Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Oh, Harry,” she said, “do wait a minute. Oh, dear man, don’t come in. Not yet.”

  If my body had suffered chills tonight, now my mind suffered the cold. Something was certainly wrong.

  “Darling,” she said, “I just heard frightful news. I can hardly tell you.” Was it the wind? I did not know whether it was the wind. There seemed some lament in the air.

  “Harry,” said Kittredge through the door, “Hugh is dead. They killed him, I fear. Gobby is dead.”

  OMEGA–5

  I CRIED OUT: “KITTREDGE, UNLOCK THE DOOR.” ON THOSE OCCASIONAL but startling nights when she would speak to her dead mother, she would croon a tuneless lullaby. Right now she was making some such sound.

  In the silence that ensued, I tried to descend into the fact. Harlot was dead.

  “Kittredge, I implore you. Please talk to me.”

  “Harry,” her voice was undeniably strange, “can you leave me alone?”

  “Alone?”

  “For just a little while.”

  If my knock had caught my wife in bed with a lover, her panic could not have been more evident.

  There was no lover, however, behind that door. Just the presence of his death. My heart followed this recognition. Death was as intimate to her fine senses as Chloe’s rut on mine.

  “I can’t leave you here,” I said, “unless you tell me more.” When she did not reply, I said again, “Tell me!”

  “Hugh washed ashore in the Chesapeake. Shot.” She came close to halting, but went on. “Security says it’s suicide. That’s what they are going to announce.”

  “Who gave you this information?”

  When she offered no answer, I knocked on the door again. “You have to let me in.”

  “I won’t. Never now.” She said this with such determination that I wondered whether she had heard about Chloe? But when? It could only be after our phone call.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “how safe it is for either of us to be alone.”

  “Safe enough.” Another tone was entering her voice—the limitless anger that stirs at the obduracy of a mate.

  “Kittredge, let me in. Do let me in.”

  “Do let me in. Oh, do,” said Kittredge.

  I backed off. Harlot’s death still seemed far away. He had inhabited my psyche since I was sixteen. But now he was dead. In a day or two, they would say Harlot was a suicide. Someone inside had to have made the call to Kittredge.

  I went back to the mud room, picked up the wet gray pinstripe off the hook, and carried it and my sopping blue oxford shirt and underwear to the laundry on the other side of the pantry. I did not know much about these matters but obviously was not without an inkling that our dryer might flagellate the suit. No matter. I could not live much longer in gardening clothes. It was like sniffing the shovel used for the grave. May I submit that I took another tot of Bushmills. It is hell not to know whether you mourn a dead friend or are relieved that an implacable and/or treacherous superior is gone.

  In truth, however, I was not having any pronounced reaction. What would you do if you received incontrovertible news that the Lord had died? You might continue making your breakfast. In ten weeks, or ten years, the edge of this knowledge could be as sharp as a knife, but now I was waiting for my suit, listening to its slap-tap going around in the dryer. Outside, in the open shed, some small animal, a raccoon perhaps, fresh from hibernation, was rattling the cans. The drip of the laundry sink came down, drop for drop. In the corner, undone by damp, a little plaster had crumbled to the floor. That dust, sad and pleasureless, caused me to think of Harlot’s remains. Would he be cremated? Had he given instructions? Other unanswerable questions rose one by one, and fell in unison with the water tap.

  I was trying to hold off the idea that I was in trouble. I did not know if my warning system had collapsed, but I did not have a sense that anyone was traveling toward me. Of course, how could anyone cross the channel tonight? Thinking this, I had to recognize my wits were asleep. Despite the chop, a good power boat would have no undue trouble reaching here from Bartlett’s Island or Seal Cove.

  A cobweb in the near corner of the laundry room began to claim my attention. On the spider’s back was a species of yellow face, or at least some small markings like eye sockets, a spine of line for the nose, something close to a mouth and chin. I meditated upon these cosmic clues like a drunk who regards the wonders of a bashed-up fingernail while galaxies of the night’s failure wheel about.

  My suit had to be ready. Ready or not—I think the Bushmills was having its untoward effect—I opened the dryer door, pulled out shirt, underwear, vest, jacket and pants, all more muddled by now than fruit in an Old-Fashioned, and got dressed.

