We Are Still Married (34 page)

This week, Americans will elect a President after a bitter and mean-spirited campaign in which the distinction between real and unreal, news and entertainment, seems blurred beyond recognition, and in which politics seems dangerously out of touch with the world we inhabit. A story in
The Washington Post
describes how, one evening last May, five of George Bush's campaign advisers went to Paramus, New Jersey, to observe a group of thirty voters assembled by Bush researchers as a test group to measure the emotional impact of campaign themes. The advisers were Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Robert Teeter, Craig Fuller, and Nicholas Brady. They sat behind a two-way mirror and watched as the group was told about furloughed prisoners, the Pledge of Allegiance, and Boston Harbor, and at the end of the session Governor Dukakis's support among the group had dropped from thirty to fifteen. “I realized right there that we had the wherewithal to win . . . and that the sky was the limit on Dukakis's negatives,” Atwater said. Mr. Bush's campaign has in effect been built on the themes that scared the Paramus Thirty, and especially the racist allegory of Willie Horton. The country appears willing, if not very happy, to elect Mr. Bush, on the basis of his personal showmanship about the Pledge, the ACLU, murderers, and a few other matters that will not concern him as President. What has been missing from the campaign is any note of reality.

The line between entertainment and news has been blurred most successfully by President Reagan. Better than any rival, he has been able to describe the world as he wanted to see it—a description independent of any objective truth—and do it so winningly that his stories seemed almost real. His talent has been to live entirely in the present, one show at a time, and he has revealed no important regrets, no compelling dreams, no history that disturbs him. Clearly, his job has been not to run the government but to be himself, an entertainer: warm, solicitous, upbeat, manly, full of cheerful news—a good uncle. Like Warren Harding, he is hated by nobody. He is humble, genuinely amiable, and gracious, is serious about the business of ceremony, and prepares himself studiously for every public appearance, executing the royal duties of his office with ease and charm. His private complications—his apparent indifference to religion, his estrangement from his children, his squeamishness about anger and unpleasantness—have been completely submerged in his portrayal of the President. As he prepares to retire, he leaves his opponents feeling tired and thoughtful. He has enlarged his office, yet diminished politics by his success, sapping our most fundamental strength, our ability as a democratic society to discuss and resolve our problems.

Grover's Mill looked as if its biggest problem were that so many people want to live there: how to accommodate them, and not ruin the good life they have come for. A happy problem, for politics to resolve. Walking in the dark that evening along a Grover's Mill road that wound past old farms and blocks of lighted houses, the air smelling of apples and wood smoke, I felt how vulnerable this good life is and what is at stake as the voters vote. All Mr. Reagan's artistry cannot change the world, which remains real: real lakes and forests are dying, the ozone is actual, genuine garbage floats on an authentic ocean. The world is not the sum total of our impressions of it, and it cannot be charmed by political entertainment. Nor can the economy, drunk on debt, be sung into sobriety. Debt is an objective, measurable fact, as the Republican Party used to point out, but this year talk about the real world has been rare. The voters who walk into the booth on Tuesday will find it unlit, as pitch-black as a radio show.

I
CAME DOWN with an awful virus a month ago that was apparently the same one everybody else had had (fever of a hundred and two, achiness, headache, loss of appetite, exhaustion, depression, a feeling of being
wasted
—a feeling that life is meaningless and banal and the world is stalked by relentless evil and confused by greed and narcissism and that beauty and humor are helpless to rescue it), because whenever the phone rang and I dragged myself over to answer it and the person at the other end said “How are you?,” if I mentioned my illness, the person said “Oh, that's what I had three weeks ago.” Not exactly the comfort that the Apostle Paul tells Christians to give to us afflicted persons, but in my condition I wasn't expecting much. I felt like death on toast.

