My problem, I felt certain, was that I had glimpsed the truth about Candace. Not about her relationship with Galvin, or the eternal torment of her father’s suicide. Those were private truths that nobody else could possibly understand. No, my curse was that I had finally come to understand her. She needed to be in control, and she had been. This had been her piece of theater all along, not Galvin’s. She had lured him to Washington, and used him to achieve her ambition. He had followed her direction, sometimes wittingly, other times not. Or so I imagined.
“Now you have what you want,” I told her the day she fired me. “Congratulations.”
The color drained from her face—the opposite of what I expected. I had assumed that she would behave like a captain of industry now, throwing me overboard and sailing on to new ports. But rather than her confident smile and keen eyes, which in recent months had come almost to resemble Galvin’s, I saw a face of infinite sadness.
“Do you think I won?” she asked. There was a sound of doom in her voice, as if she had actually survived a shipwreck.
“Of course. You got what you wanted. You always wanted to run a newspaper. And now you don’t have Galvin in the way, messing things up.”
She looked at me and shook her head. She was speechless. How could I have heard the story and not understood it? She closed her eyes. This was her fate, to be misunderstood. People always wanted love to speak, to turn somersaults and fire rockets in the air, but sometimes it was silent. Sometimes it was hidden away, unable to connect or comfort, but it was still love. Couldn’t I see that?
“I am destroyed, David,” she said. “Do you think any success in the world could make up for what I have lost?”
For once, I realized the limits of cynicism as a tool of understanding. It had been coming on slowly, this sense that sneering wasn’t an adequate response to the world. But seeing Candace that last day—as dry as a bone, surrounded by the empty tokens of status and power—made me want to tinker with my own life plan just a bit. I did not want to arrive at middle age with the look I saw on her face—bereft, loveless, having traveled so far, only to say: Is this all? I did not want to post a mental notice at the end of my days to the people I might have loved, if only I’d found the words.
AT THE END OF every Jerry SpringerShow, Jerry offers what he calls “A Final Thought.” It’s the only part of the show I really hate. Here we’ve just spent an hour watching lesbian lovers slug it out with their ex-boyfriends, and new brides plead for divorce after seeing videos of their husbands’ debauched bachelor parties—and then Jerry closes by saying something pious like: Folks, whatever flavor they come in, relationships are a priceless gift. Or, Folks, remember, if you want a doright woman, you’ve got to be a do-right man. Yeah, right, Jer, I always think. Forget the sermon. Bring back the lesbians.
But in this case, I probably do need to say a final word, about myself and about Candace.
Over the months I watched this story unfold, I began to escape from a kind of malign self-delusion. Maybe that’s the trick of anyone who observes other people carefully, that he will eventually learn something from their experience. In my case, I had been living in an acid bath for so long that it had begun to feel normal. But now it hurt, and I realized that I wanted to live like ordinary people. That’s a strange aspiration for a Harvard man, I’ll grant, but it’s genuine (a word that has always made me squirm, but never mind, I’m trying to reform).
Certainly I learned what I did not want to be anymore—which was a newspaperman. I would have quit the Sun, actually, if Candace hadn’t fired me. For me, a newspaper had been an emblem of solitude and isolation. Reading the sports page was what I did, obsessively, as a boy, rather than playing sports. In the middle of my life, reading about politics and world events became a substitute for living them. Rather than marrying, I read the marriage notices in The New York Times compulsively every Sunday, studying them like a lesson in social archaeology. Rich people tended to marry beautiful people—I’d noticed that over the years. And the very richest women, if they were lucky, tended to marry men like Galvin, men who—wherever they were from—had the contained heat of the life force blazing in their eyes. In my old age, I was sure, I would dutifully read the obituary notices to study how to die, wondering what words the newspaper would use about me. I had been trapped in two dimensions for so many years, captured by these flat pages.
But enough! Loneliness, like newspaper reading, was a habit, and it was one I intended to break. I wanted to take the dare, to step across the ice floe toward what I sensed might be on the other side. It was coldness I had loved in Candace, as pure and perfect as a snowflake, but that had made my affection for her unreal. And I wondered now: What would someone real and imperfect be like—someone like that journalist I had admired, Michelle Hagel, with the comfy body and frizzy hair. What would it be like if, instead of making a wisecrack, I had reached out in that bar and touched her hand? Would she have recoiled? Or would she have smiled and pulled me toward her? I wanted to know.
