As I listened to Karen’s clinical account of the incident—by her own admission, only one of several such incidents—I wondered: was I, as her lover, chosen by her to be the one from whom she had no secrets, or was I simply another lover?
• • •
I received a note from Helen Howmet: “Dear Jonathan, In case you haven’t seen it yet, the enclosed article might interest you. Love to you, Helen.”
The article was a feature story from a Manhattan-based society weekly, and it claimed that Cyrus Rawleigh, “the youthful Texan who owns Rawleigh Gas and Oil,” and Karen, “a top-paid U.S. cover girl,” had become “on-and-off” globe-trotters, enjoying each other in chic resorts as well as on secluded islands. Accompanying photographs showed Karen and Cyrus Rawleigh dancing in Saint-Tropez, tanning themselves on the Rawleigh yacht in the Bahamas, and lounging cozily on the patio of his San Antonio ranch house.
At a time when the gossip sheets list single models and actresses along with heiresses and women executives as the nation’s most eligible bachelorettes, Karen has been a consistent front-runner in the matrimonial sweepstakes conducted by society editors. Described often as an “all-around certified beauty,” and “the perfect companion for the man who has everything,” this year she was also selected by all the major gossip columnists to be the newest member of their Eligibility Hall of Fame.
When asked why her name is most often linked only with those of millionaires, Karen supposedly answered, “Maybe because they make me determined to remain independent, career-oriented, and sane enough to be self-centered.” By now I had learned to take all such verbal crap with a large dose of salt. However, looking at the pictures of Karen with Rawleigh, I was alarmed by her pose: it was the pose of a woman in love.
I called Karen, and Susan answered. Before calling Karen to the phone, Susan warned me that Karen had just returned from assignments in Alaska and Brazil and was tired and suffering from a throat infection.
Karen sounded friendly. She was anxious to see me, she said, and to have the two of us spend some time together. Filtering any emotion from my voice, I said I would like that very much and that I hoped I could make her as comfortable as she seemed to have been with Cyrus Rawleigh. She was silent for a moment; then she said a bit brusquely that Cyrus was her old and trusted friend. She was indeed comfortable with him, she said, because to Cyrus she was the whole world, not just another bridge to it. As an afterthought, she mentioned that in a week or so she and Cyrus planned to spend a few days in the Canadian Laurentians, where rest and the high altitude should clear up her throat infection. She talked lightly about her forthcoming assignments, the film she was doing, and a Maryland horse-breeding farm she had considered buying as an investment and a means of lowering her taxes. Then, without mentioning Cyrus again, she promised to call me soon and we hung up.
My first impulse was one of jealousy, which soon gave way to conflicting thoughts. What was it I objected to? That she might have fallen in love with another man? But falling in love was her right. That she didn’t tell me about him? Why should she? Was I her lover-confessor? What was it I wanted from her anyway? A weekly mailing of her thoughts? A subscription to her moods? A ticker tape of her sex life?
Determined to calm down, I turned on the TV. Switching from channel to channel, I saw Karen’s famous American champagne ad twice in less than an hour. As her smile and hips flashed wetly across the television screen—the pictorial landscape of America—I thought of Cyrus Rawleigh. Did he believe he was the sole owner of Karen’s smile and hips?
After Karen’s commercial, Louise Hunter, a young Broadway actress I recalled in The Financier, was interviewed about the prospects for a settlement of the two-month-long actors’ strike. She was flawlessly beautiful, with a lean, smooth, sinewy body. As I listened to her tell how the strike had threatened her financial security, as well as that of her actor-husband, I realized what I ought to do. I telephoned one of the secretaries at the company and asked her to invite Miss Hunter to dine with me to discuss her availability for a dramatic assignment.
The secretary arranged for dinner the following evening at the American Mercury, America’s most expensive restaurant.
As the maitre d’ guided Louise Hunter to my table, I noted that she was surprised by my appearance. “With your references, Mr. Whalen, I thought you would be an old corporate goat who wanted to invest in a play—or an actress—for some special reason.” She spoke with the ease and charm of the professionally gifted.
“You were right, Miss Hunter. I want to invest in a very special play, and I want you to be its star,” I said as I took her soft, narrow hand.
“I’m flattered; tell me more,” she said, smiling politely. We ordered drinks and looked at each other shyly.
“It’s the story of a man,” I said. “A young American plutocrat. His mistress, a famous American fashion model courted and admired by many wealthy and powerful men, does not fully reciprocate his love.
“One day he hires a young and beautiful Broadway actress to accompany him on a three-day sight-seeing trip to London, during which her sole task is to pretend that they have just fallen madly in love and are in London to hide from the world—as well as from her jealous husband and the plutocrat’s mistress. While the plutocrat and the actress dine out, dance, see the sights, and enjoy each other in their hotel, they are followed by dozens of photographers and gossip writers who have been hired by the plutocrat. When the story of their liaison hits the society pages of all the American newspapers, the plutocrat’s mistress realizes that she is not his only love and becomes jealous. That makes for a perfect ending, because arousing her jealousy was the purpose of the trip.”
