Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  I had certainly lost my Saturday. That night I did go to the Embassy, laid my letter into the box for the State Department pouch, and went home to write again.

  January 11, 1958

  Dear Kittredge,

  It’s midnight just about. Work has come, work has gone—a crisis with Fuertes proved not critical. I’ll fill you in before too long on our Uruguay ace, but prefer first to expatiate on my new KGB cronies.

  Of course, I can still hear one instructor at the Farm saying, “Expatiate!” That dependable Agency exhortation! The-space-you-ate, Hubbard, bring-forth-the-space-you-ate—as if memory were a mighty maw. Hark to these wings of metaphor! The truth is that I feel giddy writing to you again. Can it be the altitude? In case I haven’t told you, after Luxembourg, Uruguay is the flattest country in the world. At sea level, too. Do you know I’ve had four drinks with an avocado.

  I apologize. I feel just a little too much vertigo to go on. I’ll sleep and pick this up tomorrow.

  Sunday morning

  It’s now January 12th, and I will not tear up last night’s final pensées. I believe, despite the evidence above, that my wits show their own curious gait when I’m drunk.

  To the Masarovs. Some time ago, Varkhov, the Resident at the Russian Embassy, invited us to a large party. After cable exchanges with the Groogs and the Sourballs, we accepted. Hunt led the State Department delegation, and Porringer and I took up our cover as First Assistant and Second Assistant to the First Secretary to the Ambassador—shades of Gilbert and Sullivan! Hunt, looking over our team, decided that I needed a date.

  “How about Libertad La Lengua?” I said to that.

  “How about Nancy Waterston,” he replied.

  I’m sure it’s been so long since I mentioned our Administrative Officer that I must refresh your memory. I believe I described Nancy once as sweet, bright, and hardworking but undeniably plain and very much a spinster. She used to be devoted to Mayhew, and Hunt now gets ditto loyalty. In the beginning, I took her out a couple of times when Mrs. Sonderstrom or Mrs. Porringer or Mrs. Gatsby or Mrs. Kearns couldn’t find an unattached single girl for me. Nancy has to be ten years older than myself, and I would guess that she has never been to bed with a man.

  Well, if it had been the Swiss Embassy, or even the Embajada de Gran Bretaña, I would have accepted the chore, but I felt curiously diminished to enter the Soviet lair with Nancy on my arm.

  Hunt would have none of these niceties. “Do you know the meaning of ‘The Colonel requests’?” he asked.

  “Howard, Nancy won’t enjoy herself.”

  “She will.”

  He laughed a lot at that in the sky-high skinny whinny you so detest. He has a long middle finger, and for the life of me, Kittredge (and I hope my candor will not put you off ), I had an image of Howard inserting that finger into the poor chaste fold of Miss Waterston. It was the oddest flash to come into the conversation. I saw the finger probing back and forth—a series of wholly authoritative strokes. The mind takes us where it will, won’t it?

  “You look a little glassy-eyed,” said Hunt.

  “What is your motive?” I asked about as coldly as I dared.

  “It’s a ploy, Harry. The King Brothers won’t know what to make of you and Nancy.”

  “They’ll see right through it.”

  “Well, kid, they might not. Because I want you to introduce Nancy as your fiancée.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “She’s amenable. It’ll be fun for her.”

  “Howard,” I said, “tell me the real motive. It will go down easier.”

  “The Sovs are always running a dupe-show on us. I’ve seen one of their joy-boys with three different Russian tomatoes at three different foreign embassy functions. Each time, the same fellow has the gall to introduce the lady”—he held both hands far apart and dipped quotation marks with bent fingers—“as his wife. The time has come to show them a little of our dipsy doodle.”

  Well, Kittredge, it ended up being quite an evening. We arrived at the Russian Embassy on a Saturday in late afternoon and the light was kind to the soft yellow tones of their stone manse. Like much of Montevideo architecture, it is a hodgepodge of Italian Renaissance, French Baroque, Transylvanian Gothic, Oak Park, Illinois, circa 1912, and plain old Russian samovar, a big sprawling villa with massive doors and turrets and ingrown balconies that look like ingrown toenails, dwarf windows and magnum windows, forbidding outer gates, black-spiked fence with painted gold tips on the spearheads. “Bluebeard’s castle,” I whispered to Nancy as we entered the outer gate and were steered by a wholly uncompromising young Russian marine to the garden. I had an unruly impulse to look up at the Bosqueverdes’ window where the Bolex H-16 is posted, and give a clenched fist of a Communist salute to the Finnish Micks.

