The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘It’s no place for a girl,’ her mother said. ‘They don’t let women into Parliament, anyhow.’

  ‘First I’ll get elected to the union,’ she said, remembering Kim going on about that.

  ‘You’ll stay well out of it,’ her mother said, with the same horrified voice.

  ‘Elected to clean the lavatories,’ her father said.

  ‘She’s only having us on,’ her mother said, pouring the tea.

  Which she was, she guessed, and herself too. What else was there to do in this stinking world? And another thing, she may as well admit, she hadn’t had her periods for two months and she was putting on weight.

  The American, Paul Jonson

  They’d met the American Paul Jonson in the bar of a hotel near the university.

  He’d offered to buy them beers and they’d let him, amused by the chance to bait an American.

  ‘I graduated AB from New York City College,’ he told them.

  And they went at him about the standard of American universities.

  And then they went at him about the Negroes.

  ‘I can appreciate your admiration for Brown and Carmichael – but they aggravate – they don’t solve,’ he stated, doggedly.

  And then about Vietnam.

  He looked at them with an easy grin. ‘Am I to gather,’ he said, reaching for money for another round, ‘that you fellows don’t particularly like America?’

  They laughed. He said to Jonson, ‘Why should we?’ speaking for all of them.

  Jonson shrugged. ‘Let me buy you another beer – as a gesture of international goodwill.’

  They let him.

  ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said. ‘I’m not blind to my country’s ills,’ handing them the beers.

  At closing time they were still on about Vietnam.

  Outside the hotel on the footpath, Jonson said, ‘Well, it’s been – how shall I put it? – stimulating?’ He laughed. He wanted to meet them again. ‘I’m kind of new here and don’t know over many people. Next time, though, I’ll bone up on Vietnam and debate you.’

  He found himself exchanging telephone numbers with the American, for the sake of form.

  He drove home with Kim. ‘We sent the American up,’ he said.

  ‘He took it OK,’ Kim said.

  ‘They all talk like public relations men.’

  ‘Bloody articulate,’ Kim said. ‘They put things well.’

  ‘Don’t say you fell for the charisma.’

  The American rang a few days later.

  ‘It’s Paul Jonson – that dumb American you fought the Vietnam war with in the pub the other night.’

  ‘Oh yes – hullo,’ he was not enthusiastic, he’d been working on an essay.

  ‘Let’s meet for drinks,’ Paul Jonson said.

  He hesitated, it was a nuisance.

  ‘OK – only I’m broke – could we leave it until next week?’

  ‘Forget the expense – the night’s on me. American aid.’

  This made him uneasy. Not CIA? He didn’t have the CIA look, whatever that was. When had he ever met a CIA agent anyway? Why not let him pay? – the rest of the world did.

  They met in the same pub. He didn’t tell the others. He meant to. He saw Kim and forgot to mention it to him and then it was too late to do anything about it. Perhaps he was guilty about it.

  ‘The others not coming?’ Jonson had asked.

  ‘No, they couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Probably makes for better discussion – just two.’

  They leaned there on the bar and the conversation came easily.

  ‘Protesting lately?’ Jonson asked with a smile.

  ‘No,’ he was defensive, ‘but we have a demonstration next month.’

  ‘Give me the date – I’ll do a cover,’ Jonson said, ‘let the people back home know how much they’re hated.’

  Jonson talked a little about the news agency he worked with. Then they talked about Cuba and he said how he’d like to have a look at it.

  They argued about Berkeley.

  The conversation had a fire about it which came from the aggressiveness he showed now and then, and the way Jonson handled it. The aggression was a way of resisting the blandishment of Jonson’s accent and his style of arguing. In some ways he was whipping Jonson too and he thought Jonson liked that. And when Jonson lashed back the sting of it wasn’t a bad feeling.

  Paul Jonson bought the drinks. He felt obliged to mutter to him something about paying him back next week. But Jonson was unembarrassing about money – as though Americans had made a special skill of being generous.

  Standing in the lavatory pissing it occurred to him that he should remember to note down the things Paul Jonson told him as a source of ‘informed American opinion’ or something. Somehow he felt he should make use of Jonson. He wasn’t quite sure how or why. Except that Jonson was in one sense the ‘enemy’. But it wasn’t like that.

  Back in the bar the bell was ringing. Inside he felt slightly unsteady but not too drunk. He thought he was still coherent and didn’t sound drunk. Above the ringing of the bell Paul Jonson was saying, ‘Why don’t you come back to my apartment – sorry flat – I’ve got some cans on ice.’

  They caught a cab. ‘You didn’t mind me coming back at you a few times tonight?’ Jonson said.

  ‘No, no – it’s good practice for me.’

  It was a standardised, expensive, bachelor flat – ‘ultra modern’. It had no signs of Paul Jonson the American – except for a pile of books which had not yet been stacked into the built-in shelving. War and Peace, Strait Is the Gate, For Whom the Bell Tolls, An American Dream and a Short History of Australia.

  ‘I’ve only been in the place – what would it be now? – three days,’ Paul called from the kitchen. He heard the spurt of beer cans. ‘My books and records are in some trunk on some wharf between here and the Panama Canal.’

