Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Shortly after my arrival, forty minutes later, our affair commenced. The mermaid was hooked—a singular dislocation of metaphor! If the barb had been set, it was in me. I had never gone to bed with a girl so beautiful as Modene. If there had been nights I was not likely to forget in the brothels of Montevideo, they also revealed the trap in commercial pleasure; as my body encountered new sensations, so did the rest of me tear off in moral panic: To go so far, when one cared so little! With Modene, however, it took no more than a night to fall in love. If half of me loved her more than the other half, all of me was moving, nonetheless, in the same direction. I did not know if I would ever have enough of Miss Modene Murphy, and this passion was even larger than my anxiety that I was breaking the first commandment handed over by Harlot. If a sneaky had been planted in her room while she was away, then I was engraving my voice onto the tapes of the FBI. Even in the middle of our first embrace, I kept telling myself that they would at least remain ignorant of the name of Harry Field. For on my race over to the hotel after receiving her call, I had prepared a piece of paper on which was written: “Call me Tom, or call me Dick, but Harry never.” Of course, we embraced as the door clicked shut behind me, and stopped for breath and kissed again, and then she was crying when we finished, so I did not get to hand the note over for the first five minutes, and by then, since she was no longer weeping, but laughing as well, she took in the message and laughed some more. “Why?” she whispered.

  “Your room has ears,” I whispered back.

  She nodded. She shivered. A wanton look came over her face. In the midst of loose mascara and smeared lipstick, she was lovely. Her beauty depended on arrogance, and that had just returned. If her room was bugged, she was, at least, a center of attention.

  “Tom,” she said clearly, “let’s fuck.”

  I would know her better before I would know how seldom she used the word.

  On that night, the more Modene and I learned about each other, the more there was to learn. I was not accustomed to being all this insatiable, but then, I had never made love before to the mistress of the man who might yet be President of the United States, nor to the girl who had had an affair with the most popular singer in America, nor to the woman who might be the lover of a brute overlord in crime: All that, and I had not fainted on the doorstep—a monster of resolve was on the prowl in me. I could not have enough of her.

  When it was all over and we came down at last to a little sleep in each other’s embrace, she whispered to me on awakening at two in the morning, “I’m hungry, Tom, I’m hungry.”

  In an all-night diner in the southern end of Miami Beach, down in the twenty-four-hour sprawl on Collins Avenue of all-night movie houses and all-night stripper bars, of motels that rented by the hour while their names hissed in their neon signs, we ate sandwiches, drank coffee, and tried to talk. I felt as if I were on a boat, and dead-sweet drunk. I had never been so relaxed in my life. It was only by a last inward tide of duty that I could introduce her to the idea that we needed a private code. She took to it immediately. The urge to conspire lived as brightly as a genie in her. We decided to meet in the bars of hotels near the Fontainebleau, but the name of each hotel would stand for another—if I spoke to her of the Beau Rivage, I would mean the Eden Roc; the Eden Roc would be the Deauville, and mention of the Deauville was a signal to go to the Roney Plaza. An 8:00 P.M. date would be for six in the evening. I worked out the transpositions in duplicate and handed her one of two pieces of paper.

  “Am I in danger?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  I did not know if I wished to come back to any world at all. “Mr. Flood worries me,” I said at last.

  “Sam would not touch my fingernail,” she said fondly.

  “In that case,” I said, “he might touch mine.” I regretted the remark instantly.

  “You know,” she said, “I feel wonderful. My father was a motorcycle racer, and I think his blood is in me tonight. I feel high.”

  A black pimp at the other end of the diner was trying to catch her eye and in the absence of such contact was leaving his evil cloud on me.

  I felt as if I had come into the place I had been expecting to enter all my life.

