by Steve Almond
She was standing alone in the Senate gallery. Congress was on break, the tourists gone. Darcy gazed down into the darkening well of the Senate. She was wearing a peacoat and a dark pillbox hat, which now, in my memory, I have affixed with a veil, though I’m certain this was not the case.
I circled the gallery and waited for her to notice me. When I called her name, she gasped and placed a hand over her heart.
“Oh Billy! It’s you.”
“I’m sorry. Did I startle you?”
“No,” she said. “Not at all.”
“You look beautiful,” I said.
This wasn’t what I’d meant to say. It was certainly too ardent for the setting. But it was the truest thing I was feeling, and anyway Darcy had this effect on me.
She shook her head a little, then blushed. “What are you doing here?” she said.
“I’m not sure. I was visiting a friend downstairs, a guy who works with Sarbanes. I just sort of wandered up here.”
“I come here all the time,” Darcy said. “It helps me think.”
“About what?”
She pursed her lips. “Why we’re here, I guess. The desire to effect good in an arena of civility.”
“Is that Jefferson?”
“Not really. It’s me.”
The smell of the Senate rose from the empty well, old leather and something vaguely peppery, Brylcreem maybe. The place exuded a sense of quiet dignity, which was more than the absence of its usual clamor, seemed closer, in the end, to the calm we hoped to find at the center of our lives.
“Does that sound hokey, Billy?” Darcy said suddenly.
“Not at all.”
“You don’t think so?” Her face leapt from the dark fabric of her coat, sweetly arrayed in worry.
“Are you hungry?” I said.
Darcy opened her mouth but said nothing.
“Other plans?”
“Sort of. I should …” She looked at me for a moment. “Hold on.”
“If you’ve got plans, I don’t want to impose.”
Darcy laughed, a bit lavishly. “I wouldn’t let you impose,” she said, and drew the cell phone from her coat pocket.
There are so many competing interests on the human heart. For those of us truly terrified of death, intent on leaving some kind of mark, plowing through our impatient twenties with an agenda, there are moments when chemistry—the chemistry between bodies, the chemistry of connection—seems no more than a sentimental figment. And then something happens, you meet a woman and you can’t stop looking at her mouth. Everything she does, every word and gesture, stirs inside you, strikes the happy gong. The way she throws herself into a fresh field of snow. The delicacy of her sneezes, like a candle being snuffed. The sugary sting of whiskey on her tongue. Chemistry in its sensual aspects. Chemistry the ultimate single-issue voter.
We were both tipsy and tangled in my flannel sheets. We’d talked about not letting this happen, this sudden rush into the secret bodies. But Darcy, her neck, the length of her torso, the wisp of corn silk above her pelvic basin, and the gentle application of her hands, her generous, unfeigned devotions to my body—which I secretly loathed, which shamed me for its deficiencies of grace and muscle—and her hair reeling across my chest. … All these came at me in a tumble of violent emotion, stripped from me the language with which one crafts cautious deferrals, the maybe I should go, the sudden pause, the stuttered breath and step back, the gallant bonered retreat to the bathroom.
No. We made instead a ridiculous flying machine in two clamped parts. In the thick of our clumsy desire, pungent and shameless, we clutched one another by the cheeks, let the skin of our bellies smack briskly, and flew.
“So that’s what it’s like to love a Republican,” I said.
“There are other ways, too.” Darcy giggled. “Do you have cigarettes? I’d kill for a cigarette.”
I reached into my bedside drawer.
“Why do we hide them?”
“They’re an ugly habit.”
She took a slow drag and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “Oh yeah.”
Outside a light snow fell. The cars on the road made a sound like the surf. The moon lit Darcy’s face. Her nose was a little blunt. One of her incisors pushed out dramatically from the neat band of her teeth. These flaws served to particularize her beauty. One’s memory snagged on them.
“You’re my first beard,” she said thoughtfully.
“How was it?”
“Bristly.”
“Like being with a lumberjack?”
