On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  He had voted for Kennedy in the end, even though he distrusted him. People said he roused their Democratic ardor less than Adlai Stevenson, that he was too cold, too rich and too dispassionate. Frank felt all this to be true, but thought he saw in him also some gambler’s fire, which appealed to him. He felt that Kennedy, through his experience in war and his chronic illness, was familiar with extreme choices and would not fail to risk everything if he believed that that was the only way in the Russian troubles that lay ahead. Nixon, he believed, for all that he admired his mastery of detail and pitied him his awkwardness in the world, was a coward. Now that victory for Kennedy was so near, Frank found his journalist’s indifference begin to give way to the thrust of elation.

  An hour later he again called Bill Stevens, who told him they were going with the front-page headline “Kennedy Elected.”

  Maria opened a bottle of Four Roses and the dozen people in the office, whatever they had voted, drank to the new young president out of paper cups from the water dispenser. Then the telephone rang again.

  It was the kid from Illinois saying the state was now too close to call.

  Frank hung up. “Illinois,” he said. “You know it was in the bag? Guess what. It’s out of the bag.”

  “Shall I call New York?” said Maria.

  “It’s too late,” said Frank, as the telephone went again.

  A young sub-editor on the other side of the office reached it first. He listened and nodded without saying anything. Eventually he put his hand across the mouthpiece and spoke to the room, “It’s Scott from San Francisco. California’s now running neck and neck.”

  “I’m leaving,” said Frank. He scribbled the telephone number at 1064 on a piece of paper and handed it to Maria. “This is where I’ll be if anyone needs me.”

  There were three cabs on permanent call outside and Frank took one back to the van der Lindens’ party, which had degenerated in his absence. There seemed, despite the lateness of the hour, to be more people there than before. In among the crowd Frank saw Charlie slumped on a sofa, raging incoherently at the television screen. The woman with the orange beads, whose name he had not caught, was standing beneath the stairs passionately kissing a man that Frank was fairly certain was not her husband. Duncan Trench and the Irish diplomat stood in exactly the same positions as before, though both seemed to have blurred with the passage of the hours, becoming disheveled and inconsequential, as though each was struggling to remember why Trench was still jabbing his finger against the Irishman’s chest. The sitting room was filled with half-eaten plates of food and packed ashtrays, but from behind Charlie’s improvised bar Dolores was still doggedly pouring quantities of liquor over ice she shoveled from a plastic garbage pail beneath the table.

  As Frank accepted a tumbler of bourbon, it occurred to him that he too was drunk, a state which did not excite in him Trench-like aggression, or despair like Charlie’s, but made him wonder where his hostess might be.

  He walked through to the kitchen. There was no one in there among the debris, but as he turned to leave, the door to the backyard opened and Mary came inside.

  “I was just getting some fresh air,” she said.

  “You okay? Feeling a little …” He raised his eyebrows.

  She smiled. “Mmm. I don’t know how it happened.”

  “Liquor is how it normally happens.”

  “And you?”

  “Me too. It’s been a long night. And we still don’t have a president. I think I’d better step outside as well.”

  Mary stood aside to let him pass.

  “No,” he said, taking her elbow. “I think you need to sober up some more.”

  They walked down to the end of the grass, where they could see the rusty children’s swing dangling in the darkness. Mary felt her heels sink into the lawn; her step was a little uncertain. They turned and looked back toward the house, where the kitchen window was orange and steaming.

  Frank sighed. “A big night for America,” he said.

  “Yes.” Mary looked across the fence, over the trees and into the darkness of the rudderless capital. “Are you excited?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I feel the world has stopped.”

  Frank took her head delicately between his large hands. “Your beautiful hair,” he said. He touched her lips, her very three-dimensional lips, with the tip of his tongue.

  “When will we know?” she said.

  “Tomorrow. Sometime. That’s today now, I guess.”

  They stood for a moment, her body pressed in against his. When she closed her eyes the earth turned too fast, and she opened them again to see his eyes so close to hers in the darkness that she could make out the sharp lashes and the marks of the faded freckles beneath them.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Too much.”

  She leaned against the frame of the swing and felt his hands on her hips as she had felt them in the press of the hallway some hours before. That had been a prefiguring, a shadow of this moment, but she did not know if this one was more real. His hands went slowly up her thighs, lifting the skirt with practiced care. She sighed again, but kept her eyes open for fear of the spinning world; and she liked to see his struggle to contain his desires beneath civilized movements; she liked the sense of her power over him of which it was evidence. He stood up tall and kissed her on the mouth at the same time that his hand slid in between her legs, so that her gasp was stifled in his mouth. She squirmed in his grip, but he would not release his mouth or hand and her movements intensified the pleasure of captivity.

  “Not here,” she said, pulling back her head at last.

  “It’s too late.”

  He sat on the child’s swing and guided her hand to his belt, then to his lap; then he took her face once more in his hands and pushed back the hair behind her ears. “Go on,” he whispered into one of them. “The world’s stopped after all. Go on.”

