American Dreams Read online

“You think I’d be unfaithful? Dumb sonofabitch.” Georges was dramatic. “I am flirting with that waitress precisely so I can be a good husband.” Harold’s lack of understanding amused Georges. Also made him feel lonely.

  “What’s next?” Harold asked.

  “I want something big,” Georges said. “I’m tired of chickenshit.”

  “Damn.” Harold was already scared. His whole life was chickenshit. It was his element. He would not know how to breathe without chickenshit. “Like what?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. What’s big, real big?”

  “Banks.”

  “Dumb sonofabitch. Everybody robs banks.”

  Harold was stumped. Ask him, he’d tell you banks are a world away from chickenshit.

  Lawrence Georges thought about the man who was killed in his living room. He comes home, kisses his wife. The kids are there, the TV. He never knows what hits him. Maybe it was a 30–06. He does not hear glass break. He doesn’t hear anything. Sound’s too slow. He doesn’t feel anything. Pain’s too slow. Does he see anything, Georges wondered? The bullet hits, starting into the tunnel it will make. Catches a bone, pushes that up front. Now maybe he feels the pressure. Not pain, just pressure. The man looks down at his chest, Georges thought, where something is pressing. Does he see the hole? Does he know what is happening? Maybe, Georges concluded, for a tenth of a second. Then he’s in shock. In another tenth of a second, he’s beginning to collapse. Long before he hits the rug, he’s dead.

  Lawrence Georges ran his mind over and around all this, but his mind was more on the man in the car. Georges couldn’t understand that man. To put sights on a man in his living room and take him out as easy as turning off a light. Georges wouldn’t do it, maybe couldn’t. He could kill somebody he knew and didn’t like, somebody who had crossed him. But a stranger in his living room?

  Something lower than the man in the car Georges couldn’t imagine. Who was that man? Maybe he could revenge the dead man, the widow. No, this was bullshit. Georges was following an avenue. He wanted the perfect job, and the perfect job wouldn’t be perfect if civilians were hurt. But scum was different.

  “I’m getting awfully horny,” he said to Harold.

  Harold didn’t feel part of whatever was going on. He wanted to participate. “Do it,” he said, “one time for me.”

  “The left tittie will be yours,” Georges said. “But don’t worry, I’ll take care of it for you.… Know what’s got me curious?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who pulled the trigger?”

  “What do you care? Probably out of town.”

  “You can find out?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “Sure.” Harold shrugged from the waist up.

  “Catch you tomorrow.” Georges stood up.

  Harold was perplexed. Sometimes his friend was too moody.

  At home, Georges got as close to leaping as Mary had seen him in a year. Even with clues, she could never have guessed the lusty thoughts in her husband’s head when he grasped her ass and pushed. They had nothing to do with sex.

  9

  Some men wear a strong cologne. Mac Samson had trailed the reek of unsavory deeds after himself. He wore scandal like a carnation in his lapel. It was as if he had not fully become himself until he had tainted numerous others. What would Samson be on a deserted island? Not lonely but incomplete. He needed to stir himself in with other lives, change those other lives. They were his mirrors, giving confirmation. There are people who cannot function unless they are part of a team. Samson got the idea imperfectly. He could not function unless he was pulling other people down with him.

  Samson did not live in a big city. Anonymity would kill him. He lived in a suburb of Chicago, population 67,000. The country club set numbered hardly a thousand. They all knew him.

  The lady in one scandal was Rachel Smithers, wife of Dr. James Smithers. Rachel felt that life was cheating her. And as if to make sure, she got involved with Mac Samson.

  At least once a month, Dr. Smithers sighted Samson. On the main streets, at the best restaurants, at the club. These were painful encounters for the doctor. He had to live with the knowledge that his wife might still love Samson. Samson, however, enjoyed these sightings. A century or two ago there might have been a duel and Dr. Smithers, win or lose, would have been better off. Certainly public opinion would have been all in favor of a funeral for Mac Samson.

