Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  She was leaning over me to get her face closer to Life photographer Boone. “How long are you going to be in Miami?” she inquired of him.

  “About a week.”

  “I want to ask you some questions. I don’t like the way my pictures come out.”

  “I can help you on that,” he said.

  “You seem very serious about photography,” I added.

  She looked at me for the first time, but presented no more answer than the smallest turn of her lip.

  “Where,” she asked Sparker, “are you going to stay in Miami?”

  “At the Saxony,” he said, “in Miami Beach.”

  She made a face. “The Saxony,” she said.

  “You know all these hotels well?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  When she came back, she handed him a slip. “You can get me at that number. Or, I may call you at the Saxony.”

  “Whew!” he said so soon as she moved down the aisle again. I watched her talking with animation to a businessman in a silk suit whose manicured nails gleamed from three seats away. It took no more than that to put me in depression. I had been keyed on this meeting ever since Harlot announced it at lunch. With all I had done and not done in my life, I had certainly never picked up a girl before. The iron hand of St. Matt’s was still upon me. I felt helpless before this Modene Murphy. By comparison to myself, she seemed incredibly sophisticated and abysmally ignorant—hardly a fit.

  “Sparker, let me have the girl’s number,” I said.

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” he told me.

  Back at St. Matt’s, he had been easy to bully. Memories returned of chastening him in a headlock. Now, meeting ostensibly as equal adults, he would try to prove stubborn.

  “I’ve got to have it,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I feel as if I’ve met someone who will mean a great deal to me.”

  “Yes,” he said under my stare, “I can let you have her phone number. I can tell. She is not the girl for me.” His breath was sour as he spoke to my ear. “She looks awfully expensive.”

  “Do you believe one has to pay her?”

  He shook his head. “No, but these stewardesses demand a very good time if they give you a date. I can’t feel comfortable spending that kind of money when my wife and children can use it.”

  “That makes a strong case,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but what will you do for me?”

  “Oh,” I said, “you might try naming it.”

  “I want a contact with a good Cuban hooker. I hear they are unforgettable in bed.”

  That offered an image of Sparker Boone stroking his bone on the recollection through the sere and golden years.

  “What makes you think I can take care of that?” I asked.

  “You’re CIA. You have that sort of knowledge at your fingertips.”

  It was not altogether untrue. I could ask one or two of the exile leaders. They would have, at the least, a friend in the business of brothels.

  “Well, I will take care of it,” I said. “You have my word. But you have to do something else for me.”

  “What? You’re getting the better of the bargain as it is.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You have to watch out for Cuban hookers. The worst can be venal and ill-spirited.” I was improvising. “The ground has to be prepared. I will take pains to have you introduced to your Cuban date as the friend of a very influential man. That will make a big difference.”

  “All right,” he said, “I go along with that. But what is this ‘something else’ you want me to do for you?”

  “Speak positively about me to Modene Murphy. You obviously have her attention.”

  He frowned. He had his own kind of authority after all. “You are not an easy sell,” he said.

  “Why? Why not?”

  “Because she has made up her mind about you.”

  “Yes. And what has she determined?”

  “That you have no money.”

  I felt reduced again by the thought of Modene Murphy.

  “Sparker,” I told him, “you’ll find the way when you talk to her.”

  He pondered this just long enough to suggest that he might also remember the headlock I used to put on him. “I think I have a handle,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll tell her”—he held up his palm—“that while you won’t admit it, you’re CIA.”

  “This is the damn stupidest thing I ever heard of,” I burst out. “Why would that interest her?” But I knew the answer.

  “If it’s not money,” he opined, “then it has to be adventure. I know her prototype. Life has the same cathexis as CIA for women like that.”

  It was coming in on me again that my plane ticket was in the name of Harry Field. I would have to be introduced to her by that name.

  My stomach was upset. Bad enough for Sparker to be convinced I was an Agency man; now, I would be demonstrating it. The Agency rule of thumb, I reminded myself, was to hold out. Hold out at all costs.

  “Boone,” I said, “I have to let you in on something. I am in electronics but I don’t work in Miami. My shop is in Fairfax, Virginia. I’m going down to Miami to see a married woman whose husband is very jealous.”

  “Weighty stuff.”

  “Very. My lady-friend warned me not to use my real name. Her husband works for an airline so he has access to passenger lists. She says he could not be held accountable if he found out I had come down to Miami. So I booked myself in as Harry Field. Harry Field,” I repeated.

  “Why in tarnation do you want the stewardess’s phone number if you have a woman in Miami already?” He actually had to reach into the side flap of his safari jacket and take out the piece of paper to read her name. “Why this Modene Murphy?” he concluded.

  “Because I’m struck by her. I can warrant that it never happened to me in this manner before.”

  He shook his head. “What name should I give her?”

  When I told him, he savored the moment by having me spell it. “H-A-R-R-Y F-I-E-L-D,” I heard myself saying.

  The flight had entered on a bumpy course. For the next hour, no one could quit his seat. By the time we came into clear night sky, the trip was into its last half hour. He went up then to the galley, and I could see him talking to Modene Murphy. They laughed together a few times, and once she looked at me. Then he came back to his seat for the descent.

