JOHN
young Jack Junior doesn’t like to wait standing at attention and if it weren’t Inga Binga slowing us down he’d just have to do his business and be done with it, but it’s okay since it’s her and I’m not sure why, because the world’s full of pussies and going after them is like wanting a landslide, getting all the votes, shaking a hand and winning the voter at the other end of it and then the next and the next until every last one of them loves you, but my Inga and her pussy are the whole damn electorate in one, it clasps JJ in its grasp and whispers that it alone is all that counts, and standing now at attention I think perhaps I can be content, I think I can leave the ceaseless striving to the rest of my family, I can give up everything just to be happy like that, but I know how it works, JJ, I’m sorry but I know how it works, when she lets me move—and she soon will—and as soon as you’ve got what you want, then I’ll want to be President again
J. EDGAR HOOVER
53, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
CLYDE TOLSON
48, Associate Director
in Tolson’s apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, DC, November 1946
J. EDGAR
a congressman now, my young Jack, and he will go far and he’s all mine, I should have played my favorite of the recordings this afternoon, but it’s all right, tomorrow perhaps, and even now I can hear it clearly: the mousy squeaking of the bedsprings as he lies down—on his back, where he will remain, from spinal troubles—and the rustle of his terry-cloth towel being thrown off, he’s been walking around the bedroom in a towel after his shower and he never puts his clothes back on with her and he can’t wait any longer and he lies down and throws off the towel Inga Binga hop on let’s go he says and I rewind and I listen to the brief silence after the words, I rewind and it is silent for a few moments, I rewind and he says Inga Binga hop on let’s go and then I can hear the brief silence of his solitary nakedness, and this time it’s not Inga Arvad who approaches his bed but a different woman and he is surprised, but he gives her a close look as she stands before him and he smiles at this new woman, who is older, yes, but she pleasantly evokes a mother figure who nevertheless radiates sensuality, which he desperately needs, and her face is perhaps a bit mannish, but that’s appealing too, he likes its sense of command, and he admires her sexy but conservative fluffy black dress with flounces and her feather boa and he says Hop on and I do and he is all mine
CLYDE
in a glass cabinet across the room, our two machine guns—his hanging above mine—from New Orleans and our busting in on Creepy Karpis and his gang, and on the table beside the bed, my weekly orchid—this time he chose a Cypripedium, with green and brown speckles on its throat—and he would have led the charge through Creepy’s door but for me, but for taking care of his Clyde, holding us back behind the other agents, and when we went in, guns ready, it was shoulder to shoulder, the Director and me, and that night he had Dubonnet carnations delivered to our hotel room and we put them in our button holes and we went out and we ate oysters in the Vieux Carré and the press were popping their bulbs at us, the hero G-men, and little did they know the truth about this great and powerful man, how he was a machine-gun man and he was a flower man and he needed me to hold him
ALBERT EINSTEIN
66, physicist
MARGARITA KONENKOVA
51, Soviet spy and wife of Russian expatriate sculptor and fellow spy Sergei Konenkov
in Albert’s house at 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, New Jersey, July 17, 1945
ALBERT
I lost the office pool Teller lost the pool and I didn’t know if his voice was fuzzy from telephonic static or from grief, and then my dear Margarita arrives moments later and I hope I can do what I have to do—I want to do for her what I have to do—but Teller lost the pool, and so it has happened, the night before the first one went off he said they would put a silver dollar each on the limit of the chain reaction and he said he’d make the uncollectible bet—that there would be no limit, that it would not stop till the earth was incinerated—and if he was right, I would know, and if he was wrong, he would tell me he was wrong so I could know what I am supposed not to know, that it’s happened, and we did what we had to do, we have it and Hitler doesn’t, but Hitler’s done for anyway now and we have it and I am afraid we will find a way to make it useful and I wish I had been a cobbler, I wish what I had to do was be a cobbler; I wish we’d all been cobblers and we had filled the world with shoes
MARGARITA
he laughs so abruptly sometimes, so ringingly, it’s as if all his thoughts have gathered together so hotly and so brilliantly that they explode but it’s all right because in the end he finds the universe hilarious, and he walks so distractedly sometimes, dragging the tip of his umbrella along the iron fences of Mercer Street, but if he misses a single picket he stops and returns to touch it, almost tenderly, this Professor Einstein, this Albert, and it all befuddles me, it diverts me from my mission, but I want to get this straight: if the light from a star was our train compartment right now and Albert and I were doing this while moving at the speed of light and if Joe Stalin was watching from far behind us, would we actually be having sex like a truly connected man and woman and it was only old Joe who mistakenly sees Albert in achingly slow motion, not getting it up no matter how hard I try, and sees my eyes slowly filling with tears for not being able to get him really to love me
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON
40, Vice President of the United States
THELMA CATHERINE “PAT” NIXON
41, his wife
in the bedroom of their home in Washington, DC, 1953
RICHARD
