My Life in Heavy Metal (19 page)

“Yeah. I mean, I want—”

“Then do. Just do. Quit asking questions and kiss me.”

“I just want to know what we are.”

Darcy let out a little shriek of frustration. “Would you stop being so
literal
? This is a love affair, Billy. Okay? Withstand a little doubt. I'm the one who's taking the risk here.”

“Meaning what?”

“Stop being naive. The woman always loses power in a sexual relationship.”

“Not always,” I said.

Darcy sighed. She took her hands off me and stepped back. “I just flew four hours with a goddamn baby howling in my ear. I haven't slept more than three hours in the past two days. I'm expected to show up to work tomorrow, bright and early, to host a reception for Jack Fucking Kemp. I don't do this. I don't come over to men's houses. But I'm here, Billy. Do you understand? I am here. Now take me in your arms and
do something,
or I'm going home right now.”

What Darcy enjoyed most was a good lathering between the thighs. As a lifelong liberal, this was one of my specialties. In some obscure but plausible fashion, I viewed the general neglect of the region as a bedrock of conservatism. The female sex was, in political terms, the equivalent of the inner city: a dark and mysterious zone, vilified by the powerful, derided as incapable of self-improvement, entrenched and smelly. Going down on a woman was a dirty business, humiliating, potentially infectious, best delegated to the sensitivos of the Left.

I relished the act, which I considered to be what Joe Lieberman would have termed, in his phlegmy rabbinical tone, a
mitzvah.
It required certain sacrifices. The deprivation of oxygen, to begin with. A certain ridiculousness of posture; cramping in the lower extremities. One had to engage with the process. There were no quick fixes.

This was especially true in Darcy's case. She was scandalized by the intensity of her desire, and highly aroused by this scandal. But the going was slow. If I told her “I want to kiss you there” she would grow flustered and glance about helplessly. Just act, was her point. Ditch all the soppy acknowledgment, the naming of things in the dark. The word
pussy
made her wince. (A tainted word, I
admit, but one I employed with utmost fondness and in the spirit of fond excitements.)

I kissed my way down her body—the damp undersides of her breasts, her bumpy sternum, the belly she lamented not ridding herself of. Always, I could feel the tendons of her groin tensing. I nipped at them occasionally.

She perfumed herself elaborately, which meant withstanding an initial astringency, after which she tasted wonderfully, meaning strongly of herself, the brackish bouquet of her insides. I was careful not to linger in any one spot but to explore the entire intricate topography, the nerves flushed with blood and tingling mysteriously, while Darcy pressed herself back on the pillows and turned to face the wall and murmured the blessed nonsensical approvals of climax.

The body releases its electricity, merges with another, and together there is something like God in this pleasure. But afterward, in the quiet redolent air, there must also be offerings of truth. And so the mystery of love deepens.

Darcy's given name was Darlene. She'd grown up in Ashton, Pennsylvania, a rural township south of Allentown. Her grandpas had been farmers. Then the world had changed, grown more expensive and mechanical, and somehow less reliable. So her father, rather than inheriting dark fields of barley, worked for Archer Daniels Midland. (Her mother, it went without saying, was a homemaker.) All three of her sisters and her brother still lived in Ashton. She was an aunt eight times.

Darcy recognized that she was different from her family. But she was reluctant to speak too pointedly about these differences.
Instead, she turned the Hicks clan into a comedy routine, delivering updates in the flat accent of her grandpa Tuck.

Signs of her double life abounded. She dressed in Ann Taylor, but used a crock pot. She stored her birth-control pills in a bedside drawer, beside the worn green Bible she had been given in Sunday school. Her mantle displayed photos of the grip-and-grin with Arlen Specter, Robert Bork, Newt Gingrich. Only in the shadowed corner of her bedroom did one see a young, toothy Darcy, resplendent in acid wash and pink leg warmers, smiling from the seat of an old tractor on Grandpa Tuck's homestead. The photo was taken just before he sold the final acres to a chemical plant, back in '89.

As for me, I'd grown up outside Hartford. My parents had marched for Civil Rights and protested the war. Then they had kids, moved to a leafy suburb, and renovated an old Victorian. Their domestic and professional duties tired them out, left them susceptible to bourgeois enjoyments. But the way I remembered them—needed to remember them—was as young, beautiful radicals.

