All the Houses (29 page)

It had been easier when we were girls and I was simply trying to emulate Courtney. I borrowed her clothes, I copied her speech, I listened to her tapes, I followed her and her friends around the house until they sent me away. Or else we fought. At the corner where the school bus picked us up, she once gave me a black eye with a broom handle we'd found. Another time I almost managed to pull down her pants just as the bus was coming. Always parked at that same corner was a secret service trailer assigned to an ex–vice president who lived nearby, and just in front of the trailer we would fight each other, possibly observed by the agents inside, we never knew.

Our father found us, and came to shore. “You know who that is, the fellow you and Hugo were talking to earlier?” he asked me.

“He said he runs some kind of data management business.”

“He was at Treasury for years. Pretty high up, by the end. He was Frank Lake's boss.”

Who Frank Lake was, I had not a clue, but I pretended to remember.

“Are you having a good time?” I asked Dad.

He seemed confused by the question. “I'm having a fine time.”

“Is the semester over?” Courtney asked.

“Just final papers to grade.”

“That's good,” she said.

“So girls,” he began—it was usual for him to address us that way—“what should our plan be for Christmas?”

“We need a Plan B?” I asked.

“Maybe we could do a little more this year, you know, make it nice. I'm planning to go to the cathedral the night before if anyone wants to join me.”

“Isn't Mom coming down?” The past few years, she'd taken the train to D.C., and we'd had an early dinner with her on Christmas Eve. Then she would take the train back.

“If you wanted to join me afterward, I meant. It's a late service.”

“I think Hugo and I might go to St. Bart's,” Courtney said abruptly.

“St. Bart's?” Dad asked.

“It's an island.”

“I'm familiar with it. For Christmas?”

“It's been so hectic with work, and the move, and everything, we could use a few days on the beach.”

“Sounds nice. Maybe we could all go!” Courtney stiffened, and he added, “For the weekend at least, and then you two could stay longer…” She closed her eyes and whispered no, her face less sorry than irritated.

“Okay. Scratch that.”

“Why do you have to do this?” she asked.

“What? Do what?”

“Is it so wrong for me to spend a holiday with my husband? That's something that people do. Hugo is my family now.”

We all looked over at Hugo, who had made his way back to the birdcage and coaxed the cockatiel, or whatever it was, onto his long tan finger. He was leaning his head forward and talking to the bird, probably about trade policy with China.

“Of course, he's your husband,” Dad said. “Of course. If you haven't bought your tickets yet, why don't you let me get them, as a Christmas present.”

“Stop it! Just stop it!”

“What is up your butt?” I asked.

She ignored that and kept after Dad. “I don't need you to buy the tickets. I don't need you to do anything for me.” She turned away and walked over to Hugo, to tell him it was time to leave. The bird seemed reluctant to let go of Hugo's finger, until my sister nudged it with the side of her hand.

I understood that an old ugly argument had crawled out of the depths and taken hold of Courtney, and I wanted to say something reassuring to Dad, something about how this probably had nothing to do with him, but before I came up with anything he went off to get another drink.

I felt a draft but was slow to recognize that it had come through the open front door. I had failed in my watch, such as it had been, for here came Rob, already in the house, already shrugging off his coat. He'd had a haircut. It made me think of school, of the entire breed of private school boys and in particular that clan of handsome, lacrosse-playing, beer-pounding, boisterous ones, who floored their parents' cars at 1:00 a.m. on Western Avenue, and flirted with the Spanish teachers, and set off on summer service trips to Central America that they would later describe on their college applications. The kind of kids who bug the shit out of people—
born on third base and thinks he hit a triple
was a criticism lobbed at our prep-school president, but I don't remember those boys taking credit for their own exceptional luck. Yes, some of them had been arrogant dipsticks, but most had been merely obnoxious, often winningly so, and while I'm sure that they'd felt more confusion and angst than they'd let on, life had been good to them and they hadn't denied it. They'd had fun, something I hadn't had much of a knack for in high school, which is to say that while I had little spurts of fun, I never was able to relish, say, getting wasted or getting high or driving very fast. I didn't feel superior: I'd always believed there was some worth in these activities, not for me but for the guys who experienced them with delight, guys who'd been living it up while I wrote in my journal.

As best I could tell, Courtney hadn't caught sight of Rob yet, and instead of going straight to him I cut toward her first, wanting to block her view. He saw me and watched quizzically as I made my zigzag, and then once I'd come close he leaned over to kiss me hello. I gave him my cheek and then glanced back.

“Are we being discreet?” he asked.

“Let's go over there,” I said, pulling him into a throng of backs and shoulders near the drinks.

“What the hell are you wearing?”

“D.C. drag.”

“Nice. Is there someplace I can put my coat?”

“We won't be here long. Did you get my message?”

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and read it, as if for the first time, though I had a suspicion that he'd come precisely because I'd told him not to come. We were being continually jostled, and next to us, a man and a woman were yelling back and forth about the lamentable state of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The woman was much taller than the man, and they had to project to make themselves heard.

Insofar as my sister had been about to leave the party, I think my plan to hide Rob from her, silly as it was, might have in fact succeeded, had the crowd been slightly less oppressive, the OSHA critics not quite so noisy. But Rob took my hand, insisting we move to another spot, and when we came out from the pack, she was standing right there. He still had my hand in his. Her face, the narrower, cooler variant of my own face, managed to flay me while barely shifting its expression, until finally she turned to Rob.

“I would introduce you to my husband, but we're on our way out.”

“Next time, I hope,” he said.

“Next time.”

She gave me another eye-smack before she strode past us. “Now that's some real holiday cheer,” Rob said.

