Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  “Again,” Morgan said. “Inhale.”

  Jack dragged inexpertly on the cigarette.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Morgan said.

  She got up out of her chair. Static electricity had pasted the tail of her T-shirt to her bottom. Morgan leaned over him, breasts swinging freely beneath the gray cloth, and clapped one hand over his mouth. She pinched his nostrils shut with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. Jack’s eyes rolled. He swallowed the smoke and coughed, then retched.

  Morgan said, “Give me that fucking thing.”

  Sitting in the kitchen chair, drawn out from the table now, she smoked the joint down to the last half inch. Jack looked at her legs. She put them on the table, ankles crossed.

  “They never matched,” she said. “One was always smaller than the other. What’s your secret?”

  Jack pointed at his lap.

  “Ah,” Morgan said. “Omar the tentmaker.”

  Conditioned by Morgan’s frigidity, Jack was taken unaware by this remark. He realized that he was a little shocked that she had it in her to say such a thing.

  She pulled the Murphy bed down from the wall and stripped off her T-shirt. She had endearing cockeyed breasts: one pink areola stared straight at Jack while the other glanced shyly to the side.

  Jack took off his own clothes—speedily, lest she change her mind. Reclining on the bed with one ankle crossed over the other, Morgan watched, unblinking, silent.

  Jack had never felt such intense sexual desire. Except once, in the Daimler. He was afraid it might be over for him before he could make it to the bed.

  6 Jack soon found that Morgan unclothed was no more responsive than Morgan in bib overalls. As soon as he joined her on the bed she wound her smaller leg around the larger, tight as a tropical vine. As if performing some perverse yoga exercise, she then hooked her left foot around her right ankle. This utterly defeated Jack’s tried-and-true technique with girls whom he wished to spare the trouble of saying no. Try as he might, he could not get Morgan’s legs uncrossed, much less slip between them, Vaseline at the ready. Jack was trapped in the portcullis of desire with no way out and no way in. Morgan did not resist his fondling her breasts, but even more than most men, Jack had no interest in foreplay sans aftermath. His urgency was great, but when he tried to guide her own hand onto his body, Morgan clenched her fist and resisted. He pressed himself against her and groaned. She watched his twisted face with clinical interest, neither resisting nor assisting.

  Panting, Jack said, “What in the name of God is the matter with you, Morgan?”

  “In the name of who? Nothing that I know of.”

  “Well, at least tell me this much: Is it just me, or are you always like this?”

  Morgan said, “It’s not just you.”

  “What is it then, men as a class?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Jack, listen,” Morgan said. “I’m not the one who just came all over you, so I don’t owe you any explanations.”

  She got out of bed and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. After a moment Jack heard water running in the tub. Stealthily, he tried the bathroom door. It was locked. He went back to the bed, covered up and closed his eyes, feigning sleep. Perhaps Morgan, thinking him asleep, would drift off after her bath. Unless she tied her ankles together, he could wake her up with a big surprise. The key to Jack’s plan was to stay awake. But, exhausted by the struggle and by the marijuana, he soon fell asleep in spite of himself.

  Much later, he woke shivering with cold, to find himself alone in the bed. He groped for the covers; they were gone. He tried the bathroom door; it was locked. Morgan had taken the blankets and locked herself inside.

  “Hey, Morg,” he said, knocking.

  No reply.

  Jack covered up with Morgan’s naval coat and fell into a deep sleep.

  He opened his eyes and saw Morgan, completely naked, crouching at the foot of the bed, legs apart, fur showing. The room was filled with morning sunlight. Morgan stood up on the bed and threw back her hair with a practiced shake of her head; it swirled away in a ripple of light, thousands of individual hairs moving as one. But, amazingly, it was dyed: the roots, like her pubic hair, were dark.

  With an incandescent smile—it was his lucky morning!—Jack sat up and reached for her. His hands were jerked to a stop. He felt sharp pain in both his wrists. His wrists were handcuffed to the bed. His hands, fingers curled, were encased in surgical gloves.

