he was a finer sort of man than she was accustomed to. She knew she would have to improve her act.

  Mrs. Thelma Compton had only a dim idea of what the word aesthetic meant, but her response to Dr. Smithers was of that kind. She watched him with a bit of a smile on her lips, and a sort of detached and intellectual pleasure in her brain, as you look at a painting in a museum. She wanted to take him home.

  These feelings were unexpected. Possibly because her husband was such a bore on the subjects of Art and Beauty, she had convinced herself that she was incapable of caring about such things. Well hung was enough for her.

  The peculiarly sensitive nature of Thelma Compton’s response made her less aggressive. Here was a new sensation and she was content to idle with it. Besides, she did have the blemish of syphillis. Without that, she probably would have been pushy and ruined everything.

  Dr. Smithers, hardened over the years to flirtatious patients, found that he liked the intense heat of this woman’s eyes. He had not been scrutinized with such an aloof and civilized appraisal before, or if he had, there had always been some other actions that sabotaged the mood. In this instance, the patient was perfectly formal but appreciative. He might have been a statue in a garden passed by some ladies with tea cups in hand, their Victorian eyes delicately appreciating his muscles, their hearts beating like birds taking wing. Except in this case the Victorian lady was on her back with her legs in stirrups and he had the Hippocratic duty to examine her pinker parts. He was aware, if unconsciously, how completely she placed herself in his gloved hands.

  Few relationships start so intently so instantly.

  It was after she had dressed that he first became conscious of the nuances of the encounter. It had been an odd kind of sexual coming together. She had yielded herself. He had penetrated. There had been trust and dignified rapture on her part. He had been charmed, both by her intensity and by the elaborately ladylike way she continued on.

  There was an injection, a prescription, and, of course, it was agreed that she would need her progress checked in a week.

  What fascinated Mrs. Thelma Compton was the contrast between this meeting and several hundred others. She never remembered the men, not really, not their faces or personalities. She remembered their builds or their energy or their aggressiveness, but only in the insubstantial way that she knew the different makes of American cars.

  Dr. Smithers was the exception. She found herself recalling the hair on the back of his hands, the slope of his shoulders, how he had turned to face her when she entered the office, his eyebrows, and the faint reflectivity of his black shoes. He looked as if he might have the best bedside manner in the country. He must, Mrs. Compton decided.

  She was not young. She had to go back in her mind several years, many many years, to locate a similar cluster of emotions. God, she had virtually to go back to college, at least, maybe even to high school. Where had love been all those years? The more Thelma Compton thought about her emotions, the more she realized she had lived two decades in a drought. No, worse. She had been dead. Now she was alive. She had been lost and now she was found. It was positively Biblical. To know that she could feel such emotions was the single most startling thing she had known in her adult existence. Sometimes, in fact, Mrs. Compton forgot about Dr. Smithers, so enamoured was she of the fresh Spring zephyrs rising in her soul.

  She also looked at her husband with new eyes. Stran
gely to her, she could better understand his preoccupation with art and beautiful objects. Also strangely, she felt even greater contempt for the way he burrowed into those objects to the exclusion of all others, to the exclusion of what was beautiful in people.

  Roy Compton could not have been more startled when Thelma turned on him at breakfast.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she began.

  Possibly he heard this but did not respond, not believing the literal meaning of the words.

  “You are just about the most self-centered, cut-off, dried-up, hopelessly irrelevant person I’ve ever known.”

  Roy Compton stared at his wife for half a minute. She was wearing a flowered bathrobe he considered gaudy and she was sitting up erectly so that her breasts seemed larger. Her face was set, without animation or expression, like a marble statue, he thought.

  “What’s more, you’re no fun. I’m betting you haven’t been any fun since you were six.”

  His first thought was that he would have to have her committed because she had evidently lost her mind. A clear prima facie case, he thought, could be made. Then, more altruistically, he wondered what strain his wife had been experiencing of which he was ignorant. Certainly this business with the statue would upset anybody, but Thelma seemed possibly too emphatic for this explanation to satisfy. Roy Compton carefully wiped the corners of his mouth, where traces of yellow had lodged, and didn’t know what to say.

