Americana

Binky curled up on the sofa and went to sleep, a rippling child-snore rolling off her lips. I finished my drink and saw that the bottle was empty. For a second, seriously, I thought of taking off my clothes and then undressing her as well. Instead I lifted her coat from its hanger and covered her with it, aware that the room was well heated but feeling an overwhelming need to display some tenderness, if only in this trite way. The phone rang.

"Hello, Tab. I was in Hollywood recently. I drove my car into a palm tree and twelve guys fell out. They all looked exactly like you. Norman Rockwell soda jerks."

"Hello, Warren."

"When I called before, your secretary said you were in the office committing suicide. I called back hoping I'd be the last person to speak to you alive. Warren Beasley, the controversial radio personality, was probably the last person to talk to the popular young television executive. Mr. Beasley said that Bell, twenty-eight, had been despondent over the loss of his old fielder's glove. The deceased bore a strong facial resemblance to a number of Hollywood stars known for their interchangeability. His body will be sent airmail express to the West Coast for possible casting in a new movie Spectacular based on the siege of Leningrad."

"You sound as morbidly chipper as ever," I said.

"I'm calling to invite you to my wedding. If all precedents hold, the honeymoon promises to be a veritable jubilee of ejaculatio praecox."

Warren Beasley had his own radio program on a local station. It was called "Death Is Just Around the Corner," and it was broadcast from two to five in the morning. I had listened to the program, or at least parts of it, close to a hundred times, and not once on all those occasions had I heard Warren repeat himself to any extensive degree. He invited no guests, played no records and gave no news bulletins, except of his own making. The show had ten or twelve steady sponsors and many irregulars-hair restorers, makers of artificial limbs, ear-piercing shops, a metaphysician in Long Island City, an illuminator of manuscripts and scrolls, several dog ke

"Not again," I said.

"It's the real thing this time, Tab. She's got big pink Renoir tits and she can cook. But I fear her crotch is haunted by the ghost of Joan of Arc, that prissy little suffragette. We're going to Dublin on our honeymoon, which may sound self-defeating, but I've always wanted to do something like that."

"When's the wedding? I wouldn't think of missing it."

"It's on her lunch hour," he said. "Tuesday, noon, Supreme Court Building. She's a dental hygienist. She cleans your teeth before Dr. Dachau takes over with all his dangling pain-utensils. She has to be back in the office by one-thirty but he's giving her a week off begi

"Warren, isn't this the third dental hygienist you've married?"

"Second," he said. "The one you're thinking of was a radiologist. Tried to zap my gonads once or twice. Tuesday then."

I read two pages of a script about the melting of the polar ice caps and then called my father. His secretary said he would be with me in a minute. I tried to picture the soap beneath her fingernails.

"Hiya, pally. What's new?"

"Ste

"That's all? You're sure?"

"Unimpeachable source."

"God bless you, sport."

A few minutes later the phone rang. As I lifted the receiver Binky shifted positions and the coat slipped onto the floor and her skirt moved up her leg, making that fine hushing sound, and twisted nicely around her thighs. The telephone was quacking and I plugged it into my head.

"Dave Bell's my name; TV's my game."

"David, why didn't you call me back? You are coming this evening, aren't you?"

"What do you want for Christmas, Wendy?"

"I won't say it over the phone. But if you were here, dar-ling."

"You're just lonely," I said.

"Remember college, David? Wasn't it wild? You're one of my oldest and dearest friends. Please come to my di

There were thirty-six small holes in the mouthpiece of my telephone. They were arranged in three circles of six, twelve, and eighteen holes each. There were only six holes in the earpiece. This disparity seemed significant but I didn't know exactly why. My eyes were on the sleeping girl on my sofa while my mouth and ear were engaged with the mouth and ear of Wendy Judd. I felt I was being sucked into the telephone. Only my eyes seemed to resist the whistling tu