  19

  IT WOULD TAKE TWO WEEKS BEFORE I FOUND OUT WHY SHE HAD BEEN SO distraught on her return. Now that we were lovers, Modene told me less about herself than in our two short meetings for drinks. We could talk about her childhood and mine, about singers and bands, movies and a book or two—she did think The Great Gatsby was overrated (“The author doesn’t know anything about gangsters”) and Gone with the Wind was a classic, “although it took the movie to convince me of that.”

  I hardly cared. If we were married, her taste might be a hurdle of the first order, but then it occurred to me that I had never asked myself how much I admired The Great Gatsby. One was not supposed to wonder about that. Not at Yale. It was like asking yourself whether you were moved by St. Francis of Assisi.

  We agreed, at any rate, on The Catcher in the Rye—“Heaven,” said Modene, “although not a great classic,” and that was enough to do with books. We ate and drank well. She knew every good restaurant in southern Florida. Whenever I had a day off, and there was more time now that HEEDLESS was up to date, we would (despite her long fingernails) go waterskiing or scuba diving in the Keys and spend Saturday night in the bars of Key West. It was amazing I did not get into fights. At bottom, I felt so green in the role of squire to an incredibly lovely girl that I would be on battle-alert whenever anyone looked at her. Hardly confident of my mastery of martial arts—the stint at the Farm had obviously not been enough—I was covertly measuring every conceivable opponent until I came to learn that one seldom got into a fight before one’s woman provoked one. Modene forestalled such possibilities. I did not know exactly how she managed, but processing ten thousand or more people a year on an airplane may have had something to do with it. She was pleasant to strange men but not accommodating, and made it clear that I was her date for the evening and she was with me. So, I survived. I prospered. I may even have looked a little more formidable than I felt. I was, in any event, ready to die before I would ever yell, “You can have her, you can have her,” and knew I would wonder forever if Dix Butler had been telling the truth.

  We also drove to Tampa, and to Flamingo in the Everglades. If we would spend a day together as preparation for our night, part of the joy was to be together in a car. She loved convertibles. Soon, I was renting them. I had a principal I could never touch until I was forty which consisted of bonds issued by the City of Bangor in 1922. It had been passed on to me by my paternal grandfather, and I could use the interest, although by family protocol, I was not supposed to. Who knew why our family did what it did? I, at any rate, good Hubbard, always predeposited such interest. Now parsimony would screech at me through each pole vault into the heaven of Modene Murphy. I was beginning to suffer so much from the gap between my richest and stingiest impulses that Tom Field began to dip into Harry Hubbard’s accumulating interest to splurge on splendid meals and a rented white convertible.

  How Tom and Mo loved to drive! Our weather was hot, rainy season was on, and I came to appreciate a South Florida sky. That sky could rest weightless upon you for a splendid morning, its bowl empty and blue over the Everglades like the great empyrean of the American West, but if Florida lands were flat, flat as water level, the sky had its own mountainous topography. Torrents of rain could approach as quickly as sunlit ravines fall into the unforgiving shadow of their cliffs. The changing shape of a cloud was, therefore, never to be ignored or you would not get the top up in time. Some cumulus sailed into one’s attention off the spinnaker bellows of a tropical gust; other puffs curled on themselves like hooks prepared to gouge the fabric of the sky. Under a black ceiling of atmospheric wrath, storm clouds massed above one another in ranges and ridge lines that the land below could never offer, and insects were whipped by one’s car stream into dark exp
ectorations against the windshield, their small, exploded deaths still pitting the glass after gouts of rain.

  How water could fall in southern Florida! One moment I might be close to doubling the speed limit, my highway no more than a long white arrow launched against the horizon; then, clouds would appear like hooded strangers. Ten minutes later, curtains of downpour would force me to the shoulder. A celestial rage, as intimate but almighty as a parent’s wrath, would beat upon the metal skin of the car. When the rain ceased, I would drive through southern Florida with her head upon my arm.

