Private Screening

by Richard North Patterson

  She smiled at Jamie’s nickname for his rival, a former vice-president so mortgaged to his contributors that when he’d spoken at a candidates’ dinner Jamie had whispered, “Watch closely—when they pull the strings, his lips move.” But still she asked, “You don’t think that hurts you?”

  “Not in this state. In addition to the minorities and jobless, who wouldn’t care if I were a hermaphrodite, I need young singles, single mothers, and white liberals—the ones who buy your albums in the millions. For those people, we belong together, and every time old Charlie appoints you ‘secretary of stereo’ you can hear them yawn from Berkeley to the Baja. He’s guaranteed you’ll pack them in, even on short notice.” He examined his swollen hand. “Once you sing, we can buy the airtime to run my final spots statewide, and just maybe I’ll get the thing I’ve wanted ever since I went to Congress.”

  Stacy studied him. “My being here—you’ve thought it all out.”

  He looked up with the tactile gaze which was part of his appeal. “Stacy,” he said coolly, “I’ve thought everything out.”

  She waited a moment. “Even what might happen to you?”

  His expression grew curious and a little distant. “Spiritually, or physically?”

  “The motorcade. I agree with Tim—it scares me.”

  He shrugged. “It’s the only time anyone really sees me.”

  “Instead of an image?”

  “I like to feel there’s a difference.” He rose, heading for the bedroom. “Although at the moment …”

  “There’s a difference, Jamie. I saw it in the Baja.”

  “Quiet, wasn’t it?” He turned in the doorway. “It got lonely without you. I thought that out, too.”

  Stacy smiled. “But what does it mean?”

  He smiled back, and then his look grew serious. “That I’d have to start living with mixed motives, and that you’ve lived enough in public to accept them—and your own.” He disappeared inside.

  Stacy was not tired. But the day remained a jumble. When she went to the bedroom, Jamie was sleeping.

  His hair was rumpled as a teenager’s. Kissing his forehead, Stacy turned out the light.

  When she woke again, it was not yet morning.

  It took her a moment to realize where she was. Beside her, Jamie breathed evenly. She could not see his face.

  In the darkness, Stacy began to search her memory for a song.

  It was a trick she had learned on the road: when she was frightened of performing, or afterward, when she was strung out on her own adrenaline, she wrote to remember who she was and how she’d gotten there.

  Lying next to Jamie, she remembered the first time she’d made love.

  The boy had parked in the Berkeley hills; they’d looked across the bay toward San Francisco from his car. The city’s luminescent patterns glinted as if refracted by a diamond; the Golden Gate was an arch of lights, its traffic two opposing streams of yellow. When she had been small, wrapped in a blanket between her parents, she would invent lives and destinations for the people on the bridge. At fifteen, the memory made her squeamish.

  “I love you, Stacy.” He moved closer. “I can make it good.”

  His eyes were wide as a rabbit’s, so innocent that he might almost believe it. She took his face in her hands. “All I want is for you to be scared with me. It’s okay if you are. I just don’t want you pretending not to be.…”

  Awakening, James Kilcannon had touched her.

  Now, meeting with his aides, Jamie’s voice came from the next room. Stacy stood in front of the window, alone.

  That she could never quite lose herself with him, she thought, must be as much her fault as his.

  For another moment, she was pensive. Then she turned from the morning light, and opened the notebook she wrote songs in.

  “Scared with Me,” Stacy scribbled for its title, and smiled at herself. Thirty-one, and still ripping off your life for lyrics.

  Pausing, she wondered if that hadn’t begun scaring her a little. Perhaps what had made her want to campaign, even more than Jamie’s need, was that she needed to care for someone or something too much to sing it away. Too soon, and by surprise, her songs would be someone else’s trivia question, and then she’d face Jamie’s ironic catch-question, “But what does it mean?”

  Beneath the title, she wrote its first lines:

  Please don’t deceive me

  That the morning will show

  What it means to be lovers

  When our hearts cannot know …

  Suddenly she recalled the morning after she’d made love to the boy.