  ‘I notice you’ve bought some pamphlets about Vietnam.’

  ‘Yes, I was in your Left Bookshop,’ Paul called, ‘I thought I’d better get some reading done if I was going to drink with you.’

  Paul came out with the cans of beer. ‘Can’t offer you elaborate hospitality – nothing but crackers – the bachelor existence – I’m living one meal to the next.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind something.’

  Paul went to the kitchen and brought back a packet of biscuits.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  They sat on the settee and looked across the Bay. Drinking beer from cold cans and eating bacon biscuits.

  Paul switched off the main light. ‘You catch the view better.’

  It was a view of harmonising blacks: black textures, of dark water, dark parkland, dark streetscapes – all black, hit by a random scatter of electric yellows from lights and some neon pinks and purples.

  ‘Do you really feel animosity towards us Americans – in particular me?’ Paul asked. ‘I know,’ he held up his free hand, ‘I know, you have any number of criticisms of American life, but me, do you specifically resent me?’

  ‘I guess I hold every American responsible,’ he said, not believing it, but feeling that he had to be tough.

  ‘Now wait on – what if I held you responsible for everything your government did?’

  ‘I protest against what I don’t like.’

  ‘Right. To some degree I am culpable on those grounds.’

  ‘Silence means consent.’

  ‘Oh come on now, stop talking like a banner. Some of us would not have the damn time for anything else if we protested everything we didn’t like.’

  ‘You should protest on major issues,’ he responded. He remembered how the conversation had begun and knew it was going wrongly. He didn’t want to attack Paul now. He didn’t particularly want to talk politics. He sort of liked Paul and he had wanted to let him know this. He turned to him grinning, and said as casually as possible, ‘No, you’re OK,’ smiled and added, ‘for an American.’


  ‘Gee, thanks,’ Paul said amiably.

  He couldn’t understand how it happened. The conversation suddenly hung in midair and, without looking at each other, he reached out and they took each other’s hand. His next thought was, ‘Paul is camp,’ and before he could even see the implications of this he was moving, of his own free volition, into Paul’s arms. His heart was gasping. He had an erection, Paul and he were hugging.

  Paul said something about his boyish body. Their hands were under each other’s shirt. All he allowed himself to see was the rough-cast texture of the cement on the ceiling. Paul was taking down his trousers. The bay lapped without sound, way down amid the blackness. He was in a clean modern flat making love to a man.

  They had not moved from the settee. He had ejaculated. The breathless slide into the pleasure of it had stopped against revulsion. It was shuddering through him. He felt flung and dazed as though in a road accident. Jonson got up and went to the bathroom.

  He salivated his mouth which the beer had left dry and ravaged.

  Jonson came back and threw him a towel and said some thing about having another drink. He didn’t reply but went to the bathroom, holding his trousers as he walked, avoiding getting come on his clothes. He washed himself, drying with Jonson’s towel. It had Jonson’s personal odour and caused another wave of revulsion.

  As he came out to the main room Jonson was drinking from a can and staring at him. An uncertain smile on his face.

  He ignored Jonson and picked up his brief-case.

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘No need to rush,’ Jonson said in a soft voice.

  He didn’t reply but went to the door.

  ‘Don’t be mad at me,’ Jonson said to him.

  ‘If I’d known you were bloody queer I wouldn’t have come anywhere near the place,’ he said, letting himself out, slamming the door, hearing Jonson say, ‘But that’s bloody unfair …’

  He ran down the stairs. The running made him feel less guilty as though he was running away from his guilt.

  He had been trapped. He felt not only guilty but humiliated by his own naivety. He had not been able to see that Jonson was camp. He’d fallen for a glib American. Not that Jonson looked like a poofter.

  He thought of Sylvia and boiled with guilt and agonised with something else which, he guessed, was shame.

  He kept it away from his mind during the next week. But it crept to the edge while he was writing his anti-Vietnam war speech and in a way it made it easier by feeding his anti-Americanism. But when it came back to his mind fully, it buckled him. Bringing with it a feeling of illness. But later the same evening he had moved over to his bed, feeling slightly weary, and had masturbated. While masturbating, Jonson came to his mind and he imagined Jonson’s hand on him. When he finished some of the shame had come back too.

  His mother took two phone calls from Jonson but he didn’t return them.

  He gave his speech to the group at university before they moved downtown for the August Mobilisation Against the War. In his speech he talked about the phoney American innocence and their pathological destructiveness. Their ‘humanity’ which was contradicted by their history of violence against the oppressed – the Indians, the Mexicans, the Negroes, the working class, the immigrants the Filipinos, the Koreans, and now the Vietnamese. They had been guilty of racial, industrial and imperialistic oppression. They had produced a public relations and mass communications industry without precedent – geared to justifying them selves and selling an image of an innocent, humane nation. ‘They are now a military presence in fifty nations,’ he said.

  His speech was one of a few but he thought it was received better than the others. Some of the committee congratulated him later. Sylvia thought it was great.