  It was at this moment that my hand went up to my breast pocket. Only my desire to account for all the events of this night can oblige me to confess the next detail. My passport—soaked, doubtless, in the crossing of the channel—had been left in my breast pocket while the suit was being flung about in the dryer. Now its official pages, as I soon discovered, were all puffed up. I had a biscuit for a document. The print was barely visible. What a stupidity! I had been carrying this particular passport ever since I commenced the High Holies. Harlot had obtained it for me to use abroad should I have to decamp on short notice. William Holding Libby was the sweet alias Montague had bestowed—a god-awful name, but no matter. Should all go wrong, it was my trapdoor. I kept it on me. Now, standing on the bare wood floor of the laundry, wearing my still damp and battered suit, I seemed incapable of attaching myself to the immediate situation. That is detachment! I was in some exotic realm where the passage of time does not bring you back to any of your responsibilities.

  All the same, I wasn’t certain if I cared to knock on my bedroom door, no, not to be rejected again. Yet what other course was open? I felt no better and perhaps no worse than a man who is being asked by a superior to justify an outrageous expense account. How silent was the house as I climbed the stairs.

  Our bedroom door was slightly ajar. Not opened, but cracked. Had Kittredge gone to look for me? It did not seem probable. More likely, she had had a small change of heart, enough to open the bolt. Of course, that did not mean I was welcome.

  Before I stepped into the room, I could hear her speaking. I did not have to make out the words to know by her tone, loud and a bit abstract, as if addressing a deaf person, that she was talking to the wall. How I hoped it was her mother, hoped for it so devoutly I visualized Maisie Minot Gardiner before me with her white hair, strong white teeth, and the parrot’s voice that gracious ladies often have (as if they would not dream of using a phrase that had not been uttered first by some more appropriate person—the tones coming out of Eleanor Roosevelt’s throat were the first, perhaps, to draw attention to this phenomenon).

  Kittredge’s mother had eyes like the purple-blue of the hybrids that grew in her garden. I knew the names of wildflowers, but Maisie bothered only with brand-new species. She grew the tallest flowers, super-zinnias, four and five feet high and fabulously bright. If you put a Bonnard on an easel in her garden, the palette would have been dominated by Maisie’s blooms. On warm days those blossoms swayed to their own mood, much like Maisie. She was notoriously perky in her opinions. “Harry, don’t be a fool about the French,” she could say, “they are simply not to be trusted.”

  Yes, I prayed Kittredge was speaking to Maisie, but knew she was not.

  “I will,” I now heard my wife say, “follow you nowhere.”

  The door opened at my touch. It was exactly as I expected. That is to say, it was a good deal worse than my hopes. Kittredge sat in a chair facing the wall. She wore a white nightgown, no whiter than her skin, which made her look both nude and draped at once. Her hair had never seemed darker or more lustrous, and her eyes were no longer full of mist. They glowed. It is not common for blue eyes to glow in a modestly lit bedroom, but I could have sworn that the light came from within. She was certainly oblivious to me.

  “Hugh, I
warned you,” she said aloud. “I prayed for you. Now I am free. I will not accompany you out of this house.”

  On that occasion, not long after we were married, when I first heard her talking to her mother, I made the mistake of telephoning from Doane’s all the way to McLean, Virginia, where a psychiatrist, on CIA contract, kept his office. Kittredge had come close to not forgiving me. Ignore the damage done to her career (and mine) now that such an episode had been implanted in her file; this was the least of my error. What she could not forgive was the simple lack of respect. “I love my mother,” she said to me, “and it’s a grace that I am able to talk to her. Can’t you see? That was an overbearing thing to do—phone a doctor. Harry, I will think we are not suited for one another if you try such a barbarism again. You were calling my gift an infirmity.”

  She did not have to repeat herself around me. I did my best to mend the broken link. I had, after all, spoken to the psychiatrist but once. When he called again, on follow-up, I implied that Kittredge and I had gotten very drunk together—a highly uncharacteristic state of affairs for us, I said, and her acts under intoxication had not quite squared with mine. That was how I put it, and added, “After all, Doctor, a person’s got a right to veer off their bearings by a quadrant or so when a parent dies.”

