Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “Of course. He’s my agent.” Some part of me was ready to ask more questions, but I could not go on. I felt as if I had taken a bad fall.

  “I don’t believe what I saw,” came out in a hoarse little croak.

  He began to laugh. His mirth echoed in the small canyon of the alley, the back of six-story buildings close upon us from either side. We debouched into a street, and his laughter went caterwauling away from him on the wind. “The goddamn people I’m associated with,” he said aloud, but if I thought he was referring to the cellar bar, his next few words removed the error. “Are we supposed to conquer the Russians with personnel like you and McCann?”

  “I’m not a street man,” I said.

  “That’s where the war is fought.”

  “Yes. In that bar.”

  “Half of our agents are queer. It comes with the profession.”

  “Do you pretend to be one of them?” I found the courage to say.

  “I use them,” he told me shortly. We did not talk for a while. We walked. When he spoke again, he had come back to the subject. “I don’t think you received my point, Herrick,” he said. “Agents lead a double life. Homosexuals lead a double life. Ergo”—had he picked up ergo from me?—“agents are often homosexual.”

  “I would judge that homosexuals are just a small part of it.”

  “You would judge,” he jeered. “You choose to believe what you want to believe.”

  “What are you telling me?” No blow taken in boxing at the Farm had left me as numb in so many junctions of the mind. I needed a drink, but not to relax, rather to return to myself again. I was chilled in my mind, chilled in my heart, and not without the beginnings of some lively disturbance below. The nearness of sex to urine and feces seemed a monstrosity, as if some mongoloid of the Devil had been there at the Creation dictating nether anatomy. The smell of drains, prevalent in these nocturnal Berlin streets, was in my nose.

  “What are you telling me?” I repeated. My discomfort kept shifting as if we were playing at musical chairs and one of my better views of myself had just lost his seat.

  He stopped at a door, took out a key, let himself into a small walk-up apartment building. I did not care to follow, but I did. I knew where we were. It was one of C. G. Harvey’s safe houses.

  Once inside, installed in our chairs, holding glasses of bourbon neat, he looked at me and rubbed his face. He did this slowly and carefully for several minutes as if domiciling his temper.

  “I’ve never talked to you,” he said.

  “You haven’t?”

  “Not as a friend. I’ve merely offered facets of myself.”

  I made no reply. I drank. It was as if I were starting to drink all over again. The liquor set loose a coil of thought in me, and I began to ponder the creature named Wolfgang whom Butler had promised to fry. Was Wolfgang, beatific Wolfgang, the same fellow known as Franz? Described by Mr. Harvey, he had been slim and dark. Of course, hair could be dyed.

  “One difference between you and me,” said Butler, “is that I understand our profession. You have to be able to turn yourself inside out.”

  “I am aware of that,” I said.

  “You may be aware of it, but you cannot do it. You get stuck in the middle. Your asshole is tight.”

  “I believe I’m ready to drink up and leave.”

  “Your asshole is tight,” repeated Butler. He began to laugh. Of all the times I had heard him laugh tonight, none sounded so full of warring parties to his own balance. “They’re crazy in this fucking Company,” he said. “They give a polygraph test to all of us. ‘Are you homosexual?’ they ask. I never met a closet homosexual who couldn’t lie to a polygraph. I’ll tell you what they need in this Company. An initiation rite. Every Junior Officer Trainee ought to be ordered to pull down his pants on graduation day. Get his asshole reamed by a wise superior. What do you think of such a thesis?”

  “I don’t believe you would submit to it yourself,” I said.

  “I’ve had my initiation. Didn’t I tell you? My big brother used to corn-hole me. From the time I was ten till I was fourteen. Then I knocked him down, and he stopped. That’s what they mean by white trash, Herrick. Now, I do not believe there is any man in the Company who could stick it up me against my will. No one has the physical force.”

  “What if they had a gun?”

