Undertow Read online

  For me, the five-dollar hooker stilled the raging ego; but Don, shivering like a eunuch on the day before castration, began to toy with the idea of marriage. Whether it was love, or pussy fever, or peer pressure, they were all doing it. Don succumbed, and we had one of those big brassy bashes at the country club after the sanitary nuptials at the local Episcopal church of which Dr. Whitford was a pillar.

  All marriages seemed like clichés in those days. Maybe that’s why I never married or maybe no sweet, bronzed-legged, rich, blonde, blue-eyed girl ever tantalized me with that gorgeous goddamned velvet pussy with the invisible bar across the inner labia.

  But whatever the mysteries disgorged through the now broken hymen, they apparently weren’t as hypnotic as their speculation on the old iron beds of the Berkeley dorm, because Don was using my apartment in Haight-Ashbury less than six months after his marriage. Not that Karen and Don didn’t have what was, at least on the surface, a happy marriage. She reveled in the political life and passed from stamp licking, to hand shaking, to speech making with only minor dislocations. They made great press together—“a charming duo,” “the delightful Jameses,” “the sophisticated,” “athletic,” “smart,” “chic,” “with it” Jameses.

  There are always competing moths around a bright flame. In politics, a wife can be one big pain in the ass, especially if she doggedly insists on inclusion. Unfortunately for Karen, inclusion did not fit into our plans. You can’t spend weekends at the beach if you practice inclusion. So Don made me the heavy, and Karen reacted as if it were a case of “undue influence” on my part, which it wasn’t. Besides, Karen’s influence, in a purely political sense, began to wane as the stakes became higher, the money freer, and the professionals more numerous. Don became a kind of chairman of the board of a political juggernaut that had a single goal, to make him President of the United States; and on the board of directors, Karen had only one vote, although she was certainly an important, but programmed, performer in the “game to attain.”

  She knew her bedroom influence had ebbed and if she suspected, or knew, that Don was receiving solace with strange and younger women, she kept it under control, perhaps remembering instinctively the powerful entrapment of premarital days.

  I started to reach for the Scotch again, and then checked myself. I was getting a little too boozy.

  “In a way, Lou,” Marlena said, “I think I’m resigned to the fact that there can be no permanent future with Don.” She said it pensively, fishing, perhaps, for a ray of hope in my response.

  “That’s intelligent,” I said.

  I looked beyond the rise of her cheekbones into the dark fire in her eyes.

  “I mean it. I really mean it. And yet it’s scary.” She smiled. “It’s scary to watch you and Christine and the rest. You’re all planets around his special sun.”

  “But even planets have a life of their own,” I said without conviction. How I hated to articulate this subject.

  “Not if the sun does not shine. He is the life-giving power for you, for everyone around him. Now even for me.”

  “I don’t think that’s sad, Marlena,” I said. “What’s so damned important about being an island unto yourself?” I’ve used that bastardized line by John Donne to rationalize my role many times before.

  That was the trouble with this Marlena. She was always starting these philosophical psychodramas. I was in no mood for one this time.

  “Why don’t you go down there and play some ball?”

  “I guess it’s more fun to sit up here and throw harmless little bitchy darts.” She smiled, stood over me, and planted a cool kiss on my cheek.

  When Don had exhausted his interest in the game of catch, he and Christine came running up to the porch again, slightly reddened with exertion and the rays of the sun which had penetrated the mists. Don grabbed Marlena and embraced her with both hands around her tight buttocks. He kissed her full on the mouth. Then, arm in arm, they proceeded into the bedroom.

  Christine and I played gin rummy.

  II

  Later in the afternoon, Don and Marlena scooped a hole in the sand about twenty feet from the house and built a coal and wood fire. Christine brought out a jug of wine and a box of marshmallows. I found some long thin branches to spear the marshmallows. Don lit the fire and we sat cross-legged around it, warming ourselves against the chill of the late afternoon, as Marlena rolled some joints.

  Pot was not a new experience for us. We had attended countless private bull sessions on college campuses and invariably there was grass.

  It really turned on the kids to see Don puff deeply on the battered joints, his pinky stiff, as he had seen the kids do it. He really wasn’t much for pot, though. As always, he confined his public actions to what was politically important.

  Marlena passed the joint around. We watched how she did it, cupping her hands around the stick, breathing deeply, holding the smoke in, then slowly exhaling, following up with a little pull on the community wine jug. Christine coughed a little on the first puff.

  We passed the joint around again and again, sipping the wine, toasting the marshmallows. The haze, as the sun angled closer to the western horizon, deepened almost to a rust, darkening our faces. In this light, Marlena’s face and hands looked like well-polished onyx.

  “You know,” Don said, “This is good. This gets us out of our skin. God, how I hate my skin sometimes.”

  “Why?” Marlena asked.

  Perhaps it was the reference to skin that made her speak.