  She’d awakened to silence; somehow, she had felt her parents knew. Guiltily, she tiptoed from her room. In place of breakfast talk and clattering dishes, she heard their television.

  Her parents were in front of it. She knelt beside them. “Robert Kennedy’s been shot,” her father said.

  For a crazy instant, Stacy wanted to confess to him, so that Kennedy might live. “I’m sorry,” she remembered blurting.

  Stacy closed the notebook.

  Nerves, she thought—less than twelve hours now. Stacy walked into the bathroom, glancing wryly at the thick glasses, the first hint of lines they magnified.

  She showered, put in her contact lenses, and joined Jamie.

  He was picking up the telephone as Sherman held an index card in front of him. “Why am I doing this?” he asked.

  “A morale-boosting call from the candidate. Old man Parnell is an absolute reactionary and she’s having this party anyway. Plus, she’s a pipeline to new contributors.”

  The red-haired aide stepped forward. “I called one of our Bay Area people this morning. Some hotshot young lawyer has hold of a gay rights suit against Parnell and his paper.”

  Kilcannon glanced at Sherman. “Why didn’t I know that?”

  “I didn’t know—anyway, we need the money and it’s too late to change.” Sherman gave the aide a pointed stare. “Maybe you can set up a meeting with some presentable gay leaders. After Stacy’s concert.”

  Jamie looked from one to the other. Then he dialed, peering at the card. “I don’t see any children.”

  Sherman nodded. “The son got kidnapped, remember?”

  “Vaguely.” His tone changed abruptly. “Alexis? This is James Kilcannon.” Listening, Jamie laughed. “I’m just calling to thank you in advance. I know you’re Colby’s liberal conscience, and that’s not easy work.”

  Catching Stacy’s eye, Jamie made a grimace of self-dislike, then smiled into the phone. “Yes, I’m bringing her—she’s my liberal conscience.…”

  “Black coffee, Stace?”

  She smiled up; Nat Schlesinger, Jamie’s press secretary, had already learned what she liked. Of the people who surrounded them, she felt most affection for this rumpled, homely man who lived his life through Jamie. “Nat,” she told him, “you’re my home away from home.”

  As Nat beamed with pleasure, Jamie hung up. “What’s in San Diego?” he asked Sherman.

  “An old-folks hit. Sacramento’s the day-care hit.”

  “What’s this about?” Stacy murmured to Nat.

  Nat bent closer. “What Tim calls a ‘hit’ is to go somewhere that makes a point in thirty seconds of air-time. If Jamie goes to a day-care center, people know by watching the news that he’s for working parents.” As the door opened, Nat looked up. “Here’s one of the TV spots you’re buying.”

  A man whose pin-striped suit cloaked too much bulk hustled in with a cassette. “Who’s he?” she asked.

  “The media buyer, Bob Lauersdorf. He negotiates for airtime in the media markets statewide—represents big private accounts like Procter & Gamble that pay top dollar year-round. With that kind of clout and a little of our money, he can stick Jamie’s final spots right in the middle of ‘Dallas.’” Nat’s face clouded. “Your guy Damone—he’s got things all put together, even security?”

  He fidgeted with his navy-blue bow tie; Stacy remembered that he wore it when
ever Jamie needed luck. “John can do anything,” she assured him.

  Lauersdorf stuck the cassette into the video player.

  Jamie stood to one side of the screen, hands in his coat pockets. Stacy leaned forward.

  On the screen, an older man lovingly painted the door to his white-frame house a sylvan green. As he added the final touch, a grandmotherly woman finished polishing the brass door knocker. Turning, their eyes met; in a husky voice, she said, “We brought five children through this door.”

  The man nodded sadly.

  With agonizing slowness, the camera pulled back from them across a neatly tended lawn. As the old couple’s hands linked, a “For Sale” sign appeared in front of them. Through this silent image, an actor’s voice intoned, “Don’t let them tarnish your golden years. Vote for James Kilcannon, for a safer tomorrow.”

  “Dynamite,” the buyer enthused.

