Pierre Salinger, the press secretary, tapped her on the arm as she walked into the West Wing.
“Got a minute? The president would like to see you.”
“Of course,” she said. What else did he expect her to say: “Nah, some other time, I have to wash my hair? When the leader of the Free World called, you went.
She walked into the office, and he was standing at the window, looking out. When she walked in he turned and said, “Belvedere Blade, what the hell is going on in that town of yours? It’s all over the Post and the Times.”
He walked back to his desk and sat down. She sat in a chair opposite the desk.
“It’s pretty bad,” she said. She told him about James Washington and how he was helping to lead the fight for new housing, and how his wife and child had died for it. “All he had was this crummy little house in Niggertown, and they were trying to take it away from him. And he said no, he wouldn’t go. And he’s still saying no.”
“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. He picked up a pencil and began drumming on the desk with its eraser. She had noticed that he was never completely still; even sitting down, he tapped his feet, drummed his fingers. There was a restless energy in him that never seemed to switch off.
“People are saying crazy things,” she told him. “Like they’re going to bus in drug addicts. These normally sane people, they’re going nuts.”
“In the nineteenth century the mobs in Charlestown burned down a convent full of Irish nuns,” he said. “They thought the nuns were stealing babies. It’s the same. No different.”
“Some people say,” she suggested quietly, “that you haven’t done enough on civil rights.”
He looked at her, intently. She didn’t drop her gaze but looked into those bright blue eyes. He’d asked her to tell the truth. Then he nodded, drumming the pencil again.
“Do you read history, Belvedere Blade?”
“It was my best subject.”
“Well, history is full of magnificent failures. Great causes that went down the old tubes. It’s easy for you people to stand out there and throw rocks because I’m not moving fast enough, but I’m in here, and it’s not so easy. Timing is everything, in history. I’m going to have to kick a lot of butt, I’m probably going to have to let some idiots get appointed to judgeships. I’m going to get this goddamned bill through, and a fat lot of credit I’ll get for it from you people!”
He seemed to be pouting a little; odd, she’d never imagined presidents pouted. But she thought about what he’d said. In all her history texts, presidents made great speeches and took heroic stands. You never read about them wheeling and dealing or appointing assholes, or getting pissed when they didn’t get credit. But that was probably what history was really like.
He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “So what’s going to happen? Is this thing going to go up like a tinderbox? Christ, I don’t need that right on my doorstep.”
“I don’t know. It could get bad. Now, I think the Negroes won’t stop. They were scared at first, a lot of them, but now — I don’t think anyone wants to turn back.”
“No idea who set the fire?”
“Some people are saying it was the Klan. Or some other crazy white supremacist group. White people are scared too.”
He shook his head. “Stuff like this starting in the North could really screw up my bill. The race thing is a lot more complicated, up here. Listen, let me know if you sense there’s going to be bad trouble. There are things we can do.”
She said, “I have this friend, he’s Negro, and he’s helping to lead the protest. He’s smart, and he’s educated, and he’s not going to stay in the back of the bus anymore. He’s as American as I am. His father grew up being careful, watching what he said around white people, but Don’s not like that. He’s going to make us actually do what we say America’s all about. I think there are a lot of Negroes like that. They won’t wait anymore.”
He glared at her.
“Do you think I don’t understand about not wanting to wait? They wouldn’t let my father into clubs because he was Irish. They didn’t want me to be president because I was Catholic. You tell your friend that he isn’t the only one that had to fight for what this country is all about. Tell him I understand.”
“He’d say understanding isn’t enough. That things have to change.”
“Jesus Christ, I know that!” he said. “What the fuck do you think we’ve been doing these past few months, sitting on our asses?” Then he remembered he was talking to a woman. “Excuse me,” he said.
“You told me to tell you the truth.”
He looked at her. “I did, didn’t I? Well, thanks, Belvedere Blade, you’ve made my day.”
She walked to the door, but before she left he said, “OK, keep doing it. I did ask. It’s a pain in the butt sometimes, but I asked for it.”
