Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  She asks for my fax number. Before we finish our call, a copy of Wheatley’s application for Department of Environmental Management clearance is humming into my outer office. I am looking at the copy and trying to find Cindy Tucker’s phone number when my secretary tells me Bobby himself is on the line.

  “Good morning, my friend,” I say. “Where you calling from?”

  “O’Hare. My flight leaves in a few minutes.”

  “Well, you were damned effective on Nightline. Even if you hadn’t said a word, the whole slant of the program made you look spectacular. Almost heroic. I think you’re going to come out of this all right.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he says. “Listen, can you pick me up this afternoon? Two forty-five.”

  “Two forty-five?” I look at my appointment calendar. I think about telling him about Gail’s phone call, but there’s something both hurried and guarded in his voice. “Are you all right? You sound funny.”

  “Not perfect,” he says.

  This is a familiar though rarely used expression of his, dire, flat, succinct, equivalent to code blue being called at a hospital.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it Laura?”

  “Laura? No, no. You remember Kurt Swanson?”

  “You mean my old roommate Kurt Swanson? Of course. What about him?”

  “He called me last night in New York.”

  “And…”

  His voice falls. “I need your help on this one. Can’t talk about it now, not on the phone. Can you pick me up?”

  “All right. Two forty-five. Can you at least give me a general picture?”

  “Not on the phone,” he says. The word not is encased in ice.

  “Is it bad?”

  “Not perfect.”

  I get through to Cindy Tucker and give her the information about Wheatley’s application for DEM clearance. She is silent for a moment, sighs, and says she thinks he wants to sell the land before the election to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, no doubt to devote to housing for the elderly, and that the only story they’ll get out of it are the barrels of nitrate and phosphate.

  “If Jeremy Taylor gets off his rear end,” I say.

  “He’s been poking around, we hear,” she says. “What he’s got to do is get on his rear end and write the story.”

  Her recurring inclination to reformulate what I say amuses and irritates me. Apparently no one but her is permitted to have the last word. “I stand corrected,” I say.

  “Is that a pun? I hate puns.”

  I had not thought of punning, but her reaction makes me go on. “I think he better shit or get off the pot.”

  “All right, all right. Can you just please tell me why are you supposed to pick Bobby up this afternoon?”

  “I don’t know. Any messages I should give him?”

  “Tell him the mail is running twenty to one in his favor. Tell him he’s taken a bump up in the overnight polls but that the number who supports him strongly has dropped. Tell him the print press is extremely favorable. And remind him of Tucker’s First Law of Media Thermodynamics. If the story is running in his favor now, in two or three weeks, counter-reaction sets in and we start to see some very scary stories on post-traumatic stress. Of course, if sentiment were going against him, there’d be all kinds of sympathetic stories in a few weeks.”

  “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”

  “Right.”

  “If he’s in a bad mood, and I think he will be, you can tell him.”

  “He did terrifically on all the news shows. Why’s he going to be in a bad mood?”

  “Maybe Bobby knows Tucker’s Law.”

  “Is there something wrong? Is that why you’re picking him up?”

  “I’m picking him up because he asked me to pick him up.”

  “Oh, shit. Something’s wrong, isn’t there. Isn’t there?”

  “You’re a worrywart.”

  “No, I’m not. I just know when he says not to come myself or to send a staffer to the airport, when he cancels all his afternoon engagements, and when he gets quiet, something’s up. And look what happened last time he froze me out and called you in?”

  “This is not some big meeting. He asked me to pick him up. That’s all I know. He wants to talk about something. Maybe it’s personal, Annie or Jimmy or something.”

  “Right. Maybe. Whatever it is, just tell him not to miss his appointment at Channel Four, five-thirty sharp. And if he decides to go public about liking to wear jodhpurs and using whips and chains, have him let me know first. Okay? It’s all I ask.”

  As I am waiting for Bobby’s flight—delayed thirty minutes because of an equipment change—I see a familiar gray-suited figure heading in my direction. His rolling gait slows as he recognizes me. It is Freddie McMasters.