  Jamie ruffled his hair. “Who was ‘them’?” he asked bemusedly. “Termites?”

  “Inflation; cutbacks in old age benefits; the opposition—”

  “We have met the enemy …”

  “And them ain’t us.” The buyer smiled. “When we pretested this, one old lady cried.”

  “But what does it mean?” Stacy murmured.

  As Jamie turned to her, the buyer’s smile looked pained. “Have you seen his ads?” he asked rhetorically. “The one where he takes his mongoloid granddaughter fishing and tells her about Medicare?”

  Jamie was silent. “We’d better go,” Sherman told him. “You’re running for president, remember?”

  For another moment, Jamie looked at her. “I’ll call John,” she told him softly. “He can pick me up in San Francisco for the sound check.”

  She did that. And then they were off, sweeping through a hotel lobby filled with cameras, smiling for the midday news.

  2

  REACHING into his duffel bag, Harry Carson felt the snub nose of the Mauser.

  In his mind, Stacy finished singing “Love Me Now.” From the darkness, the crowd screamed for more, until she beckoned to Kilcannon. As he stepped into the light, Carson raised his arm. But the revolver would not fire. He was paralyzed.

  “Harry?”

  Carson flinched. Moving his hand, he found the pack of cigarettes beneath his journal of poetry, and flipped it to Damone. Damone tapped the bottom, pulling out a cigarette with his lips. Even with the beard, Damone’s face looked like hammered bronze.

  “You all right?” Damone asked.

  Carson realized he was sweating. “Just bored.”

  “That’s why I hired you—to be chairman of the bored.” Taking a drag, Damone watched the television he’d set down on the stage.

  “There’s too many amplifiers,” Carson told him.

  Damone didn’t turn. “Leave the extras out till after the sound check. If we don’t need ’em, I’ll load the boxes back on the truck.”

  On the screen, Stacy was moving with Kilcannon through the lobby of some hotel. Beneath the blonde-brown curls, her green eyes seemed wary, reminding Carson of Beth. When her smile flashed, guileless and surprising, he looked away.

  “Satellite News International will continue its live coverage of the Kilcannon campaign with a rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown.…”

  Switching it off, Damone turned to the crew. “Make sure the monitor’s set up and working. I’m picking Stacy up at noon.”

  Carson lit a cigarette for his nerves.

  Empty, the stage was an enormous concrete bunker. Four levels of catwalk rose from each side; banks of lights and colored cloth backdrops hung from the ceiling; the crew hauled beat-up metal boxes from the loading dock, footsteps echoing on the dirty wooden floor. They worked steadily, laconically. When they were finished, the lights would be lowered and angled to make the backdrops look like multicolored silk and the stage a bubble suspended in the dark, and then Stacy would appear in a blaze of spotlights.

  “Golden Anniversary” Carson decided he would call the poem.

  This morning, he’d read the lines he could not finish:

  Each year I remember you

  Hair golden, free to live

  Waiting for the camera

  His golden life to give.…

  Carson closed his eyes.

  Capwell’s blood spurted into his hands, and then he was landing in Oakland. A newspaper said that it was June 2, 1970; Carson still could not remember the thirty-six hours before Capwell had died in his arms. He stared at his hands for blood.

  The cigarette had burned to a nub. Carson looked up, and saw that Jesus, one of the sound men, watched him.

  “You have some kind of problem, man?”

  Jesus shrugged. “I was needing help with the sound.”

  Carson stubbed out the cigarette. “You want me to read your mind, Jesus, try moving your lips.”

  Sharp-eyed fucker. Opening a box, Carson stepped over the cords of the sound system as if they were trip wires and the amps could blow him to pieces. That the past bled into his present didn’t scare him so much as that he couldn’t control when it happened or remember why. And the part still missing in ’Nam had already cost him his kid.

  He began unloading the box.

