The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  He heard her whisper: “Julian.”

  On the plane, in the darkness behind his eyelids, Patrick listened to Schubert; he smelled the room where he had met Hassan. He smelled Caroline again.

  5

  Caroline never wrote to Julian while he was at war, and for years after he returned he saw nothing of her. They had no friends in common, so he met no one who had been in touch with her. Finally, the last American left Vietnam, and though the war there continued, Vietnamese killing Vietnamese with foreign weapons, the conflict ceased to interest Americans. Julian did not understand this; he remembered the vivid fragments of all that had happened to him: the fires, imperial red and black, in the midst of the green carpet below his plane, the landscape blurred by speed before him but preternaturally clear behind; he remembered especially the sleepy joy of the moment when he thought he was dying in the sea. What had made his generation of Americans shriek through a tantrum, split the night with the untreatable anger of the insane—and then fall silent and never mention the war again? Julian did not know; no one would talk to him about it. His father said, “The last white man has died. It’s as simple as that.”

  On the night that Elliott made that remark, Bedford Forrest Lockwood was dining with a large group of men in the house on 93rd Street. Lockwood was then a United States senator. Julian, still limping from his wounds, had just come back to the city after spending a month alone at the Harbor. Elliott placed his son and the senator side by side. Lockwood questioned Julian throughout supper, and afterwards in the sitting room, about his experiences in Vietnam.

  Lockwood phoned at six the next morning to offer Julian a job as a legislative aide. Julian had nothing else in mind and he wanted a job at which he could work hard.

  “I’ll come, Senator,” he said, “if our conversation about the war is over.”

  Lockwood laughed. “Don’t worry. Your father was right as usual. No one is interested anymore.”

  Soon Julian’s brain and his capacity for work made him Lock-wood’s closest aide. He learned and learned; finally he knew as many secrets as any American had ever known.

  He never learned how many human beings died in Vietnam. No one but Julian thought the exact number was important. Of the millions who perished, as Elliott had pointed out, only a few thousand were white; and few of them had been friends of Sam Rodgers and his son.

  Julian had been in Washington for a long time when, dining one night with another girl in the Cantina d’Italia, he heard Caroline’s voice in the booth at his back. He finished his food. On the way out he passed by Caroline’s table. She caught his hand in hers. She said, “Kiss me.” Julian touched her cheek with his lips and she lifted his hand and held it against her face, shaking back her wonderful long hair. She was wearing scent and a linen suit, with pearls at her throat. A red fox fur jacket lay beside her on the banquette. Despite her years of political rage, her face was still the untouched face of a young girl. When last Julian had seen her, she had talked in Movement argot; now she had her own clear accent back. She introduced the man with her. He wore a cashmere blazer and a shirt with an open collar, and a gold chain around his neck. His hair had been styled and it lay on his skull like a peruke. It was Patrick Graham.

  “You don’t remember,” Patrick said, “but we were at New Haven in the same years.”

  “Of course I remember. You quit the Yalie Daily over Che Guevara. I hope you’re not still unhappy over that.”

  Patrick had written a piece for the News about the death of Guevara in Bolivia, reporting that peasants in Andean villages were displaying newspaper photographs of the slain revolutionary in their huts in place of the customary cheap pictures of Jesus. Julian, as managing editor of the paper, didn’t believe this story and refused to print it. Patrick, after listening in furious silence to Julian’s decision, had resigned. Julian remembered now that the waxen peaceful face of Che’s bearded corpse did resemble traditional renderings of Christ’s exalted features after the Crucifixion.

  “Poor Che,” said Patrick Graham. “No—I’m not mad at you. I’ve lost too many points of principle since.”

  Caroline said, “Patrick’s been anchorman at a station in New York, but he’s with the network now. He’s going to cover the Senate, so you’ll see each other, I guess.” Caroline had been working in New York at the same television station as Graham.