Driving back home, she wondered if she should tell Charlie about her off-the-record conversations with Kennedy. She decided not to. The president was using her to get information, to talk to someone close to real people, not Washington insiders who tended to share the same point of view. And she was using him, to learn about power and how it worked, something she hadn’t seen that much of in her young life.
She thought about what he had said about timing and history. She was beginning to see that there were great forces at play in the world, and even a man as powerful as Kennedy could not control them all. Don Johnson was a part of those forces, in the vanguard of a people seeking long-delayed justice. He and the others were pressing Kennedy, forcing him to move faster than he might think prudent, but also creating the momentum that would make it possible for him to move. The southern sheriffs, with their fire hoses and their police dogs, were helping to propel it. But Kennedy needed the support of the North to get the bill passed, and the North had to feel its own peace and tranquillity was secure. But little Belvedere could turn out to be a big problem for Kennedy; it was no surprise he was watching it.
She felt a sudden shiver through her body as she realized that a national drama was playing itself out, and she was a part of it. A small part, but it was incredibly thrilling to be this close. This was why people plotted and lied and betrayed to get close to power, so they could feel like she felt at this moment. Nothing else — except maybe sex — was as compelling. And of course that was why the two were so often linked. She was already a bit addicted herself. OK, a lot addicted. She thought that if anybody tried to take this job away from her, to say she couldn’t ever be a journalist again, she’d rip their eyes out. Never again could she go back to being what she had once been, a woman who got told, who bought all the rules that men made. Never again.
She drove home, and because she had promised Karen that she would make her a special treat for tonight, she decided to try the new cake mix she’d bought. As she dumped the mix in the blender she thought this was very bizarre, that she’d just been talking to the President of the United States and now she was in the kitchen baking a cake. Her life had certainly taken some unexpected turns.
As she was finishing the frosting on the cake, the doorbell rang and it was Harry; he always dropped by on Tuesdays to deliver the cleaning. Lately, she’d made sure she was out when he stopped by, but she opened the door and invited him in. He glanced at the cake, and she offered him a piece. She poured him a glass of milk, and he eagerly took a bite of the cake. She remembered, with a pang, how she had enjoyed cooking for him early in their marriage. He always ate with such gusto.
“This is good cake, Mary. It’s really good.”
“It’s a new mix. I thought I’d try it.”
“I like it.” He took another forkful. “An awful thing, about that fire. Think they’ll get the guys?”
“I hope so. We saw them. The photographer and I. But they were going fast with their lights off, so we weren’t much help to the police.”
“You were in that house, Mary. That was dangerous. It was on fire.”
“I tried to go up the stairs, but the flames were too high. I kept thinking about Karen. What if it had been Karen up in that room? I had to try.”
“What kind of animals could burn a child to death? I mean, I don’t like the idea of busing in a lot of niggers and riffraff, but to do that!”
“Oh, Harry, that story isn’t true. It’s just a rumor. Nobody is getting bused.”
“Everybody believes it. Everybody I talk to. They’re scared of things getting like they are in Cambridge, with riots and tear gas.”
“That won’t happen here.”
“Listen,” he said, “I bought the new building in Frederick. I mean, I bought it for Mr. Gutwald. I have to hire a driver and two countermen. I’ll be glad to get out of the damned truck.”
“Harry, that’s great.”
“Well, it’s going to take a lot of work, especially at first. A lot of hours to get the place going. Also, there’s a hobby shop in the same shopping center, and the owner is retiring. I told Mr. Gutwald he ought to grab it. I checked it out. It makes a good profit. The markups are fantastic, and you get a lot of repeat business.”
“Is he interested?”
“Maybe. He just sticks his money in the bank; he’s one of these old conservative Germans. I try to tell him he ought to make his money work for him.”
“Harry, you sound like a capitalist.”
He laughed. “I guess I do. But there’s money to be made around here, Mary. The area has been depressed, but in a few years it’s going to be so built up you won’t recognize it. There’s going to be millions made by people who can look ahead. But the people with money around here are too conservative.”
