Americana Read Free

for a meeting unless his secretary sprays the place with air-freshener. But I’m holding my own. I may even take a vacation one of these days.”
    “Skiing? All those nymphs in titty sweaters.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to do something more religious. Explore America in the screaming night. You know. Yin and yang in Kansas. That scene.”
    “Maybe I’ll come with you,” Sullivan said.
    “Seriously?”
    “I’d like to do it, David. I really would.”
    “I have to go out West anyway in a few months to do a documentary on the Navahos. I thought I’d take my vacation a couple of weeks before that and spend the time driving out there.”
    “We can take Pike with us.”
    “Sure,” I said. “He can get somebody to run things for a while.”
    “We’ll let him map out our route. We’ll give him a battlefield commission. He’ll like that.”
    I felt good. It was a good idea. The man came back with their drinks. We were introduced and then I went looking for B.G. Haines. The bathroom was empty. I went into the bedroom and examined the coats on the bed. Her coat wasn’t among them. I looked in the closet and it wasn’t there either. Then I went into the kitchen. It was empty too. I stood there awhile. Then I opened the refrigerator door and took an ice tray out of the freezer. There were four ice cubes left. I brought up phlegm from my throat and spat on each of the cubes, separately. Then I slid the tray back into the freezer and shut the refrigerator door.
    I went back to the living room. Sullivan was still talking to the round gray man. I couldn’t take my eyes off that empty shoe.

2
    I was an extremely handsome young man. The objectivity which time slowly fashions, and the self-restraint it demolishes, enabled me to make this statement without recourse to the usual modest disclaimers which give credit to one’s parents or grandparents in the manner of a sires-and-dams book. I suppose it’s true enough that I inherited my mother’s fine fair skin and my father’s athletic physique, but the family album gives no clue to the curiously Grecian perspective of my face. Physical identity meant a great deal to me when I was twenty-eight years old. I had almost the same kind of relationship with my mirror that many of my contemporaries had with their analysts. When I began to wonder who I was, I took the simple step of lathering my face and shaving. It all became so clear, so wonderful. I was blue-eyed David Bell. Obviously my life depended on this fact.
    I was exactly six feet two inches tall. My weight varied between 185 and 189. Despite my fair skin I tanned unusually well. My hair was more blond than it is now, thicker and richer; my waistline was thirty-two; my heartbeat was normal. I had a trick knee but my nose had never been broken, myfeet were not ugly and I had better than average teeth. My complexion was excellent.
    My secretary told me once that she had overheard Strobe Botway, one of my superiors at the network, refer to me as being “conventionally” handsome. We had a good laugh over that. Strobe was a small, barely humanoid creature who had the habit, when smoking, of slowly rotating the cigarette with his thumb, index and middle fingers, as Bogart did in an early film of his. Strobe hated me because I was taller and younger than he was, and somewhat less extraterrestrial. He talked often of the Bogart mystique, using Germanic philosophical terms which nobody understood, and he subverted many parties by quoting long stretches of dialogue from obscure Bogart films. He also had his favorite character actors, men whose names nobody could ever connect with a face, men who played prison wardens for seven consecutive movies, who were always attacking Japanese machine-gun nests with a grenade in each hand, who were drunkards, psychotic killers, crooked lawyers, or test pilots who had lost their nerve. Strobe seemed to admire the physical imperfections of people, their lisps, scar