“A lumberjack wouldn’t whimper.”
“Did I whimper?”
“Unless that was me.”
Darcy sat up and peered around the room. Che Guevara stared down at her from the closet door, in his fierce mustache. My fertility goddesses stood ranked along the sill, squat figures with sagging breasts and hips round as swales. I waited for Darcy to ask me about them so I could recite my Peace Corps stories. (I’d saved a little girl’s life! A goat had been killed in my honor!) But she only took another drag and covered her warm little breasts.
“Where are we again?”
“My apartment.”
“The address, you dope.”
“Why do you want the address?”
“For the cab.”
“Oh please don’t go. I’d rather if you stayed. Or I could drive you.”
“No. I need to think about this.”
“Can’t we think together? I’d like to think with you.”
“I’m not sure you’re the best thing for my thought process.”
Darcy rose from the bed and began collecting her clothes. I watched her move around the room. I wanted terribly for her to come close enough that I could take a bite of her tush, which trembled like a pale bell. But this was not going to happen. From the other room came the slithery sound of panty hose, the clasp of a bra.
“What’s there to think about?” I called out. “Was this a mistake? Because I don’t feel like this was a mistake.”
Darcy reemerged looking combed and dangerous, like something from a winter catalogue. She took a last drag off her cigarette and dropped it in her wineglass. A horn sounded below, in the street.
“Can I at least walk you down?”
“You’re sweet. I wish you wouldn’t.” She set her fingers to her throat and said, a little dreamily, “I’m going to have a rash tomorrow, from your beard.”
I went to the window and watched her slip into the cab. There was something tragically illicit about the moment. I didn’t know what to do. The golden thread between us had snapped. How had this happened? I threw open the window and bellowed: “Why do I feel like I’ve been taken advantage of?”
Darcy looked up. Her face shone behind the dark pane. Just before she laughed, her mouth pulled down slightly at the corners, which suggested, even in the midst of her gaiety, an irrevocable sadness. I was certain, gazing down through the soft tiers of snow, the smell of her rising up from my beard, that this sadness could be undone. This was my bright idea. I was, after all, a good liberal.
But then Darcy disappeared and I was left to moon liberally through the long white weekend, during which I spoke and ate and fucked dispiritedly with the woman I was dating, a good woman, with earnest rings of hair and a powerful devotion to social justice.
I called Darcy at the office and listened to her outgoing message, whose crisp, chirpy tones made me feel renounced, and left two excruciatingly casual messages, and took lunch at the bistro across from the Fund For Tradition, and one afternoon wandered over to Capitol Hill and kneeled in the cool Senate gallery, waiting like a parishioner. By week two my heart had dithered into a boyish panic. I left a final message on her machine telling her that I didn’t understand what was going on but that I was hurt and confused and felt that something had been betrayed, the feelings that had passed between us, that these feelings felt real to me and that they didn’t come along very often and shouldn’t be squandered, and that if she felt any of these sam
e things, even unsteadily, she owed it to herself, as well as just to common decency, to call me back, that dodging me was no solution, unless she was one of those people who offered intimacy and then withdrew, who, for lack of a better word, used people, in which case she was best not to call back at all. But that, if she was still, if she felt, even a little, I was sorry to sound petulant, I didn’t mean to, but I was upset and if could she please call me back and here was my number, at which point a voice came on the line noting that my three minutes were up and would I like to leave the message, or re-record it, or erase the whole thing, which I did.
What was this thing between us, anyway? Just some Jungle Fever of the low political stripe. Who was Darcy Hicks, anyway? Maybe this was her secret fetish: sexing up the left and reporting the details back to her Republican overlords. On and on I went, the florid improvisations of the wounded heart.
And then, just as this clatter was subsiding, I saw her again. On C-SPAN. She stood at the edge of the frame as John McCain—fresh off his win in New Hampshire—rallied the troops in an Iowa VFW hall. Darcy kept drifting in and out of the picture. She was wearing a red dress and smiling desperately. McCain told the crowd he’d come to Elk Horn for one purpose: to discuss the plight of the small family farm, and the need for renewed agricultural subsidies.
