Waking the Dead (22 page)

Like a man in a trance, I rose from my chair and turned to face her. I put my arms around her and held her. Silently. Headlights from passing cars arced across the room. We were breathing together and she pressed herself against me. “Just do it, OK?” she said. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

I carried her to the bedroom. She was not a small woman but she felt light to me that night. I placed her on the bed and she put her hands behind her head and watched me as I undressed. She parted her legs and then brought them tightly together. “I want you so much,” she whispered. My erection was enormous, absurd. I threw myself onto the bed, kissing her, feeling her, making her ready. I slipped right in; she seemed larger than normal but her great silky spaciousness was somehow more erotic than any slight skid of resistance. I was inside her as far as I could go. She opened herself wider and pressed me tighter against her. A moan of pleasure hummed at the back of her throat, and as I began to move I was falling through a trapdoor of sensation. It was the first time I’d ever made love with such mortal purpose, the first time it seemed possible that the whole history of the world could be altered by one ejaculation, and I was overwhelmed by the newness and gravity of it—this loss of my real virginity, this coupling that made all the others seem trivial.

Sarah felt my swelling and she clasped me still closer. I put my mouth on hers in a large indistinct kiss and just before my semen and its innumerable genetic messages were about to flash out of me I felt the heels of her hands, hard and panicked against my chest. “No,” she said, frantically. “Stop. Please stop.” Quickly, guiltily, I pulled out of her. An ache went through me; the air seemed heavy, an alien atmosphere. Sarah drew her knees up and closed her eyes.

“Did you come in me?” she asked. She reached over and felt my cock, running her finger over the tip. “Sorry,” she said, trying to laugh. “I thought … I just can’t do this.”

I didn’t know what to say. An hour ago, I hadn’t even thought about a child, but now I wanted one with a deep irrational hunger. I lay back on the bed as she slipped out of it. She went to the bathroom. I could hear her washing herself, like a whore. When she came back to the bedroom she asked me if I wanted her to put in her diaphragm so we could make love anyhow. I said no. Did I want her to give me head, jerk me off? No. No. She shrugged and picked up her clothes, carried them out of the bedroom. That was it. I listened to her footsteps, heard her pants zippering up. Then there was silence, a long, long silence. I got up, out of bed. I walked into the living room and she was gone.There was a note. She needed to walk, to think. She’d be back in an hour or two. She signed the note with Love. I sat on the sofa with the note in my hands, reading and rereading it. Then I stood up and poured myself a drink and turned on the TV. It was the little black and white GE television that used to be her grandfather’s. His handprint was worn into the enamel on the top of it.

9

A
T THE LAST
minute, the goddamned Republicans thought they could make an issue over the fact that I was an out-of-towner, a New Yorker no less, and they decided to put a man into the race against me.

They chose a fellow named Enrico Bertelli, a Chicagoan by birth, a resident of the district for forty-one years, the owner of a little Hyde Park coffeehouse called the Golden Portal, where you could have cinnamon-flavored cappuccino and listen to Vivaldi coming through the KLH speakers. Bertelli was barrel-chested, white-maned, light on his feet, vaguely bohemian—berets, Argyle socks under his sandals, paisley ascots. He was so godawful lovable you wanted to tell your troubles to him, you wanted to sit at a little wobbly table eating sourdough rye and cheese and listen to him spout the philosophical clichés that professors used thirty years ago to get freshman girls to give them blowjobs: life is so tragic, we must make beauty, peace, love—lower my pet, lower. It was a brilliant piece of casting; I had to give the Republicans credit for that. If there was going to be a resentment vote against me, Bertelli was a perfect magnet for it. A charming old dodo without a political bone in his body, Bertelli could count on the fifteen percent of the district that was somehow Republican and after that who knew how many cappuccino lechers and hometown boosters he could rustle up as well. It didn’t seem he was actually going to defeat me, but suddenly I had a race to run.

The Republicans announced him four days into the new year and Kinosis’s boys, with their customary tact, at first tried to say it was too late, that the ballots for the special election were already on press. But a finger to the wind hipped the gov that people weren’t exactly thrilled to have their right to vote taken away by a printing press, so the next day he made a big show of announcing that
new
ballots would be made up, this time with a name in both the Democratic and the Republican column.

