Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  She watched him as the anger transmuted into misery. He was shaking his head.

  “Oh, Jesus H. Christ, I didn’t mean that. I swear to God, I didn’t mean that.”

  “Are you sure?” she said, evenly.

  “No, I —” His voice choked. “Christ, that was a rotten thing to say.” He got out of bed and walked up and down beside it, clenching and unclenching his fist.

  “I’m such a fucking jerk, I can’t get anything right. I could fuck up a free lunch. Christ!”

  He slammed his fist into the headboard with such savagery that she was afraid he had broken his hand. She scrambled out of bed and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Don’t, Jay. Please, don’t!”

  He sat down heavily on the bed and stared into the darkness. Her stomach tightened. He looked just like Harry had looked when the world defeated him.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  Harry’s black and bitter stare had nothing to do with her. It was the world that did things to him. Or was it? She had driven him, goaded him, tried to make him what she wanted him to be. Now there was Jay, owning Harry’s stare. It terrified her.

  “Jay,” she said. “Jay, am I a bitch?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “No,” he said. “Of course you’re not.”

  “I’m twenty-five years old, and all I’ve done is make two men miserable. I made Harry so ashamed that all he wanted to do was drown everything out. Am I doing it to you too, Jay? What kind of a person am I?”

  “It’s not you, Mary. It’s me. It’s the things I’m — not.”

  “What things?”

  “I — I don’t cope with things very well. I should have it all under control. Some guys, they seem to be able to do everything right. I fuck things up.”

  She put her hand against his face. “Don’t think that about yourself. You’re so bright, and so talented. A lot of people would give everything to do what you can do.”

  He held her hand against his face; she could feel his fingers tremble.

  “I did one thing right. I love you. I don’t want to mess this up. You’re the best thing I have in my life. But I’m scared shitless that I’m going to lose you.”

  “I won’t let you,” she said. “I promise.”

  He put his arms around her, and they lay quietly for a while. Then he said, “I’ll take the money, but only as a loan, OK? We’ll set up a special fund for Karen, and I’ll pay it back, like I borrowed it from the bank. How’s that?”

  “Great. Why didn’t we think of that before?”

  “Because we’re a couple of dummies, that’s why.”

  He pulled her to him, and she lay with her face against his chest, suddenly afraid of the world and what it could do to both of them. He stroked her hair, and a memory stirred. Long ago her father, on a night the wind had frightened her, had taken her into his bed and held her. She buried her face in the tangle of hair on Jay’s chest and closed her eyes, and the fear went away.

  She awoke later, to find him sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette. She reached up, took it from his mouth and put it out in an ashtray.

  “Bad for you.”

  “I know.”

  She reached over and ran her finger across his chest, down his belly.

  “Good for you?”

  “Oh yeah. Doesn’t cause cancer.”

  “Thank God.”

  He laughed, and she knew it was all right again. She moved her hands across him, exploring, and felt him harden and grow. What a marvelous invention it was; she loved its curves, its weight, its texture. Suddenly the hunger that had been absent earlier returned in a rush.

  “I want to do anything, everything,” she said.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, and she knelt before him; her lips and tongue found him, and he gave a soft moan of pleasure. Harry thought this the province of whores, but it delighted her to be at once obedient and powerless, and powerful and commanding, in control and abandoned. Then he pulled her to her feet and began to kiss her slowly, her breasts, her lips, her belly. They lay down on the bed, and he said, “I love to do this to you.” He spread her legs, and she thought he was going to enter her, but he bent to kiss her, a kiss so surprising that she began to shiver with pleasure. She had never imagined wanting anyone to do this to her, but now she thought she would die if the pleasure were to stop. The shivering seized her whole body, and she gave herself up to the whirling sensations. He did it to her again and then again, with a touch, a kiss, a bite, until she heard her own voice crying out. She had always thought that men were naturally selfish with sex, but his pleasure was so much a part of her own that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. When they came together, it was explosive. She wondered if the occupants of the next cabins would think people were being murdered in Number 23, with all the caterwauling going on.

  Afterwards, as they lay together, she reached up and tousled his hair and said, “You’re quite a stud, you know that?”

  His answering smile had more than a hint of male arrogance, and that pleased her.

  “You’re a pretty hot ticket yourself, lady.”

  “After tonight, Dick, I’m putting Checkers in the trash compactor.”

  “Don’t do that, Pat. Those rough edges can irritate your skin.”

  “No, Checkers is history. Next time, Dick, you’ll tie me to the bedpost and we’ll do it that way.”

  “Take off my tief Pat, you mean really take it off!”

  “Checkers can’t do bondage. He hasn’t got any thumbs.”

  “You’re a hard woman, Pat.”

  “You can put it right back on, I promise.”

  They giggled, delighted with themselves, and then he put his head down on the pillow and in a few minutes he was asleep. She watched him; men always looked so vulnerable when they slept, like little boys. She touched a tendril of his hair, gently, and thought that she would wish to die rather than hurt him. She thought, unexpectedly, of having a child with him, a boy who would be a mixture of the best of both of them, the way Karen had her eyes and hair and Harry’s mouth, and his way of tilting his head to look at something.

