Americana

"Frankly I don't know why anybody our age would want to get married," Page said. "Frankly it sounds to me like the end of the road."

"Don't you have an urge to play house?"

"If it's a triplex on Montego Bay."

"Tell me about Wild," I said. "Is he good in bed? Is he better than I am? I don't have to know any details. Just say yes or no. It's important."

The Young Man Carbuncular vanished from the campus three months before graduation. Nobody knew where he went. I thought his disappearance might arouse some guilt in those who had ignored and ridiculed him. Instead it became a joke. People said he had gone to Tibet to find a holy man who might cure his boils; or was wandering in the desert, delirious, singing hit songs of the late forties; or had barricaded himself in the men's room of the library with a submachine gun, several hundred rounds of ammo and a can of spray-on deodorant. I went to Leonard's room one night hoping to find some indication of his whereabouts, a passage underlined in a book, a road map, a letter from his parents. All I found was a piece of paper on which was written:

Something tells me that I shall dream tonight of newspapers wrapped in fish

Leonard Zajac had been four years with us, a man for all his waddling pity, and the mystery of his flight, perhaps in overwhelming dread, was met with nothing more than mild relief. He returned the day after commencement. Some of us were still on campus, loading up cars, completing plans for vacations in the Andes, on the Balearic Islands, aboard schooners bound for the East Indies. In three months we would all have to start earning a living and there was a pitch of hysteria to the dialogue of that last day. Merry and I, who would be starting east in an hour or so, were talking with some friends on the quadrangle when Leonard touched me on the shoulder to whisper hello and goodbye. He said he had come to pick up his books. He had been living with the Havasupai Indians in Arizona, he said, and he pla

Everything begins in California. It is like the hip lexicon of the ghetto; as soon as Madison Avenue breaks the code, Harlem devises a new one. So with California and New York. When surfing and nudity moved east, California got all decked out in flowing madras and went indoors to discover the commune. I liked it out there and might have stayed. But my father was back east, living alone in the music-box house, insistent on remaining. We all have something we are trying to forget. If we're smart we take off for parts unknown. But my father could not leave the house and I didn't have enough sense to remain at the shallow end of the continent. So I began to swim.

Big Bob Davidson first showed up in Old Holly when I was eighteen; that would make Jane twenty-one. Bob was working in New York at the time and he came out one weekend to meet the family. I was home for the summer, working on my golf and te

We changed and began playing. My game was better than ever and I thought I'd take it easy at the outset and see what kind of pace Bob had in mind. It soon became clear that he was out to destroy me. He ranged all over the court, grim and dusty, playing in a low cloud of clay, tersely a

"I just got here," he said. "Who's wi

"I took the first set."

"What to what?"

"I think it was six-one. Bob's keeping score. Tell you the truth, I'm not very involved in this particular match."

"Well, get involved," he said. "I want you to whip his ass. I want you to beat him in straight sets. I want to walk into that house later and tell them it was no contest. Straight sets. That's what I want to say. The kid beat him in straight sets."

"Don't you like him, dad?"

"It's not a question of whether or not I like him. I don't even know the guy. It's a family thing. It's a question of him coming into our house and Christ only knows what goes on between him and Jane. Jesus, look at him. He's so goddamn big. He could hurt her or something. For all I know he's the sweetest guy in the world. But that's not the point. It's a family thing, kid. Now go get him. Go run his ass ragged."

"Right," I said.

I beat him in straight sets, easily, embarrassing him, taunting him with soft raindrop shots which sent him from one end of the net to the other, then drilling a hummer past his ear. When it was over my father clapped me on the back, rubbed my neck, congratulated me on what he called a truly historic blitz, a glorious rout. All at the expense of the interloper, it was one of those strange bursts of bloodlove which are both puzzling and overpowering in the dimensions of their joy. I told my father I had barely worked up a sweat and he laughed at that as if it were quite the fu

My father drank Irish stout. He bought most of his suits in England. He liked Dutch cigars and drove Italian and British automobiles. Most of the books in his library were about London before the Great Fire and the American West before the Little Bighorn. His shoes were handcrafted in London by a firm which had cast impressions of his feet the day after they first stepped on British soil. Although he didn't ride much he had several Western saddles in his den as well as a small collection of Winchester 73s and one Sharps. 50 caliber rifle which he liked to call his buffalo gun. He favored German cameras and smoked Danish pipes that cost almost two hundred dollars each.

He used to have lunch at the Playboy Club about twice a week. Later he began accompanying friends or clients to their clubs for lunch-the Harvard or Princeton Club, the New York A.C., the Yale, the New York Yacht Club. My father was a graduate of Long Island University. He used a brand of men's cologne that was aged in oak casks and blended with over three hundred ingredients. The cars he owned at one time or another included an MG, a Jaguar, a Ferrari, an Aston-Martin and a Maserati. I don't know whether or not all that horsepower was supposed to take the curse off LIU.

"A man works hard to get two hundred thousand dollars," he said to me once as we drove through the outskirts of town in the Mark IX Jag. "You save, you finagle, you invest. You work yourself up to x-amount of dollars and if you plan well and get lucky in the market you can begin to build something for your family. That's what makes a democracy worth all the sweat and corruption. Security for your wife and children after you're gone. What if something happens to me? Your mother hates to hear me talk like that but you have to prepare for such contingencies. That's your job as head of a family in a free republic. I've got about nine different kinds of policies that'll provide for you and your mother and your sisters if anything should happen to me. It could happen any time, you know. Right now a dog could walk across the road, I swerve the car, and bang. Understand what I'm talking about? The turning point was the money my father left me. That put us over the top. But if you're not careful, all you get is stomach trouble. I'll tell you a true story right out of one of the country's most distinguished scientific journals. They pulled an experiment on these two monkeys. They gave them electric shocks every sixty seconds. Now the first monkey had a button and all he had to do was press it and he wouldn't get any shock. The second monkey also had a button but it was completely useless. Eventually monkey-A caught on to the gimmick and started pressing the button like mad to avoid that juice. Whereas monkey-B realized his button wasn't worth shit and he just squatted in the corner, scratching himself and getting jolted every minute. So what happens? The first monkey gets stomach ulcers and kicks off in two weeks. The second monkey, who had resigned himself to the shocks, lives happily ever after. That little experiment is a moral for our time. It shows the price you have to pay for working yourself up to a decision-making post. I'll have to show you around the office sometime. You'll see sixty-five executive monkeys weeping into their telephones and pissing blood. That's the kind of business your old man is in. But don't worry about me, kid. I've got cast iron in my gut and I'm an odds-on favorite to pull through. In my heart I'm deeply conservative. I come from a long line of secret Presbyterian drinkers. My grandfather was a blacksmith in Sag Harbor. What was the point I was trying to make?"