  Beth’s two-month-old postcard was in the duffel bag next to the Mauser, addressed to him care of Damone. Cathy was all right, she had written, and she’d found work as a cashier. It was postmarked Columbia, South Carolina, but Beth gave him no return address. She didn’t want to see him again, she finished, and knew he had no money to help care for their daughter. That night Damone had slipped him ten bucks for a fifth of tequila.

  Patching in the amp, Carson felt its sudden electronic current as a revolver in his hand. It surprised him; for a moment he did not know whether to associate this with past or future. Then he thought of the postcard.

  Rising by instinct, he walked to the center of the stage.

  The body lay behind him on the floor. Calmly, he began to follow the plan.

  “Where you going, Harry?”

  There was screaming; he did not even turn. “To pull more boxes off the truck.”

  They would catch him if he took the elevator. Moving toward the catwalk, he counted fifty feet.

  Three flights of metal stairs down, ten steps each, and Carson reached the entrance to the loading dock. His motorcycle was there. Less than thirty seconds’ time, he guessed. The adrenaline felt like a Dexedrine rush.

  Mentally, he jumped onto the motorcycle and escaped into the darkness.

  Hoisting another box, Carson took the elevator.

  Once onstage, he walked to his duffel bag. Next to it lay the newspaper Damone had lent him, open to an inside page. It was dated June second; like someone memorizing words, Carson scanned the headline “Lord to Question Parnell in Gay Rights Suit” as he lit his cigarette.

  3

  TONY Lord felt the jury moving with him toward Colby Parnell.

  He stopped for an instant, the way an actor uses stillness to dramatize what will come. In that moment, he was conscious of the judge’s stare; the court reporter bent to his machine; his client’s tautness; the heightened interest of the press; the jury poised to make its judgment. Then he stepped forward.

  Parnell’s wool suit, club tie, and neatly shined shoes seemed intended to remind himself of who he was. He touched two fingers to the handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  “Good morning, Mr. Parnell.”

  Almost imperceptibly, Parnell leaned back. “Good morning.”

  “You’ve testified that my client’s sexual preference did not influence your decision to approve his firing. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “My client was terminated last November, was he not?”

  “Yes.”

  Lord moved to Parnell’s left, so that the jury to the right of him could see the witness’s expression and the movements of his body. “And you have also said that the specific grounds were his refusal to accept reassignment to a less importan
t area than city politics.”

  Parnell folded his hands. “As presented to me by Mr. Halliburton, his editor.”

  “Did you ever discuss this situation directly with Mr. Cole?”

  “I did not.” Parnell touched one stem of his thick, horn-rimmed glasses. “I make it a point not to interfere in personnel judgments.”

  “You are the newspaper’s publisher, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “And Mr. Cole asked to meet with you?”

  “Yes.” Parnell stopped, as if hoping for another question, and saw that Lord waited. “I didn’t feel it would be a comfortable situation.”

  “Uncomfortable for whom? Mr. Cole?”

  “For both of us.” Parnell searched for a better answer. “And for me as an administrator.”

  “At the point that you declined to meet him, were you aware that Mr. Cole was homosexual?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you learn that?”

  “Through a combination of circumstances.” Parnell considered his fingernails. “I suppose the fact that his divorce involved allegations of homosexuality confirmed certain tendencies in his writing.”

  Lord cocked his head. “Define tendency, if you would.”

  Parnell tented his fingers to his lips, a new, unhappy expression making the gesture vaguely like prayer. Lord made his first instinctive judgment: Parnell disliked some aspect of the position he was in, but did not yet hold this against him. He decided not to raise his voice. “Was my question unclear?”

  Parnell removed his glasses, cleaning them as he spoke. “What I detected was a concentration on so-called gay issues.”

  “Such as?”

  “AIDS disease, the relative lack of gays on the police force or in city government, violent crime against homosexual men. One of Mr. Halliburton’s complaints was that Mr. Cole had lost interest in other facets of his beat, as it were.”

  “Mr. Parnell, if I suggested that the gay population here in San Francisco is close to twenty percent, would you dispute that?”

  Finishing his glasses, Parnell looked up. “No, sir.”

  “Larger than our Japanese community?”