What we wanted from politics, in the end, was what we had been deprived by our families. I hoped to create a world in which justice and compassion would be the enduring measure. Darcy sought permission to expand her horizons, to experience her prosperity without guilt. We both held to the notion that it mattered who won office and how they governed. Nothing, in the end, mattered more.

Yet it never would have occurred to us, not in a million years, that the 2000 election would turn volatile. The presidential candidates were a couple of second-raters, awkwardly hawking the same square yard of space, at the corner of Main and Centrist.

* * *

And so we lay about on weekends, scattering sheafs of newsprint onto the sunny hardwood floors of my apartment, lamenting (silently, to ourselves) the hopeless bias of the
Post
and
Times,
tumbling the stately avenues of downtown, drowning in happy wine and letting our messages stack up.

We were both too hooked on politics to ignore the subject entirely. But we had to be careful not to push too far into ideology. Darcy was altogether suspicious of the word. “Just a fancy way of saying policy aims,” she insisted.

I disagreed. To me, the Left was a living force, animated by heroic and martyred ideas: Civil Rights. The War on Poverty. Christ Himself—as I argued in an unreadably earnest undergraduate paper—was a classic New Deal Democrat. Darcy listened to my ravings with a polite purse of her lips. She viewed me as quaint, I think.

But Darcy had her own dewy allegiances. Reagan, for instance. They'd named an airport after him. Now he had Alzheimer's and the news told stories of his decay, over which Darcy clucked. “He made it acceptable to love this country again,” she told me. “Don't give me that snotty look, Billy. He was an American hero.”

This was astounding to me: Ronald Reagan! The man who had allowed Big Business to run the country, slashed social programs, gorged the national debt on wacko military systems, funneled arms to Nicaraguan murderers, and just generally sodomized Mother Nature.

So, in other words, we learned to avoid policy aims.

By March Darcy was traveling nearly every week. She was unofficially on loan to the McCain campaign, which was full of reformist spunk but foundering in the polls. I expected Darcy to be devastated
by the results of Super Tuesday, which all but assured Bush the nomination. But she emerged from her flight (a red-eye out of Atlanta) beaming.

“Kenny O'Brien talked to Roger about me. He wants me to do advance work for Dubya! Isn't that
amazing
!”

My reaction to this news was complicated. I was thrilled and impressed. Darcy was making a name for herself. But this would mean more travel for her, more prestige, more action. While I remained in D.C., plinking out obscure proposals on how to reduce recidivism, stewing over whether to vote for the Android or the Spoiler. And missing her.

Beyond envy, I felt genuinely unsettled. Darcy had been a rabid McCain supporter—one of his true believers. She had derided Bush as a semipro, a lollygagger. It was hard for me to fathom how she could now throw her support behind him.

“We fought the good fight,” Darcy assured me. “The key is that we managed to push finance reform onto the agenda.”

“You really think Shrub is going to do anything on that?” I said. “The guy raised fifty million before he even announced.”

Darcy frowned. “Don't be so cynical,” she said. “Have a little faith for a change. Oh, I'm hungry, Billy. Where can we get a burger at this hour?”

Winter limped into April and we barely noticed. The dirty slush glittered and the gutters lay ripe with magic. In early May the cherry blossoms reemerged along Pennsylvania and I turned twenty-seven. Darcy organized a celebration at a tapas bar in Foxhall Road, one of those places where the waiters are obliged to enforce a spirit of merriment by squirting rioja from boda bags into the mouths of
particularly valued diners. Darcy, in her little cocktail dress, offered a toast, while my friends glanced in horror at the table beside us, where a pack of trashed dot-commers were plying the waitress to flash her tits.

Darcy considered the evening a triumph, and I hoped she was right. My friends were a glum and brainy lot, nonprofit warriors and outreach workers. They could see how smitten I was and spoke to Darcy with elaborate courtesy. But to them she must have appeared no different from the hundreds of other GOP tootsies cruising the capital in their jaunty hair ribbons.

