Americana (25 page)

“Why, you’re taller than Clyde,” Mrs. Hunter said.

The Gossages felt me up, Henry and Lucy, and I spoke with Justin Hill about the Southeast Conference versus the Big Ten. My father had his arm around me for a few minutes. We were talking with Claire Collier, a tall good-looking woman. We were all talking simultaneously. I went over to the Rayburns and Taylors and said all the same things I had just said to Mrs. Collier. My mother usually referred to Mrs. Collier as “the Collier woman.” This seemed to imply some distant scandal. I was aware that Amy Loomis and I, who had been at opposite ends of the room, were slowly approaching a confrontation. It was as though all the energies broadcast from the bodies of those forty adults were impelling us toward each other. Amy was tiny. She was talking with Andrew Alexander, who kept patting his own head. My mother had my elbow in her hand and then she was introducing me to Amy, pinching my elbow during the brief silences and letting up as soon as I said something. Amy and I were alone.

“Do you know Jim Gibson?” she said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He’s got a green catamaran called Belleweather?”

“What’s his name again?”

“Jim Gibson.”

“I don’t know him.”

“That cat really flies.”

“I’d like to get one myself. They really go.”

“Do you know Marty Hammer?” she said.

“It sounds familiar.”

“His father’s got a yawl? He gave Marty carte blanche with the yawl for his sixteenth birthday? It’s something like fifty-five feet?”

“No, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. Does he have a brother named Frank?”

“No.”

“Then that’s not the one,” I said.

“Do you know Tim Lerner?”

“Didn’t he drown in Peconic Bay last summer?”

“That’s the one.”

“Do you know Billy Shaw?”

“I know two Billy Shaws,” she said.

People were filling plates with sliced ham and turkey and trying to eat standing up. It was very warm in the room. The Gossages joined us. Henry rubbed my shoulder. Lucy Gossage held my hand as she talked to Amy. Mrs. Loomis came over with Tod Morgan and asked how we were doing. Lucy Gossage held my hand up near her breast and kept caressing it with her other hand. Ray Smith came over and went into the boxing routine he always used when we met. Head tucked down on his left shoulder, he threw some mock lefts and rights at my belly, snorting with each punch. Then there was a brief lull and we heard Mrs. Loomis telling Amy to smile once in a while. Then we all started talking. Jane stopped by and introduced her boyfriend to everyone. Tod Morgan handed me what he called a real drink. It was scotch and water. It made me very warm and I didn’t like the taste much. But I seemed to be having a good time. They were nice people.
They had no scars or broken noses. They dressed more or less the same. They talked the same way and said the same things and I didn’t know how dull they were or that they were more or less interchangeable. I was one of them, after all. I was not a stranger among them and I liked their hands on my body.

“Did anyone see those motorcycles today?” Tod Morgan said.

The Collier woman and I stood by the fireplace drinking. I assumed a clubby slouch. Then Lucy Gossage had her arm around me and her husband, Henry, was whispering a dirty joke in my ear. I had trouble picking up his words. Soon he started laughing and I knew the joke was over. We both stood there laughing. Henry looked right into my face, searching for genuine appreciation, wanting to be sure I understood the point of the story. I kept nodding and laughing. When he was satisfied he went away.

August Riddle had a teardrop of flesh on each sagging jowl. I watched him. Amy was talking to me about somebody named Bobby Springer’s Austin Healey. Mr. Riddle was talking with the Stevensons. He lit his cigar and then waved out the match with a circular flourish. He dropped the match on the floor. Mae carried a platter of pineapple rings into the room. I tried to catch her eye so I could smile at her. Amy was talking into my chest. It was all settled as far as she was concerned. It was between Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. She had red hair and big green eyes. I imagined being in bed with her and her mother. Amy was drinking the champagne punch. Nobody seemed drunk yet. I asked her if she wanted to go out on the porch where it would be cooler and she said no. Just plain no. There was a terrible silence then which made me nervous and I found myself asking her if she knew by any chance how the Yankees had made out in the second game. My father came over and shook my hand for some reason. Then he was gone. Andrew Alexander was talking to Amy. You young people, he kept saying. You young people. He patted his own
head. He couldn’t have been trying to keep his hair in place, for it was cut short and it was thick and firm. Every time he patted, his eyeballs rolled up. He and Amy were discussing the color beige. I watched his eyeballs slide up and down. He asked if Amy and I were engaged. I excused myself then and went into the kitchen to watch Buford Long mix drinks. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Pouring club soda with his right hand, he took a matchbook out of his breast pocket with the other hand, flipped up the cover with his thumb and, using his index finger and his thumb again, bent a match at its middle and struck it. I liked the way he did that. I had never seen anyone do that before. I also liked the fact that he was left-handed. Left-handed people seem to do things with more style. I’ve always envied them. Warren Spahn the stylish southpaw.

“Where do you normally work, Buford? Tend bar in some bar or something?”

