Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Rodman Knowles Gardiner: “I’ve got Freddy Eaves at the boatyard looking out for a new spinnaker.”

  Maisie: “Why do the royal purple zinnias slip into blight so much more readily than the cosmos zinnias?”

  Hugh Montague: “There was word of a major avalanche yesterday in the Pyrenees.”

  Kittredge: “If you would give the purple zinnias a bit less mulch, Mother . . .”

  Maisie: “Is Gilley Butler a reliable handyman, Mr. Hubbard? Your father, Cal Hubbard, says to watch out for him.”

  Myself: “I should listen to my father.”

  Montague: “They weren’t carrying avalanche cords so the bodies are not recoverable.”

  Dr. Gardiner: “The spinnaker ripped in the Backside Regatta. I had to finish with a jenny. Half as much headway.”

  Montague: “Three cheers for making the honor roll again, Harry.”

  Dr. Gardiner: “I’m going to fill the martini shaker.”

  Kittredge and I had, nonetheless, one hour alone. She demanded it. On Sunday morning, coming back from Easter Mass, with an hour to wait for Maisie’s cook to serve us Sunday dinner, she forced the situation. “I want Harry to show me the island,” she said to Hugh. “I’m sure he knows the nooks and crannies.” A lack of plausibility quivered in the air. It would not require a guide to find nooks and crannies on our small island.

  Hugh nodded. He smiled. He held out his hand like a pistol, thumb up, forefinger extended. Wordlessly, he fired a shot at me. “Keep those nasal passages clean, Herrick,” he said.

  Kittredge and I walked in kelp and sea wrack on the pebbled shore. Near us reared the unseen presence of Harlot, a stallion over the field of our mood.

  “He’s awful,” Kittredge said at last and took my hand. “I adore him but he’s awful. He’s raunchy. Harry, do you love sex?”

  “I would hate to think I didn’t,” I said.

  “Well, I would hope you do. You are as good-looking as Montgomery Clift, so you ought to. I know I like sex. It’s all sex with Hugh and me. We have so little else in common. That’s why he’s jealous. His Omega is virtually void of libido and his Alpha is overloaded.”

  I did not know as yet that she had been consorting with these two principalities, Alpha and Omega, ever since the concept first came to her four years ago. Now I heard of them for the first time. I would encounter those words again over the next thirty years.

  “What makes it worse,” she said, “is that I’m still a virgin. I think he is too, although he won’t offer a conclusive word about it.”

  I was twice shocked, once at these astonishing facts, and again that she would tell me. She laughed, however. “I take a True Confession pill every night,” she said. “Are you a virgin, Harry?”

  “Regrettably,” I replied.

  She laughed and laughed. “I don’t want to be,” she confided. “It’s absurd. It isn’t as if Hugh and I don’t know each other’s bodies rather well. In fact, we know them perfectly. We’re very much naked together. That kind of truth binds us. But he insists on waiting for marriage to consummate the last part.”

  “Well, you’ll be wed soon, I guess.”

  “In June,” she said. “We were supposed to gather up a few final plans this weekend, but Daddy and Hugh when put together are hopeless. Worse than two relics in an old folks’ home trying to make conversation with each other’s dentures.”

  It was my turn to laugh. It went on for so long that in embarrassment I sat down. She sat beside me. We perched on the southern head of the island and looked down Blue Hill Bay to the cold Easter sun shining over the remote Atlantic.

  “Hugh may be the most complicated person I’ve encountered,” she said, “but this weekend he’s ridiculously simple. He’s in a thundering grouch because we can’t get together at night. Daddy insisted on putting me in the room next to Mother and him. So Hugh is falling apart. He’s outrageously priapic, you see. Back in Washington he’s on me all the time. I hope you don’t mind hearing this, Harry. I’ve got to talk.”

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. The facts seemed to contradict each other. “How can he be on you,” I asked, “if you’re both virgins?”

