dishes and pans. She would do them in the morning, let them soak overnight.
The second wave came as she was hanging up the dish towel. It lasted longer, and this time the room turned slowly around and her legs almost slued out from under her. She hung on to the edge of the sink.
When it was over she said “Oh boy,” and added up two Gibsons, two glasses of wine (or had it been three?), and one creme de menthe. No wonder.
She made it to the doorway of the den and kept her footing through the next wave by holding on to the knob with one hand and the jamb with the other.
“What is it?” Guy asked, standing up anxiously.
“Dizzy,” she said, and smiled.
He snapped off the TV and came to her, took her arm and held her surely around the waist. “No wonder,” he said. “All that booze. You probably had an empty stomach, too.”
He helped her toward the bedroom and, when her legs buckled, caught her up and carried her. He put her down on the bed and sat beside her, taking her hand and stroking her forehead sympathetically. She closed her eyes. The bed was a raft that floated on gentle ripples, tilting and swaying pleasantly. “Nice,” she said.
“Sleep is what you need,” Guy said, stroking her forehead. “A good night’s sleep.”
“We have to make a baby.”
“We will. Tomorrow. There’s plenty of time.”
“Missing the mass.”
“Sleep. Get a good night’s sleep. Go on . . .”
“Just a nap,” she said, and was sitting with a drink in her hand on President Kennedy’s yacht. It was sunny and breezy, a perfect day for a cruise. The President, studying a large map, gave terse and knowing instructions to a Negro mate.
Guy had taken off the top of her pajamas. “Why are you taking them off?” she asked.
“To make you more comfortable,” he said.
“I’m comfortable.”
“Sleep, Ro.”
He undid the snaps at her side and slowly drew off the bottoms. Thought she was asleep and didn’t know. Now she had nothing on at all except a red bikini, but the other women on the yacht-Jackie Kennedy, Pat Lawford, and Sarah Churchill-were wearing bikinis too, so it was all right, thank goodness. The President was in his Navy uniform. He had completely recovered from the assassination and looked better than ever. Hutch was standing on the dock with armloads of weather-forecasting equipment. “Isn’t Hutch coming with us?” Rosemary asked the President.
“Catholics only,” he said, smiling. “I wish we weren’t bound by these prejudices, but unfortunately we are.”
“But what about Sarah Churchill?” Rosemary asked. She turned to point, but Sarah Churchill was gone and the family was there in her place: Ma, Pa, and everybody, with the husbands, wives, and children. Margaret was pregnant, and so were Jean and Dodie and Ernestine.
Guy was taking off her wedding ring. She wondered why, but was too tired to ask. “Sleep,” she said, and slept.
It was the first time the Sistine Chapel had been opened to the public and she was inspecting the ceiling on a new elevator that carried the visitor through the chapel horizontally, making it possible to see the frescoes exactly as Michelangelo, painting them, had seen them. How glorious they were! She saw God extending his finger to Adam, giving him the divine spark of life; and the underside of a shelf partly covered with gingham contact paper as she was carried backward through the linen closet. “Easy,” Guy said, and another man said, “You’ve got her too high.”
“Typhoon!” Hutch shouted from the dock amid all his weather-forecasting equipment. “Typhoon! It killed fifty-five people in London and it’s heading this way!” And Rosemary knew he was right. She must warn the President. The ship was heading for disaster.
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.
