Gossip (3 page)

I nodded knowingly, without being sure we knew the same thing. I’d lost my faith in ideology too, although it could still kick in when I least expected.

“But being gay hasn’t been a problem?”

“God no. Just look.” She gestured at the room. “We’re in every bureau and department in town. We might not all be out on the job. Old habits die hard after twelve years. But most people know. Nobody cares. Except Republicans, and not even all of them. The only problem I’ve had is with the interpersonal, things you have to ignore when you can’t use the G-world.”

“Such as office romances?”

She laughed, very loudly. “Oh no. Work-environment stuff. Unfun.” An intern had reported that another intern was making homophobic jokes. Nancy called a meeting to lecture everyone about sexism, racism and homophobia, only to learn it had been one mild joke, and the whistle-blower was the joker’s bitter rival.

“What was the joke?”

She rolled her eyes. “How many lesbians does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“One, and it’s not funny?”

She nodded. “You see why I think I may have overreacted?”

We laughed. We could both be so earnest yet always saw the comedy in our zeal.

“How do you feel about Senator Freeman now?”

“Ixnay,” she said. The waiter had appeared with our food. “Oh, but this looks delicious,” she told him. “I should be more careful,” she said after he left. “This place is ear city.”

I lowered my voice to ask, “Then you’ve become disappointed with her too?”

“No! Not at all. I admire her, I respect her, I’m thrilled to work with someone of her caliber.” She stuffed a baby carrot in her mouth to stop what sounded like a press release. “No. I—” She spoke more carefully around her food. “I get frustrated. We don’t work as closely as before. Kathleen’s as swamped as the rest of us, and there’re days I don’t even see her. Last night, for instance. When I knew I’d be at the office late, rewriting her speech for the AMA convention in Pittsburgh. I needed to run a new idea by her on health care. I needed ten minutes, no more, but her secretary kept phoning and postponing, phoning and postponing, until it was seven o’clock before I got in to see her. She was at her desk, two aides waiting for her signature, her assistant on the phone. Her damn husband in the corner with his overcoat in his lap. Right away he snaps, “You can have two minutes with her. Not a minute more. We’re already late for dinner.’ And I blew up. I couldn’t stop myself. I said, ‘Look. I am going to be here until midnight, if I’m lucky, and I’ll be ordering pizza, so don’t accuse me of wasting your wife’s time.’ That shut him up. The ass. He sat there like a lamb while I went over my outline with Kathleen.”

I waited for her to laugh at this overreaction too, or explain the office psychology involved. The husband sounded obnoxious, but hardly criminal. “You said that to him?”

She chewed and swallowed. “No. But I wanted to. God, did I want to. He really burned me.” She gave herself a derisive snort. “What did I tell you, Ralph? An institutional liar. I’ve been telling myself the should-have-said version so much that I’ve begun to believe it. But you need the ballast of bullshit to hold your own here. The bullshit has entered my soul.”

“Sounds like you need a vacation,” I said worriedly.

“Except I’ve become such a workaholic that I’d go to pieces without the routine to hold me together. I’d lie in bed and never get up. Instead, I lie in restaurants.”

Nancy’s attitude toward the truth was always stricter than mine. I did not feel superior over getting the real story. And I did not think she’d lost her soul. She was in the thick of it and I wasn’t. I didn’t feel like a child in her presence, but I somehow felt shorter. When we finished dinner and got up to go, I was surprised to rediscover I was taller than Nancy.

“I should tell you,” I said when we were back on the street. “I admire what you’re doing. The world seems so out there to me. Sealed up in itself. More black-box technology. But you work inside the box. I respect you for that.”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh, Ralph. It’s nothing but boxes within boxes, all the way in. I’m in just deep enough to forget private life. Which is why I need to spend time with you.”

“Who’s nothing but private life?”

She laughed. “It’s a dirty job. But somebody has to do it.”

B
ACK AT THE APARTMENT
, I made a pot of tea and Nancy changed into a calico nightshirt. We sat facing each other on her sofa.

“City of bald heads,” I said, pointing out the Capitol.

“Then you should feel right at home,” she teased. “Except I have to say, I see it as a big white breast.” She smiled and blew at her tea. She seemed relaxed, as if she’d unloaded a demon or two at dinner. “So how are you these days?” she asked.