The virus appeared as a dryness in the throat on a Tuesday afternoon, and I dosed it with aquavit, the water of life. Wednesday, I stayed in bed. I lay there in dull misery all week and slept and perspired and drank water and lost eight pounds. Outdoors, it was cold and gloomy. After a week, I felt even worse, and called the doctor, who said, “That sure sounds like this virus that's going around.” He recommended that I stay in bed, exactly the course of treatment that a doctor of 1789 would have prescribed, minus the leeches, but I felt drained already. I couldn't remember feeling worse since a virus years ago when I was still a smoker and not even a sore throat and nausea and chest congestion could keep me from reaching for a Camel. I lit it and inhaled deeply and coughed for a few minutes and took another drag. That was worse. This was misery, but that was disgusting.

In bed, propped up with three pillows but still sagging, I read a few pounds of magazines with nothing funny or interesting in them, drank quarts of grapefruit and orange juice, and ate raw carrots. I attempted to read the
Times,
my daily habit—a sacred duty to Mrs. Moehlenbrock, my old teacher. Mrs. Moehlenbrock did not assign us children to delve into the sort of newspapers with big black headlines about “CRAZED BEAST RIPS LUNCH FROM TOT'S HAND,” or some such. She was an educator, and believed that everyone should know the names of all the Cabinet members and what makes the rain fall and where the Seychelles are; she was a
Times
woman at heart. But day after day, sick with a hopeless virus, I picked up the newspaper and felt like a teacher with an armload of sophomore term papers. The
Times
was full of dim, dumb articles with titles like “FIBER-OPTIC CALLING TO JAPAN STARTS TODAY,” “SCHOOL BOARD ELECTIONS: A TOOL FOR TEACHING,” “TREND IN PREGNANCIES CHALLENGES EMPLOYERS,” “PAIR FINDS SUBSTANCE TO CURB BLOOD VESSELS,” and “MODERN CONCERNS ENRICH PASSOVER RITUALS”: what one might call a
flu of writing.

One morning, I switched on the TV and jumped from “Good Morning America” to “The CBS Morning News” and on to “Today,” skipping commercials and catching a two-hour parade of correspondents and experts and the slow drip-drip-drip of the news about scandal, disaster, and defeat, plus a few pale-faced authors flacking their books; and ninety seconds after each eager face faded from the screen I couldn't remember one thing that had been said, except that Esther Williams, promoting her line of women's swimwear, referred to the rear end as “buns,” and a Ford vice-president, talking about the silver anniversary of the Mustang while standing next to a red one, said it had “filled a niche in the market.” My buns had filled a niche in the bed for ten days, and I wished somebody would come on TV and say, “Believe me, this is not forever, things will get better. ” Someone radiant but real, like Meryl Streep, who suffers so splendidly in her movies.

I owned a red Mustang back around 1967—a gallant little machine—but I don't own a car anymore. Too complicated. Like smoking. Enough was enough. A car in Manhattan is a ticket to misery. Nevertheless, car lover that I am, I would have kept mine, and kept complaining, were it not for a good thief who swiped it from a parking ramp one night, stripped it, and dumped it on the FDR Drive. The insurance company paid the book value, and I put the twelve thousand dollars in the bank. The car went to the boneyard. That was last July. I haven't thought much about cars since, or about smoking since I stubbed out my last cigarette around midnight on a Saturday years ago: the following day was St. Valentine's Day, the day my friend Butch Thompson and I had decided we would Quit. That there was my last smoke, I thought, and went up to bed sensing history in the making. I attended four movies the next day and ate a tub of popcorn, and spent most of Monday in the public library's reading room, not smoking, and gradually the habit passed.

Every life requires a bold move now and then to revive the interest of the liver. The way to get this done is to do it. You wake up in your warm cocoon in the woods in the Adirondacks and unzip it and drop your drawers, dash out on the chilly dock, plunge into the cold, cold lake.
This is good for you.
That cheerful, Scoutmasterly thought convinced me I was recovering, and I went and took a hot shower and got dressed and put on a white shirt and pair of jeans. I felt better out of bed, washed, with the moss scraped off, though I was unsure what day it was: there had been no word from the outside for a long while. Nobody had faxed or expressed me a thing, and the Southern lady voice of the office answering machine said, “You have no new messages.” The thought that downtown they are getting along pretty well without you is a desolate thought; you think, It can't keep going on like this. And it doesn't. The urge toward life is expressed by pulling on your pants, and the way to do it is to stand up and do it.