  A challenge to duel would have delighted Samson. Success would have given the passing sensation of fulfillment. He, still standing, right arm outstretched, the other man twisting toward the ground. At that instant Samson would have fully felt he existed. The other man’s abject fate would be proof. The other man was falling, he must therefore be rising.

  Samson, an attorney, did not require the approval of his class. His reputation as a shrewd, tough, vaguely unpalatable person drew customers. He was the rare attorney who could turn the antagonism of judges and juries to his advantage. He unsettled people, their prejudices, their proportions. And in the confusion he could supplant his own brown truths. Samson was the pressure of a tree that grows over your fence and no matter what you do with braces or supports, keeps on growing larger and heavier and leans ever more destructively on your fence. At no time do you have a sense of alarm. But one day your fence is kindling.

  It had been like that with Rachel Smithers. One day she was kindling.

  As a young woman, and stirred by an overdose of high school dramatics, Rachel had believed that she was filled with a rage to live. It was more true that she was filled with rage. For some years she imagined herself on the stage, as she did exhibit a grave cuteness, with blond hair, long and delicate, and a small nose that turned up ever so slightly. The trouble was, her particular rage to live, while filling her with a desire to expand, to experience, and to enjoy, also stymied her with a painful sensation of inertia or ominousness that made nothing seem all that worth bothering with. The compromise was that she married a rather distinguished looking young doctor, ten years older than she was, and began to think of herself as something of a martyr. Probably, if she had taken a leap at Broadway, even if she had been entirely unsuccessful, she would never have ended up trying to stab her husband. On the other hand, she may still have taken up with Mac Samson.

  Not long after he first learned of his wife’s affair, Dr. Smithers almost killed the man, or tried to. The opportunity arose from a crack in reality. Dr. Smithers was driving home, nine in the evening. He saw Mac Samson a hundred feet ahead of him starting across the street. Dr. Smithers surprised himself. He not only wanted to kill the man, he found himself trying. He looked both ways for possible witnesses and began calculating what his closing speed should be to hit the bastard at the crossing. The idea was to bump him, perhaps mash him under a tire. Then the opportunity vanished back into the crack. A dog chased the car, barking. Samson looked toward the commotion. Vaguely aware that the car was moving fast, he stepped purposefully to the sidewalk.

  Smithers expended much prayer on his homicidal emotions. That the man deserved to be run over was clear. That anyone should actually do so was another question. That he should do it himself was out of the question. The most he would permit himself was fervent hope.

  Two years passed before Smithers’ fervent hopes so rearranged the structure of the universe that his hope became a fact.

  Or: two years passed before the moral nature of the universe asserted itself.

  Or: two years passed before Samson’s mounting bad debts, psychically speaking, forced bankruptcy.

  Or: two years passed before sheer and random bad luck caught the poor fellow.

  He was smiling. His handsome, heavy face holding a smile the way Rhett Butler held Scarlett O’Hara. His wife Eloise was saying … actually she knows what she started to say but she doesn’t believe Samson heard. The words were coming from her mouth at the instant a large calibre bullet was pushing into his heart. He staggered sideways
a yard, almost comically, with this look on his face of elaborate surprise, and then he slumped to the floor like a dead man, which he was.

  Eloise could not look away from the body for several seconds. Then she saw the broken glass and realized that the bullet had come from the front lawn.

  It was funny. She would have said she was very much in love with her husband. She was, operatively at any rate, but it turned out to be more of a magic charm. In the lengthy second of his death, she knew that she did not really care that much. The charm had required his presence for its continuation. So long as he was there to enforce the reality of her love, she was in love. She might have said that she could not live without him. All of that. Then he died and the illusion died. She marveled at this, as though she had heard thunder on a clear day. The police and the neighbors who came thought she was in shock. She was in surprise.

  She had herself helped to maintain the magic charm by never hearing what people said about her husband. But, of course, she had heard. She heard but she did not hear. The effort to sustain that duplicity numbed her and left her no energy for investigating illusions. Twelve years of marriage had left her very, very tired.

