Gossip (2 page)

“Nick underestimates Nancy. And she’s out down there.” So out that she suspected she was known as the Other Lesbian, to distinguish her from the assistant secretary at HUD. “Nick wouldn’t be so scornful if he still had a little power.”

“I won’t argue with that,” said Peter. “He misses his glory days on the barricades.”

“I respect his anger,” I claimed. “When it doesn’t turn self-indulgent.” I liked Nick—I once liked him very much—but couldn’t forgive his constant sniping at Nancy.

“When you coming back?”

“Saturday. So I’ll be there at breakfast on Sunday.”

“Well, tell Nancy hi. And seriously, if you meet Thirsty, I want to hear the gory details.”

“There’ll be no gore to share, Peter. See you Sunday.”

T
HE BRICK HULKS OF
dead factories and high stride of power-line pylons swung across a cold blue sky in my window. It was a weekday afternoon, the train half-empty. I had two seats to myself and sat sprawled with
Can You Forgive Her?,
the first novel in Trollope’s Palliser series. I loved to read on trains. It was like time tripping. I especially enjoyed visits to
the
nineteenth century, not because it was more restful than the present but because it seemed thicker, more solid and knowable, its people embedded in a dense cake of custom and conscience.

I was not quite of the decade. I preferred Victorian novels to new movies, trains to planes, Fruit of the Loom to Calvin Klein. I owned a computer only because a friend had left me a Mac in his will. On the other hand, there was my head, which I’d been shaving for a year. Not razor shiny, but once a week with electric clippers, a haircut that ranged from five o’clock shadow to a skullcap of springy brown velvet. I did it first for the novelty, then continued because it saved twenty dollars a pop at the barber. And it provided instant distinction, easing the chore of proving myself cool or queer or artistic. My skull had a nice shape and the brain can be a sexy organ. I was not who I looked like but I knew who I was. The distance between appearance and reality gave me more room to breathe.

I began to think about Nancy once we passed Wilmington, but with more curiosity than fear. I enjoyed being needed yet knew she’d need me only so much. This trip was for Nancy, yet I didn’t see myself as a Good Samaritan. I looked forward to escaping the cramp of New York knowingness, and to spending a few days with my oldest friend.

Nancy had phoned a week ago, sounding frantic yet amused by her panic, which was her style. She did not plead or whine. She gave no single cause for her emotional crisis, but cited work, stress and loneliness. “I need a reality fix,” she said.

“You must be in trouble if I represent reality.”

“You better believe it,” she said with a laugh.

I offered her two days of vacation available to me before the Christmas rush began, plus my Friday and Saturday off. We often took holidays in each other’s troubles. When she broke up with her first lover, I went down to Philadelphia to provide distraction and continuity. She came to New York to do the same for me when Alberto went into the hospital for the last time.

“I need a reality fix myself,” I said. “And I want to see life in the new regime. You’re my window on Washington, Nance.”

“That’s all I am these days. Glassy essence.”

“Dissociated sensibility?”

“Out the ass.”

Our friendship had a highly literary bass line. We’d met on the school literary magazine at Chapel Hill, when I was going to be a poet, Nancy a teacher and critic. Our ambitions were perpendicular yet complementary; we extended each other. Not that anything literary came of either of us. Twelve years after college, I no longer thought of myself as an unhatched Yeats or Stevens, but as the capable head of shipping and receiving at a bookstore near NYU. And Nancy worked on Capitol Hill.

She was not in Congress. She wasn’t even a politician. You may have seen her on CNN during a Senate hearing. You’ve certainly seen people like her, the aides and staffers lining the wall behind the men whose very public faces have the half-animate familiarity of life-sized Muppets. Women senators are too rare to look like cartoons, and the staffers are clearly human, young unknowns anxiously waiting for a split second of celebrity when they pass a document to the boss. The guys can be quite cute, as many of us discovered during the Anita Hill hearings.

Nancy didn’t go to Washington until a year after Anita Hill. It was a surprising move for a Ph.D. with a dissertation on codes of lesbian desire in Emily Dickinson. Unable to find a tenure-track teaching post, she’d taken an administrative job at Penn that included writing speeches for the dean. A gift for snappy phrases that Nancy herself dismissed as “the thousand clichés of light” caught the attention of the president of Bryn Mawr, a former state representative who’d decided to run for the Senate. She hired Nancy as a speechwriter and, when she won in an upset that pundits ascribed to female anger over the incumbent’s cross-examination of Hill, took Nancy with her to D.C.

