31

ACTUALLY, I WAS GLAD TO TAKE MODENE TO A PARTY. SHE HAD NO REAL friends in Miami; I had none; we often met late at night when her return plane was an evening flight, and we certainly made love too often. Sometimes, on mornings after we had smoked marijuana, we looked at each other with the flat, eternal distaste of lovers who have become roommates.

We tried to go out to dance. I suffered again. Sometimes, after asking my permission, she would accept an invitation from a stranger, go forth to the floor, and leave me hoping that her partner was without skill. Once we double-dated at Joe’s Stone Crabs with another airline stewardess and her boyfriend, a pilot who had a mind like a meticulously plowed field: “What kind of job do you do, Tom?” “Electronics.” “That’s great.” My warning bell went off. I might have to talk about the instrument panel on his plane. “Electronics are great,” I told him, “but kind of boring. I’m really more interested in the election.”

So, Modene and I stayed at home. That is to say, I signed us out to La Nevisca, and we had congress in the master bed. I tried to exorcise John Fitzgerald Kennedy out of her flesh and must have driven him into her mind. It came over me on election night that Modene’s composure was not to be taken for granted this evening.

Nor mine. I hardly knew whether I wanted Kennedy to win. She might look upon me then as his understudy. And if he lost, well, I could remember talk of desert islands large enough for two. This election was going to bring me no romantic gain.

All the same, if Jack won, then I, by the intermediary of her body, would still have touched immortality. The ferocity of this squalid satisfaction was white as a blowtorch in my compromised heart. On to the party!

Our hostess, named Regina Nelson, proved no advertisement for divorce. Once blond, now a redhead, she had grown wrinkled from old marital bitterness and daily exposure to the sun.

“I knew a Charles family once in South Carolina,” said Regina. “Any relation to you, Bobby?”

“Sorry. No family in South Carolina.”

“Your girlfriend calls you Tom. But sometimes she says Harry.”

“Robert Thomas Harry Charles,” I said.

“Your girlfriend is gorgeous.”

“Thank you, Regina.”

“If she’s ever too beautiful for you, give me a ring.”

I hated her house. It had the kind of pastel furniture, cream colored rugs, and bamboo wallpaper that would never need a bookcase. There were mirrors in ornate gold frames but no pictures were hanging. The standing lamps stood as tall as the guards at Buckingham Palace, and the bar took up one end wall. A dark silver-dusted mirror gave backing to the bottles on the shelves. We were in Coconut Grove, and the land where the house now sat had once been a swamp.

“Is Ed your boss?” Regina asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know, when he first moved in next door I thought he was a homo.”

“Ed doesn’t look like one,” I said.

“You’d be surprised,” said Regina, “what comes out in the wash.”

“Does he act queer?”

“Well, he’s very fussy about the way he keeps his house. He is always coming over to borrow furniture polish or detergent, but maybe that’s because he wants to get to know me better.”

I realized that I not only desired to get drunk tonight, but would succeed. Beyond Regina, past an arched doorway, was the television den, a buff-colored leather pit. Modene sat alone by the TV, bourbon in hand, and studied the tube.

Regina said, “Cubans keep visiting Ed’s house. At night. I have heard that Cubans are AC/DC.”

“It’s more like they exhibit deep feeling for each other,” I told her.

“Poor Ed. I can tell by looking at him. I just might start to take care of that poor lost soul.”

No response needed. “I don’t mind inviting Ed to my party,” she said, “or him inviting people like you and your girl to drink my booze, hell and hello, everybody’s here to do that, aren’t they? ‘Just spend the green, Reggie-girl,’ I tell myself, but I don’t know half my guests. People’s tongues look kind of long when they’re lapping up your liquor and you don’t even know them.”

“I’m going to fill my glass,” I said.

I didn’t know anyone at the party either. There must have been fifty people in her living room, and they looked like realtors to me, and lifeguards, and beach girls, and insurance salesmen, and divorcées—I realized suddenly that I had been living in Florida for months and knew no one in the state who was independent of the Agency. A retired businessman, a golfer with a sixteen handicap, now began to talk to me about his putting game, and as I drank I measured in my mind the length of the Hubbard tongue dipping into Regina’s booze.

Modene was still by herself. The arched bow of her back and shoulders formed a guardrail around the TV set.

“How is it going?” I asked.

“It looks like he still is winning, but it’s not as sure anymore,” she said.

A still photograph of Jackie Kennedy appeared on the screen. “The candidate’s wife,” said the TV set, “is expecting a baby. If elected, President and Mrs. Kennedy will have the first baby born in the White House.” The still photograph gave way to a picture of Kennedy Headquarters in New York.

“Is he doing well in the Midwest?” I asked.

“Shush,” said Modene.

I felt a blast of rage worthy of my father. She had not even turned to look at me.

In a corner of the living room standing together were Hunt, Hunt’s assistant, Bernard Barker, and Manuel Artime. I did not wish to visit with them, yet I did not want to talk to anyone else.

“We were speaking,” said Hunt as I came up, “of a well-substantiated rumor that the Soviets are going to give Castro some MIGs. Delivery date next summer.”

“In that case,” I said, “we have to get to Havana first.”

