by Paul Wolfe
“I think things can change.”
“That’s where you are wrong and hopelessly naive. But I won’t burst your bubble. That is not my job. Please don’t take this as criticism. A woman has to get by any way she can. You have chosen a childish route. When you come down from your LSD, the world will still be the world, and you will have to carry on.”
She walked off, and I continued to sip the milkshake, stunned yet aware that criticism is the first reward for those who seek change. All revolutions fail, they say. Except the last one.
FEBRUARY 3
All is synchronicity. At random moments, an underlying pattern emerges, an apparency of predestination. Why was my ex-husband led down the path to skullduggery while I was led to expose it?
I still consider it an omen that Timothy Leary and Cord Meyer had met each other a long time ago in Berkeley, California. Omens are a form of magical thinking, but then isn’t all thinking magical?
Each of these two returning veterans had left a sense on the fields of butchery. Tim had forsaken part of his hearing. Cord relinquished half of his sight, the promise of a generation returning home with a glass eye—a lump of ceramic that never moved within its socket, even as the waves of thought vibrated in his brain.
Once, after watching cigarette smoke curl into his ceramic eye and die there, I gave him a copy of the Platters recording of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Cord never got the joke; he is among those not constituted to get jokes. I’ve always believed humor an indication of intelligence, humor being the ability to hold a single thought on two different levels at the same time. But the humorless overcompensate in other areas and achieve great heights, unburdened by either ambivalence or irony. Such was Cord Meyer, driven by the idea of world government, a dream I shared with him. Sovereignty was the enemy. I agreed. When you have sovereignty, you will eventually have war.
But it would not be long before Cord’s mission would change, when instead of a marching band for peace he would become a killer in the cause of sovereignty. When James Jesus Angleton would recruit him into the CIA, along with all the other fine young men in Langley committed to World War III. And my worship died there, like the vapors of his cigarette.
And following that, it would not be long before they broke into my house.
FEBRUARY 4
They are speaking the language of objects. They are piercing the invisible walls that are the true walls of a house, my little house on Thirty-Fourth Street, three windows wide. I came home last night, and the African mask from MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village was no longer attached to the wall. It lay on the bookshelf, staring up at the ceiling. My heart pounded. With a simple shift of location, the mask had gone from exotic artifact to bloodcurdling demon. The Harry Belafonte and Ray Charles albums I had left on the floor by the record player were now carefully placed atop each other on the coffee table. My Circle #3 in Indigo and Green, the only painting of mine I hang in my own home, was no longer on the wall. It had been removed. It sat on the floor, leaning up against the coffee table.
The cold men have entered my home, besmirching my possessions with a careful dusting of threat, as if to deny that I possess them. Because I know too much? Talk too much? Will never be Cord Meyer’s again, ever? Have trespassed on the body and mind of the president?
Have the cold men issued a cease-and-desist order for my life?
Where is the dictionary for the language of objects?
FEBRUARY 8
How odd, suddenly, to dream my death. Who is dreaming? Who is dying?
I am shattered by the break-in, the violation of my home that is a violation of my self, a female self that I will not allow to be silenced. My mind unravels. I tell myself a tale of erasure, a tale of two sons shorn of their mother and my brother-in-law Ben Bradlee left to convey the sad news to my friend Anne Truitt, living all the way over in Japan.
I envision an apartment in Tokyo, on straw mats, in a room divided by shoji screens, where my friend will buckle over in tears. And when she recovers, she will tell Ben there is a diary. There is a book. There are secret thoughts and forbidden adventures scribbled in plain ink in a journal of French papier de luxe. I have scribbled this saga with great pain. Who would not avoid the burden of writing if they could?
So Ben will receive news of a diary from Anne (my mind continues to unravel) and place a call to his secret master at the Agency, Mr. James Jesus Angleton. Yes, I add one more secret to the pile, a secret even Anne doesn’t know. This sleeves-rolled-up journalist with blue blood running through his veins, dear brother-in-law Ben, was recruited for the Company by James Angleton himself and is a foot soldier among the recruited writers and journalists. Assets of intelligence. Slaves with pens.
