Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  “Yeah. New talent. Works for the Pentagon. Lives in Rockville, though, that’s not too bad. You bringing Norma?”

  “Oh Christ, no.”

  “What’s wrong with Norma? She seems — earthy.”

  “Yeah. She’s earthy. What’s the reason for this party? Who’s leaving?”

  “Nobody. Milt just wanted to give a party.”

  “I’m giving Mary a ride.”

  “Purely a humanitarian gesture?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What were you two doing on the couch the other night, anyhow? Talking about cutlines?”

  Jay frowned.

  Sam looked at him. “I think this is serious.”

  Jay shook his head. “I don’t know what it is. If it is.”

  Sam lathered his face and started to shave. “Word of warning, old buddy. I think she’s pretty vulnerable right now.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’re a bleeder.”

  “A what?”

  “Jews and Irish Catholics. Very big on internal bleeding. Figures you people are the lost tribe.”

  Jay laughed. “Not so internal. When I was in the fifth grade I cut crosses on my palms. The stigmata.”

  “You mean the wounds of Christ?”

  “You got it. Sister Immaculata said good Catholics wanted to share the suffering of Christ. She prayed for the stigmata, but she wasn’t worthy enough.”

  “You don’t mean you actually cut yourself.”

  “Oh yeah. I figured, why pray for the stigmata when I had my Cub Scout knife. I bled all over the floor in the boys’ bathroom.”

  “Did they send you to a shrink?”

  “Are you kidding? I was a big hero. The only kid in school with the stigmata. Sister Immaculata was green with envy. I said I’d lend her my knife.”

  “God, it’s a wonder you’re not in the loony bin.”

  “Me? I’m fine. Now could you get out of here so I can flagellate myself before the party?”

  Jay put on his jacket and walked out to the car, whistling. He had mowed the grass that morning in a burst of energy and the fresh smell surrounded him. He inhaled it with the cool night air, then stood still and shivered with delight; he had the sense that the world was magic; the passage from boy to man destroyed it in most, but it still came to him, at times. He could not imagine being alive without it. Tonight held a sense of promise that he didn’t want to examine too closely. A strange thing had been happening lately with his Jacqueline fantasies. There she’d be, in some House Beautiful bedroom with satin sheets and great art on the walls, and when she elegantly peeled off her Oleg Cassini dress-ball gown-Chanel suit-riding costume-Yves St. Laurent lounging pajamas, her face would change and she would turn into Mary, standing naked in front of him, smiling, with the white gloves and the freckles on her pale shoulders. What a wardrobe she would have, he thought wryly, if she could just pick up the stuff Jackie dropped. All she’d have to do was say, “excuse me,” hop out of bed and scoop it all into a bag. She would get not only a great fuck (he was always fantastic; they were his fantasies, after all) but a closetful of designer clothes as well.

  He doubted that she’d ever worn a pair of forty-five-dollar silk panties, not on a Blade salary. But she was not the type for purple no-crotchies either. Tailored, no-nonsense cotton panties, perhaps with little flowers on them. He saw her in them, naked except for the panties, her graceful breasts bare, looking more seductive than anything Frederick’s of Hollywood could offer. The image aroused him. He groaned.

  No, this would not do. He banished her, and she went, regretfully. He replaced her with the Lady in Black, lovely in her black velvet gown, the Chrysler Building twinkling across her shoulder. That was better. Soothing. He kissed her red-lipsticked mouth, and she too turned into Mary, lying against his bare chest, and he was kissing her desperately, and she was kissing him back. It was odd; he had kissed plenty of women in his day, but nothing had been as searing as that kiss, on the lumpy sofa with the stuffing coming out, under a window that looked out on an alley. What was it about her that seemed to make everything so magical — even without the Chrysler Building or the satin sheets? And what was he going to do about it?

  He pulled up in front of her house, and she ran out and bounced into the front seat, the way a little girl would. The movement, totally graceless, charmed him. She was wearing a black sheath dress with a round neckline that was designed for sophistication, but her ebullient mood gave it the opposite effect.

