Gay Place (43 page)

“Up with the Governor … What are you doing tonight? Would you be interested in a party? We’re going to one — or rather I’m supposed to meet Neil at one. He’s supposed to meet Andrea there. We’re all meeting — everyone’s meeting. You want to come with me and meet everyone.”

The girl thought a moment. “What kind of party? I have nothing to wear. Really, I have no —”

“It’s not important. In fact you’ll be sensational. Wear flat heels and a plain blouse — maybe a man’s shirt. They’ll like that — this bunch … How about it?”

“All right …”

Stanley had a rented car parked just outside. There were newsboys hooting the noon edition fictions. Another picture of Neil was on the front page, and they stopped to look. But the stories were those written at eleven that morning — the ones based on the advance text. There was nothing about what happened at the luncheon and only a few lines from the speech Neil had actually delivered.

The Saturday afternoon traffic was thinning, and they stood for a moment watching all the bland faces, all the same people. They were becoming all of a type: the ten-dollar straws with the Old School striped bands, the silk suits and the gray mesh oxfords and the batiste button-downs, the women in empire waist or middy blouse or garish orange print dresses. It would all soon be as jaded and predictable and tedious as all the rest, with only a slight aberration in manner or dress dividing them from, say, Sauk City, Minnesota. Stanley thought about the old man in the hotel room with his diamond stickpin and kitchen matches and Neil trying to hold on to something, overwhelmingly assaulted by the images created for him. He looked at the faces once again as he held the car door for the girl. His own father would have astonished everyone for blocks around with his crazy beard.

“I
DON’T LIKE IT,
” Neil said.

“The hell with what you like,” the Governor said. “You do what you have to do.”

“I don’t like it.” He continued to pace about the room; he had begun to perspire again. The Governor was going after something inside his ear with the end of a matchstick jacketed in Kleenex. The old man, Andrea’s father, had drunk bourbon steadily until falling to sleep in one of the bedrooms.

“Christ almighty,” the Governor said, “what in hell is this faint-of-heart business? What do you want? Free the slaves? End the cold war? Institute land reforms?”

“No, no, no …”

“You do what you
have
to do, Neil. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. You make the best of a not-so-bad bargain. Give a little, take a little … The first principle is that you’ve got to learn to rise above principle.”

“But it’s too much. Fifty thousand dollars — it’s just —”

“You’ll need twice that much before this campaign’s over.”

“… It’s just too much. From the wrong people. I don’t even know them.”

“All the better. You realize I collected it this morning — and you weren’t even around? Skipped out on me … I’m beginning to believe I could invent you — just tell the people there was such a thing as Neil Christiansen. And win it all by myself!”

“Not a bad idea,” Neil said.

“Look — you want to stay here the next two months and be saddled with a statewide campaign? It’s a big state. Runnin’ your skinny behind off, making eight, ten speeches a day?”

“No.”

“Then you do it on the television. You go back to Washington and work at your job and let yourself be seen on television a few times a week. The TV and the ads and the newspaper support and my own little old organization I’m turning over to you …”

“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get into this … Hadn’t even made up my mind …”

“… Do everything for you.
Every
thing. You just show your face occasionally — and collect all the gravy. And don’t let it dribble down your shirt front … You want to do good? Hey — you want to do good?”

“I want to do goody-good,” Neil said, “I really do.” He looked at the Governor, unsmiling.

“Well you
can,
don’t you understand? Don’t you understand that? All you ever wanted to do. Six years … Six gorgeous years — I wish I had that much ahead of me. You know what that means? To get elected to the Senate at your age? You’re in forever if you got any sense at all and don’t rape a nun or something. You’re in there for as long as you want and you end up a committee chairman or a vice-presidential candidate and Lord knows whut-all.
You’ve
got a future … I don’t know what the hell I’ve got …”

“I understand … I appreciate that. But …
fifty thousand dollars —
are you serious? Is it that much?”

“That’s what they pledged. And they don’t ordinarily go back on their word.”

“What do they
want
?”

