An American Dream by Norman Mailer

voice oiled with a sense of its authority, and in control of a thousand irritations. “Yes,” I said, and looked up to meet a man who did not correspond to his voice. He was about five-eight in height, almost slim, with a hard, clean face and the sort of cold blue eyes which live for a contest. So it was like the small shock of meeting somebody after talking on the telephone.
    “Your name?”
    I told him.
    “Mr. Rojack, there’s a series of directly unpleasant details to get through.”
    “All right.” I said dumbly, more than careful not to meet his eye.
    “My name is Roberts. We have to take your wife to Four Hundred East Twenty-ninth, and we may have to call you down there to identify her again, but for the minute now—if you’d just wait for us.”
    I was debating whether to say, “My God, right in front of my eyes, she jumped like that!” but that was one duck which would never lift from the lake. I had an uneasy sense of Roberts which was not unlike the uneasy sense I used to have of Deborah.
    I wandered down the line of banged-up cars, and discovered that the unpleasant elderly man with the pink-tinted glasses was still moaning. There was a young couple with him, a tall dark good-looking Italian who might have been the man’s nephew—he showed a family resemblance. He had a sulky face, a perfect pompadour ofblack straight hair, and was wearing a dark suit, a white silk shirt, a silver-white silk tie. He was a type I never liked on sight, and I liked him less because of the blonde girl he had with him. I caught no more than a glimpse of her, but she had one of those perfect American faces, a small-town girl’s face with the sort of perfect clean features which find their way onto every advertisement and every billboard in the land. Yet there was something better about this girl, she had the subtle touch of a most expensive show girl, there was a silvery cunning in her features. And a quiet remote little air. Her nose was a classic. It turned up with just the tough tilt of a speedboat planing through the water.
    She must have felt me staring at her, for she turned around—she had been ministering with a certain boredom to the weak gutty sounds of the man in the pink-tinted glasses—and her eyes which were an astonishing green-golden-yellow in color (the eyes of an ocelot) now looked at me with an open small-town concern. “You poor man, your face is covered with blood,” she said. It was a warm, strong, confident, almost masculine voice, a trace of a Southern accent to it, and she took out her handkerchief and dabbed at my cheek.
    “It must have been awful,” she said. A subtle hard-headed ever-so-guarded maternity lay under the pressure with which she scrubbed the handkerchief at my face.
    “Hey, Cherry,” said her friend, “go up front, and talk to those cops, and see if we can get Uncle out of here.” Studiously, he was avoiding me.
    “Let it be, Tony,” she said. “Don’t look to draw attention.”
    And the uncle groaned again, as if to begrudge me
my
attention.
    “Thank you,” I said to her, “you’re very kind.”
    “I know you,” she said, looking carefully at my face. “You’re on television.”
    “Yes.”
    “You have a good program.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Mr. Rojack.” The detective was calling me.
    “What is your name?” I asked her.
    “Don’t even think about it, Mr. Rojack,” she said with a smile, and turned back to Tony.
    And now I realized the detective had seen me chatting with nothing less than a blonde.
    “Let’s go upstairs and talk,” he said.
    We stepped into a squad car, the siren was opened, and we drove up the Drive to an exit, and then turned back to the apartment. We didn’t say a word on the way. That was just as well. Sitting next to me Roberts gave off the physical communion one usually receives from a woman. He had an awareness of me; it was as if some instinct in him reached into me and I was all too aware of him.
    By the time we arrived,