The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  There wasn’t a soul in sight. Jocelyn could see streetlights on the bridge, gauzy in the fog, but she heard no sound at all—not a car, not a voice. Jocelyn’s stomach knotted. She had a stitch in her side. She couldn’t get the sound of the man’s footsteps out of her ears. It was March, a chilly night. The bare skin on Jocelyn’s thighs between the tops of her stockings and the bottom of her girdle suddenly felt cold. It seemed wrong to run, but nevertheless she broke into a trot. Her heavy breasts jounced in her brassiere, her ankles kept turning in the high-heeled shoes. The silk of her undergarments whispered against the lining of her dress, a feminine noise that always before had given her pleasure but now sounded like the sibilant voice of her rapist, calling to her out of the fog.

  Suddenly a strong, angry male hand seized her arm, dragging her to a halt. Jocelyn opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. “Slow down, for Christ’s sake,” Mordecai Bashian said. “Oh, Mordecai, thank God it’s you!” Jocelyn cried in gratitude.

  Mordecai led her away from the river. They walked together in the fog along the Mall, all the way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, then across the bridge to the Jefferson Memorial. Jocelyn held on to Mordecai’s arm with her gloved hand. He was much gentler now. He told her about his childhood in a tenement in New York, about his father who sent his sons to CCNY by selling things that nobody wanted—pots and pans, books of knowledge—from door to door. Mordecai described human suffering the like of which Jocelyn had never imagined. At home, when as a child Jocelyn did not eat her dinner, her mother would say, “The starving Armenians would be glad to have those carrots.” Mordecai’s family were the starving Armenians; his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, his cousins had been driven into the desert by the Turks. All had died. “America would do nothing. What does Christian civilization care about the murder of two million Armenians?” Mordecai said. “Was there outrage in your stately Virginia mansion because my grandmother was dropping in her tracks from lack of water, because my uncles were being flogged to death, because my cousins were being raped and bayoneted by the Turks?” Mordecai tapped his bony chest. “There is outrage in here, but what can a white girl like you know about that?” he said contemptuously.

  It was a terrible thing to be a member of the downtrodden classes. Until just then, strolling along beside the Reflecting Pool with Mordecai Bashian, Jocelyn had never truly understood that. She had hurt Mordecai with her mean words about his being a smart-mouth New York Jew, even though he wasn’t Jewish. And, as he explained, she had hurt him, too, by just being what she was: a pretty, well-to-do, joking girl with a state supreme court justice for a father. That was why Mordecai had been so unkind, because Jocelyn was unattainable. He kept on calling her a “white girl,” as if, in some sardonic sense that she could never understand, he was colored.

  Mordecai led her into the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial. Fog draped the brooding statue of Thomas Jefferson like a toga. It was awfully picturesque and romantic. Mordecai’s face was really a kind and sensitive face. A lock of black hair had fallen over his forehead. Jocelyn reached up and pushed it back. She gave him a sweet smile, and then on a generous impulse she kissed him, a warm soft pressure right on his lips, to show that she forgave him and knew that he forgave her.

  Mordecai kissed her back, very sweetly, arid pulled her to him. Chastely, Jocelyn let herself be kissed, as she had learned, arms hanging loose at sides, eyes shut, lips soft but firmly together. When Mordecai stopped, she opened her eyes and smiled. He put his arm around her and they walked outside. Mordecai led her down toward the Tidal Basin. She assumed that that was the way home.

  They were inside a grove of trees. The fog was so thick that they had to grope their way among the trunks with their hands outstretched before them. It was like being in the dark in a haunted house. Jocelyn shivered and giggled. Mordecai pulled her to him again and kissed her. What harm can this do? she thought. She knew how to handle amorous boys. Mordecai smelled different from the other men she’d kissed, more pungent; she wondered if it was because he was an Armenian. Again she shivered a little. Mordecai took her lower lip between his lips and gave it delicious little kisses, a new way of doing things in Jocelyn’s experience. She was aware of his body. He stepped back, untied the belt of her coat, and put his arms around her inside the coat. His hands caressed her back. He touched her breasts. “No,” Jocelyn said. But Mordecai didn’t stop, the way the boys from Washington & Lee most always did. He licked her ear and kissed her neck. She supposed he was swelling up, though she couldn’t tell through the armor of her girdle. “Come on,” Mordecai said, drawing her under a big tree. “No,” Jocelyn said, “I think we’d better go.” Mordecai uttered a sigh of wounded despair, and Jocelyn realized that he thought once again that she was rejecting him because he was Armenian. She couldn’t see his face; they were hidden from each other in the fog. Jocelyn sank to the ground with her back against the trunk of the tree.