“Interesting,” said Louise Hunter. “Will this be a theater piece or a movie?”
“Neither,” I answered.
The captain, wine steward, and waiters were hovering around us, and I sensed her growing curiosity.
“What will it be, then?” she asked.
“A happening,” I said calmly. “A real-life psychodrama, financed by me, in which I will be the plutocrat and you will be the actress.”
“Do you know, I was stupid enough to think you were serious,” said Louise Hunter, visibly disappointed.
“I’m in love with a woman—a fashion model—who is not possessive enough about me,” I said. “Your provoking her jealousy is very serious to me—”
“But not to me,” she broke in. “It’s a rather unattractive role.” Her manner was chilly and defiant.
“Maybe so,” I agreed. “But it is about love, and as Yeats says, ‘Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement: / For nothing can be sole, or whole / That has not been rent.’ In any case, if you decide to go through with it, for your three days in London you’ll be paid as much as you probably made in three months in The Financier”
“But why me?” she burst out. “There are so many professional escorts!”
“You’re well known: these days, to make the gossip columns, one has to be more than simply rich. You have talent; all I have is money.”
Leaning closer, she looked at me anxiously. “But all this publicity will make everyone think that you and I really have been lovers. What then? What about Frank, my husband?”
“Tell him you’re going with me to London on a publicity stunt, to portray a mistress—not to become one! The two of you are actors; publicity is the stuff of your life; and this trip will put you smack in the public eye! Why should he object to that? It’s the truth.”
Lowering her eyes, Louise Hunter demurely pondered what I had said. “There are a few plays I would enjoy seeing in London,” she said.
“Then we will see them together,” I said as the waiter poured more champagne.
• • •
To save our energy and make our trip to London more comfortable, I had six seats reserved, three in each row, to be used as beds during the flight. I had learned this trick from my mother, who also always traveled with a basket containing a
meal prepared by our French chef. The plane was crowded, and the other passengers, as well as the stewardesses, glanced with obvious scorn at Louise and me sprawled in our private cribs. At one point, accosting me in the aisle, a woman asked me with sarcasm, “What makes you beautiful people so special?”
“Chance injustice,” I answered. “My girl friend’s beauty is her inheritance; my inheritance is my beauty.”
The public relations company I hired had suggested that Louise Hunter, not I, should become the bait for the British and American press. Through her, they’d assured me, the media would eventually zero in on me.
At Heathrow Airport Louise was photographed and interviewed for British TV and several newspapers and magazines. In the hotel, where we purposely occupied separate but neighboring suites, to maintain the pretext of secrecy, she refused to see the press. However, well alerted by this time to our presence, British photographers trailed our car our whole first day in the city, and we let them catch us at various points. The press particularly enjoyed photographing Louise during our dinner at the Baobab, and later at the Cockpit, a fashionable disco where Louise appeared in a dress that bared more than it covered.
When we danced, I was aroused by the sight of her breasts, by her mouth next to my earlobe, by the brushing of our hips, and I reached for her as if she were my lover. Instantly her manner reminded me that I was asking for more than our bargain called for.
Throughout our London psychodrama, as we held hands, embraced, kissed, and looked into each other’s eyes for the sake of the photographers, the conspiratorial camaraderie Louise assumed helped me to behave as if I were passionately in love with her.
She told me that her husband had proven more understanding of the nature of her assignment than she had expected and that she didn’t think any amount of publicity and gossip about the two of us would change his attitude.
The first mentions of our escapade, accompanied by photographs, began to appear in the New York tabloids two or three days after our return. These were followed by longer, equally gossipy pieces in the media weeklies, and eventually the “people” sections of national magazines picked up the story.
In most of these items Louise was called “the Broadway starlet of The Financier” I was variously described as “an independent investor,” “a partner in his father’s conglomerate,” “the heir to America’s foremost iron and steel fortune,” “the Narcissus of Whalenburg,” and “the Golden Orphan of the Last Tycoon.” Now I understood why the public relations people had guaranteed only the dissemination of the story, not the copy itself, which was phrased by the columnists to give it the appearance of social comment, though what they actually revealed in their pieces was the adulterous marriage of gossip as big business and the American press as a medium of free expression.
What I anxiously waited for finally took place: Karen telephoned me about my London escapade, saying, “I didn’t know you had a penchant for easy drama—or is it easy actresses?”
I pretended not to know what she was talking about. “What drama?”
“It’s all over town. I haven’t been able to open a paper without running into pictures of you drooling over Louise Hunter.”