  “I would die first.” He smiled at me. “All the same, taking it up the ass, out of one’s own free God-given choice, may be another matter. Call it the next thing to yoga. Frees the associations. Readies you for the street.”

  “Maybe I’ll never be ready,” I said.

  “You dumb, smug, superior son of a bitch,” he said. “What if I were to push your face into the carpet, and manhandle your cherry pants off your cherry ass? Do you think I’m strong enough?”

  It was not routine to speak. “I think you’re strong enough,” I said, and my voice was weak in my ear, “but you don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I might kill you.”

  “With what?”

  I was silent.

  “With what?”

  “With whatever it took.”

  “How long,” asked Butler, “would I have to wait?”

  “Till whenever. Till I would do it.”

  “Do you know, I think you would.”

  I nodded. I could not speak. Too much fear was in me. It was as if I had already committed murder and did not know how to escape.

  “Yes,” he said. “You could shoot me in the back afterward.” He pondered this. “Or even in the front. I’ll say that for you. You might shoot me if I took away the only thing that is yours. The poor little cherry in your asshole. I wish you had something more to hold on to—you might not be so desperate.”

  If my father had uttered those words they could not have been more painful. I wanted to explain that I might be better than that. I believed in honor, I wanted to tell him. Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter—no matter how unsuited and unprepared—to a life of revenge. I knew, however, that I could not express this aloud. The words would never survive in open air.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe old Dix is not going to go in for breaking and entry. Maybe old Dix is wrong and ought to apologize.” He weighed this. He weighed his glass. “I was wrong,” he said. “I apologize. I apologize for the second time tonight.”

  But he looked as intent and full of ungovernable tension as ever. He took a long swallow of his bourbon. I took a short one of mine, happy for its heat.

  Now Butler stood up. He undid his belt buckle, opened his pants, and stepped out of them. Then he dropped his jockey shorts. He was swollen, but without an erection. “There’s two kinds of sexual behavior between men,” he said. “Compulsion and mutual regard. The second does not exist until the first is attempted. So I decided to frighten you into putting out for me. But that don’t work. So, now I can respect you. Come,” he said, and he reached forward and took my hand, “take off your clothes. We’ll do some good things to each other.”

  When I did not move, he said, “You don’t trust me, do you?” In answer to my silence, he smiled. “Let me be the first,” he said, and he bent over nimbly, put his fingertips to the floor and then his knees, and raised his powerful buttocks to me. “Come on, fuck-head,” he said, “this is your chance. Hit it big. Come in me, before I come back in you.” When I still made no move, he added, “Goddamnit, I need it tonight. I need it bad, Harry, and I love you.”

  “I love you too, Dix,” I said, “but I can’t.”

  The worst of it was that I could. An erection had risen out of I know not what, from puddles of urine on a cellar floor and a fat German slobbering his beer, from the buried loves of my life, from bonds of family and friends and all the muffled dreams of Kittredge, from naked-ass locker rooms packed into the constrictions of my memory, and the recollection of St. Matthew’s Arnold,
except here were no fat sweet buttocks, but two clumps of powered meat belonging to my hero who wanted me up his ass, yes, I had an erection. He was right. It was my chance to hit it big. I could steal something of his strength. And knew that if I did, I might live forever on this side of sex. But he had told the truth. I was too timid to live in such a way. He could leap from woman to man to woman, on top, on bottom, or hang from his heels. He was pagan, an explorer of caverns and columns, and I happened to be the piece of human work he wanted inside himself tonight. For what, I hardly knew. Was it a fiber from the spine of New England? Something he had missed? I felt for him. I walked around in front, knelt, kissed him once on the mouth, stood up quickly, stepped to the door, unhooked the chain, and felt an obligation to turn around and look at him one more time, as if in salute. He looked back at me and nodded. He was sitting on the floor.

  Out in the street, wind flayed the cheeks of my face. I walked along quickly. I knew I had not gotten out unscathed. “I love you, Dix,” were the words that would come back to me, and I writhed at the squalid echo they would soon acquire.