“Does your crisis have anything to do with Melissa?”—the lawyer Nancy had been dating since August.

“Oh no. That’s turned out to be purely social. We squeeze each other in once a week, if we’re lucky. If either of us had time to meet someone new, we’d quietly disengage. Just as well. I can’t be myself with her. You know me, Ralph. I have to present a tough front. Which brings out the pathological liar in me. Even with Melissa.”

“It’s not pathological. It’s just—”

“Neurotic. Okay. I’m a neurotic liar. Who’s become an institutional liar. Because everyone here is like that. Nobody can afford to show themselves in a bad light. So there’s nobody who can make me honest.”

Nancy wasn’t as fearless as she pretended. Her dishonesty was mostly in her own mind, although she often found it hard to tell a story without giving herself the last word she only wished she’d delivered.

“And that’s why I need to see you, Ralph. So I can be honest for a few days. Plus we’ll have fun. You’re not visiting a basket case. We’ll talk and do coffee, talk and do tea. Just like the old days.”

When I thought about Nancy in her absence, I almost always pictured her as she was in college: a galumphing girl in overalls with a squashed haystack of frizzy hair, emphatic elbows and, under her eyes, the crepey circles of a debauched courtesan by Edward Gorey. Only the circles remained, but I retained the old mental photograph, as if it were the true Nancy, the real Nancy, my pal and equal. New York friends couldn’t believe that someone like me knew someone in Congress. I enjoyed confusing their assumptions. I didn’t envy Nancy’s new importance or feel judged by her success. I was proud to know someone who did work so far beyond my capabilities.

But I was happy with my own life. I had a job rather than a career, yet preferred it that way. I passed as an adult at Left Bank Books. Only Elaine, the manager, and Howard, the buyer, had been there longer. I’d recently been promoted to assistant manager but two other people had the same title and, except on Sundays, when I ran the store, my domain was the basement. I liked working down there in the clutter, bad lighting and old-fashioned smells—the cocoa-like cardboard, the sour curdle of wet pasting tape. I enjoyed the reverse snobbery of being a manual laborer in letters. Lugging and tossing heavy boxes kept me in shape without joining a gym. And I did not take the work home with me, which left plenty of psychic space for the rest of life, such as reading and activism and affairs of the heart. I hadn’t attended a political meeting in months, and even my last routine romance was over a year ago, but I was having a spell of downtime and knew I should enjoy it while it lasted.

The sun was setting as the train flew over the rivers that empty into Chesapeake Bay; a shadow train raced across the orange fractals of water and sputtered out in the woods. Then came suburbs, then the white lights of the railway yards and, in the distance, the bald dome of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

I already knew Washington, the stage set if not the life backstage. Growing up in North Carolina, I once thought it was the Big City. Now I enjoyed its artifice. Union Station was a vast neoclassical shopping mall. The Metro seemed spookily smooth and civil after the bang and stink of the New York subway, the homogeneous white-collar crowd exotic in the theatrical lighting of coffered basilicas buried below the earth. I rode up from the depths at Dupont Circle in the long cannon of an escalator toward an oval light like a gibbous moon. The moon opened into a city of traffic and raiding leaves and half-deserted sidewalks.

Nancy lived a few blocks away in a tall turn-of-the-century monstrosity called the Cairo. She wasn’t home yet but had left a key with the doorman. I let myself into the apartment that looked much as it had when I’d helped her move in, what Nancy called Bachelor Wonkette. She sublet it fully furnished from a weapon-systems salesman who’d gone home until the next election. Her chief contributions to the decor were stacked newspapers, government reports and, on an exposed brick wall, the framed print of an Emily Dickinson daguerreotype that I gave her for her thirtieth birthday. The iron-spined, Bambi-eyed poet looked startled and amused to find herself in Washington. We were up high enough for the illuminated dome of the Capitol to be visible in the window over the sofa.

I was in the kitchen making tea when I heard the front door.

“Eck!”

“Nance!”

I swung around the corner and we embraced. Her loaded briefcase clobbered my shoulder.

