Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  Allan picks me up at the airport himself. Still wearing wire-rimmed glasses, his now receding and graying hair blown randomly about on his head, he has a hint of a paunch behind his sport coat, but his arms and neck remain thin. He smiles broadly for perhaps a second when he sees me, two at the most, and then his face instantly resumes its stony, almost angry shape, no trace of merriment remaining behind. We shake hands, and he insists on taking my carry-on bag. He has a class to teach in less than an hour, and he asks if I can join him for lunch afterward.

  He is friendly and appears more or less pleased to see me, but he also seems edgy about something. On a whim I ask if I can go to his class, claiming I don’t have any obligations until after noon. He pauses for a very long moment before saying yes. Since I have no wish to make him uncomfortable, I mention I have some other work I can do and offer to join him when his class is done. He says I should come to his class by all means, though he adds that I should be prepared for a less than cheerful climate. For some reason, as he says this I begin to get the uneasy sense things may not go as smoothly as I have imagined.

  While wide of the mark in nearly every other assumption I have made about Allan, about this at least, I prove to be right.

  Allan’s class that morning is the beginning of a week-long series of lectures examining the economic effects of Thatcherism on Great Britain. The atmosphere in the hall is a combination of sullen and hostile. The lecture itself seems pretty dry and factual, not one that ought to inspire such smoldering resentments among the students. The general drift of Allan’s lecture is that, despite persistent problems of un- and underemployment, Great Britain is in a much better position than it was, and is now in an excellent position to be competitive in a united Europe. He finishes his talk, gives the next assignment, and with a peculiar, knowing smile asks if there are any questions. Hands shoot up all over the room. He is then peppered with statements masquerading as questions about whether North Sea oil isn’t the real reason for the improved economy, not Thatcher’s policies, and whether the brain drain by underpaid academics all over Britain won’t wreck them competitively in the long run, and what about the rage and disaffection of the young and the poor?

  The rise of racism against immigrants? His answers, cool and statistical, deepen the sullen reaction among the students. When a student challenges one of his responses, he looks at her and says, “Are you saying my answer isn’t accurate, or that you just don’t like it?”

  “Both,” she says.

  “What is factually incorrect?” She starts to give a speech on social Darwinism. He interrupts her. “What is factually incorrect?” She pauses and he says, “It is soft-headed not to let the facts interfere with your opinions.” There are a few hisses. He smiles sourly and points to someone else with a hand in the air.

  He has to call a halt to the exchange at the end of the hour. Not a single student comes up to him afterward, though as we pass up the aisle, one pale young man who sat by himself wearing a tie and jacket and taking assiduous notes does murmur fervently to Allan, “Strong lecture, sir.”

  Allan shows me to his office while he goes to pick up his mail from the department’s secretary. He is gone almost twenty minutes. In the meantime, I look around at the books and magazines on his desk, and I see what has happened. Allan is not the Allan I knew. Allan is a neoconservative. From time to time, he writes for the National Review, copies of which sit on a table by his chair. He has just spent a year as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and he has written three books, two of them attacks on what the book jackets call the “permanent liberal agenda.”

  I sit in the maroon leather chair behind his desk and rub at my temples. This is totally unexpected. It also leaves me without a clue about how to proceed. I leaf through his books, hoping to find evidence he is a neoconservative of libertarian inclination, one who is against the government meddling in people’s private lives. If he is not, I do not believe I will have very good news to report to Bobby. In fact, it is not clear to me, under the circumstances, if I should mention Bobby’s predicament to Allan at all.

  He comes back with an armful of mail.

  “So,” he says. “What did you think?”

  “Tough audience.”

  “Oh, they’re not really so bad. A lot of them just are kids of parents who grew up in the sixties. It takes them longer to break away from Mommy and Daddy.”

  “We grew up in the sixties.”

  “Hormonally, maybe. Intellectually, I grew up in the late seventies and eighties. Finally left narcissism behind. A dose of Jimmy Carter helped, taking a long, hard look at the Soviets helped, and taking a couple of courses with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago helped. Anyway, despite how it looked today, the kids here are okay. It’s the faculty that’s a pain in the ass. Half of them are Marxists and the other half are liberals. I’m one of their token conservatives, and I’ll tell you, it convinces me that affirmative action is a bigger mistake than even I thought.”

  He says this without any trace of humor.

  He shows me around the campus, tells me expansively about his physician wife and two kids, and I begin to draw him out on his political views.

  Many hate him at NYU, he says, especially the Marxists, and especially now that his ideas have proven right and theirs have proven wrong. He is devout—no other word will do—about the genius and creativity of the unfettered free-market system. Vietnam, he now feels, was a noble mistake, mishandled to be sure, but the right idea. It was part of the long twilight struggle that led to the crumbling of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War. He is convinced President Reagan was one of the great presidents of the century, even if he wasn’t always on top of all the details of what was going on in his administration.

  Racism? Allan thinks “the race problem” results from blacks and black leaders not taking enough responsibility for improving themselves.

