The boy held up his drink.
To Marlene, Blonde Venus!
Manfully the table echoed the toast. Listen, if you cannot prove your valor to a woman, you may still propose a toast to her. They clinked glasses and downed highballs in her name. With tact beyond his years, Jack excused himself to go to the pool. Marlene pulled her caftan around her as she announced that she, too, would like a dip. None of the men dared follow. The Pirate took out a pack of cards as she broke the silence: Poker, anyone?
* * *
—
MARLENE WATCHED THE boy stroke a graceful freestyle that sluiced through the water. As he approached the shallow end of the pool, Marlene dipped her legs in. Jack came up for air. She let the caftan slip from her shoulders, and he paddled poolside toward her, shading his eyes to meet her gaze.
You do beautiful laps, she said.
I’m on the Harvard swim team, he said, breathing hard. Catching his breath he added: Also I sail. Right away he blushed at the earnest addendum. She smiled as she gestured to the small of her back, above the dip of her swimsuit: Would you help me with my sunscreen, Jack? Her swimsuit was bespoke. She’d run into Pierre Balmain on this same stretch of beach last year. I can never get a proper tan with swimsuits cut the way they are, Marlene had complained to him, they leave such ugly tan lines. It wasn’t as if she were a prude, she added, but she couldn’t be expected to sunbathe in the nude, could she? Imagine the photographers, the papers! The next spring, she was couriered a backless swimsuit from Balmain, accompanied by a salutatory note signed “Pierre” by hand.
As Jack slathered sunscreen evenly onto her skin, she asked him about school, girls, the future. I don’t quite know what I want to do yet, he said. Perhaps join the army, but my old man isn’t so sure about that.
Marlene looked back at the brunch table.
All the Joes had been looking in their direction, but now they looked away together, like a cockamamy brood of country geese. She tucked her hair into a crepe swim cap as she indulged him: I’m sure you’ll do great things one day, Jack. He grinned at her, lean muscles wet in the sun, as she glided into the pool. It had been a generic thing to say to a twenty-year-old boy. Who knew the kid would one day be the thirty-fifth president of the United States?
5
Was it a month or a year into her stay with the Corsican-Chinese Friendship & Trade Association that Bébé asked for a diary? She was given a half-used spiral notebook with blue lines. It had a laminated lenticular photograph of a sleeping tiger on its cover. Viewed askance, the tiger opened its eyes and jaws. The thin pages she filled with nothing but tally marks. For all the time that had gone by undocumented in Marseilles, Bébé rounded it up or down to a perfunctory fifty. Her fifty-first client, on a midsummer’s afternoon, was Chinese. That was new. Other than that, he was reliably that median of man: middle-aged, potbellied, polyester-suited. He stepped into the room, kicked off his shoes, and declared in Northern-accented Mandarin: Best blow my load before shit hits the fan!
Won’t you have a shower? Bébé said.
Chop-chop, the client said as he stepped out of his trousers. He removed everything but his beige socks, sour smelling in the windowless room, as he squatted on his haunches, fishing a cigarette out of a rumpled pack. He tried to light it, but his hands were shaking. Bébé took the lighter from him and curled her palm around the flame. Surprised by her gesture, he leaned in to catch the fire all the same. Upon finishing the cigarette, he grunted and went to take a quick shower.
When he came, he gave a long and strangled shout.
The octave of his cry made Bébé think he was in fact not Northern, but Fujianese. With great solemnity he told her that her 口交 technique was 顶尖. Completely against her will she burst out laughing. He lit another cigarette and offered her one. It was unusual for clients to remain in the room unless they wanted to try to go at it again, for which there were certainly additional charges. As a courtesy, Bébé informed him that her fee was tabulated by time, not activity.
That’s fine, he said, waving a hand. Whereabouts on the old road are you from?
Shanghai, she said, although the answer should have been Taishan.
Ah, he said. A good city.
Yourself?
Fujian, he said. Quanzhou, to be precise.
Biting back a savage smile, Bébé accepted the cigarette. Before she lit up, she asked if it would be all right for her to put her clothes back on. Yes, he said defensively, of course. He remained unclothed as she dressed, but after a moment, saw fit to throw the scratchy blanket over his lower body. No offense, he shrugged, looking down at his loose paunch and the will-o’-the-wisps of salt-and-pepper engirding his nipples, as if noticing them for the first time.
Fully dressed, she turned and brought the cigarette to her lips.
With a steadier hand now he lit her up. He told her he was a small-press publisher and that he had just got off the last plane out of Beijing.
* * *
—
THE OTHER SMALL-PRESS publishers were small because they had specific aesthetic interests. They were too niche. That, or they were politically inclined, and needed to operate on the fly. He was small because he was essentially interested in publishing translations of European literature.
He was doing nicely enough.
The educated class was hungry for foreign culture after all those years of pastoral proselytism, he said. Let a hundred flowers kiss my ass! Things were stable. Deng Xiaoping is a clincher, my kind of man. An all-out capitalist, mark my words, you’ll see, if he holds on to the hot seat China will be the most consumerist country in thirty, nah, twenty years. It was a good time for business. Place your bets. Balzac flew off the shelves. Not so much Chekhov or Tolstoy. Nobody bought Proust, ha-ha. Zola did pretty well, for some reason.