  “Well, we go in for what he calls ‘the Italian solution.’”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know anymore. Then I did. It was physically painful to contemplate what she allowed him to do. Nor could I conceive how it connected with all her soap and sunlight.

  “Actually,” she said with the quick, rising zephyr of a Radcliffe girl, “I love it. It’s debauched. To be a virgin and yet feel so wanton. Harry, it’s opened a purview on the Renaissance for me. Now I see how they could observe the Catholic forms and yet live in such near-mortal violation of so much. That’s not the unhealthiest approach, you know.”

  “Do you talk this way to everyone?” I asked.

  “Heavens, no,” she said. “You’re special.”

  “How can that be? You don’t know me.”

  “I only needed one look. Before it’s over, I said to myself, I’m going to tell this man everything. You see, Harry, I love you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess I love you too.” I did not have to pretend. The thought of Hugh Montague as a satyr hot on her back left me feeling criminally wounded. I might as well have been the cuckolded lover. I hated how her confidence had reached so easily to the very center of me.

  “Of course,” she said, “you and I are never going to do anything about it. We’re cousins, and that’s what we’ll always be. Dearest friends. At worst, kissing cousins.” She gave the littlest example of such a kiss to my lips. That too went all the way in. Her mouth had the scent of a petal just separated from the flower. I had never been near a nicer breath. Nor one with more surprises. It was like picking up a great novel and reading the first sentence. Call me Ishmael.

  “Someday,” she said, “after Hugh and I are tired of each other, maybe you and I will have an affair. Just the passing kind to give a lot of naughty pleasure.”

  “Kissing cousins,” I replied hoarsely.

  “Yes. Only now, Harry, I need a good friend. I need one like pure stink. Somebody I can tell everything to.”

  “I’m incapable of telling all,” I confessed, as if I had numerous adventures meticulously secreted away.

  “You are buttoned up. It’s what I brought you out of the house for. I want to talk about your ghost-overlays.”

  “Is that phrase from your psychological theories?”

  “Yes.”

  “My father told me you’re a genius. Allen Dulles says so.”

  “Well, I’m not,” she said petulantly as if the stupidity of the supposition doubled every likelihood of great loneliness. “I have a brain that’s marvelously empty when I’m not using it. So it allows thoughts to enter which other people would sweep away. Don’t you think the heavens often reach us with their messages just as fully as dark forces below tickle our impulses?”

  I nodded. I would not have known how to argue with this. But then, she was not looking for a debate. By her change in tone, I could sense that she was in a mood to expound.

  “I’ve always found Freud uncongenial,” she said. “He was a great man with bushels of discoveries, but he really had no more philosophy than a Stoic. That’s not enough. Stoics make good plumbers. The drains go bad and you’ve got to hold your nose and fix them. End of Freud’s philosophy. If people and civilization don’t fit—which we all know anyway—why, says Freud, make the best of a bad lot.”

  She had obviously given this speech before. She must have to explain her thesis often on the job. So I took it as a mark of friendship that she was willing to outline it for me. Besides, I liked listening to her voice. I felt she would give this lecture because she wanted us to be closer. And felt a pure pang of the nicest kind of love. She was so beautiful, and so lonely. Wildflowers in her hair, and blue sneakers on her feet. I wanted to hug her, and would have, if not for a sense of the prodigiously long shadow of Hugh Montag
ue.

  “Philosophically speaking,” she went on, “I am very much a dualist. I do not see how one can not be. It was all very well for Spinoza to postulate his Substance, that wonderfully elusive, metaphysical, metaphorical world-goo he employed to bind all opposites together and so be able to declare himself a monist. But I believe he was scuttling the philosophical bark. If God is trying to tell us anything, it is that every idea we have of Him, and of the universe, is dual. Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, good and evil, birth and death, day and night, hot and cold, male and female, love and hate, freedom and bondage, consciousness and dreaming, the actor and the observer—I could add to such a list forever. Consider it: We are conceived out of the meeting of one sperm and one ovum. In the first instant of our existence, at the moment of our creation, we are brought to life by the joining of two separate entities; how very much unalike they are. Immediately, we start to develop with a right side and a left side. Two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two lips, two sets of teeth, two lobes to the brain, two to the lungs, two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet.”