  “Call it a quart or so,” he said, and we both made a point of laughing, first in harmony, then in counterpoint. Why is phony laughter musically more structured than the real stuff?

  Career loss for my wife was limited to a notation in her 201 file: Psychiatric aid solicited on May 19, 1975. Given the number of alcoholics, divorcées, and discovered homosexuals among us (no worse, I would warrant, than in a high-pressure corporation), I hoped the listing would not do real damage. I knew, however, that the slopes were getting slippery. Our marriage had been an in-house scandal comparable to a general’s wife running away with a major.

  All of this may help to explain why I now walked around Kittredge’s chair as if I circumnavigated a holy man. Be certain, I did not fetch water to wash her face, nor chafe her feet, nor think to shake her, or even touch her. With all the habits of a life trained to take hold of things, there was nothing to do but sit down.

  She remained still for a long time. Then she began to nod her head. She said to the wall, “Gobby, you never could bring yourself to admit the truth to a soul. But you can tell me. If you think it’s important, darling, perhaps you should.”

  It was like a conversation on a roof when someone is ready to jump and the police look to dissuade him. I suspect the dialogue on such occasions comes to seem natural. Kittredge spoke to the wall as if, no question, Harlot was there. I confess it soon began to seem less exceptional to me. Our bedroom, too ascetic for my taste, too much like an upstairs chamber in a good New England inn—even the white flounces on the counterpane were professionally chaste—was put in no disarray by the intensity of Kittredge’s words. When she ceased speaking, the room took up its white pervasive silence.

  “Harry, get the fuck out, will you?”

  Through our years together, she rarely used the word. But then I was not certain she had spoken. Could that have been Harlot’s voice issuing from her larynx?

  Kittredge arched forward in her chair. “You are covered with seaweed,” she said aloud. “Oh, Gobby, pull it off. You look like you’re wearing a wig.” She laughed loudly in what was nearly a man’s voice, and then as the laugh continued, the tone became unmistakably hearty. Some men laugh as if even the embers in a fireplace, and the wrapper leaves of a good Havana, are part of the splendid service that surrounds them. My God, I thought, she is laughing just like my father. Then her features took on an expression to remind me of Allen Dulles, equally as departed as my father.

  Once in Vietnam, after a carouse through the Department Store (our name for the largest brothel in Saigon), I ended in a hotel room with a young and tiny Vietnamese prostitute who procured me opium. I smoked it with a great sense of sin, and vomited up my dinner with a whole sense of redemption. Afterward, the peace of the pipe came to me, and I began to hallucinate. The face of the whore became the face of my mother, and then the face of Kittredge whom I was in love with from afar. After a while, I was able to turn the features of this Vietnamese prostitute into any woman I chose.

  In our bedroom, however, I could not select the face I wished to see next, nor did I have any happy confidence that I was afloat on misty clouds of controllable hallucination. Rather, each set of features came forth as if someone was there to work her flesh. Upon Kittredge’s delicate upper lip appeared to sprout the rough pepper-and-salt brush of Harlot’s mustache. His wire-rimmed spectacles were on her nose, her full head of hair became his half-bald dome, and he stared at me. Next, he spoke. It came through Kittredge’s mouth, but it could as well have been his voice. “You’ll find out, Harry. She’s a consummate liar.”

  The mustache faded with the spectacles. Her mane of black hair belonged to her again. Kittredge began to weep.

  “Gobby, take me with you. I’m lonely here.” Her grief soon passed. Like a child declaring a quick end to the previous mood, a new expression moved over her features, a leer. It was the private look that only Chloe could offer, her come-into-my-domain leer. You would not see that turn on Chloe’s mouth until you were naked against her and the fiend was parting the insulations of the flesh; the baubles were ready to gleam. Released at last!

