Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  Sex keeps it static.

  When Christopher and Eli return to the kitchen they shake hands with Barney.

  “Yo, Baudelaire,” Barney greets Christopher. “Howya doin’, Eli?”

  Christopher fixes Barney a Scotch and soda. But the three men have difficulty making small talk because everyone knows Barney considers Christopher a dilettante and Eli a sellout for no longer doing investigative reporting. Christopher makes another fresh pitcher of daiquiris. Enthusiastically he begins distributing refills while Shay and I collaborate on the salad.

  The men lean against the counter and watch us.

  After finishing another daiquiri, Christopher invites Barney to stay for dinner.

  After finishing another Scotch, Barney accepts.

  Shay pauses to look at both her husbands reproachfully.

  SNAPSHOT

  There are fewer pictures from the Washington period, after Shay moved back East to invade our life once more. Here’s one of her and Steven, who’s about seven. It was taken on a day when Shay brought him over to spend the weekend with me and Eli. Shay did that a lot. Few aunts and uncles spend as much time kid-raising as we did. Around noon that day, Shay deposited Steven in the elevator of our apartment building and told him to go up to the sixth floor, where I was waiting. But after the door shut, little Steven discovered he wasn’t tall enough to reach the sixth-floor button. He stayed inside that airless tomb for a quarter of an hour before I summoned the elevator and he rushed into my arms, crying hysterically.

  As soon as Barney accepts Christopher’s invitation to dinner, Shay becomes totally disorganized. She decides we must eat by candlelight and scours the house for candles, carrying all kinds, including some red Christmas jobbies, out to the deck. There she sets them around the glass-topped patio table and, even though it isn’t yet dark, lights them.

  Finally we set out the dishes. When Shay discovers Christopher has let the chicken burn, she laughs like some southern belle, calls it “Cajun-blackened,” and arranges the burnt pieces on a big platter, which she proudly sets in the center of the table. Everyone is fairly drunk by the time we collect the deck chairs and sit down to eat. Shay opens the door to the library so she can hear if Amelia wakes up.

  Now all I can think about is the centrally cooled air leaking out into the dehydrated universe. Shay is cooling down Georgetown. Shay is combating the steamy heat of the Greenhouse Summer with Christopher’s air-conditioning. She is subsidizing Pepco in her usual extravagant and urgent way.

  While we eat, everyone talks about Jesse Jackson. We cannot get enough of talking about Jesse Jackson. Even while it was happening, we had to keep telling ourselves that we were actually seeing what we were seeing, that in our lifetimes we were watching an unabashed progressive black man make a move on the presidency. And even now, with the primaries over, we still share an excited disbelief in the history that we’d watched happen.

  Drinking white wine and eating much too much, much too fast, we speculate about what will happen when Jesse arrives in Atlanta and how Dukakis will handle him. Christopher, now aware that Shay is going to the convention, begins to wonder aloud if it’s too late to get a plane reservation and find a hotel room there. Shay, of course, ignores his logistical worries and forcibly changes the subject.

  “I was out in L.A. a few weeks ago and the town is absolutely dead. The Guild’s been out so long everybody’s hurting for money. Real bad.”

  “At least they’re killing off all those old shitcoms,” Barney observes gratefully.

  For Barney happiness is a strike in progress.

  “Hasn’t the Guild been great?” Shay asks him with warm confidence.

  Translation: Hey! Weren’t we a team? Remember, Barney? Remember how tough we were when we were together? Weren’t we something special?

  The divorced couple exchange a long look followed by a moment of silence, as if commemorating the death of a dear colleague.

  Quietly the night has begun rinsing the last violet light out of the sky. It is almost totally dark by the time we finish our food and the last of our three bottles of wine.

  I’ve got to hand it to Shay.

  Here she is, talking to a group of four people, three of them men she’s slept with, and the common denominator doesn’t dawn on her. Shay’s promiscuity is like the secret word that would release the little duck during Groucho Marx’s quiz shows back in the fifties. If no one said the correct word the duck never descended. It’s the same with Shay’s sexual past. If no one says the P-word, the duck doesn’t drop down and Shay doesn’t have to deal with it.

