Americana

"Thanks a whole hell of a lot," she said.

The old man came for the TV set. Then Carol Deming arrived wearing black pants, a black sweater and no makeup. I gave her a business kiss on the cheek, a gesture she acknowledged by smiling blankly at the camera. She sat in the armchair, her legs tucked up under her, and took another look at the script. Adjusting the tripod, I spoke to her from a directorial crouch. She bit her bent thumb, starlet in the enchanted light. The camera and tape recorder were cabled and ready to sync.

"Now the first part of this has to be simple, direct, wide open. In the second part you begin to draw back. I want to feel as though I'm listening to a stranger in a fog. The two women are very different. Maybe you've seen Persona. There are two women, a nurse and a patient, very different, who slowly begin to merge, to almost drift through each other's personalities and reappear with something added or subtracted, I'm not sure which, but a great movie, unparalleled, about the nature of diminishing existence. I'm getting off the point."

"How do you want me to sit, David?"

"Just the way you're sitting. I want the whole chair. Look directly at the camera. Very little voice. Keep the acting invisible. Then we'll cut and do part two."

"I'm scared."

"We all are."

"But I think I know what you want."

"Begin," I said.

"He had to borrow from his father at the begi

Carol went to the window and checked over the script. Without a word she tossed the pages to the floor, lit a cigarette and returned to the armchair, sitting this time with bare feet up on the chair, knees high and angled wide and with her back slumped, face framed by the knees, exhaling smoke out of that body-hut into the waiting eye of the camera. I began to shoot. Carol paused, most intelligently, for ten full seconds, contained in smoke, before begi

"His sense of insult was overwhelming. If someone used an obscene word in my presence, he demanded an immediate apology. He always got it, of course, his reputation being what it was. He was prepared to kill, quite literally to kill, in order to avenge the honor of someone he loved. He was always swearing on his mother's grave. In his company of men, there was no greater promise or proof of honor than to swear on your mother's grave. You could borrow any amount of money, get any favor, if you swore on your mother's grave to repay the debt. He told me about a friend of his called Mother Cabrini. Cabrini got a lot of mileage out of his mother's grave until it was learned that his mother was not dead. Telling this, he managed to be both outraged and amused. They were all children, of course, but not in the same way the rest of us are children. We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we've forgotten that darkness means death. They haven't forgotten this. They are still in the hills of Sicily or Corsica or wherever they came from. They obey their mothers. They don't go into a dark cellar without expecting to be strangled by a zombie. They bless themselves constantly. And us, what do we do? We watch television and play Scrabble. So there it is, children of light and darkness. There are only several ways to die and I've just named two. I could no longer bear the way I was dying and so I decided to take my chances with him. We made love for the first time in the back seat of his Cadillac in somebody's driveway at ten o'clock in the evening somewhere between Boston and New York. I was not quite a virgin at the time and this upset him. He couldn't understand how a nineteen-year-old girl from a good family and so forth. We lived together, on and off. He'd go away on one of his business trips and I'd wonder how much the nature of his job meant to our relationship. I couldn't help suspecting I had manufactured the whole thing, my need for him, simply to avoid what I considered to be the alternatives. This is one of my very a

Sullivan tapped a few ashes from her cigarette into the salad she was tossing.

"We used to sit around our quarters after a strike," Brand said. "There'd be Thaw, Hoppy, Bookchester and this kid Eldred Peck who went to some obscure college down South where he wrote his master's thesis on the swastika in history. You know, tracing it way back to the early Buddhists, way back almost to the dawn of man. That was his favorite phrase. The dawn of man. And Eldred invented this game we'd play sitting around our quarters after a strike. Except it wasn't a game really. It was really a peculiar form of conversation, almost a religious chant. It even had a name. It was called Godsave. Eldred always started it off. He was younger than any of us and he had hair that was more white than blond, so white it was almost pink, a thin ski