  The environment? The problems are hugely exaggerated, and what remedies are needed require more and better technologies, not less consumption. If you want to find real pollution, he says, look in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Education is a different story. The school day and school year should be longer, and you can pay for it by legalizing drugs and saving billions on trying to stop the trafficking and filling up the prisons and clogging the court systems with small fry. What we really need is growth and a better material life and a chance for everyone to prosper—and, if I’ll excuse him, we need fewer lawyers, fewer regulations, less paper shuffling, an end to the welfare state. And please, please don’t get him started on health care or the homeless.

  I don’t mention deficits or the growing gap between rich and poor or savings-and-loan bailouts; I just listen, hoping to find somewhere the guy I knew in college, the guy I ran into in Lincoln Park in Chicago who had been beaten up by Mayor Daley’s cops. I listen and probe, but he is just not there.

  I try talking about old times and the folks we knew in common, but Allan does not seem interested, as if it is not only old news but old news that happened to somebody else. I try mentioning the present about Kurt and Laura and others. He listens, detached, and makes it clear that, while mildly diverting, all of this stuff is merely “personal”: gossip, nostalgia, trivial bits that can be enjoyed only by people who aren’t serious. He comes alive at last when I mention Bobby, but only because he knows all about the senatorial race, including his and Wheatley’s positions on most issues. He has been following this race, along with the other thirty-three in other states, even before the psychiatric revelation brought it to national attention. As we are heading back to his place in the Village for lunch, I ask him who he thinks will win. He muses for a second and says that because the people of my state are a sensible lot, it will probably be Wheatley, helped by the drag of the doofus incumbent at the top of Bobby’s party.

  And he says that though he supposes he liked Bobby back when he knew him, he also hop
es that Wheatley wins. “The Senate,” he says, “doesn’t need another person on the wrong side of history, and particularly not a tax-and-spend, politically correct, multicultural, big-government, social-engineering type.”

  My trip, I see, is over. I plan to make my way politely through lunch, excuse myself, and see about getting an earlier plane. There is nothing to be gained by mentioning Bobby’s problem, and, given Allan’s combativeness, probably a good deal to lose.

  There is only one constant in the young man I knew in college and the one I see now. Allan was, and is, a True Believer. He was a True Believer in wanting to overthrow the System/Establishment in 1968, and he wants to overthrow the System/Establishment now. The only difference is that now he sees the Establishment as a bunch of pious, blame-America-first liberals permanently entrenched in the media and the government bureaucracy.

  He lives on the spacious second floor of a handsome brownstone. His kids are in school, Dalton and Spence, and his wife is at work. She is a neurologist and, he adds with some pride, a real conservative who abominates feminism. He shows me a recent picture of them all. The kids are cute, his wife attractive. Congratulating him on his good fortune, I am also suddenly annoyed with his smugness and self-righteousness.

  “Is this rent-controlled?” I ask.

  “We own it.”

  “Well, that’s good. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to benefit from anything that wasn’t truly free market.”

  He smiles at me, puzzled at first, then genuinely, relaxing, as if he were saying, “At last! The Real Thing!”

  “Why don’t you leave NYU?” I ask. “There must be a hundred more hospitable places who’d be glad to have you.”

  “I can write here as well as anywhere. That’s the important part. And dealing with all the pointy-headed pinkos keeps my wits sharp.”

  “I bet it does. But I get the impression you like seeing yourself as the underdog. I mean, all this stuff about ‘the liberal establishment’ is pure fantasy. Ideologues manufacture it to keep themselves feeling embattled and messianic. They—you—are the establishment. You’ve had the presidency for all but six years in the last thirty, and you’ve colonized the federal judiciary all the way to the Supreme Court. You just can’t stand prosperity, that’s all. You can’t take yes for an answer.”

  In a professorial voice he tells me about the history of Democrat domination of Congress. I can tell that for the first time since I got off the plane he is truly enjoying himself.

  When he takes a breath in his sermon about five minutes later, I say, “You dismiss ‘the personal’ and ‘the psychological’ as if you’re above such dismal concerns. Well, you may not be interested in psychology, but psychology is interested in you.”

  “Oh? And what is that supposed to mean?’’

  “Why do you connect yourself to powerful movements like the student activism in the sixties and conservatism now, but insist on seeing yourself as an outsider? You were an insider then and you’re an insider now, Allan. Though by sticking yourself in one of the most liberal universities in the country, I suppose you can maintain the illusion you’re leading some heroic doomed crusade against the godless hordes. And you may have persuaded yourself you’ve left the bad old narcissistic days behind, but I wouldn’t be so sure. You sure haven’t left self-pity behind. And self-pity’s just wounded narcissism.”

  He laughs without a trace of pleasure. “You’ve got a head of steam up on this, don’t you? Of course, you’re wrong to say that either the old student movement or conservatives now are powerful. They weren’t and they aren’t. At their high-water marks, they were no more than influential. And students influenced events purely negatively.”

  “So you say. I say all this poor-me-on-the-barricades stuff is a case of self-hypnosis, especially when the barricades include tenure for you, private schools for the kids, and what, a half-million-dollar condo?”

