Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  Not even Ross Perot would bother to fight with Dan Quayle. "If anybody in the world should be able to understand the Murphy Brown story, it's the Republican party in the White House, because their whole lives are driven by ratings," Mr. Perot declared. "Murphy Brown had the baby the way she had it to get ratings"

  President Bush, after agreeing with Quayle's negative response to Murphy Brown -- for having a baby when she wasn't married -- added only that "having a child out of wedlock is a better choice than having an abortion." But the big news was, no one really cared.

  It is rare in American politics when a belligerent fool can't manage to stir up a hornet's nest by making an insensitive remark or two. Yet Dan Quayle went on and on being insensitive, and all he inspired was a plethora of political cartoons.

  "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure," the Vice President had said in November of '89.

  In a Hardee's restaurant in Chicago, in August of '90, Quayle had greeted a woman and tried to shake her hand. "I'm Dan Quayle. Who are you?" the Vice President had asked. "I'm your Secret Service agent," the woman had replied.

  That same year, in California, the Vice President had announced: "I love California. I grew up in Phoenix. A lot of people forget that."

  But Quayle could be more mystifyingly stupid than that. "I have made good judgments in the past," he'd once said. "I have made good judgments in the future," the Vice President had added.

  As for family-oriented issues, nothing he would say about Murphy Brown could compete with this classic Quayle remark in December of '91: "Republicans understand the importance of bondage between mother and child," the Vice President had informed us. (And we thought Henry Kissinger spoke English as a second language!)

  And so, when Quayle attacked a fictional character for being an unwed mother, nothing really happened except that the media went wild for a week. When the flap died down, nobody's mind had been changed -- least of all, Dan Quayle's.

  At the time, however, Quayle's bullying idiocy about "family values" affected me more than the polls, for it occurred not long after Dan had invited me to dine with the Republican Inner Circle and I'd declined the invitation. I had developed the habit of pacing in my office, mumbling "I have made good judgments in the future." Clearly I was beginning to regret that I hadn't gone to the White House to eat with Dan and his friends.

  I remember, too, that a kind of melancholy attended the week before the election. Janet and I were in New York one night when something triggered the security system in our Vermont house; the alarm sounded. A policeman searched the house for an intruder but found only a partially deflated helium balloon. The balloon said HAPPY BIRTHDAY! and the motion detector had responded to its errant behavior in the rising hot air from the furnace. We came home to find the balloon weighted down to the floor; for this purpose, the policeman had used our one-year-old's favorite toy -- a three-foot-tall version of Big Bird, the Sesame Street character. (Television is the source of so much American life.) The helium balloon was tied around Big Bird's neck. Was this an omen? Was Big Bird a Republican or a Democrat? He looked like an Independent to me. ("Which one of the three candidates as young men would you want your daughter to marry?" Ross Perot had asked. "Ears and all," he'd added -- definitely a Big Bird kind of character.)

  Another night, when we were back home from New York, the phone rang at 5:00 in the morning and a man from the alarm company informed me that the heat detector in my security system indicated that the temperature was below freezing in my house. I told him I was perfectly comfortable, and that the house was adequately heated -- the security system was screwed up, I said. But when I couldn't fall back to sleep, I went downstairs and discovered that an outside door had blown open in the wind. The thermostat for the heat detector had been exposed to the cold air, and the front hall was full of dead leaves. A gray squirrel was sitting on the threshold of the open door; it looked uncertain -- trying to make up its mind whether or not to come inside.

  This was disconcerting enough to compel me to watch the early-morning news. At a rally in Michigan, President Bush called Al Gore "crazy" -- and Bush had this to say for the Clinton-Gore ticket: "My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos!" Later, a "news analyst" (I think this means a journalist) was whining about Bush's calling Clinton and Gore "bozos"; the issue was whether or not the demeaning word ("bozos") was Presidential. "Presidential" is an adjective we suffer over -- thankfully, only every four years. If the President said it, whatever it was, I say it's Presidential.

  Thus inspired, I kept the following election-day diary.

