At the end of the evening, Mike drove Susan home. He pulled up in front of her apartment and was jumping out to open the car door for her, but she stopped him.
‘Mike, can you just wait a moment? I need to say a couple of things.’
He nodded and turned off the motor.
‘Well, first, I want to say that what that guy said tonight was terrible. It was stupid, insulting and wrong. But I’m worried, Mike. I think those people – Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Anita Bryant, all the religious right – are going to be a lot more powerful if Reagan gets elected. I think the whole atmosphere could change. They’ve felt snubbed for years – even under Ford they were frozen out – and I think they’re looking for payback. I heard some of the guys in the office talking at the water cooler and saying they’re going to vote Reagan because . . . he’ll crush the faggots, and other redneck crap. I know they’re shooting their mouths off and maybe they don’t even mean it, but I think the time’s coming for a lot of people to keep their heads down.’
Mike nodded. He felt suddenly old and very tired.
‘Do you think . . . anyone in our office knows about me?’
‘No, I’d say most of them just think you’re a handsome, single guy.’ Susan hesitated. ‘But there’s a lot of homophobia about and I don’t like this Reagan–Falwell thing. Once the guys at the top start using that sort of crazy language, how long before Joe Blue Collar gets to thinking it’s OK to go beat up gays in the park? I’m just saying you need to be discreet, Mike. You’re already in some people’s bad books around the office, and they’ll use anything they can against you.’
Mike sat for a moment, looking through the windscreen at the street ahead, suddenly picturing himself at the Iwo Jima Memorial late at night and a group of men with baseball bats.
‘Thanks for caring about me, Susan. You’re right – about discretion and everything . . .’ He wanted to lighten the mood: they’d been so happy in the car on the way to the party. ‘Of course, it’ll mean lots more of these social outings for you,’ he added, laughing. ‘And lots more times that Mark gets left at home minding the cat.’
‘Yeah,’ said Susan, unsmiling. ‘Actually, that was the other thing I wanted to ask about. How are things between you two?’
From her hesitant tone Mike sensed that she knew something. He thought for a moment and decided he was glad she knew, glad she was giving him the chance to talk.
‘You know, Susie, I love Mark so much, but I think there must be something wrong with me because I seem to be doing my best to destroy us.’
Susan told him what Mark had said about the missing weekends and the leather fantasies, and Mike raised his eyebrows.
‘Well, I guess you know all about it, then.’ His cheeks reddened slightly. ‘And there was me keeping it a secret because I didn’t want to hurt him.’
‘Keeping what a secret, Mike?’ Susan asked imploringly. ‘It’s the secrecy that’s doing the damage.’
Mike reached forward to the dashboard and turned on the heater. It was a chilly evening and the windows were fogging up with condensation.
‘Keeping Harry a secret,’ he said dully, without looking at her. ‘Keeping the sex a secret. Keeping it all a secret.’
Susan took his hand. She had trespassed on territory she really had no right to venture into, but Mike wanted to tell her. He told her about Harry Chapman, the guy he had met at GW Law School, who had called him when he moved to New York City and invited him to come visit. Harry who had taken him to the sort of clubs Mike had always wanted to explore but never had the courage to enter; Harry who had introduced him to the exotic pleasures of bondage and sado-sex that excited him so much. And when he’d finished giving Susan the details he looked at her with puzzlement and shame on his face.
‘But the crazy thing is, even while I’m doing all that stuff, even when I’m with Harry and we’re in all those places, and even when it’s so intense and so exhilarating . . . even then, I know this is not where I want to be.’ He paused and corrected himself. ‘That’s to say, it is what I want and it’s not what I want. I do it, but I don’t know what makes me do it.’
Susan frowned, trying her best to understand.
‘I guess . . . maybe . . . because it’s so different from . . . from your other life—’
‘It’s because I find it addictive, Susan. That’s what it is. It’s because I can’t help it.’