  “Yes, skin,” Don said. “Skin is the right word. For skin is the façade. Ever notice how the holes in our skin, I mean the orifices, tell our story? The eyes, for example. You learn a lot by reading eyes. When I speak before an audience, I read eyes. They tell me how I’m relating. Stage actors will tell you that. Real stage actors. People that can’t act before a camera. They see eyes through peripheral vision on stage, and they can trace the emotional impact they are making through the eyes of certain people in the audience.”

  “I like that about eyes,” Christine said. “I hope my eyes speak. My mother always used to say, ‘I see it in your eyes.’ I became very conscious of my eyes. That’s why I hate to wear my glasses.”

  “The mouth, too,” Don was saying. “What goes into it and what comes out of it. You can, for example, tell an awful lot about a man by the way he eats, the way he chews, the way he smiles.”

  “And words,” Marlena said.

  “Words will never tell you much. Words are a voluntary act. That’s the politician talking, Freud notwithstanding. Words can be practiced. They can be sounded in the mind before they reach the voice mechanism. Words are a manipulative tool. Words are media.”

  Don, like most successful men in public life, was obsessed with the idea of the media, especially as to how it had constructed him. Only a politician with a sixth sense of how to confront the media could possibly make it in the big leagues of the American political rat race. And this sense was a gift. Don had this gift. He could reach out deep into the television tube, sending the fruits of that gift outward into the electronically charged air, and it would redefine itself again, almost as he had willed it, charging electronically into the home of the most casual viewer. There was a mystique about it. Most politicians worked at it, and the more they worked, the more they stumbled and diverted the energy that was supposed to pass between the people on camera and the people at home.

  “Then what the hell is real?” Marlena said suddenly, the smoke billowing from her nostrils.

  “Real?” asked Don. “I’m real. Here, feel me.” He reached out and put a hand on her breasts.

  “So you are,” Marlena said.

  “But how real are you on the boob tube?” I asked. The combination of alcohol and pot had made me giddy.

  “I am as real,” Don giggled, “as they want to make me.”

  “But how real are you to yourself?” Marlena asked.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Don said. “It’s how they v
ote that counts.”

  “Now we get to the heart of the matter,” Christine said.

  “I want your vote,” Don said, standing up, staggering slightly, pointing a finger at Marlena, as if he were Uncle Sam in the World War I recruiting poster.

  “You got it, baby. You got my vote.” She caught his hand and pulled him into the sand.

  “I can’t screw everybody,” Don laughed.

  “Why not?” Marlena said.

  There was silence while we each took another drag on the joint.

  “I just wanted to say one thing more,” Marlena said. She paused. “I think you are the biggest bastards I know in the whole world.”

  “You’re getting sentimental, Marlena,” I said.

  “I say,” she said, “if you’re going to do it—go fuck an elephant.”

  “You said it,” Don agreed.

  “And if you’re a politician, it’s best to be unreal,” Marlena said.

  “Invent yourself,” Don laughed. “I invented myself. I fucked myself. I conceived myself. I gave birth to myself. Who am I?”

  “I give up,” I said.

  “I am the African Ouji bird,” Don said.

  “The one that flies in ever-decreasing concentric circles and loses itself up its own asshole?” I asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “I think you’re beautiful not to exist,” Marlena said.

  Don laughed.

  “She’s a real smart ass, this one is, a real smart ass.” He reached over and buried his mouth on hers. He could see her hand reach for his prick, as if to confirm to him that he was alive, after all, a man, real. This is real, I imagined she would say as she brought the live hard-on into the depths of her being. This is the real thing, big baby.

  It was obvious that they were turned on and that they were oblivious to the eyes around them, mine and Christine’s. I sensed Christine’s discomfort and took her by the arms and pulled her out of the sand.

  “Let’s walk along the beach.”

  She looked out into the roaring ocean and shivered. I put my arms around her. “Shall I get you another sweater?”

  “No, this is better.”

  We started toward the water’s edge. Looking over my shoulder, I could see Marlena’s long dark fingers gripped around a bare buttock cheek as they merged into the private secret that suddenly they alone shared. I envied them, feeling, as always, in the presence of his conquest, inadequate and frightened.

  III

  Christine and I walked along the beach. The sea seemed to grow in agitation as the sun lowered itself in the west, deepening the tones of rust, reddening the beach, bloodying the water. High dunes formed by generations of wind eddies prevented our seeing any signs of life. We were alone, it seemed, in a peopleless void; and the very idea of it was miraculous. We walked as if in a seasonless, endless, beautiful desert. When we grew tired, we rested against a high dune and looked out to sea.

  “You know, Marlena is probably right.”

  “About what?”

  “About us. We are in fact, just planets in his solar system.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “She was right.”

  “Of course she was right. Now she’s part of the same bag.”

  “Maybe. But the options of the very young are much different.”

  “Your middle age is showing.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “When I hit thirty,” Christine said, “I thought it was the end of the world. Most of my friends were married. Some had kids. When you see other people’s kids, you feel so—so barren.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “We’re feeling sorry for ourselves, aren’t we, Lou?”

