by Karen Olsson
Look at him, Mitchell says. When are they going to get rid of that guy?
You think he should be fired?
It’s the government. Transferred.
He knows his stuff, even if he is a nuisance.
Mitchell swipes one hand out in front of him and says, He’s a bloviating idiot. I said as much to him the other day.
You told him that?
He came to me looking for a fight. He hates North. I guess he hates me. His purpose in life is to be against things. Have you seen the memos he writes? Twelve, fifteen pages single-spaced. I bet no one has ever read one.
I have. They’re overblown, but he’s well informed about the region.
God. You’re probably the only person who’s ever read one.
Tim stifles his urge to stick up for the Menace. He agrees with Dick for the most part, and (as he reminds himself) it’s probably a waste of time to dwell on the ten percent he finds too harsh. And by now the Menace has turned a corner, he’s out of sight.
* * *
What does Tim tell his wife that evening? To say that he is no longer sure that his colleagues are on the right side of the law, that would scare her. And how to explain that what he fears, more than lawbreaking, is that in a moment of carelessness he might have said something he shouldn’t have to Jodi Dentoff and that it will appear in tomorrow’s paper? That even without his name attached, his colleagues will know that it was he who spoke too freely?
In the summer he’ll come home at eight or nine or later, and some nights he’ll change straight from suit to swim trunks and do a few laps in the pool. It’s a small pool, and so he hardly gets going before he has to turn around and swim the other way. His strokes and kicks make heavy splashes. Everyone inside can hear him. Sometimes Eileen is already in bed by the time he towels off and goes back in the house, but other evenings he finds her in the kitchen, sucking on a piece of chocolate. He might take some potato chips out of the cabinet, and she might wipe up the crumbs that have fallen onto the countertop. He almost never has a chance to eat dinner when it’s actually dinnertime, but he does love the taste of potato chips after a swim.
While in the pool he snorted some water into his nose, and his throat still stings.
He is sitting at the kitchen table and she is standing at the counter. He’s always admired her profile. Although she is self-conscious about the skin starting to loosen over her jawline, what she’s lost in beauty she’s gained in softness, resolve—the two combined. She has picked up on his mood, but she doesn’t ask about it. She doesn’t want to find out just yet. She doesn’t feel like having a serious talk, you can tell by the set of her head, the way she is inspecting the linoleum.
She works so hard. He works longer hours, but she is like an athlete training for something, an endurance event that keeps being postponed. He wants to spare her any more. She would agree to bear his fears along with everything else she is carrying, but he doesn’t want her to. He says nothing.
* * *
The next morning the newspaper has not been delivered before Tim leaves for work. He usually reads an office copy anyhow, but on that day he drives downtown and then walks straight to a newsstand. There it is, not just on the front page of The Post but also in The New York Times: “NICARAGUA REBELS GETTING ADVICE FROM WHITE HOUSE ON OPERATIONS.”
Both articles teem with anonymous officials. “A senior Administration official said … Another senior official … A former senior White House official said today.” Tim wasn’t the only one who’d talked to Jodi—naturally—and he didn’t tell her anything as significant as what these others had said, these unnamed officials, probably the chief of staff’s people. The chief of staff himself maybe, Regan, who started in January and went for McFarlane’s throat almost immediately.
“Various officials confirmed that a marine officer on the NSC staff has played a key role in formation and implementation of U.S. policy in Central America…” Tim stands there on the street, reading one story and then the other. Things have gone further than he realized. He glances at his watch: the morning meeting is about to begin. He rushes back and enters the room just in time to hear McFarlane declare that there is no truth to this morning’s big headlines. Then McFarlane recites one of his standard lines, about how it is the cabinet that makes administration policy, and the NSC staff implements the policy. It’s what he’ll later say to Congress. Yet there is a new threat here, palpable in the room.
He should get out, Tim thinks. He could give Jodi a little more of the story, a parting gift, a token of his admiration, and then resign. Or resign and then talk. After all, what has his life been over the past two years? He holds it in, holds it together. At night he grinds his teeth. He shouts too loudly at the girls’ basketball games.
