Gay Place (14 page)

They were silent for a time. Finally, the Governor suggested they think about it for a few days. They all agreed to think about it. Arthur Fenstemaker’s collapsed features came together; he smiled and put an arm around each of the two young men.

In the reception room they stood and talked about seeing each other again in several days. Jay McGown was bending over one of the secretary’s desks, making corrections in a television script. The Governor suddenly reached across, took several of the sheets of paper, and began to read aloud. Then he looked up at the ceiling for a moment.

“This is too prissy, Jay,” he said. “Can’t you brag on me some without it soundin’ like I’m diggin’ my toe in the ground?”

“It’s a problem,” Jay said, “bragging on you when you’re making the speech yourself …”

The Governor looked resigned to another defeat. “Well forget it then — take that stuff out about receiving honorary degrees. I never even got the B.A., anyhow …” He turned to Roy and Willie and said: “Everybody’s tryin’ to blur my public image.”

Then he stalked back inside the office.

T
HEY LEFT THE RECEPTION
room and walked down the marble stairway, moving past portraits of dead governors and senators, Confederate battle scenes and endless bronze figures in pioneer dress. There had been an early adjournment in the House. Committee meetings were underway in the back rooms, though a good crowd remained on the floor of the main chamber. Members and their secretaries milled about with lobbyists and newsmen and pageboys. Roy and Willie walked down the middle aisle and stopped to talk with Huggins.

“Hah yew people?” Huggins said. He leaned back in a leather swivel chair, feet propped on the desk. He munched on a banana.

“What’s going on?” Willie said. “We miss anything?”

“You just missed,” Huggins said, swallowing hard, “you just missed witnessing the nearly unanimous passage of a resolution expressing the will of this body in regard to bastardy.”

“And how does this body stand?” Roy said.

“Firmly against it,” Huggins said. “Almost unanimous. Except for me and about five others. We’re for all those unwed mothers. They’re mainly ladies of color, understand. Somebody here’s tryin’ to figure a way to keep ’em from havin’ one baby after another. Gonna reduce the compensation on the welfare. Got to cut costs somewhere, I guess.”

George Giffen came over. “I heard,” Giffen said, “I heard you and Willie been in to see the Governor.”

“How’d you hear that?” Roy said.

“Giffen’s got a pipeline,” Huggins said. “I got a theory Giffen just lurks outside the reception room all day long, makin’ notes on who goes in and out.”

“Fill me in, George,” Willie said. “I need a part-time man to keep me posted on what goes on round here.”

Giffen grinned, pleased with himself. He mentioned the tennis tournament. They sat talking about the tennis tournament for a few minutes. Then they all got up and left and talked about tennis some more over cold beers at the Dearly Beloved. Roy didn’t stay long. He had two beers and then waved goodbye. On the way out he hesitated near the pay phone, wondering if he should call Ouida. His eyes were beginning to burn; he was growing dizzy from the beers and from lack of sleep. He was afraid, moreover, that any moment Earle Fielding and Rinemiller might come through the doors — and he was already embarrassed for both of them. Just thinking about it. He realized suddenly, unhappily, that he could not make the phone call. He couldn’t explain why; he only knew it was impossible and he was too worn out to begin the laborious assembly of self-justifications. He left the Dearly Beloved and drove directly home.

The phone rang several times during the afternoon, badgering him in sleep. When he could not bear it any longer, he rolled out of bed, putting the words together, hoping he could think of enough words to give to Ouida. But it wasn’t Ouida calling. His brother was on the long-distance wire.
Oh Jesus,
he thought.
Here it comes …
But again it wasn’t what he expected. His older brother wanted some advice on a case, or, more specifically, wanted Roy to handle an appeals case before the high court at the Capitol.

“You got all the books there,” Roy said to him. “You know all about the law — I don’t.”

“I’ll send you a good brief,” the brother said. “We’ll send you everything. Just want you before that court. You’re better than any of us here at that sort of thing.”

Roy said all right; he’d do it, thinking he had better begin courting favor with someone at home and remembering at the same time that he really was a pretty good lawyer. He remembered once, a year out of law school, when an uncle died and his father fell sick and the brother was off in the Pacific on Naval Reserve duty, he had been suddenly confronted with nine criminal cases all by himself. It had just about killed him, but he’d won them every one.

