It had been the first time. Stacy had pulled over to the side, and realized she was close to crying.
She had been twenty-five then, and had written the song when she was seventeen, a thousand crummy clubs ago. “We’ve worked so hard,” she’d murmured.
And one year later, when she had come back from her first exhausting concert tour to realize that she was making more money than God, she’d found a Spanishy-looking house in the West Hollywood hills so outrageous in its campiness that she’d grinned just walking through it: a bar modeled as an English pub with slot machines; a sunken bathtub with a bidet next to the sauna; Greek columns surrounding the pool. By the time she and Damone had found the black bedroom with mirrors she had been laughing out loud. “Looks like a wet dream from Walt Disney,” he’d remarked, and Stacy had decided to buy it on the spot. She’d moved her piano and all her sound equipment into the mirrored bedroom and stuck two palm trees by the pool so she could write songs under them. And now her face was as famous as her voice, and the city of mirages was her home. It disoriented her to stare at it from Jamie’s suite.
She had met him four years later, with her third album number one, and her time so consumed by writing and touring that Stacy had wondered if she’d killed the rest of her. And then Damone had called to announce with exaggerated reverence, “Senator James Kilcannon wants to meet you.”
That strangers called because they both were famous had no longer startled or impressed her. “He wants money, right?”
“He wants you to sing—the way the law works you can only give a thousand bucks, but by packing an arena you can raise four hundred thousand more.”
“But why would I want to?”
“Shall I tell him that?”
She thought a moment. “I will.”
But James Kilcannon had surprised her.
Stacy had been used to meeting politicians so determined to project warmth that it felt like she’d been mugged. But an air of amusement about Kilcannon suggested that he held part of himself back; this hint of complexity had appealed to her. His hazel eyes had an iris so much wider than the normal that they seemed to absorb everything around him, yet his fine sculpted face made him look impossibly young to be president. “You’re wondering what I want from you,” he’d said. “Besides thirty seconds as a gossip item.”
They were having lunch at Harry’s Bar. Like other things in Los Angeles, its original was elsewhere; one difference from Hemingway’s Florence haunt was the faces turned to watch them. Smiling, Stacy answered, “I’m just curious how you’ll rationalize it.”
“Simply. I want to be president and I think I need you to do that.”
“I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe you do.”
“I’m afraid I do, though. Six months ago, I came to see you in Washington. People who waited for hours to hear you sing wouldn’t cross the street to vote for me or anyone.”
“It’s because they can feel things without being used.”
“Stacy, it’s because there are two Americas now, and the one you reach doesn’t respond to words or ideas, but to sound and pictures—film, TV, video games, music. I don’t like this, but I’m not responsible for them—you are.” His face was keen with challenge. “I wonder if it’s enough to let them make you famous because you’re a beautiful woman who can sing.”
She tilted her head. “If you’re trying to make me feel guilty, skip it. I’ve worked too hard.”
“Then you’ve achieved something,” he answered crisply, “for yourself. But if people like you don’t ask their fans to commit to the world they live in, we’ll end up with a generation so passive and easily manipulated that the next Hitler could stage the Holocaust as a miniseries.”
She gave him a comic look of skepticism. “You’re running to keep Hitler off of MTV?”
“I’m running for things you’ve said you care about—like women’s rights, for openers.” Shrugging, he finished in a throwaway tone. “And because I can’t imagine being dead unless I’m president first.”
Suddenly, she wanted to communicate with him, not just fence. “Does needing it that much ever scare you?”
For an instant he looked so vulnerable that Stacy knew she’d caught him by surprise. “Does it you?” he asked.
“It sets you apart,” she answered softly, “to try and do what other people can’t. It doesn’t help that you never quite know why they want to be with you.”
As Kilcannon glanced down, she noticed his lashes were unusually long. “Stacy, I’m not asking you to sing, all right?”
“Then what do you want?”
“Something more, I think.” Looking up again, he asked quietly, “Are you free?”
There was no missing it. After a time, she said, “I can be.”
As they left, Stacy realized they made a striking couple.
Later, as he held her in the dark, she wondered why it had happened. “Stacy?” he murmured.
“Yes?”
“I really did like your concert.”
Stacy laughed aloud. “So you are going to ask me to sing.”
“Not after this.” His voice softened. “What I want now, is to see you.”
For two years he had done that, in fragments stolen from his race for president or jammed between her tours. For weeks he’d be a face on her television; then they would be lovers on the Baja. They’d rented a house there. Mornings they would swim, or run the beach. In the afternoon, hiding from the savage brightness, they would make love. He read poetry to her, Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Sometimes Stacy sang new songs she’d written as he listened, thoughtful. Her reasons for performing seemed to fascinate him—as if, perhaps, he saw himself reflected. Besides Damone, he was the man with whom she talked most easily.
“How is it for you?” Jamie asked her. “Onstage.”
They were sitting at a white wooden table overlooking the ocean; their bottle of Chardonnay was half empty.