  All she wanted from the first policeman on the scene was his professional verdict. Was he … really dead?

  She had already a sense of her dilemma if he should revive.

  Eloise Samson liked order. She made lists and checked things off. Mac was almost her opposite. She had been fooled by his law degree and his evident physical strength and his commanding manner. And now here he was dead on their living room carpet, without warning or explanation of any kind. It was just like him, she couldn’t help thinking that.

  Eloise’s picture appeared in the local paper, beside that of her dead husband. She appeared to have ordinary features, dark hair, bangs. She looked plain. Which was deceptive. If a plain woman could be beautiful, Eloise Samson was beautiful. What most people remembered was not her features but a glow, a richness even, that emanated from her dreaminess and an endless hope.

  Dr. Smithers handed the newspaper to his wife without comment. Both slept better that night.

  The newspaper said that Mac Samson was a brilliant student, that he had almost made the Olympic wrestling team, that he was thirty-eight and was survived by his wife and two children, ten and eight. There were no suspects. Police had been able to determine only that the bullet had been fired from directly in front of the house. The neighbors across the street were not implicated. The killer might have been on foot or in a car. Nobody reported seeing a car. Nobody reported hearing the shot. The reporter, with no comment from the police, speculated that a silencer must have been used, and only professional killers used silencers. Samson, the article went on, was an attorney with a solid reputation and represented a variety of businesses and individuals in several types of cases, bankruptcy to divorce.

  The minister who presided at the funeral and offered up such kindly remarks about the deceased was a recent graduate from the seminary, newly assigned to Eloise’s Methodist church. The older minister, who had known Mac Samson for some years, had assigned the young preacher for precisely the reason that ignorance, if not bliss, is sometimes very helpful. The older minister felt that Mac Samson was a rotten person and thought that he himself might choke if he had attempted to say anything noble and sweetly sentimental about the dead.

  So Mac Samson was now in a bronze box, with rouged cheeks and red lips, not causing anybody any trouble, for a change.

  10

  Raphael Higgins lay back on the sofa and contemplated the light in the ceiling. It was too bright and made a haze of everything when he stared at it.

  The woman was named Sonia. She sat across the room and watched. He could stare at a silly damned light because he had on sunglasses. That was how she saw it. He hadn’t spoken in fifteen minutes. He was all right but she couldn’t stand the silences. She hadn’t known what loneliness was until she had been lonely with Higgins. She felt that she had ceased to exist, so great was the power of his indifference. All right, she would wait him out. She had things to think about, too. Like what? Like getting up in the morning and getting to work, for Christ-sakes. And it sure wouldn’t be any easier if she stayed up half the night with this character.

  Sonia’s job bored her but she was waiting for moves from her boss once removed. That would improve her “career opportunities.” Sonia thought about her mother, her birthday coming up. What do you give a woman who doesn’t have anything, that was the question. Where do you start? She cocked an eye at Higgins, him with his sunglasses indoors on a rainy Manhattan night and just lying there like another cushion. Where his mind was she didn’t know, that was for sure. Well, when the boss once removed did something more than wink when she passed by, she would give Mr. Sunglasses the quick goodbye. Still, it was fun when Higgins changed gears. He’d be down her dress or up her dress the same second he stood up. With Higgins elaborate sequences unfolded like in dreams, smooth and warm, and you only woke up later and thought how crazy it was.

