He leaned forward and put his face in his hands, and mumbled something. Lillian realized that he was not talking about their marriage. She knelt down in front of him, took his hands away from his face, and said quietly, “Say that again, Arthur.”
“Eighty percent of our budget goes for absolute crap.”
She waited.
“I hate Frank Wisner. I hate every stupid idea that he ever had, starting with parachuting blockheads into Poland at the end of the war. Direct action! Sabotage! Subversion! His operations are the definition of ‘half cocked’! And I like Ike. I do like Ike! But thirty thousand got killed in Budapest, just mowed down, and it was because Ike wouldn’t lift a finger, and the Russians just rolled over them. Wisner hated Nagy, he’d once been a commiebastard—that’s how he talks—there is no redemption for commiebastards. We had two guys translating from the Hungarian—two, just two—but everything they translated indicated that Nagy was going to go our way, and everything we broadcasted said, ‘Go, go, go, we’re right behind you,’ but they didn’t actually look around, because if they had they would have seen us running the other direction, because Ike has some other plan, God knows what it is.”
“The Hungarians knew it was risky, Arthur….”
He took her hands and peered into her face. He said, “You know what I do every day, Lillian? I exaggerate the Soviet threat. I say they have a hundred new bombers when they only have ten. I say that there are twenty divisions when there are ten divisions. I say that they are thirty percent closer to thermonuclear-tipped ICBMs than they are.”
“Why do you do that, darling?”
“Because maybe the Soviets are lying and our sources are wrong and we have to be on the safe side, and eighty percent of the budget that goes to doing crap is taken away from finding out crap. Because I’ve become a jerk. Because that’s what they want to hear. I do feel like I’ve been doing this for a hundred years and that I can’t do it anymore.”
“Then quit,” said Lillian. You have four children and a mortgage. But she didn’t say this.
“Who takes over from me when I quit? Some kid from Yale who looks at the figures and stretches them even further. Some kid from Yale who can’t wait to be sent to El Salvador or Vietnam and is only wiping his shoes on the doormat of analysis.”
“But you’ve been thinking like this for a while, Arthur. What’s bothering you right now?”
“We didn’t know! We didn’t know a thing about either the Hungarians or the Suez attack before they happened. Were you surprised when you read that in the paper?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“I was just as surprised as you, Lillian. I nearly fell down the steps. I picked up the paper out on the front porch, and I opened it and I read the headline, and I grabbed the railing, and it was a good thing I did, because I had reeled backward and a moment later I lost my balance.”
“That’s six steps,” said Lillian.
“It would have been a mess,” said Arthur.
“Did you get in trouble for not knowing?”
“No! I had my excuses all lined up, and no one said a word. They don’t care! The White House doesn’t know what we know or when we know it, and Dulles and Wisner just cover up, because, if people started wondering what we know, then they would start wondering why we do crap, and our funding would be in danger, and we can’t have that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the charitable way of looking at it is that we might actually need it for something worthwhile in the future.”
“But why were you crying? I mean, tonight rather than last night or last November?” She ran the tip of her finger along the angle of his cheekbone, an angle that she loved in him, in Timmy, in Dean, in Tina, and then she touched her fingertip to her lips.
He said, “We’re already on to the next mess.”
Lillian said, “What is that?”
“Deposing Sukarno. Wisner swears he’s a closetcommie. The Indonesian ambassador says Sukarno loves Ike like a father. What am I going to do?”
Lillian said, “I don’t know.”
It was now almost five. The alarm was set for seven. They got back under the covers, and Lillian pressed herself into Arthur’s arms. He held her at first loosely and then tightly. What would her mother say? Lillian thought. When Rosanna was thirty, Mary Elizabeth had already died, and then, not much later, Henry was born right there in the downstairs bedroom, in a howling wind, with Joe looking on. Probably, her mother would have considered worries like Arthur’s abstract and even unimportant. Lillian could not tell Arthur what to do. But she knew there had been a shift, as slow but as inexorable as the movement of an hour hand—the cocoon she had made herself in this house was beginning to crack, and something quite different from the caterpillar inside it was about to emerge. Her mother would toss her hand, roll her eyes, and say that you had to grow up sometime. She would also probably say that such a thing was never good.
