by Caryl Rivers
He learned from his father. He learned to use money brutally, to create a juggernaut of cash and influence that rolled over men his seniors in age and experience. He learned to use women like limousines, as he had seen his father use them. He liked power. He liked being president. His saving grace was that he still believed those stories that he had read so many years ago beside this restless sea, of knights and wizards and dragons and noble quests. For the father, getting there was all. The son wanted, with Tennyson, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
But he was a Tory at heart, naturally cautious, seeking compromise, possibility, the surer thing. His natural caution warred with the hidden romantic inside him. In the corridors of power, the careful man often trod lightly. In his words, the dreamer came alive. Which was he, really! Perhaps even he did not know. But a generation heard the words, and their lives were forever changed. They believed they could move the sun and stars.
He walked to the edge of the jetty at the end of the green swath of lawn and stared, again, at the sea. He was his own man, at last. He had been a passable congressman, an indifferent senator, but at last he was growing into the job he was meant for. He was smart and he could listen and he could learn. He was growing surer and bolder with every passing day. Greatness hung, like the evening mist over the sea, almost within his grasp.
All he had to do was reach out and take it.
“Jay, look at this for a minute. I think the stiff’s heading the wrong way.”
Jay walked over to a lighted table where a young man was pasting up the centerfold section of the next morning’s Blade. Jay scanned the page; the mistake was obvious. In one photo of the crash scene, the stretchers were being carried to the right of the page, in another picture, the opposite way.
Jay pried the picture from its moorings. “Tell the guys in the darkroom to flip it. Nice catch, Andy.”
Mary Springer walked into the room and looked at the table.
“Ready?”
“Except for one picture, yeah.”
“When’s the Kennedy spread going?”
“Tomorrow. Charlie said it’ll hold for a day.”
She leaned over to look at the page, reading carefully. Other reporters did a quick once-over, then signed their initials, Mary always read every word. Sometimes she ran her fingers along the columns, as if there was pleasure in the feel of the words. A strand of dark hair fell across her cheek, and she brushed it away, impatiently. It intruded on her work. The lack of vanity in the gesture intrigued Jay. He scanned her face, liking the way the lights from the table accentuated her cheekbones and the strong, tight line of her jaw. It was not really a beautiful face, less a pretty one. He would photograph her someplace with rocks and surf. The strength in that jaw would be absurd in a garden.
She leaned forward to see better, and he noticed the curve of her breasts under the cotton dress she was wearing. He had always thought of her as thin — a false impression, because of her height and small bones. He thought, idly, that she was one of those women who would look better naked than with clothes on. He leaned over the table, enjoying being close to her. “Good story.”
“Thanks. I think I got it. This makes it”— she paused to consider — “better.”
“Better?”
“Serious. Like it should have been. The pictures and the words make it — serious. Does that make sense?”
Her intensity was almost physical; he thought he could hear the air around her hiss with it. He wondered if she would just burn up with it one day. She let out her breath, and her shoulders drooped with fatigue. “I guess it’s just the ‘first fatal’ syndrome, huh?”
“You’ll get over it.”
“I don’t know if I want to. It should be new and terrible every time. If it isn’t, you’ve missed something. I wish I could see everything new and fresh.”
“Even that?”
“Even that.”
“You’d go crazy. You have to block things out, to survive.”
“You don’t. Not when you’re shooting. I’ve watched you. You’re open. Exposed. Like I was today.”
He looked at her, a little awed. How the hell did she know that? Some photographers used the camera as a wall, they felt safe behind it. With him, things blazed and burned through the camera lens. It was a hole the world could leak through. He was trying to think of something to say about that when she laughed and shook her head.
“Jay, I’m sorry, I’m all wound up. I’m going to go home and go to bed. I think I sound a little crazy tonight. See you tomorrow.”
Jay walked to his desk, picked up his Nikon and started towards the door. Mrs. Fitts, the receptionist, said good night to him with the usual veiled invitation. Mrs. Fitts had the hots for him. She liked to jiggle her size 99’s at him as he went by, and he always tried to manage a leer. It was the least he could do. She always gave him his messages on time with the numbers right. If Mrs. Fitts liked you, you got a panoramic view and the right numbers; if she didn’t, you saw buttons and at least three wrong digits.
As he walked out to the car, he thought of Mary saying, “I’m going to go home and go to bed,” and the sentence sprang a sudden, erotic image on him. He was lying, naked, on a bed, and she was naked too, lying between his thighs, her lips on his, and he could feel the pressure of her body along his entire length. Her shoulders were pale, with a sprinkling of freckles across them, and her breasts were full with small, elegant nipples that he could feel against his chest. The image was so sudden and so unexpected that he found himself trembling. At the same time, he felt an overwhelming protective urge towards her. In his mind, he saw her standing by the wreck, wearing her pink dress and her khaki raincoat, her pretty pink shoes sodden with mud, so terrifyingly vulnerable that he was afraid the sky might fall in on her. He had never thought about her that way before. He had hardly thought of her at all. She was just the girl at the next desk, married to some local, who could say fuck and make it sound charming.
