An American Dream Read Free

great bitch, Deborah, a lioness of the species: unconditional surrender was her only raw meat. A Great Bitch has losses to calculate after all if the gent gets away. For ideally a Great Bitch delivers extermination to any bucko brave enough to take carnal knowledge of her. She somehow
fails in her role
(as psychoanalysts, those frustrated stage directors, might say) if the lover escapes without being maimed to the nines or nailed to the mast. And Deborah had gotten her hooks into me, eight years ago she had clinched the hooks and they had given birth to other hooks. Living with her I was murderous; attempting to separate, suicide came into me. Some psychic bombardment of the will to live had begun, a new particle of love’s mysterious atom had been discovered—the itch to jump. I had been on a balcony ten stories high talking to my host, the cocktail party was done, and we stood looking down on Sutton Place, not talking about Deborah—what else was there not to talk about this last long year?—and I was wondering, as indeed often I did, whether this old buddy, comfortably drunk with me, a pleasant-looking stud of forty-six, with a waist kept trim by squash at the New York A.C. and a rogue’s look in the eye kept alive by corners he cut making his little brokerage prosper (not to speak of the women he met for lunch—he had a flair, this buddy), well, wondering whether his concern was so true for me as the timbre of his voice, now sincere, now so place-your-bets sincere, or if he’d been banging my blessed Deborah five times a year, five times each of the last eight years,forty glorious bangeroos upon the unconscious horror of my back (something so hot they could hardly contain themselves, and kept it down to five each twelve-month out of delicacy, out of a neatness which recognized that if ever they let themselves go, it would all go crash and boom) well, as I say, I stood there, not knowing if Old Buddy was in the Carnal Delights, or a true sword and friend, or even both—there was a wife or two after all with whom I had done the five times eight years bit, and sweet was the prize—no offering like a wife so determined to claw her man that months of hatred are converted to Instant Sweet for the passing stud in the hay, and I felt all the stirrings of real compassion talking to
her
husband next time out. So all was possible—either this guy before me now suffered conceivably a true concern for an old friend and his difficult wife, or was part of the difficulty, or indeed yes was both, both, precisely like me so many times, and before the straight-out complexity of this, the simple incalculable difficulty of ever knowing what is true with an interesting woman, I was lost. I tell you in shame that for those eight years I could point with certainty to only five bona-fide confessed infidelities by Deborah; she had indeed announced each of them to me, each an accent, a transition, a concrete step in the descent of our marriage, a curtain to each act in a five-act play: but beyond this, in the great unknown, were anywhere from two hundred to precisely no infidelities, for Deborah was an artist in that great dialectic of uncertainty where lies lead to truth, and truth begets the shimmering of lies—“Are you
mad
?” she would ask when I would disclose my suspicions of a particular gentleman or lad, “Why, he’s a boy,” or “Don’t you know he’s
repulsive
to me,” which she always said in her best London voice, five years of Catholic schooling in England contributing much to the patrician parts of her American tongue. Yes, before the uncertainty of this, feeling like a scientist of love whose instruments of detection were either wholly inaccurate or unverifiably acute, I stood up in the middle of my conversation with old friend rogue,and simply heaved my cakes, all the gin-and-tonics, anchovy paste, pigs-in-blankets, shrimp cum cocktail sauce, and last six belts of bourbon zip over his balcony and down in a