My final thought about Candace is that she was a woman of her time. In that sense, it was beyond her control. She was one of those dazzling creatures that inhabit the American landscape at the end of our century, who appear to have everything—beauty, brilliance, success in their careers—but have missed finding the treasure. It was there; these women knew it—but they could not find their way to it. They didn’t know how to cut corners and seize it. That was what they could have learned from men like Galvin, but it wasn’t their way. They were the people who had it all, and yet knew the absolute emptiness of not having the one thing they wanted.
GALVIN HAD BEEN MUCH sicker than anyone had realized, other than himself. He had liver cancer, and though he was treated aggressively in Switzerland, he was dead by the end of January. I suspect he had known for many months that he was dying. Perhaps that was why he had come to Washington—he wanted to write the last chapter. But none of us is really allowed to do that. There was a brief effort to extradite him so that he could face charges in the United States, and the chairman of the House Commerce Committee was greatly disappointed that the star witness would not appear for his ritual flaying. But when it became known how desperately ill Galvin was, the hunters lost interest. There was no sport in pursuing a quarry that was nearly dead.
Candace wanted to see him at the end. She flew to Switzerland and went to the hospital. By then the cancer had spread so far that he was delirious much of the time, falling in and out of consciousness. The doctor said it might be better to leave him alone—he was so far gone, it was better to remember him the way he had been. But Candace insisted on going into that room. She sat by his bed, day and night, holding his hand, unsure whether he knew it was her. She never had to explain anything; he was past that. She was with him when he died, holding that now-frail hand in her own. When the doctor told her it was time to leave, she kissed his lips and said good-bye.
There was a brief funeral in Geneva, and the body was cremated, at Galvin’s request. He was just shy of fifty. It seemed a terrible way to die, for a man who had given such abundant life to others. But I could not imagine Galvin being unhappy, even at the end. He had nothing to regret. That was what made him so different from other men of his generation. They struggled against the inevitability of decline because they had never come of age in the first place. They lived their middle years with a growing sense of regret at what they had failed to achieve—and worse, what they had failed to attempt. Galvin’s luck was that he had avoided middle age entirely; his light had been extinguished in an instant, with the afterglow still pulsing in my eyes even after he was gone. I could see that lovely smile of his that said, What a life! What a gift! What a lucky man I have been.
Author’s Note
Washington itself has become so outlandishly unreal that any disclaimer about a novel set in the nation’s capital should be redundant. But I would stress that this book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, companies, and institutions are produc
ts of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. I hope several friends from college days and since will be amused by a few brief walk-on characters they partly inspired, but otherwise any resemblance to the actual flora and fauna of Washington is unintended. The Washington Sun and Tribune of my story has no connection with any real newspaper. Similarly, the D.C. mayor of my tale is neither modeled on nor inspired by the incumbent or any previous holder of that office; the secretary of transportation, assistant secretary of the Treasury, and other worthies inhabit a Washington only of the imagination.
Acknowledgments
I owe special thanks to my editor, Jon Karp, who encouraged me to write this time about people, rather than spies. I’m also grateful to the friends who read the manuscript and offered comments, including my wife, Dr. Eve Ignatius; my agent, Raphael Sagalyn; Garrett Epps; Lincoln Caplan; Susan Shreve; Graham Wisner; and Craig Stoltz. Above all, I’m indebted to Don Graham and the late Meg Greenfield, who gave me time and encouragement at a moment when I needed both.
About the Author
DAVID IGNATIUS is the author of four acclaimed novels, the most recent of which is A Firing Offense. Currently an op-ed columnist at The Washington Post, he has also been a reporter and war correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He is a graduate of Harvard University and Cambridge University and lives in Washington, D.C.
Also by David Ignatius
———
Agents of Innocence
SIRO
The Bank of Fear
A Firing Offense
Copyright © 1999 by David Ignatius
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York
Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Ignatius, David.
The sun king / David Ignatius.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3559.G54S77 1999
813'.54—dc21 99-13490
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-50455-6
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