Primary Colors (13 page)

"Gotta call Richard."

"What's wrong?" I didn't answer. The room was softly lit, ust the bedside light; it almost seemed cozy. I went over to the phone by the desk and began to dial. She came up from behind, put her arms around me-and it felt so good, so good. I stopped dialing. "Henry, you're soaked," she said. "What's wrong?"

I detached her, gently. I switched on the desk light, dialed again. "Pick up the other line," I said. She went over to the bed, sat down. Ringing. Ringing. I lost track for a moment, drifted, read the late-night pizza delivery card, forgot who I was calling. Amazing how far away you can go in an instant.

"Yeah?" Richard answered.

"Richard," I said. "We're fucked."

"Yeah?"

"Or we may be lucked--I'm not sure. Stanton didn't seem worried and Susan was cool, but it doesn't look--"

"Henry," he said. "Shut the fuck up and talk to me."

"Guy from the LA Times, investigative type--"

"The drug thing? Shit."

"It's not the flicking drug thing, it's the fucking war thing," I screamed. I was, I realized, totally out of control. I had to pull it back. This was nothing--this was just the beginning. I had to pull it back.

I told the story.

"And he's going with it?" Richard said.

"Sounds like it," I said. "What's today? Friday. Then Sunday, I'd guess."

"And that's all there is?"

"I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so--I had this feeling, y'know? I think there's more."

"But we don't know," Richard said. "We don't know shit. See? See? Didn't I call it? I been telling you this, Henri, I been saying it--since when? Since Jehoshaphat was a monkey. We gotta get someone to check out this shit. We gotta talk to him about this. We can't fucking fly blind like this. They're all gonna be comin' after us now. I mean, 'dja see any other president up there on the stage tonight? We're it, man. We're the ball game. They're gonna want a piece of us, y'knowhattamean? Every flicking flea that ever nipped his ass is gonna want a piece of this. We gotta talk to him. Get someone on flea patrol, y'knowhattamean? And we need it now: Yesterfuckingday. We got no other option."

"Yeah, but who goes to him?"

"You. You're the body man and the mind man. You're it." I couldn't. "I can't," I said.

"Then you gonna freeze your butt off this next month, watching our boy go down like the Titanic. And then you gonna be unemployed, and disgraced, and I won't even be able to hire you to handle the Nee-groes and suburban women. You're it. We got no other option."

"Yes we do," Daisy said. "We can talk to her."

"We can't talk to her. Are you out of your flicking mind? What are you gonna say? 'Listen, Mrs. Stanton, we gotta hire some sleazy flicking dick-ass gumshoe to find out who all the governor's been plugging?' Listen, Daisy. Get real."

"We've got a better shot with her than him," Daisy said. "Think about it. And we don't put it to her that way. Only you would do it that way. Remember, it's not sex now-it's the war. That makes it easier. It gives us an opening."

"She's got a point," I said.

"Awwwww. Can you believe he got arrested at a 'Lock Up Your Daughters' demonstration?" He laughed. "Perfect, huh?"

"Richard, get on a plane--first thing," I said. "You and me . . . and Daisy." I glanced over at her. She smiled. "We've got Susan patrol tomorrow. And Richard, your gossip columnist at the LA Times--Honey, is it?"

"Happy Davis."

"Call her."

"No. Seem worried."

"I suppose," I said.

"Henri, face it. We're flying fucking blind."

We put down the phones. Daisy came across the room, put her arms around me, snuggled. She tilted her face in toward mine, put her mouth on mine. There was a tenderness to this, an intimacy-really strange. I pulled back, looked at her and at the room-and laughed. I was suddenly giddy.

"So?" she asked. "So?"

"Look at this place," I said. "You're neat, too."

"Fuck you. I just got here."

"No, no," I said. "You hung up your coat. It's in the closet. You did, didn't you? Of course you did. I bet you even unpacked." I went over to the bureau, opened the drawers. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, I see." T-shirts on left, neatly stacked. Sweatshirts on right, neatly stacked. Underwear, drawer below. The sight of the underwear reminded me and I turned to her. She was there, but pulled back as I moved toward her.

