A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  She rested her head beside his. She could tell that he would not sleep for several hours, if at all.

  “Why do you care about Cambodia?” she asked him. “Why has it taken hold of you like this? Why Cambodia?”

  He paused a long time. “I met the old Cambodian prince, Sihanouk, many years ago, before his ouster,” he said. “Back when I was a Congressman. Did I ever tell you about it?”

  Joyce shook her head.

  “It was way back in the era of the Vietnam War,” Solomon said. “Even then, Sihanouk was a rumpled and middle-aged monarch. He was afraid we would overthrow him; he thought he was stuck in between Vietnam and the United States, and he’d come to New York to throw himself on the mercy of the United Nations. As though that would do any good. I received a meeting with the honorable prince.”

  At the U.N. some twenty years earlier, many of the assembled diplomats fondly remembered a younger Sihanouk, the almost painfully fragile boy Prince who, it was said, presided over a graceful, ancient paradise-on-Earth, a nation whose beauty was matched only by that of its ruler and his Eurasian Princess Monique. Some had even viewed one or two of the Prince’s scenic, mundane love films, in which the Prince and his wife had starred, smiling awkwardly at one another and, occasionally, singing.

  Solomon saw only an old man, a fat old man who wanted to slow a war on which the Congressman had staked his career. He seethed as Sihanouk proclaimed his halfhearted love for America, his no-longer-convincing desire for a victory over Communism in Asia. Sihanouk was not by nature a solemn man, and his face lit up with sudden amusement as he thought of a novel argument, and words spilled from his mouth, punctuated by disconcerting giggles. During his years as a playboy, he explained with glee, during his early years as a handsome and carefree ruler, he had usually preferred white courtesans to their Asian counterparts. How could anyone doubt his true sympathies! Nervous laughter, then a strained silence, greeted this evidence of the Prince’s traditional alliance with the West.

  Several hours after the Prince’s speech, Solomon confronted Sihanouk in a small, fluorescent conference room; the Prince, Solomon complained, had allowed the murderers of North Vietnam to use Cambodia as a safe haven, but would not give American soldiers the same freedom! Prince Sihanouk looked back at the young Congressman, and he smiled politely. When in the presence of a white man, an impolite word rarely emerged from the lips of the stately Prince.

  He wanted to explain, but the Prince didn’t know where to begin. Who was Stephen Solomon? Even the congressman himself was not so sure. He was, oddly enough, a very distant cousin of the president of the United States, a fact he did not know and would never learn. He was a direct descendent of both Oliver Cromwell and a rabbi in Minsk who was murdered one night in his sleep. His relationship with Cromwell was lost to the ages, though his family had never stopped citing the rabbi’s sad fate. Solomon was all of these people, and none of them, at once. Sihanouk, by contrast, was a modern Jayavarman, a loud, wealthy, exuberant, grandiose, beloved Cambodian monarch, who lived and breathed only to hear the cheers of his people, to feel their adoration. He knew exactly who he was. Solomon reinvented himself daily.

  “I have a deep and sincere respect both for your position in government and your lovely, neighborly country,” Prince Sihanouk said in a laughing tone of voice that suggested that he did not intend to mask his deep disingenuousness. “However, the U.S. will to fight is evaporating, Mr. Solomon. If the Americans leave Asia, the enemy emerges victorious. Where will that leave me? Can you guarantee more troops, my friend, to protect my nation when North Vietnam seeks its revenge? Will Mrs. Jones’ children risk their lives to save Sihanouk’s children? Will you send more Americans to die to protect the Cambodians who stood up for America?”

  Solomon shook his head. He urged Sihanouk to think about right and wrong, not just payback. Couldn’t the Prince have the courage of his convictions and stand for something greater than politics? Sihanouk smiled, and his voice grew merry once more. “Thank you for speaking at me,” he said, dropping a slight stylistic error into his otherwise flawless English. “I have so many people to see today. Come visit me in Phnom Penh, and we’ll have a long chat.”