The two Cubans nodded profoundly.

The gabble of the party was not unlike a jungle canopy beneath whose shelter we could speak. That gave its own pleasure. It felt better to talk shop here than in the cafeteria at Zenith.

“Will Castro be able to find enough Cuban pilots to make those jet fighters operational?” asked Artime. “He has not much of an Air Force.”

“Right now,” said Hunt, “Cuban pilots in Czechoslovakia are receiving advanced training on those same MIGs.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Barker.

Hunt turned to me. “How is the election going? Kennedy still ahead?”

“Nixon seems to be catching up.”

“I hope so,” said Hunt. “If Kennedy wins, it will be hard to identify the enemy.”

“Don Eduardo,” said Artime, “certainly you are not suggesting that any American president would desert us? Why, Kennedy even said to Nixon in their debate that the Eisenhower administration had not done enough about Cuba.”

“Yes,” said Hunt, “I saw that exercise in gall. Think of what it must have cost Nixon. There at the podium, right on live television, Dick Nixon, the Action Officer for Cuba, has to bite his tongue all the while that Kennedy is pretending to be the man who is going to do something.”

“All the same,” said Artime, “Castro should have been dead by now.”

“I thought he might be,” said Hunt.

“I could kill Castro myself,” said Artime. “I could kill him with a bullet, a knife, a club, a few grains of powder in a glass.” His voice grated on me. Artime was singularly handsome, a well-built man with broad shoulders and a fine mustache, but his voice rasped on my ears. It was the voice of a man who had pushed himself to every limit, and now would push more. Fuertes had not been charitable about Artime. “I do not like him,” Chevi had said. “He arouses his audiences by reading bad sentimental verse of his own composition. He sets his people amok with emotion. He looks like a prizefighter, yet he is fraudulent.”

“That is a strong word.”

“He was frail as a boy. I have heard that when he was a young adolescent, all the other students would pat him on the ass. In some manner, he grew out of that.”

“I would say he transcended it,” I told Fuertes.

“Yes, but there was a price. His voice tells you what such transcendence must have cost.”

“Castro will not live,” Artime said now. “If he is alive this month, he will be dead next. And if he is not dead next month, then next year. Such evil will not survive.”

“I drink to that,” said Barker.

We sipped our drinks.

At the other end of the living room, a carpet had been rolled back, and a few people were trying out a new kind of dance. I could hear the words on the record: “Let’s do the Twist.” I found it bizarre. One young vacuous blonde with a beautiful sun-ripened body kept insisting in a loud voice that they play the song again. I hated all of it. I thought it was strange in the extreme that the dancers did not hold each other but stood apart and rotated their hips like people alone in a room leering into a mirror. Maybe I was more drunk than I recognized, but I felt as if I were defending a country I no longer understood.

“Look at the wiggle on that blonde,” said Hunt with a sad, lopsided, half-superior sneer.

“Yes,” I said, “you can whistle while she works.” I did not like myself particularly for this remark, but Barker laughed so vigorously that I wondered if I had thrown it out for him. He was a small blockhouse of a man, sturdy, square in build, turning bald, and his lips were humorless. He had been a cop in Batista’s security forces. “Don Eduardo,” I said, “believes you can tell me some interesting things about Toto Barbaro.”

“He is a piece of shit,” said Barker.

“What kind of mierda?” I asked.

That produced another laugh. When it concluded, Barker said, “He works for a gangster in Tampa.”

“Can the gangster be Santos Trafficante?”

“You are the one who said that, not I,” said Barker, and gave a sign to Hunt that he was ready to leave.

“You and Bernie,” said Hunt equably, “will have other opportunities to talk.” Artime also left, and Hunt and I went to the bar for another drink. “Your girl strikes me as most attractive,” said Hunt, “albeit somewhat shy.”

“No,” I told him, “she’s really a frightful snob. She wants nothing to do with any of these people.”

“Yes,” said Hunt, “it’s not my idea of a party, either.”

“What’s the real story on Barbaro?”

“I’ll fill you in on what I know if Bernie Barker remains no more forthcoming.”

Modene turned off the television set and came toward us. “Let’s leave,” she said. “They can’t tell any longer who’s ahead, and it’s going to take hours to learn.”

I could sense a turn in Hunt’s mood. “On that premise,” he said, “I think I’ll stay and have another drink for Richard Nixon.”

“I could have guessed,” said Modene. “You don’t look like a man who would vote for Jack Kennedy.”

“Oh,” said Hunt, “I have nothing against him. In fact, I met Jack Kennedy years ago at a debutante’s party in Boston.”

“What was he like then?” asked Modene.

“Well, I can hardly tell you,” said Hunt. “For one thing, he must have had a little too much to imbibe because at the end of the evening he was in a corner chair and sound asleep. I will confess I did not discern at that moment, in those highly relaxed lineaments, any suggestion of a presidential candidate.”

“I hope I can remember how you put it,” said Modene, “because I want to tell the story to Jack,” and she inclined her head to Hunt, led me past our good hostess, Regina, and into the night.

“My God,” I said, “you are a snob.”

“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t have anything to do with people like that if they lived in Grand Rapids.”