—
JIM UPJOHN HAD a theory about women: there were those younger and prettier than your wife, but cut from the same cloth—say, they had gone to Vassar, as your wife had, if only for a year. Alex Rubino had a theory, too: you found women who were as unlike your wife as they could possibly be, and made sure that these women never crossed your path again. For a long time, Frank laughed at both of these theories, because he kept expecting the return of a certain tide—that rush of feeling for Andy that he had felt just before and after they were married, before the twins siphoned every mote of energy in their own direction. But the twins were just kids now, not enormous representations of obligation and fatigue, and Andy had made up her mind that something about her own childhood was lingering around her, a shroud, a ghost, a bearskin rug. She, of course, wasn’t the only woman they knew in psychotherapy—Frances Upjohn was quite fond of her Jungian. Both Frank and Jim thought that therapy was a luxury women could afford because they didn’t have much to regret; without mentioning it, they both knew they were talking about the war, and the only way you were supposed to talk about the war was as an adventure. They let the subject drop.
When Frank got picked up in the Waldorf, he was sitting at the bar, nursing a gin and tonic. He was wasting time, not going home, because the twins, then a year old, were a riot of screaming and upset. When she passed him, murmuring, “That looks good. Buy me one?” he didn’t even realize she was a whore. What a hick, he thought. Once a hick, always a hick. She was a nice-looking girl, dark, slender, wearing a pair of shoes Andy would have admired. But he wasn’t a guest in the hotel, and so didn’t have a room. After an hour, they left the Waldorf, and he kissed her by the front door, before she went uptown and he headed for Penn Station and home. Why had he kissed her? Because she opened his eyes. Of course, he paid her, too.
He tried it a month or so later at the Waldorf, taking a room for the night, then watching the girls work the bar. That time, the girl had been slightly younger—maybe twenty-five, and blonde, from Los Angeles, she said, looking for a job on Broadway. But she, too, wore shoes that Andy would have admired, and she carried an expensive handbag. He gave her a twenty, told the man at the desk he was called away. The next hotel he tried was the Plaza—the wrong direction. Farther south, he thought, would suit him better. The Roosevelt seemed perfect—you could walk from there to Grand Central, and the ambience was not quite as stuffy as at the Waldorf. It was winter by then; the first girl he found had a nice Sandra Dee hairdo, headband and all, and her coat was from Macy’s, not Bergdorf’s. She talked with a little whine in her voice, like the wife in a movie he’d seen, The Killing. The second girl was from the South somewhere, and maybe this had been her first time, because when he took her up to the room, she walked around, touching things like the windowsills and the wallpaper.
The third time, he paid for his room at the Roosevelt (twenty-eight bucks), then left because he was too bored to stay. The Mansfield, a little farther south, looked right, but he decided to try the West Side. The Algonquin amused him for a month
or two—the rooms were not terribly expensive, and the girls more experienced, as if they had tried out for the Plaza and the Waldorf but hadn’t made the cut. Four girls there—Leslie, Peachy, Zandra (really?), and Honey. He was ready for someplace new.
He got as far south as the Chelsea Hotel, and he liked that—there were girls coming out of every door and leaning out of every window. But he didn’t fit there, with his clean suit, nice shoes, and carefully cut hair. Better to observe the Chelsea Hotel from a distance. Three blocks away, he happened upon a ramshackle, narrow building on West Twentieth Street that faced north. The bar was called the Grand Canyon, and it had two entrances and a large window looking out onto the street. He walked through twice, looked around, greeted the desk clerk in a friendly way and reserved a room, then returned to the Grand Canyon. Three people sitting at the bar. The tables empty. Frank sat by the window. Because it was late May, the light was fairly bright. None of the regulars wanted to sit in the glare.
