Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  He cupped his hands and splashed cold water onto his face, peered again into the mirror as he wiped his face. His best feature, he knew, were his eyes — blue, alert, intelligent, that could turn to frozen chips of ice when he was angry or could seem to fill with light when his quick, warm smile could engulf a room. He could use it with calculation; more often it simply appeared. Reporters could tell when a good line was cooking in his brain. As a questioner droned on (especially if he were particularly pompous), they could see the barest hint of movement at the corners of his mouth and the mischief creeping into his eyes. He would look like a cat, about to pounce. The wit was as often turned against himself. He could be bawdy and outrageous, but rarely was he savage. Humor was more a shield than a weapon. He was smart enough to know that he could neutralize some issue — his father, his religion, his war record — by laughing about it himself before anyone else could speak. It made critics seem churlish.

  He turned his head slightly to the side, liking what he saw. He especially liked profile shots when his head was tilted upwards, so the new fullness about the jawline did not show. Privately, he would have admitted his vanity, but he raged at a Time reporter who claimed that he had once posed for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. He blistered the hapless man’s ear for several minutes —he’d been a sailor and could swear like one — because the last thing he wanted to be thought was a dandy.

  He understood, better than most, the power of image. He had been astonished, when meeting Dwight Eisenhower as the old president prepared to turn over the reins of power, that the heroic general seemed unmindful of his place in history. He had even remarked that he thought the Allies prevailed at Normandy because they had the best meteorologists.

  He ran his hands through his thick, reddish brown hair. He had a scalp massage every week, and when his aides tweaked him about it, he reminded them of who still had the best hair. He never liked to hide it under hats of any kind.

  If he managed his image with all the aplomb of a Hollywood matinee idol, it was not simply to stroke his vanity. He was intrigued by the historian Richard Neustadt’s idea of the president as a great actor, able to exercise power by persuading the people to follow where he led. He was stung by those who said he had shown a lot of profile but not much courage in his political life, who saw him as a callow young man whose father had bought his way into politics. He was fond of Stephen Spender’s poem

  I think continually of those who were truly great…

  The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

  Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

  Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun.

  And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

  Not born of the sun was he: that might have been said of his brother foe. But men who invented themselves could also sign the vivid air. If there was much of the calculator in his use of noble words, there was also something of the carpenter. If you could build a structure that was grand and great, perhaps you could also grow to fill it.

  The times could call forth greatness in a man. If I860 had been a placid, peaceful year, would Lincoln be a forgotten president from Illinois! And without World War II, what was Churchill! A failed, overweight politician. He lived, after all, in interesting times, and he knew, now, he had the mettle to meet them. All he needed was time. And after all, he was young. The mirror told him that, even with the jowls.

  Challenge could call forth greatness in a man.

  Only after she had decided she was frigid did she realize that a supermarket of sex surrounded her. Women practically fell out of their gowns in ads for movies, foreign films actually showed frontal nudity, lascivious paperbacks about bad, bad women littered the newsstands, and Playboy magazine was getting ever bolder in what its well-paid photographers were allowed to publish. Now and then she would stick a copy of Playboy from the magazine rack in her purse when she was doing the grocery shopping. She would have been too mortified to plunk it down on the counter in front of the clerk. She didn’t think of it as stealing, exactly, but getting a look into a world she knew she could never enter.

  But now, of course, it was all different. She probably could have stood it, being the shopper with the empty basket, if she had never understood what it could be like. She sat in front of the mirror on her vanity table, whacking at her hair with the brush. Glamour said a hundred strokes a day would make her hair lustrous, and she had gotten into the habit. She thought it just might fall out one day, every strand of it, beaten to death.

  She was talking with Sigmund Freud. He had taken to dropping in at odd times, lecturing.

  You know, of course, that men go to bed with women all the time, and it means nothing.

  No, this is different.

  Your brain is quite inoperative, my dear. You are thinking with your hormones. Right now all you want is to get into the sack with him again.

  That’s not true.

  She tried to banish from her mind the image of him, naked on the bed, the feel of him, the smell of him; it was so real it refused to leave.

  Shall I be specific? fust a minute ago you were thinking of rolling around with him in the surf, licking the salt water from his naked body, like they did in From Here to Eternity.

  They weren’t naked in From Here to Eternity.

  Beside the point. You were also thinking about taking a bath with him, rubbing soap bubbles all over his erect phallus — and while it is in reality more than adequate, in your imagination it is humongous — and getting on top of him and thrashing about and moaning a lot. What is this fascination you have with water! Perhaps a memory of the fetal state —

  Oh, for heaven’s sake!

  I especially like the one where you are wearing scanty clothing and twirling a baton, and he rips your clothes off and you do the most interesting things with the baton — and must I tell you what the baton represents?

  Oh, my God, I thought I’d outgrown that one.

