Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  “Eli, listen. There’s all sorts of stuff breaking loose up here. This cop, this black detective who heads the D.C. drug squad—”

  “Nat, I know you want me to come home. I know you’ve had a rough week. But I can’t tell Benson I won’t take this assignment. There’s no one else to do it. He’s my boss, Nat.”

  “Well, I guess you have to do what you have to do,” I say quietly. Then: “Shay and Mickey are getting married.”

  “I know. I bumped into Christopher. He told me. He asked if he could fly back to D.C. with me so I said I’d try to arrange it.”

  “When will you come home?”

  “Sunday at the very latest.”

  “Sunday?”

  It is painfully clear that Eli does not want to come home.

  Now I know he’s shacked up with someone.

  In truth, I do not think Eli necessarily wants a different woman. I think Eli is just tired of being married. Or maybe he’s just tired of being married to me. I know he’s weary of putting out, of reassuring me about things, of sharing his privacy and diverting his energy into sustaining and maintaining our marriage. I think he’s grown tired of talking, bored with listening, weary of acting interested when he’s not—or affectionate when he isn’t. It’s almost biological. It’s almost as if he can’t get it up to care about us as a couple anymore.

  Again I hang up without saying good-bye.

  That’s getting to be par for the course.

  I sit at Eli’s desk until the telephone rings around seven o’clock.

  It’s Bo: “What time does your husband get in?”

  “He’s not coming back tonight after all,” I say in a flat voice.

  “No?”

  “No. Change of plans. Not till Sunday.”

  “When’s your sister leaving?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “I’ll come past nine. We’ll go get some supper.”

  He hangs up.

  A moment later he calls back.

  “Is that okay with you?”

  I have to laugh.

  “Absolutely. But listen. Pick me up at nineteen twenty-four Reservoir Road. That’s my brother-in-law Christopher’s house. I have something I want to do over there.”

  There’s one more bimbo on my shit list.

  “Sure. But do me a favor, willya?”

  “What?”

  “Take your car keys into the house with you this time.”

  13

  I let myself into Christopher’s house and hunt around until I locate Shay’s black Rolodex on the coffee table in her former study, right off her former bedroom. Flipping through the cards, I find exactly what I’d hoped for—a directory of Washington’s media stars fingerprint-coded as to frequency of usage. Suddenly a glorious giddiness overcomes me. I feel empowered and anointed. Running back downstairs, I start my telephone crusade from inside the citadel of the kitchen.

  Beginning with the A’s, I work my way through the entire deck of Rolodex cards, dialing each D.C.-based print or broadcast journalist whose name I recognize. The reporters’ reputations are reflected in their addresses. Upper Northwest streets are laid out alphabetically, starting with the letters and then continuing through one-, two- and three-syllable words. Big brand-name journalists live either on the lettered streets of Georgetown or high up in the third alphabet. It’s a primitive process for determining status, but it works.

  Most of the journalists I reach know me through either Eli or Shay. None of them question the legitimacy of my announcing a press conference. Of course I’m too insecure to call it that. I simply say I’ve come into possession of some interesting documents about Fawn Hall that I am duplicating for distribution at six o’clock tomorrow in a storefront shelter called A Home Away from Home at 2121 Eighteenth Street, off Kalorama Road.

  I feel flushed with great confidence about the future. I know I can do what has to be done because I have long harbored my own grudges against the Reagan administration. Like any administrator deprived of operating funds, I know where the social-services monies I needed were diverted. Everyone knows those dollars went for military expenditures. Money for the homeless was wasted on violence and destruction.

  When Bo arrives I lead him through the house and outside into the garden. Darkness is shifting down upon the grounds, rubbing the surfaces of Christopher’s patio furniture. I flick on the pool light and Bo slices off a low whistle through his teeth.

  “Nice spread,” he says.

  Bo always comments on “nice” houses, “nice” gardens, “nice” neighborhoods. Sometimes I feel he views me as that kind of “nice,” too.