  “Manfred,” I say, extending a hand.

  “Heading out?” he asks.

  “Picking Bobby up, actually.”

  “Really?” He looks around us as if he expects to find him nearby. “He’s arriving now? I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. Give him my regards. He seems to be coming out of this psychiatrist business very, very well.”

  “Seems to be,” I repeat. “By the way, he appreciates your lead on that land-use story.”

  Freddie brightens. As he does, an entirely new thought occurs to me. It is impossible to know if the parkland story is a setup to get Freddie back inside the campaign, or if it is a purposeful attempt to get Bobby to counterpunch at Wheatley over a phony issue, or even if Freddie knows it was never much of a story in any case. I think for a moment that this is all none of my business. Then I think again.

  “You know,” I say, “Wheatley looks like he’s going to sell the land off for condos or something.”

  His eyebrows shoot up. “He’s what? No. No way. You’d better check your source.” He looks at me again, perhaps remembering that those times we have been opposing counsels over the years, he has lost more cases than he has won. “He asked me to survey it for industrial use, another fertilizer manufacturing plant.”

  “Wheatley himself asked you?”

  “Clive Sanford.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah what?”

  “I think you’ve been had.”

  He blinks. His face pales. He asks slowly, “What do you mean, had?”

  “We have it in black and white that they’re planning ‘multiple-unit dwellings.’ I think Clive wanted you to think the land was for a fertilizer plant, to tell us, and maybe to get Bobby to shoot his mouth off about it. And then he’d look like a loose cannon when the truth was revealed. I say condos, you know, but it could be a hospital or retirement housing. Something wonderful that voters all across the state will love.’’

  “What about the barrels of chemicals up there? I saw them myself. Says nitrate right on ’em.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re empty. Maybe they’re stage dressing.’’

  “That son of a bitch.’’

  “Of course, from his perspective, you’re the son of a bitch, betraying a trust and all.’’ I look him squarely in the eye. “And from Bobby’s perspective, you’re a Trojan horse. So I’d say Clive did a pretty neat job of it all around.”

  He nods, his face reddening now. “The son of a bitch.’’

  “C’mon, Freddie. Let’s at least be clear about this. You’re the one who made this all possible. You’re the one who tried to get the judgeship, hook or crook. I’ve always liked you, myself, but sometimes what goes around comes around.” I hear the tone of my words with some surprise. I sound like someone I used to know, though who I am not sure.

  “But it was Bobby who broke his word to me.”

  The plaintive note in his voice makes me lose some of the sympathy I have for him. “Because the governor broke his word to Bobby. What did yo
u want him to do? Stay lieutenant governor just so you could get your appointment?” Suddenly I know who I sound like. Myself, years ago.

  Freddie doesn’t say anything. I can see he has a lot to mull over. For a moment, right there in the airplane terminal, he actually starts to tell me about his family troubles. Though “tell me” isn’t quite right. He is speaking in the flat voice someone might use if he were talking to himself in an empty room, thinking aloud in an amalgam of puzzlement, self-pity, and self-disgust. He glances at me, finds he is not talking to himself, and stops in mid-sentence. He is still a man of some pride; he wobbles for a moment in a state between embarrassment and shame.

  “Sorry,” he says, straightening his shoulders. He walks away stiffly, like a man who has been asked to prove he is not drunk.

  He’s been had all right, I think as I watch him leave.

  As I wait the few minutes for Bobby’s plane, I turn over some ideas about what Kurt Swanson could possibly have said to make Bobby worried. I haven’t seen or heard from Kurt in over twenty years, so it is hard to guess. One idea keeps coming back, though. Blackmail.

