The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  “You don’t outgrow it, Charlie.”

  “I did.”

  “You’re different. You aren’t gay. It was just Arch for you.”

  “Do the two of you have some sort of arrangement?”

  “No. I just look the other way, and he behaves as if he doesn’t know that I know. It’s not that unusual. People have lived like this for centuries.”

  “Only because they had to. And you don’t. Neither does he.”

  “He does to have the things he wants.”

  “What about what you want?”

  “Love isn’t just about sex, Charlie. And marriage isn’t just about love. Besides, as you well know, I have secrets of my own.”

  I tried to think of something else to talk about. Nothing came to mind.

  Vanessa pointed at my cigarette. “Give me one,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Please, Charlie. You’re not my doctor.”

  I gave her a cigarette, and we sat and smoked together. When we were finished, she went back up to the bedroom.

  I found her sleeping soundly when I went in. I did not allow myself to watch her for more than a moment; my heart could not bear it.

  Hours passed. She did not wake. Arch did not come home or call. The sky grew dark. I fixed myself a drink and sank into the couch. The bourbon made me drowsy. I closed my eyes and drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

  thirteen

  As expected, Arch became mayor. He named Terrence Robie the head of a new commission on racial reconciliation and the recognition of black history. More quietly, Terrence’s Forward Progress after-school football program received a generous private donation to add lights, bleachers, and a turf field, and to knock down and replace the old warehouse with a new gymnasium. Marylou Greene, stung but still shrewd, accepted Arch’s offer to serve as executive director of the Metropolitan Planning Commission. Nick Averett became Arch’s chief of staff, Bart Walsh his deputy.

  Vanessa performed admirably in the role of political spouse, showing up whenever required, smiling, saying all the right things. But at home in the great house on the Boulevard, the facade dropped. The nursery she’d prepared for Hope became a shrine to her grief, a retreat from which she rarely emerged. Arch made appropriate gestures toward helping her move on, but Vanessa refused, as if to give up her sorrow would be to accept that she was not to blame for it, and that was something she was not yet ready to do. So he gave up and went back to work. What little free time he had, he spent with Averett. No one considered this inappropriate. Averett was Arch’s chief of staff, after all.

  I didn’t judge him. Instead, I did what I could to fill the breach. I didn’t feel it at the time, but looking back, I must have sensed opportunity in Vanessa’s decision to cloister herself, as it afforded me the chance to fill the role of doting husband, which Arch had at least temporarily abdicated while he busied himself serving the city. No one appeared to find this arrangement inappropriate either. Irony of ironies: everyone in the Creighs’ circle thought I was gay—the homo artiste, providing safe, platonic companionship for Vanessa while Arch was preoccupied with more pressing and important matters.

  But I also understood Vanessa as Arch never could, and not just because I loved her. Despite knowing better, I have never found the strength of will to stop looking backward. This is why I ran away, I think. Yet even when I found a life in a place so far removed from the leafy lanes of Belle Meade and the people there who had so entranced me, I never stopped looking toward the northern horizon.

  Perhaps this willful inertia, born out of the stubborn refusal to accept that there is only today, only now, only tomorrow, is what separated me from Arch even more than the more obvious differences. When it came to the problem of regret, Arch was like a shark: if he stopped swimming, he would die. He survived by refusing to grieve or worry or look for someone to blame—least of all, himself.

  In the third year of Arch’s term, the world became reordered. I was at home, alone, finishing a portrait of a tax attorney’s teenage daughter, when Arch called. It was just after nine in the morning, Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

  “Are you watching?” he asked.

  “Watching what?”

  “Stop whatever you’re doing and turn on the television.”

  I’d been to the World Trade Center once, with Arch and the Haltoms on a fall weekend jaunt to New York. We saw the museums and a few plays and a game at Yankee Stadium. We took the elevator to the observation deck at the top of one of the towers—I’m not sure which. I remember only the magnificence of the view and that we rode back down the elevator with a group of college-aged German tourists who kept chanting “Eins, zwei, drei, wooooh!” all the way to the bottom floor.

  In the weeks after 9/11, I heard so many stories. One person’s cousin was in the first tower. Another had a brother who had missed the flight that hit the Pentagon. This person and that person, each with a story of a near miss or a tragedy. Everyone scrambling for a piece of the nightmare. Nothing else mattered anymore. It hadn’t mattered before, either; we just didn’t know any better.

  Arch and Vanessa were often away over the next few weeks, attending funerals and memorials, in both official and personal capacities. I kept on painting. Art felt like a hollow consolation in those days. At times, it even felt like an insult.

  In late January, Arch summoned me to his office.

  “I assume you’ve heard the rumors about Thorndike,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  I’d met Jeff Thorndike once at a fundraiser Arch hosted for his last campaign. Thorndike had started adult life as a trial lawyer. Midcareer, he’d tried a case against a company that made cigarette lighters. A three-year-old girl had taken her mother’s lighter off a table and leaked fluid all over her arm and down to her torso before managing somehow to spark the flint wheel and light herself on fire. Thorndike won a massive settlement for the family and forced the company to redesign their lighters with one of those annoying safety locks. The case garnered enough attention from the media to make him a regular on nightly news broadcasts. Before long, he was showing up on the cable networks as a “legal expert.” Someone in Hollywood liked the stern, serious look of his high forehead and hooded brow. He ended up with a two-decade career as an actor playing generals and admirals, district attorneys and judges.