  “One nose,” I said.

  She had heard this before. “The nose is only a work of flesh surrounding two tunnels.”

  “One tongue,” I said.

  “Which has a top and a bottom and they’re awfully different.” She put her tongue out at me.

  “Five fingers on each hand.”

  “The thumb is in opposition to the others. The big toe used to be in opposition to the foot.”

  We began to laugh. “Two testicles,” I said, “but one penis.”

  “It’s the weak link in my theory.”

  “One navel,” I went on.

  “You’re awful,” she said. “You’re implacable.”

  “One head of hair.”

  “Which you part.” She ruffled my hair. We almost kissed again. It was delicious to be flirting with a third cousin who was a couple of years older than me.

  “Try to be solemn,” she said. “There’s really more evidence for duality than singularity. I decided to take the next step. What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person. Everything that happens to one, happens to the other. If one gets married, the other is along for the ride. Otherwise, they are different. They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.” She stopped for a nearer example. “Or optimism and pessimism. I’m going to choose that because it’s somewhat easier to discuss. Most things that happen to us have optimistic overtones, and pessimistic possibilities. Suppose Alpha and Omega—for those are the two names I’ve finally applied to these two psyches—one has to offer them some kind of name, and A and Z is much too cold to live with—so, Alpha and Omega. It is pretentious, but one does get used to it.”

  “You were going to give me an example,” I said.

  “Yes. All right. Let us say that Alpha tends to be optimistic in most situations, whereas Omega is inclined to pessimism. Each experience that comes their way is interpreted with different sensitivities, so to speak. Alpha picks up what might be positive in a specific situation; Omega anticipates what could be lost. That divided mode of perception operates for any duality you wish to invoke. Take night and day. Let me propose that Omega is a little more responsive to nocturnal experiences than Alpha. In the morning, however, Alpha is better at getting up and going off to work.”

  As if to prove the presence of Alpha and Omega within herself, her intimacy, so innocent and audacious at once, had by now drawn back, and the pedant had appeared. One would have to win both sides of this woman. It also occurred to me that I was not being very loyal to Hugh Montague, but what the hell, that might be my Omega. “I just don’t see,” I said, “why the two must react differently all the time.”

  “Remember,” she said, holding up an instructor-like finger, “Alpha and Omega originate from separate creatures. One is descended from the sperm cell, Alpha; Omega from the ovum.”

  “You are saying we have a male and a female psyche inside ourselves?”

  “Why not? There’s nothing mechanical about it,” said Kittredge. “The male side can be full of the so-called female qualities, whereas Omega can be an outrageous bull of a woman just as virile and muscular as a garbage collector.” She gave a merry look as if to show the return of her Alpha. Or was it Omega? “God wants us to be as various and faceted as kaleidoscopes. Which looks to the next point: Hugh and I agree on this: The war between God and the Devil usually goes on in both psychic entities. That’s as it should be. Schizophrenics tend to separate good and evil altogether, but in more balanced people, God and the Devil fight not only in Alpha, but in Omega as well.”

  “There seems to be endless capacity for strife in your system.”

  “Of course there is. Doesn’t that fit human nature?”

  “Well,” I said, “I still can’t see why the Creator desired such a complicated design.”

  “Because he wished to give us free will,” she said. “I agree with Hugh on this as well. Free will amounts to giving the Devil equal opportunity.”

  “How can you know that?” I blurted out.

