Waking the Dead (6 page)

We lived in a bay-windowed brownstone on Hyde Park Boulevard. I pulled into the driveway next to our house and saw Juliet’s old green Volvo. There was light coming from our windows on the third floor. I let myself in and stomped up the stairs to our apartment.

Juliet was petite and in perfect proportion. She was certainly the smallest woman I’d ever been with, although the only time I really noticed her tininess was when I kissed her from head to foot and realized how soon it was over. She was beautiful, with black hair and white skin and a blush that looked like windburn in her cheeks. She worked as a restorer at the Oriental Institute and ran a little business of her own on the side called European Restorations. Every once in a while she got to work on a piece from a genuine master—a tattered Holbein, a Whistler watercolor upon which a child had laid a Creamsicle. She loved old things; she revered the distant past and mourned for it like an exile will long for the land of her birth.

She was the daughter of two elderly academicians and she seemed to have been born knowing all the things I had to strain to keep track of—the prices of things, the hidden histories of objects, of gestures and phrases, the proper way of organizing the various tiers of acquaintanceship—whom you send a note to, whom you send flowers, who gets invited to parties of ten, who comes to parties of fifty. I had no confidence in mastering that sort of thing, and now with Juliet to look after them I just let it go altogether.

She had come to Chicago from Paris, by way of Bucks County and Palo Alto, and she had come as an orphan. Isaac did his best to look after her but she was an enigma to him. Really, she was an enigma to everyone and I think she was half a stranger to herself. She seemed to believe her emotional makeup was different from other people’s and she perceived herself as a mixture of unnatural tenderness and utter indifference. She was kind to other people but jokey about herself; she treated her own heart as if it were a cartoon character or, at best, as if it were reciting something it had read in a book. Luckily, she had inherited the family keenness for politics and they at least had that point of contact. Juliet knew her stuff from Metternich to ward politics.

When Isaac introduced us, Juliet was at the end of a torrid but herky-jerky affair with a married man—an affair that, on Juliet’s part, seemed to alternate between times of indifference and bouts of abject, almost pathetic desire. They were eventually found out by the man’s wife and the affair ended—with scarcely a good-bye. Juliet entered into a relationship with me in the same spirit that exhausted businessmen go to the Caribbean—though what sunlight she saw in my heart was a mystery to me. I think she was attracted by my own detachment: she was looking for an emotional duty-free zone where she might pick up some happiness at a lower price.

I let myself into the apartment and Juliet was on the red velvet sofa, paging through a book of Balthus paintings with a look of disapproval on her face. “I hate the twentieth century,” she said, closing the book.

“Not me,” I said, leaning over her, kissing the top of her head.

“Don’t you touch me with your icy fingers,” she said.

I had put my cold hands beneath her sweater three or four weeks ago and now she feared my doing it again every evening.

“The mayor’s got the snowplows working already,” I said, taking off my coat, letting it fall.

“We’re supposed to get ten inches of snow tonight,” said Juliet. “Uncle Isaac says in Chicago snow is a big political issue.”

“How’s work?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said. “How about you?”

“I don’t know. Not so great. Calls?”

“I wrote them down. They’re on your desk. There’s quite a few.” “Shit.”

“Some of them will wait,” she said, “but some of them won’t.”

“I don’t think there’s anything left of me right now,” I said, stretching out my legs and rubbing my eyes.

“You may as well get used to it,” said Juliet. “You are ahead of your schedule but you have to keep pace. There’s nothing to do about it.”

“I just have to do it my own way.”

“Well, poor Jerry Carmichael called. Twice. I think it would be needlessly provocative if you didn’t ring him back.”

Danny once said that my being with Juliet was like a junkie living with a nurse. I moved closer to Juliet, though something within me— heaviness in my bones—prevented me from putting my arm around her. “I made a resolution today,” I said. “I’m going to stop turning the radio onto the soul music station when I give the car to a black parking lot attendant.”

“That’s a good resolution,” said Juliet. She sat there with absolute stillness and seemed to be waiting for me to touch her.

“You’ve noticed that I do that?”

“Yes. I noticed.”

“How come you never mentioned anything?”

“I just figured you wanted the guy to take better care of your car.”

“But it’s weak,” I said.

Juliet shrugged.

“It is.” I closed my eyes; fatigue came over me like a thick mist.

