Free Americana by Don DeLillo Page B

someone else’s sleep. The dream can tell you that you’re not guilty after all. It’s like a second chance. There’s some kind of valuable clue in there someplace. Now try to remember what we did besides just sit there. Try to remember what we said to each other. It’s important.”
    “I’ve told you all there is. If there’s anything more I’m afraid I’ve lost it.”
    “I guess I’m making too much of it,” I said. “Okay, let’s hear about Puerto Rico and all the fascinating men you met down there.”
    She put the glass to her lips, looking at me over its rim. Then she decided to tell me.
    “There was one. There on business. Extremely nice. You’d like him, David. Dry sense of humor. Very athletic. A photographer. There on assignment for
Venture.
He was born in Germany, which gave us something to talk about right away, my parents having been there and all. He lives in a converted farmhouse near Darien. Very married. Three sons. You’d just know that someone like Kurt would have all boys. That’s the type he is. Athletic. Outdoorsy. Tweed and leather. But very married. We enjoyed each other’s company. That was all. Nothing can possibly come of it.”
    This police-blotter description, meant to conceal the way she felt about him, had precisely the opposite effect; so precisely, in fact, that I wondered whether she had planned it that way. The stratagems of marriage sometimes seem refreshingly artless next to those of ex-marriage. She poured two more drinks and we talked further about Kurt. Meredith liked to confide in me. After some early hedging for form’s sake, she would tell me about each of her romances with what seemed to be complete honesty. I enjoyed these discussions. They seemed to generate a real warmth between us, a fine, old and mellow heat, brandy by a fireside. I gave her genuine sympathy and some good advice and when my turn came, asit always did, to stand by that cheery fire and lift that grand old snifter and sing of my own true loves, I told nothing but lies. It was very entertaining. Soon I began to understand the attraction of pathological lying. To construct one’s own reality, then bend it to an implausible extreme, was an adventure even more thrilling than the linguistic free falls of the network. I think I went at it fairly well for a novice. I learned that in an atmosphere of seclusion, intimacy, motel-confessional, no lie is too gaudy, no cliché too familiar, no side-trip of the imagination too dramatically scenic. Beyond sheer entertainment value there were exactly ten reasons for lying to her. (1) The manic quality of these stories provided a nice balance to Merry’s conventional episodes of the heart and lower glands. (2) The night was swarming with serious young people telling their troubles to each other and I preferred to stand aside from all this empathy and slush. (3) The telling of needless lies to a loved one, or former loved one, stimulates in the liar a complex feeling of regret, guilt, superiority, pity, tenderness and power—a compound I would take downstairs with me and analyze like a vial of splendid chemicals. (4) The fabulist in me, lurking just below the water-line, welcomed the challenge of topping each new lie and looked forward to some distant nexus of perfection, the super-union of all lies into one radiant and transcendental fiction. (5) Related to (4). Man’s amoebic inching thrust toward godlike creativity. (6) Being beyond gravity, weightless, in a dream assembled by one’s own hands. (7) The sexual excitement aroused in both of us. (8) Boredom. (9) I put something of myself into some of those stories and hoped, in vain as it turned out, to arrive at a definition, one disguised of course by the surrounding absurdity—a definition of myself without the usual anguish such readings entail. (10) There was really nothing to tell her in the way of troubles, romantic or otherwise. The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the