Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  “Jesus,” said a naked lawyer, grimacing as she stripped the sheets off her bed minutes after howling through a hysterical climax, “I’ll be glad when a girl can get this done by taking a pill.”

  Jack said, “‘Girl’? Watch those four-letter words, honey.”

  His bedmate whirled to confront him. “Get lost, pig,” she snarled.

  “It’s a joke.”

  “All male jokes are chauvinist insults. Out. Now.”

  3 During the full moon in February, Jack was invited by one of his professors to a sliding party at the teacher’s farm outside Cambridge. Jack did not know what a sliding party was. He discovered that it consisted of drinking a good deal of hot buttered rum (Coca-Cola for Jack) and eating charred hot dogs and hamburgers while standing in trampled snow around a bonfire, in between rides on a child’s sled down steep, snow-covered hills.

  For the sled rides, Jack was paired off by his hostess with a young woman named Morgan Weatherby. Morgan was in the final year of her Harvard MBA. She was, their hostess murmured, first in her class, a tremendous distinction, for B-School students were notoriously smart and competitive. “But she’s fine,” said the hostess, meaning, She’s one of us, a good person, a believer.

  Making conversation after they were introduced, Jack said, “The B School, eh?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Morgan, bristling.

  “I don’t know. At first glance it seems a little out of character.”

  After a long angry stare, Morgan said, “Thanks for noticing. The idea is to use the techniques of capitalism against the capitalists.”

  They talked some more, Jack slipping back into the vocabulary of the Movement as though a switch had been thrown in a long-dormant part of his brain—which was exactly what had happened. Morgan was cerebral, humorless, withdrawn. She wore steel-rimmed glasses, army boots, bib overalls, a knit cap with a peace symbol under which she had tucked every strand of hair. She insisted on steering. On their fourth descent, Jack, behind her on the Flexible Flyer, put his hands on her breasts. Morgan kicked the steering bar hard to the right and overturned them.

  They rolled down the hill. Morgan leaped to her feet and stood over Jack, sprawled in the snow and laughing.

  “Very funny,” she said. “Next time you’ll get a combat boot in the balls.”

  Jack believed her. But she had lost her cap and her glasses in the spill, and when Jack found them and handed them back, he saw that the hair she had hidden inside her cap was a regulation Movement mane, parted in the middle and falling nearly to her waist. It seemed to be blond, bounteous but nondescript. She wound it into a knot and, holding this on top of her skull, covered it again with the knitted cap Jack had recovered from the snow. Jack grinned; she still glared. He thought, Nice tits just the same. Reading his thought as if the words were inscribed in the air between them, she sneered, turned around, and strode back up the hill. She was tall, slender, but somewhat heavy-hipped. Jack followed, pulling the sled.

  Later, standing by the campfire, tongue loosened by the many cups of rum Jack had fetched her, Morgan answered more questions about herself. Earlier in the radical epoch, as a Smith College undergraduate, she had been a front-line campus militant. She had screamed obscenities and squirted urine from a Baggie at the cops in Chicago; she was the girl waving the Viet Cong flag in the front rank of the march on the Pentagon. She had been nearby when the protester immolated himself like a Buddhist monk under McNamara’s windows.

  “McNamara was watching from behind his bulletproof glass,” Morgan said. “I saw his face. A rat in bifocals.”

  “Really?” Jack said. He didn’t believe this could be so. But he said, “Amazing.”

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  “Nope, but I was into all that at Columbia.”

  Morgan shot him a look of deep suspicion. “You were? Then why don’t I know you?”

  “I wasn’t up front like you,” Jack replied.

  “Why am I not surprised?” she asked. “Who did you hang out with at Columbia?”

  Jack furnished a list of names famous in the Movement.

  “Oh,” she said. But he could see the doubt in her eyes. She was a Movement activist, surrounded by enemies of the people. Everyone was a liar, an infiltrator, until proven otherwise.

  Nevertheless, Morgan finished telling him the story of her life. In her sophomore year at Smith, she had broken with her parents, believing like Greta that the overthrow of the bourgeois family was the first, indispensable step toward total revolution against the entire bourgeois capitalist-imperialist Establishment.

