An American Dream

Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.

That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.

Beneath a toilet water of punctilio and restraint...a deep smell came off Kelly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher's block, and something else, some whiff of the icy rot and iodine in a piece of marine nerve left to bleach on the sand. With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch's curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb. It was all of Deborah for me.

The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.

I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known.

...and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.

I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control.

A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode.

...the Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.

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.

Once, in a rainstorm, I witnessed the creation of a rivulet. The water had come down, the stream had begun in a hollow of earth the size of a leaf. Then it filled and began to flow. The rivulet rolled down the hill between some stalks of grass and weed, it moved in spurts, down the fall of a ledge, down to a brook. It did not know it was not a river.