“Who the hell knows? Everything! The goddam moon. That’s not your concern.”

“The hell it isn’t. I’m —”

“You’re job is to get elected and stay elected. That’s the first consideration. When that’s assured, you get good enough, mean enough, you learn enough to fend off the bill collectors. They come around wanting the moon you give ’em green cheese and make ’em think that was what they were lookin’ for all the time.
That’s
what you do. That’s what a professional
has
to do.”

“Give it back to them,” Neil said, staring out a window toward the hideous rooftops of tall buildings and the green hills beyond.

“The hell I will. I’d keep it myself before I’d give it back. And I haven’t even got it yet.”

“Fine. Tell ’em to forget it. We’ll get by without —”

“
Forget
it? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any
idea —
I know you must because you worked in my campaign … you’ve worked in enough campaigns to know …”

“What?”

“What a telecast over the state costs.”

“Eight thousand.”

“About ten. And radio’s half of that. And newspaper ads! And salaries for campaign personnel.
You know.
How can you —”

“All right, all right. But I don’t like it.”

“Like I said — the hell with what you like. That’s a luxury for people elected to office for six year terms. Indulge yourself some other time …”

Andrea’s father wandered out into the main room. Thin strands of gray hair fell over his face. He had lost a shoe somewhere; his garters were loose and trailed his feet, dragging the carpet.

“What time is it?” he said.

“After five,” the Governor said. “Going on six.”

“You about finished, Neil?”

“Yes.” He looked at Fenstemaker. “I’ve got to go.”

“Sure … But remember what I said. Quit behaving like you’re having a monthly or something. Take a pill. Feel better tomorrow.
I
get down. God knows I get right down on the basement floor and want to cry and throw a bomb at the next Creeping Jesus who walks into my office with a long face and a longer hand out. But I get over it. It’s a little song and dance I go through when somebody plays the secret music. Zip up your fly and go home and think about these things.”

The Governor got to his feet and walked slowly into his bedroom. They could hear him in there, on the telephone again. “Yes … Yes … Allright, all right, you can knock off. Go get tight … Go get yourself laid … Tell Sweet Mama I’ll be late … What? I’m taking a nap, that’s what … And have someone send a car around and ring me around seven …”

Neil and the old man got their coats and headed out of the suite. The late afternoon papers had arrived and Neil carried the front sections with him. There were small pictures of Neil speaking and Edwards in his arms akimbo stance, and a larger one of them slipping sideways on the marble floor of the ballroom lobby. The caption read
GREAT DEBATE — ROUND ONE
, although the story was all in Neil’s favor. He could tell himself, struggling with the emotions of uneasy objectivity and crippled pride, that whatever advantage achieved was the result of Arthur Fenstemaker’s speech to the crowd. There was a brief description of the scuffling match and the heated words leading up to it, followed by a lengthy report on all the tributes paid to Neil by the Governor. This carried over into another column on the inside pages, with more description of Edwards’ quick and unceremonious departure. In the last five paragraphs an attempt was made to summarize Neil’s luncheon speech, but the quotations were all out of context and nearly incoherent, and he wondered if there had ever really been anything to what he had said.

The old man chewed a stick of gum, a precaution, he said, against whiskey breath, and they moved through the Saturday evening traffic toward the hills. Neil drove the car, and between them sat two enormous stuffed rabbits the old man had brought with him on the plane. The girls spotted them immediately from the front steps and ran squealing and gasping with delight toward the open car door. “Grandpa!” they hooted … “Easter rabbuts! …”

They stood struggling with the weird animals in the twilight, attempting to get them pulled inside the house without dragging bottoms, arguing over colors and rabbit whiskers (“Rabbits have
whiskers
?”) and the extraordinary length of the ears. Andrea met them at the door. She was dressed to go out; in the crazy grandeur of the moment, with the porch lamp on her sweet face and the children screaming and stumbling over one another and whooping instructions at their grandfather, she seemed to embrace and give meaning to all the pretty pictures in his head of what it was he really wanted and how life ought to be. They stood looking at each other with the screen door half open and the girls dancing round them, the old man wheezing and trying to tell a story from his youth about Easter egg rolls on the courthouse lawn of some wornout and forgotten country town.