  “I stayed at the Beverly Hills,” she continues blithely. “Really—that hotel makes you feel famous just standing in the lobby. I’d never stayed there before—”

  “Yes you did,” says Barney.

  “I did?” Shay turns to look at her first husband. “When was I there?”

  “You don’t mean when, you mean with whom,” Barney corrects her.

  “Okay, so who was I there with?”

  “Whom,” Christopher edits her.

  Since Christopher didn’t know Shay during the period under discussion, he is immune to the jealousy that is clearly provoking his predecessor.

  “Dennis Stein,” Barney says definitely. “You spent a weekend there with Dennis Stein when you were covering Jerry Brown.”

  “Oh,” Shay says vaguely, beginning to back-comb her hair with tense fingertips. “You mean after the Medfly fuckup? The night Gore Vidal called Jerry Brown ‘Lord of the Flies’?”

  “No,” says Barney. “About eight years earlier, when we were still married.”

  Suddenly Shay remembers the right rendezvous and momentarily loses her composure.

  Although she probably couldn’t identify 50 percent of her lovers in a lineup, every once in a while she recalls some distant detail of sexual infidelity that upsets her equilibrium.

  Now Shay’s sexual history rises up like a sudden squall to disturb the surface calm of our gathering.

  Both Shay’s husbands look away, embarrassed by her confusion.

  A small silence drifts down upon us.

  I stare off fixedly into the hot darkness.

  It seems to me I have spent a good part of my life being embarrassed by my sister.

  It was only during the years when Shay was married to Barney and living far away in Mississippi, West Virginia or California that she was off my back. Indeed, those were the happiest years of my life. Between 1968 and 1975, Eli and I learned to know and enjoy and love each other. Life was nearly perfect when I didn’t have to sit around, hot-faced with shame, waiting for some discomfort over Shay to subside.

  Finally our embarrassment starts to dissipate and we begin to regroup like residents of some Texas trailer camp after a tornado. People who don’t want to be where they are in the first place have nothing but fortitude to see them through those disasters that rain down upon church-chartered buses and mobile-home parks with unfair frequency. We who have long been tested by Shay’s riotous past now take for granted chance encounters with some of her strange bedfellows, who appear like blips on the screens of our lives.

  SNAPSHOT

  Here’s a shot of Shay clipped from the back section of Vogue. She really looks good here. It was probably taken in the mid-seventies, before she married Christopher. I do know that Studio 54 was still in business, because she went there every night. She was powerless to stop flirting, powerless to stay out of discos, powerless to stop drinking and dancing until dawn each day. Shay loved the death-wish crowd, the carousers who lived really close to the edge. She spent a lot of time with Margaret Trudeau during Margaret’s love fest with the Stones in New York. Shay also spent one weekend on a yacht with Princess Grace. I know she once fainted at Régine’s in Paris and had to be taken to the American Hospital to dry out. Shay followed the flight of European capital, running wherever royalty still reigned and partied. She skied with the Agnellis and was a spotter (identifying people) for CBS at some big par
ty in Gstaad. During all this, Shay solemnly maintained that she was a member of the working press corps.

  “Well,” Shay says, after drawing a heavy breath to indicate her impatience with being misunderstood by both her former husbands, her former lover and her elder sister, “I’m going to find some clean clothes and freshen up a little.”

  She rises rather regally and walks into the house.

  There is a fresh daiquiri in my hand. I take a deep swallow and relax for a few minutes before Shay reappears in the doorway. I can tell something terrible has happened as soon as I see her face.

  “Natalie,” she says to me. “Your car is gone. Someone stole your car.”

  For a moment no one moves. Then all three men rise in unison, as if choreographed, to hurry through the house.

  I sit still, wrapped in a shroud of shock.

  “Did you leave your keys in the ignition?” Shay asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, feeling panic pounding inside my chest. “Maybe I did.”

