Free An American Dream by Norman Mailer

she was gone—and it was an animal howl.
    One scalding wash of sorrow, and I felt clean. I went to the telephone, dialed O, asked, “What is the number of the police?” The operator said, “Just a minute, I’ll get it for you,” and I waited for eight long rings while my nerve teetered like a clown on a tightrope, and a cacophony of voices rose all ten stories up from the ground. I heard my voice giving my name and Deborah’s address tothe mouthpiece, and that voice of mine then said, “Get over here right away, will you. I can hardly talk, there’s been a frightful accident.” I hung up, went to the door, and shouted down the stairs, “Ruta, get dressed, get dressed quick. Mrs. Rojack has killed herself.”

3 / A Messenger from the Maniac
    B UT NOW it wasn’t possible to wait in Deborah’s room until the police arrived. An anxiety went off in me like the quiver of electricity when there is a short in the line. My body could have been on a subway, it felt as if it
were
the subway, bleak, grinding at high speed; I was jangled with adrenalin.
    I went out the door, down the steps, and came up against Ruta in the hall. She was standing there half-dressed, a black skirt, no stockings yet, no shoes, a white blouse not buttoned. Her breasts were bare, no brassiere yet either, and her dyed red hair now uncombed, still mangled by my fingers, stood up like a bush. Dyed, marcelled, lacquered and then worked over by me, her hair gave off the look of a girl just taken in a police raid. But even at this instant, something relaxed in me. For there was a tough slatternly tenderness in her face, and her prize—those bright littlebreasts—kept peeking at me through the open shirt. There was an instant between us, an echo of some other night (some other life) when we might have met in the corridor of an Italian whorehouse on an evening when the doors were closed, the party was private, and the girls were moving from bed to bed in one sweet stew.
    “I was dreaming,” she said, “and you called down the stairs.” Suddenly she closed the shirt over her breasts.
    “No,” and to my surprise, I gave a pure sob. It was an extraordinary sound. “Deborah killed herself. She jumped through the window.”
    Ruta let out a cry, a thin dirty little cry. Something nasty was being surrendered. Two tears flashed down her cheek. “She was an ingenious woman,” Ruta said, and began to weep. There was pain now in the sound, and such a truth in the grief that I knew she was crying not for Deborah, not even quite for herself, but rather for the unmitigatable fact that women who have discovered the power of sex are never far from suicide. And in that sudden burst of mourning, her face took on beauty. A nourishment came off Ruta’s limbs. I was in some far-gone state: no longer a person, a character, a man of habits, rather a ghost, a cloud of loose emotions which scattered on the wind. I felt as if much of me had gathered like a woman to mourn everything I had killed in my lover, that violent brutish tyrant who lived in Deborah. And I groped toward Ruta like a woman seeking another female. We came together, hugged each other. But her breast came out of the open shirt, and slipped into my hand, and that breast was looking for no woman’s touch, no, it made its quick pert way toward what was hard and certain in my hand. It was as if I had never felt a breast before (that gift of flesh) for Ruta was still weeping, the sobs were coming now with the fierce rhythm of a child, but her breast was independent of her. That little tit in my hand was nosing like a puppy for its reward, impertinent with its promise of the sly life it could give to me, and so keen to pull in a life for itself that I was takenwith a hopeless lust Hopeless, because I should have been down on the street already, and yet there was no help for it, thirty seconds was all I wanted and thirty seconds I took, one high sniff of the alley coming from her as I took her still weeping