  “So we’re going to get personal. Well, I’m interested enough in psychology to know envy when I see it. So what if I’ve got what I’ve got. What’s it to you?”

  “I’d be happy for you ‘personally,’ Allan, if the personal had any meaning for you. But you’re like some sort of priest who’s found the one true church. Anything falling outside its theology is a petty earthly concern you can’t be bothered with.”

  “That would be a trenchant observation if it were true. But unlike you, I happen to have a family to whom I’m very devoted.”

  “Family—but only narrowly defined family—is part of the theology. Step outside the family, though, and it’s the abyss. And what makes you think I don’t have a family?”

  “No wedding ring.”

  “I didn’t wear a wedding ring when I was married.”

  “What makes you think I’m only self-interested?”

  “Well, let’s see. We’ve been together about four hours now. It’s been over twenty years since we last laid eyes on one another. We used to be friends, we used to be roommates. So isn’t it a bit strange that you haven’t troubled to ask me a single question about myself? Of course, maybe you’re not self-interested. Maybe you’re just relentlessly incurious.”

  He looks out the window to where a bag lady is picking through a garbage can. “All right, Ben. All right. Let me admit that seeing you has made me a bit uptight. People who knew me in the old days and who meet me now usually get pretty damned hostile. As if I’m an apostate who left their church.” He turns back to me. “And to tell you the truth, your being so fucking polite made me even more nervous. I got edgy.” He shrugs. “Sue me.”

  “I’m not that litigious. Too many lawyers is one of the things we definitely agree about.”

  He smiles, gestures for me to sit down, and then does so himself, crossing a leg. “Speaking of Bobby, I’ve been thinking about him. In fact, there was this business last week that started me thinking I was getting a little paranoid.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was pretty bizarre. Somebody called me here at home claiming to be from Wheatley’s office. He said they were looking into Bobby’s past and could I confirm the rumor that he used hard drugs in college.”

  I swallow hard at this news.

  “Did you?” I ask.

  “I told the guy I’d talk to Wheatley in person. He said he’d get back to me, and that was that.”

  “Are you going to talk to him?”

  “Wheatley?” He shrugs dismissively. “It was a crank call. Probably from somebody who wants to get me to say I used hard drugs in the past. As they say, even paranoids have enemies.”

  “What if it wasn’t a crank call?”

  “You mean what if Wheatley himself actually calls? That’s a good one. Well, let me see. This is like a chess game. He’d want to use it in the campaign, of course… I’d have to say I knew Bobby once used drugs because I was there when he did it. You were there. Kurt was there. You’d deny it, I imagine. Kurt’d probably deny it. After his psychiatrist story, Bobby would have to deny it. So it’d be three against one, and Bobby could point out I have ideological reasons to try to make him look bad.”

  I glance out the window, but I have stared at him a moment too long.

  “You just came here from California, didn’t you?”

  I nod.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he says, running a hand through the hair at the side of his head. “You saw Kurt and you’ve come to see me. It was Wheatley’s office. I’ll be goddamned.”

  I sigh. There is nothing to be gained anymore by concealing it. Wheatley, or Clive Sanford, will almost surely get back to him regardless of what I say.

  He looks at me. “I’m just trying to get the picture here. You don’t have any plans this afternoon, then, do you?”

  “No.”

  We both sit in silence for a while. His refrigerator hums and then stops.

  “Well, shit,” he says fi
nally. “I have to tell you, if I could contribute to Wheatley’s winning, I would. But for me to make it stick, I’d have to lie. I’d have to say you and Kurt weren’t there and it was just Bobby and I. I don’t think I’m prepared to do that. Not yet, anyway.”

  “What do you mean, not yet?”

  “Just what I said. I’m going to have to think this one over.”

  “Don’t tell me you approve of this kind of campaigning?”

  “I don’t know. I approve of winning. It’s a bad world out there, and we need some tough politicians to deal with it. Now, if you’re asking me whether Bobby ought to be elected or not because of his taking acid or whatever it was when we were in college, I’d say no, it shouldn’t matter. But if you’re asking me if Wheatley ought to use whatever comes to hand to win that’s based on truth, sure. Why not? Running for office isn’t a tea dance.”

  “‘Based on truth.’ I like that, Allan. So if we knew Wheatley had a mistress but couldn’t get her to talk, it’d be all right if we got some other woman to claim she was his mistress instead. It’d be based on the truth.’’

  He shakes his head. “Too distant from the base.”

  I give my next step a moment’s thought, and then decide it’s desperate, but why not? “Allan, what about out of the ties of friendship you just let this story die? For old time’s sake.”

  He gives first an amused look and then, as my request sinks in, a wintry smile. “I haven’t exchanged a word with Bobby since the day we graduated. Exactly what ties of friendship are you talking about?”

  “You know he’s a good guy and a good human being. You know that. And this story will ruin his career”—I snap my fingers—“like that.” He steeples his fingers and says nothing. “You said yourself it’s totally irrelevant to his candidacy.” He squints and remains silent. “You and I were roommates and old friends. What about as a favor to me?”