“Mr. Gutwald has the money, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, but he lets it sit in the bank and collect four percent. I think I’m persuading him. He figured his son Bert would take over the business, but Burt likes it out in San Diego and doesn’t want to come back. So I think, in some ways, I’m a substitute for Bert.”
“Things seem to be going very well.”
“Finally. You know, it’s taken me a long time to grow up. I read the other day that Bob Feller and his father used to spend hours in the backyard, throwing the ball. I never bothered. I used to cut practice so often the coach threatened to throw me off the team. I wish he had. I wonder why nobody ever kicked me in the pants, made me wise up.”
“Everybody liked you. You were the most popular boy in school.”
“Yeah, but high school isn’t life. When I went down to see the guidance counselor — remember old Haskell? — I him I was going to be a major league baseball player, and he said, ‘That’s nice.’ You’d think he might have suggested I should think about something else, just in case, but all he said was ‘that’s nice.’”
Mary smiled. “He told me I was going to get married and wouldn’t have to work so I ought to take Home Ec.”
Harry laughed. “Is he still there? Let’s go down and punch him out.”
He ate another mouthful of the cake and said, “You know I never told you this, but what helped me straighten out was the way you managed things. I finally figured out, if you could do it, I could too. I mean, I’m a man. I’m supposed to be the strong one.”
She picked up the carton of milk that was on the table and put it in the refrigerator. “You’ll do fine, Harry.”
“Well, I think so. I think I’m going to really have it together before long. Then we’ll talk. You and Karen, you’re my life.”
She turned to look at him. “No, you can’t live for us. You have to live for you. You have to find out what you want.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s not so easy.”
He left in the truck, and she sat at the kitchen table, staring at her hands and blinking back the tears. She had known he would be coming this morning, so she had put her wedding ring back on.
“Oh, Harry!”
If only she had a time machine, to take her back to that night she had stood on the lawn, a little crazy, to take back the words. I’m pregnant. But if she did that, there would be no Karen. Her daughter’s sturdy, perfect little body gave her such delight, and she saw in the soft curve of the cheek and the quickness in her blue eyes the shadow of the adult she would become. She could no more imagine her child nonexistent than she could wish for her own extinction.
Her child? Not hers alone. Theirs. He was the father of her child. She had waited so long for Harry to be a man. Why did it have to happen now?
She shook her head as if the motion could dislodge her thoughts. Then she went upstairs to get dressed for work, thinking of the story she was writing on James, of how he had buried his wife and child and vowed to carry on the fight. It was different from other stories she had done. He was not a string of disembodied quotes, he was coming alive on the page as no one had done before. Her own writing, she knew, was getting bolder, surer, and it excited her. A few months ago the city room had seemed like a vast universe she had to conquer. It was shrinking fast. There was a large world beyond it, and there might be a place for her out there. Jay would never stay in Belvedere. He sucked up the essences of things with his camera, and Belvedere would soon be picked clean. And if he went, she could go with him. With Jay, there were no boundaries. With Harry, her territory was paced off and staked out. Could she live anymore in so small a space? Could she survive, alone, outside it?
She opened the drawer of her dresser, and Sigmund Freud was standing there, a smug smile on his face.
Whither thou goest, I will go! Thy people shall be my people!
Yeah, something like that.
Or are you leeching onto a man, because you don’t have the guts to go yourself!
That’s absurd.
Is it? One part of you is thinking about him; another part is wilting the lead to your story. You are supposed to be lost in love, but you just did a forty-word lead. What kind of a woman are you?
You can’t just live for love. You have to work, too.
Ah, you sound just like a man.
If you even say the words “penis envy” I’ll hit you.
And what about your husband! The man who you married. Who loves you.
I … I don’t know.
He is who he is and where he is because of you. There is a debt.
He’d know. After a while he’d start to hate me. He’d know I didn’t love him anymore.
You are quite strong. You could make it work.
I know.
But you don’t want it to. You want to put yourself above everything.