  She had rooms in a slum in South Boston, devoting the income from the trust fund set up for her by her right-wing parents to the support of the PLO, the Black Panthers, the Angela Davis Defense Fund, and similar political causes. She walked through this dangerous neighborhood without fear because the people knew she was one of them and therefore she could come to no harm.

  “That’s great,” Jack said.

  Hearing this personal history of a Movement pilgrim, Jack was strangely moved. He had heard it so many times before, from so many girls with trust funds. She was, like her many counterparts, deeply deluded about almost everything, a state of being that left her convinced that she was one of the few sane people on Earth, and that her beliefs would keep her that way as long as she lived by them.

  It was a passionate conversation. In the past, a confession like Morgan’s had usually been followed by sex. Jack was aroused, a Pavlovian effect produced by the vocabulary, the intonations, the leitmotif of paranoia. Morgan reminded him of sweaty grapplings, unwashed hair, unshaved legs, furry armpits.

  The bonfire had burned down while they talked. They realized that they were alone. Cars were starting in the distance and switching on their headlights.

  They heard a female voice hallooing. It was their hostess, trudging toward them through the snow, waving a flashlight.

  “You two!” she said, pleased to think she had made a match of true minds. “We almost left without you.”

  But when Jack asked Morgan for her phone number, she turned away as if she had not heard the question.

  4 A few days later, Jack was strolling across Harvard Square with a classmate named Whitlow, a very tall man with a preppy accent.

  Whitlow, who could see over the crowd, said, “Look what’s coming. The Morg.”

  Jack said, “The what?”

  “The Morg. The queen of the B School.”

  He jerked his head, directing Jack’s gaze. Morgan Weatherby was striding toward him through the noonday crowd. He did not recognize her at once, but then he remembered her woolen ski cap with the peace symbol. She wore bib overalls under a strange long coat that hung down to the tops of her yellow, high-topped work shoes.

  Jack said, “You know her?”

  “Only by reputation. She’s said to be extremely smart.”

  Morgan planted herself in front of Jack. It was a cold day; the tip of her nose was red. She sniffled once, coughed twice. According to the label stenciled in white paint inside its upturned collar, Morgan’s dark blue coat, made of rough wool, was Canadian navy surplus.

  “I’ve checked you out,” she said. “The people at Columbia say you’re for real.”

  In a mock-hearty voice, Jack said, “Wow, that’s a relief. So what’s next?”

  “We can talk. How about tonight? My place, eight o’clock.”

  “Where do you live?”

  She gave the address in Roxbury.

  Jack said, “Sure. But let’s do it in Cambridge—take in a movie, have a pizza afterward.”

  Morgan said, “What are you saying? You’re afraid to come into my neighborhood?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Why is that, exactly?”

  “I don’t have a trust fund, so my contributions to the Black Panthers are in arrears.”

  “That’s a racist remark.”

  Jack said, “The Battle of Algiers is playing.”


  Maintaining eye contact, Morgan considered this information for several seconds. “Okay,” she said. “You’re on. Seven o’clock show.”

  She turned away and strode into the crowd.

  “The Battle of Algiers?” Whitlow said. “Talk about your aphrodisiacs. You’re going to need all the help you can get.”

  Jack said, “Oh? Why’s that, Whitlow?”

  Watching Morgan make her way through the crowd, Whitlow’s eyes filled with merriment. “She’s a dyke, Jacko.”

  “Ten bucks, Whitlow.”

  “You actually want to bet you can score?”

  “Ten bucks.”

  “Against what deadline?”

  “Commencement Day.”

  “You’re on,” Whitlow said. “But I’m not taking your word for it, Adams.”

  “There’ll be corroborative evidence,” Jack said.

  “Like what, teethmarks on your dick?”

