Charlie had been with other women between Pearl Harbor and his and Margaret’s post-VJ-Day nuptials. He hadn’t told Margaret, and she had never asked. In France he had focused on leading his platoon and pushing aside the nihilism that threatened to overwhelm them. But there were moments of which he was not proud—a night in the Alsace when a terrified woman threw herself into his arms, in gratitude born from desperation and survival. And there were other times, too, when Charlie felt himself on the precipice of such despair that nothing else would arrest it. No one even bothered to romanticize it. This was not joie de vivre. They were rats in a ship’s hull. He wasn’t proud of his behavior in France, but he tried to leave it behind. It was overseas, it was during war, it was before he was married.

Here in a Jacuzzi at Sinatra’s compound—well, this was not war.

And with that, he permitted himself to look again at Lola, who was arching her back as she stretched—

Charlie stood up abruptly in the hot tub. “Excuse me,” he said to Lola. “I just remembered I have a phone call to make.”

“Doesn’t look like you’re thinking about a phone call,” Lola observed.

He took one last look at her, swallowed, and walked inside.

Good Lord, he thought as he walked by Sinatra and Judy. She was straddling him on the sofa, though they were both still fully dressed.

“Not so easy being righteous when other dames actually want to screw you, is it?” Sinatra said loudly. Charlie suddenly wondered about the crooner’s plans to marry Juliet Prowse. Maybe Frank had forgotten.

In the kitchen, Charlie found Jacobs collecting his wallet and keys and preparing for a quick shopping trip. He asked if he could join him.

“I can pick up anything you want, Congressman,” Jacobs said. “No need for you to come.”

“I need…I need to go with you,” Charlie said. “If you don’t mind.”

Soon they were winding their way out of the Tamarisk Country Club.

“Not everyone can keep up the pace after hours,” Jacobs said when the silence in the car became awkward.

“Lawford arriving with the party girls changed the tenor,” Charlie said.

After a brief pause, Jacobs said: “Maybe it brought it all out into the open a bit more.”

Charlie considered that.

“Anyway, I could all but see the angel and devil on your shoulders in that hot tub,” Jacobs said. “Looked like a draw.”

“That’s probably being generous to the angel,” Charlie said.

They drove in silence a bit longer, passing a blur of green—immense trees that served as fences, broken up only by driveways that led to mansions. The quiet seemed awkward to Charlie, although he wasn’t sure why.