  We never talked about what had happened in Los Angeles. She did not refer any longer to Jack or to Sam. They seemed to have disappeared, and, given the size of her wound, I was not about to approach such questions. Sorrow and silence were her sensuous companions. I, well used by now to mourning for Kittredge, could ride beside Modene without speaking for an hour at a time. I lived with the lover’s optimism that silence brought us nearer. It was not until I began to suspect that her thoughts could wander while making love, that I came to realize how much of the beloved candidate remained with us. Sometimes, in the middle of the act, I could sense her mind going far away from me, and I would feel the subtle sense of pall that comes over a party when it has just passed its peak.

  About this time, a letter came in from my father by way of the Quarters Eye pouch. It is characteristic of him that with the variety of means open for communication within the continental United States—prearranged pay phone to pay phone, Encoder-Decoder, special shunt code line, secure phone, standard Agency phone, and a number of other modes too technical to enumerate—my father employed an old OSS means. He wrote a letter, sealed it in an envelope, girded it about with three-quarter-inch strapping tape (half as strong as steel), stuck it in the daily pouch to wherever it was going, and was done with it. While it might have taken two experts half a week to steam loose such a chastity belt and restore the envelope, there were more brutal methods of interception. The letter called attention to itself and could simply be stolen. Not once in his career, my father would boast, had he ever lost a communication by this means of sending it—no, he would correct himself, once he did; the plane carrying the pouch went down—therefore, he was damned if he was about to give up dispatching his messages without the feel of his hand on a pen sending out his own words directly.

  I read:

  Dear Son,

  I’m going to be in Miami on Sunday, and this abbreviated communication is to say that I would like to spend it with you. Since I don’t want to get off on a wrong note, let me issue in advance the unhappy news that wife Mary and I, one year short of our silver wedding anniversary, are now, after six months of separation, entering the process of getting a divorce. The twins, I fear, have lined up on her side. I have assured Roque and Toby that the schism is, under the circumstances, comparatively friendly, but they seem bitter. She is their mother, when all is said.

  We need not dwell on this news during my day in Miami. Just wanted to alert you. Let’s kick up our heels and get to know one another again.

  Fondly,

  Cal

  I had been looking forward to a day with Modene, and under the changed circumstances, even thought of introducing her to my father except (1) I was afraid he would steal her, and (2) I was pleased that he was going to give me this much private time—it seemed unique in our annals that he would spend that many hours with me.

  Then Modene solved my problem by deciding to work that Sunday, and I was able to greet him alone when he came off the plane. He was looking gray under his tan, and spoke little for the first hour. It was only ten in the morning and he wanted to go directly to the beach. “I need a run,” he said, “to get the office cramps out of my gut.” I nodded glumly. “We do what you want to do,” I said, and knew he was going to push me into a race. He always did. Ever since I had turned fourteen, he had engaged me in serious runs every time we were together, and every time I lost; I sometimes thought the greatest event in my father’s life had taken place long before he was in the OSS or the Agency: It was that slot bestowed on him by the Associated Press as left halfback on the Second All-American Team of 1929. Of course, he never forgave himself for not making First All-American, but then, that was my father.

  I had made friends with the pool guard at the Fontainebleau, and so I took Cal there and we used an empty cabana to change—I had had the foresight to bring extra trunks along—and then we went out on the beach for our run.

  I was blessing Modene. If, among her charming contradictions, she maintained her long, silver fingernails at every cost to herself, there was also the lady who was competitive at sports. If I could introduce her to sailing and show her all sorts of improvements to her tennis game, she learned quickly, and high-board diving and speed swimming were proficiencies she could impose on me. When there was time, we would, at her insistence, run together on the beach. Short on sleep and always in the act of eliminating a little too much booze from my ducts, nonetheless I was more or less ready for a set of jousts with my fifty-three-year-old father, and he, I was both relieved and saddened to see, had the hint of an extra inch around his waist.

  “We won’t go all out,” he said, “just jog for a while.”