The phone rang. It was late, one in the morning on a Tuesday.
“What’s your address again?” Darcy said.
I wanted to say something caustic and clever but adrenaline had flushed my chest and all the words I had marshaled in my rehearsals for this moment seemed stingy and beside the point.
The line crackled. “Billy? Hurry up! My battery’s going dead.”
“Where are you?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Oh!” Darcy squealed, and there was a thump. Her phone began to cut out, so that I could hear her voice only in snatches, urgent little phonemes: time, get, numb—. The line went dead.
Twenty minutes later my buzzer rang. Darcy burst into my apartment. She was flushed, her lipstick was off-kilter. A purple fleece hat sat goofily on her head. She threw her arms around me and burrowed her cold cheeks into my neck. A noise of pleasure came from her throat, as if she were settling into a hot bath.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” she murmured.
I stood there trying not to relent.
“I’m just back in town,” Darcy went on. “I was in Iowa. Trent sent me out on subsidies and ethanol production, and John, John McCain, he used one of my workups in his stump. And then he asked me—or Roger, his press guy—asked me to do advance work in South Carolina! Can you believe it? You have to meet John in person to get the whole picture. But those five years in Vietnam, I mean, he just cuts through all the bullshit. The man radiates charisma.”
I found myself (rather unattractively) wishing to torture Senator John McCain.
Darcy pulled her hat off and her hair fell in a tangle.
“Are you proud of me?” she said.
“I’m a little confused actually.”
“It’s a confusing time,” Darcy said breezily. “Election years always are. Aren’t you going to kiss me? I know you’re glad to see me.” She nodded ever so slightly at my erection.
I tried to look indignant. “I left messages for you.”
“I know I should have called. I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me. There was a lot going on. Not just Iowa. There were other things.” She slipped her hands inside my pajamas and touched my ribs. “Are you cold, baby? You’ve got goose bumps. Can we lie down? I’m so tired. I’ve been thinking about lying down with you.”
I was sore with the need for Darcy. She smelled of lilacs and gin; her body pressed forward. But I didn’t like the way I’d been feeling, and I distrusted this erotic lobbying.
“What other things?” I said.
“I’m a loyal person. What I’ve been doing has been for us, okay? Just trust me, Billy. Don’t you want to trust me?”
“Yeah. I mean, I want—”
“Then do. Just do. Quit asking questions and kiss me.”
“I just want to know what we are.”
Darcy let out a little shriek of frustration. “Would you stop being so literal? This is a love affair, Billy. Okay? Withstand a little doubt. I’m the one who’s taking the risk here.”
“Meaning what?”
“Stop being naive. The woman always loses power in a sexual relationship.”
“Not always,” I said.
Darcy sighed. She took her hands off me and stepped back. “I just flew four hours with a goddamn baby howling in my ear. I haven’t slept more than three hours in the past two days. I’m expected to show up to work tomorrow, bright and early, to host a reception for Jack Fucking Kemp. I don’t do this. I don’t come over to men’s houses. But I’m here, Billy. Do you understand? I am here. Now take me in your arms and do something, or I’m going home right now.”
What Darcy enjoyed most was a good lathering between the thighs. As a lifelong liberal, this was one of my specialties. In some obscure but plausible fashion, I viewed the general neglect of the region as a bedrock of conservatism. The female sex was, in political terms, the equivalent of the inner city: a dark and mysterious zone, vilified by the powerful, derided as incapable of self-improvement, entrenched and smelly. Going down on a woman was a dirty business, humiliating, potentially infectious, best delegated to the sensitivos of the Left.
I relished the act, which I considered to be what Joe Lieberman would have termed, in his phlegmy rabbinical tone, a mitzvah. It required certain sacrifices. The deprivation of oxygen, to begin with. A certain ridiculousness of posture; cramping in the lower extremities. One had to engage with the process. There were no quick fixes.