“I was going out,” she finally said. “Cocktails — it’s already started — and then dinner downtown and some kind of drinking party afterwards. Can you come with me?”

“Could it … be … later? I’m just God-awful tired … and …

“I heard you announced?” she said. “On the radio. Was it in your speech? I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t either … It just happened.”

“It was wonderful, Andy. It was the damndest thing I ever …” The old man hesitated. The two little girls were tugging on his trousers, embracing his legs. He staggered back for a moment and hoisted each child in his arms.

“Hey, Grandpa!” the youngest one yelled into his ear. “Whoo-dya love?”

“Who do I
love?
Why I love …”

Andrea still stared at Neil; her face had gone all soft and inexplicably receptive; she managed a slight smile.

“Whoodja love?” she said suddenly. There was a flash of white teeth and then the smile was gone again, and in a moment she looked on the verge of tears.

His response was nearly automatic, so much that he anticipated the remark and reviled his own contemptuous soul before he had even got the words past his lips.

“The Easter Bunny,” he said.

She turned immediately toward her father and explained to him that she was going out for the evening. “S’all right,” the old man said, giving all his attention to the girls. He had long since reached a stage of resignation in which the cruel, irrational possibilities of children grown old were accepted as one might get used to brutality in all of life. Now he cared most — and almost only — for his grandchildren.

“I’ll try to meet you later,” Neil said.

“All right.”

Their hands touched and clasped for an instant as she passed and headed toward her car. The instant was unendurable, inexpressible: blessedness and despair, early sorrow and old love and half-forgotten crimes. It was as if each had returned a scarlet nub …

After a moment, they all moved inside. Dinner was on the table, and the four of them along with Emma sat for a time and discussed how it was with carrots and broccoli and pot roast and pineapple upside down cake.

“
Up
side
down
cake,” the younger one sang.

“But you’ve got to eat it right side up,” the old man said.

The girls sat in their high stools, hugging the extraordinary rabbits, talking incessantly. Neil excused himself and wandered up the stairs to sleep. In the last moments of consciousness he felt he might have glimpsed a sudden truth, a revelation, some forgotten insight from his youth — the best in one and the worst in one, good money after bad, dereliction and desire … a harbor in morality … an inhuman social order … a meek inheritance, the meek inheriting, a general impatience with dullness … an unfathomable love for the Easter bunny. He formed the words on his lips … Love was not the natural condition of man; neither was decency … They were inventions, illusion; and what was needed was not so much cerebration or good intentions as convincing stage props … These veiled reflections must have meant something to him as sleep descended, but when he came awake later they seemed insubstantial as shadow, as Cherubim thread … ice crystals gone to moisture in the light of day.

I
T WAS NOT A
very good sleep. Or rather it was more the sleep of the standing-up, the ostensibly awake, a kind of mesmerized suspension between life and death, perilous and oddly stimulating.

He was aware all the time of the children’s voices downstairs and Emma clearing the table and the old man herding the girls upstairs to bath and bed. But he was asleep all the same, and he could not really comprehend what was going on around him. He wanted desperately for just a moment to pull himself from the bed and go and give himself over completely, unequivocally, to the children. What had he ever given them? When had he ever really made the effort? He could not recall a time. The giving required a taking, and during those rare moments when he attempted to offer up some little piece of himself, he had never managed to get the girls to understand what it was they were supposed to be
accepting.
He wanted more than anything to make some gesture, shape some memorable event, invest, just once, enough of himself and his resources so that the moment might come back to the children twenty years from now, magically vivid and graceful and full of meaning.

But he remained on the bed, perspiring a little through the clothes he had worn all day, asleep and wanting always to rise and say something, make a speech, or paint a picture, knowing without asking that his tongue was thick and cobwebby and that the blunt ends of his fingers were dipped in brine.