“It’s getting harder,” she said finally. “They expect so much now.”
“You never use drugs?”
“It’s safer to depend on myself.” Stacy shrugged. “Sometimes, before a show, I don’t feel too great.”
Jamie gazed out at the ocean. “Do you know why you keep doing it?”
Stacy wondered how to explain this. “When I write a song,” she said, “it’s still not finished. It’s only when I can take something that doesn’t exist outside me, and put myself out there to give it to other people, that I feel complete. There’s nothing I’ve ever felt as strong as that.” Speaking this, she realized how much it scared her. “Sometime, I won’t have that anymore. Maybe they’ll stop coming. Maybe, some night, I won’t step through the curtain.”
“And if you can’t, then who will you be?”
She turned to him. “I’ve never really known.”
Jamie reached out, brushing the hair back from her face.
Afterward she lay on his shoulder. When he spoke, it was almost to himself. “All that effort, Stacy. But what does it mean?”
She did not answer. He never asked this again—not of what she did.
This silence embraced his campaign. Away from him, she followed it, until at times she could not help but wish to be part of what he did. But he seldom spoke to her of his ambitions; she began sensing that he wished to hold them separate. The campaign was a void between them. She did not know what happened to him there. He never asked for help.
But she could tell that it consumed him. He would loll in an armchair, looking at the Baja sea; suddenly the look would grow hooded. Then, as if feeling her thoughts, he would laugh at himself. “AWOL again,” he would say, and take her hand.
They kept the press away. It did not matter if his reason for this reticence was politics; she did not wish to speak of him to others, even to Damone. He learned to ask when Jamie was coming, and never call. His only comment was a question, “Has he asked you to sing yet?”
“He never will.”
“No? That’s
good, then. If that’s what you want.”
“What do you mean?”
Damone’s smile was no smile at all. “I just wonder if he isn’t teasing you a little.”
Jamie won in New Hampshire, and then Florida and Massachusetts, and did not ask. For those three months she did not see him. In mid-May, when his campaign came to California, only one man stood between him and the Democratic nomination, and his life seemed more vivid than her own.
Ten days before the primary, after a day campaigning in five different cities, Jamie spent the night with her.
She was shocked by the change in him. On television, he seemed vital and triumphant. Now it was as if the cameras had bled him. He was pale and too thin; there were new crow’s-feet at the corner of each eye, the first flecks of gray at his temples.
“You look like hell,” she said.
He stretched out on her sofa, watching the eleven o’clock news like a tired husband about to fall asleep. “They say people over forty earn their own faces. Today’s my forty-third birthday.”
Not to have known this troubled Stacy. She went to the kitchen, popped a bottle of French champagne, and brought it back on a tray with two glasses. Jamie had leaned forward. A film clip of his opponent was on television, reading a speech to a group of Jaycees; woodenly, he muffed the opening joke his gag writer had inserted. Jamie watched with something close to sympathy. “Never violate your own nature,” he murmured.
“Happy birthday.”
Turning, he saw the champagne, and smiled wryly. “At my age, that’ll put me to sleep.”
“You’re allowed.”
They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, feet touching. Jamie stared into the glass.
“What’s wrong?”
He did not look up. Finally, he said, “I’m going to lose, Stacy.”
“How can you know that?”
He angled his head toward the screen. “That’s going to kill me. Right at the end.”
“You’re being awfully Delphic.” As he hesitated, Stacy saw that his fingers were swollen from shaking hands. “Tell me about it—all right? I’m tired of not knowing.”
Jamie sipped champagne. “All right,” he said at length. “The simple truth is that I’m ten days short of money.” The bitterness in his voice surprised her. “In 1980 no one west of New Jersey had ever heard of me. For four straight years I’ve flown coast to coast shaking hands and begging money until sometimes I didn’t know where or who I was. Now all that work has come down to California—whoever wins here wins the nomination. Three weeks ago I was ten points behind in a state so large and complex that I’ll live or die on television. Since then I’ve spent four hours daily on the phone extracting checks from the last contributors in America to pledge the thousand-dollar max, pumped it all into TV spots, and cut his lead to five percent with seven undecided.” For the first time, he looked directly at her. “That finished me, Stacy. I’m broke.”
Stacy tasted her champagne. “How much do you need?”
“Do you mean, Is that why you came?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He closed his eyes. “Four hundred thousand,” he answered. “The exact amount Damone told me you could raise by singing, two years ago.”
Stacy studied the lines of his face. “Well,” she said, “next time you can pay for dinner.”
When his eyes opened, she was smiling at him. “I can’t let you lose. Not if I can help it.”
Jamie could not smile. Taking his hand, Stacy realized the palm was damp.
“I’d love to have seen that performance,” Damone said when Stacy phoned him the next morning. “Did he suffer a little?”
“Look, John, I called to ask how long it’ll take to put together a show.”
“Hasn’t he noticed you haven’t sung lately?”
“He’s running for president, dammit.”
