Dolly scrambled off the sofa bed, waxy legs flashing in the street light that leaked in through a broken blind. A movie star. Someone recognizable, appealing—what better way to humanize a man who seemed inhuman? If he’s good enough for her…that was one line of thinking. And also: The general and I have similar tastes: her. Or else: She must find that triangular head of his sexy. Or even: I wonder how the general dances? And if Dolly could get people to ask that question, the general’s image problems would be solved. It didn’t matter how many thousands he’d slaughtered—if the collective vision of him could include a dance floor, all that would be behind him.
There were scores of washed-up female stars who might work, but Dolly had a particular one in mind: Kitty Jackson, who ten years ago had debuted as a scrappy, gymnastic crime stopper in Oh, Baby, Oh. Kitty’s real fame had come a year later, when Jules Jones, the older brother of one of Dolly’s protégés, had attacked her during an interview for Details magazine. The assault and trial had enshrined Kitty in a glowing mist of martyrdom. So people were all the more spooked, when the mist burned off, to find the actress sharply altered: gone was the guileless ingénue she had been, and in her place was one of those people who “couldn’t take the bullshit.” Kitty’s ensuing bad behavior and fall from grace were relentlessly cataloged in the tabloids: on set for a Western, she’d emptied a bag of horseshit onto an iconic actor’s head; she’d set free several thousand lemurs on a Disney film. When an überpowerful producer tried to maneuver her into bed, she’d called his wife. No one would hire Kitty anymore, but the public would remember her—that was what mattered to Dolly. And she was still only twenty-eight.
Kitty wasn’t hard to find; no one was putting much energy into hiding her. By noon, Dolly had reached her: sleepy sounding, smoking audibly. Kitty heard Dolly out, asked her to repeat the generous fee she’d quoted, then paused. In that pause, Dolly detected a mix of desperation and squeamishness that she recognized too well. She felt a queasy jab of pity for the actress, whose choices had boiled down to this one. Then Kitty said yes.
Singing to herself, wired on espresso made on her old Krups machine, Dolly called Arc and laid out her plan.
“The general does not enjoy American movies,” came Arc’s response.
“Who cares? Americans know who she is.”
“The general has very particular tastes,” Arc said. “He is not flexible.”
“He doesn’t have to touch her, Arc. He doesn’t have to speak to her. All he has to do is stand near her and get his picture taken. And he has to smile.”
“…Smile?”
“He has to look happy.”
“The general rarely smiles, Miss Peale.”
“He wore the hat, didn’t he?”
There was a long pause. Finally Arc said, “You must accompany this actress. Then we will see.”
“Accompany her where?”
“Here. To us.”
“Oh, Arc.”
“It is required,” he said.
Entering Lulu’s bedroom, Dolly felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz: everything was in color. A pink shade encircled the overhead lamp. Pink gauzy fabric hung from the ceiling. Pink winged princesses were stenciled onto the walls: Dolly had learned how to make the stencils in a jailhouse art class and had spent days decorating the room while Lulu was at school. Long strings of pink beads hung from the ceiling. When she was home, Lulu emerged from her room only to eat.
She was part of a weave of girls at Miss Rutgers’s School, a mesh so fine and scarily intimate that even her mother’s flameout and jail sentence (during which Lulu’s grandmother had come from Minnesota to care for her) couldn’t dissolve it. It wasn’t thread holding these girls together; it was steel wire. And Lulu was the rod around which the wires were wrapped. Overhearing her daughter on the phone with her friends, Dolly was awed by her authority: she was stern when she needed to be, but also soft. Kind. Lulu was nine.
She sat in a pink beanbag chair, doing homework on her laptop and IMing her friends (since the general, Dolly had been paying for wireless). “Hi Dolly,” Lulu said, having stopped calling Dolly “Mom” when she got out of jail. She narrowed her eyes at her mother as if she had difficulty making her out. And Dolly did feel like a black-and-white incursion into this bower of color, a refugee from the dinginess surrounding it.
“I have to take a business trip,” she told Lulu. “To visit a client. I thought you might want to stay with one of your friends so you won’t miss school.”