  Mordecai caressed her breasts. He unbuttoned her blouse and unfastened her bra. Jocelyn had permitted this to happen a time or two before; she was proud of her breasts. Mordecai touched them with his tongue. Jocelyn struggled, then relaxed and let him do it; it was dreamy and warm to be caressed as she gazed into the fog that hid them like a cloud of white tulle. Jocelyn felt wetness between her thighs. Now it really was time to go. But Mordecai wouldn’t let her leave. He put his face very close to hers. The tenderness she had detected earlier was mixed now with a petulant, hard selfishness. She was moved by the way he looked; she was a little frightened, but moved. His hands were under her skirt. This was the first time she had ever permitted this. Mordecai unhooked her garters and caressed the insides of her thighs. He removed her pantaloons, and then, as she found herself raising her hips to make things easier, he peeled off her girdle. When Mordecai removed her petticoat and her skirt she didn’t resist.

  Naked, she lay on her outspread polo coat with her arms at her sides, accepting his hands and his fingers and his lips and tongue. He kissed her body all over. She felt something happening. He was kissing her mouse! She leaped in astonishment and tried to scoot away over the whistling silk lining of her coat, but Mordecai had hold of her buttocks and he followed her with his quick tongue.

  Jocelyn stopped trying to escape. A great shuddering sensation seized her. She buried her hands in Mordecai’s thick hair, loving the coarseness of it and imagining how dark it was, and then she wrapped her legs around his neck. She had a long, sweet orgasm like a whisper that ran from her toes to her crown, and felt that her bones, her skin, her hair, and the blue veins inside her body were all one thing. As she lay on her polo coat, dazed by pleasure, Mordecai lifted his head. She kissed him in gratitude on the cheek. He thrust his tongue into her mouth. She expected to retch, but when she tasted herself on the tongue of a man she clutched Mordecai’s head again and began to use her own tongue. She felt something. She knew what it was, yet she was amazed by it: she had always imagined that it would be like a bone, cold and sharp, but it was a lovely, smooth, limber muscle that slid into her, reaching and reaching. She wept. “Move your ass!” Mordecai said. He showed her the rhythm, pulling her toward him with hands locked on either buttock. She whirled like a person going under ether into a blackness, her whole being swelling inside her glowing skin.

  After that, Jocelyn naturally considered that she was Mordecai’s wife. But when she spoke of marriage, his face grew black with disgust. “Get this,” he said. “I’ll never marry you. But I will make an honest woman of you. I’ll teach you how to think.”

  Mordecai was the smartest person Jocelyn had ever known. He insisted that she believe every single thing that he believed. In a way, Mordecai reminded Jocelyn of her mother: like her mother, he had no doubts about anything. He knew what to wear, what to say, what to believe, what to despise, and he could not bear to be in the room (could not bear to be in the same world, if truth were told) with any outsider who didn’t have the right clothes, words, beliefs, and t
aboos.

  Jocelyn didn’t find it hard to please him, though it was time-consuming. Being his mistress was like rehearsing a part: she had to know her lines by heart. If she said something wrong, Mordecai would make her say it over again until she had it exactly right. He made her read Das Kapital and Ten Days That Shook the World and The New Masses. They went only to Soviet films, which always seemed to be overexposed and speeded up, so that Jocelyn formed the impression (she knew this wasn’t so) that Russia was a country bathed in blinding sunlight, inhabited by bearded wild-eyed men who scurried around like mice, waving rifles over their heads. Mordecai and his friends talked incessantly about these few books and periodicals and films. There was nothing worth knowing in American literature, nothing worth looking at in American art: there couldn’t be, because the United States was still a bourgeois capitalist society. It was a terrible sin to read the books that Jocelyn’s father had always called “the dear, old books.” It was a shocking breach of manners to mention one’s family in the presence of Mordecai’s friends: Jocelyn embarrassed him more than once with her empty-headed chatter about her parents and her sisters and her funny cousins before she learned to be more serious.

