Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  Bo Culver picks us up in his own beat-up Pontiac to go to the airport. I feel a lot more secure with him back in the picture. By the time we’ve parked, shuttled to the terminal and checked in, I realize what a weird combo we are: middle-aged black man and white woman clearly not the parents of the little girl they have in tow. But it’s nice to be with Bo. Pretty soon I hardly notice people noticing us. Pretty soon I stop wondering what they’re wondering.

  From ten thousand feet, it is difficult to distinguish between the highways and the dried-out riverbeds below, except that the man-made scars are straighter. The Greenhouse Effect has laid a yellow blanket over most of the farmland. The drought will have killed off all the crops before August.

  Amelia naps during the flight. I am too revved up to sleep. Unaccustomed to the company of a child, I am exhausted just from being with Amelia, even when we’re not doing anything. Recent events have turned me into an anxiety queen. I can’t seem to swallow my own saliva, much less food from the dry earth. I seem to have given up both eating and sleeping.

  With Amelia between us, Bo and I maintain our private thoughts for a long while. Then I begin to wonder if he thinks I’m rude for not taking this opportunity to get to know him. So I ask him some questions and, with just a shade of impatience, he tells me he was raised in D.C., went to Howard for a year, joined the army, spent eighteen months in Vietnam, used the G.I. Bill to get a degree at the University of Massachusetts and then, after a year of law school at Georgetown University, joined the D.C. police force.

  That’s that. When he changes the subject I know enough not to press him for any more personal information.

  “Here’s my thinking on all this at the moment. However Russo got that DEA document, it was illegal. It’s stolen federal property. Maybe he got it from some corrupt DEA agent, I don’t know. But I figure he wanted it to use as some sort of shield in case any of his big contra clients got indicted. Then he could make a deal by threatening to show the DEA suppressed information about Fawn Hall to protect Colonel North. Or maybe he was going to use it to keep them from being indicted in the first place. Either way, it’s been working like a charm, I can tell you that. You following me?”

  I nod.

  “It was illegal for him to have it, but it was really dangerous for him to let it get ripped off. Over at the precinct, word was that one of the Columbia Road coke capitans went up to the Hamptons to read Jerry Russo the riot act about getting so sloppy. That’s one of the reasons I’m flying up here with you today. The guy they say went up, Pepe Alfonso, is a killer. Anyway, that heist your sister pulled off clearly shook up the contras. They don’t like it that government papers naming their local distributors are floating around D.C. That’s why they got trigger-happy at your house.”

  Bo rests his head against his seat back.

  “Look,” he begins again. “I’m figuring I can force Russo to call off his dogs. I’m going to tell him I’ve got enough evidence to bust him for possession of stolen government property. I’m going to tell him that unless his boys cut the crap, I’m going to let out the word that he’s given some dealers’ names to the news media. That could really jeopardize his practice,” he chuckles. “And, if that doesn’t work, I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. I’ll tell him that I’m holding him personally responsible for your family’s safety. The thing is, Nat, I think it would just be a damn shame to give those papers back to that lowlife. I mean, you’d still like to link North and Poindexter and the rest of those White House honchos to the contras, wouldn’t you? And I’d still love you to blow their cover so I could get a crack at them.”

  He squints at me, waiting for my answer.

  “I guess I’d still like to see it released,” I say. “It hurts to watch Ollie North get away with everything he’s done. But it’s much more dangerous than I thought it was, Bo. I didn’t know there was so much drug money involved. I suppose that’s why Mickey Teardash is coming up here to return the papers. I don’t think either you or I could change his plans now.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But how’d you feel if I went to see Russo alone as soon as we get there? I’d treat my visit as completely independent from whatever Teardash sees as his mission.”

  I look out the window at the blue ocean below the clouds. Now I understand that Bo didn’t volunteer to be my bodyguard. He has his own agenda; apparently everyone does except me. Bo wants the Fawn Hall interview released, come hell or high water. He’s not along to protect me, he’s here to pressure me into releasing the papers. He’s going to do his own thing. He’ll make Mickey crazy by acting on his own and undermining Mickey’s efforts to cut a deal with Jerry Russo.