“So you didn’t bother telling him that you came back from the European tour ten pounds lighter, ’cause you started getting sick.”
“No,” she shot back, “because I want to do this.”
There was silence. “He’ll need it by next Friday to do him any good.”
“Can you set it up?”
“At the Arena, in San Francisco.” Damone laughed without humor. “I reserved the date three months ago.”
Stacy hung up.
That night, Jamie telephoned from Sacramento; in the background, a PA system called out flights. “Come out with me,” he said.
“Campaigning?”
“Uh-huh.” He sounded fresh and cheerful. “It’ll set you apart from the rest of my contributors.”
“I don’t know, Jamie. The press …”
“If you’re going to do this for me, I want you to be a part of it.”
Stacy realized that this was what she wished to hear. “Okay,” she said. “Where do I meet you?”
Two days later, their picture was on the front page of the L.A. Times.
It had happened so quickly that she still hadn’t absorbed it. The first day out, when the Secretary of the Interior had remarked that “if you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all,” some reporter asked her opinion. “If he’d seen even one,” she’d snapped, “he’d know how small he is.” It was instinct; she had answered because it felt good. But the media had loved it—she gave them glamour and a fresh angle, and Jamie had not seemed to mind.
Now, in their suite forty-five stories above Los Angeles, Stacy tried to analyze how she felt about it.
The day before they’d swooped down from the Central Valley on a campaign high, with the press pool drinking and laughing and each crowd bigger than the one before. Jamie started throwing away his speeches; surrounded by migrant workers, he joked and quoted Yeats and Robert Kennedy, and they cheered with an intensity which surprised her. By the time the plane reached Los Angeles and they scrambled to the limousine, she sensed that Jamie really could be president. And the crowds were there for him again, packed between the stucco apartments and corner groceries and whiskey signs in English and Spanish, slowing the limo to a walk. “They can’t see me,” Jamie had murmured. Oblivious to danger, he opened the door and got up on its hood as the crowd reached out to him. The moment had a terrible beauty; Stacy wished to turn from it, but could not. Above the bobbing, shouting heads, someone raised a “Stacy for Veep” sign. Grinning, Jamie pointed to it, and then the driver opened the sunroof. She stood without thinking, waving with the sun in her eyes as the crowd cried out, “Stacy …” She could no more see faces than in the darkness of a coliseum.
But she stood all the way to the hotel where Jamie was to speak. She was part of it now.
There were more signs for her. She was sitting at the head table when Jamie rose.
“You may remember me,” he opened. “I’m Stacy Tarrant’s warm-up act.”
Stacy looked up in surprise.
In their cheers and laughter, Jamie smiled at her. Stacy thought he’d never looked younger.
Two hours later, in their hotel suite, his face looked slate-gray. His hand was swollen again.
“Stacy,” one of his aides said, “your fans outside will keep him up all night.”
“I can talk to them.…”
“Probably better to cool it. The security people will chase them off.”
She glanced at Jamie.
Aides surrounded him. Someone had scrounged cold sandwiches; another had paid the hotel to keep its laundry going all night; on the television news, their motorcade looked like jump cuts from an action film. Jamie pointed at the screen. “A sixteen-hour day, and all that counts is thirty seconds.”
“Looks good,” someone told him. “A campaign on the move.”
A red-haired aide shook his head. “It’s too ‘hot’—all those Latinos screaming at two celebrities. Joe Six-pack’s not gonna get that at all.”
“Screw him,” Jamie murmured.
“It’s okay,” the first man assured him. “The last ads are all green lawns and sha
de trees. No music even, just actors and a voice. Lauersdorf’s bringing one by in the morning for us to look at, so we can run ’em statewide after Stacy’s concert.”
Jamie’s sad-faced California manager, Tim Sherman, came in with statistics from the nightly tracking. “Two hundred calls,” he told Jamie. “Mostly to San Diego. The seniors are worried about Social Security, the women about war, and the under-twenty-ones about employment—they’re getting close to graduation. Hit those in tomorrow’s speeches, and I’ll tell the TV people to look for that.”
Jamie nodded.
Sherman stuffed the figures in his pocket. “About the cartop routine, you’re not a bullfighter. I get sick thinking what could happen.”
Jamie looked up. “No help for it, Tim.”
His voice conveyed a second message. “Let’s let the candidate get some sleep,” Sherman announced, and suddenly they were alone.
“What do you make of all this?” Jamie asked.
“You’re good.” She hesitated. “Cynical, isn’t it?”
“Practical,” he amended. “Politics is the business of getting people to let you do a little of what you want. Even your songs are written for an audience, remember?”
“It’s different, though.”
“Is it?” He smiled quizzically. “Would they let you sing if no one came to see you? Would you still write?”
Stacy flicked the hair back from her forehead. “Maybe I just don’t belong here. Some of your staff doesn’t think so.”
“They will tomorrow night.” His tone lightened. “You’re not worried about old Charlie McCarthy’s ‘Jamie Jagger’ lines, I hope.”
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