“ ‘We’ generically? In part because we’re more interested in doing good than voters imagine. That’s one of the most depressing things about politics in the nineties—this contempt so many voters seem to have for us as irrelevant, petty figures, concerned with nothing but self-preservation. Abetted by the press, of course. Worse, we have a ‘shoot to kill’ political culture premised on permanent scandal, where people in both parties don’t just try to win but to destroy each other with charges and countercharges. And I’ve stopped counting the number of special prosecutors there are.” His voice became thoughtful, a kind of self-admonition. “But what’s still just as pernicious is the overwhelming sense of your own power and importance, reinforced in a thousand ways. Unless you’re careful, it becomes an addiction.”
“But how does anyone avoid that?”
“My friend Bill Cohen writes—it helps give perspective, he tells me. But I’m a little less gifted.” For a moment, Kilcannon was quiet. “For others, I suppose, it’s family.”
Did he mean children? Lara wondered. After all, Kilcannon had a wife. “And what doyou do for perspective?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Other things. Stuff that has nothing to do with this place.”
“Such as?”
“Good works. Saintly acts.” In the darkness of the car, she could not read his expression. “But if I talked about them to you, then theywould have to do with this place, wouldn’t they? Another senator on the make, tending his image as a sensitive human being.”
This was fair enough, Lara thought. But Kilcannon might simply be taking her seduction to the next level, drawing her in with carefully packaged candor. Her doubts, Lara realized, reflected the divide between politician and journalist—in this case, between Senator Kerry Kilcannon and Lara Costello of theNew York Times —which made any interaction seem double-edged, a prelude to manipulation or betrayal. It struck her that this was also true of relationships between politicians; in Washington, there was no safe place for Kerry Kilcannon.
“It must seem pretty solitary,” she ventured. “Always being so guarded.”
In the silver glow of oncoming headlights, Lara saw his sardonic smile. “Are you a journalist,” he asked, “or a psychiatrist?”
To Lara, Kilcannon’s tone implied that she had overstepped her bounds; despite his smile, she felt slightly patronized. “It was an obvious question, Senator. We were talking like real people, I thought.”
In his silence, Lara watched them slip past the Washington Monument and the Ellipse, the White House appearing from between the surrounding trees, so familiar, yet so distant behind its wrought-iron fence, the barricades blocking Pennsylvania Avenue. “It’s odd,” he murmured. “Lately I catch myself sounding like my brother. You could go a life-time, and never know what he really thought. Or felt.”
What Lara felt was genuine surprise; Kilcannon’s public reticence on the subject of his brother was well known. There was something wistful in the veiled apology, a trace of puzzled self-reflection. She decided to let him be.
“Solitary?” he said at last. “Sure. You know your peers, but seldom very well. Because almost every relationship is based on mutual calculation—what will this do for me, and what will it cost?
“It makes you less human. So does the fact that so many people are focused onyou —your staff, your supporters, the reporters who cover you. It becomes too easy to see them only in terms of your own needs.
“But often that’s how they seeyou too. The press is merely the most obvious. There isn’t a local politician living who doesn’t havesome story about how well they know you, the time that you relied on them—some claim of ownership, true or not, which enables them to use your name.
“Most of them mean well enough. But your life and reputation become the coin of exchange.” Briefly, Kilcannon nodded in the direction of the White House. “The higher you go, the worse it gets. No one sane ignores the price.”
Lara turned to him. “So you’re not running for President?” she asked with quiet skepticism. “Not even, say, in the year 2000?”
He smiled a little. “I don’t expect you to believe this. But Iam sane, I like to think. And barring disaster, the President’s going to win reelection this fall, which leaves Dick Mason in very good shape for 2000. If that ever changes, it’ll be because of things I can’t anticipate. Or control.”
“So tweaking them about China . . .”
“Was because I think it’s right. I try to do that, every now and then.” Turning a corner, Kilcannon pulled up in front of the restaurant, adding softly, “That’s another thing Jamie left me. Not a legacy—a lesson.”