  There’re going to be some fireworks out on Long Island.

  Bo has reserved a rental car at MacArthur Airport. Amelia is cranky. I have to half drag her along as we hunt through the Hertz parking lot. The leather strap of my shoulder bag has begun cutting into the flesh of my shoulder while the leather straps of my sandals sand the skin off the back of my heels. I am edgy. Amelia starts to cry and says she wants to go home, though I can’t imagine where she means. I probe a little and finally determine that it’s Christopher’s house and housekeeper that she sees as home base. Poor little thing. I’d telephone Steven so she could talk to him except I don’t want to alarm him about our situation. I won’t call him until I can tell him everything’s okay.

  Bo drives us to East Hampton in a two-door Olds-mobile. Mickey’s house, an astonishing late-nineteenth-century mansion set back from the beach, is near the Amagansett town line. I feel terribly conspicuous as we pull into the driveway. The neighboring houses are not close, but I am sure people are watching us as we walk up to the house. The key is beneath the welcome mat, just as Mickey had promised during our long directions-and-instructions telephone conversation.

  An aura of romance, stored inside the closed beach house, wafts against me the minute the door swings open. The hallway has a faint sweet odor of old money and lost summers. There is a pale layer of sand dusting the floor. Through the living-room archway I can see that all the furnishings belong to the grand period in which the house was built. Everything is quietly expensive. A large antique armoire conceals the television so that it can’t mar the mood set by the pale chintz-covered chaises and chairs. Sheer sun-bleached curtains follow the contours of the bay windows, veiling a wraparound porch furnished exclusively in wicker.

  I am impressed despite myself.

  Amelia is immediately infected with excitement. She runs through the living room, dining room, kitchen and then back along a side hallway to the front door. It is the emptiness that excites her. Vacant rooms. Unused furnishings. Absent people. She likes the place because it’s empty; I like it because it’s full of the past. I am moved by the magnitude of memories left behind by previous residents.

  The kitchen smells slightly swampy. A glass salt shaker and sugar dispenser sitting on the handsome refectory table display kernels of white rice used to protect the contents from seashore dampness.

  “Pretty nice place,” Bo says, coming up behind me. “Shay’s boyfriend’s not hurting for money.”

  “No one ever said he was.”

  “Where’s the oshum, Auntie Nattie?”

  “I’ll show you pretty soon, Amelia.”

  “I’m going to drive over to Southampton now,” Bo says, studying the Hertz map. “I want to lay down some ground rules with Russo before Teardash talks to him.”

  I don’t answer. I’m not sure Mickey Teardash is going to welcome Bo’s assistance.

  It feels strange invading this beach house with a man and a child who don’t belong to me. But, instinctively, we adopt the attitudes and motions of a family. Bo brings in the luggage from the trunk before he leaves for Southampton. I find our swimsuits, our towels, our flip-flops. It is close to five o’clock and the sun is subsiding. Amelia and I follow a winding lane to the dunes and then splash through the sand down to the beach.

  Amelia has never seen the
ocean before. Stunned by her first view of the water and the sound of the surf, she takes my hand, shrinking back from the glare and the glory. The Atlantic is too much for her to process all at once. She has to stand still until she can acclimate herself.

  Fiction writers often try to describe human emotions by equating them with elements or acts of nature. Using the language and idioms of the sea, they compare feelings of abandonment to damp desolate beaches. Today my loneliness is like a fog sneaking in to erase the beige beach properties clinging to the dunes. Feeling forsaken is like a beach-gray day that rinses the seashore, dissolving solid objects as easily as sand slipping through a sieve.

  Jean Rhys wrote that she remembered the ocean pounding against the shores of her distant island homeland as sounding like doors opening and shutting. That’s how I perceive the surf today—one ending after another, endings after endings that never stop happening.

  “Okay, Amelia,” I say as I spread out our blanket. “Sit down and I’ll show you how to build a sand castle.”