Frank asked the bartender for a gin and tonic. He took his drink to the sunny table and sat down. A new mixer, Bitter Lemon, masked the flavor of the gin almost entirely. He formed the name with his lips, and made up his mind to look for some. The first girl through the door caught his eye, gave him a big smile. She went to the bar, ordered a Scotch and soda, and made an elaborate show of walking past him, looking for a table, then walking past him again. When she finally settled herself, he looked over at her, lifted his eyebrow, and smiled. His smile, he knew, was irresistible. He was no less good-looking than he had always been, just sharper and harder.
This one was wearing a mouton jacket. The waist of her dress was cinched tight, and she had Jayne Mansfield tits, but Frank estimated that she had ten years on Jayne Mansfield. She got up and came over to him, not forgetting to sway her hips and let her eyelids droop. She said, “You from around here?”
Frank cocked his head, neither shaking it nor nodding. He gestured for her to sit down. She said, “You staying at this hotel?” She waved her hand to indicate the building they were sitting in. Frank kept smiling.
She said, “Yeah, well. Fine.” She smiled and took a sip of her drink. Frank felt himself get a little excited. There was a kind of run-down quality about her that he hadn’t seen much of lately. He took his room key out of his pocket and set it on the table. She nodded, then smiled and said, “So I guess you aren’t from around here. By the looks of you, you must be from Germany, maybe, but that’s okay with me. I was just a kid in the war. Worse now, in a way, at least where I’m from—Allentown, that is, a little ways west of here.” She babbled on, confident that he didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. She smiled at odd places in her discourse, he supposed to keep him interested. “So, anyway, they say New York’s a big city and all, but it’s just another small town. Me, I would like to go somewhere else, but I can never get together the dough.” Frank noticed that her right cheekbone was a little bruised, carefully made up. What got him a little more excited—the bruise itself or the care in hiding it—he didn’t know. He moved to stand up. She said, “Okay, then, Mr. Schulz, yes, let’s get it over with, since you ain’t got much to say.”
They went out of the bar and through the lobby; he put his hand on the back of her waist and guided her away from the elevator and toward the staircase, which was shabbily elaborate, with a faded green silk rope and tassels looped along the pink-satin-papered wall. He pressed her up the stairs. He heard her say, “I guess it isn’t enough to work all day, can’t even take the elevator.” She probably didn’t know that she had a magnificent ass, perfectly heart-shaped and outlined by the shiny material of her burgundy-colored skirt. He kept her in front of him, and handed her the key. When she unlocked the door, he pushed it open and pushed her through so that she stumbled, though she didn’t fall. She said, “Hey! Nein! Nein with the rough stuff, Herr Schulz!”
Frank smiled and nodded.
He was gentle after that, but quick—he had a huge erection, hard and upright, throbbing against the belt of his pants. As soon as he was inside the room with the door shut, he stepped out of his shoes and dropped his trousers. Her eyes widened.
She set down her purse, stepped out of her own shoes. Her skirt had a side zipper, and it took her a moment to get out of it. She was wearing a pretty tight girdle, which was arousing, and after she took off her stockings (carefully, so as not to run them), it took her some effort to slip out of it. She kept her eyes on him, though—alternating between looking at his cock, which he was stroking and then slipping into the condom he had brought along, and his face.
He didn’t give her time to take off her blouse, just sat her firmly on the end of the bed and then pushed her back. He was so excited that he had to close his eyes as soon as he entered her and think of Andy to calm himself down, Andy smoothing Pond’s cold cream all over her face. Then he opened his eyes, and his face was right beside the face of this whore; her eyes were greenish gray, and you could see the bottom arc of the pupils above her darkly mascaraed lower lids. He had his hands on her perfect ass and he was tearing her apart.
Or so it seemed, but of course not. He finished thrusting and she gave an unconscious little sigh, waited a polite few moments, and then eased him off her and went into the bathroom.
