All the Houses (11 page)

I drank a beer and watched TV, fell asleep to a report of another roadside bomb somewhere in Iraq.

When I woke up, I went online to look for temp work. I was so accustomed to making efforts that led to nothing, to writing pilots and pitch documents that wound up in wastebaskets—and meanwhile to taking jobs in production that, unglamorous though they were, I'd found by knowing the right people—that I'd almost forgotten there were other kinds of jobs that were more or less readily available to college graduates, at least in D.C. in 2004 there were. Although I was ten years too old for filing and Xeroxing, I sent in a résumé. I touted my experience with the relevant software. I talked to some woman on the phone for less than ten minutes, and the next week I landed in an office in Crystal City, consisting of a handful of small rooms that had been modern circa the midseventies and so were plain and dreary now, in a humble building linked by tunnel to underground shops and the Metro, so that I came and went without ever stepping out of doors, a working gopher. My desk had nothing on it but a telephone and a file tray. Between tasks, I watched the light change out the window.

 

 

I went to that job on the day of Dad's panel, and after work I took the Metro straight to Farragut North and walked over to the S
____
Club, a private social club in an old mansion, where panel discussions were regularly presented for the benefit of its members. Standing before the club's elegant facade, I felt ungainly, a low-caste temp, but I went in, and up the stairs, and into the library, a high-ceilinged, plush, fusty room lined with mahogany bookcases. Collapsible furniture had been set up: a narrow table, with six vacant chairs behind it, stood underneath a line of track lights, and on the other side of the table were chairs for the audience, a handful of them occupied by white people in black coats. Others, still on their feet, mingling and murmuring, looked at me and looked away. Dad had probably invited sixty or seventy friends and acquaintances, but here, ten minutes before the discussion was due to start, there were maybe thirty people total, at least some of whom, surely, had come in support of the other panelists. I found myself making excuses on his behalf. It was early in the evening, when much of Washington was still at work, and it was two days before Thanksgiving besides.

I didn't see my sisters. They were both supposed to come—Maggie was going to take the train down and stay until Saturday. It took no more than this, their dual absence, for me to suspect that they were out somewhere getting a drink and analyzing my deficiencies (such as: the very insecurity and self-involvement behind that suspicion). A crackly “Helen!” interrupted my fretful reverie. It was my dad's old friend Jodi Dentoff who, although she was quite a bit older than the last time I'd seen her, appeared with her magic intact.

Picture a stage, and now picture, in the wings, a well-seasoned pixie of a woman who's seen the show a hundred times but still seems absorbed by it, wryly fascinated: that would be her. She came striding toward me wearing tall boots with tall heels, and even so she was short, rasping, touching me on the arm and calling me “sweetie,” which was what she called everyone. She stood before me as though there were nowhere she'd rather stand, and I sensed that there wasn't a spot in the wide world where Jodi would not have exuded the same sense of good fortune—
isn't this wonderful
, you could imagine her cooing as she entered, for instance, a yurt—and she fixed me with her big dark sponge eyes and instantly I was ready to tell her everything I knew and some things I didn't know. She was a reporter and had that talent for making people want to talk to her, if you could even call it a talent, for it was as much a part of her as her physical features, inherent in how she looked and in how she looked at you, in her mix of sisterly warmth and perfect chic, in her plucked, arched brows, which prodded you to account for yourself, and in her very smallness, which put you at ease.

“I'm so glad your father is doing this,” she said.

“He's been looking forward to it,” I said.

“How is he?” I had the sense that they were no longer very much in contact. It wasn't a complete surprise, since I couldn't think of the last time I'd heard him mention her, but there was a time when she'd been a frequent guest of my parents', a good friend. Maybe that was all before the crisis, I didn't remember. Or maybe the friendship hadn't survived my parents' divorce.

“He's good, you know, out and about, teaching his class. He's pretty much fully recovered.” Was that even true? I wondered. I'd come home to see him, and yet I'd repeatedly felt myself refusing to really see him.

“Recovered?”

