Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  ME: (looking out the window): Nobody ever said it’s a barrel of fun trying to find someone to be with after you’ve hit the big four-oh. But I don’t think I want to talk about it right now.

  BO: Okay.

  He turns on the radio; NPR gives us a heavy dose of Dukakis.

  Ugh.

  Bo lives off Sixteenth Street in a large apartment complex. After parking in a subterranean garage, we take an elevator up to the twelfth floor. The lights in the elevator glare like theatrical spots. I feel tired, awkward, out of it. Bo is also quiet. He seems to have difficulty opening the lock on his front door. Finally I realize his hands are shaking.

  This must be as hard for him as it is for me.

  His apartment is a basic L-shaped job, not that different from Marge’s. It is furnished with a begrudging nod toward fashion. A leather couch and matching easy chair with a large footstool. A couple of glass tables. Beige carpeting. He means for it to look okay, not great. That touches me for some reason.

  “If you want to wash up …” he says, gesturing down a narrow hallway.

  This is going to be too painful to bear.

  I shake my head and follow him into the kitchen. It is narrow and suddenly I feel claustrophobic. We keep bumping into each other and apologizing as we start to make drinks. People often pretend that they stumbled into sex because they drank too much, sat too close, did some drugs, lost control. But we can’t pretend it’s that way. My presence here has an air of intentionality that makes it seem low-budget, garish, obvious.

  I feel brazen. Brassy. Ballsy. Bad. Like Shay when she would decide to make it with some guy and simply set about doing it. Crude. Gross. Like Gary Hart finding the Monkey Business on which to sink himself. Definitely low-budget. On the other hand, this prelude also seems embarrassingly profound. Significant. Momentous. Big-screen. Either way, it’s too much for me to handle. I am rendered speechless. I begin losing it. Falling apart.

  Bo opens the refrigerator and instantly encounters a strong sour smell that completely distracts him.

  “Jesus, something went bad,” he groans, and then he begins to hunt frantically through various tin-foil-wrapped packages.

  White European Woman notices for first time that black men blush.

  “Maybe it’s some cheese,” I say, meaning to be helpful.

  But instantly I see my remark upsets him even more. It’s as if whatever spoiled has spoiled everything between us. Now he is banging around on the metal shelves. Miserable. Unhappy. Finally he finds some package that he deems the culprit and runs out into the hallway to throw it down the incinerator.

  Actually his kitchen is clean, tidy and nicely outfitted. He has blue French cookware and everything looks well scrubbed, even the burners on the stove. When he returns from the incinerator, he sets me to work chopping vegetables on a thick wooden cutting board. I dice everything very small. This helps me kill time but doesn’t appease my uneasiness. I feel miserable. Pitiful. Hopelessly teenaged.

  Conversation is becoming more and more difficult. Bo has already related most of the anecdotes stemming from the arrests of the drug dealers in Mount Pleasant. He has already told me what a fuss Ocheros made at the precinct after he was brought in. I have already analyzed the reporters’ reactions to Bo’s announcement and to Hannah’s visit. We have already discussed where to buy floor fans with the journalists’ donations.

  Neither of us mentions Eli.

  While the omelets are cooking, Bo sets the dining-room table: place mats, large-sized dishes, silverware, wineglasses. There is an unattractive furniture-outlet-type bar set up against one wall in the dining area, out of which he takes a bottle of red wine. Then he looks over toward the sink, where I’m rinsing off the cutting board.

  “Or do you prefer white?” he asks formally.

  “Yes, I do. Thank you.”

  Oh, God. I can’t go through with this, I think, rushing cool water over my wrists. What happened to the safe sex of married life? What happened to those big easy encounters that were as predictable as Monday-night football? I’m not up for major surprises anymore.

  Damage control is where it’s at now.

  When the omelets are ready, Bo places them on a serving platter and brings them to the table. Then he makes a great deal of noise sliding each piece off the dish with a spatula, like some waiter in an expensive French restaurant ritualistically scraping pastries off a silver serving tray. I sit at the table and chugalug my first glass of wine like a teeny-bopper. I had wanted to charm and disarm Bo, but instead I am making him enormously uncomfortable.