School was where Lulu’s life took place. She’d been adamant about not allowing her mother, who once had been a fixture at Miss Rutgers’s, to jeopardize Lulu’s status with her new disgrace. Nowadays, Dolly dropped Lulu off around the corner, peering past dank Upper East Side stone to make sure she got safely in the door. At pickup time, Dolly waited in the same spot while Lulu dawdled with her friends outside school, toeing the manicured bushes and (in spring) tulip beds, completing whatever transactions were required to affirm and sustain her power. When Lulu had a play date, Dolly came no farther than the lobby to retrieve her. Lulu would emerge from an elevator flushed, smelling of perfume or freshly baked brownies, take her mother’s hand, and walk with her past the doorman into the night. Not in apology—Lulu had nothing to apologize for—but in sympathy that things had to be so hard for both of them.
Lulu cocked her head, curious. “A business trip. That’s good, right?”
“It is good, absolutely,” Dolly said a little nervously. She’d kept the general a secret from Lulu.
“How long will you be gone?”
“A few days. Four, maybe.”
There was a long pause. Finally Lulu said, “Can I come?”
“With me?” Dolly was taken aback. “But you’d have to miss school.”
Another pause. Lulu was performing some mental calculation that might have involved measuring the peer impact of missing school versus being a guest in someone’s home, or the question of whether you could manage an extended stay at someone’s home without that someone’s parents having contact with your mother. Dolly couldn’t tell. Maybe Lulu didn’t know herself.
“Where?” Lulu asked.
Dolly was flustered; she’d never been much good at saying no to Lulu. But the thought of her daughter and the general in one location made her throat clamp. “I—I can’t tell you that.”
Lulu didn’t protest. “But Dolly?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Can your hair be blond again?”
They waited for Kitty Jackson in a lounge by a private runway at Kennedy Airport. When the actress finally arrived, dressed in jeans and a faded yellow sweatshirt, Dolly was smitten with regrets—she should have met Kitty first! The girl looked too far gone; people might not even recognize her! Her hair was still blond (defiantly uncombed and also, it appeared, unwashed), her eyes still wide and blue. But a sardonic expression had taken up residence in her face, as if those blue eyes were rolling heavenward even as they gazed right at you. That look, more than the first spidery lines under Kitty’s eyes and alongside her mouth, made her seem no longer young, or even close. She wasn’t Kitty Jackson anymore.
While Lulu used the bathroom, Dolly hastily laid things out for the actress: look as glamorous as possible (Dolly cast a worried glance at Kitty’s small suitcase); cozy up to the general with some serious PDA while Dolly took pictures with a hidden camera. She had a real camera, too, but that was a prop. Kitty nodded, the shadow of a smirk tweaking the corners of her mouth.
“You brought your daughter?” was her sole response. “To meet the general?”
“She’s not going to meet the general,” Dolly hissed, checking to make sure Lulu hadn’t emerged from the bathroom. “She doesn’t know anything about the general! Please don’t mention his name in front of her.”
Kitty regarded Dolly skeptically. “Lucky girl,” she said.
They boarded the general’s plane at dusk. After takeoff, Kitty ordered a martini from the general’s airline
hostess, sucked it down, reclined her seat to a horizontal position, pulled a sleep mask (the only thing on her that looked new) over her eyes, and commenced to snore. Lulu leaned over her, studying the actress’s face, which looked young, untouched in repose.
“Is she sick?”
“No.” Dolly sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I think she needs a vacation,” Lulu said.
Twenty checkpoints presaged their arrival at the general’s compound. At each, two soldiers with submachine guns peered into the black Mercedes, where Dolly and Lulu and Kitty sat in the backseat. Four times, they were forced outside into the scouring sunshine and patted down at gunpoint. Each time, Dolly scrutinized her daughter’s studied calm for signs of trauma. In the car Lulu sat very straight, pink Kate Spade bookbag nestled in her lap. She met the eyes of the machine-gun holders with the same even look she must have used to stare down the many girls who had tried in vain, over the years, to unseat her.
High white walls enclosed the road. They were lined with hundreds of plump shiny black birds whose long purple beaks curved like scythes. Dolly had never seen birds like these. They looked like birds that would screech, but each time a car window slid down to accommodate another squinting gunslinger, Dolly was unsettled by the silence.
