“Why not?” the senator demanded of me. “Are you too good for him?”
I tilted my head, my mouth pursed, and glanced at Senator Dodd’s expectant face. “Not too good, no, just…” I shrugged. “I’m newly sober, you see, and I’d have to be truly loaded to just fall into bed with someone I’ve only very recently met. Even if that someone is a Democrat.”
Now the air around us hung back, holding itself in check to see what would happen next. But I knew that I would not let this man get the upper hand, or somehow discomfit or shock me. I had some laws and this was one. Whatever this imperious… I want to say drunk, but he wasn’t that, not yet… whatever this imperious inebriate-to-be threw at me, I’d say something right back.
“So you were a drinker?” he said. “What did you drink?”
I uncrossed and recrossed my legs. A waiter hovered with a bottle. “I didn’t drink really, so much as take pills alcoholically. And do acid. I liked acid a lot.” I smiled at him without my eyes, watching my unexpected antagonist seated opposite me.
Four sets of liberal eyes now slid from my face back to his. There was a smell of bread. Bread and chicken.
“Did you have sex on acid?”
Wow. This was serious. There was no turning back. I looked to the ceiling for help and found it. “Acid isn’t that great for sex, you know? Well, maybe you don’t.” I tilted my head, schooling him socially.
Game on.
“It intensifies everything. It complicates the simplest things and simplifies the most complex.”
Now, the Senator was watching me with mild eyes set back in his famous handsome face. All the others were watching us, riveted. I was hyperalert now, ready for anything.
“What about masturbation?”
My eyebrows raised, as my hand almost unconsciously closed around the butter knife.
“What about it?” He was about to answer when I continued on, unabashed, “Oh, do you mean do I do it? On LSD?” I squinted my eyes and peered into one of the corners of the room. It occurred to me that this was funny—funny with an emergency in it. I smiled without losing much of my footing. “Play with yourself is the term that I like best.” I spread my smile around the table generously. “You know, like playing with a child.” I looked down into my un-napkined lap and covered my eyes with both hands, then uncovered them a moment later. “Peekaboo, I see you!” I cooed down to the vicinity of my lap. “Peekaboo! You’re it! Bang, bang, fall down!” I made a gun with my thumb and forefinger and began to shoot. I felt five pairs of very astonished round eyes staring at me from around the table.
This was a circle of privileged people gathered together to enjoy their privileges. And although, as I said, in our country there’s no actual royalty—no generations of fragile fine folk sitting on thrones and wearing shiny crowns—everyone knows that if there is anything like American aristocracy, then it’s them. The Kennedys. Always seeming to be in a class all by themselves. As a priest with a thick Irish brogue once told me, “No one understands what this family goes through. I think of them as ‘the Special Ks.’”
And then there’s what I’ve heard called “Reel Royalty”—the scandal-laden kings and queens of the silver screen. It is from this seed that I sprouted. This is the heredity that claims me, informs me, defines me. This is part of what had led me—and not blindfolded—to this room in this restaurant where I was on a blind date with a senator. A senator who laughed at my pantomime of playing peekaboo with my privates, in an effort to entertain, yes, partly, but mainly to place myself outside the grasp of Senator Kennedy’s sarcasm.
Did he take me on like that because I was merely an actress by profession—a job requiring little or no intellect or education? Did he turn his blazing bright scorn on me because I looked like a willing victim?
Maybe.
I guess I’ll never know, as he has now gone from us. A great man, making those who dined with him on this night near great. But I was just a cute little thing, barely big enough to be worth tearing down with gentle teasing, let alone this full-on assault.
By now we had blundered headlong into a world of who could outshock who. Which one of us would say the thing that would stun the table into silence? Not that most of those assembled weren’t silent already, having stepped back without moving to get out of the way of the business at hand.
Somehow, the subject of my father came up. “My father?” I shrugged. “I didn’t see that much of my dad when I was growing up. He left when I was small.” Kennedy must have asked more about my father, somehow daring or double-daring me to go further than someone would normally go. At least socially. At a table with two senators who, until this night, had been strangers to me, and those other three humans in attendance. All of us waiting to see what would happen. Just how far would we each go? Would I take the bait and reply to each all-too-intimate question? When would one of us, or the evening itself, hit the proverbial wall?
“The night before I got married I was talking to my father on the phone from my future ex-husband’s house. And my father said to me, ‘You have a great ass. You should be marrying me.’ And you know what I said?” I fixed my brown eyes on Senator Kennedy’s blue ones.
“What?” he obligingly asked.
“After thinking about it for a second, as one would, I said, ‘Thank you.’” These sorts of stories beg for a pause, while everyone tries to sort out what was just said, blinking back the thoughts forming behind our eyes.
“Do you think he actually meant that?” he asked.
“No,” I said, taking a sip of my soda. “I think he was just high and was saying things for conversation’s sake.”
I don’t believe we could have gotten to this place if I hadn’t thought, Oh, you think you can embarrass me by asking me something shocking? And what? I’ll sit there flipped to the tits, rendered speechless from the shock and awe of it?!
The senator and I stared at each other across the table. Whose move was it? Surely not mine.
“What do you do with your father that you like to do?” he asked finally, to which I responded, “Sing.” He tilted his head and rubbed his chin. “Sing, then,” he ordered me mildly. “Sing what you would sing with your dad.”
It was a dare, I swear it was. I have a clear image in my mind of sitting quite tall, or as tall as one can sit and still be quite short. I sat and opened my mouth and out came my voice, clear and bold and loud, singing a signature tune from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.
“If I loved you,” I began—and I do have a good voice, I swear. I’d almost have to with both of my parents being singers—“Time and again I would try to say / All I’d want you to know.” Everything was quiet in the small room except for my singing. “If I loved you / Words wouldn’t come in an easy way / Round in circles I’d goooo!” And the whole time my eyes held his, his eyes holding mine right back. The others at the table were startled witnesses.
“Longing to tell you / But afraid and shy / I’d let my golden chances pass me by!”
Years later, I was in Washington at a party celebrating Clinton’s second inauguration, when a woman rushed up to me, her face shining, “Do you remember me? I was there! That night in the restaurant with Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd.”
I blinked at her. “Sure, I remember,” I said. “Who could forget a night like that?”
We were on a staircase and she was holding both of my arms, breathless and smiling bright. “We spoke of that night for ages. It was incredible. We’d waited for years for someone to take him on like that.”