Read Online An American Dream by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online Page A

tourists, pokey and inquisitive, were wandering through my body. I had one of those anxieties which make it an act of balance to breathe: too little air compresses the sensation of being throttled, but too much—one deep breath—and there is the fear of a fall. There was something in the room besides Ruta and myself, something which gathered force. It was approaching now, but there were no eyes, no claws, just a sense of oppression waiting. I felt vile. “Do you have a drink?” I asked of Ruta.
    “No.” She gave a laugh and whispered, “When I drink I go out to look for men who will beat me.”
    “Crazy,” I said, and got up.
    She could hear me putting on my clothes in the dark. The oppression had lifted on the moment I was free of her bed and my fingers were quick. They seemed to float onto each piece of clothing as I needed it.
    “When will you be back?”
    “Before morning.”
    “And you will tell your wife you took a walk and came back and woke me up to let you in?”
    “No, I will tell her I left the door unlocked.”
    “Don’t give all the good things to your wife. Save a present for me.”
    “Maybe I will bring back a diamond.”
    “I love you a little bit.”
    And I was thinking of that empty womb, of that graveyard which gambled a flower and lost.
    “I like you, Ruta.”
    “Come back, and you will see how much you are going to like me.”
    I had a thought then of what had been left in her. It was perishing in the kitchens of the Devil. Was its curse on me?
    “
Der Teufel
is so happy,” she said, and a perfect spitefulness of attention came to a focus in her eye. Small cheer that she could read my mind.
    Was that the cloud of oppression which had come to me in the dark? That the seed was expiring in the wrong field?
    “Next time,” said Ruta, “you must take care of little Ruta.”
    “Next time will be an event,” I said. I wanted to blow her a kiss but there was nothing in me to send her way. So I closed the door, and went back up the stairs, up the aisle of that paddedjungle, and entered Deborah’s bedroom again with the expectation that somehow she would be gone.
There
was the body. It struck my sight like a shelf of rock on which a ship is about to smash. What was I going to do with her? I felt a mean rage in my feet. It was as if in killing her, the act had been too gentle, I had not plumbed the hatred where the real injustice was stored. She had spit on the future, my Deborah, she had spoiled my chance, and now her body was here. I had an impulse to go up to her and kick her ribs, grind my heel on her nose, drive the point of my shoe into her temple and kill her again, kill her good this time, kill her right. I stood there shuddering from the power of this desire, and comprehended that this was the first of the gifts I’d plucked from the alley, oh Jesus, and I sat down in a chair as if to master the new desires Ruta had sent my way.
    My breath was bad again. What in hell was I to do with Deborah? I had no solution. If the messenger was on his way, he gave no hint of being near. A first rat’s panic began to gnaw. “Keep cool, you swine,” said a contemptuous voice in me, all but an echo from Deborah.
    Let me tell you the worst. I had a little fantasy at this moment. It was beyond measure. I had a desire to take Deborah to the bathroom, put her in the tub. Then Ruta and I would sit down to eat. The two of us would sup on Deborah’s flesh, we would eat for days: the deepest poisons in us would be released from our cells. I would digest my wife’s curse before it could form. And this idea was thrilling to me. I felt like a doctor on the edge of a thunderous new medicine. The details fell into place: what we did not choose to devour we could grind away in the electric Disposall beneath the sink, all the impure organs and little bones. For the long bones, for the femur and the tibia, the fibula, the radius and the ulna, the humerus, I had another plan. I would bind them in a package