  “No, I think we’re feeling nothing, Christine. I think we’ve lost our ability to feel anything.”

  “That’s not entirely true. I do feel warmth for you, Lou. Not excitement, but lots of warmth. ‘Comfortable’ would be a better word. And you do meet some basic physical requirements. No, on balance, I think we have a very intelligent relationship.”

  I picked up a stick and threw it into the sea. It got carried away in a moment, lost among the foaming crosscurrents.

  “Our whole lives are wrapped around him, and you know it. And that’s what bugs me. Because I like my life to be wrapped around him. I like the whole political rat race, the whole lifestyle. And I’ve enjoyed the climb right up to now.”

  “So have I.”

  “Two stereotypes.”

  “We’re like his appendages.”

  “Inseparables.”

  “We’re his family.”

  “We’re more than his family.”

  “Do you think he can make it, Lou?” Christine asked, after a long pause. We always avoided such a reference, as if by speaking it we would put a damper on his chances.

  “We’ve got 14 months to the convention. Can you think of anyone in our party who can touch him? Better yet, can you think of anyone with a better organization?”

  “That’s only the nomination. Can he beat the president?”

  “By the time we get finished with that man in the White House, the world—the world, I said—will see him as a fascist pig—which is what he is.”

  “Won’t it be great—” Christine checked herself.

  “To be in the White House. All that power. My God, it scares me.”

  “It doesn’t scare Don.”

  “That scares me, too.”

  Christine shivered. “Isn’t it amazing how politics dominates our lives.”

  “It’s a full-time game.”

  “You’re telling me. It’s my husband.”

  “And my wife.”

  We sat for a while watching the sun, like a big red pumpkin, drop further into the horizon.

  “You know, you’re a very attractive person, Christine,” I said suddenly, putting my arms around her waist.

  “I guess you might say there’s a certain cool attractiveness about me. That comes of an Italian mother and father.”

  “What was it like to be his mistress?”

  “How do you answer a damn question like that?”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “First, flattered. Later, I loved him.”

  “You know something? I was always around during the whole time. I saw nothing. I questioned nothing. Even when we traveled together. I never really thought of your reactions to anything. You were simply a new piece.”

  “That was ten years ago—ten long years ago. There’s been lots of girls since then.”

  “But they’ve disappeared, lost somewhere along the way. You’ve stayed on.”

  “I’m part of the family. Even Karen thinks of me as a kind of fixture, the loyal retainer. I haven’t told her a truthful word in ten years. As a matter of fact, she trusts me implicitly. She’s right, too. I don’t think of Don as a sex thing anymore. I’ve always been suspicious that Karen knew about us, but she’s never let on. I think she thinks that you and I have something going.”

  “She’s right.”

  “We’re the world’s two most unlikely lovers. We sleep together because it’s convenient. We don’t have to go through the whole mating game.”

  “I do you and you do me.”

  “Somebody has got to do us.”

  We were both silent for a long time. Christine closed her eyes.

  “Did Don ever lay you on the beach in broad daylight like that?”

  “I was just thinking in the same terms.” She laughed. “Don was and is the most spontaneous lover I’ve ever been with, not that I’m the most experienced girl in the world, but that must be part of his thing. He wants what he wants when he wants it. It’s like a form of greed.”

  “That’s my most vivid recollection at college, always walking in on one of his episodes.”

  “It kind of turned me on at the time. He used to straddle me on his desk, on the floor, on his chair, in the wardrobe. I enjoyed every minute of it, I must confess. I used to go t
o the office without panties, ready for instant action. Sometimes he would talk on the phone while we did it. Once he even laid me in his own home talking to Karen in the next room.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you suppose he does it?”

  “Why not? He enjoys it. It’s only once around the track.”

  “Aren’t you bitter?”

  “Not at all. My time was over for him. I understood it. I like my life as it is. I’d never be very important on my own.”

  “Nor would I.”

  “That must be the reason we’re here. Don is important. And then, by proximity, we’re important. Would you believe that my wonderful Italian mother thinks of me as a walloping success?”

  “So did mine, before she died.”

  “He makes us important. We’re important because of him.”

  “Do you feel important?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So do I.”

  “That’s the answer then. Egoism. All those people along the way that put us down. We’re getting back at them. We’re somebody. They’re nobody. We get our names in the papers. We’re a kind of celebrity. We’re identified as his people.”

  “I like being his people.”

  “Can you imagine—if he makes 1600?”

  “I’d love it.”

  “All that power. Think of all those people who would lick my ass. Hell, I’d be the keeper of the keys. What a fantasy I’m having. Do you think it will corrupt us?”

  “Totally.”

  “Good. I’d like to wallow in it.”

  “And Don?”

  “He’ll wallow more than any of us.”

  “But will he be a great president?”

  “Sure. He’ll charm the whole damned world.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “Sure.”

  “God, we’d be on top of the world. It reminds me of an old song.”

  “Which?”

  “You’re too young. We’ve hitched our wagon to a star. I can’t remember the tune, but the image is there.”