Some were reputable reprints of translations that had gone out of print. Others I hired the best translators I could. I paid them better than most. So I was breaking even, generally content, until last month, when some kid bought a copy of a translation of Madame Bovary I’d published. He was a handsome lad, a university senior. That all seems fairly innocent, am I right? How soon fortunes turn, you better believe it! This kid took Madame Bovary around to the villages, preaching it to peasant girls before proceeding to make love to them in the hay.
Why Madame Bovary, you might ask? Why not Sentimental Education?
In his fine hands he had turned Madame Bovary into a cautionary tale against the rural petite bourgeoisie. He whispered to them sweet nothings of their right to individual freedom. He sang to them ditties about anarcho-feminism and anti-statist Marxism.
As if they could tell an elbow from an arse!
But their hearts were kindled when with great restraint each time he stopped thrusting his hips against their flailing bodies during the climactic instant of copulation to demand: Do you want to go the way of Emma Bovary?
Only when they had formed the following sentence would he resume his pelvic locomotion: I do not want to go the way of Emma Bovary!
Kid was making a killing.
Having amassed some fifteen to twenty girls with my paperback edition, he brought them to Beijing. Now they were affiliated with the university’s anarchist student group. In the day, his bevy of besotted rustics was coached in maxims of libertarian socialism. By night: rice wine orgies and folk punk sing-alongs. When the sit-in at Tiananmen Square began, they descended on the promenade with much ado. Even if you don’t understand the principles, you can still chant democratic slogans, am I right?
Now that things have turned ugly, now that the Party has fired on student protestors in the streets, now that those still alive have been taken into interrogation—these peasant girls, when asked what they were doing there, what do you think their answer was?
Madame Bovary.
So the Party got ahold of a copy of the book and trace
d Madame Bovary to my publishing press. With some digging they find out that I helped produce Cui Jian’s Rock ’n’ Roll on the New Long March album, but hey, give me a break, this was before they’d banned the guy’s music. How the hell should I have known that “Nothing to My Name” would catch on as the youth movement’s anthem? I was pally with his Hungarian bassist, that’s all. We were drinking buddies at foreign embassy parties.
That does it for them. I get called in for questioning.
When I see what they’ve written on my file—“The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing”—I start to laugh. But I shut up real quick when I see their faces.
Heaven is blind. So is the Party. Don’t quote me on that.
I wasn’t protesting at the square or in the streets. Never even popped by out of curiosity. But what do they care? They tell me I’m in cahoots with what’s transpired. They show me a copy of the book. And I realize that dog turd had photocopied my Madame Bovary—a terrible copy at that, pages misaligned—so I hadn’t even earned the royalties off these dissident wannabes. Naturally, all these student activists are silk purses born after the famines, the purges, the sending-downs that we old-timers ploughed through like farm pigs just a generation ago.
In the blink of an eye trouble is nigh.
I’m blacklisted. I’m denounced, in turn, as a Western-loving imperialist, a revisionist, an anarchist, for translating, printing, and distributing Madame Bovary in China!
* * *
—
EXCUSE ME, SIR, Bébé interrupted. What has happened at Tiananmen Square?
He gawped at her.
Are you living under a rock, baby sister? He was sweating from relating his travails with such force. Marseilles is far, but still. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It’s a bad time, he continued, a snake year. If you don’t know anything, it’s better this way. Information begets trouble. The long line of ash from his cigarette broke off, dusting the motel pillow. She relit the cigarette for him as she asked: Could you write it down for me?
Write what down?
The name of the author and the book you mentioned.
What do you want it for?
But Bébé did not want it for anything, so to that she had no answer. She’d never before read a classical Chinese novel in full, much less a European novel in translation. He studied her face. She did not look away. Slinging his hairy behind over the bed, he bent to retrieve a pen from his jacket. His ass cleft was the color of unhulled bean sprouts. He turned back, depressing the end of the ballpoint pen against his chin.
福楼拜, he wrote on the back of the cigarette pack, 包法利夫人.
He tossed it to her. As he released the pen again on his chin with a satisfying click, he said: We even republished this edition of Madame Bovary with a note from the translator, to say that Flaubert is not a capitalist. Well, he is a rentier, but his sympathies lie with the people. But did they see my effort with that? Of course not. Listen to me, girl. People want to see only the worst in other people.
What will you do now? Bébé asked.
I’ve got old friends littered all over the place. I studied literature in Paris when I was your age. Such a beautiful place, you can’t imagine! The old government paid for us to go. Of course now that’s all gone out the window. Zhou Enlai was my senior in the exchange program. Paris, Berlin, Munich, Lyon, London. It was so hard to travel then. Impossible unless you were born into money or you were a stowaway. Chairman Mao applied for the same work-study program and was rejected. I made it to Paris and he didn’t, ha! Where did that get the both of us?
He stopped to blow some air through his lips like a horse.
