American Sextet

by Warren Adler

  "His wife can't get it off without a vibrator."

  "He told you that?"

  After awhile, the sexual oddities, which she would dwell on in detail, became repetitive.

  "The general's wife sounds horrible. She gets drunk a lot and he keeps her locked up in her room all day long. I feel sorry for him. He's a very nice man."

  "Does he say anything about his work?"

  "He calls some man the chairman. Says he's an asshole."

  "You're kidding." Despite his professional glee at receiving such information, his excitement was always tempered with a personal revulsion. Every man, after all, was entitled to his dirty little secrets.

  "He's also very worried about the Army boys. Says they're not worth shit as soldiers. Too many spics and coons."

  "He said it just like that?"

  "What's wrong with that?" she asked innocently.

  Always, once she'd falter, either from boredom or lack of anything more to say, he would ask, "That's it?"

  Expecting it, she always seemed to withhold something for that last moment, as if to especially please him.

  "He gave me this little pin." She opened her robe to show him a little silver four star pin fastened to the crotch of her panties. Accepting gifts was another caveat. If they gave her anything of value, she had to turn it over to him. It was, after all, tangible evidence. But the pin didn't amount to much and he was feeling so good about the material that she was providing that he let her keep it.

  He might have been even more generous after the Senator Hurley debriefing, only the senator provided no little gifts. He had come to her very drunk after a dinner at the Saudi Arabian Embassy, but it hadn't fazed Dorothy. She was used to that.

  "He was very mad about something. He called the President a Zionist bastard." A frown gathered on her forehead. "I think that's what he said." She obviously had no idea what it meant and shrugged it off.

  "Did he say something else?" He wanted to keep her train of thought running.

  "He said the ambassador from Saudi Arabia gave him a bad time. That he'd made a deal and was being double-crossed. I can't remember. He kept going on and on about it."

  "What happened?"

  "I undressed him. He couldn't get it up. So I made him some coffee and gave him a massage. He loved that. He said I was the most beautiful girl he'd ever been with." Such compliments never failed to please her and she remembered them and their source long after they were spoken.

  "So nothing happened?"

  "Oh it did. I danced for him, like at Johnny's."

  "That did it?"

  "No. It wasn't until he danced for me. He was cute. He loved doing that dance. It gave him a hard on."

  The image of the overweight senator doing a dance with an erection made him burst out laughing.

  "He got so excited, he came in the middle."

  "You're kidding."

  "He was cute. Like a little boy. He had a great time."

  "Did he say anything else? Anything about his job?"

  "Oh, he hates that. He told me so."

  "It's unbelievable," Jason said with astonishment. "The things they tell you."

  "Why?"

  The insight excited him. A lover was better mental therapy than any priest or psychiatrist. She apparently had qualities beyond even his earlier imaginings.

  "You're fantastic."

  "Me?"

  "You set them free," he told her, patting her on the head appreciatively.

  "We have fun. I like them, Jason."

  "Just don't like them too much."

  She watched him, pouting.

  "Not the way I feel about you, Jason. Not like that."

  After a month of debriefings, he had enough information for a big story. But he wanted a bigger one. Even when it became apparent that Webster had planned to keep him out in the Fairfax Siberia indefinitely, he resisted. He wasn't ready. Not yet.

  "I'm working on something really big," he told Webster one day as they passed in the city room.

  "Great."

  The response was overlarded with enthusiasm, the kind given as a placebo, without sincerity. He had the impression that the editor had actually forgotten his name. Angered, he was on the verge of expanding the hint, but by then the editor had moved away. Not yet, he decided. His send-up was still not strong enough; he would keep to his original plan.

  But it was not without its minefields. He had to be more cautious about where he exhibited Dorothy. Not only did he want to keep the principals in his little drama separated, he did not want to risk them observing her in active pursuit of others.

  Their outings on the party circuit grew sparse and he would not make a foray if he couldn't manage to get the guest list in advance, a tactic that considerably diminished their activities. When too many questions were asked, he quickly retreated.

  "No more parties?" she sighed. Sometimes she would try on her party dresses and prance around the Capitol Hill apartment. Between trysts, he tried to keep her amused. They went to lots of movies, mostly horror films at her choosing. He also bought her movie fan magazines.

  Because of his caution, the infrequent parties he took her to didn't provide good pickings and, usually, they left early. He detected a growing restlessness in her.

  Fortuitously, Arthur Fellows provided a welcome breakthrough.

  "He wants me to meet a friend of his," Dorothy told him at one of the debriefings.

  "Who?"

  "Some man named Tate. A congressman."

  "Tate O'Haire?"

  "He just said Tate."

  Tate O'Haire was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

  "Great."

  "You want me to meet him?"

  It was, of course, an unexpected windfall that had come just in time. Dorothy was becoming less sharp about their debriefings. Her concentration meandered and his rebukes only made it worse.

  "Why must we keep doing this, Jason? It's hard to get new things."

  "You're doing just fine, baby."