Tim calls Jodi at midday. I can’t tell you anything right now, he says, the “right now” a promise of later indiscretions. They agree to get a drink at 6:30, the first time they’ve ever met in the evening. He hangs up but holds on to the handset, then starts speaking into it, to the dial tone, when McFarlane comes out of his office. Regular work has come to a halt. The sound of phones ringing is practically the only sound. He takes a slow sip of his lukewarm coffee and watches the green letters file across the screen.
There were times in his life when he felt warmly toward his colleagues, as though they were friends of his, but in fact they are not. He is on his own.
He goes to the restroom and then wanders outside, into the summer swamp, the air not so much hot as it is wet. As he walks, his shirt moistens, and his feet turn warm and clammy. After a few minutes he sits down on a park bench and unties his shoes, which is as much as he intends, but then comes the impulse to slide his feet out and peel off his socks. He puts the damp socks under the tongues of the shoes and probes the mangy grass with his feet. Tourist families shuffle past with their bags and cameras and arguments—it is the kids who notice the barefoot man. He sees one girl pause and survey him from necktie to naked toes and back, with a quick, shy glance at his face, before resuming the family march to the Tourmobile stop.
Could his life have gone a different direction? How much leeway is there for anyone?
He doesn’t immediately recognize the man in the blue serge suit. It’s rare for him to run into anyone on the street: the work sucks them inside, and it takes effort to leave.
“Getting some fresh air?”
Red Menace has inserted the tips of two fingers into his shirt, between button holes. In the humidity his hair has formed thin, damp cords. Though his demeanor is languid, there is a suggestion of things roiling underneath, a hint of rocking back and forth, of lifting up onto toes and back down.
He could have been one of the story’s sources, an unnamed official. Then again Tim doubts that he knows enough.
It’s been quite a morning already, hasn’t it.
Washington in August, Tim says. Everyone gets cranky.
Like little children. They’re like kids, all of them.
Tim has never asked before whether the Menace has kids. What a thought. Pigeons have descended and are closing in on them, indirectly, waddling around and coming nearer and nearer.
You’ve got nothing to worry about, says the Menace. Your friend Mitchell, on the other hand—
What are you talking about?
He’s up to his ass in it, isn’t he?
Whatever you’ve got against him, I’m not really—
It’s nothing personal. Mitchell’s just running with the wrong crowd.
Then, ever the name-dropper, the Menace tells Tim that he’s meeting the head of a think tank for lunch and prances off on his claw-feet.
* * *
August isn’t the worst time for a story like this to appear. The president is recuperating from surgery at his Santa Barbara ranch. Most of the political class has flown north on vacation. Still, Congress begins to clamor and squawk, demanding that the national security advisor explain what his staff has been doing. A House member makes it known that
he wishes to review every memo that North has written on Central America. And so during that August of 1985, everything that will happen fifteen months later, the big crisis to come, is foreshadowed. It’s practically a rehearsal: the clamoring investigators, the tight-lipped officials, the remote commander in chief. A drama played out for the benefit of the news media.
As soon as the stories about North and the Contras appear, the climate in and around the Old Executive Office Building shifts. Whirligigs of smoke generated by a slow, secret fire are seeping out through the building’s jambs and vents. And what clouds there are in that heavy August sky take on the shapes of axes waiting to fall.
People speak out of smaller mouths. They glance back behind them before they say anything of consequence.
The next day, Poindexter springs the assignment on Tim. Maybe if he’d anticipated that he would be asked to do such a thing, or if he had more time to think it over, he would have hesitated. Instead he says yes right away.
Though computers have come to the building, most official business is still committed to paper. There are files upon files upon files, in steel case drawers, with typed labels; hundreds if not thousands of files at the office and more in temperature-controlled storage facilities. Tim spends the rest of the week reviewing lord knows how many files, one after the other, until he is overcome by typographical nausea, until his neck and shoulders ache. He pulls out anything about the Contras, anything that might be seen as incriminating, and then he goes back over those flagged documents, examining them in light of the ban on military aid. In the end there are six memos from North to McFarlane, reporting on Contra-related operations, that Tim hands over before returning the files to their drawers. He doesn’t ask what will become of the memos. He doesn’t need to ask.