  “I think we were in Vietnam for a while at about the same time,” Patrick said to Julian. “I went over for a wire service. The thing I finally realized was this: we, the press, were making the war sound sane. Every act committed in Vietnam was a crazy act, and every day thousands of reporters would sit down at typewriters and reduce that insanity to sentences, paragraphs, whole stories—making it sane so that the folks back home would be able to believe that the unbelievable was happening to them and their country. But they never believed it.”

  Patrick spilled a glass of wine and paid no attention to what he had done; he was truly agitated. Julian remembered, suddenly, the other man’s capacity for moral outrage, his clenched stubborn face when he had quit the News over Guevara. Graham had loved Che; he had been inflamed by Julian’s refusal to believe that the Bolivians loved him too.

  “Did the war seem crazy to you, too, Julian, up in your Phantom with the bombs and guns hanging on it?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes,” Julian said.

  Caroline took Julian’s girl away; some of Patrick’s spilled wine had run onto her dress. While they were gone, Patrick looked hard into Julian’s eyes.

  “I used to see you and Caroline at Yale,” he said. “I know what was between you. But she and I are lovers now. We have been for a long time. It was me she came to after you saw her that last time in New York. We are always going to be lovers, Caroline and I.”

  “How nice that both of you know that,” said Julian. He meant it.

  The next day early, Julian picked up the telephone in his office and heard Caroline’s voice. “I’d like to see you,” she said. “Patrick is away on his first network assignment. We could have dinner.”

  At the Old Angler’s Inn that evening, Caroline told him what had happened to her. The revolutionary cell hadn’t worked out. “We planned kidnappings,” Caroline said. “We tried to make a bomb from a diagram we saw in some heavy breather of a magazine—the one black who was in the cell called it the New York Jewview of Books. He made all of us toe the anti-Semitic line, he was a very sensitive cat. But in the end we never did anything except smoke dope and yell. What the men wanted was sex. You were supposed to share everything, bodies too, with the family. Especially the black guy. He had that line, it was already too old to get results, that every white chick owed him a fuck in payment for all the times his female ancestors had been banged by rednecks. It turns out he was penetrating us in more ways than one—he was our very own FBI informer.” Caroline took both Julian’s hands—he had forgotten how tiny her own hands were—and laughed, as in the old days. “I was only with them a month. It was so boring. It was so hopeless. I got a job in television, my father was deliriously happy to help. It was my original idea to work my way up through the network hierarchy, and then thirty years hence when the revolution came, seize the transmitters and announce my true identity—Red Caro, secret leader of the underground. But the work they gave me was so God-damned interesting, and I got so hooked on office politics—you know, beating out some other woman for a promotion, making it to the top without ever taking even one foot off the floor—that I went to bed one night, and when I woke up I had turned from a cockroach back into the perfect honey you see before you—good manners, proper clothes, poise. Put a dress on me, Julian, and you can take me anywhere.”

  Patrick fled the cell, too—Caroline was the reason for his being there—and in time he found her. She borrowed one of her father’s suits and a shirt and tie, and got Patrick an audition at the station. “As soon as they saw him on camera they grabbed him. He’s been a tremendous success. You see how handsome he is, he leaps right
off the screen like Clara Bow, and he has that voice. And, God, does he want to be a star!”

  After dinner, in the parking lot, Caroline embraced Julian. On the way home she kept stopping her Volkswagen beside the Potomac to kiss him.

  An hour later, they were in Julian’s bed, Patrick betrayed and forgotten. Their sex life resumed at the same screaming pitch. Caroline, straddling Julian’s depleted body, threw back her tousled hair and lifted her clenched fists above her head in triumph. “It’s like walking by an open window and hearing a song you’ve been trying to remember for years and years,” she said.

  The story of her life with Patrick spilled out of her as she lay in Julian’s arms: “He loves me. He asks only to love me. He begs to be permitted to love me, it’s like being trapped in some Russian novel. He tried to kill the black guy in the cell for sleeping with me and the black guy beat him to a pulp—he’d been in prison, I never before saw anyone who knew, really knew, how to hurt people physically. It’s maddening to be loved the way Patrick loves me. There’s nothing wrong with him, understand, he has all the moves. But he’s never given me an orgasm. Not once. The tension! You can’t imagine what it’s like.”