  Mordecai made Jocelyn feel guilty about everything. “If you want to come into my life,” he had said, “you can’t bring any bourgeois baggage with you.” She sacrificed her magazines, her Bette Davis movies (except for Watch on the Rhine, a wonderful treat on her twenty-eighth birthday), the Episcopal Church with its sweet boy sopranos singing “Hear My Prayer,” and jokes. It made her sad to think of what she’d lost, but she knew that she could not live without Mordecai. She came to be bored by his talk, but her passion for his body grew so strong that she thought sometimes that she was going crazy. She wondered if any woman had ever done the things she did and lusted to do again. She didn’t think it was possible.

  Jocelyn’s affair with Mordecai, which lasted for nearly twenty years, was a deep secret. In the office he treated her as he always had: with such cruel unfairness that the other girls came to love her and hate him. She was not permitted to mention Mordecai to her parents, not even his name. Mordecai would not come to her apartment, and she never knew where he lived or even if he had a telephone. They made love in borrowed rooms or in the car or in the lonesome Virginia woods beyond Mount Vernon. Sometimes Mordecai would call her at midnight and tell her where to meet him. She’d drive through the deserted streets to the rendezvous and he would pull her into an alley and stand her up against the wall and have her.

  She knew that she was in the grip of a sexual obsession. If it was a sickness, then there was no cure for it, because the sickness was the cure.

  After a few years, Mordecai started to send Jocelyn on errands. She delivered messages for him to people whose names he never revealed to her: he called them “Addressees.” Sometimes she carried an envelope to an Addressee, sometimes she had to repeat a phrase that Mordecai had made her memorize; sometimes she picked things up from one Addressee and delivered them to another. Mostly she called on Addressees—scruffy people with contemptuous eyes and hateful masks for faces, like all of Mordecai’s friends—in Washington. But sometimes she went to New York or Baltimore or even to Boston. She knew better than to ask questions: she just made her deliveries. Mordecai began to talk about the need for her to have a reason to call on the Addressees. Jocelyn said she didn’t know why she needed a reason when no one even knew she was doing it, and she had no friends to tell. Mordecai was so angry that he refused to give her any relief for a whole month. They would meet and get undressed, but he would not touch her. He would masturbate while she watched, writhing in frustration. Once she tried to do the same, thinking that perhaps that was what he wanted.

  “I don’t want that,” Mordecai said. “If you love me, you have to do exactly what I say, with whomever I say.”

  The next time Jocelyn delivered a package to an Addressee, she slept with him, as Mordecai had instructed her.

  When she staggered out of his room into the street she found Mordecai waiting for her. He made her describe every act she had performed with the Addressee, exactly as he required her to repeat the ideas that he approved of. Afterward, he was very tender to her in the back of her car. “You must have a reason to call on the Addressees,” Mordecai said, bestowing one of his rare smiles on her. “Being a whore explains everything.” After that, she committed some sexual act with many of the Addressees. Mordecai invariably rewarded her after a delivery of this kind by being passionate and virile.

  At the end of a wonderful hour in a hotel room—it was the eighth anniversary of their night by the Tidal Basin—Jocelyn asked, her voice quavering, if she could please stop being a whore. She hated it; she wanted only one man, Mordecai. He pushed her away. “The others are the only thing that make it possible for me to fuck you,” he said.

  — 2 —

  Wolkowicz arrested Jocelyn on a Thursday in the spring, in a Peoples Drug Store. Sometimes, on her lunch hour, Jocelyn made a delivery to a man she never spoke to. This always happened on a Thursday, the day that Newsweek came out. Jocelyn would go to the drugstore and look at the magazines. Her job was to leave an envelope inside the third Newsweek from the top. The man would buy that particular copy and walk out with it while Jocelyn looked through other magazines, making sure the wrong person didn’t get the loaded Newsweek. As a reward, she always bought herself a copy of McCall’s to read in the ladies’ room.