  Morgan said, “Don’t struggle. You are completely in my power.”

  “Jesus Christ, Morgan!”

  “Relax.”

  She moved between his legs. He realized that he was tied by the ankles to the foot of the bed. Did she have implements of torture? Her blackjack still dangled from its hook by the door. There was no sign of anything sharp. She seemed to be empty-handed. But what might be under the bed? He began to hyperventilate.

  Morgan said, “Be calm, Jack. It’s only a game. Just cooperate.”

  She was expert, practiced. Though still fearful—what was going to happen afterward?—he was soon in a state of almost terminal excitement. Adroitly, Morgan pressed the underside of his penis with a thumb, preventing ejaculation. He writhed in agony. She continued the pressure until the spasm passed, gazing sympathetically into his wild, pleading eyes. She was not wearing her contact lenses, and the glitter of anger had vanished from her eyes, which now swam with the dreamily vacant look of the very myopic. Jack smelled shampoo, perfume, female musk. Morgan’s legs gleamed from the razor; her armpits, too, were shaved. Apparently she had prepared for this pornographic encounter with a ritual bath.

  Jack started to speak. Morgan, straddling his thighs, drew an X across his mouth with a slippery fingertip. He tasted Vaseline. She showed him her palm, on which a gob of petroleum jelly glistened. She greased him, deft and quick. And then with a brilliant smile—she had beautiful teeth all the way back to her throat—she turned her back, seized him, fitted him.

  Jack thought, The Daimler!

  He had suppressed, banished, forgotten the details of his last terrifying moments with Greta. But now they came flooding back as Morgan, as if playing a role for which Greta’s ghost had rehearsed her, descended on him in some sort of reenactment of the last sexual act performed on him in Germany. He heard Morgan screaming, the same long shriek that Greta had uttered. Just as before, he was seized by an uncontrollable spasm of fear and remembrance, as if he was remembering his own death as it had happened in a former life. In mid-orgasm—the first time he had ever had a conscious thought at such a moment—he realized that, figuratively speaking, that was exactly what was happening.

  He lay for a long time with his eyes closed. When he opened them, he found Morgan waiting. She was wearing her glasses; nothing else. He was too frightened to laugh.

  “Hi,” Morgan said in a clear Junior League voice he had never heard her use before. “Welcome to the country of the blind.”

  7 What followed, to Jack’s surprise, was a week of impulsive lovemaking. Afterward Morgan sometimes had the face of a woman in love—of a woman long deprived of love and starved for it. She fucked, Jack told Whitlow when they settled their bet on Commencement Day, like a widow who lived with her mother.

  Tender passion was not the only surprise Morgan had in store for Jack. The day after commencement, they were married in Boston by a perfunctory Unitarian minister. The old church was empty and stony cold, and the taxi driver and the church janitor stood up as witnesses. The clergyman said nothing about the holiness of matrimony. Instead he quoted Nietzsche on the subject: “The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.” Though he depended on memory for everything else, the minister read these words from an index card. At the center of his stunned yet racing mind, Jack was sure that Peter, the broker of supernumerary friendship, had chosen these words and passed them to the clergyman via Morgan,
his messenger.

  Morgan wore a pantsuit, pearls at her ears and throat. She had cut her thick hair and dyed it back to its original dark-brown color; lustrous crow’s wings now curled upward to touch her cheekbones. She was wearing her contacts. In the dim light of the church, falling through stained-glass windows, she looked quite beautiful, and as dreamy-eyed and sweetly victorious as any bride who ever took vows.

  Three

  1 Immediately after the wedding, Jack and Morgan flew to New York and thence to Barcelona. Morgan was thoughtful and silent on the night flight across the Atlantic. Jack did not ask questions. Below the wings of the plane, the Atlantic heaved in phosphorescent moonlight like some vast and stormy Styx. He was being delivered to his fate, and Morgan was Peter’s Charon. It was as simple as that. He felt quite calm about this, quite resigned. After the cabin lights were turned off, Morgan covered Jack with a blanket, then put her head under the blanket. When, many minutes later, he groaned aloud, she kept on with what she was doing, but reached up blindly and covered his mouth with her hand.