“You’re here! You found your way okay? Sorry the place is a mess but I worked until midnight last night and had to run out first thing and—welcome!”

She flung off her coat, bounced on her toes and punched me in the arm. The blond tomboy from college was hidden in a tweed suit, her frizzy hair tamed in two short wings. Not quite boyish and definitely not butch, she was entirely Nancy. The circles under her eyes, permanent crinkles of lizard skin, brought a touch of melancholy to her face.

“Let me catch my breath.” She dropped into a chair to untie her plump running shoes. “You hungry? I’m famished. I’m taking us out to dinner.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“But I want to. I made reservations at Trumpets around the corner. So you can see queer Washington first thing.”

“Do I have to dress up?”

“Oh no. You look fine. Nice to see a guy who isn’t starched and pressed. They’ll think I’m conspiring with radicals.”

The kettle in the kitchen whistled. I went to turn it off.

“We can have tea when we get back,” she called out. “I’m all yours tonight. All day Saturday too, but Thursday and Friday are going to be hectic.”

“No problem.”

When I returned, she was sitting quite still. “I feel better already,” she said in a softer voice. “Just seeing you and knowing I’ll be able to talk. Do I seem crazy to you?”

“No more than usual.”

She grinned. “Oh good.”

“But why Trollope?” she said out on the cold windy street. She knew my habits and had promptly asked about my train reading.

“I don’t know. Because there’s so much of him. Because I’ve already read George Eliot and Dickens.”

“And he’s good?”

“Very. In a sane, leisurely way. And nothing too terrible ever happens.”

“Maybe that’s what I need these days. Sane and leisurely.”

We went down to a black glass door below street level and entered a restaurant. It was like stepping into homosexuality, first the lighting, then the microwave hum of men alert to the presence of other men, although I quickly learned that their attention was not necessarily sexual.

We were checking our coats when Nancy grabbed my arm. “Ding!” she said. “Want to meet Bob Hattoy?”

“You know him?” Even I recognized the name.

“You’d be amazed at who I know.”

I followed her toward the bar, where a tall, lean fellow in glasses held court with three or four other men in tailored suits, one with a red ribbon.

“Bob!” said Nancy, thrusting her hand at him.

“Nancy! Hello. I’ve never seen you here.”

“Came tonight for dinner with a friend from New York. Bob, this is Ralph Eckhart. Ralph, Bob Hattoy.”

“An honor,” I told him, which he accepted as a perfectly natural thing to say. I resisted the urge to praise his speech at the Democratic convention and tried to remember what he’d done since.

Introductions were made, an automated round of smiles and handshakes. “Ken and I already know each other,” Nancy pointedly told the man with the ribbon. “Don’t we, Ken?”

Hattoy and Nancy shared pleasantries about Senator Freeman, Nancy’s boss, until the maître d’ told us our table was ready. We were halfway across the room when Nancy growled, “Did you see Ken Walton’s face when he found out Bob Hattoy knows me? Ha!” she crowed. “The little prick won’t even return my calls. What do you bet he phones first thing tomorrow?”

We sat at our table, an isle of light in a pool of islets, before Nancy noticed the confused look I gave her.

“Oh God. You see what this town’s done to me, Ralph?” She gave a comic moan. “I am losing my soul.”

“I didn’t think that. I’m just surprised that you of all people have to play that game.”

“I know. But it comes with the territory. Pecking orders and food chains. The court of Louis the Fourteenth with fax machines.”

We ordered quickly to get rid of the menus. Nancy launched into a discussion of her job, the overload of duties, the trial of playing housemother to the junior staff, the amount of effort required to accomplish the smallest thing. She was ferociously cheerful about it, even humorous, but let me see the panic underneath.

“I’ve gotten so caught up in the game, Ralph, that I forget what real life is about.”

“Love and work,” I reminded her, a pet phrase of ours.

“But that’s my problem. I’m nothing but work here. Everyone is. So I try to get from work the personal meaning that one can get only from love or friendship. It leads to—abominations.”

“Your politics don’t give you a grip?”

She released a long sigh. “I’ve begun to wonder if political beliefs are like algebra. Something you study in school but never use in life. It’s not how we imagined, Ralph. The good-guys-and-bad-guys stuff doesn’t cut it here. It’s more office politics than party politics, much less social conviction.”