18

IN THE SECOND WEEK OF JULY 1960, I DISCOVERED THAT I WAS NOT INHABiting the summer so much as I was living in the previous spring, for in my mind, I was following Modene through her travels between Miami, Chicago, and Washington; indeed, I only became fully aware of how removed I was from my own life when I walked into the officers’ lounge at Zenith one July evening and there on the television set was John Fitzgerald Kennedy speaking to a press conference at the Democratic Convention. I watched with all the shock of passing through an occult experience. It was as if I had been reading a book and one of the characters had just stepped into my life.

It was then I recognized that the fact that Modene was now at the convention in Los Angeles had not held as much reality for me as the account of her earlier activities I had been sending out each night to Hugh Montague.

Hearing Jack Kennedy’s reedy voice on TV, however, put me through transformations. Time, I discovered, was no unimpeded river, but a medium of valves and locks that had to be negotiated before one could reenter the third week of July. It took a day before I began to call the Fontainebleau every few hours to see if Modene had returned. When she finally came back to her room on the evening of the ninth day, her phone was ringing as she came through the door. I am certain she took it as an omen and must have concluded that I was gifted with remarkable powers, for she immediately burst into tears.

Shortly after my arrival, forty minutes later, our affair commenced. The mermaid was hooked—a singular dislocation of metaphor! If the barb had been set, it was in me. I had never gone to bed with a girl so beautiful as Modene. If there had been nights I was not likely to forget in the brothels of Montevideo, they also revealed the trap in commercial pleasure; as my body encountered new sensations, so did the rest of me tear off in moral panic: To go so far, when one cared so little! With Modene, however, it took no more than a night to fall in love. If half of me loved her more than the other half, all of me was moving, nonetheless, in the same direction. I did not know if I would ever have enough of Miss Modene Murphy, and this passion was even larger than my anxiety that I was breaking the first commandment handed over by Harlot. If a sneaky had been planted in her room while she was away, then I was engraving my voice onto the tapes of the FBI. Even in the middle of our first embrace, I kept telling myself that they would at least remain ignorant of the name of Harry Field. For on my race over to the hotel after receiving her call, I had prepared a piece of paper on which was written: “Call me Tom, or call me Dick, but Harry never.” Of course, we embraced as the door clicked shut behind me, and stopped for breath and kissed again, and then she was crying when we finished, so I did not get to hand the note over for the first five minutes, and by then, since she was no longer weeping, but laughing as well, she took in the message and laughed some more. “Why?” she whispered.

“Your room has ears,” I whispered back.

She nodded. She shivered. A wanton look came over her face. In the midst of loose mascara and smeared lipstick, she was lovely. Her beauty depended on arrogance, and that had just returned. If her room was bugged, she was, at least, a center of attention.

“Tom,” she said clearly, “let’s fuck.”

I would know her better before I would know how seldom she used the word.

On that night, the more Modene and I learned about each other, the more there was to learn. I was not accustomed to being all this insatiable, but then, I had never made love before to the mistress of the man who might yet be President of the United States, nor to the girl who had had an affair with the most popular singer in America, nor to the woman who might be the lover of a brute overlord in crime: All that, and I had not fainted on the doorstep—a monster of resolve was on the prowl in me. I could not have enough of her.

When it was all over and we came down at last to a little sleep in each other’s embrace, she whispered to me on awakening at two in the morning, “I’m hungry, Tom, I’m hungry.”

In an all-night diner in the southern end of Miami Beach, down in the twenty-four-hour sprawl on Collins Avenue of all-night movie houses and all-night stripper bars, of motels that rented by the hour while their names hissed in their neon signs, we ate sandwiches, drank coffee, and tried to talk. I felt as if I were on a boat, and dead-sweet drunk. I had never been so relaxed in my life. It was only by a last inward tide of duty that I could introduce her to the idea that we needed a private code. She took to it immediately. The urge to conspire lived as brightly as a genie in her. We decided to meet in the bars of hotels near the Fontainebleau, but the name of each hotel would stand for another—if I spoke to her of the Beau Rivage, I would mean the Eden Roc; the Eden Roc would be the Deauville, and mention of the Deauville was a signal to go to the Roney Plaza. An 8:00 P.M. date would be for six in the evening. I worked out the transpositions in duplicate and handed her one of two pieces of paper.

“Am I in danger?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

I did not know if I wished to come back to any world at all. “Mr. Flood worries me,” I said at last.

“Sam would not touch my fingernail,” she said fondly.

“In that case,” I said, “he might touch mine.” I regretted the remark instantly.

“You know,” she said, “I feel wonderful. My father was a motorcycle racer, and I think his blood is in me tonight. I feel high.”

A black pimp at the other end of the diner was trying to catch her eye and in the absence of such contact was leaving his evil cloud on me.

I felt as if I had come into the place I had been expecting to enter all my life.