Mother was a saint a Quaker saint I’m ready to go, Mother, I’m sixteen and as always I rose at four in the terrible dark and I went to Los Angeles and I bought the lettuce and the squash and the snap beans for the grocery and I have returned, with the sun, and I’m ready now to go to school, starched-collared and Windsor-knotted, and I say Mother I’m ready and she comes to me and she rises on her toes and she brings her face very near mine and she sniffs, she checks to make sure I am free of halitosis, and she says Only a faint sweetness and my breath catches at this, as it always does, I am clean and I will cause no offense and I will succeed on this day and in the night I am caught: I am clutching at myself beneath the sheet and she is standing in the doorway, just come in from closing the store and she’s still wearing her coat, a plain cloth coat, a plain Quaker cloth coat, and at her feet our dog pants and slobbers, our cocker spaniel dog, and I am caught and it makes it all the sweeter, I lift my hands from beneath the sheets to show her, I hold them above my head and I say I am not a masturbator but I am throbbing on even as I say this and she turns and she goes and she knows and it is sweet and tonight Pat stood in the door in her Republican cloth coat and she brought Checkers, as I had asked, and I was caught and it was very sweet
PAT
who am I beneath this coat, he did not ask for me to be naked beneath it but I am, I am always naked, beneath a coat, a dress, beneath my smile and the popping of flashbulbs and the clamor of voices, and he is done, my Dick, my Dick is done already in his solitude, the coat is still closed though I am naked beneath it and against my face his breath is faint and abrasive with Listerine and he is silent and I slide my arm beneath him and he does not move and we are young and nothing has begun, we are a young lawyer and a young typing teacher, a couple of amateur actors at the Whittier Community Theatre, and he takes me aside, into the dark of the wings into the smell of mildew and fresh paint and canvas and he says This is how you make yourself cry and he teaches me what his college drama coach taught him, to concentrate hard on getting a lump in your throat, and after the lesson he furrows his brow and he clenches his face and makes his lump and he begins to cry, great large tears roll down Dick Nixon’s face and beneath them I know he is sad beyond expressing and I wipe at the tears though I know they are fake
JOSEPH R. MCCARTHY
&
nbsp; 44, U.S. Senator
JEAN KERR MCCARTHY
29, his wife and long-time research assistant
on their honeymoon at Spanish Key in the British West Indies, September 1953
JEAN
oh Mama shut up, oh Mama all permed and buttoned tight, oh Mama on your divan covered in vinyl to keep the flower upholstery pristine and unsoiled and untouched, oh Mama your voice fills the gathering dimness of your living room, the low-watt bulbs turned off until the light of day has vanished utterly, oh Mama shut up, stop your last-minute warnings, thinking I’m still a virgin, stop your talk of sex and the male conspiracy of it, its infiltration, its invasion, he is heavy on me yes, he is heavy as you said, yes, but shut up Mama, he is sweating yes and I want to rub it off my face and shoulders with the back of my wrist, hard, yes, but shut up, Mama, I am married to him and he is a great man and he will save our country but I cannot even look at him in this moment while I’m hearing your voice, Mama, so I turn my face away from him for now and I say to you Mama, please shut the hell up
JOE
her eyes just moved, she should be looking at me and only at me but her eyes shifted to the left, off the bed, and she has put facts in my head and words in my mouth plenty these past few years of the crusade and she has felt my wrath and tasted my kisses and so she should know better than to take her eyes off me in the middle of me plucking her chicken, churning her butter, plowing her field with a blunt blade, so there is a reason to watch when her eyes shift off the bed at a time like this and I should stop and see what’s up but things just keep going on even though it could be that she heard a faint scuff of footsteps outside the door or a rasp of a pass key in the lock, someone ready to bust in blazing away with their Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic weapons, whose development and manufacture were financed secretly by the March of Dimes, thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, whose own eyes shifted away from the cameras at Yalta to give Joe Stalin a wink, and she’s still looking away and maybe the enemy is already in the room, maybe the enemy is right beneath us, under the bed, waiting, maybe my wife herself is one of them, maybe there’s a man under our bed and she’s just waiting for me to be done and waiting for me to fall asleep and then she will tap twice lightly on the mattress and he will come up and he will slide in beside her and he will whisper to her in a language I do not understand
ROBERT F. KENNEDY
36, Attorney General of the United States
MARILYN MONROE
35, actress
in the Santa Monica beach house of Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, 1962
ROBERT
my high hectoring whine let you be cool and calm and I elected you, and I keep your secrets secret—your back and your painkillers and your women—and they love you, the women, even when they’re being hustled away five minutes later with that dazed flutter in their eyes from it being over so quick, and in a foggy February morning off the coast of Maine I leap into the waves and you dare not follow and the cold nearly stops my heart but I do not care: I am gaunt and I brood and my eyes goggle slightly more than yours—the difference between handsome and creepy—and I was Runt to the old man and I was Little Bobby the Devout to Mother and I am Black Robert to you and—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—I am with this woman, and it’s true I am with her only after you, only because of you, but to her I am The General and I am at ten minutes and counting and I dare not ask but I can hear her saying inside her head Oh, General, yes yes you are ever so much better in bed than the President
MARILYN
