The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  She braced herself for a life or death struggle.

  But he was gentle – and practised.

  He complimented her on her body.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, aroused in a way by his scrubbing touch and his strong intention – aware that he knew precisely what he wanted to do with her and intended doing it.

  After drying her with a coarse handwoven towel he took her upstairs to the bedroom where they lay down on the wide bed which she could see was hewn from logs. He lit a small oil lamp beside the bed. Her damp hair made her slightly uncomfortable.

  She was relieved to see her clothes in the room – carefully folded and hung.

  ‘Do you have trouble with orgasm?’ he asked, softly.

  God. She lay there irritated, without answering, disliking the question.

  ‘I suppose not,’ she said, thinking that she’d never had to worry much about it.

  ‘I mean do you take long? Should I wait for you?’

  Not only was she embarrassed, she was affronted – did he have a questionnaire? – ‘I really don’t know,’ she said, ‘I haven’t timed myself.’ A little nastily.

  ‘I don’t mean to be embarrassing,’ he said, apologetically, ‘but I always think it’s best to get these things out – out of the way.’

  He was stroking her legs with his hand and feeling her breast.

  ‘You tell me when you’re ready to climax,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait for you.’

  She didn’t speak. His strong sense of intention had frayed into a desperate effort to please. She was turned off.

  ‘All right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, closing her eyes, resigned to enduring it.

  ‘Do you like breast stimulation?’

  She didn’t answer.

  They fucked, she didn’t relax and faked climax, telling him by sounds, she hoped, that she’d finished, although he kept saying, ‘You right? You right? You finished?’ and to stop him she nodded and then he whispered, ‘That was great – was it great for you?’

  She again nodded, keeping her eyes shut, and reaching blindly for cigarettes she’d put beside the bed.

  He chattered for a while about the nature of orgasm; sexual difficulty; being candid about sex; and how few men and women knew women had orgasms. She didn’t comment. She wondered how many women had lied to him about himself and about their reaction to him. What could you do?

  She stubbed out her cigarette, feeling bad, and feigned sleep.

  She was awoken in the morning by him doing his exercises on parallel bars at the far end of the room. He didn’t say a word or smile or wink but kept solidly on. She watched him from the bed, dying for a cup of coffee.

  When he finished he came over panting and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Started,’ he panted, ‘on the 5BX – Canadian Air Force – have developed – my own – programme – a hybrid of yoga and Scandinavian gymnastics.’

  From a drawer beside the bed he took a book containing hand drawings of various exercise positions and tables – all lettered in his handwriting. ‘That’s my programme,’ he said.

  She could think only of coffee. ‘I don’t even exercise – let alone have my own programme,’ she said. ‘I’m basically unhealthy,’ she said with barely concealed hostility.

  He went to the kitchen and returned with herbal tea and meal porridge, hand ground – ‘See if you like these,’ he said.

  She left half of both.

  And as she smoked her second cigarette he said, ‘Well, how do you feel,’ anxiously, and she saw that the question was directed at her psyche, health, and mood all at once. As though he was saying, ‘How was I?’

  ‘Oh, great,’ she said, not wanting to give any sort of analysis of the evening, not wanting to deceive him any more than she had to.

  She washed with the home-made soap she now found repugnant, and dressed. They walked through the garden of the house.

  ‘Would you have time to look at my observatory?’ He pointed to a dome structure at the back.

  ‘No, must rush, really, some other time,’ she said.

  ‘Then there will be another time?’ he said.

  She’d trapped herself. ‘I do have a regular sort of thing with a boy,’ she said, as a way out, smiling.

  ‘Then there won’t be another time,’ he said, logically.

  ‘Let’s leave it to chance.’

  They walked for a distance without speaking.

  ‘Do you find me a bore?’ he asked.

  She went on guard. She did. But what could you say? ‘But you’re a very interesting man,’ she said, ‘a very accomplished man.’