  She thought of Harry standing in the kitchen: “You and Karen, you’re my life.” She had to tell him. But she had discovered that marriage was like a climbing plant that grew inside you; you kept ripping the sprouts of it out, but you only found more and more. Could she ever hunt them all down and destroy them? Why was it that now all she could remember were the good things?

  Harry. Why wouldn’t the image of him go away and leave her in peace? She had made her choice. Maybe when he knew. Maybe part of it was guilt, because she hadn’t been able to tell him. He hovered even now above the bed she shared with Jay, a reproachful phantom.

  Leave me, Hairy, let me be.

  Still he floated, so she ignored him and went to sleep.

  He hung up the phone, and a smile played about his lips; talking to his brother was in some ways like talking to himself. They had been together so long that they understood, with few words, a universe of meaning. A close friend who often saw them together thought it strange to hear them converse. Neither finished a sentence. They were so much on the same wavelength that they interrupted to complete each other’s thoughts.

  They were so different, he mused. The words people used to describe him — cool, detached, ironic — were not the words they spoke about Bobby. The boy in the middle of the pack, always competing for the attention of his two older brothers, the boy who identified with his mother’s silent suffering, Bobby threw himself into things with an intensity that at times startled even his brother. If the man in the Oval Office seemed a Catholic Brahmin, if he pulled away at times from the unruly tribe that was his family, Bobby was fiercely tribal, pure Celt. The poet Robert Lowell, meeting Bobby for the first time, murmured, “My, he is unassimilated, isn’t he!”

  He leaned back in his chair, his fingers tapping restlessly on the edge of th
e desk. He had thought, when he was younger, that his brother Joe would be the figure at the center of the tribe, that Bobby would orbit around that centrifugal force. He had seen a life for himself somewhat apart, as a journalist or a college professor. But they had become more than brothers. Sometimes, it seemed that they were two men sharing the same life. They both knew that the bond existed, he mused, but rarely did they speak of it. Only once had he voiced his need, when his brother asked, “Well, Johnny, what about me?” as he was forming his presidential team. He wanted his brother as his attorney general, and he met the arguments against it with the one appeal his brother could not resist. “What I need is someone who’s going to tell me what the best judgment is, my best interest. There’s not a member of the cabinet I can trust in that way. I have nobody. There is nobody.”

  His brother warned him, “If you announce me as attorney general, they’ll kick our balls off.” And he had grinned and said, “You hold on to your balls and I’ll make the announcement.”

  His brother amused him, sometimes, with his passions. The world he saw was one of complex shades of gray, shadows constantly shifting. For Bobby, the world was black and white, in high relief. He sometimes joked about “Bobby and his Negroes,” but he knew that he relied on his brother to feel that mysterious and hidden pulse he himself could not sense so viscerally, of those who were suffering. Bobby was getting an ear for it, the way a dog hears a whistle pitched too high for humans. And he admired, grudgingly, the Puritan strain in his brother so lacking in himself.

  If his brother was a prism, through which the world was refracted, so too was he a lightning rod, drawing off all sorts of fevered hatreds and resentments. The South could hate Bobby and believe the president simply misguided. That was useful.

  He worried sometimes about his brother, who was perhaps less than half the life they shared. Had he sacrificed a life of his own to be part of two as one? They shared even the woman who was the most glamorous sex symbol of the day (as their father had taken as a mistress a glittering star of his time). He had first been attracted to Marilyn’s freshness, the sensuality that seemed as natural as breathing. It was not a love affair for the ages. She complained to friends that his lovemaking was perfunctory, that he made love like an adolescent. Light, not heat. But the two would gossip for hours, on the phone or at Peter Lawford’s beach house on the Pacific, about the rise and fall of the powerful in Hollywood, a subject that had long fascinated him. In time, her desperate need for self-esteem, her plunge into drugs and alcohol, alarmed him. It made her dangerous. He did not wish to be cruel, even when he was, but he had been unwise to send Bobby as the emissary to tell her it was done.

  Like the Puritan he was, he fell desperately and guiltily in love with her. Perhaps it was her very vulnerability — the thing that alarmed the man in the Oval Office — that was such a magnet for his brother. Bobby was a sucker for strays. But he was tribal. His wife and his children were too close to his heart for him to ever think of leaving them. Her illusions were forlorn, and doomed to fail, and her rage at being used and discarded was white hot. They had hovered close to the flame of scandal. But she was gone and the tracks of their involvement hastily covered after her suicide. If the escape had tempted him to thoughts of invulnerability, there was always J. Edgar Hoover to remind him of catastrophe.

  Some people even talked of another Kennedy presidency someday. Did not a dynasty have its heirs! It troubled his image of himself that he did not want to imagine Bobby as president. He had thought of himself as generous. But, to be honest, it was not that Bobby would fail but that he would succeed that was troubling. Might Bobby’s reach be greater than his own! Could that moral fervor be transmuted into a greatness he himself could only wave at!

  He shook his head. There was no sense worrying about the future. What would be, would be. For now, their twinship served its purpose. There would be time, later, to sort it out, to uncouple.