What the hell was going on? Probably something to do with pulling aside the curtain, as she called it, seeing death so clear, the fog of everyday living just blown off by death. But what was happening below his belt was familiar enough.
Say the rosary, son, and take cold showers. He chuckled. It was jerk-off time again. He had so many variations on that particular art, he thought, that he could be on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. He’d be more interesting than the guy who played “Yankee Doodle” on his head with spoons.
There was always Norma. He decided to drive by her house. The lights in her apartment were out. Damn. Norma was chubby, and her blond hair had dark roots, which annoyed him in the same way as somebody scraping his fingers down a blackboard. But she was energetic at least. The first time he took her out, she invited him up to her apartment and started taking her clothes off right away. He was a bit shocked; he’d heard there were women like that, but all the girls he knew took some coaxing and necking first.
Norma liked crotchless panties. Purple ones, with ribbons on them, the sort that would have made Jacqueline shriek with dismay. Once, while she was showering, he saw them on the bed, looking like some peculiar insect that was feasting on the bedclothes, engorged and reddish purple. Norma was a Frederick’s of Hollywood kind of girl. He imagined her wandering into the French boutique from which Jacqueline ordered her underthings, rummaging through the little silk panties and lace camisoles and saying, “Jeez, don’t you have anything here with a split in the crotch and holes in them for the boobs?”
He didn’t like himself much for hanging out with Norma. He didn’t love her, he wasn’t sure if he even liked her. He just used her for crotchless-panty sex. That seemed to be all right with her; she made no claims on him, didn’t seem to need him for anything but a quick fuck. It should have been ideal.
He was suddenly, unaccountably depressed by the thought of Norma, her dark roots and the purple panties and the debased coin of their relationship. The shabbiness of
his life surrounded him, oppressive as humidity. Now, the White House only made it worse. It was as if he lived at the edge of a garden where everything was beautiful and exciting, and they let him in once in a while to look around, but he could never stay. He was too old, he had started too late, nothing more was ever going to happen to him. The old feeling returned, like teeth nibbling inside his gut; it was either melancholy or an ulcer, he was not sure. He would spend his life waiting for something wonderful to happen, like his father did, and it never would. He remembered that his father had finally stopped singing, wonderful aching ballads of love and death and the Easter Uprising. There was one he had always liked as a kid. Her hair hung down in ringlets; they called her the queen of the land.
As his father sang, he liked to picture the woman in the song, on a dark, windblown moor, her hair wild in the wind. He saw Norma on a moor, the wind whipping through the Clairol No. 25 blond, scattering the dandruff in her dark roots. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
He turned the car away from Norma’s apartment and thought again about Mary in her pink dress. He could picture her on a hillside, dark hair blowing. The erotic images returned; he saw her on a bed, her hair spread out across the pillow like a fan. Her hair would taste salty against his lips. There was an inexplicable sense of promise in those images.
He shook his head. That was crazy. His ideal woman (Jacqueline didn’t count, she wasn’t really available) had hair like cornsilk. She looked, in fact, like the woman in the Breck ad — and she drifted around his Manhattan penthouse like a wraith. He had never been in a Manhattan penthouse, but it was very clear in his mind’s eye, the Chrysler Building framed slightly off center in one of the windows and lots of cold steel, modern furniture and white walls. His photographs would hang, just so, on the pristine walls. The Lady in Black — that’s what he called her — would drift about the rooms and run her fingers across the pictures and murmur, “How beautiful.” If she was a little fuzzy in his mind, the frames weren’t; they were either of high-tensile white metal, the screws hidden on the undersides so as not to interfere with the play of the shapes or the explosions of color, or of slender high-grade aluminum that barely kissed the edges of the prints. The Lady in Black did two things; she murmured “How beautiful,” and she took her clothes off. She had milk white skin, no zits or warts, and she too moaned delicately when she fucked; she didn’t bellow like Norma. She didn’t have dandruff. She never had bad breath, and she never was crabby before her period. She never had periods. She was perfect and she was waiting for him, somewhere. Not in fucking Belvedere, Maryland.
The Lady in Black didn’t have white gloves, but that was a nice touch, so he added it. She could take him in her white-gloved hand and caress him, and with her finely tuned artistic sense, she would once again murmur, “How beautiful.” He wasn’t immense, but he wasn’t puny either, and he was, he thought, nicely formed. His penis didn’t stick out at a weird angle or bend in a strange way. Jacqueline, an artiste, would have thought it certainly as nice as the curved leg of a Hepplewhite, and the Lady in Black would agree. He saw them, slim and chic, lunching together, sipping white wine and chatting agreeably about his penis.
