Nothing happened. It could have. "You could've taken me right there on the coffee table," Amanda admitted later. "Actually you probably could've taken me in your office the first time we met. Not the best start for a relationship, though."
Agreed. The interview lasted for an hour, and then I said I had to go. The snow. The trip back to Washington in the morning. My busy life. She didn't protest. "Did the interview go all right?" she asked. "Can we do another?"
"I'll call you," I said, like a guy trying to dump a blind date.
But her hand lingered in mine as we said good-bye, and there was a moment when our eyes met and I thought: Now. The moment passed, though; the door closed, and I headed home.
* * *
Liz and I walked up the center aisle to receive communion. Hypocrite. On the way back to the pew I noticed Brad Williams staring at me. What was his problem? Didn't I look sincere enough?
I knelt and leaned my elbows on the back of the pew in front of me, and I brought my clasped hands up to my face. I wondered when I had last prayed. Right now all I could do was think impure thoughts.
* * *
When I was back in Washington, Amanda stayed on my mind, through the hearings and the markups and the roll calls and the caucuses. Through the long nights alone in my apartment, when I should have been studying the memos from my staff, trying to master the next day's issues. Around eleven-thirty on one of those long nights, I called her.
Why? I had been faithful to my wife throughout a not-always-idyllic marriage. I had done only one other thing to threaten my career, and it, too, would come back to haunt me. But that other risk had been thrust upon me; this one I took all on my own—for a reporter I had met three times.
I don't think I was in love. Infatuated, certainly, but I could have dealt with the infatuation if I had chosen to. I have dealt with stronger emotions, as Marge is happy to remind me.
Here is one explanation: The campaign was coming up, and I knew that Finn would be my opponent, and I knew that it would be brutal. I thought I deserved a fling before the long race began. Not a fling, really; a quiet place where the pressures of my life could not reach.
And here is another: Liz, lost in her books and her courses, was oblivious to the campaign planning. I was starting to get fed up with her lack of interest in my career. Perhaps this was a way of testing the limits of just how little Liz cared.
Here is one final, simpler explanation: I had tired of all my roles and wanted to try another.
When Amanda answered, it was as if she had been waiting by the phone ever since I had left her apartment. "I'll be back in Massachusetts on Saturday," I said. "I have an event to attend in Worcester at eight. I can see you afterward."
"Oh, that's wonderful," she breathed. What was she wearing? A nightgown? Pajamas? Nothing at all? Was she alone? "Where can I meet you?"
"Your apartment would be fine," I said.
"I see."
We both saw.
On Saturday I sleepwalked through the fund raiser in Worcester, and then raced along the turnpike into Boston. Amanda and I pretended to have another interview, and afterward, instead of leaving, I accepted a brandy and listened to Bach. And then we left our brandies on the coffee table, went into her bedroom, and stopped pretending.
Didn't we?
I certainly did. And oh, the glory of letting go. The choice had been made, the danger and the sin were forgotten—or at least shoved into a corner of my mind, while pleasure flooded every other particle of my being. I have lived my life like a dutiful son, atoning for a sin I did not commit. For once duty didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the feel of Amanda's naked skin, the hot pressure of her lips, the movement of her hands over my body. It was wonderful. It took all my willpower afterward to shower and dress and leave, to return to the cold, complex world I no longer wished to inhabit.
After that night everything changed for a while. No more talk about the book. We met to drink in each other's bodies and souls. We were a little reckless at first; she flew down to Washington a few days later and spent the night with me in my apartment. But it was Amanda who urged caution the next morning. "You don't want to be another Gary Hart," she warned. "There are nosy neighbors. There are reporters. You can't afford to take any chances."
No, it would not have been wise to take chances.
Kneeling in the pew, I tried to remember what secrets I had told her in our conversations. Nothing terrible. Certainly nothing about Jackie Scanlon. Little about Liz and me—that had never seemed like a good topic to bring up. I had babbled on about literature, about Yeats and Hopkins and Shakespeare. I had talked a lot about my past, about growing up a motherless bookworm in the fifties, about going to Harvard in the sixties and having my world turned upside down. And I had indulged in my dreams of how to make America a better place to live. I had revealed more than I had to anyone else in years. But there was nothing, I thought, that would look terrible on the pages of Hub magazine—except for the hypocrisy of the affair itself. And that would be enough.
And how much had Amanda revealed to me? A lot, I realized, looking back on it, even though I seemed to do most of the talking. "I want so much to prove myself," she said to me once. "Lots of things have always come easy for me because I'm nice to look at. But then there's always a barrier because people assume that what they see is all there is. It was no problem getting my editor to hire me—I just walked into his office and batted my eyelashes—but now I can't get him to give me the really good stories, because he assumes I don't have what it takes. But I've shown him. I've shown him." She stopped for a moment, as if to regain her composure.
" 'Only God, my dear,' " I murmured, " 'Could love you for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair.' "
"Yeats," she said quickly. She had studied up on my passions.
"Very good."