  “Wanna take a swim?” I ask, moving toward the tiled margin of the pool.

  He looks at me questioningly.

  “There’re lots of suits in the house. I’ll get you one of Christopher’s.”

  Bo squats down and touches the water.

  “Come on,” I say, reaching out for his hand to pull him to his feet. “I’ll find you some trunks. It’ll feel great. It’ll cool you off.”

  “I don’t know how to swim,” he says.

  I look at him.

  He doesn’t know how to swim?

  But why should he?

  He was a poor black kid who grew up in D.C.

  Where the hell would he learn how to swim?

  In the private pools of friends or relatives living out in the suburbs?

  In the fountain in front of Union Station?

  In the Tidal Basin, where Fanne Foxe took her dive?

  In the polluted Potomac River?

  SNAPSHOT

  This is my Dad and me all dressed up to go someplace together on a Sunday afternoon. I’m about six. Now I can’t remember where we were going. I know we drove downtown on the Floyd B. Olson Memorial Highway, past a public housing project, where most of Minneapolis’s small population of blacks lived. That day I began to ask questions. Why do only Negroes live in the Project and no white people? Dad explained that the city built special housing for poor people unable to pay regular rents. Why are only Negroes poor? I asked. Dad explained that there were also poor white people. Why didn’t some of those poor white people live in the Project with those poor Negro people? I asked. I don’t know, Dad answered. Maybe he didn’t. Anyway, that was the day I became the Emma Goldman of our family.

  “Well, we could sit on the stairs, Bo. In the shallow part. Just to cool off,” I offer.

  He shakes his head.

  He’s afraid of the water.

  Jesus.

  Suddenly a soft panic, sired by regret and born out of sorrow, begins to stir me. I look into Bo’s face, which has now become completely legible to me. Immediately I read that he is painfully embarrassed about not knowing how to swim. Humiliated.

  A succulent sadness, ripe as a fruit, passes between us.

  This man is complicated. Now there is a jeering look on his handsome face, plus a souvenir of anger. His expression reminds me of a joke.

  What does New Jersey look like?

  The back side of an old radio.

  I can almost see the mess of wires, bulbs, conduits and connectors in his head—the whole complex system by which he operates. As easy as it was to get it on with Mickey, that’s how tough it is to connect with Bo, to dig through all the debris and to avoid the celestial stadium of invisible spectators watching us.

  “Are you worried Christopher will show up and do a Carl Rowan in reverse?”

  For a moment Bo looks blank, but then he expels a short, reluctant laugh.

  “Listen, I wanted to say something to you,” he says. “I’m sorry you slept with your sister’s boyfriend. He was just using you to get back at her and you should’ve known that. It was a piss-poor performance on your part and I can assure you that it didn’t rock my boat.”

  Of course that’s what’s eating him. He’s still pissed about Mickey, and I don’t blame him.

  “Let’s go,” Bo says in a tired voice.

  There’s a heaviness about h
im now as he drives up Wisconsin Avenue to a Brazilian restaurant near the Dancing Crab. The place is crowded; the air-conditioning is quaking from the magnitude of its mission. We order Brazilian beers, but after I taste mine I start to feel queasy. Bo orders feijoada.

  I tell Bo that Shay and Mickey are going to get married. He ask if that’s a problem for me and I assure him it’s the perfect solution, the right resolution. But I flush as I speak, sorry that Bo knows about Mickey and me. Sorry that there was a Mickey and me. Feeling raw and injured, I lower my head so I can revise my face a little before I speak again. Erasing the hurt from my expression, I pencil in some pride and apply a light dusting of dignity to my image.

  “Bo, I didn’t return the interview yesterday. I thought about everything—all the risks and everything—and I decided that I wanted to release it. I mean, until late this afternoon, I thought maybe Eli would do it when he came home. But when I talked to him today, I realized he really isn’t interested in working on any story at the moment.” My voice falters. “I think he’s with … someone, a woman, down there in Atlanta. Probably some journalist covering the convention. Seems he’s taking a little sabbatical from our marriage. Actually, he might be getting ready to throw in the towel altogether.”

