Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer
Roger Clarkson, having made a point of introducing me brusquely, even perfunctorily, as Peter, proceeds to business. He tells Chevi that an emergency was calling him back to the United States and I would be the replacement. We would no longer meet at the Montevideo Players, but at this safe house.
Chevi said to Roger, “I do not believe your story.”
Roger waved his hand ambiguously as if to blend all that was false with all that was true. “Peter is here,” he said, pointing to me. “This is the fact.”
“I,” said Chevi, “do not believe you are returning to the United States.”
“But I am.”
“No,” said Chevi, “you are going to Europe to work with Hungarian refugees whom your people will send back to Budapest for works of sabotage.”
“I cannot go affirmative on that,” Roger replied. His powers of improvisation are obviously in fine shape. “But you ought to know, Chevi, that they could never put me onto those Hungarians. I can’t manage Magyar diphthongs.” He gave Chevi a wink. It carried the day. Fuertes obviously needed to believe that his acumen was on the mark. Roger took care of that with the wink. Yes, it said, you happen to be right, but I can’t tell you. Aloud, he said, “Why don’t we deal with the here and now of the transfer?”
After that, Fuertes listened soberly and answered the detailed questions of our debriefing with long answers. I won’t bore you, Kittredge, with the product of these several hours. It was technical, procedural, and relatively smooth. Even as Fuertes gave us the Table of Organization of the PCU and the names of the leaders and section heads, my initial compassion for him began to deepen. He was so obviously divided. Perhaps 51 percent of the man had decided to go with us, but the other 49 percent is still attached to a network of old friendships closely woven into his childhood, adolescence, and university days, his Party work and his marriage, even his old neighborhood.
It was, we all knew, preparatory. One of the tips Sonderstrom had passed along to Roger and myself was to interview Chevi at length about his childhood and young manhood. “It will,” said Gus, “initiate a positive bond. He’ll feel important. People aren’t used to other people taking them that seriously.”
Do you know, Kittredge, once again Sonderstrom was right. As Chevi spoke into our tape recorder, I could feel resignation settle in over his gloom. It was as if he had embarked on a boat and was watching the shore of the past recede from the rail. When we were done and the cash payment had taken place, which I, not Roger, disbursed per Sonderstrom’s instructions—Chevi is getting fifty dollars a week—I noticed that he literally winced as the money touched his palm. (Do you know—I was perspiring from the effort of counting it out in front of him. It is humiliating to be obliged to humiliate a fellow human being.) I must say paper money had never felt so dirty.
Clarkson then did something subtle and proper. While Chevi had to be aware that we would discuss him in detail so soon as we were alone with each other, still, Roger had the courtesy to leave first. He gave an abrazo to Chevi, said, “I’ll send a postcard from the Balkans,” and walked out the door.
My brand-new agent and I must now have looked like freshmen who will be rooming together for the year to come. We were standing an uncomfortable yard apart.
“I am going to make my first request to you, Peter,” he said.
“Whatever it is, I will do it,” I replied. I figured the request would not be unpalatable.
“I wish you to ignore every conception Roger has implanted in you about the lineaments of my character. I would prefer that you come to know me by yourself.”
“I comprehend,” I said.
“I would hope you do.” We shook hands on that.
Well, that was a couple of weeks ago. Since then I’ve seen him twice. We make progress slowly. Chevi may have told me that it would not prove laborious to get to know him, but no one at the Station or back at the Groogs (which has become our exasperated name for our Washington overseers at the Argentina-Uruguay Desk) is ready to buy such an avowal. The Groogs are making us check out everything, from Chevi’s legal probity to his hemorrhoids. For fact. Sonderstrom has Gatsby and me looking up police, medical, and school records. We discover that Eusebio Fuertes was an honor student, but was also arrested, when seventeen, for riding around with friends in a stolen car—sentence suspended.
The heavy work, however, begins with cross-referencing of the take. We check out everything he tells us about the PCU against the knowledge we already have about their personnel. While our local files bear no comparison to the Snake Pit, still, files have a tendency to become files. Nothing is more demoralizing than to creep one’s fingers over hundreds of folders trying to chase down a confirmatory fact that comes to seem less and less essential as the lost hour slips by. Well, I won’t make you suffer with me.
There is also infernal cable traffic with the Groogs. They’re terrified that Soviet Russia Division, with all its maniacally suspicious people, will come charging down the hall if we decide that AV/OCADO is a KGB dangle. So, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we’re looking to decide he’s not, and what he tells us does fit our fact list. At least so far. Of course, we haven’t asked him yet to bring back something we can really use, and when I propose that we do, I’m shot down at once. Until we are confident he is not a dangle, we don’t dare to show what we are looking for, since that could feed the KGB.