“Fine. I’ve been oddly content this fall.”

“Love and work?” There was a tiny note of skepticism.

“I have the bookstore. I have my friends.” I squeezed her knee through her nightshirt.

“I don’t know, Ralph. If it were me, I’d find those weak substitutes. You’re not seeing anyone?”

“I’m having a quiet time right now.”

“Not even your annual office romance?”

I laughed. “Those were in the spring. And I can’t do that anymore since they promoted me. Just as well. The new kids are too young and insipid to interest me.”

“You haven’t been involved with anyone since Alberto first went into the hospital.”

“Bert was never a boyfriend.”

“You know what I mean.”

I did. “No. My quiet has nothing to do with that.”

“But it must be affecting you. One person after another. It never ends, does it?”

“You get used to it,” I said. “I know how awful that sounds, but it doesn’t upset me anymore. It’s awful that you get used to it, but you do.” This was one of the few places where Nancy couldn’t understand me. But I didn’t know how to talk about hospitals or death without sounding like I was either in denial or indulging in melodrama.

“You’re not still stuck on that activist, are you?”

“Nick? God no. Nick was three years ago.” I groaned with embarrassment. “I know him much too well now. And I’m tight with Peter, far tighter than I ever was with Nick.”

“How is Peter?”

“Fine. His spirits are good. His T cells are up.”

“And he knows about you and Nick?”

“Oh yeah. He even teases me about it. In front of Nick when he wants to annoy him.” Nick didn’t introduce me to Peter until our fling was ending, his friendly method of declaring it over.

“Sounds too complicated for me.”

“It might look that way from outside. But just another scene of gay life. No worse than what you and I went through.”

“It’s different when you’re younger. I have complications of my own right now, and they’re no fun at all.” She shifted into a tighter position in her corner of the sofa.

“You and Melissa?”

“Oh no. Not Melissa.” She glumly looked out the window. “I left out a big piece of story at dinner, Ralph. I’m in love.”

“Oh?” She made it sound like murder.

“With Kathleen.”

I blinked. “Your boss?”

“Yup. Senator Freeman.”

I took a deep breath. I winced, not just at Nancy but at myself for not understanding sooner. Her anger with the husband suddenly made sense.

“Stupid, isn’t it?” she muttered.

“And dangerous, right?”

“I’ll say.”

“But she’s married. She has kids.”

“Yup.”

And she was a United States senator. A vista of dangers opened in my mind. I became worried for Nancy, fearful. “Does she feel the same about you?”

“No. Of course not. She doesn’t even know.”

It took me a moment to factor that. “You’re not sleeping with her?”

“God no! Are you kidding?”

Now I could smile, just a little. “So it’s an infatuation?”

“Yes! An infatuation. A crush. A sentimental crush that’s turned into an obsession. It’s eating at me. Because I can’t act on it. And it spills over in all kinds of stupid resentments and blowups around the office. I hate her husband.”

“I got that.”

“I get jealous of anyone who works close to her. I feel hurt whenever someone else gets an assignment or invited on a trip. And I can’t let any of it show. Not a whimper, not a peep. I hold it all in and haven’t told a soul. You’re the first.”

“But she’s your boss. How can anyone be in love with their boss?”

“She’s a remarkable woman.”

“But you see her every day. You see her at her worst.”

“I love differently than you, Ralph. Familiarity doesn’t kill it for me. I love them that much deeper.” She gave me a desperate, pleading look. “Keep going. Please. I want you to talk me out of this.”

“It never works like that.”

“I know. But I have to hear it said aloud, so I can tell if I’m crazy or not.”

“Well, she’s in her late fifties, right?” I’d seen her photo but could not remember how she looked. “It’s like falling in love with your mother.”

“She’s nothing like my mother. Thank God. She plays up her age for the camera. She’s sharp and lively and physical. Tough but graceful. Like a cowgirl crossed with a swan.”

“Does she show any interest in you?”

“No. Not in the least. She’s not encouraging it or using it to get more work out of me. It’s all me. Like an anxiety attack I’ve projected on her. But it’s making me a nervous wreck.”

“Can you quit your job?”

