Lucky Bastard (41 page)

“That's okay,” Danny said. “A lot of people say the same thing. Always have. But I know Jack better than anyone.”

“Then you must know something the rest of us don't,” the governor said.

Two

1
Peter's sarcasm about my creativity notwithstanding, I did occasionally have useful ideas, and one night in Snowshoe, Pennsylvania, I broached a subject never before discussed between us. Morgan had just left us. That night, a wintry one, Morgan had been wearing her usual baggy trousers, sweatshirt, parka, and army boots. Her hair (have I mentioned that it was streaked with gray?) was tied in a bandanna, her granny glasses were covered with thumbprints and flecks of paint from the propaganda posters she had been silk-screening as a corporal act of solidarity with one of her feminist groups.
Abortion Now! Save the Whales! U.S. out of [fill in the blank]!
Gray hair or no, she was fresh and, by American standards, youthful. In certain lights, after certain turnings of the head, as when she smiled at one of Peter's quips, she was mysteriously lovely.

She had had such a moment on this particular evening, and Peter had taken note. I had seen the look in his eyes, the thought in his mind: What could I have made of this girl's beauty if her mind had not been more useful to me? What might I make of her now?

After she left us, but before her image faded from Peter's memory—usually a process of milliseconds—I said, “Morgan does not look much like the first lady of Ohio.”

Peter was reading a report on his new bank. My words produced an uninterested lifting of the eyes, a shrug. What else was new?

I persisted. “At one point, Comrade General, you suggested that the time would come when Morgan would have to become a more traditional American political wife.”

Needless to say, he had never said any such thing, and probably realized this. Nevertheless he said, “Yes?” Just as if he really had made such a foresighted suggestion at an earlier time and was just too tired to remember it.

I said, “I wonder if the time has now come.”

Peter, his eyes still fixed on the page, said, “Why now, after all these years?”

“Because we are moving into a new stage. Togetherness is important to Americans.”

Until now, the cover story for Morgan's apartness, designed to protect Jack from being contaminated should her cover ever be blown, had been that the Adamses were a loving and devoted but very private couple, and that Morgan insisted on leading her own professional life, quite independent of her husband's political career.

“And now what will she do?” Peter asked. “Gaze adoringly as he delivers speeches? Entertain political ladies to tea?”

“She already does that when he's out campaigning. What I have in mind is a physical transformation. This is called a makeover.”

I saw that Peter was confused by the word, a most satisfactory result. He said, “Come to the point.”

“New hair, new clothes, cosmetics. Manners. She must leave the costume of revolution behind her.”

“Why?” said Peter. “Isn't her dowdiness an advantage—handsome governor loves plain-Jane wife?”

“In Ohio, perhaps. But when he runs for president he'll need a princess by his side. Not a maid of Stalingrad.”

A bad joke. But Peter said, “Very well. Make her over. Tell her it is my desire, my order.” He smiled, actually amused. “I wish I could be a fly on the wall when you give her the news.”

I raised the matter with Morgan the next time we met, about three weeks later when a convention on women's rights brought her to Manhattan. We dined late, at an expensive East Side Japanese restaurant. At the time sushi was a bourgeois fad and we were surrounded by an after-theater crowd who joked knowledgeably with aloof sushi-makers and kimonoed waitresses about
negi toro
and
hamachi
and
uni
, as if they were chatting about nose and finish with a sommelier. This made me gruff. We ordered tempura, the only cooked dish on the menu. I ate the shrimp, Morgan the vegetables. Then I passed on Peter's instructions to Morgan. After absorbing the words she went as still as a doe.

“What exactly are you talking about?” she said.

I explained: a change in appearance as well as a change in role. New style, new personality, a certain new demureness, contact lenses instead of glasses. Dyed hair. Maquillage. Her jaw dropped.

“Carmine fingernails,” I said, attempting to lighten the moment.

She threw down her chopsticks and made a wordless sound of disgust.

A flash of revolutionary temper, strangled shout: “Dmitri, I'll be god—”

I said, “Argument is futile. This is Peter's wish.”

Of course she did not stop arguing. As if I were a lover who had gotten her into bed by spouting Engels and then asked her to convert to Republicanism (not a bad analogy, in her mind), Morgan told me furiously that she was what she was, take it or leave it. She would lose all credibility with her clientele, with the Movement, they would denounce her as a sellout—

“Believe me,” I said, “they will not. In their secret hearts they all want to be starlets.”

“That's insulting.”

“Nonsense. Think of it as a disguise, an extension of your trade-craft, another way to blind the enemy.”

“Jesus, but you're diabolical. Everything is a revolutionary act.”

“If coldly considered, yes.”

I handed Morgan a business card for a charm farm in Florida.

She said, “The Aphrodite? The
Aphrodite
? In Palm Beach, for Christ's sake? I can't go to Florida. I've got a million—”

I said, “They are expecting you tomorrow. It will take a week for them to transform you, so be sure to call your husband.”

“And tell him what?”

I leaned toward her. “That you will have a surprise for him.”

“Don't wink at me, Dmitri,” she said. “I hate it.”

But even at that early stage, one could see that she was not nearly so reluctant as she made out. She was human, after all, and female. Perhaps her Leonardo awaited her in Palm Beach, ready, like the original, to lead the dull young wife out of the mortal flesh and onto the canvas as the immortal Gioconda.

I said, “One little smile?”

Morgan obliged, tight-lipped and empty-eyed, as if she had read my thought. “Do you want a photograph of the results?” she asked.

“I will have a personal report from a certain Georgian who will be in Palm Beach on business.”

She smiled. “You think of everything.”