"Paper," she said. "Clothes are easy. Paper is hard. Faxes." I was nibbling her neck. "I mean, what do you do with faxes?"

A knock on the door. It was Jack Stanton. He didn't give me time to wonder why he was knocking on Daisy's door at one in the morning, and he didn't seem to wonder why I was there. He just started talking. "The Martin thing is no good," he said. "It's gonna come back. That motherfucker doesn't have a single idea, all he's got is grenades. He's a kamikaze--he can only do me harm. The war really hurts, don't you think? It hurts in ways I never realized. Dammit, damn me. Charlie can get away with things I never could, because of that. He can be loose in a way I never can, and confident. I've always got to be on the lookout, thinking about that--you can get blindsided in one of these things. I make one false move, and he can make me seem like a chickenshit." He sat down on the bed. He didn't seem to see us. He was wearing a nylon jogging suit.

"You were presidential," Daisy said. "He wasn't."

"You think so? No kiddin'?" He fixed Daisy with paralytic intensity, sucking air out of the room. She nodded and he relented. "See, but it's not just him--the damn tax cut is killing me, too," he said, to her. He had said this to me a hundred times already. "Martin's setting me up for Harris. It's really him. He's Mr. Integrity. You think we should bag the tax cut?" He wasn't asking a question. "I never wanted that flicking tax cut. A children's exemption. We coulda got by with that."

I didn't dare look at Daisy. I wasn't looking at the governor, either. I was looking at the floor.

He went on. He went through the entire debate. He went through each of his answers. And then: "It's so unfair. So goddamn unfair, don't you think? You work so hard. . . . You know, I had it figured. I knew what could be done, could be said, how far you could go--and then this . . . professor. He makes me look a like a phony. A politician. He's got nothin' to lose, nowhere to go. He's not even trying. He's just there to hurt me. Did you see what he did to me on the environmental-tax thing? Made me seem like a bureaucrat, a regulator. You see what this is about, don't you? As if he'd get eight votes in the Senate for that fucking tax of his. I mean, how do we handle this?" He paused. Did he want a strategy? I began, "Maybe we could--" "See, the thing is, if you're not gonna go with a tax, you have to go with CAFE standards," He began to explain the history and intricacies of auto emission standards. He seemed to have lost all sense of time, of parameters, of the natural arc of conversation. "You can't go too far with CAFE standards because of Michigan. We've gotta think about Michigan--and he couldn't care less. He doesn't expect to be around for Michigan. His semester ends with New Hampshire." It went on like that. I had seen him wend his way through a complicated situation before, talking like this, talking for hours. But that was just the two of us, on the road; he was teaching me, I thought, showing me how his mind worked. It was an odd thing, a tic, compulsive in a way--and certainly intense--but not pathetic. This was, sort of. It was needy, in a frightening way. Weird. Daisy fell asleep on her bed, and Jack Stanton was still talking. But he hadn't been talking to her, and he hadn't been talking to me--and while he did talk about the war, he never mentioned Chicago.

Saturday, it was as if the strange scene in Daisy's room had never happened. We were still flying. The sun was shining. The papers all gave us the debate. He seemed presidential, they said. The Charlie Martin episode played our way: Stanton's response seemed forceful in print. Nobody--except The Washington Post--mentioned the laughter that preceded it (which had Stanton worried--the Post was always a beat ahead of the others when it came to nuance and minutiae). We were moving north from Concord, up the spine of the state toward Conway, and everything felt good and clean--blinding sun on snow, sharp cold, a slight breeze sending a fine spray of ice crystals into the air. We were doing a lunch thing--volunteer firemen's club at a church in Franklin--and I noticed that it was really getting crowded now back in the scorp zone. The reporters seemed dazed, balloony in their down jackets, an obscure clerical sect--they dressed up in Washington, but campaign scorpwear was less formal. They looked overloaded, distracted and clumsy, lugging satchels of paper and laptops about. They were easy to class.

"How many we got?" I asked Laurene.

"Twenty," she said. "They're really jammed into the vans, too. Had to blow off that woman from Phoenix, and a few others who didn't sign up until after the debate."