  Morgan had seen The Battle of Algiers many times before, but each viewing yielded new details and insights. She watched the screen intently, elbows on knees, chin in hand, as Algerian terrorists murdered French policemen and French paratroopers tortured Algerian terrorists. From Morgan’s point of view, sympathetic to the heroic terrorists, it was a two-hankie movie, and when it was over her eyes were wet and wounded and she had difficulty speaking.

  “Every time I see that movie it leaves me more pissed off than the last time,” said Jack, who had never seen it before.

  Morgan said, “You have to go to the movies to get pissed off?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “It’s pretty basic. If you’re what you say you are, a committed person, you should be pissed off by injustice all the time. Every minute of every day.”

  “I try,” Jack said. “But sometimes I get distracted.”

  They were standing at a bus stop. Jack put a hand on Morgan’s cheek, then took off her glasses. She said nothing, but gave him an unblinking, teacherish stare. You have just done something wrong. Think for a moment, then tell me exactly what that was.

  Tentatively, even deferentially, Jack kissed her. Morgan kept her eyes open, watching for the bus, but parted her lips slightly and did not move away. However, that was her only response. When the bus arrived she stepped back, took her glasses out of Jack’s hand, and got aboard. When he made as if to follow, Morgan held up a hand like a traffic cop.

  For the next three months, in the interstices of Morgan’s interminable revolutionary monologues, Jack made many attempts to nuzzle, fondle, and undress her. None of his moves succeeded. She always wore trousers over pantyhose, a new kind of female undergarment that would have made Jack’s adolescent sex life impossible unless he carried scissors. By the middle of May, with commencement fast approaching, Jack had still not touched skin on any part of her body except her hands and face. When he tried, she intercepted his hand and held it off. She was extremely strong for a woman.

  Jack did not lie about his progress to Whitlow or to the many others Whitlow had told about the bet. He knew that he would not be believed.

  “How’s the foreplay coming, Jack?” Whitlow would ask at editorial meetings of the Review staff.

  “We’ve done all the positions in Mao’s Little Red Book, up to page fifty-six.”

  “Give up?”

  “I’ve still got fourteen days.”

  Oddly, Jack had the idea that Morgan loved him. In every respect but physical response, her behavior displayed the hallmarks of passion—of obsession, even. Morgan gazed at Jack as if she desired him—tenderly, as if she wanted desperately to take his body into hers and repeat over and over again the burlesque of procreation that was the calisthenics of the Movement. But this hadn’t happened. If Jack had not known better, he might have thought that Morgan really and truly did not know about sex, that she was some sort of cryogenic virgin, a woman of twenty-seven who had been frozen and stored at absolute zero since the age of five. She was awake now, but in a state of puzzlement about the breasts and pubic hair she had grown in her sleep.

  Rejection is a powerful aphrodisiac, and Jack was half in love himself. This weird absence of sexual awareness was, in its way, as exciting as the wild, cold-hearted couplings with Greta. Even more so, in a way. Having never before experienced the unattainable, Jack was beginning to understand why so much poetry had been written about it through the ages. Two days before commencement, he was still unsuccessful. Whitlow asked him how such a thing could be.

  Only half lying, Jack replied, “The Morg is my Beatrice.”

  “You mean, as in Dante?” said Whitlow, eyebrows climbing.

  “You mistake virtue for perversion, you fucking cynic.”

  Whitlow gave Jack a look of mock sympathy. “You need help,” he said. He looked left and right, then reached into an inside pocket and produced a twisted marijuana cigarette in a plastic bag. “Tijuana gold,” Whitlow said. “A graduation present. Get her to smoke it. And may it rid you of this hag.”

  5 Because she hated Ma Bell—believing, like Greta, that the CIA was one of its wholly owned subsidiaries—Morgan did not have a phone. Therefore, later that evening, Jack knocked without forewarning on the door of her apartment. It was his first visit to Roxbury. Morgan had been right: Merely imagining this neighborhood filled him with fear. Seeing the reality terrified him.