  "Sometimes it seems silly. I mean, telling all that private stuff." She shook her head. "And them not knowing that here I am telling you all about it. Sometimes it just doesn't seem right."

  "You're only talking to me," Jason said, sensing that he was on dangerous ground.

  "And that thing?" She pointed to the recorder. "Why do we need that?"

  "It's important," he said.

  "But why?"

  Hadn't she surmised it by now? Surely she had some inkling, but if she did, she was keeping it to herself. If she was confused about his intentions, it didn't inhibit her willingness to meet new men.

  Jason had flattered her by telling her that the man, Tate, had seen her once at a party and was dying to meet her. What Arthur was doing was simply passing her along, a blatant bribe. Apparently, the White House minions were under pressure to get some legislation passed to which Tate O'Haire held the key.

  "We really had a good time together," Dorothy told him as the tape recorder whizzed. Her concentration had returned. She had needed the injection of new blood.

  "He likes me to tie him up."

  "Tie him up?"

  "He brings this special kind of rope. It's a silly game. I tie him to the closet rod and close the door."

  For a moment, he was so shaken he turned off the recorder.

  "What's wrong?"

  "He's one of the most powerful men in the country," Jason said with amazement. "No money is spent, no tax laws are changed without his approval." It was the furthest he'd ever gone to explain any of it. She looked at him blankly and shrugged.

  "It's just a game."

  Jason shook his head and turned the recorder back on. He made her describe in detail the man's reactions, which she did as if she were describing the plot of a movie, replete with "and thens." This time he had to deliberately turn away from her, afraid his reactions would seem judgmental.

  "He cries like a baby. I tell him I won't let him out of the closet until h
e promises to be a good boy."

  "My God!"

  He had always thought of such behavior as aberrations. In her descriptions, after the initial shock, they sounded like no more than a mild form of recreation, like playing bridge or going to a ballgame.

  Even his elation at having been given such a juicy morsel could not temper his amazement. The idea of it also left him unguarded.

  "What a book it will make."

  "Book?"

  Quickly, he backtracked, sensing a ripple of indignation, not quite expected.

  "I mean if someone wrote about that."

  "Why would anyone want to do such a thing?"

  "Because people are interested," he explained patiently.

  "They are?"

  "Makes important people seem human. Just like us," he continued, although he detected some lingering confusion. Actually, he was more puzzled than she. There was some odd equation between sex and power. Maybe being in the public arena was so repressive to a person's id that when the pressure was off, they got weird. Was it Dorothy that brought out these oddities? It was as if she had the ability to recreate an entirely new code of sexual behavior, a completely different set of morals.

  Or maybe conventional morality, the accepted rules of sexual conduct, wasn't the truth at all, but merely existed as a protective facade, made to hide a humanity that didn't fit the concept of the Christian-Judaic ethic, squaring off human instincts to fit the perfect rounds of manufactured convention. It surprised him to probe so deeply, but it explained what he had only dimly understood before. Aberrations sold because recounting them secretly reassured people. It amazed him to see how his original idea had grown, expanded, become important in a larger context. He was becoming an instrument of greater awareness, of a philosophical truth. The great middle class and their packaged notions about themselves and their leaders was a pack of lies and he was going to be the first to blow the lid off them. It was their false indignation that made them so vulnerable and made what he was doing so valuable. He would actually be doing a great service to society, contributing to the highest goals of life, knowledge, awareness, insight.

  With four men to keep track of, her scheduling required careful balancing, playing havoc with her attendance record at Saks. On Wednesdays, her normal day off, she began seeing two of her lovers: Arthur Fellows in midday and General Templeton in the evening.

  During their debriefings she often got them mixed up, much to Jason's irritation.

  "I'm merely trying to ascertain where Arthur stands in the power struggle at the White House." His frankness only confused her. She had no idea which little detail was especially relevent to him.

  "I keep forgetting things."

  "Try to remember."

  Sometimes in Dorothy's recounting, the paths of the two men figuratively would cross in a single day.

  "It's a small, exclusive club and it meets on the pinnacle of a pyramid," he sighed.

  "Arthur says Eddie may not get to be chairman," Dorothy told him, comprehending little. Jason forced himself to remain casual.

  "Did he say why?"

  "Something about the President favoring Mulligan's man." Mulligan meant Ed Mulligan, Arthur's rival for the President's ear, the other Presidential counsel.

  "I feel bad for Eddie," she said. "He wants to be chairman more than anything in the world. And he thinks he will be. Arthur is all for it."

  "You discussed that?"

  "I just listened. Like you told me."

  "Good girl."

  "Is it very important?"

  "Very."

  The paths of Dorothy's other two lovers also crossed in conversation.

  "Charlie had lunch with Tate today."

  "Did they?"

  "They have lunch all the time."

  "What do they talk about?"

  "All I know is that Tate is going to run for the Senate and Charlie is going to try to get lots of money for him to run."

  "But they're different parties."

  "Gosh." He wondered if she understood.

  Jason had discovered another factor that seemed to take the sting of evil out of what he was doing. The men seemed to have a genuine affection for Dorothy and she enjoyed being with them. Not only did she, too, enjoy the sex, but the men's company entertained and amused her.