Besides, Sonderstrom informs me, it is still too dangerous. Chevi is not yet ready, and we must not imperil our agent needlessly. I’m becoming impressed with Gus. Big, bald, red-faced ex-Marine, yet his underlying passion is to be virtuous. It makes me think about Americans. You know, the French, they say, have a passion for financial security, and the English, according to my father, care only about manners. You can be a swine and get away with it if your manners are either good, or, better, interesting. But in America, we have to be virtuous, don’t we? Even the pimps and the drug dealers have their code, I hear. Roger certainly felt virtuous, going off to marry his moneybags princess. Didn’t want the poor ugly girl to die of a broken heart. So, Sonderstrom. He worries about doing his job with decency. Even to throwing a golf game properly. Maybe it’s late, and I’m sipping too much fundador, but suddenly I love Americans.
I can’t say that I always do at the office. The inquiries on AV/ OCADO keep coming from the Groogs. It seems Fuertes is the agent-of-the-month, worldwide—I joke—but he is large enough to excite unholy interest back at Headquarters, and I am the one who talks to AV/OCADO, I know what he looks like. I am the point! (Of course, I tell myself, this is nothing to how they’re debriefing Roger right now in Washington.) Anyway, we move forward like an elephant on clogs. I don’t think you need worry yet about any quick perils to my career. What with the Groogs and Upper Whambo (Western Hemisphere Division) and Soviet Russia Division, also known as the Sourballs, nobody will allow me to get into trouble.
I will tell you something that may amuse. Maybe not. The cable presence most feared here, although not one inquiry has come from it, is an odd desk under the mysterious umbrella of your own TSS. It is called GHOUL. That office, or eminence, or whatever it is, reports only to Mr. Dulles. I hear via Porringer that even the Soviet Russia Division is leery of GHOUL. Should this mysterious desk ever suspect that AV/OCADO is a KGB dangle, our lives down here will become unmitigated cable hell. I’m told we’ll be on the Encoder-Decoder twelve hours a day answering questionnaires.
Of course, I presume to know who GHOUL is.
I left the matter there. I hardly knew what I was up to, but, then, I was feeling wicked. I wanted to tell Kittredge about Sally Porringer and knew I couldn’t, yet, all the same, I decided to try. Recognizing that I might change my mind in the middle of composition, I took up this theme on a new page.
7
Intermission for coffee and fundador
2:00 A.M.
Kittredge,
Brand new subject. Please save judgments until you’ve read all. What I have to tell will not, I pr
All right, I know you’ll ask how it began, and who she is, and I’ll reply that she is Sally Porringer, the wife of Oatsie.
Let me give the facts. It began one evening about a week before Christmas after a party at Minot Mayhew’s house. Our Chief of Station, having received word that E. Howard Hunt is finally coming to replace him toward the end of January, threw a farewell party for himself in the form of a Christmas gathering. He invited the Station folk and wives, plus a number of his State Department cronies, plus an even larger number of relatively—I thought—undistinguished Uruguayan businessmen and their wives, and I must say it proved nothing remarkable, what with all the other Christmas parties going on.
For that matter, Christmas down here is curiously discordant. That sense of a rose-chill to winter twilight, sweet as fine sorbet, is missed in the heat of summer. One is angry and compassionate in bursts. I mention this because Mayhew’s party in his well-appointed house, filled with career mementos and hacienda-type furniture (armchairs with steer’s horns), and paid for, no doubt, with his stock-market profits, did improve once he sat down to the piano. “Every man I know,” my father told me once, “has an unexpected skill.” Mayhew’s is to sing and play. He led us through all the expected. We did “Deck the Halls,” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “Noel, Noel,” “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” of course, and then somewhere in “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” there was Sally Porringer next to me, her arm around my waist, and swaying in rhythm as we and thirty other people sang along with Mayhew.
I’m no great vocalist, you know. There are all too many inhibiting influences ravaging my impulse to utter golden notes, but I have a little bass in me, and so I get along. Sally, however, elucidated something better from my voice. I don’t know if it was due to the fact that I had never before swayed rhythmically while singing, but I heard my voice coming forth, thank you, and this freedom to sing and feel the beauty—not of the words, so much, but all the nuances and timbre of an ice-cold rose-sweet time of year—was going through me again. I felt as if it was really Christmas, even in Uruguay. I had the epiphany I always wait for as December descends into its climactic week, that feeling so hard to live without through most of the year—the conviction (I whisper it) that He may really be near.
Well, I was transported just enough to be fond suddenly of all my cohorts and their wives, and I thought of all the sweet solemn calls of country, duty, rich endeavor, and one’s dearest friends. Most of all, I thought of you, because I can often feel that Christmas is near to me again by recollecting your beauty—there, I’ve said it—and then, even as I’m singing out, “O come, let us adore Him,” I look down and see Sally Porringer’s face and she smiles back with a warmth and energy that is part of my own sudden good voice, and I liked her for the first time.