  “Mission wholly accomplished,” he said.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “You don’t want to hear. You’ll only deny it.” He smiled in such a way as to tell me that if he was going to do a job, he certainly did it well. “I gave her to understand,” he said at last, “that Harry Field is the best in the field given his kind of occupation.”

  “Did she believe it?”

  “The moment you even hint at secret work the suspension of disbelief is total.”

  He was right. After we landed, she came up with my jacket and handed it to me wordlessly. Her eyes were shining. In that instant, I learned the true force of a cliché—my heart leaped tangibly in my chest.

  “May I call you?” I asked at the door to the plane.

  “You don’t know my number,” she whispered.

  “I’ll find a way,” I said, and walked off quickly.

  Sparker was waiting in the exit lounge. He had an invoice to collect. “What is the name of that Cuban girl you are going to introduce me to?”

  Not until I offered my vow that I would leave a message for him tomorrow at the Saxony would he surrender Modene’s address to me. She was staying at the Fontainebleau.

  “Someone,” he assured me before we separated, “has to be picking up her bill.”

  I took a moment to look again at him. I might be a poor excuse for a salesman of electronic products, but he was certainly out of focus as a photographer for Life. So soon as we separated in the terminal, I bought a copy of the magazine and turned to the masthead. He was not liste
d under the photographers but among the photo editors. He was half a fraud. That cheered me. Modene Murphy did not have so formidable an eye after all.

  I was employing just this thought to underwrite my confidence when I called her room at the Fontainebleau next morning. She was as sweet, however, as when she had said good-bye to me at the airplane door. “I’m glad you called,” she said. “I really want to talk to you. I need some kind of wise man to confide in.” Then she laughed. “You know, an expert.” She had a gutty little laugh that proved agreeable, as if something unpolished in her was very much there to develop.

  She had been out late last night, she explained, and would be shopping all day. She had another date for tonight, but “I have a window from five to six-thirty, and can fit you in there.”

  We chose a cocktail lounge at the Fontainebleau. Before I was to see her, however, I had to suffer a small panic in mid-afternoon when a lunch meeting with the Frente at a safe house gave every sign of going on into the night. I would miss my date with Modene.

  We were enmeshed in a dispute over money. The more I looked at my watch, the more I grew to dislike the man who went on the longest. He was the former leader of the Cuban Senate, Faustino “Toto” Barbaro, and for this luncheon Barbaro had worked up a proposed Frente budget of $745,000 a month for “elementary needs.” Our accountants, Hunt replied, were ready to allocate $115,000 a month.

  The meeting became a shouting match. “Inform your wealthy Americans that we see through their various subterfuges,” Toto Barbaro bellowed. “We do not require handouts. We have the capacity to drive our own historical vehicle. I would remind you, Señor Eduardo, that we overthrew Batista with no assistance from you. So, give us the money for arms. We will do the rest.”

  “For God’s sake, Toto,” said Hunt, “you know our Neutrality Act puts every restriction in the way.”

  “You are playing with banal legalisms. I wielded the gavel in a Senate chamber filled with lawyers, Cuban lawyers. When it was to our advantage, we used the legal mode to paralyze the issue, but when, Señor Eduardo, we were ready to move, we excised those same restrictions. You are mocking us.”

  “You talk to him,” said Hunt in a rage, and left the room. Howard knew when to use his temper. Frente bills were coming due, and the only American who had the power to negotiate was gone. In the face of much sullenness, the offer of $115,000 was accepted pro tem, and I was able to close the meeting. I was even able, by way of Barbaro, to pick up the name of a young Cuban widow who, he promised, would not prove too cruel for my old classmate, Sparker. It was another lesson in politics—by means of this favor Barbaro entrapped me into a date for dinner later that week. Politics, I was discovering, was the fastest way to mortgage the future. All the same, I had a drink with Modene coming right up and was on the causeway into Miami Beach before a quarter to five and could leave my car with the valet at the Fontainebleau on the mark of the hour.

  7

  DRINKING WITH MY AIRLINE STEWARDESS IN THE MAI TAI LOUNGE, I would look away when our eyes met. I hardly knew how to talk. Sally Porringer provided the only near model to Modene, and with Sally there had rarely been problems with conversation—one pushed buttons to evoke themes: how much she loved her children; how much she disliked her husband; how much she had loved her first love, the football player; how much she loved me; how worthless I was; how irresponsible; how close was suicide. Sally had her share of open wounds and uncauterized anger.

  Modene Murphy, however, if one could believe her, was ready to enjoy everything. She liked the beach because it was so clean. “They take care of it.” She liked the pool at the Fontainebleau because “the barman makes the best Planter’s Punches in Miami Beach,” and the Mai Tai Lounge “because I love to get drunk here.” She even approved of Eastern Airlines because “I have it absolutely under my thumb. You suffer,” she informed me, “through your first few years on an airline because they can move you about at their merest whim, but now I have it under control. I not only choose my routes, but the days I work.”

  “How did you get all that leverage?”