He vanished, and she stood looking into space. She loved Jay, but she was tied to Harry. Unworthiness clutched at her. Didn’t Jay deserve something better, a woman who could live and die and breathe only for him? Real women did that. And Harry, a good man whose life she had determined, how could she hurt him again? God, why couldn’t she just live, and hurt no one?
There were no answers to those questions, so she put them aside and got in her car and drove to the Reverend Johnson’s house. Don was waiting for her, looking tired and drawn. She guessed he had slept very little in the last few days.
“Did you see the editorial?” she asked him.
“Yes, it was very good. If we win this, the Blade deserves a lot of credit. When we win it. Now, we have to.”
“You’ve asked for an injunction?”
“Yes. The NAACP has filed an amicus brief too. We’re asking the court to stay the action of the council.”
“Do you have a chance?”
“Iffy. Courts don’t like to step into local battles like this one. The federal regulations are vague enough so that it might get federal funds. The plan doesn’t specify that Negroes are barred from the new apartments, but of course economics will keep most people out. The council is trying to argue that there’s no intention to discriminate.”
“Our story on the fire went out on AP. The Times had a piece. You’re getting national coverage.”
“That should help.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“We go to the streets.”
“James will be there. He told me so.”
“He’s amazing. I sometimes wonder where our people get their courage. He’s determined we’re going to win this.”
She walked to the window and looked out on the quiet street. “When you change the rules, is there always a price to pay? And who pays it?”
He knew what she was asking him. He shook his head.
“The question you have to ask is, Are the rules right? And if they’re not, you have to change them.”
“No matter what?”
“Yes. No matter what.”
“You sound so sure.”
He looked at her, and she saw that he was not as sure as he sounded; and he looked, all of a sudden, very young.
“I have to be sure,” he said. If not —” He paused. “Do you think I haven’t said to myself that if I never came here, they’d still be alive? Don’t write this, please, but do you think I haven’t asked myself what right I had to come here?”
She was surprised at how much he had come to trust her. Perhaps it was because they were both outsiders in a world where other people made the rules.
“Your uncle asked you to come.”
“But why did I do it? Was it because I felt guilty that I wasn’t in Birmingham, where a lot of my friends are? Because I had a nice, soft, cushy spot in a writing class? Did I do it for my own ego? T. S. Eliot once wrote that doing the right deed for the wrong reason is, in fact, the greatest treason.”
“Does it matter? If what you did was right?”
“It’s like the way I felt in the South, sometimes. I was going to come and go, but those people had to live there. Do I have the right to ask other people to face the consequences of what I’ve started?”
“You couldn’t have known what was going to happen here.”
“I knew something violent could happen. God knows, I’ve seen enough in the South to know what happens when you take the lid off. Only —I’ve never been responsible before. Not personally.”
“Maybe the reason you do something doesn’t matter, in the end.”
“To me it matters.”
“If it’s any help, I think you were right to do this. A lot of people would have lost their homes. Why should they have to sit back and get kicked around?”
He looked at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be objective?”
“Yeah, I am. But there’s a time when some things are right, and that’s that. You have to say so.”
“That attitude,” he said, “is going to get you in trouble in your business.”
She looked at him and nodded. He was right about that. But once you started to trust your own perceptions and judgments, there was no going back.
“Any detail, Mr. Broderick. Anything at all.” The trooper was pressing, politely but firmly. “Run it through your mind, like a film. Anything you pick up on would be helpful.”
Jay was sitting in Charlie’s office, across from the state trooper.
“It was so fast,” he said. “I just got a glimpse. Two men in the front seat, maybe one in back. I’m not sure about that.”
“You couldn’t identify anyone?”
“No. Like I said, I only got a glimpse.”
“The car was a Ford?”
“I think so. A ‘fifty-six, I’d say, or ‘fifty-seven. I’m pretty good on cars.”
“No numbers on the plates?”
“No, I couldn’t see the plates. I tried after they passed me, but it was too dark.”
