But the President was gone. Everyone was gone. The deck was infinite and bare, except for, far away, the Negro mate holding the wheel unremittingly on its course.
Rosemary went to him and saw at once that he hated all white people, hated her. “You’d better go down below, Miss,” he said, courteous but hating her, not even waiting to hear the warning she had brought.
Below was a huge ballroom where on one side a church burned fiercely and on the other a black-bearded man stood glaring at her. In the center was a bed. She went to it and lay down, and was suddenly surrounded by naked men and women, ten or a dozen, with Guy among them. They were elderly, the women grotesque and slack-breasted. Minnie and her friend Laura-Louise were there, and Roman in a black miter and a black silk robe. With a thin black wand he was drawing designs on her body, dipping the wand’s point in a cup of red held for him by a sun-browned man with a white moustache. The point moved back and forth across her stomach and down ticklingly to the insides of her thighs. The naked people were chanting-flat, unmusical, foreign-tongued syllables-and a flute or clarinet accompanied them. “She’s awake, she sees!” Guy whispered to Minnie. He was large-eyed, tense. “She don’t see,” Minnie said. “As long as she ate the mouse she can’t see nor hear. She’s like dead. Now sing.”
Jackie Kennedy came into the ballroom in an exquisite gown of ivory satin embroidered with pearls. “I’m so sorry to hear you aren’t feeling well,” she said, hurrying to Rosemary’s side.
Rosemary explained about the mouse-bite, minimizing it so Jackie wouldn’t worry.
“You’d better have your legs tied down,” Jackie said, “in case of convulsions.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Rosemary said. “There’s always a chance it was rabid.” She watched with interest as white-smocked interns tied her legs, and her arms too, to the four bedposts.
“If the music bothers you,” Jackie said, “let me know and I’ll have it stopped.”
“Oh, no,” Rosemary said. “Please don’t change the program on my account. It doesn’t bother me at all, really it doesn’t.”
Jackie smiled warmly at her. “Try to sleep,” she said. “We’ll be waiting up on deck.” She withdrew, her satin gown whispering.
Rosemary slept a while, and then Guy came in and began making love to her. He stroked her with both hands-a long, relishing stroke that began at her bound wrists, slid down over her arms, breasts, and loins, and became a voluptuous tickling between her legs. He repeated the exciting stroke again and again, his hands hot and sharp-nailed, and then, when she was readyready-more-than-ready, he slipped a hand in under her buttocks, raised them, lodged his hardness against her, and pushed it powerfully in. Bigger he was than always; painfully, wonderfully big. He lay forward upon her, his other arm sliding under her back to hold her, his broad chest crushing her breasts. (He was wearing, because it was to be a costume party, a suit of coarse leathery armor.) Brutally, rhythmically, he drove his new hugeness. She opened her eyes and looked into yellow furnace-eyes, smelled sulphur and tannis root, felt wet breath on her mouth, heard lust-grunts and the breathing of onlookers.
This is no dream, she thought. This is real, this is happening. Protest woke in her eyes and throat, but something covered her face, smothering her in a sweet stench.
The hugeness kept driving in her, the leathery body banging itself against her again and again and again.
The Pope came in with a suitcase in his hand and a coat over his arm. “Jackie tells me you’ve been bitten by a mouse,” he said.
“Yes,” Rosemary said. “That’s why I didn’t come see you.” She spoke sadly, so he wouldn’t suspect she had just had an orgasm.
“That’s all right,” he said. “We wouldn’t want you to jeopardize your health.”
“Am I forgiven, Father?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” he said. He held out his hand for her to kiss the ring. Its stone was a silver filigree ball less than an inch in diameter; inside it, very tiny, Anna Maria Alberghetti sat waiting.
Rosemary kissed it and the Pope hurried out to catch his plane.
Nine
“Hey, it’s after nine,” Guy said, shaking her shoulder.
She pushed his hand away and turned over onto her stomach. “Five minutes,” she said, deep in the pillow.
“No,” he said, and yanked her hair. “I’ve got to be at Dominick’s at ten.”
“Eat out.”
“The hell I will.” He slapped her behind through the blanket.
Everything came back: the dreams, the drinks, Minnie’s chocolate mousse, the Pope, that awful moment of not-dreaming. She turned back over and raised herself on her arms, looking at Guy. He was lighting a cigarette, sleep-rumpled, needing a shave. He had pajamas on. She was nude.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Ten after nine.”
“What time did I go to sleep?” She sat up.
“About eight-thirty,” he said. “And you didn’t go to sleep, honey; you passed out. From now on you get cocktails or wine, not cocktails and wine.”
“The dreams I had,” she said, rubbing her forehead and closing her eyes. “President Kennedy, the Pope, Minnie and Roman . . .” She opened her eyes and saw scratches on her left breast; two parallel hairlines of red running down into the nipple. Her thighs stung; she pushed the blanket from them and saw more scratches, seven or eight going this way and that.
“Don’t yell,” Guy said. “I already filed them down.” He showed short smooth fingernails.
Rosemary looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“I didn’t want to miss Baby Night,” he said.
“You mean you-“
“And a couple of my nails were ragged.”
“While I was-out?”
He nodded and grinned. “It was kind of fun,” he said, “in a necrophile sort of way.”
She looked away, her hands pulling the blanket back over her thighs. “I dreamed someone was-raping me,” she said. “I don’t know who. Someone -unhuman.”
“Thanks a lot,” Guy said.
“You were there, and Minnie and Roman, other people . . . It was some kind of ceremony.”
“I tried to wake you,” he said, “but you were out like a light.”
She turned further away and swung her legs out on the other side of the bed.
“What’s the matter?” Guy asked.
“Nothing,” she said, sitting there, not looking around at him. “I guess I feel funny about your doing it that way, with me unconscious.”
“I didn’t want to miss the night,” he said.
“We could have done it this morning or tonight. Last night wasn’t the only split second in the whole month. And even if it had been . . .”
“I thought you would have wanted me to,” he said, and ran a finger up her back.
She squirmed away from it. “It’s supposed to be shared, not one awake and one asleep,” she said. Then: “Oh, I guess I’m being silly.” She got up and went to the closet for her housecoat.
“I’m sorry I scratched you,” Guy said. “I was a wee bit loaded myself.”
She made breakfast and, when Guy had gone, did the sinkful of dishes and put the kitchen to rights. She opened windows in the living room and bedroom -the smell of last night’s fire still lingered in the apartment-made the bed, and took a shower; a long one, first hot and then cold. She stood capless and immobile under the downpour, waiting for her head to clear and her thoughts to find an order and conclusion.
Had last night really been, as Guy had put it, Baby Night? Was she now, at this moment, actually pregnant? Oddly enough, she didn’t care. She was unhappy-whether or not it was silly to be so. Guy had taken her without her knowledge, had made love to her as a mindless body (“kind of fun in a necrophile sort of way”) rather than as the complete mind-and-body person she was; and had done so, moreover, with a savage gusto that had produced scratches, aching soreness, and a nightmare so real and intense that she could almost see on her stomach the designs Roman had drawn with his red-dipped wand. She scrubbed soap on herself vigorously, resentfully. True, he had done it for the best motive in the world, to make a baby, and true too he had drunk as much as she had; but she wished that no motive and no number of drinks could have enabled him to take her that way, taking only her body without her soul or self or she-ness-whatever it was he presumably loved. Now, looking back over the past weeks and months, she felt a disturbing presence of overlooked signals just beyond memory, signals of a shortcoming in his love for her, of a disparity between what he said and what he felt. He was an actor; could anyone know when an actor was true and not acting?