“He had a heart thing. A heart attack.”

“What?”

“He's doing fine, though.”

“Oh. Oh, I'm…” She stopped short. Her eyes went off someplace and came back. “Are you home for the holiday?”

“I'm here for a little while. I was kind of between things in L. A. and so I've been staying with my dad. I actually just started a temporary job, so. I'm not sure how long I'll be here. I'll probably go back sometime after the new year.” Around my parents' friends I would find myself explaining my life in too much detail, trying to make it sound full and reasonable, though the effect, to my ears anyway, was to make it sound empty.

“How nice for your father.” She reached into her small black purse and took out a card case, then handed me her business card. “Let me take you to lunch sometime, I'd love to hear about what you and your sisters are up to.”

“That'd be great.” I didn't think much of it, as I assumed that this was her way of ending a conversation, with the card and the indefinite promise of a lunch.

I claimed a chair in the row next to last, where there were three free seats for my sisters and me, and so placed myself directly beneath (I noticed too late) a claustral lighting fixture that hung from chains and had put cracks in the ceiling plaster, a brass hazard I thought might well break free and plummet to the floor, or onto my head. The title of the panel—“Opportunities and Costs: Iraq Eighteen Months After the Invasion”—all but made me wish for such a catastrophe.

My father and the other panelists entered and were introduced: so-and-so from such-and-such, a fellow at the Center for X and Y, a former director of Z, the author of A, B, and C, a frequent contributor to D. Dad had been “an official in the Reagan administration,” now “an adjunct professor at American University,” which was far less of a biography than the rest of them claimed for themselves. As he was introduced he peeped at the audience, not seeing very many of the friends he'd hoped to see. I made my face as bright as I could, so that he would find me at least, but I was so far back, I didn't know whether I was visible to him.

The room seemed to vibrate subtly from ambient noise, from ancient radiators and pipes, and microphone static, and bodies in seats. The moderator (bespectacled, bald) joked that he was especially proud to have netted a panelist from the Department of Defense, “because these days, when you invite people to talk about Iraq, it can be hard to get anyone from the government to call you back.” The man from Defense, who was maybe ten years younger than my father, smiled weakly, and once things were under way he made only brief sorties into the discussion. “The media needs to tell the positive stories about Iraq and not just the negative ones,” he noted, mentioning the upcoming Iraqi elections and “positive outcomes” in Samarra and Ramadi before going silent again.

There were two other men on the panel besides Dad and the Pentagon official, while the fifth panelist, a visiting scholar in a wine-colored shawl, was an elegant woman who kept her delicate chin lifted during the others' remarks, in a show of listening. Her professional affiliations were with the University of Bristol and Johns Hopkins, her subject the failure to empower Iraqi women. She pronounced “nonnegotiable” with all six syllables, for example, “the inclusion of women in the political sphere is nonnegotiable,” and cited statistics on the relationship between the level of women's education and employment in a country and that country's gross domestic product. She undermined herself, I think, by tossing out academic terms that wouldn't have resonated with that crowd—
subaltern
,
hegemony
,
subjectivity
—yet even those sounded lovely coming out of her mouth. Once she referred to “carefully tailored operations,” and I could only picture a company of soldiers dressed as she was, a flock of wine-colored shawls advancing across some desert.

She was the one talking when Maggie snuck in, as if by using those professorial words she'd summoned my professor sister, who with her loose blond hair, her motorcycle jacket, and her relative youth, not to mention the roller bag she had brought with her, stood out in that room full of the middle-aged in button-downs and blazers. She stationed her bag near the door, then slid in next to me, and we whispered back and forth—neither of us knew what had become of Courtney—and then turned our attention to the person now speaking, a straight-spined, white-haired man with a blockish head and a short beard, who said he'd been in the marines (years ago, it must have been) and who consulted his printed notes from time to time.