“Any other detail? Anything at all, no matter how unimportant it seems.”
Jay ran the scene through his mind, for the hundredth time. “No, nothing.” He ran it again. “Wait a minute, there was something. Hanging down. In the rear window, I guess.”
“What was it?”
“Gloves. I just remembered. My headlights caught them. Small boxing gloves.”
“Good. That may be a help.”
When the trooper left, Jay walked over to Milt in the city room.
“They’re going all out on it,” he said.
“Charlie’s done an editorial calling for the FBI to come on.”
“Any chance?”
“Doubtful. No interstate angle on it. Hey, look at this.”
Milt handed Jay a photo torn from the AP wire machine.
“Jesus, I wish I’d taken that one.”
In the photograph, George Wallace was standing in the doorway of a University of Alabama building, and the assistant attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, backed up by federal marshals, was asking him to stand aside. The governor was opposed to desegregating the stage’s colleges.
“That’s historic,” Milt said. “A hundred years from now, that picture will be in the history books.”
“They’ll think we were nuts. Federal troops to let people go to school?”
“Speaking of school, why aren’t you on your way to the science fair at St. John’s?”
“Shit, I thought you forgot.”
“Shoot for a spread, in case we need it. And don’t talk to anybody.”
“What?”
“You open your mouth, you get in trouble. I had a call from Father Carmody at St. Theresa’s today. I sent you up there to shoot the new organ. How could you get in trouble shooting an organ?”
“Look, I’m minding my business, and Carmody says to me, ‘How come I don’t see you at Mass?’”
“How did he know you were Catholic?”
“Probably the stigmata.”
“The what?”
“Never mind.”
“He said you were — and I quote — blasphemous.”
“Oh, hell no. I just told him I was a Druid. I said God is a Tree. A sycamore, on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.”
“I’m not going to tell Charlie. He’ll be bullshit.”
“Charlie’s always bullshit at me. Hey, any messages for God? I’m driving by him tonight.”
“Get the fuck out of here, Jay.”
The science fair was one of those corny assignments that Charlie loved; he said it built loyalty to the Blade to have parents see the pictures of their kids’ models of the solar system and volcanoes that spouted baking soda. It was a special challenge for him to take these assignments and make them sing. He did pretty well, he thought afterwards. Just the kind of light feature that played so well in Life. Hedley Donovan would look at it and say, “Jesus, look what this guy can do with a science fair. Get him. I want him!” He saw himself thirty-seven stories up in the Time-Life Building, chatting with Mydans and Bourke-White about exposures and f-stops. They never had to take pictures of Father Carmody and his goddamned pipe organ.
He thought about Father Carmody, and his mood soured. Carmody could have been a double for Father Hannigan, the bête noire of his martyrdom fantasies, and that fact alone pissed him off. All that innocent pleasure, down the toilet, thanks to one old Irish priest.
He was the most celebrated gladiator in all of Rome (after seeing Kirk Douglas in Spartacus) but he had converted to Christianity and would kill no more. He had already dispatched scores of opponents, stuck them in the gut with his pitchfork-shaped sword, and they bled copiously, as Caligula gave the thumbs-down signal from his skybox. Now Caligula was really POed. He decreed that his favorite gladiator was going to be thrown into the arena with the newest warrior from the wilds of Britannia, and if he turned the other cheek, tough darts.
He was in the locker room, dressing, his magnificent body glistening with oil, when the warrior burst in on him. It was Drusilda, the warrior queen of the Britons, captured and brought to Rome in chains for the sport of the arena. She was dressed in furs, her wild, dark hair falling across her metal breastplate. She wore a tiny piece of fur across her crotch, and the muscles of her long and shapely legs gleamed with fine beads of sweat. She smelled of rose water and musk.
“What’s this shit about you not fighting!” she growled. “I never thought Romans were wimps.”
“I have accepted Jesus, our Savior, and I will kill no more.”
“Who’s Jesus!”
“The Son of God, the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who created all things and keeps them in existence.”
“I thought Thor did that.”