  "I wake up at 6:00 to the sound of hail on the roof, and on the slate terrace; the trees are completely shrouded in ice -- very ominous. I go back to bed and hear two or three thuds against the north wall -- also very ominous. This usually means that grouse have been flushed from the woods and have failed to clear the house, which is three floors high, with a steep roof. The sound of the birds killing themselves also wakes up our one-year-old.

  "The three of us get up. I make coffee and watch the All-News channel, then CNN. Am informed that the polls open at 7:00. Drink one cup of coffee, then drive off to the elementary school -- our local voting place. We live on a mountain; there's a dirt driveway and two dirt roads before you get to the paved road. On the mountain, it's sleeting; in the valley, it's raining -- there's no ice on the trees in the valley.

  "They're setting up the voting booths in the elementary-school gym; I'm told the polls don't open till 10:00. Several Republican-looking people are already there, looking obdurate. I mean by 'Republican-looking' that they appear to be wealthy and retired. I can wait all day,' one of the elderly gentlemen says.

  "A young woman is setting up hot plates for split-pea soup and baked beans; the coffee urn is already plugged in, and there's a long table piled with cookies and pies. In Vermont, every public event comes with this kind of food. I drive home, drink half-a-dozen cups of coffee, get so wired that all I can think of doing is raking leaves -- an arduous task in an ice storm. But by 9:00 the sleet has turned to rain, even on the mountain. I find the three dead grouse; they're too big to 'rake.' I make a mental note to come back for them with a shovel -- maybe tomorrow. If Bush wins, I decide I'll feel like shoveling dead grouse. If Clinton wins, I won't mind shoveling dead grouse. If Perot wins, I'll let them rot until spring -- if Perot wins, everything will rot.

  "At 9:00 I begin to read a Chekhov short story; in five minutes, I decide I've already read it. I turn on the All-News channel. Some town in New Hampshire has already closed its polls. All 37 registered voters have voted -- 25 for Bush, 10 for Perot, 2 for Clinton. There's a brief interview with the town ballot-counter, a startled-looking man who resembles Christopher Lloyd in his Back to the Future phase. 'We didn't think we had any Democrats in town,' he says. He looks worried, as if the two votes for Clinton were too many.

  "I find a shovel and bury the three dead grouse in the woods, talking to them all the while as if they were Republicans. The grouse, of course, are accepting of this criticism. Suddenly it's 10:15!

  "I jump in the car and race to the elementary school. The parking lot is full and I have to wait in line for 45 minutes. Is this a good sign? Are these people fed up with George or frightened of Bill? In Vermont, a dozen people are running for President; I've never heard of nine of them. There's also a space on the ballot so you can write in the name of a Presidential candidate of your own -- or your own name, for that matter. I vote for all the Democrats on the ballot, even for Justice of the Peace, but I make an exception for Bernie Sanders, Vermont's favorite Socialist; Bernie is seeking a second term in Congress, in the House of Representatives, for the Liberty Union party. I decide, spur-of-the-moment, to vote for Bernie. It occurs to me that we may not have any other Socialists in the House.

  "I come home all hopped-up and unable to write; I regret that I've already buried the three dead grouse -- stupid birds! Decide to walk in the wet woods; change my mind because the bow-
and-arrow season (for deer) has started -- don't want to be skewered by a crazed bow hunter. I think about trying the Chekhov story again, but I can't discover which bathroom I've left the book in; the damn house has six bathrooms. I sit in my office, not writing, watching squirrels leaping in the trees. If you watch squirrels long enough, you'll see one fall -- especially after ice storms. I decide to watch them until two squirrels fall -- about an hour. Not much else is happening in nature today: no deer out the windows, no wild turkey. There are only the squirrels, and the three dead grouse; their graves, fortunately, are not in view from my office.

