How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (11 page)

“Hey, man, do you read me? Anybody home in there?” He unstrapped his backpack and took a seat across the table. He put his index finger to his ear and said “Bang!” then patted his shirtpockets. “Got a smoke?”

Trey shook his head.

“Got a voice? No, don't answer that. I know how it is. Some days, what's to say. Am I right? Silence is golden. I got this friend in some monastery, he's taken this vow of silence. Which is entirely cool.” He held his hands out between them and cracked his knuckles. “Speak to me, man. I'm going crazy. Five fucking hours at the border. They tear my pack down. They strip me. Check my asshole. Under my toenails. Behind my ears. But I'm clean. Jesus, I'd kill for a toke right now. Swallowed my last half gram on the bus. Once that hit I thought the Khyber Pass was going to
swallow
me alive. What a place. Journey into Hades. So tell me, what's the scene around here? These dudes toting guns. They got a war going on?”

Trey saw the Pathan approaching briskly, then stopping a few yards short of the tea shop, taking his pistol from the holster and leveling it at him. Trey's companion quit talking and followed his gaze, then dropped to the ground and rolled under the table.

The Pathan seemed to be trembling. “We had an agreement,” he said, his voice very strange.

“What happened?” Trey said.

“Perhaps you think to make a joke.”

Trey opened his mouth to speak but couldn't catch his breath. The pistol was following the motion of his head.

The Pathan said, “My offer was more than generous.”

“Where is Michelle,” Trey asked.

“Where? Do not worry about where. She is where you left her.” He stepped forward and examined Trey's face. “You do not know, then?” He shook his head, spit on the ground between them and, stepping forward, went through Trey's pockets with his free hand. He found the envelope, put it in the sleeve of his shirt, then left.

The man with the ponytail got to his feet and put his arms around Trey's shoulders.

Trey looked at the ring through his nose, wondering if it had hurt to have a thing like that put in.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” the man said. “That was close, man. Somebody could've got killed.”

It was almost dark, and Trey thought of telling him something Rudy had said—that it was dangerous to be in the bazaar in Landi Kotal after dark. Looking up at the huge gray sky, he could see the first faint stars. He could feel the planet turning and moving through space. He could feel the tug of gravity in his arms and legs, and he could hear the roar of darkness sweeping toward him like a fist.

1982

My Public Service

Was it Kissinger who said that power's an aphrodisiac? The dictator with his cabaret dancer, the studio boss and the starlet, all the ruthless, puff-bellied, hairy-eared trolls with their creamy cupcakes … it's hardly a notion to inspire poetry, or pride of species. But the quest for power can be a search for love. This is what occurs to me now, years after I helped bring the senator down.

Like many before him, he required women. It was a compulsion, as drinking is for some men. He was a teetotaler, but he couldn't bear to pass a night alone. If he had fifteen minutes between appointments, he wanted to spend them in hot congress with a warm body. One of my jobs was to summon them, smuggle them up the back stairs, through the rear door, spirit them out in the service elevator just ahead of his wife if she'd taken the early flight. The blonde in the second row, the stewardess named Tami, the student who asked that interesting question about mental health. I would say that the senator was very impressed with her whatever—her question, her comment, her thoughts on the health-care question, her thorough and enlightening explanation of the safety features of the Boeing 747, her long blond tresses, her tits—and would like to meet her in his suite. At first I was embarrassed. A former fat boy who retained the doughy, pig-gaited self-image long after the lard had melted away, I was nearly incapable of approaching women on my own behalf, but as the senator's emissary, I'm ashamed to say, I became good at putting just the right spin on these invitations: It was important that candidates understand it wasn't actually their opinions on the health-care question that were being solicited, the senator not having time to waste on preliminaries, while it was also important to communicate all of this by implication, deniability being crucial in case the lady in question was unreceptive. I'm sorry to say there weren't many refusals.

There was a type: slim, no ass, big tits and long blond hair. Not that he wouldn't compromise his standards in a pinch, politics being the art of compromise, after all.

And now that I've given you every reason to despise the man, let me also say that I loved him. The women weren't drugged, or coerced. Neither were the voters. In a democracy, seduction replaces rape. He was the most magnetic individual I have ever met. When I arrived on the Hill during the dark days of the Republican ascendancy, all the young Democrats wanted to work for Senator Castleton, the fresh-faced, sandy-haired Solon of his day. At that time he was becoming known as a champion of comprehensive national health care and tax reform. The press liked him because he was young and photogenic—the same reasons for which they'd later dislike him.