  Thorndike looked and acted the part so well that he made an easy transition into the real thing. Despite not having practiced law for twenty years nor having run for any public office whatsoever, he won election to the US Senate by twenty points. He’d done nothing remarkable as a senator; in fact, his most notable accomplishment seemed to have been having the poorest attendance record of any sitting member of Congress.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Is he going to run for president?”

  “He’s stepping down,” Arch said. “He’s not even going to finish his term. There’s going to be a special election.”

  “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t think so,” Arch said. “His son’s death hit him hard.”

  “I didn’t know about that.”

  “Heroin,” Arch said. “Can you believe it? The kid had just graduated from Georgetown Law. Apparently, he got hooked on painkillers he’d been prescribed after knee surgery. That sort of thing is getting awfully common, you know.”

  “What,” I said. “Upper-class junkies?”

  “It’s no joke,” Arch said. “Anyway, Thorndike said he’d been planning to retire for a while.”

  “So you’re running,” I said.

  “You bet.”

  “Isn’t that a big jump?”

  “Not when you’re following a guy who got elected without ever having held public office before.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But he’s older. And he played a senator on TV.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m gonna play one on TV too.”

  “Who do you have to beat?”

  “The Democrats are putting up Cole B
ridwell, but I’m not worried about him. The big fight will be the primary.”

  Coleman Bridwell had run unopposed in the last two congressional elections, but his district was Nashville, an oasis of moderation in a desert of conservatism. Nashville was split with a leftward tilt, and Memphis was still solid for the Democrats, but the rest of the state was fire-engine red.

  “So who do you really have to beat, if Bridwell doesn’t worry you?”

  “Dan Baird.”

  Even I had heard of Dan Baird. He was a lot like Arch, almost a doppelgänger from a different generation. When he’d gotten his start, he was young, handsome, and charismatic, a political outsider, scion of an old Nashville dynasty. His family had owned a home on the Boulevard for nearly a century. Like Arch, his inherited wealth came from the insurance business. He’d spent fifteen years as a surgeon before running for Congress in Chattanooga. He’d then served three terms before stepping down to start a charitable foundation that sent doctors and nurses to combat AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

  “I don’t know, Arch,” I said. “That guy’s friends with Bono.”

  “Being friends with Bono won’t win you too many votes outside Davidson County,” Arch said.

  “What does Vanessa think?” I asked.

  “You’re the first person I’ve told besides Averett,” he said.

  “Why me?”

  “I want your opinion. What does your gut tell you?”

  “My gut tells me you’ve already made up your mind.”

  “I won’t get a better chance for a long, long time,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Can I smoke in here?”

  “Follow me,” he said. “I know a good place.”

  Arch led me to an inconspicuous door in the corner of the hallway outside his office, which opened to a dark stairwell leading up to the roof. I lit up. Arch gazed out toward the Cumberland.

  “Master of all he surveys,” I said.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’ll draw up another logo, if that’s what you have in mind.”

  “I don’t need a logo,” he said. “I need a body man.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “A body man. Like an assistant, only you’re not typing up letters, you’re just hanging with me, helping me out.”

  “Like your shadow.”

  “More like my conscience.”

  “I’m busy,” I said.

  “I need you,” Arch said.

  “I’ve got work set up for the next three months.”

  “Oh, come off it. Here’s your chance to do something more meaningful than painting pictures.”

  I tossed my cigarette onto the ground and stamped it out.

  “Fuck you, Arch,” I said.

  “That came out wrong,” he said.

  “No, it didn’t,” I said. “And let me tell you something. I don’t really care about making a difference in the world. In my experience, people who try to make a difference just make things worse. I just want to paint and be left alone.”

  “And play house with my wife.”

  I glanced up at him. His expression betrayed no emotion. I wondered if this was his true self or the public one he’d cultivated over the years to the point of being able to become whoever he needed to be in the moment to get what he wanted from people.

  “She’s my friend too, Arch,” I said. “She’s been my friend almost as long as you.”

  “Are you in love with all of your friends?” he asked.

  “Not all of them,” I said.

  A police siren rang out from the street below. The precinct office stood across from the building.

  “I’m not angry,” he said. “Vanessa needed someone. I had to work. She needed a distraction. It seemed safe. Who better than you?”

  I had not thought of what I’d been doing as a distraction, for either of us. It certainly wasn’t meant as a favor to Arch.

  A plane passed overhead. I drew in a deep breath.

  “Come work for me, Charlie,” he said. “I need you.”

  “What about Nick?” I said.

  “Nick is moving on.”

  “Where to?”

  “Atlanta.”

  “To do what?”

  “There’s a tight governor’s race down there. They offered him a lot of money.”

  “Your doing?”

  “I helped.”

  “And how does Nick feel about that?”

  “He’ll warm up to it. Atlanta’s a great place to be.”

