The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  People screwed around in the seats to look at the speaker.

  ‘Our vegetarian friend,’ the chairman whispered, smiling, and then said to the audience, ‘well, that closes our seminar and I’d like to thank you for your attendance.’

  ‘Pollution of the blood.’

  Becker tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, not the troublemaker, not the audience buzz, not their expectant looks, not anything.

  ‘Well, that closes this seminar. If there are no further questions, we hope that it has given you food for thought.’

  ‘I said, sir, pollution of the blood.’

  Becker looked at the man.

  ‘Perhaps the gentleman from Coca-Cola would be so kind as to answer me this …’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the chairman said, smiling, placating, ‘the seminar is closed.’

  ‘Pollution of the blood stream, sir.’

  ‘I’m afraid that closes the seminar,’ the chairman said, trying to give finality to the situation by gathering his papers.

  ‘Eat only the foods of the earth,’ the vegetarian said.

  ‘Oh shut up,’ Terri cried from the body of the hall, ‘shut up, you stupid man.’

  Becker was surprised and warmed by her support. He was not accustomed to support.

  ‘Pollution of the blood.’

  Unnecessarily the chairman said, ‘Thank you’ again, coloured, and left the rostrum.

  Before Becker could move from the rostrum the chairman had scurried away, and the people, deciding there was to be no clash, emptied out.

  Becker, in his crumpled white suit, was left standing before the empty lecture hall. They sure knew how to empty a hall.

  A great note. A great note to end on. Wait till Sam heard.

  Terri came to his side.

  ‘I was going to punch him,’ she said.

  Becker, thumbs in his braces like a country sherrif, hummed ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, to calm himself.

  A great note, all right, to end on.

  ‘Can I come to the party with you?’

  ‘I can’t guarantee you’ll be at ease,’ Becker told Terri.

  ‘Coca-Cola people?’

  ‘No – people I’ve met through business.’

  ‘Business people?’

  ‘Business people.’

  She sat quietly as they drove back from the seminar.

  ‘Will they mind me without shoes and in jeans?’

  ‘No – couldn’t imagine any objection – it’s a casual poolside party.’

  ‘They’ll be expensively dressed.’

  ‘Uh uh.’

  More quiet.

  Becker also remarked to himself that they would also not be heavy with the odour of lust and spent sex.

  ‘Do you want me to come?’

  Becker hesitated. ‘I can state quite straightly that I don’t see you fitting in very well – that doesn’t worry me if it doesn’t worry you.’ In truth it worried all hell out of him.

  ‘Well, I’ll come then.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  They drove.

  ‘What’s a soda?’

  ‘How do you mean – what’s a soda?’

  ‘You hear Americans in films ordering sodas.’

  Becker spoke sadly, softly. ‘Good sodas are a rare and dying commodity – not many around who can throw together a good soda.’

  ‘What are they?’ she repeated.

  ‘Firstly, the glass must be chilled – some guys just use the glass direct from the wash and it’s hot – the syrup must be chilled, the water must be chilled … a soda is a very cold drink … it’s designed as a very cold, cold drink … one scoop of cream … just one … not fluid milk or whipped cream … just cream … the ice cream and the syrup are mixed in with a jet of soda and then you fill the glass with soda and mix it with a few sharp squirts, so.’ Becker imitated and gave squirting noises. ‘That’s a soda. Aren’t many guys around who can mix a good soda.’

  Talking about sodas made Becker aware that he was a long way from old Atlanta, Georgia, and the action.

  Terri considered it for a while and then said, ‘Why do you know so much about sodas?’

  ‘It’s my business – it’s my business to know about drinks.’

  ‘Do you know what a “red” is?’

  Becker thought, ‘You’ve got me.’

  ‘It’s the drink the kids are mad about in hotels – when their parents take them to pubs – it’s lemonade and grenadine – and a straw. It looks grownup.’

  Becker chuckled. ‘I like that,’ he said. ‘Do you know what grenadine is?’

  Terri shook her head.

  ‘French cordial – made from pomegranate fruit.’

  At the party Terri and Becker took their drinks and smiled.