  Instinct took me to Die Hintertür. Stalking night streets with a full erection must have served as my vector. An empty taxi passed, and although I needed to walk, on impulse I hailed him and thereby arrived at the nightclub just as the steel shutters were coming down, and Ingrid, small pocketbook held in one of her square hands, short and ratty fur coat on her shoulders, was shivering on the curb in the 4:00 A.M. winds. Without a tremor of hesitation, and the most perfect smile on her face as if this coincidence of our meeting was but the first note in a romantic symphony whose composer could only be Herr History, she came right into the cab, gave an address, and offered the full seal of her lips to mine. I went all the way back in my mind to the prep school instructor who had glommed me, but this was the night for such recollections to turn in their foundation. I was all over her in the back of the cab and could not stop kissing. “Oh,” she kept saying in some mixture of English and German, “Maybe you love me more than a little,” and the repetition of ein bisschen (so much like “ambition”) kept one small part of me in a state of standoff amusement while the rest was taking in the iron-corded fatigue of her legs and shoulders after a night of dancing, absorbing all of her pent energy, good and ill, into my fingers and my hands. We were necking and petting and gripping and grabbing and nipping one another like two exercise machines set loose upon one another. Since my education into the interstices, locks, and patents of a girdle was only now commencing at the age of twenty-three (Ingrid may have been slim, but she was German—in consequence, she wore a girdle), I was making frantic calculations whether to mount some central attack in the back of this cab, or to countermand the address she had given and take her to my apartment, my bed, and the inevitable waking up in the morning to the hung-over embarrassment of having to stumble through the cover names of my fellow CIA men. Already I could hear their guarded good-morning while they debated the dubious wisdom of bringing in this outside source (female) and sitting her down en famille at the linoleum-covered breakfast table. I was still running such calculations through the decision mill of my bourbonified brain when we pulled up at the address she had given to the cabdriver and it was an all-night food mill in full view of the street, two blocks off the other end of the Kurfürstendamm.

  In that place, I quickly received one more education on Berlin and its nightlife. Half the people in this place were familiar to me. I had seen them in one nightclub or another over the last week. Now they were having coffee and American hamburgers, or schnapps, or cognac, or beer, or pig’s knuckles and sauerkraut, or applesauce and potato pancakes, or gin and tonic, or Coca-Cola, or patisserie, or pastrami, or roast duck—a hell of an unlikely place, and brightly lit. I saw again some of the starched businessmen who had been dancing at Remdi’s and the Bathtub and the Kelch, their collars wilted now. Prostitutes who were familiar, plus a few of the all-night divorcées like Helga were there, and to my disbelief, nothing less than the fat German I had seen not more than an hour ago whose pants had hung from his suspenders. He was neatly powdered now, having gone, I suppose, to just the kind of all-night barbershop that would complement this all-night emporium of food and drink, and, indeed, in the next moment, I saw the wretch. He, too, was bathed and powdered. Dressed in a gray suit and vest, he wore steel-rimmed spectacles, and looked like a clerk with spavined cheeks and a large appetite: He was devouring a plate of beans.

  Ingrid, all the while, was hugging her fur coat and my body as one, proclaiming to everyone who watched that she had bagged an American. Ingrid was also eating an enormous “Grilled American” of Westphalian ham, tomatoes, and Muenster cheese. I sat beside her in twitchy detumescence while she slogged down a vast mug of beer, thereby communicating to me in twenty minutes how profoundly one might, over twenty years, come to dislike the eating habits of a mate. Poor Ingrid. The Back Door, as she put it to me with a toothsome grin, never allowed their help enough of food and drink to produce more than a goat turd for the other back door. On this night, therefore, in which my own sphincter had almost played a prominent role, insight came over me at last: I was in the presence of German humor. Die Hintertür. I got it. A nightclub for assholes.