Kinosis was irritated that now an actual campaign would have to be mounted in my behalf, but Isaac was thrilled. “I didn’t particularly care for you slipping into Congress
completely
unnoticed,” he said, calling me with the news. “With someone running against you, people will have an opportunity to hear you speak. You’ll be building a constituency.”

I was at home with Juliet. Our version of a cozy winter afternoon: she at her desk and me at mine. She was reading a book about infamous art forgers which I’d gotten her for Christmas two years ago, but which she was just getting to now. I always had the idea that Juliet, if the world ever got really screwy, could be an art forger. She was so meticulous and knowledgeable, and heaven knew a little elegant larceny might be just what we needed—as a couple, that is. Of course, when Sarah drifted toward the receiving side of the law I went rubber-legged on her and refused to follow. When it was time for her to start taking serious risks, risks that finally, and literally, exploded in her face, I was nowhere near her. Was I like that moral coward in the Camus novel who looked the other way when a woman leapt off a bridge and who then spent a drunken, misty middle age wandering Amsterdam, looking for another leaping woman so he could behave better next time?

I told Juliet about the Republicans’ nominating Bertelli and she closed her book, while keeping her place with her thumb. “It looks like I’ll have to work a little harder for this than I first thought,” I said. Juliet furrowed her brow. She was wearing a red sweater with little pearlized buttons, a black skirt, high boots: it astonished me how well she dressed for hanging around the apartment reading a book about art forgery.

“I think it’s just as well,” she said, after a silence. “It’ll give you a chance to mobilize a staff. And it’ll bring you a lot more attention this way. People will have an opportunity to hear you speak.”

“Your uncle’s very words,” I said.

A flush of color, sudden as a hawk’s shadow, went across her face.

I acted as if I hadn’t noticed. I shoved my hands in my pockets and started to pace. “I’m going to have to take what staff I get,” I said. “And that means a lot of tired old hacks from the organization. Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. When the election’s over and I have a little breathing space, I’ll start choosing my own people. All I really need now is people to answer telephones and get things printed up.”

“You’re going to need a lot more than that,” said Juliet. “You’re going to need a press secretary, media adviser, some sort of legislative aide to help you work on your positions …”

“No, I’m not. I’m not going to need that. I know what my positions are. I know what I want to say.”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“This Bertelli. He’s a nothing. He’s like a write-in candidate, you know, like voting for Tiny Tim. And he’s a lecher.”

“Are you going to use that?” asked Juliet.

“No. But maybe we’d better get married so I can run on the morality issue. What do you say?” I truly thought this was a funny, or at least a
frisky
crack. I hadn’t meant it to be taken seriously. But the corners of Juliet’s soft, deep-lilac-colored lips drew down.

“ I don’t think you’re in proper shape to marry
anyone,
” said Juliet, with a sincerity edged with vehemence.

“I was just kidding,” I said, as if this could put me back in her good graces.

“Uncle Isaac thinks we
should
get married, you know,” said Juliet, flipping open her book. It was a cold, cloudy day; the light in the room was brackish.

“He wouldn’t dare say that to me,” I said.

“Well, with me he’s not so shy. With Mommy and Daddy dead, he assumes that right.”

“And what did you say?” I asked. I leaned against the door frame and folded my arms over my chest.

She thought for a moment and then shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t like talking about these sorts of things. It makes everything so explicit and ugly. I think these things are just supposed to happen and it’s awful when you make a fuss about it. Like those jerks in California applauding for the sunsets.”

“Well it would be pretty awful if we got married and then I lost the election anyhow.”

“Yes. I suppose we would feel like fools then.”

I breathed in, breathed out. I felt heavy, cluttered with junk. “You should turn the lamp on when you read in here,” I said. “The light’s so bleak.”

“Why would it be so awful if we got married, Fielding? I mean, just as a point of information.”

“I meant if we got married for the sake of the election and then I lost anyhow. That’s all I meant.”

