All the Houses (32 page)

We just fell into these exchanges, it seemed. I wouldn't see them coming. The blandest of topics would still lead us back to
You're wrong. No, you're wrong.

*   *   *

The next day, I was reading the paper on the living room couch when Dad came in to tinker with the thermostat, a new digital model he distrusted. Offhandedly I told him about a bit from the gossip column. “That's Washington for you,” he said, and then he stared at the tree and said that he wondered from time to time how his life might have played out in a different city than this one. It was the kind of thing I wondered about all the time, with respect to my own life, but it startled me when my father said it, because I considered the course of his life, of both my parents' lives, to have been fixed. All but fated. I didn't like to think of their choices as choices. I sat there, staring at him, Dad in his sweater and jeans and slippers, hair uncombed, thumbs hooked in his pockets, and thought,
Even for you it wasn't all mapped out.
I'd been raised in a world of tests and competitive admissions and college career offices, maybe that's why I had to remind myself of the obvious—that our lives are shaped as much by other people and external forces and luck as they are by aptitudes and plans.

“I was offered a pretty good position down in Florida in, what was it, spring of eighty-five? An old friend of mine had a company that was doing very well, it was a distributor for medical supplies, and he invited me to interview for vice president of something or other. Operations? I had the sense that the interview was a formality, though. It paid very well.”

“Did you think about taking it?”

“Oh sure. We had college tuitions to think about, and it was just so different, the private sector, Fort Lauderdale, all of it. I went down there and did the interview, talked to a bunch of guys. But your mother was happy in her job here, and you girls were in high school, and you know—selling things to hospitals. I just hadn't seen myself in that sort of business. But then again…”

He drifted off, and I thought I understood: had he taken the Florida job, he would have avoided the scandal, which itself had steered him into the corporate life, but only after many months of investigations and unemployment—and painful memories that lasted much longer. But he went on.

“Then again I was certainly tempted to get out. The White House was exciting, but it wasn't the best atmosphere. There were big egos, a lot of infighting. It could be hard to get anything done, or even keep in mind what we were trying to accomplish.”

“Did you write about that, in your book?”

He stayed quiet for a bit, and then he said, “I didn't get that far.”

“Maybe you should keep going.”

“It's not about Iran-Contra, hardly any of it is. I wanted to write about the rest of what I did, the parts that got lost after the whole, whatever you want to call it. The whole shebang. I was going to give you some of it to read. That was going to be my Christmas present, but then I thought the better of it.”

“Why?”

“These old-man memoirs. They're so funereal.”

“It's not funereal.”

“‘Let's go ahead and get it on the record while he's still got his wits about him. Then we'll self-publish the thing and never look at it again,'” he said. He'd started pacing a little. “Believe me, I've seen these things at other people's houses, and they're like long, first-person obituaries.”

“Come on, Dad.” He didn't say anything. “I'd just like to know more about it. When it happened, Iran-Contra was like this big thing that nobody had straight and people made fun of, at least the kids I knew would make fun of it.”

He stood still and tall. “I'll say one thing about all that. My colleagues at the time, they skirted the law. They broke it, I suppose, and they covered it up, and they—we, I should say, since I did help them, we were caught. But those men did what they did for reasons they believed to be the right reasons. Moral reasons. I won't say I myself had all the conviction of an Oliver North, but I did believe in their good faith, if that makes any sense. I still believed I was working for and with people who had our country's best interests at heart. This may seem simplistic to you. We live in, I guess you could say, a more complicated world now, and we're more sensitive to how dangerous our convictions can turn out to be. At least some of us are. But then I look at your generation and I wonder what it's like—what do you even put faith in?”

I couldn't tell whether he expected a reply. I didn't have one. Faith? A pretty country singer. The shape of a fish on the back of a car. A musty old rocking chair that had not been handed down to me. I wanted to defend my generation, but all I could think to say was that there were other members of my generation who were better and more faithful people than I was.

Dad went upstairs, and I heard the printer going. He came back down with a small stack of paper and handed it over.