  “It’s what I think,” she said simply. “Don’t you see, we have a true and real need for two developed psyches, each with its own superego, ego, and id. That way, one can feel some three-dimensionality, so to speak, in our moral experience. If Alpha and Omega are quite unalike, and, believe me, they often are, then they can look upon the same happening from wholly separate points of view. It’s why we have two eyes. For the same reason. So we can estimate distance.”

  “Account for this,” I said. “When our eyes become too different from each other, we need glasses. If Alpha and Omega are awfully different, how can a person function?”

  “Look at Hugh,” she said. “His Alpha and Omega must be as far apart as the sun and the moon. Great people, and artists, and extraordinary men and women have dramatically different Alpha and Omega. Of course, so do the feebleminded, the addictive, and the psychotic.”

  Something in the certainty of her voice was making me dogged. “How do you account, then,” I asked, “for the difference between an artist and a psychotic?”

  “The quality of inner communication, of course. If Alpha and Omega are incredibly different, but can manage all the same to express their separate needs and perceptions to each other, then you have an extraordinary person. Such people can find exceptional solutions. Artists, especially. You see, when Alpha and Omega don’t communicate, then one or the other must become the master or there’s a standstill. So the loser becomes oppressed. That’s a desperately inefficient way of living.”

  “Like totalitarianism?”

  “Precisely. You do see what I’m talking about.”

  I was awfully pleased to hear that. Encouraged, I asked: “Would a healthier person have an Alpha and Omega about as different, say, as Republicans and Democrats? Agree on some things, disagree on others, but work it out?”

  She beamed. I had brought out her better side. The wicked light was in her eye again. “You’re wonderful,” she said. “I do love you. You’re so direct.”

  “You are making fun of me.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m going to use your example with some of those dummies I have to give explanations to.”

  “Don’t they love your ideas? I can see where Alpha and Omega tell us a lot about spies.”

  “Of course. But so many of the people I work with are afraid to trust it. I’m just a girl to them. So they can’t believe that this could prove the first reliable psychological theory to explain how spies are able to live with the tension of their incredible life-situations, and in fact, will not only bear up under such a double life, but indeed, go looking for it.”

  I nodded. She had termed me direct, but I was wondering if her mode of presentation might not also be somewhat too unadorned. Most of the
intellectuals I had met at Yale seemed obliged on first meeting to fire off an artillery barrage of great and/or esoteric authors they had presumably absorbed. With Kittredge, however, one citing of Spinoza plus one reference to Freud seemed to take care of it. She had not sent out a cavalry of esteemed authorities to turn my flank. She pursued her thoughts; they were enough. I thought she showed the forceful but innocent head of an inventor.

  Well, we went on talking. We never came to ghost-overlays, but before we were done with our hour in the nooks and crannies of Doane, I was somewhat offended that she could take as much pleasure in exposition as in our flirtation. Before we went back to the house, therefore, I tried to tease her. I asked her to confess: Who was her own Alpha, her own Omega?

  “Oh,” she said, “others perceive such things better than oneself. Tell me your impressions of how they shape up in me.”

  “Oh,” I said in imitation of her voice, “I think your Alpha is full of loyalty and your Omega is as treacherous as the tides. Alpha is surfeited with chastity, and Omega is unbalanced with sacrilege. You’re a spontaneous child on one side and an empire-builder on the other.”

  “You’re a devil through and through,” she said, and gave me another kiss on the lips.

  Nothing will ever tell me for certain whether Harlot saw that small embrace or merely sensed it. As we walked back, hand in hand, we came on him standing above a rock. He had been holding a view of our approach. I have no idea how long he had been there, but some constraint in the pit of my heart seemed confirmed. He certainly did not alter his manner, but intimacy between Kittredge and me was singed by his presence. The word is just. When we came near, my eyebrows felt like ash: I wondered if I would pay for my hour with his fiancée when I joined the CIA.

  What I have next to relate is painful. That Easter Sunday evening, Dr. Gardiner gave vent to the buried furies in his throat, and honored his guests: By the light of the fire in his den, he read Shakespeare aloud to us.