James Angleton will then hear the news of a diary and take off in pursuit. Alone. The story of a free woman kicking and screaming her way through an enslaved era will enflame his brain. A tale of sex beneath presidential sheets, chemical explosions in the consciousness of a president, a tiny hot breath a single woman breathed against the entire edifice of the Cold War, secrets falling like leaves out of the files of Georgetown and into the lap of a CIA leader’s ex-wife . . . it will all prove too explosive to assign to an underling. James will hunt down my diary himself.
Yes, James Jesus Angleton will break and enter my studio. He is a master of breaking and entering. He was taught by Kim Philby himself, or else by some assassin, or some Mafia thug, I don’t know who taught him. But he will break and enter. And what will he make of my painting studio as he wanders among the unventilated smells of paint in his black suit, his crisp white shirt and tie? Will his cigarette accidentally ignite my turpentine? Will my death ironically culminate in a chemical explosion and the death of the CIA head of counterintelligence, vaporized in a bizarre turpentine fire? Or perhaps James will be distracted by my explorations of the optical field. Will he gaze at my paintings, the circles and triangles ablaze with reds and greens and blues on my round and rectangular canvases? Will he come upon the wooden box of brushes, slide it carefully aside, and discover the mahogany box that protects this journal? Will he read the story of a woman whose destiny it was to be alive at the fulcrum of time?
Yes, he will enter my studio effortlessly when brother-in-law Ben Bradlee informs him of my diary. A woman’s padlock has no chance against the CIA head of counterintelligence.
FEBRUARY 10
And suddenly I’m reminded of the hole where a son used to be. It’s an ache you wake with, the thought that things are not right, will never be right, it’s a gripping of the lungs that connects upward to the tear ducts. I could cry but perhaps will not. Where does this pain arise in the midst of sleep, as if you were accidentally born into the wrong person and now have to march forward living the wrong person’s life, chatting with the wrong person’s friends?
The Tragedy. My sweet Michael is gone six years now. A mom cooking spaghetti, just like every mom in every kitchen in America. A knock that shatters the world. Policemen, young men in grown-up blue uniforms with the grave look of the grave on their faces, they are talking to you but you don’t hear them. Not really. A car has hit a boy on the blind curve of a country road. No one can know the blow of outliving a child. It makes you doubt the sanctity of the universe. I keep his teddy bear in my studio, on the shelf beside the brushes and cans of turpentine. I paint in the presence of the teddy bear. I paint amid the innocence of what remains of my son. Alan Watts relays the Zen koan. Chop wood and draw water. Chop wood and draw water. After the unspeakable you simply continue. This is the title of life: simply continue.
FEBRUARY 16
How many times have we met? I have lost count, but it has reached some invisible number where a shift occurs: from a kind of lover to a kind of wife. A kind of wife who will never be recorded in history, never be seen smiling and waving in the black-and-white footage of a presidency as it replays till the end of time.
But we walked out into the Rose Garden on Saturday, a kind of husband and a kind of w
ife, on a rare afternoon together when the bristling cold hit our uncoated bodies. Jack never seems to feel the cold, never bundles up properly—is it the warrior in him, or the drugs? I looked at rosebushes waiting out a long winter until they bloomed again, and he told me he wasn’t the brother who was supposed to be the politician. A family needs only one politician. Older brother Joe had been groomed since childhood to be the president. Jack smiled sadly, speaking of his lost brother. I knew the story. I was aware he’d died a useless death in a suicide mission over England in 1944. He was carrying a massive payload of explosives that detonated through sheer electrical malfunction. A pointless, senseless death, it seemed to me, but you don’t say that to Kennedys. They are queer in matters of death, so I didn’t. Daddy Joe turned to the next son, and Jack had no chance to say no to the presidency, Jack who grew up skinny and sickly in the shadow of his big brother, the blue-eyed first son who was quite mean to his younger brother, a vicious competitor. And that was how Jack came to be in the White House, a bit ashen now next to bushes where the roses had disappeared.