“It's not much,” he said. “Fits and starts.”

The pages were still warm when I took them in my hands. He was already heading back toward the stairs. “But you should be writing something of your own, not helping me with a book I might never finish.”

I thanked him; I said I was really excited to read it, which truly I was. And then again I was reluctant. I took those pages home and didn't touch them for a long time. I also put my own book on hold. The more I'd written, the more the whole construct had threatened to collapse, maybe because I'd never actually been part of the professional world I was trying to re-create, though that wasn't the only reason. Iran-Contra was too convoluted. My father was too close and also too distant. And did it matter so much what he had done in his career, or had I just fallen into an all-too-Washingtonian trap, believing his career had defined him?

This wasn't just about his career. This was my family's encounter with History. The scandal seemed to me, in its mysterious, byzantine way, to be more than a political mess that had sullied my dad. I sometimes thought of it as a puddle in which a whole swath of sky was reflected, as well as, from certain angles, my own face.

Yet it was a relatively recent obsession. I'd only become compelled by Iran-Contra once I'd had the idea to write a script—in other words, my curiosity about the story and my urge to tell the story had presented at the same time, like two symptoms of the same illness, back when I'd hoped to convert our family crisis into Hollywood drama. The longer I stayed away from L.A., though, the less I believed that such a conversion was even possible, never mind desirable. I lost track of my three-act structure. I no longer knew who the antagonists were.

I set my book aside, but I didn't stop thinking about that time. Everything—the streets, the season, the smells in the air—reminded me of the past, and I was remembering things I hadn't thought about in years.

 

PART THREE

 

1986

It was the year Len Bias died. Len Bias, All-American, star of the University of Maryland basketball team, was picked second in the NBA draft by the Celtics on June 17 and pronounced dead, at Leland Memorial Hospital, less than forty-eight hours later. The day after the draft he had flown with his father to Boston and back, and that night, while celebrating in a Maryland dorm room, he'd ingested enough cocaine to stop even a young athlete's unscarred heart. He collapsed on the floor. The friend who called 911 told the dispatcher, “This is Len Bias. He can't die,” and though the dispatcher didn't recognize the name, countless other people would've understood: not only was it unacceptable for Len Bias to die of an overdose before he'd played his first game in the pros, it was inconceivable. Not Bias with his defiant hang-time, Bias who would bring off his perfect jump shot on one possession and on the next soar straight to the hoop. Bias, one of the two greats to come out of the Atlantic Coast Conference in those years, along with Jordan.

If you were a kid who cared about basketball back then, the death of Len Bias was another
Challenger
explosion—and a much bigger deal than the reports about weapons sales to Iran and covert aid to the Contras that began surfacing later that same year.
He can't die.
No one could believe that the demigod had been so crudely exposed as a mortal, that such talent could vanish so quickly from the earth, and that nothing would be left but the game tapes and a photograph of Bias at the draft, in an ivory suit and a green Celtics cap, not beaming like you might expect but smiling shyly, more Lenny the quiet boy who used to go home from college on the weekends and wash his mother's car than Bias the big-time baller. On the news they showed that photo over and over, the picture of a glorious beginning that would be snuffed two days hence. Poor dead Len Bias, his happy face was everywhere.

*   *   *

D.C. was nuts for basketball, at least lots of us were, and the same ardor that had produced a Len Bias infected many, many lesser athletes, even a contingent of private-school girls who were, practically speaking, playing a different game that just happened to have the same rules.

Our team tryouts were in mid-November: three days and thirty-odd ponytailed teenage females, in faded T-shirts and new high-tops, crouching and sliding sideways, zigzagging across the shiny wood floors. This at an “elite” secondary school. Most of us were daughters of privilege and most were white, a small herd of spindly-legged
jeunes filles
running around in a cloud of estradiol and the bright, fruity scents of our bath products. We ran and jumped desperately, desperate to be better than we were.