Once more, Lara was surprised. “What was the lesson, then?”
Kilcannon stared out the windshield, as if speaking to himself. “For as long as I can remember, Jamie always had a goal, always believed that he controlled his fate. I don’t think he ever imagined that what happenedwould happen.” Pausing, he slowly shook his head. “I learned from my brother what it wasn’t given Jamie to learn: not to plan or play it safe. Because the only thing you control is who you are.”
Sitting with him in the quiet of the car, Lara felt a fleeting intimacy; through some quirk of circumstance—the lateness of the hour, perhaps regret that he might have seemed condescending—she sensed that Kerry Kilcannon had shown her a glimpse of himself. Then the parking valet approached, and Kilcannon turned to her as if nothing had happened. “Come on,” he said. “I can taste the fried calamari.”
THREE
Kinkead’s had a light, airy atmosphere, attentive service, and well-prepared entrées with an emphasis on fish. Recognizing Kilcannon, the young woman at the front found them a corner table on the second level, darker and more private.
“Power,” Lara told him, “is never needing reservations.”
Kilcannon smiled. With his public day ended, he seemed at ease; the absence of people competing for his time must be a luxury. “Now that we’ve got the table,” he answered, “I’m tired of being me. I know all about myself, and if I ever forget something, I can read theTimes . But all I know about you is that you’re curious about what makes people the way they are. As much as we can know that.”
You know,Lara found herself thinking,or at least you try to know. “What else should I tell you,” she parried, “that I’d ever want you to know?”
He laughed at this, softening his retort. “Why you’re bothering our nation’s leaders—questioning our motives, discovering awful truths. Wasn’t there alaw school where you went?”
“Thatis patronizing, Senator. And there was, actually—Stanford Law School. I even thought about it. But it was time for me to work.”
The directness of her answer erased his smile. “Why?” he asked. “For someone as bright as you are, I’d have guessed there’d be scholarship money.”
Lara nodded. “That wasn’t the problem—I’d been on scholarship since second grade. I needed tomake money, not take more.”
Kilcannon began to ask something when the waiter came, a stout, bearded man with an Australian accent. They chose their entrées, and after consulting with Lara and discovering that the waiter knew more about wine than either of them, Kilcannon ordered an Australian chardonnay. It was not until their second glass that he asked, “So you were tired of being broke?”
No,Lara thought.At the time I’d have given a lot to go to Stanford Law. She was not sure she wanted to tell him this—it seemed like a confession of weakness. Perhaps it was his patience, his stillness across the table, his comfort with silence. Perhaps, even, her second glass of wine. “No,” she answered. “I was tired of mymother being broke.”
Kilcannon tilted his head. “What does she do?”
“Clean other people’s houses, watch other people’s kids. And raise four more of her own.” Even now, Lara realized, she could not speak of her mother’s sacrifice without emotion, imagine the faces of her younger brothers and sisters without a rush of affection. “I love them all,” she added quie
tly. “When things are hard, there’s less room for sibling rivalry. You need everyone to help, and you want everyone to do well.”
“And your dad?”
Was a tall man with eyes like mine,Lara thought,younger in my memory than you are now. “Who knows?” she answered. “When I was ten, he took off with someone else. He might even have been sober enough to know what he was doing.” She gave a dismissive shrug. “I’ve tried hard to make him irrelevant.”
She felt Kilcannon study her. “You never can, I think,” Kilcannon said. “Better to ask what that did to you than pretend it was nothing.”
His eyes held no judgment, only interest. Suddenly Lara realized that this was a remarkable conversation; when politicians wanted to ingratiate themselves, she had learned, they would offer what they thought you wanted most—a piece of themselves, usually predigested for easy consumption. No politician had ever asked Lara for a piece ofherself .
“It’s hardly profound,” he added. “But sometimes I think that people are the most dangerous—to others and to themselves—when they deny that their past has anything to do with their present.”
The thought was more important than he admitted, Lara felt sure—perhaps because of his brother, or himself. “What was it Wordsworth wrote?” Lara asked. “ ‘The child is father of the man’?”