  ‘My wife – just after we separated – said to me, “The trouble with you, Hugo – you’re a damn bore!”’

  ‘That was a fairly destructive thing to say.’

  ‘It gave me a devastating insight – I was a damn bore.’

  She went to her bag for a cigarette.

  ‘Her words are forever inscribed on my mind as a warning – and it permitted me to correct the fault – in your words I made myself, “an interesting man”.’

  They reached the gate.

  The first personal statement made during the whole overnight visit or the months, in fact, that she’d worked with him. She had to get out before she felt she had to be honest with him. She had her own problems.

  She kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘You are – you are a very interesting man – you must be a very fulfilled man.’ It sounded so formal. Too bad.

  ‘But one needs more than that, one needs more, one needs a woman – about the place,’ he said, hopelessly, pleadingly, not only to her, perhaps not to her at all, but to all damn womanhood.

  She nodded sympathically. ‘I really must rush,’ she said, ‘I must be off. I must rush.’

  The Coca-Cola Kid

  ‘I don’t know why we’re here,’ she said.

  They slammed the Citroen doors in unison.

  ‘You know why we’re here,’ he said.

  They walked across the lawn to the door of the Yacht Club. She didn’t answer so he answered for her. ‘… To meet the enemy,’ he said, as they went from the chirping country darkness into the rattle.

  The Young Liberals were not yet drunk. A few couples had begun to dance but were not yet loose. All the poker machines were in use. The band was playing – staring out, in a trance, to the private world of dance musicians. The stewards swayed with trays of drinks, rushing with a professional slowness. The dance music and intermittent slugging of the poker machines filled the crevices between conversations.

  They left their coats at the door.

  ‘Perhaps I should’ve worn a dinner suit,’ he said, not meaning it. Trying to fill the dull emptiness between him and his wife.

  ‘Only a few’re in dinner suits,’ she said.

  He knew why they were there. They were there because they were bored and lonely in a town where they hardly knew anyone – let alone enough people to pick and choose politically. The town didn’t even have a Communist Party.

  He looked for a drink, to ease himself into the ill-fitting situation. A shoehorn drink.

  He stopped a steward with one hand and turning to his wife said, ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘Beer,’ she said.

  He wanted to throw a few down fast.

  ‘There’s Kevin and Gwen,’ she said, pointing her beer across the dance floor.

  ‘The revolutionaries made it,’ Kevin said, greeting them.

  ‘We’re waiting to be thrown out,’ he said.

  ‘Please – no politics tonight,’ Kevin said laughing. ‘Remember I arranged the invitation.’

  Kevin introduced them to another couple. They talked. Then he danced with Sylvia. ‘Now you’ve brought us here, at least be agreeable,’ she said to him. He felt as soon as she said it that the party was a mistake.

  After the dance he drifted off and lost four dollars on the poker machines and resented it.

  ‘I warned you to limit yourself to two dollar
s,’ his wife said when he drifted back to where Kevin, Gwen and she were seated around a jug of beer.

  He wasn’t looking for chastisement. He glanced at her but didn’t retort.

  He began an aggressive talk with Percival who was on the executive of the group – one of the political ones.

  ‘I agree,’ said Percival. ‘Take the farms away from those who mismanage them.’

  His aggression was seeped away by the agreement.

  ‘I’m pleased you agree,’ he said, not meaning it, with it sounding so agreeable that it disgusted him. He was caught in polite conversation. He wanted to be disagreeable. He wanted to demonstrate where he stood, who he was. He wasn’t one of them.

  He caught his wife’s expression which said, ‘Must you talk politics?’ and looked away.

  He stood up and left the table. He was alone again. He resisted the temptation to go back to the poker machines. But he didn’t want the small talk of the table. He didn’t want the bitchiness of his wife. He stood alone, a hand in his pocket, drinking too fast.

  He went to the balcony of the club. It was then that he met the American.