  “But I want to go in the oshum.”

  “You can’t, sweetie.”

  “Whyyyyyy, Auntie Nattie?”

  “Because the water is … dirty.”

  “Auntie Nattie,” she says in the preachy voice she uses to educate me, “I got a book—”

  “The ocean’s not like it used to be, Amelia. It’s not the way it was in your book.”

  “But—”

  “Somebody put some dirty things in the water, Amelia. When it’s cleaned up, I’ll take you in. Maybe next year.”

  “Next year,” she whispers without comprehension. “But can I look at it, Auntie Nattie?”

  Something squeezes my throat and makes tears shoot into my eyes. Never much of an environmentalist, I suddenly feel a poignant sense of ecological loss. Although I’ve always been more interested in the welfare of the people than the land, I now see they are not really separate. Like an invalid sinking back against a nest of pillows, I collapse upon the blanket.

  Then I retreat into my obsession with Eli once again. I actually feel cozy cocooning inside this obsession, snuggling deep into my misery, transported by pain into another dimension. I obsess, therefore I am. The thought of another woman receiving Eli’s sexual affection makes me cringe; I enjoy concentrating on that internal sensation. I shift between the beach and my melancholy mood with dreamy indifference.

  8

  About half an hour later, I see Mickey Teardash appear atop the dune we’d just scaled and begin walking across the beach toward us.

  The red sun ignites him like a bonfire.

  Unexpectedly devilish expectation dances up inside me.

  I watch him approach Amelia and hand her a package that contains a huge rubber beach ball. She shrieks with pleasure when he finally gets it blown up and bounces it toward her. Then, without speaking, he folds himself down beside me on our blanket. He is wearing neon green trunks, a striped T-shirt, orange rubber thongs and a carny barker’s come-on grin.

  Totally self-conscious in my snug blue maillot, I simultaneously begin to pull it higher up at the top and lower down around my thighs.

  “How’d you get here so fast?” I ask.

  “My Range Rover was here already, so I just took a helicopter from LaGuardia.”

  “How was Atlanta?”

  “Crazy. Big party scene. Dukakis is looking pretty good. But now we’ve got this other problem,” he says soberly. “Looks like Shay plopped us right down in the middle of a goddam drug war or something. I’m thinking maybe we should all just pack it in and go to the south of France for the rest of the summer. Whaddaya say? Or, more important, what do the police say?”

  “They think we’re in big trouble.”

  “Sounds like they’re right.”

  “The detective who’s on our case flew up here with us. A black guy. He’s actually been acting like our bodyguard.”

  “That’s good and bad news all rolled up together. Good that you got him and bad that you need him. Where is he?”

  “He drove into town, but he’ll come back to your place later. Do you think we should ask him to stay over?”

  The slightest pause.

  “Sure. Why not? Police protection right on the premises? We could use it.”

  He gives me a cocky smile, pulls off his T-shirt and flattens out beside me on the blanket.

  It’s as if we’re in a bed.

  Hmmmmmm, I think, surprised by a soft stirring in the central valley of my body.

  Something has begun to excite me. I think this man is sexy simply because he’s rich. Rich is a whole new dimension. Being near big money is exciting. Wealth might be the real Big Easy. Anyway, it puts an entirely new spin on things.

  But guess what we talk about?

  Shay.

  Mickey apparently doesn’t find it all that easy being Shay’s lover. He sings a rhapsody of complaints. She is difficult, especially when she’s working. Moody. Impulsive. Self-centered. Erratic. Impatient. Short-tempered. Her interests, obligations and preferences always come first. She is frequently thoughtless and totally impractical. She runs hot and cold. She is restless. No matter how busy their social life, she always craves more excitement. She is endlessly competitive, forever measuring herself against other high-profile women. She is sexually demanding and judgmental.

  The list goes on and on.

  Gently I suggest that Shay might not be the right companion for him.