  Solomon returned furious to his Brooklyn office, flung himself into his chair, leaned back and heaved his feet up onto his desk with a tremendous thud. Sihanouk’s behavior enraged him for many reasons, but his greatest offense had been the dismissive reception with which he had greeted Solomon’s idealistic offer to join with him in a mission more noble than the both of them and more important than the future of one tiny country somewhere in the dark jungles of Asia. He picked up the telephone and called a colleague on the House Subcommittee for Asian and Pacific Affairs, expressed his concern over the meeting. Then he telephoned Terence Hairston, a New York Times reporter covering the Hill who often came to Solomon for anonymous scoops in exchange for prominent and uncritical coverage of Solomon’s views.

  “May I say something, off the record?” Solomon said. “Quote me as a highly placed source?” Hairston agreed, and Solomon spelled out his objections to the Prince’s continued stewardship of Cambodia, the urgency of ridding the world of this dangerous and “perhaps unbalanced” leader. “He stood before the United Nations,” Solomon said, “and discussed his sexual proclivities as though he were hanging out, drinking wine with ... ” Here Solomon paused. With whom should Sihanouk drink wine? What gang of pals would be expected to listen to the Prince’s tall tales of his royal proclivities? “ ... drinking wine,” Solomon went on, “with all his Oriental prince buddies.” He said this with a great deal of scorn, as though there were something almost unspeakably seedy about the whole idea. “You know,” he added, “Sihanouk was not elected by his subjects. He did not win the throne by commandeering an army of loyal fighters devoted to his cause. He was installed by a foreign power. He works for us. He serves at the whim of the West. It is simply time for Sihanouk to go.” Solomon did not and could not mention to the reporter that the night before Sihanouk’s speech to the United Nations, an unusual thing had happened, an event he immediately forgot and never thought of again. He ate dinner alone in his apartment, reading the newspaper. Some time later, he found himself by the window, looking out at the dark, empty street, slightly wet from an early evening thunderstorm.

  What caused Solomon to turn? Was it a noise in the apartment, or a gentle tap on his shoulder? Sitting in the center of the apartment was a man – or perhaps not a man, perhaps a woman – ageless, with an aura of studied delicacy. The creature was dressed in a long silver robe, and it floated, cross-legged, several feet off the floor, so that Solomon had to look up just slightly to make eye contact. It seemed to be smiling, but Solomon could not tell. Did it have a face, a regular person-face, with a mouth that could have smiled? Again, Solomon did not know. It reached out toward him with long, thin arms and touched both sides of his head with its cold fingers. A proverb, it said, without moving its lips. If you’re wicked, be wicked enough to be feared. If stupid, be stupid enough to be pitied. These were perhaps the only options available to Stephen Solomon, and for a moment – for the few seconds that the entire encounter lasted – he felt immensely comforted.

  Then the creature vanished. Solomon forgot everything, and he went on with his life. A short time later, Solomon awoke to the news of Sihanouk’s ouster, and he could not stifle a laugh. Soon U.S. aid began to flow, U.S. bombs began to fall. Representative Solomon ate up print space with patriotic calls for even more bombing, and dogmatic attacks on the peace movement as dominated by Leninists, Trotskyites and homosexuals. And he really believed every word, too.

  A month later, in a traditional Jewish ceremony, he married a young woman. His bride looked beautiful, as brides do, and his new in-laws couldn’t have been more proud. They made jokes about his importance: Don’t offend him, one might say, or he will start a war with you. I like this boy, one might add; he’s promised to lower my taxes. The men slapped him on the back, the women gently sque
ezed his arm. They were all very nice people, very nice indeed. Sitting beside his wife, he slung an arm casually around her. “Sihanouk has taken to the Cambodian jungles,” he told her. “He has fled into the jungle like an animal. Who knows why? Does he have anyplace else to go? Is he a pariah? What will he eat? Will he wrestle boars with his bare hands?” He smiled and kissed his bride, drunk with wine, power, even with love for the woman beside him.