  “Clive Sanford called him,” Bobby tells me as we drive out of the airport, turning in his seat to look out the front and then the rear windshield to see if we are being followed. “At least I assume it was Clive.” His face tight and drawn, he has refused to say a single word on the subject until we are safely in the car, and then only after getting me to agree to be his personal lawyer. I understand he is formally protecting the confidentiality of everything he is about to say under lawyer-client privilege, though why such caution is necessary—or such paranoia, it seems to me—baffles me. This is, after all, the same man who faced cancer as a youth, war as a young man,

  and the national press over the last few days all with an equanimity far greater than anyone else I know could have summoned.

  “And then Kurt called you.”

  “Yes. And he said Clive had asked him one question. Had I ever experimented with drugs besides marijuana?”

  I remember our evening on mescaline, or LSD, or whatever it was. Of course! I am annoyed with myself that I didn’t think of it right away. I speculated about sex orgies, or mistresses, or some old cheating scandal, or some vandalism of ROTC files Kurt knew about and I didn’t. Everything but the obvious. Something we both knew about.

  “What did Kurt say?”

  “He said he hadn’t even known I was running for senator until this week when the psychiatrist story made national news. That was why he called me. At first Sanford only told him he was a security liaison from Congressman Wheatley’s office and that I was being considered for a federal job. Routine clearance.”

  “And?”

  “And Kurt said he didn’t know.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “It would have been if that was all. But it’s not. Clive presses him for a while to try and remember, and Kurt keeps hedging. Finally Clive says to him, ‘We’ve been told about your own use of LSD in those days. Is it possible you aren’t able to remember who was with you and who wasn’t because of the effects of the drug?’ This gets Kurt’s attention. He says, ‘If I’m such an impeachable source, why ask me?’ Just routine, Clive says. Kurt asks him to tell him what job it is I’m supposed to be considered for, but first to repeat his name and the name of the representative. Clive says his name is Scott Bayer—clever joke, huh?—from Congressman Wheatley’s office, and that I’m being considered for a high federal position he wasn’t at liberty to name.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Kurt tells him to submit his questions in writing under the congressman’s signature and he’ll give them his fullest attention. Until then, good-bye. He thinks it’s some sort of crank call but decides if he does get something from Wheatley’s office, he’ll try to track me down. Then he reads about my running for office and feels I ought to know what’s going on right away. And here we are.”

  Here we are, I think. Bobby doesn’t need to tell me that his candidacy, and most likely his political career, cannot survive this revelation. He can get by with having smoked dope, and he is in the process of finding out whether he can get by with having seen a shrink, but saying he took LSD (or mescaline, or whatever it was) on top of the other two? No way. He’d be a national joke, fodder for late-night monologues. A slip of the tongue, and they would say he’s having an acid flashback. Cartoonists would have a field day. Wheatley would get to run against a caricature of the sixties and a demonized counterculture, not against a person; his new campaign slogan would be “Just Say No.”

  Thirty years ago, a past divorce made it impossible to run for office. Twenty, having used a drug of any kind. Ten, having seen a therapist. Gary Hart proved a candidate cannot have an affair while in the midst of running for office, and Bill Clinton proved he can if it ended before the campaign began. In another ten years, women running for president will be asked if they’ve ever had an abortion. Standards change, privacy vanishes. Right now, though, Bobby’s political life is hanging by a thread, and Clive Sanford is snapping a pair of scissors around trying to get lucky. I am aware of feeling angry for the first time in a long, long time.

  Bobby asks me, as his friend and personal attorney, to try to get there before the scissors. He also describes the series of dirty tricks to me, the leaks and picketers, and he asks if I can look into them when I can.

  His only stricture on me is that nothing on the subject of drugs be done by phone, absolutely nothing. He thinks that Clive, if not Wheatley, is more than willing to try electronic eavesdropping. I no longer think he is paranoid.

  Bobby doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care, who from our bright college days might have heard we once tripped with Kurt. Rumor, hearsay, and conjecture are annoying but harmless in the end. What he wants is for me to ask for assurances—or do anything necessary to get such assurances—from Kurt Swanson and Allan Bernstein themselves that they won’t talk. Without statements from them, firsthand witnesses, the dangling thread is gone forever. I don’t have to think about saying yes or no. It’s yes. There is no old pull toward uninvolvement. Kurt and Allan are the only witnesses to an event I intend to get them to agree never happened. The only witnesses apart from Bobby, of course. And me.