This was especially true in Darcy’s case. She was scandalized by the intensity of her desire, and highly aroused by this scandal. But the going was slow. If I told her “I want to kiss you there” she would grow flustered and glance about helplessly. Just act, was her point. Ditch all the soppy acknowledgment, the naming of things in the dark. The word pussy made her wince. (A tainted word, I admit, but one I employed with utmost fondness and in the spirit of fond excitements.)
I kissed my way down her body—the damp undersides of her breasts, her bumpy sternum, the belly she lamented not ridding herself of. Always, I could feel the tendons of her groin tensing. I nipped at them occasionally.
She perfumed herself elaborately, which meant withstanding an initial astringency, after which she tasted wonderfully, meaning strongly of herself, the brackish bouquet of her insides. I was careful not to linger in any one spot but to explore the entire intricate topography, the nerves flushed with blood and tingling mysteriously, while Darcy pressed herself back on the pillows and turned to face the wall and murmured the blessed nonsensical approvals of climax.
The body releases its electricity, merges with another, and together there is something like God in this pleasure. But afterward, in the quiet redolent air, there must also be offerings of truth. And so the mystery of love deepens.
Darcy’s given name was Darlene. She’d grown up in Ashton, Pennsylvania, a rural township south of Allentown. Her grandpas had been farmers. Then the world had changed, grown more expensive and mechanical, and somehow less reliable. So her father, rather than inheriting dark fields of barley, worked for Archer Daniels Midland. (Her mother, it went without saying, was a homemaker.) All three of her sisters and her brother still lived in Ashton. She was an aunt eight times.
Darcy recognized that she was different from her family. But she was reluctant to speak too pointedly about these differences. Instead, she turned the Hicks clan into a comedy routine, delivering updates in the flat accent of her grandpa Tuck.
Signs of her double life abounded. She dressed in Ann Taylor, but used a crock pot. She stored her birth-control pills in a bedside drawer, beside the worn green Bible she had been given in Sunday school. Her mantle displayed photos of the grip-and-grin with Arlen Specter, Robert Bork, Newt
Gingrich. Only in the shadowed corner of her bedroom did one see a young, toothy Darcy, resplendent in acid wash and pink leg warmers, smiling from the seat of an old tractor on Grandpa Tuck’s homestead. The photo was taken just before he sold the final acres to a chemical plant, back in ’89.
As for me, I’d grown up outside Hartford. My parents had marched for Civil Rights and protested the war. Then they had kids, moved to a leafy suburb, and renovated an old Victorian. Their domestic and professional duties tired them out, left them susceptible to bourgeois enjoyments. But the way I remembered them—needed to remember them—was as young, beautiful radicals.
What we wanted from politics, in the end, was what we had been deprived by our families. I hoped to create a world in which justice and compassion would be the enduring measure. Darcy sought permission to expand her horizons, to experience her prosperity without guilt. We both held to the notion that it mattered who won office and how they governed. Nothing, in the end, mattered more.
Yet it never would have occurred to us, not in a million years, that the 2000 election would turn volatile. The presidential candidates were a couple of second-raters, awkwardly hawking the same square yard of space, at the corner of Main and Centrist.
* * *
And so we lay about on weekends, scattering sheafs of newsprint onto the sunny hardwood floors of my apartment, lamenting (silently, to ourselves) the hopeless bias of the Post and Times, tumbling the stately avenues of downtown, drowning in happy wine and letting our messages stack up.
We were both too hooked on politics to ignore the subject entirely. But we had to be careful not to push too far into ideology. Darcy was altogether suspicious of the word. “Just a fancy way of saying policy aims,” she insisted.
I disagreed. To me, the Left was a living force, animated by heroic and martyred ideas: Civil Rights. The War on Poverty. Christ Himself—as I argued in an unreadably earnest undergraduate paper—was a classic New Deal Democrat. Darcy listened to my ravings with a polite purse of her lips. She viewed me as quaint, I think.