* * *
A few days before, Tim went to meet Jodi as planned, to tell her he would be quitting. He arrived ahead of schedule at the low-lit hotel bar: wood-paneled, smoky, and not as well air-conditioned as Tim would’ve liked. Because he was early he assumed that he’d beaten Jodi there, and he was halfway across the room before he saw her sitting with Dick Mitchell. They were at a table in the corner, and their glasses were nearing empty. Jodi was smiling. Maybe Mitchell had just said something he shouldn’t have said, something that Jodi very much enjoyed hearing. Her hair fell forward into her face.
The speed and force of Tim’s jealousy surprised him—he wouldn’t even have been able to say what he was jealous of, exactly, or why the sight of them made him change his mind. Not that he changed it on the spot: he just turned around, left the bar, left the hotel, and went home to his family. What had he been thinking? What integrity would be gained by jumping ship? He didn’t want to leave and he didn’t want to be like the Menace, lamely bitching about one thing after another. The next day he went to work, with newfound loyalty he’d willed into being and that buzzing, biting worry shoved into the shredder.
Dad had received all the usual holiday invitations, to the same parties he’d been dragged to by our mother for years and years. Now he actually wanted to go to them, or so he said. He’d asked Courtney and me, weeks ahead of time, whether we would tag along to the Morgans’ Christmas party, “because the Morgans would enjoy seeing you girls,” though we knew it was that he wanted us to come, so that he wouldn’t be there alone. It was the party I’d invited Rob to, without thinking. I was relieved he hadn’t said yes.
That party, any party: a bulwark against the rest of it, against dreariness, against solitude, against dogs barking and drizzle-slush and the wet wheezing breath of the capital city in the last month of the year. The house was stately stucco, with a broad porch and two dozen steps bisected by a dripping black handrail, holly in planters, bare bushes. And the glow at the top of the door! Inside there was goat cheese, there were flatbreads and the gentle timbres of glassware, and men rumbling and rustling in their sport coats, and women cooing over one another’s jewelry. Where did you find that? In Santa Fe, in a little store on the Vineyard, oh, David bought it for me in Oaxaca, on that trip, could it really have been five years already? I know, I know, I know. How the time goes. There was music, Count Basie, and whiskey streaming like hot honey into tumblers. Everyone’s heartaches salved by the warm little egg of evening.
I’d come with Courtney and Hugo, and the three of us waded into a pride of people I still thought of as other people’s parents, and for all my preparing I wanted to turn tail, for they could be counted on to speak of their children’s careers and marriages and babies in such a way as to put in relief my not having a comparable curriculum vitae, and I felt sorry not for myself but for my mother and father, who’d been suffering the comparisons for some years now. Maybe it was just as bad, maybe even worse to have to keep reporting on your child’s single, freelance state to achievement-minded peers than it was simply to be the child giving evasive answers. It had been all right when I was younger and in school, less so when I was working in Hollywood and dating someone, and now what was there to say? (I was best glossed over in favor of my sister, the married one with a good job at a big-name nonprofit.)
But I’d gussied up, worn earrings. I was prepared to feign an interest in official acronyms, to palaver about current events, to do whatever it took.
“Where’s your father?” Hugo asked, over the din.
“Maybe he’s not here yet,” Courtney said.
“He gave me a gun,” I said.
“What did you say?”
I saw that she had taken in my words but rejected them, and I thought the better of making myself clear. “Let’s get a drink,” I said.
I saw a head, a younger one with stubbly sideburns and impish eyes, floating above the crowd, attached to a tall man (though not too tall, his head perhaps not actually so lofty as it seemed in that moment). Our eyes met; instantly I blushed; and into my own head came the thought that this might be a different sort of evening than the one I’d anticipated. My heart accelerated for maybe five beats until I saw next to him a pregnant and pretty companion. But of course. Courtney ran over and gave him a hug. It was apparently someone she knew. I followed behind her, loopily, my voice rushed and cracking as I introduced myself, and I knew my sister was watching, wondering what the hell. I couldn’t help it.