  Sometimes after a debriefing, he would ask her questions that had a special relevance for him alone.

  "Do they ever ask about you? Where you come from? How you live? You know, questions like that."

  "You said I should tell them as little as possible." She paused. "I tell them about Pennsylvania. Growing up in a coal town. Things like that. I also tell them how I feel about things."

  "Like what?"

  She thought for a moment and smiled. "About how much I like the snow. And the springtime. And clean things. But mostly they talk about themselves."

  "Egos," Jason said.

  "They're like little boys."

  She was more like a little girl herself, he thought. And they obviously didn't want the reality of Dorothy to interfere with their fantasies of her, as if they could create her whole, just the way they wanted her to be. It was, of course, one of his secret fears that one of them, or some of them, or all of them, would fall in love with her. Emotional betrayal brought out the killing beast, made reactions less predictable. Also, he feared that she, too, might fall in love with one of them. That would complicate everything.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, his paranoia would take control and he would shake her awake.

  "Do they talk about love?"

  She always slept deeply, what seemed like a silent dreamless contented sleep, and prodding her awake was always an effort.

  "The men. Any of them talk about love? Loving you?"

  "Me?" Slowly, she emerged out of the fog of sleep. "Of course, they love me. Why do they come to visit me?"

  He shrugged and moved to embrace her.

  "Like you love me, Jason," she whispered, cuddling into his embrace.

  "Like me?"

  Though not reassured, it was a subject he preferred not to explore further. He made love to her instead.

  The Czech ambassador literally picked her up at Saks. Although he spoke English fairly fluently, his understanding of the tongue was faulty. He assumed Dorothy also sold perfume. When she protested, he persisted stubbornly.

  "You are a pretty lady. You will know what I should buy."

  It was an odd hour and the store was too busy.

  "I am the Czech ambassador," he said, obviously used to pulling rank when the occasion called for it.

  Reluctantly, she helped him, after telling one of the salesgirls in perfume that she would let her write the sale so she could get the commission.

  "What kind do you use?" he asked finally, after he had sniffed all the available scents.

  Before he was through, he had his card in her hand. She read it and knew instantly how to pronounce his name.

  "I'm Polish," she said, explaining that she used the name Curtis because it was easy to pronounce.

  "A fellow Slav," he said, putting out his hand. He was a chubby man in his middle forties, blond and good-humored with a high-pitched, easy laugh.

  "May I call you?" he asked. "If you don't mind going out with a communist."

  "I never met a communist," she told him.

  As with all her encounters with men, she told Jason everything. It was becoming second nature to her now and she studied his face to read his reactions.

  "Another windfall," he said happily. After considering it for a while, his enthusiasm abated. As an ambassador from a communist country, he was obviously under complete surveillance. And he was married. It would be dangerous for the man to take risks and give the Americans a weapon that could be used against him by his own government. But he did not reject the idea outright. He had, of course, contemplated that a diplomat would one day fall into the net, but he had never calculated that it would be a communist diplomat, truly a bonus. The P
rofumo case in England came to mind. Profumo was the English defense minister, who shared a prostitute with a Russian naval attaché. It made worldwide celebrities out of all the participants. She hadn't read or heard about it, of course. Nor would the implications have hit home if she had.

  The risk of his plan was premature discovery. He dreaded the possibility of losing control of the material, even though he had Dorothy sign a paper giving him worldwide marketing rights to her story.

  A communist diplomat! The idea was intriguing. Surely the man was clever enough, knowing that he was under surveillance, to throw them off the scent when he was pursuing an infidelity. When he appeared again at Saks, this time under the pretext of buying makeup for his wife, she had been fully briefed, reporting the conversation back to Jason.

  "He asked me to meet him at a hotel," she said, giggling. "He really is very cute."

  "And direct."

  "I said what you told me to."

  He had instructed her to tell the ambassador that she was frightened of going out with a communist, that all ambassadors were under surveillance, that their lines were tapped and their whereabouts carefully monitored.

  "He just laughed and told me not to worry. Although, he did look around and lowered his voice when he spoke. 'I have my ways,' he told me."

  "What ways?"

  "He didn't say, but he told me not to worry, to trust him and no one would ever know."

  He wondered how many people had been deceived by such an imperative? Especially Dorothy. Weighing the alternatives, he decided to tempt fate. Bagging a certified communist was worth the risk.

  "Invite him to the apartment," he told her. It was too good an opportunity to enhance the story and increase its value. And value in raw monetary terms was an extremely important consideration. The cost of the operation had stretched his finances to the breaking point. He was behind on his bank note and Jane had begun legal proceedings to collect back support payments for Trey. His last few phone conversations with his ex-wife had ended badly, and he had begun to worry about Trey's future.

  "I'm working on something big, Jane," he'd said. "A book. I should get a solid advance and catch up."

  "I've heard that before." She had hung up abruptly. She was right, of course.

  "You'll see," he muttered into the dead phone.