His brother was about to ring off, satisfied, when Roy asked him how long he’d been trying to call.

“Just now,” his brother said. “Just now called. First time.”

He felt better about Ouida. It was such a murderously petty business, but now he was out front again. At least he’d made his gesture by answering one call. He flopped back on the bed, and within the next half-hour the phone jangled twice more. Then it was silent for a time. He lay on his bed in the lake cabin and tried to bring back sleep. One more hour’s release would work wondrous cures; he was certain about it. He lay thinking of sleep, and the more he thought the more it receded from him; the less there seemed of all possibilities. It could be a key, a diminished return, money in the bank. But there was only torpor. He lay in the bed, limp and wide awake, fully conscious yet inoperative, perspiring in his underwear. Sleep resisted him as the sunlight held the day. He leaned on one elbow and looked outside toward the blue-spined hills, the lilac-colored slopes. The sun was down but not yet forgotten; there was light enough still for all the young-muscled people on water skis. A half-dozen boats stirred the surface of the lake, churning circles in the region nearest the cabin, and for a moment, in the retreating light, he was partly tempted to call Ouida and suggest a ride upriver. That was one way to get her out of the apartment, out of his cabin, away from the Dearly Beloved and Fenstemaker and his family and all the others. They’d got wonderfully tight together one afternoon on the lake, drinking wine and lowering the puny ship’s flag to half-mast and raising insane toasts for Arbor Day. That was it. He remembered now. They’d celebrated Arbor Day, nearly drunk, drinking wine in the boat one afternoon.

He rolled over, stretching, trying to relax. The cat came to the bed and stalked across his body, taking up a position in the window sill. Roy slid off the bed and went to the door, holding it open. “Sam … Sam Luchow,” he called. “You want out, Sam?” The cat regarded him patiently and did not move. Roy returned to the bed and shut his eyes. In a moment he opened them again and stared around the room. He had occupied the cabin nearly three months, but there was scarcely a change in it since he had unpacked the first day. A pair of suitcases lay open in a corner, containing a laundry bundle of shirts and underwear he’d never bothered to unwrap. There were rumpled suits hanging zigzag fashion in the cedar closet, and a plastic bag of winter clothes was draped across the back of the single easy chair. The floor in and around the closet was littered with great wads of jumbled bedsheets, pillowcases, sweatshirts and bathing robes and decaying hotel towels. On one bare wall he had pinned an outsized campaign button that spelled out
A D L A I,
red on black, and on the wall opposite was the ancient oval photograph of
Our President Calvin Coolidge,
who peered out glumly, bound in celluloid collar.

Roy examined his room, deciding it could only be identified as the tourist home lodgings of some lunatic recluse who had suddenly taken to travel. He wondered what Ouida would think of his cabin. He supposed something should have to be done. But where to start and where leave off? Once underway, should he keep on setting things in order, all his life, his work, his junk-pile romance, preparing his laundry bag of splendid emotions for some final adjustment, an ultimate dislocation, acknowledging once and for all the ceaseless demands of public ambition and private loves? It seemed a crime to seek power from either source unless he was prepared to assume the responsibilities. And looking round his ill-furnished fraud of a life, he could not convince himself that he was prepared for any such thing. There was Fenstemaker, by contrast, who dared to seek it for whatever wealth of largeness it might bring him. “I tell you boy,” he’d said that week at breakfast, “there ain’t nothin’ else but power an’ change an’ improvement. The rest — an’ I think I misquote some English socialist on this — is all a mere middle-class business …” The Governor had leaned across the table, bigger than life, stabbing at egg yolk, and put the idea to him: “Ain’t no use fomentin’. Learned that long ago. Ain’t no use ’cept in the last extremity. You want to overturn the existin’ institution, that’s fine. But you got to be sure you know how to build a better one. The thing to do is work
through
the institution — figure a way to do that — to make a change and build a city and save the goddam world from collapse. You got to work through that institution, Roy …” Then he leaned back and flashed his shark’s smile, saying, “An’ I’m that institution currently …”

He rolled over in his middle-class bed and closed his eyes again. The cat stalked back across the covers and curled at his feet. Darkness settled round them, and out on the lake the motorboats vanished one by one …

The landscapes changed, colors blending and fading and separating again, outlines quivering and growing less distinct in a fusion of grays and greens and washed-out mauves. Rinemiller raised his glass of whiskey to the twilight and the burnt-orange root beer sign across the street. “Divorce is a terrible thing,” he said.