“Something like that.” Briefly, Kilcannon smiled. “My father was a difficult man. Still is, in fact.”
The delphic remark made Lara smile in return. “Actually, you’ve hit a prejudice of mine. The last thing I want is to be my mother, or for my father to be the model for my husband. If I ever have one of those, I’m demanding self-knowledge on arrival.”
Kilcannon laughed. “How old are you? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? You may have to wait awhile.”
“Are you speaking from experience?”
“Of course.” Though he still smiled, Kilcannon’s tone was softer. “When I was twenty-eight I was married, and even more clueless than I am now. As Meg could tell you.”
It was his first reference to his wife, Lara realized; though amiable enough, it revealed little. “Doesshe want you to be President?” she asked.
“Meg?” he answered. “With her, it’s an obsession. Some girls grow up wanting to be Miss America, or maybe an astronaut. Meg’s fantasy is to be First Lady. No sacrifice is too great—including me.”
Lara smiled politely. The tongue-in-cheek response was so preposterous that she saw it as a matter of hiding in plain sight: because everyone knew that the Kilcannons had a commuter marriage, Kilcannon was well prepared to duck any questions this might raise. But understanding the recesses of his life was part of her job. “So she doesn’t,” Lara persisted.
Kilcannon shrugged. “Would you? Like Meg, you’ve got your own life. It’s part of what makes politics so hard.”
This was going nowhere, Lara realized; his defenses were far too good to be pierced by yet another curious reporter. And perhaps the truth was no more complex than that of a hundred other congressional marriages, built on compromises between men and women who balanced their separate lives with a life together. Only the absence of children made the Kilcannons’ marriage less usual, and there was no simple way to probe that.
“Anyhow,” Lara said, “that’s one reason I became a journalist and not a lawyer. So I could help out.”
“And you’re still sending money home.”
She nodded. “For a while. My youngest sister, Tiffany, starts college next year.”
“Tiffany Costello,” Kilcannon repeated with a smile. “Is therereally a Saint Tiffany?”
“Her middle name is Joan—as in ‘of Arc,’ so we’re covered.” Lara sipped her wine. “My mom has a weakness for the movies. When I was born, she’d just seenDoctor Zhivago . So she named me Lara, after the woman with whom he has this heartbreaking affair.” Putting down the wineglass, Lara smiled. “With what my dad did later on, she probably wished she’d named me Hester Prynne.”
“Gloomier book,” Kilcannon answered. “Worse movie.”
Dinner arrived. As he offered her a portion of his calamari, accepting a little of her tuna in exchange, the waiter brought an extra glass of wine for both of them. “So,” Kilcannon said, “I still don’t know how you became a journalist.”
Sitting back, Lara took in the light and shadow of the restaurant, felt the glow of the wine. “Just everything else about me.”
“Yeah. I thought I’d finish up.”
Lara rolled her eyes. “ ‘How I Became a Journalist,’ by Lara Costello. ‘I became a journalist because . . .’ ”
“Yes?”
“Because when I was small I liked to read—everything, even the newspaper. Naturally, that meant I was the ‘smart one.’ So our parish priest in San Francisco helped me get a scholarship to one of the best schools in the city, Convent of the Sacred Heart, right through twelfth grade. With only girls in class, I developed a very rich fantasy life, with me at the center. The school encouraged me to sublimate through writing.” She smiled. “In between writing bad short stories and imagining I was Gabriel García Márquez, I became the star of the school newspaper. In the end, reality beat out fantasy.”
“Are you sure?” Kilcannon said lightly. “Or have you just found a way to combine them?”
Lara shook her head. “Writing fiction usually doesn’t pay. When you’ve got no money, you know things like that. Even in high school.”
“So you don’t wish you could go back, do something else?”
“No. I like journalism a lot. If I ‘went back’ anywhere, it might be to where I started.”
Kilcannon put down his fork. “Why? You’ve got a great job here.”