  Well, I’ve never described an embassy party on the theory that you’re familiar enough with them in Washington, so why be offered details of our lesser spread? Still, the Russians do it up. They had invited about every foreign gang in town—Norway, Greece, Japan, Portugal, Costa Rica, name it, even the Orden Soberana de Malta, the Reino de Bélgica, and the República Socialista de Checoslovaquia. By the time the international tide was in, there may have been one hundred and fifty people on that lawn drawn from as many as forty embassies and consulates. A Soviet offering of hospitality to the world: one ton of black caviar, endless supplies of vodka, plus the usual array of appetizers, most of which struck the eye like a bead of acid-green pigment on a mound of cadmium orange. They also serve red wine and white wine from the Caucasus—some of the worst stuff ever corked—and all the foreign embassy types did their best to practice English on me. There is something so prodigiously fraudulent about the congealed friendliness of these embassy types. Such anxiety in the air. Everyone stirs with the restlessness of birds.

  All this was exacerbated by the presence of Americans in the Russian garden. How I wish you could have been here. Your beauty would have polarized the greensward. As it was, I anticipated in advance just how it was going to show in the films. From above, each American and each Russian was the center of a cluster of foreign embassy types. Caught by a telephoto lens, pieces of information seem equal to particles of food. Tongues dart out to snatch each morsel.

  Afternoon opened onto twilight, and another mood settled in. Everyone got a little wild (by which I mean no more than a shade over into the indiscreet). Hunt tells me that movie people call this time of day the magic hour since the natural light is soft and wonderful, but the scene has to be captured on film in thirty minutes. (If I ever have to face a firing squad, I hope it’s in a garden at twilight—what a thought!) I kept picturing the frustrations of Heulihaen and Flarrety as they bore down on us with their lens and (it better be) ultra-high-speed film. Of course, the more we all acted up at the party, the less light there was to satisfy our Finns.

  Pretty soon, those minor and major embassies who happen on this day to have no particular business to initiate begin to leave, and the lawn opens for dramatic action. Now you can pick up what is happening across the garden. Hunt is talking to Varkhov, who in turn is paying court to Dorothy. Before long, Zenia takes a stroll from the Foreign Office to the KGB, which is to say leaves two of Great Britain’s officials to join her Resident, and she and Varkhov now laugh loudly at Hunt’s jokes. In another corner of the garden, a joy-boy (from Irkutsk, no doubt) is flirting with Sally Porringer, who no longer seems afraid that Sherman will put her tit in a wringer, and I, giddy from caviar after a year of eating meat twice a day, and not impervious to the vodka, move in on Boris Masarov, keeping Nancy at my side. “I want you to meet my fiancée,” I say in the best good humor, as if the idea were mine all along.

  Kittredge, I must tell you. Given my schooling, I am only now learning what wonderful and mysterious beings women are. I confess it. Nancy Waterston, whose face on a good day would give competition to a parson’s daughter, narrow, pinched, and all her features pulled by duty, her small bust unable to protrude be
yond the forward hunch of her shoulders, now looked as attractive as if sparklers had been set off on her wedding cake. When a plain woman looks dazzling for an instant, one’s breath stands still; the universe is full of surprise. (Which is equal to saying, I suppose, that the universe is meaningful.)

  Masarov reacted formally. “I congratulate you,” he said. “I lift glass to toast vital spirit of future marriage.”

  “Mr. Masarov, that is a distinguished toast,” said Nancy in her good Midwestern accent so cram-packed with honest step-by-step sentiment. But then she gave a little laugh as such honesty came face to face with her present role. “Maybe you will attend our wedding,” she said.