  Bo looks solemn. “You’ve definitely got a double-header going here today,” he finally says. “Both your hubby and your sister’s beau—that’s B-E-A-U, right?—you’re really stacking ’em up.”

  “Anyway, that’s why I went over to Christopher’s house. I used Shay’s Rolodex and called up all the bigwig journalists in town. I’m going to release the interview tomorrow at a press conference in my shelter at six o’clock. It’ll either fly or it won’t, but I really think Contragate is ten times worse than Watergate so I just had to do something about it.”

  “Well.” He smiles. “I’m proud of you.”

  I grow warm beneath his praise.

  “I always thought the best defense on something like this was an offensive move,” Bo continues. “The publicity will shield you better than anything else. Once it’s out there, you’ll be too visible to hit.” He looks at his watch. “But we better think about Ocheros for a minute. It’s ten-thirty. By now he knows you’re not going to show. This is your most vulnerable time, Nat—from now until the press conference. You can’t be alone. I’ll just stay with you tonight, wherever you go.”

  “I’ve had worse offers.”

  Surprise freezes his face.

  Then pleasure chases the surprise away.

  Sitting in this brightly lit, overcrowded restaurant, it is difficult for me to look directly at Bo. In Christopher’s garden, the darkness had smudged some of our disparities. The night had softened the differences between us. Now everything has become hard-edged again, and I feel shy.

  Once more I’ve become the White European Woman, laden with all the burdensome baggage assigned me by history. Bo and I both have a lot of baggage. Each of us is dragging around a lot of memories in the little red wagons of our pasts.

  “Look,” he says, “this is tough.”

  “What?”

  “This.”

  I decide to take a chance.

  “Why is it tough?” I ask, accepting the assumption of our feelings for each other and meeting his eyes for the first time since we sat down.

  “Because I’m having trouble forgetting about you being with Teardash,” he says simply. “Why’d you do that?”

  I shrug, miserable.

  “I’m sorry you did it. It makes things real tough for me. I’m a … finicky man. Were you … doing your sister?”

  I shrug even more speculatively.

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “I guess it was better than being alone.”

  He shakes his head regretfully.

  “But you weren’t alone, Natalie,” he reprimands me. “And you knew that.”

  He’s right.

  Shay was right, too. I should eat shit and die.

  “I was scared, Bo. Everything felt so scary.”

  “And sleeping with Teardash made you feel safe or something? That was safe sex?”

  “Well, yes. I suppose. In a way.”

  “Look,” Bo sighs as if to launder his voice so he can launch a fresh explanation. “I go around to D.C. high schools and give lectures on safe sex. It’s not part of my job, but I volunteered to do it because I think safe sex is important.”

  He looks around the room at all the overwarm but still enthusiastic people enjoying their ethnic dinners, super-conscious of their surroundings and their titillating certainties.

  “You know, sex is real risky,” Bo continues.

  He’s talking more than condoms. I nod.

  “But then it’s always been risky,” he continues. “Even before AIDS. It’ll still be risky after they beat AIDS. Sex in the modern age is a dangerous thing.”

  I look at Bo. He’s talking feelings now. He’s talking about the chances people take. He’s also talking racial risks. The racial perils:

  1. Doing it to show there are no racial reasons for not doing it, or

  2. Not doing it to show there are no racial reasons for having to do it.

  Although I don’t know any of the people in this restaurant, they are, for the most part, people like me—white liberal professionals living amidst walloping contradictions without any power to resolve them. Even if offered the opportunity to make some social repairs, these people would probably fuck up, since that’s what most people—including myself—do despite their best intentions. Anyway, at the moment they are eating and happily guzzling Chardonnay, having discovered—just as I did—that wine can get them drunker faster for fewer calories and less money than booze while letting them feel virtuous about not drinking hard liquor anymore.