He sighed. He had moved up in the world, in his fantasies at least. For one thing, Father Hannigan never appeared in them anymore, to chastise him, as he used to do. In the old days, Jacqueline would have given him only the first delicious nip when Father Hannigan would have stormed in, cast her one of his famous stony glances, and made her put her Oleg Cassini dress back on. He’d have scolded, A nice Catholic girl, too, now, Missy, you stop this and say the rosary, and she would have grabbed the dress and scampered off. Father Hannigan would have called the Lady in Black, who was vaguely Protestant, a common whore, and she would have stalked off in a huff, taking her white gloves with her. Norma would have unhinged Father Hannigan completely. He’d have taken one look at her, in the purple panties and the bra with the nipples peeking through, and he would have fallen to his knees, waving the cross at her, crying out, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
Norma would have grinned and said, “Hey, kinky! Let’s do it!”
He tried to think about the Lady in Black, but her face, never too clear to begin with, just melted away, dripping like wax, and it was Mary’s face that replaced it. Some unexplored cavern of his mind was in charge now, and it was useless to resist it. He lay astride her on the bed, her breasts gentle against him, and he was kissing her mouth, a kiss at once passionate and infinitely tender. Her mouth was warm and soft, and he kissed it deeply, never wanting to stop, feeling that his entire body and soul was flowing out of himself and into her. He felt again a sense of calm, as if the phantom kiss had the power to heal him.
He shook his head. Things were rattling around tonight. It had been a long time since he had been out on a fatal. He had forgotten the power of death’s face to unhinge him.
He pulled the car up in front of the Victorian house he shared with two reporters from the Blade. One of them, Sam Bernstein, was sitting on the sofa doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“What’s a three-letter word for the ruler of a kingdom of fools?” he asked. “JFK.”
“Levity at this hour? Jesus.”
“For Chrissake, Sam, why don’t you give up on that goddamn thing? You spend more time on the fucking Times puzzle than anyone I ever saw.”
“It’s my talisman.”
“Your what?”
“The day I can do the entire Times crossword puzzle, that’s the day I die. I’m safe till then.”
“If you quit doing it you’ll never finish.”
“That’s cheating.”
“Columbia J School rotted your brain. I got a better one. The nine first Fridays.”
“What’s that?”
“You go to Mass and communion the first Friday of every month, and you die in the state of grace.”
“So?”
“Straight up, you heathen. Right to the harp section. You can steal, murder one, sleep with goats, but you go direct to heaven.”
“That’s absurd.”
“You’re jealous because you’re Jewish and you only get to the porch.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“Jews aren’t baptized, so they don’t go to heaven proper. There’s this little porch tacked on, for the Jews who lead good lives. God’s Irish, so I figure he doesn’t want people around who don’t drink and who are smarter than He is.”
“They didn’t actually teach you this stuff.”
“I swear to God they did. Did you know that just before the end of the world, all the Jews will be converted?”
“Oy.”
“So if you ever wake up with this wild urge to go to Mass, it’s all over. Trumpet time.”
“I should have voted for Nixon.”
“Nah, it’s time we had a Catholic president. The thumbscrews give the Oval Office a little class. Hey, where’s Roger?”
“Out with Giggles.”
“Oh fuck. How did I get stuck in the room next to Roger? His love life comes right through the walls.”
“I miss the folk singer.”
“Not me. One more night of humpedy-hump followed by ‘We Shall Overcome’ and I would have personally burned a cross on Roger’s bed.”
Sam laughed. “Roger was covering the state NAACP convention yesterday. Nice story, except he called it the National Association for the Prevention of Colored People.”
“Roger’s a great writer, but he’s sort of fuzzy on details. What do you hear from the Post?”
“Al Friendly likes my stuff, they say they got me in mind. Christ, sometimes I think I’ll be stuck in Belvedere the rest of my life.”
“You know where we should be. In Ala-fucking-bama,” Jay said.
“Right. Getting knocked down by fire hoses.”
“Hit with billy clubs by southern sheriffs.”
“Bitten by police dogs.”
“Shot at by white
trash.”
“God, that would be great! We’re missing it all, Jay. History is passing us by!”
“Shit, yeah.”
“Want to go down to the Sahara Room? Drown our sorrows.”
“I’m beat. I think I’ll hit the sack.”
“Pretty gory?”
“Not really. Just … depressing.”
He climbed the stairs slowly. Things were still rattling around. No use putting it off. He was going to think about his father tonight. His own life seemed tangled with his father’s, a coil that circled around on itself so that it was impossible to tell where one strand ended and the other began. He had tried, and failed, to give himself absolution.
Bless me Father, I have sinned.
Yes!
I didn’t love my father enough, and he died.
Not loving enough isn’t a sin.
Yes, it’s the worst one.
You were angry at him for getting sick.
It wasn’t fair. I needed him and he got sick.
So you punished him by not loving him.
And he died. I made him die.
You think you have the power of life and death!
No. Yes. I don’t know.
You were only fifteen.
If I had loved him, he wouldn’t have died.
You were fifteen. Ego te absolvo.
No, you can’t.
I absolve you. Accept it.
You can’t.
He remembered.
His fingers spread across the belly of the ball, strong, thin hands, long from joint to joint. His father’s hands. He moved back, looked. He was Johnny Lujack. The crowd sucked in its breath; he threw. A wondrous arc, hanging in the blue, suspended in time and space, and the crowd went “Ahhhhhhhhhh —”