“Sometimes I feel so alone here, Mary.” It embarrasses me when people repeat themselves, and Jack has said the same words to me before.
“You’re never alone as long as I live,” I said, and he smiled with a bit of pain.
“Lemnitzer wants to launch a preemptive strike against Russia. A nuclear strike. He’d launch a world war tonight if I gave him the go-ahead. Wipe out millions of people, just like that. Can you believe what I’m up against with these generals?”
I took his hand in mine, the strange freckled Irish skin giving it the look of a hand that never grew up, no matter how much pain its owner endured. I will reveal my secret plan to him soon. Meanwhile, I smiled when he quoted a line from a poem written by a Spanish matador.
Only one is there who knows,
And he’s the man who fights the bull.
FEBRUARY 19
Another sleepless night. Something jangling in my chest like anxiety or excitement or foreboding. I got out of bed and headed to Clyde’s for a bourbon, and when I arrived, C was there, the Wildroot Cream–oiled Cold War man I fucked last summer.
There had been no second time—I had seen no need—but he was electrified to see me at Clyde’s at that late hour. It’s a short story. I had two bourbons, he had two Scotches, I felt like he would never leave, nor ever leave me alone, I suddenly saw no need to be left alone, I’m a free woman, I must have said to myself, and I took him home. Voilà, as my French nanny used to say.
It was all rather impersonal, but as I was reminded, he is a smooth machine. Highly practiced. And it felt extremely good, for a brief, limited period of time. Then I felt what might be called nothing. I told him to leave. I was rather blasé about it. He asked to see me again, and I told him no conversation, he had to go. And he was quite a gentleman about it, smooth even in the closing. He put his tie back on carefully, quite meticulously for such a ridiculously late hour, and as his head barely cleared my little front door, I noticed not a greasy hair out of place. Who was he? I asked when the door closed, and had no immediate answer. Another cold warrior with a dick.
But who are we when we fuck, anyway? Not the personality life has thrown together in order to get by. The identity for which the government issues a social security number. We are primordial in the sexual act, we escape identity, and as such all sex is anonymous.
FEBRUARY 28
Memories of violation. Memories of the Tragedy. Memories of the pain that Jack bears. I am haunted by ghosts. I haven’t painted for a few days, and just when I think perhaps I can start again, memories return of a back seat in a LaSalle Series 50. That was where she left her body, my ghost sister Rosamond, in the back seat of a LaSalle Series 50. She breathed a last breath of carbon fumes on that seat till there was no more oxygen to break down sugar in her cells. She was the loveliest woman in America. They wrote that. The theater critics wrote that when she acted onstage. The newspaper writers wrote that when she acted in French films.
She taught me to swim. She taught me to lie naked in the sunlight with high green branches fanning our behinds, and not to care who saw. She taught me to ride. She stormed through the woods of Grey Towers on her stallion in the moonlight. I would hear the galloping clip-clop outside when they thought I was sleeping, and I said one day I would ride with Rosamond.
She left her body in the back seat of a LaSalle wearing a white evening gown, silver slippers, and white ermine wrap. We don’t know her mind, and now there is no longer a mind that answers to the name Rosamond Pinchot.
Ghost sister. Discovered on a ship when her days as an actress began. Discovered in car when they were over.
MARCH 2
Chop wood and draw water. So says Alan Watts in The Way of Zen. Life continues, and it’s time to break the spell. I called Lorraine Cooper and told her I needed to break out of a really blue mood.
“Get your girdle on and meet me at Le Bistro. One o’clock,” she said.
“How about a walk on the towpath?”
“What? I’m at two with nature. See you at Le Bistro.”
She hung up, so I had no choice but to put on a fresh pair of pedal pushers, a pink angora sweater, and flats, not sneakers. Le Bistro is a bit stuffy. It’s Jackie’s favorite lunch place, but she’s French, I think, or at least has this strong French bent.
I was thrilled to see Lorraine at the bar in a blue Dior dress and hat, already sipping her Tom Collins. “I’m just having a chat with my friend Tom over here,” she said, raising her glass. “You’ve got to meet him. Alfred? One more.”