How’s the food? was what I’d meant to ask, I swear, but what I in fact uttered was, “How’s the fetus?”
Well, fine, they said, smiling, as Courtney stepped deliberately on my toe. In fine fetal fettle. Just yesterday it had caught the hiccups. And then I made a joke so poor I can’t bear even to repeat it here, all I’ll say is that they excused themselves then, and rightly so, leaving me with my sister, who asked, “Am I going to have to take you home?”
“Just five more minutes. Who was that?”
“You don’t remember Ted Wexler?”
“That’s Teddy Wexler? He was a lot less hot in high school.”
“What’s the matter with you? He’s about to have a baby.”
“That doesn’t disqualify him from hotness. It doesn’t de-hotify him. What is he, like some do-gooder lawyer now?”
“Actually I think that is what he does.”
“Where do these men hang out when they’re single?”
“Not in the neighborhood you’re living in.”
“That’s helpful, thank you.”
I stepped away from her, then glanced at my phone and saw that Rob had texted, asking for the address of the party. I sent it to him and then instantly regretted it.
* * *
In no time at all came the phase of the party when all the rented glassware had been distributed and was in use or abandoned on tables, smutched with fingerprints and lip balm, while standing by the bar pouring red wine into a coffee mug was a rosy Nordic giant in a bright red sweater and wide-wales, his face flushed with his own good fortune. I had a feeling that this was the sort of man I ought to be talking to, if I wanted to improve my prospects in Washington. But before I could work up the resolve to introduce myself
I was distracted by a balding fellow in a down vest who’d found a birdcage under a worn yellow towel and was proffering, to what I think was a cockatiel (or was it a cockatoo?) a blanched haricot vert. And then rather than speak to either man I got caught up in a swell of women ascending the stairs to admire some just-completed renovations of the upper floors.
A small, sparkly woman led the way—our hostess, Rennie or Ramie I think her name was. Her youngest son was still in high school and lived on the third floor, which was its own apartment practically. A tricked-out living area at the top of the stairs had a leather sofa and television, also a sink and a refrigerator and a stretch of marble-topped counters. There, a thin scapular boy with a pierced lip stood pouring a vodka and coke.
“Say hello, Jonathan.”
“Hello, Jonathan,” the boy said. The mother paused, her face crinkling coolly. Then she clapped her hands together and led us down again. “We let him drink at parties,” she confided, though as soon as we were back on the first floor she whispered something to a man who’d been handing out cocktails; he went bounding tightly up the stairs. When he returned, holding the bottle of Grey Goose, his eyes had gone glassy, yet he went into the kitchen and after a minute came out dimpled and hale once again.
I saw my father bending another man’s ear, spinning some theory no doubt. The other man was noticeably well-groomed, not a stray hair on his head, and as he listened he polished off a slider, neatly, and touched his lips with his napkin afterward. I pulled out my phone and texted Rob again:
party no bueno, let’s meet up after?
The bird fancier was still standing by the cage, still wearing a down vest over his shirt, but now the bird had perched on his hand. And all at once the sight of that obliging tropical specimen with its curled pink talons and clipped wings filled me with a childlike sadness. At the same time I wanted to take the bird on my own finger.
I couldn’t place the man, but I’d seen him before, either he was someone’s parent or else someone who had at one time or another been in the margins of the spotlight: a campaign advisor, a special counsel. And now I felt I might as well be the bird, looking to perch on somebody else’s status-callused hand. Did I actually begin to trifle with the man in the down vest? If so it wasn’t intentional. Or else he started it, passing the bird off to me, so that we were attending to it together, and the lies began pouring out, that I was applying to law schools, that I had loved college, that I had missed Washington, that I was interested in what his sons were doing: Who the hell were his sons? Who was he? It was one of those party exchanges that go on and on before you get around to names. Finally, I told him mine.