In cold revolutionary terms, yes. And as might have been expected, he fell in love with this redesigned Morgan all over again, just as he had done with all her previous personae.

2
A week later, when Morgan came home to the governor's mansion, she found Jack playing cars on the floor with the twins. He did not recognize her at first; neither did Fitz and Skipper, who seldom saw her anyway.

Then Jack said, “Shazam! It's Mommy, guys!”

“No it's not,” said Fitz, kicking her on the ankle.

Morgan had been transformed—flowing coiffure, face elaborately made up, sleek designer suit, long depilitated legs seldom before glimpsed by the eyes of man, pedicured feet in sling-back high heels. Her large eyes, always before swimming behind thick lenses, were now exposed, moist and dreamy and slightly out of focus, a most attractive effect, beneath new contact lenses that made them subtly greener than they really were. Perfume wafted from her hair, from the creases of her flesh.

“Good God, how did you get past security?” Jack said.

Morgan said, “They recognized my voice when I raised it. But I'm supposed to work on that, be more kittenish.”

“But why?”

“Orders from Peter. It's a disguise, to get you more votes. How do you like it?”

Morgan tossed her luxuriant hair, dark blond but crackling with auburn lights. Jack laughed aloud.

“Yeah, baby,” he said. “That's
stimulating.
”

“Forget it, baby,” Morgan replied.

To Morgan's friends on the Left who were distressed by this abrupt transformation, she told the simple truth: This Morgan was an impersonation, a necessary tactic, a way like any other to wage revolution. The reassurance was not really necessary. As I had predicted, they loved the way she was now—the Red Avenger as Barbie. Such a delicious joke!

For many years, as you know, Jack had been telling true believers to ignore appearances and believe in him as an act of faith. As he explained, “As long as these people think you're lying for a good cause,
their
cause, you can get away with anything.” For Jack Adams, bastard son—in his mind at least—of JFK, a reincarnated Caligula who convinced the world that he was really young King Arthur, this was blood wisdom.

Caligula's court, the media, which the old Morgan had avoided like poison while they largely ignored her, was intrigued by the new one and, to her surprise, she by it. This new Morgan was tremendously telegenic. She began to appear with some frequency, then almost compulsively, on talk shows. So charming was her on-camera conversation, so quick her wit, so visible her sympathy for every kind of human being, that there was talk of giving her her own talk show.

Something else happened. For the first time in years Morgan felt men's eyes on her, and after years of feigning frigidity she was surprised to find that she enjoyed the heat of their regard, that she liked returning an age-old, slow measured glance that rebuffed and invited at the same time. Even Danny Miller, most faithful of husbands, gave her the occasional appreciative look. They were seeing a good deal more of each other now as a result of their common involvement in the Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve, which was prospering as a result of Morgan's amazingly good advice as a management consultant. Morgan flirted a little with Danny—nothing much: a flash of thigh, a smile, a physical delight in his jokes. Afterward, lying abed, she felt that he might have made a move, if he were anyone but Danny and she were anyone but Jack's wife.

And then what? Alone in the dark, she imagined it in detail.

3
Though there was no way to be certain, short of submerging him in a diving bell, we had the impression that Jack was living a more orderly sex life. He no longer had his call-in show, and his mobility and privacy had been greatly diminished by the constrictions of high office. Now that he was the governor, he was accompanied at all times by bodyguards. As a precaution against his turning them, JFK-style, into companions of the bedchamber, Morgan took over the job of interviewing and hiring them. Every one she selected was a devout, born-again Christian family man who abhorred sin. This was Jack's first close-up experience with prudery, but being Jack, he found a way around the problem by arranging daytime rendezvous with seemingly respectable females in the privacy of his office, by combining nighttime political events with quick encounters in parking lots, or by slipping out of the house in the early hours of the morning to jog and then meeting women in the offices of Miller, Adams & Miller before the doors opened.

Also, quite early in the game he hit on the happy idea of hiring female bodyguards. To prepare the ground for this new personnel policy, he planted stories in the press demanding women's rights in law enforcement and responded to these stories by announcing that he would set an example by hiring women as guardians of the governor's person. Applications poured in. On Jack's instructions to the mail room, the ones with photos attached were routed directly to him. Most of those hired were young, pretty, and eager for promotion. He also had the power to appoint a large number of state officials, and the markedly higher standard of pulchritude among secretaries, clerks, tax collectors, and even judges soon became a running joke in press rooms and political back rooms.

“What exactly do you think you're doing?” Morgan asked Jack.

“I thought you wanted me to appoint women to office,” he said.

“Women, yes,” said Morgan. “A harem, no.”

“Morgan, what a strange and suspicious mind you have. I am compelled by laws lobbied by your own clients to appoint women to every feasible post.”

“What are you going to do when one of them sells her story to the tabloids?
THE GOVERNOR SUCKED MY GUN. I WAS A SEX SLAVE IN A STATE TROOPER UNIFORM
. Not that they spend much time in their cute little outfits, if I know you. And I do.”

“Look at the files,” Jack said. “Every one of these women is a good Christian girl.”

“And you know them all in the biblical sense.”

This development did little to calm the turbulent waters within Morgan. She was, at thirty-seven, a woman at the apex of her sexual life cycle. Her newly revealed beauty had made a sex object of her while doing her no sexual good. She had not had a rendezvous with the Georgian since the makeover in Palm Beach. But beyond that she was outraged because Jack had outwitted and outmaneuvered her yet again. Her tantrums over the risks Jack was taking with the operation—
her
operation—became more frequent and more violent as the intensity of her jealousy increased in lockstep with her frustration. Jack saw this, she knew he did; he understood it. He did nothing to allay it because, by the ground rules laid down by Peter, it had nothing to do with him.