Eventually a section of wall swung open and the car veered off the road and pulled to a stop in front of a massive compound: lush green gardens, a sparkle of water, a white mansion whose end was nowhere in sight. The birds squatted along its roof, looking down.
Their driver opened the car doors, and Dolly and Lulu and Kitty stepped out into the sun. Dolly felt it on her neck, newly exposed by a discount version of her trademark blond chin-length cut. The heat forced Kitty out of her sweatshirt; mercifully, she wore a clean white T-shirt underneath. Her arms had a lovely tan, although a scatter of raw pink patches marred the skin above one wrist. Scars. Dolly stared at them. “Kitty, are those…” she faltered. “On your arms, are they…?”
“Burns,” Kitty said. And she gave Dolly a look that made her stomach twist until she remembered very dimly, like something that had happened in a fog or when she was a small child, someone asking her—begging her—to put Kitty Jackson on the list, and telling them no. Absolutely not, it was out of the question—Kitty’s stock was too low.
“I made them myself,” Kitty said.
Dolly stared at her, uncomprehending. Kitty grinned, and for a second she looked sweetly mischievous, like the star of Oh, Baby, Oh. “Lots of people have,” she said. “You didn’t know?”
Dolly wondered if this might be a joke. She didn’t want to fall for it in front of Lulu.
“You can’t find a person who wasn’t at that party,” Kitty said. “And they’ve got proof. We’ve all got proof—who’s going to say we’re lying?”
“I know who was there,” Dolly said. “I’ve still got the list in my head.”
“But…who are you?” Kitty said, still smiling.
Dolly was quiet. She felt Lulu’s gray eyes on her.
Then Kitty did something unexpected: she reached through the sunlight and took Dolly’s hand. Her grip was warm and firm, and Dolly felt a prickling in her eyes.
“To hell with them, right?” Kitty said tenderly.
A trim, compact man in a beautifully cut suit emerged from the compound to greet them. Arc.
“Miss Peale. We meet at last,” he said with a smile. “And Miss Jackson”—he turned to Kitty—“it is a great honor as well as a pleasure.” He kissed Kitty’s hand with a slightly teasing look, Dolly thought. “I have seen your movies. The general and I watched them together.”
Dolly steeled herself for what Kitty might say, but her answer arrived in a ringing voice like a child’s, except for the slight curve of flirtation. “Oh, I’m sure you’ve seen better movies.”
“The general was impressed.”
“Well, I’m honored. I’m honored that the general found them worth watching.”
With trepidation, Dolly glanced at the actress, wishing only that the mockery she took for granted not be too scaldingly manifest. To her amazement, it wasn’t there at all—not a trace. Kitty looked humble, absolutely sincere, as if ten years had dropped away and she were a grateful, eager starlet once more.
“Alas, I have unfortunate news,” Arc said. “The general has had to make a sudden trip.” They stared at him. “It is very regrettable,” he went on. “The general sends his sincere apologies.”
“But we…can we go to where he is?” Dolly asked.
“Perhaps,” Arc said. “You will not mind some additional travels?”
“Well,” Dolly said, glancing at Lulu. “It depends how—”
“Absolutely not,” Kitty interrupted. “We’ll go wherever the general wants us to go. We’ll do what it takes. Right, kiddo?”
Lulu was slow to connect the diminutive “kiddo” to herself. It was the first time Kitty had spoken to her directly. Lulu glanced at the actress, then smiled. “Right,” she said.
They would leave for a new location the following morning. That evening, Arc offered to drive them into the city, but Kitty demurred. “I’ll pass on the grand tour,” she said as they settled into their two-bedroom suite, which opened onto a private swimming pool. “I’d rather enjoy these digs. They used to put me up in places like this.” She gave a bitter laugh.
“Don’t overdo it,” Dolly said, noticing Kitty headed for the wet bar.
Kitty turned, narrowing her eyes. “Hey. How was I out there? Any complaints so far?”
“You were perfect,” Dolly said. Then, lowering her voice so Lulu wouldn’t hear, she added, “Just don’t forget who we’re dealing with.”
