A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [66]
It took ten days to persuade the general he had no choice but to face his inquisitors. He donned his military coat with the medals and epaulets, pulled the blue hat over his head, took Kitty’s arm, and walked with her into the phalanx of cameras awaiting him. Dolly remembered how perplexed the general had looked in those pictures, newly born in his soft blue hat, unsure how to proceed. Beside him Kitty was smiling, wearing a black close-fitting dress that Arc must have gone to some trouble to procure, so apt was it: casual and intimate, plain yet revealing, the sort of dress a woman wears in private, with her lover. Her eyes were hard to read, but each time Dolly looked at them, rubbing her gaze obsessively over the newsprint, she’d heard Kitty’s laugh in her ears.
“Have you seen Miss Jackson’s new movie?” Arc asked. “I thought it was her finest yet.”
Dolly had seen it: a romantic comedy in which Kitty played a jockey, appearing effortless on horseback. Dolly had gone with Lulu at the local theater in the small upstate town where they’d moved shortly after the other generals began to call: first G., then A., then L. and P. and Y. Word had gotten out, and Dolly was deluged with offers of work from mass murderers hungry for a fresh start. “I’m out of the game,” she’d told them, and directed them to her former competitors.
Lulu had opposed the move at first, but Dolly was firm. And Lulu had settled in quickly at the local public school, where she took up soccer and found a new coterie of girls who seemed to follow her everywhere. No one in town had ever heard of La Doll, so Lulu had nothing to hide.
Dolly received a generous lump sum from the general shortly after his rendezvous with the photographers. “A gift to express our immense gratitude for your invaluable guidance, Miss Peale,” Arc had said over the telephone, but Dolly had heard his smile and understood: hush money. She used it to open a small gourmet shop on Main Street, where she sold fine produce and unusual cheeses, artfully displayed and lit by a system of small spotlights Dolly designed herself. “This feels like Paris” was a comment she often heard from New Yorkers who came on weekends to their country houses.
Now and then Dolly would get a shipment of star fruit, and she always made sure to put a few aside to eat with Lulu. She would bring them back to the small house they shared at the end of a quiet street. After supper, the radio on, windows open to the yawning night, she and Lulu would feast on the sweet, strange flesh.
9
Forty-Minute Lunch:
Kitty Jackson Opens Up About
Love, Fame, and Nixon!
JULES JONES reports
Movie stars always look small the first time you see them, and Kitty Jackson is no exception, exceptional though she may be in every other way.
Actually, small isn’t the word; she’s minute—a human bonsai in a white sleeveless dress, seated at a back table of a Madison Avenue restaurant, talking on a cell phone. She smiles at me as I take my seat and rolls her eyes at the phone. Her hair is that blond you see everywhere, “highlighted,” my ex-fiancée calls it, though on Kitty Jackson this tousled commingling of blond and brown appears both more natural and more costly than it did on Janet Green. Her face (Kitty’s) is one you can imagine looking merely pretty among the other faces in, say, a high school classroom: upturned nose, full mouth, big blue eyes. Yet on Kitty Jackson, for reasons I can’t pinpoint exactly—the same reasons, I suppose, that her highlighted hair looks superior to ordinary (Janet Green’s) highlighted hair—this unexceptional face registers as extraordinary.
She’s still on the phone, and five minutes have passed.
Finally she signs off, folds her phone into a disk the size of an after-dinner mint and stows it in a small white patent-leather purse. Then she starts to apologize. It is instantly clear that Kitty