“There can be no doubt that security is the most important question in Iraq today,” he was saying. “If we don't quell the insurgency, the United States will lose control of the country.” He spoke of the mistakes of the Allawi government, the need for more U.S. military checkpoints and controls. My sister leaned into me. “Dad doesn't look too thrilled,” she whispered. This was true. He frowned at what the ex-marine had to say, or possibly the frown had nothing to do with that. His eyes darted back and forth.

Even before the next man, this one wearing an argyle sweater, took a turn, it was clear that the panelists didn't care much about interacting. No doubt they'd all recently written essays or speeches related to Iraq and would now summarize their own work, the panel like a themed op-ed page come to life. Argyle Sweater's topic was Iraq's economic integration into the global marketplace—it was economic opportunity, he said, that would lead would-be insurgents to put away their bombs and open up shoe factories. Meanwhile we needed to train local police and military so that the Iraqis could take charge of their own security.

At this, the ex-marine sat up even straighter and interrupted. “Based on my conversations with a number of our military commanders, I'd have to say that any proposal to turn over security to the Iraqis would be premature. We have armored vehicles, they have pickup trucks. If we just stand by and let them get hit, then we're just going to cultivate even more resentment of American forces.”

“Surely, though, we all recognize we can't occupy the country forever,” said Argyle Sweater. “Maybe we provide them with some armored vehicles, but eventually…”

“First things first. More checkpoints. Secure the roads.”

A pipe belched, and the moderator intervened: “Before we get into particulars, let's hear from the last panelist. Tim? Are there lessons from history that might shed light on the challenges of reconstruction?”

Dad took a deep breath. He had a strange grimace on his face. I knew that he'd prepared for the panel, that he had an answer to the question, but it was as though a fuse had blown. He stayed silent for some twenty or thirty seconds. Then he said, practically yelled, “I don't buy it. I don't buy any of this.”

The moderator raised his brows and then followed with: “Maybe you could be a little more specific?”

“Specifically, I think it's all been a bunch of bunkum. We lied to ourselves and made a big mess over there. This idea that we can go into a country, take out the bad guys, and be welcomed by a bunch of would-be Jeffersons and Madisons who've just been waiting to remake their country in our image. The idea that we can create democracies out of whole cloth. When has this ever happened? It's a fantasy.”

“Shit,” I said under my breath, so that Maggie could hear. She squeezed my arm.

“Shit,” she whispered.

“Arguably though, if you look at what's happened in El Salvador and Nicaragua—” began Argyle Sweater.

“We made terrible blunders in Central America,” Dad said.

“But speaking about the policies of the 1990s as opposed to the 1980s, we helped foster greater transparency in those countries,” the Sweater continued.

“You people are dreaming! When are we going to stop deluding ourselves?”

“We all have microphones,” the moderator said. “So there's no need to yell.”

“This administration has turned out one rotten idea after another, and our country has lost standing in the world as a result.”

“Well, let's come back to that. First I think we should let Maryam have another chance to speak. Maryam?”

I do wonder why he'd been asked to be on the panel in the first place. Maybe an old colleague threw him a bone, someone felt sorry for him, wanted to include him in something: let him trade theses about geopolitics with a few wonks and a visiting scholar. As it turned out, a bad idea. It wasn't the first time I'd seen my father pissed off in public—hardly—but there was a tinny, plaintive quality to his harangue, the anger of a man whom no one hears, a man who believes he's been left alone on an island of reality continually circled by delusional people on party barges. When had my father started sounding like a cranky isolationist? The things he said could've been said by me or one of my friends, at a bar, but on this panel, and (I suspected) in Washington generally, he merely distanced himself from other people by saying them.

His vitriol did resonate with me. As an adult I'd followed politics with enthusiasm at times and at other times out of a sense of duty, but lately only out of duty. Never had I felt more removed from what was happening, more detached, than during the current presidency. The war, the torture, Guantánamo, it had stunned me, and while from time to time there was a petition to sign, or a form letter to send to my congressperson, I felt myself retreating from it all. Dad hadn't done that exactly, but I saw in his alienation a reflection of my own. He didn't utter another word until the moderator asked him to weigh in on a matter being discussed by two of the other men, something about bolstering stability.