“Why does that make my stomach hurt?”

“Look, if it was me saying we ought to get married, it would be you saying what I’m forced to say. This is the system of checks and balances we’ve worked out.”

She shook her head and looked away from me, into the uninviting darkness that gathered at the far end of the room. “You’re making me feel cheap.”

“Cheap? You could never feel cheap. You’re just confused that you’re asking a low-life like me to marry you. And you—”

“I am not asking you to marry me. You’re being unbelievably cruel.”

“OK. I’m sorry I said it.”

“Are you having any more of those … episodes?” she asked me. She wanted to make eye contact with me for this one and because she was sitting and had to look up, her eyes appeared a little crazed for the moment.

I waited good and long before answering. It was a shitty question, but I knew sooner or later she’d have to ask it. I probably deserved it for going on about it that night of the radio, for not going to the extra bother of lying.

“Episodes?”

“Yes. Like before you went to New York.”

“Oh that.” I waited another moment and then said, “Yes.” I suppose I’d meant to put her in her place, to stiff-arm her for coming after me like that, but the thing backfired on me and the ease of my admission, and hearing it, hearing my voice putting that weird signal out into the world, sent up a storm of longing in me—and a second storm of fear. I’ve always done passably well in masking my feelings, but at that moment my face must have looked no more stable than a broken egg.

Juliet stood up at her desk. I could see she wanted to come to me. I don’t know if it was instinct or feminine training, but my distress awakened in her a desire to shelter me from my own misery. She opened her mouth to say Are you all right? but there were other forces in play by now. We were in a complicated situation and she was letting it dawn on her slowly just how over her head she was. This was supposed to have been something rather easy, this arrangement between the two of us. But now she was living with a man who, for all she knew, might start chasing after cars in a day or two. And she was also living with a man who loved someone else with the openness and lack of common sense that we dare only with unattainable lovers.

Juliet had taken me on, knowing that in a hundred ways I was the wrong sort of man for her—I’d slept too close to a noisy childhood radiator; been too shifty and mean through school; developed a kind of flipness and even a hardness that made me a little coarse and obnoxious to someone as delicate, as cultivated as Juliet. I mean, I still thought it was funny to open and close my mouth and wave my arms around when she watched the opera on TV, and even when I was on my best behavior, acting so proper and under control that it could give you a pounding headache to behold, there was always something a little off, like a Russian playing jazz. But Juliet had allowed herself to go this far and perhaps she thought that at thirty-four there was no easy turning back. I don’t know what exactly was going through her but it was no one thing. And like a three-penny nail quivering in the invisible net strung between the positive and negative poles of a magnet, Juliet could neither come closer to me nor get further away. She could not even say whatever it was she wanted to say. She just looked at me, with her eyes pulsating betrayal one moment and compassion the next, and soon it was me going toward her, coming closer and closer and she drew herself up to receive me, and then finally I had her in my arms and was holding her close, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” into the fragrant folds of her soft white neck.

S
UNDAY THERE WAS
a brunch at Isaac and Adele’s and I was introduced to the people who’d be running my campaign. Juliet and I arrived before the others. Juliet was sensing in me a return to a somewhat businesslike attitude and for this I guess we had the Republicans and old Bertelli to thank. And if I was going to start acting a little more like my old self, then Juliet could, too. Though she was moodier, and more disorganized than I was emotionally, she was still perfectly capable of doing a profit and loss calculation, and had, it seemed, come to the decision that I was essentially the same person I’d always been, one, and two, that I was about to be getting to the serious part of my career, which would surely be interesting, and three, that whatever possessed me to rub her face in the ashes of the dead was probably just a reaction to my sudden fortune and would surely pass, if it wasn’t exactly passing already.

Juliet was helping Adele and Mrs. Davis in the dining room, whereas Isaac and I were sent into his grand Tudor study.There seemed some primitive superstition involved here, as if we were not supposed to see the dining room table, with its place settings and goblets and linen-covered bowls of bagels until it was completely prepared and the lunch was to begin, just as a groom is not supposed to look at his bride while she dresses for their wedding.