With a bit of grit and grease our kind can always start over. A noodle stand, or a hand laundry—stomachs are hungry and clothes will be dirty. A good coat can be made from gathering up enough poor scraps, yeah yeah. Something always comes up if you keep your eyes open. Hey, it’s good to see a homeland chicken so far from the old road. Nothing like a Chinese woman’s skin, you know?
6
Marlene and JFK had not kept in contact, so when she visited Washington on a day-trip in 1961 to receive an honorary peace prize, she was surprised to receive a call from his aide: Mr. President extends an invitation to the Oval Office for late-afternoon drinks.
She could not be certain what “drinks” meant in his book, but she was open to finding out, and just in case, she wore a nice pair of pink silk panties. Great minds think alike, she said, when two and a half drinks into their meeting he leaned in to kiss her.
He said: Huh?
Please don’t mess my hair up, she said. I have a ceremony to attend later.
It was all over in a few minutes. He’d moistened her with a few sloppy licks before making his entrance, and she was just getting into the rhythm of things by the time he was done. Before he undressed her, he had told her that for security reasons the room was bugged. But not to worry, the aides could only hear them, not see them. Gallantly, she made sure to issue a few more husky sighs than the encounter warranted so as to protect his reputation. He cleaned up and turned to her, asking: Did you ever do it with him?
Marlene wasn’t sure whom he was talking about. She asked: Him? He nodded. Incredulously she ventured a guess: Your daddy?
He nodded again.
Jack! she protested. I never did it with your daddy.
I knew the old devil was lying, he said, patting her rump twice. That’s the only door I got in first.
Unsure if she should be amused or offended, Marlene excused herself to the bathroom. She had not made him wear a condom. Not because he was the president—it was an indiscriminate favor she extended to any man she bedded. They were always so grateful afterward. Vinegar douching was what she swore by, and she never went anywhere without said spermicide ever since stoically seducing her music teacher at boarding school. The vinegar method had been taught to her by the older girls. All you needed was apple cider vinegar diluted with water and a douchebag with a nozzle. On her way in to the Oval Office, Marlene had been frisked and patted down several times. Her handbag went through a scanning device. They picked out her vial of apple cider vinegar. My weight-loss potion, she said, and unscrewed it for them to sniff.
Mr. President was snoring when Marlene came out of the bathroom.
She tried to shake him awake, but he was heavy as lead. He smiled doggishly in his sleep, and she recognized the teenager by the pool in the sun.
It was a quarter to seven and Marlene had to be at the Institute of Peace on the hour. When she put her hand on the doorknob, the door opened from the outside. She almost fell through. Steadying her, the president’s aide bowed deeply. Changing channels on his flesh-colored surveillance earpiece, he called for a chauffeur.
* * *
—
AT THE INSTITUTE OF PEACE a balding compere read out individual citations for the catalog of honorees, comprising in excess wizened white émigré men, dead and alive: Albert Einstein, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Raphael Lemkin, Joseph Brodsky, Thomas Mann, Béla Bartók.
Seated in the front row, waiting to receive her prize, Marlene almost dozed off herself. She leapt up from her seat when she heard her name.
Listening to Marlene Dietrich sing “Lili Marleen” on the black radio was as devastating as an air raid for German troop morale, the balding compere said as she took the stage. Hemingway said of her: Even if she had nothing left, she could break your heart with her voice. As early as 1933 she spoke out against the Nazi Party, and in 1939 rescinded her German passport to become a U.S. citizen, despite a personal invitation from Hitler to return to Germany under his direct patronage. During the war, she was a high-profile frontline entertainer for our boys, attaining the rank of captain for her tour of duty. Can I have a round of applause for Marlene Dietrich, who chose to throw her lot with us from the very beginning!
The 19
61 U.S. Institute of Peace prize medallion was gold leaf, with a laurel of olive branches topping the institute’s logo.
It was a bit much, but Marlene had put it in one of her boxes all the same. She hoarded jewelry, love memos on the backs of napkins, program sheets for premieres, magazines with her face on the cover. She had a special malachite box where she preserved intimate souvenirs: Joe DiMaggio’s jockstrap. Frank Sinatra’s guitar pick. A lone stocking unclipped from Edith Piaf’s garter belt. The pink silk panties she’d worn for the president also resided there. She’d repurposed the peace-prize medallion as a paperweight in this cave in Paris. It held down the obituary notices of friends and acquaintances she cut out from the papers; of course she was keeping tabs. Top of the pile for now was Lucille Ball—ruptured aorta, ten days after open-heart surgery at Cedars-Sinai, and doctors had claimed the rupture had nothing directly to do with the surgery. Pshaw!
Everyone Marlene had known from before seemed to have died out by around 1980. There was no one left to admire or loathe or compete with. Not only had she outlived them all, she thought, she’d tried everything at least once, and she would like to do it all over again. A bell was ringing from far away, reeling Marlene back in.
It was the phone.
Marlene dipped her chin into the plush white collar about her neck, letting the feathers tickle. She stared at the telephone for three whole rings before picking up the receiver. Miss Dietrich’s residence, she whispered, who is calling?
She heard:
You wanted greater yet, but love
forces all of us down to the ground.
Sorrow bends powerfully, but an arc never returns
to its starting point without a reason.
* * *
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 5