  I try to remember getting out of the car after Shay insisted I stay for dinner. I try to recall what moves I’d made, but everything is blurred and, indistinct. When Shay’s around, I feel like I’m the roadie with a rock-and-roll band, responsible for all the equipment, baggage, engagements, transportation and dope connections.

  “I’ll go look in my purse,” I say. “It’s in the kitchen.”

  I stand up and then look at Shay again.

  “Do you mean you left your bags outside in the car with all those papers in them?”

  My sister and I stare at each other.

  This is unbelievable.

  This is clearly a brand-new single on the LP album of our lives. As usual, Ancient Animosity, our rhythm-and-blues backup, strums the history of our endless discontent with each other. I go to the front door and gaze out at the empty space where I had parked my car. The men are standing on the lawn near the driveway, talking excitedly to each other. I don’t go into the kitchen. I head for a bathroom, where I try to collect myself. For once I’ve done my sister, instead of vice versa. For once I’ve sabotaged her. Instead of Shay putting me down, so she’ll shine all the brighter, I’ve messed her up.

  It’s not unusual for one sister to diminish the other so as to appear more dazzling, as all those savage sibling-sagas published by Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz amply display. I have always kept tabs on Princess Margaret and her sister, Elizabeth, the queen of England. I am always subliminally aware of Ann Landers and Abby Van Buren (twins who once didn’t speak for seven years), the Gabor girls, Mariel and Margaux Hemingway, Marisa and Berry Berehson, Jackie Onassis and Princess Lee Radziwill.

  My interest in bad blood between sisters borders on obsession.

  The minute I return to the deck, my sister and I get into it in a big way.

  SHAY: You dumb fuck, Natalie. You make a big production out of everything you do, but you never do anything right.

  ME: Screw you, Shay. How could you leave important papers in a car full of suitcases people could see right through the windows? That’s why someone stole my car. To get your damn luggage. Your laptop computer!

  SHAY: For someone who’s so hung up on doing the right thing all the time, why don’t you lock your car? Nobody leaves their car unlocked with the keys in the ignition in nineteen-fucking-eighty-eight. What are you—crazy or something?

  ME: Oh, no. I’m not going to get stuck holding the bag on this one. You’re full of shit. You know damn well you were just using me. If you use people, Shay, you should at least tell them. Otherwise you have to take responsibility for what happens. So it’s my car that gets stolen. Great! That’s what I get for picking you up at the airport.

  SHAY: But you saw me leaving my stuff in the backseat.

  ME: Jesus, this is Georgetown. It’s supposed to be safe here. Besides, nobody ever steals a Ford Escort. It’s the least-stolen car in the whole United States. They can’t even get one stolen for publicity purposes. You’re such a bimbo, Shay.

  SHAY: I can’t believe you said that.

  There is a long, agonized silence.

  “So. Who do you think stole it?” she asks in a quiet, conciliatory way.

  “How should I know?”

  “I bet it was the CIA,” she says.

  Oh, sure. Shay always goes-right to the top.

  “Or maybe the FBI,” she continues. “Or maybe they just sent the police to pick it up. They must have come here to arrest me, but when they saw my luggage in the car and the keys in the ignition, they just took the whole damn Ford.”

  Eli comes back out onto the deck. “Well, it’s gone,” he says, shrugging. “I guess we should call the police.”

  “God, no!” Shay wails.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, Eli.” For once Shay seems genuinely shaken. “I was so stupid. I stole some government documents out on Long Island but I left them in the car.”

  Eli leans against the deck railing as he processes this new information. Shay’s confession, back-to-back with the theft of my car, is a bit much for Eli after a long day’s work and so many drinks. When Christopher and Barney return we all sit down around the table again and listen to Shay’s story about how she found Fawn Hall’s testimony. When she’s finished, she’s rewarded with the perfect tribute of total silence.

  Finally Christopher slams a fist down on the glass tabletop so that all the dishes and wineglasses jump in alarm.

  “Well,” he says, “this beats anything I’ve ever heard before.”

  “Shay, what have you done?” Eli moans, rubbing slow lazy fingers across his face, as if trying to erase his own identity.