  When Patrick returned from his first network assignment he found that Caroline had moved out on him. He couldn’t find her; he searched for her among all her friends and none had seen her. She might as well have gone underground again. Finally he called Julian’s apartment and heard her voice on the phone. He hung up without speaking, and that evening waited for Julian outside the Senate office building. When Julian emerged, Patrick seized his arm and propelled him across the avenue and onto the deserted West Lawn of the Capitol. Graham, who had been so neat and groomed when Julian last saw him in the Cantina d’Italia, was disheveled. His hair was in disorder, he wore a sweaty shirt with the points of the collar turning up, his jacket and pants were wrinkled. Chest heaving, fists clenched, he confronted Julian. Patrick was, of course, the much smaller man, but Julian thought at first that he meant to attack him. Patrick was violent, uncontrolled, raging—the old wild self Julian remembered from Yale. He lived by a system of resentments. He believed that men like Julian, whose family had buildings named after them on campus, were joined to others just like them in a secret circle, a sort of universal Skull and Bones, to control Graham’s life, to break the heart of mankind.

  Julian believed in the honesty of Patrick’s emotions. He didn’t know how to deal with him. He knew that he could overpower him physically with little effort; he didn’t want to hurt him. Caroline had hurt him enough. “You take what you bloody want, don’t you?” Patrick screamed. Julian realized that Patrick saw in his recovery of Caroline some form of droit de seigneur. Graham had loved Caroline for five years and he knew, at last, that he had brought her to bed for nothing. He had thought that her politics, so much like his own, were a surer basis for love than the attraction of manners and class and position that Julian had to offer. Julian looked down, unspeaking, into Patrick’s distorted face; he wanted to put an arm around the other man’s shoulders to comfort him: he understood so little.

  Winter was beginning in Washington, it was dark in the early evening and chilly. Patrick, raw-eyed and breathless, wore no coat. Behind him, on the roof of the Capitol, the floodlit flag whipped in a strong wind. Though he was shivering violently, he did not seem to feel the cold; he felt nothing but his loss. “I want to say one thing to you, Hubbard,” he said. “I hate you! I know that solves nothing, but I want you to live with the fact. You don’t care—I know how people like you think. Who the hell am I to you? But remember: I hate you. I always have. I hated you when you were napalming kids in Vietnam, I hated you when you got yourself next to Frosty Lockwood, who’s the best guy in the Senate and oughtn’t to be contaminated by your Goddamned kind. I hated you at Yale when the professors overpraised your rotten short stories because of the glorious old Eli name at the top of your paper. I hated it when you made managing editor of the News—and made it on talent, you bastard. But I’m not going to shit you with class conflict and politics. I really hated you because for years I had to watch while you fucked the girl I love. Now you’re doing it again. You couldn’t wait a week after you saw her with me again. You stepped on me! You cocksucker, I wish you’d die!”

  Patrick raved on, a torrent of profanity and abuse. Traffic flowed up and down Capitol Hill as the working day ended, a rattle of breath through the diseased lung of the city. Patrick’s broadcaster’s voice, trained and strong, penetrated all background noise. Julian let him talk. Patrick was weeping. At last Julian put a hand on his shoulder. Patrick went on; Julian increased the pressure of his hand, he looked into Patrick’s face. It shone with tears. He wanted to say: I admire you, Patrick, all that feeling, that wonderful lack of shame. What’s wrong with Caroline that she can’t love you? But instead he just stood there and took it, and after a while Patrick stopped shouting. He drew in great broken breaths. Then he did something Julian hadn’t seen since he used to follow Lipton, the gardener, around the lawns of the Harbor, in the years before his mother left for France and they used to spend summers all together in West Stockbridge. Patrick turned away, bent at the waist, and blew his nose on the grass, closing first one nostril and then the other with his forefinger and expelling long, viscous ropes of mucus.