  "If Bush loses, there's someone in Arizona I'd like to call, so that I can gloat. But the person may be dead, and I never knew his name. In 1988 I was invited to speak at a fund-raising event for Planned Parenthood in Phoenix. (Dan, if you're reading this, Phoenix is in Arizona.) I gave a rousing speech in favor of abortion rights, and lambasting George Bush -- from an exclusively Planned Parenthood perspective, mind you. I said you couldn't be a member of Planned Parenthood and vote for George Bush -- Michael Dukakis was the alternative, then. The speech was rather coolly received. A woman told me that most of the women were Planned Parenthood members, but most of their husbands were Republicans who supported Planned Parenthood -- 'only financially' -- because they didn't want the Hispanic vote to one day outnumber the vote of the retired community. In other words, they supported Planned Parenthood for Mexican-Americans -- and the Republican party for their every other need. They supported Planned Parenthood only out of their fear that the Mexican-Americans were out-reproducing them! This pissed me off; I wished someone had warned me before my speech -- then I could have been directly insulting to these particular Republicans.

  "It was in this mood that I went to the men's room, where I was accosted by an elderly, infirm Republican who used one of those aluminum walkers. He shuffled over to the urinal and glared at me, which I found fairly inhibiting.

  "'What's a writer like you make a year?' he asked me. 'Half a million? More?'"

  '"About that,' I answered cautiously.

  "Then you ought to be a Republican, you idiot!' the old gentleman said. He was certainly right in one sense. Before Ronald Reagan was elected, when Jimmy Carter was in the White House, my personal income was taxed to the maximum -- I was in the highest bracket. After Reagan took office -- and for the next 12 years -- my taxes dropped about 40 percent on personal income. There were lots of friendly loopholes -- meaning tax deductions for rich people. Even so, I explained to the old fart with the walker that I didn't vote solely out of self-interest.

  '"Then you're a damn fool!' he told me. 'What other, dumb-ass reason to vote is there?' I was on the verge of hinting that the gentleman might be too old a dog to learn new tricks, but that perhaps it wasn't too late for him to develop a social conscience ... only I never said any of this. At that moment, both the elderly gentleman and I noticed that he'd peed all over his walker. Political agitation had doubtless affected his aim. There seemed to be nothing I could add to the conversation." (Or to my diary.)

  President Bush became the first incumbent to win less than 40 percent of the popular vote since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 -- another year when the economy was a crucial issue. Bush was gentlemanly in accepting the loss; frankly, I thought he looked relieved. Perhaps he knew what he was going to do on Christmas Eve. At that time of the year when we are most inclined to exhibit some form of goodwill toward our fellow-man, Bush would issue a presidential pardon to Caspar Weinberger -- the ultimate gesture of not "coming clean" about the Iran-Contra affair. Even in defeat, Bush would be Bush -- cynical to the core.

  As for Independent Ross Perot, he finished with 19 percent of the popular vote -- ears and all. Perot made the strongest third-party showing since Teddy Roosevelt ran on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912; Teddy captured 27 percent of the vote, which the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, won.

  Old news. Politics becomes old news quickly. My election-year diary is of limited and fast-fading interest, but my dinner at the White House with Ronald Reagan will stay with me. I was shortsighted not to accept Dan Quayle's invitation to dine with the Republican Inner Circle; I'm certain that something wonderful or terrible or both would have happened -- at least it would have been memorable. In comparison to what that occasion might have been like, of what lasting interest is it that I think Bill Clinton is a waverer, and/or that I will almost certainly vote for him again -- or for any Democrat over any Republican? We all have our opinions concerning what or who is ruining our country; right-wing conservatives are at the top of my list. As a novelist, my political opinions or yours aren't half as interesting to me as what happens at a good dinner party.

  Does it matter that I personally like Mrs. Clinton better than Bill? I don't think Hillary is a waverer; I doubt she would have let Dr. Elders slip away. Dr. Elders was a favorite of mine; it was deeply disappointing to me that the President didn't beg her to stay as our Surgeon General. (Anyone who thinks that condoms and masturbation are the worst things to introduce to young people is standing at a low point of social responsibility and historical accuracy, not to mention common sense; yet those who attacked Dr. Elders won that round.)

