Americana

'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.

'It was only a matter of time,' she said.

'I'd better turn on the light.'

It was a low-watt bulb and the light seemed almost brown in that narrow room full of dark jars. She was standing now.

'There is nothing but time. Time is the only thing that happens of itself. We should learn to let it take us along. The Collier woman is a fool.'