  She lived in a fourth-floor walk-up. Stepping over children both sleeping and waking who perched on the steps as if waiting for something to end or begin, Jack made his way upward. Morgan’s door stood at the end of a cluttered dark hallway that reeked of milk, urine, scorched food. Through the door, a brand-new one, sheathed in steel, he heard the sound of very fast typing. He knocked. The typewriter keys ceased to rattle; he heard a page being ripped from the platen. Morgan’s green eye appeared in the peephole, wary even though disembodied. The peephole closed. He heard the sound of many chains and locks being undone.

  Morgan did not seem to be surprised by Jack’s arrival—or particularly pleased by it, either. In silence, she refastened the various chains, deadbolts, and bars. A blackjack hung by its thong on a hook beside the door.

  She wore a long T-shirt but no other garment. Jack watched appreciatively as she worked on the locks, bending and stretching, putting her whole body into the effort. Her bottom was harp-shaped, womanly, and pleasing, like a nymph’s bottom in a painting by Bouguereau. Jack had never seen her legs before. They were long, as he already knew, and shapely and strongly muscled, as he had suspected, but the remarkable thing about them was that they did not match. The left one was much thinner than the right one. Each in its own way was normal, even pretty. But they were not a pair.

  That was why she always wore pants. Her bib overalls hung from a hook by their straps. He expected her to grab them and put them on, but instead she sat down in a kitchen chair and hid her legs under the table.

  She still had not spoken. The apartment consisted of one big room with the table in the middle, a Murphy bed folded up against the wall, an old-fashioned wardrobe trunk, and an alcove kitchen with sink, hot plate, and tiny refrigerator. Through an open door Jack could see a bathtub and toilet. The table was piled high with books, but otherwise the place was spotlessly clean. A tumbler of apple juice stood beside the typewriter.

  Morgan wasn’t wearing her glasses. Her eyes were large, green, slightly tilted. Suddenly she swept her hair over one shoulder and held on to it with both hands as if to keep from falling off the chair. It was the most maidenly gesture Jack had ever seen her make, and certainly the most unexpected.

  Jack said, “Do you always type without your glasses?”

  “Always. I only wear them for distance.”

  Jack looked more closely at her swimming, slightly-out-of-focus eyes and realized that Morgan was wearing contact lenses—the only woman in the world, he thought, who wore glasses in public and contacts when she was alone.

  Morgan said, “Why are you here, Jack?”

  “To celebrate,” Jac
k replied.

  “Celebrate what?”

  “Tomorrow. The big day. How about a pizza?”

  “Jack, tomorrow doesn’t mean a thing. I’m busy.”

  “Doing what—writing a paper on the night before graduation? Give me a break.”

  Expressionless as usual in the face of innuendo, Morgan said, “What kind of a break did you have in mind?”

  In return, Jack smiled at full wattage.

  Morgan stared. Quizzical and very nearly smiling herself, she said, “I’m sure you don’t realize it, but you look kind of like a Kennedy when you smile.”

  Jack said, “No kidding? Is that a point in my favor?”

  Morgan was still holding on to her hair, and she was still wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Her legs were not crossed, nor were her arms. She had just said something to Jack that could be construed as a compliment. He was beginning to think that this might, after all, be his lucky night.

  Jack produced Whitlow’s marijuana cigarette.

  Morgan said, “What’s that supposed to be?”

  “A graduation present.”

  “I thought you didn’t do drugs.”

  “I don’t. It’s for you.”

  “How sweet.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “What, as an aid to seduction?”

  Jack said, “Jesus, Morgan, lighten up. You’ve got your blackjack.”

  This seemed to amuse her. She said, “Okay. There are matches in the kitchen.”

  Jack fetched a kitchen match and lit the joint for Morgan. She inhaled deeply, doing something she had obviously done many times before. Her chest expanded, breasts stretching the T-shirt. Eyes squinting, she passed the joint to Jack. He waved it away.

  She exhaled. “None of that shit, Jack,” she said. “You brought it, you help smoke it.”

  “I have no idea how.”

  “Like this.”

  She inhaled again, then passed him the joint. Jack took a mouthful of smoke and held it. He hated the taste. Smoke leaked from his nostrils. He opened his mouth and the smoke rolled out.