  “Would you like some catsup or A-One sauce?”

  “No. This is fine, Bo. Thanks. It’s really good.”

  Our silverware keeps scratching against our dishes. Every time I break off a piece of omelet, my fork screeches across my plate. So does Bo’s. The noise is outrageous. Having consumed a year’s worth of cholesterol and all the cacophonous scratching I can endure, I quit eating. So does Bo. After a while we carry our dishes and wineglasses back into the kitchen. Bo washes our two plates and two goblets before starting to scour the black iron griddle. I wipe the silverware with a somewhat tired dish towel.

  SNAPSHOT

  Dad took this picture of Shay and me about fifteen years ago—a few days after our Bubbie died. Shay and I had both flown home to attend the burial at a suburban cemetery owned by the Twin Cities Workmen’s Circle. This fierce fraternity of socialists had bought a piece of foreign soil on which to regroup after death. My family created a small island of life in that deserted landscape. The first generation of middle-aged affluent assimilationists, swaddled in mink and cashmere overcoats, sat on folding chairs set upon the frozen soil. I stood among the crowd of our cousins, all in their mid-twenties and thirties—intellectuals of varying persuasions—and surrounded by their own waist-high children. It was this second generation that formed the ambivalent, neurotic wing of our family. Our clan of cousins, all pampered children of prosperous professionals, had been subverted by the smoldering socialism of our grandparents, eternally caught between a seductive style and an alien analysis.

  Finally I say: “I’m pretty tired, Bo. Maybe we should call it a day.”

  His relief is palpable, visible, audible.

  “You should be tired,” he says sympathetically. “I’ll drive you wherever you want to go. You wanna go back to your brother-in-law’s place?”

  Abandoning the griddle, Bo takes the dish towel away from me to wipe his hands. Suddenly we are caught up in a great rush of preparations. In his eagerness to get me out of there, Bo loses his car keys and has to hunt around his apartment to find them. This gives me a little additional time to edit my departure.

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve had time to process everything that’s happened,” I say by way of apology, while staring out of the big bay window at the blackboard night outside. “I mean, in one week I had my sister on my hands and my car stolen. I’ve been out to Long Island and Minneapolis. My house has been shot into, vandalized and rammed by a car. I’ve messed around with my future brother-in-law and met a wonderful guy—a policeman …”

  “Your sequencing’s all screwed up,” Bo says in a flat, dead voice. “Anyway, don’t kid yourself, kiddo. It’s just because I’m the wrong color for you.”

  “Oh God, Bo,” I gasp. “I thought we were such good friends you wouldn’t think that. It’s only because it doesn’t matter that I can say I’m not up for it tonight.”

  “Well, I’m not up for it tonight, either.”

  So I deliver my headline:

  “Eli’s in love with another woman,” I say with a sob, sinking into the leather armchair.

  “Oh yeah, that’s a pisser. I’m sure you’re hurting,” he concedes coldly. “But I’ve been there too. My wife, the woman I’m separated from, she doesn’t love me anymore. It’ll do ya every time. Now Bernice, my first wife, whose son got kilted, she’s begun to phone me up. Wants to start dating again.… Nothing ever really ends anymore
.…”

  “You must be tired too, Bo,” I say. “I mean look at all you’ve been through. I mean, people get tired, right? We’re not kids anymore.”

  “Right.”

  But there’s a look of closure on his face that frightens me.

  SNAPSHOT

  This is another photo from that funeral weekend—Shay and me and some of our cousins. Estranged from our country-club parents by the radicalism our immigrant grandparents had bequeathed to us, we kept our distance from them at that cemetery. The old socialists, lying beneath their tombstones, had won our hearts and minds through years of bedtime stories that fixed our political vision, forever estranging us from easy assimilation or conformity. We cousins, who straddled both worlds, felt drawn toward the small group of old Jews standing haughtily apart from the immediate family of mourners. These were the last survivors of the Twin Cities Workmen’s Circle, three old men wearing black fedora hats and hand-me-down overcoats, one withered old woman in an ancient chocolate-brown fur jacket. Like pilgrims from some Yiddish short story, they had come to bury their dead, routinely attending the funeral of each member or mate of their original group. When the service was over they limped back to the rented limousine that had been retained twenty years before—prepaid to transport the dwindling tribe of survivors to each of the burials until the last of the eternal exiles arrived in a hearse.