nothing but the slowing of my heart, nothing but filling up in the hungry place, and the hunger stops at once as if it was nothing to start with, but the fullness inside that part of me makes another kind of nothing and I float with that, I can turn my head as I float and I can feel my face moving, my eyes falling on something—a clock on a blond wood chest of drawers—and I feel my face turn again and the ceiling is spackled and the nothing that is usually trying to claw its way out of my chest, out of my wrists, out of my throat and eyes and brain, the nothing that I am, the nothing worth anything: that nothing is gone and the nothing that remains is some man, a man of a certain bulk, of a certain scent, of a certain murmuring, a certain sighing, a certain panting and wanting and wanting—wanting me—and to me it is nothing, but the nothing it pours into me lets me close my eyes and rest a few moments from what I am
WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON
24, law student
HILLARY DIANE RODHAM
23, law student
in his second-floor bedroom at a rented beach house in Milford, Connecticut, late spring, 1971
HILLARY
this had to be done eventually and the personal is political all right and if your underwear and your armpits and your hairdo and your shoes are political then choosing to fuck a specific man in a specific bed on a specific day is political and it’s merely political and he’s the one all right because everything we talk about makes it clear: McGovern next year and somebody after that and somebody after that and somebody after that and then he and I may choose to fuck in Lincoln’s bed or on the eagle on the floor in the Oval Office, and I don’t care if that’s the next time we do this, to be honest with myself, but I choose this time and I will choose some others in between because one day we’ll be fucking on the eagle and there’s a soft knock at the door and the secretary knows not to barge in and she says Madame President, the Soviet premier is on the phone
BILL
this has to be done at this point, though I miss the surprise, I miss the gasp from a grab of their tits or the dropping of my pants when they least expect it, but there are plenty of others for that, this one’s not in her body yet, which is cute enough in spite of her severe qualms, but at least I did get her to shave her legs pretty quick and I can sometimes surprise her into a brief silence with some line of reasoning—McGovern’s chances for the nomination or Ping-Pong as metaphor for Chinese-American relations or some other thing that comes to my lips as quick as kisses—and I did at least rip those red-frame glasses off her face, and Coltrane is playing in my head—A Love Supreme—and my lips go itchy and not for Hillary’s mouth on mine but for an abandoned ambition, me on the sax forever, though the twinge passes quickly now because Coltrane’s power is detached from his own moment-to-moment life, even in the clubs, the ones he’s got hold of are out beyond the glare of lights, beyond his direct touch, I was right to let that go, let go of being a surgeon, too, where you exercise your ultimate power only when they don’t even know it from the anesthetics, I know the path for me and this girl knows it too, better than anybody else—I can see crowds, great large crowds to wade into and to touch—she’s smart and she’s tough and I know she won’t put up with certain things from me and I don’t want to lose her but before she’s done here I’ve got to figure out how to get on top
ELVIS PRESLEY
42, singer
HOLLY SINGLETON
20, admirer
in his dressing room at the Market Square Arena, Indianapolis, Indiana, after what would be his last public performance, June 26, 1977
HOLLY
he was singing all in white in this kind of jumpsuit with a big golden something on him, like the sun, but it was split in half by his bare chest and it was about driving me crazy to see that, and now listen to me, I’m naked with him and I should be memorizing his body but instead I’m trying to remember him from the stage even though he’s right here with me in his own private dressing room and he’s touching me and I can look at what I’ve always dreamed about seeing but I can’t stop thinking about seeing him instead of actually opening my darn eyes and seeing, like what if you had ten minutes with Jesus and you kept thinking Wow here I am with Jesus, Wow God’s Chosen Son is sitting right in front of me instead of going Jesus, is it okay to use my tongue when I kiss my boyfriend and Please Jesus, my mama’s about driving me crazy with her criticism, is it dishonoring her to tell her to stop even if I don’t actually say “shut up” and look what I’m
doing now, I’m thinking about talking to Jesus when Elvis is right here, and my head is so full of stupid thoughts that I’m not even seeing him, and even thinking about how my thoughts are stupid is stupid because it’s still more of not seeing him, but really, if I do see him, if I do actually look at Elvis Presley’s naked body, how will I ever go on with the rest of my life
ELVIS
you’re how it used to be, pretty lady, me singing like it’s just for some new girl in the front row, but all this goes way back, Mama and me sitting in chairs in the little patch of grass at the Lauderdale Courts and she’s been waiting up for me and she’s past being mad, she knows I been on Beale Street, at dusk I went on and walked out of Pinchgut and down Lauderdale to Beale, and like I do, I’m moving from door to door at the clubs, listening, and somewhere along the way somebody who knew to see me finally says Let that white boy in and I go in trembling and it’s Arthur Crudup singing and he is singing to me and he is singing about me, this colored man with his dark angel voice who knows every pain in the world, and I come back and before Mama can say anything I sit down alongside her, and behind us and above us there’s voices shouting at each other and there’s a dog barking somewhere and there’s a woman’s crying, too, coming from a window and a boat whistle from the river and I lean to Mama and I touch her arm, and this is just for her, and though I’m feeling already that someday I’ll do this for everybody and I’ll do it with a beat and I’ll move my body to the life of it, for now I sing just to her, real soft and slow That’s all right now, Mama, anyway you do
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