Each afternoon a skimmed light fell from the high windows and faded as we went on. Coach E—the varsity coach, Deanna Estes—pushed us until we were raw and heaving and more or less mute. We might make eye contact and stick out our tongues, but then it was back to the pain and the striving, each of us trapped inside our hopeless bodies, lashing at them, go on, go on, until the sky was dark and the air in the gym had thickened into a fug of sweat and nerves. There were two secondary authorities, the varsity assistant and the junior varsity coach, but Coach E, fortyish and wide-hipped and hoarse and intimidating to me, was in charge, and all business.

The year before, as a junior, Courtney had been the varsity's leading scorer. I'd been a freshman on JV and had come in off the bench, and so my hope was to start for the JV that season. But on the first day of tryouts I flubbed everything. I missed shots, I dropped passes, I stumbled around the gym like some sedated heavyweight, wondering whether I would so much as stay on the JV team, even as Courtney was nearly perfect. She moved through the drills matter-of-factly, like someone doing housework, like a charmed person doing housework. When it came time to shoot she hit shot after beautiful shot, lowered her head and ran on. It wouldn't be quite right to say that she was a superior athlete, or that she was egoless, but she had worked very hard to become pretty good, and she was something like her best self when she played on a team, and you couldn't help but feel grateful for it. Her body was loose, easy, but if you looked at her face you saw her eyes always scanning, alert to the steal, the cutter, the shot, the hole.

In my room that night, I sat on my bed and rubbed at the red indentations my socks had left in my ankles, then wiped my nose against my sleeve.
Oh fuck it. Fuck me. Well as if anyone would.
I stood up and stalked around the room. I ripped a taped-up picture of the Georgetown Hoyas off the wall and crumpled it up, which was hardly satisfying.

I could hear him climbing the stairs. My dad, in his slippers.

“Knock knock.”

“Go away.”

“I'd rather not.”

“Go away!”

“Aren't you going to eat?”

I shook my head, though he couldn't see me do it, a piece of my dark wet hair attaching itself to my jaw. He cracked the door.

“Your mother says you missed dinner.”

“I'm not hungry.”

He stepped into the room and, seeing my face, spoke more softly. “You should eat.”

“I messed up. I did terribly.”

“I'm sure you did better than you think you did. Courtney said things went well.” He nodded to himself and started to look around the room. I'll eat later, I told him.

Because we were sisters who played basketball, people assumed that Courtney and I had grown up playing together. I can picture it myself, an alternate girlhood in which we unwound game after game of one-on-one from a fat spool of afternoons, sweating and squealing and laughing all the while. But when we actually tried to play, it sucked. We would come this close to punching each other, and between punching each other and killing each other was barely any distance at all. She was the older sister, and so she absolutely had to win. She did in fact beat me consistently, but she wasn't expert enough to win every single game: she wasn't quicker than I was or any kind of ball-handling whiz. I was more reckless, more physical, which sometimes worked in my favor and sometimes backfired. Every now and then I took the lead, but I didn't want to make her mad, and so I would start to giggle and do silly things. I would, when I had the ball, turn my body away from the basket and then back myself toward it, dribbling and backing into my sister until I got close enough to attempt an unlikely hook shot. Those hook shots infuriated Courtney. “Come on!” she would say. It didn't take long before she grabbed my hair, and I would exclaim, jovially, “Folks, now she's got her sister by the hair!” which only made her yank harder.

I wanted her approval badly, but instead of doing things she'd approve of, I did the opposite.

In other words we didn't play together much. Mostly, I ran. Ran the trails down to Georgetown and back up through the streets, ran along the parkway by the river, ran on Reno Road and Nebraska Avenue, ran around the grounds of the cathedral, ran up and down the hills in Battery Kemble Park. Ran in excess of what was necessary or even desirable for basketball, for I was overworking the wrong muscles. I had much more lung capacity than I had power. But in high school everyone has to find her own way to keep her head on straight, and my way was to lope around for an hour at a stretch with a mix tape in my yellow Sports Walkman, taking refuge in those patches of woods that are scattered among the Washington neighborhoods, jumping over roots and skirting the muddy sections and shortening my stride to skitter along exposed pipes.