  He was standing alone leaning against a wall, drink in his hand, bow-tied, looking across the water. He turned and acknowledged him with his eyes and raised his glass in salute, saying in a slightly slurred American accent:

  ‘I must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky. All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’

  A smile squeezed out of him involuntarily as he heard the American’s recitation – it disarmed him.

  ‘And furthermore, Buddy, I know the last stanza too,’ the American said.

  ‘Must go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy … da da dah da dah … and all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover.’ The American seemed to falter, paused, and then continued, ‘And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.’

  The American’s face then sagged, sadly. He drank from his glass, his hand wrapped around it in a tight grip.

  He said to the American, ‘I thought only Australian and British kids learned Masefield.’

  ‘I learned Masefield, Buddy, I learned Masefield.’ His face tightened up again for performance.

  ‘I’m going to be a pirate with a bright brass pivot gun,

  And an island in the Spanish Main beyond the setting sun.’

  ‘I don’t know that one.’

  ‘The Tarry Buccaneer,’ he said, ‘The Tarry Buccaneer.’

  He lapsed again.

  ‘Do you sail?’ he asked the American, again writhing against the compulsion to be ‘sociable’.

  ‘I fly,’ the American said, and then in a formal voice, ‘so you’d like to be a pirate with a big brass pivot gun – come in, sit down – do you smoke? – no, have one of mine – I think we can find you a suitable position – provided of course that you have the requisite qualifications – have you a brass pivot gun?’ It was a meandering performance for the American’s private amusement.

  Then the American turned to him as though he had remembered his presence and became genial. ‘My name’s Becker – Atlanta – the Coca-Cola kid from Coca-Cola City.’

  They shook hands heavily and overlong like two drunks. ‘How do you mean Coca-Cola kid?’

  ‘I’m the Coca-Cola kid – Coca-Cola – work for Coca-Cola – here from the parent company.’

  His resistance to Becker grouped instantly, his sociability strong-armed out of the way. An enemy.

  ‘Out here to rot some teeth,’ he said, softening it only mildly with a quarter smile, glad at last to be critical, although aware of the effort it took to be unpleasant against the mood.

  Becker smiled, puzzled, and seemed to fumble to make out the true nature of the remark, as though only hazily aware that it was not just facetious.

  He wished he’d been able to say something that let Becker know he’d met the unexpected – that he was face to face with a radical.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Becker said, coming to a realisation, almost singing, ‘what have we here – an enemy of Coca-Cola?’

  ‘I guess I am,’ he said, trying to be firm – it wasn’t exactly how he’d seen himself – ‘among other things.’

  Becker shook his head with disbelief. ‘Could not be – could not be – the enemies of Coca-Cola have all been liquidated – Atlanta had them all liquidated.’

  He didn’t smile at the humour.

  ‘How could you talk about the Holy Water like that?’ Becker said. ‘Why, we made a profit of eighty-nine million dollars last year – why, baby, the whole world drinks Coca-Cola.’

  ‘A few million people can’t be wrong,’ he said, coldly.

  ‘A few million? Baby, ninety-five million people drink Coke every single day – you saying people don’t know what they like?’

  Becker saw a steward. ‘Steward, my good man –’ he turned to him and asked what he was drinking and then ordered.

  ‘Why, Coca-Cola,’ Becker went on, ‘is an everyday word in every language – it’s in the dictionaries.’

  ‘Truck drivers wash their engine parts in it to eat away the grease,’ he said, ‘and stomach linings and teeth …’ He wanted to say something about economic priorities.

  ‘Their parts? – I wash my parts in it too. Don’t tell me the one about the tooth dissolving overnight in a glass of Coke – I don’t want to hear that one.’ He shook his head. The steward came back with the drinks.

  ‘What do you do for the good of the world, Kim boy?’ Becker drank deeply.

  ‘I’m a teacher,’ he said, feeling a certain virtue.