"You think we need a bus?"

"Maybe. But the immediate problem is, a lot of them want to go back to Manchester after Laconia. They don't want to go all the way up to Conway. The guy from the Chicago Trib is really pissed. He didn't know Stanton was flying back to Manchester--and none of them are too happy about the three-hour drive on a Saturday night. We don't have any seats on the plane, do we?"

"Absolutely not," I said. "But let's peel off one of the vans after Laconia for the ones who don't want to do Conway. You stay with the other one, keep them as happy as you can."

"Gee, thanks," she said. Laurene was cool, a real pro. She didn't feel the need to do the "Hey, bro--ain't these white debbils flicked up!" routine with me. Our thing--Laurene's and mine, I realized--was that we were above all that defensive shit. We were or uptown. "Who knows this place?" Laurene asked. "Maybe we can find a cute inn or something, land them there for dinner on the way back. But, Henry, we gotta start thinking this through better. We need someone who thinks scorp logistics days ahead, y'know?"

We continued north. It was like that all day. Normal. We brought local activists, one by one, into the van. We had Barry Gaultier, the minority leader of the state assembly and a real power, riding with us all the way. Barry was on the cusp of an endorsement, but he wanted us to guarantee him a job with the campaign after the primary. We were doing well enough that we didn't have to promise shit. We wanted Barry to see that. He was a former insurance salesman, had the terminal gray look. And you could almost see him troping closer and closer to Stanton with each stop. I hated this part of it--reminded me of the crap I had to do with Larkin: stroking, stroking, promising, praising. But, then, Barry Gaultier was a legislator. Stanton was right about that: they were a lesser breed.

Laconia: a town meeting in the high school gym. There were some empty seats, the first the governor had seen in a week or so--advance had miscalculated. Daylight was waning in the narrow windows at the top of the bleachers, cold and blue-gray. Several of the scorps stayed outside, in an echoey pea-green tile lobby with the unpolished trophies and faded ribbons in glass display cases, working their cellulars, calling the desk, seeing if they could blow off Conway--it would b
e r
ight on deadline. The wires, looking particularly glum, knew they couldn't. They'd be coming with us all the way--and driving back all the way, while we flew. Bad staff work.

"Henry, you gotta fix this shit up," said Tommy Aldrenio from the Philadelphia paper. "You let the schedule drift, you don't think about filing time. This is the big step up now--you gonna step up and be real or is this gonna be a bush-league operation?"

"We're real, Tommy," I said. "You wrote it today."

"You're real by default," he said. "You're running against dogmeat. The big leagues gonna be harder than this. Don't get cocky."

"We'll work on it, Tommy," I said. "What's everybody writing?" "They're writing you," he said. "They hear Time has a Stanton cover coming Monday. They want to beat the call."

"No shit," I said. I had completely forgotten about Time. They'd been along, earlier in the week. They'd had two editors, their beat man and a bigfoot interviewing Stanton in a ratty Concord motel room on Tuesday. They'd shot him--forty-five minutes out of our schedule--on Wednesday. They'd said "maybe" a cover. It was either us or a new book about pet psychology."I assumed the latter, as the folks from Time seemed to, and then I'd let it slip--the debate, the guy from the LA Times, a hundred other worries. I do not absorb the possibility of good news very well, I guess.

"Excuse nie," I said to Tommy, and I went to the principal's office and used the phone to call Brad Lieberman, who had moved his operation to the Manchester storefront.

"You hear anything about Time?"

"You hear anything about Time?" Brad shouted to the room. Then: "Richard just got in. Hold on. Spork? Yeah? No shit. Spork has a kid over there, a researcher--did some summer stuff for him. He'll call over. Wait."

"Meanwhile, Brad--we need to get our scorp act together. They're tolerating us now because we're throwing heat and it's early. But we gotta get someone thinking strategically about this. We gotta think about buses, and planes--how many you need before we get a plane?" "We went through this in the war party, Henry," he said. "No plane until after New Hampshire. We don't do a big plane until we get the Service. Anyway, you don't need a fucking plane in New Hampshire."