Don DeLillo - Americana

"How did you meet him?" I said.

"Thereby hangs a tale, brother. But I may as well let you in on it, if only to forestall another trouncing by the checker king of Westchester. After I made my controversial decision to leave school, one little thing kept nagging at me. What would I do next? I didn't want to come back here, as we all know by now, but I wasn't very anxious to get an apartment in the city and pursue a career in stenography either. The thought alone made my knees buckle. All I knew was that I had to get out of college. Massachusetts is no place to get educated, despite all the raving about intellectual ferment. My most vivid memory is of earnest young men banging their pipes into ashtrays, a sight that depresses me more than I can say. I was sick of the whole thing. I was sick of hearing the same expressions over and over. Just constantly. The same phrases, sentences, paragraphs. I'm hypersensitive, I know, but I was under the impression that up there, if nowhere else, my petty talent for finding fault might be allowed to dwindle and die. It was a false impression. The whole place was too inbred for me. The whole educational complex and the particular lollipop factory I was privileged to attend. The passion for ritual was overpowering. And of course nobody learned anything. One nice and bitchy memory I'll keep. Our democratic little sorority had a sort of informal initiation process. About one-fifth of us were in on it. The others thought it much too unladylike. It was simple. Whenever a new girl sat down to her first dinner in the house, one of us would say to another: Pass the motherfucking carrots, please. Or words to that effect. The response would be in a similar vein and we'd usually keep it up all through the meal, tossing off the worst obscenities imaginable and doing it with a certain politesse, as if we were discussing sisal-growing in the Bahamas. By the time dessert arrived, the newcomer was in an advanced state of shock. I'm getting way off the mark, aren't I?"

"Arondella," I said.

"Want a sip of rum?"

"Okay."

"I finally packed it in," Mary said. "I took a cab to town and got on the first bus to Boston. Then I took another cab to the railroad station. I paid the driver, stepped onto the sidewalk and there he was. Sitting in that blue whale of his. Combing his hair. It was forty degrees but he had the top down. He was wearing a light windbreaker with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He was sitting on the passenger's side of the front seat. He put the comb away and placed his right arm out over the top of the door. The arm was flexed and his bicep was pressing against the door so that it would look enormous. I was trying to carry two heavy suitcases, an overnight bag and a purse. And I knew he was watching me. He said hey. I stopped and looked at him-he obviously thought he was God's gift to the virgins of Boston-and he said I'll take you wherever you want to go. Anywhere in the continental United States. I said New York. He said hey, that was the one place I really meant. And we both smiled. Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman. Later I found out he had been sent to Boston to kill a man."

"Did he do it?"

"The man had been arrested the night before. Some kind of narcotics charge. Eventually he was killed in prison."

"Last week daddy said if Arondella's in the rackets you won't be allowed to see him anymore."

"David, I won't be living here much longer."

"Are you going away with him?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"I don't know," she said. "He's got a wife and three children. It's a delicate situation to say the least. All sorts of relatives are applying all sorts of pressures."

"What exactly does he do in the rackets?"

"He goes places. He's in Syracuse now. He makes business trips. That's what he calls them. His territory seems to be upstate and New England."

"Does he kill people?"

"I imagine so. He as much as told me. I don't think the Boston trip was an isolated instance. But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I've been fighting all my life."

"Give me some more rum," I said.

"Don't you love it when it rains like this? So gray and dark. I love dark chill days. We're doing just the right thing for a day like this. Sitting in the attic drinking rum. It's nice up here, isn't it? Those skinny gray trees outside and the sound of the rain. We should have some music. Organ music would be perfect."

"I'll go get the radio."

"Leave this house," she said. "As soon as you can, get out of here. Run like hell, David. This place is haunted and everybody in it is haunted. Mother is terribly ill. And if she goes, if she slides all the way out, she'll try to take you with her. I know her, David. I'm the only one who knows her."

Meredith and I were married between my junior and senior years at Leighton Gage. A week before the event, I got a letter from Ken Wild.

I'm writing because I want somebody to tell me whether I am alive or dead. I have been asked that question recently and I couldn't think of an answer. So if you get this letter, write back as soon as you can. This way I'll know I'm alive. Are you really going to marry Miss Dairy Products USA?

I'm in the Michigan woods photosynthesizing. My big problem this summer, aside from life and death, is that I don't have any classes to stay away from. A man should never be left without a class to cut. I flew up here in my father's company's plane, which was full of territorial managers on their way to hunting lodge for business meeting and ribald chortling. Two thousand pounds of condemned pork. Just before we were due to land, an engine, flamed out. First thing I did was put out my cigarette. I believe this is called coolness under fire. But a second later I found myself on the edge of panic. Nobody else seemed even slightly upset. Were they really a planeload of Zen masters? Then we were landing, no trouble at all, and I was filled with disappointment. Because it had not been enough. I wanted to land in flames with crash-wagons screaming down the runway. Perhaps you understand this sort of pathos.

Dostoyevsky sat next to me barbering his humorous fingernails

I fish, I hunt, I write my wounded lines. My father wants me to join the firm after graduation. For the moment all I have to do is assure him I'll think about it seriously. Everybody craves assurance. It's the coin they insert in reality. It doesn't matter whether anything comes out of the machine as long as they get their money back. What a pity it is that you're reading this with such lack of compassion. Saying poor dumb Wild he's like everybody else, pissing all over his own toes. I am writing a mock-epic poem-you won't believe this-I am writing a mock-epic poem about a boy who grows up among wolves somewhere in Siberia. Several distinguished publishers have indicated a wary interest.

Write to me with news of the archduke. Jesus I hate this kind of letter. If only I were less sane. I could write poems the size of cathedrals!

I had taken Wild's letter, along with paper and pen and three cans of beer, to my favorite spot in Old Holly. This was the slope behind the firehouse, a green and treeless place, always private, facing west so that the grass turned slowly golden green as the sun circled toward the far hills. The slope dropped a hundred feet or so to a sort of lesser valley, a barren area of boulders, stunted trees and the scratched earth of a dried-out creekbed. Across the valley was a small hill, and on top of it, at the eastern limit of a large estate, was a pasture; and from the slope you could see the horses moving slowly, heads down, the lovely mild curves of their necks, grazing, moving against the more distant hills; or standing, where the hills dropped away as if to graze also on some low meadow, standing against the sky and the rich citrus setting of the sun.