“But that’s Beltway thinking, isn’t it?” She had talked too much already, Lara thought, and to a nominal adversary, one she barely knew. But that was part of it, she told herself: properly managed, a friendship with Kerry Kilcannon would be a good thing for any reporter to have. “I think politics is important,” she went on. “And theTimes is the best. Those are reasons to be here. But another reason is that, with my background, it felt counterintuitive to turn down a promotion.”
“What would you rather do?”
“Maybe something more about people and what they need, not just politicians.” Lara finished the last glass of wine. “When I first worked for theChronicle , I did a series on migrant workers—I speak fluent Spanish, so it helped. I wrote about the conditions in the fields, and now the UFW is coming back again.
“It got attention forme , too, and a state journalism award. The only problem is, four years later, it’s still the work I’m proudest of.”
Saying this, Lara realized it was so. She felt Kilcannon watch her across the table. “If that’s true,” he said after a time, “you won’t want it to be true four years from now. It seems you’ve done enough for other people.”
To her surprise, the simple statement touched her. Was he also talking about himself? she wondered. Then came a more unsettling thought: that she had enjoyed Kerry Kilcannon’s company more than she had her recent run of male friends. In combination, they had been too young, too anxious about their careers, too horny for what Lara could manage to feel for them. It was odd that she seemed more comfortable with a well-known senator, except that he felt more comfortable with himself. And, married, was not a problemthat way.
“It’s nice,” she told him, “to be absolved of the sin of selfishness.”
This made him smile again. When the waiter came with the check, Lara felt surprised.
“Let me,” she said.
Kilcannon shook his head. “It’s all covered by campaign funds,” he assured her. “From foreign donors.”
“A story,” Lara answered. “At last.”
Leaving the restaurant, they stopped on the curb outside. The air was balmy, with a hint of rain to come.
“Can I give you a ride?” Kilcannon asked.
The thought of asking for anything more set off an internal alarm in Lara, renewin
g the fear that she had lost her distance. “No,” she answered. “I can take a cab. You’ve had a long day already.” She held out her hand. “Thank you, Senator. I really enjoyed my orientation. Dinner too.”
Kilcannon gave a mock wince. “Kerry,” he said. “And whatever you decide, Lara, good luck.”
FOUR
The next time Lara spent any real time with him was in August 1996, at the Democratic convention in San Diego.
Lara had never covered a convention before, and her reaction ranged between amazement and amusement. Around the modern convention center there was security everywhere—cops on motorcycles, streets blocked off, cars being checked for explosives. Outside, anti-abortion demonstrators kept a constant vigil, denouncing the delegates as “murderers.” Inside the hall was another world altogether, insulated and surreal: balloons and banks of klieg lights hanging from the rafters; skyboxes for the networks—NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, C-SPAN; hospitality suites for major donors and lobbyists, awash in liquor and canapés, come to watch the hollow spectacle like Romans at a triumph. And itwas hollow, Lara wrote; the mass of delegates hugged each other and traded addresses like any conventioneers, half listening to empty rhetoric about the “party of prosperity for all.” The only purpose was to recoronate the President and Dick Mason with as little fuss as possible; the only problem was Kerry Kilcannon.
She saw him on the convention floor, surrounded by delegates who wanted to shake his hand, to get an autograph, or simply to touch him. The electricity surrounding him reflected Dick Mason’s well-known belief: that Kerry was positioning himself to fight Mason for the presidential nomination in four years’ time. The Vice President’s minions had already punished the New Jersey delegation for Kerry’s anticipated sins in the petty, telling ways through which an incumbent could play hardball: bad hotel rooms, well away from the convention hall; limited invitations to parties and outside events; cramped meeting rooms.
But Kerry’s immediate sin was his refusal to submit any speech he might give to Mason’s handlers for approval. The result was that—unless Kerry relented—he was scheduled to speak for no more than ten minutes late Tuesday night, well after the network coverage had stopped. It was, as Nate Cutler quipped to Lara, “a special place in media purgatory.”
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