  Students were milling around chanting, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’

  They moved off. He’d hoped for a larger crowd and somehow a more ‘solid’ crowd. He felt they all looked … too weird or something. But downtown the nonstudents would be joining them and they would change the way it all looked. He felt conspicuous although he was with a thousand others. Workmen at the roads looked up, paused on their shovels, handkerchiefs knotted around their heads, and he felt they were looking at him. A Greek in a milk bar, one arm deep in an ice cream canister, looked up for a second and then served his cone.

  When they reached the main demonstration he felt less self-conscious. It was larger. The chanting began, ‘Bring the boys back.’ It faltered and then like an intermittent wind grew alternatively loud and strong and low. He said it soundlessly and then began to give it volume and repeated it until it lost its meaning and became like walking.

  ‘Anything could happen here today,’ he said to Sylvia, feeling a hankering for violent eruption. Although he was against violence.

  Then a hand on his arm and Paul Jonson was walking beside him, wearing sun-glasses, a Leica camera around his neck.

  He had feared Jonson would come.

  ‘Some crowd you’ve got,’ Jonson said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with an effort, ‘better than last time.’ His face flushed, internally he shrank. All he wanted to do was bury his face in the chanting and the movement.

  ‘Why aren’t you carrying a poster?’ he forced himself to say to Jonson.

  ‘I’d infringe my status as an observer.’

  He could not stir enough aggressive energy to attack. He was using it all to overcome his trembling tension.

  Then as they moved together he realised that Sylvia was looking at them both a little puzzled. She had for a moment been excluded by the hot presence of Jonson.

  ‘Sylvia, I’d like you to meet Paul Jonson.’ He introduced them without looking at either. ‘He’s a journalist. From America.’

  Jonson was effusively polite and interested in Sylvia.

  ‘Carl’s been breaking down my neutrality with inexorable argument,’ he said to her.

  ‘You should have heard his speech,’ she laughed.

  ‘I must see a copy,’ Jonson said. ‘I’ll flash it across every wire service in the States.’

  Sylvia moved off slightly to a friend who had called her.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she said, weaving away.

  ‘You didn’t return my calls,’ Jonson said quietly to him.

  They walked together.

  ‘I’ve been studying – working on the speech. Other things.’

  ‘Look,’ Jonson said with intensity, ‘I’m sorry about the other night. Deeply sorry.’

  He clenched inside as Jonson mentioned it.

  ‘I promise it will never happen again,’ Jonson said.

  A bystander scuffled with a demonstrator and the police moved in to separate them. Other demonstrators bulged around the scuffle and were moved on. Jonson lifted his camera but shrugged and lowered it, turning back to him.

  ‘You’re sure it’s OK between us?’ Jonson pressed.

  ‘Yes, let’s forget it,’ he said, wanting to forget Jonson.

  ‘I’d hate for us not to be able to talk,’ Jonson said, quietly. ‘I value what we have … intellectually.’

  He didn’t answer; although feeling vaguely flattered, he wanted to be away from Jonson.

  ‘You will meet me again … and talk?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been busy, that’s all,’ he lied.

  ‘Meet me after the demonstration for a beer?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening after the demonstration.’

  ‘I’ll watch for a while and then go to the Kings Head – try to make it.’

  Paul Jonson walked beside him for a few minutes, asking questions about the demonstration, and then left. ‘Try to make it,’ he said.

  ‘Who was the American?’ a fellow near him asked, grinning, ‘CIA?’

  When the demonstration broke up he found himself uncomfortably debating whether to meet Paul Jonson. He’d been quite certain during the demonstration that he wouldn’t. But like it or not, he enjoyed his company. But Kim and Sylvia deci
ded it for him; ‘Come and have a beer,’ Kim said, and he went with them. They raved about the demonstration. ‘But we should have sat down – we need dramatic confrontation,’ Kim said.

  Others joined the group.

  ‘You’re not with us,’ Sylvia said quietly to him.

  ‘Oh – just thinking about something,’ he said.

  His mind was on Paul Jonson. He was tired of the demonstration talk. He was tired of their voices. After two beers he said he had to go.

  Sylvia went to the door of the hotel with him. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to go home to study.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ she said, ‘I’ll go some of the way with you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, caught unawares. ‘No, I want to do a few things first.’

  ‘Well, I’ll come along with you.’

  She was searching his face for a sign which would explain his evasiveness.

  ‘I’d rather be alone,’ he said, avoiding her eyes, angry at her for putting him in a corner. ‘I just feel like being alone.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said, shortly.

  He gave her a perfunctory squeeze of the arm and left the bar.

  He walked quickly to the Kings Head Hotel and was relieved to find Paul still there.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ Paul said.

  ‘I nearly didn’t make it,’ he said, carelessly. ‘Sent your propaganda to the States?’

  ‘No. I’m doing a full length “backgrounder” – the climate of opinion – that sort of crap.’

  He wondered if his speech would be printed in the States. That would be one reason to be friendly with Jonson. An opportunity to get stuff across.

  They talked and drank. Paul took him to dinner and then they went to another hotel and drank until closing time.

  They stood outside the hotel. A burning silence after a garrulous evening.

  ‘Well,’ Paul said sheepishly, trying to smile away any implication, ‘I’ve got some cans back at the flat.’

  They looked at each other. He looked away.