  Becker thought Terri, to her credit, was trying. Barefoot, jeans, and Women’s Liberation tee shirt and stinking of sex, she needed to try. However, she didn’t appear as dishabille as he had privately worried she might.

  The house bared itself to the sea and cradled a swimming pool.

  A white-coated chef cooked silently at a barbecue surrounded by drunk noise.

  Becker was then approached by the one overdressed woman at the party who by her overdressed presence threw Terri into relaxed and appropriate contrast.

  ‘Oh, you’re the American,’ the woman said, a matronly marcasite brooch tied in a knot on her breast. ‘Oh, you’re the American.’

  She sat down beside them. ‘I adore American fashions.’

  ‘Are you in the fashion business?’ Becker guessed, finding it difficult to believe from her appearance.

  ‘I’m about to make a triumphant return from ten years buried in the graveyard of suburban martyrdom.’

  She’d said that before, Becker could tell. He observed, on the other side of his brain, a comfort from the pressure of Terri’s non-conformist denim leg against his.

  ‘I feel that the fashions have turned the full circle and caught me up – it’s back to me – I’m a fashion commentator by profession – these maxis are so feminine, definitely me,’ she said, overloudly for confidence, drinking her brandy crusta.

  ‘I suppose you’re delightfully uncaring about dress,’ the ex-fashion commentator pelted at Terri, glancing up and down the jeans.

  ‘I’m turned on by Indian styles,’ Terri said, ever-so-politely.

  ‘Oh really, how fascinating,’ the woman said, with the emphasis which Becker observed began with unfelt enthusiasm and died immediately to intentional uninterest.

  ‘And what burning cause does the tee shirt represent?’ the ex-fashion commentator asked, as they were joined by another lady.

  Becker knew that Terri would break. Becker knew he had goofed in bringing her. This was no place for kooks. His mistake.

  ‘Women’s Lib,’ she said. ‘Women’s Liberation.’

  Becker wasn’t sure what Women’s Liberation were on about. He remembered something from Time. But he knew this – it was giving the two ladies an instant pain in the gut. He sensed that for a discussion topic it had a dangerous wail about it.

  ‘Oh, the men haters,’ the second lady said. ‘Why, darling? Why do you hate men?’

  ‘You were just complaining about housewives in suburbia,’ Terri pointed out to the ex-fashion commentator, ‘and I only hate some men,’ she said to the other with bare politeness, ‘and a lot of women,’ she added, ‘especially those who do the dirt on their sex.’

  Oh oh, here we go. Inside himself, Becker whistled a hymn of deliverance, as he watched the personalities take a collision course.

  ‘Oh, you resent ladies who love their husbands and their families?’ the ex-fashion commentator said.

  ‘Yes,’ Terri said loudly as they met in collision, ‘I’m a man-hating, bra-burning, lesbian member of the castration brigade. My mind’s between my legs because it suits men to keep me in underpaid mentally unfulfilling jobs, make women have backyard abortions, fuck them without caring if they like it. You women stink and your m
en stink – from their mother-fucking socks to their short back and sides, from their piss-stained jockstraps to their Apex badges. All power to every woman who’s been put down and fucked over and I’m going to tell every man who does – to go suck his own cock and to every woman who submits – go lie in their own shit.’

  It was a speedy speech, similar, Becker imagined, to being thrown through a plate-glass window. He stared deeply down into his empty glass wanting to be huddled there at the bottom. He looked up and thought the two women had lost their face muscles. Then one laughed, a squeezed-out little laugh, and said. ‘Really? Oh there’s Jenny – I must go over.’

  The other said, ‘I must go to the little girl’s room,’ and then hearing her expression and guessing that it was probably a Liberation crime, laughed neurotically and left Becker standing with Terri and their empty glasses.

  Becker knew one thing. The party was, for them, over.

  Close to tears, Terri said, ‘I’m sorry – well, they asked for it. Women’s Liberation is not a big thing for me at all – they asked for it, that’s all. I got it all from Kate Jennings.’

  ‘It’s been quite a day, quite a day,’ Becker said, more to God than to Terri.

  ‘I want to go.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Hold on.’ Terri went to the lavatory, not, Becker prayed, to continue the encounter. He rocked there for a minute on his own, managing one uncertain chuckle. A bad day for PR. A bad day.