  “Well, it’s not as if she’s a member of the Baader-Meinhof,” he laughs. “Maybe she’s not your basic Jewish grandmother, but she’s not really all that far out. She’s not a Muslim fundamentalist or anything like that.”

  I think for a while and then I ask:

  “Well, why are you with her?”

  “I have an addictive personality.”

  “Come on,” I chide. “That’s too simple.”

  But I know how easy it is to get hooked on Shay. She’s a hot ticket to any fantasy a person fancies. Still, on this issue there’s no winning side for me, so I change the subject.

  “Look, Mickey. I’ve been thinking about Shay dropping the Fawn Hall story and returning the papers to Russo. Maybe that’s a mistake. Fawn Hall is the first really dramatic link between Ollie North and the contras, and there won’t ever be a better time than right now to go public with it.”

  “Hey!” Mickey says, raising his head. “It’s stupid to spend another minute discussing that interview. Shay was out of her mind to steal it. You see how she put everyone in jeopardy for no damn good reason? Having people shooting up your house wasn’t a lot of fun, was it?”

  “You should read that interview, though,” I counter. “It’s wild. These people have no respect for the law. Here they start an anti-drug frenzy in the country and then they spend their Saturday nights snorting blow in Georgetown toilets.”

  “I did read it, Natalie, and I still say, Who cares? I said the same thing Saturday afternoon in your kitchen. Who the fuck cares if someone else parties it up a little? I use coke. Everyone uses coke. It’s no big fucking deal.”

  “But it’s not about partying,” I insist. “Bo says it’s the contras who are bringing all the crack cocaine into D.C. They’re bumping off the Nicaraguans with guns and the Americans with drugs. And Fawn Hall is the shortest, straightest line between the White House and the contras’ cocaine scene. That bleached-blond space cadet is the connection.”

  “What’s with you, Natalie? Why can’t you forget it? I happen to know this guy Russo, and he’s not someone to mess around with.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Well enough to know it’d be better for everyone concerned to forget this whole cockamamy caper you and your nutty sister dreamed up. As soon as we get back to the house I’m going to call him and ask if I can come over to see him. Then I’m going to tell him that Shay acted nuts and now she’s sorry. I’m going to apologize. I’m going to eat shit. And then I’m going to promise we’ll keep our mouths shut fro
m here to eternity if he’ll call off his thugs—assuming he’s the one who sent them. Then I’m going to give him back the fucking interview and get the hell out of there. In other words, I’m going to try to save as many Karavans as I can and salvage the rest of the summer, if possible.”

  “Why should he trust you, Mickey? Why should he believe we won’t talk about it later?”

  “Because if the story gets out, he’ll know we’re responsible for it, and then we’ll have to face the consequences. You’ve already gotten a little taste of that, haven’t you? These drug guys don’t monkey around. They’re like any other businessmen when it comes to money and image. Hey!” he says irritably. “It’s really not that complicated, you know?”

  “But what if the D.C. dealers come after us anyway?”

  “They won’t if they have their damn interview back. Those papers are like an insurance policy for them. It’s protection. You take away their protection and they get real upset. It’s also got their names on it, for chrissake. They don’t appreciate that kind of publicity, Natalie.”

  I get up then, angry that he won’t really listen to what I’m saying, angry that he knows so much but feels so little. It’s all so easy for him; this man wants peace, not justice. I walk slowly through the still-warm sand and lure Amelia into playing catch with me. After a while, Mickey joins us. Then we play running bases, with Amelia hurtling back and forth, trying not to be thrown out. At the end of the game, she collapses in a laughing heap upon the sand.

  By the time we get back to the house, Bo is sitting on the front stairs of the porch. I introduce the men and toss Bo a cautionary look that he quietly absorbs. It is clear Bo and Mickey are on a collision course. Mickey wants an armistice while Bo still wants to win the war. Fresh from his first, still-secret engagement, Bo looks satisfied with himself.

  We sit on the porch as the sun makes its glorious descent.

  “Mind telling me your plan,” Bo asks Mickey, “vis-à-vis Jerry Russo?”