“But I want to forget,” Kitty said, pouring herself a gin and tonic. “I’m actively trying to forget. I want to be like Lulu—innocent.” She raised her glass to Dolly and took a sip.
Dolly and Lulu rode with Arc in his charcoal gray Jaguar, a driver peeling downhill along tiny streets, sending pedestrians lunging against walls and darting into doorways to avoid being crushed. The city shimmered below: millions of white slanted buildings steeping in a smoky haze. Soon they were surrounded by it. The city’s chief source of color seemed to be the laundry flapping on every balcony.
The driver pulled over beside an outdoor market: heaps of sweating fruit and fragrant nuts and fake-leather purses. Dolly eyed the produce critically as she and Lulu followed Arc among the stalls. The oranges and bananas were the largest she’d seen, but the meat looked dangerous. Dolly could see from the careful nonchalance of vendors and customers alike that they knew who Arc was.
“Is there anything you would like?” Arc asked Lulu.
“Yes, please,” Lulu said, “one of those.” It was a star fruit; Dolly had seen them at Dean & DeLuca. Here they lay in obscene heaps, studded with flies. Arc took one, nodding curtly at the vendor, an older man with a skeletal chest and a kind, anxious face. The man smiled, nodding eagerly at Dolly and Lulu, but his eyes looked frightened.
Lulu took the dusty, unwashed fruit, wiped it carefully on her short-sleeved polo shirt, and sank her teeth into its bright green rind. Juice sprayed her collar. She laughed and wiped her mouth on her hand. “Mom, you have to try this,” she said, and Dolly took a bite. She and Lulu shared the star fruit, licking their fingers under Arc’s watchful eyes. Dolly felt oddly buoyant. Then she realized why: Mom. It was the first time Lulu had spoken the word in nearly a year.
Arc led the way inside a crowded tea shop. A group of men scattered from a corner table to give them a place to sit, and a forced approximation of the shop’s former happy bustle resumed. A waiter poured sweet mint tea into their cups with a shaking hand. Dolly tried to give him a reassuring look, but his eyes fled hers.
“Do you do this often?” she asked Arc. “Walk around the city?”
“The general makes a habit of moving among the people,” Arc said. “He wants them to feel his humanity, to witness it. Of course, he must do this very carefully.”
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br /> “Because of his enemies.”
Arc nodded. “The general unfortunately has many enemies. Today, for example, there were threats to his home, and it was necessary to relocate. He does this often, as you know.”
Dolly nodded. Threats to his home?
Arc smiled. “His enemies believe he is here, but he is far away.”
Dolly glanced at Lulu. The star fruit had left a shiny ring around her mouth. “But…we’re here,” she said.
“Yes,” Arc said. “Only us.”
Dolly lay awake most of that night, listening to coos and rustles and squawks that mimicked sounds of assassins prowling the grounds in search of the general and his cohort: herself, in other words. She had become the helpmate and fellow target of General B., a source of terror and anxiety to those he ruled.
How had it come to this? As usual, Dolly found herself revisiting the moment when the plastic trays first buckled and the life she had relished for so many years poured away. But tonight, unlike countless other nights when Dolly tipped down that memory chute, Lulu lay across from her in the king-sized bed, asleep in a frilly nightie, her doe’s knees tucked under her. Dolly felt the warmth of her daughter’s body, this child of her middle age, of an accidental pregnancy resulting from a fling with a movie-star client. Lulu believed her father was dead; Dolly had shown her pictures of an old boyfriend.
She slid across the bed and kissed Lulu’s warm cheek. It had made no sense at all to have a child—Dolly was pro-choice, riveted to her career. Her decision had been clear, yet she’d hesitated to make the appointment—hesitated through morning sickness, mood swings, exhaustion. Hesitated until she knew, with a shock of relief and petrified joy, that it was too late.
Lulu stirred and Dolly moved closer, gathering her daughter in her arms. Unlike when she was awake, Lulu relaxed into her mother’s touch. Dolly felt a swell of irrational gratitude toward the general for providing this one bed—it was such a rare luxury to hold her daughter, to feel the faint patter of her heartbeat.