  “Queer capital of the South,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I just mean, maybe Atlanta’s a better place than Nashville for Nick.”

  “Be careful, bud,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “You too,” I said. “I mean it.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  A tense quiet set in. Arch leaned against the wall in his shirtsleeves, arms crossed, his expression calm.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  Arch smiled. “This is going to work out perfectly,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  fourteen

  Thus began my short, ignoble career in politics. It was really just for a few months, or so I told myself. I pushed back the delivery dates for the portraits I had been commissioned to do and bought a new wardrobe—with Arch’s credit card, naturally. Brooks Brothers suits and ties and shirts, polos and chinos, loafers, and boat shoes. I cut my hair and started shaving every day. Arch rose early and went to bed late and expected me beside him almost every minute he was awake. In the morning, while he worked out in the gym at the house or whatever hotel we happened to be staying in, he took a briefing on the day’s schedule from Bart Walsh, who’d taken over Nick Averett’s role. Afterward, we might meet over breakfast with a donor or a local honcho of one sort or the other, followed by a photo-op visit to a school or church or community center. When we didn’t have a lunch meeting, we ate in the back of a car on the way to yet another venue for handshaking and bullshitting. In the evenings, after we’d made our last pilgrimage to kiss rings and babies, and Arch had delivered his final recitation of the stump speech, we’d head back home or to the hotel and huddle up for debate prep.

  Vanessa came along when Walsh thought she needed to be there. One would never suspect from watching her that she had any reservations at all about the future her husband had chosen for the both of them. At home, nothing changed. She remained consumed by her grief, so she did not seem to miss my company.

  The inner circle was not much different than the one Arch had started with when he ran for mayor: Walsh, Lonnie, Jim. I’d been hanging around forever but had never been a part of things in this way. Arch brought in another experienced political operator to run his campaign: Andy Goldberg, late of Virginia, where he’d flipped the governor’s office for the GOP. He had much in common with Averett, but his penchant for fast food, beer, and strip clubs made him an unlikely candidate to replace his predecessor in the more compromising capacity.

  The other new addition was Marcus Hughes, a kid Arch had recruited from Terrence’s after-school program for admission to Yeatman. Marcus had been given a special leave of absence from school to work as an intern. Yeatman benefited from the optics almost as much as Arch. This sort of shameless tokenism was not perceived as such by the voters of Tennessee.

  Goldberg loved the idea.

  “We need a little something to offset all those shots of Dan Baird hugging little Africans,” he said.

  Marcus didn’t seem to feel used. He couldn’t have been more eager. I saw a great deal of myself in him. He had been plucked up and set down in a den of opulence and power. Arch treated him as Jim had once treated me, though with even greater attention and affection. Other, more typical interns were given menial tasks, verbally abused, ignored unless needed to do something no one else wanted to do. Marcus got nothing but smiles and warm words. No one even sent him out for coffee or told him to empty the trash.


  He was bright and curious, quick-witted, and self-possessed, and quickly picked up, as I had, how to dress the part: the chinos, the button-down oxfords. I knew from experience that these qualities had not endeared him to the boys he’d grown up around. To them, he was an Uncle Tom, an Oreo, a sellout. I suspect Marcus had not survived the junior school at Yeatman unscathed by the sort of ugliness that finds its most honest, unfiltered voice in the mouths of pubescent boys—but he struck me as the type of kid who cared less about fitting in with his peers than about earning the praise of adult authority figures. He so delighted in Arch’s attentions that he could not possibly have recognized himself as a prop. And I liked him too much to disillusion him.

  Or maybe I was the one under the illusion. Maybe Marcus knew exactly who he was dealing with and what he was doing, from the beginning. Maybe he was just wearing the mask we wanted to see. Maybe to those who possess it, ambition is an instinct as natural and unconscious as any other, the same kind of winnowing characteristic that led one ancient organism to crawl out of the water while another stayed behind, awaiting extinction. Perhaps Arch recognized in Marcus a kindred spirit.

  It was Marcus, after all, who came forward with the tool Arch needed once again to hack away at a deficit which had begun to seem insurmountable.

  We were listening to Walsh read down the day’s agenda the morning after the first debate. Arch hadn’t done poorly, exactly, but Baird had come off much better. The primary election was shaping up to be a referendum on poise and experience. Not only was Dan Baird a physician and a congressman, but he’d been a national champion in policy debate at Montgomery Bell. Arch did fine, but he looked like what he was: young, opportunistic, inexperienced. The outsider card didn’t help him much, given that Baird had walked away from Congress to serve God and save Africa. Arch’s charm and intelligence couldn’t compensate for the facts.

  Goldberg had been boiling his brains and burning up the phone, looking for some liability in Dan Baird, some soft underbelly where he could slide in a knife that might disembowel the good doctor’s righteous image, but nothing had yet to yield. Dan Baird, it seemed, was that rarest of all things: an honest man, true to his principles. His only apparent shortcomings—being absurdly rich, detached from the reality of life for underclass and minority Tennesseans, lockstep alignment with GOP policies that favored the rich at the expense of the poor, etc.—were just as true of Arch.