"Anyway, maybe I don't have what it takes," she admitted. "Maybe life has just been too easy for me. I'm not as aggressive as I should be. You have to be a bitch sometimes to get ahead, and I just find that so hard."
I thought of our first interview; she had probably hoped I would be as easy to convince as her editor. "Was the book about me going to be a way of proving yourself?" I asked.
Amanda smiled dreamily and kissed me. "I guess it was," she said. "But look how that turned out."
We laughed and made love. We did that a lot.
She was pensive sometimes, and she talked about her future. She should go back to school. Maybe law school—what did I think? She should quit Hub and go free-lance. She should find a cause and work for it. What causes did I recommend? All these discussions seemed tentative and painful, I realized, because they ignored the central question facing us both: Was I part of her future?
And I realize now that the more intense our relationship became, the less self-confidence she seemed to have, as if what was happening were as troubling to her as it was to me. Or perhaps I was just uncovering the reality beneath the pose. It was a reality I was familiar with; it's hard to succeed in this world, and if you aren't tough, at the very least you have to look tough, to make the world believe you are tough, or you'll never get anywhere.
I wonder if that was ultimately Amanda's downfall.
The good part lasted from Christmas to Easter, when we managed to spend a few days together in San Francisco, at a criminal justice conference that I spoke at and she pretended to cover. Even then I was starting to wonder where it would all lead. The affair was only adding to the pressures of my life, and in a few short months the campaign would present me with all the pressure I could handle. But I couldn't imagine not seeing her anymore; I couldn't imagine life without the pleasure she brought me.
The issue of Hub was waiting for me in my office when I returned from the conference. Marge was happy to confess that she had put it there. It contained a story by Amanda about people on general relief, a catchall category in the Massachusetts welfare system for those who didn't qualify for any other form of assistance. There was
a move afoot to cut back on it, and Amanda's article put a human face on the effect the cuts would have.
It was straightforward, heart-on-sleeve liberal journalism. Many of the people on general relief suffered from something called situational anxiety, which (Marge joked) apparently meant that working made them tense. One woman claimed to have seasonal affective disorder, which Harold interpreted as meaning that she didn't like winter. Callous Republicans could laugh about it, but there was nothing wrong with the article—if the author hadn't gushed to me about how she agreed with my views on personal responsibility and getting government out of people's lives. "Good thing we kept this woman away from you, huh, Jim?" Marge said, giving me one of her meaningful looks. "Having her writing a book about you would sure cause a little situational anxiety in the campaign."
Harold was blunter: "I don't know what exactly you're up to, but if it's what I think it is, you'd better stop it fast. I'm not going to let you throw away your career on some blonde on the prowl for a story."
So they suspected. I had probably been a lot less circumspect than I imagined, and maybe they understood me a lot better than I thought. I couldn't argue with them; the article spoke for itself. I could, however, argue with Amanda.
I drove angrily to her apartment—as I did the night she was murdered—and confronted her, as I had intended to do that awful night.
She burst into tears when I accused her of lying to me. "It's just a story," she said, sobbing. "It's my job. I do human interest. That's what I'm good at. It's what my editor gives me. That's all the story was—human interest."
"Am I part of your job? Get some dirt on the senator? Is this the big break you've been hoping for from your editor?"
"No, Jim. You don't understand."
"But you have been lying to me about your politics, right?"
Amanda squeezed her hands together as she tried to get control of herself. I had never seen her so upset. I thought: She looks gorgeous when she's upset. But I couldn't let myself be interested in how she looked. "I guess I have sort of misled you," she said carefully. "I wanted so much for you to like me, I wanted to get to know you, and that seemed to be the only way. But see, it's not that I disagree with your politics; I really don't have any politics. I—I sympathize. Maybe that's why I always get assigned the human-interest stories. I try to sympathize with my subjects, with the people I interview. I don't know if you're right or wrong about crime and all that, but you're an interesting person—the most interesting person I've ever met—and I wanted to find out what you had to say, I wanted to find out why you were the way you were."
"Are you planning to write about me?"
"No, Jim, no." Her eyes hardened. "I'm not a whore."
"But you're a liar."
"All right, maybe, but no more than—"
She stopped, but it was easy enough to finish her sentence. No more than you are. Guilty as charged. But right now she could hurt me much more than I could hurt her. She suddenly looked frightened. "I didn't mean that," she whispered.
I shrugged. "You can understand the position this puts me in," I said. A line from a script.
"I love you," she replied.
A line from a totally different script. It was the first time those words had been spoken between us. Her eyes glistened with tears. She reached out and touched my arm. I felt myself becoming aroused. I thought: If she had wanted a scoop about the sanctimonious senator's loose morals, she had long ago collected all the necessary evidence. There was no need for her to act anymore.
"Maybe it was phony at the beginning, but it's real now," she said. "Can't you feel it, Jim? Do you want me to quit my job? Do you want me to register as a Republican? What can I do to prove that it's real?"