  Julian handed Patrick his own clean handkerchief. Patrick wiped his cheeks on it and cleaned his nose. Then he flung it to the ground. The wind took it and it went skittering down the steep lawn, a little playful patch of white vanishing into the darkness.

  Patrick said, “It’s over now. But Julian, I meant every word I said.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julian said. “Would you like a drink?”

  Patrick turned away. It was an unmistakable gesture of disgust. But then he turned around again and followed Julian out to the curb, where they found a cab, already loaded with other passengers. The two men sat crowded together. Patrick drew himself away. Julian’s body had been with Caroline’s, had been inside it, so recently, that Patrick imagined he could smell her hair and skin in the overheated air of the cab.

  They had a single drink at the Federal City Club, and in its tranquil atmosphere, standing at the bar with men he wanted to know, Patrick was transformed into his new, self-controlled personality again. As they left, Julian paused at the bulletin board to read the list of candidates for membership.

  “You ought to belong here, Patrick,” he said. “It’s not a bad place. I’d be glad to put your name up.”

  For an instant, Patrick’s face twisted and he looked like an enemy again; but then he nodded. “That’s nice of you, Julian,” he said. “It’s like you.”

  6

  Caroline and Julian were married in the spring in the chantry at Saint Thomas’s. It was a white wedding. Caroline’s mother provided the details for a long notice in the Times; the writer listed schools and colleges; clubs and occupations, grandparents and even more remote ancestors, including a forebear of Caroline’s father who had been among the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was noted that the bride was called “Caro” by her friends, and that both the groom and his half-brother, who acted as best man, had been awarded the Navy Cross, in different wars.

  Patrick did not attend the wedding. Later that year he was transferred to London. Julian, by that time, had arranged for his membership in the Federal City Club. The two men never spoke of Caroline again, though they often saw each other, and, when Patrick returned from England a few years later with Charlotte as his bride, the two couples frequently met socially.

  The marriage was happy for a long while. Caroline, who had destroyed so many fetuses, was a long time conceiving their son Elliott, but carried him to term without difficulty. Two years later she gave birth to Jenny. After that, she had herself sterilized. She hated contraceptives. “I know what it is now to see a living child,” she told Julian; “I couldn’t do what I did before, I’d keep seeing human faces like Elliott’s and Jenny’s.” Caroline remained a vo
racious lover. That she lost none of her desire for Julian did not surprise her. It amazed Julian, he had never had the gift of being excited by sexual experiences once they were over. He did not resist the feeling of responsibility for Caroline that her lust reawakened in him. He was passionately interested in her. Caroline seemed to Julian, as she had always done, to be alive in a dimension that was inaccessible to him. He did not love her, but he observed her love for him, saw how much pain it gave her and how much pleasure, and he envied her—more, he entered her person, lived his emotional life through her. The intensity of her feelings set up echoes in his own emotional field. Sometimes, when making love, a faint rash, like a dusting of freckles, would appear on Caroline’s chest. Her interior life, breaking through the surface of her skin, made it possible for Julian to see the reality of love. That was the key to himself, Julian realized: he lived in others. He was always trying to complete himself by hiding himself in others. He required a host.

  Caroline discovered the joys of mainstream politics with the thrill an astronomer might feel on finding that a row of planets, identical to those in the known solar system, existed on the opposite side of the sun. Lockwood was the first conventional politician she had ever known. He astonished her with his intelligence, his decency, his honesty. Lockwood was a Kentuckian, the son of a man who had spent his life working in an ammonia plant in a wasted town on the banks of the Ohio River. Lockwood escaped his father’s fate because he’d been born with the ability to run one hundred yards in less than ten seconds, and this earned him a football scholarship at the University of Kentucky. He became an All-America back, and that feat made his name famous in his home state. He was gaunt and tall, with a sad, creased face and a bulbous nose saved from clownishness by many fractures on the football field. He had a charming smile and a gentle manner, and he had been elected to Congress, and then to the Senate, and finally to the presidency, defeating an incumbent President by the narrowest of margins, simply by offering himself, as he was, to the voters. And, in the most recent ten years of his career, by listening to Julian’s advice.