  By the time this book is published, a new election-year hysteria will already be gripping the country. I find it instructive to look at my diary of only four years ago -- how dated and irrelevant it is! Look around you today, right now: what the candidates and their supporters (or detractors) are saying occupies the mainstream of the media's attention; all this energy -- both the promises and the accusations -- will quickly become dated and irrelevant, too. The passion of our political convictions can be as misleading as sexual desire, and as short-lived. What lasts longer is a good story. The only time I went to the White House, I had a great time. I should have gone again.

  FICTION

  INTERIOR SPACE

  George Ronkers was a young urologist in a university town -- a lucrative situation nowadays; the uninformed liberality of both the young and old college community produced a marvel of venereal variety. A urologist had plenty to do. Ronkers was affectionately nicknamed by a plethora of his clientele at Student Health. "Raunchy Ronk," they said. With deeper affection, his wife called him "Raunch."

  Her name was Kit; she had a good sense of humor about George's work and a gift for imaginative shelter. She was a graduate student in the School of Architecture; she had a teaching assistantship, and she taught one course to undergraduate architecture students called "Interior Space."

  It was her field, really. She was completely responsible for all the interior space in the Ronkers home. She had knocked down walls, sunk bathtubs, arched doorways, rounded rooms, ovaled windows; in short, she treated interior space as an illusion. "The trick," she would say, "is not letting you see where one room ends and another begins; the concept of a room is defeating to the concept of space; you can't make out the boundaries. ..." And so on; it was her field.

  George Ronkers walked through his house as if it were a park in a foreign but intriguing city. Theories of space didn't bother him one way or another.

  "Saw a girl today with seventy-five warts," he'd say. "Really an obvious surgery. Don't know why she came to me. Really should have seen a gynecologist first."

  The only part of the property that Ronkers considered his field was the large, lovely black walnut tree beside the house. Kit had spotted the house first; it belonged to an old Austrian named Kesler whose wife had just died. Kit told Ronkers it was repairable inside because the ceilings were at least high enough. But Ronkers had been sold on account of the tree. It was a split-trunked black walnut, growing out of the ground like two trees, making a high, slim V. The proper black walnut has a tall, graceful, upshooting style -- the branches and the leaves start about two stories off the ground, and the leaves are small, slender, and arranged very closely together; they are a delicate green, turning yellow in October. The walnuts grow in a tough, rubbery pale-green skin; in the fall they r
each the size of peaches; the skins begin to darken -- even blackening in spots -- and they start to drop. Squirrels like them.

  Kit liked the tree well enough, but she was ecstatic telling old Herr Kesler what she was going to do with his house after he moved out. Kesler just stared at her, saying occasionally, "Which wall? That wall? You're going this wall to down-take, yes? Oh, the other wall too? Oh. Well... what will the ceiling up-hold? Oh..."

  And Ronkers told Kesler how much he liked the black walnut tree. That was when Kesler warned him about their neighbor.

  "Der Bardlong" Kesler said. "He wants the tree down-chopped but I never to him listened." George Ronkers tried to press old Kesler to explain the motives of his would-be neighbor Bardlong, but the Austrian suddenly thumped the wall next to him with the flat of his hand and cried to Kit, "Not this wall too, I hope not! Ah, this wall I always enjoyed have!"

  Well, they had to be delicate. No more plans out loud until Kesler moved out. He moved to an apartment in another suburb; for some reason, he dressed for the occasion. Like a Tyrolean peasant, his felt Alpine hat with a feather in it and his old white knees winking under his lederhosen, he stood in a soft spring rain by his ancient wooden trunks and let George and Kit hustle the furniture around for him.

  "Won't you get out of the rain, Mr. Kesler?" Kit asked him, but he would not budge from the sidewalk in front of his former house until all his furniture was in the truck. He was watching the black walnut tree.

  Herr Kesler put his hand frankly on Kit's behind, saying to her, "Do not let der pest Bardlong the tree down-chop, okay?"

  "Okay," said Kit.

  George Ronkers liked to lie in bed in the spring mornings and watch the sun filter through the new green leaves of his black walnut tree. The patterns the tree cast on the bed were almost mosaic. Kit had enlarged the window to accommodate more of the tree; her term for it was "inviting the tree in."