  Joyce kicked the senator out of bed at 4:30 am to give him time to sneak out of her apartment building. Fifteen minutes later, Solomon came out of the shower in his bathrobe, and she handed him a cup of coffee. “I’m glad you could be here,” she said sleepily. “Do you have more time now?”

  He shook his head. He would be working double-time to push for more aid to the rebels. Then back to New York for some photo ops with his wife, then off to the Middle East to meet with Saddam Hussein; a good guy, he remarked, who’d just had a hard time with the press and with the liberals in Congress –

  “OK,” she said. “OK.” He gulped down the last of his coffee and went back into the bedroom to dress. “A little flurry of activity, then, you know, we’ll see.” A few minutes later he emerged in a wrinkled suit. “Something else may interest you,” he said. “In a few months, I may be in Thailand. A little free vacation, whenever I can fit in the time. It’s something of a secret meeting with this foreign contact who’s helped me out. But you can come along. Wouldn’t make sense without you.”

  “At last!” she exclaimed. “It’s been such a long time.”

  He smiled, nodding.

  “One of these days,” she said, “we will be caught.”

  “Not in Pattaya,” he said. “Don’t worry. No cameras ... no Americans. I’ll be safe.”

  She didn’t care about his career, she told him; if he were spotted with a mistress coming back from a romantic weekend in some impossibly exotic place and were voted out of office for the indiscretion, that would be fine with her. It was her own career she was worried about. She had to exude an aura of competent, studied, feigned impartiality, and being the other woman in a political scandal would somewhat diminish her effectiveness. And besides, she added, if she were spotted with him hanging from the Giant Swing at Wat Suthat in Bangkok, it might seem as though all those votes he’d cast on behalf of gas and oil interests had been at her behest, in exchange for ... well, she said, he saw the point, didn’t he?

  “It would be the truth, wouldn’t it?” she asked him. “You vote the way you do because it makes me unbelievably passionate when I win a big tax break in the Senate. You do it for the sex, don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “I do it for the PAC money.” He smiled.

  “I love you, Stephen,” she said quickly, as he reached for the doorknob.

  “I love you,” the senator said. “Forever and ever.”

  Joyce went back to sleep for ninety minutes, then woke up, drank her coffee, now just slightly caramelized. She watched Good Morning America while she ate a piece of grapefruit. Glanced at the headlines in The Washington Post. Apparently the President’s approval rating, after a slight rise from an earlier dip, had now dipped again slightly.

  She left her apartment, walked down the stairs, out onto the street, hopped on a Metro Bus and rode it several miles. Then she got off the bus, walked into the front lobby of her ageing office building in the heart of downtown D.C, rode the elevator up to the seventh floor, walked down the hallway to her office, tossed her briefcase in the corner and collapsed into her chair. She reviewed her schedule: she had a meeting with her boss at 10 am to review the gas industry’s general opposition to new environmental proposals currently before Congress, as well as new labor laws that the industry also wanted to see defeated. Then at 2 pm she would be speaking before a House subcommittee studying the proposals. She might be seen on C-Span but, for some reason, no one could confirm that for her. She glanced at her in-box. A note from her boss, congratulating her on a recent quote in the Post that had rather convincingly portrayed both proposals as wasteful and, as the note continued, “un-American.” Joyce smiled, flipping the note onto her desk. She shut her eyes and leaned back in her desk chair. She might well win all her legislative battles, it seemed. Stephen was winning as well, pushing through his aid packages to the rebels. Life was good, she supposed.

  Outside her window, seven floors down, two men on the street were screaming loudly at each other. Joyce barely heard. The words were unintelligible, but the hostility was apparent, the argument just virulent enough to sink into her mind, to make her uneasy.

  Her smile faded away slowly, and she didn’t know why. A moment later, when she received a phone call from Charlie, she told him that she couldn’t talk, and she hung up without waiting for a response.

  Charlie was not a secret; he was the man she sported on her arm when she wanted to sport someone on her arm and Stephen Solomon would not do. He was also a man for whom she felt deep, intense feelings of affection. Charlie said he loved her, but she didn’t love him, not quite. It was just his own bad luck; if she had not known Solomon, she would have loved Charlie, there would not even have been any doubt in her mind. Under any other circumstances, her affection for Charlie would have been good enough.

