by Reed Karaim
The night editor, a friendly woman with a shock of red hair, glanced up when I passed her on my way out the door.
“Calling it a night?”
“Just need some fresh air. I’ll be back.”
I walked down the long sloping street past the gray buildings until I came to the Mall, where I sat down on a park bench. The sun hung low over the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument cast a shadow halfway to the Capitol. That peculiarly marbled light of early evening in Washington fell across the thick grass and the gravel paths crowded with tourists, runners, and the last remnants of the bureaucratic army that occupied the city every dawn, only to flee before dark. The bells in the Old Post Office tower began to chime and startled pigeons rose in a swirl.
A woman with long, beautifully tanned legs jogged by, black hair in a ponytail, eyes raised above the glances of the men she passed. Her stride kicked up a small stone that settled next to my shoe.
I thought about how I had come to love this city. The disdainful part that couldn’t be bothered to look you in the eye. The hustling part that filled the streets east of Fifteenth. The tourist part with its dinosaur bones and famous flying machines. I loved the way the figures in Statuary Hall grew more severe late at night, the hollows of their eyes deepening in unforgiving judgment. I loved the giant shadows of the flags flapping across the Washington Monument, Jefferson’s somber silhouette when the lights went down on his stone cage.
It had always been night when the city felt most mine, when I felt I had earned some small claim on its secrets. You finished covering Congress late and crossed the marble paths on the Hill with your footsteps echoing in the silence, the Capitol dome floating behind you like a Roman helmet, the ancient trees on the East Lawn, so manicured in the light, reclaiming their rightful mystery in darkness. The policemen in their black uniforms stood in pools of light on the corners, guarding the congressional office buildings as if each were some sacred ruin left here by catastrophe only dimly understood. There was a tremendous comfort and sense of belonging in the familiarity of it all.
From my bench I could see the green, wrought-iron light poles for the skating rink next to the Natural History Museum. Robin skated all the time the first winter we were here, a frantic circular chase to reclaim one piece of a world she understood. I wondered what she thought when she saw the rink now. All she had really wanted was to earn that feeling I had when I left the Capitol late at night, the feeling of having won the right to take your role seriously. She wanted it more than I ever had.
I remembered coming home to find her staring at the Capitol through the glass wall in our apartment.
“I got word today from Congressional Quarterly,” she said. “They’re still not hiring.”
We had been in Washington four months and she had learned that her experience as a reporter in Montana might as well have been in Montenegro for all it counted here. The first set of resumés had been sent out in a flush of excitement, as if she could feel a new beginning waiting for her behind a half-open door. The second set had gone out with steely determination. The third had been sent with a kind of grim fatalism. The fourth in a daze. I spoke to the bosses at Cannon and they made calls and a few interviews came through, but nothing more. I thought that if someone could just sense how much she wanted to belong to something, how completely she would throw herself into the cause, they would have jumped across the room to hire her. But desperation is the muffled bomb tick to employers, the warning of past and future explosion.
The first few weeks I came home she was waiting for me on the balcony, watching so she could wave as I appeared on the sidewalk. She sat on the couch with her knees tucked under her chin “Tell me what it’s like,” she said. “Tell me what happened. Where did you go? Tell me who you spoke to,” and I tried at first and then I found I could not really share the experience. I was struggling in my own fashion, trying to master a new job in a city where no one helps you learn the ropes, and I sensed, in some inarticulate way, how important this was to the rest of my life. And I have wished a thousand times since that I had told her this, told her how I felt I needed to hoard what strength I had to deal with each day, but then I only knew that the thought of talking about it filled me with a sense of weightlessness, as if I was one of those cartoon characters pedaling madly across thin air, knowing the one mistake I could make was to look down.
And maybe this is bullshit, maybe I am blaming temporary causes for a permanent condition, maybe we all find excuses for who we are.
The squeal of tires floated up to our apartment from the Anacostia Freeway seven stories below.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s okay,” Robin said quietly. “Why should you?”
She ran a hand through her tangled hair and it fell lank and untidy across her forehead. A line of red splotches ran down one temple, as if her knuckles had been pressed hard against the side of her head.
“I’ve got an interview at PBS Thursday. They need a research assistant. They told me over the phone it’s unlikely I’m what they’re looking for, but they’d give me an interview . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“That’s great.”
“I need to put my stuff together tomorrow,” she said. “I want to practice what I’m going to say. Can you help me?”
We had been through this before, and I knew how the night would end: her loathing and then anger as she faced the inadequacy of her qualifications, tears and defeat and a desperate reaching out for assurance I could not give.
“Sure,” I said.
I walked into the claustrophobic kitchen, turned on the light and scared a single cockroach, who scurried behind the toaster. I found some frozen chicken and put it in the microwave. I was making a salad, chopping an onion, when I heard a tearing sound in the next room.
“Robin?”
She sat in the dark on the edge of the couch, elbows on her knees. Scraps of paper fluttered to the carpet from her hands.
“Don’t say a thing,” she said.