“Thor is a pagan invention, Jesus is the true Lord, and he commands us to love one another.”
“Thor says we should kill and loot and pillage.”
“That crap is for pagans, Jesus tells us to love those who hate us, and we will have eternal glory in Heaven.”
“That sounds neat,” Drusilda said. “How do you get to be a Christian!”
“Believe in your heart, and you will be saved.”
A sudden glow of light bathed the room, heavenly music drifted in the air, and Drusilda fell to her knees before him. Suddenly, she lifted the hem of his gladiator skirt, her round lips moist, her breasts heaving under the metal plate —
“Stop right there.” Father Hannigan’s voice boomed in his mind.
Oh, jeez, I’m doing it again. OK, no more gladiator.
His hands were tied to two marble pillars, a Christian hiding in the catacombs, hunted down by the evil emperor. Again and again the cruel lash bit into his back. He groaned but refused to burn incense to the pagan gods. Disgusted, his torturers untied him, and he fell, bleeding, to the floor.
“Leave the Christian scum to die with the dogs,” they said.
The beautiful wife of the emperor, dressed in her silks and robes, came to the dungeon with her handmaiden. She saw him lying, naked and bleeding, on the floor.
“Such courage he has,” she said to her handmaiden.
“Cute buns, too,” the handmaiden said.
“Let us ease his pain. Such a brave man should not be left to die with dogs. Get me the oils and the healing herbs.”
She rubbed the ointments into his bleeding back, then cradled his head in her arms, not caring that his blood stained her silks.
“I will not refuse my God, though I die,” he murmured.
“Rest easy, Christian. I will help you, if I can.”
She rubbed the oil across his chest and belly, gently. Of course, the torturers would be back, and they would flay him alive with their metal-tipped whips, but in the meantime…
“There!”
“Ah yes, that’s good.”
“And there!”
“You are very kind, milady.”
Gently, her hands went lower, lower…
“This Christian is hung like a horse,” the handmaiden said.
Milady’s fingers touched him gently, gently, and he moaned, and she rubbed him a little bit, and he moaned some more, Ohhhhhh, Ohhhhhh. Ohhhhhh. Oh shit!
“That is enough. You have a very warped idea of martyrdom.”
“This isn’t a blow job. It’s only a little … massage. Can’t a martyr get a massage before he’s flayed to death!”
“Not where you were getting it. And what’s this ‘hung like a horse’ business! Do you think martyrs obsess over penis size!”
“Maybe they think about it once in a while.”
There was a sudden grinding noise from the front of the car. Father Hannigan and his lecture vanished. The car started to pull to the right, and the noise got louder.
“Fuck!” He pulled the car to the side of the road, got out the flashlight and went to look at the tire. It lay hopelessly flattened against the ground.
He kicked the tire, viciously. “In the fucking boonies.”
He went back to the trunk to get the spare; it was there, but the jack wasn’t. He remembered he had loaned it to Roger, who hadn’t bothered to return it. He started in on Roger, questioning his sexual habits and his ancestors fifteen generations back. When he tired of that, he looked up the road. The nearest house was at least a half mile away. He could probably drive on the tire, but it would be slashed to ribbons, and it was a brand-new tire.
While he was debating, he heard the hum of an engine and saw two headlights coming towards him down the road. He waved his flashlight, and a truck slowed down as it passed and pulled to the side of the road in front of him. A man got out and walked towards him.
“Hi,” Jay said. “Thanks for stopping. I got a flat and no jack. Can I hitch a ride to Belvedere?”
“No jack?” Jay could see the man now in the glare of the headlights. He was young, stocky, with close-cropped hair. His manner was amiable.
“I did a real half-assed thing. I lent my jack to a guy and forgot to get it back.”
“I got a jack in the trunk. You got a good spare?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll give you a hand. I wouldn’t leave a car out here. The damn kids go joyriding, and they like to strip cars.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I drive this road a few times a week. I had a flat here myself, so I know how it is. There’s nothing out here.”