He came out of the high plains, his exact origins obscured in a cloud of red prairie dust and self-invention. The campaign biography stated that his father had died in combat in World War II. That was the start of the trouble, when an enterprising reporter found the birth certificate that named his father as “Unknown.” The fallout from this revelation was mixed, the senator perhaps gaining as much sympathy for his fatherlessness as censure for his mendacity. After the first disclosure, the second-day press coverage was somewhat cautious, accompanied by sidebars about compassionate man-on-the-street reactions, as well as a smattering of breast-beating editorials about the role of the press. Subsequent revelations about his background—the mother's lack of visible means of support, the hospitalizations—were handled gingerly, almost apologetically. The senator was perceived by many to be the double victim of an unfortunate childhood and an insensitive press. Trey Davis, the former administrative assistant who worked on the campaign, used to joke that this episode bought him an extra planeload of blondes.

The senator himself was reticent about his background, and in the end I'm not sure he could separate his own inventions from the facts. But one day in Georgia, during his first presidential bid, he told me about his mother. He'd just addressed a group of students at a private university and had been confronted by a shouting delegation from a nearby Bible college, whose members denounced his opinions on school prayer and abortion. Standing up to the protestors, he called them “narrow-minded religious bigots;” the event had ended in an uproar, with part of the audience chanting the Lord's Prayer to drown out the voice from the podium. Driving back to Atlanta, he was seething. After many miles of silence, he suddenly told me that his mother had been involved with a group called the Assemblies of God, to which she tithed much of what little money she was able to beg from relatives or collect from the state. His jaw clenched, the Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand shaking, he said she'd once driven him into a small Missouri town and made him beg money from strangers. Two days before, she'd signed over a Social Security check to a minister who promised her the Lord would provide. Later, he said, when his mother went back to complain, she was told that her wallet was possessed by Satan, who encouraged her spendthrift ways. The future senator had watched his mother perform an exorcism on the kitchen table, pounding on her wallet, chanting “Satan be gone.” I tend to believe this story because of the clenched fury in his dripping face that day, the kudzu-strangled telephone poles ticking past the back window of the steaming Lincoln, and because I never heard him tell it again.

Between fits of religiosity, his mother drank, and as an adult he had little patience for drinkers, which made him some thing of an anomaly in the Senate. At any rate, she died when he was fifteen and he went to live with an aunt and uncle, attended the state university on a scholarship, married his first sweetheart, went to Harvard Law and joined the Kennedy administration.

These are the facts, the campaign bio. But try to imagine the distance between these points. Far easier to walk on your knees over broken glass from the state capital to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., than to do it as he did. Try to picture the days and nights devoted to work and study; you are obviously obsessed and driven to succeed, or you never would've made it so far. When finally you slump over on the desk, or turn off the light in your room in your uncle's basement, imagine the howling demons of fear and loneliness coming in off the plains like tornadoes and rattling the windows. Imagine those few moments suspended over the abyss between work and exhausted sleep. At dawn, the ordeal will begin again.

One morning—in New Hampshire, I think—I was due to wake him up. He had a breakfast speech with the Elks or the Moose, some antlered fraternity. I was just outside his door at the Holiday Inn when I heard the woman's voice, pleading, calling his name, and remembered her from the night before, the waitress from the cocktail lounge downstairs. When she started to cry, I used my key to open the door. They were in bed. She was on her side, facing out, and he was wrapped around her. She'd thrown the covers off but couldn't extract herself from his sleeping arms, which were clamped fiercely around her torso, his left hand with its wedding band clasping a breast that bulged pinkly between his clenched fingers. I managed to rouse him, and to free her. It would happen again, and even some of the women who managed to free themselves in the morning remarked on his tenacious reluctance, once asleep, to let go.

He graduated fifth in his class at Harvard Law and then signed on with Vista, the fledgling domestic version of the Peace Corps. JFK was his hero, and they became acquainted. I often wonder if he knew then about JFK's satyriasis, or if his later behavior was influenced by the eventual rev elations. According to those who knew him back then, he was the straightest of arrows—like me, I like to imagine—and devoted to Doreen and their two children, avidly creating the family he'd never had.

On the anniversary of that infamous day in Dallas, I sat with him in a coffee shop in Iowa, where we were stumping for the caucuses, and he said he'd cried when he heard the news, sobbing uncontrollably as he hugged his secretary. Tears stood in his eyes as he told me this. “And then,” he said without a trace of self-consciousness, “I decided I would take his place.”

He had gone back home to run for Congress, then, after two terms, for the Senate. He took care of his state even as he refused to share its most conservative convictions. When he came out against the Vietnam War, early on, all agreed that his senatorial bid was ruined. His victory was seen by the national press as a signal event in the debate over the war; almost from the start, he was a national figure. He was, as unfashionable as it sounds, a hero of mine. Hero worship was especially unfashionable in the wake of the sixties, yet I was not alone. Most of us would've worked for him for nothing. In the end, some of us did.