  I will have to rearrange a few things and cancel a few appointments. But even on reflection, I have no problem with this errand. None at all. I feel it’s no one’s business that in his youth, in the midst of his confusion and numbness and despair, Bobby once did something foolish that risked harm to no one but himself. If the people of our great state do not want to elect him because of his policies, his positions, his age, his having seen a psychiatrist, his speaking manner, or even his hairstyle, so be it. But I’ll be damned if I will let Clive Sanford get them to decide on the basis of half a tablet of something Bobby swallowed more than twenty-five years ago.

  I start thinking about the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics. It has been a while since I’ve done so in a concentrated way, but it all comes back in an instant. I am aware, too, that Jeannie would probably be filling this role if she were still able, but now, with things as they are, it has fallen to me.

  “What are you going to say,” I ask, “when Wheatley gets some reporters to start hounding you on whether you ever took drugs other than marijuana?”

  “He will get some to do it, won’t he?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell ’em your position on drugs is clear and well-known, that yes, you did smoke marijuana a few times and you regret it in light of what the drug problem has become in this country. If they keep pressing, admit you took No-Doz.”

  “And when they keep pressing?”

  “Look ’em straight in the eye and say, ‘No, I have never taken drugs other than marijuana.’”

  His cheeks sink in and his face grows white. He is silent for a while. Then he say
s, his voice hoarse, “Jesus Christ. I hate this.’’

  “Are you afraid to get your hands dirty?”

  He glances down at his knuckles. “No. I like getting my hands dirty. I just hate lying.’’

  “I think it’s pretty simple. If you want to have the chance to continue not lying to the public, you’re going to have to on this one. Have you got anything else you’re ever going to have to lie about? Mistresses, bribes, skeletons in the closet?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then. Gird your loins and tell one, and that’ll be it, your one and only, world without end, amen.’’ He looks as if someone has just told him for the first time that death is universal. “It’s a harmless lie, Bobby. It is not about public business. It affects no one but you. And in my book it’s nobody else’s fucking concern.’’ He is still sunk in gloom. I think of something Jeannie once said to me. “Some questions deserve lies. ‘Do you like my new clothes?’ ‘Isn’t the baby cute?’ ‘What do you think of my rhinoplasty?’ ‘Did you ever take drugs other than marijuana?’”

  He remains silent. “I just don’t like breaking faith with the people,” he says finally.

  In a political context, any sentence that has “the people” in it—not to mention “faith”—is apt to render me mute. It didn’t used to. I must have chanted “Power to the people” a thousand times when I was in college, and usually at gatherings that ended with someone raising a fist and saying, “Keep the faith.” (Right on, brother!) But Bobby is not speaking the hot rhetorical language of our youth. I assume he must be talking about some aspect of himself. But maybe not. Maybe he means exactly what he says about faith and the people.

  I do not know what to say to him. I do know he’s going to be on television in a short while and he needs to keep his eye on the ball. I inject a note of cheerful cynicism in my voice. “Just remember what they say.”

  “What?”

  “The truth is a fragile thing, but a lie well told lasts forever.”

  “Right,” Bobby says, nodding and then shaking his head grimly. “Exactly.”

  I make my two carefully sanitized phone calls, one to Kurt in Malibu and the other to Allan in New York City, book a flight for California as well as another for the red-eye from there to New York. I am leaving no intervals for leisure or sightseeing. This has got to be done with all possible speed. Before I leave, I tell my secretary, Margie, to handle things while I am gone. And I decide to make one last visit before the plane takes off. The wish to make this visit is almost like that parched feeling deep in the throat I get from time to time. I feel I should ignore it and wait until it passes. But I don’t.