  At the door, Milt Beerman greeted Jay with “Well, Primo Camera, glad you got here,” and Jay grumbled, “Another face joke. Just what I need.”

  Jay and Mary joined a group in the corner of the room, where a heated discussion about the urban renewal plan was taking place. Jay complained that all they ever talked about was work, and then they started speculating about JFK’s girlfriends, but in a few minutes it was back to urban renewal. The room grew warm and the laughter louder and the glasses filled and emptied. Sam came in with his date, and as soon as someone put “Tenderly” on the stereo, Joe Rosenberg, who covered the cops, asked her to dance.

  Sam groused to Jay. “One of these times that son-of-a-bitch is going to bring his own date.”

  Sam asked Mary to dance when Bill Haley blared “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” and Joe showed no sign of releasing Sam’s date. Jay sat on the couch and watched them all. Mary’s face was flushed, and she was laughing as she moved her body in the dance that was innocent and erotic all at once. He wondered how she could change so quickly; one minute she could seem small and plain, and the next instant radiant, almost beautiful. When the music stopped she dropped, laughing and breathing hard, onto the sofa beside him.

  “Sam, I’m getting old. Medicare is around the corner!”

  She threw her head back against the couch, and Jay studied her throat. It was a lovely throat, soft and white. She saw him studying her and she said, “Did I make a complete ass of myself?”

  He shook his head. “You’ve having fun, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, I am. I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.”

  There was an awkward silence. The phonograph started with an Eddie Fisher ballad, and she said, “This is more my speed.” She turned to him; he was unaccountably nervous.

  “I’m terrible. I’ll step on your feet.”

  “I’ll probably step on yours first.”

  At first he concentrated on avoiding her toes, but her body was warm and he could smell her perfume and he pulled her close against him. After a while he realized that they were not really dancing, just holding each other the way lovers embraced. He looked around to see if anyone was watching them, but no one seemed to care. A sweet lassitude came over him, and he wished it would just go on and on, the music and her body against his. He felt again the sense of calm flowing through him.

  Finally, the party started to wind down and people began to leave. Regretfully, he released her. She got her coat, and they walked together towards the car.

  “How about one for the road? Sam has a new bottle of Courvoisier we can steal.”

  “That sounds good.”

  He drove to the apartment, and when they walked in he turned on the lamp by the sofa instead of the overhead light. He got out the brandy and found two old shrimp cocktail containers that looked vaguely like liqueur glasses.

  “Watch out,” he said, handing one to her. “When you’re used to Jules’s swill, this stuff can pack a wallop.”

  She took a tentative sip. “Oh, that’s good. I’ve never had brandy before.”

  They sat silently, sipping the drinks, aware of each other. He was not a calculator; elaborate schemes of seduction were foreign to him. The situation was not clear. She was still wearing her wedding band.

  “That was a good party,” he said.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “After everybody got over the bad jokes about how I look.” He touched his face, gingerly.

/>   “You don’t really look like Primo Camera.”

  “I bet you don’t know who he is.”

  “He was this big, hulking figure, but he had a glass jaw.”

  “That’s incredible. You must be the only girl in America who knows about Primo Carnera.”

  “I read everything. The sports pages, I read cereal boxes.” She was silent for a minute. “Your face does look awfully sore. Does it hurt much?”

  “Only when I laugh.”

  She reached up and touched his face. Things were no longer unclear. He pulled her to him and touched her hair and started to kiss her mouth; it opened under his, and he explored the softness of her lips and tongue. It was strange how things with her were so astonishingly intimate; a touch, a kiss. When kissing her was no longer enough, he moved his hands across her body. He slid his hand down the neck of her dress and discovered she was not wearing a bra; he found that deliciously wanton; it excited him. He pulled the top of the dress off her shoulders. She did have freckles, tiny ones, on her pale shoulders. He felt himself sliding out of control, not just physically but as if his whole being were being pulled under by a wave. A voice inside his head said, loud and clear, I don’t want to love her.

  Then she shuddered and moved in his arms, and the voice was still.

  “I want you,” he said. “I want you so much.”

