Americana

'Have I heard of him?'

'No,' I said.

'If you're wondering about the leg, I broke it skiing.'

'I was about to ask.'

'Are you a good lover?' she said.

'Even a hawk is an eagle among crows.'

'You're real quick. I won't mess with you anymore. You're too quick for me. I was trying to get you off balance and you come up with a terrific line probably from some great old Randolph Scott movie in that green Technicolor. Where do you drink? We all drink at the Bow-Wow on Second Avenue.

The bartender's name is Roone. He's real quick too. Some of the things he says. Too much. But I don't like him visually. We're all sharing a house at Fire Island this summer. There's a half a share left. If you're interested, tell Barry or Spike. A half a share costs a hundred and sixty. Then you chip in for food, liquor and incidentals. Bring a blanket because it gets cold at night. The house we're getting this year is just one house down from the dunes. Are you a Scorpio by any chance?'

Then Wendy walked in, dragged a chair to the middle of the room and straddled it in the manner of a Berlin nightclub singer in the disillusioned twenties.

'I'm so delighted David could come tonight. David Bell is the only one who can save me. We were lovers in college. David had this white Thunderbird and we used to drive into the desert and take our clothes off. Pow. Where can you do that in New York? I went up to one of the sundecks in my blue bikini last August and they wouldn't even let me take off the top. In Panama City I had a lover who had David's eyes. It was fantastically uncanny. But he was a freak in everything else. I couldn't believe this man. He was some kind of banana agent and he had this thing about tarantulas. We were in a restaurant once and he said what if a big furry tarantula suddenly crawls out of your food; what will you do; you have to be ready for something like that in this part of the world. I've had some freaky lovers. Antony Ambrose wanted to put me to work in a SoHo striptease joint because of my breasts. I couldn't believe that man. When we split up he told me thanks for the mammaries.'

I went into the bathroom. There were books, woodcuts, a magazine rack, two scatter rugs, a small bronze gong. I sat on the rim of the tub and flipped through a magazine article about the war. Each page of the article was adorned with color photographs. Opposite a picture of several decapitated villagers was a full-page advertisement for a new kind of panty-girdle. The model was extraordinarily lovely, a tall dove-colored girl holding a camel whip. The copy said this high-fashiony girdle clings to your bodyskin and comes in three huggy colors. I turned to a brandy ad. A woman in a white evening dress was walking a leashed panther across the lawn of a Newport estate. The war article covered about fifteen pages, the text set in very small type. I realized the bathtub was full of water bugs. I went into the kitchen and Wendy turned and then we were all over each other, heavy and ravenous, jammed into a corner, and what I saw in my mind was Binky asleep on my sofa.

Dinner was chicken and rice. We sat around the living room, plates on knees, and searched each other's raincloud faces for some clue to our dilemma. I counted the greeting cards which Wendy had placed on exhibit throughout the room. There were sixty-four of them.

'There are water bugs in your bathtub,' I said.

'That's impossible,' Wendy said, her mouth puffed with rice, and I was sure that all ten of us shared a skittering image of quick black creatures nesting in every scoop of rice in every bowl.

'I tried to count them but there were too many.'

'This is a new building. It has a sanitary code you wouldn't believe. David is just being macabre, everyone. It's his own special brand of humor. Just go on eating and don't worry about a thing. Once a week they clean and scrub every inch of this building from top to bottom with the most modern equipment available.'

'There were at least twenty,' I said. 'You have to be ready for something like that in this part of the world. I'm sure they've been scanned on the radar by this time. One of them was having babies.'

Dessert was a nervous affair. The women did not remain seated and even avoided standing in one spot for more than a few minutes at a time. I said I had to catch a big silver bird to the Coast early the next morning and Wendy saw me to the door. She reprimanded me for being naughty and then, tongue to my ear, promised me a night of canal-zone pleasures if only I would remain. The elevator was not working and I had to walk down sixteen flights. It was snowing heavily. On Second Avenue dozens of off-duty cabs went by. Finally one of them pulled up. I got in and the driver batted down the flag and started off toward lower Manhattan at high speed in the total snow.