“I’m a maintenance man. Mae and I, we live down Manhattan in the West Twenties. I maintain six buildings. I collect garbage from outside their doors and bring it downstairs. I fix things need fixing. I shine things up.”

“What’s it like? Hard work, I bet.”

“It’s not hard so much as menial. But at least it’s got some intrinsics to it. It gives you clues to human nature. Garbage tells you more than living with a person.”

“You don’t mind it too much then.”

“Oh, I love it,” he said.

“Is the garbage different in different buildings?”

“Sure it’s different. There’s clues that tell you that. You don’t even have to see the garbage. Anytime you see a cracked mirror in the hallway you know the garbage isn’t going to be any good.”

“I guess it’s satisfying to help keep the city clean.”

“It overjoys me,” Buford said.

“They say pound for pound Sugar Ray Robinson is the best fighter ever.”

My mother was in the doorway telling me that Amy was all alone. I went out there and stood next to her. John Retley Tucker came by. I asked him if he had ever met my other sister and he said Jane had never mentioned any sister. He stood there talking to us and the index finger of his right hand was stuck between his shirt collar and the back of his neck. This meant his elbow was up around ear level. I saw Amy staring at the patch of sweat under his arm. John Retley was about six-four and two-twenty and he looked like a cop directing traffic on a Sunday afternoon and not minding it at all. The Collier woman approached again and I disengaged myself to talk to her. She was wearing beige.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. “You’re a young man now and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know this. You’ve grown to almost your full stature. You have a man’s body and a man’s appetites. This is what I want to say. Women love to be loved.”

“Yes.”

“Who is that man behind you?”

“John Retley Tucker. My sister Jane’s boyfriend.”

“There’s something indecent about a man with thumbs that large.”

I needed some air. I told Amy I was going out for a while. She said she’d come with me. I left her there on the porch for a moment and went back inside for two drinks and brought them out. I didn’t turn on the porch light.

“Do you drink a lot?” she said.

“I drink quite a bit. I drink quite a bit, yes.”

“Do you know a boy named David Bell? He drinks incredible amounts of liquor. He does it on a dare. He can really hold it.”

“I’m David Bell,” I said.

“I got confused. I meant Dick Davis.”

“Freudian slip,” I said. “They say if you use somebody’s name like that by mistake it means you like that person very much.”

“Don’t get ideas, mister.”

“I was only kidding.”

“Your parents are very nice.”

“So are yours. Do you think I’m handsome, Amy?”

“What a question.”

“I know it’s an ambivalent thing to ask but I heard you discussing colors with old Andy Alexander and you seem to have good taste and I was just wondering what you thought. I’m sure you wonder if people think you’re pretty. Do you think I’m handsome?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you want to know if I think you’re pretty?”

“Okay.”

“I think you just miss,” I said. “What’s your opinion of Burt Lancaster? I think he’s the all-time greatest.”

Henry Gossage came out on the porch. He took a deep breath and clubbed himself on the chest with both his baby fists. Then he saw us standing by the rail and pretended to be startled, drawing his body back and raising his arms in self-defense. “Two purple shadows in the snow,” he sang. I hoped he wouldn’t tell another joke.

“Our kids are away at camp,” he said. “Oldest is a counselor. Middle waits on tables but he’ll be a counselor next year. Youngest is only twelve so he’s got a ways to go yet before he gets out of the camper category.”

“How’s Hank?” I said.

“He’s the oldest. Henry Jr. He’s fine. Appreciate your asking.”

“Give him my best.”

“Will do. Damn good of you, lad. Damn nice of you, Dave boy. Damn sweet thing to say. Where can I throw up?”

“In the hedge,” I said.

“It’s all right. I don’t think I have to anymore.”

Amy said she thought it would be a good idea to get back inside. Everybody stood talking and eating. At the far end of the room Tod Morgan and Peter Fisher’s wife were talking.
I was watching his face when he laughed. His features stretched and quivered. He looked extraordinarily ugly. I imagined a small explosion in his head. He was laughing in an exaggerated manner, overdoing it, creating the laugh as if with ceramics, and I watched his head come apart in slow motion, different sections tumbling through the air, nose-part, ear-part, jaw with lower teeth. I went through the kitchen and out the back door.

The small porch out there was full of empty bottles. I walked along the edge of the woods past Harris, Torgeson and Weber. The Harris and Weber houses were lit. I cut across a lawn and walked the five blocks to Ridge Street. The drugstore was closed. There were four or five people in the ice cream parlor. I had a soda and waited for Kathy Lovell to turn up but she didn’t. I almost went to the movie theater to look for her. Then I started walking toward her house. Finally I went back to the ice cream parlor and called her from there. Her father answered and I hung up. Ten minutes later I was on Green Street. It was dark and quiet. There was the beginning of a breeze. I stood beneath an elm and watched a woman in a shingled house ironing clothes. No one passed on the street. It was a Sunday night in early September and my body beat with sorrow at the beauty and mockery of all bodies.