  So we set off to the north on the unending sand of Miami Beach, wide and packed and much too hot already. To our left, on the side of the land, were the monoliths of the big hotels, white, shining, monumental, monotonous. The sky began to revolve just a little under the heat, and a narrow band of protest soon tightened around my skull at the inhumanities I was visiting upon the civil society of my body; on we jogged, side by side, for a mile, his breath coming unashamed and heavy, his sweat lining the curves of his powerful hairy chest, and I stayed even with him, determined that on this day, fortified by the unseen presence of Modene, I was going to beat him at last.

  We turned around after a mile and a half, both of us tired and panting, both of us going along stride for stride, but now we no longer spoke. He did not ask me any longer how the tarpon and sailfish were taking to the hook on the sport-fishing cruises, he did not mention the seven-hundred-and-eighty-pound tuna he had caught on the first day out of Key West on a fishing vacation eight years ago, no, now he was silent, and I was silent, and the level sand began to feel like the longest uphill grade I had ever climbed while the sky overhead began to seem as unstable as a dance floor to a drunk. I knew we would run until one of us fell, or we finished up back at the Fontainebleau, and since I wouldn’t quit, and he wouldn’t, we kept running on that level, side by side, up the endless grade of sand itself, and neither of us dared to break into the lead for fear there was no reserve to call upon—one might gain three steps on the other and collapse. Then, as we came into the last few hundred yards, the long curve of the Fontainebleau three hotels away, then two, then one, we spurted, which is to say we each churned in the sand and ran one modest increment faster, and all the world was in danger of turning black before I won by five yards and touched the railing of the boardwalk at the point where we had begun.

  It took fifteen minutes of walking up and down the beach before we were ready for a swim, and when we came out of the water, the race still unspoken between us, my father began to spar with me. It was open-hand and allegedly not serious, but he was an awful man to spar with. He was clumsy, he was unorthodox, he was fast for a heavyweight of his age, and he could not really scale down his punches. I had learned enough at the Farm to be quick enough to avoid most of what he threw at me, although his jab when he caught you with an open slap did rattle one’s teeth, and when I made the mistake of replying with a slap-jab of my own, he began to throw rights. He was just slow enough, and enough of an old-fashioned boxer, to give clear warning each time, but that alert was crucial because his body could still coordinate itself into the full heft of the punch, and each of the rights I slipped, or ducked, went by like a freight train. I had to content myself with throwing medium-stiff replies into his solar plexus until—and this was much to my happy
surprise—he held up his hands at last and hugged the life out of me. “Kid, you’ve learned how to box, I love you,” he said, and if he looked very pale under the tan, he was, with half of himself at least, honestly happy.

  We finished by arm wrestling on one of the picnic tables at the boardwalk. This was pro forma. He always won with the right hand. No one in our family, or in the circle of our acquaintances, or for that matter in the Agency—at least by legend—had ever beaten him. I used to wonder what would happen if he and Dix Butler got together.

  Now he disposed of me with the right hand and the left. We did it again, and he beat me without pain in the right, and took a little longer on the left. By the third time, I gained a draw with my left arm, and we were both content.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said.

  So, close to heat prostration, regurgitation, and stroke, we went for another easy swim, dressed, got back into my Company car—I did not dare to show him the white convertible I had leased on the interest of the Bangor bonds—and down we went to the Keys, going as far as Islamorada before our stomachs came back to us sufficiently to feel hungry. At a fish-house joint whose deck gave separate views of the Gulf and the Atlantic, we got down to stone crabs and beer, and I was able to realize that all of the four hours spent until now were as much a personnel recruitment test as an inquiry into the capacities of his oldest and, until this day, third-best-loved son. We just kept looking at each other, and smiling at each other, cuffing each other on the shoulder open-handed, and quaffing beer, digging with our two-tined forks into crabmeat about to be lathered with mayonnaise. God, we loved each other. “This damned Agency has done as much for you as I ever did,” he said.