Sullivan lived in a top-floor loft on Greene Street. Her reputation was growing locally and I felt it wouldn't be long before the critics and art marketeers and all those natty little gallery men with vicious shoes and dagger sideburns recognized that she belonged in the top rank of American sculptors. She worked in mahogany, epoxy and automobile paint. In her own words, everything she did pursued a curve. The smoothness of her shapes and the dull blunt colors she used seemed to suggest a horrible softness, that of slugs or worms, boneless things curling at the edge of one's sleep. Several people had told her they were afraid to touch her pieces of wood and this pleased her but only to a point; she said her highest ambition was to give people the feeling that they were eating small live wet amphibians. The Whitney owned two of Sullivan's works and private collectors accounted for about ten more. At least thirty had been bought by various corporations. A chemical firm in Muncie had recently purchased three of her smaller things and placed them in the lobby. This had surprised and delighted me. Like all those who loiter around talent I tended to overpraise Sullivan and to consider her work one of the essential measures in the salvation of the republic, and it did not seem impossible to me that Indiana might rise to new spiritual heights thanks to Sullivan's three pieces of carefully handcrafted afterbirth. She told me not to get too excited. The chemical firm was merely trying to improve its image; they had even sent a number of their executives to a mountain retreat where they walked around in sandals and togas; and it was all a tax gimmick anyway. I had met Sullivan when our unit at the network did a half-hour filmed report on something we called the phenomenon of power-art, meaning art produced by electric tools. Two minutes were devoted to Sullivan and her fantastic studio. It took almost a whole day to film this segment and she and I spent a good part of it in conversation. She said she liked me because I was so beautiful and sad, so squarely in the American tradition. Only Sullivan, I believed, could save me.

The front door was off its hinges. It stood in the tiled hallway with the word door painted white across the glass pane which composed its upper half. I walked up the first flight. The two doors were marked good and evil. I kept climbing. The tiled steps were rounded and black at the edges. I passed four more doors. One was labeled breast and the others were marked justice, martyrdom and river. Climbing the final flight to Sullivan's loft, I smelled something terrible blowing through the building, some presence that carried with it a sudden vivid evocation of open wounds, swamp, panic and disease, the stench of a retreating army, and it was so strange and pervasive that I knew I must make a joke of it, as I did, ultimately, with all those things I did not understand, and so I assembled an opening remark to toss at Sullivan. The remark would be both clever and graphic and I was still working on the exact phrasing when I opened the unmarked door and walked into the room.

She was not there. Seven coiled shapes, hulking and purgatorial, stood around the loft. They were much larger than anything she had done before and far more complex, wheels inside wheels, scythes rising from the rounded edge of a ludicrous shield, men or burial urns, industrial menace of cogs and inner clocks, a massive butter churn, all fearful, indefinable in the end, looming and never still, her long soul in wood. To shape, bond and coat. She said it was the blessing of God, the final grace, to have given us opposable thumbs. I could never enter Sullivan's studio without feeling that I had just stepped, unwillingly, into an alien country, one visited in the past but with a landscape that remained no more than the barest of memories. There were first the shapes circling in and out of their own smooth contours. There were the two spotlights placed on pedestals at opposite ends of the room. There was the wood-dust covering everything and then the hungry tools with teeth and claws, the radial-arm saw and saber saw, the orbital sander, the huge band saw and stationary sander, all their wires looped in the dust. There was, finally, most alien, the membranous chemical material which covered the walls and ceiling. Similar to the kind of wrapping used to keep sandwiches fresh, but somewhat more dull and opaque, this material was not wallpapered on in sections; it was a single tentlike unit, clinging, billowing slightly at times, bubbled with air pockets between itself and the walls. One rectangular section corresponding to the length and width of the door had been cut away so that people could enter and leave. The thing had been placed in the loft by the previous tenant, a Swiss inventor and collagist who was totally, rampagingly mad as only the Swiss can be. He referred to this, his lifework, as the Cocoon, and to himself as the Cocoonist. It had been his hope to fashion an environment that would be a work of life as opposed to one of art, an organism insulated from the hostile outer topography, a