  Dolores removed the smoking cigarette from Charlie’s hand as she slid his arm from her shoulder and dropped him onto his bed. She pulled off his shoes and rolled him over on his side. He seemed to be asleep already. Dolores went over to the window to draw the curtains. She paused for a moment to look out over the backyard, and at the end of the grass, next to the children’s swing, she could make out two figures joined in some desperate embrace; but it was too dark to see who they were before, with a swish of cotton interlined material, they were gone.

  Mary went back to the party, while Frank smoked a cigarette on the swing. He let it rock a little back and forth beneath his weight. The sense of exhausted gratification lasted only for a minute; by the time she had straightened her clothes and begun to walk away, he wanted more of Mary, to be buried in her body always: nothing else would do.

  He carefully checked his belt, fly and shirt, ran a hand across his hair and straightened his tie. Back in the house, he went to the children’s bathroom on the upstairs landing and in the bright light above the mirror, above the plastic mugs and Donald Duck brushes, scrutinized himself more carefully for signs of the adultery. Down in the hall he called another cab and, while he waited, lent a hand with clearing up the wreckage of the sitting room. There were still a dozen or so revelers, listening to Frank Sinatra, drinking coffee or, in a belated attempt at moderation, beer.

  The front-door bell rang. “Cab for Renzo?”

  He kissed his hostess farewell politely on the cheek and shook hands with Edward Renshaw, who was also on the point of leaving.

  “Good party,” said Frank.

  “Absolutely,” said Edward. “A pity there’s still no outcome. ‘That each man holds his loved one near / The nation sleeps but cannot breathe / Its weak heart failing in the night.’ ”

  “Sure,” said Frank, as he walked up the lit path of Number 1064. “And young Lochinvar is come out of the west. Or Boston, at least.”

  Halfway back to his hotel, he told the cabdriver to stop.

  “Go to the White House, will you?”
/>   Frank paid the driver and stood outside, looking into the lit windows, where he pictured the anxious staff pacing the corridors while the elderly leader slept away his final night of heirless power. The army officer who had been his commander in chief, the fatherly golfer who had swung his leg quite naturally over the side of the jeep, changed into a suit (without ever looking quite at home in it) and strolled into the White House … It was curious, he thought, that this ordinary soldier, rather than his brilliant or ambitious aides, the scholars, sharks and specialists, should have had the imperial glory, that in his round and dimpled face America had chosen to see itself embodied. Presumably he didn’t give a damn who followed him; secretly, he probably would have voted for Kennedy out of sheer irritation at the inauthentic, Godley-esque presence who had been beneath his feet for eight years.

  Turning from the lit cupola, Frank began to walk through the cold and vacant streets of the capital. A feeling of despair enshrouded him. He had grown up with Eisenhower, then in the last months of the presidency his own sense of what was possible had drastically expanded. With the old guy went the limited dreams whose nourishment had once been enough. He went slowly up Pennsylvania Avenue to the west, a reverse presidential procession, toward the river; and on the bridge he paused and looked down for a long time into the water.

  He thought of Roxanne, and Tilly, his Annamite girl, of whether they hated him or, perhaps worse, just shrugged at his memory. He felt alone.

  Trucks and taxis occasionally went past, but he barely heard them. He could not seal Mary to himself; no flagrant act could force a union; no words could defeat the centrifugal force of love—away, always away, back into smaller particles, back into the darkness where he had dared to find it.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a gray-faced bum, a weary grandfather of the streets, asking him for money. Frank roused himself and felt in his pocket for a bill.

  “Know who won the election, pal?” he said.

  The man looked at him madly and backed away, muttering.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Frank.

  He handed him a dollar and walked into Georgetown as the sun was starting to come up behind him, edging the dormant buildings with hopeless light.

  Back at the hotel he slept for two hours in his room, then turned on the television to discover that Nixon had conceded. He slept again, awoke, took a shower, shaved and put on clean clothes. It was ten o’clock when he walked out onto M Street to find some breakfast; he bought a copy of his own paper from a vending machine on the corner. It was a late extra edition that must have gone to press at about six, he calculated; the headline on the front page said, “Kennedy Apparent Victor, but Losing Votes in Two Key States.” He pushed open the door of a diner and breathed the fug of bacon, boiling coffee and fresh cigarettes.

  Chapter 19

  Mary hugged her father on the threshold of the family house. He looked gratifyingly the same, not physically reduced by grief, as he held his daughter tightly to his chest for a moment or two, then released her so that he could also welcome Charlie, who was waiting on the step.

  When she and Charlie were installed in her old bedroom at the top of the house, Mary went down to see what needed doing. Her father’s domestic arrangements had not fallen apart as she had feared they might; once she had settled the men in front of the sitting-room fire with some coffee, she went out to the shops to stock up with what she and her father would need for the next week or so while Charlie was in Moscow.