  They spent the day in Barcelona, lunching on the Ramblas, visiting the cathedral, wandering down twisted streets, before taking an afternoon flight to Palma de Mallorca. They took a taxi from the airport, Morgan giving the driver directions in fluent Spanish. Dark was beginning to fall when the taxi stopped at the gate to a white stucco villa. From the outside the house seemed as small as an American tract house, but once they were inside—Morgan opened the front door with a key—Jack saw that it was built into the face of a cliff, and that it was very large. They stood on a balcony overlooking a huge, two-story room that took up the entire reception floor of the house. Through a wall of glass, they saw the sun setting over the Mediterranean. The figure of a man, tall and slender, was silhouetted against the sunset.

  The luggage Jack had carried down the path still dangled from his shoulders. “Ah, Jack,” Peter said. “Already the overburdened husband.”

  He clapped his hands. A silent, unsmiling manservant materialized and relieved Jack of the bags.

  Peter said, “Ramón will show you to your quarters. Freshen up, but hurry back. We have a lot to talk about.”

  The bedrooms were on a lower floor, separate rooms at opposite ends of a long hall. Morgan seemed to expect this. Jack was surprised by nothing. He opened the window and saw that the wall of the villa dropped thirty feet to a heap of boulders. He could smell the sea, iodine and brine. He felt vaguely nauseated; his palms were sweaty. Though a brisk salt breeze poured through the window, whipping the curtains, he had difficulty breathing.

  The reality of his situation overwhelmed him. Everything that he had willed himself to forget about Greta, about Peter, and now about Morgan, his lawful wife, poured back into his mind as if the sound of the waves had released him from a hypnotist’s command to remember nothing. He was a prisoner, gazing helplessly out the window of a castle. He would never escape. His imprisonment was his own fault, all of it. Jack pounded the windowsill and said, “Stupid son of a bitch!”

  He tried the door. It was unlocked. He tiptoed down the corridor to the door of Morgan’s room and softly knocked. No reply. He tried the knob. The door was locked. He whispered Morgan’s name. She did not answer.

  2 They dined late, at a table laid with crystal and silver. Ramón appeared out of the darkness with a silver tray: cold soup, a large fish with the head still attached from which he dexterously cut and served portions with a large silver spoon and fork held in one hand. He wore anachronistic white gloves, buttoned at the wrist; there was a small hole in the index finger of the left glove. The food smelled and tasted of garlic and scorched olive oil. Jack did not like it but he ate everything, even the salad, which came last.

  Morgan wore a long skirt and a scoop-neck silk blouse that revealed an inch or two of cleavage. Her table manners, formerly those of a motherless Stakhanovite, were now exquisite. In Peter’s presence she was quiet, attentive, even submissive. Peter had permitted candles to be lit, and these burned in an ornate silver cande labrum. In the dark glass wall, as in a Velázquez come to life, Jack could see their animated images dreamily lifting forks and goblets. Morgan’s reflection was eerily beautiful because her newly dyed mahogany hair was absorbed into the surrounding darkness. Her disembodied face seemed to float in midair, green eyes glowing in buttery medieval light.

  Like an uncle taking an interest in things that he already knew, Peter asked questions about Jack’s life in the years since their last encounter. Jack answered every one factually, sparsely, spinning no tales. His instincts told him to be very, very careful, but to show no fear.

  “You’ve done extremely well,” Peter said. “You’ve followed instructions to the letter. I’m pleased. So are we all.” He nodded benevolently to Morgan, including her in the circle of his praise. “But all that was Stage One. Now you’re no longer alone. Now the real work begins. The plan takes hold.”

  Peter paused, raised a finger. “This is very important,” he said. “Your trust in Morgan is your trust in us. If that trust is weakened by doubt, the whole plan will fail. Do you understand?”

  Jack nodded.

  Peter said, “Aloud, please.”