  “You mean Fawn Hall was doing coke in Georgetown while she worked for Colonel North?” Barney asks with a stutter of excitement.

  Barney has always had a seductive hunt-and-peck way of speaking. The pauses between his words work like vacuums to suck in his listeners. Now he is looking at Shay with enormous pride.

  “What a ball buster,” he continues. “It’d be wild to release something like that and really nail those bastards.”

  “Well, you’ve sure done it this time, Shay,” Christopher says grimly. “Someone’s going to find those papers and turn them over to the authorities. They’re going to throw you in jail and throw away the key.”

  “Oh, gimme a break, Christopher,” Shay protests in a raggedy whine. “I’m a journalist. I have a right to release that kind of stuff.”

  “What you are, Shay,” Eli says wearily, “is in a world of trouble.”

  Shay looks scornfully at both of them.

  “First of all,” she says with exaggerated patience, “if it was the FBI that took the car, they just might want to keep quiet about everything. Return the damn interview to the DEA and let me eat my story. I can’t prove that I even saw the interview. I can’t even prove it exists.”

  “What do you want to do about reporting the car stolen, Shay?” Eli asks in a flat, quiet voice.

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to think. What time is it?”

  “Hopefully the questions won’t get any harder.” Eli smiles, looking at his watch. He is trying to be friendly. Supportive. Collegial. “It’s ten o’clock.”

  “Can we drive over to Café au Lait?”

  “Sure.”

  “But first I’ve got to find something to wear. Lemme just look through the junk I left here.”

  I see Christopher flinch as Shay’s words strike him.

  “Just give me ten minutes and then we can go.”

  “She’s crazy,” Christopher announces bitterly as soon as Shay disappears. “She’s out of control. She’s out of her head.”

  “This is a bit much, “Eli agrees morosely.

  We sit in somber silence, sipping our drinks, while the enormity of the situation envelops us.

  “Why does she want to go to Café au Lait?” Eli finally asks me in a whisper.

  “She’s supposed to meet Mickey Teardash there.”

  “How does he fit int
o all this?”

  “She’s sleeping with him,” I whisper back so Christopher won’t hear. “I guess his firm’s been doing some PR work for Dukakis or maybe he’s made some big contribution or something.”

  Christopher is slouched down in his chair, clearly feeling imperiled. All he had wanted was a reconciliation, a resumption of his marriage to Shay, and now she’s done something that effectively destroys his dream. He is staring off into the darkness with a mixture of hurt and resignation on his face.

  Barney has begun pacing back and forth across the deck.

  “Look. Even if the actual document is gone, we can still hold a press conference and announce its existence. Or we can leak it to Jeffrey Altney at the Times and let him investigate it.”

  “Hang on,” Eli says. “We’ve got to see what Shay wants to do since it’s her head that’s on the line.”

  But it’s my car, I think. Her head and my car. How come I haven’t got the right to report it stolen? Where are my rights?

  When Shay returns she is wearing a tight blue cotton dress that has clearly shrunk at least one size in some overheated dryer. The dress pulls across her breasts and stomach, barely reaching to the middle of her thighs. She is carrying an overnight suitcase and another Big Brown Bag. My sister, the queen of the bag ladies. My sister and her matching luggage from Bloomingdale’s.

  Eli jerks his head in my direction to suggest I stand up.

  “It’s good Barney’s taking care of Amelia tomorrow,” Shay murmurs as we pass through the library, where the little girl is still sleeping. “It’s going to be crazy tomorrow.”

  We walk back into the kitchen. Shay reclaims her red suede shoulder bag off the counter and I retrieve my purse from beneath the table. My keys, of course, are missing. I have to admit that all of this is my fault and that I have really fucked up royally this time. Then I start trying to remember what was in the trunk of my car. I feel bad about the I AM A FONZ (Friend of the National Zoo) bumper sticker, which I know is no longer being manufactured. My favorite tapes, including Carly Simon’s Coming Around Again, were in the glove compartment and my most comfortable shoes under the driver’s seat.