  She was relieved to be out of the house. It was the familiar smell that was intolerable, the odor of antiques polish, cut flowers, woodsmoke from the fire and something peculiar to the fabric of the house itself. This was the aroma of her childhood; for forty years it had been the smell of love and permanence. She did not know how her father could live with it; that, or the unchanged creaks and rattles that failed to register the crucial change in the human weight that sounded them, or was no longer there.

  When she returned with half a dozen bags of groceries, she heard laughter from the sitting room, and blessed the part of Charlie that had always responded to her father, resolutely understanding what he called the point of him, even siding with him in pretend alliance against Mary. She joined them before lunch, pulling her chair up closer to the fire, stifling a yawn as she fought off waves of fatigue brought on by the sleepless flight.

  “Keeping you up, are we?” said James, in a decades-old response to her yawn.

  Mary completed the catechism. “No. You’re keeping me awake.”

  “Charlie’s been telling me about this Moscow visit. He’s obviously a useful asset, knowing both sides, as it were.”

  “That’s right,” said Mary.

  “Didn’t you want to go too? See old friends and so on?”

  Mary laughed. “Daddy, I was only there for about five minutes. I was living with you most of the time. Don’t you remember? When Louisa was ill. Anyway, it’s difficult, getting people in and out.”

  “It’s exceedingly fraught,” said Charlie. “They won’t let me go alone, which is why I have to wait until Friday, when there’s a group of building inspectors going. Things are very strained, what with the U-2 business and the collapse of the Summit and so on.”

  James nodded. “I can imagine you’d have to be careful. What exactly are your colleagues worried about?”

  Charlie sighed. “That I might be compromised in some way. They try to set you up with women, or drug your drink so you don’t know what’s happening. Then they take photographs. You’re followed everywhere, every step, and everything you say is recorded. You’re not allowed to travel alone outside the city, you have to be accompanied at all times. Even in Moscow they don’t really like you to be on your own. I’m being put up by an old friend from the Embassy.”

  “But you wouldn’t actually … vanish, would you? As a diplomat of all people? Surely you have immunity and so on.”

  “Of course. Though the Soviet definition of what you’re allowed to do is so tight that if they chose to enforce it, pretty well any foreigner could be arrested. You have to be wary.”

  And, presumably, sober, Mary thought to herself with a squeeze of anxiety.

  “The worst thing,” said Charlie, “is that there are no real records of anything. There are no telephone directories in Moscow. If someone disappears, the authorities can deny that there ever was such a person. If they had a listing in the phone book their family could point to it as evidence that they really did exist. And there are no maps.”

  “How do you know where you are?”

  “You get to know the streets. The CIA have made a map and I believe we now have copies. That’s the only one there is.”

  That night at dinner, Charlie seemed preoccupied, joining in the conversation less than usual. He drank only a glass or two of wine, though Mary knew how much whiskey he had earlier consumed upstairs. It was not surprising, she told herself. Both of them were tired, and Charlie was nerving himself both for the flight to Moscow and for whatever was waiting at the other end.

  The night before he was due to leave, Charlie awoke from a drugged sleep with a feeling that he was being stifled. He struggled to breathe as he climbed out of bed and made his way across the room to the window; he held hard to the sill as he looked through the parted curtains and down to the street lamp below. It took him some moments to recall where he was. Mary’s home in London. But why? And was he truly there or would he wake to find himself in Moscow?

  The weight of barbiturate tugged at him, dragging him back toward unconsciousness, but he did not want to go there, for fear of what he might find. There was sleep, there was unknowing; there were dreams and there were cities; all of them were separate realities, and in none of them could he locate himself.

  He felt fear begin to sweep away the sedative power of the drug. He did not know if he was awake or dead, but he seemed to be waking up further, going up through levels of awareness that would make the ordinary sensation of livi
ng look like sleep.

  His hand on the window frame was visible in the bright city darkness, but he did not recognize its shape; the fingers were not his. The flesh appeared transparent; the skin gave up the secret of what lay beneath, the wiring of the nerves and arteries.

  Charlie breathed in deeply. He turned from the window and walked into the room. The wooden boards beneath his feet were for a moment reassuring; they were cold, familiar, and pressed as they should onto his skin, tree on flesh, hard on soft.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and held his face in his hands. This, too, felt good, for a moment: the bone beneath the cheek on the strong palm. Then the thought that these two disparate things were part of the same body dismayed him; they were separate yet joined; one yet two. And his mind also was not one mind, but many; and he was not one man, one steady consciousness through which the world was mediated, but a plain, an open road for any reality that chose him for its own.

  He slid to the floor and held on to the foot of the bed. He squeezed the wood beneath his hands. He wanted to call out to Mary, but was too frightened of the sound he might make. The noise that emerged might not be his own voice; it might turn out to be that of a stranger. He was frightened that Mary would hear his voice, but would not recognize it; that she would wake and run for help, calling for someone to turn out the intruder from her room.

  One part of his mind told him he must let go of the bed, find the new pills Weissman had prescribed and take two, preferably with whiskey. Yet he was scared that when they dropped him into unconsciousness he might find there a worse reality.