Earle Fielding was silent for a moment. “Let’s have a parachute jump,” he finally said.

Rinemiller looked through the highball glass. “But sometimes it’s for the best,” he said.

“I feel like makin’ a jump,” Fielding said. “It makes a man feel like a man.”

The others chatted back and forth across the dining table. There were a half-dozen of them in the Mexican café. They sat in a little bunch at one of the tables, talking, watching the sun go down. They called the proprietor Mack the Knife, though not to his face. He was a huge Irish-Mexican, black-mustached, gold-toothed and sinister.

“All the people down here do is get dronk and chase each other,” Mack the Knife said.

“You’re not being fair,” Willie said. “It’s this way all over — it’s a sick world, Mack.”

“Not in Detroit,” said Mack the Knife, who had been in Detroit.

“In Detroit, yes,” Willie said. “You just weren’t aware of it. Too busy on the assembly lines making all your money.”

“I am a self-make man,” said Mack the Knife.

“I know you are self-make,” Willie said. “Here — have some of your good self-make Mexican chianti …” He held the bottle out; Cathryn, sitting beside him, offered her empty glass. The others talked incessantly and at the tops of their voices. Mack the Knife always came over to their table, making time with the women, preferably large blondes like Ellen Streeter and, as a matter of good form, unattached.

Mack the Knife grinned. “You craze
cabrones
,” he said. “That’s no goldam self-make. A brought it all the way from Monterrey and the State of Nuevo León in my pickup truck.” He looked around, proud of the establishment. “Everything in here I did,” he said.

“I know you did,” Willie said. “That’s how it is possible for you to build yourself an authentic State of Nuevo León Mexican restaurant … Have some chianti.”

“How ’bout some good Club Ninety-Nine brandy,” Mack the Knife said. “Why doan you buy a bottle? Every bit as quality as a Five Star …”

“The chianti,” Willie said, “is quite quality enough.”

Mack the Knife took an empty seat next to Cathryn. “You want some of the Ninety-Nine?” he said to her. She shook her head and smiled.

Willie said: “All she wants is a red M.G.”

“I’ll buy you one,” Mack the Knife said. “Buy you one for cash tomorrow.” He had been born along the border, on the Mexican side, and come across as a teenager — he could not remember at what exact age — following the cotton and wheat harvests into the Middle West. In Michigan he had found work on the automobile assembly lines, saved his money, and returned to build his own restaurant. Now he was very rich, owning, in addition to the restaurant, a loan company, a catering service, a tamale factory and an apartment house.

“You mean it?” Cathryn said.

“Goldam right I mean it. I doan kid around.”

Mack the Knife got to his feet and told Cathryn to think it over. He waved goodbye and moved across the room, directing abuse in Spanish at the waiters and busboys. Earle Fielding talked about how he would like to jump out of an airplane. Harris and Ellen Streeter discussed the problem of Ellen’s frigidity. George Giffen was attempting to get his secretary tight. Huggins talked with Rinemiller about the race for the speakership and how many pledges Alfred had received from the House membership up to that time. Willie tried not to think about Rinemiller, who sat directly across from him. He wondered if Arthur Fenstemaker could somehow resolve or explain away the matter of the bribe — its offer and acceptance — before Willie himself might be forced to make a decision. He put his hand on Cathryn’s knee.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because it feels terrible good,” she said.

He left his hand there and tried not to think about Alfred.

Arthur Fenstemaker arrived in his hotel suite, three floors above the banquet room where he had given a banquet address. He lay down on the sofa, holding his head, massaging his eyes, groaning quietly to himself. His brother, Hoot Gibson Fenstemaker, crawled about on the floor near the sofa, looking for a lost shirt stud. “It was mah dyemond one,” he kept saying.

“That’s no goddam diamond,” the Governor said.