  “Well, maybe we could just stay here and get some rest,” I say, loud enough so he can hear me above the hard-rock beat of my blood.

  “I don’t think tonight’s a very good night to try that,” he says conclusively.

  Already I feel lonely. Already I have begun to long and ache for him, yearn for his attention. I scramble to get up and out of the slippery concave chair; Bo bends over to help me and then I’m in his arms again, leaning against the proud stubborn wall of his body. I lift my face upward and he kisses me. I can taste my own salty tears on our lips, but the kiss is still sweet. Soft. Simple.

  And then there is no stopping or retreating, no more equivocating or procrastinating. This is inevitable. This is a passion so sudden and deliberate that it has become my destiny. I walk down the long hallway to his bedroom with his arm around my shoulders. The bed is beautifully made, covered with an old-fashioned chenille spread. I touch the Braille-like pattern of big flowers.

  “My grandmother’s,” Bo says proudly..

  For one moment, I think of Eli. I know I have come to a point of no return, that I have embarked upon a solitary voyage without any map. But the thought disappears and I surrender to sensation, reaching for Bo with a thirst born of loneliness.

  This is what I want.

  This is the best way to talk about love.

  In its silent language.

  The wordless dialect.

  The dazzling vocabulary of sex astonishes me all over again, the primitive but perfect grammar of internal dialogue, the eloquence of its syntax.

  It is sweet to be near this man. Like a big shade tree, he offers me solace and shelter. My body nurses on him; I inhale and heave around him, hold him tight, absorbing his silent and silencing movements.

  Is this for real?

  Has any man ever felt so good, so nourishing, during a drought? We are in some alien dimension where time has been tamed and defanged. We loll about in perpetuity until we reach a place that proves unendurable, and then we crash, smash and splash into a million pieces, multicolored shards in all the hues of a rainbow. We don’t sleep until dawn. I lose count of our couplings. All physical and temporal perimeters are lost in the darkness.

  Right before dawn I hear myself begin to cry in my sleep.

  Bo rolls me back into his arms and holds me until I grow quiet again.

  The next morning I am half-asleep when he comes back into the bedroom. He has showered and put on fresh Lagerfeld and is holding The Washington Post open in front of himself like a shield. There is my picture in the left-hand bottom corner of the front page under the headline.

  D.C. SOCIAL WORKER LEAKS DEA DOCUMENT

  I look like Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist. I look like an absolutely ballsy, self-composed, self-edited, purposeful, committed, independent and unafraid woman. I look unflappable. I love the way I look. It’s the way I’ve always wanted to look. Sweat has put a glow on my skin despite the scratches and cuts. The humidity has ruffled my straight limp hair into confusion. My eyes are fiery; I have a purpose. Although America has no stereotypical female intellectuals, no prototype like Simone de Beauvoir, I guess I look like the progressive political activist I’ve always wanted to be. Jesus, I look great!

  ‘What do you think of that?” Bo asks.

  I watch the center of the newspaper stir and bulge of its own volition.

  “Looks great,” I say.

  “Wait till you read the story.”

  He hands me the newspaper. I don’t mention his aroused condition, although I experience a rush of proprietary pleasure.

  The transcript of a Drug Enforcement Administration interview with Fawn Hall, secretary to Lt. Colonel Oliver North when he served as Assistant Deputy Director for Political-Military Affairs on the National Security Council, was released late yesterday afternoon by Natalie Karavan Myers, director of A Home Away from Home shelter for homeless women at 2121 18th Street N.W.

  Ms. Hall, who, during testimony before a Congressional Investigative Committee, admitted altering and shredding official government documents and concealing other papers on her person to pass through security at the Executive Office Building, admitted to DEA investigators that she used cocaine on a number of weekends during the period she worked for Colonel North. Ms. Hall’s attorney later denied she’d admitted to extensive drug use.