“I’ve considered it. But I can’t leave. Not yet. Only I don’t know if it’s the work I can’t leave or Kathleen.”

“There’s always the Tim-and-Nina solution.”

“Oh God.”

“Just kidding.”

She tried to smile. “It should be funny, shouldn’t it? And nothing’s going to happen. Absolutely nothing. It will pass. Unless I have a nervous breakdown, it will pass. Only then where will I be? What if love turns to hate and I can’t work with her anymore?”

“Then you can quit this job and find another.”

“Will anyone want me?”

“Come off it, Nancy. You’re a good speechwriter. You’ve said so yourself. Every time she’s quoted in the news, it’s a phrase you coined. People must know that.”

But she did not want compliments. “What really worries me is, whatever happens, I’ll go into a black depression. Like I did after Annie broke up with me.”

“You were depressed, but you weren’t comatose. Or if you were, it was only by your standards.”

“But I need to be excited. All the time or I feel like I’m dead.”

Nancy called herself a manic depressive, but the depression expressed itself mainly in her fear of it. Nancy depressed looked like many people running at normal speed.

We circled over the same ground—love and work, impossible love, love as a symptom of something else—for the next hour without coming to any new conclusions, although Nancy became less fretful, more resigned, even witty.

“I have this horror of seeing a photo from our college yearbook in
The National Enquirer”
she said. “Under a headline like ‘Lesbo Vampires on Capitol Hill.’”

“Or ‘A Queer and Present Danger.’”

She laughed long and hard at that. And then she yawned.

“Sorry. Didn’t know I was so tired. We can continue this later, can’t we?”

She offered me the choice of the sofa or sleeping with her. “You should like the new bed. It’s queen-sized.”

“Ha ha,” I said, but accepted.

Poor Nancy, I thought while I brushed my teeth, although I couldn’t help feeling envy as well as sympathy for her. Other people’s troubles are always more dramatic than one’s own. She was in an exciting place, of heartbreak and scandal here. Could love scandalize anyone nowadays?

When I came out of the bathroom, Nancy was on the far side of the bed, hands behind her head. “I don’t believe it, Eck, but I feel calmer now than I have in weeks.”

“Good. Maybe talking helped after all.” I climbed into bed.

“Do you have any plans for tomorrow?” she asked. “Do you want to meet for lunch?”

I did. I wanted to see where Nancy worked, the scene of the crime, so to speak. We agreed to meet at her office in the Hart Building at noon. I hugged her good night.

“It’s so good to have you here,” she said, and kissed me.

“Likewise.” I kissed her.

We scooted back to our pillows and she turned off the light.

We’d shared a bed many times, but it still carried a faint erotic charge, an echo of that first bed many years ago.

Nancy and I met on our school literary magazine, but did not connect until we fell in love—with different halves of a young married couple. I fell for the husband, Nancy for the wife.

It’s hard to say what made Tim and Nina so symmetrically lovable. They weren’t beautiful, only cute. Small and faintly androgynous, like children, they were seniors, but their marriage suggested two kids playing house. They were tickled to be married. They seemed to know something the rest of us didn’t. College is supposed to be sexual Eden, but everyone in my circle was cramped with fear and embarrassment, even straight people, even those who regularly got laid. Everyone except Tim and Nina. They radiated a careless physical bliss. Alone with me, Tim let that bliss shine into my eyes like a secret he wanted to share. He rarely talked about sex, but spoke often about Bloomsbury. Tim said he and Nina read aloud from Virginia Woolf’s diaries every night in bed, which sounded like heaven to me, that two people could be naked together—they must sleep nude—and still read.

I was a junior that year, a stuffy, shaggy, bearded boy who believed his intellect was his sole likable trait. Nancy was a stumpy girl from New Jersey with wild hair and a nasty sense of humor. We lingered after meetings at the magazine to talk with Tim or Nina, secretly courting them, suspiciously eyeing each other, not yet knowing how much we had in common.

Nancy and I were alone in the office one afternoon, reading poetry submissions, when she went into a tirade about the deluge of love poems, the blather of love, the cliché of it—we were all afraid our emotions were trite and secondhand. “Being in love is such a bore,” she spat.

I pompously declared that I enjoyed it as a sweet agitation of soul, even when it went nowhere.