Don DeLillo - Americana

This police-blotter description, meant to conceal the way she felt about him, had precisely the opposite effect; so precisely, in fact, that I wondered whether she had planned it that way. The stratagems of marriage sometimes seem refreshingly artless next to those of ex-marriage. She poured two more drinks and we talked further about Kurt. Meredith liked to confide in me. After some early hedging for form's sake, she would tell me about each of her romances with what seemed to be complete honesty. I enjoyed these discussions. They seemed to generate a real warmth between us, a fine, old and mellow heat, brandy by a fireside. I gave her genuine sympathy and some good advice and when my turn came, as it always did, to stand by that cheery fire and lift that grand old snifter and sing of my own true loves, I told nothing but lies. It was very entertaining. Soon I began to understand the attraction of pathological lying. To construct one's own reality, then bend it to an implausible extreme, was an adventure even more thrilling than the linguistic free falls of the network. I think I went at it fairly well for a novice. I learned that in an atmosphere of seclusion, intimacy, motel-confessional, no lie is too gaudy, no cliche too familiar, no side-trip of the imagination too dramatically scenic. Beyond sheer entertainment value there were exactly ten reasons for lying to her. (1) The manic quality of these stories provided a nice balance to Merry's conventional episodes of the heart and lower glands. (2) The night was swarming with serious young people telling their troubles to each other and I preferred to stand aside from all this empathy and slush. (3) The telling of needless lies to a loved one, or former loved one, stimulates in the liar a complex feeling of regret, guilt, superiority, pity, tenderness and power-a compound I would take downstairs with me and analyze like a vial of splendid chemicals. (4) The fabulist in me, lurking just below the water-line, welcomed the challenge of topping each new lie and looked forward to some distant nexus of perfection, the super-union of all lies into one radiant and transcendental fiction. (5) Related to (4). Man's amoebic inching thrust toward godlike creativity. (6) Being beyond gravity, weightless, in a dream assembled by one's own hands. (7) The sexual excitement aroused in both of us. (8) Boredom. (9) I put something of myself into some of those stories and hoped, in vain as it turned out, to arrive at a definition, one disguised of course by the surrounding absurdity-a definition of myself without the usual anguish such readings entail. (10) There was really nothing to tell her in the way of troubles, romantic or otherwise. The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person. This would have been hard to explain.

"The dream, David. I just thought of something. Maybe the clue is that we were just sitting there."

"The way we're sitting here."

"Maybe that's it. Maybe I was repressing something."

"Maybe that's it," I said.

Then, right on cue, she went to the window like Olivia de Havilland, so gracefully ill.

"It's still snowing," she said.

Communication between us was extremely precise. For a moment I thought of all the old Burtian and Kirkesque characteristics, the clenched emphatic fist, majestic teeth, angry hand brushing the hair, the surprise of a colossal smile, a smile as rich and full as a field of sun-cut Kansas wheat, and then a touch of passionate sadness, low flame in the eyes. Kirk as Van Gogh. Burt as the Birdman of Alcatraz. It was a comfortable feeling to be back in the simpleminded past. I noticed two new prints on the wall. I couldn't identify the artists but their subject was the same, expressionistic Germany, thick black plague and guilt, and I felt almost sure she had become interested in German painting because of her photographer friend, the man's man of the great outdoors. I moved toward her and the moment my hand touched her hip, loose and soft and lazy inside the housedress, I thought of the girl I had said goodnight to only several hours before, and of the circle she would resume with her sisters or brotherly lovers, the circle I had been afraid to enter. Meredith nude by the window was a known quantity. I took off my shirt.

Minutes later we were in bed and there was the feeling of a strange conspiracy. There was gratitude between us then, communication, mutual willingness to honor our conspiracy. And at the end, the fevers of our breaths mingling, what I knew more than anything was the feeling of coming back to an old and affectionate house. It was the twenty-first time we had made love in the five years since our divorce.

I carried in the portable TV and we watched a movie for half an hour or so. It was one of those old English films in which people are always promising to meet at Victoria Station the moment the war is over. She fell alseep then, on her belly, one leg draped over my thigh, her all-American ass classic and twinkling, campus-worthy as ever. My head went to one side and I was just beginning to go to black, in network parlance, when I heard footsteps in the hall below and the sound of crinkling paper. I knew that the journalist who shared the second floor with me was sneaking across the hall to put one of his garbage bags outside my door. Whenever he had just one bag for the janitor's morning pickup he left it by his own door; more than one bag, I got the surplus. I imagined his thin dry figure, in Punch-and-Judy pajamas and brown peeling slippers, hunching its way along the wall, teeth clamped tight and face all knuckled up. There are things nobody understands. In the last analysis it is the unseen janitor who maintains power over us all.

I slipped out from under her leg and turned off the TV. I went naked down the stairs, carrying my shoes and clothing. I wanted to wake up alone; it was a characteristic of mine, which many women learned to despise down through the years. My apartment welcomed me, dim and silent, the red-wine flavor of paintings and rugs, the fireplace and oak paneling, the black leather upholstery, old and comfortably cracked, the dull copper mugs on the mantelpiece and the burnished ale tone of the desk lamp-all warm and familiar and needing no acknowledgment, all reminding me that solitude asks no pledges of anyone. I took a shower and went to bed.

Weede Denney's head, prematurely bald and freckle-brown, repeated the suave circular bareness of his coffee table. It was as though the office decorator had devised them both, head and table, in a triumphant demonstration of ideal harmony between an executive and his furnishings. He stood for a second, dipped his knees slightly-something my father always did when his underwear got stuck in some netherland crevice, instructing me, a mere boy, that this was the civilized alternative to manual extrication, that boorish hobby of the underprivileged and the insane-and then sat down again in the black and ivory barber chair, refreshed and jacketless, his steel-drum chest eliminating any slight pleat or wrinkle from the muted blue shirt he was wearing. It was nine sharp, time for the Friday review, and we were all there, with pencils and note pads: Richter Janes, Mars Tyler, Walter Faye, Jones Perkins, Grove Palmer, Paul Joyner, Quincy Willet, Ted Warburton, and Reeves Chubb, who was wearing the same shirt, tie and suit he had worn the day before. Weede's secretary came in and took coffee requests, a process that consumed at least five minutes, most of them devoted to a mass clarification of Reeves Chubb's order, which included a large coffee, black, one sugar cube; a cream puff but not the kind with chocolate frosting; a fruit cup without the cherries if that was possible; and a packet of mentholated plastic-tipped cigars. Weede's face tightened somewhat during this scene and when it came my turn to order I graciously declined, saying I had already eaten my breakfast, and was rewarded for this lie by a rare Weedean pope-nod.