  Higgins thought he was intelligent but he continued to do chancey things. He called it his weakness. His fatal weakness, he sometimes called it. Higgins decided he might as well step over to Europe. There was the chance of making the connection. Expenses maybe a thousand. Odds three to one against. The deal wouldn’t run up any money worth the effort, but he wouldn’t be any more bored there than where he was. Certainly a positive point. The problem was friends. He wondered if he had any. Contrariwise, what had he done to deserve any? Never mind. People were ready to fuck him, eager to fuck him. Being tough was hard work. People wouldn’t leave you alone. What the hell, it was just a question of how you went. When he was younger and more romantic, Higgins decided it would be in battle or with somebody’s wife. Either exit was class. More and more he thought it was going to be a mix-up and some kid or other incompetent would kill him. No class. All right, he would go to see this guy, who was probably not a friend. They would act like friends, almost as good. Drinks would be consumed midst smiles. The guy would know some girls. Higgins remembered that he had a girl, named Sonia. She rose up before him as a skeleton and he laid muscles and skin on her and created in his mind what she in fact was.

  When was the last time he had looked into somebody’s eyes and wanted something good for that person? Maybe Daphne’s eyes, that were great limpid galaxies. Maybe when otherwise? Who could count the years?

  Sonia crossed her legs, exposing a knee that she thought not bad at all. Sonia’s dark secret, she thought, was that she was capable of anything if a man pushed. Hell, if he asked. Even if his need was great enough. As it was Higgins’ pleasure to find out what people were capable of, Sonia had been forced to examine this secret in the glare of recent experience. There was what he had done to her in the phone booth, or she to him. Telling her he had to make a call, business, and he’s faking dialog with a dial tone while she’s blocking the booth and nearly fainting from the fingers inside her. He says then, heh, you sit here, talk to this crazy guy, and she’s startled at hearing the sound of a dial tone and the sound of a zipper. Sonia squirmed perceptibly in her chair.

  “Sonia,” Higgins said, “you have enough to drink?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. What are you thinking?”

  “You know I was a professor once?”

  “No kidding?”

  “Art. Artsy fartsy smartsy.”

  “No kidding.” Sonia was trying to decide if she was sticky.

  “A girls’ school in New Jersey. You hear of Douglass?” Higgins sat up and put his feet on the carpet.

  “No.”

  “The things I did,” he said.

  “What?”

  “To the girls.”

  “Oh …” Sonia smiled and squirmed perceptibly.

  “Goddamn.” Higgins grinned.

  Sonia grinned.

  Higgins leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The years burned smokily in his brain, like thick-piled leaves in Autumn. “I remember this girl
named Lucy. Very short, big tits. Like the Lady of Wilmendorf.”

  “What?”

  “A statue. Looked like Lucy.”

  “Big …”

  “Huge.”

  “You mean bigger …” Sonia squared her shoulders back.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Sonia looked hurt.

  “But you’re prettier.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “Lucy was a dwarf.”

  “Oh.” Sonia smiled more.

  “But when she was standing on my desk, she wasn’t so short.”

  “Your desk?”

  Higgins remembered that he had told her she was a work of art. He didn’t say which one. Lucy had been so grateful—her body was out of fashion—for his demented professorial love. “There were ugly rumors about me,” Higgins said.

  “I bet.”

  “They had to get rid of me.”

  “I bet.”

  Higgins stood up and gave Sonia a long Hollywood kiss before he began tossing her clothes all over the room.

  The next afternoon Higgins went to his doctor. The doctor was old. He needed a doctor. Whatever bad he said, Higgins said, “You and me both, Doc.”

  The doctor said, “You don’t eat right, you don’t sleep right, you don’t exercise right. You don’t live right. You’ll probably die of some unpleasant disease.”

  “You and me both, Doc.”

  “Why do you come here, you don’t listen to me.”

  “I do, Doc, I really do.”

  Higgins was envious of the doctor. When he saw the doctor, he saw a man with a long well-spent life behind him. Higgins wondered what that must feel like? The doctor had eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren, at last count. Higgins liked to see the doctor now and then, the way some people like to stop by a church for a few minutes.

  Afterward Higgins walked downtown toward Grand Street, beyond SoHo. He had two people to see. Both had promised consignments. Higgins walked through people on the sidewalk feeling that he was from another country although he was not. He wondered where they all went, what safe, ordinary lives they inhabited? He scorned them. He wanted to go home with them.