  “Let’s talk about you,” she said.

  “I’m not interesting,” I told her. “Or, at least, electronics is not interesting. Not if you’re selling it as I am. It’s just wires.”

  What compounded my discomfort was that I had a tape recorder going in the attaché case accompanying me today (newest of the toys to come down to Zenith from Quarters Eye) and so I would be obliged to listen to my own remarks later.

  “You may be an expert,” she said, “but it is not in electronics.”

  “What kind of expert am I, then?”

  “You are able to find out things about people that they don’t want you to know.”

  “Well, that’s true. You’re right. I’m a private detective.”

  “I like you,” she said. Then she laughed. “I approve of your style. It’s so controlled.”

  “Controlled? Why, I twitch every time I look at you.”

  She slapped my hand lightly.

  “In fact,” I said, “I’m mad about you.” I stammered slightly as I said this and realized it was the only way to make such a remark. I sounded sincere to myself. “That is,” I said, “I have known women before who meant a great deal to me, and there is one woman I have been in love with for many years, but she’s married.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Modene told me wisely.

  “But I have never experienced the . . . the impact I felt the first time I looked at you.”

  “Oh, you are trying to woo me. Beware! The first time I saw you was in First Class with your head down. All I could notice is that you don’t take very good care of your scalp.”

  “What?”

  “Dandruff,” she told me solemnly, and burst into laughter at the look on my face. “Maybe it was only lint,” she said, “but you certainly don’t have a woman looking after you.”

  “The way Sparker’s wife takes care of him?”

  “Who?”

  “Bradley Boone, the Life man.”

  “Oh, him. I have no interest in him.”

  “Why did you offer the impression that you did?”

  “Because I want someone to teach me photography.”

  “Is that why you gave off that very large suggestion of liking him?”

  “I just go after what I want and ensnare it.” She gave vent to her gutty earthy little laugh as if she couldn’t believe how outrageous she was.

  “I think you’re terrific,” I told her. “You gave me such a turnaround. I never felt that before. Not even with the woman I love.” I looked at her eyes and took a large swallow of my drink. I had already decided I was not going to pass the raw transcript on this over to Harlot.

  “I want to kiss you,” she said.

  She did. It was a small embrace, but her lips were soft and I certainly didn’t get to the bottom of them. “You’re earthy,” she said as she withdrew.

  “That’s good, I hope.”

  “Well, I seem to attract earthy people.”

  My lips were feeling the tactile echo of her lips, and my breath was resonant. Earthy? Well, that was news! “Who are some others you would characterize in such fashion?”

  She wagged a finger at me. “Kiss and tell.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I do. My life is private to me. I cater to my privacy.”

  “Don’t any of your friends know anything about you?”

  “Let’s talk of something else,” she told me. “I know why I want to see you, but why do you want to see me?”

  “Because one look at you and—I have to confess—a force came over me. I never felt that before. It’s the truth.”

  What was the truth, I wondered? I had been lying for so long to so many people that I was beginning to feel mendacious relations with myself. Was I a monster or merely in a muddle? “What I guess,” I said to her, “is that you feel this kind of impact when you meet someone who’s absolutely equal to yourself.�
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  She looked dubious. Was she thinking of the condition of my scalp?

  “Yes,” she said, and gave me a very careful second kiss as if assaying samples for ore content.

  “Can we go somewhere?” I asked.

  “No. It’s ten after six and I have to leave in twenty minutes.” She sighed. “I can’t go to bed with you, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve reached my quota.” She touched my hand. “I believe in serious affairs. So at any given time I only allow myself two. One for stability; one for romance.”

  “And now you are fully booked?”

  “I have a wonderful man who takes care of me in Washington. I see him when I’m there. He protects me.”

  “You don’t look as if you need protection.”

  “Protection is the wrong word. He . . . takes care of my needs on the job. He’s an executive at Eastern. So he makes certain I get the flight schedules I want.”

  Her executive sounded somewhat smaller than the giants Harlot had been promising.

  “Do you love him?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But he’s a good man, and he’s absolutely dependable. I can count on him trying to make me happy.”

  “You don’t talk like any girl I’ve ever known.”

  “Well, I would like to think I’m a bit unique.”

  “You are. You certainly are.”

  She tapped the bar with one very long fingernail. “Right here, however, Miami Beach, is my port of choice.”

  “You have the longest fingernails,” I said. “How do you keep from breaking them on the job?”

  “Constant attention,” she said. “Even then I’ve been known to rip one occasionally. It’s painful and it’s expensive. I spend half my pay getting nail splints.”

  “I would think this hotel is expensive.”

  “Oh, no. It’s summertime. I get a rate here.”

  “Isn’t it far from the airport?”

  “I don’t care to stay with the other girls and the pilots. I’d rather spend the time traveling in the hotel van.”

  “So you don’t like being with your crew?”

  “No,” she said, “there’s no point to it unless you want to marry a pilot, and they are unbelievably stingy. If three stewardesses and the pilot and the copilot share a dollar-and-eighty-cent taxi ride with tip, depend on it, the pilot will ask each of the girls to contribute thirty-six cents.”