  “Furthermore,” she finally went on, “you’re probably the biggest damn fool in this county. No, this state. You get the blue ribbon.”

  Thelma Compton had the most pleasurable sense of herself as a sort of hot springs erupting, like the one they had seen together in Yellowstone, the potent geyser that shot spray in the air and made rainbows from every angle. She had achieved in her own mind anyway a kind of silvery and crystalline clarity. Sunlight shone through her. She was a pure force of nature.

  If Thelma Compton had had the least religious background, or even the most meagre spiritual vocabulary, she might at this point have announced she was leaving for a convent to spend the rest of her life loving God. She had, at any rate, attained a highly enlightened state, pursued by some for a life without success but attained by others in blinding visions.

  Thelma Compton’s pilgrimage up the silver mountain took six days from the afternoon of her visit to Dr. Smithers’ office. There was now the real question of what to do next when you are catapulted to the summit without warning and without desire and without understanding.

  Roy Compton stared wanly and then warily. Something had happened. There had been a break-down in reality. Time had turned inside out. He knew that the newspapers said that spaceships come from other planets—his wife for all practical purposes might as well have just landed on a rocket from the Big Dipper. Well, they hadn’t had much to say to each other in twelve or fifteen years. What would be different now, even if she was just off a UFO?

  Roy Compton got up from the table without having said a word.

  29

  There were so many restrictions a man didn’t have any choice but to work around them. It was a matter of surviving against long odds. The government was snooping into everything, regulating when you went to the bathroom. The idea was to legislate everything and everybody level. Flattened down to the last numbnut. “God must like mediocre people,” Carlyle shouted, “He made so damned many of them.”

  Carlyle was letting off liveliness, riding a forklift around a factory in Tulsa, home of the better bedspring. A-gents, as Carlyle pronounced them, had come calling and Carlyle had conveyed them all over hell and back to make sure they didn’t see any violations of the National Nothing Doing Act, as Carlyle called any laws in his way.

  Then it was back to the executive suite to disrupt everybody there, make telephonic intrusions everywhere he could think of, and then jump into his silver jet and whooossh into the wild blue. Crooning along at 15,000 feet, he thought the country looked manageable. His loyal armies could be inspired, and his enemies exposed and shot up.

  On the plane he had a report to read and reread about the peregrinations of one Raphael Higgins, on whose trail he had placed a tail. Carlyle was delighted with his reading. “This fellow Higgins,” he said to GA, “hasn’t sat still more than ten minutes in a week.”

  GA listened raptly, fascinated by whatever fascinated Carlyle. She was wearing a jumpsuit of maroon velvet, selected by Randol, the whole outfit so tight he could keep an eye on those dimples he loved, the ones near the lower spine. Really, everything about GeorgiaAnne was fantastical, grotesque to some, but then you saw the way she looked at her husband. She did love him.

  “You know,” Carlyle sighed, blowing Cuban smoke all about the cabin, “I may have to build me up a whole new business just so I can put this Higgins fellow in charge of it. Beats me what it would be, though. Something to do with overthrowing foreign governments by stealing them blind, raping all their women and giving every kid a pinball. How we going to float a bond issue on that prospectus?”

  Carlyle began to be sorry that he had ever met the unreachable Mr. Higgins, or bought that statue. A lot of nogood things had happened since that day. The idea came to Carlyle that the statue was a bad omen, and he decided on the instant to give it away.

  After a long pause, Carlyle said, “I think that architect fellow needs some bucking up. I’ll send him a little something.” GA smiled as though she understood completely.

  Carlyle propped his baby alligator boots on a mahogany table. The shirt he was wearing would have given apoplexy to the entire staff of Women’s Wear Daily. The body of the shirt was blood red, the shoulders lime green, and six silver disks depicted stories from America’s history. There were gold tassles and there were stones blue and green and sapphire. GeorgiaAnne had to unbutton a few buttons to insert her silky hands along Carlyle’s chest, which was small and barrellike and hairy and soft and hot. Carlyle, nibbling under her ear, thought that GA sure enough compensated for a whole trainload of a-gents and Yankees and L.A. loonies.