‘So don’t you love Mark any more? Is that what—’
‘No, no. I do love him . . . I love him.’
‘Then why are you so hell-bent on wrecking your own happiness? Can’t you see Mark thinks the world of you? And you always seem so in love, like you were made for each other, and yet here you are throwing it all away.’
‘I know, I know. It makes no sense. There’s a side to me . . .’ Mike thought for a moment. ‘There’s a side to me that I can’t control. It’s bad and wrong and it’s self-destructive. I know it will spoil everything in my life, all the love and all the joy, but it’s always there and it’s always beckoning, always whispering, “You are unworthy of this happiness; therefore you must destroy it.”’
SIXTEEN
1980
Mike and Mark spent a quiet Christmas and New Year together. Mike made no mention of his conversation with Susan, but he seemed chastened. When Mark asked if he was OK, Mike smiled and kissed him on the cheek. On Christmas Day they spoke of their shared years, from the tragedy that brought them together to the periods of domestic contentment, and their hopes for the future. But they did not broach the issue that had sown discord between them and neither really knew if they were putting it behind them or simply to one side.
January 1980 dawned with their relationship in limbo and America holding its collective breath: the economy was hurting, unemployment high and gasoline supplies running out. With the Iranian hostage crisis in its third month, the lines for gas last seen after the Arab–Israeli war of 1973 were back, and Jimmy Carter was taking the hit. For the Republicans, Ronald Reagan was mobilizing the right, and his only challenger – former CIA Director George Bush – was so bland and ineffectual that the nomination looked a shoo-in.
Mike volunteered to work for the Democrats and Jimmy Carter, went canvassing and helped with registering voters. At the end of February, after the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, he raised a few eyebrows in the NIMLO office by turning up with a Carter for President button on his lapel. Someone took exception and a message was relayed to him that Charles Crane wished to see him. This time there were no cigars and no avuncular charm.
‘I won’t hide the fact from you,’ Crane began, ‘that there has been dissatisfaction, Mr Hess. Partisan buttons can have no place in a non-partisan organization like ours. But this misjudgement on your part is not my only reason for wishing to speak with you.’ Crane paused, preparing to utter something he obviously considered of great moment. ‘No one here has any quarrel with your abilities; indeed, we can see you have a remarkable understanding of constitutional law. But there have been suggestions that you – how shall I put this? – are building your own private contacts in the world of politics and that you’ve been using the NIMLO name to help you do so.’
Mike looked shocked and made to interrupt, but Crane had not finished.
‘Some of our attorneys feel you have established too much of an independent reputation with our clients – that clients are now calling you directly for advice instead of coming through the proper NIMLO channels, and that you may have ulterior motives for encouraging this to happen.’
Mike laughed. ‘Whoa! You’re accusing me of being too helpful to our clients? This is crazy, Charles. They come to me because I give them the advice they need. Like the Amendment Fourteen defence I’ve been working on for redistricting cases – I told you all about that, didn’t I? That’s something that’ll help boost the NIMLO name: it’ll make us indispensable to both political parties.’
Charles Crane grunted and raised his hand for him to stop, but Mike wa
s angry.
‘So who is it that’s been snitching about me? Who says I’m not being a team player? Who says I’m acting too smart? It’s Bill, isn’t it? He’s come running to Daddy, right?’
Mike thought Charles looked a little embarrassed – apologetic almost – but he was a man accustomed to winning arguments and he wasn’t going to lose this one.
‘Mr Hess, I wish you to take to heart what I have said to you today. From now on I wish you to make NIMLO your number-one priority – your only priority – and to forget about furthering your own ambitions by exploiting your position here. And one final thing . . .’ Crane focused his eyes firmly on the desk in front of him. ‘I want you to be very clear about this: we at NIMLO cannot, and will not, tolerate any . . . irregularities in the personal lives of our staff. I trust you understand what I am referring to?’