“Are you going to make your calls?” Juliet asked.

I slipped my hand beneath her sweater and felt her warm, heavy breast; I laid my cheek on the top of her head, against that rich, comforting bonnet of dark Balkan hair.

Our apartment had three bedrooms. It had once been well occupied by a musical couple with four children. Before we painted the entire place bone white, we lived with the archaeology of the Belsito kids’ exuberance: kick marks, crayon skids, dried Play-Dough on the fir floors, roller skate gouges in the foyer. Now the place was as clean and uncluttered as one of those young professionals’ apartments in the magazines. The children’s bedrooms had been turned into home offices, one for me and one for Juliet. We each had our own phone, our own number; our offices were joined by an old wooden door with a crystal knob that had turned violet from sunlight and which we never opened without first knocking. I walked into my office. It was a white rectangle lined with books. The window looked out at a young oak with its branches thick with snow.

Juliet had placed my telephone messages next to the phone. I looked them over until I found Carmichael’s number and then I dialed it, deliberately not giving myself a chance to organize my thoughts. I realized a long time before that in order to be truly prepared for leadership you had to be born to it; the rest of us just had to trust instinct.

“Yes?” Carmichael said, picking it up on the first ring. His voice sounded high and quick, as if he were waiting for a call from the hospital. It conjured his face for me: receding brown hair, aviator glasses, a nose half the size of my thumb, a patchy brown mustache hovering over whistler’s lips.

“Hello, Jerry. This is Fielding Pierce.”

“Hello, Fielding!” he said, with a friendliness that was unnerving—probably deliberately so. “Glad you called.”

“Good,” I said. A pause. “What can I do for you?”

“Hey, it’s more what can I do for you. I just wanted to help make this an orderly transfer. I realize we’re dumping a whole lot in your lap.”

“That’s all right,” I said. A car passed below and its headlights lit the snowy oak; a skin of ice was forming on the window.

“I was hoping you could stop up this evening,” Carmichael said, “and we could go over a few things. You’ll be surprised how fast this is going to get complicated and I think we better grab this time while we can.”

“I’m glad to see you’re not overly concerned about this winter storm watch,” I said, sitting on the edge of my desk. “I think it’s a way of dress rehearsing us for nuclear war.”

“Yes? That’s an interesting way of looking at it. So you’ll come over? I’m just five blocks away.”

“Sure,” I said. “We should talk.” I looked at my watch. It was nine thirty.

He gave me his address on Cornell. I hung up the phone and stood there and felt my heart beating. I felt suddenly enormous. I felt if I stretched my arms out I could touch both ends of my room and then if I stretched a little farther I could reach out beyond. My ambition had always been mixed with a certain unreality, but now that it was starting to be realized a new, deeper, stranger unreality was taking hold.

Juliet was eating ricotta and scallions in the kitchen. I came in dressed to leave.

“I better go see him,” I said.

“I’ll wait up for you,” she said.

I nodded. A turn had been taken in our relationship. Events were forcing our hand and we were both a little embarrassed that the sudden velocity of our partnership was taking us beyond the natural boundaries of our feelings for each other. We were on our way to becoming a public couple and we barely knew each other.

The snow had stopped for an hour but as I drove over to Carmichael’s apartment it was beginning again. The new snow was soft, floaty, as if someone had slit the belly on an enormous pillow. By the time I pulled in front of Carmichael’s high rise, a half inch of new snow was on the ground. There was a parking space in front of his building, somewhat marred by the presence of a fire hydrant—I parked anyhow, figuring it was nothing I couldn’t fix.

I walked into the wind, toward Carmichael’s lakefront condo. I could see through the glass doors into the lobby. A tense, athletic-looking black man in a doorman’s uniform was pacing about, staring with anger at the video monitors—fancy security system. The TV screens showed only the closed, icy door of the underground garage and three empty elevators, each opening its door to an empty corridor, and closing it again. It seemed the doorman was the only living soul in the building.

“I’m here to see Congressman Carmichael,” I said.

“Name?” He didn’t take his eyes from the monitors. I couldn’t imagine doing his job. What was his mind like after eight hours of looking at those screens?

“Pierce,” I said. The lining of my nose had stiffened up in the walk from car to building and now, in the heat, it was starting to run. I wiped it on the sleeve of my coat.

