Marina admired Kennedy in his own right—not only as a reminder of Anatoly. The more she saw of him the better she liked him, and it got so that she would flip through the pages of every magazine she could lay her hands on, asking: “Where’s Kennedy? Where’s Kennedy?” With a patience that was utterly unlike him, Lee translated everything for her, every article and every caption—about the president, his wife, their children, and the Robert F. Kennedy family. He did not balk, as he did when she asked him to read about movie stars, nor did he scold her for being unable to read it herself. He seemed nearly as interested in the Kennedys as she was, and if the article was favorable, he seemed to agree with it. About three times that summer they heard Kennedy give a speech over the radio (they still did not have a TV). Lee listened intently and said “Shh” once when Marina asked him to translate while the president was still speaking. After one speech, probably the one of July 26 when Kennedy announced the signing of a nuclear test-ban treaty in Moscow, Lee told her that the speech had been an appeal for disarmament. But generally he refused to tell Marina what the speeches were about. He went quietly back to his book without a comment.
Marina got the impression that her husband liked and approved of the president and believed that for the United States in 1963, John F. Kennedy was the best president the country could hope to have. His only reservation seemed to be that socialism was a better system. Lee did say that some critics blamed Kennedy for “losing” Cuba. He added, however, that Kennedy would like to pursue a better, more gentle policy toward Cuba but was not free to do as he wished. A president, he explained, had to reckon with the opinions of others.
As for Marina, her reactions were entirely personal. If anything, she thought more about Mrs. Kennedy than about the president because Mrs. Kennedy, like Marina, was a wife and mother, and both of them were pregnant. To Marina Jacqueline Kennedy was a latter-day goddess. She might conceivably have passionate feelings underneath, but Marina supposed that, being Catholic and upper class, she must have been taught to restrain them. Indeed, Marina wondered whether the First Lady, unlike herself, was not a bit of a “cold fish.” But she was aware of “Jackie” as a human being, too. She was interested in what she wore and how she fixed her hair, and she was concerned about her pregnancy.
Marina’s feelings for the president were once again utterly personal. She loved photographs of Kennedy that showed him with his face wide open in a smile. Most of all she loved the pictures of him walking along a beach or on the golf course, his hands thrust into his pockets and wearing an old sweater and a pair of khaki pants, just like anybody else.[9] She was astonished that in this country such photographs of the president were allowed to appear. It seemed odd to her that the president’s picture could be taken “in such an informal pose.”
“They take his picture in all poses,” Lee said.
In her admiration for Kennedy, Marina had only one reservation: he was in “politics.” When she thought of Lee or of other men she had known, it was clear to her that anyone who cared about politics, especially any man who was even slightly tempted to place politics over his own family, must be sick or trying to escape personal unhappiness. To her, President Kennedy’s interest in politics meant that something was missing in her life.
Marina speculated—to herself, not to Lee—about the president as man and lover. Since he looked like Anatoly, she wondered if he kissed like Anatoly. The resemblance suggested that he did. Marina did her best to convince herself that because he had a bad back he probably wasn’t much of a lover. Even so, the words Marina now uses to sum up her feelings toward the president are identical to the words she uses of only two other men in her life until then, Anatoly and Lee. The words are: “I was in love with him.”
Marina had her photograph of President Kennedy, and Lee had his of Fidel Castro, which he clipped out of the Soviet magazine Ogonyok and pinned to the living room wall. Marina did not know what he planned to do with all his leaflets; she did not know that on the afternoon of June 16 he had passed some of them out at the Dumaine Street Wharf. But she did notice that Lee’s habits were beginning to change. He was getting very sloppy. By late May and early June, he had become alarmingly indifferent to the way he looked and went around wearing only sandals, work pants, and a dirty T-shirt. Marina would beg him, when they were going out, please to put on a fresh shirt. He refused—and she would cry. She was ashamed to be seen on the street with him.
When he went to work, he looked even worse. “My work isn’t worth getting dressed for,” he told Marina.
“Do it for yourself, then,” she said. “Or if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”
“I simply don’t care,” he replied.
He stopped shaving on weekends and by mid-July shaved only every other day. Where formerly he had brushed his teeth three times a day, now he brushed them only at night. He stopped washing his face in the morning. And when he took a bath, he even stopped using soap. He just sat listlessly in the bathtub until he could stir himself to get out. “I’m not dirty,” he would say.
He refused to let Marina darn his socks, preferring to go around in old, holey ones instead. She had to steal his socks if she was to mend them at all. He would burp at meals without excusing himself, and he got his hair cut at the nape of the neck so he had hair only on the top of his head. “I’ll wear it any way I like,” he said.
Marina told him that her Russian relatives had thought he was from a good family because he was clean and good-looking. “If you’d looked this way when I met you, I never would have married you at all.”
His breath got bad, and Marina used to beg him to brush his teeth, especially if he was going to kiss her. “You’re my wife. You’re supposed to love me any way I am,” and he would come at her, his mouth open, breathing as hard as he could. He would try to kiss her, yet his eyes were so full of hate she thought he was going to kill her instead.
It got so he was dirty, unshaven, and unwashed nearly all the time. He knew it made Marina angry. “Ah-ha,” he would say. “You can’t stand me this way. I won’t wash and I won’t clean up just because you want me to.” But Marina saw that it had nothing to do with her. He had simply lost all desire to take care of himself.
Lee’s behavior was also unpredictable. Often he would look up from his book to propose an outing. Marina would get dressed and would dress the baby, too. Then, at the last minute, Lee would change his mind and tell them to go without him. Sometimes it was a ploy to get rid of them so he could work on his writings alone. Yet he hated their being away for long and was distraught if they were as little as half an hour late getting home.
By far the worst change, however, was the return for a few weeks in June of Lee’s feeling that Marina was his property, or slave, and he her owner. This meant he had the right to take her, sexually, by force any time he liked, and now and then he tried.
Marina was outraged. “You advanced revolutionary,” she shouted at Lee as he was stamping his pro-Castro leaflets. “You have a moral code no better than that of ancient Egypt.” She now realized that Lee existed in two worlds: a fantasy, political world, of which he gave her barely a glimpse, and an everyday, down-to-earth world in which June was the one human being he truly loved. Marina, too, was part of this world, and it was her role to rear and protect his “treasure,” June.
But there was another world she knew nothing about: the real political world. Lee existed in that world, too, and from time to time it seems to have intruded upon his fantasies. Thus on June 23, a Sunday, when he had more time than usual to read the newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune carried a front-page story to the effect that President Kennedy had left Washington by air for a major journey to Western Europe.
9
One picture of the type Marina describes appeared in