  ‘Yes,’ Becker said, looking out to sea, ‘you teach good habits, I teach the bad.’

  ‘If that’s the way you feel,’ he said, seizing the point, ‘why don’t you get out?’

  Becker turned back with a grin. ‘Hell, I’m not serious – I like Coke – hell!’

  He blushed at having failed to see Becker’s flippancy.

  ‘Now look –’ Becker said, with a loud selling voice, ‘you might give kids a lot of good ideas but you give them a lot of Godalmighty crap too – I just push a good soft drink – the best as it so happens – nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘But the waste of it all.’ He moved on to the line he wanted to argue. ‘The waste of resources when they could be used for food. Socially desirable ends.’

  ‘I notice you spending a few damn dollars on social undesirables,’ Becker said, clinking their glasses to make his point.

  ‘Personal charity is no answer.’

  ‘Stop.’ Becker held up his hand in a halt sign. ‘Stop – the game’s over. I’m here to get drunk, not to sell Coca-Cola or debate the world.’

  He wondered if he’d scored against Becker. It was typical of people like Becker that they could switch off matters of conscience.

  Becker had gone for more drinks.

  He came back. ‘I’m going to be a pirate with a bright brass pivot gun.’ Gracefully Becker presented the drink. ‘I want to tell you a secret.’ Becker sounded drunk. ‘I don’t want to be the Coca-Cola kid,’ he shook his head, ‘I want to be a jazz pirate.’

  ‘Jazz pirate?’

  ‘Jazz pianist – jazz penis,’ Becker said.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ he asked without interest. Becker was obviously not going to talk seriously.

  ‘They don’t have jazz penises any more – not any more.’ He waved his drink around. ‘I practised every day – I wrote for lessons – filled in a coupon back of a comic book.’

  At first he thought Becker was rambling on with nonsense but realised he wasn’t altogether joking. He looked at him with slightly more sympathy, although jazz pianists weren’t actually in the vanguard of social reform. Decadent white jazz.

  He stood there to finish the drink with Becker, who didn’t say any more. He seemed to be conversing with his own thoughts.

  He found himself with nothing to say either and stood for a second rebelliously uncomfortable –
stymied – unable to engage Becker. Then he wandered off with a glance at Becker who wasn’t looking and appeared not to notice.

  He saw his wife dancing with Kevin. They weren’t aware he was watching. He felt as if he were spying. He was spying – but his wife was innocently serious and there was a quite proper distance between them. They were talking more than dancing. He joined them when the dance finished.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ his wife queried.

  ‘Talking to an American – the Coca-Cola Kid.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Reciting Masefield.’

  Her face expressed irritation and she turned to Kevin, obviously with no intention of forcing her way through his enigmatic answers. He didn’t care to help.

  Most people were on the way to being drunk. The poker machines were rattling faster. The dancing was full of sex.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ he heard his wife say politely to him as though she felt it necessary to say something to link herself with him, perhaps as a conciliatory offer. He recognised it as a move to end the bad day they’d been having together.

  ‘What can you expect from the sons and daughters of graziers and Coca-Cola executives?’ he said, matching the effort of her wifely question with a husbandly tone. But it really didn’t dissolve the bad feeling between them. Somehow he didn’t care, somehow he preferred the bad feeling.

  Later he went to the lavatory. In the lavatory standing side by side at the urinal he heard two young men talking about skiing. ‘She had the bottom part of her leg in plaster, you see,’ one said, and the other laughed.

  He felt distaste and resentment. Because of their exclusiveness.

  He decided to look at the other rooms of the club. Along a corridor he heard piano playing. Sloppy piano playing. He followed the sound into a small carpeted room with glass cases containing a few books fallen like dominoes. A few dusty trophies. Over in the far corner in the half light Becker was playing the piano, his drink on the piano seat beside him.

  He felt obliged to say something now he’d entered the room.

  ‘Practising for that job as jazz pianist?’ he said.