I feigned nonchalance. “I like Louise, and I like to see her once in a while,” I said. “She knows a lot about theater.”
“She certainly knows how to get herself written about,” said Karen with a tone of professional jealousy.
“She is a talented actress,” I said, “and she deserves her popularity. She has worked very hard to gain it.”
“I’ll bet she has,” said Karen. “Harder than she has at her marriage.”
“What do you mean? The last time I saw them, Frank and Louise seemed quite close,” I bluffed.
“The last time is right. They’ve split!” Karen exclaimed. “Yesterday Frank filed for divorce. He is naming you as ‘the other man’ in Louise’s life. His lawyers must love all those pictures of you, Mr. Financier himself, hugging Mrs. Frank Hunter!”
Stunned, I asked, “Where did you hear this?”
“For one thing, it’s in the papers. For another, I have friends who know them.” She paused. “Louise’s agent is also furious. The play’s producers have told him that because of her conduct, Louise has blown any chance she had to star in the film version of the play. By the way,” she added, “when you and I went to see The Financier, why didn’t you tell me you had fucked Louise Hunter?”
“What for?” I asked. “We all have our Rawleighs. Like Gloucester in King Lear, ‘Better I were distract: so should my thoughts be sever’d from my griefs.’ Besides,” I added, “though you may be everything to Rawleigh, Louise is not my whole world—just another bridge to distraction.”
Karen told me with bitterness that I think she is in command of her life, but that whenever she attempts to convey to me who she is, she feels like the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands, the only one still speaking her tribe’s language, who knows that when she dies, the tribe’s language will die with her. Then, still angry about the incident with Louise Hunter, Karen turned on me. “For most of us, to become free, we would have only to cast off our responsibilities, but you, Jonathan, you are responsible to no one; your pocket money alone could buy the entire stage my life revolves on: the model agency, the photographers’ studios, the fashion magazines, the cosmetics companies. You could produce a play, a movie, or a TV series, own a newspaper, or entertain the world’s most exciting people. You could travel or live anywhere in the world. You could finance a new church, start a revolution, become a missionary or an anarchist. You could give in to the senses, discover new pleasures, delay aging. You could be what Ophelia imagined Hamlet to be: ‘the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eyes, tongue, sword. The glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observ’d of all observers.’ Each day you live could be the equivalent of a decade in anyone else’s life, Jonathan, because by speeding up experience you could in effect slow down the passage of time. Instead, you live your life as if a decade meant less to you than a single day, and you waste even that on the Louise Hunters of this world. Why?”
• • •
Karen has obviously scrutinized all the diaries I kept and the notes I wrote during my life abroad. If I ever had any doubts about whether I had made myself too accessible in them, or not accessible enough, she dispelled them by sending me as a gift a silver wall plaque with the following quote engraved on it:
Total Depravity
The free gifts, which belong to health, were taken away from man after his fall; the natural gifts, which cannot lead him to health, have been corrupted and polluted. . . Man’s understanding is so entirely alienated from the justice of God, that he cannot imagine, conceive, or understand anything but wickedness, iniquity, and corruption. Seemingly his heart is so poisoned with sin, that he can produce only perversity.
Our nature is not only void and destitute of all good; but it is also so fertile in all types of evil, that it cannot be idle. It is that all the parts of man, from his understanding to his will, from his soul to the flesh, are soiled and entirely full of this concupiscence, or rather, to make it short, that man is nothing more than corruption.
Waiting, then, we see flesh desiring all loopholes through which it thinks of transferring elsewhere the guilt of its vices.
—John Calvin, of Geneva
On an enclosed card, she had written, “To Jonathan, whose roots are branches now, from Karen.”
• • •
“We’ve never met, Mr. Whalen, but I had the good fortune to meet your mother about two years after your father’s death. Shortly before we met, several of my articles on the Byzantine period had been published in popular magazines, and I was beginning to earn a reputation as an archaeologist. Through my work I had met a Turkish antique dealer who sold your mother a large collection of art objects, among them many she had sought to acquire for some time. In gratitude, that spring your mother invited the dealer to stay for a week as her
guest in New York. One day he invited me to lunch, to meet Mrs. Whalen, and soon after she invited me to dine with her. After dinner she proudly showed me her newly acquired objects. On the following day I sent her some of my books, having first underlined certain passages that might interest her.
“The moment I met her, I found your mother very attractive, Mr. Whalen. The truth is, I became enraptured by her. You might ask, had Mrs. Whalen been an ordinary office girl, would I have been so captivated? But you see, she was not ordinary. She was Katherine Whalen, widow of Horace Whalen. Just as an office girl is inseparable from her uneventful existence, your mother was inseparable from her past, as well as from the Byzantine splendor of her environment—her home, her wardrobe, her jewelry, her collections.