  “It will be when?” he asked, and I could not help but notice that he was looking down the length of the lawn to where Zenia and Var-khov were still talking to Hunt and Dorothy. The anguish on Masarov’s face (which I cannot say I would have perceived had not the Zenia-Varkhov liaison been advertised to me as a 75-percent likelihood) now seemed analogous to the wound of a tired animal who pauses, blood dripping, before gathering itself to climb one more hill. He downed his drink in a shot and stopped a Uruguayan waiter who was carrying an ice-cold bottle of vodka on a tray.

  “We don’t know the date yet,” said Nancy, “because I believe in long engagements.” Was she drunk, I wondered, or merely intoxicated by newfound talents? “That’s an old family institution,” she told him. “My father and mother went together seven years before their wedding bells spoke up long enough to say, ‘Enough of this. Please ring us. We’re rusty.’”

  “Yes,” he said, “may I ask? What does your father do?”

  “He’s a circus acrobat,” said Nancy, and giggled again. Her eyes were dancing behind her eyeglasses. I realized, as if I were cleansing the inside of myself with the nicest pomade of compassion and sweet sorrow, that this must be the liveliest evening she had had in Uruguay. “No,” she said, “our country was founded on the idea that you cannot tell a lie. My father is retired, but he used to be a corporate executive in insurance in Akron, Ohio.”

  Masarov looked relieved, as if a piece of intelligence had just checked out. “My country was not founded,” he said in reply. “More likely, was shot out of a cannon.”

  Be certain, I underlined that last remark for referral to Hunt.

  Masarov held up his glass. “Toast to future nuptials.”

  “I like being toasted,” said Nancy.

  “First, however, learn to drink our vodka. Americans are always telling me is hard to keep up with Russian banquets. Because they do not know secret.”

  “Oh, give me the secret,” she said.

  At just this juncture, Varkhov, who was making a tour of his remaining guests, joined us, and jumped in so quickly on Masarov’s speech that I realized both men were equally well used to informing all and sundry how to imbibe Russian spirits. Varkhov’s syntax in English, however, was what an instructor at the Farm once called Russky Tarzan. Articles, pronouns, and the verb to be withered away. Primeval grunts were substituted.

  “Not sipping,” he said. “Never sipping. Gulp vodka. Only”—Varkhov held up one Russian commissar of a flat, heavy palm—“offer toast. First! Deepest toast. Appraisal of relationship. From heart. Offered from heart, drink vodka in gulp.” Which he did, and whistled for the waiter to come back. “Fill glasses. Not worry. Small glasses.”

  We filled glasses. “After vodka,” he said, “eat caviar. Better, eat zakuski. Appetizer.”

  “Yes,” said Nancy, as if she were well used to obeying orders.

  “Then, darling lady never drunk.”

  “Ho, ho, ho,” said I.

  “Cynic,” said Varkhov.

  He held up his glass again. “Toast,” he said. “To evening, to future of peace, to lovely lady, to American with mission,” and he winked at me. We were all drunk, yessiree baby.

  Outside on the Bulevar España you could hear the traffic going to and fro between the city to our right and Pocitos Beach, with its high-rise apartment houses, down to the left. I thought of the safe house where Chevi and I meet. From side streets, the tangential whoops of adolescents ricocheted through the evening air. Quite as abruptly as he had joined us, Varkhov bowed and left for another group.

  “Do you play chess?” Masarov asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, “not all that well.”

  “But not so badly?”

  “I can play,” I said.

  “Good. You must be very good. I will invite you to my home. It is nearby. And you, Miss Waterston.”

  “Name the date, I’ll bring the cake,” she said.

  “An old American expression?” he asked. Was I reading too much into him, or was it said with something like longing? He not only spoke reasonably good English but seemed to take pleasure in it.

  “No,” she answered, “it’s as hometown and hicky as you can get.”

  “Hometown and hicky,” he repeated. “Hicky is . . . pustule, pimple?”

  “Just about,” said Nancy.

  Kittredge, this was the hot core of the evening. The string was thrown across the abyss and now the cord and rope will follow. Indeed, it has. I will tell you in my next letter about the evening with the Masarovs.