“She's had some stressful things to deal with lately. She's not always like that,” I said, which was true, much as I sometimes made her out to be a full-time ice queen. “Let me go find my dad and tell him I'm leaving. We're leaving, okay?”

My father found us first, and I introduced him to Rob. “Remember I mentioned him to you?”

“This is—you're Dick's…” He stared at Rob, as though he might find a resemblance.

“Stepson, right.”

“I think we're taking off, Dad.”

“I see. Do you have a car? Can I give you guys a ride someplace?”

“That's okay,” I said. “Stay here and enjoy the party.”

“It's no problem—”

“I do have a car, actually,” Rob said. Dad seemed sorry to hear it.

*   *   *

At my apartment Rob grinned and grabbed me, then started to unbutton my blouse. He had this invisible ribbon he was winding around me. A chrysalis was forming, and meanwhile I was so full of questions, itches, feelings without words; they overwhelmed me, and I had trouble saying anything.

As prey I wasn't challenging enough, I hardly struggled. I found myself performing to keep him there, even though I didn't necessarily want him there. In my head I'd started explaining myself to Courtney, making excuses: it wasn't my fault, I had tried to un-invite him.

What followed wasn't especially nice or especially anything. Afterward he took a shower. By then it must've been midnight or later. I lay on the bed as I listened to the sound of the water, nestling into the gap in time this shower offered. It seemed to me that these gaps in time, the blank spaces inserted into the middle of the night, were the best part of hooking up. He came out of the bathroom rubbing his hair with a towel, naked the long dripping rest of him, and then found his BlackBerry. He was easily bored.

I knew better than to ask him about Courtney, and still I asked him. When had they started going out?

“Mmmm,” he said.

“You guys totally went out.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Yes you did.”

“We fooled around a few times.”

“But I remember you picking her up from our house, I remember you calling.”

“I might've done those things, but we weren't … You know how your sister was in high school.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She got around.”

“Wait. That is not—it's not like she was some slut.” He'd turned toward me by then, and I detested the look on his face, which managed to be innocent and superior at the same time, his brows lifting in surprise, or mock surprise, while the word
slut
hung there unrefuted. “Are you kidding me? She was not.”

“I didn't use that word.”

“You're wrong if you think that. She was into sports. She was a big jock.”

“That's not the only thing she was into. She got kind of out of control.”

I felt suddenly furious. “That is so—”

“I'm not making this up.”

“You'd better leave,” I said.

“You're kicking me out?”

“I am.”

“You're kicking me out of your apartment for saying that Courtney Atherton got around in high school.”

“No, I'm kicking you out because you're being a dick.”

“Okay-bye,” he said quickly.

As soon as he said that, I changed my mind, but he already had his pants on and was reaching for his shirt. By the time he left I was wide awake, still hearing him say
out of control
and trying to call up the nights I'd seen my sister with her boyfriends. But there was too much interference. I kept replaying in my head the proceedings of the prior ninety minutes, and everything I thought about it, i.e., about Rob, was just a bunch of cliché junk from pop songs. He was the worst person I'd ever liked, I thought, but then I remembered that he wasn't even close to being the worst. He was merely typical of the men I liked, men who were always going away from me, often at my own insistence. And he was someone I'd liked all the more, presumably, because of my unshakable desire to compete with my sister, although now I didn't exactly feel like I'd won anything.

*   *   *

Then I remembered how I'd left my dad behind at the Morgans' so that I could bring Rob home with me. I wondered how long he'd stayed after that. I wondered whether he'd been sober enough to drive home. I had an urge to call him, but it was the middle of the night.

When we were kids, our father had spent what time with us he could: Saturdays on our bicycles, Sundays at Roy Rogers. And then later, he'd spent on us, opening the billfold time and time again, the cash inside always brand-new as though the bank were minting it just for him. Money having come to him later in life, during his postgovernment years at Intelcom, he seemed eager to get rid of it. No end to the meals, clothes, anything we happened to express a wish for in his presence.

Even before then, we could always lean on him to get us the stuff our mom wouldn't. She was the in-house IMF and he was the backwater potentate who couldn't quite give up his old spendthrift habits. Sometime in the eighties he'd gone from economizer to granter of wishes, like he was trying to buy back what had already been lost, during all those hours at the office or in the car, in elevators: he'd stepped inside, the doors shut, he went up and down and stepped out again to find we were little girls no longer. We were mysterious creatures holed up in our bedrooms, the phone cord snaking under the door; we climbed out our windows, we burst into tears, we tramped through the kitchen with packs of friends, we giggled and protested and whispered and thundered down the stairs and then we were gone.

 

 

For better or worse (in the end, probably worse) he stays at the NSC. He doesn't quit in August 1985, and after he makes that choice he is confronted by a second one: he can stay at his desk shuffling memos, or he can ally more closely with the people who are doing things. It isn't enough to be smart, not if you aren't willing to engage. He chooses to side with the activists—I don't blame him for it. Well: I do and I don't.

It's the national security advisor who quits. At the end of November, McFarlane, who has become ever more strung out and unhappy, who's started smoking again, who is unable to mask the swells and crashes of his disappointment, resigns. Quite a few people saw it coming, including Tim, who was along on what should've been a rest day, a visit to a boys' school in Virginia where McFarlane spoke to the assembled student body about the meaning of public service. On the drive back into Washington he started to raise his voice, he yelled about the recent arms talks in Geneva but also seemed to be yelling at life itself,
The hell with this, the hell with this
, and they had to pull over so that he could calm down.

Not long after that he throws in the towel, and Vice Admiral Poindexter replaces him. My dad starts reporting to North, not officially but as a practical matter. He buries his reservations about the man.