That evening, Mike sat in silence through dinner. He told Mark he was tired, but Mark knew him well enough to see there was something going on. Just before they went to bed, Mike said he had decided not to go to the fancy dress ball they had been invited to at the weekend.
‘What?’ exclaimed Mark. ‘Why on earth not? We’ve been looking forward to it for weeks. Did something happen at work? What’s up?’
Mike bit his tongue. He knew it was wrong, but he was mad at Mark for being surprised – though he had every right to be – was mad at him for not somehow magically understanding, was mad at him, Mike realized glumly, for simply being there.
‘I’ve just changed my mind, that’s all,’ he said, not looking up.
Mark sensed there was more.
‘Mike, if you’re doing this to hurt me, then please don’t. I’m getting weary of never knowing where we’re up to nowadays. One minute you’re loving and tender and the next you’re as cold as—’ He gestured to the snow swirling in the light of the street lamp outside the window . ‘If you must know, I’m pretty pissed with the whole thing.’
He regretted the words as soon as they left his lips; he knew immediately he had given Mike the pretext he needed. Mike felt a surge of triumphant indignation – if his refusal to go to the party hadn’t hurt Mark enough, he had another bullet ready loaded in the chamber: ‘Well, if you must know,’ he said with a frozen smile on cruel lips, ‘the reason I’m not going to the party is because I’m going away for the weekend.’
The spring of 1980 came in and things went from bad to worse for Jimmy Carter. He severed diplomatic ties with Iran, and the Ayatollah taunted him by parading blindfolded American captives before the world’s press; he announced a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and footage of him collapsing while out jogging ran in all the news bulletins; he sent military helicopters to rescue the hostages and, inevitably, they crashed in the desert.
Mike’s emotional state followed the plunge in the president’s ratings. He told Susan Kavanagh that everything was going wrong in his life and the world was slowly closing in on him. He was still campaigning for Carter, but he told his fellow volunteer John Clarkson that the whole thing was a hopeless cause. John’s Texan optimism would not allow him to throw in the towel, though, and he did his best to rally Mike’s spirits. ‘If we don’t campaign for Carter,’ he said, ‘we’ll get Reagan and the Christian right. Did you hear what Jerry Falwell’s been saying about us? He told a rally, “Gay folks will just as soon kill you as look at you.” So whaddya think about that, then?’ He laughed. ‘Do I look like a killer?’
The one thing that did not wane with Mike’s plunging mood was his fascination with the law. However badly his life was going, its cut and thrust still excited him. He knew so much about redistricting now, and like a chess grandmaster he was building a line of attack that would provide powerful ammunition for politicians of either party to challenge their opponents’ gerrymandering. The old arguments of racial discrimination had run through the courts with limited success, but Mike had scoured the 1965 Voting Rights Act and concluded that the fatal flaw in the practice of partisan gerrymandering was its inherent conflict with the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the constitution guaranteed that ‘no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of US citizens’, he argued, then redistricting to disadvantage opposition voters would surely qualify as a curtailment of their rights. If a redistricting plan were to interfere with an opposition party’s ability to participate in the electoral process, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment must surely have occurred. And since the whole point of partisan gerrymandering was to do exactly that, Mike concluded the schemes should undoubtedly be struck down.
On the face of it, it was a dry, arcane formula, but a stack of redistricting cases were going through the courts and the legal profession was braced for many more that would surely result from the new round of reapportionment following the 1980 census. If a party could argue down its opponents’ manoeuvres, it would gain a significant political advantage.
Susan Kavanagh put up with Mike’s sullenness with good grace. She made allowances for him; he had shown her a great deal of kindness in the three years they had worked together and had brought a lot of fun into her life. So now when he got mad and yelled at her, she didn’t answer back or hold it against him; and the following day he would invariably bring her flowers, ask her to excuse his behaviour and take her for a conciliatory drink after work.