  They were young; they had at least half a lifetime to do it.

  Martin Luther King looked distracted, Jay thought. The man whose voice had rung out so powerfully over the hundreds of thousands at the march was struggling with his answers as he stood in front of the White House. He had come from a meeting with President Kennedy, and Jay kept snapping pictures as the reporters descended on him. He was wearing a suit and tie and perspiring in the heat of the September day — a month often as hot as August in Washington.

  A few days earlier, on September 15, at 10:22 A.M., a powerful bomb blasted the face of Jesus from the stained-glass window of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young girls — dressed in white from head to toe because they were about to lead the Youth Day Sunday service — were in the basement ladies’ room. The bomb had been planted in the basement. There was a terrible roar, shaking the foundations of the church, and all four girls died. One could be identified by her parents only by her feet and a ring on her finger.

  The horror of such savagery rippled through the nation. President Kennedy had ordered the FBI in to investigate the bombing — the worst of twenty-eight bombings in the city whose perpetrators were still at large. There was fear that racial warfare could break out in Birmingham. Kennedy had jawboned local officials, urging them to end Jim Crow, but he was loath to send in federal troops. King had come to an edgy agreement with the president, who would send two presidential envoys to Birmingham. Other Negro leaders said this was not enough. Pierre Salinger, the press secretary, had announced that the envoys would be the former Army secretary Kenneth Royall and the former Army football coach Earl Blaik.

  Mary stood on her tiptoes to see over the very tall wire service man who stood in front of her. She was hoping Kennedy would emerge to answer questions, but he was nowhere in sight. There were a number of Negro reporters in this group, not a common sight at the White House, and they were taking the lead in the questioning.

  King mopped his brow and said, “This is the kind of federal concern needed,” but the reporters picked up his tentative tone, and they pounced, with the Negroes being especially tough. Was sending a couple of retired Army men really an adequate response to the horrible tragedy in Birmingham? Did he know that no Negro had ever played for “Red” Blaik’s Army teams?

  King’s replies were short and hardly displayed the eloquence for which he was famous. He darted away quickly after responding to a few questions, relieved to be out of range.

  Mary and Jay walked down the winding drive to the White House gate, and she said to him, “He wanted more.”

  “Yeah, but if you send troops in, George Wallace would have another chance to be a martyr.”

  “But these two Army guys, what can they do? I think I’d be pissed if my church had been blown up and they sent an old Army football coach. What’s he going to do, Sixty-three Blue up the middle?”

  “It’s a mess, all right. Good item for your column, though.”

  Mary had developed a column called “White House Watch” for the Blade, dealing with the comings and goings at the executive mansion. Readers seemed to like it, since she wrote it with a mixture of sass, style and solid information, and Charlie had given her more space and used her picture. Jay’s photographs, of dignitaries and Kennedy relatives, often accompanied it.

  But there was more on her mind than the news today. She had finally summoned the nerve to call Harry, to tell him they needed to talk tonight. His voice on the phone had sounded cold and distant, and she thought, with a coldness in the pit of her stomach, He knows.

  Back at the paper, the hours crept along. She had work to do, but every time she looked at the clock, the hands seemed not to have moved at all. Finally, as the time approached, the muscles in her stomach began to cramp. She tried not to think about it, to deliberately relax, but she could not. She gobbled Rolaids and waited. She had told Jay she would meet him in the small park behind the paper before she saw Harry. He was coming to the house.

  Jay was waiting for her, pacing. He b
ent to light a cigarette, cupping his hands near the flame, and in its light his face seemed alien to her. He could have been a stranger. How much did she know about him, really? She was astounded at the panic that clutched at her. She sat down on a bench, and he sat down next to her, occupied by his own thoughts. She wished he would turn and look at her.

  “I’d better go soon.”

  “You still have a few minutes. How do you think he’ll take it?”

  “I don’t know. He sounded funny on the phone.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No. Only that he’d come over.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me outside in the car? He won’t do anything crazy, will he?”

  “No, he won’t. I just wish it was over. I’m a coward, I guess. I was going to write him a letter, but that wouldn’t be right. I have to tell him face to face.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She felt a stab of self-loathing. She should have handled the whole thing herself. Why was she dragging Jay through all this? Why did she need him to hold her hand?

  “Jay, on the divorce, all Harry would have to do is sign his power of attorney over to a Mexican lawyer. It would be all arranged. I’d go to the courthouse in Juarez and present a paper, and we’d be divorced.”

  “And if Harry doesn’t agree?”

  “It gets complicated.”

  “Yeah, complicated.”

  He was very tense. She wondered if he wished he were free of the whole mess.

  “It bothers you, doesn’t it, this divorce thing.”

  “No, I’m worried about you, that’s all.”

  He put his arms around her, and that was what she’d wanted him to do all along. She felt safe that way. She wished she could stay here, next to him, and forget what she had to do. But she got up from the bench and said, “I’ll call you.”

  “I’ll be at the apartment. You’ll call me right away?”

  “Yes.”

  She drove home and found her mother waiting in the hallway. Her mother’s attitude had softened since she had learned Jay wanted to marry her, but still she was anxious.