But I was scared now. The early stages of the campaign were getting under way, and the thought of what an article about an adulterous love affair with a glamorous blond reporter would do to the campaign was enough to put a stop to any sexual urges. "Amanda," I said, "you've got to understand. I can't afford to take any chances. You said so yourself. The campaign is starting, and everyone's going to start paying attention to me and—"
Somewhere during my speech her eyes went dead. She took her hand away from my arm. "Of course," she said. "I understand. I'm sorry, Jim. Really I am."
And so was I. I left her apartment feeling as if I had just been beaten up. Worse: as if I had just beaten someone up.
I thought I would never see her again.
* * *
"May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace," the priest intoned.
The whole church seemed to be crying—including Liz. Liz? She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a tissue. Was it just the solemnity of the occasion? Thinking about the spirits of the dead?
She noticed me looking at her, and she turned away, still sniffling.
Oh, Liz. Will you ever believe me that the affair was over? Do I believe that myself?
* * *
I was in a funk all summer.
Even mistrusting Amanda, I couldn't seem to let the affair end right away. There were still those lonely nights in Washington when she was just a phone call away. There was still the temptation to go to her apartment when I was in town and have her wrap her lovely long legs around me.
She never refused to see me when I called, but of course, everything had changed. We both were more guarded now, afraid to do or say anything that might shatter the fragile remains of our relationship. I was surprised that she didn't try harder to win me over, but the self-confidence was entirely gone now, and she had become an almost totally passive recipient of whatever affection I chose to bestow on her. I'm not sure I liked the change. Looking back on it now, I'm sure she didn't like the change either.
When she did finally say something, it was enough.
I had gone over to her apartment for dinner. I helped prepare it, as I often did, chopping celery with the knife that later killed her. We drank wine; we chatted about the campaign. She told me she was thinking of quitting her job and going back to Europe. Maybe she could write articles for travel magazines. Or maybe she wouldn't bother. After dinner we made love, an urgent, silent coupling that left us both exhausted. Then we lay in bed together, and pretty soon we knew that it was time for me to go. And each time that happened, we—or I, at least—wondered if I would ever return.
Her back was to me. I put a hand on her shoulder, the sign that I was about to leave. "Amanda—" I began.
"I don't think you should come back," she interrupted, not looking at me.
"Why?"
"Because each time you come, I think: You're doing this to humor me, just till after the election. So I won't write anything about you. So you won't have to worry about the wrath of the scorned mistress."
"That's ridiculous."
"It's no more ridiculous than what you've thought about me."
I stroked the naked curve of her back. Her body was stiff and tense beneath my hand. She was right. And that was when I truly saw that it was hopeless. There were more lines in my script: I'm under so much pressure right now. I just need some time to sort out my feelings. But they wouldn't make her trust me, any more than her avowals of love could make me trust her. Better just to let it go.
And that was the last time I saw her, until the night I saw her corpse.
That final scene between us put me into an even worse funk. Not just because I was worried that she would write about me—although I'll admit that crossed my mind. It was more that it had all ended so inconclusively, so messily, leaving me feeling guilty and worried and, yes, lonely. Could it have ended any differently? Differently, yes. Better? Probably not.
I realize now that other people observed me in my funk and came to other conclusions about what was going on. And that was part of the reason why I was sitting in a church on a rainy Monday morning, watching the pallbearers approach my lover's casket.
I wondered what would have happened if she hadn't died. After the election. I felt
in my pocket; her key was still on my key chain. Why, if our relationship was over, did I still have the key to her apartment, ready to use it on the night she was murdered? Too busy to think about getting rid of it? Or too uncertain of my feelings to make the final break? Too selfish, Liz would say. And she would probably be right.
Amanda? I thought as they carried the casket past me. I need help, Amanda. I'm in terrible trouble. Do you still care? Did you ever care?
And that was as close as I got to praying.
* * *
Liz and I walked out of the church and into the midmorning drizzle. We stood with everyone else on the steps while the casket was being slid into the hearse. The reporters huddled in the distance, waiting to pounce on me. Liz was still sniffling; the cameras, I was sure, would notice. Sam Fisher would be thrilled.
"A moment, Senator?"
It was Brad Williams. I shook my head.
He came a step closer. "I know you were having an affair with Amanda, Senator," he murmured in my ear. "I think I should get your side of the story before I tell the world about it."
He was wearing cologne that made me think of fern bars and men wearing gold chains. There are few people whom I can't even stand the smell of; Brad Williams had joined their ranks. I looked at him. "Adams House would be very proud," I said.
He didn't appear to be bothered. "Well?"
I shook my head again. "Go fuck your mother," I said, and I headed down the steps of the church with Liz on my arm.
We didn't go to the grave. I had to get to Washington; Liz had to get to school. We had done our duty. We no-commented the reporters and made our way back to the car, where Kevin was waiting for us. He folded up his Globe and started the car. "Nice mass?" he asked.
"Very moving."
"Such a shame," he said. "So young. Such a future ahead of her."
Shut up, Kevin. Liz didn't seem to mind. Kevin drove us to Cambridge. "What course are you taking?" I asked Liz. Why were you crying, Liz?
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