She picked up another page from a stack beside her on the couch and slowly tore it in two. The sound was agonizing, like skin tearing. She tore the halves in two again and then tossed the pieces into the air. I picked one up. It was a page from her resumé.
The next day at work was hard, and when another reporter in the bureau invited me to join a group going up to the press club for a beer, I jumped at the chance. I told myself I would only stay for one, but I stayed for several and soon it was later than I had realized, and it was too late to call.
I saw her skating when I was walking home. I stood in the darkness on the edge of the rink and watched her. She wore black tights and a red ski jacket. Her hair was pulled around and pushed out sideways beneath a stocking cap and she skated slender and fierce, leaning out over the ice, blades flashing. I watched her and saw, as if for the first time, how beautiful she was, and felt, with a hollow pain, how much I loved her, and knew I had failed her in some immeasurable sense, not just tonight, but every day since we had arrived, and she was going to leave me.
The rink was quiet now, unlit, disappearing as the sky turned the color of wine. I closed my eyes and tried to remember her turning a pirouette, the ice flying in slivers around her ankles. Instead I saw her on the road, standing by a nameless stage in a parade of nameless stages, smiling at me through the crowd. She had what she’d always wanted.
What did I have? These nights amputated from the rest of my life, hanging over the days with a dull ache like a phantom limb? What happened when the road came to an end? I knew the things I wanted and they weren’t special things. They were ordinary things, but I knew them, and I knew who I wanted them to be with. But we had tried. We had tried before. What else did I have? I had my job.
I walked back to the bureau and dialed my editor at home.
“I don’t want to miss the days before the debate. I want to cover the buildup. I’m the best reporter to cover the buildup. I have t
he best connections. But I’ll fly to Berthold the morning after it’s over. You can get someone to cover for me. I’ll stay down there until I know it doesn’t make any more sense.”
I heard her take a deep breath. “Good.”
“Ellen,” I said, “Kelly hasn’t called me back. If I don’t get a chance, tell her I’m sorry.”
I set the telephone down and then despite myself there was a moment when I almost dialed Robin. I held the phone and it seemed as if it would be so easy, as if I could step through a door into a world where the rules would change. I wanted so badly to believe it could happen. But I had just rededicated myself to the truth.
VI.
THE CRANE for President campaign ran its first attack ad the following week, a thirty-second spot that opened with a black-and-white shot of a school in Wyoming where chemicals seeping into the water had left twenty-seven children seriously ill. The ad went on to tie the administration to one of the worst groundwater pollution cases in the nation’s history. The spot ran in the West and was paid for by an independent political organization, maintaining the tissue-thin fiction that the campaign was not responsible. It could have provoked a backlash, but the press, which can rarely think of more than one thing at a time, was already caught up in the countdown to the debate.
Those who managed Crane’s campaign used their success with the ad to press for more changes, and so there came a night when he sat in a hotel room watching a chart of the public’s affection for his every word displayed on a television screen. We are all undone by the vagaries of love, and maybe it was too much to expect him to be different.
They played him a dial poll, in which a selected sample of voters watches a speech or ad on television and registers approval or disapproval by turning hand-held dials. The results are superimposed along the bottom of the videotape, so moment-by-moment emotional reaction can be measured. The possibility that the voters might go home, spend a night thinking about things, and change their minds is a quaint notion to modern political handlers.
Steven Duprey told me this on the condition he could not be identified and the story could not be used until at least a week after the debate, but he told it well. Crane with his tie undone and his feet up, sitting in an easy chair, following the graph climbing and dipping at the bottom of the tape. They played and replayed slightly different wordings he had used while talking about the economy and, as the strange pulse ticked along at the bottom of the screen, Duprey said you could feel Crane’s heart reluctantly, inevitably, start to keep time.
“Play it again,” he said.
And they did, repeatedly, until they winnowed all the words he had said on character and community down to a handful of sentences, all the words on the economy down to a simple phrase: “Jobs with a future, not a dead end.” The tape rolled to an end and Duprey thought Crane might ask to see it again, might have it played over and over like a song that reminds you of the first girl you ever loved.
“Millions and millions of words,” Crane said. “And you never know. Amazing.”
They waited and he glanced away from the television absently.
“‘Jobs with a future.’ That’s what they want to hear?”
“Yes.”
Watching him closely, Steven Duprey thought Crane measured the phrase as if it had to satisfy him in some abstract sense unattached to its message, as if he weighed its worth in some hidden currency. Why is he running? my editor had asked at the very beginning. If I had been there to ponder that question at this moment, the answer would have seemed farther away then ever.
“I’ll work it in more often,” he said.
Blendin jumped up from the couch. “All right. We don’t eat, sleep, shit, smoke or breathe anything but ‘Jobs with a future’ when it comes to the economy.”
“There’s one more thing,” said Susan Douglas, his chief pollster.
They slid another tape into the VCR and Angela appeared on the screen. She looked like a china doll behind the podium, but her voice carried as clearly as a wind chime and her olive skin seemed to glow. The graph at the bottom of the screen soared giddily to the top and stayed there. Crane smiled.