  “I understand,” Jack said. “But I have questions.”

  “Ask them.” Peter sipped his wine, eyes alert over the rim of the glass.

  Jack said, “What exactly is the plan?”

  “I thought I had answered that question the last time we met,” Peter replied. “A life for you in politics.”

  “With what goal?”

  “I have already told you that. There are no limits.”

  Jack said, “Meaning what in the end, if all goes well?”

  Peter said, “The White House, of course.”

  Peter delivered these words casually, as if this were the most natural answer in the world. Jack looked at Morgan. A look of serene belief, of calm confidence, had taken possession of her face.

  Jack said, “You think this is possible, Morgan?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Morgan said. “Why else would I be here?”

  “You don’t think we’re going to have a lot of competition for this particular job?”

  “Yes. But that’s irrelevant.”

  “What is relevant is this,” Peter said. “You want this. Am I correct?”

  Jack shrugged.

  Peter said, “Don’t shrug in my presence, please. Answer yes or no.”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “Good. That’s the starting point. You are electable. Not the slightest doubt about that. What you didn’t have until now was the rest of the package—money and, above all, a powerful figure in the background who can make things happen for your benefit, who can make things come out right in your life.”

  Methodically, as if reading from a checklist, Peter outlined the life that Jack and Morgan would live. First, move to Columbus, Ohio. Morgan opens a business as a financial adviser and gets involved in liberal causes. Jack passes the bar examination and opens a law practice. He makes liberal noises but stays clear of liberal causes. After establishing a name for himself on the basis of Morgan’s instructions, he runs for the first available public office, then for a higher one, followed by an even higher one.

  “Timetable, twenty years,” Peter said.

  Jack blinked. “That’s quick.”

  “You’re twenty-six,” Peter said. “Your father was elected at the age of forty-three.”

  Jack said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely serious.”

  “You do understand how much money this is going to cost?”

  “Money is not a problem.”

  Jack smiled his full, charming, dead-eyed smile. “Okay,” he said, “then let’s get going.”

  Peter’s expression changed. Jack, a student of faces, saw something in Peter’s face that surprised him: relief. It came to him, as if written in the air by the spectral finger of his dead father, that he, Jack, had nothing whatsoever to fear o
r worry about. Peter needed Jack more than Jack needed him. And if Peter’s plan actually did succeed and Jack did by some miracle become president, Peter’s power to reveal how he got there would cease to exist. No one in the world would believe him, no matter what proof he offered.

  Ramón poured champagne from a bottle wrapped in a napkin. Peter raised his glass again. “To all our fathers,” he said. “May we surpass them.” Jack touched the rim of his glass to his lips but did not drink, but even so tiny an evasion did not escape Peter’s notice. “Come, Jack,” he said. “Be a little more filial. You must at least wet your tongue.”

  Jack drank. Peter watched him, as if the sparkling wine contained some secret ingredient that enabled him to see into Jack’s mind. And as if reassuring a doubt he had read there, Peter said, “I mentioned your father for a reason.”

  “Which was?”

  “To tell you I take this possibility seriously. And to remind you of certain historical facts. John F. Kennedy is a legendary figure now, a King Arthur, an Alexander, a figure for the ages. But that was not always so. For all his money, for all his charm, for all his genius, there was a time when he was regarded by the world as an upstart, as a lightweight with nothing to recommend him except a rich and powerful and laughably ambitious father. No one thought he could be elected to any office, let alone president, or be any good if he were. His own party laughed at him. Harry Truman ridiculed him and advised him to get out of the way of his elders until he grew up. He was his own father’s second choice for a Kennedy president.”

  Jack said, “Who was your first choice, Peter?”

  Peter never settled for a second choice. Morgan looked downward. Jack had stepped over the line. Peter smiled faintly, one eyebrow lifted. Finally he laughed, a wintry sound. “Jack,” he said, “you’re quite a fellow. Genes, I suppose.”

  Silence.

  “Now,” Peter said. “There’s something I want to say to both of you about this marriage of yours.”