  Cockburn came over. ‘Nice to see you Becker. Those outlines are finished. I’ll drop them in on Monday. The figures too.’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  Terri came back and after pleasantries with Cockburn they left.

  ‘I wrote, “Women Demand the Right to Control Your Own Bodies” on the wall of their bathroom in texta colour,’ she said. ‘They’ll never get it off.’

  Becker reeled as her confession smacked into him.

  His social life was already, to say the least, thin. Oh, this country.

  ‘But Terri, why?’ he groaned.

  ‘Propaganda.’

  They were driving when Terri said with a giggle, ‘I also wrote “Becker Sucks Cocks”.’

  Bang. His palms wept sweat. ‘Now, come on …’ He turned to her, disbelieving, horror-struck. ‘No?’

  She giggled.

  He dabbed his sweating brow, wiped his palms.

  ‘I wrote it on a mirror,’ she said. ‘They’ll be able to rub that off easily.’

  ‘Oh good,’ Becker said, absolutely horror-struck, ‘oh good, that’s just fine, that’s good, very good, it’ll rub off easily, will it? Oh good, very good.

  ‘You didn’t really?’ he pleaded.

  ‘I didn’t think you cared – it was a joke – those people are so crummy.’

  As they drove, Becker, to escape his horror, told Terri, in a low homesick voice, about the Dogwood Festival in Atlanta where he dearly wanted to be.

  ‘We have the usual thing,’ he told her, ‘you can go to the sculpture – they pile in all the First National Bank lobby and they have all the gems and such at the Fulton Bank. Square dancing with the Greater Atlanta Federation of Square Dances – in Lenox Square – the Bottle Club have a show.’

  She butted in, ‘I’m sorry about writing that if it’s upset you – you sound so … crestfallen.’ She touched him. ‘They’ll take it as a joke.’

  ‘Please, let’s not mention it again. And no, they will not take it as a joke.’ Cockburn might, he thought, but the others … Jeez-us!

  Becker persevered with the programme of the Dogwood Festival – ‘There’s the jazz – the jazz down in Ruby Red’s warehouse – Dixieland jazz – lovely, oh boy, lovely.’

  He mused, he recollected, ‘The Atlanta Dixieland Jazz Society, I was a member, albeit not a very active one.’

  She was crying now. She should be crying.

  ‘Why the crying?’ He placed an awkward arm around her.

  ‘Why do you do it – why do you mix with those shits, those business shits, and their frightful women?’ she cried.

  ‘Oh, they’re not so bad,’ he said, ‘just react badly,’ and then he lied, ‘They don’t matter over much to me – just acquaintances.’

  ‘But you don’t belong there.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ Becker said, ‘yes I do, I’m their sort,’ or at least he had been.

  ‘You’re not,’ she shouted, stopping her crying, ‘you’re not, you’re not – you’re different.’

  ‘No, Terri,’ Becker said, this time surely, or at least trying for certainty, ‘I’m a man of business, a merchant, a pedlar, and I work for Coca-Cola and I like it. I’m in soft drink – soft drink and the distribution of soft drink.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  Terri sat in total silence, crying a sob now and then. Becker gave her his awkward comfort.

  A few miles further on she turned to Becker and said, putting her hands on him, ‘Jesus, I like you.’

  Becker was touched. It almost compensated for his social destruction back at the party.

  ‘You kook,’ he said, ‘I like you,’ and gave her his awkward affection.

  ‘You’re not a business man,’ she said, trying another tone, ‘not really.’

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’ll prove it – now, take investment – now, accepting losses is the most important single investment device to ensure safety of capital. It is also the action people know the least about. Too often the investor is prone to say that losses are only paper. He looks at the dividend and capital gains and forgets that some capital losses are inevitable and must always be deducted from gains. Whenever an owner gets a small profit he takes it and when the stocks sustain a paper loss the stock is held in the hope it will come back and eventually, of course, the account is frozen …’

  ‘Stop it,’ Terri said.

  ‘Convinced?’

  ‘Yes, I’m convinced.’