Still glaring at the screens, the doorman picked up a phone and called up to announce me. “Mr. Carmichael’s in Ten A,” he said to me, hanging up the phone and indicating the elevator bank with an irritable jerk of the thumb. I felt his eyes on me as I made my way on in. After all the lousy publicity, did the doorman assume I was one of Carmichael’s lovers?

Carmichael’s apartment was at the end of the hall on the tenth floor. I walked toward it quickly: I wanted whatever was going to happen to go down quickly. I knocked on 10 A. There was a braided-rope welcome that in front of the door; a pair of salt-stained rubbers had been left out to dry.

“Fielding!” he said, throwing the door open to me. He was dressed in a pair of brown corduroy jeans, a blue blazer, and a white shirt: he had a teenager’s trim, tentative body. His face gleamed; his skin looked poreless and immaculate. “Glad you could make it.” He reached toward me and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “This has been quite a turn of events, hasn’t it,” he said, ushering me in, taking my coat. “But it’s all working out. We’re getting it all under control. The governor tells me you’ve agreed to run and I want to tell you I just couldn’t be happier about that.”

He was rubbing his smallish hands together as I followed him into his apartment. It was decorated Chinese, with watercolors of pandas and pagodas, gold and blue carpeting, vases filled with dried flowers, lamps with ricepaper shades, low black-lacquered tables. I smelled coffee and furniture polish. There wasn’t a book or a paper in sight. At the east end of the room was a picture window with a view of the lake, obscured now by a flashing curtain of snow.

“Lorraine and the kids are in Florida while all this craziness sorts itself out,” he said, indicating with a wave that I should sit on the sofa. “Hell of a situation, huh?” He sat down on a chair near me and crossed his legs.

“Yes, it is,” I said. I wanted to tell him how repulsive I found the scandal but the danger of sounding insincere brought me up short. I supposed if I’d really found it disgraceful then I would have refused to profit from it. Though I did not think the benefit was wholly personal: I truly did believe I’d be a better congressman than Carmichael. His record was undistinguished, gutless.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve decided to step in while we work out our options,” he said. He squeezed his hands and dropped them into his lap. “Hey, like I said, Lorraine’s in Florida—the lucky stiff—so there’s nothing to eat. But I’ve got coffee going. Want a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, maybe later. It’s one of those do-hickey jobs that keeps the coffee warm, so if you change your mind …” He gestured toward the kitchen and his blazer opened up a little: to my great surprise, he was carrying a pistol in a fancy tooled holster, strapped Pinkerton-style under his arm.

For a moment, I felt death in that room, like a current of icy water in an otherwise tepid lake.

“Well, with one obvious exception,” he said, just as merry as can be, “you’ll be inheriting a hell of a staff. I’ve talked to them, naturally, and most of them have decided to hang in there with you, pal, and give you all the support you need. Unless, of course, after the election you plan to bring in your own people.”

“I don’t have people yet,” I said. In one moment, it seemed abundantly clear that Carmichael, driven mad from the loss of his office, had invited me to his apartment in order to shoot me. In the next, however, it seemed impossible. Some people just carry guns. My brother, Danny, has a handgun, for example. Eisenhower, when he was president of Columbia University, used to stroll the Upper West Side with a .45 in his pants.

“What kind of gun is that, Jerry?” I asked, casually.

“Oh, this old thing,” he said, nudging it with his elbow. “It’s ancient. A .38.I really should get rid of it and buy a new one, but I’m always so busy. Anyhow, with all this insanity going on, I’m going to be keeping a low profile for a while. But I don’t want you to think you’re going out there to get slaughtered. I’ll be working with you, behind the scenes. I’ll be with you every inch of the way.” His merriness was increasing as his motor raced.

“Well, I really do appreciate that, Jerry. Let’s just hope it won’t be necessary.”

His smile broadened; now it was well past all human proportions. This was exactly the grin of a man who was going to shoot someone. “Oh come on, it’ll be necessary. No man is an island, right?” Suddenly, all this cheerfulness seemed to exact its toll and his boyish face went slack, revealing an older, more frightened face beneath it. He sat back in his chair and breathed out a long sigh. His eyes lost their focus; his skin went gray. “I’ve got a rest coming to me and I’m going to really enjoy it,” he said.