  “Yes,” she said, very low, into his shoulder. Then she said, quietly, not looking at him, “Do you have something?”

  He nodded and took her hand and led her into the bedroom. He closed the door and touched her face and said, “Only if you want to,” and she nodded.

  He undressed her, fumbling with zippers and hooks. The only light in the room spilled in from the streetlights outside, and where it touched her, it made her skin seem translucent. Her breasts were as he had imagined them, full and sloping and gently curved. How was it he knew so much about her?

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. He reached for the buttons of his shirt to undress hastily, but she surprised him by taking his hand away and undoing the buttons herself. He stood still while she undressed him, and when she slid to her knees to remove his underpants, he was startled again at how intimate, how tender and erotic the gesture was, all at once. He thought he had never felt so naked before, not like this.

  They walked together to the bed, and he touched her, explored her. She didn’t close her eyes but watched him, her eyes on his face, and that excited him too. Then she said, “Let me touch you,” and he lay back on the pillow. At first she touched his face, running her hands across its plains and valleys. Then she moved her hands and her lips to his chest, his belly, and tentatively, her hands slid between his legs.

  He gasped at the touch, and she said, “Do you like this?” and he said, “Yes. Don’t stop. Please.”

  He was astonished at her delight as she touched him, as if his body were some beautiful object. He had never imagined he had the capacity to draw this from a woman. He had never thought of himself as particularly handsome or desirable. A wave of gratitude washed over him. He understood that no one had really made love to him before.

  He reached up and drew her body down on top of his, feeling her weight on him, a lovely burden. They moved together until he could stand it no longer, and he said, “I need you now,” and he reached over for the condom, his nimble fingers suddenly clumsy. She slid underneath him, and her legs parted, and he drove into her, seeming to float, layer by layer, into the deeps of her. He began the shuddering dance that would, at its height, obliterate the world, and he heard her call his name, just once. He knew it was a sound that would echo through the rest of his life.

  When it was done she huddled against him, and he stretched his arms around her, kissing her hair, wanting to give to her as much as she had given to him.

  “Was it — OK for you?” he asked.

  She touched his face and kissed him on the lips and smiled at him. He got up and went to the bathroom to get rid of the rubber. He felt an absurd throb of regret for the cloudy liquid as it rolled around the toilet bowl and vanished. Seed no longer seemed a peculiar word for it. He saw her belly swelling, felt his hands on it. Then he realized what he was thinking, and he said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  He went back and lay down beside her. He felt that she was inside him, everywhere inside his body, and he felt a joy so fierce he thought it would tear his chest apart. It frightened him. Who could live with this?

  “This isn’t all I wanted,” he said. “This too, but it’s you, the way you talk, the things you say, Christ, that sounds dumb —”

  She put her fingers to his lips. “Jay, you don’t have to tell me. I wanted you to, I was afraid you’d guess and think I was — a tramp or something.”

  “Don’t think that. Don’t ever think that.”

  “I was — all right, wasn’t I?” She was looking into his shoulder, not his eyes. “It’s supposed to be like this, isn’t it?”

  “You were wonderful,” he said.

  “I want to be what you want. I always thought I could, you know, respond. You read a lot about men liking that, but what you read isn’t always true.”

  He had a sense, then, of what her marriage must have been like, and he felt a stab of pity for her.

  “If you want a biased opinion,” he said, “you are the sexiest broad in the entire Golden Area region, which is what our beloved employer calls this depressed and godforsaken neck of the woods.”

  She giggled. “The Golden Area is not big on sex ed. I used to think Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were doing it. Because we had this film in school that showed little dancing sperm and eggs.”

  “In seventh grade Father Hannigan took the boys in one room to talk about the marriage act. I thought it was something the Founding Fathers signed, like the Stamp Act. I asked the kid ahead of me what the Marriage Act was, and he said, ‘screwing, you dummy.’”

  “Miss Hansen said that sex and comic books were rotting the moral fiber of America.”

  “I lived on comic books. Remember Captain Marvel? I liked him.”

  “Sure. He said Shazam and an old guy with a white beard threw a thunderbolt. He lived at the Rock of Eternity.”

