An American Dream by Norman Mailer

Author:Norman Mailer [Mailer, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780233957265
Publisher: Andre Deutsch Ltd
Published: 1965-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

It went on. On for a double column the length of the page and inches of overflow into a new column, a quick haul of anecdotes, it listed fifty people—her dearest friends—and then like a trumpet blowing taps to the mournful grandeur of a violent death, as if one virtue of violent death might be to open at last some secret gates for conscientious readers, Buchanan finished with a laid-out table of everything to which Deborah had at one time or another belonged: charities, leagues, cotillions, balls, foundations, sisters, societies, and such odd-name congeries as The Caveat Napoleon, the Lasters, the Bahama Rifles, the Clambs, the Quainger, the Croyden Heart, the Spring Oak Subscription, the Philadelphia Riding, the Kerrybombos.

What a secret life had Deborah. I had not known a third of everything to which she enlisted. That endless stream of intimate woman’s lunches into which she disappeared every perfumed noon over the years—what princes must have been elected, what pretenders guillotined, what marriages turned in their course. With the insight of an ice pick the precise thought came to me that I had lost my own marriage without ever a chance to fight for it on an open field. What a garroting must have been given my neck by the ladies of those lunches, those same ladies or their mothers who worked so neatly to make me a political career all eighteen years ago. It didn’t matter. At this instant the past was like a burned-out field after the blaze has gone through.

I had a bad moment turning the key to the apartment. I was like a gambler who lives in fear of a card. It is the Queen of Spades, and each time it appears disaster has come up another step. So each time I felt the presence of Deborah, it was as if the card turned high. And she was everywhere in my apartment, there in the echo of all those nights I slept without her, fighting those early-morning wars when every one of my cells insisted I was losing her into still another depth of separation, and my pride swore I would not pick up the phone. Now in the apartment something had died—all memories of Deborah living. An odor of death in a trash pit rose from the wastebaskets with their stale cigarettes, the garbage can in the kitchen, the musk of stale memories in stale furniture, death lived like a beast in this air. Would one go scraping over the crusted lip of the incinerator into the sour end of sour ashes? Like a fever the desire for one stiff drink came over me again. I passed through the living room, that hateful living room of champagne-colored settees and champagne paper on the walls, another of Deborah’s flings with a decorator, silver-gray, pale green, cream, all the colors of face powder, the arbitrary palette of elegance: I had always felt like Deborah’s footman sitting in that room. My fist was clenched.

The phone was ringing. It

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