  “Is that good, Bo?” I ask, pointing at his almost-empty plate.

  “Yeah. It’s their national dish,” he answers. “Want a taste? Before it’s too late?”

  “Okay.” I nod. “I’ll taste it.”

  Bo spears a piece of sausage plus a couple of beans, and extends his fork across the table.

  IMAGINARY ILLUSTRATION

  This is my mental picture of a scene from Under the Volcano. The always-drunk British Consul in Mexico and his estranged wife are standing on a balcony; her hand is resting on the balustrade. The Consul thinks that if he can reach out, right at that moment, and place his hand atop his wife’s, their estrangement will be eased, perhaps ended. Just as he steels himself to do it—to reach out and touch her—a sudden breeze stirs and his wife slowly lifts her hand to repair her hair. With that motion, the moment is lost. The Consul suffers a fatal loss of will, thereby ensuring the loss of his wife and, a short time later, his life—in a dramatic, violent death.

  I do not reach out for Bo’s fork.

  Instead I lean forward and open my mouth. He places the food between my lips, steadying the fork until I’ve wiped it clean.

  My face is hot.

  I feel a million eyes on me.

  I settle back in my chair and look around.

  Okay, not a million, but a few people are watching.

  An older, obviously indignant couple seated nearby are discussing me, bothered by a White European Woman tasting food from the fork of a black man. And though I sense them watching me, I don’t really mind. I just chew my mouthful and smile at Bo. He smiles back at me as if he understands the test I just administered to myself.

  And passed.

  A short while later, he pays the check and we leave. Outside, Wisconsin Avenue is humming with heat as we walk toward Count Western’s jeans store, where the car is parked. Suddenly, with a reggae rotation of his shoulders that makes him totally appealing, Bo starts to sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in a dark husky voice that has an island heat to it.

  I suffer a meltdown.

  “We can’t go back to your place,” he says in his cop voice as soon as we get into the car.

  “I have to get my suitcase, Bo. It’s right in the kitchen
. And I have to get a book too. Something I need for the press conference.”

  So he drives back to my house and parks in the side driveway. When he comes around to open my door, I start to get out but miss my footing and suddenly his arms are around me.

  Bo is holding me. He is holding me, but also holding on to me, with a kind of a democratic neediness that corresponds to my own. Being near him is like being next to a big shade tree that offers shelter on a hot summer night when there hasn’t been any rain for seven weeks.

  “No sex tonight,” he says, smoothing my hair away from my temples, where it’s pasted down with perspiration. “No condoms, no sex. I can’t tell those kids not to do something if I do it, right? You don’t want me to be like our mayor, do you?”

  But we are having sex.

  Our bodies are like relief maps—hardened protuberances and absorbent valleys. We are having sex and it is safe, the safest sex I’ve ever had. No demands, no danger. No requests, no risks. I am in the hands of the law, and although they are not soft, they seem gentle.

  He has taken me into protective custody.

  Maybe that’s the definition of love.

  After a long while, Bo cuffs my chin gently.

  “Let’s go in. I have to call my office.”

  Once inside, I leave Bo in the kitchen and run upstairs, turning on lights as I go. I walk into Eli’s study and suddenly remember the millions of times Eli looked up from his desk to smile at me when I appeared in his doorway. Now my heart turns into a fist and I experience a moment of pristine longing for the past. I would have liked my life to stay the way it was, but it was silly to think that what was good for one person would necessarily please the other forever.

  I kneel down and begin sifting through the piles of books that have been dumped on the floor around Eli’s desk. I’m lucky to find the paperback anthology, edited by our friend Scott Armstrong, titled The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras. When the fat little paperback finally surfaces, I shove it into my purse. Then I pick up Eli’s answering machine, which is lying upside down on the floor, and reset and return it to his desk before I hear Bo calling me.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, trotting toward the stairs.