  After two hours at 15,000, shrieking through the dazzle of cosmic rays and radio signals from a billion light years away, Carlyle felt as lively as lightning dancing inside the mountainous white cumulus of the desert. When the flaps dropped at O’Hare and the tires screeched and engines screamed dying down, Carlyle thought he was ready to kick ass as far as the eye could see.

  Once on the ground, a sort of golf cart took Carlyle and GA to a gold Porsche, one of dozens he kept waiting for him in airports everywhere. Part of Carlyle’s liveliness was the love of holding a steering wheel and having the petroleum breeze of throughways and city streets sighing past his face. Forced to be in the back seat with someone else driving, Carlyle was restless as a cow being transported in a station wagon. GA had seen him tip a cabbie twenty so he could drive himself.

  In his earlier years, Carlyle had raced stock cars and some fancier kinds but he had been crazier than skilled and spun out on more turns than he collected prizes. “Aw hell,” Carlyle would say, “damn racing ain’t no fun, just a bunch of bureaucrats and middle management types sitting on top of everything, figuring up new ways to make things dull.” Now Carlyle confined his racing to Downtown, U.S.A., and even though GeorgiaAnne trusted her man all the way up the Rio Grande and back, she came often near to wetting her pants every time Carlyle came on a throughway, sort of hopping sideways among the cars already there, or exited down a ramp at 70, breaking, downshifting and cornering with the rear wheels skipping along a circle until Carlyle got the car straight with the new direction. Worse yet, Carlyle was usually discoursing, one hand gesturing, and then baroooomm, shift, clutch, “Look out there, buster, now where was I, sweetie?” GeorgiaAnne was sure hard pressed to tell him.

  Nor did it make her feel better when Carlyle, threading traffic, would tell her, “Now see this here roll bar, honey, we can just turn this baby right over and stand her back up and keep on going and damned if I don’t mean to do it one of these days.”


  GA made sure her seat belt was cutting into flesh and thought if only her Mommy could see her now, her Mommy who used to say, “If God had meant people to drive with one hand, they wouldn’t have two, now would they?”

  Carlyle was in Chicago to see bankers, people he thought made unexcitement into a high calling, and he intended to rouse the spirits of the Northamerican Leisure Company, what Carlyle called his little baby conglomerate. He had his mind on seeing some people he called crooks, too, to help him with various other crooks and union people, as there was no better way of dealing with crooks than with their own kind, a kind of corporate homeotherapy. Crooks to Carlyle were not crooks because they broke laws, as he would himself break laws when he could find some good ones to break. No, he called them crooks because they were low and mired and had no class, no art about it all. Given a crooked way to make a buck and a lively original way, a crook would always settle for being crooked.

  There was no variety. Crooks were crooks from morning on through the night and Carlyle couldn’t respect anything so predictable. All the crooks Carlyle knew seemed to him stunted apish sorts. Whereas for a businessman the point of it all was to keep busy, the money just a way to keep score, the point for crooks was to be crooked. It was like people who are cheap: they will find ways to let other people pick up the check, they will forget debts, they will offer $10 for whatever is marked $15, knowing sometimes they’ll get it. Life is for them nothing but trying to finagle somebody out of something. Cheap people say it’s saving money that counts. Carlyle thought cheap people were just cheap, pure and simple, just like crooked people were crooked, and that’s it, and talking about money was on the same level of truthfulness as an alcoholic telling you how good bourbon is.

  “Goddamned alcoholic,” he told GA, “would lick piss off a drainpipe if the proof was there. And a cheap sonofabitch will pay any price for anything so long as he thinks you wanted more. And a fucking crook will only do things where there’s a sewer to swim through and it’s the sewer, not the swimming, crooks like. And don’t let nobody tell you different, sweetie.”