“We know Angela prefers to stay out of the limelight,” Susan said. “But the public loves her. They love everything about her. How tiny she is. How she looks. The way her voice sounds. I don’t know that she has to do much more than read the phone book, but it would be nice to get her out front more. It’s less than ten weeks now.”
“She’s not comfortable with it,” Crane said. “She’s had a hard career and she would just as soon not become a center of attention.”
“It could help,” Blendin said. “You wanna see the tape again?”
Crane stared at the blank television.
“I’ll talk to her, but we’re not going to push. We’ll do what she wants.”
He stood up to leave and the room came to informal attention. He pushed back the veil of exhaustion long enough to smile slyly.
“Jobs without a future. Like the vice presidency.”
So he went out drawn in bolder and simpler lines, but I am not sure any of us noticed, so eagerly did we look ahead. The days before the debate were spent looping across the Midwest, our pace slowed to give Crane time to prep. We rolled through Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin, and other places that melt together into a long sunny afternoon with the waving pennants, glinting coronets and martial foot-stomping of a college football rally. We were the home team everywhere, and there was only one dark moment I can remember.
In Paducah, Kentucky, the buses had stopped in a light rain when something hit the window next to Stuart’s seat. He jumped at the same time I became aware of the chant. A red stain ran down his window, bleeding pink in the rain. Stuart settled back in his seat, running his fingers down his long nose as more blood hit other windows, plastic bags exploding with a sodden thump. On the side of the street, the signs with the fetuses bobbed up and down like an angry mob while the protesters beneath them stood oddly motionless behind the police line, only their mouths and their arms moving.
“This is a bit much,” Stuart said, returning with theatrical aplomb to the Atlantic Monthly.
The reporter from the local radio station was unsettled. “I don’t get it. Why does he make them so mad?”
Nathan leaned forward from the seat behind them. “Hey, he’s a Catholic boy. Even went to a Catholic school. That makes him a traitor to the faith. Plus, he conned them when he was a congressman. You go back and look at his speeches, and he’s talking about how uncomfortable he is personally with abortion. You know who Daniel Smith is? The head of Shepherds of the Unborn? That’s the group you see out there, mostly. He thought he had Crane’s assurance he was with them.” Nathan smiled. “He was everything to everybody then. It wasn’t until he got to the Senate and he had to vote that they smoked him out. They thought they’d been betrayed. Smith thought he’d been betrayed.”
The radio reporter stared at the diluted blood pooled in his window frame. “They’ve been blocking a clinic here off and on for six months. Don’t you ever wonder how long this can go on?”
Stuart turned a page. “The crusades, young man, lasted three hundred years.”
We rode through rural Indiana and then we were back in one of the places we started, but now it was late summer and Iowa was a different country, a quilt of green and gold and black. The buses were parked in a yellow dotted line along a country road, a single cloud floating across their windows as if on a roll of film. Beneath them Robin descended the hill surrounded by a tail of reporters. They came straight toward me and I could hear the conversation clearly.
“So you say you’re holding foreign aid to the same level?”
The words rattled out of the mouth of a reporter I had never seen before. He was short with a balding crown, and he jogged alongside Robin to keep up with her long strides, his houndstooth-check sportcoat billowing behind him.
“The same or a couple hundred million dollar
s lower,” Robin said. “But basically the same. That’s right.”
“Then I think you’ve got a bit of a problem,” the reporter announced.
They stopped, the other reporters circling around Robin and her interrogator. He held a crumpled copy of the Crane budget outline in his hands. His pen scrolled down a page until it came to a line where it hovered.
“Because you say on this page that you plan to raise spending on food aid to the Third World by one billion dollars.”
The pen came up and pointed at Robin’s chest. The other reporters waited. Robin’s eyes fell to the pen and then climbed to the balding reporter’s face. Her smile was small, contained, but I saw clearly how much she was enjoying herself.
“That’s because the Food for Peace program, which handles food aid, doesn’t come out of the foreign aid budget. It comes out of agriculture. And we make corresponding cuts in an export subsidy program to pay for it.”
She gently bent the pen earthward.
“That’s all right, though,” she said. “It was a good question. Keep us on our toes.”
When they were gone, the reporter in the houndstooth-check coat shuffling along defeatedly, Robin sidled over and stood looking at the stage beside me. We watched a blond girl in white cowboy boots toss a silver baton into the air.
“You’ve been avoiding me?” she asked.
“No.”
“I thought you might call in Washington.”
“I almost did.”
She looked out at the countryside and nodded.
“What a beautiful day,” she said.
The baton twirler was replaced by a quartet of teenage girls dressed as bobby-soxers. Three of the girls began singing doo-wop, moving in synchronized dance steps.
“Tonight,” Robin said.
“Maybe.”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “I have to fly back to Illinois for a week right after the debate. I won’t be around for a while.”
The fourth member of the quartet, a thin slip of a girl, wide-eyed with a touching wisp of a nose, stepped to the front of the stage. She reached for the microphone with long gawky arms. In a crystalline voice she sang, “I found my thrihhill . . . on Blueberry Hihhill . . .”