  And, of course, just like a woman, one night in bed and you’re smelling orange blossoms.

  That’s ridiculous.

  There was the matter of her byline. She had thought “By Mary Springer Broderick” might seem clumsy. “M. S. Broderick” was classy, like one of the bylines in the Times.

  He’s going to leave, you know. He’s going to have sex with you and you’re going to break your heart over him and wreck your marriage as well, and then where will you be?

  I don’t know. I don’t care. I love him.

  You loved Harry too.

  Mary threw the brush down on the table. How nice it must be, she thought, to be a man. Men looked at things so differently. Life was like one of those connect-the-dots puzzles in a child’s book. Men just saw the numbers, floating in space, so they were free to move as they wished. Women saw all those connecting lines that men didn’t see. The lines gave women a sense of what held the world together, kept their lives from being the empty corridors some men’s lives became. But they could be fetters, too, holding them back. Mary and Harry and Karen had those lines between them. Could she just rip them out?

  I’m pregnant, Harry. I’m pregnant.

  She was so different now from the girl who had stood on the lawn of Harry’s house and sobbed out the lie that would change their lives. He was different, too. Who was he? What were they to each other? She had read that the Chinese believed that if you saved a person’s life, you altered fate, and you were responsible for that person from then on. What if you determined the course of a life? Had the lie put that responsibility on her? Had she tied them navel to navel, with a cord of words. I’m pregnant.

  She tried to think of Harry, but he kept turning into Jay, in bed beside her. She had never imagined she would trust a man the way she trusted him. She had blurted out her discoveries, and he had not patronized her; she had a mortal fear of inconsequence. If she was paranoid at all, it was when she thought people might be laughing at her. It was eas
y for men to think they counted for something, because they were men and could not be disregarded. It was their birthright. A woman had to drag consequence out of the world, inch by bloody inch. With Jay, she would not be trivial. He could take her, command her, make her want to get down on her knees for the pleasure he gave her, but he would never ask her to be a mirror in which he saw only himself, magnified.

  She shook her head, as if to dislodge the weight of her thoughts. She went to the closet to get dressed for work. Usually she grabbed the first thing she put her hands on. Today, she changed clothes three times. The shirtdress spoke of indifference, it was too bland. The black sheath, too obvious. The blue sweater and skirt, too dressy with the heels, but with the low-heeled pumps, it would pass. She put on mascara and rouge, and wondered if people would notice.

  She went into the living room, where Karen was waiting with the storybook. It was their daily ritual, one she never missed if she could help it. The little girl was busily drawing on a piece of paper.

  “What are you drawing, sweetie?”

  “Bugs Bunny, see.”

  “That’s good. What are those little round things?”

  “Farts.”

  “What?”

  “Farts, Mommy.”

  “That’s very … interesting. I never saw a picture of a fart before.”

  “That’s how Danny makes ‘em. He showed me.”

  She laughed, delighted by the idea that her daughter had mastered the subtleties of drawing farts. She loved the way her daughter’s mind worked, making wild, inventive leaps from one place to another.

  She remembered herself as a child, at the top of the tallest tree. How had that little person become the girl so frightened of life that she had to trap a man into marrying her with a lie?

  She ran her finger across her daughter’s soft cheek. They’d try to put fetters on that wild, lovely imagination someday. People would try to make her conventional, into a nice little girl who would be seen but not heard. No way. No fucking way. Whatever else she did, she would see to that.

  “Read me Piglet,” Karen demanded.

  “Piglet, again? Don’t you want another one?”

  “I like Piglet.”

  “I like him, too. He’s silly.”

  Karen giggled. “That’s why I like him. He’s silly. Pooh Bear is very serious.”

  When the station wagon sounded its horn outside, Mary walked Karen out to see her off to nursery school. Then she went back inside to make herself a cup of coffee. Her mother was reading the paper.

  “You’re dressed up today.”

  “This? It’s a million years old.”

  “Isn’t that sweater a little tight?”

  “Mom, I’m not Jayne Mansfield.”

  “You don’t want to send off … signals.”

  “Oh, no, not the lecture again.”

  “When a woman is separated from her husband, men see her as fair game. It’s true, believe me. When you don’t have a husband, they are … forward.”

  Mary looked at her mother. “Are you talking from experience?”

  “Let’s say I know what it’s like.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t. It’s just that … it’s so easy to make mistakes, on your own.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “I worry about you. You seem to think that none of the rules apply to you. You think you can just go out and act like a man and nothing will happen to you.”

  “Maybe I can. Fuck the rules.”

  Her mother frowned. “You never listen to me. You’ll just do what you’re going to do.”

  “Bye, Mom. I’ll see you later.”

  She got in the car and drove to the Blade. Sigmund Freud was sitting beside her.

  You should listen to your mother.

  Oh, shut up.

  There are rules, you know, even if you don’t want to know about them.