After the carols, we sat on the sofa for a while, and I asked her a question about herself. She gave me a considerable amount of her life story in return. Her father was a rodeo rider, but drank too much and left her mother, who remarried a nice grain-and-feed man. Sally and Sherman knew each other in high school (Stillwater, Oklahoma), went on to Oklahoma State in the same class, but never saw much of each other the first three years. He was a grind, getting all kinds of academic honors, and she was on the cheerleaders’ team. (I was right about that!) I took a second look at her then. She’s pretty enough, if in no striking way, small turned-up nose, freckles, pale green eyes, sandy hair, a slightly harried housewife in her present cast, but I could see how it must have been ten or twelve years ago. She was probably healthy and vivacious then, and was having, as she now indicated, some kind of all-out affair with one of the football players. I expect he ditched her, since in senior year Sherman and she found each other and were married after graduation.
I knew I was now expected to reply in kind, but I didn’t feel like raiding my own meager cupboard. So I sat there, and smiled, knowing I had to come up with something. Will you believe it? I went on and on about discovering Skeat at Yale, and I expect she did her best to keep from falling asleep in disappointment. A minute later, just as we were about to move away from one another, Sherman came up. He was Duty Officer tonight at the Embassy. That meant he had to take his car to work and was leaving now. She wanted to stay on. I, being equipped for the evening with a Chevrolet two-door from the Embassy motor pool, offered to drop her off on my way back to the Cervantes. I hardly wanted to, I would just as soon have departed right behind Porringer—I did not like the idea of those paranoid eyes staring at me through the malign screen of his thick spectacles, but she looked so sad at having to leave that I stayed.
A little later, I danced with her. Minot Mayhew was now playing all kinds of what I call Charleston rags, although I know the term is not accurate for dances like the Shag and the Lindy and the Lambeth Walk. I didn’t know how to do them, but she did, and we had fun. When he played a couple of slow foxtrots from the thirties—“Deep Purple” and “Stardust” are the ones I remember—she danced just a little too intimately, I thought. It was the sort of semiflirtatious stuff that’s acceptable, I suppose, if the husband is still in the room. Which he wasn’t. Then, Barry Kearns, our Commo Officer, cut in—to my relief. When I sat down, however, I was irked because she seemed to be enjoying herself just as much with Barry.
Sally was right there with me, however, on the turn of the party tide, and we left together. On the drive back to Montevideo from Carrasco, I searched for subjects to discuss, but we were silent. I was feeling the same kind of tension I used to have years ago at the Keep playing kissing games with the neighbors’ girls; there was that awful silence as you marched out of the room with a girl. I remember that I always felt then as if I were passing through the woods during a thaw and every sound of melting water had the composure of a far-seeing purpose.
So soon as I parked in front of her house, she said, “Drive around the block.”
I did. The Porringers were living in a small stucco house on one of the medium-income, medium-horizon, only-slightly-crumbling streets in an anonymous area back of the Legislative Palace. Even in summer, the streets are relatively deserted, and the block behind her house was distinguished by several empty lots. We parked, and she waited, and I did nothing. Then she reached around to lock the doors and close the windows. I still did nothing. I think my heart was beating loud enough for her to hear it. I did not really want to make love to her, and I did not want to cuckold Sherman Porringer, although there was, I admit, some dirty little rise somewhere down there. Then she said,
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you a queer?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why won’t you kiss me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Prove to me you’re not a queer.”
“Why do you think I am?”
“You talk so upper-class. Sherman says you’re a prep-school kid.”
I plunged. She went off like a firecracker. I confess to you, Kittredge, I didn’t know that women could be so passionate.
This last sentence betrayed what I had known from the beginning—I was not going to go to conclusion. The carnal details were not to be put into a letter. So I sat back in my chair, looked out my hotel room window at the grim building across the street from me, and recalled how her lips had kissed mine as if our mouths were in combat. Her hands, free of any conceivable embarrassment, hooked onto the buttons of my fly. Her breasts, which she soon freed of her brassiere, were in my mouth whenever she had need to lift her head to breathe, and then, to my horror, as if a long string of underground ammunition dumps i
That was remedied in surprisingly little time. I decided Lenny Bruce knew less than he imparted on the inner logic of the second time. Only one far-off part of me could possibly be working for the ego bit. The rest was hell-bent on enjoying all I could, as much as I could, as fast as I could, and yet, how I was repelled! It seemed manifestly unfair to raid the treasury of sex. In the middle of all my elation, exuberance, sexual wrath, and jubilee, in the midst of all my sense of something awfully strong in each of us smacked totally up against one another, there was the long, faint, elevated horror that Kittredge—for whom I had saved myself; Ingrid did not count!—was forever removed from my first taste of all-out frenzy and lust. I had always assumed this kind of heat could only arrive at the end of the deepest sort of love affair, and with momentum as gravely joyous as the mount toward elation in a majestic orchestra embarked on a mighty symphony. Sex with Sally was a football mêlée with bites and bruises and chocolate squashed in your crotch.
By my third ejaculation, I was weary of her. The car windows were clouded, our clothes were a wadded-up joke, and I hardly knew if I was a stud or a rape victim. Drawing away from her, I managed to induce us to get our clothes together, Sally half-unwillingly. Her kisses—how cruel is the after-shade of desire!—had begun to seem leechlike. I wanted to get home.