  “Remember who Captain Marvel was when he wasn’t Captain Marvel?”

  “Billy Batson, boy broadcaster from station WHIZ,” she said.

  “OK, but how about Captain Marvel, Jr.?”

  “Freddie the crippled newsboy.”

  “You’re good. You’re really good.”

  “There was a bad guy who always said, ‘Heh-heh-heh.’”

  “Dr. Savannah. And he had a daughter named Georgiana Savannah who also went, ‘heh-heh-heh.’”

  She giggled and pulled the covers up to her chin. “Jay, I don’t believe this conversation. In John O’Hara, people don’t talk about Billy Batson, boy broadcaster, after they have sex.”

  “In John O’Hara, they talk about Plastic Man.”

  “Plastic Man! Oh, my God, I forgot all about him. He stretched his arms and his legs out and he was so yucky.”

  He laughed and pulled her close. She lay against him, her head on his chest, and the eerie sense of calm descended on him again. He felt — he wasn’t sure how he felt. Strong, male.

  Mated.

  That was it. He had the sense that this was where he belonged, that some missing piece of him had been restored. She stirred in his arms and sighed, and was quiet. He thought how good it was, just being quiet with her. It was odd that at his age there were so many things about being with a woman he didn’t know.

  He had the feeling he was going to learn.

  He combed his hair and peered into the bathroom mirror; he was more than somewhat vain. He liked to keep a tan, and his face looked bronzed and healthy. Early on, it had been to hide the faintly brownish tones that Addison’s disease, an adrenal malfunction, caused in the skin. That was under control, but he liked the tan anyway. It certainly hadn’t hurt in the debat
e with Nixon. Helluva thing, to think he might have won the presidency thanks to a tube of Coppertone.

  He ran his finger down the side of his cheek, frowning a bit at the way the lines in the neck stood out under this light, and at the slight puffiness around the jaw. It was important to him to think of himself as young, and he tended that image carefully. He swam to keep his weight down, his suits were impeccably tailored to emphasize his leanness, and he was careful about the photographs that were taken of him. He never let anyone photograph him while he was eating; he had seen a photo of Nixon wearing a lei around his neck and trying to eat poi with his fingers; the vice president had looked like an asshole. He never put on cowboy hats or Indian headdresses or kissed babies or did anything else that would make him look undignified. Sometimes, when he was traveling on the campaign, he would hunch in the backseat of a car to wolf down a hamburger out of sight of the photographers. His critics, especially the liberals, carped about his attention to style. Probably because none of those fucking guys would know style if it hit them in the balls. They all worshipped Adlai Stevenson, who could never make up his mind, even about whether he wanted ham or pastrami on rye. The fucking liberals, they always had some cause or other that they carried with them like Marley’s ghost dragging his chains, moaning all the while. And they dressed like shit.

  He smiled, and the image in the mirror smiled back, winningly. It was not manly to speak of charm, that was for women, but he knew it had its uses. So often hospitalized in his youth, he had no power to demand that attention be paid, but charm could bring that extra bit of care from the nurses. Unable to compete with his bigger, healthier brother Joe in athletics, he used his charm to draw a circle of other boys around him in school. He could turn it on and off at will. Once, he told a young woman he was squiring to a party that he was going to play Mr. Big Shot and bowl all the adults over; he did.

  His father had a kind of charm, he knew, but it was of a rougher, more blustery sort, and it repelled nearly as many people as it attracted. But the old man was savvy. He liked to say that the New Deal had destroyed the last of the social hierarchies that had been traditional in the nation, and that Hollywood would provide the new aristocracy. On his own trips to California as a young man, he had been endlessly fascinated with the creation of illusion, the way sex appeal — rather than sex itself — could be sold like soap flakes. That was, in fact, exactly the term his father had used once in describing how his son could be sold to a willing electorate: soap flakes. He told an interviewer, “Jack is the greatest attraction in the country,” and he boasted that his son’s appearance at a fund-raising dinner would draw more people than Gary Cooper or Cary Grant.