I met Darcy's friends the following week, at a luncheon held in the executive dining room, on the second floor of the Fund's stately colonial. The maître d' grimaced politely at my sweater. He whisked into the cloakroom and reappeared with an elegant camel's hair sports coat.

Darcy waved to me and smiled, which instantly snuffed my doubt, made me hum a silent pledge of allegiance to our love. The men at her table wore matching dark green blazers, with an FFT in gold script over the breast pocket. Darcy stood out like a rose in a stand of rhododendron.

The servers were brisk Europeans, officious in their table-side preparation of chateaubriand. George F. Will delivered the keynote, wearily lamenting the “deracination of moral authority” to general mirth and light applause, though his platitudes were obscured by the sandblasting from next door, where workers were empaneling a new marble patio at the Saudi embassy.

I cannot remember the names of Darcy's colleagues, only that they seemed to have been cut from the same hearty block of wood. The older fellows evinced the serenity characteristic of a life spent in private clubs. The young guys imitated these manners. They were
clean-shaven, deeply committed carnivores who seemed, in conversational lulls, to be searching the rich wainscoting for signs of a crew oar they might take up.

They all adored Darcy, that much was obvious, and chaffed her with careful paternalism.

“A remarkable young woman,” said the gentleman on my left, the moment she had excused herself to the bathroom. “You are watching a future congressman from Pennsylvania.”

“Congresswoman,” I said, half to myself.

“Yes,” he answered, poking at a rind of fat on his plate. “Darcy mentioned that about you.”

At the brief reception after lunch, while the higher-ups clustered about Will, Darcy introduced me to her mentor. Trent was a thick blond fellow with the most marvelous teeth I had ever seen. “This your special friend, Hicks?” Trent said. “Good to meet you.”

“Bill,” I said.

“Bill. Good to meet you, Bill.”

He gripped my hand and held it for a few beats. It occurred to me that Trent had served in the Armed Forces, possibly all four of them.

“Darcy tells me you've done some work for Bradley.”

“Not really. A little volunteering.”

“A good man,” Trent said. “Principled. Shame he got ambushed by Gore. Not surprising, especially, but a shame. What're your plans for the election, Bill?”

“I'll probably be sitting this one out,” I said.

Trent barked. “How long you been in the District, Bill? No such thing.” He winked and drew Darcy against him. “You watch this one, Bill. She's going places.”

Darcy blushed.

“You take care of her,” Trent said.

“Darcy does a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”

Trent dragged his knuckles across his chin and shot me a look of such naked disdain that I took a step backward. Then he wrapped Darcy in a bear hug, kissed her on the brow, and wished me well.

“He just seemed a little aggressive,” I said to Darcy later, in her office.

“Nonsense. He's just protective.”

“You know him better than me.”

“Wait a second.” Darcy's eyes—they were steel blue—flickered with her triumph. “You're jealous!”

“The guy was all over you, honey. And the way he behaved toward me—”

“He wasn't all over me. He was being
affectionate.
”

“Is that what they're calling it these days?”

Darcy began to laugh. She'd had three cups of punch and was still flying. I listened to her gleeful hiccups and watched the chandelier in the foyer glint. “Trent's LC,” she said finally. “Log Cabin, Billy. He's gay.”

She began laughing again.

Trent the Gay Republican? “He must be thrilled with Shrub's support of the sodomy laws in Texas.”

“There you go again,” Darcy said. She was imitating Reagan now. “Judging people. I thought you enlightened liberals didn't judge people.”

Darcy traveled throughout spring and into summer, and this lent our relations an infatuated rhythm. My heart beat wildly as I waited for her plane to land. This was not her beauty acting upon me, the glamour
of her ambitions, even the promise of sex, but the sense of good intention she radiated, a kindheartedness measured in the drowsy hours before she could assemble her public self. This was my favorite time: Darcy in the shades of dawn, warm with sleep, her hair scattered across the pillow.

There was an ease to her domestic rituals, the way she snipped coupons (which she would never use) and scrubbed her lonely appliances and listened sympathetically to the latest reports from Ashton. She fretted endlessly over what to pack for her trips. “I'm too fat for these slacks,” she complained. “I'm one big, fat ass, Billy.”