  Ms. Myers, who refused to divulge her sources or tell how she came into possession of the interview, said she was operating as a private citizen in making charges against a person imperiling U.S. national security.

  Allllll riiiiiight!

  When he’s dressed, Bo kisses me good-bye and leaves for work. But ten minutes later he’s back.

  “It’s me. Don’t get scared,” he yells from the hallway. Then he rushes back into the bedroom. His arms are full of newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Times, USA Today and more copies of The Washington Post.

  “You’ve just replaced Fawn Hall as the woman of the hour. The week. The month. The year. You’re a star, Natalie.”

  He is smiling. He is happy. He hands me the newspapers, kisses me again and then jogs back to the front door.

  I am also on the front page of The New York Times, below the fold, with a jump to page A24:

  TRANSCRIPT OF DEA INTERVIEW WITH FAWN HALL REVEALS COCAINE USAGE

  There is a sidebar to the story describing who I am, and another attractive, but totally different, photograph of me. Alongside my picture is one of Fawn Hall. We look like we’re from different planets.

  This is really a photo finish.

  I go into the kitchen to put up some coffee.

  Suddenly I wonder if Eli has seen the papers. I pick up the telephone and dial our number. After four rings, I hear my own voice on the answering machine. I hang up and dial the code that lets me hear the messages:

  • “Well, you really take the cake, Natalie, you bitch. Call me the minute you get this message.”

  • “Good morning. This is Caitlin Gregorson at ABC News. Mr. Peter Jennings would like to speak with you to get some background information since you have been proposed as a possible choice as ‘Person of the Week.’” (She laughs.) “Which isn’t bad for the same week as the Democratic National Convention. Please call us collect at 212-555-6937. Thank you and congratulations.”

  • “This is Carl Badeiner at The New York Times. I’ve been assigned to do an in-depth person-in-the-news-type interview with you this afternoon, if possible. I am here in the Washington bureau and will wait to hear from you. I’ve known Eli for years and look forward to meeting you. My direct number is 555-4399. Thanks for returning my ca
ll.”

  • “Hi, Natalie. I’m Cynthia Credenzia from People magazine. You are the talk of the office today. What a ballsy thing you did. I bet Ms. Fawn Hall would like to get her hands on you this morning. Of course we want to do a photo-interview story—you know, follow you through one of your days, catch you at the shelter where you work, that sort of stuff. If your sister’s in Washington, maybe we can get some shots of you two together. Well, again, it’s Cynthia Credenzia, at 212-555-2341. Please call back ASAP.”

  • “Brava, lady. You’re a tiger. Don’t worry. Be happy. I’ll defend you pro bono. Call me at home. I want to talk to you about Amelia, too. Boy, you really struck a blow for freedom.”

  • “Hello. This is Mr. Fitzgerald from the Whistle Blowers’ Association. Your name has been placed in nomination for induction into our organization. My number is 555-8976. I’m eager to speak with you. Frank Fitzgerald.”

  • “Natalie! Oh, this is really so great. It’s Marcia Prouty from the Statehood party office. I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Thursday afternoon we had a citywide Coalition for the Homeless meeting over at Saint Mark’s Cathedral. There were reps from about ten different groups and we finally hammered out a charter and an agreement to band together for all our fundraising activities and campaigns. Oh, it’s too complicated to tell you everything, but please call me up. Call me at home at 555-4567. Anyway, I think we can use all this publicity you’re generating to make a real strong fund-raising pitch, so call me as soon as you can. Everyone’s real proud of you, Nat. You did a really brave thing there, lady.”

  • “Good morning, Ms. Myers. Dean Carlos from Newsweek’s Washington bureau. Would you kindly give me a call at 555-9788?”

  David Hummings, from Disney’s Touchstone studios, tells me where to call him collect at any time. There are also calls from Good Morning America and the Today show. I scribble down the names and numbers as fast as I can, but the first call I return is Marcia Prouty’s.