She didn’t ask him directly about his relationship with Mark, but she had a sense of how things were going. She was aware of the argument over the fancy dress party and knew it had left things tense between them, but as spring retreated before the dazzling Washington summer, she felt Mike was beginning to come out of the woods. His demeanour was brighter, the bags had gone from under his eyes and he was smiling again like the Mike she had known before. She had done much of the research that Mike was putting into his redistricting paper and shared some of his excitement about it. He still complained bitterly about the bungling and bad luck that were making a Democratic defeat in November look inevitable, but his comments about Reagan and the new conservatives were combative now, barbed and pugnacious where before they had been filled with terrible, haunted anxiety.
‘Can you believe these guys?’ he said one morning, brandishing a copy of the Post. ‘Now they say if they’re elected they’ll repeal any anti-discrimination legislation that could be used to give guarantees to gay people, and they’ll fight against the abolition of DC’s anti-sodomy laws. What a bunch of antediluvian cretins! They’re like puritan Rip Van Winkles waking up after 300 years and thinking America’s still in the seventeenth century!’
When the phone rang that afternoon, Susan covered the mouthpiece and called over to Mike, ‘A Mr Van Winkle for you. Republican National Committee on line three – they say welcome to the seventeenth century!’
Mike picked up the phone and found it full of the thunderous nasal diphthongs and curtailed consonants of south Boston.
‘Ron Kaufman here, Mr Hess. Tom Hofeller told me I could call you. Says you’ve got some crackerjack scheme on redistricting I need to know about. Can you do lunch this week?’
When Mike put down the phone he told Susan with a laugh that he would be out for lunch on Thursday.
‘I’m supping with the devil now,’ he said. ‘Better get me the long spoon!’
June 1980 saw the beginning of the longest heat wave since US meteorological records began. Temperatures in Washington DC rarely fell below ninety degrees, the blacktop melted on the Beltway and over a thousand people died from heatstroke. A nationwide drought caused damage estimated at upwards of twenty billion dollars, and while Jimmy Carter was scaring voters by reintroducing the draft in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Ronald Reagan was triumphantly anointed as Republican candidate – and now odds-on favourite – for November’s presidential election.
Mike had behaved himself at his lunch with the Republicans. Ron Kaufman was a sharp, witty operator in his mid-thirties who had been a senior field director for the Bush campaign but moved seaml
essly into the Reagan camp after the nomination went his way. Mike had tackled him about the party’s willingness to cosy up to the bigots of the religious right, but Kaufman had smiled and refused to rise to the bait. Then they had discussed Mike’s ideas for the redistricting litigation and Kaufman had thanked him for his advice.
‘Just don’t go talking to the Democrats, OK?’ he’d joked as they were leaving the restaurant.
Mike had heard nothing further and assumed the conversation would have no follow-up, but at the end of the month he was again summoned to see Charles Crane.
‘Mr Hess, I’ll get straight to the point,’ Crane said, before Mike was even through the door of the office. ‘We’ve had a phone call from the Republican National Committee. They were full of admiration for you and for your Amendment Fourteen strategy, which they’re planning to use in some case or other.’
Mike heard the words of praise and wondered why he was not cheered by them. There was something in Crane’s tone of voice which clashed with the content of what he was saying.
‘Well, good. It’s great to get an endorsement from the guys who run the political platform of one of our nicest parties. And it’ll help NIMLO too. You were concerned about that, remember?’
Charles Crane looked at him with expressionless eyes.
‘I think your tone is inappropriate, Mr Hess. And no, I do not think this will help NIMLO. I understand from some of our attorneys that your meeting with the Republican National Committee was intended to further your own interests, not ours.’
Mike blinked at the unfairness of the accusation and the suggestion that he was somehow courting the Republicans.
‘Well, I don’t know who’s told you all this, Charles,’ he said with a growing sense of unease, ‘but I can tell you I was acting solely in NIMLO’s best interests: I had no personal agenda whatsoever in speaking with Ron Kaufman.’
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 27