  My love to you, to Hugh, and to Christopher,

  Harry the Betrothed In my letter, I had jumped conveniently over the rest of the evening. Nancy was drunk and said she had eaten too many appetizers, so I took her home. Home proved to be three rooms on the second floor of a modest villa on the Calle Doctor Geraldo Ramón not three blocks from the Embassy. “I think freedom consists of being able to walk to work in the morning,” she told me in most certain, if inebriated, terms. She certainly had a second voice installed behind the first. I made the mistake of kissing her.

  She kissed back as if we were indeed betrothed and getting married tomorrow. I was discovering that the mouth of a virgin spinster was not like others. Her lips pressed against mine, a family seal upon wax. Her teeth offered the faint odor of dentifrice, mouthwash, and tooth inlay, but her breath was a furnace, and back of that was some baleful neutral zone inspired by her stomach. I had an awful set of impulses I could never have been able to confess to Kittredge. I knew that Nancy Waterston could be mine forever if I chose, and the centrality of such power stirred something awfully cold in me. The image I had had of Hunt’s finger stroking her vagina with precise professional strokes became the image of my finger. I had been using him as a cover story for my own impulses. It was then I kissed her a second time on the cheek, assured her that it had been a remarkable evening and perhaps we would visit the Masarovs together, and made my exit much impressed with the ability of one kiss to conduct me right up to the edge of a possible marriage.

  On the way home, I had time to recollect that Sally (not at all witting of Hunt’s improvised matchmaking) had had time to pass me on the lawn, and say, in a husky, shaky whisper which did not promise to be kept down for long, “Cheap son of a bitch, you could at least have some taste.”

  My immediate concern, however, was that the Finnish Micks might be photographing her lips. Quickly, I said: “A ploy. Hunt’s idea. Don’t zoom, Sally,” and raised my glass in the salute you give to Company wives in whom you have no interest larger than minimal courtesy.

  Only now, driving home, did it occur to me that the Russians may also have had a camera trained on the garden. They would have seen my face. What would my words communicate to them? “A ploy. Hunt’s idea. Don’t zoom.” I might have given away much too much. On the other hand, it could prove rich in interpretation for Soviet eyes and send them off into far-flung scenarios.

  One of Harlot’s thoughts now came back to me. Evil, he had once informed me, was to know what was good, and do one’s best to tamper with it. Whereas wickedness was merely one’s readiness to raise the stakes when one did not know what one was doing. By that measure, I was wicked. It also occurred to me for a moment that everything we were doing in Uruguay might by that logic be equally wicked, but then I recogn
ized that I did not care. Let no one say that the innocent are always good. I drove on to bed.

  18

  January 27, 1958

  Dearest Kittredge,

  I was hoping for a letter, but perhaps you are waiting to hear more about the Masarovs. In any event, I feel like writing. You see, I’m obliged to report these days on each step taken with Boris and Zenia. Then the Groogs and Sourballs masticate my cables down to the molecules.

  As one example of the present work mode, the Groogs and Sours decide in concert with Hunt (for he refuses to be bypassed on any decision, minor or major) that Nancy should not accompany me to the Masarov home. Their reasoning is that a continuing presentation of Miss Waterston and myself as prospective bride and groom might put our histrionic abilities to too great a test—Nancy’s, anyway, Hunt allows. I suspect that Hunt messed up in the first place by putting an Administrative Officer like Nancy into such a slot.

  At any rate, Miss Waterston was sufficiently disappointed to show chagrin. “Oh, fudge,” she said, “oh, fudge and yee-God crackers,” so help me, Kittredge, is what she said. Then, with a sigh and a formal, professional smile—Lord, she is professional—she went back to auditing one more of Gordy Morewood’s Byzantine accounts. Poor Nancy—she is so weathered by disappointment.

  Meanwhile, I get ready to visit the Masarovs. I call, and, via Hunt’s specific instructions, make the date for Nancy and myself. The idea is to keep Zenia at home with Boris. If she knows Nancy is not accompanying me, she may absent herself, and Howard is trying to forestall that. It’s deemed more rewarding to get a take on husband and wife together. If the Masarovs are near to a breakup, there may be indications which of the two could be more likely to defect. On the off chance that they present themselves as a strong, well-knit couple, maybe they’ll fly the coop together. Such is our advance reasoning.