Alfred brought me the first in what would be a series of Tom Collinses, and I started venturing far, far from my blue mood.
“Sherman tells me he’s introducing this bill in the Senate to cut deficit spending, and I tell him I understand it perfectly, I’ve been doing deficit spending my whole life and it’s worked out very well. But what on earth is balance of payments? Sherman scrunches up his face, the killjoy, so I tell him to run along to Capitol Hill because I’m going to have a Tom Collins with Mary. I tell him, if you decide you like deficit spending after all, you know where to find me.”
I’m laughing, Lorraine is laughing, even Alfred is laughing, I think he’s from South America. Then I notice James Jesus Angleton sitting at a table in the rear with none other than Cord.
“Lorraine, Cord and James Angleton are in the back having lunch together!”
“That’s their problem, sweetheart, we’ve got drinking to do,” she says, and we crack up again.
“You want some rabbit stew, Mary? It’s to die for at this place.”
“I’d love some. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat.”
“Sparingly, my dear. Sparingly. I grew up in Italy, and I decided early on you either choose men or cakes, you can’t have both, and I’ve never deviated. Do you take vitamins, Mary?”
I was taken aback. “No. I take LSD, though!” I burst out laughing again.
“We’ve got to talk. François! I think we’re ready to sit down, if you’d be kind enough to show us to a table. But not in the back, please.”
We followed François to a table by the window.
“We’ll both have the rabbit stew, and two more Tom Collinses, please,” I heard Lorraine telling the waiter, but I was feeling swirly and looking out the window onto M Street and grinning.
MARCH 4
Jackie’s in Paris with her sister, hunting for clothes, and Jack was lonely. So Jack and Ben and sister Tony and William Walton and I boarded the big plane for dinner at Hyannis Port. The staff made meat loaf again—Jack loves that meat loaf, though it may not be about what he loves so much as what his delicate stomach can bear. There was a full moon shining on Cape Cod, churning the sea waves into a surfer’s dream, but inside, the fireplace crackled and conversation was cozy.
“Tell Mary about your paintings, Billy Boy,” Jack said to William. “She’s quite a painter too. And you’re a sculptor, right, Tony?
” He turned suddenly to my sister, not giving William a chance to speak, and beamed in her direction. Tony blushed—she is so much more shy than I am, so much thinner, so much quieter, so much everything that is ladylike, and it haunted me: Does Jack prefer her? Tony spoke of her pottery. “I’m only happy when I have wet clay on my hands.”
“And you, Benjie,” he said to Ben Bradlee. “No talent whatsoever!”
“That’s it, Jack. I live off the backs of people with talent.”
“And other parts of them too, no doubt.” Jack was feeling frisky, and I suddenly asked him to show me the ocean, to show me the places where he began sailing as a boy, a sickly boy pushed by his father out into the deep. He paused, then looked at me and smiled. Tony seemed confused, her eyes darting back and forth between Jack and me. Ben smiled into his martini glass, and William Walton turned to Tony and began describing how he had redecorated the Oval Office, choosing a copper-painted bust of Saint Thomas More as the centerpiece.
Jack and I rose—I desperately hoped it wouldn’t generate rumors—and we walked outside onto the carpet of the full moon. We held hands as we walked to the water but said nothing, as if silence was proof to others that nothing was really afoot. But as we looked at the white churn of surf in the charcoal night, I had an impulse. I unzipped my dress, pulled off my bra, and wriggled out of the girdle I had worn to look thin. I stood naked, a moon-bathing statue, and Jack stared at me. “It seems like Christmas has come early.” He smiled, looking between my legs, and suddenly he was on the ground licking me. Unusual indeed for Jack; the full moon must have affected his brain. Jack’s mouth between my legs, the roar of Atlantic surf penetrating my ears, I stood in that night of salty wind and orgasmed. All went quiet. Then Jack said we needed to get back. Jack always needs to get back, so I wriggled back into my clothes, all these things a woman is forced to wear so that polite society remains polite.