When she came out, he almost forgot that he couldn’t speak English, but he remembered at the last moment, and just took two twenties out of his billfold and held them out to her. He threw the twenties on the bed and shrugged. She paused, then reached out and took them, putting them in her handbag without finding her own wallet. Then she pulled out a pack of Kents and a Zippo lighter and went over to the window, which she opened three inches. She said, “You know, stupid me, I gotta have a smoke first, even before I put my clothes back on. I been smoking since I was thirteen—can you believe that?—my brother got me going. He used to swipe my dad’s Viceroys. My dad thought he was smoking four packs a day!” She laughed.
Frank couldn’t stand this woman. She was perfect.
He was out of there by six and home by six-forty-five. It was still light, and Janny was playing with another girl from down the street—what was her name?—they were tossing Janny’s Pluto Platter back and forth. Frank was in a good mood, so he didn’t let their clumsiness bother him. He went through the gate, set down his briefcase, and said, “Hey, girls. Let me show you a trick.”
Janny approached him more suspiciously than the neighbor girl, who walked right over and handed him the disc. Janny stood off a step or two. He knelt on one knee and put the girl’s hand on the front of the disc, then put his head next to hers and his hand over hers. Then he said, “Okay, now, you keep your hand flat and your thumb up and you watch the top of the Pluto Platter the whole time you’re throwing it. You look at where you want to throw it until you let go. You want to throw it right where your thumb is, okay?” Then they tossed it toward the gate, and it landed on the walk right there, in front of the gate. The girl jumped away from him and said, “That was good!” She ran to get it.
Janny said, “I want to try it.”
“Okay, then. Come over here.” She nestled against him suddenly, as if her usual reserve had collapsed. The neighbor girl brought them the Pluto Platter. He kept his mouth shut, but Janny had been listening, and she arranged herself the way the other girl had and tossed the disc. It went right over the gate and into the street. He squeezed her shoulder and said, “Good for you, Janny,” then gently, ever so gently, pushed her away.
—
SPUTNIK HAD BEEN DISCOVERED up there in the sky in early October. Now that Joe was beginning the corn harvest with his uncle John and John’s son Gary, he had plenty of time to stare west, imagining a just barely visible glowing plume rising over the horizon, and plenty of time to look east, wondering what was happening behind him. Of course, no farmers discussed this. The real mystery was that they hadn’t thought about it in this way before. Yes, the Russkies had had the bomb for years now, but bombers took a while and could be shot out of the sky
somewhere over, say, Canada. But missiles, like the one that launched Sputnik, took less than half an hour, it was said. Faster than a tornado, hardly time to head for the storm cellar. This year had been a good one for tornadoes, too—nine in May alone, and five more in the summer—though none had touched down as close as the one in ’51, which took out most of that church up in Randolph and stayed on the ground for almost an hour, people up there said. Joe himself hadn’t seen a thing that day—just been standing in the barn, fixing something, and looked up to see how green the sky was. Well, bombs and missiles would be worse.
These were not thoughts he shared with Lois or Minnie. It might be that Lois, who read only cookbooks and was bored by the news, didn’t know what Sputnik was, though Minnie, because of her position at the high school, of course did. One of the first things she’d said about it was “Look out. More homework.” And she was right. A big deal was being made in the paper every day about whether American children were wasting their time in school reading Dick and Jane and learning addition tables—maybe they should be reading something more challenging and learning how to use a slide rule in second grade. According to Minnie, who did keep her ears open, they were going to put “missile silos” out west, in the Dakotas and Nebraska. Those would be targets, too.
The funny thing was, and he was reminded of this every day he harvested the corn, he had just bought a new tractor in the spring, an International Harvester 400, a huge thing, 48 horsepower, and he had spent the whole summer worrying about how and when he was going to pay it off. That Sputnik satellite got into his mind (they said you could see it passing over, but he hadn’t), and he forgot to worry about the tractor, even though it was red, like the bull’s-eye in a target.
They finished the row they were harvesting, at the far end of the north field behind his house, and he jumped down off the tractor. As they walked toward the back door, John, who was seven years older than Joe but looked the same age, started talking about a combine he’d heard about that propelled itself. The tractor could be off doing something else. Gary said, “Like what, grocery shopping?” and they all laughed.