Jay rolled the spare to the front of the car and squatted down to pry the hubcap off the old tire. The man returned with the jack, slipping the edge of it under the Chevy’s bumper.
“That’s a good jack,” Jay said. “The one I got, you have to be an engineer to figure it out.”
“Cars are a pain in the ass,” the young man said. “They make the damn things to fall apart.”
“This one’s falling apart on me now. I run it a lot.”
“I got one of those compacts the first year they came out. A fucking lemon. It was always in the shop.”
Jay put the spare on; the young man pumped the jack again and the car descended. Jay looked at the man’s thick, well-muscled arms with a twinge of envy. He had sent away for a Charles Atlas kit to try to get arms like that through Dynamic Tension, but he got bored after a week. His arms were sinewy but too thin, he thought, and he was still self-conscious about them.
The man pulled the jack away and said, “You live in Belvedere?”
“Yeah. My name’s Jay Broderick. I work for the Blade.”
He stuck his hand out, and the man took it, a firm handshake.
“Oh sure, I’ve seen your pictures. I’m Harry Springer. You know my wife, Mary.”
Jay’s mouth gaped open. He closed it, quickly, glad for the darkness.
“Oh sure. We work together a lot.” The simple sentence seemed charged with innuendo. Harry didn’t appear to notice. Jay struggled for a neutral sentence. “Hey, I really appreciate your help. I’ve got some pictures I have to get in tonight.”
“Glad to help you. Mary’s always got deadlines to meet, so I know it’s tough. Nice to meet you, Jay.”
“Thanks again.”
Harry put his jack in the truck and drove off. Jay stood staring after him.
Harry Springer. Jesus H. Fucking Christ, Harry Springer.
He pulled the Chevy back on the road. Harry Springer was no longer a name without a face. He was a nice guy. That was depressing. There were so many guys whose guts he hated the minute he saw them. Why couldn’t Harry have been one of those, a loudmouth or a prissy-assed jerk? He was a good-looking guy. Well built. Women liked guys with muscles like that; well hung too, probably.
He had a sudden mental picture of Mary in bed with him, those large hands touching her in the places he had touched. Jay was suddenly and irrationally furious with her. Oddly enough, it was Father Hannigan’s voice he heard inside his head. “If you went to the Hecht Company, and you saw a nice, clean blouse in a plastic package and a dirty, wrinkled blouse, which one would you buy? You know, of course. That’s why you should marry a good Catholic girl, a virgin. No man wants damaged goods.”
Damaged goods? Where the fuck had that come from? In what corner of his subconscious was that kicking around? Did he want a virgin? The Lady in Black, was she one? No blood on the sheets or cries of pain — that was no fun — but she was virginal. He had invented her, so of course she surrendered only to him.
The women he had wanted, as opposed to the ones he had screwed, were they virgins too? Yes, they were. It was the ail-American dream, the girl who spread her legs only for you. Why should he be immune to it? He had the sense of being cheated. Damn. Other men got the dream girls, hymens intact, why couldn’t he?
I don’t want to love her.
Why should he have to take seconds? She wasn’t beautiful, really, and he had never had a virgin. Even Marilyn, for all her resistance, had admitted one night that the boy next door got there first. It was one of the reasons he couldn’t love her. Why did somebody always get there first?
And then he thought of Mary kneeling on the bed beside him, touching him as no one had ever touched him before, and his whole body flamed with the need for her touch. He felt a flush of shame for what he had been thinking. It was so complicated, this business of loving someone. He suddenly hated Father Hannigan and the whole fucking universal, apostolic, holy Roman Catholic Church for making it harder.
Damaged goods? Father Hannigan, you stupid prick, don’t you know we’re all damaged goods! That’s what life does to you if you don’t stay in a fucking church and pray all day.
He thought about Mary and her sad, failed marriage, and about Harry, who thought a woman who enjoyed sex was a whore, about himself with his night terrors and his dreams about his father, a picnic for a shrink if ever there was one.
Damaged goods, that said it all right.
Damaged goods.