There were only about fifteen people left when I returned to the house. They seemed to have too much room to move around in. Unfinished drinks were everywhere and the chairs and sofas were occupied now. On the floor was a white slice of turkey with a shoeprint on it. Most of the women were sitting together at one end of the room. The men were drifting in and out of the kitchen. They all seemed to be drinking beer now. I walked across the room smiling. I went upstairs and took off my jacket and tie. I could hear voices from Jane’s room. I stood very still. Jane was apparently showing her boyfriend a family photo album.

“This is mother as a little girl,” she said. “That’s her father and that’s her uncle Jess who wrote poems and killed himself.
This is me as a little girl. This was taken on West End Avenue, where we used to live. This was taken in Central Park. This is Old Holly and that’s daddy. This is Aunt Grace in Alexandria. This is mother again. So’s this. So’s this. This is David when he was two years old. This is daddy in his office.”

“Jane,” he said. “Jane.”

I went downstairs to the kitchen and got a beer out of the refrigerator. Harold Torgeson was standing in the corner. He was drinking a glass of milk. We were alone.

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he said. “Right out there in that room tonight there were forty or fifty good stories. I tried to write when I was a young man but I had no staying power. I’d get started in a burst of energy and goodwill and then I’d just fade out and die. Let’s face it, I was born to be an insurance agent. But the thing gnaws at me even now, lad. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping and I get out of bed and light a cigarette and sit by the open window. And I get this bittersweet feeling about my life and what I’ve done and what I haven’t done. You’re too young to understand that. But there’s something poetic about sitting by an open window at midnight smoking a cigarette. The cigarette is part of it. There are memories in the smoking of a cigarette. I just sit there thinking about my life. I killed three Japanese in the war that I know of. I’m telling you these things because they’ll be useful to you someday.”

Ray Smith had come in halfway through Torgeson’s monologue. He went over and shook Torgeson’s hand. Then he got a beer from the refrigerator.

“My own story begins in wartime London,” he said. “There was a nurse named Celia Archer.”

Three other men were standing in the kitchen entrance, listening. I slipped past them into the living room. The ladies didn’t seem to have very much to say to each other. Through the window I saw my father out on the porch. William Judge and I were the only men in the room. Nobody said anything. My mother looked strange. Then Jane and her boyfriend came
down the stairs. Someone asked what they had been doing up there and everyone laughed. The laughter was a signal. They had all been waiting for it. They got up now and began to leave. My father came inside and stood by the door, trying not to look delighted. My mother was standing in the middle of the room. Her hands whisked back and forth as if she were trying to sweep everyone out the door. People kept leaving and then returning seconds later for things they had forgotten. Finally they were gone for good. My father began turning out lights and locking doors. Jane was already upstairs. Soon I was alone in the living room. Someone had left almost a full glass of something on the buffet table. I took a sip, closed my eyes, concentrated, could not determine what it was, and slowly finished it off. I realized my father had not said goodnight to anyone. I turned off the hall lamp and the house was dark except for the kitchen. I started in and then stopped at the doorway. My mother was in there. The refrigerator door was open. She was wearing just one shoe. The other was on the floor, a black shoe, upright, near the wall. She held a tray of ice cubes in her hands and she was spitting on the cubes. She disappeared behind the refrigerator door and I could hear her open the freezer compartment and slide the tray back in. I moved away as the freezer slammed shut. I went upstairs and into my room. I closed the door behind me as quietly as I could. I took off my shirt and my shoes and lay on the bed, knowing it was too hot to sleep. I thought of Harold Torgeson sitting by his open window smoking a cigarette. I wondered how many novels he had dictated to himself that way. After a long time I passed into a thin dreamless sleep, less a state of mind than a dislocation of the senses. Coming up out of it for only seconds at a time, I did not know where I was or whether it was morning or the middle of the night. It disturbed me not to know where I was and yet I was content to slip off again into the river, the not at all deep or treacherous river, the river which is language without thought, and in seconds, what seemed like seconds, I would come up again
and wonder where I was but somehow never who; that much did not escape me. Then I was wide awake. My hand was on my belt buckle and I realized I hadn’t taken off my pants. I lay there without moving, aware that sleep was impossible now. I listened for trains or cars but there was nothing. Trains are lovely things to hear when you are waiting for sleep. I imagined that the novel Torgeson was dictating to himself at that moment was the kind of novel in which young lovers hear a train in the distance or in which somewhere a dog is barking or in which laughter is always floating across the lawn. I felt tense and restless. It was my body that was awake but not my mind. I would think of something and then try to come back to it and it would be gone. I could not keep a thought going. Nothing connected. I got up and looked out the window. Then I went downstairs. The kitchen light was still on but she was in the pantry. I could barely see her. She was sitting on a stool against the bare wall that faced the door. On either side the high shelves were stocked with bottles, jars and cartons.