  At Terri’s flat they made love and Becker felt a very tender affection for her and her kookiness. At other times he thought of other such things as Carolina and Georgia in the springtime. The cherry blossoms of Charlotte in April, the tall Charlotte banks, higher than any blossoms. The jazz at Ruby Red’s. He also thought of these things: grenadine, chilled sodas, lime fruit, Justerini and Brooks, Denominazione di Origine Conrollata, Wolfschmidts, Lowenbrau, and other things which afterwards he could not recall for listing. He also racked his brain for a way of explaining to his friends and associates the scrawled message, ‘Becker Sucks Cocks’, but was unable to find one.

  Jonson’s Letter

  Hotel Merlin

  Kuala Lumpur

  My dear Carl,

  No, I don’t accept that our last night together at the apartment was ‘a further demoralising business’, nor do I accept that I was ‘again to blame’ for what happened. You have agreed on numerous occasions (and on this occasion too!) that love is possible between men, and that it follows as a logical extension that physical expression of this love should occur. Remember also, Carl, that you were the one who, that significant and painful six months ago, spontaneously initiated the physical side of our relationship. But I thought as you wrote further on in the letter that I detected a relaxation of your troubled and censorious beginning. By the last page, which I now realize you wrote the following night, you had completely reversed your feelings. I was relieved.

  That out of the way, I want to say how much gladness you gave me by being with me on my last night. I now know that I’ll probably be gone for about three months – Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia and back again. The Agency Chief up here said I was to be given ‘a working acquaintance’ with Asia (in three months?). Whatever that may mean. Sometimes I agree with you about my countrymen.

  The thing which I regret most and which worries me is that I cannot be with you during the next months which could be so crucial for you. Conscription is an evil thing in that it forcibly takes away a man’s autonomy and makes a decision for him which no man should make for
another – to kill or not. It chooses a man’s enemies for him. (But here I am telling you.)

  Your decision to refuse to go into the army is of course the ultimate protest and while I admire you for it I harbor dreadful fears for your well-being. It could change the quality of your life and your personality. If you go to jail for two years (is that really likely?) not only would we be separated, which I cannot begin to imagine, but you would be separated from your intellectual resources and milieu which are basic to your development. Isn’t conscientious objection for non-religious people possible? You must have explored it. What about going ‘underground’? Surely the war can’t go on for much longer and by doing this you could maintain some freedom of manoeuvre and some degree of normal life – even if you were, so to speak, ‘on the run’. I would certainly, this goes without saying, give you all the assistance I could (financial and otherwise) and I say that with tremendous heartfelt fervor. I know that leaving the country isn’t possible now – what about deferment?

  Of course my deepest fear is for your emotional and physical well-being should you go to prison. I see you as a tender and sensitive young man (don’t turn away with embarrassment) and from what we know of prison life, ‘tender and sensitive’ young men are often victims of savage and coarse sexual treatment. It makes me wince. You must find a way of avoiding prison.

  To move now to the happier part of your letter. Your decision to live with me – which I take is final? – is momentous news. But when contrasted with the possibility of losing you to prison, it is as if I am being offered paradise or hell – the decision resting with a petty legal system. The absence of a decision is insufferable.

  Practically, move in as soon as you want – you have a key. If you feel we need a bigger place we can arrange that on my return.

  To get back to the last night we spent together. I enjoyed talking muchly to you for those last hours and I now feel kind of guilty that I didn’t force myself to say a little more directly what I wanted to say. But the biggest problem is really quite simple – it’s merely that I can’t put into words all I want to say about you and me and our future. We will have time some day to talk it out and perhaps it is just as well to take it slow at the start. I appreciate, too, how difficult the decision to share an apartment with me was for you, knowing your confusion about the physical thing. Somewhere sometime we’ll solve this confusion and if you’re interested go further and deeper into such things. Though it has been a painful period it cannot have failed to have taught us both something. As you have said, you do not ‘brood’ as much about the puzzling physical side of it as you once did. You may also think that I have worked it all out, being older than you, but although I am not racked by it as you are, I have qualms. Sometimes I’ve been in courtrooms back in the city and listened to cases involving perverts and have felt that I should be up there too – that I should just get up and volunteer myself to the court for sentence. They are only passing moments of utter self-condemnation, but still, manifestations of irrational guilt. I’ll show you my diary pages about it someday.