  She finished her meal. We found cabs waiting outside. We took one to another address she gave. It proved to be a cavernous cheap hotel in another bombed-out working-class quarter of Tempelhof, and the night clerk took an unconscionable time studying my passport and hers, and finally returned Ingrid’s with a muttered German insult I could not catch. I begged her to explain, and in the rise of the self-service elevator which took us up at a creak and a hitch past one plaster-dusted floor after another she managed to translate. “American whore-bitch fucker” was something like how it went, but if there is a universal harmonium of consonants and vowels, it certainly sounded worse in German.

  It affected her mood. We came to our floor and walked down an echoing cavernous hall. She took the key, whose prominent handle was the size of a phallus itself, and opened the door to a room as cold and damp as the night outside. The overhead bulb in the ceiling may have offered twenty-five watts. One standing lamp offered another such bulb, and the bed presented a coverlet in the full palette of entropy. That may be described as not-brown, not-gray, not-green, and it was long enough to wrap around a bolster as heavy as a rolled-up rug.

  We started to kiss again, but with less fever, and she shivered. “You have zwei Mark?” she asked. When I found a coin, she put it into a gas meter, came back to me for matches, lit it, and stood by a fire which came up in a blue whispering flambeau behind artificial logs. I felt the weight of the city. All of Berlin was now contained for me in the image of a gargoyle straining to move a boulder up a slope—no vast originality at this hour!—and then I embraced her again, and we shivered with that side of our bodies which was not toasted by the fire.

  I did not know how to proceed. The girdle seemed more formidable than ever. Sobering up, I was all too near to nothing at all, but my erection, holy prime factor, was intact. It had been waiting for years. I felt as if long-dead Hubbards were gathering about. In this ghostly room, so much more suited for laying out a corpse than lying on a living body, a filament of desire rolled around in me, hot and isolated as a wire in a heating coil. Yet it must have warmed some minimal ardor in her because now she was kissing me back, and after a moment, with a muted reluctance as grave and stately as a formal procession, we moved the four steps to the bed, and she lay down on the edge of it, gave, presto, a few deft snips and snaps to the yoke of the girdle, unhooked her garters so that each falling stocking inspired one more thin filament of desire—these unkempt stockings reminiscent of a pornographic daguerreotype, circa 1885, which had lain all through my boyhood in some old tin box of my father’s up in Maine. Maybe my father had guarded it through his boyhood. One more family log to throw on the fire.

  By the light of the twenty-five-watt bulbs, I saw revealed, without preliminary, my first vagina. As if I wer
e robbing a house and did not wish to tarry, I opened my pants, to which she gave a grunt of pleasure at the readiness of my erection. I, however, taking another look at that repository of female secrets, was tempted to drop to my knees and pay homage until my eyes were sated of their formidable curiosity, but, child of good decorum, I did not really dare to look too long, and was certainly afraid of this vagina’s superior relation (what with all its folds and recesses) to secrets of human state I could not even contemplate. Therefore, I placed the head of my cock where I thought it should go, shoved, only to hear another grunt, now of reproach, on which she took me by her hand, and guiding me with two deft fingers, put her other hand against my chest as I started to plunge. “No, Harry, verwundbar! I’m sore. Go easy, go easy. You are mein Schatz, liebster Schatz—soldier boy.” And she opened her brassiere which had a catch at the front I had never thought to look for, and at the sight of those breasts, which were a little depleted but, all the same, breasts, the first naked ones ever seen so near to me, I plunged, and came back, and plunged again, and had a picture, as I now entered the land of sex (where far-off universes of the mind will, I suppose, implode) had, yes, a picture of Allen Dulles talking before us on the day of our initiation about a girl on a tennis court. Then I plunged and came back, and plunged again, and realized I was inside a cunt. It was another world, and all at once: The inside of her belly was one’s first station in heaven, but another part of me was offended. What mean auspices—what a foul initiation! I hardly liked the odors in this stale cold room. A thin avaricious smell certainly came up from her, single-minded as a cat, weary as some sad putrescence of the sea.