  One day, as the man was paying for his Newsweek, two young men in dark suits and straw hats took him by the arms and seized the magazine. They found the envelope inside.

  “I am an official of a foreign embassy,” the man said in a loud voice. “I have diplomatic immunity. I demand that you return my property.”

  He attempted to free his arms; the young men resisted. There was a wild struggle and all three men fell to the floor, punching and cursing. Their straw hats fell off and rolled down the aisle toward Jocelyn. She was terrified. A strong male hand seized her arm. McCall’s fell from Jocelyn’s hand and fluttered to the dirty floor.

  A burly man with cold, cold eyes was showing her some sort of identification in a leather case. Through the thin sleeve of her blouse she could feel the sweat on his hand.

  “I want you to come with me, Miss Frick,” he said in a conversational tone. “Don’t look at what’s happening up front. Just walk out of the store like you always do. I’ll be right behind you.”

  He unbuttoned his coat. She saw the butt of a gun protruding from his waistband.

  It had been Jocelyn’s great fear, when she was taken into custody, that the whole story of her becoming a whore would get into the newspapers. Sitting on a straight chair in the bare room Wolkowicz took her to, she had wide-awake dreams, a whole series of them, in which her father read the unspeakable truth in the Richmond News Leader and then did the only thing he could do: Jocelyn flinched when she heard the gunshot in the library, cried out when she saw the judge’s flowing white hair stained with blood.

  Wolkowicz seemed to understand her burden. For the first few hours, she would tell him nothing. He didn’t bully her at all; for a man who looked like a brute, he was remarkably kind, even courtly. Finally Wolkowicz gave her a long look, filled with sympathy, then opened an envelope he had brought with him. It was a holey government messenger envelope, closed by a cord that wound around two little cardboard buttons.

  “Jocelyn,” Wolkowicz said, “I want you to look at some pictures.”

  Then, one by one, he laid out glossy photographs of Jocelyn engaging in sexual acts with the Addressees. She stared in fascination at the shiny enlargements. Men with slack faces and rumpled hair penetrated her, kneaded her breasts, and did worse. The pictures were bleached and jumpy, like Soviet films. She hardly recognized her own face, twisted as it was into a shame-filled mask with wild eyes. Jocelyn had never realized how ugly copulation looked.

  Wolkowicz let her cry for a long time. Then he pulled one of her hands away from her face and pl
aced a clean handkerchief in it. Jocelyn dried her eyes and blew her nose. The first sight she saw, when she was finally able to look at a human face, was the homely features of Wolkowicz, and there wasn’t a trace of blame or disgust or cruelty there. While she cried, he had put the photographs away.

  “Jocelyn,” he said, “I want you to look at one more picture.”

  She covered her eyes again. Gently, he pulled her hands away from her face and held them. On the table, all by itself, lay a photograph of Mordecai Bashian. It was a group portrait. There was a woman in the picture too, and three children. All had dark, sullen faces like Mordecai’s. Jocelyn tugged at her hands and Wolkowicz let them go. She picked up the photograph and a spear pierced her heart.

  “Then he was married every minute of the time I’ve known him,” Jocelyn said, dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief.

  “That’s about the size of it,” Wolkowicz said sympathetically.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” Jocelyn cried.

  Wolkowicz let her go on until she was all cried out and racked by dry sobs, like a child whose heart has been broken. Then he took one of her hands in his and apologized.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We didn’t take those pictures. I’m sorry you had to see them. Mordecai Bashian had them taken; we found them hidden in his house. When you wouldn’t talk to me, Cinders, I thought it might be because you were afraid everyone would find out what’s in the pictures—afraid that we’d use this evidence against you, to hurt you and your family. Was I right about that?”

  Jocelyn nodded. Hearing him call her Cinders perked her up somehow. She’d never dared to reveal this old pet name to Mordecai. Suddenly she was bright-eyed and deeply calm. Wolkowicz squeezed her hand reassuringly.

  “That doesn’t have to happen,” he said. “I promise you. The pictures can be destroyed. No judge would ever see them, no other human being would ever see them. Nothing would happen to you. You’ve suffered enough. None of this was your fault. Do you believe me?”