  I was feeling odd impulses. To be walking on the avenue and feel an abrupt inclination to go down a side street is not an uncommon impulse. Presumably it comes from oneself. Here, I had no doubt. The suggestions coming to me were not my own. I was like an iron filing skittering about on a plate as magnets are shifted beneath. Powerful as gods are those magnets. Whatever compulsion delivered me periodically to the door of Chloe’s trailer was now on the prowl for my wife. A wash of lust, pure as wild goat, came into my loins. The screw-grease heats reserved for Chloe were over me again. I cannot bear to confess my next thought. Colder than Harlot was my heart: I wanted to bring Kittredge to the Vault.

  But I had invoked Harlot’s name. That gave up the game. I broke into a sweat. Was it Harlot who was coaxing me toward the Vault?

  Leaving Kittredge in her chair, I went down to the first floor of the Keep. There I lit the fire in our den. It was the warmest room we had. When other lights were out, and the fire was well along, the stained wood of the old barn planks enriched the walls with the color of bourbon and brandy. One could summon the illusion that one’s marriage and profession were not without their liaison to the universal hearth.

  Now, however, my thoughts were as livid as the obsessions of an insomniac. I sprawled into an old leather chair and studied the fire. I did my best to empty my mind. I had gifts for meditation; techniques, as you may suspect, to restore detachment. I needed peace in the way an exhausted general needs sleep. After twenty minutes of seeking to compose myself, I received instead the poor coin of the substitute: apathy.

  It was at this moment that the telephone on the end table began to ring. That was not common at this hour. Ten years ago, calls sometimes came from Langley in the middle of the night, but not lately. At this moment, however, what impressed me most was my quiet expectation that the phone was going to ring. Then it did.

  OMEGA–6

  I KNEW THE VOICE BEFORE I COULD UTTER THE NAME. “CHLOE,” I SAID.

  “I hate to call you like this,” she began. A full amateur’s pause followed, as if only now had it even occurred to her—“Can we talk?” she asked.

  Was guilt still skewing my senses? I had the notion that Kittredge was stirring in the bedroom. “Yes, we can talk,” I said. But my voice was low enough to assure her we could not.

  “I’ve got to see you. I wanted to call you hours ago, but I didn’t know if it was okay.”

  “How is the weather back in Bath?” I make no excuse for saying this. I might have said anything to purchase a moment. Then, I added, “Aren’t the roads bad?”

  “My four-wheel-driv
e happens to be a big fat lemon on the ice, but it will be all right. Harry,” she said, “something has happened. I’ve got to see you. Tonight.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s nothing open now.”

  “I want to come to your place.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re certainly welcome, but you could never find it.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I know your place. I know the road. I lived near Doane one winter.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure,” she said, “I was shacked up for a while with Wilbur Butler. I lived in the double trailer down the highway.”

  I saw those car carcasses rusting in the front yard.

  “How is it I never had a sight of you then?”

  “I just lived with Wilbur for a couple of months. He never let me out of bed. I used to watch through the window when you drove by. ‘Boy, he’s cute,’ I used to say to Wilbur. Did he get to hate you!”

  I thought again of the malevolence in Wilbur’s eye when we passed on the road. “I guess he did,” I answered. I could hear her breathing. “Chloe,” I said, “it is not at all a good idea to come here tonight.”

  “You’re spinning your wheels,” Chloe said. Her voice showed the same anger she brought to carnal junction. “Now!” she always said at such times. “Harder, you son of a bitch! Harder!” Yes, the echoes were there. “Harry, it’s got to be tonight,” she said.

  “Why? Why tonight?”

  “You’re not safe.” She paused. “I’m not safe,” she said. She paused again. “Have they gone through your house?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “They went through mine.”

  “What?”

  “While I was out having that last drink with you. They went through every last thing in the trailer. They cut open the stuffing in the furniture. They broke into my picture frames. They took apart my gas stove. They slit my mattress. They dumped the bureau drawers.” She began to cry. She cried like a strong woman who has just received news that a relative was maimed in an accident. “Harry, I sat there for an hour. Then I went through what I own. I was prepared for the worst, but they didn’t steal a thing. They even put my costume jewelry in a neat pile on the bed. And my bikini panties. And my red and black bra. Right next to it, what do you think? They laid out one roach. I toked a little marijuana last New Year’s Eve and hid the roach at the bottom of my drawer. They laid it right next to my costume jewelry. I hate them,” she said.