I grew up in the sterile, fertile state he represented, not on one of its amber-waving farms, but in an aluminum-sided suburb rimmed with shopping malls. My father sold insurance. I was a 4-H captain, a stamp collector, an apple-polisher in white socks. A young nerd with aspirations to public service, I represented my state at a national high school conference on government, flying to Washington for three days of make-believe legislative sessions and inspirational speeches from lawmakers. Castleton spoke to our group and later invited me to his office. He had a face that seemed incapable of harboring deceit or insincerity, a visage like an open book. We chatted for ten minutes. His speech about the virtues of hard work and the joys of public service might have been lifted out of a civics textbook, but I believed every word. Unlike most of the other congressmen I'd met, who seemed to be speaking by rote, whose gestures and phrases sounded stagy and false even to a seventeen-year-old teacher's pet, he seemed absolutely genuine. Like a real person, talking man to man. What I sensed then was how much it actually seemed to matter that I liked him. I wanted to go to work for him then and there, but I had to wait five years. He wrote me a letter of recommendation to Harvard, and though I was accepted, my father made too much to qualify for financial aid and too little to pay for tuition comfortably, so I went to the state U. A week after my graduation, I was installed as an intern in his Senate office in the Dirksen Building.

The years I worked with him on the Hill seem, in retrospect, the best of my life. That first year, I shared a dormlike house near Lincoln Park with half a dozen other unpaid or underpaid press aides and interns. We walked to work, did most of our eating from canapé platters at nightly receptions and Capitol events. Later, when I became a legislative assistant, I moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Adams Morgan with Trey Davis, who also worked for the senator. Davis was a New Yorker, the first I'd ever met, and had a year's seniority and a world of experience on me. He'd grown up on Fifth Avenue, attended Buckley and Hotchkiss and Williams, where he'd been the protégé of James McGregor Burns. Initially I was put off by his dangerous good looks, his arrogant and cynical manner. As my immediate superior, he subjected me to a species of hazing the first few weeks and referred to me behind my back as “the lemur,” an allusion to my putative wide-eyed innocence. His own eyes, beneath heavy bat-wing brows, seemed knowing and cruel.

At the end of the first week, he looked me up and down and said, “You're an aesthetic menace. The polyester has got to go.” He took me to Brooks Brothers and picked out a pair of gray flannel slacks, a pair of chinos, three oxford-cloth shirts and a blue blazer, charging them to his own account. When I protested, he said I could pay him back in installments. Somehow, we became friends. I think I was like the plain girl who becomes the confidante of the beauty queen; he needed a protégé, an appreciative audience. When he moved to the apartment in Adams Morgan, he asked me to share it with him. Neither of us spent much time at home anyway. Mostly we worked. Trey would sometimes take the shuttle to New York for the weekend, returning, haggard, with tales of nightclubs and parties populated by dirty debutantes. He tried to explain the difference between downtown and uptown to me. I was content to stay in D.C., which was more than worldly enough for me. Occasionally I would have a beer at a neighborhood pub and attempt to impress ambitious young women in Talbot's suits. Though I didn't know it at the time, it was the heyday of the Pill, after Roe and before AIDS. I had a few dates and a brief, awkward romance with a Georgetown student who was interning in Senator Kennedy's office, during which I managed finally to shed my virginity at the age of twenty-three. But I wasn't very good with women. I think I was too earnest, even for serious young ladies with Phi Beta Kappa keys and Bass Weejuns who'd come to the Capitol to serve their country.

When the senator announced to the staff that he was going to make a run for the White House, we were ecstatic. We would all rise with him. But more than that, we believed in him, though by then I'd learned that heroes have a few warts. We all knew he'd had an affair with one of the assistants, whom he later placed in the office of the senior senator. And one night when I went back to the office late to retrieve some papers, I saw him emerge from the inner office with a disheveled female reporter. His face was flushed and glistening with a film of sweat. They were both giggling, until they spotted me and hurriedly donned their coats, the senator wishing me a curt good night.

Neat, housewifely Doreen had come to the office for the announcement. She smiled and hugged us, seeming more like the candidate's spinsterish sister than his wife. I couldn't help wondering what the campaign really meant to her. Bad enough to be the wife of a senator. But maybe he was a victim, too, married early to a woman he'd soon outgrown. She must have looked much different to an orphan at the state university than to a rising U.S. senator. After she left, several of us overheard Joe Cleary lecturing him from inside his office. “Goddamn it, you've got to keep it in your pants, or you're going to fuck the whole thing up,” he roared. I couldn't make out the senator's response. Cleary was a tough old Boston politico who'd worked for Kennedy and alongside Castleton since his congressional days. Shambling red-faced out of the office, he turned to me and asked if I knew the three
b's
. “The three whats?” I said, looking up at the craters and exploded veins on his broad, florid nose. I was afraid of him, of his caustic whiskey breath with its whiff of decomposition and corruption. He seemed to me the antithesis of the new political order we were trying to create. “Broads, bribes and boys,” he said, then ran his sleeve under his nose. “Sooner or later …” Cleary shook his head and left the office, the sentence unfinished. I was glad to see him go. Although I might have concurred with the sentiment, it seemed out of place on this special day, the dawn of an era. I was full of liberal indignation at his crude and chauvinistic term for women, a word I'd certainly never heard on the senator's lips.