  Charlie had an easygoing manner, a ready smile filled with perfect white teeth, a head full of curly brown hair, and an ex-wife named Clarice, with whom Charlie had shared a birthday as well as, briefly, his life.

  On Charlie’s desk in his apartment in Gaithersburg was an old photograph: his mother and father, his sister, and little Charlie. Also, his young cousin Daniel, whose parents had died in a traumatic way, and who had come to live briefly with Charlie and his family, all those years ago. In the photograph, Charlie had his arm around Daniel’s shoulder, and Daniel’s face was very pale, still shocked.

  Daniel was no longer speaking to Charlie. Charlie would always claim that he did not know why, that Daniel had never explained the source of his animosity, and that he was unable even to hazard a guess. But when he said all this – as he frequently did – Charlie was lying.

  Charlie was born in New York City, but he moved in childhood with his family to the West Coast. He went to Stanford University after high school, dropped out after three semesters, bought a car and drove all the way to Belize, where he lived for a year and took photographs that conveyed enough drama to catch the attention of a documentary filmmaker named Hobbs, who lived somewhere out West, Nevada or Arizona, or something like that, and who became Charlie’s mentor.

  Four months after he first sat down at the new typewriter that he’d bought with his parents’ money, he completed a screenplay set in Belize. Filled with magical realism, and a few moments of leftist politics – added, during a night of drunkenness, by the much more enlightened Hobbs – it was quickly rejected by every film studio. Charlie was convinced that he could be a great filmmaker – why not, after all?; he was young, and the young believe they are destined for greatness – so, undaunted, Charlie applied for and received a number of grants, then applied for and received a number of credit cards, and then with the help of American friends and artists he knew in Belize, he shot the film himself in a few weeks. On the last day of filming, he married Clarice, whom he’d met on a trip through New Mexico, and with whom he’d corresponded for a few months.

  The film received a surprisingly favorable critical reaction at that year’s Berlin Film Festival, reviewers choosing to praise not just Charlie’s visual style but an allegedly sophisticated political vision as well. The film, wrote the Village Voice, “puts the ‘anarchy’ back into libertarian-socialist-anarcho-syndicalism,” a contention that kept the puzzled and almost religiously apolitical Charlie awake for three nights straight.

  German distributors asked Charlie to remove a few superfluous, disapproving statements about the Nazi era spoken by the film’s protagonist. Charlie refused. The film was rejected by the other festivals, and Charlie wound up broke, dejected, and maxed out on his credit cards. And also divo
rced, which was not actually surprising, when Charlie thought about it.

  He became a salesman in Maryland, although he would never tell his friends what it was he sold. By his own admission he was “ashamed” of his product, which might have somewhat diminished his professional effectiveness. Also in Maryland, he met a woman named Joyce, who worked for a lobbying group representing the interests of wealthy gas and oil companies. Joyce was not the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, and she might have been a few years older than Charlie, but there was a mystery to her life that appealed, and an ambivalence she clearly felt about Charlie himself that made him try ever harder. They fell into a routine that dragged on for years: planning a rendezvous once a week on a Thursday or a Saturday, eating dinner in Georgetown, then walking a few blocks to her cozy apartment. Sometimes, in springtime, they would spend a weekend afternoon cycling through Rock Creek Park. Sometimes Joyce would vanish on obscure business trips, about which she would say very little.

  One night, several years after they first met, Charlie stood with Joyce on a dock, lit up by hundreds of lights, which stretched for what seemed miles into the middle of a lake dark as marble. The lake was either in Switzerland or upstate New York. Standing on that dock, staring out into the void of night, Charlie shut his eyes, gave Joyce’s hand a friendly squeeze and asked, “Is there someone else?”

  Yes, she told him quickly.

  He asked why she hadn’t even needed to pause.

  “Because I knew the answer without thinking,” she replied. Why hadn’t she paused to think about the proper way of responding? “Because I don’t lie,” she said. “Not ever.”