  Fuck the rules.

  Must you?

  Sorry In your century, people don’t say that.

  Let us propose a scenario. Everyone was drinking, a man was horny, a woman was available.

  Horny?

  We don’t say that in my century, but we should. What if, when he sees her in the daylight, he thinks that she is not beautiful, that he must have made a mistake?

  I … didn’t think of that.

  Perhaps you should have.

  She pulled into the parking lot. His car was there. Everything looked so — ordinary, as it always did. Had last night happened at all?

  By the time she had reached the front door, she had decided it was a one-night stand for him, that was all, how could she have been such a fool, writing “By M. S. Broderick” in her notebook? She was an absolute ass.

  OK, so what if it was a one-night stand? Two could play at that game. The double standard was old hat, not for modern women. She tossed her head defiantly and became — Jeanne Moreau. Jeanne Moreau, woman of the world, who used men and then threw them away.

  Jeanne Moreau walked into the Blade building and went right to the bathroom. She choked through half a cigarette, and kept it in her fingers as she walked into the city room with elaborate coolness. He was sitting on the edge of Sam’s desk, in animated conversation. He didn’t see her come in, and she put her purse down on the desk and began to flip through the paper. She felt her heart thumping; it was as loud as the one in the Edgar Allan Poe story, echoing off the walls, the ceiling. She didn’t look at him, but she knew he had seen her and turned around. Finally she did look up, trying to keep her heart out of her eyes.

  “Hi,” he said. He was smiling his crooked smile.

  “Hi.”

  “It’s a nice day.”

  “Really nice. I’m glad it’s summer.”

  “Me too.”

  “Hasn’t rained much.”

  “No, it’s been dry.”

  Sam looked at them. “That’s what I love about this job. The pay sucks, but the conversation is so witty.”

  Jay laughed and said to Mary, “Come take a look at the pictures I did at the hospital. I want your opinion.”

  They went downstairs to the darkroom, and she said, “Where are they?” and he grinned. “There aren’t any. I just wanted to say hello.”

  He put his arms around her and kissed her, hungrily, and she kissed him back.

  “Don’t ever say I don’t take you classy places.”

  “Oh, Dick, it’s such fun necking in the war room.”

  “Look at all those buttons, Pat. Red ones, blue ones. Oh, God, I’m getting my first hard on since they stoned my car in Venezuela.”

  “Dick, don’t waste it. Take me, right here on the instrument panel!”

  “Ohhh! Ohhhh! The buttons hurt so good. ”

  “Dick, I’m coming. I’m coming in the war room. Oh, Dick, that was fantastic!”

  “Yeah, Pat, that was just swell. I got hard, you came, and, by the way, we wiped out Sverdlovsk.”

  They laughed, and he said, “I missed you this morning. I wanted to find you there when I woke up.”

  “I missed you, too.”

  “I’m going to look for a place of my own. Someplace where I can be with you without anyone else around.”

  “I want to be with you, Jay.”

  “Listen, I’ve got some time off. Let’s go to D.C. To a nice hotel. We’ll live like swells for the weekend.”

  They kissed again, and she leaned against him, feeling nearly faint with desire for him. She wondered what would happen if they were doing it, right there, in the darkroom, while people all around them were going about their jobs. The idea was thrilling, but if Bill McChesney walked in it could be mortifying. McChesney was very focused; he’d probably say, “Hi, guys,” and stick his prints in the developer as they humped next to the enlarger. Finally, reluctantly, they pulled apart and went back upstairs to the city room. Sam looked at Jay.


  “Did you get the pictures done?”

  “Yeah, we picked ‘em out.”

  “Nice shade of lipstick you’re wearing. What do they call it, Photographic Pink?”

  Jay wiped the lipstick off, sheepishly, just as Milt Beerman walked over to them.

  “What are you guys hearing?”

  “Weird things,” Mary said. “My mother told me that people are saying there’s going to be a ten-story housing project and they’re going to bus Negroes in from Washington.”

  “Where did they get that?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s all over.”

  “A guy yelled at me in Art’s Diner this morning,” Sam said. “He said something about ‘busing in the niggers.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “People seemed scared,” Mary told him. “I’ve never heard so much talk about nigger this and nigger that. You used to hear talk like that every once in a while, but now it’s all over the place.”

  “Do you think there could be trouble at the council meeting tonight?” Milt asked.

  “The Negro group isn’t about to back down,” Sam said. “Reverend Johnson said this is the first time in years he’s seen the people really pulling together on something.”

  “We could have a ‘situation’ on our hands.”

  “I’m talking to Don Johnson at two,” Mary said. “And after that I’m interviewing James Washington. He’s going to be the spokesman for the group.”

  “Are they worried?”

  Sam shook his head. “They’re prepared for trouble, if it comes. Don Johnson’s been giving people lessons in nonviolent resistance.”