A
BIG CITY like New York could use at least one good snowstorm every year. A storm is the only event that happens to everybody at the same time, the most sociable event there is—one that pulls all the colorful little stories together into a big black-and-white epic. So that imaginary snowstorm that blew through town the other weekend had a lot of people counting on it, and happily contemplating the trouble it would cause, long before it finally did not appear. I was one of them. I woke up Friday morning to find the
Times
predicting from three to six inches, maybe twelve on Long Island, where “gusts over 50 miles an hour are possible, whipping the snow into high drifts.” A sentence like that makes me think I'd better go check on the livestock. I looked out on the terrace where the herd would be if there were one. No snow, but the sky had a grayish, metallic cast that looked pre-stormlike to me. Then a carpenter phoned and mentioned eight inches. He was supposed to come and install a shelf above the washer that morning, and he called to say he'd be two hours late, because, on account of the big storm, he'd have to come by car instead of bike, and his car was at a garage in Brooklyn having its brakes relined. He did not seem discouraged by the storm's advance. When I mentioned Long Island's twelve inches and wind-whipped drifts, he paused a moment, as Gary Cooper might have, and said, “I'll be there.”

I put on my warm boots and left for work. I thought I detected down in the subway a pretty clear mood of storm-readiness—people looking around with a weather eye, bundled-up people bouncing gently against each other on the train. I overheard “eight inches” several times. At the Columbus Circle station, there was a woman preaching on the platform. She was short and powerful, and paced to and fro yelling, “There's an express train to Hell, too! Yes! There's a Heaven and there's a Hell! And which train
you
ride? Do
you
know?” She wore a brown parka, a red stocking cap, and mittens.

It was still not snowing when I came up out of the ground at 42nd Street. I glanced up at the big National Debt Clock recently installed on a wall above the hamburger stand across the street, which showed the debt beating its way toward the three-trillion-dollar mark (“Your Family Share $41,661”). The debt rose all day Friday and the snow continued to not fall, and now it is a week later, my family is deeper in debt, and still no snow, although last Sunday I did see some slanting, slow-falling, semicrystallized rain in the twilight in Central Park. Some of what was falling seemed to possess particularity and to flutter flakelike as it fell, but when the stuff hit asphalt it was nothing but anonymous water. I was angling across the Park on a long hike back from lunch up in the clouds, in the dining room on the hundred-and-seventh floor of the World Trade Center, where the great, dense, swirling mists seen from a few feet away, over a plate of cold pasta salad and herring in mustard sauce, had storm written all over them, but it was a storm on its way somewhere else.

My wife pulled up her collar and said, “It's cold,” which some people would say if a shadow fell on them, but it
was
cold. The wind had an edge to it, the sky was hard. Nobody was in the Park. “It's too cold to snow,” she said. And it didn't. By Monday morning, the six hundred city garbage trucks that were equipped with snowplows had been decommissioned.

I've seen no snow since January, when I was in Chicago, and I feel deprived. In the liturgical year of basic visual images imprinted on a person's mind back in grade school, winter is represented by snow: cottony puffs on pine trees and hills and the roofs of small, square houses. We children did not sit around the long library table with paste and crayons and construction paper and make pictures of dusty gray sidewalks with tree wells full of trash, dead grass, and frozen dog manure. That nonstorm may have been the city's last chance for snow this winter. Perhaps it was needed here, to teach us something, which now we won't know, apparently.

Winter is a mysterious season. It is less researched than the others, because scientists don't care to freeze, either. They are rationalists, and prefer pleasure to pain; hence the vast shelves of monographs about the gorgeous fish of the coral reefs of Micronesia, the lifeways of tropical peoples, etc., and the few, slim volumes about the frozen tundra. Margaret Mead did not study adolescence in Greenland, and Jacques Cousteau did not steer the
Calypso
into the Bering Strait in November. They went where it was nice. Television and movie producers don't shoot many pictures in the North in winter, because it's a pain and because cold and snow are ominous phenomena, clear reminders of mortality. So America's popular images of itself are false, meteorologically speaking: a green, sunny land where nobody needs to wear warm clothing—a nation of Pasadena.